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Charles Krauthammer examines the administration’s social security position.
Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – Social Security is the most solvable.
Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett’s check gets redirected to a senior in need.
The relative ease of the fix is what makes the Obama administration’s Social Security strategy so shocking. The new line from the White House is: no need to fix it because there is no problem. As Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote in USA Today just a few weeks ago, the trust fund is solvent until 2037. Therefore, Social Security is now off the table in debt-reduction talks.
This claim is a breathtaking fraud. …
… On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia denounced Obama for lack of leadership on the debt. It’s worse than that. Obama is showing leadership. With Lew’s preposterous claim that Social Security is solvent for 26 years, Obama is preparing to lead the charge against entitlement reform as his ticket to reelection.
Jonah Goldberg clues us in on Washington math.
By earth-logic, if you got a raise of 10 percent last year, but this year you’re only getting a raise of 8 percent, you’re still getting a raise. On Planet Washington, that qualifies as an indefensible slashing.
So when the GOP cut $4 billion from the budget last week, the Democrats acted as if it was an involuntary amputation.
Now the GOP wants to cut $61 billion of discretionary nondefense spending from the total budget of $3.7 trillion, and Democrats are responding as if this will spell the end of Western civilization.
But given their terror of forcing a government shutdown, Democrats were forced to counteroffer with a cut of $10.5 billion, or 0.28 percent of the federal budget.
Imagine you have a budget of $10,000 (about 40 percent of it borrowed on a credit card), then “slash” 28 bucks. That’s what it’s like to be a frugal Democrat. …
John Steele Gordon notes liberal lock-step commentary.
… The nice thing about liberal political commentary these days, apparently, is that you only have to read one to know what all the others say as well.
David Harsanyi wants to know why we can’t discuss radical Islam.
… Now, admittedly, I don’t believe criticism of religious ideology is equivalent to prejudice. Why does any belief deserve dispensation for its stunningly illiberal outlook of, say, the role of women in society? In Egypt’s Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the anticipated democratic nation, a mob of God-fearing men aggressively descended on the women there on International Women’s Day, intimidating and abusing them.
Sometimes it seems some of us are more concerned with admonishing political incorrectness than overt intolerance.
And though I am skeptical that King’s hearings will accomplish anything constructive, the obfuscation of his goals is, in the end, more harmful than the hearings themselves. Because it’s the critics who have falsely transformed a ham-handed congressman’s hearing on radicalism into an imagined referendum on all American Muslims. Which turns something useless into something incendiary.
Since Jacques Barzun graduated from Columbia as valedictorian of the class of 1927, he might be expected to know something about the history of the college.
… In 1969, spurred by antiwar student riots, the university cancelled its Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, which had its roots in the Columbia Midshipmen’s School that trained over 23,000 naval officers in World War II. By the 1990s, after the fervor around the Vietnam War had subsided, university officials justified keeping ROTC off campus because of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
With Congress having repealed that edict last year, Columbia faculty have raised new arguments against ROTC. Some faculty members have recently circulated a petition that the military should remain banned because it continues to be a “discriminatory institution” on the basis of “many reasons from physical disability to age.” The basketball team discriminates too. …
We don’t often celebrate the conquests of Arianna Huffington, but her evisceration of the pompous editor of the NY Times is something to behold. Jennifer Rubin has the story. Here’s Arianna;
“I wonder what site he’s been looking at. Not ours, as even a casual look at HuffPost will show. Even before we merged with AOL, HuffPost had 148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism. . . .
… And did he not notice that he lost one of his top business reporters, Peter Goodman, to The Huffington Post — despite his best efforts to keep him? Indeed, on the very day that Keller’s column began circulating, we published a piece Goodman edited, a 4,000-word investigation of a for-profit college by Goodman’s first hire, Chris Kirkham, a former Washington Post intern. Did he think he came over to aggregate adorable kitten videos? And was he too busy scanning all those lists of “most powerful people” he’s on to notice that he also lost one of his top editors, Tim O’Brien, to us? . . . . But then Keller went much further, accusing me of “aggregating” his very thoughts!”
Fascinating post from Reason on how trade made us human. The writing is a bit dense, but the Reason summary will tell you if you want to read more.
… To summarize: trade and the division of labor are hallmarks of human cooperation. These findings bolster the arguments made in my friend Matt Ridley’s superb new book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Ridley argues that groups that took advantage of the division of labor and traded peaceably with strangers outcompeted less cooperative groups. And more cooperation leads to more invention and more prosperity over time.
Nothing dense about Reuters story about people who walk on the mudflats of the Thames. They’re called mudlarks.
It’s seven in the morning and we kneel in black mud on the freezing banks of London’s River Thames in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, where a church has dominated the ancient city since the 7th century.
As the tide ebbs exposing the shore, Steve Brooker casually tosses a 17th century trader’s token he has found in the dirt into his bucket.
“Remember it’s all about getting your eye in,” says Brooker, who, armed with little more than a trowel, gloves, obligatory boots and an infectious enthusiasm has been combing the foreshore for antiquities for the past 20 years.
Traders’ tokens were issued by local merchants during and after the English Civil War (1642-1651) as a form of small change at a time when lower denominations of the realm were out of circulation. Preserved by the oxygen-free mud, the tiny copper-alloy farthing bears the name Thomas Lowe of Three Nuns Alley.
The other side of the coin is stamped with the figures of three nuns and is later traced to a merchant’s house in a long-lost narrow lane that now lies buried deep somewhere beneath Threadneedle Street, home to the Bank of England.
“You can smell the history down here — it’s everywhere,” he says as we disappear from view for a guided tour under the cavernous quay supports of Old Billingsgate Fish Market, an ancient place associated with the trade of all manner of goods, including seafood, since medieval times.
Brooker, 49, a larger than life character — he is 6 feet 6 inches tall — is no ordinary beachcomber however.
He is one of only 45 members of the Society of Thames Mudlarks who are licensed by the Port of London Authority to search the northern shore between Westminster, the seat of government, in the west of the old city and the Tower of London in the east. …