A Forum for Grinches and Ho-Ho-Hoes

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
I think you're conflating two subjects, but maybe I did too. There are two questions: 1 is whether the SS surplus should be "on budget" such that it can be used to make the real deficit appear smaller (this year--2006--the projected surplus is $280B, compared to a nominal defiict of $390B). I believe it should not, but it's semantics. The second question is what should be done with that surplus. I'm comfortable having it in gov't debt, as opposed to corporate debt (bankruptcy), stocks (volatility), or international (oh, great, which countries).

4 (2 + 2)

Agree that Social Security should be on budget. Clinton invested some effort in this, but no one had the political will after 2000 to try to stop the gross fiscal irresponsibility that Bush ushered in. The Bushies routinely lie with numbers,* and it's just too much work for a supine media to try to sort it all out.

* E.g., they keep referring to an (inflated) early prediction of last year's deficit as the target when they talk about halving that deficit, but that number is inflated by many, many billions of dollars.

Also inclined to agree that the government should not be investing in the market. It's not what the government does best. But I would concede on this as a part of a package to shore up SS.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
By the way, Wonk, this post makes you very sexy. Just thought I'd perk up your day! And, fwiw, if I win the lottery, your new ticker is still high on the list of my first purchases.

What gets me is I'm vapid- but I essentially made Wonk's post 2 months ago. I'm actually one of the few people who create opinion change here, because I don't do it as forced concepts.

And by the way, is GGG employed in a law firm or some legal aid society thing? I have never seen anyone so tax obsessed. If you take his solution to health care and add his solution to SS, I have no incentive to do anything. How about this instead- let the rich get rich- then once a year draw out names of 10% of the rich and take away everything. the remainder will have incentive to amass more- and the rich are optomistic so they'll keep thinking there is a reason to carry on.

[sgtclub]

• It's not often that a professor tells a packed crowd at Columbia University that Edward Said was a political extremist and that faculty members in the school's Middle East studies department encourage Islamic terrorism.
  
  The professor who made those statements yesterday isn't from Columbia but from Harvard. Law professor Alan Dershowitz showed up at the intellectual home of Said, a literature professor who was a fierce critic of Israel, to rebuke Columbia's faculty and administration for tolerating an atmosphere on campus that he said promotes the hatred of Israel

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
4they keep referring to an (inflated) early prediction of last year's deficit as the target when they talk about halving that deficit, but that number is inflated by many, many billions of dollars.

so you do understand that a number true at one point in time is menaingless for a changing number?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
401(k)s barely scratch the surface of tax-free and tax-advantaged savings vehicles, particularly for people who can call themselves "self-employed" (e.g., partners). They can put away amounts in the six figures a year, tax-free (not just tax-deferred on the returns), plus huge amounts in a variety of plans where the returns are tax-deferred. Some of which have been rendered invulnerable because virtually every Senator or Rep owns one.

So, what you said, but much more so. Put differently, 2+.

But this will never happen under Bush -- anything that looks like a current tax increase is being rejected out-of-hand. Future tax increases (i.e., massive deficits) are okay, and as a near-40-y.o. I must express my appreciation to younger Repubs for footing that bill on my behalf.

We may need to talk. I haven't found those tax-free vehicles yet.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by taxwonk
The solution to both SS and Medicare, at least in part, is simple, albeit brutal. Let more people die, and die younger.

Modern medical science has been obssessed for decades with chasing technologies and drugs that prolong life, simply for the sake of prolonging it. Why should a woman in her late 70's, with severely metastisized bone cancer, be given course after course of radiation and chemotherapy? So that she can live another five years in pain and waste away? The focus on such patients should be palliative care. And yet, this scenario is played out in every hospital in the country on a daily basis.

In a nation where we face an extreme shortage of donated organs, Mickey Mantle undergoes a transplant at a cost of over a million dollars to live another two years, while a 34 year-old father of three dies for lack of an organ.

Cardiologists are spending countless dollars on artificial hearts designed to work outside the body, passing along the cost to everyone in the health care system, so that terminal patients can spend months in the hospital while the rest of their organ systems slowly shut down. Why? Because we can.

Old people are people, too, and I think helping them live longer is a good idea. At the same time, resources are finite, and we can't do everything. People object to rationing health care, but health care is rationed now, just in a half-assed, decentralized way. As always, RT has my proxy on this issue, and I'm hoping she'll come along and say something interesting about it.

The biggest problem is that we are aging as a population, medicine allows us to extend that aging period, and we are producing less babies to shunt the bill onto, which is what has kept the system going lo these past three generations. Nobody is setting priorities in health care and as a result the money for grants and research is going towards subsidizing our fear of death, instead of improving the general population's overall health and saving those who still have lives to live.

A falling birth rate is a problem in all industrialized countries, ours less so than most of Europe because we have more immigration. (There was a terrifying story in the New Yorker a few months ago about the coming decline in Russia's population, and the problems we can expect as a result.) What we need is government subsidies for sex.

Part of this problem, too, is that old people vote, and young people don't.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

* E.g., they keep referring to an (inflated) early prediction of last year's deficit as the target when they talk about halving that deficit, but that number is inflated by many, many billions of dollars.

Take a look at the WSJ today - there is an editorial from the Cato Institute that takes Bush's numbers/budget to task.

Also inclined to agree that the government should not be investing in the market. It's not what the government does best. But I would concede on this as a part of a package to shore up SS.

I assume you mean that the government should not be directing investments in the market, right? I don't think anyone is proposing that.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
so you do understand that a number true at one point in time is menaingless for a changing number?

I understand you better when you post in English.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
401(k)s barely scratch the surface of tax-free and tax-advantaged savings vehicles, particularly for people who can call themselves "self-employed" (e.g., partners). They can put away amounts in the six figures a year, tax-free (not just tax-deferred on the returns), plus huge amounts in a variety of plans where the returns are tax-deferred. Some of which have been rendered invulnerable because virtually every Senator or Rep owns one.

So, what you said, but much more so. Put differently, 2+.

But this will never happen under Bush -- anything that looks like a current tax increase is being rejected out-of-hand. Future tax increases (i.e., massive deficits) are okay, and as a near-40-y.o. I must express my appreciation to younger Repubs for footing that bill on my behalf.

FWIW, Congress/Admin did make the nonqualified plan arena less attractive with the legislation passed at the end of last year. I generally feel like whacking executives across the face with a meat tenderizing and screaming repeatedly, JUST PUT SOME OF YOUR COMP IN AN INVESTMENT ACCOUNT!!!! TAX-PREFERRED SAVINGS IS NOT A GOD-GIVEN RIGHT!!!!!! but, whatever. I guess I can just be happy that they can't play with it like it's a savings account (holding money they don't have to pay tax on until they decide to) anymore.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
What we need is government subsidies for sex.

2.

And, also, renewed immigration. Open up those borders.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
What we need is government subsidies for sex.

Mmmmm, sex. But subsidized or not, I'm not making any babies.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub

• It's not often that a professor tells a packed crowd at Columbia University that Edward Said was a political extremist and that faculty members in the school's Middle East studies department encourage Islamic terrorism.
  
  The professor who made those statements yesterday isn't from Columbia but from Harvard. Law professor Alan Dershowitz showed up at the intellectual home of Said, a literature professor who was a fierce critic of Israel, to rebuke Columbia's faculty and administration for tolerating an atmosphere on campus that he said promotes the hatred of Israel

I don't know much about Columbia, and wouldn't be surprised if it lacks a diversity of views on this issue. But trashing a dead man doesn't seem like a very good way of making this case. Typical Dershowitz.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by ltl/fb
Mmmmm, sex. But subsidized or not, I'm not making any babies.

Instead of government spending, what we really should do is outlaw birth control. My bet is we'll get more babies without having to further incentivize sex.

And, to Wonk's point, the AIDs deaths will lessen the retirement problem (but they will screw up Medicaid, won't they?).

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
We may need to talk. I haven't found those tax-free vehicles yet.

We may need to talk to the IRS. You can do a defined benefit plan and max out defined contribution plan contributions (like $45k I think; obviously I did not work on communications at the end of last year!!), but for partners in a law firm there's not really the option of nonqualified comp because of the way partnership tax works. So generally the other options are stuff that is sometimes known by the term of art "tax fraud."

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by sgtclub

• It's not often that a professor tells a packed crowd at Columbia University that Edward Said was a political extremist and that faculty members in the school's Middle East studies department encourage Islamic terrorism.
  
  The professor who made those statements yesterday isn't from Columbia but from Harvard. Law professor Alan Dershowitz showed up at the intellectual home of Said, a literature professor who was a fierce critic of Israel, to rebuke Columbia's faculty and administration for tolerating an atmosphere on campus that he said promotes the hatred of Israel

Does anyone think Dershowitz actually helps his cause?