Social Security, Warming; Eph Konigsberg RIP View 20110908

View 691 Thursday, September 08, 2011

The fallout from the debate continues. We will see what Obama makes of it tonight.

The media continue to pound on Perry for saying that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. The problem is that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme, and there is no possibility that it can continue as it goes. The nation can afford to pay those already on pension (including those on disability who never paid into the fund in the first place – a sizable portion of those now entitled to Social Security) – but those just entering the work force have no chance of getting anything at all from Social Security when they read retirement age, and if they plan to be disabled they ought to be quick about it, because the fund will run out of money for that in a couple of decades at most.

I am nearly 80, and I expect that my Social Security payments will continue through my life; but were I 55, I would think hard about what to do when I reached 75.

Madoff used his Ponzi money to buy mansions and yachts. The US government used the Social Security revenue to hire bunny inspectors. That is, there was this revenue, and it made the deficits smaller, so there wasn’t so much incentive to eliminate Bunny Inspectors, and those closing down Gibson Guitars, and those who closed the restaurant that didn’t have a front door ramp for the handicapped (you had to go in through the back – it was a Cliffside restaurant and the way into the front was appropriate for the location). And the inspectors who caused the owner of another restaurant to close it and retire because he was damned if he would pay a bribe to a man in a wheelchair who said the mirror in the bathroom was 4 inches too low to allow him to groom himself. That’s what the Social Security income went to, not into any trust fund; which is why those who paid into this Ponzi Scheme can’t get their money back.

But the media are pounding on Perry for daring to say what is obvious to anyone who cares to spend a few minutes thinking about it. When Social Security first happened, within days there were checks going to people who had just joined it. Clearly that was not from the money they had paid into it: it was from all those paying into it who weren’t retired yet. For the first decades there were a hundred people working for each one receiving. But over time the number receiving got larger and larger – they lived long enough – while the work force didn’t grow that fast. And then there were added to Social Security the young disabled who had never paid into the system in the first place. Go to your local Social Security office – I had to a couple of years ago – and you will be astonished at how many young people, recently unemployed, have become “disabled” although their disability is not obvious. Many are disabled from a psychological aversion to work or a desire to pursue hobbies while Social Security pays them. Others are genuinely disabled, some by work, some from birth. Social Security is obliged to pay them and give them other benefits. I am told that some even get extra money to pay for a housekeeper. In at least one case the post of housekeeper seems to have been used as a party favor. All that comes from Social Security.

Now Perry, we are told, is not fit to be President because he dares say the truth about this Ponzi Scheme. In fact it’s not really a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi was just a thief. Social Security is a money laundering scheme to let the government borrow more and more money to pay for Bunny Inspectors and other overpaid government employees and their pensions.

And no one dares say so.

As Cain said, the problem is not identifying what Social Security is: the problem is fixing it. We have a number of people who paid into Social Security and made no other provisions for their retirement. This was probably foolish of them, but they were encouraged by government. They can’t just be abandoned, and no one proposes to do so. There are others on Social Security who never paid into the system and ought not be there. Some, alas, have spent a good part of their lives there, and there’s no way out. All this must be dealt with when we fix Social Security.

Note that at its best, Social Security must be a combination of a compulsory savings and investment program, and a welfare grant. That raises the question of who is entitled to what, and why? If someone is entitled to something, someone else must be obligated to pay for it. With charities that is voluntary, but if government is involved, the obligation is quite real to the point of depriving the reluctant payer to poverty or jail. We do not seem to be agree on where that obligation comes from. Everyone is for rights, but the obligation to pay for those “rights” is not so often discussed.

When I was young we had slogans about Freedoms. In 1941 Roosevelt proposed four of them:

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

The first two were not controversial, but there was a firestorm of discussion about the 3^rd and 4^th: where in the Constitution did we get those? How were they freedoms? My freedom from want corresponds to your obligation to pay: where did you get that obligation?

Fixing Social Security will require that we address all those problems; but before we can fix Social Security we have to recognize that it is broken, and that it is not longer simply the retirement program enacted during the New Deal.

The global warming debates are heating up. Pun more or less intended. Now, it seems, Spencer’s paper on the misinterpretation of sensor data is both small potatoes and seriously flawed. I am not sure how it can be both.

From what I can discern, I can probably change the average temperature of the Earth by small manipulations in the weights assigned to the measures of the temperature of the sea at various depths. How you get an average sea temperature is itself a puzzle to me: it’s a dynamic process, with volcanoes, winds across the sea, rains, currents and circulation, all of them affecting temperatures at various depths – is even the notion of an average a sensible thing? And the measurements are in no way random: we take the measures we have, and we have no possibility of getting a random sample of temperatures at various depths and locations. How could we? It’s similar with atmospheric temperatures and altitudes. Does the very notion of an average make sense?

I don’t mean that there is no climate; but I keep noting that the charts all show what amounts to 0.1 degree measurements, and I don’t know how they arrive at those, since I do not think their original measurements are anything like that accurate. I have had people try to explain to me that enough random measures at 1.0 degree accuracy can give me a measure reliable to 0.1 degree accuracy. That would possibly be true given enough independent and unbiased random observations, but I don’t see much evidence that this is the case.

Meanwhile, Perry is being pounded because he rejects science. The evidence of this is that he says the science on global warming is not settled, certainly not sufficiently settled to be trillions of dollars on by adopting policies that harm the US economy and leave China and India free to siphon off the work that US regulations hamper. If it’s all true and the CO2 is dooming the planet, then a poor and bankrupt US will have impoverished itself for nothing: China and India will continue to build CO2 emitting power plants. A wealthy US might be able to save the Earth with some new process; a prostrate US will be able to do little or nothing.

Or am I being over dramatic? In any event I did not hear Perry reject science. I heard him reject the notion that the Science in AGW is fixed and settled. I have heard no refutation other of this other than the traditional proof by repeated assertion, coupled with a typical Al Gore speech. Of course we can trust Al Gore. Can’t we?

Eph Konigsberg, RIP

http://www.sierramadrenews.net/?p=4678

Eph was a very old friend. At one time he was a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, but that was well before I knew him or about LASFS. I met him as part of a discussion group in the 1970’s when he was married to Josepha. We went to each others birthday parties, and I very much liked going to dinner with Eph at the Cal Tech Athenaeum of which he was a member. Eph owned and was chief scientist of an instrumentation company that did fabulous work on physiological instrumentation, including a pill that troops could swallow and thereafter broadcast their fundamental physiological data. He did all this in early days when Moore’s Law hadn’t made such work easier.

Eph was a very well read man, and our discussions ranged through human history. He was a scholar of Jewish early writing and history, and he liked to lecture even more than I do, but he was less inclined to inflict this on unwilling listeners. I was very much willing to listen to him.

He used to call me every couple of months to tell me of some development he thought I’d be interested in, and he was a long time reader of my work. We were long time friends, and although we didn’t meet as often as we used to, I was always glad to hear from him. After my cancer treatments I have tended to be an interrupt driven system, meaning that he called me more than I called him simply because my mind doesn’t range so far as it used to; I regret that because I meant I didn’t call Eph every couple of weeks as I had before the radiation.

A scholar, a local community activist, and a very good friend. I’ll miss him.

Jerry Pournelle

I have heard that Amazon is trying to make a deal with California on sales tax. I can hope this means they will restore the Associates Program, which paid me a modest but not insignificant sum. I know nothing more than having heard a news item on this. Perhaps I’ll learn more.