FROM 2012 INTO 2013 POLITICS THREAD

BTExpress · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Which makes it a regressive tax.
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Well, yes. But that's not automatically a bad thing.

Most taxes need to be regressive, because you can't charge Bill Gates 50% sales tax on a box of cereal just because he's Bill Gates.

Azrael · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

GeorgeFHayek said:

Azrael said:

If your personal wealth exceeds a certain baseline, maybe you test out of Social Security.

Like many other forms of insurance, that you paid for it doesn't necessarily mean the insurance ever pays out to you.
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Don't be silly. Social Security isn't insurance. It's an income transfer program. Nothing more.
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This is why the other Austrians voted your ancestors off the island all those years ago.

www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/progdesc/ssptw/2010-2011/europe/austria.html

Captain Obvious · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

GeorgeFHayek said:

Azrael said:

If your personal wealth exceeds a certain baseline, maybe you test out of Social Security.

Like many other forms of insurance, that you paid for it doesn't necessarily mean the insurance ever pays out to you.
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Don't be silly. Social Security isn't insurance. It's an income transfer program. Nothing more.
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OASDI

Captain Obvious · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

cranberry said:

MisterCreosote said:

cranberry said:

MisterCreosote said:

I miss the days before Jan. 20, 2009, when everyone in America lived in blissful ignorance and blind acceptance of what the government was doing.
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Outside a few remarks from Tip O'Neill I don't recall Beirut being a terribly politicized tragedy.
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There weren't hearings after Beirut? Cutting past all of the empty Fox News rhetoric, that's all that's really happening now, too.
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I don't recall Congressional hearings or any attempt to politicize Beirut. There was a DOD report aimed at fact finding and preventing similar incidents in the future. The military took the fall in the end but privately and in later years publicly Cap Weinberger blamed Reagan.
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http://www.phillyburbs.com/entertainment/in-debacle-reagan-escaped-the-blame-game/article_0174fce9-b60c-5b6b-8934-915bd3c2bcf7.html

The Reagan administration immediately attempted to deflect blame for the attack with a deluge of false statements and misrepresentations. In a televised speech four days after the bombing, the president insisted the attack was unstoppable, erroneously declaring that the truck crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements, and argued that the U.S. mission was succeeding.

Despite the fact that Reagan had dispatched the Marines into an impossible situation and then had issued orders that led to their inability to defend themselves, he suffered relatively little criticism from the press or partisan opponents, and after months of vigorous campaigning was overwhelmingly re-elected the following year.

Contrast this with the controversy over the recent attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where on Sept. 11, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were assassinated.

Within hours of that attack, and with no evidence as to how or why it had occurred or how it could have been prevented, presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke from what has long been traditional political protocol in situations of this type and attacked President Barack Obama, accusing him of sympathizing with anti-American interests in the Muslim world.
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3_Octave_Fart · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Azrael said:

Mamet on guns, fisked, debunked.

www.salon.com/2013/01/29/david_mamet_should_stick_to_writing_plays/
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Yes, the ever original 'fisking' as means of advancing the discourse.

GeorgeFHayek · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Here is a pull from a primer on Social Security put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (Craig P. Aubuchon, Juan C. Conesa, and Carlos Garriga, A Primer on Social Security Systems and Reforms, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, January/February 2011, 93(1), pp. 19-35):

The U.S. Social Security system was implemented in 1935 under President Franklin Roosevelt. This system, formally known as Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI), is a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) system in which workers provide financing through a Social Security tax; these contributions provide benefits to the currently retired or disabled. The system requires an implicit guarantee that future generations will then provide the same support for them. In contrast, fully funded (FF) social security systems require that benefits accrue based on individual contributions paid over time. In such systems, future obligations are fully funded by earlier contributions.
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What is the risk to retirees (or those close to retirement)? That this implicit guarantee will be breached:

A payg system ... faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as 'political risk,' that some generations do not agree to contribute as much as expected (Demange, Gabrille, On Sustainable Pay-as-You-Go Contribution Rules. Journal of Public Economic Theory, August 2009, 11(4), pp. 493-527).
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Whether that is likely or unlikely is beside the point. The facts are that Social Security et al. benefits are only guaranteed to the degree that subsequent worker cohorts agree, through their political agents, to provide them. That is, no matter how much you have paid "into the system," upon retirement (or disability) as a matter of law you (and those like you) have no contractual claim on future benefits.

"Social Security was not insurance, the majority in (Nestor v. Flemming) made clear. 'Earned' social insurance benefits were neither 'property' nor contractual right. This was a major pronouncement about the nature of America's welfare state, one that has never been overturned, (Tani, Karen M., Flemming v. Nestor: Anticommunism, the Welfare State, and the Making of 'New Property,' Law and History Review (2008), 26(2), pp. 379-414).
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The realities of the Social Security system is that it may have been sold politically as insurance -- even that was dicey, as its proponents soft-pedaled that when the law was brought before the Supreme Court the first time around in Helvering v. Davis in 1937 -- but it's always been a paygo system.

"The ideology that ... Social Security administrators fashioned for the old-age security system ... was based on a (technically quite false) analogy to private savings or insurance" (Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (1995), Princeton University Press, p. 162).
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Azrael · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

3_Octave_Fart said:

Azrael said:

Mamet on guns, fisked, debunked.

www.salon.com/2013/01/29/david_mamet_should_stick_to_writing_plays/
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Yes, the ever original 'fisking' as means of advancing the discourse.
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Well, it advances "the discourse" insofar as it points out the serial factual and conceptual errors in the piece.

cranberry · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

GeorgeFHayek said:

cranberry said:

Do poor people live as long as wealthy people?
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Wasn't there a piece mentioned here earlier that was kind of mixed? As in, overall poor people have lower life expectancies, but once you get past a certain age it's pretty much a wash?

But, for the hell of it, let's stipulate that they do. What's the point?
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I'm wondering whether increasing the retirement age would disproportionately affect poor and lower-class people as well as those with hazardous and/or physically demanding occupations.

3_Octave_Fart · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Azrael said:

3_Octave_Fart said:

Azrael said:

Mamet on guns, fisked, debunked.

www.salon.com/2013/01/29/david_mamet_should_stick_to_writing_plays/
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Yes, the ever original 'fisking' as means of advancing the discourse.
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Well, it advances "the discourse" insofar as it points out the serial factual and conceptual errors in the piece.
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Opinions vary.
Mamet could write circles around this guy half-drunk and underwater.
So let's not so smugly tell one of the last American polymaths to "go back to his plays."

dooley_womack1 · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

I'll work Ruckus' corners for a second: Logical fallacy, appeal to authority division.

OK, Ruck, all yours again.

GeorgeFHayek · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Captain Obvious said:

GeorgeFHayek said:

Azrael said:

If your personal wealth exceeds a certain baseline, maybe you test out of Social Security.

Like many other forms of insurance, that you paid for it doesn't necessarily mean the insurance ever pays out to you.
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Don't be silly. Social Security isn't insurance. It's an income transfer program. Nothing more.
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OASDI
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Oh, like how the government labels its actions means anything. Ever read the bill the Senate passed in 2008 that gave us, among other things, TARP etc.?

In the Senate of the United States,
October 1 (legislative day, September 17), 2008.
Resolved,

That the bill from the House of Representatives (H.R. 1424) entitled ‘‘An Act to amend section 712 of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, section 2705 of the Public Health Service Act, section 9812 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to require equity in the provision of mental health and substance-related disorder benefits under group health plans, to prohibit discrimination on the basis of genetic information with respect to health insurance and employment, and for other purposes.’’
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dooley_womack1 · Jan 30, 2013

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Also, how does being a playwright make Mamet an authority on anything other than writing plays?

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