Less Crunk, More Capitalism

Re: "political" hip-hop...
Just once, I'd like to hear a MC that would proudly rock one of these in his video. I mean, some of the lefty ones make decent music, but the Left clearly is not the only way to say "F__k The System". That we've come to such a narrow worldview that our musicians think it's either idiotic Bling-Bling or Marxism is just plain sad...

Not so "private" after all, huh?

A (long, for a reason) excerpt from a Q&A on Social Security Reform. Emphasis mine:

Q: Could private account money be invested in anything?

A: Probably not....Instead, officials have compared possible investments to those available to federal employees under their thrift savings plan - a choice of five or so mutual funds, ranging from international stocks, to blue-chip US equities, and corporate or Treasury bond funds.

A life-cycle fund would also be a likely choice. These are funds in which the percentage of an individual's investment devoted to stocks automatically declines as they near retirement. This would be a means of locking in any gains, and guarding against losses from market volatility.

Q: Could workers withdraw private account money before retirement?

A: No. Under the White House plan, participants would not be allowed preretirement access to their money - nor would they be permitted to make loans to themselves through the accounts, or borrow against them.

There would be at least one important restriction on how the money can be used after participants reach retirement, as well. According to the White House, individuals would not be permitted to withdraw money from their personal account if it would plunge them below the poverty line.

If a worker's payment from traditional Social Security was not by itself large enough to keep them out of poverty, the government would require them to use some portion of their personal account money to buy an annuity - an investment with a fixed monthly payout for life.

You can't pass most annuities along to your heirs, so to some extent this would reduce the amount of freedom that lower-income workers would have in terms of personal account distribution....

Q: If you opt to invest in a private account, would your traditional benefit be reduced?

A: Yes. That would be only fair - workers with private accounts would be diverting some of their tax money away from traditional Social Security, so when time came for retirement they should get less out.


So, the government would dictate what you could invest the setaside money in, bar you from access to any of it before retirement, require you to buy an annuity with the money if it went below a certain point, pretty much keep low-income workers from passing it on to their heirs, and in the case of your contribution to the non-existant trust fund would consider that money to be theirs and not yours.

THIS is "privatization"?

Maybe it would've been a lot simpler to just cut the payroll tax, and shift funding of SS to general revenue. Might as well, they've been stealing from it this long shifting money from SS to everything else, why not in the immediate term -- that is, until phasing out the program -- reverse it? Then w/ the payroll tax cut people could decide for themselves what to do with the extra money.

If anyone out there feels I'm wrong on this, feel free to respond...

In search of a final answer

You knew it was coming....

US Supreme Court. Hardcore christians (from Kentucky, this time). ACLU. 10 commandments:

An empty frame now hangs in the lobby of the Pulaski County Courthouse.

Yesterday, the county's judge-executive, Darrell BeShears, sat in the chambers of the nation's highest court, listening to arguments that will help determine whether he can put the Ten Commandments back in that frame....

Those of us that know a little about early US history have an idea of how this has drifted over time. It used to be thought that there was a much stricter seperation between federal & state powers -- and limitations -- than there is today. For example, at one time individual states actually had official religions, as the Establishment clause was thought to only apply to the federal level. If it weren't for previous court rulings that moved towards an interpretation that the bill of rights applied directly to the states as well as federal, then clearly these people could have their monument....and anything else they wanted no matter how far out. Consider the following:

BeShears was among more than 200 Kentuckians in favor of posting the Commandments who traveled to Washington, D.C., to see the case argued before the Supreme Court yesterday...."It was awesome," said Don Swarthout of Lexington, who is president of the advocacy group Christians Reviving America's Values.

Imagine what this group would be advocating if this were 1801.

Now, I've had my own issues with the shifting of constitutional interpretation. Personally I follow constitutional Literalism: what it means is what it says. The ONLY area where actual interpretation beyond what the authors themselves put into practice is not a violation is when the language used is vague & the actions taken based on the language contradict each other, all else is written in stone. As such, the transformation of the term "states' rights" into some code word for bigotry by groups that would love nothing more than to impose their will on the entire country troubles me. Different areas have different standards, and there is nothing wrong with maintaining a marketplace of ideas among localities. Enforcing a uniform standard for everything erases the potential for experimentation.

However, there is still such thing as a reasonable endpoint. If it were determined that the states were completely untouchable, then the Bill of Rights would essentially be null & void. A scenario where DC can't legally violate your rights but your neighbor can is no less dangerous than one where the states are restrained in exchange for unlimited federal authority. This contradiction has been dealt with over time, reversing earlier precedent.

It can be argued as to whether or not the extent has swung the pendulum too far the other direction -- and I personally believe it has in various ways. Yet on this particular case, the sentiment on the christian side of the dispute sounds like a paen to the previous contradiction. To see what the problem is here, imagine a similar hypothetical but with a different central image, say....firearms: if in the early days localities had been allowed to legitimately ban gun possession, and this precedent were tossed over time, what would be made of a group called "Americans for Traditional Disarmament"?

"It's about our heritage. It's about our history," said David Carr, who owns a Christian radio company based in Somerset and helped arrange the bus trip. "It's about the future of our children."

This is a prime example. In casual discussion some in favor of the commandments displays remaining may point out that the commandments simply being there does not enforce a religion, and I would agree with that view. Yet the view of their advocates is not that they aren't for that purpose, as they argue the exact opposite. One could even interpret their stance to mean if they ceased to believe posting the 10 commandments would encourage a Christianification of government that they would find their request meaningless and drop it.

Beth Wilson, executive director of the ACLU of Kentucky, said she and one of the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit traveled to Washington together. A small group of friends of the ACLU also came for the occasion. Wilson said the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places infringes on the rights of people who do not subscribe to them.

"The Ten Commandments advocate religious beliefs, and those need to be left to individuals," she said. "Religious freedom can only thrive when the government stays out of it."

Were the primary advocates of the commandments remaining to use the view of them being benign, then this would be overblown. Instead, they admit a long-term strategy to goad government into acting on their beliefs, and that the displays are intended to be the first entry towards that end.

There are cases where I don't see eye-to-eye with the ACLU. This is not one of them.


Cross-linked at Outside the Beltway

Rude, yet oh so true...

Yes, it is time to discuss culture. To start off with, check out this link I stumbled across earlier. No Marriage: honest relationship advice for men

I'm guessing it's meant to be semi-funny, but I actually found a really good point in there, a lot of the analysis is stuff I or my friends have said ourselves. The gist of it I got was this:

***Gays aren't undermining marriage in the US, american culture is. More specifically, the culture in the US that tells women to value fantasy over reality, simultaneously denounces sex and defines it as a bargaining chip, and turns every societal issue into fodder for the nightly news.***

Some of the rhetoric at that link sounds primative at first listen, but the proper way to see it is as the swift kick in the ass a sacred cow needs to actually start giving milk again. The situation we currently have here is due to the clash of values stemming from Political Correctness and the typical religious background of the average American. This guy says, either drop both or don't even bother getting married, and personally I agree.