Now, If I Were In Congress.

Well today's big news is that the Social Security trust fund will run out of funds in 2033. Much sooner than previous estimates. Two big reasons are all the baby boomers set to retire and the slow economy. Now the baby boomer thing is not new information and the economy thing is easy enough to understand. The real question is why hasn't congress addressed the problem? Well if you ask almost any Republican, they'll tell you the Democrats in the Senate refuse to do anything about it. If you ask almost any Democrat, the Republicans in the House are only interested in eliminating it. The truth? Neither party in Congress has the will to fix the problem, especially in an election year. Of course it's election year, or at least campaign year, every year. And this is a presidential election year, which makes it even bigger. But how in the world could they fix such a major problem as this? Joe Scarborough of Morning Jo on MS NBC says he could fix it in 20 minutes or less. And he was a congressman. Which is odd, because the biggest problem with Social Security is congress. Well actually it's not so much congress as it is the legislators themselves. See, if they didn't have to belong to a political party and if they didn't care so much about keeping their jobs, it could be done in maybe a couple of days. I doubt the twenty minute thing. Isn't it always the way? Somebody who once served in congress thinks they have all the answers and the members of the "other" party are the ones causing all the trouble. But if they have all the answers, why didn't they fix it when they were in congress? The answer, they would claim, is the other party. The other party's members wouldn't allow them to fix the problem. The funny thing is, pretty much everybody knows the solution and pretty much agrees with the solution. Maybe a little tweaking, but no big deal. No big deal unless you're actually in congress. Then the party lines are drawn. And nobody is drawing any conclusions. Or solutions either. It's a lot like one of those doomsday movies. The world is set to self destruct in twenty minutes. But, hey, we still have time for nineteen minutes and fifty nine seconds of drama.

When It Comes To Education, How Dumb.

What is it that you hear most about the poor? They're lazy? They don't work, they just sit around, get tattoos, smoke, drink and sponge off hard working people. Well guess what? To some extent that's true. But if it's true, then how do you go about turning them around? How do you get poor people off welfare? The one way we seem to keep trying, over and over, is to provide their children with low standard educational opportunities. Poorly equipped, run-down schools, lower paid teachers. We keep trying these models and they keep failing to turn out highly motivated young people. Just more poor people to sponge off working folks. Why do you suppose that is? Here's an experiment you might want to try. Take just a few of those schools and fix them up, equip them with the best equipment, give them some of the best teachers. I'll bet that by the time they get to high school, they'll be as advanced as the other kids in the more affluent schools. Well, maybe not quite as advanced. That's because they wouldn't have the other advantages of being affluent. Of having families that can afford perks like tutors, college tuition and other life experiences away from school. But it seems cheaper to just let those kids have the bad schools so we can go on complaining. After all, it is one of our favorite pastimes. And we get to do it without it costing us a single dime. The thing is though, it does costs us more in the long run to pay for the welfare, than it does for the better education. That's because we're less likely to have to provide welfare for the better educated. So from the standpoint of economics, we're being dumb. I'm just saying.  

A.L.E.C. Spells Trouble For All Of Us.

There's an organization made up of state legislators and corporate representatives. It's acronym is ALEC. The purpose of ALEC is to write legislation for consideration by all state legislatures for passage. It's a tax exempt organization, but it seems to be doing the work of a lobbyist. Which should make it inellegable for tax exempt status. But that's just a small part of the problem. It's really a front for some of the worst public safety legisative issues in the country. For instance, it has included the "Stand your ground" laws as one of it's favorites. Here's another one. In the drilling for oil and gas, the practice of "Fracking" where water, sand and a soup of chemicals is forced into the shale rock, deep in the earth to release oil and or natural gas, they have written a bill that allows companies to refuse to release the names of the chemicals used because they're trade secrets. So if your drinking water well gets contaminated by one of these chemicals, you will have no way to find out if your well is even contaminated at all, because you won't know what to test for. Does that make sense to you? Do you think that even the most partisan politician would knowingly vote for such a bill? Well, okay, maybe there are some, but should they? And would they if the public knew they were voting for such nonsense? Who thinks up laws like this? And the Stand Your Ground law? Who would be so dumb or mean to think up something like secret chemicals in the ground? Not the legislators, they wouldn't know about the need for such secrecy unless somebody told them to. No it coud only be the folks who work for the corporations who stand to profit from such unsafe laws. Well, and an organization like ALEC that's willing to help the cause.

Keep One Eye On The Gambler. Maybe two.

Say, what's the word on energy these days? Well, government inspectors are talking about relaxing oversight on derivatives, especially on oil. With oil, you have several cost centers. There's the extraction cost center, where you actually get the oil out of the ground, then there's the refinement cost centers where the oil is refined into gasoline, home heating oil and a myriad of other products. Next comes the distribution cost center. The tankers, truck drivers and gas stations, for gasoline. All of this can be clumped into the physical side of the cost of oil and it amounts to a little over two thirds of the price at the pump. The last cost center is the derivatives or trader cost center. This is where modern day, Wall Street, tinhorn gamblers play cards for profit and the other one third of the price of gasoline. This is where uncle Sam wants to ease up on oversight. Now you couldn't very well get along without the extraction cost center, The same is true for the refinement and distribution cost centers. But if you really wanted to get the price of gasoline and all the other oil based products,  like many plastics, down, you just might be able to get along without the last cost center. That's because, while it does add more to the cost of oil, it just doesn't add any value to the oil. The other three do add value, each in it's own way. The only value the fourth adds is to the pockets of the derivatives dealers. Not unlike the value the old tinhorn riverboat gambler added to the cost of the dollar. So if these dealers in gambling are relieved of oversight by the government, they will do what? Be extra honest? Not overcharge for their services? If nobody is watching a riverboat gambler, you might think that he'll deal from the bottom of the deck, right? Well, what's to suggest these modern day gamblers won't do the same? Because they wear pin-striped suits? But didn't riverboat gamblers wear suits too? Maybe it's the pin-stripes. I'll bet that's it. If one of these guys were to wear a solid navy blue, double-breasted, you might not trust him, but with pinstripes, he's okay, right? But if the government doesn't check to see what he's wearing today, and you can't see him, how are you supposed to know what to think of him?

Viet Nam or Afghanistan. Lessons.

I don't often find anything to write about on Morning Jo on MSNBC in the morning, but this morning they had a segment where they talked about the Afghan war, the casualties and especially about the wounded, both physically and mentally and our obvious inability to provide the proper care for them. Ariana Huffington (Huffington Post) and Nicholas Kristof (N Y Times editorialist) were the guests. Watching the show, I tried to figure out how come. How come we can spend unquestioned billions on prosecuting this war but can't seem to put together enough to support the troops who are wounded. Don't get me wrong, our politicians talk a good story. Even we the people are indignant when told of how these veterans are left untreated. But everybody knows talk is cheap. I think one way to explain the problem is to compare it to another protracted war. No, not Iraq. While it was protracted, it really is a mirror image of Afghanistan in this respect. I mean we need to look at Viet Nam. Both had histories of colonial warfare in which the outsiders finally lost and pulled out. For Viet Nam it was the French, for Afghanistan it was the Soviets. Both were and are countries with customs and a society we did not and do not clearly understand. Both had corrupt governments, both were a severe challenge to modern warfare, in fact both are more suited to gorilla warfare. A lot of similarities. The differences, for America, were/are that in Vietnam, we had the draft, troops served only one tour, at least for the most part, one and done and it was paid for by taxes. Afghanistan on the other hand is handled by an all volunteer military. Better trained, better equipped, but by far and away it's fought by multiple deployments and we're not paying for the war. Not yet. So when you have to borrow the money to fight this war from a potential, even real enemy in some sense, and you have to ask the same small number of people to fight the war, the public seems to forget the costs of the war. Also, the reason that far more troops were being killed in Viet Nam, is because of greatly improved medical handling of the injured. But similar numbers of troops are being shot. Just not as many are dying. So how did that Viet Nam thing turn out? We pretended a victory and ran. There are some things we do well. We nearly always win battles. We're not always so lucky with wars. Unless we're allowed to go toe to toe. And after we left Viet Nam? After we left, we didn't owe an enemy for the cost of the war. And while returning troops from Viet Nam weren't treated very well by the public, the government failed to properly care for the wounded until finally forced to. Does any of this sound familiar? America is good at fighting an enemy it can see, but not one they can't find hidden in the populace. We're getting better at covert warfare, but you have to choose what kind of war you're going to fight. Politicians have figured out that it's easier to get the public to go along with a war they can put on the credit card and they love to pretend we can build governments and create democracies where there were none.Therefore, I recommend we demand that any future war be paid for by taxation for that war. And that should include any conflict we engage in and nobody should be asked to serve more than one tour in that war or conflict.  To declare war should automatically carry with it, conscriptions. No exceptions. I'll bet we don't go to war very often after that.

Don't Get Caught Voting The Wrong Way.

Nanotargeting. That's not some new military weapons system. It's all about the campaign and voting habits. So instead of zeroing in on a tank two miles away, it means that the political parties are zeroing in on you. In fact, they're zeroing in on your left hand. Or your right hand, or your pinkie finger of either hand, or the thumbs of each hand individually. Yep, Somehow they've managed to figure out what you will have for breakfast on the morning of the election. Which side of the bed you'll get up on and what shoes you will select to wear. About the only thing they haven't figured out yet is the weather. But they're working on that. Here we are in the land of the free and the home of the brave and they know who you will vote for. The general elections are more than six months away and they already know more about you than your spouse does. Now that's nanotargeting. They may have even  come up with the formula for separating your heart from your brain on fiscal matters and social concerns. And if you think you can fool them into thinking one way while you plan to go the other way, they know that too. They know your waist size, shoe size and hat size, even if you've never worn a hat. Even if you don't know your hat size, they do. Just ask them if you need to buy a hat. They even know when you and your spouse were intimate. No matter how long ago that was. And they know the formula for becoming more interested again. Yes. They know all about you. But how in the world do they come by this information? They buy it. From your grocer, your favorite clothing store, the internet. Especially the internet. Even if you don't use the internet. What you buy on credit, even what you pay cash for. When you drive and where. But take heart. They mean no harm and they would never share this information with anyone. Well at least unless someone pays them for the information. You know, like a major donor. So demographics is a thing of the past. Demographics is 20th century. Nanotargeting is 21st century. There's only one thing that's got them worried. What comes next and will they be ahead of the curve or at least ahead of their opponent. What we need to worry about is that if they know this much now, will they need us at all, in the next technological advance? I mean, so far we've been relatively important to the electoral process. But make no mistake. They'd drop us like a cold date if they could.

Another what?

There's another proposal in Washington you're gonna love. It's the "Small Business Tax Cut Act". Basically what it does is allow business owners to deduct 20% of their business income in 2012. Now that sounds like a fair deal for business owners. After all, they do have a lot of expenses in the operation of any business. But no, this isn't about business expenses. This would come after all business expenses are already deducted. So after they pay the rent and the lights and pay all the employees their wages, what's left over, which is usually called profit, this is where they want to give a 20% discount on taxes. The claim is that it "would lead to more hiring". Problem is that businesses aren't hiring because there's not enough business to justify new hiring, not because they're holding out for another tax cut. And here's another interesting bit of information. Small businesses include any company with up to 500 employees. 500 employees. That's a lot more like medium size, if you ask me. And then there's the question of who gets helped the most.  The total cost to the government would be about $46 billion. Half would go to folks making over $1 million per year. Two thirds of the total would go to those making more than $200,000 per year. These folks aren't struggling. They're waiting for more buyers. Wanna help these small businesses? Create more buyers. So how would you go about creating more customers? Well some folks think that giving more and bigger tax cuts to the super wealthy will do the trick. Now that would truly be a trick. The other way of thinking is to get the money directly to the customers or at least indirectly by creating jobs. And since small businesses and even large ones don't want to do it without some assurance of more customers, then maybe it is time for the government to do the job. How? Well I can tell ya one thing for sure. Our infrastructure needs a lot of work. A lot. For starters. Also, maybe they could change that bill to the Small Business Employee Tax Relief Act. Those are the folks who need help. And if a small business needs help, tell them that if they actually hire more people, at a living wage, with benefits, they'll get their tax cut.