http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/430457/november-13-2013/blood-in-the-water---richard-cohen-s-conventional-wisdom
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Stephen Colbert Takes Down Richard Cohen
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/430457/november-13-2013/blood-in-the-water---richard-cohen-s-conventional-wisdom
Monday, November 18, 2013
Young Compassionate Conservatives
On Sunday, I joined a number of these 40-somethings to watch the Browns-Bengals game. At one point, the telecast went to a commercial break which was an appeal for charitable relief contributions for the many victims of Typhoon Haiyan. One of the biggest, most powerful, most damaging storms the world has ever seen, Haiyan tore through the Philippine Islands over a week ago. Over 4 million people have been displaced, with the death toll at 4000 and counting.
I love my little friends. They're good people, family people. I enjoy their company. We have so much in common, with the lone exception being that most of them are acute conservatives. So the moment the Haiyan relief ad ended, one of my young buddies piped up loudly with his opinion that those fuckin' Filipinos sure had their nerve asking us for money. After all, how much did they send us after Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Katrina or whatever?
Whatever for sure, dude. The comment was so off-base, so tone-deaf and so uncalled-for even his fellow young conservatives were silent. And never mind that disaster relief doesn't work that way and that, compared to the U.S., the Philippine government barely has two nickels to rub together.
Being the wise old fart in this gathering, I played deaf and said nothing. But I wondered to myself, when I was 40, was I that big of a douchebag?
(Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. "No, not then, Buster, but you sure as hell are now!" Touche, my friends. Touche.)
Family Feud
Yes indeed, Liz, who needs family when you can have power instead?
Mary declared her sister to be "offensive" and "on the wrong side of history." A colleague of Liz's said "Liz is a lot like Ted Cruz, only less charming." (Ooh, that's a good one!)
Father Dick(head) had previously said he supported Mary without reservations. Today, he tried to have it both ways, saying Liz "treats her sister with love and respect, but has always believed in traditional marriage." That's slicing the old baloney pretty goddam thin, Dick. Some people believe the earth is flat, but they're still wrong, aren't they?
It's all quite amusing. Couldn't happen to a nicer family.
"We asked one hundred people at random, 'Who is the biggest asshole in Wyoming?'
Tom Suddes on Right To Work (For Less)
____________________________________________________________
An outfit named Ohioans for Workplace Freedom wants voters to sign a petition to place a right-to-work constitutional amendment directly on Ohio's ballot. Claiming that Right To Work is about workplace freedom is like calling a slave-owner a job creator.
The only workplace freedom that Right To Work cheerleaders want is bosses' freedom -- and the destruction of unions' independent political power.
Yikes! I'm Not Even Halfway In My Right Mind!
Below is a fun little 30-second "test" which purports to determine if you are right-brain dominant or left-brain dominant. In a general physiological sense, the right hemisphere of the brain controls the muscles on the left side of the body, while the left hemisphere controls the right side. In general psychological measures, left-brain dominant people are said to be analytical and do well in math and science, while the right-siders are supposed to be creative and excel in the arts and people skills.
I took the test and it said I was 53% left-brain and 47% right-brain, which makes me neither analytical nor creative -- just a middle-of-the-road dullard.
Click the link and take the test!
http://en.sommer-sommer.com/braintest
Public Pension "Reform"
Buster (never a government employee) is acquainted with quite a few public-sector workers, both current and retired. The insightful article from the great Matt Taibbi linked below is quite good. What follows are bits and pieces. Hope your pension is doing well!
[Excerpts from "Looting The Pension Funds" by Matt Taibbi, published in the 10/10/13 issue of Rolling Stone.]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926
_______________________________________________________
There's $2.6 trillion in state pension money under management in America, and there are a lot of fingers in that pie.
The Employee Retirement Income Safety Act (ERISA) of 1974 was a landmark worker-protection law that left open a major loophole: It didn't cover public pensions. Politicians quickly learned to take liberties, [like] illegally borrowing cash from public retirement funds to finance other budget needs, then never paying it back. It's the governmental equivalent of stealing from your kids' college fund to buy lap dances.
In the past decade, a number of states have regularly failed to make their Annual Required Contributions to their pension funds. New Jersey, for example, made just 33% of its required payments. This rampant underpayment was rationalized by unwavering belief in the bull market and the assumption the good times would never end.
Then five years ago, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios -- remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its toxic mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.
Suddenly states were in a real, no-joke fiscal crisis. Somebody had to take the hit. It was then that the legend of "pension unsustainability" -- a.k.a "unfunded liability" -- was born. It had nothing to do with systemic problems with pensions. It was instead a deadly combination of unscrupulous states illegally borrowing from their pensioners, and the unscrupulous banks whose mass sales of fraudulent subprime products crashed the market. The result was that states' pension funds were out some $930 billion. Yet the public was being told that the problem was state workers' benefits were simply too expensive.
The two paths out of this wilderness appeared to be bankruptcy or pension "reform". Although anyone could see that "reform" meant giving up cash, many public workers were scared enough to accept cuts as preferable to the alternative. Beyond this, most pension reforms required states to go after higher returns by seeking out "alternative investments"*.
*(Local readers may recall that Ohio was an early experimenter in "alternative investments". In the late 1990's, the Ohio Bureau of Workers Comp gave corrupt GOP fundraiser Thomas Noe $50 million to invest in "rare coins and other collectibles", including Beanie Babies. Noe stole some of the money, his investment tanked, and he went to jail, but the main consequence of "Coingate" was that states stopped disclosing where public money was invested. They didn't learn to stop doing it. They just learned to keep it secret.)
Many states turned to hedge funds, a private pool of high-risk, highly leveraged investments. They refuse to take a state's money without a non-disclosure guarantee. Hedge funds promise high returns but usually produce results no better than (and often worse than) a simple index fund. Hedge fund fees are infinitely more expensive than fees for index funds. The typical hedge fund management fee is "two plus twenty", meaning the manager collects 2% just for showing up, then gets 20% of any profits. Fees on a no-brainer index fund are around "one basis point", or .01% -- about 200 times less than the standard hedge fund fee.
Union leaders all over the country have started to figure out the perils of hiring a bunch of overpriced Wall Street wizards to manage the public's money.
Bottom line -- "unfunded pension liability" is, if not exactly fictional, certainly exaggerated to an outrageous degree. The idea that benefit packages are causing the fiscal crises in our states is a fabrication crafted by the very people who actually caused the problem. We have an unfunded pension liability problem because we've been ripping off retirees for decades -- but the solution being offered is to rip them off even more.
Asking cops, firefighters and teachers to take the first hit for a crisis caused by reckless politicians and thieves on Wall Street is low, even by American standards.
[Excerpts from "Looting The Pension Funds" by Matt Taibbi, published in the 10/10/13 issue of Rolling Stone.]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926
_______________________________________________________
There's $2.6 trillion in state pension money under management in America, and there are a lot of fingers in that pie.
The Employee Retirement Income Safety Act (ERISA) of 1974 was a landmark worker-protection law that left open a major loophole: It didn't cover public pensions. Politicians quickly learned to take liberties, [like] illegally borrowing cash from public retirement funds to finance other budget needs, then never paying it back. It's the governmental equivalent of stealing from your kids' college fund to buy lap dances.
In the past decade, a number of states have regularly failed to make their Annual Required Contributions to their pension funds. New Jersey, for example, made just 33% of its required payments. This rampant underpayment was rationalized by unwavering belief in the bull market and the assumption the good times would never end.
Then five years ago, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios -- remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its toxic mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.
Suddenly states were in a real, no-joke fiscal crisis. Somebody had to take the hit. It was then that the legend of "pension unsustainability" -- a.k.a "unfunded liability" -- was born. It had nothing to do with systemic problems with pensions. It was instead a deadly combination of unscrupulous states illegally borrowing from their pensioners, and the unscrupulous banks whose mass sales of fraudulent subprime products crashed the market. The result was that states' pension funds were out some $930 billion. Yet the public was being told that the problem was state workers' benefits were simply too expensive.
The two paths out of this wilderness appeared to be bankruptcy or pension "reform". Although anyone could see that "reform" meant giving up cash, many public workers were scared enough to accept cuts as preferable to the alternative. Beyond this, most pension reforms required states to go after higher returns by seeking out "alternative investments"*.
*(Local readers may recall that Ohio was an early experimenter in "alternative investments". In the late 1990's, the Ohio Bureau of Workers Comp gave corrupt GOP fundraiser Thomas Noe $50 million to invest in "rare coins and other collectibles", including Beanie Babies. Noe stole some of the money, his investment tanked, and he went to jail, but the main consequence of "Coingate" was that states stopped disclosing where public money was invested. They didn't learn to stop doing it. They just learned to keep it secret.)
Many states turned to hedge funds, a private pool of high-risk, highly leveraged investments. They refuse to take a state's money without a non-disclosure guarantee. Hedge funds promise high returns but usually produce results no better than (and often worse than) a simple index fund. Hedge fund fees are infinitely more expensive than fees for index funds. The typical hedge fund management fee is "two plus twenty", meaning the manager collects 2% just for showing up, then gets 20% of any profits. Fees on a no-brainer index fund are around "one basis point", or .01% -- about 200 times less than the standard hedge fund fee.
Union leaders all over the country have started to figure out the perils of hiring a bunch of overpriced Wall Street wizards to manage the public's money.
Bottom line -- "unfunded pension liability" is, if not exactly fictional, certainly exaggerated to an outrageous degree. The idea that benefit packages are causing the fiscal crises in our states is a fabrication crafted by the very people who actually caused the problem. We have an unfunded pension liability problem because we've been ripping off retirees for decades -- but the solution being offered is to rip them off even more.
Asking cops, firefighters and teachers to take the first hit for a crisis caused by reckless politicians and thieves on Wall Street is low, even by American standards.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
"I Liked My Old Plan (Because It Was Cheap)"
Some people with privately issued health insurance (i.e. not employer-provided, not Medicare or Medicaid) are now being informed by their carriers that their policy will not be renewed because it does not meet the new and improved minimum standards required under Obamacare. Qualifying coverage is available via their current carrier or other carriers, but at higher cost, often a lot higher.
That's because most of the people in this small segment are self-employed, work for a very small company, or took early retirement. Unlike most Americans (who may spend a career in an employer group plan, then move into Medicare and never know the true cost of their health insurance), these folks know that real, full-coverage health insurance in America is very expensive. And for reasons of that cost, many of these folks chose a relatively substandard plan mainly because it was relatively affordable. I know. Been there, done that.
Now the half-assed cheapo plans are history. Complaining that "I liked my old plan" essentially translates to "I liked my old price." Now the coverage is better but the premium is higher. Maybe you qualify for a tax credit, maybe you don't, but either way you gotta pay the full freight up front, then worry about your tax return later.
We can debate another time whether the higher premiums result solely from expanded coverage, or if some opportunistic profiteering is also involved. Both are minor factors. The main driver of premium costs continues to be the free-market, for-profit troika of Big Medical/Big Pharma/Big Insurance. Our twisted system is rigged for their benefit. As a result, every aspect of American health care simply costs too damn much.
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