"Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" - Matt Kibbe

6/21/11

Why is Granny Throwing Her Kids Under the Bus?

Recently I posted a short piece about a hilarious video that some goofy people made that showed a guy pushing an old lady off a cliff. I say goofy because it was apparently meant as a serious attempt to make people think that any reduction in spending increases or any rational Medicare reform was proof that mean old Republicans and other evil doers were trying to kill Granny. 

It was titled Unintentional Humor is the Best Kind and if you missed it you can revisit it here and have a good laugh. The video backfired of course, at least with anyone of average intelligence.

So what's with the title of this post? Surely I'm not going to accuse old people of intentionally screwing their children and grandchildren, am I? No, I'm not.

But I am going to try to illustrate the point that it's not Granny or any other older Americans who have been paying into Social Security who will be left holding the bag when that system finally collapses if it's not reformed in a meaningful way, and soon. It's her kids and grand kids who will come up empty because that's who is paying her monthly check in the Ponzi scheme farce we call Social Security.

Despite what liberal activists (AKA the mainstream media) have been trying to lead us to believe, absolutely no one from either party has floated any reform proposal that would cut any current recipient's benefit or raise the age of retirement for anyone near the filing age. And it would be political suicide if they did, so no one need worry about that in the short term. (It's the monetization of that debt they should be terrified of.)

The reason for this post is that I got a heads-up on another fine article written by American treasure Dr. Thomas Sowell from a family member who stays current on rationally thought-out articles and knows of my penchant for reading anything Sowell puts to page. Many thanks to son-in-law Bob for pointing me to one I hadn't seen yet.

The article is short and super readable, just as all Sowell articles are. The combination of his intelligence and writing skill make it one you won't want to miss, particularly all you liberals who read this blog. (OK, I can't resist mixing a little humor into every post.)

The Missing Money by Thomas Sowell

One of my earliest memories of revulsion against war came from seeing a photograph from the First World War when I was a teenager. It was nothing gory. Just a picture of a military officer, in an impressive uniform, talking to a puzzled and forlorn-looking old peasant woman with a cloth wrapped around her head.

He said simply: “Don’t you understand, madam? The village is not there any more.”

To many such people of that era, the village was the only world they knew. And to say that it had been destroyed in the carnage of war was to say that there was no way for them to go back home, that their whole world was gone.

Recently that image came back, in a wholly different context, while seeing pictures of American seniors carrying signs that read “Hands off my Social Security” and “Hands off my Medicare.”

Read the rest..

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm a huge Sowell fan. I read this article the other day at Human Events. As usual, Sowell is right on target. We must find a way to communicate clearly to todays retirees and those that will soon join the retiement ranks, that neither the republicans nor the Democrats have any intention of touching their SS pension payments. At the same time, these people need to understand there will be nothing for their children and grandchildren unless the necessary reforms are made.