"George Willer" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
"George Willer" wrote in message
...
Ed,

Forgive me for being just an uneducated bumpkin who never went to
college,
but we are looking at different things.

Just to qualify it, I didn't question Jim's intelligence, and certainly
didn't question yours. I don't, however, confuse exposure to
education
with intelligence. We simply differ on the value of converting to
socialist
programs that cause more harm than good.

You said "intelligence." I'm just taking you at your word, George.

Then take me at my word and go back to see the context. I gave Jim credit
for having the intelligence to understand.

I do and always have recognized
the impending disaster that was set up when SS was first put in place,
for
example. I think it was about 3rd grade when we learned to do the
math.

That must have been some math. The top economists in the country still
don't
know what's going to happen. They're doing politics, not math, making
the
assumptions that further their causes.

Most ordinary citizens know what the long term effects of declining birth
rates and increasing retirees with their longer life spans will have on S
S.

Most don't. I'm not going to belabor statistics here, but here's a brief
sampler. The US Bureau of the Census's projections for the US population in
2042 versus today (2042 is a key year in some of the SS debates, which is
why I chose it):

2005 (as of yesterday):
295,801,760
2042, low estimate:
314,707,000
2042, high estimate:
490,401,000
2042, "zero international migration series" (you can figure that one out):
322,506,000
2042, "middle series" (best-guess, in other words)
382,555,000

Look at the size of that range, George: between 314 million and 490 million.
Jeez. The most accurate way to interpret it is that Census doesn't have a
freaking idea of what the population will be. Neither does anyone else. The
gap between "zero immigration" (there is very little emigration from the US)
and "best guess" is almost 70,000,000 people. Those are immigrants, and
they'll be working, assuming that any of us are. g But what will our
immigration policies be? Do you know?

About birthrates: The rates went UP after you were in 3rd grade, George, not
down. They hit a peak in the early '50s. So where were you getting the idea
that the birth rate was going down when you were in 3rd grade? If you got
that idea from somewhere, you did your arithmetic wrong. And nobody was
predicting the kind of decline we had over the past few decades. That's a
new phenomenon. Neither you, nor anyone else, had a clue.

As for lifespan, the U of Chicago med school is predicting a 2- to 5-year
DECLINE in average lifespan in the US within 20 years. The average lifespan
isn't the figure you want, anyway: it's distorted by higher infant mortality
rates in the early part of the last century, so it tells you nothing about
the relationship of workers to retirees. The figure you want is "life
expectancy at 65." In the last 25 years, it's increased by only 1.4 years.

So you really had nothing to go on but a bunch of bunk, which is what George
Bush is running on now. The people who do this kind of actuarial analysis
for a living will tell you the same thing, that the current situation faced
by SS is the result of the post-WWII baby boom, not the result of some
structural fault with SS. It can be fixed, if we decide that fixing it is
what we want to do.

Yes, we could easily have figured it out in grade school that there would
be
a day of reckoning... just not exactly when. Top economists? Phooey!

sigh Sometimes I wonder how we survive as a democracy. . .


What do you call "socialism"? Get specific. Let's hear what programs you
object to. Tell us which ones you'd eliminate.

For starters, I would eliminate every program that no Constitutional
basis.

Well, there goes the Army and Air Force. I think we get to keep the Navy.
Some people will be happy to get their slaves back. . .

Redistributing the rewards for one's efforts by force is at the top of the
list. What new Marxist socialist programs would you like to start?


Public security is bull****! There is no such thing... only the
illusion
of
security.

There is no private security. There is no such thing, as millions of
people
realized just a few years before you were born. You must have missed it.

No, I didn't miss the great depression. I lived with it's aftermath every
day until I left home at 18. I worked very hard to secure my family's
security the only way to be truly secure... with skill, ambition, and hard
work.

Well, a few tens of millions of people lost their shirts during the
Depression. That's why you had to work so hard -- because your "security"
had gone to hell, and you had to start all over again. That's not
"security." That's *recovery*, which is exactly what my father and
grandfather had to do, too.

So, you rebuilt your security. And now George Bush wants to put people right
back where they were in 1929: living on an imaginary cloud of private
"security." Bull****. If you didn't learn it then, then you're not likely to
learn it now.

I doubt if anything will change your mind, George, so believe what you want.
But the fact is, you had no idea what was going to happen to SS then, and
you have no idea now. Neither does anyone else.

One thing is certain, though, from any real actuarial analysis of the facts.
Social Security can get over this hump and it can be saved, if we want to
save it. If we become convinced that it can't be saved, then we'll find a
way to destroy it. The question is how many people thought they had it all
figured out when they were in 3rd grade.

--
Ed Huntress