CBO: US likely to fall off 'fiscal cliff' if Bush-era tax cuts allowed to expire

The part that can't identify sarcasm?

 

Because they are so selfish they actually want some kind of Social Security and Medicare, and simply do not believe all The Responsible People explaining to them how much better it will be for The Job Creators if we simply pull the plug on both programs and send the money on to the poor suffering banks (and Wall Street) who of course can put it to much better use.

 

Sorry, I did not realize you were being sarcastic orginally. I intrepeted it as a very candid explanation of the political philosophies of Mitt Romney and his supporters.

 

A distant cousin:

 

People on this thread keep wanting to judge the need for social safety nets (and other government programs) through individual value judgements.

But it's not about that. It's about sociological and economic predictors. For example, nn a given set of conditions, it is inevitable for certain crimes to increase. So it makes more sense to minimize those conditions than to try to eliminate the crime by catching each individual criminal (because as long as the same conditions apply, the criminal taken off the street will be replaced by another).

Social safety nets are the same way. If you are concentrating on the one schmuck who is 65 and has never heard of a Roth IRA or a 401K and complaining that it's because society is going to "take care of him" that he doesn't even try, then you're missing the point.

If you remove the safety net, it's a predictable outcome that more people will insufficiently save for retirement than society can or wants to handle. You'll have too many poor people without the means to support themselves, which creates a snowball burden. So it goes to reason to create a safety net that minimizes that predictable outcome.

It's not about the individual schmuck, it's about the larger, predictable trend.

 

The way I see this...

Company A sold its soul to Wall Street when it went public. Now Company A has to turn a profit every year in some way so that stock price will keep creeping up. This is important because they started paying themselves in shares of Company A. If Company A does not make more money each year (mind you it is still making money, but it still needs to keep making more each year) then everyone loses money. Facebook is a great example. Zuckerburg never had a boss until last week. Now he has millions.

So now Company A has done pretty much everything they can to keep that stock price going up each year. They have taken away health care from their workers, laid workers off, subbed out work to China, fought like crazy to not pay their air share of taxes and now they have to find a new way to make the bottom line less so that their profit can increase. What's left? Not paying into Social Security.

This is just a vicious, vicious cycle, IMHO.

 

Facebook stock is down 26% in the last week. Facebook better start laying people off.

 

But you have to balance that trend against the trend of people acting less responsibly and desirably when there are safety nets in place to bail them out.