===
Israel takes swift action. (See 2 below.)
===
Obamacare financial costs are reviewed and analyzed. (See 3 and 3a below.)
====
Pat Condell - my kinda guy! http://www.youtube.com/embed/Bqjlc3eGMpE?rel=0
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There is much truth to the fact that the middle class and its net worth is shrinking in America .
That said, it does not necessarily follow that this author's prediction is correct. (See 4 below.)
On the other hand, when citizens lose faith in their government's promise that is how a nation can unravel.
I am more of the view Social Security will be paid. The problem is, it may only buy an egg. (See 4a below.)
===
John Fund touches a sensitive issue but tells it like it is, (See 5 below.)
====
George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four and created "Big Brother." He was ahead of his time but "Big Brother has arrived. Government is "Big Brother" and by the time "Big Brother" smothers you with laws, regulations and rules that can make you guilty of something at the drop of a hat we will have lost our freedoms. But by then what difference does it make?
Anyone still thinks the US didn’t watch the action in Benghazi as it unfolded?
This is cutting edge photography, and then some .
The size of the area being covered and the high quality of the imagery is beyond
incredible!
incredible!
This imagery is being taken from 17,500 feet up.
That is roughly equal to 3-1/2 miles.
Objects as small as 6” can be seen.
Impressive.
===
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1)
En route to a Third World USA
|
By Wesley Pruden
Maybe we've been conned. There a growing recognition that Barack Obama is an incompetent poser, working out of his depth, and his administration is the gang that can't shoot straight. There's a lot of evidence to support that view.
Everything he touches becomes a bloody mess, like crushed bones and bits of flesh caught in the tracks of a tank rumbling through a rank of soldiers (or civilians). Iraq, Syria, Egypt — all gone, as prospects for countries with a prosperous and democratic future. The "reset" with Russia, meant to insure that America and the replacement republic of the old Soviet Union can be friends, is a reset that looks like a reset to the Cold War, with the new Russia more adversary than friend, transformed by a feckless American president and an ambitious Russian leader eager to take advantage of weak and ineffectual American leadership.
The "humanitarian crisis" on the nation's southern border is the most persuasive evidence yet that America is adrift in a sea of incompetence, pushed about by every wind that blows. The mighty ship of state is bereft of a rudder, traveling in endless circles with the captain stumbling on the bridge trying to make sense of navigation charts he can't read.
However, this may be ascribing to incompetence what is better explained by conspiracy. Mr. Obama promised in 2008 that he intended to transform America, and he is well on his way. Anyone who looked closely at the man and the influences that shaped who he would become was called a racist, a nativist, a bigot, a redneck yahoo. He was the messiah everyone was waiting for.
The ruins of American foreign policy are not likely to catch the attention of a culture drunk on the entertainment of the trivia, the trifling and the unimportant. But everybody begins to notice when the chaos comes close, when those monitoring the border begin to tremble and sag under the weight of a tsunami of illegal immigration. The scary implications for the future of the exceptional nation begin to weigh on Congress.
This week a Texas congressman who does not have the luxury of looking the other way because he sees trouble in every direction he looks, said what nice people think must never be said. The tsunami will change everything.
"Either we're going to enforce our laws and remain strong, economically or otherwise, or we ignore the rule of law and go to being a Third World country," Rep. Louis Gohmert told Fox News. "You've got to follow the law. You cannot bring hundreds of thousands of people into this country without destroying the country. Then there's no place that people can dream about coming to."
No one knows this better than Barack Obama.
Making the United States over into a Third World country is exactly what this president is about. He is of the Third World. He's comfortable in the Third World. He spent his formative years in the Third World, and when his mother, obsessed with the Third World, brought him back to America he sought out the company of those who dreamed of making America over into the world's largest welfare state, a France writ large, with Velveeta instead of Camembert. He and his Chicago cohort of potheads, "community organizers" and dreamers of fuzzy dreams entertained themselves with fantasies of how they would one day transform the land of the free and the home of the brave into a soft and corrupts nation worthy of taking its rightful place among the nations of the Third World.
Mr. Obama sounds like that captain who can't make sense of the navigation charts, but it may be an act. He may actually understand navigation very well. He talks of deporting the illegal children he invited here, of appointing hundreds of immigration judges and opening a vast new network of "detention facilities." These may be the jobs he promised.
But he has no intention of deporting more than a few token illegals, maybe the gangbangers who came in with the innocents. He can't do more than that. He knows the American people, with more mercy and compassion in their hearts than he has, would never stand for dumping children on a barren and hostile landscape, to be carrion for the coyotes. There's got to be a better way.
Of course, once the transformation of America is complete, and there's not much difference between Indiana and El Salvador, or between San Francisco and Honduras, the invasions will cease. America will no longer be the stuff of the dreams of "the huddled masses, yearning to be free." Nobody will want to come here because it will be no better than the miserable places they would leave behind. We have seen Barack Obama's future, and it doesn't work.
1a) The Daydream and the Nightmare
Obama isn't doing his job. He's waiting for history to recognize his greatness.
By Peggy Noonan
I don't know if we sufficiently understand how weird and strange, how historically unparalleled, this presidency has become. We've got a sitting president who was just judged in a major poll to be the worst since World War II. The worst president in 70 years! Quinnipiac University's respondents also said, by 54% to 44%, that the Obama administration is not competent to run the government. A Zogby Analytics survey asked if respondents are proud or ashamed of the president. Those under 50 were proud, while those over 50, who have of course the longest experienced sense of American history, were ashamed.
We all know the reasons behind the numbers. The scandals that suggest poor stewardship and, in the case of the IRS, destructive political mischief. The president's signature legislation, which popularly bears his name and contains within it the heart of his political meaning, continues to wreak havoc in marketplaces and to be unpopular with the public. He is incapable of working with Congress, the worst at this crucial aspect of the job since Jimmy Carter, though Mr. Carter at least could work with the Mideast and produced the Camp David Accords. Mr. Obama has no regard for Republicans and doesn't like to be with Democrats. Internationally, small states that have traditionally been the locus of trouble (the Mideast) are producing more of it, while large states that have been more stable in their actions (Russia, China) are newly, starkly aggressive.
That's a long way of saying nothing's working.
Which I'm sure you've noticed.
But I'm not sure people are noticing the sheer strangeness of how the president is responding to the lack of success around him. He once seemed a serious man. He wrote books, lectured on the Constitution. Now he seems unserious, frivolous, shallow. He hangs with celebrities, plays golf. His references to Congress are merely sarcastic: "So sue me." "They don't do anything except block me. And call me names. It can't be that much fun."
In a truly stunning piece in early June, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein interviewed many around the president and reported a general feeling that events have left him—well, changed. He is "taking fuller advantage of the perquisites of office," such as hosting "star-studded dinners that sometimes go on well past midnight." He travels, leaving the White House more in the first half of 2014 than any other time of his presidency except his re-election year. He enjoys talking to athletes and celebrities, not grubby politicians, even members of his own party. He is above it all. On his state trip to Italy in the spring, he asked to spend time with "interesting Italians." They were wealthy, famous. The dinner went for four hours. The next morning his staff were briefing him for a "60 Minutes" interview about Ukraine and health care. "One aide paraphrased Obama's response: 'Just last night I was talking about life and art, big interesting things, and now we're back to the minuscule things on politics.'''
Minuscule? Politics is his job.
When the crisis in Ukraine escalated in March, White House aides wondered if Mr. Obama should cancel a planned weekend golf getaway in Florida. He went. At the "lush Ocean Reef Club," he reportedly told his dinner companions: "I needed this. I needed the golf. I needed to laugh. I needed to spend time with friends."
You get the impression his needs are pretty important in his hierarchy of concerns.
***
This is a president with 2½ years to go who shows every sign of running out the clock. Normally in a game you run out the clock when you're winning. He's running it out when he's losing
All this is weird, unprecedented. The president shows no sign—none—of being overwhelmingly concerned and anxious at his predicaments or challenges. Every president before him would have been. They'd be questioning what they're doing wrong, changing tack. They'd be ordering frantic aides to meet and come up with what to change, how to change it, how to find common ground not only with Congress but with the electorate.
Instead he seems disinterested, disengaged almost to the point of disembodied. He is fatalistic, passive, minimalist. He talks about hitting "singles" and "doubles" in foreign policy.
"The world seems to disappoint him," says The New Yorker's liberal and sympathetic editor, David Remnick.
What kind of illusions do you have to have about the world to be disappointed when it, and its players, act aggressively or foolishly? Presidents aren't supposed to have those illusions, and they're not supposed to check out psychologically when their illusions are shattered.
***
Barack Obama doesn't seem to care about his unpopularity, or the decisions he's made that have not turned out well. He doesn't seem concerned. A guess at the reason: He thinks he is right about his essential policies. He is steering the world toward not relying on America. He is steering America toward greater dependence on and allegiance to government. He is creating a more federally controlled, Washington-centric nation that is run and organized by progressives. He thinks he's done his work, set America on a leftward course, and though his poll numbers are down now, history will look back on him and see him as heroic, realistic, using his phone and pen each day in spite of unprecedented resistance. He is Lincoln, scorned in his time but loved by history.
He thinks he is in line with the arc of history, that America, for all its stops and starts, for all the recent Supreme Court rulings, has embarked in the long term on governmental and cultural progressivism. Thus in time history will have the wisdom to look back and see him for what he really was: the great one who took every sling and arrow, who endured rising unpopularity, the first black president and the only one made to suffer like this.
That's what he's doing by running out the clock: He's waiting for history to get its act together and see his true size.
He's like someone who's constantly running the movie "Lincoln" in his head. It made a great impression on him, that movie. He told Time magazine, and Mr. Remnick, how much it struck him. President Lincoln of course had been badly abused in his time. Now his greatness is universally acknowledged. But if Mr. Obama read more of Lincoln, he might notice Lincoln's modesty, his plain ways, his willingness every day to work and negotiate with all who opposed him, from radical abolitionists who thought him too slow to supporters of a negotiated peace who thought him too martial. Lincoln showed respect for others. Those who loved him and worked for him thought he showed too much. He was witty and comical but not frivolous and never shallow. He didn't say, "So sue me." He never gave up trying to reach agreement and resolution.
It is weird to have a president who has given up. So many young journalists diligently covering this White House, especially those for whom it is their first, think what they're seeing is normal.
It is not. It is unprecedented and deeply strange. And, because the world is watching and calculating, unbelievably dangerous.
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2) Six Suspects Arrested over Murder of Arab Teen
by Tova Dvorin
Police have arrested six suspects in the murder of 16-year-old Arab teen Mohammed Abu-Khder.
The suspects, among them several minors, are believed to be Jewish, appearing to back suggestions
earlier today that police had made significant headway in their investigation, and that they were almost
certain the motive was "nationalistic".
"We have begun to put together the pieces of the puzzle, and 70-80% of the background information
indicates [the crime is] nationalistic," a police source claiming to be part of the central investigation told Walla News.
"But research has failed to understand what happened during critical moments," he added, referring to
the two-hour window between the boy's alleged abduction in Shuafat and his body being found in the
Jerusalem Forest.
Almost immediately prior to the arrests, a police source told Channel 2 that arrests in the case were
"imminent" and could be carried out later in the day.
Rioting throughout Jerusalem erupted last week after rumors circulated that 16-year-old Mohammed
Abu-Khder's murder was an act of Jewish "revenge" over the abduction and murder of three Israeli teens Naftali Frenkel (16), Gilad Sha'ar (16) and Eyal Yifrah (19).
Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, as well as some in the international media, have
since repeated those claims as fact. Israeli leaders - including the mayor of Jerusalem and Prime
Minister Netanyahu - rushed to condemn the murder, despite the lack of clear evidence suggesting that
the murder was an act of nationalistic revenge.
Conflicting testimonies from the boy's own parents about an alleged attempt to abduct their younger son some time before have raised further questions about the possibility of criminal or some other motive.
Meanwhile more footage has emerged from CCTV cameras near the scene of the crime, purporting to
show the murder suspects approaching Mohammed before kidnapping him.
[youtube:194857]
Previous footage, taken from across the street, was obtained late last week by The Telegraph; but while those images were far harder to make out, the latest film is somewhat clearer - though not clear enough to make out the killers' identities.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3) An Unfolding Fiscal Disaster
|
The calamitous finances of Obamacare
Imagine that it is 1937 and time for the first Social Security payroll taxes to be assessed on workers and their employers. Two years earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s new program was successfully sold to the American public as an ambitious yet fiscally responsible, self-financing expansion of social insurance protections. The new Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax—a payroll tax of 2 percent on earnings—will pay for it.
Imagine further, however, that upon 1937’s arrival, FDR and Congress decide they don’t want to risk the problematic politics associated with imposing the payroll tax. And so, despite previous assurances of fiscal rectitude, they roll back the tax while leaving in place what eventually proves to be the single most expensive spending program in the history of the American republic. The result is a fiscal disaster of unprecedented magnitude.
Something eerily similar to this hypothetical scenario is now happening with the Affordable Care Act. The ACA was enacted in 2010 with the promise of reducing the federal budget deficit while expanding health insurance coverage. Nearly lost amid the recent press cheerleading over ACA enrollment figures is that this promise has disintegrated, and now no one—including, notably, the Congressional Budget Office—can say how much fiscal damage the ACA will ultimately cause. All we know for certain is that many of the saving
CBO currently estimates that the ACA’s coverage provisions will cost the federal government $92 billion a year by FY2015. This is roughly 0.5 percent of projected U.S. economic output for 2015, well exceeding the relative costs of Social Security and Medicaid at similar points in their histories. (The amount falls just short of the proportion of GDP absorbed by all of early Medicare.) Worse, the federal fiscal position was far weaker when the ACA was passed than when Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were created.
Troubling though the ACA’s startup costs are, they represent only the tip of the fiscal iceberg that will be the fully phased-in law. CBO projects that its annual costs will hit $200 billion by FY2020, or nearly 0.9 percent of GDP. Yet this assumes that lawmakers will be content to allow the ACA’s health insurance subsidies to grow more slowly than low-income beneficiaries’ health care costs, as the law now stipulates. Thus there is every reason to believe that the ACA’s eventual costs will far exceed initial estimates, as happened with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
No sooner was the ink dry on the ACA than the law’s various “pay-fors” began to be tossed overboard, one after the other. The ACA’s CLASS Act (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports, a long-term care program) was financially unsound from the beginning, had to be suspended a little over one year later, and was eventually repealed. The original CBO score had assumed that CLASS would provide $86 billion of net financing for the ACA over the first 10 years.
Roughly $100 billion of financing in that first decade was also to come from penalties on individuals (for failing to carry health insurance) and employers (for failing to offer it). But the Obama administration has repeatedly postponed enforcement. Unsurprisingly, there is now a campaign to abandon the individual mandate penalty altogether, despite advocates having previously touted it as essential to the workings of the ACA. The administration has also been dropping cuts to Medicare Advantage required under the ACA, with the costs of these decisions still unknown.
Also unclear is whether the ACA’s reinsurance and “risk corridor” provisions will produce unexpected federal budget costs; these provisions were included in the ACA to protect insurers from financial losses if their exchange plan participants prove to be sicker and costlier than initially presumed. CBO assumes that the ACA’s risk corridor provisions will have net positive budget effects, based on previous experience with Medicare Part D. But Part D involved a very different incentive structure and participant pool; there is no telling whether the ACA’s exchanges will line up with that experience. Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to promise both participating health insurers and taxpayers that they will each be protected from loss under the risk corridor provisions, though it remains unclear how both objectives will be accomplished.
What has caused the ACA’s financing to immediately unravel in a way that Social Security’s and Medicare’s did not? Part of the answer lies in the decision of the ACA’s advocates to push the law through Congress on a party-line vote despite public opposition. Social Security, by contrast, received overwhelming support from both parties in both chambers.
The ACA’s partisan origins have left lawmakers with vastly reduced incentives to achieve the budgetary savings required to make its finances work. Republicans, who saw the law enacted over their strenuous opposition, are unmotivated to support implementation of the ACA’s controversial tax increases, penalties, and Medicare cuts. This leaves Democrats, at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, with sole political ownership of these aspects of the law.
After shaking a favorable score out of CBO in 2010 based on the assumption that the law would be enforced as written, Democrats now exhibit little motivation to follow through with its most politically radioactive savings measures. There is little reason to suppose that provisions looming on the horizon, such as the tax on so-called Cadillac health insurance plans and the decisions of the Independ-ent Payment Advisory Board, will be enforced any more diligently than others have been to date.
Much of this was predictable—indeed predicted—from the outset. After 1983’s Social Security solvency rescue, the two major parties were both invested in upholding politically painful measures such as delaying cost-of-living adjustments, imposing income taxes on benefits, and raising the retirement age. In 2010, on the other hand, a major federal spending expansion—as well as the controversial measures required to pay for it—was muscled through Congress by one party over the impassioned opposition of the other. That the finances of such a program are already proving politically untenable should surprise no one.
Charles Blahous is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a research fellow
at the Hoover Institution
at the Hoover Institution
3a) Senate Dems Try to Pull Focus From Obamacare
North Carolina Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan has her Republican opponent right where she wants him geographically - and, therefore, politically.
Thom Tillis is stuck at the state capitol trying to resolve a budget quarrel as speaker of the North Carolina House. It's a spot that helps Hagan emphasize Tillis' role leading a Republican-controlled state government that Democrats contend has gone overboard with conservative zeal by restricting access to abortion and the voting booth while cutting corporate taxes and slashing spending on schools.
If Tillis is worried by Hagan's portrayal, he doesn't show it. Drinking coffee this past week from a hand-grenade-shaped mug in his no-frills legislative office, he's got his own message in his campaign to take Hagan's Senate seat. "Obamacare," he said, "continues to be a big problem."
Similar themes are playing out in other crucial Senate races, as voters have four months to decide which party will control the chamber in the final two years of Barack Obama's presidency. For Republicans, it's all about tying Democrats to Obama - especially to a health care law that remains unpopular with many Americans. And for Democrats, the election is about just about anything else, especially if they can steer attention away from Washington and federal matters.
It's a political strategy that sometimes gives the campaigns an inside-out feel, with veteran senators running as if they were first-timers without a Washington resume to defend or tout.
Democrat Mark Pryor has represented Arkansas in the Senate for two terms, yet one of his TV ads begins with a man saying, "I remember when Pryor was attorney general." A woman adds that he pursued "scam artists that were ripping off seniors."
Pryor was state attorney general more than a decade ago, and for just four years, compared to his nearly dozen in the Senate. His harkening back to that time points to his desire to make the election a choice between a famous name in Arkansas state politics and first-term Rep. Tom Cotton, a Republican whom many view as less personable and engaging than Pryor.
The GOP strategy, in return, is straightforward. One TV ad has a young girl spelling Pryor's name as O-B-A-M-A.
Traditionally emphasized by first-time campaigners, personal biographies are central to several other Democrats' re-election campaigns. Alaska Sen. Mark Begich has aired a TV ad with footage of him as a boy of about 10, when his father, Rep. Nick Begich, died in a plane crash. "Mark is clearly his father's son," says the narrator, Begich's wife, Deborah Bonito.
And after 18 years in the Senate, Democrat Mary Landrieu is arguably the most accomplished member of her famous Louisiana political family. Still, she has aired an ad in which her father - former New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu - says affectionately: "When you have nine children, you're bound to have one who's hard-headed."
Some Democrats might say the same about the GOP's strategy of bashing "Obamacare" now that the Affordable Care Act is 4 years old. Not Tillis, who says Obama and Hagan exaggerated the extent to which people could keep their doctors and insurance plans. He calls it "the greatest example of a promise not kept."
He's getting help with the message from Crossroads GPS, the political group run in part by Republican strategist Karl Rove, which is spending more than $3.5 million on television ads in North Carolina this summer. The group's latest ad attacking Hagan asks whether voters know she "cast the deciding vote for Obamacare."
"The idea that this will be anything less than a referendum on Obamacare is wishful thinking," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C.
The amount spent on the Hagan-Tillis race - about $17 million and climbing - is among the nation's highest. It comes in a state that few can rival for political change in recent years, as Republicans ended a century of frustration by winning control of both legislative chambers and the governor's office in 2012.
What came next is a "conservative revolution" that Tillis said he's proud of leading. Hagan and her fellow Democrats argue the Republicans went too far in a state so closely divided politically that Obama carried it in 2008 and lost it four years later. They believe a bump in teacher pay that Tillis promises lawmakers will enact this summer won't erase North Carolinians' memories of the deep cuts to education that Republicans passed last year.
That approach, said Rep. David Price, D-N.C., is Hagan's best chance to focus November voters' attention on something other than Obama. Her strategy "is exactly what she should do," Price said, because Tillis "has got that hung right around his neck."
Hagan, meanwhile, points to achievements close to home. They include her push to provide medical care to military families exposed to tainted water for decades at Camp Lejeune, the giant Marine Corps base in eastern North Carolina.
"Kay Hagan," said veteran North Carolina GOP strategist Paul Shumaker, "is hoping the sins of Raleigh are much bigger than the sins of Washington."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4) MarketWatch's Nutting: Middle-Class Debt Buildup Spells Doom for Economy
The strength of the middle class has historically powered the U.S. economy. But now the middle class is suffering, and that means trouble for the economy, says MarketWatch columnist Rex Nutting.
A big part of the problem is household debt, he writes. "We've had a big debate about whether the nation can survive with a government debt-to-GDP ratio above 90 percent, but almost no discussion about what it means for private-sector debt to total 240 percent of GDP."
The economy is still too reliant on borrowing from the middle class, Nutting argues.
"Recent data show that the middle class is once again borrowing, mostly for autos and education. Although the cost of servicing their debts has fallen to a record low thanks to low interest rates, middle-class families are vulnerable if interest rates rise significantly," he explains.
"And that means the economy is vulnerable. In order to grow, our economy requires spending by the middle class. But how can the middle class spend when their incomes are flat and they are already overburdened with debt?" Nutting asks.
"Unless middle-class incomes can rise along with productivity growth again, the U.S. economy probably is doomed to a long period of stagnation."
U.S. consumer credit soared by $26.85 billion in April to $3.18 trillion. That puts the annual consumer debt growth rate at 10.2 percent, the fastest pace since July 2011.
To be sure, not everyone is worried about the increase. "The ability of consumers to carry debt is vastly improved," Millan Mulraine, deputy head of U.S. research at TD Securities, tells Bloomberg.
"This is what we need to see for us to believe that the economy will make that transition to a self-sustaining growth trajectory."
A big part of the problem is household debt, he writes. "We've had a big debate about whether the nation can survive with a government debt-to-GDP ratio above 90 percent, but almost no discussion about what it means for private-sector debt to total 240 percent of GDP."
The economy is still too reliant on borrowing from the middle class, Nutting argues.
"Recent data show that the middle class is once again borrowing, mostly for autos and education. Although the cost of servicing their debts has fallen to a record low thanks to low interest rates, middle-class families are vulnerable if interest rates rise significantly," he explains.
"And that means the economy is vulnerable. In order to grow, our economy requires spending by the middle class. But how can the middle class spend when their incomes are flat and they are already overburdened with debt?" Nutting asks.
"Unless middle-class incomes can rise along with productivity growth again, the U.S. economy probably is doomed to a long period of stagnation."
U.S. consumer credit soared by $26.85 billion in April to $3.18 trillion. That puts the annual consumer debt growth rate at 10.2 percent, the fastest pace since July 2011.
To be sure, not everyone is worried about the increase. "The ability of consumers to carry debt is vastly improved," Millan Mulraine, deputy head of U.S. research at TD Securities, tells Bloomberg.
"This is what we need to see for us to believe that the economy will make that transition to a self-sustaining growth trajectory."
4a)Most Millennials Not Expecting Social Security Benefits
On this Fourth of July, 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, we are still bitterly divided over race.
More than half the members of the millennial generation, 51 percent, believe they will not receive any Social Security benefits at all when they reach retirement.
Just 6 percent of millennials — Americans born after 1980 —think they will get benefits at the level enjoyed by current retirees, and 39 percent believe they will receive benefits at reduced levels, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center disclosed.
Millennial adults are now ages 18 to 33, and they comprise 27 percent of the total U.S. population.
They are even more pessimistic today than they were when Pew conducted a similar poll in 2011. At that time, 42 percent said they expected to receive no Social Security payments, while 72 percent said benefits would not be a "main source" of their retirement income.
Among Americans already retired, 58 said that benefits were their main source of income, and 28 percent said the payments were their only source of income.
There are ample reasons for the millennials' concerns. Within 15 years, the number of Americans reaching retirement age will increase 70 percent, while the number of working-age Americans will rise by just 6 percent.
When Social Security started in 1935, there were 17 workers for each retiree. By 2035, it's estimated that there will be only two workers per retiree, according to The Daily Caller.
Social Security already accounts for 23 percent of the federal budget, and the trust is estimated to run out of funds by 2042.
Most of the increase in benefits being paid out is attributable to Americans' longer life expectancy. In 1940, life expectancy after age 65 was about 12 years. Today it is 19 years.
To deal with the looming crisis, most millennials favor changing Social Security to allow younger workers to put their payroll taxes into private investment accounts. Pew found that 86 percent of millennials favored such an approach, while only 40 percent favored raising the Social Security retirement age.
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This week marked the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and federally funded programs. We all should celebrate how, a century after the Civil War, moral leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. persuaded Congress that it was wrong to treat people differently based on their skin color. “No more powerful expression of a commitment to equal opportunity can be found in the annals of modern legislation anywhere in the world,” professor Edward Erler of California State university has noted.
And yet, sadly, the country has lost sight of much of the reason the Civil Rights Act was supported by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress (more than 80 percent of Republicans and two-thirds of Democrats). People all across the political spectrum believed the promise of the new law, which was to replace segregation with a color-blind society, or something as close to it as we could get. In King’s famous words, people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Opponents of the Civil Rights Act warned that it might serve as a vehicle for racial quotas and reverse discrimination. Senator Hubert Humphrey, the bill’s principal sponsor and later the 1968 Democratic nominee for president, flatly disputed any such suggestions. He famously promised to eat the bill if it led to racial preferences. Responding to one of his colleagues in debate on the bill, Humphrey said: “If the Senator can find in Title VII . . . any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.”
Clint Bolick, a noted constitutional lawyer, captured this debate in his bookChanging Course: Civil Rights at the Crossroads:
The great liberal Justice William O. Douglas viewed the racial preferences applied by the state as any veteran of the civil-rights movement should — he considered them invalid on their face. Douglas looked for support to Justice Thurgood Marshall, the former civil-rights lawyer who had forcefully proclaimed in his argument in Brown v. Board of Education 20 years before that “the Constitution is color blind in our dedicated belief.” In a response that tragically symbolized the wholesale abandonment of traditional principles by the former champions of civil rights, Justice Marshall glibly replied to Douglas: “You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it is our turn.”
In the years since then, many civil-rights advocates have continued to shift their goals away from the ideal of a color-blind society. In 2003, on the 40th anniversary of King’s famous 1963 speech on the Washington Mall, Hillary Clinton boldly asserted: “If we don’t take race as part of our character, then we are kidding ourselves.”
The new problem is that race is increasingly trumping character when it come to federal law. Federal laws written in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act required the demonstration of intentional discrimination in matters such as hiring, housing, contracting, and admission policies before action was warranted. Now the Obama Administration claims that enforcement of civil-rights law can be based on statistical evidence that supposedly shows a “disparate impact” on certain minority groups.
The Department of Justice, for instance, has issued policies warning that “racial discrimination in school disciplines is a real problem today.” They cite studies showing that African Americans made up 15 percent of the student population but accounted for more than 35 percent of suspensions. The warning is clear: Teachers and principals may have to answer for suspensions of black students if those suspension are not in direct proportion to their numbers. But there might be another explanation: Black students might misbehave in disproportionate numbers; and also, as Gail Heriot, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, notes, black students might also be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms.” One solution to the problem of unequal schools might be to make sure that families have more of the kind of school choice that the Obama Justice Department so bitterly opposes.
Yale historian Geoffrey Kabaservice lays much of the blame for the racial polarization of our politics on Republicans, who have, he alleges, alienated minority voters in areas such as immigration, voting rights, and the minimum wage. At the same time, he acknowledges that Democrats have adopted a program of color-conscious solutions that focus on affirmative action and wealth redistribution. “Republicans have never gotten on board with that last piece,” Kabaservice told Politico, “and so Democrats now almost have to define Republicans as anti-civil rights.” As Politico notes: “Democrats have seized that viewpoint, sharpening their civil-rights rhetoric against Republicans to the point where bipartisanship on the issue has all but disappeared.”
The country has never fully accepted the racial-entitlement revisionism that leftists have imposed on civil-rights issues. Americans support equal opportunity and outreach but still hold up the goal of a color-blind society. Last year, a Gallup poll found that three-quarters of whites believe that college applicants should be admitted solely based on merit, even if that results in few minorities being admitted. More interestingly, in the same poll, 59 percent of Hispanics said that applicants should be judged only on merit, while blacks were divided in their views, with 48 percent supporting the use of race as a factor in admissions and 44 percent opposing it.
There are sound reasons that so many Americans resist a regime of racial entitlements. Schools now put a race-conscious fist on the admissions scale rather than a thumb and clearly admit students based on race. They aren’t doing these students a favor. Affirmative-action students are 50 to 75 percent more likely to drop out of a science program than are regular admits. At law schools, they are two or three times more likely to fail the bar exam. But students who attend a school where their entering credentials are similar to those of their fellow students are more likely to finish and fulfill their work and life ambitions. We almost certainly now have fewer black doctors, lawyers, and business chiefs than we would have had under race-neutral admissions policies.
In Wounds That Will not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide, Princeton professor Russell Nieli wrote: “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that racial-preference policies have lulled substantial segments of the black middle class into complacency and half-hearted performance in our increasingly education-focused world.” That isn’t the outcome that supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hoped for or promised. It’s time to return to the original vision of civil rights that principled liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and William O. Douglas supported.
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