Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

What of this “Trust” Fund?

Trust Fund

Note to readers: Someone in comments below mentioned the widely misunderstood Social Security Trust Fund. I am somewhat a wonk, and have written about such matters. (I realize that issues of aging have limited appeal, which is why I asked the younger Fauxlex aboard, to write about issues with broader appeal.) Rather than rewrite the piece on the Trust Fund, I am simply re-dating it. If all goes according to plan, it should appear below with the original comment thread intact. From 6/26/2018:

The above image is making the rounds on Facebook. Later in this post I will talk about the so-called “Social Security Trust Fund” and how it never was and never will be. For now I want to thank my friend Kevin for putting up his post directly below called A Crashing Success, as it offers an easy and early escape  from this post about (cue violin screech) … taxes!!!

Go now, quickly, or prepare to be flooded with the conceptual abstractions that are used to justify the theft of our hard-earned money. The words “hard-earned” are important, as there are other forms of wealth that are easily owned by people who by pure chance slid down the right birth canals – trust funds, stocks and bonds, inherited wealth and Cayman bank accounts. The essential feature of taxation is that hard-earned money is heavily taxed, while the birth-canal funds are only lightly touched, if at all, by the IRS.

So journey with me now beneath the fold, or make your escape. The particular tax I am going to write about has a name you might know, one that sounds like a disease or the claw of a wild beast. It is called … “FICA.” From that word springs the myth of something called a “Trust Fund.”

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Attention Senior Citizens – have your grandchild read this to you

Bright logoWe senior citizens are noted for two things, diminishing physical and mental abilities. We cannot do much about the former except exercise, what I call “running from Father Time.” It is loss of mental capacity that keeps the advertising industry interested in us. Senior citizens have to be the reason for the waves of robocalls that are torturing all of us. They only need a <1% response to make money, given their low overhead. Shame on us! We are the reason your phone is always ringing.

Every year, during a 45-day period known as “open enrollment” (OE), we seniors are deluged with mailings from members of AHIP, “American’s Health Insurance Providers,” trying to lure us into a program called “Medicare Advantage.” I bit, one time, but was able to escape the grips of Humana by complaining directly to Medicare about its deceitful practices. I re-entered Medicare last June. I now ask myself this: “I spent the first 65 years of my life trying to get away from health insurance companies. Why would I voluntarily go back to them?”

The answer, of course, is diminished mental capacity.

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Fickle foehn fallacies

Esperanza
ESPERANZA

I was out birding with a group of folks on Saturday, out on the South Platte River northeast of Denver. In terms of quacks seen, it was a spectacular day, with thousands of birds covering fourteen species along with bald eagles, hawks, cormorants and herons. And smaller stuff. It helps that a major waste treatment plant dumps its final product in the Platte upstream … it both warms the water and adds nutrients. The vast majority of ducks we saw were Northern Shovelers, known to like brackish water.

Shovelers
Shoveler male and female

Such a day makes up for my weak outing on the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, where a friend and I walked  for several hours through woods, not seeing one bird. At the outset we saw two crows flying high overhead, and I reported them only to be told they were ravens.

“So,” I told our group leader, “I saw two birds this afternoon, and got them both wrong.”

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Comedians I like and not

This post could just as easily be called “Tastes are Personal, Dontcha Know?” It is about comedy and comedians. We all have our favorites, and I will list just a few of mine.

Dennis Miller: Even when I was very liberal, I enjoyed this man. His humor is biting, and extremely clever. Talking about service animals on airplanes, and how carried away (so to speak ) it has gotten, he mentioned a seatmate on an overseas flight, and her “therapeutic puff adder.” He said that Hillary’s campaign was “shakier than a blood bank at a Greyhound Depot.” Something like that, things that would never cross my mind, that catch me by surprise, and make me laugh out loud.

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The institutionalization of brainlessness

I am “friends” with several people on Facebook who I have on perpetual “30-day snooze.” Why don’t I just unfriend them? It seems harsh. The problem with these people is that they are morons. They say stupid things, and by means I do not understand are able to put their stupid words up in boldface with a colorful backdrop. Like this:

A82F8C4E-AE62-491D-AFDA-A6E8E4D3FEC8

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Manniacal Maddness

Australia Burnt Area

(Graph prepared by Dr. Bjorn Lomborg)

Michael Mann, of Hockey Stock infamy, is in Australia, and as usual is littering the landscape with nonsensical statements about the fate of our planet. He said

“Australia’s Wildfire Catastrophe Isn’t the “New Normal.” It’s Much Worse Than That.  … These are the things that keep us up at night as climate scientists.”

Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts had enough of it, and gave a speech on the floor of the Australian Parliament which is reprinted in full beneath the fold. It’s to the point: Mann has no evidence of anything, and never has. Hardly anyone calls him out on it.

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Back when we had vineyards in Billings, Montana

Pittsburgh Snowfall

Last September in a mountain refugio in Northern Italy, we met three German psychologists. One thing about traveling Europe, I find that Germans speak very good English, so conversing with them was easy.  And, as with all trail people we meet, they were friendly, welcoming and interesting.

They were from Hanover, Germany, and told us that it has stopped snowing there, and that in years gone by it used to snow regularly. In other words, they had bought into Climate Change. Because we were all nice people, we were able to disagree amiably.

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Millennials: Stop your moping, start reproducing!

Birth DeaarthI just got done reading a long piece at National Review by Lyman Stone, a Hong Kong resident, called Our Global Birth Dearth. It’s behind a pay wall, unfortunately, but they do allow three free articles.

I first subscribed to NR when I was perhaps 21 years old, and carried the subscription for a couple of decades. I ventured off into liberalism, and dropped it. I recently re-upped, not imagining that I would find much of interest, and generally that is true. I don’t care about party politics or Trump or the Democrats or the elections. NR cannot go near the notion that any major public event might be a hoax. In fact, such ideas would be quickly subject to derision.

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The lead OJ actor has a new gig

I have not paid much attention to the Trump impeachment proceedings, assuming it is all a sideshow complete with clowns and carnival barkers. It could be that something real is in store, as Trump is, like all presidents before, just an actor. In my worst imaginings, he is set up to act as controlled opposition in the Climate Change game and will take all of the remarkable skeptical community down with him.

Climate Change is one of the biggest hoaxes I have seen, and I have lived through McCarthyism, the assassinations of the 1960s, The Cold War, The Missile Crisis, The Iran Hostage event, Jonestown, the Iraq Wars (including the alleged starving of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi kids and old people), the Soviet Collapse, AIDS,  911, the 2000 election, and, oh yeah, I almost forgot, Bill Hicks’ cancer death. Commenters will add to this list no doubt. In the end, we might have 33 or more major hoaxes.

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