Yes, it is embarrassing when Stern Daddy gets all in yo’ face muthafuckah like he’s cool or something.
But hey, it’s not like they could have gotten him elected on the issues or anything.
(My Christ. Fighting unpopular Hollywood movie stars! How terribly, terribly brave! And effective!)
You are the generation that bought more shoes and you get what you deserve.
Maybe it’s the bourbon talking, but I just figured out the shorter meme that insists the MSM (sic; oh God, how sic) is successfully holding back the most sophisticated army on Earth with a handful of disgruntled insurgents half a world away when it couldn’t manage to rig an election in its own backyard against an incumbent with staggeringly low approval ratings and a Washington Redskins team that lost the crucial pre-election home game, and this despite its best efforts in discrediting those lovely Swift Boat chaps:
How is it the people who show us the news always just happen to be where the news they show us happens?
Fighting evil.
I suppose it says—something—that just before the doubletake I was thinking, what, now they’re selling superhero costumes?
Because it is better to light a candle.
Thank you, Billie Miller. —Via Eschaton.
Sponge 1, kulturkampf 0.
I’m not a huge fan of the comments over at Kevin Drum’s place. I’m usually not that fond of the comments on high-traffic political sites: slapshot chuckles, me-too high-fives, the distressing propensity of entirely too many no matter their ostensible politics to get all chest-thumpy and dick-wavy—really, the sheer number of smoke-this-suck-that-stick-it-where-they-ain’t-no-lube I wade through sometimes makes me think that evolutionary psychologists aren’t all blowing smoke, and the serious business of government is nothing more than primate dominance dynamics with keyboards. —Political Animal isn’t so much with the sodomite-catamite power struggle, and his own personal trolls Al and Charlie saw their shadows a while ago, or something, and don’t come out from under their bridges so much these days, but the dreary Camazotzian drone of Tim Graham Kevin’s Konscience still ends up suffocating most threads with the tragic call-and-response that violates rule no. 1 of the internet everywhere.
Still, I’m glad I cruised through the remarks following Amy Sullivan’s recent post on Tinky Winky 2: Porifera Boogaloo. If I’d written it off, I’d’ve missed the wonderful Gospel according to NTodd:
Does that mean I can wear cotton/wool blend pants, and touch my wife during her period?
Yes. The sponge has set us free.
(Really, I’m shocked at the good Doctor Stickypants’ sadly slackening grasp of the Zeitgeist. Everybody knows Spongebob is all about the stoners.)
Extremism in defense of what, exactly?
But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of— The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for—you know, these—some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not—this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over—as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly—over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What’s going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes—the daughter had come home—before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a—I hadn’t thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows—she doesn’t know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just—I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn’t say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became—one of them was published.
—Seymour Hersh, speaking at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in December
via Sidelights
In which I take the words of an old friend woefully out of context.
Actually, I probably shouldn’t refer to Rob as an “old” friend. I’ve known him longer than almost anyone I know now outside of family, true; Phil’s the only one who beats him, and that’s only due to a chance encounter when I went up to Oberlin my senior year of high school as a prospective. (“Is that ‘Memories of Green’? I said, and he looked up from the piano and said, “Why, yes. Yes, it is.”) —Rob was (briefly) in my froshling Russian class, first semester, and I actually officially met him when I responded to an Infosys post about a neat-sounding PBM game. He sold me his position, which I never did anything with, and later on when he was shedding all his Heinlein books I bought his copy of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Not because I had an especial thing for Heinlein—as all liberal SF aficionados must, I’d shed him like an old coat, leaving only “The Menace from Earth” and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress behind, and Spacesuit, because the protagonist’s name is, um, Kip.
But that was all a long time ago, and while I dropped out and wandered off this way for a bit, he headed off yonder, and our paths have crossed only a couple of times since, in the occasional Seattle living room. And we can argue all night about whether you ever really change or just become more of who you always already were—I’m pomo enough to know that things look different from different points of view, and so while I might shrug and shake my head and say (with some little wistfulness) that he’s gone through the looking glass and over the edge off the deep end, he’d smile (I’d like to think he’d smile) and tell you I’d always had too much heart and not enough head, and what there was was woolly, at that. (Of course, by that standard, Giordano Bruno was postmodern. But I digress.) —The facts on the ground are this: he’s pretty much as right-wing and reactionary as you can get from my linchinography, he is by a long shot, and he’s only there because I knew him when, and he knows jokes that most of you don’t, and it was through him I met Elkins and Barry and Phil (again), and through them everybody else; without him, I wouldn’t be who I am today. A link on a blogroll is chickenfeed, next to that.
(Charles? Charles had the room under me, froshling year, and borrowed my copy of The Darkest Road, and he still swears Carl Muckenhoupt was the one who broke my slinky. So I would still have met Charles, and could have through him everyone else etc. But that’s not how it happened. So Rob gets the glory, and the blame.)
This is what Rob had to say, in another context, just recently:
You are certainly entitled to treat other people as you see fit.
The broad political grouping that I find myself a part of has adopted a different approach. We don’t all agree on everything, but we have agreed to support one another on the issues that we do agree on. And, as part of our compact, we each try our best to refrain from casting aspersions at one another—so I don’t call my bozo fundamentalist friends bozos, for example. It makes coalition building much more effective, as we’re able to reach out to groups with whom we have any common ground at all.
Other political groupings adopt a different strategy—one where ideological purity on a wide range of issues is required before there can be any cooperation, mutual respect, or basic courtesy. This prevents idiosyncrasy and heresy from infecting the loyal troops; you can’t be infected by the evil meme if you drive off the memebearers with vitriol.
So far, my side has taken control of the government, is setting the national and regional agenda on many-to-most of the items that are important to us, and is daily making huge inroads on the popular culture.
How’s your side doing?
Well, we aren’t trying to get Alberto Gonzalez in as Attorney General. That’s how we’re doing.
Leaving aside the stark fact any fule kno—that utilitarian arguments for torture crumble before its staggering uselessness as a means of generating trustworthy, actionable intelligence—there’s the craven, callow figure of a man Gonzalez presents, willing to bend any rule, write any memo, fill out any form that does what his boss wants done. Forget, for a moment, torture: Alberto Gonzalez, attorney, judge, Republican, insouciantly opined that the President could “set aside” whatever quaint laws got in his way—thereby setting aside almost 800 years of common law pretty much because a few bad apples might otherwise rough up the ride a little.
A woolly-headed socialist with anarcho-syndicalist leanings shouldn’t have to remind a libertarian what happens when you grant a government powers like that.
And maybe my “side” does demand a certain ideological purity, comparatively speaking; maybe doing so means we’ve pretty much lost on this one, and we’ll have Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and the sick-making transposition of an “n” for a “q” in today’s Times will prove a harbinger, not a typo, and we’ll be talking about the horrible photos coming out of Evin in a couple of years. Maybe that’s not how it will happen. I don’t know. But whatever happens, however it happens, I’ll know I never valued liberty so lightly that I’d toss it out the window at the first sign of trouble. I’d know I still thought some ideals were worth a suicide pact. Torture is wrong; we should never, ever do it; anyone who ever tried to write it off as no big deal for whatever reason has no business as our Attorney General—and if my “side” fails to prevent that from coming to pass, well, that’s something we’ll have to live with, yes, but at least we’ll know where we stood, and for what.
And it says something cold and horrible that I even have to say these words, and take this stand. But anyway, that’s how we’re doing. Or what it looks like, from where I’m at.
X had been the editor of Upton Sinclair’s EPIC News, a political newsletter with a peak circulation of two million, and one of six men chosen by Sinclair to write a constitution for EPIC in 1935 as it set out to become a nationwide movement. Clearly this young man was no mere fellow traveler and certainly not “the moderate Democrat” he would claim to have been when he once referred to this otherwise deleted section of his curriculum vitæ. No, he was the genuine article, a ’30s radical leftist, and his name was Robert Heinlein.
—Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of
Let’s say amen together.
The Mother of All Bombs, folks.
(Why are you still here?)
Sticky eyeballs.
Yeah, I know, I should lay off the AFA; low-hanging fruit, kulturkampf is a rationalization of assholery by other means, ignore the bully, strike them down and they will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. But hey: they want you to write a letter to the FCC, telling them to stop cutting sweetheart deals with CBS, and that’s something we can all get behind, right? Anyway, here’s the pitch:
In November 2004, the FCC cut a backroom deal with CBS and its parent company Viacom.
In summary, Viacom agreed to donate a paltry $3.5 million to the FCC in exchange for dropping thousands of indecency complaints filed against it by taxpaying consumers.
Basically, the FCC cut a deal with CBS. What was the result? CBS immediately went back to their standard fare of lewd and indecency programs.
On December 31, 2004, CBS re-aired an episode of Without A Trace, complete with an extended teen-age orgy scene. The original broadcast of this episode had thousands of FCC complaints against it, which were tossed out in the November FCC/CBS “back-scratching” deal.
Click here to view the abominable Without A Trace scene for yourself! Be warned, it contains offensive and graphic scenes.
Because of these kinds of backdoor deals, the FCC continues to allow networks like CBS to flood the airwaves with indecency.
Do I need to tell you that the emphasis was in the original? —Way to drive the traffic there, Don.
Leather.
Apparently, that’s the traditional type of gift one gets and gives on the third anniversary. (The modern? Crystal, or glass. There’s a moral to be drawn, if you’re so inclined.)
I’ve been at this for three years now, which is roughly a twelfth of my existence, which doesn’t sound too bad, I guess, you put it that way.
Trying to move it all over to another server and use WordPress instead and prevent another round of galloping linkrot and maybe redesign the whole shooting match while I’m at it which means I’m trapped in an another round of why am I doing this again and what is it I’m doing, anyway, and wouldn’t I have more fun if I just committed to the shallow end of the cult stud game instead of trying to come off like a second-rate Rude Poor Man, except then I feel like I haven’t done the reading, which is usually why I fall back on coming off like a second-rate etc., and anyway shouldn’t I be doing more local politics? And culture? I could have sworn there was a resolution around here somewhere to that effect. Oh, and since the day job went back to what passes for normal, I’ve been trying to do more non-whateverthisis writing. Like City of Roses. Good God, has it really been that long?
Which would explain the relative silence hereabouts of late in part, I guess.
(No, it’s not pretty. It never is. Nor does it help to realize Barbellion said pretty much what I’m trying to say 102 years ago, or thereabouts.)
So.
Um.
Oh, head over here for some photos of our cats, and me in my new silly hat; “Hänger Långsamt I Luften,” “Raining Twilight Coast,” “Red Rain,” “Polchasa,” “Ask DNA,” “Caught Making Love,” “Dead,” “Letter to a John,” “Filipino Box Spring Hog,” “Pigeon Toes,” and let’s throw in the Nappy Roots / Mountain Goats mashup, since it’s fun; vote in the Koufax Awards, where I think I’m up for best writing, but also, I got nominated for a Perranoski for design, so vote there, too, I guess, and, um, I’ll be back. Browse the archives, or hit the blogroll, or, hell, you know how this works.
Out of curiosity.
Why am I suddenly overwhelmed (to the tune of over 300 hits before 9 AM Pacific) by requests for the meaning of IOKIYAR?
The Book, the Book, the Book is on fire!
Another week, another email from the American Family Association. Shall we?
In the 27 years of this ministry, I have never witnessed a more outrageous miscarriage of justice than what is happening in Philadelphia. Four Christians are facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the First Amendment.
Holy cow! Really? That’s awful!
On October 10, 2004, the four Christians were arrested in Philadelphia. They are part of Repent America. Along with founder Michael Marcavage, members of Repent America—with police approval—were preaching near Outfest, a homosexual event, handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages.
When they tried to speak, they were surrounded by a group of radical homosexual activists dubbed the Pink Angels. A videotape of the incident shows the Pink Angels interfering with the Christians’ movement on the street, holding up large pink symbols of angels to cover up the Christians’ messages and blowing high pitched whistles to drown out their preaching.
Rather than arrest the homosexual activists and allow the Christians to exercise their First Amendment rights, the Philadelphia police arrested and jailed the Christians!
Goodness. As something of a free-speech absolutist, I’m appalled. One thing, though: you say Repent America already “were preaching,” “handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages,” but then, when “they tried to speak”—tell me, why do you separate the acts of preaching and speaking like that? What, exactly, were y’all doing when you “tried to speak”? —Let’s get another point of view, shall we?
The confrontation began when the 11 protestors marched to the front of a stage at Outfest and began to yell out Biblical passages to drown out the events on stage.
Police attempted to get the protestors to move to to an area on the edge of the site. Instead they went deeper into the gay crowd. Using a bullhorn they condemned homosexuality. They then got into an argument with a group of Pink Angels, who screamed back.
It was at that point police intervened arresting the 11.
Oh.
Hey, look, folks, not to jog your elbow or nothin,’ but most definitions of “speak” aren’t so broad as to include “marching to the front of the stage and yelling out antagonistic slogans so as to disrupt what other people have peaceably assembled to do.” That just doesn’t go without saying. So, your email message? About how they’re “facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the First Amendment”? Not to tell you your commandments or nothin,’ but that’s perilously close to false witness. Y’all might want to reconsider.
After all, yelling “Faggot!” at a crowded gay pride event is one fuck of a lot closer to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater than, oh, sending out a letter urging resistance to an upcoming draft. So that First Amendment? Not as operational as you seem to think, here. —Yes, I know, it’s a terribly grey area, fraught with complications, rife with the potential for abuse; like anyone who lives in a major American metropolitan area, I’ve seen how the cops will use it to shut down legitimate protest. But y’all went in spoiling for a fight, and you got one. You want my sympathy? You gonna have a problem if we bum-rush the megachurch, carrying Darwin fish emblems and yelling through a bullhorn about how the Christianist faith makes mothers cut their babies’ arms off?
Thought so.
Oh, and one more thing: the Bible has been determined to be hate speech? Really? Are you actually trying to tell me that 2,000 years and 66 books and three-quarters of a million words of theology and philosophy and myth and law and story and peace, love, and understanding can in its essence be boiled down to a couple of verses you like to use to hate on people whose sex lives make you feel uncomfortable somewhere deep inside?
Well, hell. Forget it. We don’t need no water; let the motherfucker burn.
Comic-page illustrator?
An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character the Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers.
—The New York Times Corrections: For the Record, 6 January 2005
(Also, they forgot “vast personal fortune.”)
Pissing in the wind.
This, this is what Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), former exterminator and fine, upstanding Christianist American, your House Majority Leader and mine, had to say about the 150,000 people who died, who have died, who are still dying as a result of the horrible earthquakes and tsunamis that struck on St. Stephen’s Day:
Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
And had I believed in God, as such, I would no longer: no word has yet reached Google news of the sudden and spontaneous immolation of Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land). How could any God worthy of the name allow such blasphemy to blot His earth without smiting the squalid little pisher with lightning? Or at least a coronary failure in flagrante? —There’s mysterious ways, and then there’s the only decent thing, and this, this man dares turn his back on love and compassion, decency and tolerance, on all our best qualities, the very things that make us human, that the book he professes to follow would teach him if he’d ever bother to listen—all this he spits on in a public forum before us all to play yet another game of my god is bigger than your god, Allahu Akbar motherfucker? The Old Testament God would at the very least have sent a bear to eat him up for this insult, and even the New Testament Christ at His most peaceful would eyes flashing toss this moneychanger from the temple and hurl stones upon his head.
Nor do I believe in hell, for all that I wish I could, so that I might join right-thinking people everywhere in praying fervently for his damnation to it. We could console ourselves by imagining him in the icy realm of Cocytus, and while away sinfully pleasant hours by disputing whether he might end up gripped in ice, head bent forward or backward, or completely submerged at the center of the Earth itself, awaiting his turn in one of Lucifer’s mouths. —Nor can I play the Devil, and quote Scripture to my purpose: much as I might dream of driving all-out for days from here to Washington, DC, stopping only for gas and the occasional cat nap, that I might stride horns swelling up the steps of the Capitol in my Chuck Taylors, unshaven and wild-eyed, demanding his whereabouts of everyone I met in those polished halls of power until I finally got to beard the pathetic little Texan in his wood-panelled lair and point my finger thusly, bellowing with a preacher’s booming cadences, “Know this, sinner: The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”
But I probably couldn’t make it past the cops, and anyway, that’s Tarantino, not Ezekial.
Not even the cooler æsthetic comfort of poetic justice is available to me: much as I might look forward to the day when his power will be broken, the panoply of his office scattered, his house razed, when his family will deny him bread and salt and PAC money, when the pot he pisses in will be taken from him and he must beg for the very compassion he tried to drive from this land, I can’t begin to believe he will ever come to realize it is all only what he must reap for the filth he has sown and the hurt he has spread. I can’t believe he’ll ever learn a thing. Comprehension is as far from him as compassion, or shame.
GIMEL ZAYIN YUD. This, too, shall pass. Y’all had the slightest inkling of what that really meant, we’d all be much better off. My god is bigger than your god: if that is all the meaning you pathetic little shits can draw from something like this, give me nihilistic despair. Please. It’s far more human.
The enemy is life.
Eisner the cartoonist always left me a little cold: shopworn stories and whiskered gags told in some of the most gorgeously expressive cartooning you’ve ever seen. The ink flowed as naturally as breathing, but I’d look up and shrug. Eh. —I’m smart enough not to write him off as a triumph of technique over substance, but even if I weren’t: my God, what technique. I’ve nattered on about how important Scott McCloud and Understanding Comics are in the scheme of things, for laying the groundwork of a grammar of comics and its study. Will Eisner was one of the first cartoonists to look up and realize what they were messing around with, all that ink and newsprint, those squiggles and balloons, was a language. Comics is a language. That’s huge. So I understand why all the cartoonists around me revere him so.
Eisner the man? I shook his hand. I think. Cons are busy, noisy, overwhelming things, and I’m flighty and absent-minded. Maybe I just said hi. He touched Jenn’s cheek once. Which is more important to me than anything I might have said to him, or he to me. Gosh, Mister Eisner, you’re one of the most important figures ever in comics. Well, thanks, young man. —Tasha Robinson once asked him, “Do you think all of your works address heartbreak on some level?” and he said, “Probably. I’m dealing with the human condition, and I’m dealing with life. For me, the enemy is life, and people’s struggle to prevail is essentially the theme that runs through all my books.”
Will Eisner is in intensive care following open heart surgery on Wednesday afternoon. Quadruple bypass. He didn’t want anyone to know until he came through OK, but all signs are that he is recovering terrifically. He’s already joking with the nurses and “biting his lip” over delayed deadlines. [...]
He’s not supposed to return to work for 6 – 8 weeks (I’m making side bets), so it’d be nice in the interim if the industry deluged him with warm words while he’s recuperating.
He knew what he was on about and he did it with everything he had and on the way he taught tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world how to do what they were doing better, or to do it at all in the first place. He’s left this world a better place for his having been here, and if that doesn’t do much to mitigate the heartbreak of his passing, well, it’s the best any of us can ever hope for. Would that we all could do it half as well as he did. The Spirit is dead; long live the spirit.
The Onion: What is it like seeing the early-1940s Spirit stories back in print again?
Eisner: Well, I love the package. I think the package is marvelous. I try to avoid looking at the artwork because it makes my toes curl. [Laughs.] I want to grab a pencil and redo it. “Oh, my God, did I get away with this junk?”
0wnzorship society.
Hark! That awful, sucking sound… the indescribable shape looming towards us through the gloom… that gagsome stench… What could it be? (Melvin?) —No, it’s the January Surprise: the plans to abolish Social Security, as prophesied, are beginning, slowly, to coalesce...
Social Security Formula Weighed: In informal briefings on Capitol Hill, White House aides have told lawmakers and aides that Bush will propose the change in the benefits formula…. Currently, initial benefits are set by… adjust[ing] those earnings… based on wage growth…. Under the commission plan, the adjustment would be based instead on the rise of consumer prices…. [A] middle-class worker retiring in 2022 would see guaranteed benefits cut by 9.9 percent. By 2042, average monthly benefits for middle- and high-income workers would fall by more than a quarter. A retiree in 2075 would receive 54 percent of the benefit now promised….
Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post on October 20, 2004:
Ads Push the Factual Envelope: John F. Kerry is denouncing deep Social Security cutbacks that President Bush has not proposed…. A Kerry ad, based on a private comment Bush is reported to have made on wanting to privatize Social Security, says: “Now Bush has a plan that cuts Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent.” But the president, while favoring allowing younger workers to put part of their benefits in private accounts, has never put forth a plan—and has vowed that any change would not affect current retirees…
But that’s not the funny bit; that’s not the funny bit by half. For the funny bit, you have to dig into the numbers a little, and figure out what you ought to be making, what you’ll probably be making if we do nothing, and what you’ll end up making if the Republicans carry the day. Max points out the CBO study which does the math, and you really ought to listen:
In Table 2 of this study, we get estimates of benefits resulting from this approach. Since it’s all about the kids, we should start with the impact on what’s called the “10-year birth cohort starting in year 2000.” Kids born after January 1, 2000. We focus on the middle of the middle, as far as income distribution goes (“median in middle household earnings quintile”).
If Little Nell is this type of person, in retirement she would be due $26,400 a year in benefits annually under current law. This would require some kind of infusion into the Trust Fund after 2052 (when CBO says it runs a shortfall). With no such infusion, alas Little Nell can only be paid $19,900 (everything here is constant 2004 dollars). (The same type of person retiring today—“the 1940 birth cohort”—gets $14,900.)
Let’s chew on that for a second. With no transfer of revenue into the Trust Fund after 2052 (as opposed to redemptions of its assets with general revenue), Little Nell still does quite a bit better than a retiree today.
This is a crisis? Surely we can do better. What about the excellent reform envisioned by G. Bush?
When you include the returns to the individual accounts and “price indexing” of benefits, Little Nell’s benefit is . . . $14,600. SHE DOES WORSE THAN UNDER THE “BANKRUPT” TRUST FUND! Way worse! Can you hear me now? She even does worse than a current retiree.
And Matt’s right: there’s nothing ideological about this, the delusions of Grover Norquist notwithstanding. The financial industry has more money than any one of us does. So we lose. Simple as that. Our future’s been pwned.
