Bookworm Room

Tweet James Taranto highlights a couple of women, Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell, who complain that it’s unfair that married women, when widowed, get to receive social security benefits that tie into their husband’s social security “earnings.”  Here, per Taranto, is the heart of Arnold’s and Campbell’s argument: “More than 1,000 laws provide overt legal [...]

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the government will screw up through indifference and people will die. Not because government is “bad” or that the people in government are “bad”, but because people are people and government can never be better than our collective human nature.

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Tweet A Ponzi scheme is a pretty simple animal:  You pay old investors using money put in by new investors.  When you run out of new investors, nobody gets paid. Social security is also a simple animal:  We pay old taxpayers money put in by new taxpayers.  Because there are more old taxpayers than there [...]

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Tweet Danny Lemieux sent me an email regarding Social Security that I reproduce here.  I know that the bit about the “not for identification” is true, because I have in front of me my card, which has that message, and my children’s cards, which don’t.  I do not know if the rest of the email [...]

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Tweet Lawrence Lindsey explains in language even a numerophobe can understand precisely why Obama’s Social Security proposal isn’t just mean-spirted, pandering and illogical, but is also disastrous for the American economy: Although the formula connecting benefits to tax payments or “contributions” has evolved slightly over time, it still adheres to this basic message. Today, what [...]

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