Sunday, August 12, 2012

Poseur or prophet? Potentially pwned putz?

They're already giving young Paul Ryan a hard time for wanting to gut the Social Security system although when he was a teenager and his father died he collected Social Security survivor benefits himself, and he didn't even need the money. Like it's ironic or something. This is unfair on just a massive series of levels, and somebody really needs to speak out about it.

In the first place, Ryan has never wanted to gut the Social Security system. To the contrary he wants it to live forever. He just doesn't want it to turn over all its money to a bunch of stupid old people!

He believes, as perhaps Congress's number one expert in cranky-person economics,  that it should have a more legitimately financial-type purpose, like providing a constant supply [jump]
From CoinNews.
of funds to the US stock market, which is otherwise in danger of running completely out of new clients, leaving a man with a normal portfolio virtually marooned.

Is that what you really want, for the stock market to be out on the streets, holding out its hat for sandwich change, unable to take care of its investors? When the situation could easily be remedied by mandating asking our seniors to take their vouchers and turn it around? When the market could be flying on vouchers like the gold coins in fancy packaging Uncle Howard kept buying until the nursing home cut off his phone service? I thought not.

Then, this voucher system wasn't going to apply to any orphans or widows or disabled folks anyway. The SSI payouts for survivors and disability are unchanged in the Ryan Road Map, except for that Progressive Price Indexing,  a cunning method of making your preretirement income look smaller so that Social Security can make your payments smaller to match, but that's not supposed to start seriously impoverishing anybody for decades.

In fact the whole thing is written, according to the highest standards of the philosophy of Objectivism as founded by Jesus and perfected by Ayn Rand, to make sure that nobody who's paying attention to the debate will suffer. Those who are most interested, people who are already getting their checks or starting to think about it, the over-55s, will also be unaffected by the voucher system and are invited to vote for it in the name of the Higher Selfishness.

This may seem to clash a little bit with the frequent injunctions to pay down the national debt so our grandchildren don't have to, but then if you think about it, given the terrible sacrifices our own less fortunate compatriots have to make so that future generations can live debt-free, it's only right that those future generations should make some sacrifices in return. And show some respect, too, little snots.

Finally, it's true that young Ryan didn't really need those survivor benefits in the sense of poverty or what have you; he put the money aside—on his mom's advice, I'll bet—and used it to pay the out-of-state tuition at Miami University in Ohio, avoiding the fevered Marxism of state colleges in his native Wisconsin, and presumably finding a better class of people to network with, since it did in fact get him to Washington and the front door of the right-wing welfare establishment.
Outfits designed by students of Bunka Fashion College, Tokyo; fitted with $1.2 million worth of gold coins loaned by the Austrian Mint Office. From Luxury Launches.
But isn't that what America is all about? Taking responsibility for yourself, planning, and making sure you know the right people? That SSI money in the hands of a poor kid who had to spend it all on food and clothing would be money burned; with Ryan, and his mom's guidance, it was capital—really, in the long run, job-creating money, creating jobs for Objective no. 1, Ryan himself.

Plus a lesson that was not lost on the young economics genius: Wouldn't it be better, instead of exhausting itself with fruitless efforts to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, if the government were to invest all that money with people who can afford to do something with it? It was a lesson our hero would take to heart.

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