Riding the Third Rail
For a long time, we’ve all known that Social Security was on life support, suffering from a terminal illness. As the number of old people keeps climbing and the number of those whose paychecks maintain the program continues to decline, the end can only be catastrophic.
For a long time, we’ve all known that Social Security was on life support, suffering from a terminal illness. As the number of old people keeps climbing and the number of those whose paychecks maintain the program continues to decline, the end can only be catastrophic.
Anyone who has been paying attention realizes that in 1935, when Social Security was established, people tended to die before they reached 70, so there were about 30 workers supporting each retired person. Today, because of the greatly increased life expectancy, the ratio is less than three to one.
There are ways to keep Social Security going for a few more years, but it would entail either raising the age at which people can start collecting or diminishing the payments, or a combination of the two. The politicians don’t dare do anything because, one, old people may not get around as much as they used to, but they do get out and vote. Plus, if you’re in your late 50s, you don’t want to suddenly get the word that you’re going to have to remain in harness for an additional four or five years so that your dad can keep playing golf.
Every honest old person knows the program was a scam from the very beginning. FDR and the Democrats sold the idea that the money they were pulling out of people’s paychecks would go into a locked box, but of course they busted that particular piggy bank to help finance World War II. Besides, stuff in a box doesn’t increase, unless it’s a stage magician’s box containing rabbits. Even then, it’s the rabbits that will increase, not your money.
Retirees, with some justification, point out that, unlike money bestowed on illegal aliens and the able-bodied who prefer not to work, they put their own hard-earned dollars into the Social Security fund. But that’s not entirely true. The average retiree is going to wind up collecting a lot more money than he put in unless he dies shortly after he or she quits working.
The government should never have stuck its nose into any of this. Prior to FDR and his fellow socialists insisting that the nanny state should be responsible for our upkeep, people understood they were expected to save for their own retirement.
But it does give me a chuckle when I hear old people claim they care about the world they’re leaving to their kids and grandkids when they refuse to even consider modifying Social Security and when, in 2012, so many of them re-elected the schmuck responsible for doubling the national debt.
Another problem with the economy is that civil servants are provided with pensions by politicians that the rest of us have to finance with our tax dollars. As if it’s not bad enough that most of them didn’t have to work very hard or very well when they were on the job, we then have to support these strangers for years after they no longer even have to wake up in the morning and show up somewhere.
Which brings me to Sen. Bernie Sanders. He is pushing a bill that would guarantee $15 an hour, plus full medical benefits, to any American seeking a job. It is the new and far more expensive version of the jobs bill that FDR came up with during the Great Depression. Although Roosevelt’s fellow leftists ballyhooed the Works Progress Administration (WPA), it mainly provided federally funded jobs to actors, painters and writers, paying them to act, paint and write, and paid others to rake leaves and vote for Democrats. Still, for all his vote-getting programs, it still took World War II to get America’s economy cooking.
Naturally, Sen. Sanders never explains where the money for his brainstorms is going to come from, whether it’s free college tuition or $15-an-hour jobs for people who aren’t qualified to work at fast food joints or as crossing guards.
I suspect if you tied Bernie Sanders down and refused to release him until he shared his secret, he would eventually say: “It’s simple. You get the dough by picking the leaves off the money trees in the money tree orchard. I thought everyone knew that.”
As bad as our politicians are, our so-called journalists are even worse. That’s because they not only make up their own lies, but they repeat the lies of others, while simultaneously labeling honest people liars.
I blame Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Prior to their arrival on the scene, people used to pursue newspaper careers because they were cynics who wanted to get the goods on public officials, whatever their party affiliation; or because they wanted to be where the action was; or because they had been bewitched by the depiction of the ink-stained wretches in books and movies and came to believe that journalism was the one career that not only allowed people to drink on the job, but actually encouraged it.
But Woodward and Bernstein changed all that. These guys not only became rich and famous, and got to date beautiful women, but they shared a Pulitzer Prize, saw themselves on movie screens being portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and were hailed in many quarters for driving a Republican president from the White House.
As a result, every young left-wing ignoramus who would otherwise have become a social worker, a pot-smoking high school teacher or a community organizer, changed his college major to journalism.
Speaking of community organizers, Barack Obama never heard of a confrontation between a black man and a white man in which, in spite of not knowing the facts, he wasn’t quick to declare the white man in the wrong.
Considering that he rode to fame after delivering a speech in which he announced there wasn’t a black America or a white America but only one America, it’s a shame that he was only conning gullible voters into not recognizing a racist when they saw one.
Even those of us who feared the worst hoped that the upside of electing a black president would be that guilt-stricken white Americans could finally live down the shame of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
Of course, those of us who recognized that no friend of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan was going to be part of a healing process weren’t at all surprised that Obama and his wife spent eight long years reminding those white Americans who had fallen for his malarkey that they’d been played for suckers.
Obama clearly blamed whites for the miseries of black urban communities, never acknowledging that by the 21st century, most of those problems were self-inflicted.
As Jason Riley, a black member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, recently pointed out: “The poverty rate for white Americans is 11%. The poverty rate for black Americans is 22%. However, the poverty rate for married blacks is just 7.5%.”
Even Barack and Michelle would probably recognize that blacks who get married are far likelier to have graduated from high school, if not college, stayed off drugs and gotten jobs, than the other 14.5%.
My friend Joe Neuner sent me a list of states and the amount of money that each devotes to illegal aliens. As of 2016, California was number one, spending $25 billion to make these trespassers feel welcome.
I replied that we are spending even more than that in 2018. Which, I believe, is the true sign of a champion. Even though we were number one in 2016 and could have remained number one into the foreseeable future, we refused to rest on our laurels.
As a writer, I always feel slightly embarrassed when an author says something so moronic you would swear it had been said by a politician. But it was in fact novelist Joyce Carol Oates who said that the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Sen. Ted Kennedy’s car was “acceptable collateral damage considering all the great things that Sen. Kennedy went on to do.”
But being an even bigger fool than the average politician, Barack Obama proved himself up to her challenge by calling Ted Kennedy “the greatest Democratic senator in history.”
I know that Kennedy gave the Obamas a dog, Bo, when they moved into the White House, but I have to suspect it was the fact that Obama gave the senator full credit for delivering the 2008 nomination to him that made him so great.
Hard to believe that a man, Ted Kennedy, who did so much to ruin America on his own also paved the way for Barack Obama to finish the job.
And here you all probably thought Kennedy’s worst crime was leaving a young woman to suffocate in his car.
