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

To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (551369)	3/13/2004 4:05:19 AM
From: DOUG H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

mwhodges.home.att.net mwhodges.home.att.net Each year nearly every congress-person in both parties claims they want to save social security. But every year they allow every penny of paid-in surpluses to the trust fund to be spent on other stuff. The total amount siphoned-off from the trust fund to date is $1.3 Trillion, With zero plan to pay it back to support future retirees. Trust fund surplus siphoning continues to help camouflage government spending, So budget surpluses can be claimed when acutally there are deficits, Or smaller deficits can be claimed than is really the case. This camaflauge helps politicians get elected, Drives up debt like crazy And destroys social security and other trust funds. And - destroys citizen trust in government

To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (551369)	3/13/2004 6:55:56 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

Roh came to power promising to be South Korea's Robin Hood. He looked to poorer South Koreans left out of the economic miracle that in 30 years transformed an Asian backwater into an industrialized global powerhouse with one of Asia's highest standards of living. Roh and his new crop of mostly young aides -- many of them dissidents during Seoul's military governments -- levied more taxes on the rich while spending billions of dollars on new government housing for the poor. In January, Roh fired his foreign minister and cleaned house in the North American affairs division after top officials had made statements that were deemed too pro-Washington. But many South Koreans see the United States as the nation's great protector against the menace of the North, which maintains an army of 1.1 million across the most heavily militarized border in the world. "We strongly believe Roh lacks the ability and morality to lead the country and govern the people," said Park Jin, a Grand National Party legislator and a key supporter of the impeachment proceedings. "Roh has led the country down the wrong path." Analysts say it is difficult to predict whether South Korea's Constitutional Court will uphold the impeachment. If Roh is reinstated by the court, and his supporters increase their foothold in the National Assembly, he could gain a new public mandate for policies that do not always coincide with Washington's, analysts say. Although Roh and his staff have been ridiculed in the South Korean press for gaffes during their administration -- including sending important faxes to the wrong offices and blurting out off-the-cuff public statements -- Roh remains a shrewd politician, analysts say. Offered a chance by his opponents to escape impeachment proceedings if he simply apologized for his public remarks in support of the Uri Party, Roh refused. Many suspect he is gambling that his impeachment will make him seem a victim of the establishment. That could shore up his popularity, which has been slipping because of a corruption scandal that sent several of his aides to prison for accepting illegal campaign funds. But analysts see it as a dangerous ploy. South Korea's nascent economic recovery is showing signs of weakness, and foreign investors are likely to see the new political instability as another reason to avoid South Korea and seek more stable havens elsewhere in Asia.

To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (551369)	3/13/2004 11:00:49 AM
From: Srexley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Alan Greenspan must be lying then. Because he says it is in big trouble and that we need to lower benefits, and eventually raise taxes to keep it going. And this is well before 2042. The poster I was responding to said we should lower SS taxes, which would exacerbate the problem. So it is you that is lying, it appears.

To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (551369)	3/13/2004 11:09:10 AM
From: Srexley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

This editorial contains some interesting facts that are backed by credible sources. Unlike your unbacked source that SS is totally sound through 2042. sacbee.com George F. Will: Quiet on entitlements By George F. Will Published 2:15 a.m. PST Thursday, March 4, 2004 WASHINGTON -- American politics may have had stupider, more undignified moments than this. It is impossible to imagine Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan doing anything like John Kerry leading a crowd chanting "Send Bush to Mars!" Has any candidate ever gone further on anything dumber than John Edwards' three-hanky tear-jerker speech about a father losing a job? Most of the approximately 1 million small businesses started each year fail -- send for more hankies -- within a decade, so it is unsurprising that 10 percent of manufacturing jobs, and an even higher percentage of service jobs, are normally eliminated every year. All this was a feast of reason compared to the Kerry and Edwards responses -- approximately, "Shut up!" -- to Alan Greenspan's restatement of this problem: There is a mismatch between the Social Security and Medicare promises we have made to ourselves -- calls on the nation's future economic product -- and the ability of the economy to fund those promises when the 77 million baby boomers retire. According to Laurence J. Kotlikoff of Boston University, the present value of the gap between promised outlays and projected revenues is $51 trillion -- more than four times the nation's annual GDP. Today the household wealth of Americans -- the value of their houses, 401(k)s, cars, refrigerators, toasters, socks, everything -- is about $42 trillion. In impeccable Greenspan-speak, the government's truth-teller said "significant structural adjustments" will be necessary. This much is widely understood: Raising the retirement age and some other benefit reductions (including taking the exaggeration of inflation out of cost-of-living computations) will be necessary because tax increases to fund current benefit schedules would cripple the economy. It is axiomatic -- meaning, true outside of Washington -- that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. Here are some facts, many of them gleaned from a new book from the MIT press, "The Coming Generational Storm" by Kotlikoff and Scott Burns of The Dallas Morning News. By 2030, the boomers, who begin retiring in 2008, will have made America's population older than Florida's is today. America's population will have increased perhaps as much as 18 percent, its retirees 100 percent. Already the fastest rate of growth of any age cohort is of Americans over 85. Today life expectancy at birth is 76, which is troublesome enough, but additional expectancy at 65 is 17 years -- and growing. For about 150 years the longest life expectancies have advanced about 2.5 years per decade. Most people start collecting Social Security at 62, so the year 2019 will be especially challenging because more American babies were born in 1957 -- 4.3 million in a population of 172 million — than in any year in American history. Today there are more than 100 million additional Americans, but there were fewer than 4 million newborns per year throughout the 1990s. In the 1950s the median age for women's first marriages was 20.3. By 2000 it was 25.1. This has meant a decline in fecundity, which affects the wager we have made on Social Security as an intergenerational compact -- children being able and willing to support the elderly. On Jan. 31, 1940, a check, numbered 00-000-001, for $22.54 was issued to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., making her the first recipient of recurring monthly Social Security payments. Then, in an act of dubious citizenship, she lived to 100, dying in January 1975, having received $22,000 in benefits. That did not matter because in 1940 there were 42 workers for every retiree. Today there are 3.2 to one. In 2030 there will be 2.2 to 1. Nowadays, parents have fewer children than they used to, the children are geographically more dispersed and their sense of obligation is attenuated by distance and divorce. Since 1963 medical costs have grown faster than the economy. And given the dynamism of medical science that is multiplying expensive diagnostic and therapeutic technologies -- pharmacological and others -- medical costs are likely to grow even faster relative to the economy. Kerry and Edwards simply recoil from contemplating the consequences of these facts, hoping, like Dickens' Mr. Micawber, that something will turn up. The Bush administration has a plan (individual accounts investing a portion of Social Security taxes) for coping with the facts, but no discernible plan -- certainly none it will discuss -- for economies that will make possible paying the transition costs. All of which suggests that entitlement reform remains one of those contentious issues that cannot be debated in an election year or the year before one. Meaning: ever.

To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (551369)	3/13/2004 3:53:51 PM
From: Srexley	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769670

"SS is 100% solvent until 2042 according to the SS Trustees report" This is an outright LIE. Here is what the report says: "The fundamentals of the financial status of Social Security and Medicare under the intermediate economic and demographic assumptions remain highly problematic. Although both programs are currently running annual surpluses, these will give way to rapidly rising annual deficits soon after the baby-boom generation begins to retire in about 2010. The growing deficits will lead to rapidly mounting pressures on the Federal budget in a decade and exhaustion of trust funds beginning in little more than two decades that will not permit full payment of currently scheduled benefits. In the long run, these deficits are projected to grow at unsustainable rates" What a jack-ass you are. This bold lie kind of proves that you idiots will say anything in hopes that nobody will check it out. And you say I am dumb (another unsubstantiated claim! lol