Social Security

Hurry-Up Saturday Ethics Round Up, 2/29/2020: “Happy Birthday Frederick!” Edition [Corrected And Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

 

Yes, it’s Frederick’s 41st birthday.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should. Frederick is the overly duty-conscious and somewhat dim-witted hero of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance,” one of the Savoy duo’s so called “Big Three,” the Victorian operettas that have been performed the most over the years. (The other two are “H.M.S Pinafore,” and the currently unfairly besieged—but arguably the best of them all—“The Mikado.”) They aren’t my three favorites, mind you, but like seven of the other G&S masterpieces, they are damned good, and have aged better than most American musicals, especially the Rogers and Hammerstein classics. Poor Frederick was apprenticed to a pirate until his 21st birthday, but due to a cruel twist of fate and legalistic nit-picking, his 21st birthday didn’t arrive until 1940, because he was born on leap year. Today is his 41st birthday, though he is 164 years old.

I apologize for the stupid subtitles in the clip from the movie. Unlike most G&S performers, the diction of Kevin Klein, Rex Smith and Angela Lansbury is excellent.

(I’m hurrying because I’ve learned from cruel experience that traffic on Saturday after 12:30 slows to crawl..)

1. Thus ends Black History Month. I do not favor tribal distinctions in our days and months. It is inherently divisive, and Black History Month smacks of honors affirmative action. The history of black Americans is American history, inextricably intertwined with the history of the rest of us. Our entire history ought to be taught and learned without bias and spin, and no race or ethnic groups should hesitate to take pride in the accomplishments of other Americans regardless of their color or ancestry.

NOTICE of CORRECTION! Item #2 below has now been shown to have been based on a hoax. More after…

2. Res ipsa loquitur:

Obviously the  note in Chuck’s tickler file came up: “Today transition from saying Trump was doing too much in response to the Corona virus to saying that he isn’t doing enough.”

What awful, awful hacks these people are.

They are still awful hacks, but I hate being caught by these hoaxes. This one was especially sinister, because the fake tweet is completely consistent with what the Democrats and the news media had been saying about the President’s move to stop travel from China. However, insisting that a faked message is still “true enough” is what Dan Rather did in the scandal that ended his career as a respectable journalist.

We now know that the tweet is a hoax because ProPoblica, a nonprofit journalism organization, maintains a database of tweets deleted by politicians called Politwoops that uses Twitter’s Streaming API to find tweets from politicians that have been deleted.  Schumer’s tweet  is  NOT in the database, thus we know it wasn’t posted.

I apologize for being caught this way, AGAIN.

3.  The rest of the story: Remember Tilli Buchanan, the Utah stepmother who paraded around the house topless in front of the kids? She was arrested and charged under Utah law with three misdemeanor counts of lewdness involving a child. Iwrote that this should be an ethics question, not a legal one:

[T]here are the Tilli Buchanans among us, who want to tear down social norms, not really knowing what the consequences will be over the long term, just for the hell of it. In addition to being irresponsible and disrespectful, they are also lousy citizens.

They are not, however, criminals. She should be able to walk around naked in front of her children, just as we allow parents to engage in all sorts of other dubious practices. That she can doesn’t mean she should, but this is part of a long, long list where we must rely on ethics rather than law.

Facing  being placed on a sex offender registry for 10 years,  Tilli agreed to a plea deal with her pleading guilty one class B misdemeanor lewdness charge and paying a $600 fine while serving probation. The charge will be dismissed if Buchanan can keep her shirt on for a year.

4. More “The rest of the story,” uber-jerk division. In 2018, Saturday Night Live performer Pete Davidson mocked GOP Congressional candidate Dan Crenshaw for his eyepatch, the result of a combat wound. Davidson said that he looked like “a hitman in a porno film” and dismissed the origin of his disfiguring injury as something he got in “war or whatever.” Veterans, their families and others who don’t usually pay attention to SNL anymore since it has become partisan, shrill, and lazy protested loudly, and Davidson apologized while Crenshaw appeared on a later show, where he was funny, gracious, and forgiving

It was obvious to me (and, I’m sure, Crenshaw) that Davidson was forced to apologize, but it takes a special breed of jerk to come back after he has left the scene of his insults and say so.

In Davidson’s new stand-up special, “Alive from New York,” Davidson, says,

“So I made fun of this guy with an eyepatch and then, like, I kind of got forced to apologize. My roommate thought I should apologize so that I didn’t get shot in the face. People were like, ‘You hate America!’ And I’m like, ‘No, I just didn’t want to be incorrect about how he lost his fucking eye. Is that a crime?! The only thing I did do, which I am guilty of — and I apologize for — is I did make that guy famous and a household name for no reason, right? I did what, like, Ariana Grande did for me, right? I sucked his dick at ‘SNL.'”

This is what you lost your eye for, Dan.

5. You could show this to your Bernie Bros friends, but I doubt they could understand it.  At the Foundation for Economic Education, J. Kyle de Vries does an excellent job of explaining the Social Security cheat, and why it has to be reformed. The system no longer makes sense, but the socialist enablers refuse to consider the problem. de Vries writes in part,

Millennials and Generation Z: Do you want to fund my Social Security benefits with higher payroll taxes than I paid in the past? Especially when the likelihood is high that your benefits are not going to be as lucrative as mine?

I am lucky. My Social Security benefits will be funded by you and other workers, and I plan on living to 140. If you are younger, that should concern you. Right now, you and your employer are forced to contribute 12.4 percent of your income into a fund that goes into a black hole, financing some other guy’s retirement. Wouldn’t you rather put that 12.4 percent into a fund you manage?

…Assume a self-employed 25-year-old makes $75,000 this year. Further assume she is required to set aside 12.4 percent of her income into a protected, tax-deferred trust, just as she must do for Social Security. But this is her account, managed by her, just like a 401k plan. If she realizes a 3 percent increase in income each year and can earn 6 percent on a conservative mix of stocks and bonds during her lifetime, her trust will accumulate to over $3,500,000 at age 70. At 8 percent growth, that number will be an astounding $6,142,000.

Would you rather have accumulated these much larger sums to augment your retirement income than get the average $1,500 per month Social Security check issued today? Lesser potential income is just one of the problems with the present system.

…Contrary to popular belief, payroll taxes are not invested in a fund to secure benefits like most other pension plans. Since the beginning, payroll taxes went first to make payments to current retirees with the balance “borrowed” by the feds for spending on things other than Social Security benefits. For most of the program’s history, the amount of payroll taxes the feds received was much higher than the Social Security payments, meaning the feds had a lot of money to spend on other things. Because of demographics, that situation has changed perilously, threatening the future of the Social Security system.

…What all this means is millennials and Gen Zers will see higher taxes for Social Security across the board, perhaps many times. They will also most likely see reductions in promised benefits, especially if they accumulate a lot of money over their working lifetimes.

…Wouldn’t you rather have your own retirement fund you manage yourself instead of the flimsy promise of government IOUs? Increasing payroll taxes today only delays the day of reckoning. The current unfunded liabilities for Social Security are over $34 trillion. Let’s not double down on a failed experiment that will bankrupt our country in the future and leave millions destitute in retirement.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Donald Trump was articulate enough and organized enough to explain this in a debate, or in a national address to the public? Wouldn’t it be nice if young voters would pay attention, and if the news media could report on the issue fairly?

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could fly to Disney World by flapping my arms really hard?

Robert Samuelson And Social Security’s Pro-Rich Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments
A typical nuanced view of the problem...

                                    A typical nuanced view of the problem…

My father was in the private pension business before he died, and the idiocy of how Social Security was set up drove him to distraction. I’m pretty sure he voted for Ross Perot in 1992 because Perot argued that it made no sense not to means test the program. I’m tempted to take a copy of Robert J. Samuelson’s op-ed last week to Arlington National Cemetery and leave it on his gravestone.

Samuelson is reliably one of the most rational, thoughtful and probing of all the op-ed columnists. Last week he wrote about how the life-expectancy gap between the wealthier segments of U.S. society and the poorer ones made Social Security as it is currently constituted a significant contributor to the income gap that progressives desperately want to make a key issue in the 2016 election, because dividing the nation by class (and race, ethnicity, religion and gender) is a big part of their playbook.

He wrote…

“The figures come from a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which estimated life expectancies for workers born in 1930 (now 85) and 1960 (now 55) at age 50. The findings are stark. For the richest fifth of men, there was a 7.1-year increase in life expectancy, from 81.7 for those born in 1930 to 88.8 years for those born in 1960. Meanwhile, for the poorest fifth of men, life expectancy fell slightly, from 76.6 years for those born in 1930 to 76.1 for those born in 1960. The changes for the remaining men also parallel income: For the second richest fifth, the increase was 8 years to 87.8 years; for the third richest, 5.3 years to 83.4 years; and for the fourth richest, 1.1 years to 78.3 years.”

Nobody should be surprised that wealth equals health. It is difficult to pinpoint why the gap is so large, but should we have to? It seems intuitively obvious. Many  disadvantages–race, upbringing, family stability, good roles models, education, character, intelligence, opportunities, culture, neighborhoods—that undermine quality of life simultaneously or in combination with each other handicap earning ability  and health before we even get to the question of medical care.

Samuelson goes on… Continue reading →

Now THIS Is An Unethical Lawsuit!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

chuck.chuck_

A New Mexico appeals court has refused to overturn the summary judgment dismissal  of Arthur Firstenburg’s five-year-old lawsuit against his neighbor Raphaela Monribot, whom he had accused of causing him excruciating pain and discomfort by using her iPhone, a Wi-Fi connection, dimmer switches, and other electronic devices in her own home. Firstenburg says that he suffers from electromagnetic sensitivity, or EMS, an acute sensitivity to electronic radiation that doctors and and scientists almost unanimously (but not quite) believe doesn’t exist.

Because Monribot had the misfortune to live next door to this guy, she had to defend against a $1.43 million lawsuit that has racked up court costs of over $85,000, and heaven knows what in legal fees. Firstenburg is not paying for any of it because he is broke; his lawyer, Lindsay Lovejoy, had taken the case on a contingent fee basis. She decided the appeal was a lost cause: the plaintiff handled it himself.

This case will, I assume, become the new poster child for those favoring a “loser pays” system, a bad idea that would be godsend in abuses of the system like this one. Continue reading →

The Sixth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2014 (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Cosby3

2014 was the year of the Ethics Train Wreck. They were coming so fast that they were getting tangled up with each other, and old wrecks from past years started rolling again, or the damage that was triggered a year ago or more started kicking in. I don’t know if every year really is more ethics free than the year before, or that it just feels that way because I’m getting better at sniffing it out. By any standards, it was a wretched year, with epic ethical misconduct across the culture. But I can’t stall any more: let’s wade into it. There will be more installments this year, so the misery is coming in smaller bites. You’re welcome.

Ethics Train Wreck of the Year

trainwreck

It’s a tie!

The Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck and The Obama Administration Ethics Train Wreck

The obvious winner is the Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck, which has managed to hook up with the 2012 winner, The Trayvon Martin- George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck, as well as a the sub-EthicsTrain Wreck attached to the death of Eric Garner, to further degrade U.S. race relations, undermine the stability of numerous cities, get several people, including the recently assassinated NYC police officers killed, revive race riots, give vile demagogue Al Sharpton unprecedented power and influence, and pick up such distinguished riders as President Obama,  Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, New York Mayor de Blasio. It is also still barreling along at top speed after many months, and is a good bet to continue its carnage well into 2015. 

Yet, it became clear to me this summer with this post that the entire Obama Administration has become an Ethics Train Wreck, and one that is neck-and-neck with the one spawned in Ferguson in threatening short and long-term damage. Incompetence, dishonestly, lack of transparency and arrogance have hardened cynicism in the public, corrupted the ethical values of defenders, let journalists to disgrace themselves, and fertilized festering potential disasters internationally and domestically. This is also, I now see, a wreck of long duration that started in 2009, and had gathered momentum with every year. It also has sparked other wrecks, including the one that now keeps it from being the sole 2014 winner. How much damage will The Obama Administration Ethics Train Wreck do in 2015? Which agency or department will prove itself to be corrupt, incompetent and mismanaged, which official will continue in a post after proving himself unfit to serve, which inept pronouncement or abuse of power will further degrade American trust and freedom?

I’m not looking forward to learning the answers.

Fraud of the Year

The U.S. Justice Department, which allegedly participated in a plot to force  Sierra Pacific Industries and other defendants  to pay $55 million to the United States over a period of five years and transfer 22,500 acres of land as settlement of charges brought against the company by DOJ for causing a 2007 wildfire that destroyed 65,000 acres of land in California. Naturally, the national news media has barely covered this scandal, which is still in litigation. Runner Up: The Victoria Wilcher scam, which made KFC pay for plastic surgery for a little girl when there was no evidence that the company was in any way involved with her injuries. After the fraud was discovered, it didn’t dare ask for its money back. Well played, fraudsters! Continue reading →

KABOOM! Now I’m Satisfied That The U.S. Will Never Solve Its Debt Problem, Since It Takes This Long For Congress To STOP PAYING ENTITLEMENTS To NAZIS

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

exploding-head

I’m on the way to Cleveland. I guess I might as well leave my brains on the ceiling, where this story deposited them:

“The House on Tuesday passed legislation to terminate Social Security benefits for suspected Nazi war criminals. Passed 420-0, the bill was approved after an October Associated Press report found that dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals forced to leave the U.S. collected millions of dollars in federal benefits.”

On the plus side, See? We can have bi-partisan agreement in Congress!

On the other side: why do we need the Associated Press to point out to Congress that we’re giving millions of dollars to former Nazis to keep them supplied with fresh Zykon B? Why wasn’t this bill passed six years ago? Sixteen years ago? As long as President Obama thinks he can rule by fiat, where was the executive order directing the Treasury to stop paying non-resident Nazis Social Security?

You can read the original AP story here, which I was going to post on until it got lost in the shuffle.

File this one under “Incompetent Elected Officials,” or perhaps simply, “We’re doomed.”

Ethics Observations On Tim Geithner’s Ethics Quote Of The Month

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Stress Test

“I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit. It wasn’t a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute. Pfeiffer said the line was a ‘dog whistle’ to the left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we intended to protect Social Security.”

—- Former Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, revealing that the White House wanted him to mislead the public on the deficit, debt and Social Security, in his newly published memoir, “Stress Test.”

Some ethics observations:

  • Sadly and predictably, the conservative news organizations are going bananas over this passage, while the liberal organizations—that is to say, all of the rest—are scrupulously ignoring it or trying to. Why sadly? Because in an ethical, objective journalistic culture, every reporter would be examining this admission, and critically.
  • Any journalist who is not bothered by this account has implicitly adopted the position that it is acceptable for the President of the United Sates and U.S. officials to mislead the public regarding crucial matters they have a right to know and understand. This is an unethical position for anyone, but especially for a journalist.
  • Of course, this is not the position of most left-oriented journalists. The position of these journalists is, apparently, that it is acceptable for Democratic Presidents of the United Sates and officials in Democratic administrations to mislead the public regarding crucial matters they have a right to know and understand, since they have exhibited no such tolerance when Republicans have occupied the White House.

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Vice-President Biden (No, Not THAT Unethical Quote!)

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

 “I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.”

—-Vice President Joe Biden, in reply to a supporter at a campaign stop in southern Virgina who told him,  “I’m glad you all are not talking about doing anything with Social Security.”

I know this feels like “Pick on Poor Joe Biden Week” at Ethics Alarms, but everyone has a lot of catching up to do in that regard.

The Washington Post picked up on the above quote by Biden, which it made the subject of an editorial and pronounced “depressing.” It is more than depressing, but then, the Post has to protect Democrats even when they prove themselves irresponsible or dishonest, as Biden does with this “guarantee.” As the Post quite accurately points out, Social Security is going broke, its trustees have called for immediate reforms, and the longer the government waits to do what is needed, the harder it is going to be to do it. Biden, however, and presumably his superior, President Obama, apparently believes that either refusing to take the steps that are essential to prevent a Social Security meltdown or lying to the public about the fact that they will have to take them is preferable to the alternative: responsible fiscal policy and governance and leveling with the public. Critics can scream about the broken system, economists can repeat the math, op-ed writers can warn against constantly “kicking the can down the road” until, like Greece and other profligate and incompetent societies, there is no more road, but if our leaders refuse to show political courage and do their duty, the U.S. has a guarantee, all right—a guarantee of future fiscal catastrophe. That’s okey-dokey with politicians like Biden however. He doesn’t need Social Security, and besides, he’ll be happily drooling in Madam Kluck’s Home for the Bewildered by then. Based on his recent conduct, maybe sooner than he thinks. Continue reading →

Tales Of Ethics Dunces Past: Recalling the Self-Indulgent Suicide of Hunter Thompson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I can’t claim that I am surprised that my post about the suicide of Don Cornelius attracted comments that either showed a misunderstanding of what I wrote or a stubborn determination to change the subject. It was not a post about the virtues of suicide, but about how suicide’sethical calculations may be changing as a broken medical care system increasingly makes the final years and months of the elderly a burden that crushes families and constricts the quality of life  for the nation generally. In short, killing yourself for your country may have to become an accepted practice, an ethical and courageous act, if something doesn’t change. Killing yourself for yourself—to avoid pain, problems, or the consequences of your own actions, should always be considered wrong, for wrong it is.

Jeff Hibbert, one of my favorite contributors here and also one with a great memory, reminded me that I had written on this topic once before. I had forgotten, but that post may be a useful contrast to the Cornelius post. There is not a word of it that I don’t still believe. It concerned the 2005 suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the cult “gonzo journalist” who lived like frat boy and  wrote like angel. Here it is:

Hunter Thompson’s values were admittedly always a little out of whack, but nothing diminished the self-styled “gonzo journalist” in this world so much as his manner of leaving it. He shot himself to death last February while talking on the phone to his wife, with both his son and grandson in his house with him. Nice. That should guarantee some lucky psychoanalyst or three a comfy income for the foreseeable future. Continue reading →

Don Cornelius, Suicide…and Ethics Hero?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Soul Train” creator and pop culture icon Don Cornelius took his own life at 75 yesterday, using a gunshot to the head to do it. Suicide always conjures up feelings of special sadness for the deceased, sometimes mixed with anger. The act can be cruel and devastating to family members and friends; often it leaves behind crushing problems, financial and otherwise, that the living have to deal with. Suicide is stigmatized in our culture as a coward’s way out of earthly problems; many religions consider it a sin, and many legal systems consider suicide a crime. Yet it may be that American culture will have to undergo a major cultural transformation in the matter of taking one’s own life. While morality tends to ossify, ethics is fluid and adaptable. Changing conditions and new realities can, in rare circumstances, cause societies to conclude that what was once considered right is really wrong, and what was once condemned as wrong is in society’s best interests. I think we may reach that point with suicide. Continue reading →

A Frightening Figure, Setting Off Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

We don't even know how to play Russian Roulette responsibly.

On Friday, the day before Christmas Eve when much of America was thinking about sugar plums,  lay-away plans, and protesting Christmas pageants, the Federal Accounting Office released its analysis of  the net present value of the nation’s Social Security and Medicare obligations, “net present value” being  the total funds that would have to be set aside today to pay the costs of these programs in the future. Seldom do figures so clearly indict the unethical practices and statements of so many.

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the catching up on the required funding of Medicare and Social Security rose from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. That $2.9 trillion increase should be regarded as adding to the $1.3 trillion cash deficit for fiscal 2011, making a $4.2 trillion deficit—and this coming in a year in which the rising national debt was supposedly recognized, at last, as a threat to America’s stability, prosperity, and welfare. The costs of Social Security and Medicare are rising at a frightening rate, nearly doubling in the last decade, with little or nothing being done to address the problem. And there is good reason to believe that the Medicare estimates are based on unrealistic assumptions. The GAO report also includes an alternate, less rosy scenario (or perhaps “more putrid” is a better phrase) in which the projected Social Security-Medicare debt is more than $46 trillion. How serious is that? Well, the combined value of the equity in U.S. homes and the value of all publicly-traded companies is less than 20 trillion dollars.

What do these figures tell us about the ethics of the various players on the national scene? Continue reading →