A Forum for Grinches and Ho-Ho-Hoes

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
why it's OK to borrow government money that taxpayers in the future are going to have to pay taxes to repay (with interest) but it's not OK to collect taxes now to pay for the same thing?

Two words: Iraqui Oil

[Skeks in the city]

I love thinking of social security and medicare as having funds. Here're nice facts from the CBO: 2004 spending on Medicare, social security and interest on federal debt is $1.47 trillion;
2015 spending on those things is projected to be $2.51 trillion.

The US can't possibly allow the $1 billion increase push the US' $500 billion deficits to $1.5 trillion deficits without horrendous inflation. It won't matter whether the deficit is due to issuing new debt or selling old debt that was part of the social security "fund" so the US will have to react by a combination of cutting benefits and increasing taxes.

[Adder]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
While privatization isn't a bail-out. No one thinks that. And people certainly think that privatization will allow people to earn greater returns, but the crucial point is that in a world where the returns are great enough to make up for the problems with Social Security, the economic growth was also probably robust enough that Social Security doesn't need to be saved.

I don't see how your last sentence is relevant unless you see privatization as a bail out. In other words, privatization might be good even if there is no no need to save anything.

In your last paragraph, you seem to be buying into the assumption that historic returns will be matched in coming decades. This is likely not true, for the reasons Drum discusses.

Perhaps I will need to go back and actually read what you are referring to, but I am highly skeptical of anyone who believes they can predict what the market will do, especially if they are predicting that things will be susbtantially different than they have been in the past.

[Adder]

Originally posted by Skeks in the city
I love thinking of social security and medicare as having funds. Here're nice facts from the CBO: 2004 spending on Medicare, social security and interest on federal debt is $1.47 trillion;
2015 spending on those things is projected to be $2.51 trillion.

The US can't possibly allow the $1 billion increase push the US' $500 billion deficits to $1.5 trillion deficits without horrendous inflation. It won't matter whether the deficit is due to issuing new debt or selling old debt that was part of the social security "fund" so the US will have to react by a combination of cutting benefits and increasing taxes.

I think you are missing a few factors that make your numbers imprecise, but I take your point.

[andViolins]

I'm no scientist, but is it really that hard to keep track of how much food, or lack of food, one may have on one's international space station?

aV

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by andViolins
I'm no scientist, but is it really that hard to keep track of how much food, or lack of food, one may have on one's international space station?

aV

though I don't know how they do that, I can imagine ways to do it.

[ilikenewsocks]

Soldier's tough question for Rummy was a reporter's plant, says CNN

I'm so discouraged by this. What have the media come to? I think I'll go home and watch a little Dan Rather for comfort.

[baltassoc]

Originally posted by ilikenewsocks
Soldier's tough question for Rummy was a reporter's plant, says CNN

I'm so discouraged by this. What have the media come to? I think I'll go home and watch a little Dan Rather for comfort.

Was the applause by a few thousand other soldiers also planted?

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by ilikenewsocks
Soldier's tough question for Rummy was a reporter's plant, says CNN

I'm so discouraged by this. What have the media come to? I think I'll go home and watch a little Dan Rather for comfort.

The soldier's girlfriend told NPR this morning that she doesn't think the question was planted because they'd talked about the questions he might ask the night before the event.

Nashville and Tennessee are behind him.

http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4212183

[SlaveNoMore]

Replaced_Texan
The soldier's girlfriend told NPR this morning that she doesn't think the question was planted because they'd talked about the questions he might ask the night before the event.

Nashville and Tennessee are behind him.

http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4212183

Who cares. So an embed gave the grunt a few good questions.

It was good for troop morale. Rummy gave a quick and honest response* Win - win all around for everyone.

Somehow, I doubt enlisteds in other countries get to speak with the head honcho like that.


* Read his full response. Not his edited soundbite

[SlaveNoMore]

CBS Politcal News Chief calls for regulation of Blogs.

Hmm. I guess those suits at CBS are still steaming that the blogosphere busted Rather and Mapes as the partisan hacks that they really are?

Blogs: New Medium, Old Politics
NEW YORK, Dec. 8, 2004

By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com chief political writer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Internet blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks. With the same First Amendment protections as newspapers, blogs are increasingly gaining influence.

While many are must-reads for political junkies, are some Internet blogs also being used as proxies for campaigns? In the nation’s hottest Senate race, this past year, the answer was yes.

Little over a month ago, the first Senate party leader in 52 years was ousted when South Dakota Republican John Thune defeated top Senate Democrat Tom Daschle. While more than $40 million was spent in the race, saturating the airwaves with advertising, a potentially more intriguing front was also opened.

The two leading South Dakota blogs – websites full of informal analysis, opinions and links – were authored by paid advisers to Thune’s campaign.

The Sioux Falls Argus Leader and the National Journal first cited Federal Election Commission documents showing that Jon Lauck, of Daschle v Thune, and Jason Van Beek, of South Dakota Politics, were advisers to the Thune campaign.

The documents, also obtained by CBS News, show that in June and October the Thune campaign paid Lauck $27,000 and Van Beek $8,000. Lauck had also worked on Thune’s 2002 congressional race.

Both blogs favored Thune, but neither gave any disclaimer during the election that the authors were on the payroll of the Republican candidate.

No laws have apparently been broken. Case precedent on political speech as it pertains to blogs does not exist. But where journalists' careers may be broken on ethics violations, bloggers are writing in the Wild West of cyberspace. There remains no code of ethics, or even an employer, to enforce any standard.

At minimum, the role of blogs in the Daschle-Thune race is a telling harbinger for 2006 and 2008. Some blogs could become new vehicles for the old political dirty tricks.

Like all media, blogs hold the potential for abuse. Experts point out that blogs' unregulated status makes them particularly attractive outlets for political attack.

“The question is: What are the appropriate regulations on the Internet?" asked Kathleen Jamieson, an expert on political communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communications. “It’s evolved into an area that we need to do more thinking about it.

“If you put out flyers, you have to disclaim it, you have to represent who you are,” Jamieson said. “If you put out an ad you have to put a disclaimer on it. But we don’t have those sorts of regulations for political content, that is campaign-financed on the Internet.”

First Amendment attorney Kevin Goldberg called blogs “definitely new territory.”

“[The question is] whether blogs are analogous to a sole person campaigning or whether they are very much a media publication, which is essentially akin to an online newspaper,” said Goldberg, who is the legal counsel to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

“Ultimately, I think, the decision will have to come down to whether the public will be allowed to decide whether bloggers are credible or whether some regulation needs to occur.”

Generally, the Supreme Court has ruled that restrictions on political advocacy by corporations and unions does not apply to media or individuals. The reasoning has been that media competition insures legitimacy. This has historically been the argument against monopolies in media ownership.

Hypothetically, if The Washington Post discovered that The New York Times had a reporter being paid by the Bush campaign it would report it. If proven, the suspect reporter would be fired and likely never work in mainstream journalism again. Hence, the courts have been satisfied with the industry’s ability to regulate itself.

The affiliations and identities of bloggers are not always apparent. Take writer Duncan Black, who blogged under the name Atrios. His was a popular liberal blog. During part of the period he was blogging, Black was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America. Critics in the blogosphere said this fact wasn't fairly disclosed.

“People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it’s partisan,” Jamieson said. “The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.”

That is not a legal problem, however, but one of ethics. Black eventually claimed credit for his blog and his affiliation with Media Matters. Fellow bloggers heavily publicized his political connections. And Black continued blogging.

Defenders of Black point out that unlike the South Dakota blogs, he was not working on behalf of a campaign. And clearly, absent blog ethical guidelines, what Black did was not that different than many others.

“He is perfectly free to write the blog. You can criticize him for it but he had a perfect Constitutional right to do what he did,” said Eugene Volokh, who teaches free speech law at UCLA Law School and authors his own blog, the Volokh Conspiracy.

“People are free to say whatever they want to say and not reveal any financial inducements and not reveal in whose pay they are,” Volokh added. “Now there is an exception for speech that urges the election or defeat of a particular candidate.” But where this exception relates to Internet blogs is unclear.

Beginning next year, the F.E.C. will institute new rules on the restricted uses of the Internet as it relates to political speech.

“I think those questions are going to have to be asked and answered,” said Lillian BeVier, a First Amendment expert at the University of Virginia. “It’s going to be an issue and it should be an issue.”

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Adder
I don't see how your last sentence is relevant unless you see privatization as a bail out. In other words, privatization might be good even if there is no no need to save anything.

Social Security is an intergenerational transfer, or, if you like, a Ponzi Scheme. Payments to the old are funded by the young, with the promise that when the young grow old, they too will be taken care of. "Privatization" is something completely different -- the notion that this compact should be replaced with a system in which the young are permitted or compelled to invest for themselves. So the fundamental problem is that if we adopt "privatization," who pays for the old until today's young are old? Whether or not "privatization" is "good," you have this (huge) problem.

Perhaps I will need to go back and actually read what you are referring to, but I am highly skeptical of anyone who believes they can predict what the market will do, especially if they are predicting that things will be susbtantially different than they have been in the past.

Then you should be "highly skeptical" about the claims made by privatization advocates that investments in the market will earn 6% or 7%. But obviously there is a connection between the performance of the stock market and the performance of the larger economy, and if the privatization advocates are claiming that the latter will suffer in coming decades, as a result of demographic factors, it's hard to see how they could think that returns in the market will keep ripping along at past rates.

The answer is, of course, that they don't -- they are wedded to privatization for ideological and venal reasons, not because they believe in these numbers.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Skeks in the city
I love thinking of social security and medicare as having funds. Here're nice facts from the CBO: 2004 spending on Medicare, social security and interest on federal debt is $1.47 trillion;
2015 spending on those things is projected to be $2.51 trillion.

The US can't possibly allow the $1 billion increase push the US' $500 billion deficits to $1.5 trillion deficits without horrendous inflation. It won't matter whether the deficit is due to issuing new debt or selling old debt that was part of the social security "fund" so the US will have to react by a combination of cutting benefits and increasing taxes.

The big problem is Medicare, right? Conservatives like to group Social Security and Medicare because it makes the former look more troubled than it is.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Somehow, I doubt enlisteds in other countries get to speak with the head honcho like that.

The British aside, very few of them are in Kuwait or Iraq, so their questions about truck armor are doubtless less pressing.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
CBS Politcal News Chief calls for regulation of Blogs.

I'm missing the call for regulation.

There's a good point in there that there doesn't seem to be any sort of code of ethics whereby (e.g.) those Thune blogs would be obliged to disclose that they were on the Thune payroll. Competition doesn't work as well when consumers don't have this sort of information.

I don't understand why they include Atrios, except perhaps out of some screwy impulse to look even-handed by attacking someone on the left. Atrios wasn't paid to blog, and having a position with a watchdog group is very different from having a position with a campaign.