j_b

Yes - keep looking out for the little guy. "One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life, and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits—a total of $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment." a 49 yo retired state employee? More cherry picking from the market zealot.

that's rich coming from the guy who claims that SS is responsible for the debt crisis, when in fact it is solvent for at least another 30 years. Intellectual honesty seems to be an entirely foreign concept for JayB.

What do you do now that the till is empty? You reinstate the tax on the wealthy that you cut, moron!

what's laughable is how 30+ years of large tax cuts to the wealthy and financial deregulation (both policies advocated by libertarians and their closet toadies in Washington) have bankrupted America as well as the world economy, yet the looters managed to turn around and claim that Social Security (an immensely successful program by any measure) is responsible for the crisis they engineered. You guys have no credibility whatsoever, no matter how you try to spin your dismal record.

that's because he is a soshalist, and fascists are soshalists too.

My cat goes crazy for octopus and squid, whereas he does not care that much for meat or rich fish.

My favorite is a salad with barely cooked squid, white beans, garlic, lemon juice, parsley, black olives, olive oil, and whatever sounds good.

You guys did it. I am starving now.

Never had giant squid before but I assume it tastes the same as regular squid. It perhaps needs more cleaning like removing tough membranes.

Fresh squid is great in salads, stews, stuffed, etc ... and it is relatively cheap too.

Vice President Biden Lends His Prestige To Robert Rubin's Relaunch by Dan Froomkin Robert Rubin, the ultimate symbol of the Democratic Party's coziness with Wall Street fat cats, has kept a relatively low profile in Washington ever since the financial world he helped remake exploded in late 2008. As Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin was a key proponent of the extreme financial deregulation that eventually brought the economy to its knees; after leaving government, he proceeded to enrich himself to the tune of $126 million while driving Citigroup to the edge of bankruptcy. But Rubin is leaping back into the Washington policy-making scene next week, with a splashy relaunch of his pet think-tank, the Hamilton Project, housed at the Brookings Institution. As founder of the project, he will deliver the opening remarks and speak on one of the two panels And the Democratic Party, rather than keep Rubin at an extreme distance, is apparently welcoming him back with open arms. The event's keynote speaker is none other than Vice President Joe Biden. Rubin, even in exile, has continued to be an influential behind-the-scenes player, speaking regularly to proteges (many of them alums of the Hamilton Project) who occupy top economic-policy positions in the Obama administration -- they include Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, White House budget chief Peter Orszag, and key White House advisers Jason Furman and Michael Froman, just for starters. And the Rubinites, amazingly enough, are riding high these days. They feel like they saved the financial world -- at what they consider a relatively low cost. The millions of lost jobs and homes are considered unfortunate collateral damage. [..] More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/13/vice-president-biden-lend_n_535283.html

in other words SS isn't a ponzi scheme despite the best attempts by debt fearmongerers to drive a wedge between the young and the old. how come libertarians are always in the sack with Wall Street?

Friedman was a neoliberal whose main objective was complete deregulation to enable laissez faire or anarcho-capitalism. The results of which can be admired today in the state of the world economy as well as that of the nations that went bankrupt before this financial crisis (Argentina, Russia, Asian tigers, etc ..)

you shouldn't confuse a refusal to accept your framing of the discussion with going off in a new direction. Despite JayB's repeated claims nobody said the general fund would be used to pay off SS claims.

the server is behaving badly this a.m.

what were the debt fear mongerers doing when Bush was starting wars we couldn't pay for? cheering?

No. You? What is the trust fund composed of, and where will the assets required to fund the redemptions of the said assets come from when the annual cost of paying for SS benefits begins to exceed the value of the SS taxes collected in a given year. The funds will come from the SS trust fund that has accumulated several trillion dollars. Nobody claimed that funds would come from the general fund beside debt fear mongerers like you (or at least those that use debt fear mongering to try privatizing SS)

Attack Wall Street, Not Social Security by Dean Baker Suppose our top generals described the growing threat from a hostile Middle East power. The country has tens of billions of oil dollars, a growing army, chemical and biological weapons, and is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. After carefully describing the risks posed by this country, our generals suggested an immediate attack on Canada. They explain that combating this Middle East country would be difficult, but defeating Canada is easy. This is essentially the story of the latest attack on social security. Everyone who looks at the projections agrees; the scary budget stories being hyped in the media and by the Wall Street crew are driven almost entirely by projections of exploding health care costs. But instead of proposing ways to fix the health care system, these deficit hawks want to attack social security. They tell us that fixing health care is hard. By contrast they think that cutting money from social security will be relatively easy. The facts on this are straightforward and known by everyone involved in the budget debate. The US health care system is broken. We pay more than twice as much per person as the average for other wealthy countries. And it is projected to get worse. In three or four decades we are projected to pay three or four times as much per person for health care as people in countries like Germany and Canada. Since more than half of our health care is paid through public sector programs like Medicare and Medicaid, this explosion in health care costs will bankrupt the government if it actually occurs. Of course it will also devastate the private sector. On the other hand, it is easy to show that if we contain health care costs then our budget problems are relatively minor. In fact, the current projections of enormous budget deficits two or three decades out would flip over to projections of enormous budget surpluses if our health care costs were comparable to those of any other wealthy country. Logic would dictate that our top priority should be getting our health care costs under control. But fixing health care is difficult because, as we saw in the health care debate, this means confronting the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical supply industry, highly paid medical specialists and other powerful lobbies. [..] Of course attacking social security makes as much sense as our generals' plan to attack Canada. The Congressional Budget Office's projections show that the program can pay full benefits until the year 2044 with no changes whatsoever. Even after that date the program would always pay a higher benefit than what current retirees receive, even though somewhat less than the full scheduled benefits. The long-term problem is not that anything improper has been done with the program; the reason that social security is projected to eventually face a shortfall is that future generations are projected to live longer than we do. This raises costs since our children and grandchildren are projected to enjoy longer retirements than we do. In short, there is no story of generational inequity here, contrary to what the Wall Street deficit hawks say. If our deficit hawk generals are too scared to take on the health care industry then we also have to also make them too scared to take on social security. If we need to reduce the deficit the best place to start is a financial speculation tax. A modest set of financial transactions taxes, like the 0.5% tax on stock trades in the United Kingdom, can easily raise $150bn a year. This would go a long way toward addressing future budget shortfalls and it would raise money from people who can afford it: the Wall Street crew whose financial shenanigans led to the meltdown. Federal Reserve board chairman Ben Bernanke recently suggested cutting social security because: "that's where the money is". That's not true, the real money is on Wall Street. Let's go get it. more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/attack-wall-street-not-so_b_535018.html

are you really claiming that politicians didn't use the SS trust fund to pay for general fund expenditure?

most natural monopolies have been completely deregulated and turned over to the private sector. Just consider the nonexistent competition among cable operators for an example.

what Friedman thought about drugs is hardly relevant considering the economic fiasco his policies caused.

beside fear-mongers nobody is claiming that will happen it's not because the robbers have been put in charge of keeping tab on the bank, that we should get rid of the bank. The proper solution is to put the robbers in jail.

always trust regressives to transfer wealth to the ever more wealthy and drive us to bankruptcy, then hear them claim that the state is bankrupt and we cannot afford social programs. It's classic disaster capitalism at work: [video:youtube]JG9CM_J00bw

as if organic producers didn't have to increasingly compete with agribusiness thanks to relaxation of regulations. Before long agribusiness will control that sector too. you denial that Friedman's so called free market competition has in fact engineered massive consolidations of most economic sectors into oligopolies is revealing and not very convincing.

Despite regressive lies there is no SS crisis: "Social Security continues to run annual surpluses and remains capable of paying scheduled benefits in full for the next three decades or so. The deep recession has indisputably affected the Social Security system’s finances, and the next report of the Social Security Trustees — due this spring — is expected to show some deterioration in the program’s financial outlook. (Last year’s report estimated that starting in 2037, balances in the Social Security trust funds would be inadequate to pay full benefits promised under current law.) But Social Security faces no immediate threat." http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3104