Financial Future of Medicare, Social Security. Glass Half Empty

Report from the New York Times Re: The Financial Future of Medicare and Social Security:

The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2033, three years sooner than projected last year, the administration said. And Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund will be depleted in 2024, the same as last year’s estimate, it said.

Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue, a trustee of the two programs, said Social Security’s disability insurance program faced the most immediate threat, with its trust fund expected to run out of money in 2016, two years sooner than predicted last year.

For the disability program, as for Social Security over all, tax receipts would be sufficient to pay about 75 percent of promised benefits after the trust fund was exhausted.

In the past, Congress has occasionally shifted revenue from one trust fund to another to avoid any interruption of benefits. But if the disability trust fund borrowed money from Social Security’s old-age trust fund, the loan would have to be repaid, officials said, and the measure would not solve the programs’ problems.

Richard S. Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, said the projections in the report, based on current law, “are probably poor indicators of the future financial status of Medicare.”

 But, the public trustees said, “the reported long-term financial outlook has grown worse,” primarily because the government accepted advice from technical experts suggesting faster growth in Medicare costs.

In explaining changes in their Social Security projections, the trustees cited slower growth in average earnings of workers and the persistence of unemployment in the slow recovery from the recession. They lowered their projection of average real earnings in the future, primarily because of a surge in energy prices and “slower assumed growth in average hours worked per week after the economy has recovered.”

Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the panel’s health subcommittee, said, “Today’s report continues to show Medicare on a sound financial footing,” mainly because of the 2010 health care law. Still, Mr. Stark said, Republicans keep trying to “end Medicare as we know it, not because the program is unsustainable, but because they want government out of the business of guaranteeing health care.”

What Mad Dog infers from this report of various experts, trustees and actuarials is that both Medicare and Social Security would run out of money, unless new money is provided , sometime in the next 20 years.  That is, if things stay static for the next 20 years, and we do not pump any more money into these programs, these programs will start to run out of money. 

That new money could come from an improved economy, with more taxpayers paying more into the programs, or from, Heaven forbid, higher tax rates to support these problems. That is, we might solve the problem of the bank account, by depositing more money into it. What a novel idea!

But, because Republicans have taken a no tax pledge, the option of generating more money for the programs does not exist for them, which means the only thing to do is to cut expenditures.  That means, coupon care, abandoning the promise to pay for your medicare expenses and abandoning the promise to pay out pensions under Social Security. It's the only way, the Republicans say.

And it is, if you vote Republican.

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A version of this article appeared in print on April 24, 2012, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headli

Ms. Maud Instructs

I am working on the cartoon, but until it is done, a few cogitations on Ms. Biddle's salient points.

Let us begin with the most important articles of faith, i.e. #12 (see previous post):  Medicare and Social Security are about to go bankrupt and can only be saved by Paul Ryan, his Coupon Care and the Republicans efforts to slash these programs down to a splintered shadow of their former selves.

There are different ways of knowing, and we can do the citing of references, examination of numbers, but my understanding, which is based on what I have read from the Congressional Budget office and from what Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama and virtually all the Democrats (but, significantly, not from a single Republican) is this:  Medicare is actually quite healthy. It is in great shape until at least 2030. The Republicans, Mr. Ryan in particular, have tried to rumor it into a fatal illness, but none of the scientists can find anything to indicate poor health. It seems robust and hale and hearty at nearly 50 years of age.

Social Security has been in similar robust good health, and in fact it's main problem has been it's very prosperity, such that all it's friends, relatives and neighbors have been borrowing from it at a prodigious rate, which has diminished Social Securities own account over the years.

The standard line from the Tea Party Republicans is that the numbers don't lie: There will be fewer and fewer young healthy, working people coming along to pay into the program which supports that big part of the population, the baby boomers now entering retirement. But, contrary to what the Republicans say, the demographic does not mean the Social Security program is or will be in the foreseeable future, in financial  dire straights. Enough people have paid into it for long enough, it's doing just fine.

I did make a cartoon about this, with Paul Ryan pushing the head of the dolphin under water so he can claim it's drowning. 

Oh, we have to save Flipper. He's drowning!

But nobody commented on it, so I guess it didn't make the point.

Mad Dog must admit, he has not gone over the numbers recently. He is guilty of what Rush and Sean and Paul and Glenn are guilty of--simply repeating something heard because you want to believe it--a la Karl Rove--a sort of math that makes you feel better. 

Mad Dog will endeavor to bring some references to bear on this point.

Republicans Explain Their Defeat: Oh, This Is Too Good

Here is a wonderful letter to the Portsmouth Daily Herald,  from a Ms. Sally Biddle of New Castle which says it all, a distillation of Fox News and the Thunder from the Right in nearly pure form, a specimen representative of the species. Ms. Biddle suggests a cartoon be created to run in the Herald elucidating what the Democrats want and what their victory means.

Mad Dog has taken the liberty of adding numbers to the text, so we do not miss anything.

"Let's be fair and picture the Donkey saying 'If You Vote For Us.'

1. We'll pardon the illegals, 
2.  give free condoms and abortions to women, 
3.  a college tuition discount 
4.  and we'll tax the rich so much employers won't be able to afford to hire 
5.  or pay the increase in health insurance, 
6.  employees will have to be laid off or become part -timers. 
7.  We'll make sure unions can't fire you even if you do a poor job, 
8.   and make sure Republican members contribute toward our campaigns so unions can provide perks like free facials etc.  
9.  Companies might go into bankruptcy, maybe no more Twinkies, 
10. but hey, the government will make sure you don't even have to try finding a job. 
11. Oh yes, who cares if most of the doctors leave their profession because of "Obamacare" 
12.  and Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt. 
13. When the government runs out of money, run into streets, protest, riot, fight and scream, just like they are in Greece and other countries. 
14. Remember, the government will take care of you!'"

It's all there, in one letter.

Mad Dog will chew on this for a while. We can all work on deconstructing it, teasing each malevolent little morsel out, masticating, savoring each bitter flavor.

Can you imagine what this woman's living room looks like?

Lincoln, Obama and Stressed Out Presidents

As David von Drehle has noted in Rise To Greatness, Lincoln is our greatest President because he had the greatest challenges to overcome. 

Nobody is seriously moving to leave the Union, taking up arms, firing on Fort Sumter, enslaving a third of the population and insisting this is God's will, appealing to European powers to enter a war against Washington, and for all its faults, Washington, DC is not stinking in pestilence, with typhoid claiming the lives of the Presidential family, , with an armed enemy just across the Potomac, blocking egress along the river, with unpaved streets knee deep in mud and animal droppings, spittoons in the lobbies of hotels, carpets stained with tobacco spit, and a Supreme Court having endorsed slavery.

The one thing Mr. Obama might envy as he casts his eyes back to Mr. Lincoln's circumstances:  By 1862, the disloyal opposition had already left town, and Congress, while still comprised of Democrats and Republicans, was basically of one mind. The only arguments were about how far to go, now that meaningful opposition to abolition of slavery had left town.

While it remains stupefying to listen to Mitch McConnell and John Boehner still singing the Republican chorus-- "We must address our fiscal problems, our deficit by cutting spending.  We will only alienate the job creators if we do not cut taxes for everybody (i.e. including the upper 1%.) and the road to recovery is through cutting spending and taxes"--these oppositional types are only slow learners. They have yet to figure out they lost the election. For them, what is important is that they retained control of the House of Representatives.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats can, if they choose, focus their fire on individual Republican leaders--McConnell, Ryan, Boehner, Cantor, Demint--and de legitimize them as they did with Mr. Romney, and eventually they will cave.

The only question now is how long it will take Mr. Obama to learn the lessons of Debate #1--you need to attack when you are blocked by a dug in opposition. And when you attack, you win.  When you listen and try to act all bi partisan, you lose, and you look stupid and ineffectual in the process.

In Lincoln's time, he was more hurt by his friends than by his enemies. His generals simply refused to fight--McClellan, Buell, Halleck all had constant excuses and reasons for their own inaction.  Finally, Lincoln found some generals who worried more about inaction than the risks of action, and that was his path to greatness. Lincoln knew what he wanted, but he dithered about getting there. He was unwilling to  forthrightly break with those who blocked up the hall.  

President Obama has the same proclivity with which his predecessor from Illinois was afflicted--the willingness to tolerate stalling.

Mr. Obama and the Supreme Court

Here is the speech I am looking forward to hearing from President Obama soon.

My fellow Americans, we have just completed an election for national legislative and executive offices, and those elected have serious and urgent business before them. But ours is a system of three distinct branches, and the third branch, the judiciary was conceived as providing balance and thoughtfulness to the actions of the other two. 

Over the course of history, there have been times this branch, and in particular the United States Supreme Court have provided this balance, but there have also been notable failures, and for several generations this un-elected branch has actually become the most radical branch and its excesses the most extreme.

I am sure within milliseconds of finishing my remarks, and even before I finish, across the electronic world wide web the word will go out: President Obama attempts to bash the Constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, to answer this notion, I will read the only three paragraphs of the Constitution which mention the Supreme Court, its justices and their powers. It won't take long. They are contained in the first two sections of Article III, and this is all the Constitution says, in its entirety, about the Court:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court , and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Minister and Consuls; to all Case of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction; to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party; to Controversies between two or more States; between a State and the Citizens of another State, between Citizens of different States, between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States and between a State or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States Citizens or Subjects.

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Minister and Consuls and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. IN all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to law and Fact, with such Exceptions and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

That is all the Constitution says about the court and its justices and its authority.
Notice, there is only one sentence describing the justices.  It does not set a number. It says only they will serve "during good Behavior" and that nobody can cut their pay.

The court, much as some would like to deny it, is a political institution. We hope the justices form their opinions based only on the law but the cases which reach the Supreme Court often fall into gaps between what the law says explicitly and the details of a particular circumstance.

In the Dred Scott case, a man sued for his freedom from slavery.  The Supreme Court ruled that as a slave, this human being had no rights, because in the eyes of the law, he is not a human being but property and only a human being can sue in the court.  Dred Scott had not "standing" with the court, because he was nothing more than property. The Constitution did not address this principle directly. Nowhere in it is there mention of the word "slave" although it did mention "free persons" and "all other persons."  So the Supreme Court had to draw its own conclusions and these conclusions were based on the sensibilities and experience and philosophy of the justices in nineteenth century America.

In the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court ruled that a corporation had the rights of a human being, the right to free speech. So in the nineteenth century the court ruled  a human being was not a human being because he was property and in the 21st century, the Court ruled a property, that is a corporation, had the rights of a human being. 

The Supreme Court has, occasionally, filled in the gaps between stated law and principle in the direction of progress and moving the nation toward the right side of history: In Brown vs the Board of Education, the Court rejected the idea that schoolchildren in  public schools could be separated by race by state law. It said "separate but equal" was an oxymoron--separate meant inherently unequal.  But this is a case in point--the Supreme Court decides cases where the law ends and philosophy and good sense begins, and that is where the personal history of the justices prevail.  We cannot allow nine entrenched men and women to block the progress of 300 million.

These cases are merely examples of a larger issue:  The Court has evolved by tradition to be nine justices, appointed for life, each appointed by whatever President happens to be in office when one justice departs. This haphazard system has resulted in justices "gaming" the system, hanging on until a President who is not to their political liking leaves office. It has meant that when the country has moved to new understandings and beliefs, as it has in the case of marriage equality, the Court stands as an obstacle to the flow of freedom. It has resulted in absurd rulings, like the one which embraced the idea, "Corporations are people."

I am not the first President to see freedom and prosperity thwarted by a Court which has gripped the choke collar on progress to the point of  asphyxiation.  And I am loathe to change now what we may regret changing later. But I do think it is vital to be on the right side of history and the Supreme Court needs to change, as the executive branch and the legislative branches have changed with the demands of the times.

The Constitution is not a holy book inscribed in stone by God's hand, but a living document, a brilliant and enduring document, and it needs to be interpreted by a living  and responsive court.

I propose Congress enact legislation--no Constitutional amendment is necessary--which would require the President to appoint one Supreme Court justice during each year of his Presidency. The sitting justices should hear cases, argue their merits and render opinions, but only the nine most recently appointed can vote on the verdicts.

In doing this, we will acknowledge what has been evident for generations, that much as they strive to be objective, justices are people and will be influenced by their experience and by their own personal values.  As the nation changes, we cannot allow a static court to thwart its progress. 

I have no illusion the current Congress will enact this legislation. The House of Representatives is in the grip of a fundamentalist faction of the Right Wing. But in two years, all the seats in the House will be up for renewal. It is with 2014 in mind I make this proposal tonight. During by year elections, with no President on the ballot, voter turn out tends to be low. If we can focus now on this upcoming election, I hope we can see a voter turn out which duplicates or exceeds the participation we have just seen in 2012.

Thank you and good night.

Why We Need Texas

Wouldn't you love to have Gail Collins living next door, so you could have coffee with her every morning?

Ms. Collins reports that Peter Morrison, treasurer of the Hardin County (Texas) Republican party and a former textbook committee member for the State Board of Education (which screens textbooks for their appropriateness for the tender, impressionable minds of Texas youth) has declared it is time for Texas to secede from the Union. And he anticipates a fight from those nasty carpet bagging Yankees who can be anticipated to swarm down to the Lone Star state, in hordes, the way they did the last time a Southern state tried to walk out. 
 "We must contest every single inch of ground," he said, echoing the famous Churchillian call to fight the Nazis on the beaches and in the fields.  Well, Texas doesn't have all that much in the way of picturesque beach, but you get the idea. 

Resist! "Delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity," he said. "In due time, the maggots will have eaten the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity."  

Apparently Mr. Morrison learned something from reading all those textbooks.

Ms. Collins must have a subscription to a variety of Texas newspapers to find such stuff, and Mad Dog is thinking of paying for a subscription, if he can only find out where the best Texas tirades are printed.

Mad Dog admits he has advocated expelling Texas along with Arizona (or at least Maricopa County) South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi from the Union, but now he has to re think.  Where else can we get such distilled clarity of the thinking (if we can be that generous, to describe it as thinking--frothing might be a better word) of the lunatic right? 

And if we threw out Arizona, we'd lose John McCain, who, as Ms. Collins points out, provides such wonderful comic relief, complaining bitterly the Administration has stone walled and refused to tell him what happened at Benghazi even as the briefing at the White House was going on--the briefing McCain skipped, having been truant so he could hold a press conference at which he could complain nobody tells him anything. Now that is chutzpah! That really is the boy who murders his parents and then pleads for leniency on the grounds he is now an orphan.

No, if we simply kept the Blue States, we would be the poorer, for the loss of all those wonderful clowns who control the Red States. 

It would be like purging the Police Log from the Portsmouth Daily Herald.  There you see people in their most revealing state.  My personal favorite is the report, as always given straight faced and without comment, "Called to home on Islington Street, eleven A.M. Female resident complains her neighbor called her 'Obese.'"

Try To Stop Smiling

Mad Dog has had a very serious talk with himself.  He has pointed out, to himself, that his life has not substantively changed since November 6. He still goes to his day job, every day, still arises at 5 AM, still gets back home at 6 PM. His salary is unchanged. He drives the same car with no prospect for a new one. His house is still the same color. His lawn is unraked, and leaves still need raking.

But, as the song goes, I have often walked down this street before, but the sidewalks always stayed beneath my feet before.

As David Remnick says in this week's New Yorker, the joy of seeing the brothers Koch and Sheldon Adelson failing to buy this election, of knowing that despite the Supreme Court's best efforts to hand the election to the Republicans with their Citizens United ruling, they failed and the delight of seeing  Donald Trump, that epitome of buffoonery,  sputtering impotently, and that wonderful exchange between Megyn Kelly and Karl Rove--"Is this just the math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?"--all that was sooo satisfying. 

To see those haters, like the guy in Albany, New Hampshire who owns the Kawasaki motorcycle dealership, who put up the sign shown above at the gateway to the White Mountains--to see them vanquished is oh, so sweet.

But the really sweet part is not just seeing the scoundrels lose, but to see a really fine man prevail.

But then there is the question of what we are facing now.

For Remnick, the biggest issue is not the fiscal cliff, but global warning.  

As Mark Twain (or possibly it was Charles Dudley Warner) said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." The question remains, not so much whether man has changed the climate but whether or not he can do anything to fix it. 

There is the old saw about throwing a frog into a pot of boiling water--he jumps out. But put him in a pot of cool water and gradually turn up the heat and he stays in and boils--that applies to humanity in a gradually heating planet: It all happens so slowly, we hardly notice and take no action to save ourselves.

Remnick does his cause no service by saying the European heat wave of 2003 left 50,000 people dead.  This is Mad Dog's Law of Big Numbers, as soon as you hear somebody throwing around big numbers, you know he's wrong, or at the very least bogus and doesn't know where those numbers come from.  So we hear this disease costs the American economy $5 billion a year, and so does that one and by the time you add up all the thousands of diseases which cost that much you have a number which exceeds the gross national product.  It's a number, so it must be authoritative and correct. The fact is, few of us really understand the numbers and the evidence which support the idea of global warming--we have read about it and we choose to believe the sources we choose to believe. Mad Dog believes in global warming and believes it is prudent to do what we reasonably can to ameliorate it, especially since we are talking windmills, solar power and stuff that are likely a good idea even if we are wrong about global warning. 

The fact is, Mr. Obama is doing what his constituents will allow--he's investing in green energy and this week NPR informed us the United States is likely to become energy independent within the decade, and we import only 10-20% of our oil from the Middle East today, most of our oil coming now from Canada, Mexico, Brazil and the rest of South America and from our own drilling in the USA. The boom in natural gas production apparently has made a game changing shift. While all the politicians were posturing, some scientists were actually solving the problem of providing sufficient fuel for this nation, at least for the next decade or so. This strikes Mad Dog as under reported good news. 

From Mad Dog's perspective, the big agenda item ought to be health care, which Obamacare began to address, but did not come close to actually solving. We can tweak and try the Massachusetts solution, but if we see it falter, we ought to be ready to offer Medicare for all. Don't have the votes for it yet--but come 2014 there are a lot of seats in the House up for grabs.

But, for now, we can rejoice. There is a season for all things. For crying and for laughing. This is the laughing part.

We must be on guard however--remember it was less than a week after Lee surrendered at Appomattox that an assassin slipped past a drunken guard and shot Lincoln dead. All of our joy could turn on a dime, if we cannot keep Mr. Obama safe. That is the disquieting part. So much of what has brought the joy coalesces around one man. Joe Biden has his virtues, but he is no Barack Obama.

And those haters are still out there. Mad Dog has  not been back to Albany, New Hampshire, but he is willing to bet that banner is still unfurled up there. There are plenty of little men with big guns out there, just looking for their chance to show how important they are.