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Want to prevent this from happening again? Andrew Tobias is the DNC treasurer: http://www.andrewtobias.com/, send Andy a message and he will tell you how to get involved.

Dear Andy,

If you want to win the next presidential election, tell your party to stop running sea slugs as candidates. Anyone with two brain cells and a cup of caffeine could have beat Bush in the election. Hell, Bob Dole could have beat Bush in the last election! But instead you chose to run an incoherent somnambulist candidate. Until people stop voting against the other guys and starting voting for your guys, you'll continue to lose.

Sincerely

Stop whining.

Bush stole the election fair and square. It's our (Americans') fault for not creating a massive landslide against him. The fact that a near plurality of people voted for the wanker created an opportunity for Bush 43, his brother, Kathleen Harris and the Republicans to seize power.

History will show that this election was a coup d'état, and that we were the fools who let it happen.

Want to prevent this from happening again? Andrew Tobias is the DNC treasurer: http://www.andrewtobias.com/, send Andy a message and he will tell you how to get involved.

When the mass media and the Dems and GOP are trying to steer us away from are ideas like the following:

--raising the cap on the SS payroll tax (currently at $86K) and using the substantial monies from that to pay into a general SS fund

--taxing the substantial wealth of the plutocrats, and using that to pay for SS, and many other items. Just a small 1% tax on wealth of the rich would pay for SS, universal healthcare and college tuition for all.

That's an interesting statement, especially about the "Dems". I invite you to stop by and take a look at Andrew Tobias (the DNC tresurer and the creator of the MYM personal finance app, among other things) personal website.

You might be interested in reading this recent column, one of many where he talks about options around Social Security.

Please don't take this as criticism - its an honest suggestion. The linked column also talks about another major issue with SS privatization - if the SSA stops buying treasuries, our economy is going to get pretty screwed pretty quickly.

He's a democrat - and he's the treasurer of the DNC - and he's gay. All told, some interesting stories.

Check it out at http://andrewtobias.com/

Pentabytes? Some of that satanic shit like Pentagrams and calico cats! Devil worship I tells ya! Thank the Lawaaaard for John Ashcroft!

Extraordinary popular delusions

The way Microsoft's corporate behavior could be moderated, quite successfully, would be to break it up into separate companies, as the DoJ wanted to do back in the days when we had a DoJ that was more concerned with things like antitrust laws than with calico cats and bare boobies. But of course, no European court has the authority to impose such a penalty on a US company, so don't expect anything to change any time soon.

But you OWE 15.4% on all your wages to this mythical retirement plan.

Put much better than I ever could: Andrew Tobias's Column from 05/09/01

Our FICA money is, for the most part, not invested for our future retirement. As fast as we pay it in, most of it is paid right back out to our parents and grandparents just as the taxes they paid when they were working were paid out in benefits to their parents (and the taxes your kids will pay when they are working will be paid out to you).

Social Security was never intended as an investment program, nor as being sufficient to provide a comfortable middle-class retirement. It was intended as a bare-bones, bare-minimum safety net a pact between generations to assure that none would starve, each successive generation taking care of the last and it has served that purpose, and is likely to continue to.

The first generation paid very little in taxes and got, relatively speaking, huge benefits in return. (For one thing, people started living longer than the original draftsmen of Social Security expected they would. Instead of collecting benefits for three years, they might collect for twenty-three.) That first generation made out like bandits. By now, with so many more retirees to support, the "return" you are likely to get on the taxes you pay in will be much smaller. But neither, as John Seiffer points out above, are you as likely to have your grandmother living in your house with you for the next 20 years.

It's true that in the past decade or so we've begun collecting more than we need to pay out right now, hoping to build a cushion for when the baby boomers are retired, with too few workers to support them all. (When Social Security was launched, there were about 40 workers paying into the system for each retiree receiving benefits. Now it's more like 3 workers and headed for 2.)

This surplus is invested in a special form of Treasury bond. I forget the exact formula that determines the rate, but it's a lot more than 2%, at least before allowing for the effect of inflation.