Hildegarde

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

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5 Responses to 'Yeah, Yeah, Yeah'

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1. It all sounds reasonable to me–but it’s also not quite what you’ve been preaching.

   

   robert_piepenbrink

   28 Sep 10 at 4:09 pm
2. An interesting article. I won’t comment on partoes as I no longer follow US politics. But this article by Victor Hanson might interest people.

   http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson092710.html

   He claims:

   The public is seldom told that 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 40 percent of the income taxes collected, while 40 percent of income earners are exempt from federal income tax — or that present entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are financially unsustainable.

   I have no idea whether he is correct.

   

   jd

   28 Sep 10 at 8:36 pm
3. People MUST know that the present US system of entitlements (and similar ones in other countries) are unsustainable, unless they’ve been living in a hermit’s cave for decades! It’s been very widely discussed!

   Fortunately for me, the Canada Pension Plan has a different structure than the US Social Security and similar plans in some other countries, and although the payout isn’t large (I’d hate to have to live on that alone, but some people do, that and the supplement), it’s not going to go belly-up. But the probles of those plans funded in the same way as the US Social Security plan are very widely known.

   

   Cheryl

   29 Sep 10 at 6:36 am
4. On another topic – I just heard a fleeting reference to this woman, and although I haven’t had time to read much about her one comment stuck out:

   “Literature is not an aesthetic experience but practical help for being human and I started Get Into Reading to address the waste of this fabulous resource, the thing Doris Lessing, in her 2007 Nobel acceptance speech, called “a treasure-house of literature”

   http://thereader.org.uk/the-director-jane-davis.html

   

   Cheryl

   29 Sep 10 at 6:45 am
5. JD, focusing on income tax is (deliberately?) misleading–most lower income folks, who don’t pay income tax, do still pay payroll taxes. And they have an upper limit as to amount of income that is taxed, so they fall disproportionally on the poor. And Medicare and Social Security are only unsustainable in the long run if nobody changes anything (that’s what the payroll taxes are for, so getting rid of the income cap would go a little way toward fixing it).

   

   CAFiorello

   29 Sep 10 at 11:10 pm

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