I Ponder. Obama and Kerry Accomplish The Opposite of What They Sought. Radicalization of Higher Education! Is Georgia Ripping Itself Apart?

Left handle for white but no beer! and Obama flew over Indian Reservation trying to get them in his health                                                                care program.
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I seriously ponder over these matters when I am not writing memos!

How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered? 

 Why does a round pizza come in a square box? 

 What disease did cured ham actually have?

If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a stupid song about him?

 If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from?

Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him for a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?

 Why does someone believe you when you say there are four billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet? 

Why do they use sterilized needles for death by lethal injection?

 Why did Kamikaze pilots wear helmets? 

  If people evolved from apes, why are there still apes?

How come you never hear father-in-law jokes? 

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What now - toga terror? (See 1 below.)

The consequence of Obama and Kerry's peace efforts is that they created a temporary peace between Abbas and Hamas.  No Palestinian agreement lasts because they fear each other, have different approaches towards the same goals and do not trust each other but for the time being Obama and Kerry can boast they achieved the opposite of what they sought.  (See 1a below.)
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The radicalization of most of America's college campuses will prove the best way to destroy our Republic along with the crippling debt.

When you shape the minds of future generations from within you create a powerful force for the acceptance of change without comparable  reasoning ability to recognize the mistakes inherent in emotional thinking.

This is what has been going on for decades and this is what helped set the stage for a radical like Obama to be elected. (See 2 below.)
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This is so logical that if defies rejection and that is why it is never proposed. (See 3 below.)
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Will Harry Reid in because Georgia loses? This should be enough to scare conservative voters to come together.

Because a bunch of radical incompetents, who would never stand a chance of being elected, allowed their egos to propel them into a seven person race the Republican Party in Georgia is at it again - possibly rendering itself impotent.

Republicans never learn that you let your opponent destroy themselves!(See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) CAROLINE GLICK

Time for consequences

It’s hard not to admire Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s brazenness.

Two weeks ago, Abbas signed on to 15 international agreements that among other things require the PA to respect human rights and punish war criminals.

And this week, he signed a unity deal with two genocidal terror groups all of whose leaders are war criminals. Every leader of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two parties that signed the deal with the PLO, are war criminals. Under the Geneva Conventions, which Abbas signed onto just a couple of weeks ago, he is required to put them on trial, for their war crimes.

Here it is worth noting that under the Geneva Conventions, every single rocket launch from Gaza into Israeli territory is a separate war crime.

Abbas was only able to sign the Geneva Conventions on the one hand, and the unity deal with terrorist war criminals on the other, because he is utterly convinced that neither the US nor the European Union will hold him accountable for his actions. He is completely certain that neither the Americans nor the Europeans are serious about their professed commitments to upholding international law.

Abbas is sure that for both the Obama administration and the EU, maintaining support for the PLO far outweighs any concern they have for abiding by the law of nations. He believes this because he has watched them make excuses for the PLO and its leaders for the past two decades.

When it comes to the Palestinians, the Western powers are always perfectly willing to throw out their allegiance to law – international law and their domestic statutes – to continue supporting the PLO in the name of a peace process, which by now, everyone understands is entirely fictional.

Why do they do this?

They do it because the peace process gives them a way to ignore and wish away the pathologies of the Islamic and Arab world.

The peace process is predicated on the notion that all those pathologies are Israel’s fault. If Israel would just surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians, then the Arabs writ large, and the Muslim world as a whole will cast aside their support for jihad and terrorism and everything will be fine.

At least that is how Abbas analyzes the situation.

And so far, the US has not disappointed him.

The Obama administration’s immediate response to Abbas’s unity with terrorist war criminals deal involved pretending it didn’t understand what had just happened.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, shortly after Hamas war criminal Ismail Haniyeh signed the deal with Fatah and Islamic Jihad, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki acknowledged that the deal is bad for the peace process. But she wasn’t willing to reach the inevitable conclusion.

Rather, she averred, idiotically, “I think the ball, at this point, is in the Palestinians’ court to answer questions to whether this reconciliation meets the US’s long-standing principles.”

Two days before the unity deal, a reporter from Al-Monitor asked Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar if Hamas has given up terrorism.

Zahar responded, “Anyone who claims so must be drunk. How has Hamas abandoned the resistance [that is, terrorist] effort? What are the manifestations of it doing so? Where have we prevented the launching of rockets?” No ambiguity whatsoever there.

And Abbas just signed a deal Hamas, and with Islamic Jihad, the official representative of the Iranian mullahs in the Palestinian war criminal lineup.

No ambiguity there, either.

If the US is willfully blind to who the Palestinians are, what they are doing, and what they stand for, the Europeans are so committed to the Palestinians that they invented an imaginary world where international law protects war criminals and castigates their Jewish victims as international outlaws.

In the EU’s view, Hamas is an attractive organization.

During a meeting with Abbas last October, Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, urged Abbas to sign a unity deal with Hamas. A statement from her office read that she views reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas “as an important element for the unity of a future Palestinian state and for reaching a twostate solution.”

And while unity between terrorist factions is something that Ashton considers conducive to peace, in her view, Jewish presence in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is tantamount to a war crime.

In a statement released by her office last week, after Baruch Mizrahi was murdered by Palestinian terrorists while driving in his family car, with his wife and young children, to a Passover Seder, Ashton gave no more than a perfunctory condemnation of the war crime.

Four-fifths of her statement involved condemning Israel for respecting Jewish property rights and the rules of due process and international law in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

In the EU’s imaginary world, being in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem while Jewish is a war crime. Murdering Jews is merely impolite.

The deal signed on Wednesday is the fourth unity deal Fatah has signed with Hamas. After the first one was signed in 2007, the so-called Middle East Quartet, which includes the US, the EU, the UN and Russia, issued three conditions for accepting the unity government: Hamas has to recognize Israel’s right to exist, abjure terrorism and accept the legitimacy of the previous agreements signed by the PLO with Israel.

As Zahar and every other Hamas leader has made clear repeatedly, these conditions will never be met.

But regardless of how Hamas views them, in and of themselves the Quartet’s conditions are deeply problematic. They themselves constitute a breach of international law.

The Quartet’s conditions assert that if Hamas and Islamic Jihad agree to them, they will be accorded the same legitimacy as the PLO. In other words, the Quartet members have committed themselves to granting immunity from prosecution for war crimes to all Palestinian terrorists.

Providing such immunity is arguably a breach of international law. And it exposes a profound and irrational dependence on the mythical peace process on the part of Western policy-makers.

Reacting to this week’s unity deal, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said, “The agreement between Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad brings the Middle East to a new diplomatic era. The Palestinian Authority turned into the largest terrorist organization in the world, 20 minutes from Tel Aviv.”

And under international law, including the agreements that Abbas acceded to just two weeks ago, Bennett is absolutely right.

Apologists for Abbas note that this week’s deal is as unlikely as all its predecessors to be implemented.

But even if they are right this doesn’t mean that Abbas’s repeated practice of signing unity deals with war criminals should be cast aside as insignificant.

They expose the lie at the heart of the peace process. The time has come to call things by their names.

Abbas is a terrorist and the PA is a terrorist organization.

In light of this incontrovertible fact, the time has come to treat the PA in accordance with international law.

Perhaps shocked by Abbas’s behavior, perhaps overwhelmed by the serial failure of every one of its foreign policies, the administration acknowledged that Israel can’t be expected to negotiate with a government that doesn’t accept its right to exist.

Administration officials even said that the US would have to revisit its relationship with the PA in light of the agreement with Hamas.

No doubt, the administration is convinced that it can revert to form and ignore reality once again the moment the smoke as cleared. But whatever its intentions, the administration’s acknowledgment of Abbas’s bad faith opens the door to action by both Israel and the US Congress.

The Israeli government and the US Congress should take the steps necessary to bring their national policies toward the Palestinians into accordance with the law of nations.

On Thursday, the security cabinet rightly decided to end negotiations with the PA. But this cannot be the end of the line. Israel must also stop all financial transfers to the PA.

Just as critically, Israel must stop cooperating with PA security forces in Judea and Samaria.

It must end its support for US training of those forces and call for the US to end its mission to assist PA security forces.

Israel must begin arresting and prosecuting Palestinian officials who incite for the murder of Jews, and charge them with solicitation of murder.

The government should assist Israeli citizens in submitting war crimes complaints against Palestinian officials and the PA generally at international tribunals for their involvement in war crimes, including their incitement of genocide.

As for the US Congress, last week, with the passage into law of Sen. Ted Cruz’s bill banning terrorists from serving as UN ambassadors, the Congress showed that it is capable of acting to force the administration to uphold US anti-terror laws.

To this end, in accordance with those laws, Congress must act to immediately end US military support for Palestinian security services.

The Office of the US Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian territories that trains Palestinian military forces should be closed straightaway. Its personnel should be redeployed out of the area forthwith.

So, too, given that the Palestinian Authority now inarguably meets the US definition of a foreign terrorist organization, the US must end all financial assistance to its operating budget. Also, in accordance with US law, the US banking system must be closed to PA entities. Foreign banks that do business with these entities should be barred from doing business with US banks.

Abbas is not interested in peace. The two-state model isn’t about achieving peace. It is about blaming the victim of the absence of peace for the absence of peace.

Abbas knows his apologists, both in Israel, and most important in the US and Europe. He knows they will go to any length to defend him.

The Israeli Left does so because without the phony peace process, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, the Labor Party and Meretz become political irrelevancies.

The administration and the EU defend Abbas and the phony peace process because they don’t want to acknowledge the plain fact that Israel is the only stable ally they have in the Middle East and the stronger Israel is the more protected they are. Doing so contradicts their ideology.

So now Abbas is telling them that the deal is good for peace since it brings Hamas-controlled Gaza into the PLO and so reunifies the PA, which has been operating as two separate entities for seven years. And they may go along with it.

They’ve been perfectly willing to embrace utter nonsense countless times over the years.

Only the Israeli government and Congress can stop them. And they must stop them.

These phony peaceniks’ preference for Jew-killers over international law comes with a prohibitive price tag. Jews are murdered, war criminals are embraced, and the rule of law is rent asunder.


1a) Kerry's Talks Achieve Peace Between Hamas and Fatah

Abbas and Hanieyh on poster, next to a picture of Arafat.  (Photo Credit: Flash 90)

Rival Hamas and Fatah factions reached a unity agreement Wednesday afternoon, the big success of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s nine-month Peace Talks that now have given birth to political Siamese twins, guaranteed to destroy the Palestinian Authority.

The outline of the agreement was reported earlier today here.

Hamas announced in Gaza, and Ramallah officials confirmed to the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency, that peace between Hamas and Fatah will be finalized within five weeks, with elections to take place in six months.

Both rival factions agreed to release political prisoners that each side is holding.

Hamas and Fatah were unified in the Palestinian Authority administration until 2006, when the United States, as it is wont to do, blew it up by encouraging democratic elections that resulted with Hamas winning a majority in the PA legislature and making a fool out of then- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Slightly one year after the elections, Hamas and Fatah waged all-out war in Gaza. Fatah’s American-trained troops, those who remained alive, scuttled out like scared rabbits and jumped backed into their foxholes in Ramallah while Hamas took control of Gaza and continue its successful effort to its subjects deeper into hell.

Previous unity agreements have fallen flat on their terrorists’ faces, but this time it doesn’t matter  because the announcement itself, less than a week before the official end of Kerry’s nine-month charades, leaves Kerry only being able to announce that he unwittingly really has succeeded in achieving a peace agreement. Given the upside-world today, it would not be a wonder if he gets a Nobel Prize for his efforts.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Jewish Home party leader Naftali Bennett reacted to the anticipated unity agreement with the most superfluous statements of the year.

Lieberman said, “It is impossible to make peace with both Israel and Hamas, a terror organization that calls for the destruction of Israel,” and Bennett called the unity an “alliance of terror.”

More interesting will be the reaction of the Obama administration, starting with Wednesday’s daily press briefing at the U.S. State Dept., whose spokeswomen certainly are meeting with Kerry to figure out to get out of the trap the entire administration has set for them by hardly even mentioning the word “Hamas” the past nine months.

As Kerry would say, “’Poof,’ and it is gone.”

“Poof” is gone, but Hamas is around and kicking, when it is not shooting.

Basem Naim, a foreign affairs adviser to de facto Gaza prime minister Ismail Haniyeh was quoted by The Washington Post two months as saying, “Any talks that do not take Gaza into consideration will fail. Obama sees Gaza as a side issue, and he believes that Gaza and Hamas are not at the center of things, because we are not participating in these negotiations. This reflects a kind of naiveté, for the success or failure of all efforts depends on Gaza.”

What, Obama naïve?

How could that possibly be?

He has a grand strategy, just like all his other failed strategies for a new Middle East. Kerry was to hammer out a “framework” for peace, entangling Israel into a web it could not get out of, and then bringing in Hamas with some fancy doubletalk to tie the noose. President Barack Obama, during his visit to Israel and Ramallah last year said, “If there is a model where young Palestinians in Gaza are looking and seeing that in the West Bank, Palestinians are able to live in dignity, with self-determination, that’s something that the young people of Gaza are going to want.”

As in the story of Purim, he made a noose for himself.

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2)   The Closing of the Academic Mind

•BY WILLIAM KRISTOl

From Brandeis on the Atlantic to Azusa on the Pacific, an iron curtain has descended across academia. Behind that line lie all the classrooms of the ancient schools of America. Wesleyan, Brown, Princeton, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Berkeley, Bowdoin, and Stanford, all these famous colleges and the populations within them lie in what we must call the Liberal sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from the commissars of Liberal Orthodoxy. .  .  .

NEWSCOM

How can one resist the chance to echo Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech? Okay, it’s not a precise analogy. It’s true that liberalism isn’t communism. It’s true that today’s liberals deploy the wet blanket of conformity rather than the clenched fist of suppression. It’s true that communism crushed minds, while today’s liberalism is merely engaged in closing them. And it’s true that most of the denizens of our universities, unlike the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, embrace their commissars. But commissars they are.

On April 8, the admirable human rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali had an honorary degree from Brandeis University revoked because some of her criticisms of Islamism—and yes, even (God forbid!) of Islam itself—were judged by that university’s president “inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” Apparently two of Brandeis’s core values are cowardice in the face of Islamists and timidity in the face of intolerance. Less than two weeks later, on April 21, an appearance by the formidable social scientist Charles Murray at Azusa Pacific University was canceled by its president, two days before Murray was to have appeared. The administration was afraid Murray’s presence on campus might hurt the feelings of some Asuza students and faculty. The same day, at Eastern Connecticut State University, a professor told his creative writing class that Republicans are “racist, misogynist, money-grubbing people” who “want things to go back—not to 1955, but to 1855,” and that “colleges will start closing up” if the GOP takes control of the Senate this November. If only!

What’s striking about all three episodes isn’t so much the illiberal complaints of professors and students. It is the pathetic behavior of the university administrators. Thus, a spokesperson for Eastern Connecticut State University explained, “Our faculty has academic freedom to conduct their classes in whatever way they choose, this is not a university matter.”

So what a professor says in the classroom “is not a university matter”? Apparently not. On the other hand, it turns out that the administrators of a Jewish university in Boston, a Christian school in California, and a state college in Connecticut are in agreement about what is a “university matter”: protecting the “university community” from discomforting thoughts.

In an open letter to the students of Asuza Pacific University, Charles Murray wrote, “Asuza Pacific’s administration wants to protect you from earnest and nerdy old guys who have opinions that some of your faculty do not share. Ask if this is why you’re getting a college education.” The question is worth asking. Students and their parents should ask it. But the honest answer from the groves of academe would be: Well, now that you ask .  .  . yes.

In her statement on Brandeis’s withdrawal of its honorary degree, Ayaan Hirsi Ali noted, “What was initially intended as an honor has now devolved into a moment of shaming. Yet the slur on my reputation is not the worst aspect of this episode. More deplorable is that an institution set up on the basis of religious freedom should today so deeply betray its own founding principles. The ‘spirit of free expression’ referred to in the Brandeis statement has been stifled here.” But the founding principles of Brandeis are no longer its governing principles. The spirit of free expression is not the spirit of Liberal Orthodoxy. And it is the illiberal spirit of Liberal Orthodoxy that dominates, that governs, that controls our colleges and universities. 

But there is an alternative to Liberal Orthodoxy. It is liberal education. Liberal education can be pursued today, as it has been for most of history, outside the official “educational” institutions of the society. Those institutions have embraced their closed-mindedness. But that doesn’t mean the American mind has to close. There is a great country out there beyond academe. In it, free speech can be defended and real education can be supported. Liberal education can be fostered even if the academy has become illiberal. The fact that our colleges and universities have betrayed the cause of liberal education means the rest of us have the grave responsibility—but also the golden opportunity and the distinct honor—to defend and advance it.

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3)“Why Aren’t Social Security and Medicare Means Tested?”

Fiscal Health Project, Fiscal Health

By Joe Minarik

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a twice-yearly luncheon of the BOB (Bureau of the Budget) and OMB (Office of Management and Budget) Alumni Association.  These meetings are always a pleasure.  My former colleagues were among the most dedicated public servants you can find.  They were willing to go above and beyond for every president of either party, and to provide impartial, fact-based advice from a wealth of institution knowledge that they carefully preserved across generations of career staff.  And most of them are older than I am, which is an encouraging change from just about every other setting in which I find myself these days.

The subject that the group asked me to address was economic inequality.  (We have just discussed that issue in a CED monthly Trustee conference call as well.)  This BOB/OMB conversation provoked a question from one attendee, a former political appointee in a Republican Administration.  He asked:  Why are you Democrats so opposed to means testing Social Security and Medicare?

The premise of the question, which I recall the questioner articulated at least in clear shorthand, was fairly straightforward:  The overall federal budget is in trouble, and the contributory and putatively self-financing Social Security and Medicare programs are not living up to their financial billing either.  Although many of the elderly are poor in terms of both income and assets, some have comfortable (or even more than that) wealth, which throws off comfortable (or even more than that) income, and yet they still receive benefits from these universal programs.  So why would anyone resist means testing those programs to close their financing gaps – through reducing the benefits for those who need the benefits the least, without affecting those who need the benefits the most?

You (like me) probably have heard this question often, and have seen it in print as well.  Accordingly, it would seem to be worth discussing in some detail.

And the answer, in a nutshell, is that Social Security and Medicare are already means tested.  This answer comes as a surprise to many people, so an explanation is called for.  But that answer will not preclude a follow-up question as to why Social Security and Medicare should not be even more aggressively means tested than they already are, and that follow-up question deserves an answer, too; we will come to that in due course.

But to begin, some backup for the (to some) surprising assertion.  The notion that Social Security (Medicare discussion to follow) is not means tested flows from a fairly simple view of the program’s cash benefits.  Retirees who earned comparatively higher wages receive higher benefits than those who earned lower wages, the reasoning would go, therefore the program cannot possibly be means tested.  Furthermore, the amount of wages subject to the payroll tax that funds the program is capped – and therefore the tax is regressive, and so the overall program must be pro-rich and anti-poor.

But as some understand, that simple reasoning misses two key aspects of the program’s operations.  First, the program’s benefit formula favors lower-wage workers.  Benefit amounts are based on the lifetime earnings history.  The first dollars of a worker’s wages are replaced at a 90 percent rate.  Earnings in a second bracket (mechanically like an income-tax-rate bracket) are replaced at a 32 percent rate.  And any earnings above that level are replaced at only a 15 percent rate.  Thus, although higher-wage workers receive more dollars in absolute terms, they receive less back in Social Security benefits per dollar of tax paid over their lifetimes.  At the extremes, the difference in the implicit rate of return on those contributions is enormous.

The second key program feature is that a fraction of Social Security benefits can be subject to income taxation, on a progressive basis – and then the income tax that applies to those included benefits itself is progressive.  Once a beneficiary’s total income (including half of Social Security benefits) exceeds $25,000 ($32,000 for a married couple), the first dollar of benefits begins to be taxable, up to inclusion of one-half of benefits.  And once income (including half of Social Security benefits) exceeds $34,000 ($44,000 for a married couple) the portion of benefits included in taxable income begins to rise further, up to a maximum inclusion of 85 percent of benefits.  This provision is designed to have no effect on the low-income elderly, while gradually increasing its impact as total incomes rise.

The Social Security Administration estimates that the average beneficiary in 2013 received an annual benefit of $15,528.  If that person had no other income, he or she would owe no income tax – on Social Security benefits or anything else (although that person certainly would not enjoy a luxurious lifestyle based on that benefit).  As incomes from whatever source rise above the $25,000 threshold noted above, benefits progressively become subject to tax, at income tax rates that start at 10 percent and rise according to the total amount of taxable income.  Tax is calculated after a $3,900 personal exemption and a $7,600 standard deduction (for single persons of age 65 or older).  Thus, a beneficiary with a taxable income of $11,500 (from taxable Social Security benefits or any other source) would owe no income tax, with tax beginning to accumulate above that level only at the bottom-bracket 10 percent rate.

The theoretical maximum annual benefit in 2013, for a lifelong maximum wage earner retiring at the full eligibility age, was $30,396.  If that person also received other income of roughly $40,000, the full 85 percent of that person’s benefit would be subject to income taxation.  At the absolute upper end of the scale, a beneficiary in the highest income tax rate bracket with 85 percent of benefits subject to tax would pay tax on benefits at the margin at a rate equal to about 34 percent (that is, 85 percent of the 39.6 percent top-bracket tax rate).  And to get into that top income tax rate bracket, that taxpayer would need to have a taxable income, after the personal exemption and any standard or itemized deductions, of over $400,000.

In other words, the income tax due on Social Security benefits is quite progressive, with benefits for probably most of the elderly not subject to tax at all, but with more than a third of benefits paid back in income tax by the most well-off.  Taking into account the lower benefit-formula conversion rates that apply to high-wage retirees, their after-tax returns on their lifetimes of payroll tax contributions, measured in investment terms, would be quite modest – if not in some instances negative (further reflections on that fact later).  So Social Security is means tested in reality, if not in name.

Then there is Medicare.  The conclusion on Medicare is the same, but more so.  For starters, consider that the nature of the Medicare benefit is different from Social Security.  The high-wage Social Security beneficiary might get a significantly lower rate of return on his or her past contributions, but still gets more dollars in absolute terms.  However, the high-wage Medicare beneficiary get exactly the same health-insurance policy as the lower-wage retiree.

But to get that identical insurance policy, the higher-wage Medicare beneficiary paid much more in taxes.  This was true even some years ago, when the Medicare payroll tax was collected on the same capped wage base as the Social Security payroll tax.  But effective in 1993, the maximum earnings cap for the Medicare payroll tax was eliminated.  Then in 2013, an “Additional Medicare Tax” of 0.9 percent was imposed on earnings from labor in excess of $200,000 for a single person ($250,000 for a married couple).  In the same year, an additional “Net Investment Income Tax” of 3.8 percent was imposed on such incomes of persons above the same income thresholds.

So the original, basic Medicare payroll tax could have been said to constitute a means testing of Medicare, but all three of the additional provisions – the lifting of the earnings cap for the regular Medicare payroll tax, the “Additional Medicare Tax” on labor earnings and the “Net Investment Income Tax” on income from property – all add to the effective means testing of Medicare.  Because of all of these features, persons with higher incomes pay more for the same Medicare health insurance coverage than do persons with lower incomes.

Perhaps the most common first-blush view of what would constitute means testing of Medicare would be in some way to have more-affluent beneficiaries pay a higher percentage of their medical bills, such as through higher deductibles or co-pays.  But that would have the unattractive properties of burdening people when they are sick, and of collecting more from sick beneficiaries than from healthy beneficiaries who are precisely equally well off.  That probably would strike people, upon careful reflection, as unfair.  It also would raise administrative issues, particularly if Medicare beneficiaries ran up large bills in a final illness or injury.  How do you collect at that point?  And if you don’t collect, how do you justify the unequal treatment relative to someone else who is identically situated but who survives, and then has to pay the higher medical bills?  The real benefit that people get from Medicare is insurance coverage against risk, not medical services; and the coverage against risk is the same whether the risk materializes or not.

Thus, people who call for “means testing” of Social Security and Medicare are just a little late; means testing is already there.  In fact, it arguably was embodied in the original features of both programs, and it has been made only more pronounced over time.

As noted at the outset, one might argue that even the current means testing is not enough.  And truth be told, as both programs are altered to make their financing sustainable over the long haul, the kinds of features described above are likely to be tweaked still further (although many people probably still will not recognize them as “means testing”).  However, there is an arguable case that we should employ some caution if we proceed down the road toward greater effective means testing.

First of all, the kinds of conditional additional taxes now imposed at upper-income levels add complexity to the tax system.  They are far from transparent, and might catch out especially persons who just exceed the thresholds and might not have expected the extra charge that appears only when they fill out their tax returns well after the end of the income year in question.

Second, those additions to marginal tax rates do reduce incentives for productive activity.  And perhaps to greater effect, they increase incentives to engage in manipulation and create tax shelters to avoid the higher burden.  The result is an endless game of cat and mouse between the taxpayer and the revenue authorities, in which successive and ever-more-intricate manipulation schemes are answered with successive and ever-more-complex regulations that in the end erode taxpayer morale and benefit no one.

And finally, although Social Security has always aspired to provide at least a fair return on taxes paid by all income groups of workers (understanding that because of the annuity nature of the program, longevity will play a major role in determining the return for any particular worker), that aspiration is being challenged – notably for high-wage retirees.  The ideal of an investment return for all that is at least fair helps to maintain a societal consensus in support of the program.  Conversely, the pressure that we sometimes feel from people who perceive that their own interest would be better served if they could opt out of the program threatens to undermine its political viability in the long term.  The returns received by particular workers are driven by circumstance.  Social Security is relatively more generous to the traditional “Ozzie and Harriet” family (where Ozzie is a lifetime high-wage worker, and Harriet stays at home, keeps up the TV program filming stage, and raises the two future rock-and-roll stars) than it would be to Ozzie alone (if he chose to live the life of a free spirit, unburdened by the wife and kids), for example.  But generally, the higher the income, the lower the investment return to Social Security contributions.

There are any number of sides to the inevitable debate about the generosity of Social Security to different income groups.  A vigorous line of argument comes from some who observe the shorter average life spans of low-wage workers, and who therefore claim that Social Security provides a bad deal to the worst-off.  But that claim is answered by others who point out that for the very same reason, Social Security’s disability and survivor benefit programs provide correspondingly greater protection to those same low-wage workers.  There is a continuing administrative challenge from that same disability program, where there are mutually conflicting needs to provide prompt rulings on behalf of suffering applicants, but also to investigate fully the inherently complex claims that those applicants submit.  Disability can be very hard to verify.

Some people argue that any pairing of the payroll tax with Social Security or Medicare benefits to assess the fairness of the entire programs is artificial; these people want a progressive retirement benefit financed by a progressive income tax.  Others counter that the American people want an earned benefit, and argue that the contributory nature of the programs is responsible for their generally fiscally responsible handling up until this point – benefit increases always have been paid for, at least in keeping with the best estimates at the time – and for the programs’ extraordinary longevity and perceived success.  I could go on with this back and forth, but you would be late for dinner.  Tomorrow.

The central underlying issue probably boils down to the nature of social insurance itself.  “Social insurance” contains two words.  The “social” part suggests some measure of assistance from the more well-off to those less fortunate.  “Insurance” denotes a program where individuals are willing to pay in the event of a good outcome to lessen the blow of a bad outcome – like fire insurance on a home, or accident insurance on a car.  Those terms paint an innocuous picture – until some people contemplate a future in which they believe they will receive less from Social Security or Medicare than they have hitherto paid in.  We all would like to enjoy a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose system, from which we get both protection from a bad outcome and a fair investment return in the event of a good outcome.  In the real world, that is decreasingly possible as demography has its inexorable effect.

In its early years, the real-world performance of the Social Security program hid an inherent long-term tension in the concept of the program.  The early Social Security program has been characterized as “immature” in the sense that upon its inception it could pay immediate benefits to an elderly population that had not contributed at all.  For those persons, every benefit dollar constituted a windfall – and therefore a much better-than-fair return.  Social Security is now fully mature in that respect, however, with virtually all of today’s beneficiaries having contributed over their entire working lives.  The financial comparison of today’s benefits against the actual contributions paid in is therefore obviously far less favorable than it was in the program’s early decades.  Add to that the demographic challenge from steadily increasing longevity and falling birthrates, plus the population irregularity of the baby boom that could not have been forecast at the creation of the program, and what had been an easy-to-achieve better-than-fair deal for all has become a close calculation for some, and therefore a much more difficult political lift.

So against the easy early favorable outcomes from an immature pay-as-you-go system now are weighed the hard realities of a mature program in challenging times.  We need to make policy decisions going forward on the basis of the current mature system.  And that raises questions about the core values behind the program.

Looking at the concept of social insurance very broadly and considering big-picture options, some might prefer to abolish Social Security (or make it voluntary, to the same effect) and strike a firm bargain with all workers at the beginning of their careers:  Save for your own retirement or deal with the consequences on your own when the time comes.  In semi-practical terms, that raises the unaffordable problem of how to finance the benefits of today’s retirees who already have contributed to Social Security over their entire working lives.  But such show-stopper issues aside, even the strongest opponents of Social Security might want to give the issue a re-think.  Even taking such a free-market approach on its own terms, Social Security may look like the best possible protection for society.  There can be circumstances beyond the control of even the conscientious.  In the absence of Social Security and Medicare, society might find it impossible to refuse the claims of the worst-off of the elderly, whatever explicit bargain was struck at the beginning of the working life.  Dealing with such situations on a piecemeal basis with outright welfare programs probably would be the worst of all possible worlds.  Social Security and Medicare might avoid such an unpleasant outcome for society.

There is a value to today’s defined-benefit Social Security and Medicare programs.  They fill a void that has been left by the demise of private defined-benefit pensions and retiree health-insurance programs, particularly for working people with modest incomes.  But given economic and demographic realities, that void will become gradually ever more difficult to fill.

We face hard choices going forward.  And although Social Security and Medicare already are means tested in a realistic sense of the term, we may need to revisit those decisions, and perhaps to push them further.  We will need to proceed with care, weighing the risks on both sides.

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4)How a Democrat Could Win a Senate Seat in Georgia

By Kyle Tygstad

4)

Nunn, right, speaks with supporters at her meet-and-greet event in Shellman, Ga., on April 16. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

COLUMBUS, Ga. — If Democrat Michelle Nunn wins Georgia’s open Senate seat in November, she will undoubtedly have experienced countless scenarios similar to one on a cold and windy mid-April morning on this city’s revitalized Chattahoochee riverbank.

Patty Cardin, a local retiree and Mitt Romney voter, walked alongside Nunn, peppering the Senate candidate with questions about her father. Cardin, who said she came away impressed, wouldn’t be the last Romney supporter lured to a Nunn campaign event that day by the legacy of former four-term Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn.

It’s the blend of that reverence for the candidate’s father with appreciation for Nunn’s own message of business-friendly bipartisanship that’s positioning the former head of the Points of Light Foundation to peel off a chunk of moderate Republicans in November. That’s vital in Georgia, where Democrats have struggled statewide for more than a decade — but it’s also just a piece of Nunn’s uphill path to victory.

And with so many vulnerable Democratic Senate seats this cycle, this GOP-held seat could play a pivotal role in deciding the majority.

“It does involve getting people mobilized in a non-presidential year and excited about the race, and getting lots of people out there,” Nunn said in an interview in the living room of a south Georgia home, just after delivering a 10-minute stump speech to some 50 supporters.

Nunn speaks to attendees at her meet-and-greet event in Shellman, Ga. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

“And certainly converting some people that have been independents or voting Republican, and sort of demonstrating to them that they can have the kind of leadership that they’re looking for in an independent-minded Democratic candidate,” she continued.

In a trio of recent campaign events and in her first two TV ads, Nunn has worked to accomplish the latter. She had another strong fundraising quarter in which she raised $2.4 million, ending March with $3.9 million on hand, making state and national Democrats optimistic about Nunn’s ability to define herself before Republicans can choose a nominee.

Behind the scenes, a coordinated effort between Nunn and gubernatorial candidate Jason Carter, the grandson of President Jimmy Carter, is based in a growing number of offices in the state, where senior field operatives are building the groundwork for a voter registration and contact operation.

As Senate Democrats work to make the midterm electorate in battleground states more closely resemble a presidential cycle, they have to do better than that in Georgia, where President Barack Obama lost by 7 points without putting up much of a fight.

A boom in the metro-Atlanta population over the past decade included a spike among minorities, who are generally more likely to support Democrats. And while the percentage of the white vote decreased from 75 percent to 61 percent from 2000 to 2012, Democrats in the state say there are still more than 800,000 unregistered black, Hispanic and Asian voters.

When asked why Democrats expect to register black voters who stayed home twice when Obama was on the ballot, state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams noted that the Obama campaign did not expend significant resources in Georgia and said there was a lingering perception in the state that he wouldn’t win anyway.

“People who didn’t register to vote for President Obama in 2012 or 2008, they did not have someone coming to their door saying we have a chance to win,” Abrams said. “With Michelle’s race, there will be a concerted effort to register and mobilize and turn out voters.”

Beyond winning over some moderate Republicans and getting potential Democratic voters registered and to the polls, the midsummer GOP primary runoff will mark a turning point in the race to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss. At a recent 90-minute Republican debate in Augusta, Nunn’s name wasn’t uttered until the final three minutes — anecdotal of the reality that Nunn has so far gone largely untouched.

National and state Republicans remain skeptical that she can put together a winning coalition of voters, but there is concern that the GOP nominee who emerges from the July 22 runoff will turn out to be someone Democrats can effectively label as far outside of the mainstream.

Nunn tours the Second Harvest food bank in Valdosta, Ga., (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

“It won’t take more than a few ads pointing out Nunn’s first vote will be for Harry Reid for majority leader — and that enables the entire Obama agenda — to end any serious flirtation moderate, suburban white voters will have with her,” said Joel McElhannon, a veteran Georgia Republican consultant. “The only real risk Republicans have of losing is if we nominate someone perceived as too extreme to those voters — so extreme it trumps concerns about Obama’s agenda.”

The two candidates most often mentioned by Republicans as concerning are Reps. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, conservatives with track records of controversial comments.

The front-runners in the May 20 GOP primary are former Reebok and Dollar General CEO David Perdue, the cousin of former Gov. Sonny Perdue, who is running as the outsider in the race, and Rep. Jack Kingston, who touts both his conservative record and his willingness to make his party’s case on MSNBC and HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

Either would likely make winning in November a taller climb for Nunn.

Former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, who was nearly nominated for governor in 2010, has struggled to keep up financially with Perdue and Kingston but is hoping for a late surge to make the runoff.

Another Georgia Republican insider was far more concerned about the possibility of a Nunn victory but noted her campaign’s challenging weave of messaging to attract both moderates and fervent supporters of the president.

“She’s raising money and doing a good job of distancing herself from the White House without alienating her base,” the Republican said. “If she wins, it’s going to be by a razor-thin margin, but it’s possible.”

One path for Democrats outlined in an analysis of demographic and voting data by the Atlas Project, a Democrat-aligned firm, includes improving performance in metro Atlanta and at least matching former Senate nominee Jim Martin, who took Chambliss to a runoff in 2008, everywhere else. It also notes Democrats must take more than 50 percent on Election Day to avoid a runoff, which this cycle would be held on Jan. 6.

Nunn, center, speaks with Richard Bishop, president and CEO Uptown Columbus, and Dan Gilbert, of Whitewater Express, as she tours the Whitewater Express rafting business by the Chattahoochee River in Columbus, Ga. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

In Columbus, Nunn was on the second of a three-day tour highlighting the local benefits of public-private partnerships. Here, she spoke with the owner of a newly opened whitewater rafting company, WhiteWater Express. It was drawn to the area by a new man-made rapids course — “the longest urban whitewater rafting in the world,” according to the company — which was enabled by the commitment of both government and private resources to rejuvenate the river and downtown.

Cardin had heard about Nunn from her daughter and wanted to see the candidate for herself.

“I’m drawn to her as a candidate, and I just think we need more people like her in Washington rather than some of the people that are there,” Cardin said.

That afternoon, Richard Spencer, a 48-year-old garden designer from Albany, who also voted for Romney, came to a home in nearby Shellman to meet the daughter of one of his heroes. He’s hoping she can influence Democratic leadership in Washington.

“The feeling I’m getting from Michelle is just like Sam, and I love that,” Spencer said. “Give me someone who can infiltrate that side with some common sense.”

The Georgia Senate race is rated Favored Republican by the Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call.