Coming Up For Air

I know I haven’t been post­ing any­thing for over a week now. Of course, if you’re not a per­son inter­est­ed in TiVo, then you prob­a­bly haven’t been read­ing my posts for longer than that. Sor­ry about that. What can I say, I got a new toy and I’ve been play­ing with it. Actu­al­ly, the rea­son for not post­ing for the last week is that I’ve been very sick. Some sort of res­pi­ra­to­ry infec­tion. Well, 3 OTC’s, 4 pre­scrip­tions, and 2 trips to the doc­tor’s office lat­er, and I’m begin­ning to feel a lit­tle bet­ter. I promise nev­er to make fun of Rich­mond’s Doc-In-A-Box again. I’m so glad there here and can help me on a Sun­day after­noon! Okay, I’m not going to make them into some­thing they’re not. How­ev­er, I’m not going to bust their chops either. They do good work over there. Not to men­tion, they keep a lot of peo­ple out of the emer­gency room. We can all be thank­ful for that.

Well, oth­er than a less-than-rous­ing State of the Union address, there’s not been too much goings on to write about. I won’t go into here, oth­er than to say that the “own­er­ship soci­ety” rhetoric is get­ting a lit­tle old for me. Have we all for­got­ten Enron & World­com? Who the hell wants this to be the future of Social Secu­ri­ty? For all the talk of social secu­ri­ty being bro­ken and in need of imme­di­ate repair, what we real­ly need is to under­stand that it’s not pro­ject­ed to run out of mon­ey until 2042, even by con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mates. That’s if it’s left alone right now. There is no emer­gency and we don’t need to go blow­ing tril­lions (yep, that’s a T) by pri­va­tiz­ing any of this. Not yet at least. Let the gov­ern­ment take some time and use some lever­age to get pri­vate com­pa­nies and invest­ment firms to go along with­out that mas­sive cost. That’s some­thing of an over-sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, but not unrea­son­able. I under­stand some impor­tant peo­ple won’t make as much mon­ey in the short term, but this is Social Secu­ri­ty and was nev­er about mak­ing any­body mon­ey. It was about ensu­ing we’ll all have some help after retire­ment… to ensure that Amer­i­cans could even con­sid­er retire­ment. I’m not Social Secu­ri­ty expert, and I’m cer­tain­ly not invest­ing Guru. How­ev­er, I can spot a bleed­ing emer­gency when I see one, and this folks, isn’t such a thing. Hav­ing the com­mon sense not to rush into fix­ing this pro­gram that is cur­rent­ly work­ing rea­son­ably well (I have fam­i­ly mem­bers that get their checks) is the same com­mon sense that kept me out of the emer­gency room for a bad cough.