Lies, damned lies, and Social Security

It's kind of gotten lost in all the kerfuffle over the empty-headed Miss California and her wardrobe malfunctions, but that perpetual target of the right wing is back: Social Security. The latest set of estimates indicates the trust fund will be exhausted a couple years earlier than anticipated, so naturally the talking heads who read the news are busy trying to gin up some hysteria. All the usual bits of misinformation are being repeated ad nauseum, the primary one being that "OMG Social Security will be depleted in [insert year here]!!!"

Bizarre. They may read whatever is shoved in front of them but Wolf Blitzer et al apparently have the comprehension levels of a first-grader. Social Security will not be depleted in 2000-whenever (anywhere from 2037 to 2045, depending on the projections being used); that's the possible year the trust fund zeroes out and the system has to rely solely on contributions being made to the system by workers. And that's assuming absolutely no fixes to the existing system are made, such as removing the earnings cap on taxing wages or upping the age at which a person would qualify for full benefits -- I've never heard a suggestion about upping the age when we all can start collecting partial benefits, which is 62.

When I was listening to the news CNN had a clip of President Obama suggesting the first -- removing the earnings cap -- but of course Wolf et al totally ignored that particular sound bite and instead blathered on breathlessly about Social Security not being there 40 years from now. The man's an idiot.

Of course, having recently sat through a 2-day pre-retirement workshop during which everything a person could ever possibly want to know about Social Security, federal pensions, and private investments was laid out in excruciating detail, I know that Wolf isn't alone in being an idiot. Most Americans are clueless when it comes to Social Security. I heard some truly strange questions asked by co-workers, and if my co-workers (who I would hope are slightly better read and/or informed than the average American) are clueless, that doesn't give me much hope concerning the rest of the populace.

For a start, it's absolutely astounding how many people still labor under the mistaken belief that Social Security is an investment plan. No, no, no, people, it's old age insurance! The money we all pay into Social Security isn't an investment, like buying a bond or putting money into a 401k, it's an insurance premium to protect us from starving to death if we get too old or too crippled to work. When the system was first proposed, in fact, that's how it was described: Old Age Insurance. And just like every other insurance system, it's based in large part on the assumption that a goodly number of the people paying into the system are never going to have to collect, which is why the retirement age for full benefits is set where it is. Back in the 1930s actuaries looked at death rates and deliberately set the minimum age high enough that the number of people who actually collected would be low enough to make the system sustainable. In 1935 the life expectancy in the U.S. was 61; in 2005 it was 77. And there's the Social Security problem in a nutshell; people are living too long.

I could go on, but I need to get to work.

It's still May

After reading some of the strange comments I've been seeing in various places around the intertubes lately, I'm thinking more people (me included) need to remember it's still May, It's Okay Not To Blog Month. The blogosphere is not the real world. It's time to put down the Cheetos, push away from the desk, and go breathe some fresh air.

Doing our part for economic recovery

And we were actually sensible instead of going for the Nissan Xterra of my dreams.

Some people need to leave the basement more often

Saturday morning. C-SPAN. Ten minutes into "Washington Journal" and the tin foil hats come out. It's as predictable as the sun rising in the east or the air being unbreathable in Atlanta in July. (And the S.O. just pointed out that it's just as predictable that if it's the weekend I'll do a post about the tin foil hats. So I'm a creature of habit. There are worse things to blog about.) Anyway, this morning once again the reich wing wackaloons are trotting out The Birth Certificate. Or the supposed lack thereof.

I'm not sure which is more hilarious -- the notion that some radical Islamic sleeper cell cleverly arranged for Obama's birth back in the 1960s and carefully manipulated his life so he'd be in just the right place to be elected President in 2008, which is the most elaborate of the fantasies I've heard spun out in C-SPAN calls, or the simpler fantasy that at some point after Obama began his political career the original birth certificate showing a purported birth in a foreign country vanished and a forged one appeared. Which, I assume, also included going around the world finding every single micro fiche copy of the Honolulu paper from that time period and substituting doctored microfilm that included the birth announcement.

Then again, I have a hunch quite a few of the wackaloons are totally convinced Hawaii itself is a foreign country so it doesn't actually matter where Obama was born -- the key thing is they don't like him for purely visceral reasons (he's black and he's smarter than they are) so there's got to be something they can use as an excuse. I can understand the impulse. Obama's predecessor made my skin crawl. Fortunately, when it came to finding rational reasons to dislike a politician, aWol provided plenty of ammunition. No one had to go all the way back to hovering over Barbara Bush in the delivery room to come up with stuff to use for Bush-bashing; we had lovely recent material like the "My Pet Goat" video. Although, of course, it would have been so much more fun if it had involved aWol with a goat instead of just reading about one, but, despite intriguing rumors, we never got that lucky.

Ego surfing

This is so cool. Our vaccination article got the lead for the May issue, and I'm not the last author listed.

It's still raining

One of the first 45s* I ever bought -- and also one of the songs that tend to run through my head whenever I wake up to the sound of rainwater running off the eaves.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why I bothered to buy it when I'd been hearing it through the floor of my bedroom for months. At the time, my family was renting an apartment on the second floor of a building in Saxon, Wisconsin. Today the structure is a one-story place known as (the last time I checked) The Bear Trap, one of those typical smalltown Wisconsin taverns. Until the 1990s, though, it was two stories. It had probably begun as a hotel with a hallway running right down the middle of the building. At some point it was remodeled into apartments, 3 or 4 coldwater units that shared a bathroom, which did get hot water, thank goodness. For the approximately 5 years we lived there, most of the other apartments were unoccupied -- another thank goodness, or getting ready for school in the morning could have been a real headache.

When we moved in, I thought it was a huge improvement over the family's previous digs. We'd moved to Wisconsin in mid-winter because the Old Man had finagled a promotion to section foreman with the Chicago & Northwestern. Financially it was no doubt a big step up, but I don't recall us kids being too thrilled about it. The first place the Old Man found for us to live was in the middle of nowhere -- the former Kimball railroad depot. It was cold, it was drafty, heat was provided by a woefully inadequate oil-burning space heater, and plumbing consisted of the classic little brown shack out back. The biggest thing it had going for it, I assume, was it came furnished so my parents didn't have to worry about moving furniture back in the days before U-Haul. We had to walk up what felt like the world's longest driveway to get to the bus stop for school, and the closest neighbors all seemed to be retired farmers. Then when Spring arrived we discovered most of the local vegetation consisted of poison ivy, and the predominant fauna were woodticks. (Now that I think about it, it was like a dress rehearsal for visiting Arkansas.)

Moving into an apartment with steam heat and indoor plumbing was, of course, wonderful. And the fact there was a bar right under my bedroom with a jukebox blasting until late at night was a bonus. (Another insight: no wonder I was able to ignore my kids fighting once they got big enough to start annoying each other -- I'd already spent five years of my life tuning out much rowdier combatants.)

[*If you need to ask what a 45 is, you're too young to appreciate the Cascades.]

Tin foil hat time

Don't even have to wait for phone calls this morning on C-SPAN -- all I have to do is listen to Ed Gillespie run his mouth. You name it when it comes to the Bush legacy and Gillespie will either lie about it or put some weird spin on it. You know those domestic terrorists like Eric Rudolph and Tim McVeigh? The nutcases who bomb federal buildings and abortion clinics? Gillespie calls them people who "love life." When it comes to Ed's ability to cater to the far-reich wing wackaloons, political hack doesn't even begin to cover it.

The S.O. switched the tv to NBC because he couldn't stand to listen to Gillespie for one more second. Guess it's tin foil hat time in Georgia, too. According to the local news folks, the state's lone case of swine flu has magically vanished. The state health department has decided that even though the patient is in a hospital in LaGrange, it's not a Georgia case after all. It's Kentucky's, because that's where the woman is from.

Then again, Georgia is a state that's great at putting a happy spin on problems by wishing them away. They've reduced their poverty rate by denying (or cutting off) welfare benefits to most of the people who qualify -- if they never issue a TANF check, they can claim there's no one in the state who needs the help.

And, speaking of stupidity on a massive scale, a definite failure to communicate, the AJC has an article today about the state health department doing a fax to all the clinicians in the state asking them to report possible swine flu cases ASAP to the health department, including sending in specimens to be checked. Except they didn't bother to provide instructions on just exactly what they meant by specimens, how to take them, and where to send them. One doctor said that he did have a patient he had questions about, so he called the state health department for information. He got voice mail. He persisted, finally connected with a human who told him to "use the special packaging," which he didn't have. She said they'd send him some -- but by the time he received it, too much time would have elapsed and the sample would be useless. He had taken a throat swab, but wound up just throwing it away.

LNA may have its act together, but, if Georgia is any indication, a lot of the states don't. Once again I'm thinking we'd better hope we never do have a truly serious air-borne illness hit, because if one does, we're well and truly fucked.

Another cartoonist to love

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