Dreams

Last night was quite an adventure in dreamland. I ended up crawling through various secret passageways in old town Sacramento, climbing down stairs reduced to rubble, and ended up riding the top of a bus for a bit, but swinging off into a pool of water because I wasn't about to ride around on the top of the bus until the next station. Also, one of the caverns dumped me out into some old, classy hotel lobby where everyone was waist-deep in water.

Throughout all this, I ended up running into ex-boyfriends. I remember being fundamentally annoyed at their presence. I was boggling at what I fell for them in the first place. What a rip off of a dream.

So this is what happens when you have a glass of Laphroaig Scotch on the rocks too close to bedtime. That smokey little bastard of a beverage gives one odd dreams!

Here's an article that bears further scrutiny

Op-Ed Columnist: Stopping the Bum's Rush

January 4, 2005
By PAUL KRUGMAN





The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate
an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate
imaginary weapons are now trying another bum's rush. If
they succeed, we will do nothing about the real fiscal
threat and will instead dismantle Social Security, a
program that is in much better financial shape than the
rest of the federal government.

In the next few weeks, I'll explain why privatization will fatally undermine
Social Security, and suggest steps to strengthen the program. I'll also talk
about the much more urgent fiscal problems the administration hopes you
won't notice while it scares you about Social Security.

Today let's focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social
Security faces an imminent crisis.

That claim is simply false. Yet much of the press has
reported the falsehood as a fact. For example, The
Washington Post recently described 2018, when benefit
payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenues, as a "day of
reckoning."

Here's the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the
rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus,
thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result,
Social Security has a large and growing trust fund.

When benefit payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security
will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a
long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052,
says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many
economists, who point out that these projections assume that the economy
will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.

So where's the imminent crisis? Privatizers say the trust
fund doesn't count because it's invested in U.S. government bonds, which are
"meaningless i.o.u.'s." Readers who want a long-form debunking of this
sophistry can read my recent article in the online journal The Economists'
Voice (www.bepress.com/ev).

The short version is that the bonds in the Social Security trust fund are
obligations of the federal government's general fund, the budget outside
Social Security. They have the same status as U.S. bonds owned by Japanese
pension funds and the government of China. The general fund is legally
obliged to pay the interest and principal on those bonds, and Social
Security is legally obliged to pay full benefits as long as there is money
in the trust fund.

There are only two things that could endanger Social
Security's ability to pay benefits before the trust fund
runs out. One would be a fiscal crisis that led the U.S. to default on all
its debts. The other would be legislation specifically repudiating the
general fund's debts to retirees.

That is, we can't have a Social Security crisis without a general fiscal
crisis - unless Congress declares that debts to foreign bondholders must be
honored, but that promises to older Americans, who have spent most of their
working lives paying extra payroll taxes to build up the trust fund, don't
count.

Politically, that seems far-fetched. A general fiscal
crisis, on the other hand, is a real possibility - but not because of Social
Security. In fact, the Bush administration's scaremongering over Social
Security is in large part an effort to distract the public from the real
fiscal danger.

There are two serious threats to the federal government's solvency over the
next couple of decades. One is the fact that the general fund has already
plunged deeply into deficit, largely because of President Bush's
unprecedented insistence on cutting taxes in the face of a war. The other is
the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

As a budget concern, Social Security isn't remotely in the
same league. The long-term cost of the Bush tax cuts is
five times the budget office's estimate of Social
Security's deficit over the next 75 years. The botched prescription drug
bill passed in 2003 does more, all by itself, to increase the long-run
budget deficit than the projected rise in Social Security expenses.

That doesn't mean nothing should be done to improve Social Security's
finances. But privatization is a fake solution to a fake crisis. In future
articles on this subject I'll explain why, and also outline a real plan to
strengthen Social Security.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/opinion/04krugman.html?ex=1105856095&ei=1&
en=568111f84b3277d1

From denimdoll...

Six Apart to buy Livejournal.