Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, August 28, 2012


Sing along! It'll put you in a good mood and keep you in one! It'll put a smile on your face!

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9 comments:

William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-27/social-security-s-woes-are-worse-than-you-think.html

While the Romney and Obama camps have made increasingly bitter accusations about each other’s plans for Medicare, a bipartisan consensus on entitlements has emerged in the past few years.

Too bad that consensus is wrong.

On both Left and Right, the politicians and "experts" are saying the U.S. needs to fix Medicare and have made fixing Social Security an afterthought.

President Barack Obama has signed changes to Medicare into law, but has done nothing about Social Security.

For two years in a row, Republicans in Congress have supported budgets that rein in the growth of Medicare spending but leave Social Security alone. +

(Expect to hear a lot more about Medicare than Social Security at the Republican convention this week.)

The main reason Medicare is getting more attention is that in the long run, it has much higher costs than Social Security. That’s why it’s often described, accurately, as the driver of America’s long-term debt problem.

The Social Security gap looks small, though, only in relation to Medicare.

(On any other scale, it’s pretty big.)

The 1983 deal to "fix" Social Security is often held up as a model of bipartisan achievement, with the implication that it just needs to be replicated to fill the gap...

(*ROLLING MY EYES*)

Charles Blahous, a Social Security trustee and the author of a recent book on the program, points out that the 1983 "reform" model is actually pretty discouraging.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

In 1983, the financing gap over the next 75 years amounted to 1.8% of payroll.

Blahous estimates that the gap today, measured using the same standards as in 1983, is 3.5%: almost double what it was then.

And every year that passes without action, that number gets bigger.

(Do we think today’s politicians are prepared to solve twice as large a problem as their predecessors did?)

* TO BE CONTINUED...

August 28, 2012 at 11:57 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Right now, we spend more money on Social Security than on Medicare, and that will remain the case for a while.

The programs’ trustees project that by 2035 Social Security will consume 6.4% of the economy and Medicare 5.7%.

(The Medicare projection may be optimistic about recent attempts to impose cost controls, but we shouldn’t expect Medicare to become vastly larger than Social Security in the next two decades. After that point, Social Security costs start going down as demographics play out while Medicare becomes a vastly larger problem.)

But our finances will be in what’s technically called "a world of hurt" before Social Security costs peak.

Under current projections by the Congressional Budget Office, by 2025 public debt will have reached 106% of gross domestic product.

By 2035, it will have reached 181%.

What would happen after that point is an academic question...

(*BITING MY LOWER LIP*)

We need to fix both programs, but if anything, it’s Social Security that ought to be saved first because it’s the more urgent near-term problem.

Some of the steps we can take to make the program solvent, moreover, would improve Medicare’s finances, too.

Raising the retirement age, for example, would encourage people to work longer and thus pay more taxes into both programs.

* BUT... BUT... BUT... UNEMPLOYMENT IS OVER 8%... WHERE ARE THESE NEW... ADDITIONAL... JOBS COMING FROM?

* HEY... DON'T GET ME WRONG... I SUPPORT RAISING THE RETIREMENT AGE... I'M JUST POSING A REASONABLE QUESTION!

[W]e have a better sense of how to restrain the growth of Social Security than of Medicare. One promising option is to reduce the growth of Social Security benefit levels, especially for high earners. The program could be reformed so that high earners who retire in 2040 receive the same benefit level that high earners who retire in 2020 will - with an adjustment for inflation, but nothing more.

(Under the program as it stands now, those future retirees will get a bigger benefit.)

Benefit levels for people in the middle of the income spectrum, meanwhile, could be set so that they more than keep up with inflation but don’t rise as much as currently scheduled. ... Compared with today’s benefit levels...it’s not a cut at all.

Democrats will prefer to raise taxes, especially on high earners, to let benefits grow faster. The drawback to this approach is that higher payroll taxes, the CBO has found, discourage people from working and saving. We would be taking a hit to economic growth for a purpose - boosting benefit levels for relatively well-off seniors - that shouldn’t be a high social priority.

(It seems perverse to raise taxes on high earners to finance higher benefits for them.)

Just to have that argument over taxes and benefit levels would be progress. One way or the other, we need to get Social Security’s finances in order, instead of acting as though there’s no problem to be solved.

August 28, 2012 at 11:58 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/315125/politifiction-editors

The website PolitiFact is going to be "truth-squadding" the Republican convention speakers this week, delivering verdicts on which claims are “mostly true” and which deserve a “pants on fire” rating. Our advice: Pay no attention to those ratings. PolitiFact can’t be trusted to get the story right.

* BETTER ADVICE... KEEP READING USUALLY RIGHT BLOG POSTINGS AND NEWSBITES!

* OTHER ADVICE: WHEN IN DOUBT... ASK ME! EMAIL QUESTIONS... OR ASK QUESTIONS DIRECTLY ON THE COMMENT PAGES...

(*SHRUG*)

* LISTEN... NRO EDITORS ARE BASICALLY CORRECT. POLITIFACT CAN'T BE "TRUSTED" BLINDLY ANY MORE THAN NRO CAN BE TRUSTED BLINDLY! LIKE REAGAN CAUTIONED... "TRUST BUT VERIFY." IF SOMETHING SOUNDS FISHY... CHANCES ARE IT IS. I KNOW I'VE CAUGHT THE VARIOUS "FACT-CHECK" SITES IN VARIOUS DISTORTIONS AND FLAWED ANALYSIS.

(*SHRUG*)

Its recent rulings on Medicare have demonstrated the point thrice over. PolitiFact said that Romney’s comment that Obama had “robbed” Medicare of $716 billion to pay for Obamacare was “mostly false.” Among its reasons: “The money was not robbed in any literal sense of the word.”

(*SNORT*)

PolitiFact’s other arguments are that Medicare spending will continue to rise and that Obama’s spending reductions are “mainly aimed at insurers and hospitals, not beneficiaries.” Leave aside the economic naïveté of that argument, and focus instead on the irrelevance. Romney said that Obama had taken money that was going to be spent on Medicare and instead spend it on ObamaCare, and suggested that this was a bad thing. In other words: an absolutely true claim, and an opinion based on it. If PolitiFact disagrees with that opinion, let it publish its views under a different name.

(*NOD*) ABSOPOSITIVELYUTLY!

PolitiFact zinged Paul Ryan (“mostly false”) for saying that Obama “puts a board of 15 unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of Medicare who are required to cut Medicare in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.”

(Those bureaucrats aren’t “unaccountable,” says PolitiFact, because they can be removed for “malfeasance in office” — which obviously isn’t what Ryan was getting at.)

(*SMIRK*)

An Obama ad had claimed that Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan could raise costs for senior citizens by $6,400 — and PolitiFact rated it “mostly true,” and then backed down to “half true.” It is wholly false. Ryan’s most recent plan was designed so that seniors will never have to pay more for Medicare than they would under Obama’s budgets. PolitiFact claims that Obama is giving an accurate characterization of an older version of Ryan’s plan.

(*SNORT*) (*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN AMUSED DISGUST*)

* ANYWAY... AGAIN... THE MAIN POINT THE NRO EDITORS MAKE IS INDEED TRUE. TO PARAPHRASE, "POLITIFACT'S LIBERAL MINDSET BLEEDS THROUGH ITS ANALYSIS."

August 28, 2012 at 12:22 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.statebudgetsolutions.org/publications/detail/state-budget-solutions-third-annual-state-debt-report-shows-total-state-debt-over-4-trillion

For the third consecutive year, State Budget Solutions examined state debt and calculated the total amount of debt that each state faces. This year's report shows that aggregate debt across the 50 states amounted to $4.19 trillion.

(State debt calculations include a state's regular debt, the fiscal year 2013 budget gap, outstanding unemployment trust fund loans, unfunded other post employment benefit liabilities, and the state's unfunded pension liabilities.)

California again trumped other states with a $617 billion debt.

New York has the second largest total debt burden in the nation.

Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois rounded out the top five states with the most debt.

* SO... FOUR BLUE STATES... ONE RED STATE.

Vermont has the least amount of debt of all fifty states with a $5.8 billion state debt. North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska follow Vermont with the smallest debt burdens in the country.

* ONE BLUE STATE... FOUR RED STATES...

(*SHRUG*)

Though almost all states have so-called "balanced budget" amendments requiring general fund expenditures to stay within state revenue limits, state budgets are often very far from balanced. Legislators and governors have developed a deep bag of tricks to "solve" budget gaps: delaying paychecks for a week so that they fall in the next fiscal year; underfunding state budget commitments; borrowing and transferring from designated funds; inflating future revenue projections and estimations. This consistent habit of kicking the can down the road has put states in their current fiscal catastrophe.

* FOLKS... THE LINK (PROVIDED ABOVE) FOR THIS STORY IS ALSO THE LINK TO THE WEBSITE. IT'S A PRETTY GOOD WEBSITE! I'M ACTUALLY GONNA BOOKMARK IT!

August 28, 2012 at 12:38 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/315127/entitlement-reforms-thomas-sowell

* BY THOMAS SOWELL

For those of us who like to believe that human beings are rational, trying to explain what happens in politics can be a real challenge.

* NO. IGNORANT AND EMOTIONAL. THAT'S MORE THE NORM.

* AND AT THE RISK OF PISSING OFF MY WOMEN READERS... THE "EMOTION" OVER "REASON" SPLIT IS EVEN MORE PRONOUNCED.

For example, that segment of the population that has the least to fear from a reform of Medicare or Social Security is the most fearful — namely, those already receiving Medicare or Social Security benefits.

It is understandable that people heavily dependent on these programs would fear losing their benefits, especially after a lifetime of paying into these programs, but nobody in his right mind has even proposed taking away the benefits of those who are already receiving them.

* I'D LIKE TO SEE THEM MEANS-TESTED. YEP. PULL THE CURTAIN AWAY. CALL A SPADE A SPADE. IDENTIFY SOCIAL SECURITY FOR WHAT IT IS... JUST ANOTHER TAX.

(*SHRUG*)

Yet opponents of reforming these programs have managed repeatedly to scare the daylights out of seniors with wild claims and television ads such as one showing someone — who looks somewhat like Paul Ryan — pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair toward a cliff and then dumping her over.

There are people who take seriously such statements as those by President Barack Obama that Republicans want to “end Medicare as we know it.”

* AND THAT'S SAD BOTH BECAUSE THIS IS NONSENSE... AND SADDER STILL BECAUSE IT'S NONSENSE. (GET WHAT I'M SAYING?)

Let’s stop and think, if only for the novelty of it. If you make any change in anything, you are ending it “as we know it.”

(*CHUCKLE*) (*SMILE*) (*NOD*)

Does that mean that everything in the status quo should be considered to be set in concrete forever?

If there were not a single Republican, or none who got elected to any office, arithmetic would still end “Medicare as we know it,” for the simple reason that the money in the till is not enough to keep paying for it.

The same is true of Social Security.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

August 28, 2012 at 1:36 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

The same has been true of welfare-state programs in European countries that are currently struggling with both financial crises and riots in the streets from people who feel betrayed by their governments.

(They have in fact been betrayed by their politicians, who have promised them things that there was not enough money to pay for. That is the basic problem in the United States as well.)

We are not yet Greece, but we are not exempt from the same rules of arithmetic that eventually caught up with Greece. We just have a little more time. The only question is whether we will use that time to make politically difficult changes or whether we will just kick the can down the road, and keep pretending that “Medicare as we know it” would continue on indefinitely if it were not for people who just want to be mean to the elderly.

In both Europe and America, there are many people who get angry at those who tell them the truth that the money is just not there to sustain huge welfare-state programs indefinitely. But that anger might be better directed at those who lied to them by promising them benefits that were inherently unsustainable.

Neither Social Security nor Medicare has ever had enough assets to cover its liabilities. Very simply, there has never been enough money put aside to do what the government promised to do.

These systems operate on what their advocates like to call a “pay as you go” basis. That is, the younger generation pays in money that is used to cover the cost of benefits for the older generation. This is the kind of financial pyramid scheme that got Charles Ponzi put in prison in the 1920s and got Bernie Madoff put in prison in our time.

A private annuity cannot play these financial games without its executives risking the fate of Ponzi and Madoff. That is why proposed Social Security and Medicare reforms would allow young people to put their money somewhere where the money they pay in would be put aside specifically for them, not used as at present to pay older people’s pensions, with anything left over being used for whatever else politicians feel like spending the money on.

It is today’s young people who are going to be left holding the bag when they reach retirement age and discover that all the money they paid in is long gone.

It is today’s young people who are going to be dumped over a cliff when they reach retirement age if nothing is done to reform entitlements.

Yet the young seem not to be nearly as alarmed as the elderly, who have no real reason to fear.

Try reconciling that with the belief that human beings are rational.

August 28, 2012 at 1:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/gasoline-rising-to-holiday-record-as-storm-surge-pressures-obama.html

Prices at the pump will be the highest ever for the U.S. Labor Day holiday, AAA said yesterday.

* O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A!

August 28, 2012 at 7:41 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.renewamerica.com/article/120828

Missouri has recently been at the center of the conversation on abortion.

[Today] the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) announced the launch of a $150,000 television ad campaign across Missouri highlighting President Obama's extreme record on abortion and featuring abortion survivor Melissa Ohden.

* YEP. ABORTION SURVIVOR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwFIEprF_9Y&feature=player_embedded

* WATCH THE VIDEO.

* THE CHARGES BEING LEVELED AGAINST BARACK OBAMA ARE TRUE - 100% TRUE.

* THIS ISN'T ABOUT "ABORTION" FOLKS; THIS IS ABOUT INFANTICIDE.

August 28, 2012 at 8:15 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f477ac96-f149-11e1-b7b9-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fworld_us_politics%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct#axzz24tDyB0eY

U.S. farmers are heading for their most profitable year on record despite the worst drought in half a century as high grain prices and payouts from a federal crop insurance program compensate for a smaller harvest.

* THAT'S YOUR "BIPARTISANISM" IN ACTION, FOLKS - FARM SUBSIDIES... WHETHER THEY'RE NEEDED OR NOT.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

Agricultural economists at the University of Illinois have estimated that the drought will trigger gross indemnities of about $30 billion this year, with an underwriting loss of $18 billion. Of that, the U.S. government would shoulder about $14 billion, they said.

* AND BY "U.S. GOVERNMENT" THEY MEAN "WE THE PEOPLE," "WE THE TAXPAYERS." ("WE THE FUCKING SCHMUCKS" MORE LIKE IT!)

The department said that the government would also pay producers $11.1 billion in direct subsidies in 2012, a 6.3% increase from last year.

* THAT'S A 6.3% INCREASE WITH REPUBLICANS HAVING CONTROL OF THE HOUSE!

* REPEAT AFTER ME, FOLKS: GUNS... AMMO... GUNS... AMMO...

August 28, 2012 at 8:24 PM

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