Re: Buckley finally sees the light

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 14:28:47 -0600, Harlow Wilcox
<Harcox_Willow@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rumpelstiltskin wrote:

Are you ready yet to suggest cutting back on the tax cuts to help
out the debt?

If I thought for one moment that the kleptomaniacs in the Congress would
use increased taxes solely to reduce the debt, and for no other purpose,
I certainly would make such a suggestion. Reality, on the other hand,
teaches us that the Congress will just spend and spend and spend . . . .

Notice which party got us up to eight trillion dollars debt?

What's that supposed to prove? Do you really believe that some other
party would be more fiscally responsible?




Look at Clinton, in the middle, the only administration even
marginally fiscally responsible since 1980. Do you think he would
have cut taxes in a way that gave almost all benefit to the
wealthiest, or cut kept the cuts after he saw what they were
doing? I sure don't, and Clinton didn't.




Time for a change, if it's not too late already which I think might
be the case...

Change away, and enjoy. When the 'other' party behaves in exactly the
same way, please don't complain.



I'll complain, alright, about my own party, if they do anything
as stupid as that.

That wouldn't, however, include complaining about not instantly
being able to liquidate the debt and accumulating interest on the
debt run up by the Republican party administrations: that was
their doing and the cost of it will be with us a long time if we can
even survive it. I'd expect the Democrats to first of all get back
to sanity, but, as in relativity, objects not only have weight but
their very weight creates more weight, like the annual interest on
debt that's already been run up.



\>
SS is after all an honour-bound obligation already paid
for by the people, whereas tax cuts are not. Or do you maintain, as
many still do, that the tax cuts to the wealthiest help "the economy"
more than the loss of money from reduced tax revenue hurts the
federal government by way of aggravating deficits?

To the extent
that the debt, rather than a general loss of fitness of the USA within
a "global economy" is the problem, that seems to me the gist of
the major dispute of tax cuts versus honouring past SS contributions.
(I find any attempt to put them in different boxes monumentally
unpersuasive, because it's all money, and huge chunks of money.)

Huh? What does income tax have to do with FICA taxes?



If you take money from obligations that should have been covered
by general taxes, you have to pay it back with general taxes, or just
welch on it and screw the people you borrowed it from. I'm glad you
said a little bit more than "huh" so I could tell what you were
getting at. Jerry sometimes neglects to say more than "huh".





You may find separating the funding source for SS and government ops
unpersuasive, but that's the way the system was set up by FDR in his
infinite wisdom. The giant fraud of the 'unified budget' the crooks use
to disguise the extent of their irresponsibility serves amply to confuse
the issue. You dislike the tax cuts, and constantly conflate them with
SS difficulties, but in actuality, the two are totally separate. The
crunch is going to come when Congress has to replace the SS surpluses
which it has spent.


I said that SS and other government money should be
separate, not the opposite. That was of course exactly my
complaint: that separation is violated when the government
borrows SS money and then introduces previously
undisclosed roadblocks when it's needed to be redeemed.

Finally, we completely agree on something.

We know what we paid into SS, we know what it was for, and
we know the accounting shows that there's a healthy surplus. If
there's some problem, it's not with SS, it's with the government's
shenanigans, and we should be looking at the shenanigans, not
blaming SS or trying to revalue it to the disadvantage of those
who already paid their share into keeping it actuarially solvent.

Shenanigans, indeed. I seriously doubt the Congress is ever going to
admit its past misdeeds, let alone correct them, so how do we, as
taxpayers, correct that behavior pattern? I don't trust the Congress,
which is why I support an individual's ownership of funds earmarked for
retirement, denying Congress access to the cash. Almost all of us will
be dead long before the fit hits the shan, but our children are almost
certain to be affected by Congress's 'shenanigans'.

A loss of fitness does seem to me something that exists, and is a
scarier factor, though. I'd say it's mostly independent of any
discussion of SS versus tax cuts, except that if SS is destroyed,
that will be a big negative factor for the confidence of Americans in
their government to serve the people rather than a network of
monied interests, which a lot of people including myself already feel
is increasingly the case. The mere threat to SS itself, even before
anything is done, seems to me a factor in disillusionment with the
government. I guess I s*hould mention that I'm with Gary James on
being very willing to entertain ideas like tariffs and unions,
unpopular positions these days. My justification would be that the
people have to come first, and clearly first, not just as incidental
beneficiaries of some presumed but not very visible "trickle-down"
side effect, because the people are really what make the country.

'Destruction' of SS is a political opposition myth; the 'reforms' being
discussed are intended to preserve and strengthen the SS system. It is
due only to the out-of-control partisan war in Washington that the myth
of 'destruction' has been born. For instance, Harry Thompson says there
is no problem, and thus no reason for anyone to worry about the future
of the SS system. I agree with you, though, that the people have to come
first, and since there is almost universal agreement (except among the
most rabid partisan warriors) that the SS system faces future funding
difficulties. If only the simple solution of rescinding "tax cuts for
the rich" would solve the problem! It won't -- the demographics are
inexorable.

SS has plenty of money. It will run out in a couple of decades,
sure, and we should make provision to prevent that. We already
made necessary adjustment did it once when we raised the
retirement age from 65 to 67. We can do something like that
again, and other things, but it's nowhere near as draconian and
immediate adjustment is needed as is bruited by those who want
to escape responsibility for what they did to the country's finances.

'Draconian' and 'immediate' are inventions of partisan warriors who
oppose Bush and anything he proposes.



Partisan warriors who oppose Bush and anything he proposes,
yep, that would be me indeed. I can't think of anything offhand that
the Bush administration has done that hasn't been a disaster, but
maybe you can come up with something. If you can I'll try to
be fair about it. I'm not kidding, I really can't think of anything
offhand, but there must be something and maybe you have it at
your fingertips. "Personal retirement accounts" is at least neutral,
I guess, except that it's putting conventional SS under attack. I
don't see much to it myself, since personal retirement accounts is in
effect what I did myself to retire early anyway - I didn't need a law
to do it, but I felt a lot easier in my mind by having SS in the
background, like mom whose house will be open, as much as she
can manage, no matter how I screw up otherwise.

Ah, the personal retirement accounts are tax-deferred! Now
there's something to say about them - not a whole lot maybe,
but something - except that, as proposed, they're tainted by
threatening conventional SS one of whose functions is
"insurance" so that people don't have to fear outliving their
ability to buy food. That threat is a worse disadvantage than
the tax deferral is an advantage.




Raiding money from SS to pay for new programs that won't help
the people who already paid for SS is not an honourable answer.
Diminishing SS because the government gave away the money it
borrowed from SS, and knew it was obliged to repay, to other
people, and now wants to forego the debt, is a contemptible
answer.

Ah, that's the nub of the problem. Too many people just can't believe
that the government would screw them. Well, surprise, surprise.



I'm going to keep arguing against letting them get away with it.
Rescind the tax cuts for one. We can't afford them and they don't
benefit working people anyway, anywhere near as much as they
hurt them.




I am
not, however, convinced that the Congress would 'forego the debt'. The
backlash would be too heavy for the average politician to withstand. The
public is much more likely to sheepishly accept the relatively huge tax
increases that will be necessary to replace the spent funds (bailing the
Congress out of its difficulty). The sooner the increase is imposed, the
smaller it will be for a given individual.



Rescind the tax cuts. Working people got almost nothing out of
them, so they'll never notice if they're rescinded. I never noticed
my tax cut, though I do notice schools closing and police cutbacks
and ever-more-predatory meter maids and parking rules from a city
trying desperately to run itself despite having its money resources
cut below survival level.




------------------ (begin rant)
How could anybody who graduated from second grade think
they could run a government with these deficits? Put taxes back
to where the country can support itself, pay debts without a whole
bunch of bitching and moaning or, much worse, trying to play the
Middle Class for rubes, and get the clowns who have done all
this damage out of office.

Unless some fiscally responsible third party magically appears, I
seriously doubt that you'll see much change, no matter which major party
controls the Congress.



Let's try the Democrats. Sure they're a bunch of screwballs, but
not nearly as screwy or as dangerous as what we've had lately.




There was never any big question about SS until this
administration got into office, but SS is just one symptom of a
fiscal irresponsibility beyond belief until it actually happened.
I hope the USA can recover, but I was never before as uncertain
as I am now that the country can be in the future as it was in the
past. Pig may have picked a good time to move to France,
except that a collapse of the US may take France with it.
------------------ (end rant)

Au contraire, mon ami. As far back as 1986, when SS tax rates were
raised significantly by the Greenspan Commission to 'build up a surplus'
for the baby-boom generation, there has been widespread knowledge that
the funding mechanism was broken. There have been several commissions,
notably including one chaired by the well-known Liberal Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, Democratic Senator from New York City, that have confirmed the
'problem' and suggested various solutions. None of the solutions have
included continuing business as usual.


No, of course not. We raised the retirement age for 67, for one
thing. Now SS is OK for a while. Later we'll have to do something
like that again, or raise rates or something. Let's pay for SS with
SS things, not use SS to pay for non-SS things and then say it's
broken because of what the other things cost.



However, I share your gloomy outlook. We live in interesting times.



Yeah, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, a friend is trying to
get out of money and into property, because he really feels doom
and gloom about the money system. He bought a house and land
in Kentucky for one thing, but what California boy would want to
live in Kentucky among the Kentuckians? He lived there several
months at first, met nobody he could relate to, and came back to
California for a couple of years. Then he tried Kentucky again but
that only lasted a couple of weeks. He was planning on moving
back again last I heard, and maybe is there right now, once I
check my email.

Property is a way of getting out of cash, but I don't even own my
own house and I still feel burdened down and trapped by all the
crap I own. There's no way I'd want to own big property, myself.
It would be like buying a ball and chain - it seems to me a pretty
crazy thing to do - why would I want a ball and chain, much less
pay to have one? I know, I'm nuts and most people don't look
at things that way, but the idea of being confined forever to some
nice little place with a duck pond makes me want to scream and
run the other way. I own a car, not so much because I want to
get away, but because I'd freak out if I knew it had simply become
impossible for me to get away - that I was lodged like a barnacle
on a rock, forever held in place by my own comfortable shell.



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