Tag: kevin drum

…you just need to be really brazen about your flip-flops. Sure, sites like ThinkProgress or Politifact with catch you, and the first few times that happens maybe you’re a little worried about what’s going to happen. But then it dawns on you: nothing is going to happen. Your base doesn’t read ThinkProgress. The media doesn’t really care and is happy to accept whatever obvious nonsense you offer up in explanation. The morning chat shows will continue to book you. It just doesn’t matter.

Kevin Drum, yesterday, on Newt’s ridiculous flip-floppery re: Libya (last week: bomb ‘em into the stone age!; this week: we can’t just go around bombing countries willy nilly!). I thought Drum was being a bit overwrought with this, but then the sad spectacle this morning of NPR doing exactly this…they presented a smorgasbord of GOP talking points about the GOP House not being “consulted” sufficiently pre-bombing.
Of course, these same GOP House members were screaming “bomb! bomb! bomb!” every day of every week leading up to bombs falling, but their opinions were apparently unheeded. As soon as the first bomb fell, though, those opinions did a 180. Now intervention was out of the question. The whole “Obama dithers too much!!!” meme: down the memory hole forever.
NPR uncritically reported this new GOP position, paying zero heed to the old GOP position (of last fucking week), larding it with a “he fools around too much running about in Latin America” and only then stamping the whole moldering package with a fig leaf in the form of a “some say” from an administration flack.
But yes, NPR is clearly a liberal hellspawn that must be destroyed if we’re ever to have any semblance of balance in reportage.

…how much more concrete could our current situation be? Republicans — and, unfortunately, some Democrats too — are pushing for an economic austerity plan that will keep unemployment high and the job market loose. The result is downward pressure on wages, which keeps middle-class incomes stagnant and corporate profits high. This benefits the executive and investor class, and while it’s a shortsighted benefit, it’s a benefit nonetheless. And it’s not thanks to globalization or returns to education or anything like that. It’s due to a deliberate political decision that favors the rich at the expense of everyone else.

Kevin Drum
If only we had a particularly skilled orator in high office somewhere who could use some sort of bully pulpit to explain this concept in simple terms once or twice a day from now until the thought finally sinks in and takes root. Meh: So it goes.

Or: Why most of Congress could give a shit about unions, jobs, and generally thinks Social Security needs to be discontinued as soon as possible because who even needs that kind of small-potatoes stuff unless they totally screwed up or chose a bad accountant?

From the supplemental graphs section (seriously) of Kevin Drum’s excellent piece on Our Plutocracy and ever growing inequality.

Social Security isn’t even hard to understand. Taxes go in, benefits go out. Unlike healthcare, which involves extremely difficult questions of technological advancement and the specter of rationing, Social Security is just arithmetic.

[…]

Right now, Social Security costs about 4.5% of GDP. That’s going to increase as the baby boomer generation retires, and then in 2030 it steadies out forever at around 6% of GDP.

That’s it. That’s the story. Our choices are equally simple. If, about ten years from now, we slowly increase payroll taxes by 1.5% of GDP, Social Security will be able to pay out its current promised benefits for the rest of the century. Conversely, if we keep payroll taxes where they are today, benefits will have to be cut to 75% of their promised level by around 2040 or so. And if we do something in the middle, then taxes will go up, say, 1% of GDP and benefits will drop to about 92% of their promised level. But one way or another, at some level between 75% and 100% of what we’ve promised, Social Security benefits will always be there.

This is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s not unsustainable. The percentage of old people in America isn’t projected to grow forever. Lifespans will not increase to infinity. Taxes go in, benefits go out. It’s simple.

Kevin Drum: big yep. And almost a usable political slogan as well: Taxes go in, benefits come out. Got to work on something for the T-word, though.
It is, however, remarkable how the serious people in the MSM have obligingly turned Social Security into some sort of indecipherable rocket science which everyone knows will be defunct sometime later this week, all without ever pausing to consider that Social Security is A): self funded outside the annual budget (and therefore deficit neutral for many, many years to come), and B): the easiest fix currently in the entire governmental clusterfuck that the GOP both caused and loves to natter on about. You want to talk about something important? Let’s talk Medicare or defense spending if you want to get at the real dollars, Gwen. Let’s talk about the Bush tax cuts. Your Liberal Media.
Source: Mother Jones

Right on, Kevin Drum. Implicit here is what nobody ever seems to say: if your taxable income is $250,001, you will see tax increase only on that last one dollar. You still get the tax break on the first $250K, just like every single other American. Compare that to the GOP plan (red portion of bars). Utter and indefensible lunacy.

And yet The Democrat is absolutely getting his clock cleaned on this.

I don’t see any possible repercussions to this fecklessness and timidity in the face of a fight on which you hold the economic, moral, and public-opinion high grounds once we get to the real fight early next year on the debt ceiling.

Will the “Real” McCain Please Stand Up?

…the McCain phenomenon has always baffled me. Even back in the glory days of the Straight Talk Express he seemed like a consummate phony to me, sucking up to reporters not because he was being unusually candid, but because it seemed like a good strategy to beat a well-financed guy who was running ahead of him. He’s always been nasty, he’s always been hot tempered, he’s always looked out for number one, and he’s always been willing to take whatever position was convenient at the time.

Yep. The media enjoyed the perception of total access, and thus created the myth of the maverick. As David Foster Wallace showed us (but whose text no longer appears to be online), the truth of “Bullshit 1” was always out there, they just refused to mention it. Too busy talking about Al Gore being told to wear un-American four button suits while discovering the Love Canal and then lying about these and other entirely media-created falsehoods.

Will the “Real” McCain Please Stand Up?

Kevin Drum supplies us with a graph that does more to explain the McDonalds thing than anything else I’ve seen. Red bar is current Mini-Med plan. As you can see, under ACA, the vast majority of McDonalds workers get a better deal; those earning minimum wage get a vastly better deal, in that far more comprehensive healthcare is now free for them.
In fact, only those making more than $12/hr, a tiny minority of McDonalds workers, will pay about what they pay now…and but also get a hell of a lot more useful health insurance.

Indeed: what a failure for the ACA. Yet this failure narrative, unintended consequences, and so forth is precisely what we hear from Our Liberal Media. Again and again.

This is just the sort of graph that needs to be trotted out every time this comes up. Simple and easy to understand. But isn’t. And now even self-identified Democrats are turning against a plan they most likely have no idea about other than what they’ve heard on FOXnews. Because those anchors are at least trying to tell the truth of the story, right?
If you don’t think this is a serious problem you haven’t been paying attention. This is why they fail.

Lockbox!

Kevin Drum provides (perhaps) the most lucid explanation of the Social Security Trust fund I’ve ever read:

Group A overpaid and built up a pile of bonds in the trust fund. Those bonds are a promise by Group B to repay the money. That promise is going to start coming due in a few years, and it’s hardly surprising that Group B isn’t as excited about the deal now as it was in 1983.

Yep. Read the whole thing to be shocked and dismayed by who Group B represents (and is represented by)…

Lockbox!

Kevin Drum visits the fever swamps so we don’t have to. Some of the explanations for this clearly nefarious number on the back of a (modern) Social Security card:

im researching it but from what I’ve gathered that is a bank routing number linking you as property of some royalty british bank.

My friend’s card has red numbers. Mine are of another color and I don’t know why.

That sounds like an observation that probably needs to be explained through conspiracy. Wait for it. Ahhh, here it is:

the red numbers on the back of the social security card are your EIN, employer ID number. If you’re just a regular John Doe citizen, you’re an employee of the US Corporation, and are in fact yourself a corporation. That’s why you use the number on the front, your employee ID number (SSN). Supposedly, if you have a replacement card issued to you, the number on the back will come in red ink, and you can use it to declare that you’re a soveriegn American and not a citizen OF the United States….If you use the number on the back, the “tracking number for blank cards” printed in red ink, you’re claiming ownership of the card and the chattel property it represents. You are the chattel property. If you don’t, they “own” you. You’re their chattel property, and you’re being used as collateral on the bankruptcy the US Govt. filed to the international banking houses back in the 1930’s, the time of the great depression.

So, with the red ink, I can declare myself a sovereign nation, but with the blue ink, I’m still chattel property, but I only have to obtain a card with the red ink, declare myself a sovereign nation, and then stop paying my (clearly illegal) taxes. What if I start with the red ink and the new one comes in blue?

well to answer your questions about the red numbers on the back of your cards when i was working for the government i learned that during the great depression the government started investing in the world market in our names and using our ssn #’s so that if that ever happened again they could pay out the unemployed.

Most likely carried out at the department of redundancy department; however, they were declared redundant and payed out into unemployment sometime in the 1930’s. But, fully rational though it is, don’t pause too long to think about it because we now find ourselves at the root of all far-right conspiracy theory: separating the rubes from their money.

Please beware my friends of people who want to charge you money for this information. I paid out a pretty penny so far and the information I received is conflicting. I have some friends that are working with a “Patriot” who has gladdly accepted many thousands of dollars from them as a fee to help them and so far all that has happened is they got there bank accounts closed for righting fraudelent checks. Nobody has been arrested though so that is interesting but I am following there progress closely.

Now, of course, Drum helpfully points out that one with either a blue or red number could just check this stuff out, for free, and discover that:

Sequential Control Number. On the rear of a legitimate card there is a sequential control number. The control number is a combination of alpha and numeric that bears no relation to the actual social security number on the card. However, the computer records of the Social Security Administration should show a correlation between the control number and the social security number and name on the card.

Which is just what the Bilderbergers want you to think, chattel.