Day: January 3, 2005

Altercation —

The governments of Sweden and England contributed $8.40 per citizen. The government of the wealthiest country on earth, the United States of America, originally offered twelve cents per citizen, here.

Now we’re up to a buck twenty. Japan, a country a fraction of ours and with a relatively tiny population, is giving more than is our government.

The New York Times publishes a strong, informative editorial —

For a society to be functional and humane, it’s not enough that some people have a chance to be rich in old age. Rather, all old people must have the dignity of financial security, and that requires universal coverage.

You are encouraged to read it in full.

From Gallup —

George W. Bush leads Gallup’s annual survey of the “most admired man” for the fourth year in a row. Hillary Clinton tops the most admired woman list with Oprah Winfrey close behind. Republicans overwhelmingly say the president is the most admired man, and also name first lady Laura Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice as the most admired women. Democrats, meanwhile, are most likely to mention Bill and Hillary Clinton as the most admired man and woman.

Josh Marshall has a must read posting on Social Security. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a key point —

After 1980 we started borrowing money big-time to finance our deficits — in large part because of tax cuts on high-income earners. However you want to slice it, we started spending substantially more than we were taking in in tax revenue.

So where’d we borrow the money?

This is from memory, so I may have the numbers a bit off. But I believe about $4 trillion of that debt was borrowed on the open market — individual Americans have them in their investment portfolios, or pension funds hold them, or the Chinese, Japanese and the Saudis and others have them in bonds.

But about $3 trillion of those dollars we needed to fund the 1980s and 1990s deficits we managed to borrow closer to home. We borrowed it from the Social Security (and a few other government) trust fund(s).

Almost the entirety of President Bush’s Social Security phase-out plan comes down to a simple proposition: finding out how not to pay it back.

Now, admittedly, this is an approach that the president is rather familiar with from his own business career at various failed energy companies. But it is, in so many words, a straight up con — one of vast scale, and one which virtually no one in the media ever frames in just these terms.