A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
These myths about Social Security are drawing attention from what’s really going on
Talking with family and friends, listening to cable news or following public debate about the future of Social Security, you’ve likely heard one or more of the following comments asserted as incontrovertible fact:
Social Security is going bankrupt, going broke, in crisis; young people will never see a penny in benefits.
Social Security’s trust funds are simply an accounting gimmick, worthless IOUs.
Social Security is unsustainable. There just will not be enough working-age people to support retired boomers.
Social Security is unfair to younger Americans.
Here is a point-by-point refutation of each of these assertions and how these claims undermine confidence in the future of Social Security and distract attention from what is really going on.
More at https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-myths-about-social-security-ar
e-drawing-attention-from-whats-really-going-on-11622834550
The article does not say but the spreaders of these myths are Trumptards. I wonder what happened to those who lean Republican, even if they don’t always vote for only Republicans, to make them this way?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:I've been paying into Social Security since I was a 13 year old working for my father at Burger King in 1965. Except for then and in the military and a half year in the VA hospital and then another year back at Burger King working for my father, again, as a full grown adult and then summer work in college, I have always paid the maximum amount into Social Security. I will get the maximum payment back from Social Security, too, a lousy $3,895 per month when I turn 70 in 2022. I will have to live to be about 110 to get back all the money I paid into Social Security. It is a program to support poor white trash Trumptards like you, 6ix. They are the ones who are getting a cheap ride. They are also the ones spreading falsehoods about Social Security.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/examplemax.html
(By the way I will still be paying into SS after I "retire" because I will still be working. You should try working, 6ix. It will get you out of the house more often.)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:I was only in SS for a few years, not enuf to be able to draw from it on retirement, so there's money I'll never gr back. (I was contributing to a county-based social security-like retirement plan, however.)
Originally posted by second:Quote:I've have been paying into Social Security since I was a 13 year old working for my father at Burger King in 1965. Except for then and in the military and a half year in the VA hospital and then another year back at Burger King working for my father, again, as a full grown adult and then summer work in college, I have always paid the maximum amount into Social Security. I will get the maximum payment back from Social Security, too, a lousy $3,895 per month when I turn 70 in 2022. I will have to live to be about 110 to get back all the money I paid into Social Security. It is a program to support poor white trash Trumptards like you, 6ix. They are the ones who are getting a cheap ride. They are also the ones spreading falsehoods about Social Security.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/examplemax.html
(By the way I will still be paying into SS after I "retire" because I will still be working. You should try working, 6ix. It will get you out of the house more often.)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Like SECOND, hubby has been paying the max into Social Security, and there's no way in hell he'll ever get that back. It is a transfer of wealth from high wage workers to low wage retirees. Isn't that what you wanted, SIX?
BTW, I agree with SECOND: You need to start working again. You can't live off Covid stimulous checks, unemployment, and your nest egg forever. I know that you're hoping t make money when you sell your house (and I hope you make beaucoup bucks and get paid for all that work that you're putting into it) but you don't know what the market's going to be like when you sell, and your savings should be going up, not down, if you want to secure your future.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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A character in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom, puts it this way: “If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.”
How America Fractured Into Four Parts
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.
Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.
The two parties reflected a society that was less free than today, less tolerant, and far less diverse, with fewer choices, but with more economic equality, more shared prosperity, and more political cooperation. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats played important roles in their respective parties. Americans then were more uniform than we are in what they ate (tuna noodle casserole) and what they watched (Bullitt). Even their bodies looked more alike. They were more restrained than we are, more repressed—though restraint and repression were coming undone by 1968.
Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.
The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.
Part 1 about How America Fractured Into Four Parts.
Call the first narrative “Free America.” In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other people—the negative liberty of “Don’t trea
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When SS started, it was 1% of your pay being taxed.
Now, with Medicare included, it's 15.3% of your wages.
That's because all of the boomers coming from families of 5 kids are drawing it, and it was a pyramid scheme from the beginning. Just another in an endless string of bubbles we are great at making here.
I have no intention of working again unless it's absolutely necessary. White males without college degrees at my age can't even get a decent job anymore, and I've started from the bottom and worked my way up to nearly 60k per year twice only to have that job disappear.
The last year has been one of the best and most productive of my life.
If our government were able to do 10% of the good I've done with almost nothing coming in during that time, we'd be running the world for the next 10,000 years.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor
The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.
Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”
But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil.
As it happened, just as I was watching Republican governors try to immiserate low-wage workers who weren’t yet jumping at the chance to return to poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour, I was sent “A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century,” a plan that seeks to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal, developed by Darrick Hamilton, would guarantee a $12,500 annual income for every adult and a $4,500 allowance for every child. It’s what wonks call a “negative income tax” plan — unlike a universal basic income, it phases out as households rise into the middle class.
“With poverty, to address it, you just eliminate it,” Hamilton told me. “You give people enough resources so they’re not poor.” Simple, but not cheap. The team estimates that its proposal would cost $876 billion annually. To give a sense of scale, total federal spending in 2019 was about $4.4 trillion, with $1 trillion of that financing Social Security payments and another $1.1 trillion support Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
I’m less blasé about financing a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20 percent, but at the same time, it’s clearly possible. Even if the entire thing was funded by taxes, it would only bring America’s tax burden to roughly the average of our peer nations.
I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest. When we spoke, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People can’t reap the returns of their effort without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “If you lack basic necessities with regards to economic well-being, you have no agency. You’re dictated to by others or live in a miserable state.”
But those in the economy with the power to do the dictating profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. “It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, told me.
This
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I'm sure we're going to hear more about this as unemployment benefits start dropping off 12 weeks early in the 25 states that ended them, which can be particularly problematic among states that haven't entirely reopened and banned vaccine passports. Particularly those with large minority populations.
I'm surprised how little coverage that has gotten.
It will though.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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A Republican controlled Senate will never again confirm another Democrat Supreme Court Justice
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he would refuse to let President Joe Biden fill a Supreme Court seat in 2024 if Republicans win the Senate next year. McConnell also suggested that he would not let Biden fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2023, even if the president nominated “a normal mainstream liberal.” These comments are not remotely surprising. The Republican Party has outsourced much of its agenda to the federal judiciary, a strategy that requires its lawmakers to ruthlessly extinguish Democrats’ influence over the courts. To that end, a GOP-controlled Senate will never again confirm a Democratic president’s Supreme Court nominee. Not in an election year or any other year. Not in your lifetime or mine. Never.
McConnell played slightly coy when discussing the possibility of a Supreme Court confirmation in 2023, telling Hewitt: “Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens.” But anyone who seriously believes a Republican-controlled Senate would confirm a Biden nominee that year—or even hold hearings on one—is deluding themselves. McConnell’s approach to judicial confirmations reflects two core principles of the modern GOP: first, that only the federal judiciary can impose key items in the Republican Party platform that are too unpopular to pass through the democratic process; and second, that only conservative judges faithfully apply the Constitution, whereas liberals make it up as they go along.
These principles might appear to contradict each other. But Republicans have harmonized them by convincing themselves that their platform perfectly reflects the Constitution. Thus, in the eyes of the GOP, when liberal judges issue decisions that align with Democrats’ priorities, they are judicial activists who are betraying their duty to apply the law as written. When conservative judges issue decisions that align with Republicans’ priorities, by contrast, they are independent jurists who are honoring the Framers’ design.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/mcconnell-biden-breyer-sup
reme-court.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?
Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:McConnell’s move, like everything he does, is calculated. First of all, it helps unite a fractious Republican base, which cares deeply about conservative jurists – and views McConnell’s blocking of Merrick Garland in 2016 as a moment of triumph.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?
Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
Second, it is likely to stir up the Democratic base – and confirm that Breyer needs to retire and Biden needs to fill the opening created ASAP. Which could well impact Breyer’s ultimate decision.
Breyer may announce at the end of this term – which will be at the end of this month – that he is retiring. He'll be 83 in August. But if he decides to stay on an extra year so that he can be another Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying on the job, the fight for control of the Senate next year will have epically large stakes in the Supreme Court.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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