Thank you! Finally SOMEONE gets it! About damn time!
Perhaps then one shoudln’t throw around personal pronouns in charged situations. Adding “your” adds a whole new level of personal outrage. My reaction to “guns kill thousands of people” is far, far different than my reaction to “your guns kill thousands of people.”
One starts a conversation, the other starts a petty online trolling fight.
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Captain Picard:
‘We’ve overcome hunger and greed, and we’re no longer interested in the accumulation of things.’
…You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century… The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity."
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Context clues. Surely you didn’t actually think I was referring to you personally rather than gun owners collectively?
Like I said, if a non-driver said “your automobiles kill thousands…” or a non-American said “your military kills thousands…” I would understand they weren’t referring to me personally.
Maybe the problem is that you identify so strongly as a gun owner that any criticism of guns or gun policy feels like a personal attack. Even in a discussion that’s ostensibly about economic inequality.
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I think its true that in general: the more money you have then the bigger the advantage you have. In relation to the distribution of wealth, those uber rich people out there in the 1% have such a huge advantage over the vast majority of the population that this paradigm of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer will surely continue. So it makes sense to me that by 2030 the rich will indeed be richer. Agreed?
What fascinates me about this situation is that the majority of people are sustaining and supporting the 1%? Why? Logically, shouldnt if make sense for the majority to rise up and and demand more money, for a revolution? It is outrageous - no?
Instead we see the 1% admired and maintain their elite status? I guess it’s all about the tipping point? So why hasn’t this point been reached yet? Or perhaps it has? Perhaps the 1% are a minority group that influences the majority to want to ‘be like them’ and therefore is supported? So much for the guillotine…
WTF is wrong with people!
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I’ll bet you a nickle the explanation isn’t quite as simple as your conspiracy theory, especially since the figures are out there for those who want to count the Federal employees’ pensions into wealth measurements.
I’ll bite. Can you post a link as to what the US government owes for federal employees, and how much it owes as a result of people pay social security, so as they get a pension in their old age?
Pages 1103-1105 of this obscure document that I liberated from the Illuminati lays it out.
Asking that question betrays the fact that you don’t understand the difference between insurance (e.g. SSI – guess what those initals stand for) and a pension. Here’s a primer for you.
I provide that link because there was a nutter here who didn’t understand that either, and kept harping obsessively about a Social Security crisis (of which there is none). No-one took him seriously because he never could grasp the difference despite or perhaps because of his obsession (which eventually got him banned).
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This shit drove an old Econ prof absolutely bonkers. He went on an epic rant about it early on in macro- in part as a warning to the class to never ask him about it.
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Welcome to BoingBoing!
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I think you’ve hit on something there, de-ukelization. It’d make BB much better.
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Yeah, but it isn’t you.
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De-ukelelelization? What did Tiny Tim do wrong?
I’ll see myself out.
Don’t judge me. It’s been a crappy day. Bad puns are all I’ve got.
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This is one of the finest examples I have ever seen of Sar-chasm.
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So why not publish the debt number?
Simple reason. Then the young can see what they have to pay. After all its the young that are on the hook for SS.
What I find strange is that people who say there is no crisis can’t provide the numbers to back it up.
e.g. Good measures are
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Ratio of debts to taxation.
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Amount per tax payer
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Annual rate of increase
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Percentage of taxes going on debt servicing
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Rate of increase in debt costs
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Projections of how that will change in the future.
All of those tell you if there is or isn’t a debt problem. SS being just one of the debts.
Graccus
Thanks for the link. Give me some time to read it, and I’ll come back with any questions.
In the interim, what’s the liability or debt number for government employees?
Not the current spend, the actual amount owed?
Let’s call the parasite’s bluff, end the extractive policies enriching them. They’re already doing what they would do other wise: Cheat on taxes, move money and jobs offshore. What more can they do?
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Does the Daily Mail know about this?
Maybe knowing it was invented by a German (whose grandson then migrated to the UK) might help them finally make up their editorial mind about whether it works or not?
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You’re welcome. Pay special attention to the section titled “Social Security Isn’t a Pension”.
As in the total owed to every one of them? Beyond goalpost shifting, why would you want a figure no-one* cares about? The total amount of Federal pension obligations is a constantly rolling figure, not a fixed one like a mortgage.
[* Well, no-one but a person who believes that every single Federal employee is going to retire at the same time.]
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Against what calamity is it insuring?
Old people losing all their investments and pensions and savings in a major market/banking crash and not being able to afford the costs of eating or paying the most meagre rent. As is often the case with insurance, the calamity in this instance needed to be experienced once before an insurance programme was put in place to mitigate the effects of a future one.
It’s evolved into more of a universal supplement to a fixed income for those Americans fortunate enough to have some sort of pension or retirement fund but the original intent remains and, as conservatives work hard to return us to the kind of “you’re on your own” laissez-faire capitalism that was the norm during the Hoover administration, it becomes more valid with every passing day.
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Some things never change, as for example the avarice of Justinian, as related by Procopius in his Secret History:
XIX. HOW [JUSTINIAN] SEIZED ALL THE WEALTH OF THE ROMANS AND THREW IT AWAY IN THE SEA AND ON THE BARBARIANS
HOW he seized all wealth I will next discuss: recalling first a vision which, at the beginning of Justinian’s rule, was revealed to one of illustrious rank in a dream.
In this dream, he said, he seemed to be standing on the shore of the sea somewhere in Constantinople, across the water from Chalcedon, and saw Justinian there in midchannel. And first Justinian drank up all the water of the sea, so that he presently appeared to be standing on the mainland, there being no longer any waves to break against it; then other water, heavy with filth and rubbish, roaring out of the subterranean sewers, proceeded to cover the land. And this, too, he drank, a second time drying up the bed of the channel. This is what the vision in the dream disclosed.
Now Justinian, when his uncle Justin came to the throne, found the state well provided with public funds. For Anastasius, who had been the most provident and economical of all monarchs, fearing (which indeed happened) that the inheritor of his Empire should find himself in need of money, would perhaps plunder his subjects, filled all the treasuries to their brim with gold before he completed his span of life. All of this Justinian immediately exhausted, between his senseless building program on the coast and his lavish presents to the barbarians; though one might have thought that it would take the most extravagant of Emperors a hundred years to disburse such wealth. For the treasurers and those in charge of the other imperial properties had been able, during Anastasius’s rule of more than twenty-seven years over the Romans, easily to accumulate 3,200 gold centenaries; and of all these nothing at all was left, for it had been squandered by this man while Justin still lived; as I have already related.
What he illegally confiscated and wasted during his lifetime, no tale, no reckoning, no count could ever make manifest. For like an everflowing river swallowing more each day he pillaged his subjects, to disgorge it straightway on the barbarians.
Having thus carried away the public wealth, he turned his eye upon his private subjects. Most of them he immediately robbed of their estates, snatching them arbitrarily by force, bringing false charges against whoever in Constantinople and each other city were reputed to be rich.
Some he accused of polytheism, others of heresy against the orthodox Christian faith; some of pederasty, others of love affairs with nuns, or other unlawful intercourse; some of starting sedition, or of favoring the Greens, or treason against himself, or anything else; or he made himself the arbitrary heir of the dead and even of the living, when he could. Such were the subtleties of his actions.
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