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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (191480)	10/12/2001 3:09:03 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769668

Well, what do you expect? We're stuck with a big government, and I'm a pragmatist. I'll go with whatever works! With one caveat though: If given my druthers, I prefer true Long Term Solutions... not short-term band-aid fixes (like the kind we have been ladling on Social Security for years). Social Security - a paradigm of big government solutions - is so clearly just a Ponzi scheme... because it fails to account for the fluctuations in population growth that are inevitable in a real society. A 'pay-as-you-go' solution such as S.S. is, mathematically cannot fail to be demonstrably unfair... unless you have a static, unchanging population. That is obviously not a real world population. The fact that no political party of either stripe has had the guts to correct the inequity by transitioning us to a '401K style' insurance program, in the entire history of the program from FDR down to now, despite the fact that the program's designed-in weaknesses were blindingly obvious, is one of the most gut-wrenching failures of American political leadership I can think of. Even little Chile has managed to transition to a retirement plan type program. The FICA tax bite out of the middle-class and lower paycheck is now the largest tax bite for most of our population... and future retirees will get little or nothing on their 'investment'. The only way the system will continue to creak along into the next generation is to inflate the hell out of the dollar.... The politicians all know this, but they don't really care... they will all be long gone from office when the bill comes due. By the way, when the federal income tax was passed, it was supposed to be a temporary measure to finance WWI, and was to be 'repealed' right after the conflict was over. The maximum rate was 1 1/2%. When Congress was debating the measure, one guy rose up to suggest that 'ultimately this tax could rise to even 2%... and he was roundly shouted down. No one thought such a thing was possible. That telephone tax you pay on your phone bill every month was levied in the time of Edison. It too was supposed to go away just as soon as the phone lines were strung :-)