My ego says "Wow. Glenn Beck read my post of two days ago, and went on to write this CNN opinion piece." The rational part of my brain says "It's an issue that affects us all, that is (or should be) a campaign issue, and that isn't discussed enough." Whichever part of the brain is right, Beck's piece talks about the impending financial obligations Social Security is bringing down on us all (well, we US citizens).

Thought experiment: how much more money would you have in your pocket, and how much more of what you want would the government be able to do if there was no Social Security? When it was started, it was a surplus the government could borrow against. Very soon now, it will become a liability. Remember, your social security taxes are not being held for when you retire; they're going out almost instantly to someone who is already retired (or otherwise receiving social security payments). By the time you get around to retiring, if the Social Security system still works, the money you paid in will have long gone back out, and circulated through the economy who knows how many times. That small monthly check you'll be getting will be the taxes paid by people working at that time.

If Social Security can't be saved—if there must come a time when we say "No more. I'm sorry. It doesn't work any more"—then there will be a generation of people who are rightfully pissed off for having paid so much into the system and gotten nothing out. And they'll also be upset for having planned on using that money as some of their living expenses during their retirement, only to have no money there. It's probably going to happen, unless we start working on it now. Start reducing payments and increasing taxes to cover what's needed today. Start educating people that their Social Security checks will be smaller, and that they need to save more for retirement on their own. Start at the very least discussing what is commonly known as the third rail of politics. Maybe what we need is a President who comes to office and says "I don't intend to run for another term. I want to do the best job I can today, and I want to work with a Congress that cares more about doing its job than keeping its job." With that group of people maybe, maybe, they can rationally discuss Social Security and implement the changes necessary to wean us from it. Anyone willing to try?

In this post, lonfiction talks about his desire for a politician (or an average person, for that matter) to "put your money where your mouth is." In other words, don't just tell the electorate you're for education: show it by increasing the budget for education. It's a good, passionate argument.

Unfortunately, it reminded me of this editorial from the March issue of Kiplinger's which my father pointed out a few weeks ago (and I inconveniently forgot to write about). In it, Knight Kiplinger starts off by saying "If you really want to know what people value most, look at how they spend their money." Basically, the same argument Lon is making. Kiplinger goes on to look at the various chunks of the federal budget*. Kiplinger talks about how little, as a percentage of total tax dollars, each field gets. After enumerating most everything the average person thinks about (including the Department of Defense, which has a whopping 21% of the budget), he notes that he still hasn't accounted for more than half of federal spending. "So where do the majority of your federal tax dollars go? To your fellow citizens, in direct payments and benefits." He explains how those payments and benefits make up 56% of annual federal spending. "[A]bout one-third of all federal spending goes out as Social Security benefits and Medicare payments."

His summation: "the vexing problem of reordering national priorities is that 65% of the current federal budget (56% in transfer payments and 9% in interest on debt) is virtually untouchable." Good and read the entire article: he spells it all out simply and clearly).

Finally, there's this AP article which talks about the nearing difficulties of continuing Social Security and Medicare as they have been. Quoting from it: "While the Social Security trust fund will have resources until 2041, the more critical date in terms of government revenues will occur in 2017. In that year, Social Security, which has been providing billions of dollars in surpluses to the government for over two decades, will start having to pay out more in benefits than it will receive that year in payroll taxes.

"At that point, the government will have to start replacing the money it has borrowed from the Social Security trust fund. It can do that only by increasing borrowing from the public, raising taxes or cutting other government programs. The elimination of the Social Security surplus is a key reason that experts are projecting sizable budget deficits in future years."

Did you catch that? We've been borrowing from Social Security (yes, yes, I know that wasn't a secret, and it's been going on for many years), but that fund will soon be unable to loan the general budget any more money.

All in all, a sobering look at the finances dictating the federal budget. We can complain about insufficient funding for education, too much money being wasted on science, even overspending on needless wars; but all of those pale in comparison to the 56% gorilla sitting over there in the corner. We've got entitlements which were designed during the Great Depression as stopgaps and assistance programs for a populace living shorter lives, but those programs have become so institutionalized that politicians feel they can't even talk about them.

You want fiscal responsibility in our leaders? Make them talk about Social Security. Not "how do we keep funding it," but rather "does it make sense to keep looking for bandages to keep the system limping along."



* Something I've been talking about since I was actively involved with the Artemis Project: to wit, everyone complains about over-spending on space and science, but those expenditures are less than 1% of the federal budget.

I've just realized I haven't been posting much, and that I neglected to mention that I turned in the introduction and index for The Presidential Book of Lists on Friday (hours before arriving at Lunacon). That means that, for now, I have no work to do on my book (although my editor was hinting at wanting me to do something more, in order to mess with the release date—nothing definite yet).

I guess I'm in the post-book slump of not wanting to write very much right this minute (oh, there are a dozen or three projects floating around my head, all wanting to get written next, and I want to get to them, but I'm taking a few days away from the creative writing circuits because I'm pooped).

However, I've also just realized that I typed probably several posts worth of comment into debgeisler's lj today, in response to her post musing about the seemingly illogical stock market today. Rather than forcing me to come up with something new to write about, I'm going to repost my comments here. They may form an interesting commentary on how the market works, or they may be the incoherent babblings of a former day-trader: you decide.

( Several posts on why the stock market does what it does; cut for length. )

Sure, I know, the reason the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more than 300 points (nearly 3%) is mostly the Fed's announcement that they'll be pumping a lot of money into the markets, but part of me wonders if a little of that exuberance is due to Eliot Spitzer's apparent downfall. As AG, he wasn't seen as exactly friendly to the traders on Wall Street; seeing him get his come-uppance can't have engendered anything other than good feelings on the Street.

(Note: this post is accurate at 3:03PM. I make no prediction about where the markets will close today.)

Edited at 4:37PM: the DJIA closed up 416.66 points, or 3.6%. (The New York Times discusses why here.) In simple numbers, this is the fourth-biggest one day gain on record. In terms of percentage… well, the 10th-biggest one day percentage gain was 9.08%, so today was nothing. The closing average of 12,156.81 is still more than 14% below its highest ever of 14.164.53 (closing) on 9 October 2007 or 14,198.10 (intraday) on 11 October 2007.

(But remember, while it's nice to compare the numbers, the DJIA is simply a measure of how a group of 30 stocks—the members of which have changed over the years—have performed. It may be indicative of greater financial or market trends, but it measures nothing except those 30 stocks.)

...about a sprinter who has decided to follow his dream and compete for a spot on the Olympic team: "Great set of wheels for Olympic hopeful", from The New York Times. It isn't precisely the same as, but is in keeping with, yesterday's post about supporting artists and micro-patrons.

Several blogs I read have links to this article today about "True Fans" as a way for an artist to make a living. Having read the excerpts, it struck me as something similar to an old-time artist finding a patron, except that in the modern world, it would be a thousand or so patrons each contributing just a little bit to the artist's upkeep. Turns out the author had already thought of that.

Synopsizing the piece (though if you're an artist of some sort, you could do worse than spend five minutes reading it), author Kevin Kelly says that the way to make a living, for an artist today, is to accumulate about himself a group (Kelly assumes 1,000, but the number might be higher) of what he calls "true fans." That is, fans of your work willing to spend one day's income (about $100) a year on what you create. If you have 1,000 of them (plus, of course, the less ardent fans who will spend less money on your work), you can make a decent living. One of the keys to accumulating these "micro-patrons" is interaction: Kelly feels that fans want to feel a part of the process; they want to interact with the artist.

I was a late adopter of the "we can make money on the internet" concept (see SFScope for my attempt at it), but I'm a strong proponent of the "interacting with your fans will only help your career" idea. I don't think the things I produce are (yet) worth $100 a year to anyone, but I can definitely see a simple progression from today to a point where I could be doing that.

Anyway, accumulating that circle of fans isn't my priority—creating the stuff that they may be interested in is—but it's something I'll keep in the back of my mind while I work.