Unversal Coverage
 

Uh, ok.

My attempt at a joke tried to leverage SS' manatory home ownership policy and Bush's Ownership Society. I thought the break from the original story was pretty complete.

Unversal Coverage
 

Bah, Humbug

How your taxes are being wasted in Iraq.
 

Conservatives, rejoice! All your worst fears about government waste are being confirmed! Too bad it took a GOP government to do it.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/mov...iraqfunds2.jpg

The Army We Have
 

As SecDef Rummy has so eloquently told us, it's a shame that there's not a pie slice in there that actually relates to the procurement of equipment.

WaPo

• An America coming out of the Great Depression somehow found the leadership and the will to build and deploy around the globe 2.5 million trucks in the same period of time that the incumbent U.S. government has failed to get 30,000 fully armored vehicles to Iraq.
  
  The Bush administration has appropriated $34.3 billion on a theoretical missile defense system -- which proved again this week to be an expensive dud in its first test in two years, when the "kill vehicle" never got off the ground to intercept the target missile carrying a mock warhead -- but has been able up to now, according to congressional budget authorities, to spend just $2 billion to armor the vehicles of Americans under fire.
  
  Nobody has been more persistent in holding the Pentagon and the White House accountable than maverick Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee. "When I visit Iraq," says Taylor, "I ride around in an armored vehicle, and I am sure the secretary [of defense] does as well. That should be the single standard: If it is good enough for the big shots, it is good enough for every American soldier."
  
  The armor is truly a matter of life and death, as the Mississippi congressman explains: "Half of all our casualties, half of all our deaths and half of all our wounded are the direct result of improvised explosive devices [IEDs, or homemade bombs]." But when Washington officials visit Iraq, their traveling security includes not only heavily armored vehicles but also radio-signal jammers, which can disable the IEDs.
  
  What makes Taylor authentically angry is the inexcusable failure of the U.S. brass -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he names -- to provide radio jammers (which cost $10,000 each) to the fewer than 30,000 U.S. military vehicles in Iraq.
  
  How many U.S. vehicles are now equipped with jammers? The Pentagon insists the figure is classified. According to Taylor, the number is "minuscule."

Granted, the comparison is to some degree unfair. WWII involved asking the citizenry to sacrifice to actually make this happen, instead of being asked to accept tax cuts.

Query: If Rumsfeld actually does develop a sudden desire to spend more time with his family after January 30, as Kristol's, McCain's, Lott's, and others' comments suggest, anyone care to guess who replaces him? Or wager how this will change any facts on the ground?

Maybe There's Hope
 

Doesn't that seem exceedingly unlikely? Especially as these arguments have been made before?

Unversal Coverage
 

Well, I thought it was funny.

*sigh*
 

You know, when you actually go read the actual regulation, though (see parts E & G), it's not that bad. The SSA clearly accepts same sex marriage certificates from Massachusetts and Civil Union certificates from Vermont), but refuses certificates from jurisdictions where the legality of the certificates is unclear.

I mean, I'm a blue blue stater, but this is just about giving clear instructions to the flunky down at the front counter at your local Social Security Office. Or to put it another way, it would be just as easy for a red stater to get worked up about this reg., based on the recognition of Massachusetts same sex marriages.

Tim Dunlop posts about our relations with India:

• Last night I had an interesting conversation with a friend who works on Capitol Hill. He was recently part of a Congressional delegation that went to India. The delegation was mainly Republicans.
  
  They spoke to a lot of Indian government people and the message from them was very clear, and in a nutshell it was this: We don't much care about America. He said they were very polite but almost indifferent. Maybe matter-of-fact is a better description. The conversation went something like this:
  
  We consider ourselves as in competition with China for leadership in the new century. That's our focus and frankly, you have made it very difficult for us to deal with you. We find your approach to international affairs ridiculous. The invasion of Iraq was insane. You've encouraged the very things you say you were trying to fix - terrorism and instability. Your attitude to Iran is ridiculous. You need to engage with Iran. We are. We are bemused by your hypocrisy. You lecture the world about dealing with dictators and you deal with Pakistan. We are very sorry for your losses from the 9/11 terror attacks. Welcome to our world. You threaten us with sanctions for not signing the non-proliferation treaty, but you continue to be nuclear armed and to investigate new weapons. You expect us to neglect our own security because you want us to. We don't care about sanctions.
  
  They also spoke about economic development and the message here was that we're doing fine thanks. We can't address the poverty in our country wholesale--most of it is rural poverty anyway--but we find we have skills in the hi-tech area. We will continue to pursue that. We currently produce around 10,000 (I think, ed) science PhDs a year. We will build up a rich, well-educated strata.
  
  Another thing he said that was mentioned a number of times was the relationship with Australia. They spoke of educational exchanges and the growing number of immigrants. Australia was thought of highly.
  
  Like I said, this was a Congressional delegation and it spoke to key people in the Indian government. I gather it was a real eye-opener for those involved. (Having friends back home who have worked on Indian issues for Australian governments going back twenty years, I doubt you would get the same level of surprise.)

(Dunlop is Australian.)

Not to mention their dry cleaning monopoly.

Funny, I recently read an article that was 180 degrees from this. I'll have to see if I can find it.

this is great! if we can fuck the Indians, we can really support the Pakis. We just need to give the Islamists one country it hates- everyone assumed it needed to be Israel which makes it tough- but now shit- lets support Kashmir going Paki and maybe even help them with strong military hardware.

Too much choice
 

One possible downside of SocSec privatization is that, despite its moral superiority, perhaps many Americans wouldn't want to be overwhelmed by the choices it presents.

• People want control over their lives; they value their freedom. But the first reason to wonder whether "ownership" is always good is that it can be stressful. It may be true, as promoters of ownership like to say, that nobody ever washed a rented car; but renters are very happy not to have to get the hose out. If it's up to you to choose how to invest your pension account, agonizing over health stocks vs. Asian bonds may not be such a privilege.
  
  It's not just that financial planning is a dry topic to most folks. It's that modern life is overloaded with choices. In "The Paradox of Choice," the Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz shows how a certain measure of choice can be liberating but how too much is a treadmill -- sometimes even triggering depression. Freedom and choice are wonderful things that allow us to realize our human potential. But there's a limit to how many choices each of us has time to make, and most people in the rich world are pretty much maxed out already.
  
  You see this truth in the behavior of the affluent, who actually pay to avoid choices. They hire home decorators so they don't have to stare glassily at 200 kinds of curtain rail. They hire marriage planners so they don't have to fret about cream napkins vs. white ones. There are said to be 10,000 wedding consultants practicing in the United States. If the rich are deliberately avoiding choice, why are we so sure that the majority want more of it?
  
  Ownership does not merely involve choice; it involves risk also. A certain measure of risk is fine; indeed, if you want a dynamic society it's positively essential. But just as the modern economy threatens Americans with choice overload, so it also piles more risk on the shoulders of the average citizens. The risk of not being able to afford health care has risen, albeit because health care has more to offer than it used to. Fewer people have risk-free "defined benefit" pension plans that guarantee a fixed proportion of salary upon retirement. An index devised by Yale's Jacob Hacker shows that income volatility has increased sharply since the 1970s. Given that risk is already on the rise, perhaps public policy should avoid adding to it?

Bush to Christians Everywhere: Drop Dead (and during the "Holiday Season", too!)
 

Opening of Bush' press conference today.

• PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you. Please be seated.
  Good morning and happy holidays to you all.

Boy, is O'Reilly going to tear this guy a new one.

Bush to Christians Everywhere: Drop Dead (and during the "Holiday Season", too!)
 

I don't remember him doing that on the calls.

fake crisis
 

Why are the Administration's economic predictions gloomier when they talk about Social Security? Why, bilmore, why?

• DOES BUSH BELIEVE IN THE CRISIS? Following up on the post below and a suggestion from Nick Confessore, I thought it would be instructive to compare the Social Security Administration's economic forecasts on which the alleged "crisis" is based to the administration's own growth forecasts. The SSA says that "the average annual growth in real GDP is projected to be 2.9 percent over the short-range projection period (2004-13), a slower rate than the 3.3 percent average observed over the historical 40-year period (1962-2002)." Meanwhile the White House's Council of Economic Advisors has recently released its own economic forecasts (PDF) for the years 2004-10, concluding that we'll see an average of 3.4 percent growth for that seven-year period.
  For the numbers to work out, we'd need to see an extraordinary collapse to 1.87 percent average annual GDP growth for 2011-13. Another way of putting this would be that for five out of the seven years in which their projections overlap, the administration's estimates for productivity growth are higher than those used in the SSA's intermediate forecast. If even the White House doesn't believe the SSA's short-term forecasts (i.e., the ones that are most likely to be accurate) why should the rest of us (and the press and politicians in general) be expected to take their 75-year (and even infinite horizon!) forecasts seriously?

Matt Yglesias at TAPPED.