Excellent take on Smirky's ramblings last night

Via Democratic Underground

Bush on Social Security: Sharing is BAD!
Posted by Plaid Adder
Added to homepage Fri Apr 29th 2005, 08:30 AM ET

I'm glad he doesn't give press conferences very often. I can't take much more o' this.

Oh my GOD, it is PAINFUL! The disconnect between the questions and the answers, the rambling, the leaping from talking point to talking point as if they are ice floes giving him temporary shelter from the black and turbulent waters of ignorance and incoherence, the first-grader vocabulary, and the BULLSHIT! Just the BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT!!!

Social Security, for instance. It's not fair! It's not fair because if you are paying into it and then you die before you're 62 your spouse can't inherit both your benefits and her benefits! The money you paid in just DISAPPEARS!

No, it doesn't disappear, asshole. What happens is that it goes into the common pot out of which other people are drawing their benefits. In other words, it gets SHARED. That is the whole principle of Social Security: that people share their money. We are putting in money now from our payroll taxes; well, that money is not going to 'come back' to us when we retire. That money is paying for peoples' benefits right now. Our benefits will be paid by the taxes of the people who are working when we retire. And so on. Everyone pays into the kitty and the kitty pays out to everyone. And that is how, if you hit retirement age but you have blown your whole wad on the ponies or single malt scotch or Enron or college tuition for your kids, you can still survive--because even though 'your' money has gone up in smoke, the kitty into which everyone has been paying will still take care of you. That's what a safety net is.

The private account thing is based on the same logic: I don't want my money paying for some other bozo's benefits! I want MY money to pay for MY benefits! Mine mine mine all mine! And somehow he never ends up explaining that if, for instance, I decided right now to invest some of my social security taxes in my voluntary stock market account, that would mean that the pool of money available for people who are retired *right now* would decrease by that amount. And if everyone was doing it, then the pool would decrease significantly. OK, so when we fire up these 'private accounts,' basically we are refusing to play along and put into the kitty. Nevertheless, the number of people drawing from the kitty does not change. So how does this help make the system solvent?

It doesn't. That's not the point. The point is: You get to keep YOUR MONEY! Fuck everyone who's retired right now! Why should THEY get YOUR MONEY?

If you take what Bush said about the unfairness of Social Security at face value, it boils down to this: Sharing is bad. And of course, that is why they hate Social Security, isn't it, because it's sharing. Sharing...you know, it's kind of one of them Communist things.

@#$!,

The Plaid Adder