1 July 2010

Posting today will be brief; I’ll catch a quick workout while my daughter is “belly up” from her long trip.

But for now
Social Security, raising the retirement age:
Representative John Boehner (R-Ohio, Minority leader) mentioned that one way to reduce spending is to raise the social security retirement age to 70 years old; he said that this would apply to those who are 20 years or more away from retiring right now (e. g., a 50 year old such as myself wouldn’t be affected).

My take: believe it or not, I am ok with this idea, even if they made it apply to me. Why? Social Security was enacted in 1935. In 1940, the number of years that a 65 year old could expect to have remaining was: 12.7 years (male), 14.7 years (female). Note: this is NOT “life expectancy minus your age” and “life expectancy” from birth included accidents, diseases, wars, etc. Source.

Currently, the life expectancy (as of 2006 anyway) for a 70 year old is: 13.6 male, 15.9 female. That is, a current 70 year old has more years left than a 1940 65 year old. (source)

Of course, this does not take into account things like senility, ill physical health, etc. Perhaps people are living more mentally and physically incapacitated years these days?

But, the real problem is that the Republicans seem to seek solutions OTHER than making the wealthy pay more. Had he said: “ok, let the tax on the wealthy go back to the rates they were under President Reagan AND raising the retirement age (after checking to see if the extra life span included quality years), I’d be more inclined to take it seriously.

More Republican Stuff: not going along with the extension of unemployment benefits is a bad idea.

Integrity of Sources and Sites

Daily Kos has reason to believe that they were not fed accurate poll data by Research 2000, the firm that they got to do polls for them. Surf to the link to read about it; on example is that the results didn’t appear to have enough noise to be actual data. Needless to say, Research 2000 is pushing back. I haven’t examined the data in detail, but the facts look damning to me.

But the larger point: Daily Kos didn’t just run with data that looked suspicious, even when it showed stuff that we wanted to hear. Also, the problems were brought up to DK via other liberals.

That, to me, speaks to the integrity of the site.

Advertisement