Category: Issues of the Day

Let’s talk about a guy we know. We’ll call him Sam.

Sam is well respected. He’s always doing things for others out of his own pocket. Trouble is Sam does so much that by the end of the year almost every year he has spent more money than he earned.

But Sam has good credit. The banks and credit unions (even the loan sharks) love loaning money to Sam. Even Sam’s children loan him money from their savings accounts (at interest).

Sam pays the interest on all his loans faithfully — but he always rolls over the principal. As a result, every year Sam is more and more in debt (and every year more of his income goes to paying interest).

In a few years Sam’s children are going to need their savings. They’re saying, “Dad, do you have our money safely put away for when we need it?” And Sam knows he doesn’t. He spent the kids money helping people (including his children).

What will Sam do?

As of the end 2004 the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund held $1,500,764,334,000 in U.S. Government securities. The Disability Insurance trust fund held $186,220,792,000. The total for the two trust funds was $1,686,985,126,000.

(That’s one trillion, 686 billion, 985 million, 126 thousand dollars.)

According to the Social Security Administration, “The average interest rate, weighted by the amount invested at each rate, is 5.492 percent at the end of December 2004.”

As of Tuesday, the federal debt was $7,623,393,028,778.05.

(That’s 7 trillion, 623 billion, 393 million, 28 thousand, seven hundred seventy-eight dollars and five cents.)

$4,428,946,193,753.01 is owed to individuals, corporations, state or local governments, and foreign governments. Types of securities held by the public include Treasury Bills, Notes, Bonds, and United States Savings Bonds.

The remaining $3,194,446,835,025.04 is owed to Government trust funds, revolving funds, and special funds.

If you’d like to make a contribution to reduce the debt:

1. Make check payable to the “Bureau of the Public Debt”
2. In the memo section of the check, make sure you write “Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public”
3. Mail check to –

   ATTN DEPT G
   BUREAU OF THE PUBLIC DEBT
   P O BOX 2188
   PARKERSBURG, WV 26106-2188

From Body and Soul, an interesting essay on the teaching of history from which the following is excerpted:

I’ve been pleasantly surprised — up to a point — with the way history is covered in my daughter’s class. When my son was her age, ten years ago, he had a teacher who was so uninterested in history — she actually told me that she despised the subject — that one time a kid recited, “The Indians made corn and ate baskets,” and the teacher just nodded and moved on. As long as the kid got Indians, corn, and baskets in one sentence, as far as she was concerned he knew everything he needed to know about Native Americans. And it wasn’t likely she was ever going to ask a kid to put Columbus and genocide in the same sentence.

Ever since then, “The Indians made corn and ate baskets” has been our code for how bad elementary school history is.

Source of income for FY 2006:

• Income taxes $967 billion
• Payroll taxes $819 billion
• Corporate income taxes $200 billion
• Excise taxes, gift taxes, etc. $172 billion
• Our children and grandchildren (borrowed) $390 billion

Over at Albloggerque Jon Knudsen talks of how million and billion soon lose their meaning. He notes, “If a person counted one number per second, it would take about 11 days to count to one million. It would take 33 years to count to one billion.”

NewMexiKen likes this analogy. If you spent $10,000 a day, you could spend a million dollars in 100 days. It would take you almost 274 years to spend a billion dollars.

From an editorial Monday in The Washington Post:

You could be forgiven for thinking that the archivist job is about ensuring that fading documents behind thick glass are adequately protected from the elements. As important as that is, the position involves far more. The archivist oversees and — in the best of worlds, facilitates, promotes and prods — the release of far less musty government documents, material essential to understanding modern American history. In an age when the amount and type of information are proliferating, the archivist decides what information must be preserved and ultimately made public and how best to make it accessible.

For example, at the dawn of the e-mail age, the archivist had to determine whether an administration’s e-mail messages were government records that had to be maintained for posterity; luckily for historians and the public, it was eventually required that they be saved. The next archivist will inherit a similar question about videoconference tapes and transcripts.

The History News Network has the latest on the nomination of Allen Weinstein to be Archivist of the United States.

On the eve of Monday’s Senate committee vote recommending his nomination as Archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein’s reputation and character were called into question by people who lured him two decades ago to run a high-profile institute in California. In 1984 Weinstein was appointed to revive the fortunes of the Robert Maynard Hutchins Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Eight months later he left in a cloud of doubts about his management abilities, according to a press account at the time.
…

The largest organization for which Weinstein has been responsible had an annual budget of between $6 to $8 million and a staff of several dozen, he told HNN. The National Archives has a budget of more than $300 million and a staff of some 3,000 scattered across the country. Weinstein is confident he can successfully manage the Archives. He told senators in his response to written questions, “it is important to recognize that the Archivist of the United States does not ‘manage alone,’ to paraphrase the popular book title, but [i]s the head of a talented and experienced leadership team…. I do not view the administrative responsibilities as Archivist as more daunting than the ‘small business’ model from which I have drawn most of my experience.”

“While Mr. Bush last week acknowledged that private accounts, by themselves, wouldn’t help Social Security’s long-term financial outlook, now the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary has informed the White House that its plan would hasten to 2012 from 2018 the date when Social Security will begin taking in less in payroll-tax revenues than it is paying out in benefits.”

— Wall Street Journal quoted by Atrios

From Daily Howler:

BUSH (2/4/05): Yes, ma’am.

QUESTION: What will be the cost of the transition from the way Social Security is now to the way you’re proposing to do it?

BUSH: Yes, she’s asking about the cost of the transition. Estimated at about $600 billion over a ten-year period of time to get the personal accounts started on the—the way we’ve suggested they grow. It’s a good question.

“It’s a good question,” Bush told the young woman—and then he basically lied in her face, offering a baldly bogus reply to her seminal question. In fact, the transition to private accounts would cost trillions of dollars, over the course of the next several decades—perhaps $15 trillion in all, the Congressional Budget Office has said (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/2/05). This Sunday, even Cheney acknowledged, on Fox News Sunday, that transition costs would run in the trillions.

From Eric Alterman:

“The era of big government is back.” Previous to this year, George W. Bush increased the size of the federal budget by 27 percent, if I’m not mistaken, busting a budget that had been in surplus when he inherited it and making him the biggest of big government spenders since Lyndon Johnson. Within that context, he has still managed to cut—or is trying to, almost all payments going to the most vulnerable members of society, children, students, the poor, the working poor and even (particularly) veterans (and here), while vastly increasing the amount given to the very rich and to the military. Five years ago Bush told us he was something different; a “compassionate conservative.” We now know he is neither compassionate, nor by any imaginable definition an economic conservative. Rather he is merely dishonest; effectively so, perhaps, but no less dishonest for being so.

The Denver Post, of all people, criticizes the Bush budget — Budget a blueprint for fiscal fantasy.

The $2.57 trillion budget that President Bush sent to Congress yesterday will draw fire from deficit hawks who see that it doesn’t give a realistic picture of what the government will spend in the upcoming fiscal year.

For example, the military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t enter into the balance sheet.

The Post concludes:

As a result of those cuts, U.S. tax revenue will fall to 17 percent of gross domestic product this year, down from 21 percent in 2000 and the lowest in four decades.

If the president and Congress continue insist on making those tax cuts permanent, the sea of red ink will continue rising.

“It remains my opinion that Social Security reform is not necessary at all if Congress would seriously address Medicare reform, balance the budget, erase the trade deficit, and make pension reform a real priority.”

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) quoted by Talking Points Memo

“Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”

President George W. Bush, Press Conference, November 4, 2004.

From Nicholas Confessore in The New York Times, Going for Broke May Break Bush:

Opinion polls show no public clamor to change the Social Security system; citizens are not yet marching on the Capitol demanding that they be allowed to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in the stock market. Nor does the program face an imminent threat that demands immediate action: According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security trust fund won’t run out until 2052, after which payroll tax receipts will still cover 81 percent of the benefits promised senior citizens. Even many Republicans seem cool to the idea.

Nevertheless, Mr. Bush embarked last week on a five-state Social Security tour, determined to get traction on the first major effort of his second term.

And if the past is any guide, he is unlikely to change direction.

From a report in The New York Times:

More than half the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit in Texas seeking compensation for exposure to silica – used in making glass, paint, ceramics and other materials – previously filed claims against a trust set up to compensate those injured by asbestos, a cancer-causing flame retardant.

The tort reform NewMexiKen would like to see would be to make it a potential criminal offense to bring frivolous lawsuits.

Paul Krugman takes Bush to the woodshed for his “shameful” playing of the race card — and lying at that — regarding Social Security this week.

Put it all together, and the deal African-Americans get from Social Security turns out, according to various calculations, to be either about the same as that for whites or somewhat better. Hispanics, by the way, clearly do better than either.

From Photo

Four of ten deaths due to the tsunami were children.

Link via TPM.

Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post via the San Francisco Chronicle on the Larry Summers matter:

Is it so heretical, though, so irredeemably oafish, to consider whether gender differences also play some role? As the daughter of two scientists and the mother of two daughters, I think not. After all, scientists are reporting day by day about their breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of diseases or personality traits. Brain studies of men and women show that the two genders use different parts of their brain to process language. (Men tend to be left-siders, women both-lobers.)

Summers drew fire for relating the story of how he bought a set of trucks for his daughter, only to find her naming them “Daddy Truck” and “Baby Truck.” A clumsy and ill-advised anecdote perhaps, but one that resonated with legions of would-be gender-neutral parents of girls. I, for one, have a basement full of Brio train tracks, as pristine as they were pricey. We use the train table to fold our laundry.

Many of the same people denouncing Summers, I’d venture, believe fervently that homosexuality, for example, is a matter of biology rather than of choice or childhood experience. Many would demand that medical studies be structured to consider differences between men and women in metabolizing drugs, say, or responding to a particular disease. And many who find Summers’ remarks offensive seem perfectly happy to trumpet the supposed attributes that women bring to the workplace — that they are more intuitive, or more empathetic or some such. If that is so — and I’ve always rather cringed at such assertions — why is it impermissible to suggest that there might be some downside differences as well?

Kakistocracy (from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000)

SYLLABICATION: kak·is·toc·ra·cy
PRONUNCIATION: kăk-stŏk’rə-sē, käk’–
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. kak·is·toc·ra·cies
Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
ETYMOLOGY:
Greek kakistos, worst, superlative of kakos, bad; caco– + –cracy.
Oldest use: 1829.

* Reference link 1
* Reference link 2

PUTTING THE WORD TO USE:
“Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?” – 1876 OED

From Altercation correspondent Barry R.

Functional Ambivalent wanted to know “What is Condi Describing and Why Does She Seem So Disgusted?”

The American Street suggests she might be talking about Harvard President Larry Summers.

or did the lack of flu vaccine story just go away?

FEMA for Kids: Tsunami Game.

Link via Rox Populi. Similarly, I am without comment.

THE WASHINGTON POST: Why do you think [Osama] bin Laden has not been caught?

THE PRESIDENT: Because he’s hiding.