Social Security and Medicare

So I'm watching the news yesterday, and the story is that the government will have to pay back the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds in 2017. Medicare is expected to be completely insolvent by 2019. Social Security will be in the red in 2019 and completely insolvent by 2041.

If those dates sound "too far off to care" or "I might not be alive by then" let me provide some perspective. If you're 25 right now, then in 2019 you'll be 36. So that means that all the medicare money that was taken from your paychecks all these years will not amount to anything.

And as for social security, if you're 25 now that means you'll be 56 when social security becomes completely insolvent, so you'll have just missed getting any benefits at all by 6 years.

So what do we do? I'll have to say for once in my life I agree with President Bush. I supported him in 2005 when he proposed the social security private accounts, for which he was slimed by the left. For those of you who are on the left and oppose the private accounts option (because it was optional and not mandatory), what is your solution? How do you fix a system that was designed to have a lot of workers on the bottom supporting a few workers at the top? Sure, it may have worked in the 30s when we were still a largely agrarian society and recent arrivals of Jewish and Catholic immigrants would have 6 or 7 kids, but since then social security has gone from having 13 workers to every retiree to 3 workers for every retiree. The only way to fix it is for people to have more kids, and how exactly is government going to force people to have more kids. THEY AREN'T!!! They can't!!!

It's so sad that the one thing that would have saved us from this looming crisis was put down by the left for 2 stupid reasons: (1) AARP pulls the strings of the Democrat marionets, (2) they wanted to get a cheap political victory after years of losing to the Republicans and after having just lost the 2004 presidential election.

So in 2041 when Social Security goes down the toilet and our debt mushrooms even larger than the outrageous amount we currently owe, remember who to thank: Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. Oh yeah, and also every Republican and Democrat administration that borrowed and borrowed and borrowed from the social security trust fund.

My e-mail to John Stossel of 20/20

Let me preface this before showing the e-mail: I have tremendous respect for John Stossel. I love his journalim and I agree with him far more often than not. He's done excellent exposees on the homeless, the education system in America, and health care, but I disagreed with him on energy, making points that I would expect him to know. Here it is:

John,

while I agree with you 90% of the time, I must disagree with you on ethanol. I am not a midwest farmer or a ADM lobbyist. I am a 25-year old city-slicker from San Antonio, TX. I disagree with you for 3 reasons: (1) Corn is not the only source of ethanol in this country. We have plenty of switchgrass that can be used for ethanol. We also have sugar cane in Florida and Louisianna, and sugar beets in Minnesota. Outside of this country there is Brazilian and Caribbean sugar cane. (2) You say ethanol has to be transported in trucks because it is corrosive to pipelines. Currently that is true, but how do you know that one day our pipelines won't be revamped in such a way that they will be able to carry ethanol. After all, if it couldn't be done, how do Flexfuel cars have fuel lines that can carry ethanol without corroding? (3) You say nothing of biodiesel. It is a non-corrosive compound that any diesel vehicle can run on. It can be made simply from USED restaurant cooking oil. The fats that lie in the grease tray for my George Forman Grill when I cook chicken breasts or burgers can be used for bio-diesel. So ethanol AND bio-diesel will one day help us become energy independent.

Thank you.

XM-Sirius merger should not pass go, not collect $200

In the news today I saw that the Justice Department has green-lighted the merger of the only 2 (or at least the only 2 that I'm aware of ) satellite radio carriers in the U.S. -- XM and Sirius. The only thing holding it back right now is review by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). Well I hope that my boy Jonathan Adelstein stands up for the American consumer and leads a strong effort to block this.

Folks, being a libertarian means you support and believe in the free market to provide better goods and services to the consumer, but that's only true given COMPETITION, and there is no competition when the only two companies in an industry merge.

Competition drives down costs and creates the best product. Without it, we might as well live in East Germany in the 1980s.

Good example of this is wrestling. When there was strong competition between WWF and WCW every monday night from 1996 to 1999, the product was hot. Millions in PPV sales, ticket sales, wrestler merchandise, and you felt like you had to watch it every Monday night or you'd miss something big. But in early 2001 when ECW went bankrupt and WCW got bought by Vince McMahon, the product gradually declined from thence.

Let's oppose this merger in whatever way we can. If it means disconnecting my service if it gets approved, so be it.

Let's also go on a hunt for other satellite radio companies and support them.

Wright is Right on a couple things.....

In all the hubbub about Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his relationship vis-a-vis Barak Obama, all the coverage has portrayed the Reverend in a strictly negative light. Whether it's Anderson Cooper 360, Hannity & Colmes, etc. etc., they have to show Reverend Wright talking about our foreign policy and incenuating he's "evil" for his views, and Obama is by default, evil as well. Before I proceed, I am not going to vote for Obama. He's a socialist. But a couple points about his pastor:

(1) He says we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki after fire-bombing them, and we "never batted an eye," yet we're so outraged about 9/11.
Hate to break it to ya, but that's true. A lot more people died after the nuking of those two cities in Japan during World War II, and nobody cared. President Truman even said he "slept like a baby" that night. But yet Truman is a saint to some in the Democratic party.
There was no reason to nuke Japan. The U.S. military had already driven Japanese forces out of all the island posessions they'd taken prior to Pearl Harbor, and those two cities had already been fire-bombed before the dropping of the atom bombs. But because America had to have it's way to the hilt, we had to punish them more than necessary. Also, Truman and the Pentagon felt it necessary to "send a message" to Stalin and Mao not to try to take any more territory.

(2) He says Israel is one of the reasons we were attacked on 9/11 and that Israel is an apartheid state not unlike pre-Mandela South Africa. That's also true. You can read Peter Bergen's interview with Osama bin Laden from 1997, or any other Osama Bin Laden speech and you'll note our support for Israel is one of the reasons so many Arabs and Muslims hate America. And as for the apartheid allegation, I don't know what other comparison could be used for a country that treats one group of people one way, and the other group a lesser way. I don't know what else you could describe a situation in which 500 Jews in Hebron live on and control 20% of the city, and 100,000 Arabs live on the other 80%. I don't know what else you could call a state that lets illegal West Bank settlers (who by the way are living there in violation of the Geneva conventions) have swimming pools in their back yard but has Arabs live on 60 liters of water a day. I don't know what else you would call a state that has "sanitized/Jewish-only roads."

(3) Liberation theology, contrary to what that black guy on Glen Beck who used to be a UN diplomat said last night, is not some concoction of Communist/Marxist countries who felt like they could not destroy the Church so they set out to redefine it. Liberation theology is simply put, a group of people anywhere in the world, who use their theology and the scriptural verses to emphasize the freeing from slavery or oppression. So in America in the 1800s, liberation theology existed among slaves. In pre-1888 Brazil, Catholic clergy who supported the rights of the indigenous and african slaves used adhered to Liberation theology. Same thing with Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. and Dr King Jr. Same thing with Fr. Atallah Hannah, a Jerusalem Orthodox Priest who uses his Christianity to emphasize freedom from Israeli oppression.

Bigot Neal Boortz show his ignorance and stupidity

So last night I'm in my car after work running a couple errands, mailing a couple things out at the post office, and I'm listening to right-wing talk radio as I usually do, and I hear Neal Boortz reading a newspaper clipping toward the end of his second hour, quoting an article about an Israeli-Arab doing an honor killing to his sister, all the while saying "this is the wonderful world of Islam," and this is "the peaceful serene religion."

He then refers to Islam as a "trash gutter religion."

Now, I happen to remember Louis Farrakhan getting into a lot of heat for saying Judaism is a "gutter religion," and rightfully so, even though I am not a critic of Farrakhan.

But Neal Boortz gets a free pass?? I know that if an Arab-American or a Pakistani-American called Judaism a gutter religion or said offensive things or used the worst possible examples of Jews, he wouldn't have a show? Why does Neal Boortz get to slide by? I think his sponsors should do to him the same thing that happened to Michael Graham after he called Islam "a terrorist organization." Give Boortz the boot.