The Half-Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

So I was listening to Dave Ramsey and he gave an illustration to a leftie about why he thinks Social Security is stupid. I'm looking at the wall in my office, and it shows the minimum wage as $5.15/hr. That is $206/week. Social security, between the employee "contribution" and the employer "contribution" (in quotes because it is not voluntary in any way) is about 15% going to the Federal Govt. That's basically $30/week. That comes to an average of $134/month.

Now let's put that $134/month into a mutual fund in a Roth IRA at 10%/year average return. Let's also assume that our employee is an incredible loser and never gets a raise. What is $134/month at 10% from age 20 to age 65? Only $1.4 MILLION. If you took 8% out to live on each year, our "loser" would be living on $112,000 per year, forever, and would have 1.4 million to leave to his heirs.

My mother in law gets Social Security and lives on, shall we say, a small fraction of $112,000.

You can get 10% in an index fund! Boring, boring.

That's why Social Security is stupid.

This column talks about the dangers of ideology. I would define ideology as "something someone dreamt up as a great political philosophy." In essence, he says that a political, not economic, Marxism has been planted in the United States and comes out as "political correctness." By the way that term is a masterstroke of propaganda! Who can be opposed to correctness? Until you learn what it is, it sounds like something you should be for. It's really a form of political censorship.

Rhode Island has joined the list of states in liability crisis, and Texas (following some legal reforms) has fallen off the list. Congratulations, Texas!

Al Jazeera picked right up on Jordan's dumb statements about soldiers targeting reporters.

Eason Jordan used to be a high executive at CNN. He resigned Friday after bloggers caught him sliming the US military to a group of Europeans at Davos. Here is a history of the event by Michelle Malkin. The so called Media never caught on to this story. It's in some ways even worse than the Dan Rather story. Looks like an effort to whitewash. Is there any real competition in the news business any more?

Dennis Prager, as usual, hits the nail on the head. He has my favorite radio show (even though it is over the noon hour and I rarely get to listen.) I've got his book, "Happiness is a serious problem" which I highly recommend.

There is a huge problem in the world, started by philosophers who went out into left field and decided that because they couldn't always decide between good and evil, therefore a person could never decide. How strange. Only someone with a PhD could be that dumb.

Most of us know, most of the time, when something is evil. Start listening to that inner knowledge and tell Hume and Nietzche that they were entertaining but ultimately irrelevant.

See this article from a German, recounting European appeasement efforts. Note that he is writing about Europeans. Americans unfortunately often do the same thing. Appeasement is tempting but nearly always wrong.