Category Archives: morality

What’s Going On Here?

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US military members tend strongly to vote Republican.  Yet in election swing states, absentee ballot requests are shockingly low.  There are a couple of possibilities for why this is so: on the one hand, our soldiers and spouses, and those who support them, don’t care enough about voting in this year’s elections to request their ballots.  This is hard to credit.

On the other hand, they’re not getting the information they need to get their ballots so they can vote.  We know some things about this.  For instance, we know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff is not in the chain of command for our soldiers, but it is charged with providing the command chain with training, equipage, and support for the commanders’ soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines.

We also know that the Chairman of the JCS, General Martin Dempsey, is too busy hectoring ex-military and civilians for exercising their free speech rights to have any time left providing that support—which, among other matters, includes making it possible for our soldiers and spouses, and those who support them, to vote absentee.

Here’s how well he’s doing on soldiers’ absentee voting, and how will others specifically charged with the task are doing.  This table, taken from the Military Voter Protection Project‘s report, shows how far the numbers of requested absentee ballots have fallen from the numbers in 2008 (the complete report is available at the MVP Project link).

State

Total Requested
in 2008

Current
Requested
in 2012

Percent
Difference

Florida

121,395

65,173

-46%

Virginia

41,762

12,292

-70%

North Carolina

19,109

7,848

-59%

Illinois

9,858

3,532

-64%

Ohio

32,334

9,707

-70%

Alaska

13,766

6,535

-52%

Colorado

5,104

2,986

-41%

Nevada

4,919

1,750

-64%

We also know some other things about this shameful failure.  DoD spokeswoman Cmdr Leslie Hull-Ryde is insisting that 2012 is much different than 2008: the 2008 elections had contested primaries for both major parties, but this time only Republicans had a contested primary.  That’s their excuse, apparently: there must be primaries by both parties, else the Pentagon is relieved of its duty.  Hull-Ryde added, proudly,

We are in complete compliance with the law.  (The Federal Voting Assistance Program) strives to ensure that every absent military and overseas citizen voter has the tools and resources to receive, cast and return an absentee ballot and have it counted—regardless of who they vote for.

When I was on active duty in the USAF, such “meets standards” performance, noted on an Officer Efficiency Report or an Airman Proficiency Report, was the kiss of death to a career.  We were expected to do better than that.  Moreover, DoD was authorized $75 million for last year and this to set up the mechanisms—including those voting assistance offices—for getting this voting information to its service members.  Yet it has chosen not to, to any great extent, despite the fact that the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act requires them to.

Pam Mitchell, acting director of the FVAP, compounds the matter, bragging that there are over 220 voting assistance offices seat up worldwide, and claiming with a straight face,

I strongly believe that voting assistance is the best that it has ever been.

Never mind that she has a vested interest in downplaying this failure.  Never mind that the 220 offices of which she’s so proud is a trifling number compared to the thousands of locations around the world at which we have soldiers and spouses, and those who support them—or just soldiers and their support—stationed.  It seems the FVAP isn’t striving very hard.

Despite the Pentagon’s decision to fail [sic] on this, soldiers and spouses, and those who support them, can request absentee ballots at the MVP Project link above and at  the Heroes Vote Initiative Web site, http://heroesvote.org.

One more thing: think the military vote is too trivial to matter?  Aside from the utter immorality of depriving these men and women who are willing to sacrifice everything in order to protect us and our freedoms—including our right to vote—of their right to vote, think about the numbers involved.  Compare the present reduction in military votes cast (again, a segment of our population that tends strongly to vote Republican) with the closeness of past Presidential elections in Florida and other swing states, the 2008 Senatorial election in Minnesota, the gubernatorial elections in Washington, and so on.

He’s Been Booker’d

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Fox News reported this last night:

The office of the United States’ top intelligence official appeared to take the blame Friday for the Obama administration’s changing narrative on the US Consulate attack in Libya, saying administration officials who initially claimed the attack was spontaneous did so based on intelligence officials’ guidance.

The statement by Shawn Turner, spokesman for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, was put out late Friday….

As Fox News put it, “Turner’s statement marked a complete reversal from the initial claims.”  Turner’s statement included this, in part:

In the immediate aftermath, there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo.  We provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available.  Throughout our investigation we continued to emphasize that information gathered was preliminary and evolving.

However, Fox News also has been reporting that two intel sources have told them that intelligence officials knew within 24 hours that the attack was terrorism and that they suspected it was tied to Al Qaeda.  As Fox dryly put it, it’s unclear why the intelligence community told Executive Branch officials it was spontaneous.

This is highly reminiscent of the event late last spring involving Newark, NJ, Mayor Cory Booker.  In a May “Meet the Press” interview, Booker told NBC’s host, Dick Gregory, that the Democratic Party campaign’s attacks on Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney (in all but name at the time) for his time at Bain Capital were “nauseating.”  Twenty-four hours later, Booker had been browbeaten by the White House into apologizing for his nauseating remark.

This is what is being done to Clapper—he’s being forced to take the fall for this administration’s dishonesty in its mischaracterization of the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left our Ambassador to Libya murdered along with three of his staff.

A Social Security System Proposal

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Social Security, as we know it, is going to go broke in a few short years.  Demographics guarantee this.  When Social Security was instituted, it was a supplemental income program for our retired, who were expected to continue to rely on their own resources and those of their families for their retirement years.  Moreover, at that time, there were roughly 7 workers paying into the system for every retiree and a retiree lifespan in retirement was about 6 years.

Today, Social Security is expected to be an income replacement program.  Moreover, the number of workers paying into the system is around 3 for each retiree, and that number is falling.  Then, each retiree is expected to live for 17+ years in retirement.

But one thing has remained constant.  Each worker paying into the system is paying for someone else’s current retirement—the money paid in is not set aside to accumulate for the payer’s benefit.

I propose to change this in the following way.  It will eliminate Social Security as we know it, but it also will preserve and strengthen the promise of social security: a reasonably comfortable retirement for the retiree.  Privatize, entirely, Social Security.

Eliminate the payroll tax for both employer and employee (think about the immediate stimulative effect from reduction in the cost of labor of 6.2%).  However, require the employee to set aside 6.2% of his income from all sources, not just from wage income (just to keep it simple, and consistent with a tax proposal nearby).  Why 6.2%?  That’s the current employee payroll tax for Social Security, absent any temporary reduction.  Eliminate, also, the present upper limit on income (wages) subject to the Social Security payroll tax.  However, instead of this money immediately being paid out to someone else’s present retirement, it will be put into an account owned and managed by the employee, and the money will accumulate for his own future retirement.

Let’s look at the effect of this on a hypothetical man’s retirement.  Let’s say the man earned $100,000 per year in his last years of working.

Under the current system, that man retiring at 66 will receive $25,800 per year until 2033, when the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted and payroll taxes will only be able to support payouts at 75% of their nominal rate—our man, after having been retired just 20 or so years (never mind the 17+ years of an actuarial retirement), will see his payout cut to $19,400 per year (note that for this, I’m ignoring inflation and cost of living increases).

Now suppose our man has been socking away 6.2% for his, let us say, 40 years of working life, and he’s still making $100,000 in his last years.  Again, we’ll ignore inflation, and we’ll take a naïve position of his having started out making $20,000 per year and received constant annual pay raises to reach his present $100,000 annual income.  With his 6.2% set-aside each year naively left to grow with the market (the S&P500 historical growth rate has been 9.77% since 1926—a period including the Great Depression, the Carter Recession, and the Panic of 2008), our man will accumulate enough by the time of his retirement to withdraw over $55,000 per year over the course of a nominal 18-year retirement, or more than $29,000 per year, if he expects to have a 34-year retirement (i.e., live to 100).  And he won’t have a reduction to 75% of that because the government ran out of money.  Of course, this table napkin analysis ignores inflation, also, and it ignores leaving the remainder of the man’s accumulated retirement fund still invested—now perhaps in bonds.

Notice one other critical factor here: with privatized retirement savings in place of Social Security, each man will be working for his own future instead of working for someone else’s present.  With his own money at stake, the man will do a far more careful job of managing for his future retirement than the government already has done—with OPM.

There is, of course, the risk that the man may invest foolishly, or he may invest wisely but have a run of bad luck in the market—downturns do occur.  What happens to him in this brave new world?

First, look at what happens in the present situation, where the impending failure of the Social Security System is an empirical fact.  In this scenario, where the government’s management of our retirement accounts has failed, the disaster affects all of us—every retired individual; every soon-to-be-retired individual; and each of the rest of us, who must find a way to support these unfortunates.

If the man fails, though, whether through his folly or his bad luck, the effects of his failure is limited to him and his family; it is not a national disaster.  And these individuals will be few enough in number that help—a hand back up, generally, or support if his failure comes too late for him to recover—can come from his family, his local community, church and/or charity, and, yes, as a last resort, state government.

A Thought about Unions

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Perry Chiaramonte, of Fox News, noticed this bit a few days ago.

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) was carrying signs and chanting slogans in front of the future site of the United Food and Commercial Workers federal credit union in downtown Pittston.

Because UFCW is using non-union labor for the construction of this future site.  The reasons for both the picketing and the use of non-union labor is made clear by the IUPAT’s spokesperson:

Bob Griffiths said he never expected a fellow union to bypass organized labor to save a buck.

Doesn’t a business improve its chances of succeeding—and of keeping its employees employed—by holding down its costs?

Griffiths also said, without any irony,

It’s about the principal, not losing the work[.]

Never mind that those who got the work would be out of work if the union took the job.  Never mind that, as Griffiths has already bragged, that job would be done at higher cost, which can only be passed on to the credit unions’ customers.  Never mind that those customers include union members.

I have to ask: are unions for the working stiff, generally, or just the chosen few?  Are businesses just jobs welfare programs for unions?

First, the Official Denial

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…now comes a partial enumeration of the weasel words and evasion.  I wrote a bit ago about the official denial that the Blind Sheik, he of the first World Trade Center bombing, would be released/transferred to Egypt at Egypt’s behest.

Here’s what former Judge and US Attorney General Michael Mukasey has discovered in the way of that evasion and those weasel words.

Asked before Congress in July whether there is an intention “at any time to release the Blind Sheikh,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano responded: “Well, let me just say this.  I know of no such intention.”

And

The State Department’s spokesperson last week, after the ceremonial “let me be clear,” said that there had been no approach on this topic “recently” from any “senior” official of the Egyptian government….

I suppose Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi isn’t senior enough for this spokesperson.

And this:

All of this plays out in the context of an Obama administration that hasn’t hesitated to employ executive orders to get around Congress, led by a president who was caught on a “hot mike” assuring Russia’s leaders that if he wins re-election he will have more “flexibility” to accommodate Russian demands that the US curtail missile defense in Europe.

Since the guy who occasionally sits in our President’s chair refuses to say definitively that the Blind Sheik won’t be released/transferred anytime or under any conditions, all of this sounds pretty definitive to me.