Tag: usatoday

It’s on: Apple cranks up the Beats for $3 billion

CUPERTINO, Calif.

By welcoming Beats into his portfolio, Apple CEO Cook is acknowledging a shift away from its pioneering iTunes pay-per-song model and toward streaming audio. He also is side-stepping founder Jobs’ insistence that all Apple hits be crafted in-house.

I guess we’re not counting iTunes (which started life as SoundJam MP until Apple bought, re-skinned, and renamed it) and of course iPod, which was Apple industrial design around the PortalPlayer reference platform and Pixo software. So, yes, excepting those two massive omissions in the most directly comparable field to that which you are writing about, Jobs insisted on only Apple crafted hits.

Additionally worth noting that Jobs apparently outsourced Apple misses. Looking at you, Cube.

It’s on: Apple cranks up the Beats for $3 billion

Social Security Pays for Itself

OMB director Jacob Lew, from the turnstile:

Social Security benefits are entirely self-financing. They are paid for with payroll taxes collected from workers and their employers throughout their careers. These taxes are placed in a trust fund dedicated to paying benefits owed to current and future beneficiaries.

[…]

For years, the surpluses in the Social Security trust fund have helped to mask our deficits elsewhere. Now that we are paying Social Security back, the problem is not with Social Security, but with the rest of the budget. In 2001 and 2003, Washington cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and later expanded Medicare without paying for it. Blaming Social Security for our fiscal woes is like blaming you for not saving enough in your checking account because the bank lost all depositors’ money.

Replace “Washington” in the second-to-last sentence with “Republicans and the Bush Administration rammed through” and we are in full agreement. Now if we can just get serious people talking in these terms on the serious Sunday morning shows (and etc…) every week for the next 20 or so years, the logical argument can finally begin on equal footing.

Social Security Pays for Itself