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A couple days ago , Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) called Social Security a 'forced retirement program' and said workers' payroll contributions should be gambled on Wall Street. My senator, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) proposed adjusting the payroll wage cap so that people making over $400K per year begin paying their fair share — a "win-win." Let’s take each of these in turn: 1. No, Social Security is *not* a retirement program. It is retirement insurance. Retirement programs include such things as 403b and 403c plans, 401k plans, IRAs and personal savings. In all these plans, money is invested in the name of the person to become available to that person upon retirement. There is no personal Social Security account for each worker. Social Security is a pay-go program, where current workers are paying the benefits of current retirees (pace the Trust Fund).  For many Americans, Social Security is the only thing keeping them from living under a bridge eating cat food. Yes,...

The ammosexual response to the epidemic of gun-related deaths in t he US is that you can’t blame the guns, it’s the people. We should just put up with a level of gun violence far higher than any other industrialized nation. But then what about drugs? Using the same ammosexual logic, narcosexuals should point out that drugs don’t kill people, people kill people. Accordingly, we should relax drug laws and make narcotics freely available to everyone over the age of 21. It’s the price of freedom, right?   https://www.foreignaffairs.com/mexico/can-mexico-avoid-confrontation-united-states?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fatoday&utm_campaign=The%20Stunning%20Failure%20of%20Iranian%20Deterrence&utm_content=20260319&utm_term=A

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich died on March 13 th . His 1968 book “The Population Bomb” was both influential and controversial in its time and has proven to be better fiction than science since then. I was required to read The Population Bomb in college. I recall being beguiled by its arguments and probably too by the stature of its author. Over the decades, I’ve come to appreciate the value of prophecies like those of Ehrlich; they are specific enough that, if we live long enough, we can see if they come to pass. If they do, the prophet is validated. If they don’t, he is discredited. In the case of Ehrlich, he was massively and conclusively discredited by events that followed. “. . .    in 1970 he forecast that within the coming decade “100-200 million people per year will be starving to death” and “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people”. Furthermore, by 1980 the life expectancy of the avera...

I’m neither an economist nor an historian, but I know enough about Marx to know that none of the governments that have been established in his name followed Marx’s theories. Suffice to say that Marx taught that socialism—and eventually communism—would arise in mature capitalist economies, when the workers got tired of labor exploitation and overthrew their capitalist overlords. Marx believed that the nations most ripe for this revolution in his time were Germany and the UK. Marx was long dead by the time Lenin and the Bolsheviks claimed his mantle in the 1917 Russian Revolution. To resolve the paradox of how a Marxist revolution is legitimate in a predominantly agrarian pre-industrial society, Lenin et al. sidestepped this inconvenience by proclaiming “socialism in one country.” IOW, socialism because we say so. Of course, the West was happy to accept the re-branding as a way of alienating Marxist economics for its workers. In 1949, Mao and his cadre came to power in China, branding hi...

As a Roman Catholic kid in the ‘60s, I took piano lessons from an Israeli pianist. On a couple of occasions, I was enlisted to perform in Youth Aliyah concerts at the local synagogue. These were fund-raising events to send kids to Israel. At the time, I had no understanding of the Zionist project in Israel. It was only many decades later that I learned that both of my paternal grandparents were born in the Pale of Settlement and immigrated to the US (not to Israel) from Ukraine in the first decade of the 20 th  century. It turns out that the intersection between Christianity and Zionism long antedates my personal experience. “ The idea of gathering the world’s Jews in their mythical homeland was advanced by evangelical Christians centuries before it was taken up by secular Jews at the end of the 19 th   century.  However, religious Jews and the most distinguished Jewish scholars long   opposed   the idea of a Jewish state, especially one in the Holy Land —migrat...

The Trumpenproletariat loves to point to those who disagree with Dear Leader as having Trump Derangement Syndrome. But like everything they accuse others of, it’s what they’re guilty of. “ A week ago I   asked   whether global energy markets have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I was being a bit arch because I didn’t mean in the sense that MAGA world means, which is being somehow obsessively, compulsively anti-Trump. I meant the opposite. Are the markets wedded to a kind of Trump magical thinking? ” In other words, those who blindly trust that Trump has a plan and knows what he’s doing are the ones deranged, particularly in light of his long and growing record of failure. “ To be clear, the best or most generous interpretation of this is TACO, a phrase that started on Wall Street: Trump Always Chickens Out. The idea being that whatever he   says , Trump knows when one of his ideas is going seriously sideways and he moves quickly to pull the plug. And the tariff story does t...