"The greatest threat to your Social Security retirement funds is Congress itself. Congress has never required that Social Security tax dollars be kept separate from general revenues. In fact, the Social Security 'trust fund' is not a trust fund at all. The dollars taken out of your paycheck are not deposited into an account to be paid to you later. On the contrary, they are spent immediately to pay current benefits, and to fund completely unrelated federal programs. Your Social Security administration 'account' is nothing more than an IOU, a hopeful promise that enough younger taxpayers will be around to pay your benefits later. Decades of spendthrift congresses have turned the Social Security system into a giant Ponzi scheme, always dependent on new generations. The size and longevity of the Baby Boom generation, however, will finally collapse the house of cards. [...] "The Social Security crisis is a spending crisis. The program could be saved tomorrow if Congress simply would stop spending so much money, apply even 10% of the bloated federal budget to a real trust fund, and begin saving your contributions to earn simple interest. That this simple approach seems impossible speaks volumes about the inability of Congress to cut spending no matter what the circumstances."
So much for "Gardasil Rick" (vaccinating little girls at gunpoint on behalf of Merck, the company who brought us Vioxx while suppressing the adverse safety data in their clinical trials).
So Perry second-hands the right diagnosis about Social Security, but way late. Props for copping a clue, but where the hell was he on this issue before 2010?
Simply removing the FICA cap so that the wealthy payed the same percentage as everybody else (in other words, Ron, turning it into the "flat tax" you're so enamored of), would eliminate the projected funding shortfall.
But saving SS is the last thing any of the concern-trolling Republicans want, so I guess that this is off the table.
With regard to the Republicans and SocSec, NickE, you've really gotta unwedge your head. In 1934, it was the Republicans in the Congress who had "denounced the President for his tardiness in presenting a plan" to set up federal old-age pensions (John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth [1948], page 59).
While dumping the FICA cap on taxable earnings over $106,800 might insignificantly mitigate the present problem (though it's too damned much like trying to bail out the Andrea Doria with a gallon bucket), this kind of "tax the rich" National Socialist stupidity can't do anything more than indulge your "Liberal" fascist masturbation fantasies.
First, there simply aren't enough "rich" people to make a difference. Not to mention the fact that the "rich" have the resources to structure their earnings so as to shift what they don't defer into non-taxable revenue streams.
Why the hell d'you think they spend so much money bribing - er, "contributing to the campaigns of" - both Republican and National Socialist politicians? Those tax codes are insanely Byzantine and jammed full of loopholes for a reason.
Second, it doesn't do anything about the way the Congress keeps ripping off the SocSec fund by way of "intragovernmental debt."
Right now, the only assets held by the Social Security Administration are about $2.4 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds.
Those are federal government I.O.U.s, nothing more. A government bond is just a promise to increase taxes - in some way other than FICA "contributions" - at some time in the future.
Yeah, I know that you "Liberal" fascists just love to increase taxes - as long as you think you're gonna be screwing somebody other than yourselves.
The problem is that all taxes imposed on the economy - even when think you're sticking it to the "rich" - get paid (at one remove or another) by consumers. The "rich" just raise the prices they charge for whatever they're involved in, and the little guy always winds up paying the bills for them.
And it's the consumers with the lowest discretionary incomes - the people trying to get by on pensions and savings and Social Security and welfare - who get hammered the worst whenever the prices of necessities go up.
Ron Paul's suggestion for a "flat tax" of 10% is an "opt out" that would enable people to refuse the benefits of Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, public education and government loans if that's what they want to do. Anybody who wants to stay with the present system can go on paying higher rates.
Remember, FICA is actually 12.4% of what you earn, not just the 6.2% you see getting sucked out of your take-home pay. Your employer budgets his part of that "contribution" as part of your personal compensation package - his cost of keeping you on the payroll.
Those of us who've spent any time working on our own are all too familiar with the feds' "self-employment tax" rate of 13.3% (as well as the Medicare portion - 2.9% - on absolutely every damned dime earned above the $106,800 annual limit).
Hm. How many of you "Liberal" fascists obsessing over Mallard Fillmore here have ever been self-employed?
Certainly might be worth betting that none of you have ever had to meet a payroll as an employer.
Oops. That's about $2.4 trillion (not "billion") in U.S. Treasury bonds as assets in the SocSec trust fund at present.
If an insurance company running a retirement annuity tried to claim its own corporate instruments of debt as assets in their clients' trust funds, the managers would find themselves facing criminal charges.
What was that line of Nixon's? "Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
Those terms are still far too nuanced for Tin Eye. Mallard continues to agitate for the politically correct term "Death Camp Liberal Nazi Murder Spree" since, after all, words have no more meaning than the dancing shadows a bonfire casts on a cave wall.
Anyway, big stunner that our guest blowhole is a Paultard. That endorsement of Paul by the Coalition Of Racist Potheads Living In Their Moms' Basements has really changed the political landscape.
I would be self employed, except then I would not be able to get medical insurance. (By the way, for years the insurance companies have been "pulling the plug" on your granny, parents, siblings, etc., but GOP in Congress thought it was perfectly OK.)
And I'm not a liberal. Just not crazy about Republicans. And having to see MF in local paper only emphasizes how evil they are.
I see the inclusion of differing viewpoints has capped the enthusiasm of the usual dwellers in Duck and Cover Land, although it has inspired more nasty invective from the "tolerant" left. "Paultards" - used against those who support the only candidate who wants to bring home our troops and end the endless Bush/Obama wars.
OTOH, in the real world inhabited by real Americans, Social Security is usually thought of as by most seniors (and those about to be) as their best (and probably only) hope of surviving retirement not living on the street eating cat food.
As for Tucci/Anonymous @ 10:26AM, we probably wouldn't want to bother their tiny little brains with things like how Social Security changed the elderly from our poorest demographic to one where a somewhat comfortable old age was a probability, not a pipe dream. Because, of course, no government program has ever done anything good for any human ever in recorded history.
And your "argument by authority" is coming from Ron Paul? Because who would know better about economics than an MD, right?
WV: unninkin. What Tucci and his ilk are best at (consider it as a contaction for "unthinking"). BTW, let me save you the Merriam-Webster citation, Tucci -- I know there is no such word; I am making it up.
Some say the Republican plan to destroy everything in the country is accidentally playing Russian Roulette with itself, but I say it is more like shooting itself intentionally in the head.
The conservative attack on Social Security would be political suicide, except they're working to keep old people from voting. The elderly frequently give up their driver's licenses and therefore will not realize until November 2012 that they won't be able to vote in many states.
---
Anonymous Coward's claim that @Tucci has "capped the enthusiam" is directly opposite the facts; @Tucci's spewings have stimulated a large number of responses. But, then, truth has never been AC's concern. ---
With regard to the Republicans and SocSec, NickE, you've really gotta unwedge your head. In 1934, it was the Republicans in the Congress who had "denounced the President for his tardiness in presenting a plan" to set up federal old-age pensions...
And right there I stopped reading. Because if Tucci thinks the political orientations of the Republican Party of 1934 bear ANY similarity to those of the current GOP, he's even more of a drooling Jonah Goldberg-grade moron than previously thought.
Benjy Sarlin explains the difference between a Ponzi scheme and Social Security. He notes there are surmountable issues, but (Tucci's inevitable spray of fictionalized history and goalpost-movers notwithstanding) Perry's full of crap...and so is Batshit for playing along.
Never trust a man whose plan to help you involves pulling the rug out from under you.
Benjy Sarlin's TPM piece of September 26th (he uses Nick Baumann's Venn diagram graphic from MotherJones.com, where the first characteristic of SocSec listed goes: "Is run by the government, which can print money and tax people") might be compared against Robert Murphy's online op-ed of September 19th, where we read:
"The complaints about Social Security are accurate: The only reason it has enjoyed such 'success' thus far is that it relied on increasing contributions from each new generation of workers. Now that the demographics have turned against the system, it is literally unsustainable. We will see increased taxes on workers, reduced payments to beneficiaries, or some combination of the two. [...] "Finally, in one important respect a classic Ponzi scheme is less dangerous than Social Security: It relies on fooling people into voluntarily handing over their money. Once the fraud is detected, the danger is eliminated. In contrast, American workers have no choice but to 'contribute' to Social Security, whether they like the deal or not."
I particularly like the way in which Sarlin (by way of pasting in Baumann's graphic) compares Ponzi/Madoff's "Is usually not invested in anything" to SocSec's "Is invested in U.S. Treasury bonds."
I did make the point above about what U.S. Treasury bonds are, right?
Murphy considers the "Ponzi scheme" comparison "unfair — unfair to Charles Ponzi.
"However, so far as we know Ponzi never threatened anybody. He didn't tell struggling young workers, 'Give me 15 percent of your paycheck every week, so that I can make you a fantastic return — or else I'll send goons to kidnap you.'"
So Perry is wrong when he retails the "Ponzi scheme" meme about SocSec.
Is the funniest part about @Tucci's copypasta attacking social security on demographic grounds (A) that it applies with greater force to private retirement plans, or (B) that it is deliberately ignorant of economics?
(A) If the argument is the common-sense-sounding one of "too few workers to support too many old people", the same problem obtains with private plans. When you have a 1-to-1 ration between workers and non-workers, it seems on its face to be "unsustainable". The only difference between public and private plans, in such an analysis, is that private plans skim something off the top to support an investor class, and therefore suffers from the demographics problem even more.
(B) The more economist-sounding argument looks at the issue solely in terms of money, assuming that labor will appear so long as there's enough pieces of paper to conjure it. But this argument completely ignores productivity improvements. Today's farmer grows ten times as much food as in FDR's era, and therefore can support ten times as many non-farmers. Other goods have enjoyed comparable improvements. In medicine, for example, while we simply cannot add more doctor-hours to the day, we CAN and have made those hours more productive by increasing the medical knowledge of we patients. For example, we patients now know not to smoke, and therefore the dollars needed to support Ayn Rand having a personal assistant as she coughed her life away on Social Security would not have been needed (...may I assume that @Tucci understands the large fraction of Social Security that supports the infirm non-aged? Bugger me if I made a bad assumption!) The costs of supporting the infirm and the elderly can actually decrease as productivity improves ... but only if those improvements are reflected in price reduction instead of profit inflation.
David in NYC [who has claimed to be "someone with two degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in Economics"] whines about:
"...'argument by authority'...coming from Ron Paul? Because who would know better about economics than an MD, right?"
Jeez, you'd think that a clown who perpetrates argument from authority by irrelevantly posting a claim that "...one of my graduate advisors was Wassily Leontief" in an idiot effort to make himself somehow smell less like a pile of shit would know the difference between a fallacious appeal to authority and the citation of expert opinion.
In addition to being an OB/GYN, Ron Paul is also a long-serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives. This qualifies him as an expert on what the Congress has actually been doing with regard to raiding the SocSec trust "to fund completely unrelated federal programs."
By the way, David, you never did get around to responding to the answers I provided to your two wonderfully cement-headed "questions" about the difference between "what is usually called 'fiat money'" and counterfeit (answer: none) and where currency comes from "if not from a 'central bank'."
rewinn, you schmuck, it's us primary care physicians who do most of the work responding to the SocSec bureaucrats on medical justification for SSDI claims.
I know a helluva lot more about "the large fraction of Social Security that supports the infirm non-aged" than I'd ever thought I'd need to learn forty years ago.
With regard to your blithering idiocy about how: "In medicine...while we simply cannot add more doctor-hours to the day, we CAN and have made those hours more productive by increasing the medical knowledge of we patients"....
Not really. In the past twenty-odd years the patient who comes into the office with a fistful of computer print-out has become something of a cliche in conversations among American doctors. That bit about "increasing the medical knowledge of [you] patients" by way of free-range browsing on the Internet tends to make the doctor's job more difficult, not less.
As with putzes like David in NYC [who has claimed to be "someone with two degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in Economics"], inculcated error has got to be addressed and refuted before you can get to what's real and what needs to be done to fix it.
And where have you been with regard to changes in the provision of medical services over the past thirty-odd years? Nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) functioning as "ancillary health care providers" continue to take on more of the job of assessing and treating patients, and that's just going to increase, especially in primary care.
A few years ago I even persuaded a group of nephrologists to take on an NP when they couldn't get any fresh-from-their-fellowship guys to join them in them here in flyover country. I knew that most of their time-consuming work involves patients on dialysis who are more-or-less stable. The NP they found has been working out fine for them, though she admits that she'd never thought about doing secondary specialty work when she'd finished her training.
The failures of the SocSec bureaucrats and the politicians to address the absolutely predictable (and well-predicted) actuarial realities of changes in demography and economic productivity are more profound than you're willing or able to credit, rewinn, and comprise yet another argument for not entrusting responsibility for such "social safety net" functions to thugs who rely on winning popularity contests to get and keep their positions of authority.
Because private-sector insurance carriers have to make a profit in order to stay in business, their managers - even the "Pointy-haired Boss" types - get direct feedback on conditions to which they've got to respond in a much more "real-time" environment than is invoked by the election cycles.
If they're not perniciously buffered from confrontation with these realities by politicians meddling in the marketplace to "pick winners," these private sector actors have to accommodate their management of disability insurance and retirement annuities to what's actually going on in the economy. They can't evade responsibility because they can't "print money and tax people."
Among the various well-reasoned and effective proposals to fix the U.S. health care system there's even acknowledgement of the way to improve access to qualified physician expertise by removing regulatory "barriers to entry preventing people from practicing medicine who are eminently qualified to practice medicine, or be nurses, or make medical devices, and so on."
Does it surprise you, rewinn, to learn that medical licensing was imposed upon America through the machinations of the AMA to no purpose other than to create and preserve a lucrative oligopoly by keeping down the number of doctors permitted to see patients?
Though I've disagreed with Milton Friedman on many particulars, his argument for getting rid of medical licensure has my heartiest professional endorsement.
Jeez, Tog, but "Physician (retired)" is in my profile, isn't it?
Your fellow "Liberal" fascist rewinn certainly clicked the link; it's the reason for his brain-dead necrophilic jerking-off over how he thinks Heinlein would've supposedly "curbstomped" me about observing how our Marxist Mulatto has nothing but his status as the product of miscegenation with which to sell himself to the voters.
Golly, Tucci's brilliant arguments sure shut up all you cement-heads! He's probably hung like a horse, too, you needle-dicks! And wow, he's a doctor too! He is awesome beyond all imagination or belief!
He might even be Batman!
I'm totally not him at all BTW so stop saying that!
I can see where an alleged doctor who spends all hours trolling novel-length idiot tracts onto a Mallard Fillmore blog would want to get rid of medical licensing, ya know what I mean?
Oh, well, certainly if it's in your Facebook profile, it MUST be true.
I haven't looked at your profile because (a) I'm not interested, and (b) when someone else did that it set off one of your lunatic rants.
In spite of the fact that I've run into plenty of loon quacks in my life, I can't imagine anyone like you remaining in practice for more than a day, even in Alabama. You certainly have the arrogance and egoism down pat, but everything else about you suggests you couldn't handle a tongue depressor, let alone a prescription, a scalpel, or a tube of anitfungual ointment.
And CW in LA (who keeps proving that he's "Ideologically hidebound, dumb and crazy") can't come to grips with the concept of retirement?
As for Tog, why not quote Ron Paul? He certainly gets you "Liberal" fascisti jumping and squealing and jerking off in public until your frenula bleed, doesn't he?
Oh, yeah. Tog? Topical antifungal agents are formulated in cream or gel vehicles because cutaneous mycoses don't respond well when covered with ointments (petrolatum) that tend to trap moisture and increase skin maceration.
There, all better, end of world averted. Misspelled "antifungual" anyway. Surprised you didn't catch that with your highly-focused ubermind.
...Now, don't you wish you could change your posts? To something even marginally sane?
At least you admit you're trolling, as weird as that may be for someone who claims to be a retired physician. Like you, Ron Paul doesn't anger me. Like you, it's the obscene stupidity a delusional old fool proselytizes, and the suffering it will lead to if ever put into action, that troubles me.
I appreciate the fact that you sprinkle every one of your posts with unnecessary racist phrases like this. It saves me from having to read the remaining 50,000 words.
Aw, Tog, spelling snarks were being dismissed as shit-flicking on Usenet thirty years ago.
The failure to understand the difference between topical medication vehicles, on the other hand, is therapeutically significant. To this day I still see patients screwing themselves up by applying stuff like Neosporin ointment over perfectly appropriate OTC antifungal creams to wreak havoc on simple interstitial fungal infections.
But don't you dorks know the difference between "trolling" and straightforward opposition?
The asswipe who keeps posting in these fora as "Tucci" in a feeble pretense of distraction is trolling. When David in NYC - who claims to be "someone with two degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in Economics" - posts two questions about the nature of fiat currency and the role of central banking in the issue of such, and then evades address of the response, that's "trolling," too.
I'm just grinding factual reality in your "Liberal" fascist faces, and it's pissing you Tinsley-obsessed schmucks off.
But I enjoy your noise about how "Ron Paul doesn't anger me."
What I like about Dr. Paul is the way in which he angers the hell out of "establishment" Republicans - especially the neocon "We're the cops of the world!" imperialists - as well as you National Socialists.
As for the observation that your Hubshi Halfling's man-tan was the only thing he had going for him as an advantage in the 2008 "advance auction sale of stolen goods"....
Hey, that's just another aspect of factual reality you're trying to evade acknowledging, right?
"But don't you know the difference between "trolling" and straightforward opposition?"
Yes. And gratuitous racist filth and an obsession with male genitalia that suggests you're so deep in the closet you can see Narnia are indicative of trolling.
It's funny; old Ron Paul doesn't come across as overtly racist (although he did once tell Jon Stewart that the slavery-era US was close to his idea society), but vicious, hate-filled racists sure do love the guy.
Fumblenuts CW in LA can't get over the fact that if his Mulignane Messiah hadn't been able to present a faux noir facade of negritude, the pitiful poverty pimp might be managing a Baskin-Robbins (if that) instead of farting into Oval Office upholstery.
If this critter had taken after the honky/semitic aspects of his genetic makeup (remember, his nominal male parent was Luo, an ethnic group considerably intermarried with Arabs, meaning that he's really even less than half Black) to appear Caucasian, and had presented under one of his other names - the "Jean Paul Ludwig" associated with his Connecticut Social Security account number, or "Harrison J. Bounel" perhaps - would he even have been Cook-County-machined into the Illinois state senate?
The altogether uncanny background of the "Barack Hussein Obama II" persona - including Stanley Ann Dunham's jet-setting all over the planet before Barry's birth and during his childhood - continues to raise a boatload of well-justified questions about his qualification under Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution to have run for election to the office he presently occupies.
Even if that "Whoops, there it is!" magical appearance of an arguably forged long-form birth certificate in Hawaii state records earlier this year is accepted as valid (why did it take so damned long for Barry's handlers to cough it up?), there's so much in our "57 states" fumblenuts' personal past history that's not only suspicious as all hell but also sealed away from public scrutiny by measures like the first Executive Order to which Barry put his signature upon seating himself at the Resolute desk.
For example, does anybody dispute that his childhood adoption - under the name Soebarkah, nickname "Barry" - by Soetoro (nickname "Lolo") to become a citizen of the Republic of Indonesia and "a good Muslim schoolboy" imposes some question about whether or not our TelePrompTer-in-Chief had enjoyed unimpaired lifelong "natural-born citizen" status even if he hadn't been born in Coast Province General Hospital in his hometown of Mombasa?
The wonderful way in which all "Liberal" fascists kneejerk with such reliability into howling "racist!" every time somebody questions their Kenyan Keynesian's machinations simply emphasizes the fact that their Empty Suit has absolutely nothing going for him except his ability to pretend membership in an admittedly persecuted American ethnic minority to which Barry - raised in Indonesia as the adopted son of an elite Sukharno apparatchik and then spending his adolescence in Hawaii as a member of his maternal grandparents' lily-White family, educated in the most prestigious prep school in the state - has no legitimate claim of adherence.
I repeat that morally and mentally crippled dorks like CW in LA keep trying to play the "race card" in defense of their National Socialist "spread the wealth around" Schwarzer because it's their only recourse.
Yeah, that very last stream of piss really supports your "retired physician" story, bro. (/sarcasm)
Speaking of "tired," you're really locked hard onto that whole "liberal fascist" thing, aren't you. Are you sure you aren't Lucianne's Very Special Little Cheetoh-Vacuum?
Tog, it's impossible to characterize you leftie-luser dorks as genuinely liberal because you're emphatically not. Never have been.
The term "liberal" came into political use in the 19th Century to describe those of us who defend individual human rights against government thuggery.
You guys with your fixations on groupthink and "government-as-Santa-Claus" and Keynesian fucking with the economy and affirmative action and compulsory unionization and Kumbaya-at-gunpoint "multiculturalism"?
No friggin' way are you genuine liberals.
The last Democrat of national prominence who could reasonably be called a real liberal was Grover Cleveland, and it's a pretty safe bet that none of you schmucks clustering here even know who the hell he was.
So when I use the "L"-word to characterize you people, I do it with a capital-L and between quotation marks to qualify its speciousness.
I'd do the same for the conservatives, but there have never been conservatives in American political history who've really had clue number one about just precisely what it is that they're supposed to be trying to "conserve," so there's no risk of confusing our current crop of god-besotted bankster-sucking corporate welfare right-wingers with anybody who had ever been worth the proverbial thimbleful of warm spit.
"Progressive" does fit you fools, but only in the sense that the word is used in oncology. A cancer is termed "progressive" if it continues to grow in mass and/or metastasis after a course of treatment has been completed, with the grim prospect that it's going to kill the patient.
The "fascist" bit was something I'd long averred on the basis of my own observations of "Liberal" political economics (I mean, just consider that NRA Blue Eagle insignia of the New Deal; FDR did everything in the Nazi playbook but Krystallnacht and Winterhilfe), and when Jonah Goldberg published Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning in 2008, even with the obvious flaws to which he proved susceptible (hey, what can you expect from a Republican?) it got prominent play in the lamestream media and squeals of "Liberal" horror at the way it turned a spotlight on their heritage in the bloodsoaked Socialist Century which their political hatefulness did so much to inflict upon humanity.
It's taxonomy as unimpeachable as the naming conventions used in characterizing pathogenic microorganisms. I figure I might as well go with it.
As for the Republicans.... Well, the "Liberals" have been sucking on Stalin's dead dick since the '30s, following his Comintern commands to label everybody opposed to "scientific socialism" as fascisti.
Would that it were so simple when it comes to the Republicans. They can be called a lot of things - "Rotarian Socialists" per Frank Chodorov and "state capitalists" according to Clyde Wilson - but they're not fascists, and never have been. They're America's "court party," their heritage going back to the Whig Party (with Henry Clay's "American Plan" of pork, protectionism, and banksterism) and the Federalists.
Just as bad in their own ways as you "Liberal" fascists, but not quite the same.
What I meant was: your manner of expressing yourself doesn't even remotely suggest the sort of mature person one normally associates with "retired physician;" more like "severely imbalanced teenager."
You DO understand that, aside from the hardier debaters, no normal person would read your preposterously long and gassy copypastes, don't you? You seem to ricochet between sincerely arguing points and trolling even within individual sentences, and a sane person would be able to comprehend the foolishness of that.
In the end you are merely a sad spectacle, not unlike the street drunk whose love of his own voice has degenerated into screaming obscenities at people who aren't actually there.
I'd give you some money but you'd probably just spend it on crack.
Tog, if the greatest part of the usual gang of gooberss drawn here by their hatred of Tinsley's comic strip (even the guy who claims to be "someone with two degrees [undergraduate and graduate] in Economics") haven't got the literacy or attention span to handle logically consistent reasoned argument regarding purposeful human action, it's not matter of much concern to me. When I'm not writing for pay or to satisfy someone on the editorial staff of a medical journal, I'm in it for the personal entertainment value, and I write as I goddam well please.
Considering that I haven't been a "teenager" since LBJ was still throwing conscripts and B-52s at Uncle Ho, it's altogether delightful to read your fumble about my age. While I'm happy to insult you dorks (I think of it more along the lines of "character assessment"), I don't make silly stabs at personalities.
Except of course, to the extent that someone like David in NYC tries to claim ex cathedra authority on the basis of nothing more than a claim to have studied with one of the more prominent ordinative statist econometricians, and then fails to support his trolling even with lucid reasoning.
You guys really aren't used to exchanges outside your own little religious group, are you?
Maybe Tucc-bag is "retired" bec ause he had his license revoked for abusive conduct? More likely, he got kicked out of med school. Or a pre-med program.
Or maybe he's just making shit up. Righties have certainly been known to do so. You'd think adherents of an ideology they claim to be so comprehensively wonderful wouldn't need to keep lying to make it look remotely palatable, but darn if that's not how it goes.
In any case, Tucc-bag, there's a reason your life is such a spectacular failure that you're reduced to logorrheic trolling on a blog devoted to making fun of a shabbily-drawn cartoon duck for any acknowledgement of your wretched existence.
And it's not because of "'liberal' fascism"; no, it's because you're an odious, mentally damaged freak. Take some of that personal responsibility conservatives are endlessly blathering about and admit it, at least to yourself.
Really got to you, didn't I? Why else do you reference me multiple times in every thread despite the lack of additional comment from me? Methinks the man doth protest too much.
I stopped responding to your economics-related bullshit because even though I do enjoy a battle of wits as much as (or even more than) the next person, it's really unfair to fight an unarmed opponent. The only arguments you will ever win will be those -- like the one with me -- where the other side just gets too tired and bored of listening to the bullshit.
As I said before, if brevity is the soul of wit, lack of wit is clearly evidenced by lack of brevity (that's called a contrapositive; I can't wait for your several-hundred word exegesis on why it isn't). You, clearly, demonstrate that in spades.
And the problem isn't that I (or anyone else here, except for the occasional Anonymous) "haven't got the literacy or attention span to handle logically consistent reasoned argument regarding purposeful human action", it's that you haven't made any such arguments.
As for your dismissal of Wassily Leontief's credentials (which I did not actually cite as an authority, merely as a reference point to my own background in economic study) and concommitant support of Ron Paul's (which you did use as your sole authority, lack of relevant credentials notwithstanding) in a discussion of economics when I raised the "argument by authority" issue just proves you really don't have a clue what you are talking about.
As for not responding, I note the utter failure of you to address the issue I raised of your accusing other commenters of being perjorative while being more perjorative, by several orders of magnitude, than anyone else posting here, including the occasional Anonymice.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment back on Planet Earth.
The overuse of potty words is a good sign of dementia, as is his inability to respond substantively to criticism and his occasional admissions that he knows facts that falsify his claims.
I appreciate the fact that he's unhappy that patients no longer passively accept his pronouncements as Gospel, and pay for whatever pills the salesmen are pushing this month. Why he complains about the time he wastes filling out paperwork justifying payments from the government is a mystery; it seems to me he'd be in favor of fiscal prudence.
But @Tucci does not complain about the much greater timewaster: filling out paperwork justifying payments from insurance companies. No doubt that's because he Randian religion requires such human sacrifice for the greater good: richer investers at the cost of sicker patients.
I feel compassion for primary care physicians locked into our insane American system. The last two times I visited primary care physicians, each misdiagnosed a simple problem easily curable by a minor change in diet; each took their 6-minute segment to prescribe a drug which a co-pay, side-effects, and profits. I assume that they are simply trapped in the system.
P.S. @Tucci has never refuted that Heinlein despised racists such as @Tucci.
Of course you can express yourself however you wish, Tuc-Tuc; no one said otherwise.
I'm just curious about what you think writing in such a schizophrenic fashion accomplishes.
We all know you love to explain everything in voluminous detail (well, almost everything--not the stuff you pretend to ignore, as David in NYC points out); I figured you'd jump at the chance to tell us how your troll/gentleman-of-letters crazy-quilt is supposed to be more effective (or time-efficient) than outright trolling.
Well, let me point out "in voluminous detail" where you schmucks are wrong.
First, contrary to David in NYC (who didn't cite Leontief but rather mentioned him pointedly as one of his academic advisers in an execrable effort to gain something of the Nobel laureate's cachet without employing anything of the man's work to support any assertions of fact), I didn't use Dr. Ron Paul as an authority in economic theory but rather as a qualified expert witness to what the Congress has been doing to the Social Security fund and how the Social Security system has become actuarily unsound as the result of Congressional mismanagement.
Dr. Paul isn't just an OB/GYN. He's also a long-serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the chamber of the Congress with the principal responsibility and the authority to exercise "the power of the purse" accorded the federal legislature by the Constitution.
David in NYC being the only Tinsley-hating putz frequenting this attack site who has claimed to be "someone with two degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in Economics," he's voluntarily set himself to a higher standard of knowledge in this area. Then he has failed to perform.
Heck, instead of addressing himself to what argument I've voiced pertinent to economics - such as the nature of U.S. Treasury bonds - David in NYC has claimed that I'd been "accusing other commenters of being perjorative while being more perjorative, by several orders of magnitude, than anyone else posting here."
Not that David in NYC offers any examples of where I'd complained about any of you "Liberal" fascists brickbatting anybody (with or without justification). I pretty massively don't care about such stuff, and don't recall having tried to take anyone in this forum to task for any "pejorative" he/she might have posted.
That's your collective type of squealing, senseless noise. Beyond seeking support for a particular excoriative accusation ("You say he buggers buffalo? You got something from a police blotter to back that up?"), I never bother with it.
David in NYC presently states that he had "stopped responding to [my] economics-related" contentions when in actuality he'd never started. As I'd written, he'd posted two questions about the difference between "what is usually called 'fiat money'" and counterfeit (short answer: none) and where currency comes from "if not from a 'central bank'," and then evaded the response.
I note that he's still evading the response, as well as failing to perform otherwise as the expert in "Economics" he's held himself forth to be.
Next (in no particular order), there's the perptually fatuous CW in LA, intent upon nothing more than claiming that whatever I've offered about my own personal self is a prevarication and his irrelevant speculation that my "life is such a spectacular failure that [I'm] reduced to logorrheic trolling on a blog devoted to making fun of a shabbily-drawn cartoon duck."
Truth to tell, I only found this virtual circle-jerk of "Liberal" fascists by way of a Web search undertaken after seeing Tinsley's "designer cupcake" strip and wondering to what phenomenon he was referring. I've been interested in business cycle "boom-and-bust" since the years of the Carter Malaise, and suspected that "the designer cupcake boom" was an instantiation of this process of which I hadn't previously been aware.
That you cement-heads find lucid argument "logorrheic" is more a remark upon your own inividual and collective inability to reason about both reality and your own responses to the facts thereof. CW in LA and similar idiots find themselves way out of their narrow little comfort zones when confronted with explicitly articulated observations of how the world really is.
Like any other cult of religious fanatics, you "Liberal" fascists don't do at all well when your groundless articles of faith are challenged.
Psychotically unable to grapple with what I've been posting, CW in LA has got to fantacize about my supposedly miserable personal life.
Well, I've already admitted that I'm married, so misery can be taken for granted. But what has that to do with political economics or the naked criminality of the Obama regime?
Then there's rewinn, our explicitly admitted aggressive "mercantilist" who wants his neighbors prevented from selling and buying as they choose in order to preserve rewinn's peculiar "patriot" vision of American national grandeur.
rewinn remarks about how in this forum I don't "complain about the much greater timewaster [in a primary care physician's professional life]: filling out paperwork justifying payments from insurance companies."
Well, first, of course, I'm retired and therefore no longer have to deal with that crap from the perspective of the "healthcare provider." Second, I haven't had occasion - yet - to discuss third-party payors. rewinn had only brought up the subject of SSDI, not HCFA - er, MAMA; I mean CMS - or the private sector health "insurance" carriers.
Much of the interface between the practicing physician and third-party payors had long ago been automated by way of electronic billing systems (EBS), and there really hasn't been much that those of us in primary care have had to extraneously or extraordinarily document in disputes with third-party payors. We're not proceduralists, by and large.
Handling temporary and permanent disability claims, on the other hand, still requires a bit of work. I used to draw pretty heavily upon the AMA's Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, and these have certainly helped.
Nevertheless, there's still much truth in one of my old preceptors' observations that for your patients, "Falling back on SSDI is like falling back on an open set of carpenter's tools."
They're a bitch to deal with. Anybody reading here have any perspective on the process from the patient's side?
As for patients who "no longer passively accept [my] pronouncements as Gospel," when did they ever? Yeah, there are always people who just want the antibiotics prescriptions for every sore throat (and to whom you've got to explain repeatedly and at length that viral infections don't respond to amoxicillin), but the technical medical jurisprudence term in tort law for a doc who doesn't listen to his patients is "defendant."
But rewinn has something approaching the right of it when he posts about "whatever pills the salesmen are pushing this month." Like most guys my age, I'd certainly gotten stung by the marketers yelping up their companies' "latest and greatest" proprietary products over the decades. I did mention Merck's Vioxx (rofecoxib), didn't I?
In the days before electronic medical records (EMR), I've had memorably to comb through hundreds of paper charts to find those patients who'd been started on a new medication that wound up being withdrawn from the market for some adverse effect or other.
I'm not one of those guys who fought EMR, though I still mistrust the way in which those systems have been required by the politicians. HIPAA protections notwithstanding, the people you least want dropping a digital hose into your medical records as a patient and siphoning off data on your personally-identified private and particular ailments are goverment thugs.
And when it comes to "fiscal prudence," by what psychotic fantasy (or abysmal stupidity) does rewinn associate "fiscal prudence" with the federal government?
When it comes to rewinn's continued necrophilic effort to fuck the ashes of Robert A. Heinlein on how much the old guy hated racism and therefore would've hated me for observing that Barry Soebarkah is a fake even when pretending the American Black ethnicity that's the only marketing element in his image, to what level of reliance upon government "fiscal prudence" did Heinlein attain over the course of his evolution from EPIC socialist to "rational anarchist"?
Finally, Tog, it'd be interesting to get something more from you on how you justify the descriptor "schizophrenic" when it comes to my writing style.
A major part of the diagnostic and therapeutic work involved in modern primary care over the past several decades has come to be central nervous system (CNS) maladies, with emphasis on mood and thought disorders. I'd had pretty steady numbers of cases under my primary or secondary management responsibility with schizophrenia of one or another subtype, and like all American practitioners I've been subjected to steady pressure by the manufacturers of the on-patent atypical antipsychotic drugs to write them for patients who do not suffer the major thought disorders for the treatment of which these medicines had been developed.
Boy, am I glad that I no longer have to deal with anxiety and depression patients coming in seeking scrips for Seroquel (quetiapine) or Abilify (aripiprazole) because of a TV commercial or Internet puff piece.
While I can wish there were some respect for the proper use of diagnostic terms (or at least the employment of words like "schizophrenic" in explicit analogy rather than an idiot confusion with some kind of "split personality" presentation), I look at Tog the "Liberal" fascist and consider the source.
In the words of Heinlein, "Them Boys Hain’t Drugged, They’re Just Stupid!"
Who says I don't "like being called 'logorrheic'"? Admittedly, it's the improper use of a clinical term, but there's leeway in its employment as figure of speech.
As with head-up-the-ass "intelligent design" advocates and those who have been suckered by (or who are perpetrating) the "man-made global climate change" fraud, you "Liberal" fascisti are pressing for the aggressive violation of your neighbors' individual human rights on the basis either of cupidity or stupidity.
(It's charitable to assume that you're merely stupid, though you do persist in making it unavoidably obvious that there's a solid streak of outright criminal malevolence in your collective make-up.)
Composing reasoned argument against what we'll laughingly call your "political positions" on subjects like the business cycle (and government counterfeiting), the Arab Spring uprisings (which have been triggered by food shortages caused by "biofuels" marketplace meddling in the industrialized West), and our Illegitimacy-in-Chief is certainly enjoyable for its own sake.
Some guys spend much more time and money running around in the woods to blow away Bambi; who can fault me for taking virtual pot-shots at genuinely vicious vermin like you guys?
Besides, the only infections I'm risking are computer viruses. Any of you yups ever treated anybody for either trichinosis or Lyme disease?
Not that David in NYC offers any examples of where I'd complained about any of you "Liberal" fascists brickbatting anybody (with or without justification). I pretty massively don't care about such stuff, and don't recall having tried to take anyone in this forum to task for any "pejorative" he/she might have posted.
Really? WTF would you call this, from my earlier comment:
==================== "Don't you just love how the wingnut set (though in Tucci's case, we can probably just leave off the "wing" part) love to complain about things like:
especially the pejorative labels you slap on your opponents to dehumanize them
IMMEDIATELY after (as in, preceding grafs) writing about other commenters here such lovely things as:
Jeez, and I thought you were too friggin' stupid to cop a clue, dickbreath. My bad.
Like every other species of real bigots, you "Liberal" fascisti fail to focus on concrete realities while masturbating over abstractions ====================
So: You are QUOTED using the word "perjorative". Immediately following is a two-sentence quote with FIVE EXAMPLES -- BOLDED so even a blithering idiot like you could see them -- and you have the unmitigated gall and/or stupidity to assert that (1) you never used the word "perjorative", and (2) you never said anything that could be described with that word.
Never mind the imaginary drugs I suggested you had forgotten earlier. You need to start taking some REAL psychotropic medications, stat.
P.S. I originally used "logorrhea" in the non-clinical sense (it does have other uses). But, since the DSM-IV defines it as:
Logorrhoea: Logorrhoea, also known as "volubility", is characterized by a patient's fluent and rambling speech using numerous words.
I guess I also accurately used it in the clinical sense.
David in NYC grunts and strains to conflate my use of the word "pejorative" in the observation of a general tendency among the "Liberal" fascisti - labeling their opponents and victims with denigratory categorizations in order to deprive them of the moral status of human beings - with action on my part "to take anyone in this forum to task for any 'pejorative' he/she might have posted."
Keep on groping around in your drawers, David. Not that there's all that much down there for you to find.
As for simple incidental insult applied in exchanges with you flaming idiots in this venue, that's nothing more than merry contumely.
If you take it to heart because you feel so strongly that it's accurate characterization of your own personal failings - which it seems in David's case very much to be - c'est la vie.
Tucci there must be a way you can condense your copypasta to less then 7,000 words,Otherwise your no different from the rambling homeless person with an "The end it neigh" sign on the corner.
I'd originally thought that this "copypasta" blithering was a schmuckish local neologism for "copy and paste" in the sense of putting forward something somebody else had written as if it were your own (as opposed to quoting and attributing, or using expressions like "advance auction sale of stolen goods," which any literate reader recognizes as a draw from Mencken's "Government is a broker in pillage..." remark in Prejudices, First Series [1919]).
But what the hell; I'm on the Web. I looked it up, and found that it has something to do with "imageboards" and pertains specifically to "Anything which is repetitively posted" on such sites, with emphasis on "a direct or nearly direct copy-and-paste of memes, posts from older forum discussions, or other material, often accompanied by an attempt to pass off the contents as new and original."
None of which pertains to any of the posts I've made in this forum, natch.
Jeez, you leftie-luser fucktards can't even use pornboard slang correctly?
Is his use of potty mouth to disguise the fact he conceded my point about Heinlein's disdain for racists such as himself more amusing than his fear of admitting that for-profit health insurance is far more inefficient that government-managed insurance (30% overhead compared to something like 3%)?
Inquiring minds may never know because @Tucci's senilely foul mouth and off-topic loggorheaic anti-Americanism add up to tl;dr.
rewinn's fantasies about how Heinlein would hate me because of the author's "disdain for racists " has long since qualified as genuine "copypasta," obviously ""a direct or nearly direct copy-and-paste of memes, posts from older forum discussions, or other material, often accompanied by an attempt to pass off the contents as new and original."
rewinn, you pitiful fucktard, I've not said anything at all about American Blacks generally, or offered more than observations I've personally found robust about other sociocultural moieties, such as immigrant Sikhs in my community and Islamist physicians (both Arab and non-Arab) of my professional acquaintance.
It's only when I discuss our corrupt wastrel avowedly socialist Mulatto-in-Chief that I emphasize his personal and political career of purest "blaxploitation," duplicitously leveraging the purest illusion of membership in an ethnic group to which he has never belonged.
The public persona carefully constructed by "Harrison J. Bounel" (or whatever in hell his name really is) has always depended upon his ability to leverage his "high-yaller" complexion and negroid facies to gull the voters while concealing his totally alien character behind a facade of purest deceit.
Shit, he's so completely foreign to America that he couldn't even correctly pronounce the word "corpsman," and lost track of the fact that there are only 50 states in our federal union (obviously confusing the number with the 57 member states of the Oganisation of Islamic Cooperation).
There's no need for anybody to be "racist" when condemning your Mombasa Messiah, who is the perfect image of reverse racism par excellence. About Barry Soebarkah and his flagrant fraudulent appeal to negritude, one need speak nothing but that which is specifically pertinent.
The stunningly nekulturnyCW in LA (who has no goddam clue as to the origin and meaning, for example, of the term "negritude" and can't click active Web links provided) is bereft of anything but the race card to play, and obviously - senselessly, psychotically - lives what we'll call his "life" according to William Macpherson's 1999 categorization of "racist" as that "which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person."
To quote James Delingpole's recent mention of this aspect of the Macpherson Report: "That definition [...] has done immeasurable damage to social cohesion in Britain, further encouraging a poisonous culture of victimhood, grievance and entitlement, as well as serving to increase the racial tension it was supposed to diminish."
And there's what "Liberal" fascisti like CW in LA - by way of their endless yammering of "racist" every time anyone points out that the only value of the carefully fabricated "Barack Hussein Obama II" false front lies in the principal perpetrator's simulation of authentic American negritude - are trying for:
"...a poisonous culture of victimhood, grievance and entitlement...."
You "Liberal" fascists do just hate it when real Black Americans - like Walter Williams and Herman Cain and Thomas Sowell and Dick Boddie and Clarence Thomas - refuse the role you've chosen for them as pitiful, helplessly compliant Darkies on your plantation, don'tcha?
And it so predictably jerks you by your remaining short hairs every time somebody makes it explicitly clear that your brainfucked efforts to peddle your "poisonous culture of victimhood, grievance and entitlement" aren't working any more.
I'm not a racist. I love blacks with the negritude who kiss my entitled ass. It's when there's miscegenation and people born of same getting elected president of the United States that I lose my tenuous grasp on my shit.
In conclusion, Blah blah blah blah blah x1,000,000
Anyway, Tucc-bag, what makes you think I have any interest on clicking on any of your stupid links? I'll admit to a certain unwholesome pleasure in pointing out what a massive waste of oxygen you are, but really I spend too much time on you as it is.
As for my being uncultured, I want no part of your malignant culture, to which General Sherman gave an inspirational yet all too incomplete response. So that works out.
As I've observed before about you "Liberal" fascists, with all your false-flag-flapping (or should that be "fapping"?) about "multiculturalism," you not only know nothing at all about the various cultures you're using as a lying excuse for your pilferage and power-grabbing but nothing about the one in which most of you had been raised.
Oh, yeah. I haven't "mispronounced a word" in the American language since I was about seven years old.
That's the same age at which our POTUS-With-an-Asterisk was concentrating on the pronunciation of words in Indonesian and Arabic.
My dad had been the lone squid in the family during World War II - the rest of his generation in our clan had served in the Army - but with all those movies about the USMC in "da big one" in the theaters and on afternoon TV, my generation learned the role of Hospital Corpsmen in the Fleet Marine Force (and how to pronounce the name of their rating) by way of that popular American culture from which little Barry Soebarkah was so completely alienated during his privileged life in Sukharno's slaughterhouse of an archipelago.
Flaunting yet again his historical illiteracy as well as his general stupidity, CW in LA proves that he has no friggin' idea whatsoever of what the U.S. Constitution was created (both ostensibly and actually) to do when it came to the political and economic consolidation of the original signatory sovereign states (as in "nation-states" or "countries") joining in the alliance of a federal union by way of the original Articles of Confederation which were "revised" in Hamilton's star chamber proceedings.
At the time of the War of Northern Aggression, almost every citizen of these United States, when asked the name of his country, would respond with the name of the specific state in which he'd been born or with which he otherwise identified himself. For example, despite his long career in the U.S. Army (before resigning to accept a commission in the organized militia of his home state) at posts in states and territories all over the continent, Robert E. Lee identified Virginia as "my country," not the federation in which his country was a participant.
He also referred to the Northern aggressors as "those people" during and after active hostilities were waged against his country.
This was the condition of our constitutional Union prior to our American Lenin's war to ram Henry Clay's American System forcibly down upon the inhabitants of those countries outside the politically dominant northern region of the federal republic which sought to benefit from the wholly unconstitutional "protective" tariffs which the Republicans had been elected in 1860 to impose.
Indeed, were the Constitution to be enforced as the law of the land - with specific attention paid to the Tenth Amendment - that would be the condition of our federation today instead of the catastrophe to which you "Liberal" fascists and our Republican corruptocrats have reduced it.
With it understood that the meaning of "America" in the Constitution which our servicemen and federal politicians swear "to preserve, defend and uphold" is rather more like the present European Union than the fantasy of a monolithic totalitarian tyranny over which CW in LA and his fellow "Liberal" fascisti masturbate so frenetically, it can be said most accurately that I love and defend America as it is instantiated in civil government under the rule of law established by the U.S. Constitution.
CW in LA, of course, most emphatically does not.
But CW is either a traitor with malice aforethought or a person too wonderfully stupid to know what the hell he's doing or advocating.
I'm just a good, loyal American patriot who respects the U.S. Constitution and wants it (again, emphasis on the Bill of Rights) to be enforced.
"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
70 comments:
"The greatest threat to your Social Security retirement funds is Congress itself. Congress has never required that Social Security tax dollars be kept separate from general revenues. In fact, the Social Security 'trust fund' is not a trust fund at all. The dollars taken out of your paycheck are not deposited into an account to be paid to you later. On the contrary, they are spent immediately to pay current benefits, and to fund completely unrelated federal programs. Your Social Security administration 'account' is nothing more than an IOU, a hopeful promise that enough younger taxpayers will be around to pay your benefits later. Decades of spendthrift congresses have turned the Social Security system into a giant Ponzi scheme, always dependent on new generations. The size and longevity of the Baby Boom generation, however, will finally collapse the house of cards.
[...]
"The Social Security crisis is a spending crisis. The program could be saved tomorrow if Congress simply would stop spending so much money, apply even 10% of the bloated federal budget to a real trust fund, and begin saving your contributions to earn simple interest. That this simple approach seems impossible speaks volumes about the inability of Congress to cut spending no matter what the circumstances."
-- Ron Paul, November 9, 2004 (emphasis in the original)
So much for "Gardasil Rick" (vaccinating little girls at gunpoint on behalf of Merck, the company who brought us Vioxx while suppressing the adverse safety data in their clinical trials).
So Perry second-hands the right diagnosis about Social Security, but way late. Props for copping a clue, but where the hell was he on this issue before 2010?
Simply removing the FICA cap so that the wealthy payed the same percentage as everybody else (in other words, Ron, turning it into the "flat tax" you're so enamored of), would eliminate the projected funding shortfall.
But saving SS is the last thing any of the concern-trolling Republicans want, so I guess that this is off the table.
Oh look, more copypasta from Douchie, yawn.
"Ponzi scheme" is so yesterday.
When do we get to the new word "Soylyndra"?
I should have actually typed Solyndra, but I keep thinking of Soylent Green
With regard to the Republicans and SocSec, NickE, you've really gotta unwedge your head. In 1934, it was the Republicans in the Congress who had "denounced the President for his tardiness in presenting a plan" to set up federal old-age pensions (John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth [1948], page 59).
While dumping the FICA cap on taxable earnings over $106,800 might insignificantly mitigate the present problem (though it's too damned much like trying to bail out the Andrea Doria with a gallon bucket), this kind of "tax the rich" National Socialist stupidity can't do anything more than indulge your "Liberal" fascist masturbation fantasies.
First, there simply aren't enough "rich" people to make a difference. Not to mention the fact that the "rich" have the resources to structure their earnings so as to shift what they don't defer into non-taxable revenue streams.
Why the hell d'you think they spend so much money bribing - er, "contributing to the campaigns of" - both Republican and National Socialist politicians? Those tax codes are insanely Byzantine and jammed full of loopholes for a reason.
Second, it doesn't do anything about the way the Congress keeps ripping off the SocSec fund by way of "intragovernmental debt."
Right now, the only assets held by the Social Security Administration are about $2.4 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds.
Those are federal government I.O.U.s, nothing more. A government bond is just a promise to increase taxes - in some way other than FICA "contributions" - at some time in the future.
Yeah, I know that you "Liberal" fascists just love to increase taxes - as long as you think you're gonna be screwing somebody other than yourselves.
The problem is that all taxes imposed on the economy - even when think you're sticking it to the "rich" - get paid (at one remove or another) by consumers. The "rich" just raise the prices they charge for whatever they're involved in, and the little guy always winds up paying the bills for them.
And it's the consumers with the lowest discretionary incomes - the people trying to get by on pensions and savings and Social Security and welfare - who get hammered the worst whenever the prices of necessities go up.
Ron Paul's suggestion for a "flat tax" of 10% is an "opt out" that would enable people to refuse the benefits of Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, public education and government loans if that's what they want to do. Anybody who wants to stay with the present system can go on paying higher rates.
Remember, FICA is actually 12.4% of what you earn, not just the 6.2% you see getting sucked out of your take-home pay. Your employer budgets his part of that "contribution" as part of your personal compensation package - his cost of keeping you on the payroll.
Those of us who've spent any time working on our own are all too familiar with the feds' "self-employment tax" rate of 13.3% (as well as the Medicare portion - 2.9% - on absolutely every damned dime earned above the $106,800 annual limit).
Hm. How many of you "Liberal" fascists obsessing over Mallard Fillmore here have ever been self-employed?
Certainly might be worth betting that none of you have ever had to meet a payroll as an employer.
Oops. That's about $2.4 trillion (not "billion") in U.S. Treasury bonds as assets in the SocSec trust fund at present.
If an insurance company running a retirement annuity tried to claim its own corporate instruments of debt as assets in their clients' trust funds, the managers would find themselves facing criminal charges.
What was that line of Nixon's? "Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
Somebody has too much time on their hands and needs to get a real job.
Those terms are still far too nuanced for Tin Eye. Mallard continues to agitate for the politically correct term "Death Camp Liberal Nazi Murder Spree" since, after all, words have no more meaning than the dancing shadows a bonfire casts on a cave wall.
Okay Tucci, you're boring now.
A Ron Paul quote two screens tall after the elision of non-relevant parts? Yeah, sure, I'll get right on reading that.
Regarding the comic that we're here to actually discuss, those are either the largest walnut shells I've ever seen, or the smallest coconuts.
I thought they were fake breasts?
Anyway, big stunner that our guest blowhole is a Paultard. That endorsement of Paul by the Coalition Of Racist Potheads Living In Their Moms' Basements has really changed the political landscape.
In what way has SS ever been a shell game?
I would be self employed, except then I would not be able to get medical insurance. (By the way, for years the insurance companies have been "pulling the plug" on your granny, parents, siblings, etc., but GOP in Congress thought it was perfectly OK.)
And I'm not a liberal. Just not crazy about Republicans. And having to see MF in local paper only emphasizes how evil they are.
I see the inclusion of differing viewpoints has capped the enthusiasm of the usual dwellers in Duck and Cover Land, although it has inspired more nasty invective from the "tolerant" left. "Paultards" - used against those who support the only candidate who wants to bring home our troops and end the endless Bush/Obama wars.
OTOH, in the real world inhabited by real Americans, Social Security is usually thought of as by most seniors (and those about to be) as their best (and probably only) hope of surviving retirement not living on the street eating cat food.
As for Tucci/Anonymous @ 10:26AM, we probably wouldn't want to bother their tiny little brains with things like how Social Security changed the elderly from our poorest demographic to one where a somewhat comfortable old age was a probability, not a pipe dream. Because, of course, no government program has ever done anything good for any human ever in recorded history.
And your "argument by authority" is coming from Ron Paul? Because who would know better about economics than an MD, right?
WV: unninkin. What Tucci and his ilk are best at (consider it as a contaction for "unthinking"). BTW, let me save you the Merriam-Webster citation, Tucci -- I know there is no such word; I am making it up.
Tucci must be high on meth: That explains his nonsensical paranoid delusions and ability to post before everyone else.
Word Verification: A messy, Mallard Fillmore and Tucci come together to form a messy pile of incomprehensible racist shit.
Some say the Republican plan to destroy everything in the country is accidentally playing Russian Roulette with itself, but I say it is more like shooting itself intentionally in the head.
"inclusion of different viewpoints" or "threadshitting", you make the call.
The conservative attack on Social Security would be political suicide, except they're working to keep old people from voting. The elderly frequently give up their driver's licenses and therefore will not realize until November 2012 that they won't be able to vote in many states.
---
Anonymous Coward's claim that @Tucci has "capped the enthusiam" is directly opposite the facts; @Tucci's spewings have stimulated a large number of responses. But, then, truth has never been AC's concern.
---
@Tucci's copypasta from Ron Paul reminds us all of what happens when you follow Paul's philosophy to its logical conclusion: you die without health care, leaving huge bills for everyone else to pay.
With regard to the Republicans and SocSec, NickE, you've really gotta unwedge your head. In 1934, it was the Republicans in the Congress who had "denounced the President for his tardiness in presenting a plan" to set up federal old-age pensions...
And right there I stopped reading. Because if Tucci thinks the political orientations of the Republican Party of 1934 bear ANY similarity to those of the current GOP, he's even more of a drooling Jonah Goldberg-grade moron than previously thought.
Perry's pretty much toast, but he's not the first fearmonger to trot out the "Ponzi" reference.
Benjy Sarlin explains the difference between a Ponzi scheme and Social Security. He notes there are surmountable issues, but (Tucci's inevitable spray of fictionalized history and goalpost-movers notwithstanding) Perry's full of crap...and so is Batshit for playing along.
Never trust a man whose plan to help you involves pulling the rug out from under you.
Benjy Sarlin's TPM piece of September 26th (he uses Nick Baumann's Venn diagram graphic from MotherJones.com, where the first characteristic of SocSec listed goes: "Is run by the government, which can print money and tax people") might be compared against Robert Murphy's online op-ed of September 19th, where we read:
"The complaints about Social Security are accurate: The only reason it has enjoyed such 'success' thus far is that it relied on increasing contributions from each new generation of workers. Now that the demographics have turned against the system, it is literally unsustainable. We will see increased taxes on workers, reduced payments to beneficiaries, or some combination of the two.
[...]
"Finally, in one important respect a classic Ponzi scheme is less dangerous than Social Security: It relies on fooling people into voluntarily handing over their money. Once the fraud is detected, the danger is eliminated. In contrast, American workers have no choice but to 'contribute' to Social Security, whether they like the deal or not."
I particularly like the way in which Sarlin (by way of pasting in Baumann's graphic) compares Ponzi/Madoff's "Is usually not invested in anything" to SocSec's "Is invested in U.S. Treasury bonds."
I did make the point above about what U.S. Treasury bonds are, right?
Murphy considers the "Ponzi scheme" comparison "unfair — unfair to Charles Ponzi.
"However, so far as we know Ponzi never threatened anybody. He didn't tell struggling young workers, 'Give me 15 percent of your paycheck every week, so that I can make you a fantastic return — or else I'll send goons to kidnap you.'"
So Perry is wrong when he retails the "Ponzi scheme" meme about SocSec.
SocSec is a helluva lot more invidious.
Is the funniest part about @Tucci's copypasta attacking social security on demographic grounds (A) that it applies with greater force to private retirement plans, or (B) that it is deliberately ignorant of economics?
(A) If the argument is the common-sense-sounding one of "too few workers to support too many old people", the same problem obtains with private plans. When you have a 1-to-1 ration between workers and non-workers, it seems on its face to be "unsustainable". The only difference between public and private plans, in such an analysis, is that private plans skim something off the top to support an investor class, and therefore suffers from the demographics problem even more.
(B) The more economist-sounding argument looks at the issue solely in terms of money, assuming that labor will appear so long as there's enough pieces of paper to conjure it. But this argument completely ignores productivity improvements. Today's farmer grows ten times as much food as in FDR's era, and therefore can support ten times as many non-farmers. Other goods have enjoyed comparable improvements. In medicine, for example, while we simply cannot add more doctor-hours to the day, we CAN and have made those hours more productive by increasing the medical knowledge of we patients. For example, we patients now know not to smoke, and therefore the dollars needed to support Ayn Rand having a personal assistant as she coughed her life away on Social Security would not have been needed (...may I assume that @Tucci understands the large fraction of Social Security that supports the infirm non-aged? Bugger me if I made a bad assumption!) The costs of supporting the infirm and the elderly can actually decrease as productivity improves ... but only if those improvements are reflected in price reduction instead of profit inflation.
David in NYC [who has claimed to be "someone with two degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in Economics"] whines about:
"...'argument by authority'...coming from Ron Paul? Because who would know better about economics than an MD, right?"
Jeez, you'd think that a clown who perpetrates argument from authority by irrelevantly posting a claim that "...one of my graduate advisors was Wassily Leontief" in an idiot effort to make himself somehow smell less like a pile of shit would know the difference between a fallacious appeal to authority and the citation of expert opinion.
In addition to being an OB/GYN, Ron Paul is also a long-serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives. This qualifies him as an expert on what the Congress has actually been doing with regard to raiding the SocSec trust "to fund completely unrelated federal programs."
By the way, David, you never did get around to responding to the answers I provided to your two wonderfully cement-headed "questions" about the difference between "what is usually called 'fiat money'" and counterfeit (answer: none) and where currency comes from "if not from a 'central bank'."
rewinn, you schmuck, it's us primary care physicians who do most of the work responding to the SocSec bureaucrats on medical justification for SSDI claims.
I know a helluva lot more about "the large fraction of Social Security that supports the infirm non-aged" than I'd ever thought I'd need to learn forty years ago.
With regard to your blithering idiocy about how: "In medicine...while we simply cannot add more doctor-hours to the day, we CAN and have made those hours more productive by increasing the medical knowledge of we patients"....
Not really. In the past twenty-odd years the patient who comes into the office with a fistful of computer print-out has become something of a cliche in conversations among American doctors. That bit about "increasing the medical knowledge of [you] patients" by way of free-range browsing on the Internet tends to make the doctor's job more difficult, not less.
As with putzes like David in NYC [who has claimed to be "someone with two degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in Economics"], inculcated error has got to be addressed and refuted before you can get to what's real and what needs to be done to fix it.
And where have you been with regard to changes in the provision of medical services over the past thirty-odd years? Nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) functioning as "ancillary health care providers" continue to take on more of the job of assessing and treating patients, and that's just going to increase, especially in primary care.
A few years ago I even persuaded a group of nephrologists to take on an NP when they couldn't get any fresh-from-their-fellowship guys to join them in them here in flyover country. I knew that most of their time-consuming work involves patients on dialysis who are more-or-less stable. The NP they found has been working out fine for them, though she admits that she'd never thought about doing secondary specialty work when she'd finished her training.
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The failures of the SocSec bureaucrats and the politicians to address the absolutely predictable (and well-predicted) actuarial realities of changes in demography and economic productivity are more profound than you're willing or able to credit, rewinn, and comprise yet another argument for not entrusting responsibility for such "social safety net" functions to thugs who rely on winning popularity contests to get and keep their positions of authority.
Because private-sector insurance carriers have to make a profit in order to stay in business, their managers - even the "Pointy-haired Boss" types - get direct feedback on conditions to which they've got to respond in a much more "real-time" environment than is invoked by the election cycles.
If they're not perniciously buffered from confrontation with these realities by politicians meddling in the marketplace to "pick winners," these private sector actors have to accommodate their management of disability insurance and retirement annuities to what's actually going on in the economy. They can't evade responsibility because they can't "print money and tax people."
Among the various well-reasoned and effective proposals to fix the U.S. health care system there's even acknowledgement of the way to improve access to qualified physician expertise by removing regulatory "barriers to entry preventing people from practicing medicine who are eminently qualified to practice medicine, or be nurses, or make medical devices, and so on."
Does it surprise you, rewinn, to learn that medical licensing was imposed upon America through the machinations of the AMA to no purpose other than to create and preserve a lucrative oligopoly by keeping down the number of doctors permitted to see patients?
Though I've disagreed with Milton Friedman on many particulars, his argument for getting rid of medical licensure has my heartiest professional endorsement.
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"...his argument for getting rid of medical licensure has my heartiest professional endorsement"
Ideologically hidebound, dumb and crazy is no way to go through life, numbnuts.
Wow. You need more to do.
Mallard Fillmore: The dopey kid in the class who try to one-up what the cool kids say.
AND THEN THE BIRTHER TEABAGGER TROLL WITH THE BAD CASE OF KEYBOARD DIARRHEA WAS A DOCTOR
Suddenly!
Jeez, Tog, but "Physician (retired)" is in my profile, isn't it?
Your fellow "Liberal" fascist rewinn certainly clicked the link; it's the reason for his brain-dead necrophilic jerking-off over how he thinks Heinlein would've supposedly "curbstomped" me about observing how our Marxist Mulatto has nothing but his status as the product of miscegenation with which to sell himself to the voters.
Golly, Tucci's brilliant arguments sure shut up all you cement-heads! He's probably hung like a horse, too, you needle-dicks! And wow, he's a doctor too! He is awesome beyond all imagination or belief!
He might even be Batman!
I'm totally not him at all BTW so stop saying that!
I can see where an alleged doctor who spends all hours trolling novel-length idiot tracts onto a Mallard Fillmore blog would want to get rid of medical licensing, ya know what I mean?
Oh, well, certainly if it's in your Facebook profile, it MUST be true.
I haven't looked at your profile because (a) I'm not interested, and (b) when someone else did that it set off one of your lunatic rants.
In spite of the fact that I've run into plenty of loon quacks in my life, I can't imagine anyone like you remaining in practice for more than a day, even in Alabama. You certainly have the arrogance and egoism down pat, but everything else about you suggests you couldn't handle a tongue depressor, let alone a prescription, a scalpel, or a tube of anitfungual ointment.
You quote Ron Paul, for God's sake.
And CW in LA (who keeps proving that he's "Ideologically hidebound, dumb and crazy") can't come to grips with the concept of retirement?
As for Tog, why not quote Ron Paul? He certainly gets you "Liberal" fascisti jumping and squealing and jerking off in public until your frenula bleed, doesn't he?
Oh, yeah. Tog? Topical antifungal agents are formulated in cream or gel vehicles because cutaneous mycoses don't respond well when covered with ointments (petrolatum) that tend to trap moisture and increase skin maceration.
Well, that certainly means an important thing.
*antifungual cream*
There, all better, end of world averted. Misspelled "antifungual" anyway. Surprised you didn't catch that with your highly-focused ubermind.
...Now, don't you wish you could change your posts? To something even marginally sane?
At least you admit you're trolling, as weird as that may be for someone who claims to be a retired physician. Like you, Ron Paul doesn't anger me. Like you, it's the obscene stupidity a delusional old fool proselytizes, and the suffering it will lead to if ever put into action, that troubles me.
"...observing how our Marxist Mulatto..."
I appreciate the fact that you sprinkle every one of your posts with unnecessary racist phrases like this. It saves me from having to read the remaining 50,000 words.
Tucc-bag's retired, is he? And he chooses to spend that retirement on the electronic equivalent of gibbering all day on a street corner?
Grandkids hate you that much, do they Tucc? Can't say I blame 'em, especially given your bilious crotch fixation that exceeds even Brews'.
Aw, Tog, spelling snarks were being dismissed as shit-flicking on Usenet thirty years ago.
The failure to understand the difference between topical medication vehicles, on the other hand, is therapeutically significant. To this day I still see patients screwing themselves up by applying stuff like Neosporin ointment over perfectly appropriate OTC antifungal creams to wreak havoc on simple interstitial fungal infections.
But don't you dorks know the difference between "trolling" and straightforward opposition?
The asswipe who keeps posting in these fora as "Tucci" in a feeble pretense of distraction is trolling. When David in NYC - who claims to be "someone with two degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in Economics" - posts two questions about the nature of fiat currency and the role of central banking in the issue of such, and then evades address of the response, that's "trolling," too.
I'm just grinding factual reality in your "Liberal" fascist faces, and it's pissing you Tinsley-obsessed schmucks off.
But I enjoy your noise about how "Ron Paul doesn't anger me."
What I like about Dr. Paul is the way in which he angers the hell out of "establishment" Republicans - especially the neocon "We're the cops of the world!" imperialists - as well as you National Socialists.
As for the observation that your Hubshi Halfling's man-tan was the only thing he had going for him as an advantage in the 2008 "advance auction sale of stolen goods"....
Hey, that's just another aspect of factual reality you're trying to evade acknowledging, right?
Sorry guys, I can't do it. About two paragraphs into another Douchie novella my gag reflex trips and I can't make it to the end.
Brevity Douchie, brevity. Dumb people ramble.
"But don't you know the difference between "trolling" and straightforward opposition?"
Yes. And gratuitous racist filth and an obsession with male genitalia that suggests you're so deep in the closet you can see Narnia are indicative of trolling.
It's funny; old Ron Paul doesn't come across as overtly racist (although he did once tell Jon Stewart that the slavery-era US was close to his idea society), but vicious, hate-filled racists sure do love the guy.
Fumblenuts CW in LA can't get over the fact that if his Mulignane Messiah hadn't been able to present a faux noir facade of negritude, the pitiful poverty pimp might be managing a Baskin-Robbins (if that) instead of farting into Oval Office upholstery.
If this critter had taken after the honky/semitic aspects of his genetic makeup (remember, his nominal male parent was Luo, an ethnic group considerably intermarried with Arabs, meaning that he's really even less than half Black) to appear Caucasian, and had presented under one of his other names - the "Jean Paul Ludwig" associated with his Connecticut Social Security account number, or "Harrison J. Bounel" perhaps - would he even have been Cook-County-machined into the Illinois state senate?
The altogether uncanny background of the "Barack Hussein Obama II" persona - including Stanley Ann Dunham's jet-setting all over the planet before Barry's birth and during his childhood - continues to raise a boatload of well-justified questions about his qualification under Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution to have run for election to the office he presently occupies.
Even if that "Whoops, there it is!" magical appearance of an arguably forged long-form birth certificate in Hawaii state records earlier this year is accepted as valid (why did it take so damned long for Barry's handlers to cough it up?), there's so much in our "57 states" fumblenuts' personal past history that's not only suspicious as all hell but also sealed away from public scrutiny by measures like the first Executive Order to which Barry put his signature upon seating himself at the Resolute desk.
For example, does anybody dispute that his childhood adoption - under the name Soebarkah, nickname "Barry" - by Soetoro (nickname "Lolo") to become a citizen of the Republic of Indonesia and "a good Muslim schoolboy" imposes some question about whether or not our TelePrompTer-in-Chief had enjoyed unimpaired lifelong "natural-born citizen" status even if he hadn't been born in Coast Province General Hospital in his hometown of Mombasa?
The wonderful way in which all "Liberal" fascists kneejerk with such reliability into howling "racist!" every time somebody questions their Kenyan Keynesian's machinations simply emphasizes the fact that their Empty Suit has absolutely nothing going for him except his ability to pretend membership in an admittedly persecuted American ethnic minority to which Barry - raised in Indonesia as the adopted son of an elite Sukharno apparatchik and then spending his adolescence in Hawaii as a member of his maternal grandparents' lily-White family, educated in the most prestigious prep school in the state - has no legitimate claim of adherence.
I repeat that morally and mentally crippled dorks like CW in LA keep trying to play the "race card" in defense of their National Socialist "spread the wealth around" Schwarzer because it's their only recourse.
And it's all worn out, isn't it?
Yeah, that very last stream of piss really supports your "retired physician" story, bro. (/sarcasm)
Speaking of "tired," you're really locked hard onto that whole "liberal fascist" thing, aren't you. Are you sure you aren't Lucianne's Very Special Little Cheetoh-Vacuum?
Tog, it's impossible to characterize you leftie-luser dorks as genuinely liberal because you're emphatically not. Never have been.
The term "liberal" came into political use in the 19th Century to describe those of us who defend individual human rights against government thuggery.
You guys with your fixations on groupthink and "government-as-Santa-Claus" and Keynesian fucking with the economy and affirmative action and compulsory unionization and Kumbaya-at-gunpoint "multiculturalism"?
No friggin' way are you genuine liberals.
The last Democrat of national prominence who could reasonably be called a real liberal was Grover Cleveland, and it's a pretty safe bet that none of you schmucks clustering here even know who the hell he was.
So when I use the "L"-word to characterize you people, I do it with a capital-L and between quotation marks to qualify its speciousness.
I'd do the same for the conservatives, but there have never been conservatives in American political history who've really had clue number one about just precisely what it is that they're supposed to be trying to "conserve," so there's no risk of confusing our current crop of god-besotted bankster-sucking corporate welfare right-wingers with anybody who had ever been worth the proverbial thimbleful of warm spit.
"Progressive" does fit you fools, but only in the sense that the word is used in oncology. A cancer is termed "progressive" if it continues to grow in mass and/or metastasis after a course of treatment has been completed, with the grim prospect that it's going to kill the patient.
The "fascist" bit was something I'd long averred on the basis of my own observations of "Liberal" political economics (I mean, just consider that NRA Blue Eagle insignia of the New Deal; FDR did everything in the Nazi playbook but Krystallnacht and Winterhilfe), and when Jonah Goldberg published Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning in 2008, even with the obvious flaws to which he proved susceptible (hey, what can you expect from a Republican?) it got prominent play in the lamestream media and squeals of "Liberal" horror at the way it turned a spotlight on their heritage in the bloodsoaked Socialist Century which their political hatefulness did so much to inflict upon humanity.
It's taxonomy as unimpeachable as the naming conventions used in characterizing pathogenic microorganisms. I figure I might as well go with it.
As for the Republicans.... Well, the "Liberals" have been sucking on Stalin's dead dick since the '30s, following his Comintern commands to label everybody opposed to "scientific socialism" as fascisti.
Would that it were so simple when it comes to the Republicans. They can be called a lot of things - "Rotarian Socialists" per Frank Chodorov and "state capitalists" according to Clyde Wilson - but they're not fascists, and never have been. They're America's "court party," their heritage going back to the Whig Party (with Henry Clay's "American Plan" of pork, protectionism, and banksterism) and the Federalists.
Just as bad in their own ways as you "Liberal" fascists, but not quite the same.
What I meant was: your manner of expressing yourself doesn't even remotely suggest the sort of mature person one normally associates with "retired physician;" more like "severely imbalanced teenager."
You DO understand that, aside from the hardier debaters, no normal person would read your preposterously long and gassy copypastes, don't you? You seem to ricochet between sincerely arguing points and trolling even within individual sentences, and a sane person would be able to comprehend the foolishness of that.
In the end you are merely a sad spectacle, not unlike the street drunk whose love of his own voice has degenerated into screaming obscenities at people who aren't actually there.
I'd give you some money but you'd probably just spend it on crack.
Tog, if the greatest part of the usual gang of gooberss drawn here by their hatred of Tinsley's comic strip (even the guy who claims to be "someone with two degrees [undergraduate and graduate] in Economics") haven't got the literacy or attention span to handle logically consistent reasoned argument regarding purposeful human action, it's not matter of much concern to me. When I'm not writing for pay or to satisfy someone on the editorial staff of a medical journal, I'm in it for the personal entertainment value, and I write as I goddam well please.
Considering that I haven't been a "teenager" since LBJ was still throwing conscripts and B-52s at Uncle Ho, it's altogether delightful to read your fumble about my age. While I'm happy to insult you dorks (I think of it more along the lines of "character assessment"), I don't make silly stabs at personalities.
Except of course, to the extent that someone like David in NYC tries to claim ex cathedra authority on the basis of nothing more than a claim to have studied with one of the more prominent ordinative statist econometricians, and then fails to support his trolling even with lucid reasoning.
You guys really aren't used to exchanges outside your own little religious group, are you?
Maybe Tucc-bag is "retired" bec ause he had his license revoked for abusive conduct? More likely, he got kicked out of med school. Or a pre-med program.
Or maybe he's just making shit up. Righties have certainly been known to do so. You'd think adherents of an ideology they claim to be so comprehensively wonderful wouldn't need to keep lying to make it look remotely palatable, but darn if that's not how it goes.
In any case, Tucc-bag, there's a reason your life is such a spectacular failure that you're reduced to logorrheic trolling on a blog devoted to making fun of a shabbily-drawn cartoon duck for any acknowledgement of your wretched existence.
And it's not because of "'liberal' fascism"; no, it's because you're an odious, mentally damaged freak. Take some of that personal responsibility conservatives are endlessly blathering about and admit it, at least to yourself.
Loser.
Really got to you, didn't I? Why else do you reference me multiple times in every thread despite the lack of additional comment from me? Methinks the man doth protest too much.
I stopped responding to your economics-related bullshit because even though I do enjoy a battle of wits as much as (or even more than) the next person, it's really unfair to fight an unarmed opponent. The only arguments you will ever win will be those -- like the one with me -- where the other side just gets too tired and bored of listening to the bullshit.
As I said before, if brevity is the soul of wit, lack of wit is clearly evidenced by lack of brevity (that's called a contrapositive; I can't wait for your several-hundred word exegesis on why it isn't). You, clearly, demonstrate that in spades.
And the problem isn't that I (or anyone else here, except for the occasional Anonymous) "haven't got the literacy or attention span to handle logically consistent reasoned argument regarding purposeful human action", it's that you haven't made any such arguments.
As for your dismissal of Wassily Leontief's credentials (which I did not actually cite as an authority, merely as a reference point to my own background in economic study) and concommitant support of Ron Paul's (which you did use as your sole authority, lack of relevant credentials notwithstanding) in a discussion of economics when I raised the "argument by authority" issue just proves you really don't have a clue what you are talking about.
As for not responding, I note the utter failure of you to address the issue I raised of your accusing other commenters of being perjorative while being more perjorative, by several orders of magnitude, than anyone else posting here, including the occasional Anonymice.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment back on Planet Earth.
@Tucci's impotent rage amuses me greatly.
The overuse of potty words is a good sign of dementia, as is his inability to respond substantively to criticism and his occasional admissions that he knows facts that falsify his claims.
I appreciate the fact that he's unhappy that patients no longer passively accept his pronouncements as Gospel, and pay for whatever pills the salesmen are pushing this month. Why he complains about the time he wastes filling out paperwork justifying payments from the government is a mystery; it seems to me he'd be in favor of fiscal prudence.
But @Tucci does not complain about the much greater timewaster: filling out paperwork justifying payments from insurance companies. No doubt that's because he Randian religion requires such human sacrifice for the greater good: richer investers at the cost of sicker patients.
I feel compassion for primary care physicians locked into our insane American system. The last two times I visited primary care physicians, each misdiagnosed a simple problem easily curable by a minor change in diet; each took their 6-minute segment to prescribe a drug which a co-pay, side-effects, and profits. I assume that they are simply trapped in the system.
P.S. @Tucci has never refuted that Heinlein despised racists such as @Tucci.
P.P.S. @Tucci's and Godwin's Law LOL!
Of course you can express yourself however you wish, Tuc-Tuc; no one said otherwise.
I'm just curious about what you think writing in such a schizophrenic fashion accomplishes.
We all know you love to explain everything in voluminous detail (well, almost everything--not the stuff you pretend to ignore, as David in NYC points out); I figured you'd jump at the chance to tell us how your troll/gentleman-of-letters crazy-quilt is supposed to be more effective (or time-efficient) than outright trolling.
Well, let me point out "in voluminous detail" where you schmucks are wrong.
First, contrary to David in NYC (who didn't cite Leontief but rather mentioned him pointedly as one of his academic advisers in an execrable effort to gain something of the Nobel laureate's cachet without employing anything of the man's work to support any assertions of fact), I didn't use Dr. Ron Paul as an authority in economic theory but rather as a qualified expert witness to what the Congress has been doing to the Social Security fund and how the Social Security system has become actuarily unsound as the result of Congressional mismanagement.
Dr. Paul isn't just an OB/GYN. He's also a long-serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the chamber of the Congress with the principal responsibility and the authority to exercise "the power of the purse" accorded the federal legislature by the Constitution.
David in NYC being the only Tinsley-hating putz frequenting this attack site who has claimed to be "someone with two degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in Economics," he's voluntarily set himself to a higher standard of knowledge in this area. Then he has failed to perform.
Heck, instead of addressing himself to what argument I've voiced pertinent to economics - such as the nature of U.S. Treasury bonds - David in NYC has claimed that I'd been "accusing other commenters of being perjorative while being more perjorative, by several orders of magnitude, than anyone else posting here."
Not that David in NYC offers any examples of where I'd complained about any of you "Liberal" fascists brickbatting anybody (with or without justification). I pretty massively don't care about such stuff, and don't recall having tried to take anyone in this forum to task for any "pejorative" he/she might have posted.
That's your collective type of squealing, senseless noise. Beyond seeking support for a particular excoriative accusation ("You say he buggers buffalo? You got something from a police blotter to back that up?"), I never bother with it.
David in NYC presently states that he had "stopped responding to [my] economics-related" contentions when in actuality he'd never started. As I'd written, he'd posted two questions about the difference between "what is usually called 'fiat money'" and counterfeit (short answer: none) and where currency comes from "if not from a 'central bank'," and then evaded the response.
I note that he's still evading the response, as well as failing to perform otherwise as the expert in "Economics" he's held himself forth to be.
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Next (in no particular order), there's the perptually fatuous CW in LA, intent upon nothing more than claiming that whatever I've offered about my own personal self is a prevarication and his irrelevant speculation that my "life is such a spectacular failure that [I'm] reduced to logorrheic trolling on a blog devoted to making fun of a shabbily-drawn cartoon duck."
Truth to tell, I only found this virtual circle-jerk of "Liberal" fascists by way of a Web search undertaken after seeing Tinsley's "designer cupcake" strip and wondering to what phenomenon he was referring. I've been interested in business cycle "boom-and-bust" since the years of the Carter Malaise, and suspected that "the designer cupcake boom" was an instantiation of this process of which I hadn't previously been aware.
That you cement-heads find lucid argument "logorrheic" is more a remark upon your own inividual and collective inability to reason about both reality and your own responses to the facts thereof. CW in LA and similar idiots find themselves way out of their narrow little comfort zones when confronted with explicitly articulated observations of how the world really is.
Like any other cult of religious fanatics, you "Liberal" fascists don't do at all well when your groundless articles of faith are challenged.
Psychotically unable to grapple with what I've been posting, CW in LA has got to fantacize about my supposedly miserable personal life.
Well, I've already admitted that I'm married, so misery can be taken for granted. But what has that to do with political economics or the naked criminality of the Obama regime?
Then there's rewinn, our explicitly admitted aggressive "mercantilist" who wants his neighbors prevented from selling and buying as they choose in order to preserve rewinn's peculiar "patriot" vision of American national grandeur.
rewinn remarks about how in this forum I don't "complain about the much greater timewaster [in a primary care physician's professional life]: filling out paperwork justifying payments from insurance companies."
Well, first, of course, I'm retired and therefore no longer have to deal with that crap from the perspective of the "healthcare provider." Second, I haven't had occasion - yet - to discuss third-party payors. rewinn had only brought up the subject of SSDI, not HCFA - er, MAMA; I mean CMS - or the private sector health "insurance" carriers.
Much of the interface between the practicing physician and third-party payors had long ago been automated by way of electronic billing systems (EBS), and there really hasn't been much that those of us in primary care have had to extraneously or extraordinarily document in disputes with third-party payors. We're not proceduralists, by and large.
Handling temporary and permanent disability claims, on the other hand, still requires a bit of work. I used to draw pretty heavily upon the AMA's Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, and these have certainly helped.
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Nevertheless, there's still much truth in one of my old preceptors' observations that for your patients, "Falling back on SSDI is like falling back on an open set of carpenter's tools."
They're a bitch to deal with. Anybody reading here have any perspective on the process from the patient's side?
As for patients who "no longer passively accept [my] pronouncements as Gospel," when did they ever? Yeah, there are always people who just want the antibiotics prescriptions for every sore throat (and to whom you've got to explain repeatedly and at length that viral infections don't respond to amoxicillin), but the technical medical jurisprudence term in tort law for a doc who doesn't listen to his patients is "defendant."
But rewinn has something approaching the right of it when he posts about "whatever pills the salesmen are pushing this month." Like most guys my age, I'd certainly gotten stung by the marketers yelping up their companies' "latest and greatest" proprietary products over the decades. I did mention Merck's Vioxx (rofecoxib), didn't I?
In the days before electronic medical records (EMR), I've had memorably to comb through hundreds of paper charts to find those patients who'd been started on a new medication that wound up being withdrawn from the market for some adverse effect or other.
I'm not one of those guys who fought EMR, though I still mistrust the way in which those systems have been required by the politicians. HIPAA protections notwithstanding, the people you least want dropping a digital hose into your medical records as a patient and siphoning off data on your personally-identified private and particular ailments are goverment thugs.
And when it comes to "fiscal prudence," by what psychotic fantasy (or abysmal stupidity) does rewinn associate "fiscal prudence" with the federal government?
When it comes to rewinn's continued necrophilic effort to fuck the ashes of Robert A. Heinlein on how much the old guy hated racism and therefore would've hated me for observing that Barry Soebarkah is a fake even when pretending the American Black ethnicity that's the only marketing element in his image, to what level of reliance upon government "fiscal prudence" did Heinlein attain over the course of his evolution from EPIC socialist to "rational anarchist"?
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Finally, Tog, it'd be interesting to get something more from you on how you justify the descriptor "schizophrenic" when it comes to my writing style.
A major part of the diagnostic and therapeutic work involved in modern primary care over the past several decades has come to be central nervous system (CNS) maladies, with emphasis on mood and thought disorders. I'd had pretty steady numbers of cases under my primary or secondary management responsibility with schizophrenia of one or another subtype, and like all American practitioners I've been subjected to steady pressure by the manufacturers of the on-patent atypical antipsychotic drugs to write them for patients who do not suffer the major thought disorders for the treatment of which these medicines had been developed.
Boy, am I glad that I no longer have to deal with anxiety and depression patients coming in seeking scrips for Seroquel (quetiapine) or Abilify (aripiprazole) because of a TV commercial or Internet puff piece.
While I can wish there were some respect for the proper use of diagnostic terms (or at least the employment of words like "schizophrenic" in explicit analogy rather than an idiot confusion with some kind of "split personality" presentation), I look at Tog the "Liberal" fascist and consider the source.
In the words of Heinlein, "Them Boys Hain’t Drugged, They’re Just Stupid!"
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^^^^^
Ladies and gentlemen, the guy who doesn't like being called "logorrheic".
Who says I don't "like being called 'logorrheic'"? Admittedly, it's the improper use of a clinical term, but there's leeway in its employment as figure of speech.
As with head-up-the-ass "intelligent design" advocates and those who have been suckered by (or who are perpetrating) the "man-made global climate change" fraud, you "Liberal" fascisti are pressing for the aggressive violation of your neighbors' individual human rights on the basis either of cupidity or stupidity.
(It's charitable to assume that you're merely stupid, though you do persist in making it unavoidably obvious that there's a solid streak of outright criminal malevolence in your collective make-up.)
Composing reasoned argument against what we'll laughingly call your "political positions" on subjects like the business cycle (and government counterfeiting), the Arab Spring uprisings (which have been triggered by food shortages caused by "biofuels" marketplace meddling in the industrialized West), and our Illegitimacy-in-Chief is certainly enjoyable for its own sake.
Some guys spend much more time and money running around in the woods to blow away Bambi; who can fault me for taking virtual pot-shots at genuinely vicious vermin like you guys?
Besides, the only infections I'm risking are computer viruses. Any of you yups ever treated anybody for either trichinosis or Lyme disease?
Not that David in NYC offers any examples of where I'd complained about any of you "Liberal" fascists brickbatting anybody (with or without justification). I pretty massively don't care about such stuff, and don't recall having tried to take anyone in this forum to task for any "pejorative" he/she might have posted.
Really? WTF would you call this, from my earlier comment:
====================
"Don't you just love how the wingnut set (though in Tucci's case, we can probably just leave off the "wing" part) love to complain about things like:
especially the pejorative labels you slap on your opponents to dehumanize them
IMMEDIATELY after (as in, preceding grafs) writing about other commenters here such lovely things as:
Jeez, and I thought you were too friggin' stupid to cop a clue, dickbreath. My bad.
Like every other species of real bigots, you "Liberal" fascisti fail to focus on concrete realities while masturbating over abstractions
====================
So: You are QUOTED using the word "perjorative". Immediately following is a two-sentence quote with FIVE EXAMPLES -- BOLDED so even a blithering idiot like you could see them -- and you have the unmitigated gall and/or stupidity to assert that (1) you never used the word "perjorative", and (2) you never said anything that could be described with that word.
Never mind the imaginary drugs I suggested you had forgotten earlier. You need to start taking some REAL psychotropic medications, stat.
P.S. I originally used "logorrhea" in the non-clinical sense (it does have other uses). But, since the DSM-IV defines it as:
Logorrhoea: Logorrhoea, also known as "volubility", is characterized by a patient's fluent and rambling speech using numerous words.
I guess I also accurately used it in the clinical sense.
Physician (allegedly), heal thyself.
David in NYC grunts and strains to conflate my use of the word "pejorative" in the observation of a general tendency among the "Liberal" fascisti - labeling their opponents and victims with denigratory categorizations in order to deprive them of the moral status of human beings - with action on my part "to take anyone in this forum to task for any 'pejorative' he/she might have posted."
Keep on groping around in your drawers, David. Not that there's all that much down there for you to find.
As for simple incidental insult applied in exchanges with you flaming idiots in this venue, that's nothing more than merry contumely.
If you take it to heart because you feel so strongly that it's accurate characterization of your own personal failings - which it seems in David's case very much to be - c'est la vie.
Economist, come up with something praxeological.
Tucci there must be a way you can condense your copypasta to less then 7,000 words,Otherwise your no different from the rambling homeless person with an "The end it neigh" sign on the corner.
I'd originally thought that this "copypasta" blithering was a schmuckish local neologism for "copy and paste" in the sense of putting forward something somebody else had written as if it were your own (as opposed to quoting and attributing, or using expressions like "advance auction sale of stolen goods," which any literate reader recognizes as a draw from Mencken's "Government is a broker in pillage..." remark in Prejudices, First Series [1919]).
But what the hell; I'm on the Web. I looked it up, and found that it has something to do with "imageboards" and pertains specifically to "Anything which is repetitively posted" on such sites, with emphasis on "a direct or nearly direct copy-and-paste of memes, posts from older forum discussions, or other material, often accompanied by an attempt to pass off the contents as new and original."
None of which pertains to any of the posts I've made in this forum, natch.
Jeez, you leftie-luser fucktards can't even use pornboard slang correctly?
@Tucci's impotent rage amuses me greatly.
Is his use of potty mouth to disguise the fact he conceded my point about Heinlein's disdain for racists such as himself more amusing than his fear of admitting that for-profit health insurance is far more inefficient that government-managed insurance (30% overhead compared to something like 3%)?
Inquiring minds may never know because @Tucci's senilely foul mouth and off-topic loggorheaic anti-Americanism add up to tl;dr.
rewinn's fantasies about how Heinlein would hate me because of the author's "disdain for racists " has long since qualified as genuine "copypasta," obviously ""a direct or nearly direct copy-and-paste of memes, posts from older forum discussions, or other material, often accompanied by an attempt to pass off the contents as new and original."
rewinn, you pitiful fucktard, I've not said anything at all about American Blacks generally, or offered more than observations I've personally found robust about other sociocultural moieties, such as immigrant Sikhs in my community and Islamist physicians (both Arab and non-Arab) of my professional acquaintance.
It's only when I discuss our corrupt wastrel avowedly socialist Mulatto-in-Chief that I emphasize his personal and political career of purest "blaxploitation," duplicitously leveraging the purest illusion of membership in an ethnic group to which he has never belonged.
The public persona carefully constructed by "Harrison J. Bounel" (or whatever in hell his name really is) has always depended upon his ability to leverage his "high-yaller" complexion and negroid facies to gull the voters while concealing his totally alien character behind a facade of purest deceit.
Shit, he's so completely foreign to America that he couldn't even correctly pronounce the word "corpsman," and lost track of the fact that there are only 50 states in our federal union (obviously confusing the number with the 57 member states of the Oganisation of Islamic Cooperation).
There's no need for anybody to be "racist" when condemning your Mombasa Messiah, who is the perfect image of reverse racism par excellence. About Barry Soebarkah and his flagrant fraudulent appeal to negritude, one need speak nothing but that which is specifically pertinent.
That's certainly damning enough, right?
"avowedly socialist"
lie
"Mulatto-in-Chief"
racist
"his personal and political career of purest "blaxploitation,""
racist lie
"an ethnic group to which he has never belonged."
racist and profoundly stupid
"his "high-yaller" complexion"
stunningly racist
"negroid facies"
old-school pseudo-intellectual racist
"totally alien character"
cheap xenophobia
"completely foreign to America"
paranoid yet dishonest
""corpsman,""
Please feel free to post a notarized PDF that you have never in your over-long life mispronounced a word.
""(obviously confusing the number with the 57 member states of the Oganisation of Islamic Cooperation)."
Seriously tin-foil beanie nonsense. And racist, obvs.
"Mombasa Messiah"
racist, and pretty damn hilarious coming from somebody who worships at the altar of Ron Paul and munches on Ayn Rand's decaying muff.
"reverse racism"
'I'm not the racist, you are' construct favored by racists
"negritude"
WTF-level racist
"That's certainly damning enough, right?"
More than.
The stunningly nekulturny CW in LA (who has no goddam clue as to the origin and meaning, for example, of the term "negritude" and can't click active Web links provided) is bereft of anything but the race card to play, and obviously - senselessly, psychotically - lives what we'll call his "life" according to William Macpherson's 1999 categorization of "racist" as that "which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person."
To quote James Delingpole's recent mention of this aspect of the Macpherson Report: "That definition [...] has done immeasurable damage to social cohesion in Britain, further encouraging a poisonous culture of victimhood, grievance and entitlement, as well as serving to increase the racial tension it was supposed to diminish."
And there's what "Liberal" fascisti like CW in LA - by way of their endless yammering of "racist" every time anyone points out that the only value of the carefully fabricated "Barack Hussein Obama II" false front lies in the principal perpetrator's simulation of authentic American negritude - are trying for:
"...a poisonous culture of victimhood, grievance and entitlement...."
You "Liberal" fascists do just hate it when real Black Americans - like Walter Williams and Herman Cain and Thomas Sowell and Dick Boddie and Clarence Thomas - refuse the role you've chosen for them as pitiful, helplessly compliant Darkies on your plantation, don'tcha?
And it so predictably jerks you by your remaining short hairs every time somebody makes it explicitly clear that your brainfucked efforts to peddle your "poisonous culture of victimhood, grievance and entitlement" aren't working any more.
I'm not a racist. I love blacks with the negritude who kiss my entitled ass. It's when there's miscegenation and people born of same getting elected president of the United States that I lose my tenuous grasp on my shit.
In conclusion, Blah blah blah blah blah x1,000,000
Anyway, Tucc-bag, what makes you think I have any interest on clicking on any of your stupid links? I'll admit to a certain unwholesome pleasure in pointing out what a massive waste of oxygen you are, but really I spend too much time on you as it is.
As for my being uncultured, I want no part of your malignant culture, to which General Sherman gave an inspirational yet all too incomplete response. So that works out.
Hey, looka! CW in LA was masturbating in front of the History Channel earlier today.
Can you say "war crimes," putzie? Sure, executing small numbers of Sherman's uniformed looters, rapists, arsonists and murderers was nasty summary field justice on the part of the Carolinians defending their country from foreign invasion, but that's small beer against the deliberate grand campaign of terrorism in the Northern aggressors' war to enforce the Morrill Tariff that gives your feces-flecked little pud to tingle and twitch so obscenely.
As I've observed before about you "Liberal" fascists, with all your false-flag-flapping (or should that be "fapping"?) about "multiculturalism," you not only know nothing at all about the various cultures you're using as a lying excuse for your pilferage and power-grabbing but nothing about the one in which most of you had been raised.
Oh, yeah. I haven't "mispronounced a word" in the American language since I was about seven years old.
That's the same age at which our POTUS-With-an-Asterisk was concentrating on the pronunciation of words in Indonesian and Arabic.
My dad had been the lone squid in the family during World War II - the rest of his generation in our clan had served in the Army - but with all those movies about the USMC in "da big one" in the theaters and on afternoon TV, my generation learned the role of Hospital Corpsmen in the Fleet Marine Force (and how to pronounce the name of their rating) by way of that popular American culture from which little Barry Soebarkah was so completely alienated during his privileged life in Sukharno's slaughterhouse of an archipelago.
"Carolinians defending their country from foreign invasion"
Tucc-bag hates America. I suspected as much; here he admits it.
Flaunting yet again his historical illiteracy as well as his general stupidity, CW in LA proves that he has no friggin' idea whatsoever of what the U.S. Constitution was created (both ostensibly and actually) to do when it came to the political and economic consolidation of the original signatory sovereign states (as in "nation-states" or "countries") joining in the alliance of a federal union by way of the original Articles of Confederation which were "revised" in Hamilton's star chamber proceedings.
At the time of the War of Northern Aggression, almost every citizen of these United States, when asked the name of his country, would respond with the name of the specific state in which he'd been born or with which he otherwise identified himself. For example, despite his long career in the U.S. Army (before resigning to accept a commission in the organized militia of his home state) at posts in states and territories all over the continent, Robert E. Lee identified Virginia as "my country," not the federation in which his country was a participant.
He also referred to the Northern aggressors as "those people" during and after active hostilities were waged against his country.
This was the condition of our constitutional Union prior to our American Lenin's war to ram Henry Clay's American System forcibly down upon the inhabitants of those countries outside the politically dominant northern region of the federal republic which sought to benefit from the wholly unconstitutional "protective" tariffs which the Republicans had been elected in 1860 to impose.
Indeed, were the Constitution to be enforced as the law of the land - with specific attention paid to the Tenth Amendment - that would be the condition of our federation today instead of the catastrophe to which you "Liberal" fascists and our Republican corruptocrats have reduced it.
With it understood that the meaning of "America" in the Constitution which our servicemen and federal politicians swear "to preserve, defend and uphold" is rather more like the present European Union than the fantasy of a monolithic totalitarian tyranny over which CW in LA and his fellow "Liberal" fascisti masturbate so frenetically, it can be said most accurately that I love and defend America as it is instantiated in civil government under the rule of law established by the U.S. Constitution.
CW in LA, of course, most emphatically does not.
But CW is either a traitor with malice aforethought or a person too wonderfully stupid to know what the hell he's doing or advocating.
I'm just a good, loyal American patriot who respects the U.S. Constitution and wants it (again, emphasis on the Bill of Rights) to be enforced.
"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
"I'm just a good, loyal American patriot"
Wrong on all four counts. What a vile excuse for a citizen and a human being out Tucc-bag is.
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