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To: JBTFD who wrote (20899)	1/11/2005 2:40:21 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 116555

The resistance to revisit the effectiveness of a social program may very well be because of an awareness of the intent of neocons like Grover Norquist. You make a good argument to ban all government social programs if fear of competing ideology deters the people who run them from even testing from time to time to see if they actually achieve the desired results they set out to achieve. Imagine a company running various competing divisions this way, "We like your idea Tod, it's got great intentions, don't tell us if it works or not because that asshole over in corporate is looking to shut us down.". The smallest Mom & Pop biz has a means to test and a feed back mechanism to adjust their assumptions and methods. Let's try this, if it works, we keep it, if it doesn't we try something else. Losses in a market system tell you when you've done something that isn't working, they force you to try the next idea if your previous idea fails. The successful action comes from weeding out those actions which failed before it. They want to reform social security. With government programs there is no point at which the loss or cost becomes too big. Social Security is a great example. It had wonderful intentions, let's give some of our poorest elderly a pension in their old age. In order to prevent a possibility of say 2% of the population of elderly citizens (a very real estimate from the 30s, when these programs were introduced) having to live out their last years in destitution ( a cheap and easy social problem to fund) we incrementally morph what started out as a modest charitable program into this massive program which sucks down 12.5% of everyone's income every single year of their working lives in order to pay them a pittance in old age. The program pays money to middle class and wealthy retired people and makes those same middle class people dependent on receiving those benefits who previously could live out their lives in no danger of being set out on the street. At the same time we take in a surplus that Congress raids every year to expand other programs and call the resulting IOUs a trust fund and pay it imaginary interest. Now the whole thing looks very much like a Ponzi scheme, with a Ponzi scheme's mathematical impossibility of paying anyone off but the early investors. You can't take $100 from a bunch of Peters to give $200 to Paul in the later stages of a Ponzi scheme, you simply run out of Peters. How much you want to bet the end result will include a cut in benefits? What is your solution? reduced nominal benefits? massive debt? means testing benefits? or tax and inflate those benefits away? Pick your poison.