Indulge me.

[kellinator]

For those of you who are planning to vote for Bush in November, would you please tell me why? Preferably a reason a little more nuanced than "Kerry's an asshole"?

Note: You're not going to change my mind on this. If the past four years haven't changed my mind, a fifty-word comment sure as hell isn't going to do it.

I'm just trying to understand. Right now nothing scares me more than the thought of four more years of Bush, but I know there are people I like and respect who disagree for whatever reason, and I want to know why, so I can at least try to understand.

No flaming. If I'm too slammed to post my DragonCon pictures (coming soon!), I'm sure as hell too busy to play referee. Play nice, folks.

Comments

[winterbadger]

i have heard that social security is not as "in danger" as we think it is--that if the trust fund hadn't been raided so many times to fudge the budget in other areas, it'd be totally solvent now. seems to me somebody could, in theory, put that money back into the fund and the crisis would be averted. but i'm just guessing, because i don't know if that's even legal.

Well, there *isn't* any "trust fund" which is one of the dirty not-so-secrets of domestic policy (along with "there is no 'welfare' program that just pays you for being poor"). Taxes are assessed for SSI, then they go into the general fund; that, along with all sorts of other federal income not specifically and irrevocably (like anything is irrevocable in legislation) earmarked for some specfific purpose, is used to pay all the government's bills.

The "trust fund" is a theoretical construct, kind of like Adam Smith's invisible hand or Schrodinger's Cat :-) If the amount of income from SSI tax is more than what is spent on SSI, the Treasury Department makes up special issue bonds for the difference out of thin air and puts them in an accounting column makred "SS trust fund" and then spends the actual money on whatever Congress authorizes spending on. The money doesn't get saved in a bank account, just bonds that (hopefully) whoever is in government when they mature will find some way to pay.