Posted on 01/14/2013 4:50:06 AM PST by Kaslin
I have a serious question for readers. What’s worse, bailouts for government or bailouts for the private sector?
Yes, both are bad, but is it worse to bail out a bankrupt entitlement program, such as Social Security, or it is worse to bail out an industry, such as the financial sector?
To bail out the housing sector, or to bail out Medicare? Fannie and Freddie, or GM and Chrysler?
All these examples involve huge amounts of money, and both private-sector and public-sector bailouts have perverse long-run effects, but which is worse?
And don’t forget there are lots of other bailouts in our future, as discussed on this interview for Fox Business News.
The interview took place before Christmas, but the topic is even more relevant today since the budget season is about to begin.
Most of the discussion was about government agencies and programs that may get more handouts, though bailouts for the Federal Housing Administration and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation would be indirect bailouts for big business and housing.
So we’d get the worst of all worlds, more government spending and more cronyism.
Or, as they call it in Washington, a win-win situation.
But I call it legal corruption.
Every so often, I try to appeal to statists by explaining to them that it’s not in their self interest to steal too much.
Why? Because if you kill off the geese that lay the golden eggs, what will you do tomorrow when nobody is left to produce?
Heck, even the former leftist President of Brazil understood that there can’t be any redistribution if there’s no production.
I’ve made this point by sharing a very clever cartoon. I’ve made this point on television. And I’ve tried to explain it using simple analysis.
I’m not sure I’ve been overly successful, but perhaps this Chuck Asay cartoon will help get the point across.
The cartoon is akin to the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. But the “modern” version of the story, featuring coerced redistribution that causes the ant to no longer be productive.
Heck, it’s also what we see in the PC version of The Little Red Hen. And the same theme can be found in the amusing anecdote that uses beer to explain the corrosive impact of a “progressive” tax system.
The moral of the story – in every case – is that you shouldn’t be too greedy if you’re living off others.
In my speeches, I often joke that a tick or a flea is in trouble if it’s feasting on a dog that dies. Well, on a more serious note, this can happen to countries. Greece is in deep trouble because there are too many people riding in the wagon and not enough people pulling the wagon.
We’re not there yet, but I don’t like the trend.
OK... I’m intrigued...
please explain
Friend, the money you paid in the past is irrelevant to whether or not you’ll get anything back.
Right now the money you get is taken from somebody else who earned it, along with people who will be told to earn it in the future
This is true for anyone who gets a government check.
Nothing else matters.
You do not deserve other people’s money.
Your time to complain was when you were paying. Now that you are collecting a better strategy for you and other folks that get checks is to be nice to taxpayers, who are on the verge of dropping out of the tax base in increasing (worrisome) numbers.
Try being grateful for what other people give you. That the folks that took your money in the past were ungrateful is no reason for you to be rude and disrespectful to those who pay you today.
Those are the uncomfortable facts, my friend. You should get comfortable with them, or you’ll be making it all too easy for folks to feel good about cutting you off from their money.
It’s not the parasites who are to blame. It’s the enablers. And it’s hard to take people seriously in their condemnation of the government, when they keep on meekly sending it money.
“screw ‘em”
There is a good chance they’ll tell you the same thing.
Where will that leave you?
“No one who has paid into the system is a ‘moocher’.”
Ma’am, everyone who collects today, collects from folks who earn it today (and tomorrow too). That’s just a fact.
The money paid out by folks in the past was squandered and spent by ungrateful benefit collectors and government.
Today your attitude will enslave, starve, and leave penniless an entire generation. They won’t allow it, I guarantee you.
You need to understand that the money you collect is not yours - it belongs to someone else who (for now) willingly allows you to have it.
This is true of every penny of every check written to every person who gets one from the government. No matter why they get it, or how noble or ignoble the cause.
We are broke.
Where was this taken? I actually have sympathy for these people. They have been so lied to and used, by the democrats and the liberals.
Are they starving? Are they dying of thirst?
“The people who have paid in to SS had no control over their money being taken.”
The time to complain about past funds paid is long past. Today we do not have the money to pay everyone everything they have been told to expect.
The money folks get today is not theirs, it is earned by someone else today, or in the future (debt).
Don’t disagree with you at all... just saying that what you will ultimately receive is more than you paid in.
the thing is we don't want to steal what's yours. you have been good and paid into the SS, but the govt either misused your money or just bungled it up.
SS is a pyramid scheme -- the future pays for the past. The problem is that there are less producers now -- the baby boomer generation is the largest, so there will be less people paying into SS
ergo, that system will go bankrupt sooner or later.
“What happens when 50 million people who depend on food handouts are turned away, due to “reality” rearing it’s ugly head?”
Coming from you, I know this is a rhetorical question.
The best thing to do today is for local communities to figure out how they are going to house, feed, and care for the elderly when the checks stop.
The EBT’ers will have to be dealt with too. Unfortunately they are not used to working to feed themselves and in all likelihood will continue to ‘take’ until they can take no more.
Yes, it’s time to reform SS something George W. Bush tried to do in 2004 with no little or no support from congressional Republicans and total stonewalling from Democrats. Let young people starting out now or under 30 be allowed to choose where to put their money in funds other than ss. But don’t penalize people who through their long working lives had no choice.
That would leave me a victim of generational theft brought about by the greedy...
Perhaps it is time to take the discussion away from those that are and did pay, and turn it to those that did not and do not pay...
socialist security needs to be phased out, but to cut off those that paid into it and say “Sorry pal” would take an entire generation and turn them out into the streets ( not an exaggeration, but a for real thing ) because a whole host of people did not prepare, but spent all they had banking on s.s.
I find that way of thinking irresponsible at best, but this is the fact..
It needs to be phased out over time, and it can be done without creating a generation of people that spent their lives working, only to be put out onto the streets..
here is a starting point..
1) all benefits, present and projected, are frozen, no cola, no raises, just frozen...
2) People aged 50 and up will recieve all frozen benefits, but will have their s.s. taxes jacked up..and the reason for this is simply a lack of time to save enough to replace the s.s. income they paid into for over 40 years..
3) people 40 to 50 would see a slight increase in their s.s. taxes, and would recieved reduced benefits. The monetary “penalty” would be offset with larger tax advantages for saving and contributions to IRA/401K plans. They still have a fair amount of time to recover and plan.
4) people 30 to 40 would pay the same rate they do now, with even greater tax advantages for contributing to retirement..they would get a greatly reduced amount from s.s.
5) people 20 to 30 would pay a greatly lesser amount, and would get no s.s..... but they will get a very large tax advantage for contributing to retirement
6) people under 20, will contribute nothing, and will not get the “superduper” tax advantage.
this is my starting point. What do you think?
The men who threw the Boston Tea Party did not “own” the tea, either. Would you have discouraged them?
Today, lines are being drawn. The Tea Party vs. the EBT Party. Pick a side.
“Your time to complain was when you were paying.”
I have been complaining for over 35 years and my voting record and constant barrage of communication to my elected officials reflects it, sadly I and many others were ignored for the “greater good”.
You have some interesting ideas, but first and foremost is effectively communicating to everyone that “we’re broke” and that there is no way everything is going to be paid as they may expect.
We haven’t even come close to that hurdle, so that makes all the suggestions you make, prudent or not, irrelevant.
If here, on a supposed conservative internet site we cannot convince people of the fiscal reality that is before us, how are we ever going to convince a wider, likely less reasonable group of people that they aren’t going to get “theirs”
The political reality is that nobody is going to suffer a cut until everyone suffers a drastic cut.
The GOP isn’t going to do it, the Democrats would never think about it, given that the Tea Party was initially a response to Obamacare impact to Medicare - not about the true fiscal situation we face, I’m not optimistic about a government solution, when this is a problem borne of government “solutions”.
The truth is all that matters. Money you get today comes from somebody who must earn it today and tomorrow - and who is not going to have a government check waiting for them like people today have.
What would be a rational response for them? Pay and hope?
“But don’t penalize people who through their long working lives had no choice.”
Understand, I do not wish to “punish” anyone.
However the fiscal reality is cold and cruel, and will leave those with expectations of a check from government, and endless medicare until death wondering how this can happen.
We can’t even convince people who are otherwise open to debate here on FR that we are broke. How can we convince those with less capacity to understand the magnitude of the problem and that “their” needs aren’t going to be met by someone else who must provide for themselves first?
Moochers have no common sense.
The typical example is the virus. Virusus that quickly kill the host, fail to replicate and by natural selection, are few and far between in the wild. Yet they still exist.
Now in societies, mouchers with no common sense also quickly kill the host and those societies die out.
But it is only by mathematical natural selection that mouchers don’t kill the host.
This is a well established fact in the population dynamics regarding parasites and bacteria.
I suspect if anyone did a study on humans, the result would be the same.
“The men who threw the Boston Tea Party did not “own” the tea, either. Would you have discouraged them?”
If we had a “Boston Tea Party” today, no government check recipient would ever get another dime because government would not have the money for anything but basic constitutional tasks.
We are headed there one way or another. There is no end to the lamentations of those who want “their” money from government.
We can no longer pay.
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