Shake the Ornaments Out of the Tree -- Or Burn It Down>
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Iceberg Cometh
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The Social Security scare is a standard Bush administration
tactic: invent a fake crisis to get what you want.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/opinion/11krugman.html?th
..................
Paul Krugman and many others have been pointing out the obvious. The Bush plan to privatize Social Security (along with the rest of his economic agenda) is a disaster in the making. No way that it can work. No way that it is needed -- half of Bush's tax cuts restored would keep the system going indefinitely. All the programs that have tried this trick or treat -- Chile, Argentina, Thatcher's Britain -- have found it a major loser for all but brokers who have been making out like bandits.
As a child of the Great Depression -- I was born when my parents were on the run between jobs in Mount Kisco, NY in 1933 (my mother had been banned by national policy from continuing her school teaching career by the 'one-job-in-the-family' rule) -- I well remember the austerity that all felt just prior to WW2, which began at long last to restore our economy to something like what it had been before the Republicans destroyed it with their greedy stock market grabs -- all those types then leaping out of their Wall St. high rise windows when all hell broke lose.
My father had been an honest broker who had seen the worst coming and had gotten his clients and friends out of the market before the Crash -- but people will persist with greedy dreams of great wealth until it is too late -- all those 401(k) folks who got slaughtered in '00 with their NASDAQ-based portfolios.
And so here we go again. CBS has sent a message to any TV commentators who have the gall to tell it like it is and the typical American gets his basic information from these same talking heads. Will the under 40s who are obviously being targeted now be conned? In the red states, perhaps. There is not much out there in the way of alternative news sources, unless one is an internet geek. But how many do not even have computers who voted Bush & Co. back into another 4 years? I guess we will have to count on the vulnerable Republican pols who can be voted out of office for another 50 years -- not Bush, Cheney, and others who figure that they have got it made in the shade and who can get back to counting their stacks of gold pieces -- or should I say silver in this faith-based age?
The Iceberg Cometh
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The Social Security scare is a standard Bush administration
tactic: invent a fake crisis to get what you want.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/opinion/11krugman.html?th
..................
Paul Krugman and many others have been pointing out the obvious. The Bush plan to privatize Social Security (along with the rest of his economic agenda) is a disaster in the making. No way that it can work. No way that it is needed -- half of Bush's tax cuts restored would keep the system going indefinitely. All the programs that have tried this trick or treat -- Chile, Argentina, Thatcher's Britain -- have found it a major loser for all but brokers who have been making out like bandits.
As a child of the Great Depression -- I was born when my parents were on the run between jobs in Mount Kisco, NY in 1933 (my mother had been banned by national policy from continuing her school teaching career by the 'one-job-in-the-family' rule) -- I well remember the austerity that all felt just prior to WW2, which began at long last to restore our economy to something like what it had been before the Republicans destroyed it with their greedy stock market grabs -- all those types then leaping out of their Wall St. high rise windows when all hell broke lose.
My father had been an honest broker who had seen the worst coming and had gotten his clients and friends out of the market before the Crash -- but people will persist with greedy dreams of great wealth until it is too late -- all those 401(k) folks who got slaughtered in '00 with their NASDAQ-based portfolios.
And so here we go again. CBS has sent a message to any TV commentators who have the gall to tell it like it is and the typical American gets his basic information from these same talking heads. Will the under 40s who are obviously being targeted now be conned? In the red states, perhaps. There is not much out there in the way of alternative news sources, unless one is an internet geek. But how many do not even have computers who voted Bush & Co. back into another 4 years? I guess we will have to count on the vulnerable Republican pols who can be voted out of office for another 50 years -- not Bush, Cheney, and others who figure that they have got it made in the shade and who can get back to counting their stacks of gold pieces -- or should I say silver in this faith-based age?
posted by Ed Kent at 6:05 PM
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