Living in Oblockbusterville
By Katie Kieffer
Truman tries to escape the constricting set of the movie, The Truman Show. Image Credit: http://tinyurl.com/ykqsakb
Have you ever felt like you were living in a movie? This weekend, as I read the news and did my “blog homework” to catch up on current events, I had the surreal sense that I was living in a movie. I felt a little like Truman (Jim Carey) in the movie, “The Truman Show.”
I get the feeling that our country – the United States of America – is changing at an alarming rate. I’ll share some of my weekend findings with you.
The Obama Administration and the mass media – with rare exceptions such as Fox News and some bloggers, business associations and conservative magazines – are pushing changes in America that are blockbuster movie material. These are the sorts societal transformations that you might see in a movie trailer – and watch as entertainment – not changes you’d ever assume would happen in America where we have “checks and balances” of power, and rights and liberties enumerated in our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Changes like:
- Health care bill passes in the House on Nov. 7, 2009 despite tea party protests and an overwhelming number of phone calls made by Americans to their elected officials. This will be the “most expensive program in U.S. history.” The House passed it even though Obama Care had been proven – as articulated by Stanford University’s Hoover Digest - to be laden with problems such as:
- “Limited access to specialists, state-of-the art drugs, modern technologies and safe treatments.”
- Limited “choice of doctors and treatments.”
- Limited “choice on coverage.”
- Limited access to leading health care innovations.
- One of our most fundamental rights as Americans – the freedom of speech – is under threat. Americans across the country are expressing their concern in letters to the editor. It appears that the Obama Administration has a deep distrust of any conflicting viewpoints to the point that it has taken extreme, unnecessary dictator-like measures to break down free speech. Where does this insecurity come from? Watch this video to learn more:
- Conflicting viewpoints are necessary for freedom. It is not under the government’s purview to monitor the internet or social media like Facebook®. Who else censors free speech on the internet? Oh yes, that would be communist China’s government. Do we want to model our country after China?
- This restrictive attitude toward free speech has and will continue to directly impact freedom of education, the arts, the press and religion. Watch this video, the first in a series of five, where Glenn Beck explains.
Think about the ramifications of these existing and pending changes. Think about how they have and will change your lifestyle. I don’t like the constricted, Truman-like feeling I get when I observe the changes our government is trying to impose on us. I prefer freedom, don’t you?
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9 Responses to “Living in Oblockbusterville”
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@Aguy – Wait wait wait. WE’VE made the policy choice to have Social Security? I’m sorry, that was FDR, (a Democrat in case you forgot) who basically forced Congress to pass the initial SS law when there was ZERO public support for such a thing. http://www.fee.org/pdf/the-freeman/0905Richmancolumn.pdf So dont try to claim that WE’VE made this policy choice. It was forced on us by FDR. If you read the article through, it suggests that Roosevelt saw a golden opportunity for vote-getting by making all Americans dependent on government for their retirement income. Wow, that sounds really similar to this Socialized Healthcare that Obama is pushing. Tax the top 1% of earners to buy the votes of the bottom 50%… It’s genius, you have to give FDR and Obama that. Pander to the majority by stealing from the minority. Good way to stay in power.
Amazing how the power of compound interest works isnt it?
Yes, yes, compound interest is truly amazing … but I’m not arguing Social Security is supposed to make huge amounts of money for people. You’re math clearly shows that — surprise surprise — the government won’t make you rich. You have clearly established it is not a good deal for money making, and I agree. However, the program is not called “Individual Riches;” it’s called “Social Security.”
If you’re arguing “why can’t we just keep the money and invest it ourselves?” well … that’s because we’ve made the policy choice to make sure you won’t be 90 years old, dying in a gutter! The point’s not to make tons of money for you (they can do that on their own, without government), the point is that we didn’t like seeing our sick grandparents dying in the streets. SS solved that, despite your claims that they “should have” saved X amount of dollars a year. They didn’t do that (rightly or wrongly) and we thought it was the moral thing to do to get old folks off the streets. We no longer experience that problem on that sort of scale, so it’s easy to forget that it’s worked and continues to work.
Now people are living longer, and we ton infinitely more old folks. That’s a challenge, but it’s not a problem for the program overall — despite it not making millions for people…
Aguy – Before you question whether I understand percentages maybe you should have asked for the spreadsheet. Or done the math yourself.
Want to know how much someone making $12 an hour (equivalent to $24000 a year) pays in SS a year? Don’t worry, I’ll tell you. $1,488. As does their employer. So, $2,476 that you could invest yourself. Now, doing the math, and compounding the interest monthly (not yearly as I was doing before), you end up with $528,211 at the current retirement age of 67. You can then take out $33,224 every year for the next 30 years (you’re now 97, does anyone really think they’re going to live to be 97?) and still have some left over. THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS, YOU CAN TAKE OUT MORE EACH YEAR THAN YOU MADE EACH YEAR WHILE YOU WERE WORKING! Amazing how the power of compound interest works isnt it?
Want to know how much someone making $12 an hour will get in SS per year? $12,852 http://www.ssa.gov/retire2/AnypiaApplet.html
Great deal huh? You’re losing out on $21,000 a year. And remember, you have to live to 97 to collect that money from SS. Wouldnt you rather save it yourself and leave $362,000 to your kids if you happen to die early at the ripe old age of 82?
That was the numbers for someone making $24,000 a year. They were better off saving the money themselves, so there goes your theory of grandma and grandpa on the streets after working at KFC all their lives.
Anyway, let’s find out how much someone who makes $50,000 a year gets robbed. They end up with $1.1 million when they retire. They can take out $69218 a year until they’re 97 and still have money left over. But dont worry, Social Security will save the day! If you make $50,000 a year, Social Security will pay you $21,168 a year http://www.ssa.gov/retire2/AnypiaApplet.html. You’re only losing $48,000 a year, no big deal right?
For heaven’s sake, do some math. Ask me for the spreadsheet, look it over, show me where my math is wrong! I’m begging you to pull your head out of the sand and realize what an awful program Social Security is.
@aguy You said “In government, more spending means more jobs.” But what do those jobs accomplish? More paper pushing? More red-tape? That’s not productive. The government doesn’t create/produce anything that increases GDP. So all these jobs that the government “created” are useless. They’re taxing people to give the money to someone else. It’s redistribution of wealth just like Social Security.
Wow, I’m so glad you solved the Social Security problem by stating that we’ll fix it. You should definitely let all the politicians know not to worry about it since you have it taken care of. Just because it’s the least problematic of Medicare, Medicaid and SS, doesn’t mean it’s not a problem lol. You do realize they’ve upped the requirement age constantly since SS started? Pretty soon you’ll have to be 70+ to collect.
Why exactly do you want the government to hold onto your money? Do you not feel that you have sufficient self control to leave it in a retirement fund? So what you’re saying is that if I have the self control I should be able keep my money for my own savings purposes. After all, the only reason you think its a good idea is that you’re paying yourself down the road and feel that you’re incapable of controlling yourself in the here and now. If I feel differently than you, even if I’m the minority I shouldn’t be oppressed and forced to do what you want should I?
The real question is do YOU know what a Ponzi scheme is? And, do you actually know how SS works? You’re not getting your money that you pay in. Your grandparents are getting the money that you pay in now. You will be getting the money from your grandkids when you retire.
Ponzi scheme definition (look it up): A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves paying returns to investors out of the money raised from subsequent investors, rather than from profits generated by any real business
Social Security sure sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me.
You’re happy about reducing the deficit by $104 billion when they just raised taxes by $572 billion?
Money is money. If the government taxes 572 billion dollars so we don’t have to pay more money elsewhere — while covering a whole lot more people — than so be it. It’s spending money to save money on unnecessary treatments, ER visits picked up by you and me, etc. Government can do health care, as shown in other countries. The US has failed; spending money to save money is the right thing to do, both for people’s lives and for the nation’s expenses. Besides, it doesn’t raise the deficit.
We just raised $600 billion in new taxes, instead of using it to reduce the $1.4 trillion deficit,
People have always correlated jobs with approval ratings. That doesn’t mean that reducing spending will increase jobs, though. In government, more spending means more jobs. In the long term we will most definitely need to reduce the deficit. Right now, everyone thinks that’s a horrible idea because we still need more recovery (and with the 3.5 percent growth last quarter, we may be on our way). I’m not saying deficits are unimportant, I just think that at best, people are worrying too early and at worst, people are using it as a proxy for worries about the economy — which could have damaging outcomes if stimulus programs are reduced right now.
Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money in 2041.
We will fix it by then. It’ll be a politically hard thing to do, but policy-wise it’s not as tough as this health care/Medicare stuff. For instance, you could raise the retirement age. As a percent of GDP, SS is not the problem.
Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever created.
Your grandparents would probably disagree with you (and maybe be embarrassed you don’t what a Ponzi scheme is?) SS is me giving money to myself, 60 years later, so I’m not destitute and on the streets begging for spare change. That’s what it was like in the US before. The budget problem is a recent challenge for policy makers in continuing this insanely popular government program, not a reason for the program to not exist in the first place.
Wow, Social Security isn’t looking like such a good deal now is it? The government is ROBBING us and no one cares, probably because they don’t fully understand this math…
I’m thinking you either don’t understand the policy or percentages. First, income doesn’t increase forever. Second, you assume that money in is money out. This isn’t a savings account, it’s a program to keep old people from being poor. I can’t put in a ton of money (that six percent you mention) if I’m working at the KFC down the street — but people generally think I shouldn’t spend my last 5 years of life on the street. So, I get a baseline amount, regardless of whether I was a huge money-maker, putting in tons of money each year.
As a columnist wrote:
”
The role of Wall Street is to move investment funds to their most productive uses. If the process works well, the economy expands, living standards rise and the stock market advances. But inevitably there are losers, because Wall Street is an exercise in collective risk-taking. A free market means continuous trial and error.
By contrast, the welfare state is an exercise in collective risk reduction. It strives to provide some security — aka the “safety net” — against life’s misfortunes and the economy’s upsets. It aims to protect society’s poorest and weakest members. We have many welfare programs. Social Security is the largest and most popular.
”
SS isn’t a savings account, it’s [the original] welfare program. If we did it with savings accounts, I’d be screwed if I retired in 2001 or 2008 or 1932. The alternative is handing over tax payer money to banks — something that should be done @ last resort. Besides, this it’s not a huge problem right now. Treating SS as a private account would be deadly for the people holding it: they’d have unlimited funds to invest in whatever political way they wanted. I’m probably more trusting of government than you; I’m just not that trusting.
(On the other hand health care reform is definitely not an entitlement or a welfare program. It’s a whole lot of cost containment and regulation to reduce costs and improve care. All good things.)
@Aguy Did I ever say I supported the spending of the last decade? The answer is no, I didn’t. I’ve criticized the absurd spending by the government since before I can remember.
Alright, so let’s pretend a miracle happens and the government is actually able to reduce costs by what they claim they can. Let’s assume another miracle occurs and they’re spending estimates are correct. You’re happy about reducing the deficit by $104 billion when they just raised taxes by $572 billion? Oh yeah, I’m jumping for joy (sarcasm). What’s the deficit this year, $1.4 TRILLION? This is the kind of accounting the government has been doing for years. “We just raised $600 billion in new taxes, instead of using it to reduce the $1.4 trillion deficit, we’ll increase spending by $500 billion.” Do you see how insane this is?
Aguy said, “We wont run out of SS for a long long time” and then links to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)#Demographic_and_revenue_projections . Again, did you actually read this? SS will be running deficits in 2010 and 2011, and then from 2016 to eternity. Yes, eternity… What I’m guessing you read from which you base your claim of “a long long time” is where they say that the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money in 2041. What you failed to realize is that the SSTF doesn’t have any money IN it. It has IOU’s from the government that it will draw on until 2041. We already USED all the surpluses that went into SS since it was started. The money is GONE. When the SSTF pays out money, it gets it from the general fund that our taxes go into. The SSTF was a scam created by the government to allow it to run massive deficits that looked like minor deficits because they just wrote out an IOU to the SSTF and took the money and SPENT it. Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever created.
Here’s a little math to help you out in planning your retirement: The government taxes you and your employer 12.4% of your salary split evenly. So, say your salary is $50,000. You’re paying $3,100 into SS. Your employer is also paying $3,100 into SS, so you could be making an extra $3,100. So, the government gets $6200 every year. I’m pretty good with Excel and in 5 minutes I just created a spreadsheet doing a rough tally assuming a 5% increase on your capital each year, and then adding the $6,200 that you would have payed into SS. Guess what, after 40 years of paying in you would have $750,000. That’s with one person paying in, for instance, a one parent works and the other stays home with the kids. Now, (going off your $10,000 poverty level number) since we’re talking a married couple we’ll assume $20,000 is taken out every year during retirement and then 5% interest on the remaining capital. Guess how much is left after 30 years? (you’re now somewhere between 92 and 95 years old…) $1.774 MILLION. That’s right, it went UP, you now have MORE money then when you retired. How about if we take out $30,000 a year? Hmm, still went up to $1.12 million after 30 years. Guess what, you can take out $47,109 every year for 30 years and you’ll still have $58 leftover.
Wow, Social Security isn’t looking like such a good deal now is it? The government is ROBBING us and no one cares, probably because they don’t fully understand this math…
P.S. Anyone who wants to look at the spreadsheet just post an email address. I’ll even spend another 5 minutes sprucing it up and label everything.
@aguy So let us know how well the government is taking care of us with Social Security, I’m all ears. I hope they do as a good a job with health care (sarcasm).
Ryan said: Deficit is what, $12 trillion dollars right now? 5% of $12 trillion is $600 billion.
Again, let’s look at what created the deficit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CBO_Forecast_Changes_for_2009-2012.png
Where was this sort of criticism previously? Why is the criticism of current programs so disproportionate to what’s actually going on? Seems sort of political. Even ignoring that, the health care bill from the Senate and House reduces the deficit:
maybe, just maybe, instead of spending more money on new programs, perhaps we should try to pay down the deficit?
And we’re doing that, so cheer up! Before you start applauding and planning a party to celebrate, here’s the deal: for some reason health care reform is thought of as some enormous welfare program or something, but really it’s a whole bunch of cost containment and some regulation of private insurers. The fact that it reduces the deficit shouldn’t be surprising or debatable anymore, but here we are talking about that fact once again….. even Google knows what’s up.
Social security — a program not designed as a saving account, but as a way to ensure the elderly are taken care of — is working out okay. There are a whole lot of proposals to make it better., but that doesn’t mean the whole program is worthless. The real thing that’s screwing up the budget is Medicare. We constantly overpay for treatment on the public’s dime, and that is awful. But, if we get an idea of the actual prices for services, things will get better. Health reform tries to do that.
Fix health care, and you fix Medicare.
But responding to your criticism: Social Security was passed far before we had one large, unified “budget” for the federal government, and far before we even had a CBO, so I’m not sure how it would have been deemed “budget neutral” by non-partisan agencies tasked with figuring that sort of thing out. Even with that in mind, the program has been amended like crazy, people are living far longer, and we have tons of baby boomers retiring now (and drawing on their SS money). Still, we won’t run out of SS for a long, long time.
I don’t see how small needed changes in the law — things we do all the time — amount to that law being deemed a failure. Prior to SS, our grandparents would’ve been roaming the streets because they were so likely to be poor. SS clearly fixed that. The fact we face some budgetary challenges now doesn’t negate the years of good it’s accomplished.
http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=13656
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/Hard_times_hardest_on_elderly_poor.html (”Certainly, the elderly poor have been helped a great deal by Social Security: In 1959, 35 percent of people age 65 and older lived below the poverty threshold (which today is around $10,000 a year in a single-person household). By 2006, the proportion of the elderly living in poverty had decreased dramatically to around 9 percent.”)
@aguy: I have so many things I want to say I don’t even know where to start. You can’t call it budget neutral if you RAISE taxes to pay for it. You can call it budget neutral if you CUT something else and use that money instead, but that’s not what they’re doing. Do you realize you’re spouting rubbish when you say, “the bill pays for itself, the bill pays for itself” over and over again? It DOESN’T pay for itself, we’re not saving 900 billion dollars by cutting things, we’re raising taxes to pay for it! Did you even read what you linked? It clearly states on page two that there will be an increased income tax. And did you really just say this? “but the bill’s money isn’t coming from our pocketbooks.” Wow, I like your attitude of, well I don’t have to pay for it, someone else is getting taxed, so sure, spend away! (sarcasm)
Deficit is what, $12 trillion dollars right now? 5% of $12 trillion is $600 billion. The deficit increases by ~$600 billion every single year, even without Congress adding to the deficit by spending more money than we have. So you’d think, that maybe, just maybe, instead of spending more money on new programs, perhaps we should try to pay down the deficit? Calling this budget neutral is the politician’s way of twisting words for gullible people. It doesn’t change the fact that THEY’RE SPENDING MORE MONEY! The “budget” increases because of this. That’s like going to McDonald’s and buying a Value Meal for $6 when you only have $4, and then saying “These fries are budget neutral, I can’t pay for the drink, but just remember, these fries are budget neutral!” Do you realize how illogical that is? You’re spouting nonsense. If you can’t pay for the overall budget, NOTHING is “budget neutral.”
And just in case anyone forgot.
Social Security was supposed to be “budget neutral”
Social Security was supposed to be “budget neutral”
Social Security was supposed to be “budget neutral”
To use your words, “Aguy:” “I cant repeat this enough”
Social Security was supposed to be “budget neutral”
Social Security was supposed to be “budget neutral”
Social Security was supposed to be “budget neutral”
Remind me how Social Security is working out for us…..
This will be the “most expensive program in U.S. history.”
This is demonstrably false. The bill pays for itself! It pays for itself! This cannot be said enough: the bill pays for itself. It’s “budget neutral.” It saves money and then uses that money for the bill. We’re using those cost savings and plowing them into covering more people. There’s a Senate version that reduces the deficit. These things are un-arguable; they’re just true.
http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10688/hr3962Rangel.pdf (non-partisan Congressional Budget Office)
As an aside, did anyone — on the right or the left — even make a peep talking about the 680 billion defense appropriations bill passed last week? Compare that to the 90 billion dollar health care bill (both figures are per year). No one got all hot and bothered about dollar figures when it comes to keeping troops in Iraq/Afghanistan; we get in a tizzy about a fraction of that cost when it comes to reforming health care.
That’s not to say that there’s a whole lot of money involved, but the bill’s money isn’t coming from our pocketbooks. As an aside, health care systems across the world vary in a very unintuitive way. Great Britain spends way, way too little money on their system and they have the most socialized system – conscripting doctors in the whole health care system. Switzerland and the US will try to tackle reform from the insurance side – which costs a whole lot more money. In return, there’s more freedom to buy coverage and for private insurance companies to do business. That’s a trade off that I think is good on the whole, but it’s opposite of what some American conservatives believe.
http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm (non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation)
But again, I cannot repeat this enough, the bill is budget neutral.
I know health care reform has been attempted for 50 years and failed. But, this failure should not be used as the “default” – changes to that norm need not be scary merely because they haven’t been tried in the United States. We can quickly look to other countries which spend far less and receive better care (on average. Yes, the US has the best care for those willing to spend top dollar. But that’s like saying we only have the best fancy restaurant in the world, when the rest are McDonaldsthes) and these other countries haven’t devolved into some Stalin-esque situation. I’m still waiting on an explanation on why emulating Switzerland makes us Soviet Russia.
The Hoover Institute is named after a much-discredited president with much-discredited economic theories, and that partisan think tank’s findings should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, it is false on its false that there would be limited access to specialists, drugs, etc. If we wanted the cost-cutting seen in Great Britain and didn’t mind government controlling physicians, that limited access would be the case for a lot of people. The thought is that this eliminates unneeded treatments.
I think that’s bad because the UK under-funds its system – it’s too cheap and people suffer. Conservatives think it’s a socialist dystopia where the government makes people stand in line. Either way, it’s a dumb system. In the US, we’ve chosen to only pursue insurance regulation – which does not limit these types of things.
Besides the fact that the administration was practicing its own free speech without revoking FoxNews licensing or censoring newspapers or whatnot, your concern over freedom of speech misses the political context there. During the time Rahm et al attacked FoxNews, they were getting huge, huge pressure and flak from the left for ignoring the public option once again. The Progressive Change Action Committee started running ads against Harry Reid in Nevada, etc.
To cover their left flank, they thought it’d be helpful to attack FoxNews as a sort-of head fake. It was a political move to divert attention away from Obama/Rahm pushing back against Pelosi/Reid on the public option. Obama/Rahm don’t think a bill can pass with a PO and are annoyed at liberals, while Pelosi/Reid (responding to activist pressure) don’t think Dems will support a filibuster so they think it can be included. Liberal blogs were upset, so Obama came out against FoxNews. It was a political play.
Again, though, you mentioned dictatorship. If I had un-popular views in any administration, I’d be worried about the government’s executive powers. The government can wiretap, throw someone in a secret prison without warrant, etc. That is far more scary than Obama being faux-upset about FoxNews. People would support those attacks on Obama; they wouldn’t support vague anxieties about dictatorships/socialism/etc that are not persuasive to 90 percent of Americans outside of Glenn Beck’s audience.