Matt Taibbi makes a point that I made 5 or 6 years ago. (And I’m sure it wasn’t original to me.) Social Security isn’t the problem. Thanks to an increase in the regressive payroll taxes back in the 80s, Social Security has been solvent. The problem has been the raiding of that regressive tax money to pay for things like tax cuts for millionaires and ill-advised wars.

Let’s be clear about what’s going on here. Social Security was never the cause of the nation’s debt problems. This issue dates all the way back to the Eighties, when Ronald Reagan hired Alan Greenspan to chair the National Commission on Social Security Reform, ostensibly to deal with a looming shortfall in the fund. Greenspan’s solution was to hike Social Security tax rates (they went from 9.35% in 1981 to 15.3% in 1990) and build up a “surplus” that could be used to pay Baby Boomers their social security checks 30 years down the road.

They raised the SS taxes all right, but they didn’t save the money for any old Baby Boomers in the 2000s. Instead, Reagan blew that money paying for eight years of deficit spending and tax cuts. Three presidents after him used the same trick. They used about $1.69 trillion in extra Social Security revenue (from the Greenspan hikes) to pay for current-day goodies, with the still-being-debated Bush tax cuts being a great example. This led to the infamous moment during Bush’s presidency when Paul O’Neill announced that the Social Security Trust Fund had no assets.

Well, duh! That is what happens to a fund, when you spend 30 years robbing it to pay for tax cuts for Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. It will tend to get empty. But of course this wasn’t presented to the public as being the consequence of too many handouts to wealthy campaign contributors: this was presented as a problem of those needy goddamned old people wanting to retire too early and being just far too greedy when it came to actually wanting their Social Security benefits paid out.

The Journal & Courier is reporting that Sen. Joe Harrison died on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010 at the age of 79. (h/t Tipsy Teetotaler). (Longer article here.) At 40 years in 2006 when he retired, Harrison was Indiana’s longest serving state Senator. My understanding is that he was part of a group of four state senators who dominated that chamber for a good long time – him, Morris Mills, Bob Garton, and Larry Borst.

He headed up the Senate’s labor committee where labor laws passed by the House usually went to die. He was also the Senator who offered the most resistance to the in-house printing project at Legislative Services back in the late 90s when I was there. (He was reluctant to take printing of the bills out of the hands of the private contractor who had been doing the work.) He was also tied into the Harrison Steel company in Attica.

That’s most of what I know about Sen. Harrison. There is no doubt that he was a major force in Indiana politics over most of the last half century. Rest in Peace, Senator.

We’re hot on the heels of the 150th anniversary of the secession of South “First in Treason” Carolina: December 20, 1860. You’ll hear a lot of apologists try to pretend that the Civil War was not about slavery. It was about federalism and limited government. This is demonstrably false. South Carolina was kind enough to follow the lead of Thomas Jefferson and state the reasons for taking up arms against the United States of America.

South Carolina was upset that the Northern States had been less than faithful in executing the Fugitive Slave Act – the law that said non-slave states had to help recover slaves who ran away. Got it? South Carolina was upset that states weren’t submitting to federal law. No state’s rights there. No limited government. They were upset that non-slave states weren’t helping them to preserve slavery.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia.

Secession was absolutely about slavery and anyone who says otherwise is lying or willfully ignorant.

Liberal media, my ass. Here is the AP framing the story of the tax cut vote incorrectly. Bush and the Congress at the time passed taxed cut legislation in 2001 that expires this January. That’s the law. It’s going to expire. Nobody has to do anything. If new legislation is not passed, those cuts will expire. That’s how the law was designed due to deficit concerns.

The House and most Senate Democrats voted for legislation that would enact new tax cuts that would replace the expiring ones beginning in 2011 for everybody to the extent of their first $250,000 of income or so. A minority of Republicans and a few Democrats has filibustered the majority to prevent those new tax cuts from being enacted.

Now, look at how the AP frames it. The headline says: “Republicans block Democratic tax plan on upper incomes.” Sounds like the Democrats are trying to impose a tax on upper incomes, right? Well, no. That’s the effect of the prior legislation, designed to expire not the new plan.

The first sentence says:

Senate Republicans blocked legislation Saturday to let upper-income tax cuts expire on Jan. 1, a showdown scripted by Democrats eager to showcase GOP lawmakers as defenders of millionaires.

Again, no. Legislation to let those tax cuts expire on January 1st, 2011 was passed ten years ago. Mainly by Republicans. If they didn’t want to raise taxes, they should have made the tax cuts permanent 10 years ago. But, they didn’t want to come clean at the time about the huge hole the tax cut plan put in the budget. Now they’re willing to go to the wall blocking tax cuts for everybody’s first $250k in an effort to get concessions for those few Americans who have income in excess of that amount. Incidentally, that concern about the deficit seems to have disappeared – as it does whenever military expenditures or farm subsidies come up.

(With apologies to Lord Tennyson for the title.)

The Indiana School Superintendent sent out a memo indicating that no state funding cuts are expected for K-12 education in 2011 as compared to 2010. Mikel Livingston, reporting for the Lafayette Journal & Courier reported on that memo, along with a story discussing how financial problems have hit Tippecanoe School Corporation especially hard.

Because of last year’s state cuts and its own budget problems, TSC has increased class size – by about 37% in the class cited by the article; and has cut art and music instructional time in half.

When I read about our struggle to maintain funding for something as basic as education, it’s hard not to worry that we are a society in decline. Cutting education is like eating your seed corn; you just don’t do it unless there aren’t any other options. In the past, we, as a society, were able to be productive enough to have the resources to educate our children at a certain level. It seems to me like our ability to fund schools has been stagnant or in decline for at least a decade; and it does not appear that any return to vigor in that area is likely in the near future.

Of course, it could be that we are still productive enough, but the fruits of that productivity are accumulating elsewhere. But, I’ve been advised, that suggesting such things is class warfare and irresponsible.

George Will (h/t Paul Roales) has a brief history of the “coarsening” of kids’ culture in the 20th century. He attempts to pin that particular tail on “progressives,” but that part of his undertaking is clumsy and doesn’t much work.

What it does show is that efforts to censor popular culture because it’s corrupting the children comes off looking pretty stupid in retrospect: comic books and Elvis, oh my!

I’ve mentioned this before — I’ve been doing this for six years, there is going to be some repetition — but generation after generation seems to think that the next generation is lazier, dumber, and has worse taste in popular culture than they did. Unless you subscribe to the notion that humanity has been in steady decline since it was kicked out of Eden, this is at least a little ridiculous. We’ve come a long way since we were competing with Neanderthals for supremacy. Somewhere in there, a generation or two must have had better music than its predecessor.

Whenever I see an article or column in the “kids these days” genre, it gets me to rolling my eyes.

I’m grateful for a whole lot of stuff, much of which I’ve blogged about before. Today, I’ll just stick to the basics. I’m grateful for a loving, remarkable wife; healthy, smart, kind-hearted children; and parents & siblings who gave me a stable, positive environment to grow up. I am grateful for my job – particularly co-workers who took me into an established practice and taught me how to be a good lawyer (I make no comment on whether I’ve taken full advantage of that teaching.) And, I’m grateful for a community where I and my family are safe and have the opportunity to prosper.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

My thoughts from Thanksgivings past:

Thanksgiving 2005
Thanksgiving 2006
Thanksgiving 2007
Thanksgiving 2008
Thanksgiving 2009

I don’t have time right now except to throw this out there. The Palladium-Item had a story on Richmond Community Schools’ push to get students caught up on their vaccinations. There were 1,500 who weren’t in compliance. There wasn’t anything nefarious in this – a lot of parents apparently thought they were up to date when they weren’t.

What caught my attention, however, was a comment to the story (my own fault – nothing good ever comes from reading a newspaper’s comment section). The commenter was on about the dangers of vaccinations.

I will grant you that vaccinations are not without risk. However, the risks of vaccination are far outweighed by the risks of non-vaccination of the entire population. Now, what is pernicious about the movement is that they are attempting to be free-riders on the fact that the bulk of the population gets vaccinated. They can perceive the risks of vaccination as comparable to non-vaccination because the diseases against which we are guarding are not tearing through the population because of the prevalence of vaccination. The more this movement catches on, the more I and my family are at risk. Because vaccinations aren’t guaranteed effective for all individuals – but the less a disease can spread, the less risk for everyone.

The Evansville Courier Press has a pretty good editorial on the federal deficit reduction issue.

I have one quibble, that is minor in one respect but important to the framing in another. The CP says:

President Barack Obama has urged Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for all but high-income individuals and families. It’s the right thing to do if we’re going to attack the deficit problem.

Letting the tax cuts expire for individuals earning over $200,000 and families over $250,000 would generate $700 billion in revenues for the government over the next 10 years.

My quibble is that the tax cuts wouldn’t expire for those individuals. Rather, the tax cuts would expire for that portion of an individual’s income that exceeds $200,000. It’s sort of the flip side of that Anatole France quote I like to use:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

In this case, the law would be majestically equal in not taxing everyone’s first couple hundred thousand dollars as much, and majestically equal in taxing everyone’s three hundred thousandth dollar a little bit more.

And, just another observation, that it’s tough for even fire-breathing conservatives to come up with actual cuts. They like to talk about “earmarks,” but that’s a relatively tiny part of the budget – and they can’t even agree on that. Jim DeMint apparently went to the last refuge of the fiscally conservative scoundrel: “administrative waste.” I’ve heard Republicans and Democrats alike promise over the years to balance the budget by eliminating waste. If there ever was that much “waste” in the budget, with years of lawmakers looking for it – with a bit more diligence, one presumes, than O.J. has spent looking for the real killer – there cannot be much left.

If you have to grandstand about something, please pick something other than our nuclear weapon policy. At the moment, Sen. Lugar appears to be the only Republican Senator willing to move forward with the new START treaty.

Whether Sen. Lugar’s colleagues are willing to move ahead with this or not should go a long way toward showing whether they are political nihlists, willing to run any risk as long as it means an Obama defeat; or public servants, willing to occasionally put aside their political games for a moment if it will be helpful in not destroying the planet.

I sometimes have my differences with Sen. Lugar, but appreciate him taking a stand on this one.