Social Security Is Not Broken But Our 401-K and IRA Voluntary Do-It-Yourself Retirement System Is

4/9/16  

I listened yesterday to a fascinating podast of a Jan 7 2016 Diane Rehm interview with Economist Teresa Ghilarducci: "How To Retire With Enough Money"

Highlights and excerpts follow.

The United States is the only country on Earth that allows early withdrawals from retirement accounts that receive favorable tax treatment  (tax-deferred contributions and compounding) according to the Diane Rehm's interview with economist Teresa Ghilarducci: "How To Retire With Enough Money".   Ghilarducci believes that closing this hole would go a long way to helping with America's "do-it-yourself retirement system" which she calls one of the greatest failed experiments in economic history.

I've called our do-it-yourself retirement system one that is now composed of voluntary individual-directed and commercially-run 401 (k) s, IRAs a failed experiment. We took a bold step. We, the United States, in our retirement incomes policy about the beginning of the 1980s and implemented -- Congress was part of this and the retail, money management industry was also part of it -- implemented a bold experiment. No other country did it, to have people save for their own retirement, invest their own portfolios, decide how much to save and we gave them out, that if they if they needed it or wanted it before they retired, they could withdraw money before retirement, even though they were subsidized by tax favoritism.

The majority of Americans over age 50, have $30,000 or less saved for retirement.  "And that will get you about $100 a month for the rest of your life to supplement Social Security. So I and my fellow economists are quite worried about what we call the retirement crisis. And we don’t use that word, crisis, lightly.

On October 7, 2008, she testified to Congress about helping individuals with toxic assets in their retirement accounts and swapping them for a government guaranteed retirement account .   She was simply brain-storming, trying to stop the free-fall as 401-K's become 201-K's in a couple of weeks. It was a complex plan based on simple principles. Everyone could have a safe and secure retirement plan. Death threats begin to come in. They came from lots of people who became scared to death and she became the target for their fears.

She recommends plan that gives a guaranteed benefit, administered by the government using the existing social security infrastructure. 

If everyone start saving even 3% between ages 20 and 25 or 6% to 10% to 15% in their 40s, they can supplement their social security income.

She said that there has to be some protection or if you lose 25% of your assets right before retirement, you never really catch up and instead will always be in the labor market or at least for a lot longer.  The government could provide this security in the form of a guarantee. 

It's totally false that that you will not get your benefit Social Security. At the very least you work at three-quarters of the promised benefits.

The idea that Social Security won't be there for you in retirement is a right wing myth.  People have been predicting the demise of Social Security ever since it was established in 1935.  79% of Americans support Social Security and want revenues increased to shore up the system. It will always be there for you. We could even expand the system something we haven't talked about 30 years.

This extraordinary anxiety about retirement is unique to the American scene:

I have studied pensions systems all over the world. And unique to the American scene is a great deal of anxiety among older people. Not just because they hear from political elites every once in a while, the Social Security benefits need to be cut. Not true. Economists know it can be easily fixed…

They also know that the financial markets are out of their control and that their pension systems are based on what happens to the financial markets. That's a real shame… As you get older, the anxiety about money can actually lead to very unhelpful and unhealthful activities.  I've heard of a lot of older people skipping lunch in their 70s and 80s, worried about not having enough money. More seriously, they skip going to the doctors or cutting their pills in half. This is very American. This doesn't happen in other countries and it shouldn't happen here.

Corporate pension funds for the last 35 years have performed better than individual retirement accounts or 401 K's.  Why is this?  Because pension funds have investment vehicles available, such as private equity and real estate, that are unavailable to 401-K investors.   They also get professional investment management and know that the money will not or cannot be withdrawn for other short-term needs. 

This aspect of the 401-K is completely flawed.  Every $24,000 you take out of your 401-K deprives you of $100 a month.

Never pull money out of a 401-K to fund a child's college.  Make sure your children go to colleges your family can afford.  State schools are excellent. 

Social security trust fund contains government bonds.   By law, the federal government must pay these bonds a higher interest rate and they have never missed a payment on this. But Congress really backs up Social Security.   Every time there is a short fall, Congress steps up and shores up the system.  Eliminate the earnings cap which she recommends, raise the FICA tax and tweak benefits.

Raising the age of retirement is something she opposes; a raised retirement age is really a big cut in benefits. It doesn't mean that people can keep on working - it just means that they will much less money when they either get fired or laid off or can no longer work for medical reasons.

If you can delay Social Security, it's one of the best deals on the planet. If you don't have a terminal disease and you can keep on working do it that's her advice to everyone

"Every month or year you delay, you get a guaranteed rate of return of something between 6 2/3 percent and 8 percent at older ages."

The 110 richest Americans who make $110 million a year stop paying their social security taxes 2 hours into their first work week. 

600 people who are the very richest Americans have actually stopped paying their Social Security tax by Thursday of the first workweek. 

"So if we just raise the earnings cap, … [most Americans] won't see any increase at all. There's a lot of money at the top… to pay for our Social Security System.   So I wouldn't worry about the deficit."

Over-spenders have always been with us. The main problem - why people don't save enough - is the design of the system we have. Over the past 35 years, we've asked all humans to anticipate their needs when they're older, to curb their consumption and to find an investment vehicle to save their money in. Oh, and by the way, they should decide where the federal funds' rate are going to be or what the risk of financial [markets might be].  We're really asking too much of people. So the main cause is not too many lattes or cables or car leases.

The problem is the design of our system relies on a voluntary, individual directed, really commercial-based system. We need to put back the designs that worked before, when even low-income people -- think of janitors, lady garment workers, home health care workers -- they have low incomes too, but they have a well-designed system to automatically save.

How much should you save?

As a rule of thumb she says you should have

1-2 times your annual income if you're in your 20s,

4 times if you're in your 40s and

8 times if you're on the verge of retirement.

A great way to spend less is "Don't live in a high-income neighborhood."  You should live in a neighborhood where you are surrounded by people who earn the same or even a bit less than you do. 

Jesus and the 47%

And he gathered his disciples together and said, "I say unto you - well 47% of you anyway - that you have grown dependent on a handout. Verily, I say unto you, as you treat the least of these (except for the free-loading 47% - you know who you are) so do you do unto me. And those among you who are outcast, downtrodden, without taxable income - you are now uninterested in caring for yourself. And those who have much will have more as long they create jobs which they do not need to do until a Republican is president. And if you are struck on the cheek by an enemy, turn the other cheek, unless that enemy is a member of the 47%. Oh, wicked 47%ers, what profit you if you win a free meal but lose your potential for corporate personhood?

Jesus - at least the Jesus who comes to us through the oral tradition that was later written down, edited, rewritten in parts (there is no other Jesus) - was obviously speaking like someone who felt, as he put it, that the Kingdom of Heaven was nigh. His movement was essentially an apocalyptic one, predicting an end of the world as they knew it before some of his followers had tasted death, as he put it, meaning in their life times. Therefore, if your time horizon is contracted, your priorities change. You behave differently if you believe the ship is about to sink than if it will reach the port safely (and your kids' college bills are there waiting to be paid). Give everything away and get ready was essentially his message. Live as the birds in the field live, he said in Matthew, who do not (according to belief at that time anyway) gather food for the future but have faith they can find sufficient food each day. One of the essential difficulties with Christianity is that this short-term model is not viable long-term economically if taken literally, so a balance must be found, not just in my humble opinion, but in that of most of those who have identified themselves as Christians in the centuries that past after all his followers tasted death but the world was very much its old bloody, labor-demanding, investment-rewarding self.
Mitt Romney's solution to this problem seems essentially ignore it, pretending Jesus never said these things, or if he did, that he was just kidding. Hoard, invest, don't be bothered helping the poor who are, he tells us in a moment of candor, simply looking for a hand-out and will only be enabled by your helping them.
But Jesus did say these things and most of what he said had to do with such a radical view of wealth redistribution and personal material wealth (eschew it in favor of spiritual wealth) that he would never have been invited on Fox and Friends had it existed, Glenn Beck would have warned his listeners (viewers?) not to listen to his message, and O'Reilly would have devoted an entire season to bashing the War on Wealth launched by this long-haired hippie-looking Jewish teacher spreading a subversive message of class warfare.

It's amazing that certain people continue to get paid to say such stupid things:

 

Monsieur Robertson, Jesus, if he could be said to have any party affiliation, was a socialist. Religious conservatives are hostile to socialism (and have a soft spot for fascism and militarism) only because of a quirk of recent history. Marx and Engels were indifferent to religion (calling it the opiate of the masses was not a bad thing in an age in which some tincture of opium was in every active medicine) and the communists in Russia, then later China, showed overt hostility, feeling - with some justification - that religion seemed more interested in self-preservation than in progress. But this is a silly, recent quirk; Jesus and Amos and a whole host of Jewish prophets would never have been invited on Fox and Friends for the left-leaning tendencies.

The Ten Biggest Tea Party Fabrications, Part I

The Ten Biggest Tea Party Fabrications

 [Note:  this page is being updated so check back periodically for additions and editions.]

28 days after President Obama took office, the Tea Party was formed allegedly as a populist movement against what its founders, the Koch brothers, described as an out-of-control administration.  I have always been curious what a president 28 days into his new term could do to make so many predominantly white men so mad, mad, mad! (11% when polled did admit that they didn't trust our first African American president because of his race, but the Tea Party claims to have purged its ranks of racists after firing Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams after he made one racist remark too many).  I was hoping to get some insight into this antipathy toward President Obama, something that I must admit shocked me, seeming to come out of right field.   The deafening silence of these white, angry crowds when many of the budget-busting programs were being put into place over the prior 8 years, including the Bush-Paulson $700 billion corporate bailout, seemed curious. 

Well, since then we have had two budget cycles and a midterm election that seemed to validate frustration with incumbents and the status quo.  A number of freshmen Tea Party congressmen defeated seasoned politicians, even Republicans who were seen as too willing to work with President Obama.

The Tea Party narrative goes something like this: 

 Everything was fine until 2009 when an out-of-control tax-and-spend Democrat who was a radical community organizer, a socialist, closet Muslim, and perhaps a Kenyan by birth, became President.   As part of his radical socialist agenda, this president imposed "Obamacare", the "crown jewel of socialism", a "government takeover of healthcare" on an unwilling country.  Doing so would increase government spending even more, which under Obama is already out of control, threatens to bankrupt our country.  Unless we stop Obama and his radical agenda, our best days are behind us as a nation.   Tax cuts and military spending have nothing to do with the deficits or debt, and the last thing a recovering economy needs is a greater tax burden.  As Sarah Palin put it, what America needs is to "get big government off our backs."  Mid-term elections have given us a mandate to abort healthcare reform and massively reduce government spending.  

I think I managed to hit all the Tea Party talking points.   It's hard not to know them, since the Republicans are nothing if not disciplined about being on message.  There is just one problem with them:  almost none are true.  Each either misrepresents recent or historical events or is an outright fabrication.  Let me address the 10 Biggest Tea Party Whoppers:

Claim:  "Government debt has never been higher."

Reality:  In nominal dollars (reported without taking inflation or the size of the economy into account), it is true that our government is facing a record debt, almost $15 trillion.   This number sounds frightening and certainly requires corrective action, but it is not true that it has never been higher relative to the United States economy, which remains the world's largest.   During World War II, debt surged to 117.5% of GDP.    This is not to say that the debt is not too high - by any reasonable measure it is - but the United States during past periods of crisis has mounted and paid off even larger debt levels. 

The United States began as a country in debt and the question was whether that debt should be floated to the public in the form of Treasury bills, notes, and bonds, or simply retired as rapidly as possible.  Alexander Hamilton won that argument, and the world's most successful and secure investment instrument was born.  Even as I write this, with the government borrowing $1 billion a day, lenders around the world (and many American citizens) are willing to lend money to the United States government for only 3.19% for 10 years versus 5.19% when Bush took office and 8.43% when Bush I took office in 1990.  No borrower who is not credit-worthy could ever get such a free ride from bond vigilantes who have far more to do with setting interest rates than the Fed.  If President Obama were such a disaster for fiscal discipline and the United States economy, why are bond investors willing to lend him money 39% lower than his predecessor and almost two-thirds lower than Bush's father.  

Our 30% debt following the Revolutionary War was paid off, but climbed to 30% again during the Civil War, then again during World War I.  It soared to a still-unprecedented 100%+ of GDP during World War II as the United States borrowed massively to defeat Hitler, and is approaching that level following the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis.  

Unless people believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will last forever or that the United States economy will never recover, history indicates that crisis-induced debts are always repaid without a catastrophic collapse in the economy or society.   The difference now is that for the first time in the history of our country, perhaps of any country, the United States lowered taxes in a time of war, creating a disastrous, yawning deficit compounded over time into a massive debt.   In a way, this is good news, however, since tax cuts can be rolled back or reversed.  It is likely when all is said 

Claim:  "Obama created the debt."

Reality:   This is the easiest Tea Party fabrication to disprove.   Most of the debt we are facing was accumulated years before President Obama took office, two-thirds of it in the 8 years of his predecessor.  

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the total debt was $5.62 trillion dollars when President Bush took office in 2000.  By the time President Obama took office, this debt swelled to $9.64 trillion dollars, an increase of $4.02 trillion during Bush's two terms.   Approximately two-thirds of our debt was accumulated before President Obama took office.  

Claim:  "Obama's reckless spending increases accelerated the debt build-up, even if they didn't create it in the first place."

Reality:  For those of you with non-financial backgrounds, a few caveats about assigning causality in a field as murky as economics is in order.  (Skip if you took a good Economics 101 course and remember what you were taught.)

What the Tea Party advocates would like us to believe, as would Marxists on the other extreme, is that because there are gaping holes in free market economic theory and disagreement over optimal rates of taxation, government intervention or regulation of the marketplace, or social security funding, we can just make our own economic laws.  Such as "tax cuts always pay for themselves" (they clearly don't), deficits either don't matter (when created by Reagan or Bush) or do (when increased by a Democrat), or cuts to government programs helping the poor will always be offset by even greater increases in private charitable giving.  The biggest pseudo-law, repeated so often its absence of empirical evidence is often forgotten,  is that cuts to top marginal income tax rates will always grow the economy (and have no net effect on the deficit).   There is some weak but contradictory evidence for the first idea, but none at all for the latter.

So with all those caveats, in mind, let's return to the Tea Party's claim that the deficit and debt were caused by a dramatic increase in spending by President Obama.  

For the conclusion to be true, the premise (that Obama dramatically increased spending) must be also.  Did he? 

It depends by what you mean by dramatic and he.

President Bush spent $2.979 trillion dollars his last year in office.  President Obama spent $3.107 trillion dollars his first year in office, an increase of 4.3%.  This is hardly dramatic, but the Tea Party based its largely successful 2010 campaign on this claim.  (Since then, spending has increased further, but at the time the Tea Party made this claim, it was not true.)  (Source:  CBO.)  

  FactCheck.org provided this informative graphic in the middle of an article slamming Obama's Treasury Secretary for falsely claiming his boss's spending would be lower as a % of GDP than under  Bush and comparable to Reagan's.  Note the surge in Bush's term, particularly his final year; the increase under Obama has bee modest and is projected to decline, albeit not to Clinton-level eras.  

Furthermore, what did the Tea Party mean by he, President Obama, triggered this spending?  Brushing aside the observation that Congress, not the president, controls the purse strings, the president can at least communicate his priorities and of course proposes a budget but it's Congress that must create it.  But how much of the budget does the president actually control?  

Of the $3.1 trillion in the 2009 budget he signed into law, the $1.896 trillion, or 60%, was mandatory, meaning they were entitlements that had to be paid based on agreements made (and signed into law) decades before President Obama took office.   

Of the other 40%, much of that was also relatively fixed, including continuation of bailout programs begun by his predecessor (but the bill for which arrived as President Obama took over the White House).   

To be fair to Obama's critics (a favor they never return to the president), the year-over-year increase in discretionary spending he controlled was a bit faster than the year-over-year increase in the mandatory spending he did not, but even taking this into account over half of the increase in federal spending (54%) had nothing to do with who was in control of the White House or Congress.   This money would have been spent even by a President McCain.  Anyone who states that a Republican president would have been able to overhaul Social Security and Medicare after less than a year in office (and have these changes show up in the annual spending numbers for that year) is lying or perhaps unaware that Bush actually tried unsuccessfully to do some of these things for 4 years then abandoned the effort (although he did massively increase Medicare spending by expanding the benefit to include prescription drug coverage, something those trying to make the case that Republicans hate big government always forget).  

Claim:  "Obama's spending reflects a radical socialist agenda that weakens defense."

Reality:  Republicans may be surprised to discover this, but some of the biggest increases in President Obama's 2009 budget (continued in 2010) were in defense and national security spending, even excluding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.   $743 billion was spent on defense-related expenditures under President Obama in 2009 versus $700.3 billion under President Bush in 2008.  Say what you will about President Obama, but weakness on defense, at least as measured by expenditures in that area, is not one of them.  

And even here, the idea that President Obama was entirely responsible for these increases (if you are opposed to increases in any government spending, even military expenditures, something most Tea Party advocates claim not to be) is nonsensical, since the largest single military-related agency increase was the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose funding is a function both of demand (the wars Bush started generated a steady flow of traumatized and wounded veterans who now require a lifetime of care) and of response to Bush-era scandals such as those at Walter Reed showing returning veterans getting inadequate care and resources. 

  It is intellectually and morally dishonest to blame the President who increases care of veterans wounded by wars started by his predecessor.  Whether one agrees with those wars or not (I opposed the Iraq invasion which generated most of the increase in demand for VA services), hopefully even the most radical Tea Party government-hater will agree that we have a moral obligation to pay for those harmed by them.  

So where else did this "radical socialist" President increase government spending?  Compared to his massive military and defense spending, nothing else really comes close, but in order of increase in spending in discretionary programs, he pumped $56.1 billion more into the Department of Transportation, mainly through stimulus spending, and a relatively puny $3.3 billion more into "Department of State and other international programs", an equal increase into the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and $1.1 billion more into the Department of Health and Human Services.   The  Departments of Energy,  Agriculture, and Treasury all received between 2.9% and 3.3% more than under Bush, and NASA's budget was increased by a not-so-whopping 1.7% (which after inflation means its budget was cut in real terms).  

This radical socialist president cut funding on the Department of Labor by $100 million paid less on the interest on the national debt thanks to a drop in interest rates (saving taxpayers a billion dollars), and slashed $10.6 billion (an 18.9% reduction) from the Department of Education.  

When you consider that the Bush deficit massively increased demand for everything from unemployment insurance to Medicaid (by allowing more Americans to become eligible by moving into poverty), it is hard to understand how or why we can honestly blame President Obama for the $36 billion increase in "Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending" or the $15 billion increase in "Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)."  Of course, honesty or pesky things like facts were never barriers to people such as Sarah "death panels" Palin.  

Claim:  "Tax cuts have nothing to do with our deficit or debt and should be ignored in favor of spending cuts only."

Reality:  This is not quite as easy to slap down as most intelligent adults who understand that in the zero sum game of government budgeting, there is no difference between increasing a dollar of revenue (through taxes) or decreasing a dollar of spending (through cuts to existing programs).   Where it gets complicated is that both the economy nor the government budget are dynamic, moving targets, and changes in one affect the other, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. 

To their credit, there is some evidence that marginal reductions in taxes can boost economic activity, but very little to none that these increases in economic activity offset the loss of revenue the tax cuts actually stimulate.   FactCheck.org perhaps put it best in a nice review of this topic in 2008 (since then Bush tax cuts have been extended by President Obama and that debt has surged even more):  

Q:  Have tax cuts always resulted in higher tax revenues and more economic growth as many tax cut proponents claim?

A:  No. In fact, economists say tax cuts do not spark enough growth to pay for themselves.  - FactCheck.org

Now most of us love to make fun of economists (if you want my favorite economist jokes, email me), but what is the alternative to the historical economic record?   However imperfect the intellectual track record of even the worst economists, I will take it over that of a Michelle Bachman, who apparently is confused about the definition of socialism, or Sarah Palin, who could name neither a single paper she reads regularly nor a single Supreme Court decision (besides Roe v. Wade) and seemed under the impression that Africa was a country rather than a continent.  I am not sure why intellectual giants such as this, who took 5 years and as many colleges to get her degree in communications from the University of Idaho, and who apparently believed a Civil War general was running operations in Afghanistan, should be given any more credibility in understanding much less critiquing or (god forbid) forming monetary and fiscal policy than people who at least get the basic facts right.  (We are free to disagree with their premises, but not to make up our own historical record.)

It is true that despite the tax cuts, revenue increased somewhat under President Bush from $1.991 trillion the year he took office to $2.524 billion the year he left.   But this 26% increase in revenue was far less than the 42% increase in GDP that occurred over that time frame, meaning that had the rate of taxation of this expanding economy remained constant, we would have no deficit.  Revenue as a percentage of GDP fell from 20.9% the last year of Clinton's administration to 17.6% the final year of Bush's office.   Some very simple math would indicate that had this plunge not occurred, there would be virtually no budget deficit.

Using a 2010 GDP of $14.6 trillion, had the government collected a Clinton-level 20.9%, the total inflows to the government would have been $3.054 trillion instead of the $2.162 trillion actually collected.   This additional $889 billion would not have eliminated almost two-thirds of the deficit.  When you consider that $260 billion spent on interest on the debt would have been eliminated had the Clinton surpluses not been turned into deficits because of the Bush tax cuts, the total savings would have been $1.149 trillion, wiping out all but 17% of 2010 actual deficit of $1.390 trillion!  

Now, Tea Party activists who have never heard of fungibility and Starve the Beast activists who have argued that creating a fiscal crisis is the only way to mobilize political support for the radical societal changes they envision argue that this assumes that the economy would have grown had the Bush tax cuts not been passed.  In other words, it does you no good to take 20.9% of a pie if that pie shrinks or grows slower for want of those tax cuts.  Fair enough, and most economists agree tax cuts can stimulate some growth at the margin, but there are several ways of pointing out the flaws of this counter-argument:

    First, most economist do not agree that the increase in economic growth offsets the decrease in revenue from lowering tax rates. 

    Second, there is no empirical evidence that government spending is inversely correlated with economic growth; if anything, there is a very weak positive correlation between government spending and change in GDP over the next year from 1977 to 2010.   

    Third, the correlation between individual income taxes collected and subsequent economic growth is not only weak, but positive, meaning higher individual income tax collection rates are associated with stronger economic growth, as measured by year-over-year change in GDP.   The same is true for aggregate tax collections - higher collection rates are associated with slightly higher rates in economic growth.  Now it maybe that if income taxes are lowered dramatically below the record 5.7% low set by President Obama in 2010, something magical will happen that has not happened in the range of values experienced from 1977 to 2010, but when someone claims lowering taxes stimulates the economy and raising them slows economic growth, the burden of proof is on them to explain why this has not been the case over the past 35 years or so. 

Claim:  "President Obama is foreign-born (and therefore by implication not eligible to be president)."

Reality:  This claim has been so thoroughly and repeatedly debunked it is not worth addressing seriously.  Even before President Obama humiliated television personality and failed businessman Donal Trump by releasing his long-form birth certificate (something no white president was ever asked to do), this was an urban legend irresponsibly advanced by the Tea Party as a pseudo-controversy.  Factcheck.org decisively shot it down long ago.  It deserves no further comment. 

 To be continued....

We can be free and insure our children; indeed, we can't be if we don't

I recently responded to an email equating life in a more progressive society with communism:

"So if you want to imagine what life will be like when the central planners and experts get complete control, just imagine being in the army for the rest of your life, with no chance to ever leave it :)"

I will try to remember that the next time I step outside, considering I live in a country now that has all the things "progressive say they want" and the contrast between Switzerland and the military could not be greater.   All the countries of Western Europe - and I have visited or lived in most of them - have universal healthcare and the idea that this leads inevitably to loss of freedom or stagnation of economic growth is beyond ludicrous.  If there is an exodus of French, Germans, or Swiss fleeing for the United States, I must have completely missed it.  No chains, no camps, no gulags.   Just healthier children and citizens and no risk of losing everything you ever worked for because you get sick between jobs.    On every parameter from infant mortality to teen pregnancy to life expectancy at birth, countries with universal healthcare do far better than we do.  Our own CIA (the same one who just killed Osama bin Laden) ranked us 49th in the world in life expectancy.   49th.

The Commonwealth Fund recently put out a survey of 7 leading countries and where do you think we ranked?  Dead last.   Although we were #1 in one category:  spending (@ $7,290 per citizen, about twice what the other surveyed countries spend).   They pay less and get more, so if you want to reduce waste, you must support healthcare reform (don't you?).   

There are many sorts of freedom and many forms of tyranny.   Europeans are free from having to save a fortune to send their kids to a private college or take them out of failing public schools or pay thousands a year for a for profit health insurance plan.   They pay more for a Big Mac though and our cell phone plans are a bit cheaper, so I guess there are some advantages to life in America.  Personally, I would rather my child did not die from a treatable illness because some gubment-hater was duped into believing that healthcare reform is a "government takeover of healthcare."  But that's just me.

You are confusing being in uniform and having each minute of your life orchestrated by a government with having to pay a nickel more in taxes each day (if that) but a thousand dollars less a month in private insurance premiums.    I think you're also confusing socialism and communism, but I  have given up trying to educate people on this (they do both end in -ism, after all, and the communists called themselves socialists; avoiding socialism because communists misused the word would be like shunning democracy because East Germany called itself "Democratic.")  

"I must be looking at the wrong government bashing websites.  The ones I look at don't say much about 'doing nothing right', but rather focus on government over-reach and over regulation, and massive, massive overspending."

Perhaps you have been out of the country for as long as I have.  Google "Tea Party" or "Koch brothers" or "John Birch Society" (a creation of David Koch's father).   Listen to the pronouncements of the freshmen class of Congress including one of our classmates.  Perhaps Reagan was stuttering when he said that government was not part of the problem, it was the problem.  

Re government over-reach and over-regulation, how does defunding Planned Parenthood, NPR, Head Start, healthcare for 9-11 first responders, or healthcare for poor children, the elderly, and disabled, fit into that scheme?  And I'm not sure increasing government intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship (when the patient is a woman) fits into your libertarian theme anymore than government telling citizens they cannot organize for better working conditions has anything to do with freedom.  

I agree the government, even under Obama, is continuing to deficit spend  (it tends to do that during wars and economic crises such as the one triggered by the deregulation of the smartest guys in the room who brought us the mortgage-backed securities and other job-crushing private initiatives) but I'm not sure I would agree that 5% of GDP is "massive, massive," especially if the deficit was created by a package of tax cuts that cost about 5% of GDP.   If the deficit is "massive, massive" then so are the tax cuts, so thanks for making the case for rolling them back to at least Clinton, if not Reagan, era levels. 

Most government spending is non-discretionary, determined decades ago by legislation, particularly the Great Society programs, and demographics.  You can't plug a 1.5T whole by ignoring 1.5T of tax cuts and defunding $30 or $60 or $90 billion from programs to the poor who did nothing to get us into this mess.   I personally do not mind paying a bit more in taxes so that someone's grandmother does not have to eat cat food or choose between groceries or medicine, or so that returning veterans will have fully-staffed clinics and no veteran will sleep under a bridge one day, but that seems a minority opinion in some circles.  

Let's just all thank the gods that this strike on Osama bin Laden was not outsourced to a private firm but left to professionals whose primary motivation is service to others, not service to self. 

To My Conservative Friends Who Think That By Being Born on Third Base They Must Have Hit a Triple

To my conservative friends from humble beginnings who believe their success was self-generated:
First, if you can read this, you benefited from a public education system that had a government employee teach you. Many of the poorest on this planet are illiterate and have no hope of schooling of any kind. Indeed, were we to return to a pre-Jeffersonian system where only the wealthy hired tutors and public education was considered a radical luxury no government was in the business of guaranteeing or providing, you would have been unable to understand or respond to what I am writing now. 
You did not work in a sweat shop in Vietnam or serve as a gun runner for warlords in some Mexican village or a child soldier in Somalia. 
You had access to vaccinations, medicines, and clean running water and sewage that were all provided at public expense to you or your family (you could not have attended school without the former). 
You had safe, government-inspected roads and probably had some means of transportation with government-mandated safety devices such as seat belts. 
You ate government-inspected food that did not kill you. 
I bet you had shoes and even the ability to bathe regularly. You may not have had three cars and a vacation, but you probably were not hungry most of the time or walking 5 hours a day to fetch water, as is true for the world's poorest citizens. 
In other words, you didn't just survive childhood (something many of the poorest children don't do) and appear educated and ready to enter the business world by magic. You had an entire village of invisible helpers, most of them publicly funded and paid for by taxpayers so that the accidents of your birth would not condemn you to a life of poverty or an early death. 
And yes, you benefited from a socialized police and fire department that kept your streets relatively safe (compared to Mogadishu or Karachi, let's say) and allowed you to get to school and back each day and not find your house or apartment had burned down. 
So please stop begrudging all these benefits you enjoyed, man up and pay for them.  Find a cop or teacher and say thank you.  Ask how you can help pay back the society that gave you so much even if you did not appreciate it at the time. 
And stop trying to deny those same services to the least among us who deserve the same opportunities for hard work and success as you were given.

Newt Gingrich: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine - my review

Newt Gingrich:   To Save America:  Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine - my review

This is how your review will appear:  Beyond Garbage, March 10, 2011 By  Mark Vakkur - See all my reviews     This review is from: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (Paperback) To really save America, you might start by pledging never to read this book. Not only is it bad history (stunning for a man who apparently taught the subject and wrote a few works of historical fiction), but it advances as facts spurious, disrespectful, inflammatory charges that have virtually all been widely discredited. The fact that Newt Gingrich must know this, but writes it anyway, indicates that his fidelity to the truth is no greater than his fidelity to his first two wives. Mr. Gingrich can't even get the title right. First, it's PRESIDENT Obama. He earned that title by winning the election, receiving more votes than any American president in history. Second, President Obama is a Democrat, not a socialist. There is only one member of Congress who is a socialist, an easy fact for Mr. Gingrich to check. Third, the breathless reference to a "secular-socialist machine" is simply not supported by anything President Obama has done, stated, or written, and it most certainly is not backed up by anything Mr. Gingrich writes. Fourth (and perhaps this is technical) socialism by definition is secular, so the secular part is gratuitous and redundant (and probably should not be hyphenated). It does add a certain alliterative punch though, which is perhaps why the author chose to throw it in there. Mr. Gingrich alleges that there is a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy with the diabolical aim of empowering government to rule the people rather than serve them. As evidence of this, he cites the Justice Department's respect for the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of suspected terrorists (in Newt Gingrich's world, they are already guilty, and trials and attorneys are a redundant (and tax-supported) burden. I always find the idea of an American Left (which Mr. Gingrich capitalizes for emphasis) as amusing, considering that in Europe, where I live, the Democrats would be considered a right-of-center party and the Republicans a far right party. Issues the Republicans view as socialist plots to deprive us of our liberties - such as universal healthcare, worker's rights, federally-funded daycare, extensive public transportation - have long been settled here with generally outstanding results. In fact, the United States spends more on health care but (as I write this) leaves 59 million of its citizens without health insurance, a problem Newt Gingrich does not address directly (although he has two chapters on health care, mostly about how to reduce costs and the dangers of death panels, a Sarah Palin fabrication whose critics he ridicules (p. 56)). Perhaps Gingrich feels his audience will not get his message unless he overstates it, but instead of saying that he opposes healthcare reform, he titles the chapter in question, "The Secular-Socialist Machine's Health Bill Disaster" (p. 85). Wow, if that doesn't make you run into the street waving a Lipton's tea bag, I don't know what will. It's interesting that the same man who does not believe our children need health insurance believes that what we do need is a gun in each household and that - even with our government's advanced arsenal - a family could and should be able to keep those weapons just in case that government ever gets tyrannical (p. 294). This myth of the gun lobby - that guns can protect you not just against intruders but against your own government - is reminiscent of Sharron Angle's "second amendment remedies" rant and her intent to "take out" Senator Reid. If Gingrich's first name was Saddam, he likely would be getting a visit from the Department of Homeland Security for making even veiled terroristic threats against his government, but Newt is very, very white, and a new convert to Catholicism, so apparently gets a free pass. The book is not only sloppy in its logic, but mean-spirited. Mr. Gingrich tells us he is a Christian, but don't expect any evidence of charity or compassion in these pages. People who are on the Left are not like you and me, Gingrich assures us. They believe in theft rather than work, union bureaucracy rather than "productivity", corruption rather than honesty, and "secular oppression" rather than "religious belief." Now, I'm not sure how much stock to put in a lecture about honesty from a man who cheated on two wives with much younger women (one while crucifying the President of the United States for cheating on his wife), and I don't know how committed Gingrich is to "religious belief" if he has been one of the most vocal critics of his fellow citizens exercising their religious beliefs in lower Manhattan. But this collection of cartoon-like false dichotomies which he lists on page 7 is not only insulting, but completely uncorroborated by anything that follows. If you want a reference to any of these dastardly traits from that oppressive Secular Left (did I mention they have a Machine?), you won't find one. If many of these stereotypes sound familiar, that's because they are rehashed talking points from Fox News, who pays Gingrich $1 million a year for repeating them. The fact that Mr. Gingrich's personal life is so sordid and deviates so widely from what he pontificates should matter to us all, since he has advocated repeatedly that the personal, sexual life of public officials is not only fair game, but a fantastic litmus test for measuring their righteousness. By that measure, Gingrich fails, and this book does nothing to explain the yawning gaps between his serial adultery and his preaching of Christian morality. Comparing the president of the United States to Mao or Hitler while calling him something Gingrich knows (or should know) he is not is beyond irresponsible, especially during a time of war. The idea that a president who just extended massive tax cuts for the rich, who has advanced or passed no serious firearm legislation, who has kept Guantanamo Bay open and escalated the war in Afghanistan is a socialist is beyond nonsensical, and Gingrich should be ashamed for advancing such a lie, especially in the title of a book. But a man who can present his wife with a divorce agreement while she is recovering from cancer surgery probably has a much higher threshold for shame than the rest of us. Your Tags: fascist, tea party, hypocrite, adultery, cancer, multiple sclerosis, fat, islamophobia

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An Open Letter to My Conservative Religious Friends

I wrote this as a letter to an individual with whom I had a disagreement, in an attempt to clarify my views and make peace, but realize the message [scrubbed of personal details] is appropriate for a broader audience:

Dear Friend, 

I honestly do not believe providing healthcare to women (the latest issue that evoked such a strong, hostile response from you) is controversial.  I am saddened that expressing such views could prompt the impugning of my motives or even integrity.  

I disagree with the Republican push to defund Planned Parenthood and this is no secret, but this is not the only area where programs helping women and the children they disproportionately care for are being systematically defunded.   Certainly slashing Medicaid or WIC have nothing to do with either Planned Parenthood or the Mother of All Wedge Issues, abortion.  

In fact, the defunding of Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with abortion, since no federal dollars can directly support abortion by law.  Yes, dollars are fungible, but then we would have to make it illegal for private donors to give to Planned Parenthood also, and that would be going down a path I hope none of us wants to take.  If you wish to overturn Roe v. Wade, the law of the land for over 3 decades, do so openly through the legislative process.  Do not defund all of Planned Parenthood, because 3% of its services involve abortion.  The other 97% is life-saving work (and ironically prevents far more abortions). 

I do not reflexively dislike Christians in general, or Catholics in particular, as you seem to imply.   I have tremendous respect for many of the intellectual and artistic creations that they helped sponsor, and for their ability to evolve and grow as an institution, embracing ideas that would have sent shivers through the spine of the first authorities in the Roman branch of Western Christianity before it rose to relative ascendancy, then broke apart into dozens of warring denominations that have since tried, however haltingly, to make their peace.  At least we are not burning each other at the stake or torturing each other for worshiping in the "wrong" way as we once were, or condemning King George III as the anti-Christ because he granted Catholics in captured Quebec territories to practice their faith, but historically speaking, those events occurred yesterday.

Yes, I am concerned they could happen again, and little from what I read of the religious right makes me reassured that they all got that Enlightenment religious tolerance memo.  It is quite clear that a number of lawmakers do not understand the importance of separation of church and state, or pretend not to (always a possibility when playing to the Least Common Denominator sort of TV-based politics we now enjoy). 

I feel deeply, passionately, and strongly that we have a moral obligation to the least among us.  If this obligation is not reflected in the policies of our society then it represents empty words, an unfulfilled promise, a banging gong.  

I have not read about healthcare, I lived it and saw it.  I witnessed people getting substandard treatment or losing everything they worked for because a for profit healthcare plan cut them off, "lost" their third submitted claim, or told them they ran through their lifetime cap.  I have seen premiums soar and bureaucrats get heavily involved in the doctor-patient relationship decades before the Koch brothers invented the disparaging (and insulting) term "Obamacare" which is years away from full implementation and cannot possibly be blamed for the premium surges that predated its conception not just passage into law.

Government maybe inefficient - like any large organization, it is far from infallible - but in a modern, complex economy, it provides the only hope for millions of our citizens.  It keeps our elderly out of abject poverty and finances their healthcare.  Thanks to President Bush's push to expand the role of government in healthcare, it now pays for prescription medications also.  For the least among us, there is no viable hope beyond the government for financing the pap smears and chemotherapy and surgery.  If the donation basket at Sunday services could do the trick, we would not have the scandal of 59 million Americans without insurance, or 45,000 Americans under 65 dying each year for want of insurance.  Health care costs would not be the cause of over half of all bankruptcies.  In fact, the United States is alone in the developed world for all of these things.   If private charity could manage something as complex as a modern healthcare system, then the mortality of those without insurance would not be 40% higher  than the insured.  

I do not believe you must believe in the divinity of Jesus to understand what he wrote and said.  And that message of social justice made it quite clear where he would have stood on this issue.  I would hope that whether one believed in the resurrection or transubstantiation or not, we would all help the man beset by robbers or the woman seeking healthcare or the child in need of a well-paid teacher. 

Like Jefferson, I believe Jesus was a great voice of moral reason in an age, like ours, steeped in hypocrisy dressed up in the finest religious garb.   The idea that only those who believe in  a particular metaphysical interpretation could "get" the far more accessible moral teachings of Jesus is at best highly questionable, at worst arrogant and self-serving.   There is something intellectually dishonest about this approach (particularly since all Christian denominations disagree about particular literal articles of faith), somewhat akin to stating that unless I am a Stoic, I could never understand the teachings of Zeno of Citium.  I believe his message was universal, for all of us ("let him who has ears hear").   

Metaphysical beliefs do not alter one's understanding of the moral message Jesus was teaching through easily understandable parables and stories (although belief in his divinity would, you would think, increase the sense of urgency about following it).  He constantly chastised his followers for looking for "signs" and for ignoring the obvious good that had to be done in front of them.  He equated how we treat the poor, homeless, imprisoned, and sick as how we treat him and follow his message, making quite clear that those who lived their lives in rectitude, following all the rules, but who did not care for the least among us would be in for a rude awakening when their judgment day came.  Pretty harsh stuff, and at some level deeply insulting to the religious hypocrites of his time, but he was saying this for a reason, trying to shock his audience into doing something radical, something that even today is condemned as "wealth redistribution" or "socialism" or punishing the "economically successful."  Jesus never said anything about a moral imperative to create jobs or grow the bottom line of a business, but said much negative about focusing on the accumulation and hoarding of wealth.  Oh, and he said we should pay our taxes (that whole "yield under Caesar" thing). 

His was a universal message and I deeply resent anyone telling me that they and only they have the One True Interpretation.  This "There Is No God But God" exclusivism has caused so much cruelty and suffering throughout history (and still does today although thankfully less so in the post-Enlightenment West).   

We are free to interpret, but not free to change or ignore the texts of the agree-upon books representing the moral teachings of Jesus.   I can read, and I can count words.  I can find significant omissions (such as of homosexuality, for example) and recurrent themes (such as the evils of adultery, hypocrisy, and the importance of social justice).  I can compare texts and I can try to reconcile conflicts, or use those conflicts as a reminder that we have to make a choice between 2 or sometimes 3 or 4 different descriptions of the same event (who exactly came to find the tomb empty?  what exactly were Jesus's last words?  did Jesus's family flee at one point to Egypt or not?).   Religious fundamentalists, who believe the Bible should be read with the literal concreteness of a physics textbook, are the only ones threatened by these sometimes annoying inconsistencies and contradictions.   The rest of us can recognize that however divine their inspiration, these works were written, translated, and copied by men with all their foibles and faults (and impulse here and there to insert or alter a word to support or refute a local argument).   To claim the Bible is inerrant and infallible as Jerry Falwell once did, is to place a blind faith in a chain of human beings we have never met to have gotten the story absolutely right.  

Any work of literature has to stand or fall on its own merit.  There is much that is troubling in the teachings of Jesus (his redefinition of divorce and remarriage as adultery, for example, was something few modern Christians agree with), but there was much that was about as plain as you could make it.  Be compassionate.  Don't just tolerate your enemies - love them!   Be prepared to give everything to the least among us.  Have faith.  Focus at least as much on your own shortcomings as on those of your perceived enemies.  Don't kill people, especially if you're not perfect yourself (none of us is).  Don't meet violence with violence - turn the other cheek, even if you are in mortal danger.  If you live by the sword, you will die by it.   Treat others as you yourself would want to be treated.  You are far more likely to be condemned by what comes out of your mouth (your words) than what you put in your mouth (dietary mitzvahs); don't allow the religious trees to make you miss the moral forest.   

I wish that more people of good will spoke up and said, "Now wait a minute..." when some of the more outrageous claims are made.  

We should all resist the urge to spurn the advances of those whose expression of faith is different than ours or nonexistent.  There is a reason we were told not to cast stones unless we ourselves are perfect.  Interpreting words and phrases such as "social justice" with deeper, more sinister meanings helps advance no cause or win any converts.  We are all interconnected and I think we have a moral duty to look out for each other and be good stewards of our planet.  I understand we may differ over means, but rarely over ends.  Very little of what a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or humanist believes differs in the things that really matter. 

We all love and nurture our children.  We all try our best to do what we believe is right and to live up to our highest ideals.  We all recognize (hopefully eventually) when we stumble.   Whatever labels we give ourselves, we are all members of the same species and our survival depends, as it always has, on our ability to put aside our differences, explore our reality fearlessly, then adapt, grow, and cooperate.  

Hitler was as much a "socialist" as the German Democratic Republic (communist East Germany) was democratic

Let me just wade in here again and point out that it is historically correct to state that Hitler's party began with a socialist element but this was largely liquidated and its remnants hunted down and destroyed after the Night of the Long Knives.  Hitler was a master at getting people to act against their interests, playing on worker's discontent by channeling their fury toward a fictitious international Jewish conspiracy; many workers were anamored of anti-semitic nonsense before Hitler actually became very anti-semitic himself (believe it or not, there were a number of contemporaries from his failed artist days who never remember him as being anti-semitic then, and his family doctor and a man who helped sell some of his art work was Jewish (and this never was raised as any sort of issue)).  My point is that Hitler was nothing if not a cunning exploiter, seeing which way the popular rage was blowing and taking advantage of it.  When it was in his interests to be seen as a champion of the working man and the unions, he modeled himself this way (although virtually all parties did - there were no equivalent of the Republican party today that distances itself from workers and their interests while espousing faux-populist nonsense).  But his true backers were the large German industrialist families who had much to gain by having a reliable business-friendly government who halfway through his rise to power made sure that unions were not going to be a problem for all those lucrative war contracts that would be handed out by his regime.  In fact, all non-Nazi unions were banned, so he could continue the fiction (to anyone who ignored the disappearance of the labor leaders and the purging of the left from his party) that he was living up to the "socialist" part of national socialist.
When one considers that much of the Nazi war machine was fueled by slave labor provided first by Russian POWs then by Jews, intellectuals, and dissidents of every stripe, it is impossible to make the case that Hitler was a worker-friendly leftist.
Those who claim Hitler was a leftist may not realize they are taking Nazi propaganda at face value and playing right into his legacy (he certainly would welcome that sort of revisionist softening of his murderously anti-worker, anti-human being, right-wing regime).  But it makes no more sense to say that socialism is always and everywhere bad because Hitler called himself a national socialist anymore than it would make sense to say that Democracy is always bad because East Germany called itself the German Democratic Republic!