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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Social Security</title>
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		<title>Illegal Alien Benefit Free-for-All</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/illegal-alien-benefit-free-for-all/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=illegal-alien-benefit-free-for-all</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Nov 2014 05:56:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deportation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246137</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama's amnesty will give non-citizen law-breakers access to a “wide array” of programs -- and an advantage in the job market. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-immigrationjpeg-0107f_c0-67-2700-1640_s561x327.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-246138 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-immigrationjpeg-0107f_c0-67-2700-1640_s561x327.jpg" alt="obama-immigrationjpeg-0107f_c0-67-2700-1640_s561x327" width="315" height="285" /></a>Apparently President Obama’s unilateral decision to grant de facto amnesty to five million illegal aliens was insufficiently outrageous. On Tuesday, a White House official <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/illegal-immigrants-could-receive-social-security-medicare-under-obama-action/2014/11/25/571caefe-74d4-11e4-bd1b-03009bd3e984_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> the <i>Washington Post</i> that many illegals now protected from deportation will be eligible to receive a “wide array” of government benefits, including Social Security and Medicare.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The admission verifies that, once again, Americans are forced to endure another lie perpetrated by the president. When he announced his <a href="http://politics.suntimes.com/article/washington/obama-immigration-executive-order-speech-transcript/thu-11202014-903pm"><span style="color: #1255cc;">executive action</span></a> last Thursday, Obama was adamant. &#8220;It does not grant citizenship, or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive—only Congress can do that. All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you,” he insisted.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Not exactly. The status conferred by the president activates the <a href="https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0300204010"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996</span></a>, which states that the government &#8220;will pay monthly title II and title XVIII benefits to a claimant/beneficiary who is present in the U.S. and who is a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or <i>lawfully present alien</i> as determined by the Attorney General” (italics mine). It further states that payment provisions &#8220;apply to retirement, survivors or disability benefits. This rule also applies to payments made for Medicare services rendered.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Illegals would be required to pay a <a href="http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA)</span></a> tax, which includes separate payments made to Medicare and Social Security. Once they do that, benefits await. “If they pay in, they can draw,” White House spokesman Shawn Turner told the <i>Post</i> by e-mail.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Turner further noted that such eligibility does not extend to benefits such as student financial aid, food stamps, housing subsidies or ObamaCare. Yet as critics of the president’s plan rightly explain, this administration’s “flexible” approach to the rule of law and the Constitution leaves the door wide open for additional “adjustments” to the program.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“Deferred action and parole-in-place don’t fit neatly into statutory definitions that prohibit access to benefits, mostly because deferred action and parole-in-place have no statutory basis themselves,” Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) communications director Bob Dane <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/11/17/Exclusive-Report-Obama-s-Executive-Amnesty-Will-Put-Illegal-Aliens-On-Welfare-Public-Benefits-Like-Obamacare-and-More"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> Breitbart News. “Congress has never imagined a rogue president pulling rabbits out of a hat to justify a broad, transformational makeover of the country by way of amnesty. There will always be thousands of loopholes in the law and backdoor methods to achieve a desired agenda, but ultimately the intent of Congress is preeminent. It may be that the courts will have to review that.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">If a recent <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/11/25/court-denies-arizona-request-to-block-drivers-licenses-for-undocumented-immigrants/?wp_login_redirect=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">ruling</span></a> by a three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is any indication, there may be little relief in sight. On Monday, they rejected Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s request to rehear a case related to her 2012 executive order denying about 20,000 illegals access to drivers’ licenses. The Court determined that the Obama administration&#8217;s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), allowing illegals brought here as children before June 15, 2007, and born after 1981 to be protected from deportation, included the right to obtain those licenses.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In other words, we <i>already</i> <i>have</i> exactly the kind of court-sanctioned “extrapolation&#8221; of a constitutionally-dubious executive order that completely belies Turner’s assertion. Thus it is more than likely a president interested in a “fundamental transformation” of the nation—one that includes the transparent attempt to make the Democrat Party an unassailable power—would be more than OK with pulling a few more “rabbits out of a hat” to realize that agenda.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">According to the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, the current level of benefit access <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/11/24/Robert-Rector-Amnestied-Illegal-Immigrants-to-Cost-Taxpayers-2-Trillion-Over-Their-Lifetime"><span style="color: #1255cc;">imposes</span></a> a staggering cost on the nation. &#8220;The net cost&#8211;which is total benefits minus total benefits paid in&#8211;of the amnesty recipients I estimate will be around $2 trillion over the course of their lifetime,” Rector <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/11/24/Robert-Rector-Amnestied-Illegal-Immigrants-to-Cost-Taxpayers-2-Trillion-Over-Their-Lifetime"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> Breitbart News Monday. “What [Obama] is doing is he is putting these 4 million people&#8211; who on average have a 10th grade education&#8211;into the Social Security and Medicare programs. Given their expected earnings, from someone that has a 10th grade education, they will draw about three dollars worth of benefits out of those programs over their lifetimes for every dollar they put into them. But the overall cost in outlays will be around a trillion dollars for those programs alone,” he added.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rector’s calculations were based on a figure of 4 million illegals living an average of 50 years each. The additional trillion dollars of his estimate is based on an assumption that is the mother’s milk of the American left: incrementalism. Rector assumes that additional legislation—or another executive order—will eventually grant amnestied illegals unrestricted access to America’s welfare state. He further envisions that once the citizen children of the amnestied illegals turn 21, they could petition the government for green cards to be granted to their parents, without those parents having to leave the country to get them. “After 5 years with a green card status they are eligible for all the welfare programs,” he explained.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ironically—or perhaps more accurately, inevitably—the push to expand amnestied illegals access to benefits will be driven by ObamaCare. As the <i>Washington Times</i> <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/25/obama-amnesty-obamacare-clash-businesses-have-3000/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a>, the current executive order gives up to 5 million illegal immigrants three years of legal presence in the country that includes the ability to obtain work permits—but not ObamaCare. As a result businesses that hire amnestied illegals will not have to pay the $3000 ObamaCare penalty for denying them healthcare coverage. Since that penalty would apply to native-born workers, ObamaCare has established a perverse incentive to favor illegal employees over American employees</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rep. Lamar Smith lamented that reality. “If it is true that the president’s actions give employers a $3,000 incentive to hire those who came here illegally, he has added insult to injury,” he contended. “The president’s actions would have just moved those who came here illegally to the front of the line, ahead of unemployed and underemployed Americans.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Or as mentioned earlier, it would provide the administration with a springboard to expand ObamaCare coverage to include amnestied illegals. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to envision the administration pursuing mainstream media-assisted sales pitch that such a scenario is a “win-win” for illegals who get healthcare coverage, and American workers who no longer have to worry about that perverse incentive.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Republicans were ostensibly surprised that amnestied illegals would be eligible for Social Security and Medicare. “First with Obamacare we were told we should pass it and then read it to find out what was in it,” noted Republican National Committee (RNC) spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski. “Now Obama overreached and acted unilaterally on immigration, which should have been vetted and authorized by Congress, and we’re finding out there’s more to the story than Obama and the Democrats originally told Americans.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">All well and good, but one suspects Americans have little sympathy for a reactive GOP, one “finding out” that the same president and party who lie on a regular basis would once again engage in subterfuge to further their agenda. Credit the normally clueless Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for having a clue this time around. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said the best way to get rid of the loophole is to get rid of the employer mandate itself, adding that next year’s GOP majority should hold a vote on such a proposal.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That would theoretically put the president between a rock and a hard place—unless he unilaterally decided to grant temporary access to ObamaCare to amnestied illegals. There is little doubt a president who makes it up as he goes along would dismiss such an idea out of hand. Another solution would be to once again postpone the business mandate. Again, in the age of the Imperial President, all things are possible.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In the meantime, Obama reminded the nation why he remains one of the most divisive individuals to ever occupy the Oval Office. “There have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks,’ even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans,” he <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/immigration/august_2014/voters_strongly_oppose_obama_s_amnesty_plan_for_illegal_immigrants"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> a Chicago audience Monday, completely dismissing the concerns of millions of Americans, including <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/immigration/august_2014/voters_strongly_oppose_obama_s_amnesty_plan_for_illegal_immigrants"><span style="color: #1255cc;">62 percent</span></a> of likely voters who opposed his unilateral efforts. He further insisted migrants “will boost wages for American-born workers.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">There are <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/09/immigration-boost-economy-widens-wealth-gaps-says-harvard-report/?print=1"><span style="color: #1255cc;">conflicting reports</span></a> with regard to that statement, depending on whose ideology is being served. Yet the most basic rule of supply and demand cannot be ignored: when you have more of something, as in a larger pool of foreign and native-born workers competing for jobs, each unit of that something, in this case wage levels, are worth less. Yet as far as this president and his party are concerned, the well-being of Americans and illegals are now inseparable agendas. One is left to wonder how long American citizens will put up with that.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Privatized Social Security: The Chilean Model</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/larry-elder/privatized-social-security-the-chilean-model/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=privatized-social-security-the-chilean-model</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2014 04:10:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chile]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[investment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[return]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stock Market]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235990</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Latin American country's citizens are retiring much richer than many Americans. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/00168.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235991" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/00168-389x350.jpg" alt="00168" width="260" height="234" /></a>The stock market reached a record high last week, closing over 17,000 for the first time. Good news, of course. As President John F. Kennedy famously said, &#8220;A rising tide lifts all boats.&#8221; But it sure helps if you own a boat.</p>
<p>In this case, the &#8220;boat&#8221; would be the dynamic American stock market.</p>
<p>But investors in the stock market disproportionately come from the top 1 percent, and they hold about 35 percent of all stocks and mutual funds. The next-richest 9 percent control about 45 percent. The remaining 90 percent have less than 20 percent. While nearly half of Americans have either direct or indirect investments in the stock market, half of Americans do not. And even for those who do, their home equity is still, by far, their largest investment.</p>
<p>President Obama wants to focus his remaining years in office on fighting &#8220;income inequality.&#8221; To do so, he has proposed things like &#8220;promise zones&#8221; where federal grants and tax incentives is supposed to spark development. He has promoted silly income-transferring schemes like &#8220;cash for clunkers&#8221; and &#8220;cash for caulkers,&#8221; and HAMP to help homeowners fight off foreclosure.</p>
<p>But there is something we could do immediately to help to increase the net worth of the bottom 99 percent — allow private accounts for Social Security.</p>
<p>Chile recently celebrated its 33rd year of private retirement accounts. Its then-secretary of labor and Chilean pension system, Jose Pinera, went on television day after day to explain to cabdrivers, housewives and construction workers the benefits of allowing private savings accounts.</p>
<p>Pinera successfully persuaded 93 percent of Chilean workers to invest their &#8220;social security&#8221; contributions in one of several types of managed portfolios. Those who feared the &#8220;risk&#8221; of the stock market could continue as they did before. While U.S. workers pay 12.4 percent of their wages into Social Security, Chileans put 10 percent (or up to 20 percent) of their earnings into a private fund, earning compound interest. On retirement, workers can choose a life annuity or make programmed withdrawals. Heirs inherit what&#8217;s left.</p>
<p>The result? Chilean workers averaged a near double-digit annual return on their money — 9.23 percent above inflation — over the first 30 years. In the U.S., Social Security nets a theoretical 1 to 2 percent return — less for newer workers. Not only do they allow private accounts for &#8220;social security&#8221; in Chile, but also in Australia and the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>Columnist John Tierney, writing in The New York Times in 2005, calculated what his retirement benefits would be if he&#8217;d paid into the Chilean system instead of Social Security.</p>
<p>He found he&#8217;d have three options: &#8220;(1) Retire in 10 years, at age 62, with an annual pension of $55,000. That would be more than triple the $18,000 I can expect from Social Security at that age. (2) Retire at age 65 with an annual pension of $70,000. That would be almost triple the $25,000 pension promised by Social Security starting a year later, at age 66. (3) Retire at age 65 with an annual pension of $53,000 and a one-time cash payment of $223,000.&#8221;</p>
<p>Social Security is an especially bad deal for blacks.</p>
<p>CATO Institute&#8217;s Michael Tanner writes: &#8220;The longer you live, the more money you get from Social Security. But African Americans have shorter life spans than whites. As a result, a black man or woman earning exactly the same lifetime wages, and paying exactly the same lifetime Social Security taxes as his or her white counterpart, will likely receive a far lower rate of return. A study by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation found that the rate of return for African-Americans was approximately one percent lower than that for whites. The result was a net lifetime transfer of wealth from blacks to whites averaging nearly $10,000 per person.&#8221;</p>
<p>Worse, the Supreme Court ruled long ago that one does not have a proprietary interest in his Social Security contributions. In other words, when the recipient dies, the &#8220;contribution&#8221; goes &#8220;poof.&#8221; With private accounts, the money can be bequeathed to a family member or to a charity.</p>
<p>So why not private Social Security accounts?</p>
<p>The late vice presidential candidate, Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, D-N.Y., opposed private accounts for Social Security. She said if one lacked the &#8220;knowledge and the wherewithal to manage your own private funds &#8230; you&#8217;re gonna be out of luck.&#8221; Out of luck?</p>
<p>Legendary investor Warren Buffett quotes his mentor, Benjamin Graham, who said: &#8220;In the short run the stock market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.&#8221; For the long term, prices reflect actual value, and investors who prudently and patiently &#8220;invest&#8221; in the stock market will have a much greater net worth and therefore realize the resources to enhance their comfort in their retirement years.</p>
<p>Democrats think Americans too stupid, too irresponsible and too impatient to manage their own Social Security contributions. Chileans can. Australians do. Many European and Latin American citizens do. But Americans, at least the bottom 99 percent, well, they&#8217;re just too stupid to join the party.</p>
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		<title>The Coming Collapse of the Welfare State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-coming-collapse-of-the-welfare-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-coming-collapse-of-the-welfare-state</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Feb 2014 05:54:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[baby boomers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birth rate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[decline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219640</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The left isn’t just running out of money; it’s running out of people.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BabyBoomersAged.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-219641" alt="BabyBoomersAged" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BabyBoomersAged.jpg" width="258" height="205" /></a>In 1935, the year that FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, the birth rate was 18.7 per 1,000. In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4. By 1954, when Disability had been added, the birth rate at the heart of the Baby Boom stood at 25.3. </span></p>
<p>In a nation of 163 million people, 4 million babies were being born each year.</p>
<p>By 1965, when Medicare was plugged in, the birth rate had fallen back to 19.4. For the first time in ten years fewer than 4 million babies had been born in a country of 195 million. Medicare had been added in the same year that saw the single biggest drop in birth rates since the Great Depression.</p>
<p>There could not have been a worse time for Medicare than the end of the Baby Boom.</p>
<p>Today in a nation of 317 million, 4.1 million babies are being born each year for a birth rate of 13.0 per 1,000. 40.7% of those births are to unmarried mothers so that it will be a long time, if ever, before they pay back into the system, and most will never put back in as much as they are taking out.</p>
<p>Liberals and libertarians both act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed if we take more from the &#8220;wealthy elderly&#8221; or give them less. The crisis is born of demographics. It can&#8217;t be fixed by targeting the elderly because they haven&#8217;t been the problem in some time.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s the same crisis being faced by countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. The difference is that Russia is autocratic and has little concern for its people while Japan shuns immigration and has a political system dominated by the elderly.</p>
<p>The United States however takes in a million immigrants a year. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Barack Obama praised Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old Haitian woman who moved to the United States at the age of 79 and never learned to speak English, but did spend hours waiting in line in Florida to vote for Obama.</p>
<p>Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants over 65 doubled from 2.7 million to 5 million. Twenty-five percent of these senior immigrants were over 80. Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like Desiline Victor, don&#8217;t even have to learn English to be able to stand in line and vote.</p>
<p>15 percent of senior immigrants come from Mexico largely as a result of family unification programs. If amnesty for illegal aliens goes through, before long the country will be on the hook not just for twelve million illegal aliens, but also for their grandparents.</p>
<p>The welfare state has been spending more money with an unsustainable demographic imbalance. There are fewer working families supporting more elderly, immigrants and broken families. The Russians invest money into increasing the native birth rate. Instead we fund Planned Parenthood because liberal economic eugenics dictates that we should extract &#8220;full value&#8221; from working women as a tax base to subsidize the welfare state while discarding the next generation.</p>
<p>The &#8220;modern&#8221; system that we have adopted with its low birth rates, high social spending and retirement benefits is at odds with itself. We can have low birth rates, deficit spending or Social Security; but there is no possible way that we can have all three.</p>
<p>And yet we have all three.</p>
<p>In the European model that we have adopted, men and women are supposed to spend their twenties being educated and their thirties having two children. These Johns and Julias will work in some appropriately &#8220;modern&#8221; field building apps, designing environmentally sustainable cribs for the few children being born or teaching new immigrants to speak enough English to vote. Then they plan to retire on money that doesn&#8217;t actually exist because they are still paying off their student loans.</p>
<p>John and Julia began marriage with tens of thousands in debts, only one of them will work full time, while the other balances part time work, and they will do all this while being expected to support social services for new immigrants and a native working class displaced by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to mention the elderly and the entire bureaucracy that has grown around them. If John and Julia are lucky, they will find work in a technology field that is still growing, or, more likely they will pry their way into the social services bureaucracy which will keep on paying them and cover their benefits until the national bankruptcy finally arrives.</p>
<p>In this post-work and post-poverty economy, those most likely to have children are also least likely to work or to be able to afford to have those children.</p>
<p>Birth rates for women on welfare are three times higher than for those who are not on welfare. Within a single year, the census survey found that unmarried women had twice as high a birth rate as married women. These demographics help perpetuate poverty and feed a welfare death spiral in which more money has to be spent on social services for a less productive tax base.</p>
<p>Children raised on welfare are far more likely to end up on welfare than the children of working families.</p>
<p>Fertility rates fall sharply above the $50,000 income line and with a graduate degree; that has ominous implications in a country whose socio-economic mobility rates continue to fall.</p>
<p>Progressive activists still talk as if we can afford any level of social service expenditures if we raise taxes on the rich, but workers can&#8217;t be created by raising taxes. Everything that the left has done, from breaking up the family to driving out manufacturing industries to promoting Third World immigration has made its own social welfare spending completely unsustainable.</p>
<p>By 2031, nearly a century after the Social Security Act, an estimated 75 million baby boomers will have retired. Aside from the demographic disparity in worker ages is a subtler disparity in worker productivity and independence as senior citizens are left chasing social spending dollars that are increasingly going to a younger population. ObamaCare with its Medicare Advantage cuts was a bellwether of the shift in health care spending from seniors to the welfare population.</p>
<p>Increasing welfare is only a form of Death Panel economic triage that doesn&#8217;t compensate for the lack of productive workers. It&#8217;s easy to model Obamerica as Detroit, a country with a huge indigent welfare population and a small wealthy tax base. The model doesn&#8217;t work in Detroit and it&#8217;s flailing in New York, California and every city and state where it&#8217;s been tried.</p>
<p>After a century of misery, the left still hasn’t learned that there is no substitute for the middle class. It’s not just running out of money, it’s running out of people.</p>
<p>The welfare state has no future. It is only a question of what terms it will implode on and what will happen to the social welfare political infrastructure when it does. The violence in Venezuela and the slow death of Detroit give us insights into the coming collapse of the welfare state.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Government&#8217;s War on Poverty Reduction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/governments-war-on-poverty-reduction/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=governments-war-on-poverty-reduction</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/governments-war-on-poverty-reduction/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Dec 2013 05:55:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212926</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the crusaders against American "income inequality" won't tell you. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/homeless.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212927" alt="homeless" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/homeless-442x350.jpg" width="265" height="210" /></a>While President Obama is pushing his redistributionist war on &#8220;income inequality,&#8221; the American left is excited about a new <a href="https://courseworks.columbia.edu/access/content/group/c5a1ef92-c03c-4d88-0018-ea43dd3cc5db/Working%20Papers%20for%20website/Anchored%20SPM.December7.pdf">study</a>, &#8220;Trends in Poverty with an Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure&#8221; that purports to show that government welfare programs have significantly eased the burden faced by poor Americans in the nearly 50 years since Lyndon Johnson&#8217;s War on Poverty was launched. According to the research, the so-called safety net was instrumental in reducing the percentage of poor Americans from 26 percent in 1967, to 16 percent in 2012. Yet even in the midst of the euphoria, the <i>Washington Post</i> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/study-us-poverty-rate-decreased-over-past-half-century-thanks-to-safety-net-programs/2013/12/09/9322c834-60f3-11e3-94ad-004fefa61ee6_story.html">reveals</a> that the study&#8217;s findings &#8220;contradict the official poverty rate, which suggests there has been no decline in the percentage of Americans experiencing poverty since then.&#8221; In other words, the statistics have been manipulated to reach the desired result.</p>
<p>While that conclusion may rankle leftists, it is political blogger Kevin Drum writing for the left-leaning Mother Jones who explains why it is true. In an article with an equally rankling title, &#8220;New Study Says Poverty Rate Hasn&#8217;t Budged For 40 Years,&#8221; Drum notes that statistical analyses must be done with care. &#8220;If it&#8217;s test scores among school kids, you need to disaggregate by race and ethnic background,&#8221; he writes. &#8220;If it&#8217;s life expectancy and Social Security, you need to make sure to use life expectancy at age 65, not life expectancy at birth. And if it&#8217;s poverty measurements, you need to distinguish between elderly poverty and working-age poverty.&#8221;</p>
<p>When he separates elderly poverty&#8211;which is considerably lessened by Social Security, a program that existed long before the War on Poverty began&#8211;from working age poverty, the results are discouraging. Overall poverty &#8220;has still declined, but not by much and only between 1967 and 1973. Since 1973, the poverty rate hasn&#8217;t budged. It was 15 percent forty years ago and it&#8217;s 15 percent today.&#8221; And while he applauds the &#8220;good news&#8221; in the study, he is forced to acknowledge that it is the result of its authors using &#8220;their new measurement&#8221; to achieve it.</p>
<p>By contrast, the Cato Institute&#8217;s Daniel J. Mitchell bases his <a href="http://www.cato.org/blog/dramatic-increase-poverty-rate-one-small-step-obama-one-giant-step-so-called-war-poverty">findings</a> on figures released by the Census Bureau. Those figures paint a damning picture of leftist re-distribution schemes, revealing that the largest decrease in the percentage of poor Americans occurred <i>before</i> LBJ’s War on Poverty began. From 1950 to the late 1960s, Census Bureau data show the poverty rate in a dramatic decline. <em>Immediately</em> after LBJ&#8217;s &#8220;Great Society&#8221; programs kicked into gear, the poverty rate began to stagnate. And it has more or less stagnated ever since, despite <a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2009/pdf/sr0067.pdf">trillions of dollars</a> of government spending on means-tested programs. Mitchell concludes there could be alternative explanations for such stagnation, but he wonders aloud whether &#8220;government intervention may be encouraging poverty by making indolence more attractive than work.&#8221;</p>
<p>A 2013 <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/work-versus-welfare-trade">study</a> published by the Cato Institute&#8217;s Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes provides some daunting insight. “The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work,” Tanner and Hughes write. &#8220;Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour.&#8221;</p>
<p>Tanner and Hughes further contend that if political officials are serious about reducing dependence and rewarding work, &#8220;they should consider strengthening welfare work requirements, removing exemptions, and narrowing the definition of work. Moreover, states should consider ways to shrink the gap between the value of welfare and work by reducing current benefit levels and tightening eligibility requirements.&#8221;</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been moving in the opposite direction. In 2012 they <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/309300/obama-ends-welfare-reform-we-know-it-robert-rector">gutted</a> much of the welfare reform instituted by <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2003/02/the-continuing-good-news">The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996</a>. Better known as the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the bill was enacted during the Clinton administration with the kind of <a href="http://www.ssa.gov/history/tally1996.html">bipartisan majorities</a> in both chambers of Congress for which today&#8217;s Democrats ostensibly yearn. And it was gutted in a move that has become depressingly familiar: Congress was bypassed, and a <a href="http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/resource/policy/im-ofa/2012/im201203/im201203">policy directive</a> was issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It was gutted despite the reality that in the four years following its passage, welfare caseloads and childhood hunger numbers were cut nearly in half, even as employment surged, and poverty among single mothers and black Americans dropped to historic lows.</p>
<p>That leftists would be more excited about studies that require &#8220;new measurements&#8221; to promote the value of dependency on government programs, as opposed to <i>empirical evidence</i> that demonstrates unquestionable success in promoting independence and work, is quite revealing.</p>
<p>Equally revealing was the Obama administration&#8217;s efforts to promote their own set of “new measurements” with regard to poverty itself. A 2010 article by National Review&#8217;s Robert Rector <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427180/obamas-new-poverty-measurement/robert-rector">explained</a> the change, noting that the old poverty measure was based on &#8220;absolute purchasing power&#8211;how much steak and potatoes you can buy,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;The new measure will count comparative purchasing power&#8211;how much steak and potatoes you can buy relative to other people.&#8221;</p>
<p>The reason for the change is obvious: once poverty is relative, it becomes impossible to eliminate&#8211;along with the government programs and the massive amounts of bureaucracy needed to do so. Furthermore, as Rector illuminates, &#8220;if the real income of every single American were to magically triple over night, the new poverty measure would show there had been no drop in &#8216;poverty,&#8217; because the poverty income threshold would also triple.&#8221; Rector then gets to the issue that is very much in the forefront of President Obama&#8217;s current populist pitch. &#8220;In honest English, the new system will measure income inequality, not poverty,&#8221; he wrote three years ago.</p>
<p>Most Americans are undoubtedly inclined to help the poor. Yet as a Heritage Foundation study released in 2011 <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty">reveals</a>, the term has largely lost its meaning, at least in terms of material wherewithal:</p>
<blockquote><p>In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.</p></blockquote>
<p>Such an inconvenient reality underscores the Obama administration&#8217;s need to promote poverty in <i>relative</i> terms. If Americans were largely aware of the true nature of American poverty, a safety net that has engendered a significant portion of our $17 trillion debt bomb would be a prime target for serious reformation.</p>
<p>Thus, the American left is once again hard at work, pulling on the public&#8217;s heartstrings. A good example of that effort is a five-part <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=1">story</a> dedicated to the travails of a New York City family, and the hard-heartedness of a town where income inequality looms large. Yet as the rival <i>New York Post</i> <a href="http://nypost.com/2013/12/09/the-new-york-times-homeless-hooey/">reveals</a>, the &#8220;hooey&#8221; presented by the <i>Times</i> downplays some critical facts, including the reality that the family&#8217;s &#8220;shelter, rental assistance and food stamps alone have added up to nearly half a million dollars since 2000. In addition, Medicaid covers health care.&#8221; They further note that the parents of the eight children are a couple &#8220;with a long history of drug problems and difficulty holding jobs.&#8221;</p>
<p>Thus, the <i>Post</i> reaches an alternative conclusion. &#8220;If the city is at fault here, it might well be for having been too generous&#8211;providing so much that neither the father nor mother seems much inclined to provide for their kids.&#8221;</p>
<p>If there is one thing the left depends on when it comes to pushing the expansion of the welfare state, it is the idea that such disinclination can never be measured statistically. Moreover, it would be utterly anathema for those promoting statist solutions to all of our problems to do so. Better to characterize <i>any</i> effort to reduce government dependency as &#8220;mean-spirited,&#8221; and any effort to weed out fraud, such as obtaining fingerprint IDs from welfare recipients for example, as <a href="http://nypost.com/2011/11/17/quinns-welfare-war/">stigmatizing</a>.</p>
<p>All of that being said, the &#8220;wealth gap&#8221; that ostensibly antagonizes the president is in fact occurring. The word &#8220;ostensibly&#8221; is critical because it is precisely this administration&#8217;s embrace of the Federal Reserve&#8217;s Quantitative Easing policy most responsible for it. As the <i>New York Post&#8217;s</i> John Crudele <a href="http://nypost.com/2013/12/09/seven-percent-solution-backs-bernanke-into-a-corner/">reiterates</a>, it has caused the &#8220;largest wealth redistribution in the history of mankind.&#8221; &#8220;Those who’ve saved and rely on interest income are being screwed,&#8221; he explains. &#8220;Those wealthy enough and courageous enough to put their money into the stock market have seen their wealth soar.&#8221;</p>
<p>What Crudele doesn&#8217;t explain is why the Fed&#8217;s interest rate has been kept at virtually zero for the longest stretch of time in the history of the nation. It&#8217;s because the vast amount of deficit spending necessary to underwrite the welfare state&#8211;and the unconscionable amount of interest payments generated as a result&#8211;would be virtually impossible to continue doing at historically normal interest levels. Furthermore, what amounts to little more than a debasement of our currency, represented by the $85 billion per month of newly-created money, exacerbates the wealth gap even more: devalued currency amounts to a de facto tax on everything Americans buy.</p>
<p>Yet while this utterly misguided policy has been a boon for the rich, the massive amount of government &#8220;stimulus&#8221; that has necessitated it has done virtually nothing for the poor, other than providing an increasing disincentive to work. And while the poor may be less poor in material terms relative to the rest of the world, they still remain afflicted by the same dignity-sapping dependency that relying on the tender mercies of bureaucrat masters inevitably engenders. It is precisely the <i>maintenance</i> of that dependency&#8211;rather than the liberation from it&#8211;that forms the heart of progressive policy-making.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Do Americans Prefer Deception?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/do-americans-prefer-deception/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=do-americans-prefer-deception</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/do-americans-prefer-deception/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2013 04:15:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employee]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[payroll taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=211032</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Do employers really pay half of all Medicare and Social Security taxes? Or do workers pay it all? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/social-security-taxes.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211046" alt="social-security-taxes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/social-security-taxes.jpg" width="289" height="181" /></a>There&#8217;s more to the deceit and dishonesty about Social Security and Medicare discussed in my recent columns. Congress tells us that one-half (6.2 percent) of the Social Security tax is paid by employees and that the other half is paid by employers, for a total of 12.4 percent. Similarly, we are told that a Medicare tax of 1.45 percent is levied on employees and that another 1.45 percent is levied on employers. The truth of the matter is that the burden of both taxes is borne by employees. In other words, we pay both the employee and the so-called employer share. You say, &#8220;Williams, that&#8217;s nonsense! Just look at what it says on my pay stub.&#8221; OK, let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>Pretend you are my employer and agree to pay me $50,000 a year, out of which you&#8217;re going to send $3,100 to Washington as my share of Social Security tax (6.2 percent of $50,000), as well as $725 for my share of Medicare (1.45 percent of $50,000), a total of $3,825 for the year. To this you must add your half of Social Security and Medicare taxes, which is also $3,825 for the year. Your cost to hire me is $53,825.</p>
<p>If it costs you $53,825 a year to hire me, how much value must I produce for it to be profitable for you to keep me? Is it our agreed salary of $50,000 or $53,825? If you said $53,825, you&#8217;d be absolutely right. Then who pays all of the Social Security and Medicare taxes? If you said that I do, you&#8217;re right again. The Social Security and Medicare fiction was created because Americans would not be so passive if they knew that the tax they are paying is double what is on their pay stubs — not to mention federal income taxes.</p>
<p>The economics specialty that reveals this is known as the incidence of taxation. The burden of a tax is not necessarily borne by the party upon whom it is levied. The Joint Committee on Taxation held that &#8220;both the employee&#8217;s and employer&#8217;s share of the payroll tax is borne by the employee.&#8221; The Congressional Budget Office &#8220;assumes — as do most economists — that employers&#8217; share of payroll taxes is passed on to employees in the form of lower wages than would otherwise be paid.&#8221;<a id="itxthook0" href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/walter-williams.html#" rel="nofollow">Health</a> insurance is not an employer gift, either.</p>
<p>It is paid for by employees in the form of lower wages.</p>
<p>Another part of Social Security and Medicare deception is that the taxes are officially called FICA, which stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act. First, it&#8217;s not an insurance program. More importantly, the word &#8220;contribution&#8221; implies something voluntary. Its synonyms are alms, benefaction, beneficence, charity, donation and philanthropy. Which one of those synonyms comes close to describing how Congress gets Social Security and Medicare?</p>
<p>There&#8217;s more deceit and dishonesty. In 1950, I was 14 years old and applied for a work permit for an after-school job. One of the requirements was to obtain a Social Security card. In bold letters on my Social Security card, which I still possess, are the words &#8220;For Social Security Purposes — Not For Identification.&#8221; That&#8217;s because earlier Americans feared that their Social Security number would become an identity number. According to the Social Security Administration website, &#8220;this legend was removed as part of the design changes for the 18th version of the card, issued beginning in 1972.&#8221; That statement assumes we&#8217;re idiots. We&#8217;re asked to believe that the sole purpose of the removal was for design purposes. Apparently, the fact that our Social Security number had become a major identification tool, to be used in every aspect of our lives, had nothing to do with the SSA&#8217;s getting rid of the legend saying &#8220;For Social Security Purposes — Not For Identification.&#8221;</p>
<p>I wonder whether political satirist H.L. Mencken was right when he said, &#8220;Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Congressionally Duped Americans</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/congressionally-duped-americans/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=congressionally-duped-americans</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/congressionally-duped-americans/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:05:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fraud]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[retirement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209851</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Debunking government's Social Security mistruths. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/images.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209856" alt="images" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/images.jpg" width="220" height="146" /></a>Last week&#8217;s column, &#8220;Is There a Way Out?&#8221;, generated quite a few responses, some a bit angry. Some people were offended by my reference to Social Security and Medicare as entitlements or handouts. They said that they worked for 45 years and paid into Social Security and Medicare and how dare I refer to the money they now receive as an entitlement. These people have been duped by Congress and shouldn&#8217;t be held totally accountable for such a belief. Let&#8217;s examine the plethora of congressional Social Security lies. I&#8217;ll leave the Medicare lies for another column.</p>
<p>The Social Security pamphlet of 1936 read, &#8220;Beginning November 24, 1936, the United States Government will set up a Social Security account for you. &#8230; The checks will come to you as a right&#8221; (http://tinyurl.com/maskyul). Therefore, Americans have been led to believe that Social Security is like a retirement account and money placed in it is their property. The fact of the matter belies that belief.</p>
<p>A year after the Social Security Act&#8217;s passage, it was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, in Helvering v. Davis. The court held that Social Security is not an insurance program, saying, &#8220;The proceeds of both employee and employer taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like any other internal revenue generally, and are not earmarked in any way.&#8221; In a 1960 case, Flemming v. Nestor, the Supreme Court held, &#8220;To engraft upon the Social Security system a concept of &#8216;accrued property rights&#8217; would deprive it of the flexibility and boldness in adjustment to ever-changing conditions which it demands.&#8221;</p>
<p>Decades after Americans had been duped into thinking that the money taken from them was theirs, the Social Security Administration belatedly — and very quietly — tried to clean up its history of deception. Its website explains, &#8220;Entitlement to Social Security benefits is not (a) contractual right.&#8221; It adds: &#8220;There has been a temptation throughout the program&#8217;s history for some people to suppose that their FICA payroll taxes entitle them to a benefit in a legal, contractual sense.</p>
<p>&#8230; Congress clearly had no such limitation in mind when crafting the law&#8221; (http://tinyurl.com/49p8fl2). The Social Security Administration failed to mention that it was the SSA itself, along with Congress, that created the lie that &#8220;the checks will come to you as a right.&#8221;</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s my question to those who protest that their Social Security checks are not an entitlement or handouts: Seeing as Congress has not &#8220;set up a Social Security account for you&#8221; containing your Social Security and Medicare &#8220;contributions,&#8221; where does the money you receive come from? I promise you it&#8217;s neither Santa Claus nor the tooth fairy. The only way Congress can send checks to Social Security and Medicare recipients is to take the earnings of a person currently in the workforce. The way Congress conceals its Ponzi scheme is to dupe Social Security and Medicare recipients into thinking that it&#8217;s their money that is put away and invested. Therefore, Social Security recipients want their monthly check and are oblivious about who has to pay and the pending economic calamity that awaits future generations because of the federal government&#8217;s $100 trillion-plus unfunded liability, of which Social Security and Medicare are the major parts.</p>
<p>Pointing to the congressional lies and future economic chaos is not the same as calling for a cessation of checks going out to recipients. Instead, it&#8217;s a call for the recognition that we&#8217;ve made a mistake that needs to be corrected while there&#8217;s time to avoid a calamity. It&#8217;s also a call for us to recognize that we all share in the blame and hence the burden to make it right. Politicians have little interest in doing something about an economic calamity that will happen in 2030 or 2040; they only care about the next election. Older Americans, who own most of the political clout, must lead the fight to get Congress to do something about entitlement programs. Of course, the alternative is continued belief in the Social Security and Medicare myth and the heck with future generations.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<slash:comments>15</slash:comments>
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		<title>Entitlement Madness: Is There a Way Out?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/entitlement-madness-is-there-a-way-out/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=entitlement-madness-is-there-a-way-out</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/entitlement-madness-is-there-a-way-out/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Oct 2013 04:10:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicaid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208952</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can budget-busting programs be reined in before they collapse? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/shutterstock_money_whirlpool.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208954" alt="shutterstock_money_whirlpool" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/shutterstock_money_whirlpool-436x350.jpg" width="262" height="210" /></a>According to a recent Fox News poll, 73 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, up 20 points from 2012. Americans sense that there&#8217;s a lot going wrong in our nation, but most don&#8217;t have a clue about the true nature of our problem. If they had a clue, most would have little stomach for what would be necessary to arrest our national decline. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>Between two-thirds and three-quarters of federal spending, in contravention of the U.S. Constitution, can be described as Congress taking the earnings or property of one American to give to another, to whom it does not belong. You say, &#8220;Williams, what do you mean?&#8221; Congress has no resources of its very own. Moreover, there&#8217;s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy who gives it resources. The fact that Congress has no resources of its very own forces us to recognize that the only way Congress can give one American one dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American through the tax code.</p>
<p>If any American did privately what Congress does publicly, he&#8217;d be condemned as an ordinary thief. Taking what belongs to one American to give to another is theft, and the receiver is a recipient of stolen property. Most Americans would suffer considerable anguish and cognitive dissonance seeing themselves as recipients of stolen property, so congressional theft has to be euphemized and given a respectable name. That respectable name is &#8220;entitlement.&#8221; Merriam-Webster defines entitlement as &#8220;the condition of having a right to have, do, or get something.&#8221; For example, I am entitled to walk into the house that I own. I am entitled to drive the car that I own. The challenging question is whether I am also entitled to what you or some other American owns.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s look at a few of these entitlements. More than 40 percent of federal spending is for entitlements for the elderly in the forms of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing and other assistance programs.</p>
<p>The Office of Management and Budget calculates that total entitlement spending comes to about 62 percent of federal spending. Military spending totals 19 percent of federal spending. By the way, putting those two figures into historical perspective demonstrates the success we&#8217;ve had becoming a handout nation. In 1962, military expenditures were almost 50 percent of the federal budget, and entitlement spending was a mere 31 percent. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that entitlement spending will consume all federal tax revenue by 2048.</p>
<p>Entitlement spending is not the only form of legalized theft. The Department of Agriculture gives billions of dollars to farmers. The departments of Energy and Commerce give billions of dollars and subsidized loans to corporations. In fact, every Cabinet-level department in Washington is in charge of handing out at least one kind of subsidy or special privilege. Most federal non-defense &#8220;discretionary spending&#8221; by Congress is for handouts.</p>
<p>Despite the fact that today&#8217;s increasing levels of federal government spending are unsustainable, there is little evidence that Americans have the willingness to do anything about it. Any politician who&#8217;d even talk about significantly reining in unsustainable entitlement spending would be run out of town. Any politician telling the American people they must pay higher taxes to support handout spending, instead of concealing spending through deficits and running up the national debt and inflation, would also be run out of town. Can you imagine what the American people would do to a presidential candidate who&#8217;d declare, as James Madison did in a 1794 speech to the House of Representatives, &#8220;Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government&#8221;?</p>
<p>If we are to be able to avoid ultimate collapse, it&#8217;s going to take a moral reawakening and renewed constitutional respect — not by politicians but by the American people. The prospect of that happening may be whistlin&#8217; &#8220;Dixie.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Guns and Pensions</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/guns-and-pensions/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=guns-and-pensions</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/guns-and-pensions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Feb 2013 04:20:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pensions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politicians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=178452</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How short-sighted spending decisions handicap our future. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/guns-and-pensions/government-money-wasters-1/" rel="attachment wp-att-178507"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-178507" title="government-money-wasters-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/government-money-wasters-1.jpg" alt="" width="297" height="267" /></a>A nation&#8217;s choice between spending on military defense and spending on civilian goods has often been posed as &#8220;guns versus butter.&#8221; But understanding the choices of many nations&#8217; political leaders might be helped by examining the contrast between their runaway spending on pensions while skimping on military defense.</p>
<p>Huge pensions for retired government workers can be found from small municipalities to national governments on both sides of the Atlantic. There is a reason. For elected officials, pensions are virtually the ideal thing to spend moneyon, politically speaking. Many kinds of spending of the taxpayers&#8217; money win votes from the recipients. But raising taxes to pay for this spending loses votes from the taxpayers. Pensions offer a way out of this dilemma for politicians.</p>
<p>Creating pensions that offer generous retirement benefits wins votes in the present by promising spending in the future. Promises cost nothing in the short run — and elections are held in the short run, long before the pensions are due.</p>
<p>By contrast, private insurance companies that sell annuities are forced by law to set aside enough assets to cover the cost of the annuities they have promised to pay. But nobody can force the government to do that — and most governments do not.</p>
<p>This means that it is only a matter of time before pensions are due to be paid and there is not enough money set aside to pay for them. This applies to Social Security and other government pensions here, as well as to all sorts of pensions in other countries overseas.</p>
<p>Eventually, the truth will come out that there is just not enough money in the till to pay what retirees were promised. But eventually can be a long time.</p>
<p>A politician can win quite a few elections between now and eventually — and be living in comfortable retirement by the time it is somebody else&#8217;s problem to cope with the impossibility of paying retirees the pensions they were promised.</p>
<p>Inflating the currency and paying pensions in dollars that won&#8217;t buy as much is just one of the ways for the government to seem to be keeping its promises, while in fact welshing on the deal.</p>
<p>The politics of military spending are just the opposite of the politics of pensions.</p>
<p>In the short run, politicians can always cut military spending without any immediate harm being visible, however catastrophic the consequences may turn out to be down the road.</p>
<p>Despite the huge increase in government spending on domestic programs during Franklin D. Roosevelt&#8217;s administration in the 1930s, FDR cut back on military spending. On the eve of the Second World War, the United States had the 16th largest army in the world, right behind Portugal.</p>
<p>Even this small military force was so inadequately supplied with equipment that its training was skimped. American soldiers went on maneuvers using trucks with &#8220;tank&#8221; painted on their sides, since there were not enough real tanks to go around.</p>
<p>American warplanes were not updated to match the latest warplanes of Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. After World War II broke out, American soldiers stationed in the Philippines were fighting for their lives using rifles left over from the Spanish-American war, decades earlier. The hand grenades they threw at the Japanese invaders were so old that they often failed to explode. At the battle of Midway, of 82 Americans who flew into combat in obsolete torpedo planes, only 12 returned alive. In Europe, our best tanks were never as good as the Germans&#8217; best tanks, which destroyed several times as many American tanks as the Germans lost in tank battles.</p>
<p>Fortunately, the quality of American warplanes eventually caught up with and surpassed the best that the Germans and Japanese had. But a lot of American pilots lost their lives needlessly in outdated planes before that happened.</p>
<p>These were among the many prices paid for skimping on military spending in the years leading up to World War II. But, politically, the path of least resistance is to cut military spending in the short run and let the long run take care of itself.</p>
<p>In a nuclear age, we may not have time to recover from our short-sighted policies, as we did in World War II.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>America&#8217;s Last Chance</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/americas-last-chance/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=americas-last-chance</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/americas-last-chance/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Feb 2013 04:05:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Federal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[National]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=175853</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The country is approaching the point of no return on runaway government spending. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/americas-last-chance/national_debt_clock-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-175855"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-175855" title="national_debt_clock" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/national_debt_clock1.jpg" alt="" width="281" height="206" /></a>Let&#8217;s expose presidential prevarication. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama warned that Social Security checks will be delayed if Congress fails to increase the government&#8217;s borrowing authority by raising the debt ceiling. However, there&#8217;s an issue with this warning. According to the 2012 Social Security trustees report, assets in Social Security&#8217;s trust funds totaled $2.7 trillion, and Social Security expenditures totaled $773 billion. Therefore, regardless of what Congress does about the debt limit, Social Security recipients are guaranteed their checks. Just take the money from the $2.7 trillion assets held in trust.</p>
<p>Which is the lie, Social Security checks must be delayed if the debt ceiling is not raised or there&#8217;s $2.7 trillion in the Social Security trust funds? The fact of the matter is that they are both lies. The Social Security trust funds contain nothing more than IOUs, bonds that have absolutely no market value. In other words, they are worthless bookkeeping entries. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, meaning that the taxes paid by today&#8217;s workers are immediately sent out as payment to today&#8217;s retirees. Social Security is just another federal program funded out of general revenues.</p>
<p>If the congressional Republicans had one ounce of brains, they could easily thwart the president and his leftist allies&#8217; attempt to frighten older Americans about not receiving their Social Security checks and thwart their attempt to frighten other Americans by saying &#8220;we are not a deadbeat nation&#8221; and suggesting the possibility of default if the debt ceiling is not raised. In 2012, monthly federal tax revenue was about $200 billion. Monthly Social Security expenditures were about $65 billion per month, and the monthly interest payment on our $16 trillion national debt was about $30 billion. The House could simply enact a bill prioritizing how federal tax revenues will be spent. It could mandate that Social Security recipients and interest payments on the national debt be the first priorities and then send the measure to the Senate and the president for concurrence.</p>
<p>It might not be a matter of brains as to why the Republican House wouldn&#8217;t enact such a measure; it likes spending just as the Democrats.</p>
<p>I believe our nation is rapidly approaching our last chance to do something about runaway government before we face the type of economic turmoil seen in Greece and other European nations. Tax revenue has remained constant for the past 50 years, averaging about 18 percent of gross domestic product. During that interval, federal spending has risen from less than 20 percent to more than 25 percent of GDP. What accounts for this growth in federal spending? The liberals like to blame national defense, but in 1962, national defense expenditures were 50 percent of the federal budget; today they are 19 percent. What accounts for most federal spending is the set of programs euphemistically called entitlements. In 1962, entitlement spending was 31 percent of the federal budget; today it is 62 percent. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security alone take up 44 percent of the federal budget, and worse than that, it&#8217;s those expenditures that are the most rapidly growing spending areas.</p>
<p>Our federal debt and deficits are unsustainable and are driven by programs under which Congress takes the earnings of one American to give to another, or entitlements. How long can Congress take in $200 billion in revenue per month and spend $360 billion per month? That means roughly 40 cents of every federal dollar spent has to be borrowed. The undeniable fact of business is that a greater number of people are living off government welfare programs than are paying taxes. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s driving Europe&#8217;s economic problems, and it&#8217;s what&#8217;s driving ours. The true tragedy is that just to acknowledge that fact is political suicide, as presidential contender Mitt Romney found out. We can&#8217;t blame politicians. It&#8217;s the American people who will crucify a politician who even talks about cutting their favorite handout.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Social Security Disability Program May Hit Shortfalls by 2016</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/social-security-disability-program-may-hit-shortfalls-by-2016/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=social-security-disability-program-may-hit-shortfalls-by-2016</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/social-security-disability-program-may-hit-shortfalls-by-2016/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 27 Jan 2013 02:15:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=175053</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The number of US workers claiming disability insurance increased by 22 percent in 5 years]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/social-security-disability-program-may-hit-shortfalls-by-2016/hqdefault-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-175054"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-175054" title="hqdefault" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/hqdefault-450x337.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>Social Security will eventually hit the wall, but<a href="http://weaselzippers.us/2013/01/26/social-security-disability-trust-fund-may-fail-to-provide-full-benefits-as-early-as-2016/"> Social Security Disability Insurance may hit </a>the wall even before Obama heads off to a permanent vacation on the many golf courses of Hawaii or rewrites the Living Constitution to become Emperor of Post-America.</p>
<blockquote><p>Over the long term, Social Security and Medicare have promised tens of trillions of dollars more in benefits than the nation can pay for under current policies. But Social Security’s disability trust fund is in even worse shape, and current estimates say by 2016 it won’t have enough money to pay full benefits.</p>
<p>The fiscal security of the disability trust fund got rapidly worse as the unemployment rate rose. The number of applications has almost doubled in the last 10 years, from 1.5 million a year in 2001 to more than 2.8 million a year in 2012.</p>
<p>Obama has said little about how he would fix the fund&#8217;s finances.</p></blockquote>
<p>Blame Republicans. That always works. The SSDI situation has gotten so bad because <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/5-percent-of-the-american-workforce-is-now-on-disability/">the system is clearly being abused</a>. There&#8217;s no other explanation for such a dramatic hike in claims.</p>
<blockquote><p>The number of US workers claiming disability insurance increased by 22 percent in 5 years, coinciding with an economic recession.</p>
<p>1.6 million Americans got on the disability rolls, moving them up from 7.1 million to 8.7 million. And 99 percent of the people on those rolls stay on them until retirement age. And the total cost of all that is around 130 billion dollars a year.</p></blockquote>
<p>Over 5 percent of the working age population is on disability. That&#8217;s rather high. Either construction sites have decided to dump hard harts and every lunch room has decided to start cooking with plutonium, or there&#8217;s something else at work here.</p>
<blockquote><p>Eberstadt points out that in 1960, only one-fifth of disability benefits went to those with “mood disorders” and “musculoskeletal” problems. In 2011, nearly half of those on disability voiced such complaints.</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Federal Deficit Increased 30% in 2012</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/federal-deficit-increased-30-in-2012/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=federal-deficit-increased-30-in-2012</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/federal-deficit-increased-30-in-2012/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 20 Jan 2013 17:02:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[National Debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174144</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama knows quite well that he's spending money that can never be repaid. That's why he's spending the money. Because it's his last chance to spend it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/federal-deficit-increased-30-in-2012/obama-money/" rel="attachment wp-att-174145"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-174145" title="obama-money" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/obama-money.jpg" alt="" width="275" height="183" /></a></p>
<p>That&#8217;s counting unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities and it shows just <a href="http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2013/01/sounds-sustainable-using-gaap.html">how big the Obama DebtHole is becoming</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>John Williams, writing at ShadowStats.com, used the Treasury Department&#8217;s latest financial statements and calculates the true 2012 federal deficit, which includes the net present value of unfunded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare) at: $6.9 trillion.</p>
<p>In 2011, using GAAP accounting, the federal deficit was: $5.0 trillion. Which means the annual deficit grew at a rate of nearly 30 percent in one year.</p></blockquote>
<p>And the hole is only getting bigger because <a href="http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-10-stats-you-should-never-show-baby.html">we&#8217;re running out of productive workers</a>. While the government class is increasing and we have large numbers of immigrants who mainly work low paying or government jobs, we don&#8217;t have much of a private sector left. And the private sector is being cannibalized by the government class.</p>
<blockquote><p>In 1945, there were 42 workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits. Today, that number has fallen to 2.5 workers, and if you eliminate all government workers, that leaves only 1.6 private sector workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits.</p></blockquote>
<p>Government pensions in states like California with a huge government and welfare class will fall first. Then everything else goes.</p>
<p>Obama knows quite well that he&#8217;s spending money that can never be repaid. That&#8217;s why he&#8217;s spending the money. Because it&#8217;s his last chance to spend it.</p>
<p>The guy who knows that the shipwrecked boat is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is going to eat up all the rations because he knows that there&#8217;s no rescue coming so he might as well pig out and position himself to survive as long as he can.</p>
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		<title>Social Security: Even More Insolvent Than You Thought</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/social-security-even-more-insolvent-than-you-thought/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=social-security-even-more-insolvent-than-you-thought</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/social-security-even-more-insolvent-than-you-thought/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:35:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tom Blumer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=172631</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Its actuaries have been blowing the calculations, and there is no “buffer.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/social-security-even-more-insolvent-than-you-thought/fe_da_intro_boostsocialsecurityslideshow/" rel="attachment wp-att-172644"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-172644" title="FE_DA_Intro_BoostSocialSecuritySlideshow" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/FE_DA_Intro_BoostSocialSecuritySlideshow.jpg" alt="" width="230" height="167" /></a>At first, one doesn&#8217;t know whether to laugh or cry at research findings reported by two Ivy League profs <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/social-security-its-worse-than-you-think.html?_r=1&amp;">in a co-authored column</a> in the Sunday <em>New York Times</em> titled &#8220;Social Security: It’s Worse Than You Think.&#8221;</p>
<p>Actually, white-hot anger is more appropriate, given that what <a href="http://gking.harvard.edu/">Gary King</a>, a professor of government and director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, and <a href="http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~ssoneji/">Samir S. Soneji</a>, a demographer and assistant professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, really told us, namely that the New Deal-era retirement system, thanks to its use of ossified actuarial calculations, is more insolvent than almost all of us knew.</p>
<p>The pair&#8217;s core finding, as presented in the <em>Times</em>: &#8220;[T]he Social Security Administration underestimates how long Americans will live and how much the trust funds will need to pay out — to the tune of $800 billion by 2031.&#8221;</p>
<p>There are at least three justifications for feeling righteously outraged.</p>
<p>The first has to do with the delay between when King and Soneji originally reported their core findings to the academic community and when they deigned to let the rest of the country in on their virtual secret.</p>
<p>The pair&#8217;s research paper, &#8220;<a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0106-z/fulltext.html">Statistical Security for Social Security</a>,&#8221; reported that &#8220;Social Security, especially the OASI program, may be in a considerably more precarious position than officially thought&#8221; because the government&#8217;s actuaries are ignoring the financial implications of life expectancy increases due to &#8220;the steady decline in smoking,&#8221; which more than offset decreases relating to &#8220;the rapid rise in obesity.&#8221; The estimated net effect they reported in their paper was &#8220;$730 billion less in the OASI and SSDI (Old Age and Disability) Trust Funds&#8221; by 2031 (I will get to the &#8220;Trust Funds&#8221; fiction and the $800 billion/$730 billion discrepancy later in this column).</p>
<p>The paper first appeared in <em>Demography</em> <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SocSecPaperOnShortfall051712.png">on May 17, 2012</a>; the link from the their Sunday <em>Times</em> column <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13524-012-0106-z">to the web page</a> containing the paper&#8217;s abstract is labeled &#8220;August 2012.&#8221;</p>
<p>This means that King and Soneji had credible evidence that Social Security is in far worse shape than most of us thought well in advance of the November 2012 elections. Apparently, they made no special effort to bring their work to the nation&#8217;s attention, even though virtually any credible center-right news outlet would have been extremely interested in their findings. In their <em>Times</em> column, King and Soneji almost seem to crow about the fact that Social Security was not a contentious item in the presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: &#8220;It was a rare issue on which both men agreed — and both were utterly wrong.&#8221; Well guys, if you knew they were wrong, why didn&#8217;t you say anything?</p>
<p>Further blame assignment is in order. How could Romney&#8217;s largely Northeast-based advisers have missed the article&#8217;s publication? Isn&#8217;t setting up Google Alerts on key terms supposed to part of Campaigning 101? Though it appears that <em>Demography</em> has been coding its web pages <a href="http://link.springer.com/robots.txt">to avoid search engine detection</a>, a Google Web search <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=The+financial+viability+of+Social+Security%2C+the+single+largest+U.S.+government+program%2C+depends+on+accurate+forecasts+of+the+solvency+of+its+intergenerational+trust+fund.&amp;hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=zYrrUOD-C7G_0QGZz4H4Aw&amp;ved=0CCEQpwUoBg&amp;source=lnt&amp;tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A01%2F01%2F2012%2Ccd_max%3A09%2F01%2F2012&amp;tbm=">on the research paper&#8217;s first sentence</a> shows that it should not have escaped detection last summer.</p>
<p>A very sad and worse possibility which cannot be ruled out is that Team Romney learned of the research and didn&#8217;t believe that bringing up Social Security&#8217;s unprecedented decay <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/social-securitys-implosion-continues/">during Obama&#8217;s presidency</a> would be a good idea. As we have so often seen but Republican campaigns have failed to learn, timidity does not win elections.</p>
<p>The second reason for outrage is the government&#8217;s decades-long failure to modernize its actuarial methodologies. King and Soneji show that the system currently uses assumptions based on &#8220;a combination of linear extrapolation and qualitative judgments,&#8221; which, though they were the best available frameworks many years ago, are now dangerously outdated and divorced from reality. Unfortunately, this is all too typical of what happens when entrenched government bureaucracies simply go through the same processes year after year after year without giving adequate or sometimes even any thought to whether they could or should be improved.</p>
<p>This debacle would never have happened if Social Security&#8217;s trustees had been outsourcing their annual actuarial reviews to one of the industry&#8217;s leading firms. These organizations live or die on their ability to develop credible and state of the art mortality estimates for their private and public clients. Social Security&#8217;s trustees should make outsourcing this work in future years while ordering the firm selected to follow the best available practices one of their first orders of business. Odds are they won&#8217;t &#8212; and that if they try, Obama and Harry Reid&#8217;s Senate won&#8217;t let them.</p>
<p>The final source of outrage relates to King&#8217;s and Soneji&#8217;s fictional presentation of how Social Security supposedly works in their research paper, their <em>Times</em> column, and that column&#8217;s accompanying flowchart.</p>
<p>Sentences from each of the pair&#8217;s three documents will demonstrate that what they tell readers about the Social Security&#8217;s &#8220;trust funds&#8221; is an exercise in sheer fantasy:</p>
<p>• Their research paper engages in laughable historical revisionism: &#8220;As a result of payroll taxes that generated revenue in excess of annual benefit outlays over the last 25 years, the trust funds have amassed large surpluses in preparation for the aging population.&#8221;</p>
<p>• Among their column&#8217;s claims: &#8220;(The trust funds are) a $2.7 trillion buffer built in anticipation of retiring baby boomers &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>• They saved the worst howler for their column&#8217;s graphic: &#8220;Current workers’ payroll taxes go into the Social Security Trust Funds — a bank account for current and future beneficiaries &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>What rubbish. Jay Leno could use these assertions as jokes on <em>The Tonight Show</em> and have most of his audience rolling in the aisles.</p>
<p>The real facts are these:</p>
<p>• The &#8220;trust funds&#8221; consist almost entirely of IOUs from the rest of the federal government. Congress has taken Social Security&#8217;s annual surpluses and spent them on other things for decades.</p>
<p>• The rest of the government currently has a balance of $11.5 trillion in &#8220;<a href="http://www.savingsbonds.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np">debt held by the public</a>&#8221; (i.e., excluding &#8220;intergovernmental holdings&#8221; like the &#8220;trust funds&#8221;).</p>
<p>• Our supposed betters in Washington have run deficits of over $1 trillion during each of the past four years, and have added an even greater amount to the national debt during that time. Fiscal 2013, despite the fiscal cliff deal, appears to be on track to stretch that streak to five.</p>
<p>• Part of the government&#8217;s annual deficit now includes money needed to cover Social Security&#8217;s annual cash shortfalls, which, as King and Soneji have noted, began in 2010.</p>
<p>• Social Security&#8217;s ability to continue to pay benefits at current levels depends largely on the government&#8217;s ability to cover those annual cash deficits, which are projected to grow as far as the eye can see. Given that <a href="http://reason.com/24-7/2013/01/07/boehner-obama-insisted-we-dont-have-a-sp">Obama insists</a> that &#8220;we don&#8217;t have a spending problem,&#8221; there is substantial reason to believe that the government will not be able to cover those cash deficits several years from now.</p>
<p>The serious deterioration in Social Security&#8217;s viability we have seen in the past four years is partially due to the recession, but really has far more to do with the fact that the economy under Obama has failed to adequately recover from that recession. If the economy only grows by 2 percent per year, those paper entities known as the &#8220;trust funds&#8221; will run dry in an accounting sense well before 2031, perhaps by as much as a decade &#8212; assuming that the rest of the government&#8217;s finances don&#8217;t collapse sooner.</p>
<p>One indicator of how serious the system&#8217;s decay is can be seen in the fact that the $730 billion shortfall estimated in King&#8217;s and Soneji&#8217;s research paper ballooned to the $800 billion noted above in their <em>Times</em> column&#8217;s presentation. Though they may have refined their life expectancy data in the meantime, the higher number more likely occurred because their original paper used data from the 2011 Social Security Trustees Report containing calendar 2010 data, while their Times column instead used data from <a href="http://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/2012/index.html">the 2012 report</a>.</p>
<p>Parting question: What kind of impact would the failure to consider the life expectancy estimation problems King and Soneji cited have on the financial projections for Medicare and ObamaCare? None of us should be surprised if the twenty-year impact on those programs runs to several trillion dollars.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>A Nation of Takers Hurtles Toward the Fiscal Abyss</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:58:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=168573</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama shows the future of the country is the last thing on his mind. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss/money-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-168580"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-168580" title="Money" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Money1-450x337.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="202" /></a>The on-going negotiations over avoiding the tax hikes and spending cuts we call the “fiscal cliff” are the simply the latest act in a farce of self-serving political denial. For decades now both parties have overseen and nurtured the expansion of the entitlement state all the while ignoring the slow-motion economic implosion whose predictable end can be seen today in a bankrupt Greece currently surviving on EU handouts. But American voters and politicians are so marinated in expectations of endless federal and state largess that modest reductions in spending, such as those proposed earlier this year by Congressman Paul Ryan, are attacked as draconian “cuts” that will “shred” the safety net and throw millions into Dickensian penury.</p>
<p>And make no mistake. The “cliff” might not be reached in January, even without a deal. But it’s still waiting down the road. Baby Boomers, 75 million strong, are retiring at a rate of 200,000 a month, and they can expect to live on average until 84 if they make it to the retirement age of 65. The two big drivers of entitlement spending, Social Security and Medicare, weren’t designed to transfer money to retirees for so long, or pay for artificial knees and hips for Boomers who want to be active in their 70s and 80s. If left unreformed, spending just on Social Security and Medicare will eat up 14% of GDP in 40 years, necessitating even more federal borrowing than the 40 cents currently borrowed for every dollar the feds spend. That’s not a cliff, that’s an economic abyss.</p>
<p>Reining in entitlement spending, then, is the major problem that everybody needs to focus on. And a good place to start is Nicholas Eberstadt’s <em>A Nation of Takers</em>. Eberstadt’s grim documentation of the reckless expansion of what he calls the “vast and colossal empire of entitlement payments that it [the state] protects, manages, and finances,” and his analysis of the ill effects such transfers have had on the American character should be read by everyone serious about the fiscal threats to our way of life.</p>
<p>Redistributing wealth through programs like income maintenance, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance has become the federal government’s most important function. This development would have astonished the Founders, who codified national security and defense as the national government’s primary role. And this momentous shift has led to an accelerating number of Americans on some sort of dole. In the early 1980s, 30% of Americans received at least one government benefit. By 2011 just over 49% were. The costs of this increase have accelerated as well. In 1960, entitlement spending by government at all levels was $24 billion in today’s dollars. In 2011, the cost was almost $2.2 trillion. As Eberstadt glumly prophesizes, we are heading for “the day in which entitlement spending comes to exceed all other activities of all levels and branches of the U.S. government.”</p>
<p>The costs of such profligacy, however, are more than economic. These wealth transfers have had deleterious effects on traditional American character. Observers of the American character traditionally had remarked on what Eberstadt describes as a “fierce and principled independence” and “proud self-reliance.” This independence extended to financial self-reliance as well. Americans “viewed themselves as accountable for their own situation through their own achievements in an environment bursting with opportunity,” Eberstadt writes, and had “an affinity for personal enterprise and industry” and a “horror of dependency and contempt for anything that smacked of a mendicant mentality.” Accepting help or handouts was considered “an affront to their dignity and independence.” These are the strengths of character and virtue that have created the richest, freest, and most powerful nation in world history. But the federal government’s ever- increasing handouts––which these days are not considered signs of shame, but deserved legal and civil rights––are eroding these virtues.</p>
<p>This corruption of character insidiously spreads throughout the culture, enabling politicians to expand these benefits in order to create electoral clients. One malign result has been what Eberstadt calls the “male flight from work.” The government has replaced husbands and fathers as providers, leading to “the proliferation of fatherless families and an epidemic of illegitimacy.” This change can be seen in the decline of men participating in the labor force. Between 1948 and 2011, male labor force participation sank from 89% to 73%, a drop twice as large as the number of men who left the workforce because of the Great Recession. For more and more Americans food stamps and welfare have replaced the wages of a working male.</p>
<p>Or consider the abuse of Social Security disability insurance. In 1960, Eberstadt reports, an average of 455,000 workers were receiving monthly disability payments. In 2010, 8.2 million were, four times the number of people on welfare. Worse yet, the average age of those receiving disability insurance has lowered. In 2011 the rate of workers in their thirties and forties receiving disability was more than double that of the same cohort in 1960. Given the big improvements in health care and longevity during that time, these increases do not reflect a more dangerous work environment. What happened was the addition of “mood disorders” and “musculo-skeletal” ailments to the diagnostic categories that made workers eligible for disability. Since doctors can’t disprove the existence of potentially subjective conditions like “depression” or “back pain,” we shouldn’t be surprised that these days nearly half of all disability claims are based on these ailments.</p>
<p>The costs of food stamps, welfare, or disability insurance, however, are spare change compared to the monstrous costs of Social Security and Medicare, which in fiscal 2012 totaled $1.2 trillion, 37% of non-interest federal spending. Nor are these programs “earned” through payroll taxes that were saved. As economist Robert Samuelson wrote recently, “But they weren’t saved; they paid the benefits of earlier retirees. Even had they been saved and earned interest, they typically wouldn’t cover lifetime Social Security and Medicare benefits, estimate the Urban Institute’s C. Eugene Steuerle and Caleb Quakenbush. A couple with average wages retiring in 2010 would receive $966,000 in benefits against taxes of $722,000.” Rather than endowments funded by worker contributions, Eberstadt writes, Social Security and Medicare funding are “accounting contrivances built upon a mountain of future IOUs.” And this problem will only worsen as the number of retired Boomers reaches 72 million by 2030. According to the Heritage Foundation, Social Security alone is projected to run a $344 billion deficit in 2035. Looking farther down the road, the unfunded liabilities of Social Security for the next 75 years is $8.6 trillion, and those of Medicare from $27 to $37 trillion.</p>
<p>The monstrous deficits and debt the government has been amassing for four decades correspond in part to the need to borrow money to pay for these two programs. But this downward spiral of increasing entitlements and growing debt––which in Obama’s first term has increased 83%–– will damage more than just our budget and character. We have already seen defense budgets targeted for reductions, even though we spend 3 times as much on entitlements as on defense. When President Eisenhower in 1961 warned of the “military-industrial complex,” the ratio was 2-1 in favor of defense spending, which represented 9.4% of GDP compared to 4.8% in 2010. And we are looking at another half a trillion of cuts over the next decade, on top of the half a trillion Obama has already slashed. The point is not that we can’t afford to spend more on defense, but that we have other priorities. As Eberstadt notes, “By the calculus of American policymakers today, then, U.S. defense capabilities seem to be the primary area sacrificed to make the world safe for the unrestrained growth of American entitlements.”</p>
<p>Yet despite this looming disaster, President Obama and the Democrats have taken entitlement reform off the table in the current negotiations over the “fiscal cliff.” Indeed, Obama’s latest offer included $600 billion in vague future spending cuts, but $200 billion in new spending along with $1.6 trillion in new taxes. According to economist <a href="http://keithhennessey.com/2012/12/03/potus-offer-1/">Keith Hennessy</a>, in reality this offer would lead to a spending <em>increase</em>, not a reduction. Clearly, Obama is not interested in heading off the fiscal disaster Eberstadt documents. Rather, he is pursuing the old progressive dream of income equality through the redistribution of wealth. Unfortunately, for future generations that dream will be a nightmare of bankruptcy at home and compromised national security abroad.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>How Obama&#8217;s &#8216;DREAMers&#8217; Will Get Social Security Numbers and Become Legal Residents</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/how-obamas-dreamers-will-get-social-security-numbers-and-become-effective-legal-residents/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-obamas-dreamers-will-get-social-security-numbers-and-become-effective-legal-residents</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Aug 2012 04:15:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Volpe]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A "glitch" in the system?  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/dream.act_.obama_.600.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-142274" title="dream.act_.obama_.600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/dream.act_.obama_.600.gif" alt="" width="375" height="239" /></a>Cracks in our Social Security and immigration systems will mean that many of those granted administrative amnesty under President Obama’s executive enforcement of the DREAM Act will effectively be legal residents even though the clear language of the mandate says that they will be granted a work visa for two years.</p>
<p>That’s because along with the work visa, all the new DREAMers will be eligible for a permanent and fully functioning Social Security Number. With a social security number, one can get credit, a driver’s license in most states, and be eligible to work legally. While DREAMers will be identified clearly in their social security cards, many employers don’t require actually showing the card for identification purposes during the employment screening process.</p>
<p>Center for Immigration Studies policy analyst Jessica Vaughan said that in the absence of having a physical Social Security Card, it requires proactive verification on the part of most human resources department in order to identify DREAMers. In the past, most HR Departments were unlikely to do proactive investigation when presented with a legal and fully functional Social Security Number.</p>
<p>Mark Hinkle from the Press Office of the Social Security Administration, in an emailed statement, told Front Page Magazine that it is taking proactive steps to identify DREAMers on their Social Security Card.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Social Security Act (section 205(c)(2)(B)(i)(I)) requires SSA to assign a Social Security number to work-authorized non-citizens, which does not make an individual eligible for any Federal or State benefit program, including Social Security retirement, disability or survivors benefits.  Noncitizens with temporary employment authorization have the following restrictive legend on their Social Security cards that reads: “VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION.”  This legend has been used since 1992 (with reference to “INS” authorization prior to 2004).</p></blockquote>
<p>While true, said Jessica Vaughan, this wouldn’t apply if DREAMers didn’t actually hand in a Social Security card when they started with a new employer. She said that the Social Security Card is normally just one of many forms of identification that a prospective employee can choose from that they must provide.</p>
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		<title>Why Liberals Behave the Way They Do</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/why-liberals-behave-the-way-they-do/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-liberals-behave-the-way-they-do</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Aug 2012 04:40:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Only slogans and fear-mongering delight mobs.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/alg_occupy-wall-street-police-plaza.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-140666" title="alg_occupy-wall-street-police-plaza" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/alg_occupy-wall-street-police-plaza.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>My smash best-seller &#8220;Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America&#8221; has just come out in paperback &#8212; and not a moment too soon! Democrats always become especially mob-like during presidential election campaigns.</p>
<p>The &#8220;root cause&#8221; of the Democrats&#8217; wild allegations against Republicans, their fear of change, their slogans and insane metaphors, are all explained by mass psychology, diagnosed more than a century ago by the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon, on whose work much of my own book is based.</p>
<p>Le Bon&#8217;s 1896 book, &#8220;The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,&#8221; was carefully read by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in order to learn how to incite mobs. Our liberals could have been Le Bon&#8217;s study subjects.</p>
<p>With the country drowning in debt and Medicare and Social Security on high-speed bullet trains to bankruptcy, the entire Democratic Party refuses to acknowledge mathematical facts. Instead, they incite the Democratic mob to hate Republicans by accusing them of wanting to kill old people.</p>
<p>According to a 2009 report &#8212; before Obama added another $5 trillion to the national debt &#8212; Obama&#8217;s own treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, stated that in less than 10 years, spending on major entitlement programs, plus interest payments on the national debt, would consume 92 cents of every dollar in federal revenue.</p>
<p>That means no money for an army, a navy, rockets, national parks, food inspectors, air traffic controllers, highways, and so on. Basically, the entire federal budget will be required just to pay for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security &#8212; and the cost of borrowing money to pay for these programs.</p>
<p>When Social Security was enacted in 1935, the average lifespan was 61.7 years. Today, it&#8217;s almost 79 and rising. But liberals believe the age at which people can begin collecting Social Security must never, ever be changed, even to save Social Security itself.</p>
<p>Mobs, according to Le Bon, have a &#8220;fetish-like respect&#8221; for tradition, except moral traditions because crowds are too impulsive to be moral. That&#8217;s why liberals say our Constitution is a &#8220;living, breathing&#8221; document that sprouts rights to gay marriage and abortion, but the age at which Social Security and Medicare benefits kick in is written in stone.</p>
<p>Le Bon says that it is lucky &#8220;for the progress of civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.&#8221; If &#8220;democracies possessed the power they wield today at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>The Promise of Paul Ryan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/the-promise-of-paul-ryan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-promise-of-paul-ryan</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/the-promise-of-paul-ryan/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Aug 2012 04:50:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlement programs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicaid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Ryan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=140210</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[No candidate is better positioned to educate the country about its looming entitlement crisis. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/paul.ryan_.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-140213" title="paul.ryan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/paul.ryan_-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" /></a>There can be little doubt that the addition of Paul Ryan to Mitt Romney&#8217;s presidential ticket has galvanized Republicans in a way that Romney himself has mostly failed to do. The $3.5 million <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/08/12/Romney-Campaign-3M-24-Hours">fundraising haul</a> that the Romney campaign reported within 24 hours of the vice presidential announcement is testimony to the enthusiastic approval of the GOP base. But whether Ryan will be an asset in the general election will depend on his ability to rally Americans to the cause of entitlement reform and economic growth just as he has his Republican admirers.</p>
<p>One problem with the Ryan pick is that, improbable as it may seem to political junkies, he is an unknown quantity for much of the country. Polls show that a majority of Americans <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/09/cnn-running-mate-poll-who-are-these-guys/">know little about the Wisconsin Congressman</a>. Polls also show that most people are <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/CBSNewsPoll_Medicare_061311.pdf?tag=contentMain;contentBodyry">unfamiliar</a> with the budget reform proposals that have made him a hero on the right and a hate figure on the left. Of those who have heard about Ryan&#8217;s reforms, a majority is confused about how they would work. The hopeful notion that Ryan can transmit some of his intra-conservative star power to the Romney campaign thus runs afoul of the hard truth that much of the country is clueless about who he is.</p>
<p>A related problem is that the public does not really understand the importance of the issues – government spending generally and the runway government spending on entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security specifically – on which Ryan has made his reputation in the Republican Party. While Americans routinely overestimate how much the federal government spends on foreign aid, they just as often underestimate how much it spends domestically. For instance, a CBS poll in 2011 <a href="http://www.volokh.com/2011/01/17/political-ignorance-and-federal-spending/">found</a> that less than a quarter of the public knew that Medicare and Medicaid take up nearly 20 to 30 percent of federal spending. Similarly, nearly half the country underestimates the size of Social Security spending. Given that Ryan&#8217;s signature policy agenda calls for restructuring these programs, for instance by reducing the government&#8217;s role in their provision through competition and consumer choice, the fact that much of the country does not recognize the threat to their long-term solvency makes that agenda a more difficult sell nationally.</p>
<p>The good news for the Romney campaign is that few are better positioned than Paul Ryan to explain the gravity of these issues and to make the case for reform over the status quo. A lifelong policy wonk who <a href="http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/paul-ryan-gets-free-markets/">started reading federal budgets in high school</a>, Ryan has not only a broad understanding of federal spending policies and their budget impact but also a unique ability to communicate the need for reforming government spending in a way that is coherent, accessible, and rich in supporting evidence. His 2010 &#8220;<a href="http://roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/">Roadmap for America&#8217;s Future</a>,&#8221; an ambitious budget proposal for reforming entitlement programs and reigning in the national debt, has been the most influential factor in forcing Republicans to make these issues a top legislative priority over the past several years. Among them was Mitt Romney, who <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/analysis-ryan-pick-sets-clear-november-choice/2012/08/11/0ab2ad3a-e3ee-11e1-89f7-76e23a982d06_story.html">hailed</a> Ryan&#8217;s plan as &#8220;marvelous.&#8221; Adding Ryan to the ticket makes that policy connection explicit.</p>
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		<title>Duped by Congressional Lies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/duped-by-congressional-lies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=duped-by-congressional-lies</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/duped-by-congressional-lies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Jun 2012 04:00:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[theft]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=134947</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Refuting the claim that Social Security recipients are cashing in on "their" money. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Social-Security-Card.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-134949" title="Social-Security-Card" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Social-Security-Card.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a>Some of the responses to my column last week, titled &#8220;Immoral Beyond Redemption,&#8221; prove that Americans have been hoodwinked by Congress. Some readers protested my counting Social Security among government handout programs that can be described as Congress&#8217; taking what belongs to one American and giving to another, to whom it doesn&#8217;t belong — legalized theft. They argued that they worked for 45 years and paid into Social Security and that the money they now receive is theirs. These people have been duped and shouldn&#8217;t be held totally accountable for such a belief. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>The Social Security pamphlet of 1936 read, &#8220;Beginning November 24, 1936, the United States Government will set up a Social Security account for you. &#8230; The checks will come to you as a right.&#8221; (http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssb36.html). Americans were led to believe that Social Security was like a retirement account and that money placed in it was, in fact, their property. Shortly after the Social Security Act&#8217;s passage, it was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, in Helvering v. Davis (1937). The court held that Social Security was not an insurance program, saying, &#8220;The proceeds of both employee and employer taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like any other internal revenue generally, and are not earmarked in any way.&#8221; In a 1960 case, Flemming v. Nestor, the Supreme Court said, &#8220;To engraft upon Social Security system a concept of &#8216;accrued property rights&#8217; would deprive it of the flexibility and boldness in adjustment to ever-changing conditions which it demands.&#8221;</p>
<p>Decades after Americans were duped into thinking that the money taken from them was theirs, the Social Security Administration belatedly and quietly tried to clean up its history of deception. Its website (http://www.ssa.gov/history/nestor.html) explains, &#8220;Entitlement to Social Security benefits is not (a) contractual right.&#8221; It adds: &#8220;There has been a temptation throughout the program&#8217;s history for some people to suppose that their FICA payroll taxes entitle them to a benefit in a legal, contractual sense.</p>
<p>&#8230; Congress clearly had no such limitation in mind when crafting the law.&#8221; The Social Security Administration&#8217;s explanation fails to mention that it was the SSA itself that created the lie that &#8220;the checks will come to you as a right.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Economic Chaos Ahead</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/economic-chaos-ahead/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=economic-chaos-ahead</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/economic-chaos-ahead/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:09:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[congressional budget office]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicaid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=121688</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is an economic collapse the only way we will come to our senses?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-121690" title="National-Debt-Clock" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/National-Debt-Clock.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></p>
<p>Let&#8217;s think about the kind of mess that we&#8217;re in. Federal 2010 Medicare and Medicaid expenditures totaled $800 billion. The projected annual growth of both programs is about 7 percent. Social Security expenditures are more than $700 billion a year. According to the 2009 Social Security and Medicare trustees reports, by 2030, 49 percent of federal revenues will go for Social Security and Medicare payments. The unfunded liability of both programs is already $106 trillion.</p>
<p>But not to worry. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it&#8217;s possible to sustain today&#8217;s level of federal spending and even achieve a balanced budget. All that Congress would have to do is raise the lowest income tax bracket of 10 percent to 25 percent and the middle tax bracket of 25 percent to 66 percent and raise the 35 percent tax bracket to 92 percent. That&#8217;s a static vision that assumes that people will have no response and they&#8217;ll work just as hard and send more money to Washington. If Congress did legislate such tax increases, it would be the economic equivalent of committing national hara-kiri.</p>
<p>Professor Daniel Klein, editor of Econ Journal Watch, and Professor Tyler Cowen, general director of the Mercatus Center, both based at George Mason University, organized a symposium to promote a better understanding of the U.S. debt crisis. The symposium&#8217;s title, &#8220;U.S. Sovereign Debt Crisis: Tipping-Point Scenarios and Crash Dynamics&#8221; (http://econjwatch.org), is a strong hint about the seriousness of our nation&#8217;s plight.</p>
<p>Professor Cowen introduced the symposium pointing out that in 2011, the major crisis was in the eurozone, where Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland dealt with the risk of default. The survival of the eurozone is now seriously doubted. Cowen added: &#8220;When it comes to a sovereign debt crisis, it is no longer possible to say &#8216;it can&#8217;t happen here.&#8217; Right now, we are borrowing about 40 cents of every dollar the federal government spends, and the imbalance has no end in sight.&#8221;</p>
<p>Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, associate professor of economics at San Jose State University, says that a default on Treasury securities appears inevitable.</p>
<p>He says that the short-run consequences for the economy will be painful but that the long-run consequences, both political and economic, could be beneficial. That&#8217;s because an economic collapse is the only way we will come to our senses. That&#8217;s a tragic statement about the foresight of the American people.</p>
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		<title>Rep. Paul Ryan clashes with Obama over budget &#8211; washingtonpost.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/rep-paul-ryan-clashes-with-obama-over-budget-washingtonpost-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rep-paul-ryan-clashes-with-obama-over-budget-washingtonpost-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/rep-paul-ryan-clashes-with-obama-over-budget-washingtonpost-com/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:56:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[age]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Baltimore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget Deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[budget legislation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[budget plan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[corporations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economic growth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[goal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[growth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Legislation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicaid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[medicaid beneficiaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[opposition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[opposition party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[private insurance plans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Released]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rep. Paul D]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[republican lawmaker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[retirement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[retirement age]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[retreat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ryan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[session]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[solvent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[someone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tax]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tax rate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[week]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wisconsin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wisconsin republican]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49252</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Rep. Paul D. Ryan says he is determined to make sure the Republican Party is viewed as &#8220;the alternative party, not the opposition party.&#8221; That is a goal President Obama embraced when he visited House Republicans at their policy retreat in Baltimore last week, and he singled out Ryan as someone he would like to [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Rep. Paul D. Ryan says he is determined to make sure the Republican Party is viewed as &#8220;the alternative party, not the opposition party.&#8221;</p>
<p>That is a goal <a href="http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Barack_Obama">President Obama</a> embraced when he visited House Republicans at their policy retreat in Baltimore last week, and he singled out Ryan as someone he would like to work with &#8212; even mentioning budget legislation the Wisconsin Republican co-wrote.</p>
<p>Released two days before the unusual back-and-forth session between Obama and the GOP, the bill sponsored by Ryan and five other House members would seek to reduce the deficit and spur economic growth by cutting the tax rate on corporations, shifting future Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries to private insurance plans, and both raising the retirement age gradually to 70 and reducing the growth of benefits to make Social Security solvent. Even Democrats have acknowledged that it is one of the few plans offered by a member of either party that would lower the long-term budget deficit.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020404238.html">Republican lawmaker&#8217;s budget plan gets Obama&#8217;s attention &#8211; washingtonpost.com</a>.</p>
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