Compromise

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

I think that the issue at hand in Washington is that there is a consensus there that the little people need to get screwed a little, but there is disagreement about how to screw the general populace and still retain the perquisites of power.

But what I am thinking is that there may very well be a need for the little people to get screwed.  The amount of money flying out Woodlawn is astonishing.  In 2003, before the baby boomers started coming home to roost, the amount amount paid out by the Social Security Administration was 37% of all government expenditures and 7% of GDP.

I kind of doubt that that percentage of expenditure has gone down in the last ten years.  That and a couple more wars that we lost followed by some real crap economic times and I would not at all be surprised to see the outlay at more like 45% or so.

So, we have this huge outlay for old folks and folks who can't quite deal.  I know you think that this is being harsh, and in a way you are right, but that is the demographic served by the SSA.  Now, I think taking care of old folks and the folks who wouldn't make it otherwise is a fine thing to do.  But the current system reflects what I feel is a mistaken belief that the program is an "insurance" that you buy during your working days to help in your dotage.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah....I can already hear the flames a comin'.  "I paid for it", "Of course it is insurance, it says so right there on the label".  Yada yada yada.

Look folks, when the government takes your money by edict, it is a tax.  If you like what the government does with the money, it is a fair tax, taken for the public good, for a just and reasonable purpose.   If you don't like it, it is an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties, taken against our will by jackbooted thugs, placed there to oppress us.   It really is your call, as these appear to be the only two applicable and acceptable modes of thought in our current political discourse.

So, we have all been paying this tax, I have had the money coming out of my meager paychecks for over forty years now.  Its a tax, the money is gone.  I have received a whole bunch of benefit for the privilege.  My Mom (84 years old with stage 6-7 Alzheimer's) is being taken care of in an excellent home with caring and professional staff.  That expense took all my SSA deductions, as well as Mom's and my two sisters and then spent some more.   Even if you factored in the "interest" on the government bonds, the money is gone, gone, gone.  We are more than even, the program has been a benefit.

Now, there are those of you who would sneer at my taking the easy way out, but, there wasn't much else to be done.  My savings wouldn't have kept here there for a single year, she in on year three.  I would have had to quit my job or had one of my boys stay home from school to take care of her.  There was only the social security option open.

Now you are probably thinking that I am being disingenuous in saying that something has to be done with the benefits.  After all, didn't I just describe how the programs saved my sanity and possibly my mothers life?

There isn't any conflict in my mind.  The program has been very good to my mother.  But the truth is the amount of money spent is merely being transferred to my sons by the magic of compound interest.

We will all die.  It would be interesting to know how much money is being spent prolonging lives like my mother's?  How much is being spent to keep fellow-citizens from starving when the economy has no further use for them?  How much is being given to comfortable bourgeois to pad their already healthy recreation accounts?  How much of their share is not being paid by the wealthy?

But I think that the first thing that has to be done is a simple statement that the programs supported by the SSA are not an insurance program.  They are a struggling and divided government's attempt to deal with complex and conflicting goals and a fractured body politic.  They are paid for by taxes and the money taken in over the last 83 years has all been spent and we are paying for the services extended by the money taken in from our paychecks every week.

I don't know is Social Security can be saved.  I think that if it cannot be saved, it may well serve as the catalyst for the process that will result, years down the line, of the Balkanization of the US.  It came into being as a means of holding together an angry nation and a broken economy.  It may well go out as failing in its goal.

One of my favorites

I am quite disappointed this year by the lack of complaints about football and America’s obsession with football.  The usually peak about this time.  They are remarkably thin this year.
Not that I agree, I love watching football, warts and all.  I loved playing even more. I agree that the game definitely needs to get safer. The head injury issue needs to get worked on and changes have to be made to the rules to lower injury rates.
Naw, that bit went through it’s 24 hour wash-rinse-repeat cycle during the last couple of months.  The hystericals seem to have shot their wad then and are quiet now.  That is too bad, I have really come to appreciate the over the top antics of the “Football as an American Evil” crowd.
Naw, gonna watch some football on Sunday, then the TV gets mothballed for the year

A Man of Parts

"Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

OK.  Those of you who have read this screed for a while are aware of my unabashed distaste for the "sport" of cycling.  So you may find it odd that I am weighing in on the recent "revelations" that Lance Armstrong doped during his run being the king shit of the bicycle world.

I really can't say as I care any more than I cared about Paul Hornung or Pete Rose's gambling.  I care about the steroid abuse in baseball an equivalent amount.  Adderall use in the NFL interests me equally.

That is to say, not at all.

"I don’t think he was ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart."

 F. Scott Fitzgerald

Professional athletes are one of the oddest parts of our culture.  Sports is of such a trivial importance to our society, yet the mass media uses the National Enquirer culture to force feed the foibles of a bunch of pandered children as part of the appeal of the game.

Lance Armstrong did some pretty amazing things, even taking into consideration his notable inattention to the rules of the game.   The sport of bicycling is known as a cess-pit of rule bending, skating the line, and absolute cheating.  I really can't think of a dirtier sport.  I have heard that the agency that runs the Tour de France is having difficulty locating a participant who is not under investigation to award the prizes vacated by Mr. Armstrong.

You see, even with the doping, Lance has to be up there with one of the great ones of the sport.  If a cheater beats all of the rest of the cheaters, then, by definition, he is the best in the sport.

But Lance is a different critter.  I have never been a big fan of our adulation of the "cancer survivor", as if scrambling not to die somehow puts you above the herd.  So his "beating" cancer doesn't really hold any special pull for me.

So he went out and created a PR firm to harvest guilt-gelt harvesting machine.  It did great work for the business model that he isolated;  The perpetual motion money making machine that is the search for the cure for cancer.

Leigh Cowart over at NSFW banged the description of cancer right down on it head. (please splurge the subscription fee so that these folks can keep going, this is a great news service)

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. There’s no cure for cancer. There could never be, and will never be a cure for cancer. See, cancer isn’t a thing. It’s not a fightable foe, like a bacterial infection or George Foreman. It’s not an simple environmental agent that you can remove from your surroundings like Agent Orange or Aunt Tilda. The reason you cannot cure cancer is because cancer isn’t one disease. Or a hundred diseases. Or a thousand diseases. 

Cancer is millions of diseases. Cancer can become other diseases within the same cancer patient. Cancer is the varied and seemingly innumerable ways in which the abnormal cells in the human body can exhibit uncontrolled growth. And it’s changing all the time.

 So Little Lancie, a serial cheater, scrambles like hell to get rid of testicular cancer (an act which I hold in no contempt, seems like a damn fine idea), and sets himself up as a demigod for the masses and scrapes in buttloads of money for cancer research and his own lifestyle.  Sounds like quite the deal.

But now the Oprah crowd and its hangers on are finding out that Lance was an asshole during his run at greatness.   Wow, who would have thought it.

But our umbrage and outrage about Mr. Armstrong's behavior strike me as kind of disingenuous.  Maybe it is the contempt which I hold the world view that Ms Winfrey espouses, but more than that I think that it is our desire as a culture to have the folks who are willing to do anything to achieve the transient greatness of this life be "just ordinary Joes",  to be just like us.

Ms. Winfrey is the sounding board for the folks who have shoveled aside everything for the pursuit of fame.  It is a closely scripted, tightly controlled facade where the rich and powerful can pretend that they are "plain folk" for the edification of the masses and the increase in bottom lines of self-serving elites.

No, we can't blame the folks like Armstrong for their single minded drive.  They are different than us.  They will cheat to get what they want, because what they want is beyond the reach of the "ordinary Joe" we so wish them to be.

The blame lies with us, the noble unwashed masses who desire more than anything to retain the thought that we are just as good as the single minded automatons that have sacrificed everything to achieve their goal.  When we find out that such as these are different than us, have differing motivations, different interpretations of the rules, it ruins our fantasy that excellence is a path that we could have chosen, but one we just didn't tread.

The Barn Door

Consider for a moment the following website:

http://defensedistributed.com/

I am always surprised and saddened by the lack of sophistication on both sides in the "Gun Debate".

It is kind of scary.

Gun control is an extraordinarily difficult subject, it is resistant to any attempt to simplify the issue and the noisiest folks in the debates are usually those with the least to contribute.  Somehow gun control has become a touchstone, an article of faith in the holy war between the defenders guns and those who wish to see them gone.

Pandora's box is open.  The guns that are out there can't be called back.  I am not interested in a civil war, so the thought that the government will go out and confiscate firearms is not one that I will ever support.  But the truth of the matter is that there are too many guns out there.

I think that the folks who have guns aren't going to be giving them up without a struggle.  I don't think that the problem of guns in the hands of criminals will suddenly disappear with the passage of a few laws.  Crazy folks will still get access to guns that they shouldn't have.

The folks that think that passing a couple of laws and implementing some executive orders will solve the problem are deluded.  Folks that think free and simple access to guns will solve the problem are deluded.

The horses are running away, closing the barn door may seem foolish, but there might be a horse or two left in there, we might want to keep them there.

Multiples

Now

Then

So, Russell comments on my post from the fifteenth.

45% of the 1.6 million Afghanistan/Iraq veterans are claiming compensation for injuries, versus 21% of Gulf War vets. They are also claiming far more injuries (10+) than earlier vets - although that may be an effort to make a lot of "minor" injuries add up to enough to count as disability.

I get thinking.  The bare stats that Russell cites seems to be a critique of the current crop of discharged vets, a subtle slam that they are trying to "milk" the system to a greater degree than the vets of the past.

OK, this is the longest time period that troops have ever been deployed.  The nature of the Army is different, no longer a draftee army doing a single tour and then back to the world, but a volunteer army doing multiple deployments under a single enlistment.

So more folks are asking for disabilities?  Yes, I would imagine that it is true and fair.

Every time you go to see the elephant, you start from zero and go into another, discrete probability space where you can get fucked up.  Each discrete tour adds to the overall possibility you will get fucked up.  Training fucks you up.  The military uses people like a person with a cold uses kleenex.

So, we have been abusing the hell out of these kids and then are surprised when they come back damaged.  I remember one of the reasons we stayed in that shithole Iraq as long as we did is the oh-so-moral "you break it, you buy it" rule.

So why is that not the case with veterans?

What do they do?

Courtesy of the Demotivators

So, over at the Zerohedge site when I came across this little gem.   It was a cross post Submitted by Jim Quinn from The Burning Platform.

A true rant about the lazy bastards who suck off of social security and how the system is already broke. Well, I will certainly agree that the money is gone.  CongressCritters stole it a long time ago to pay for their pet projects.

Hmmm.  So what is trying to be said here?

This is the quote which really intrigued me.

Just because the scumbags on Wall Street and in the rest of corporate America commit fraud on a massive scale does not mean we should look the other way when lowlifes in our community do the same thing on a smaller scale. 

Wow.

Everyone is trying to pay no attention whatsoever to the fact that the world has changed a lot lately.  A person who goes on SSDI is now a "lowlife".  Now, even if the person is capable of working, just what job is available to them?  I haven't seen a huge increase in the job creation numbers lately.  Truth be told, job creation doesn't even appear to keeping up with population growth.

So what we are developing is a class of non-working poor who still wish to eat and have a warm place to shit.   The jobs that they once held are gone to China and the inexorable push of robotics and computerization.  In other words, in the words of Bruce:

"Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back

to your hometown"

So, what I am wondering is what do we do?  SSDI is being used in a manner it was not being designed for:  the long term support of effectively unemployable persons.  Some folks squeak about this, but the truth be told, the folks that are applying are usually without any other options.

Being older, under-educated, slow, and unemployable in a compressive collapse is a pretty shitty place to be.  The folks that I know who are going this route are any number of combinations of the above.

Over and over again, I keep asking what do we do with folks who don't have the intelligence or tools to compete in a job market that is being shrink to fits the needs of shareholders?   Hell, the government even allows companies to deduct the cost of buying the robots being used to kick people out the door.  You don't have to look far to find a story about the jobs that used to be.

What do we do?