Chicken Little has friends in Congress

Chicken Little has a strong following in Congress

 

As we enter the New Year and a new form of government – government by clowns – I am preparing myself for a flood of doom and gloom rhetoric that will especially emanate from the new disciples of mirth and silliness.  Before the coming of Spring rest assured we will be told of the pending destruction of the United States if the "people: don't immediately hit the rewind button on President Obama's two year reign as a secret foreign born Muslim pretender.   We will be told over and over that all of the laws and new regulations signed into law by this regime were done in complete secrecy and totally without the consent of the governed.  Even though this electorate generated more filibusters and 60% cloture votes than have been presented in the last half century.  Still they will want you to believe that Congress was never consulted on any of these rather earth moving new laws designed to benefit Americans and their children and strengthen social safety nets.  This type of "2012" destruction rhetoric, of course, has as much factual basis as does the Mayan "2012" predictions but it's nothing new.  Let me take you back to some of the previous doomsayers who saw total collapse in the Government's efforts to seek laws that directly benefitted our citizen's.

 

1.     "We are forcing all citizen's, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program.  It is socialized medicine, and one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."  (Ronald Reagan)

 

2.     "The Federal Income Tax," a Senator from New York said a century ago, "might mean an end of our 'distinctively American experiment of individual freedom.

 

3.     "Social Security is actually a plan to Sovietize America."  (Chairman, US Chamber of Commerce, 1935)

 

4.     "The minimum wage and mandated overtime pay are steps in the direction of Communism, Bolshevism, Fascism and Nazism."  (National Association of Manufacturers, 1938)

 

5.     After Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation in 1954, 101 members of Congress signed a statement calling the ruling an instance of 'naked judicial power' that would sow 'chaos and confusion' and diminish American greatness. 

 

6.     In 1964, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal described civil rights marchers as "asking for trouble" and civil rights laws as being on "the edge of constitutionality."

 

The various bills laws signed into by Mr. Obama have, for the most part, joined this list of prophetic doomsayers.  I guess we should all begin digging our bunkers now and stocking up on food in preparation for the inevitable.  

Investment in the future

Being that I am one of the fortunate citizens in the United States to be the recipient of one of the best investments I ever made – Social Security payments.  Investment?  Have I been hitting the eggnog a bit too heavily or what?  Nope actually, I have been taking my son's advice.  As a licensed engineer, he has always extolled me to "do the math Dad.  Do the math first!!!  Well I did and was I ever surprised.  Now I doubt what I am about to lay down will convince any of my conservative friends that Social Security is not, in fact, an evil communist or at best, socialist plot, to enable our government to take control of our lives but I can lay down some math that is hard to debate.  Here goes.

 

Like most of my upper middle class senior friends, I receive around $1600.00 a month from an account in which I paid around $80,000 during my 40 + working years.  I would have received about $2500.00 a month if I had chosen to wait until I reached full tenure around my 67^th birthday.  I chose man early pay out option beginning at 62 since it is always a turkey shoot whether I would still be kicking at 67.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that I would probably live until I was 82 with a 25% chance that I would live until I was 90.  They did not take into account the bullet holes, high blood pressure, diabetes, Parkinson's et. al. that have made a home in my body.   I did take these into account and chose an early option.  I will continue to receive this monthly annuity until I die whenever that might be, and I can look forward to slight annual increases to boot, and yes, it is all taxable income so I do pay some of it back.   But, and this a big "but", my Social Security annuity is guaranteed by the US Government.  Okay "Free Marketeers", le's see what your private firms are offering. 

 

First and foremost virtually none of the available public annuity firms offer annual re-looks and annuity increases based on any facet of the US economic profile.  According to ImmediateAnnuities.com, a 66 year old man would have to pony up just over $128,000 into an annuity account to guarantee him an annual annuity of just $10,000.   Twice that amount for an annual annuity of $20,000 with no protection for inflation.  New York Life will give you a 0.3% annual increase as an inflation hedge but that same 66 year old man would need to cough up $180,000 for that cushion.   For those hardcore conservative "do it myself" crowd well look at these numbers.  The Employee Research Institute, a think tank specializing in retirement programs, notes that fewer than half of all US employees have saved even $25,000 towards their individual retirement plans, and only a third of these folks have saved $50,000.  Forty percent have saved less that $10,000 and a fourth of these good people have saved nothing at all.  To put these numbers in perspective, someone with $25,000 can buy into an annuity (with a .3% annual bump) that will return $1400 a year in benefits.  Increase that to a $50,000 account and your annual benefits jump to $2800.00 a year – or an income of about $54 a week.  Good luck with that. 

 

So when  we started to look for tax cuts it is amazing that we chose Social Security as the one major program to cut into with a taxpayer decrease.  Less money into the program means it will suffer even more than it is now which I detect might be the true rationale of the conservatives in Congress who sincerely hate this "benefit" program.  If they have  now decided to use the Social Security program as a political football, I thin it is only fair that they give us back the "football.  Since Ronald Reagan hit on the idea, the US Government has used the Social Security trust fund as a bank of first choice to balance out the books.  Reach in and jerk out a few billion and then issue some Federal Bonds as security for repayment.  OK – PAY US!!! And no more bonds please.  If the Federal Government would just pay back what it "borrowed" from the trust fund, the Social Security system would remain solvent for a century or more even with the ill-advised tax cut.  Are You Listening Out There All Of You Bubble Headed Tea Party Clowns?  The big bad government is doing big bad things to money that is not theirs.  Sic em!!!

A few things nibbling at my psyche

A few things nibbling at my psyche:

The voters have spoken and they have decided that the folks who put us into the economic mess we are in would, by some odd logic, be the best people to get us out.  Oh my!  Am I being unfair to the right?  Maybe but let's look at the numbers.  Ronald Reagan, the great spokesman for "trickle down economics," entered office in the blustery winter of 1981.  He called for a balanced budget amendment but he himself never submitted anything resembling a balanced budget.  In fact, he entered office with a national debt of $1.3 trillion dollars and by 1992 when he left the Whitehouse he had steered the country into a $4.17 trillion dollar indebtedness – a nice cozy four hundred percent increase.   Nice going for the conservative smaller government party.   Clinton took the reins in 1992 and to be frank, under his watch the government debt did increase but only by a mere $1.1 trillion dollars to just at $5.19 trillion.  He spent a good deal of his Presidency answering to his sexual missteps but he still was able to pay down a big chunk of the national debt before leaving office but it was to no avail since George W. Bush managed to surrender any of Clinton's savings in another demonstration of "trickle down" that took the $5.19 trillion dollar national debt and raise it to – are you ready for this -  $12.3 trillion dollars in just eight years.  This is what Mr. Obama was given on inauguration day and in less than two years he has not been able to wipe out what twelve years of conservative trickle down economics managed to build.  Shame on him for not being a magician.  The answer, as noted above, was to elect the same type of economic blunderers that created this monstrous international embarrassment.   In light of what has happened under the previous miscreants, here is what the new crew sees as the solution to what is in fact, their problem.  First they want to insure that the wealthy in the US continue to get wealthier by extending tax breaks enacted by Bush – the guy who took us from $5 trillion to $12 trillion in indebtedness.  This will add $700 Billion to the national debt under the trickle down theory that if the wealthy are made richer they will invest it wisely in industries that will hire us measly peons and everyone will be happy.  This raises an obvious question – at least obvious to me – if that theory is so valid why did Mr. Obama enter office with thousands a citizens a day being laid off.  The Bush tax cuts had been in effect for eight years and during that eight years there was no burst of entrepreneurism, no withering of unemployment lines and no sudden burgeoning of this Nation's industrial base.  On the other hand the rich did get richer – obscenely so - and the poor did get poorer, tragically.   In spite of these obvious and easily obtainable statistics, the GOP has held fast in their demand that the JP Morgan's of America deserve to become even more wealthy.   To push our nose into their mess even further, they want to eliminate the inheritance tax settling, as it turned out, for a compromise of 35% tax on all inheritances valued at $5M or more.  This affects less than 10,000 Americans.  So much for a government "of the people."   Can you think of any other bill that affected only l0,000 people and tied up congress for so long?  Of course not unless it's their absolute panic at the thought of having homosexuals serving in the defense of this nation.   The number is probably not 10,000 but even if it were more, so what!  I have served with men and women whom I knew to be homosexuals and if their job performance were less than exemplary I would have taken appropriate action based on their performance alone and not what they did in the privacy of their personal lives.  I know of one General Officer, now retired, whose homosexuality was a commonly known fact but his battle expertise was unquestionable.   Nobody seemed to care about his private life.  Yet we can spin Congress up to a fine pitch by even mentioning such an unforgivable prospect.  This same Congress wants to cut back on Social Security while disapproving unemployment benefits.  Who benefits by these national safety nets?  Nobody on Knob Hill I can assure you so why not eliminate them altogether since the "trickle down" from their tax breaks will most certainly fill the gap.  Do you really believe this?  It is going to be a long hard winter especially when the real clowns move into their new offices on Capital Hill.  I think we should all cash in our savings and invest in Brazilian bananas or anything more secure than our own economic future in the US.