Our New Look
Maybe you noticed the new banners, buttons, and colors. These highlight SherWright.com’s obsession and reason for existence – to counter the anti-reality obsession of the extreme right wing now holding the reins of power in our beloved country. Every aspect of what they stand for screams denial of reality, most notably fiscal realty as evidenced by their monster debt and deficits, environmental reality in their attempts to reverse a century’s progress even in the face of looming environmental limits, undermining of science as society’s formal exploration of natural reality, and regression to public policy and attitudes outmoded by centuries.
02.19.05 @ 08:46 PM EDT [link]

An Easy Way to Tell that the Bush SS Plan is Full of Stuff
Rumsfeld has said of the turmoil in Iraq that “stuff happens.” A brief review of the Administration’s plans for Social Security shows that lots of stuff must have happened when they were working it out. To continue the metaphor, the plan they are putting out is “stuffy.” Often when plans are full of stuff it’s possible to find nonsensical situations that arise when the features of the program interact. When the people who put a program have stuff for brains there tend to be a stuff-load of inconsistencies. Today’s entry spotlights one of these. First let’s note that Bush has been crisscrossing the country pointing out that the program will be “flat broke” when there is more money going out than coming in, an event forecasted to occur in 2018. Let’s forget for the moment that by this definition the US Treasury has been “flat broke” forever, particularly since Reagan started running up big deficits and especially particularly since Bush started running up REALLY big deficits. Anyway, it’s clear from Bush’s new “Social Security is Broken” stump speech that he feels bold action is needed. He probably uses those very words. He then outlines a program. The natural assumption any listener would make is that he is offering a program that addresses the problem he just talked about. But he isn’t. Let’s pick a specific example. He says that the problem is that there won’t be enough money going into the system in 2018 to pay the current level of benefits. He also has said that he will not entertain increases in the tax rate. He then suggests a program that would allow retirees to will their benefits to heirs. Let’s consider the case where a worker is almost ready for retirement but then dies. Under the Bush scenario, all of that money would then leave the system. Under the current scenario, that money is available to pay other retirees. See the contradiction? Bush is saying there isn’t enough money to pay for current benefits and in the same breath is proposing a costly new benefit that would drain significant sums from the system. Amazingly enough, legions of Dittoheads still find his logic to be inexorably compelling. Or maybe it’s not so amazing, considering all the stuff we’ve learned about Dittoheads.
02.18.05 @ 10:08 PM EDT [link]

It All Comes Down to DB versus DC
Maybe I’ve mentioned this before, but my highly diverse professional career happens to include some heavy experience with putting retirement programs into place. I thus have something to bring to the party on Social Security discussions. Perhaps you’ve been subjected to some of the jargon acronyms associated with retirement, particularly the most significant ones: DB for “Defined Benefit” and DC for “Defined Contribution.” Understanding these terms takes you a long way towards understanding the fundamental issues of Social Security reform. While we at SherWright.com normally focus on Dittohead translations, translations of bureaucratese jargon acronyms aren’t so far removed from Dittohead to be inappropriate for a site such as this. (A greater concern is that such translations don’t have nearly as much opportunity for laughs, but we’ll look for targets of opportunity!) Anyway, a Defined Benefit retirement plan, sometimes called a 403(b), promises the retiree a specific amount of money every month. Prospective retirees know exactly how much they will have to meet expenses. Such plans are unpopular with employers, since they have to constantly reevaluate pension investments to ensure that they will be able to make these payments, which look to the employer much like a payroll. Social Security as currently structured is a DB plan. It’s not as hard for the government to administer its DB plan because, unlike employers, the government is relying on a stream of revenues from workers to cover payments to retirees. In other words, there is no real investment portfolio (the Social Security Trust Fund is an accounting device, not an investment portfolio). Employers greatly prefer DC – Defined Contribution plans, also called a 401(k) plan. The accounting is very straightforward. The employee puts in a defined about with each paycheck, the employer may match it, it all gets stuck into investment accounts, and the retiree gets whatever is in those accounts when they retire. If all the investments go south, their retirement plans could take a big hit (consider the Enron DC, where employees were required to invest in Enron stock). So which plan is better for Social Security? My take is that many people already have but DB makes more sense for a safety net program, particularly when a great many people will already have a 401(k). If your 401(k) does an Enron, a 401(k)-like Social Security could well have done the same thing, if the drop is related to a market-wide drop. Keeping Social Security as a reliable floor on which to base retirement planning makes more sense to me that making it a weak-sister imitation of your corporate retirement plan. So why does Bush like DC? The same reason that employers do: you stick a certain amount of money out every month and what the retiree gets at the back end is what they get. If it’s not enough to keep them out of poverty, well, that’s what they get for playing the markets!
02.17.05 @ 08:09 PM EDT [link]

Hilary’s Common Ground
Sen. Hilary Clinton has been criticized for trying to find common ground with those who want to criminalize abortion. I for one applaud the effort, not the least because looking for common ground is virtually the defining characteristic of moderation. I also happen to believe that there indeed are common interests and concerns to be found, if only the pro-criminalization crowd has interest in listening. That remains to be seen, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. What common ground could there be? Sen. Clinton said she wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Criminalization advocates would also want abortion to be rare. Common ground! The primary program that anti-abortion advocates would put in place to make abortion rare is to punish women and doctors involved with abortion, both directly by putting them in jail (by making it illegal, in opposition to the “legal” in Hilary’s list) or indirectly by forcing desperate women to again risk their lives on back-alley abortions (by making it unsafe, in opposition to the “safe” in Hilary’s list). As a strategy for making abortions rare, it has to date been a total failure, simply because most Americans are opposed to outlawing abortion. It would be a failure even if the strategy were to “succeed” because women would merely travel to states where it remained a legal option. If criminalization advocates were truly Pro-Life – if they really wanted to reduce the number of abortions as opposed to just making noise - they would get off criminalization as their primary strategy and instead recognize that the overwhelming majority of Americans would like abortion to be rare but with this rarity not necessarily accomplished by fear of prison or mutilation. Common ground between Pro-Life and Pro-Choice ground is thus in alternatives to abortion. Abortion, legal or not, will always be a choice of desperate women, so the focus should be on eliminating the sources of that desperation, not the acts that desperation triggers. Some of the programs championed by the Right seek to do this, specifically programs that shelter pregnant women from disastrous circumstances like poverty that may be associated with their pregnancy. There is every reason for people across the political spectrum to support such of programs. I certainly do. The Left’s focus is largely to avoid the circumstances that created the desperate situation in the first place, most specifically by contraception. There is every reason that people across the political spectrum to support contraception programs. (There are people that don’t but they are Right Wing Dittohead idiots who would prefer the certainly of dead babies and dead women to the possibility that teens might have more sex if they’re not afraid of pregnancy). These approaches together are much more effective in reducing abortion than attempts at criminalization. For all the effort the Right has put into trying to criminalize abortion, they have no real results – in terms of reduced numbers of abortion – to point to. This is not at all the case for the abortion alternative programs they’ve championed. As even Rush Limbaugh points out, persuasion is a more effective strategy for getting your way than trying to enlist the coercive power of the state, since this power will never be delivered without the majority backing of Americans.
02.16.05 @ 08:15 PM EDT [link]

Man on a White Horse
With Clint Eastwood in the limelight with his latest cinematic success, let’s consider a much earlier work that’s one of my personal favorites: High Plains Drifter. It’s perhaps the classical allegorical western. A charismatic hero rides into a Western town that is paralyzed with fear at the prospect of retribution for past transgressions. I find it remindful of the situation with Social Security, with Bush in his full “great man on the white horse” mode, heralding the danger presented by future social security shortfalls. In the movie, the stranger on the pale steed gets the town busy in preparation for hard times ahead. But these preparations are odd and seemingly unrelated to the nature of the danger. For example, he has the town setting up banquet tables on the main street. This reminds me of Bush’s plans for “fixing” Social Security’s shortfalls, fixes which have no direct relation to the problem. (The problem is not enough money coming in to continue current benefits. His fix is to do something different with the money coming in so this money legally must go to the person who put it in. It does nothing about the fact that there’s not enough going in to guarantee current benefits to both current and future retirees). Getting back to the story, the townspeople have misgivings but go along, because they want to believe there’s a painless solution to their problem, because the tall, handsome stranger is convincing, and because nobody has any other ideas. When the big day arrives (the equivalent of Baby Boomer retirement), the gang comes rampaging through town. Too late the townspeople realize that they were set up – their “preparations” did nothing more than turn them into sitting ducks. And I think that’s exactly what Bush has in mind. It’s clear to me now that he and his extreme Right Wing cronies plan to pile up debt by slashing taxes so far below the level needed to sustain modern governmental services that the only alternative facing future generations is to eliminate these “discretionary” services in favor of mandatory interest and principal on the debt. If you’ve got a better explanation, I’d love to hear from you.
02.15.05 @ 08:06 PM EDT [link]

Romance of the Railroad
I’ve always loved railroads. My folks tell me I used to line books to make a choo choo. The train trip my Grandmother took me on from Phily to Florida was a definite high point of my very young life. During the years I lived in Europe I often took the train, and only a few years ago did a two-week Eurail trip through Italy and Germany with the family, a wonderful experience. And now I catch a total of six daily trains, counting subways which of course you should because New Yorkers call them trains. You don’t say “I took the subway,” you say “I took the R Train.” In fact, I’m writing this on a train. It’s also very historic. Trains first stitched the country together. I remember being impressed with the story of the explorer Fremont who, not many years after his arduous journey across the West, repeated it on the train in a fraction of the time and far, far greater comfort. From and environmental standpoint it beats other means of transport hands down. It represents a strategic hedge against international events like the oil shocks that brought car travel to a standstill. Many of my colleagues stranded by 9/11 far from home on business trips took the train back when the planes stopped flying. So why is Bush trying to kill Amtrak, our national rail system? How could it be the money, if the amounts involved are a tiny fraction of even some of the more obscure tax cuts he’s trying to ram through? I read a great line today from the columnist Gene Sperling who compared Bush’s cuts to a Dad who tells his teenager that he has to eat cheap generic peanut butter because of a family austerity program, at the same time that Dad has gone out and bought a new Hummer. The political reason behind the cuts, the message that Karl wants to send, is that Amtrak is a very Blue State program, on many levels. We already talked about the environmental angle, plus most riders get on and off in Blue States on either coast, and the people who ride in the other states have color, and it’s not the color of Bush’s base! Advanced trains are closely associated with foreign countries like Japan and the EU, and we all know how the Right Wing feels about FCs. I’m thinking he’s embarrassed that trains in, say Italy, are so much more advanced than the US. In other words, a gap in America’s otherwise perfect record of technological superiority. Maybe it’s a Texas thing, that there’s something unnatural about traveling in straight lines while sitting next to strangers as opposed to riding across the plains on your faithful steed. In any case, if Bush gets his way the country will have a way to travel from Earth to Mars, but no train to take from DC to NYC!
02.14.05 @ 08:36 PM EDT [link]

My Pitch to CNN
Crossfire has been cancelled so I’m guessing that CNN has a hole in its schedule. Here’s my suggestion: put on a talking heads show staffed not by true believers who can be trusted to parrot the line of their party’s extreme wing, but with thoughtful moderates. Each would be slightly left or right of center. They would engage in intelligent and respectful conversation. For example, both would likely note when the other says something that haves some merit. Could a show like that possibly have a snowball’s chance of success? Well, the alternative isn’t very appealing. Crossfire died (IMHO) because they it became nothing more than a bumper sticker delivery system. Even if you liked hearing the slogans your side delivered, you were subjected to the other side’s slogans. Anyone needing partisan sound bytes can just watch the news. Some might argue that moderate talking heads would be boring. My counter-example is Siskel and Ebert. What was great about that show was these two guys could have completely different opinions about a particular film, yet never took these differences personally. The only other alternative to shows that intelligently discuss issues is further polarization of media into partisan channels like Rush’s Excellence in Broadcasting Service (EiBS). Actually, it’s EIB Network, but don’t you think Rush was asking for it with his “cBS, aBS, nBS” comment noted in today’s Rush Insight to Ponder feature?
02.13.05 @ 07:25 PM EDT [link]