Social Security Must Live #258
By Hank Silverberg
Social Security is NOT an entitlement. It is NOT a handout. It is insurance. The program was approved and signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, and it helped dig America out of the Great Depression.
The idea is simple. Each working American pays a Social Security tax. It is money taken right from your paycheck. It's an insurance premium on a policy that you can then collect once you reach retirement age. That age was 65 at first.
But as Baby Boomers began to collect their retirement insurance, the retirement age was raised to 66 or 67, depending on what year you were born. It was hoped that would keep the Social Security Trust Fund solvent. It isn't solvent, mainly because Congress dipped into the trust fund to pay for other things from time to time, even though that was not supposed to happen. If you were born after 1960, your retirement age remains at 67 today.
Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to privatize Social Security, lower benefits or get rid of it altogether. The attempts all failed mainly because the Baby Boomer generation, those coming of age to collect it, was the biggest voting block in the country. No politician wanted to touch what used to be called the "third rail" of politics, the one with an immediate negative reaction from voters. That included Medicare, the government run health insurance that was added in 1965.
The World War Two generation was the biggest beneficiaries. They are now gone or all but forgotten by politicians. Their children, the Baby Boomers, are now benefitting from both programs, and unfortunately, draining that trust fund that Congress borrowed from and never replenished.
So that has prompted the gen-Xers and the Millennials who now hold the political power, to again call for either reductions in payments or another raise in the retirement age, to 70.
To them I ask, what would you do if the pension plan or insurance policy that you had paid into with decades of hard work all of a sudden disappeared or was reduced to less than promised? You would scream fraud, robbery, betrayal!
That is what all this talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare feels like for the millions of Baby Boomers who are either getting the benefits or are close to retirement.
With the exception of freeing the slaves and beating Fascism, Social Security and its little brother, Medicare, have been the most effective government success stories in United States history.
To those advocating for elimination or reduction of both programs now, DON'T DO IT. We may not rule the roost anymore, but Boomers still vote at rates higher than any other age group, and we have very long memories. Shame on you for even suggesting reductions in benefits we EARNED.
And to young people who sometimes whine about all the money taken out of their paycheck, you need to remember that it pays to help keep grandma, grandpa or mom and dad happy and healthy, so you don't have to worry about them.
Insurrectionists in Public Office???
What do you know about the people running for office in your town, city or state? Sure, they put out a resume about their education, work and other things, but as we learned in the George Santos fiasco, nobody bothers to check a candidate's real background. The disappearance of local news media in many areas has made fake backgrounds
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| (U.S. Capitol, Jan 6, 2021) |
But some states are taking action. New York, Connecticut and Virginia now have proposed legislation that would make anyone convicted in an insurrection ineligible to hold public office, or any position of public trust, such as a police officer.
That's a good idea. If you want to overthrow the government, you should not be allowed to be in a position of power in the existing one.
But here's the rub. What about those people who provide logistical or material support to someone involved in an insurrection but are not convicted of a crime? We have several people serving in Congress right now that fit that category.
Our Founding Fathers, who were all revolutionaries themselves, thought about this when they framed the U.S. Constitution. The legislation proposed in the three states may not really be needed:
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
That eliminates a lot of people. Since January 6th, 2021, 972 people have been charged in federal or local courts from the attack on the Capitol. Of that number, 495 have plead guilty and 25 others were convicted on all charges. One was acquitted and 13 cases were dismissed.
The investigation is still not over. More people will probably face charges.
But how many people IN CONGRESS helped support the insurrectionists? That is a question that needs to be answered.
Unfortunately, many of the GOP members currently in Congress don't want the answer. It makes you wonder how many of them knew something about the attack beforehand, or even helped plan it. This is not the start of a new conspiracy theory, just a legitimate question.
In the meantime, when you start talking to candidates running in your neck of the woods or on the national level, ask them about January 6th. Their answer may tell you all you need to know to cast your vote.
Media Literacy
Do you always know what source the information you are reading or seeing comes from? It is getting harder and harder to tell real news from partisan driven propaganda or fake news. Add in sponsored material and you never know if what you are reading is true.
For Millennials and Generation Z, raised on smart phones, tablets and social media, with millions of words at their disposal in seconds, it's even harder.
I have some tips on this that I present to the students in my college class, but by then it may be too late to change habits.
Researchers at Stanford University found that 96% of high school students who were surveyed failed to see how a website's tie to a fossil fuel company could affect its credibility on climate change issues. Two thirds of the students couldn't tell the difference between news stories and advertising, even when the content was labeled "sponsored." And 52% believed a grainy video on Facebook claiming to capture ballot stuffing constituted strong evidence of voter fraud.
People's inability to tell fact from fiction played a major role in spreading the pandemic, and most likely cost lives.
Many claimed they "DID THEIR OWN RESEARCH," but had no clue about what the source of their information was.
New Jersey may have a partial solution for this problem. It's the first state in the country to require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students.
Students in the Garden State will be taught how to do research and use critical thinking so they can tell truth from disinformation. The state Board of Education is drafting a program that will focus on this for every student from kindergarten to the 12th grade.
One of the key aspects of this program is to increase the number of school librarians to help students find factual information.
The bill easily passed the New Jersey General Assembly with bipartisan support. But, of course some of the right-wing news organizations, which will lose the most if people start looking for truth, have called the New Jersey program an attempt to weaponize the school system. https://newjerseymonitor.com/2022/11/23/media-literacy-bill-heads-to-governors-desk/
Who Wrote This?
My name is on the by-line for this blog. But are you sure I wrote it? Are you sure a human being wrote it? Academia is beginning to take a close look at Artificial Intelligence in a different light because of a program called ChatGPT.
It's a bot that can write like a person, and it's now available to the public on an easy-to-use website. It can write prose, poetry, song lyrics and it can also write book reports and term papers. "Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer" is the official name. The program can also do complicated math problems and give parenting advice.
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/what-exactly-is-chatgpt/
Teachers from first grade to graduate schools are now on the alert for students who may be using it to do their assignments, with plagiarism always a major issue.
ChatGPT is correct between 80 and 90% of the time, and the most frightening part is that it can think critically.
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| (A-I robot) |
Why worry? The issues are so clear that Gene Roddenberry and his writers laid them out in an episode of the original Star Trek TV series in 1968 (Season 2, Episode 24). In that episode, an artificial intelligence control system called M-5 takes over the Enterprise and attacks the Federation fleet, killing hundreds of people.
Other writers have worried about this as well.
Isaac Asimov, whose series about robots has a large and loyal following, even went so far as to propose the three laws of robotics that he put in all his science fiction.
A robot may not injure a human being or allow a human to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders, unless they conflict with law number one.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as those actions do not conflict with either the first or second law.
I know, that's science fiction. But we also know that science fiction from the past has often become science fact in the present. Imagine ChatGPT in a machine a that can also walk and talk.
But be assured I wrote this. Maybe a machine would have done a better job.
Dumbest Quote of The Week!
This week it comes from a familiar source of dumb quotes, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz. He was talking about the tragedy of human trafficking that continues to plague our southern border. Instead of promoting real solutions through immigration reform and faster processing of real asylum requests, many Republicans simply resort to attacks on Joe Biden. Hence, this quote from Cruz during one his podcasts this past week:
"Joe Biden is responsible for modern day slavery, and it is every bit as evil and grotesque and cruel and inhumane as it was in the 1700s and 1800s,”
“Under Joe Biden — he’s responsible for funding the slave traders and for their murder and torture and suffering. That is all deliberately caused by this White House.”
No sane person really believes this.
While the Biden Administration has failed so far to come up with an effective plan for dealing with illegal immigration, they are not encouraging it or aiding human trafficking cartels. Cruz's quote is dumb rhetoric, not constructive criticism.
It should be noted that neither Congress, nor any of our most recent Presidents from either party, has been able to get a handle on this issue. And Cruz and his GOP colleagues are a big part of the problem.
Cruz continues to lose what little credibility he ever had on anything.
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Note to readers: The former President, whose name I will not use, continues to make dumb quotes almost every day, but I will not use them.
(Your comments and suggestions are welcome)
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