Bourbon St Sooner
11/4/2010, 12:54 PM
And why it won't get fixed.
I'm not one to post articles on here, but this ones got a lot of truth in it that people in this country need to come to grips with.
The truth about social security.
The fact is, the Social Security trust fund has $3 trillion of paper IOUs issued by the Treasury Department over the last 70 years, but not one dime of real money. Over that time span, we collected a modest excess of payroll taxes over current-year benefit payments, and spent the excess cash on cotton subsidies, student loans, and aircraft carriers. It’s all long gone.
The truth is, the Social Security program is a $700 billion per year inter-generational transfer payment program in which lifetime taxes paid by current recipients bear only a faint and arbitrary relationship to benefits now being received. So when the retirement “insurance” and trust-fund fictions are cut away, the underlying program cries out to be means-tested. To be sure, that would amount to a default on the implicit social compact that has undergirded the program since its inception. But in the context of the massive fiscal retrenchment which is now unavoidable, there's no rational alternative.
The fiscal truth about the wars
On the fringes of the 75-plus greenhorns who will populate the Republican caucus, there appears to be some sentiment in favor a modern version of Senator Robert Taft’s sensible isolationism of an earlier era. At least some of the Tea Party crusaders appear to be saying, “enough of nation building and wars of occupation in the global backwaters." But wait until the neo-con thought police get done with “freshman orientation” at the Republican caucus meetings in December. The $800 billion that goes for national security and its step-child, homeland security, will be safe from assault -- at least from the anti-spending forces of the GOP.
http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/midterm-elections-quantitative-easing-qe2-fomc/11/4/2010/id/30936?page=1
I'm not one to post articles on here, but this ones got a lot of truth in it that people in this country need to come to grips with.
The truth about social security.
The fact is, the Social Security trust fund has $3 trillion of paper IOUs issued by the Treasury Department over the last 70 years, but not one dime of real money. Over that time span, we collected a modest excess of payroll taxes over current-year benefit payments, and spent the excess cash on cotton subsidies, student loans, and aircraft carriers. It’s all long gone.
The truth is, the Social Security program is a $700 billion per year inter-generational transfer payment program in which lifetime taxes paid by current recipients bear only a faint and arbitrary relationship to benefits now being received. So when the retirement “insurance” and trust-fund fictions are cut away, the underlying program cries out to be means-tested. To be sure, that would amount to a default on the implicit social compact that has undergirded the program since its inception. But in the context of the massive fiscal retrenchment which is now unavoidable, there's no rational alternative.
The fiscal truth about the wars
On the fringes of the 75-plus greenhorns who will populate the Republican caucus, there appears to be some sentiment in favor a modern version of Senator Robert Taft’s sensible isolationism of an earlier era. At least some of the Tea Party crusaders appear to be saying, “enough of nation building and wars of occupation in the global backwaters." But wait until the neo-con thought police get done with “freshman orientation” at the Republican caucus meetings in December. The $800 billion that goes for national security and its step-child, homeland security, will be safe from assault -- at least from the anti-spending forces of the GOP.
http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/midterm-elections-quantitative-easing-qe2-fomc/11/4/2010/id/30936?page=1