Friday Cat

Social Security "Survivor"

There are people who want to eliminate Social Security. Like their kin, the people who want to eliminate a woman's right to choose. Both goals are detrimental to the vast majority of people.

Instead of proposing what they are really after, they propose cuts to Social Security, or the piecemeal whittling away at access to safe, legal abortion. These incremental steps make it easier to obscure the underlying agenda. Further obfuscation comes through the use of misleading banners like "Save Social Security" (by cutting it!), or any of the myriad slogans the right-to-lifers choose to obscure the fact that what they are really trying to do is force their religious beliefs on everyone.

These Social Security Eliminators (in Social Security Cutters' clothing) suggest that we should cut Social Security benefits. The people they are suggesting cutting benefits from (everyone currently receiving Social Security, everyone about to receive Social Security, and everyone working in America today) have, since the day they started working, payed a portion of their earnings into Social Security. They did so to support the retired population so that elderly folks no longer able to work would not fall into destitution. Even the hardest of hearts would have a hard time arguing against such a social good. These payments were made on the promise that those who pay in will be receive that same social benefit upon their retirement.

The Eliminators/Cutters want to break that social contract. It's that simple.

Here's a great idea for a way to educate those Cutters on what it's like to live on current Social Security benefits. Maybe it will change their minds on cutting them:

A new reality show starring the people who want to cut Social Security. He suggests having John Boehner, billionaire benefit-cut advocate Peter G. Peterson, and Deficit Commission chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles live for a year on the average Social Security benefit of $14,000.

Read more.

Blogging

Should be back soon. Work sucks.

Republican Bubbles

From David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, in the New York Times:

[Senate minority leader Republican Mitch] McConnell’s [extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy] stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy...[The current Republican fiscal] approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy.

Read more.

Truth in Comics

If it's Sunday, it's Truth in Comics.