Social Security Again

Not quite dead yet.

WTF is it with Obama and Social Security. No place (other than right wing rags) is there any intimation and no place is there any real evidence that Social Security is in any trouble before 2042. And then all the information currently available is that a minor shift can fix it at that point. Yet Obama puts it on the table again and again.

I suspect that his butt and his coalition were saved by Pelosi and (of all people) Reid when they let him know that they would not allow an up or down vote for an extra legislative committee's recommendations. This is particularly true since the committee would be heavily larded with the economists who did not foresee the current crisis and those Wall Streeters who also lost trillions.

I mean really WTF?

Social Security or How the Democrats Will Screw Us Again

Once again, almost like clockwork, the Democrats have managed to drag defeat from the jaws of victory.

Obama says that he needs a bi-partisan study group to "fix" social security. It does not need to be fixed, but those inside the beltway seem to think it does. Why do you suppose that is and why do you suppose that the "leaders" (scare quotes) of the Democratic party buy into that idea?

Glad you asked. Damned if I can completely figure it out. Well I do have an answer, but I really don't like it. It is that our rulers (note no ironic quotes) are in the same mental place as the patricians in the ancient Roman Republic at the end of that republic were.

They are on the whole not too bright, not too creative and in love with their own privileges. Their government is a combination of a plutocracy and a kelptacracy with a fair amount of incompetence thrown in. So in the end they will continue to steal from the poor. But what is more important to our country they will steal from the middle class and make them either poor or make them into people who are reasonably paranoid about losing what they have. Turning them (us?) into 21st century fascists. Kicking those who are worse off than we are to try to keep what little we have left after the super wealthy take theirs. Of course, the final result for the patricians was some pretty nasty personal endings once the various Caesars took power. In the end, for those folks the Caesars didn't even come from their own class.

I don't quite understand it, but I can see it. Why can't they?