Better Banter

The other night I was looking through some old Word documents of mine and stumbled across this essay I wrote a dozen or so years ago, when I was 25, about my fears for Social Security. Upon re-reading, I winced at a couple of my analogies, but thought it was worth posting as it hasn't held up that badly with time. What bothers me about my future, what wakes me up at night in a cold sweat, is not that social security will not be there for me when I retire, but that it WILL be there. I'm worried that in 50 years, I'll be 75 years old and eligible for the first time for social security. And that this dinosaur of a program, the T-Rex of big-government money-burning plans, will somehow still be in place. I shudder at this is because I cannot imagine the cost of making this happen. I wonder under how much debt will my children and grandchildren be burdened so that I can have a paycheck from the government. I try to speculate about the debt we have accumulated as a nation to...

I'd never read Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight blog before, but happened upon his take on a recent George Will column today. Although I think he missed Will's point on this one, I've been missing out by not reading Silver before. The bad first: Here's the part ( a part) of Will's argument against a public option for health insurance that Sliver has a beef with: Government is incapable of behaving like market-disciplined private insurers. Competition from the public option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers. Conservatives nod their heads. Silver does not, and offers this interpretation: Will's argument is apparently this: The government does not need to make a profit and will have greater leverage with providers; therefore it will deliver the same service for less money. That's unfair! In fairness to Silver, Will leaves a bit unsaid in his column. Like the difference between p...

Posting has been, at best, sporadic since the 2004 election. That's a long time to be dormant. We've refreshed the look a bit (left-justified alignment seems to work better for mobile browsing) and hope to be posting more often in the weeks and months ahead.

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