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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (24901)	1/5/2005 12:33:22 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

the law states clearly that voter intent is what counts. Then the law is an ass.

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (24901)	1/5/2005 12:34:43 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 90947

Apocalypse 2018 Tuesday January 4, 7:00 pm ET Ibd Social Security: As part of reform, President Bush is mulling a small change in how the nation's retirement system calculates retirees' benefits. It's a good start. The change sounds simple enough: Instead of calculating Social Security benefits based on growth in workers' wages, Bush would peg benefits to inflation. Since wages generally rise faster than inflation, the long-term effect would be quite profound. A 48-year-old worker today from a two-income family can expect to get $1,194 in monthly benefits in 2001 dollars. By changing the formula to peg growth in benefits to inflation rather than wages, that same worker would collect $1,088 a month. Because of the magic of compounding, the impact on workers born today and retiring in, say, 2075, would be more dramatic. It would slash payments by nearly 46%, from the $2,032 a month currently promised to $1,099. Sound unfair? It isn't. In fact, the worker born today will come out ahead. Far ahead. And the reason is simple: private accounts. The future difference between what has been promised and what can be delivered by a bankrupt system is enormous. Recent estimates put the long-term shortfall in Social Security at $26 trillion. With no private accounts, that would require either a 50% rise in Social Security taxes or a 27% cut in benefits -- or some combination of the two. As the chart shows, the system is headed for a collision with the hard wall of reality in just 14 years. That's when Social Security's revenues will no longer cover its costs. The many who insist there is no crisis ignore reality. By every realistic actuarial estimate, Social Security is headed for a bust. That hasn't stopped some in Congress from demagoguing the topic. Bush's idea has barely been floated, but already House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has dragged out the scare rhetoric on Social Security her party seems to favor. The change in the formula "is the equivalent of forcing seniors today to live at a 1940s standard of living," Pelosi said. It is no such thing. And she knows it. The average worker today will see about a 2% return on his or her Social Security taxes. Future workers will get negative returns. Yet long-term stock market returns are about 6.5%. So young people will benefit by being able to invest a piece of that money in the stock market. The U.S. economy will also benefit as Americans' retirements will be backed up by real investments, not empty promises and IOUs from a bankrupt Social Security fund. But that's something critics of Bush's bold and elegant plan just don't seem to understand. biz.yahoo.com

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (24901)	1/5/2005 12:40:19 PM
From: Selectric II	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

Not true. Machines cannot count the same batch of ballots the same way twice. Whether or not there are mechanical glitches, they use the same objective standards, unlike people. They are not swayed by political proclivities. They don't change the rules in the middle of the game, like Democrats do. Hand counts, when done in teams of two counters and two observers, applying crosscheck methodology, are the most accurate type of count available. Wrong. Hand counts are subject to interpretation, bias, and slight-of-hand. You are an apologist for the Florida democrat canvassing boards. Punch cards should be outlawed, because they are subject to wear. They only wear out when they're counted and re-counted a hundred times by democrat election thieves until they come up with the "right" number. They should only need to be counted once, or twice at most. While a college freshman, my computer science class required that we write programs in Fortran, with only one line of code on each IBM punch card. It resulted in stacks of punch cards, sometimes 1-3" high, being fed into card readers. Never, ever, do I recall a punch card being mis-read, even when programs were edited and altered and the cards re-fed umpteen times while being debugged. I know a fellow that has arthritis so bad in his hands that filling out the bubbles on his absentee ballot is difficult for him as he cannot grasp the pencil well. Lots of alternatives are available, including alternate methods and voter assistance. You're raising a red herring. The law requires that people take the necessary action to express their intent. If they can't do that despite all the alternatives, methods, and assistance, their "vote" isn't a vote at all -- it's a nullity, because they didn't express their intent. What if a perfectly able person goes to the polls on election day and states to the officials, "I hereby express my intent to vote for John Doe, but I refuse to take any written or physical action to record my vote." He is offered a ballot, a machine, and assistance, but refuses them all. Do they count his vote? (Hint: If John Doe is a democrat and it's a democrat-controlled precinct, maybe yes, if they think they can get away with it. Maybe even twice.) I really liked one '00 FL canvassing board's reasoning about a ballot where both Bush and Gore were dimpled but not punched at all, and otherwise democrat. Instead of an "undervote," it was deemed a Gore vote because of the other dem votes. lol.