Comment on the Belmont Club: Stop me before I steal again"

no mo uro,
call SS what it really has become – welfare

Bush wanted to replace the Social Security system for new entrants with a savings and investment plan modeled on the Chilean program. That is how the federal government employees own Thrift Savings Plan works. By shifting people's retirement planning away from government welfare, which is what SS is, and into equity investments two things would happen;
1. the inflationary focus on home ownership, that caused the bubble, would be reduced,
2. the savings rate would rise, leading to a reduced need to borrow from overseas.

The poor oppressed voters of Jefferson County, Alabama feel cheated by the clever bankers and lawyers of New York? That sounds like a Leftist lead in for some old fashioned Antisemitism. While I have no doubt that the people at Goldman Sachs have made an industry out of serially corrupting government institutions at all levels, culminating in Jon Corzine running New Jersey into the ground, they are not the one's who bought the sewage plant. The voters elected the politicians who did this in their name. Unless they can prove that Acorn moved in and stole the elections the voters are responsible.

A theory of displaced responsibility is also behind liberal efforts to simultaneously reduce punishment for violent criminals who use a gun and punish the people who manufacture the gun. It is the same attitude that wants third parties to pay for expanded health benefits for people with unhealthy and self indulgent behaviors while increasing the taxes and regulations faced by the merchants who produce the junk food consumed by those same voter-patients. In NY Governor Patterson wants a special tax on soft drinks. That will probably lead to an increase in the consumption of beer. The discovery of new health problems caused by sedentary people sitting for hours surrounded by beer cans while staring at a TV could be addressed by placing a special tax on La-Z-Boy, and the manufacturer of Barca loungers.

NY City is blessed with one of the safest and cleanest water supplies on earth. Fresh water flows into the City from reservoirs, mostly in the Catskill watershed, that the City owns. The system is a marvel of 20th century civil engineering. NY City is now effectively bankrupt partly because the federal government insisted that the City build and pay for a multi-billion dollar Croton Filtration plant under Van Cortlandt Park.

One important reason to support Federalism is so that the costs of irrational or failed expenditures can be isolated. When Socialists push for the centralization of control and the spreading of costs to the entire nation they break down the financial fire walls. If a mistake in Alabama fell on the tax payers there then the system could provide for a realignment of capital. When the problem becomes a national one then the entire market is paralyzed. It is like having to many water tight compartments on the Titanic breached.