Watching a heartbreaking episode of Restaurant: Impossible, where this restaurant was run by a guy for 30 years, but it is just a train wreck.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.
Our messy unity will be our strength.
This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.
Giving up is unforgivable.
Shut up, hissy kitty!
Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.
Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.
The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris
Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.
“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.
Hot air and ill-informed banter
Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.
America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.
Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?
Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.
Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.
I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.
One way or another, he’s a liar.
Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.
Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”
🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵
Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.
Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?
It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.
Linnaeus
Trying not to jump to conclusions, but I do not have a good feeling about this:
andy
Restaurant: Impossible is a cringe-inducing show but it doesn’t even compare to the wingnut sausage fest that is the Sons of Guns marathon over on the Discovery channel.
Gonna be hot this week so I made more of the heirloom bean salad I made for a party the other day.
mcd410x
@Linnaeus:
Egads. E-fucking-gads.
We’re fucked.
mcd410x
Only Nixon could go to China.
andy
And @Linnaeus, I agree that the Social Security thing is scary as fuck. I realize the limitations of the Bully Pulpit but the President should be up talking about what a bunch of treacherous fucks the GOP are. They may not want to move but if they have enough shame poured on them from all the frightened angry grannies burning up their phone lines they might even get a few of them to move. It’s time for a fight, not this shit (which the GOP will only hang around their necks in 2012 anyway).
Jules
So I see folks on my Twitter feed are freaking out over a article in the Washington Post that has no specifics and nothing but says:
Would it be so horrible if there was means testing for medicare and SS. And would it be such a bad idea if the limit was raised on how much of your income is taxed for SS. As it is now we pay out from 100% of our income while others who make much more money do not.
Linnaeus
@Jules:
True, the WP article is very general, which is why I said I’m trying not to jump to any conclusions. But any talk about SS/Medicare cuts makes me a little nervous.
slag
@Linnaeus:
Honestly, though, observing this Administration at work is like trying to watch a film in a completely foreign language. Just when you think you’ve finally figured out that the plot is a standard rom-com about two lovers from opposite sides of the tracks, out come the dancing zebras and you’re all fucked up again. In other words…Forget it, Jake, it’s bollywood.
Corner Stone
I…uhhh…I just did something that no man should ever do…
oh fuck me
SBJules
I think it is a case of “if we write it, he’ll have to do it it or deny it.”
Linnaeus
@SBJules:
Could be. That’s why I’m waiting to see what the Administration says on this before I say much more. Might be a trial balloon kind of thing.
Joel
Isn’t every episode of Restaurant: Impossible about some old dude who has run his crappy restaurant the same way for thirty years and lost his customer base when they starting dying off? And I say this as someone who likes Restaurant: Impossible (even with noted liar Robert Irvine running the show).
Also, isn’t Discovery Channel the History Channel’s slightly less wingnutty brother?
MonkeyBoy
My fix for FYWP & BJ broken reply button works for Firefox and Chrome and can now be installed from Userstyles.org.
In that post I tried to give a fallback Greasemonkey script but predictably FYWP@BJ prevented me from doing so.
Xenos
Whether it is 11D chess or passive-aggressive floundering, the idea seems to be to embolden the crazies in the GOP to let their freak flags fly. At some point this crap has got to start and the hardball ought to be open for public view. Or the electorate will be too depressed to show up.
Mark S.
Corner Stone:
Elaborate.
Martin
The GOP is getting rolled. They’ll never vote for any of this and the Dems know it. If they thought the GOP would vote for it, they wouldn’t leak it because that’s the surest way to kill the effort.
The GOP rhetorically rushes to the right, because the teatards want them to – but the GOP can’t vote for what they advocate. Rather than try and pull them back, Obama rhetorically goes bigger, which forces the GOP to go bigger yet. In the end, Obama will win over moderates for being willing to make big changes, but the GOP will insist on something small because that’s all they’re going to be able to agree on. We won’t get $4T or $2T in cuts but maybe $500B over 10 years, and it’ll all be milquetoast trimming around the edges.
TooManyJens
@MonkeyBoy: You rock, sir.
Edit: although I would point out that your userstyles.org link is broken.
El Cid
Our poor benighted gun stores are once again under attack by the calumny of liberal gun haters who want to make up stuff about guns sold in the US being connected to crime.
Not too many months ago our gun patriots freaked out because the ATF asked them to send in a form if, say, some guy purchased about 60 AK-47’s from the same gun store over a course of 4 months, but, you know, they’re so oppressed, these small businessmen, that it was just too much big gubmit paperwork to send in information about such a routine ordinary purchase of dozens and dozens of rifles from one gun store in Arizona. Because shut up you 2nd Amendment-haters.
slag
@Martin:
Or just piss off a bunch of old people. Which, I suppose, is really no big deal since those guys never vote.
PeakVT
Would it be so horrible if there was means testing for medicare and SS.
Actually, it would be horrible. Both programs would be much easier targets if they were to stop including the well-off. And the money saved wouldn’t be all that much. It’s better if they both stay universal insurance programs.
Martin
Well, since they’re the backbone of the GOP and they vote reliably, I doubt pissing them off will make much difference one way or another. But that’s more an explanation for why the GOP can’t vote for any of this stuff, rather than for why Obama shouldn’t propose it.
Stefan
Would it be so horrible if there was means testing for medicare and SS.
Yes, yes it would be. Because means tested programs gradually become “welfare” programs, and we know how popular those are….
Just Some Fuckhead
I’d love to talk about raising the cap on SS and how that’s really all that needs to be done to “fix” it and how everyone pays Medicare taxes on 100% of their income already and neither program should ever be means tested but..
MonkeyBoy inspired me to copy and paste the entire balloon juice style sheet into Stylish and I’ve completely customized the site, including making all the ads raunchy porn links to my favorite porn sites.
It’s going to be HARD reading the site from now on.
Lolis
This lack of transparency on the debt ceiling negotiations is troubling, especially when they are discussing Medicare and Social Security. I don’t trust any of them when the chips are done. Obama has a lot of weak spots on economic policy.
handy
@El Cid:
I have a co-worker who as a card-carrying member of the NRA is convinced this is all a conspiracy by the anti-gun Obama government, that they are selling the guns to the cartels in order to fool the public about how the cartels are armed, thereby tricking people into believing AKs and similar ‘Murkin firearms ought to be outlawed.
Also, too, he recently jumped on the they-are-putting-flouride-in-our-water-as-mind-control, so there’s that.
eemom
k, nuffa this insipid teevee shit and ignoring the 800 pound gorilla on the blog.
FER FUCKSAKE COLE WHEN ARE YOU GONNA FIX THE MOTHERFUCKING REPLY BUTTON?
slag
@Martin:
Not all old people are white and male. At least, not as far as I know.
slag
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I vote for Al Franken’s donut hole.
MonkeyBoy
@TooManyJens:
Is one really? FYWP@BJ allows only 3 links per post so rather than giving 2 userstyles.org links I gave one link to my posting containing the 2 userstyles.org links. And all seem to work from here. Yes I should have given my BJ posting a better link text than Userstyles.org, but are you experiencing any other linkage failures?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
You zipped yer pen1s, didn’t ya? Christ, that shit hurts.
handy
@slag:
McCain got 51% of the vote in ’08 among the 60 and older crowd. Of course, Obama got 47%, not an insignifcant amount. How much this intersects the 43% of white voters I’m not sure. What I assume Martin is getting at is Obama has a lot of breathing room within this demo so long as enough of the key demos who put him well over the top in ’08 come out again.
Lojasmo
Stop with the Obama concern trolling. I know it is a single step down from the fire bagger OMGWTFBBQ hair on fire bullshit, but it is still too obvious. Please tone it the fuck down.
Also soshiulsim,
TooManyJens
@MonkeyBoy: Oh, I see now.
[Roseanne Rosannadanna]Nevermind.[/Roseanne Rosannadanna]
i'm so old
I’m so old I remember when this was John Cole’s blog and I would read his opinions…
mcd410x
President said today that our unemployment is structural. A Democratic President just told the 15% of the country that’s under/unemployed, sorry, y’all, and good luck!
The only color that matters in this country is green!
slag
@handy:
Could be. But from where I sit, it’s all fun and games until somebody loses a pen1s-shaped state off the Gulf of Mexico.
FlipYrWhig
I know that virtually every reporter is a blithering idiot, but is it THAT hard to for ONE reporter to understand that “reductions in Medicare spending” and/or “tackling the rising cost of Social Security” DON’T NECESSARILY INVOLVE REDUCTIONS IN _BENEFITS_ YOU STUPID FUCKING FUCKS RIDING FUCKSTICKS TO FUCKTOWN. Jesus Christ.
ETA: Controlling costs without reducing benefits would be a genuine accomplishment. The HCR bill had a ton of stuff in that vein, all the “bending the cost curve” stuff. Then cracking down on paying people to give the same test over and over again, that sort of thing. Cracking down on Rick Scott’s Fraudulent Free Scooter Force, for another.
I don’t know how it could be done in a comprehensive way, but it would be great to attempt it.
Just Some Fuckhead
@mcd410x:
Well, if you consider most of us don’t have the skills or relocation ability to work on Wall Street, he’s right.
Martin
@handy:
For whites, McCain won the 60+ vote 57/41. But where those votes were matters because elections are decided by winning states, not the popular vote. I don’t expect that a bit of a shift in 60+ voters will hurt Obama much in 2012.
Xenos
@MonkeyBoy: Thanks, Monkeyboy! (said he via the resurrected ‘Reply’ button).
Linnaeus
I thought that too as I posted my comment way up at the top of the thread – reducing costs doesn’t, in of itself, mean reducing benefits. But it’s my understanding that both Medicare and SS run with very low overhead/administrative costs as a percentage of their total costs, so I’m not sure how much else there is to reduce.
Martin
I think their new Governor is doing a bangup job of making the case for them to go with Obama again. Besides, Obama could have lost FL and California in 2008 and still won.
handy
@Martin: @Martin:
Which kind of gets to slag‘s point about FL.
I’m not sure Obama has that wiggle room you imply by essentially writing off the white and old vote. This same bloc helped deliver wins for GWB twice before ’08, arguably even more so in 2000. And if unemployment hovers around double digits, then Repubs crank up the Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! talk and no way BO is out of the dark.
mcd410x
I don’t care about slagging Obama. Or whatever. With 15 furlough days over the next 6 months, I just hope I keep my job. Better than those who got laid off last month.
MattR
@MonkeyBoy: You da man.
Joel
I’ve given up trying to interpret what Obama is going to do in negotiations with Republicans. It’s basically like trying to figure out Belichick press conferences. One thought about cost reduction: Part D.
MikeJ
Obama hates teh gayz.
FlipYrWhig
@ Linnaeus / 41: Like I said, I don’t know the scale or scope of these things, but from the HCR debate it sure seemed like there were ways to implement cost control without impacting benefits or care. Bob Somerby throughout HCR was making a rather sharp point about how much outright looting was baked into the cake of the American health-care system, as evident from the crazy high per-capita costs for no improvement in outcomes. Get some of that money back, a billion here and a billion there, and, as they say, pretty soon you’re talking real money.
But the important thing is that not all “cuts” are created equal. We should be alarmed at the prospect of cuts to benefits, and, in particular, cuts that negatively impact health and well-being. Other kinds of cuts don’t have to be feared. Squeeze the doctors and hospitals, for instance, and you’d be “cutting,” perhaps to the tune of many billions, without ravaging the care received.
El Cid
@ handy:
People will be really fucking sorry for their idiocy not only on guns, but much more importantly drug laws enabling the massive US consumer market when the new Mexican narco-paramilitaries — who imported both US direct “counter-insurgency” training and Colombian narco-paramilitary indirect US “counter-insurgency training” — bring their ability to engage police and military forces directly closer and closer to US communities.
This ain’t your father’s Mexican drug dealing network. Unless it is your father’s, in which case I proudly retract all criticisms of the wonderful services provided by our Mexican allies in the cross-border entertainment pharmaceutical industry.
MikeJ
@MonkeyBoy: Also installable as a greasemonkey script. If you’ve already got greasemonkey (for instance if you use the pie filter) there’s no need to install stylish (not that there’s anything wrong with stylish).
slag
@Martin:
Ahhhh…good times!
Martin
Truer in the case of SS. Changing the COLA is one way to do it, as you aren’t technically reducing benefits given that nobody can bake in future increases to their expected benefits, so changing those increases isn’t technically a decrease. But you really need to squint and cock your head just so to see it as an actual savings but not reduction. Other ways to do it are to eliminate some of the other populations that draw Social Security benefits – if we want to take means testing off the table in order to keep SS pure, then taking some of these other populations out (or reducing benefits) would be consistent with keeping it ‘pure’.
For Medicare there’s a fuckton of saving still to be had. 10% of beneficiaries are responsible for 70% of the costs. Changing what Medicare pays for a variety of end-of-life procedures and care would go a really, really, REALLY long way to bringing the cost of Medicare down.
10% of recipients account for 70% of costs. Just think about that. That’s an average of $75,000 per year per recipient in that category.
FlipYrWhig
@ Joel / 46 : Or raising the earnings cap for Social Security. That would help “tackle” its “rising cost”… without cutting benefits.
handy
@El Cid:
No worries, Jim Gilchrist is on it!
Linnaeus
Sure, I totally get this. I’m waiting to see if this is in fact the argument that the administration is going to make to congressional Democrats. Because if you really have to give them the hard sell, that implies you’re going in the direction of benefit cuts. But the admin hasn’t said anything openly yet.
Joel
@MonkeyBoy: Well done. Well done.
MattR
@Martin: If you modify the COLA so it is guaranteed to be lower than it currently is (which is necessary if you expect to get savings) that means that benefits under the new plan would grow slower than under the old plan. So at any point in the future, benefits under the new plan would be lower than they would have been under the old plan. How is that not reducing the benefits?
Martin
Yeah, there’s room everywhere, but Part D isn’t a big problem any longer. Parts B and D are both paid for out of the same pot, called SMI or Supplementary Medical Insurance. They both carry premiums that can be adjusted each year, and they’re both means tested (Part D started this year, part of PPACA). Part C used to be a problem as it paid out more in premiums than a comparable Part A+B plan, but that too was changed under PPACA, but doesn’t go into effect for another year or two – I forget.
Part A is the problem. Unlike B,C,D which can be jiggered each year to roughly break even, Part A is the real entitlement program, carries no premiums and costs are skyrocketing. Last year SMI ran about a $4B deficit, which is expected to be closed in the next year or so. Part A (HI, or Hospital Insurance) ran a $32B deficit and will exhaust its trust fund in under 10 years unless there’s a dramatic economic expansion. That’s where the real costs are and that’s where the real cost problem is.
On the Social Security side, Disability Insurance is the main problem and nobody has a solution for that, other than increased payroll contributions. It ran a $23B deficit and will exhaust it’s trust fund in about a decade as well. OASI (Old Age and Survivors Insurance) added $92B to it’s trust last year. It’s paying out vastly less than it’s still receiving. It’s a long term problem as the boomers continue to retire, but there’s quite a lot of time to tweak it.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@MonkeyBoy:
thanks monkeyboy, you are the last best hope for mankind.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@MonkeyBoy:
thanks monkeyboy, you are the last best hope for mankind.
MonkeyBoy
@MikeJ:
There is a “security hierarchy” on installing things on one’s computer. “Stylish” is the safest because it only messes with CSS and there is practically no security concern with installing a Stylish rule. Greasemonkey is pretty safe if you watch and understand which userscripts you install. However if I convince you to install a cryptic userscript it may be able to send me info about your bank account.
The worst security-wise are browser extensions which should only be installed from a highly trusted source or maybe reading the source code to be make sure it is not up to something hinky.
So basically Stylish rules are near secure and need no user evaluation which userscripts and extensions do.
Stylish.org does allow one to download a stylish rule as a Greasemonkey userscript. In this case the userscript should be considered as secure as a Stylish rule (that is unless the Stylish.org site has been hacked to generate insecure userscripts).
slag
@MonkeyBoy: Yes. What @Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal said!
PanAmerican
They should change the concept to Restaurant: Bustout
Robert Irvine shows failing restauranteurs how to screw suppliers, rip off patrons, get in hock to the mob and then burn the place to the ground.
Chad N Freude
@MonkeyBoy: Hey, it woiks! I am going to build a monument to you greater than anything ever built by the Pharaohs, the Mayans, or whoever put up that building in Dubai.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou.
ETA: Thank you.
Brandon
I’ve been reading this blog since at least 2003. I remember the post that sent me here. It mentioned Ben Domenech, Patrick Ruffini, Paul Cella and Tacitus.
Anyway, all I really wanted to say is I like the new hire. She keeps it short.
Martin
Since you never knew what the benefit would have been, you haven’t actually lost anything. Like I said, you need to tilt your head and squint to see it as not being a reduction. It’s a reduction, but not one that people can actually measure since COLA is arbitrary anyway. Truly, one COLA index is arguably little or no better than another. Put another way, for the last half century we could have indexed COLA to something that’s generally higher than the current index – does anyone see that as a reduction in benefits? Nope.
The argument is between CPI and chained CPI. Chained CPI is equally valid, and I’d argue moreso for an entitlement benefit. Basically it assumes (unlike CPI) that consumers will shift to other goods in a given category if prices spike. If the price of beef shoots up, you might buy more chicken – it assumes reasonable substitutions within a category, without shoving the consumer out of the categories (it won’t assume that people will stop eating vegetables just because the price of carrots goes through the roof). CPI is really designed to be more of an upper bound for COL, rather than an accurate measure of actual cost-of-living. The chained CPI is designed to be a more accurate index, without actually being a COL index.
Chained CPI is a more than reasonable index for SS benefit increases. It’s a new index – less than 10 years old, so it wasn’t previously rejected for some reason, it simply didn’t exist.
MikeJ
Yes, this is what I said.
MattR
@Martin:
Even if you don’t know the exact dollar values, if you know that the benefit would have been higher without the change to the rules, then yes you have actually lost something.
FlipYrWhig
@ Linnaeus / 55 : It could also be the case that Democrats aren’t having to be sold on benefit cuts but, rather, on how not to get demagogued about cutting things-that-are-not-benefits. Because that’s what happened the last time: HCR accomplished some “reforms” that were susceptible to being depicted as “cuts,” and dozens of Democrats lost their seats in the process. If I were a Congressional Democrat, I might well say, “Whoa, hold up. How is what you’re proposing different from a ‘Medicare cut,’ and can you guarantee me that I’ll be able to sell it as something totally different?” Or, “Can we win on this, or are we just slitting our own throats for some kind of weird symbolic victory?”
Yutsano
This is smaller.
(neener)
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig, #68: *nod* I’ll ruminate on that just before I go to bed. Night all.
Martin
But you don’t know what. And you may have lost something you aren’t entitled to. That’s why I think chained CPI (C-CPI) is a reasonable choice. Since the entire debate is about the COLA, and CPI is designed to be an upper bound on COLA, the current formula is (from the governments POV) either matching or exceeding actual COLA. You aren’t getting a reduction in the base benefit – you’re instead getting a more accurate (if lower) adjustment to that benefit to match cost of living.
Now, if C-CPI were underestimating cost of living, that’d be a different matter, but there’s really no case to be made there. The way C-CPI works is that it uses the same individual cost indexes as CPI but if some indexes in a category increase in price relative to others (carrots vs cucumbers) then it builds in a certain degree of consumer shifting from one index to the other (it assumes people will buy more cucumbers and less carrots than when the prices were tilted the other way). It doesn’t assume people will buy fewer vegetable or that they’ll buy no carrots or cucumbers. I don’t see anything unreasonable about that – that’s completely normal behavior for consumers. Most people won’t keep buying an item regardless of it’s price unless it’s the only item in that category (people can’t generally substitute for gasoline, for example).
MonkeyBoy
@MikeJ: @MikeJ:
Maybe, but I strongly wanted to point out your implied position that a Userscript was equivalent to a Stylish rule.
Userscripts are much less secure than Stylish rules and non-experts should prefer Stylish rules over Userscripts, particularly when a link to one is send to you out of the blue.
Cliff in NH
@Yutsano:
Ha.
MattR
@Martin:
That is moving the goalposts. The issue is not whether the change is good or fair, but whether it should be considered a reduction in benefits.
EDIT: For a change in COLA to produce savings to the program as a whole it has to result in paying less to beneficiaries than the current plan would. That is a reduction in benefits compared to the current plan.
EDIT2: Maybe another way to put it – what would you call it if a company asked its union employees to change the contract so that pay raises increase at a slower rate?
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
Yeah, well, mine’s so small it disappeared completely. Can’t get smaller than that. FYWP.
Can some front-pager (I’m looking at you, Anne Laurie) please rescue me from
oblivionarbitration–Justin H. Bieber on the cross, I can’t even think of the right word!–if my long rant even made it that far?MattR
@Steeplejack:
Is that really something to brag about? ;)
Yutsano
Wow. It did. Now I have a totally out of context comment that makes me look slightly mad. I’ll have to ponder if this is a positive or a negative.
Martin
No, it’s not, for the same reason that the lack of a COLA for 2011 was a reduction in benefits – there was no CPI increase from the previous year. Lots of people were pissed about that because they thought they should get a little something extra each year, but the CPI said no, no COLA.
The base benefit is fixed. It’s been fixed since they dicked around with SS back in the 80s. Everything beyond that is some kind of attempt to match that fixed benefit to the cost of living. The benefit adjustment for next year isn’t known to anyone yet. It could be $0, it could be $200. Nobody knows. What we do is apply a formula that gives some approximate measure of actual cost of living. If that formula is too high, then we’ve been overly generous, and rather than merely extending that base benefit, we’ve been increasing it each year. Changing to a formula that measures it more accurately doesn’t reduce the base benefit, it merely doesn’t increase the base benefit. I’d argue (and a lot of economists would as well) that the CPI has been increasing the base benefit, and changing to C-CPI to merely extend the base benefit isn’t a reduction in the base benefit.
dogwood
In this case the president is right. I’ve seen structural unemployment for 30 years. I grew up in the Coeur’d Alene mining district an area that fueled the industrial revolution in much of the country. One lone silver mine in Kellogg, Idaho produced more silver than all the silver mines in Nevada combined. From the late 70’s to to mid 80’s most of the mines closed down, unemployment benefits ran out and no new jobs appeared. Those miners thought they had secure union jobs for life, but they were wrong. It always amazed me that people who were buying, selling, swapping, flipping houses thought it would go on forever. They were delusional.
Martin
Depends. Were the employees promised COLA pay increases? If the cost of living doesn’t go up as fast, that’s not a change to the contract. If the measurement of the cost of living is adjusted to be more accurate, that also isn’t a change to the contract.
I’m not saying the employees would be happy about the change, but it’s not a change to the contract. And that’s exactly how SS is set up. The increases are not ‘raises’. They’re cost of living adjustments. They aren’t designed to pay out more each year – rather to pay out the same in adjusted dollars.
MattR
@Martin:
Having a formula produce a different result from year to year is vastly different from changing the formula itself to always produce a lower number every year. And decreasing the rate of increase is a reduction in benefits over the long term even if the base value never decreases.
@Martin:
It is not a COLA raise. It is a raise based on corporate profits. But now management decides that they have a better measure of corporate profits that they are going to use (which always happens to result in smaller raises for the workers)
I don’t care if they have the right to do it or if it is the fair thing to do, all I am saying is that as far as the workers are concerned they just had their benefits reduced over the long term.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
It’s a negative, definitely a negative. Frankly, it makes you seem a little like Matoko/Hermione/whatever. Hmmph.
Martin
The formula wasn’t changed to produce a lower number every year. It was changed to produce a more accurate number every year. Maybe this is the scientist in me coming out too much, but if I add another decimal place to the mass of an atom, I didn’t make it heavier, I just measured it better. SS recipients have never, ever been promised a certain rate of increase in benefits. They were promised a cost of living adjustment. If we measure that better, then we measure it better. If the result is a lower rate, then it’s a lower rate. FWIW, the C-CPI sometimes is higher than the currently used CPI, so it’s not guaranteed that the rate will be lower, though it tends to be because the CPI is designed to over-estimate actual cost of living.
Seniors are still getting what they were promised. They still retain buying power consistent with what they had under previous payout levels. That’s the whole point of SS, and that doesn’t change at all.
MattR
@Martin:
I don’t disagree with this, I just see it as irrelevant.
Since this change was brought up in the context of saving SS money, I think we can assume that on average the C-CPI will be lower.
This too is irrelevant to whether or not they are getting a reduction in benefits. If we have an agreement where I guarantee you enough money to put food on the table every month, but then I start giving you a few extra bucks so you can do something nice for yourself in addition. If I later to decide to stop giving you those few extra bucks, I have not broken my promise to you but I have reduced the benefit you are receiving.
Martin
CPI is an arbitrary approximation of COLA. It’s known to overestimate, by design. You’re essentially arguing that the accuracy of the measure is immaterial. So let’s invent the BJ-CPI, which is twice as inaccurate as the CPI and overestimates by an even larger margin. Wouldn’t it be equally correct to then argue that seniors, under the current policy have a benefit cut because the CPI is designed to produce a lower number every year over the BJ-CPI?
Because CPI is arbitrary and not an actual measurement of what it’s being used for, anyone can argue that benefits are increasing too fast, too slow, or anything in between, and therefore politicians can correctly take whatever the fuck position they want to take. The only way to actually resolve the issue is to focus instead on what’s happening relative to the actual measure. The actual measure is real cost of living which we know is lower than CPI, and closer to but still lower than C-CPI. So long as we aren’t taking an index which is lower than the real cost of living, we aren’t reducing the promised cost of living increase. We can’t be – by definition. Seniors may argue that they deserve more – but they always argue that. Rather than arbitrarily decide that they do or don’t deserve more, we can go back to the measure and see if we gave them what was promised, and under both CPI and C-CPI, they are getting what they were promised, plus a little more – it’s just a littler little more in the case of C-CPI.
MattR
@Martin:
No. Maintaining the status quo is not a benefit cut. But to switch from CPI to BJ-CPI would be a benefit increase.
Steeplejack
It doesn’t look like my long, impassioned rant is going to come out of–damn it, what is it you get when you say “socialism”–oh, yeah, moderation, so I just want to say that the gist of it was that working in retail sucks. Everything else was just needless frippery and ornamentation.
Steeplejack
It doesn’t look like my long, impassioned rant is going to come out of–damn it, what is it that you get when you say “socialism”?–oh, yeah, moderation, so I just want to say that the gist of it was that working in retail sucks. Everything else was just needless frippery and ornamentation.
Yutsano
Damn. Now I’m sorry FYWP got a sudden munchie attack.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
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Fortunately, no one could have foreseen this historic development from our wise and fierce President Obama. Also too, if the price of his re-election must include a few dead old, young, infirm and poor parasites, we all here – including Tunch – will solemnly agree that this is a small price to pay indeed.
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Martin
Yeah, it almost always does. Sorry your job sucks. They do that quite often. And customers are too often assholes, and employers pretty much always assholes. For as many of us that have worked retail at one time or another, you’d think more customers would be sympathetic to the employees. But no.
My job sucked today as well – I fired one of my staff. I liked her a lot, but she wasn’t cutting it, and working for the state with budget cutbacks, I just can’t afford to have staff that aren’t cutting it. This was her first job out of college. She cried and thanked me for the opportunity. I did the right thing for the office, but I’m going to feel like an asshole for a while.
BlueDWarrior
The thing I want to know is, do I need to go into “Obama sold us out (again)” mode now or can that wait until 3 weeks from now?
Maybe I need to get the fuel tank and meter on my portable internet outrage generator checked…
Bmaccnm
I don’t care about any of this. I just canned 6 pints of Royal Anne cherries- from my own tree- in a raspberry & reisling syrup. Nothing can hurt me. Nothing at all. And I have more cherries on my tree, and more wine, too.
Steeplejack
@Martin:
Shorter version of my disappeared rant is that of five closers tonight (one assistant manager, four worker bees), two of the latter were young women without cars, who
werewould have been turned out on the slightly sketchy streets to make their way home late at night. And it was totally unnecessary: the store has other worker bees (who have cars) who can close. It didn’t have to be these two. It was just an artifact of (complete) management incompetence. Plus both of these women are scheduled to work tomorrow morning, one at 9:00 a.m. and the other at 7:00 a.m. Get the fuck out of here. That’s criminal.I was able to convince the closing manager to give one of the women a ride home–it turns out they live relatively close to each other–and the third closer and I dropped off the other woman at a bus stop by a McDonald’s where she could wait safely until her bus came. But it’s bullshit that it had to be that way.
Yutsano
Best way to ameliorate your feelings is to write her up a good recommendation she can take to her next gig. And yeah, being fired sucks, but if she comes out a better person and a better worker for someone else, that’s a positive for both of you.
dogwood
Martin and Matt – Good discussion; enjoyed reading all of it. I’m not a number cruncher, but watching the cost of my health care benefits skyrocket over the last ten years, it’s hard for me to believe that simply raising taxes on the very wealthy is going to make Medicare solvent. If that’s the case and the middle and upper-middle classes refuse to accept any tax increases, then some type of cuts are inevitable. Good grief, the public doesn’t want the debt ceiling raised either.
dogwood
You might feel like one, but I doubt “asshole” is a term anyone would apply to you.
licensed to kill time
@MonkeyBoy:
Eleventybilliongazilliontetrazillion cheers for MonkeyBoy! Painlessly installed your fix and YE GODS I HAVE A REPLY BUTTON AGAIN!
You.are.a.GENIUS.
¡Muchisimas gracias!
FlipYrWhig
@ dogwood / 95 :
Not necessarily. It depends on how much redundancy and looting there are. If the system is paying out, to make up some numbers, $10,000 for an antiseptic-and-bandaid treatment, we can surely find ways to treat that problem _as effectively for less money_ — rather than conceding that it’s always going to cost $10,000 and trying to drum up that money from somewhere. You can in fact spend less money and achieve comparable or better outcomes. You can plug leaks and smooth out the kinks and get a more consistent flow out the bottom — and the “cuts” would only affect the duplicative and wasteful parts of the system. In theory.
If you stumble upon a system that reimburses hospitals $100 for each box of bandaids, then stipulate that from now on that’s going to be $5 because that’s what bandaids _cost_, is that a “95% cut”? Technically, yes. Is it detrimental to health? No. Paying less doesn’t have to mean sacrificing care… if you’re smart and careful. That’s the kind of budget cutting a technocrat should love, even a dyed-in-the-wool lefty technocrat.
WereBear
Hey, Bethesda Maryland Unemployed! Alley Cat Allies is hiring.
This is the national organization I feel most comfortable donating to when I have the shekels left over from my local shelters (who rock, fortunately.)
Ron
Watched that episode too. I swear every episode has a point in it where there is NO WAY they will get the work done inside the restaurant in time to open, and yet they always make it in time. Restaurant:Impossible is always a case of “trainwreck TV” but this one was pretty sad. Wonder if they are still doing as well as they apparently were even 4 months after the episode was filmed.
stuckinred
Ron
All these shows with this bullshit drama, cars, houses, food. . .just fucking stupid. Show how they built or make the stuff and move on.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Martin
We could tighten eligibility for SS. As it stands, people do not have to work much at all to be eligible.
brettvk
@MonkeyBoy: Thank you!
jeffreyw
Breakfast
slightly_peeved
@FlipYrWhig:
On this point, it’s worth reminding people that the UK government spends about as much (as a percentage of GDP) on healthcare as the US government. It funds pretty much a full single-provider system on that money. There’s plenty of room to cut costs in the US system without cutting the quality of care; the IPAB, as implemented by the ACA, is designed to find those cost reductions.
On the general subject of the cuts; they suck. But, and this may be the view of an ignorant foreigner, I thought one thing that the US Congress has in common with Parliamentary systems is that the lower house is the most important in terms of drafting legislation. You guys (as a country, not those here) voted in batshit loonballs, so it’d be tough for Obama to prevent some batshit lunacy getting through. And I’d rather not have the world economy tank because of US Rand ideologues screwing it. Again.
norbizness
So, in restaurant impossible, is everybody betrayed by Jon Voight and the kitchen is blown up?
cathyx
Where are our usual morning posters? Is everyone sleeping in late, on vacation, or both?
Maybe we could talk about the looming cuts to medicare and medicaid heading our way.
Ash Can
@MonkeyBoy: I just want to add my voice to the chorus of accolades here. Especially since I think of proficient computer techies the way Jeff MacNelly portrayed them in his cartoons — as wearing Merlin hats and brandishing magic wands — I am thoroughly impressed. Bravo!
Southern Beale
Last night I awoke at 12:00 a.m. to the most awful, stabbing pains in my lower back, literally brought me to my knees when I tried to stand. Husband googled “kidney stones” and I seemed to have all the symptoms, but since I’ve been laid up with a sinus infection for 3 days I worried I was having a reaction to my antibiotics. So we packed it off the ER where they ordered a CT scan. 3 hours later we were told that I seemed to have … “unspecified lower right flank pain.” Take some Ibuprofin, call us in the morning.
WTF?
Poor husband. We didn’t get home till well after 3 am. He pre-emptively called work and said he wouldn’t be in until this afternoon. And as for me? My lower back pain is better but still there.
At least I don’t have kidney stones but jesus christ, I can’t believe a muscle spasm would knock me out like this.
stuckinred
cathyx
Anne said she was going to have visitors and would be gone for a few days. It doesn’t really take a new thread to discuss something.
stuckinred
Ash Can
I’m sure someone has explained WHY it can’t be foxed on the back-end?
JPL
The New York Times has a study on health care and the poor. link
Just Some Fuckhead
@Southern Beale: Prolly dehydration.
Amir_Khalid
@southern Beale #111:
I can’t help wondering, how much did they charge to not find out how come your back hurt?
Ash Can
@stuckinred: I have no idea what you’re talking about, which is probably why I’m so delighted with Monkeyboy’s nifty little widget.
Amir_Khalid
@MonkeyBoy: Hail, o artful MonkeyBoy! Now I too have a visible reply button once again!
Southern Beale
@Amir_Khalid:
Husband has excellent insurance, thank God. No co-pay. I’ll find out how much Blue Cross/Blue Shield paid when I get the statement.
How much it cost my husband’s employer, on the other hand, who pays astronomical sums for our policy … well, he can go on and on about that, but I’ve heard the rants so often I tune them out.
Our healthcare system is still fucked up.
This is the second time in 2 years I’ve gone to the ER, btw. First time I got hit on the head and passed out, got worried about the whole Natasha Redgrave (was that her name?) thing, wanted to make sure I didn’t have a subdural hematoma. That time the doctor basically handed me an ice pack and gave me a lecture on the evils of Canadian healthcare.
This time I got a CT scan and no political lecture. But both times I had to wait 3 hours. C’est la vie.
Amir_Khalid
@Southern Beale:
No money out of pocket? That’s good.
You’re thinking of Natasha Richardson. She was one of Vanessa Redgrave’s daughters and the wife of Liam Neeson.
Jim C
@Too Many Jens
[Roseanne Rosannadanna]Nevermind.[/Roseanne Rosannadanna]
Emily Litella.
valdemar
News from Little Old England – Rupert Murdoch’s most profitable newspaper is being closed down. People power, perhaps, because the News of the World lost so many advertisers. But it could be a legal dodge to avoid some kind of corporate prosecution.
Steeplejack
@MonkeyBoy:
Thanks for your work. Just installed your fix, and it appears to work like a dream.