Since sombody asked...... our golden years went poof in the PRIVATE MARKETS. You know that place where George W. Bush wanted to stash our Social Security funds.
By law SS has to invest in the most secure equity possible US teasury notes. You know that widely held paper backed by the full faith and credit of he US government.
How convenient.
SS was originally designed to be a pay as you go system where those who were working paid for those who were retired. That worked when the average life expectancy was around 65 and there wasn't a post wae baby boom. The last time I checked the SS trust fund held about $2.6 trillion dollars in US treasury notes representing cash the actuarial experts said we'd have to set aside for the baby boom retirees. That's extra money Reagan and "read my lips no new taxes" Bush insisted the baby boomers cough up cover our own retirment.
Historically the SS trust fund has financed about a third of the government,s debt, supressing the interest rate the government would have to pay in the open market. Unfortunately GW Bush and the Repubs decided to count the SS trust fund as a "surplus" to be refunded as a tax break going mostly to richest Americans who incidently as a percentage of earnings pay almost nothing into SS since SS is capped at the first $90k of earnings. This effectively represented the a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Meanwhile we burned through the cash building Reagan's star wars lazers and his 600 ship navy. Trillions went out the door blowing up innocent people in Iraq and now the baby boomers are starting to retire. Wall Street just effected the greatest hiest in history looting private pension funds and the federal treasury of every last cent we are likely to earn for generations to come and we are absolutely terrified that some ilegal alien will get a free band aid.
As for those treasury notes held by the SS trust fund, they are the same type of notes held by the folks in China and Saudi Arabia. Our government wouldn't think of defaulting on those investors in a million years. During this last panic the government treasury note auctions were yielding 0% INTEREST. In other words these folks around the world were willing to give us their money for safe keeping for free! With all this talk of "entitlement reform" it seems ironic that the ONLY creditor our government seems willing to stiff is its own people.
Attack!
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It is a truism of political campaigns that you can't beat somebody with nobody, or something with nothing. It is equally true in propaganda wars. Opponents of Obama's health-care reform have un-leashed all the bogeymen and pushed all the emotional buttons. "All the horror stories are being told by the Republican side," says Nunberg. The Democrats have struggled to make an emotional connection with the public, even though it is possible to do that without lying. Westen suggests the Democrats "should say that, since health insurance is tied to employment, 'the current system takes away your freedom to quit your job.' " Berkeley linguist George Lakoff thinks the White House could win hearts and minds by emphasizing that in the current system, "insurance companies deny you care." And the administration could score extra points by describing people who have been bankrupted or killed by that denial. There is no shortage of examples, from Blue Shield denying high-tech cancer surgery that oncologists said was patients' only hope, to Cigna nixing a liver transplant that was a 17-year-old's only chance of survival. She died. (Wall Street rewards insurers for denying claims; a company with a claims-paid rate of, say, 80 percent is viewed as better run than one with a rate of 85 percent.) "If you told the story of how greedy insurers deny coverage to sick people, you could whip up emotions in favor of reform," says Westen.
Not surprisingly, proponents of health-care reform are somewhere between furious and incredulous that the White House has been so ineffectual at countering the lies. "The White House's philosophy seems to be, don't counterpunch till you're on the ropes," says Westen. "Even now, the president refuses to call out anyone by name who is trying to undo his signature issue." The Obama team has finally realized that it needs to fight back, and this month set up a Web page, Reality Check, to debunk false claims. Memo to administration: the way you know you're a little late on this is when a doctor forwards a chain e-mail to his son, a White House staffer, saying Obama's plan would allow the Feds free access to physicians' bank accounts. The e-mail went viral before the White House could counter the baseless claim. "I don't think anybody anticipated this kind of reaction," says one Democratic congressional staffer.
They should have. Health care stirs powerful emotions, and because the subject is so complicated, people are unable to balance their emotional reactions with rational ones. Moreover, appeals to fear, anger, and hate really gain traction when ignorance is wide and deep. One of this summer's iconic moments was when a man stood up at a town-hall meeting in South Carolina with Rep. Bob Inglis to demand that he "keep your government hands off my Medicare." When some portion of the citizenry is ignorant of the fact that Medicare is run by the government, and lies, damned lies, and misleading statistics flourish, it is little wonder that we find ourselves in a summer of death panels.
With Claudia Kalb and Katie Connolly in Washington and Jeneen Interlandi, Stuart J. Johnson, and Ian Yarett in New YorkClaudia Kalb Katie Connolly Jeneen Interlandi Stuart J. Joh n son, Ian Yarett
© 2009
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