Dick Armey is so aggravated with us stupid Americans for liking Social Security that he sat down at his computer and wrote an op-ed trying to talk us all out of it.

Social Security already is the largest tax that most Americans pay. Studies have shown that payroll taxes would need to increase by 50% in order to temporarily save the insolvent program. But what happens when that's not enough? At what point does Social Security become generational theft?

Funny how that savings thing becomes a "tax" unless it's invested in "private" investments, eh?

Americans should ask, if Social Security is such a great program, why is it mandatory? Workers should have the choice about whether they want to remain in the current system or invest in a personal saving retirement account, which would allow them to have complete control over their retirements funds and pass the remaining balance to family members. Let's have Social Security compete against other investment options.

Because that worked so well for everyone who had 401(k) money invested in 2008, right? Imagine the disaster that would have befallen seniors all over the country when their otherwise-reliable pension payment became half of its former self.

Social Security isn't going anywhere, and if I have anything to say about it, the Social Security Retirement Age can stay right where it is. The only tweak they should make is lifting the cap on contributions. In fact, they could lift that cap and drop the rate a percentage point if they wanted. That should ensure solvency through the end of this century or so.

Paul Krugman explains why we can't settle for stabilizing the economy, and says unless there's a bigger economic stimulus package, high unemployment is here to stay for a long, long time:

The effects of the stimulus will build over time — it’s still likely to create or save a total of around three million jobs — but its peak impact on the growth of G.D.P. (as opposed to its level) is already behind us. Solid growth will continue only if private spending takes up the baton as the effect of the stimulus fades. And so far there’s no sign that this is happening.

So the government needs to do much more. Unfortunately, the political prospects for further action aren’t good.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

But can we afford to do more? We can’t afford not to.

High unemployment doesn’t just punish the economy today; it punishes the future, too. In the face of a depressed economy, businesses have slashed investment spending — both spending on plant and equipment and “intangible” investments in such things as product development and worker training. This will hurt the economy’s potential for years to come.

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

Even the claim that we’ll have to pay for stimulus spending now with higher taxes later is mostly wrong. Spending more on recovery will lead to a stronger economy, both now and in the future — and a stronger economy means more government revenue. Stimulus spending probably doesn’t pay for itself, but its true cost, even in a narrow fiscal sense, is only a fraction of the headline number.

O.K., I know I’m being impractical: major economic programs can’t pass Congress without the support of relatively conservative Democrats, and these Democrats have been telling reporters that they have lost their appetite for stimulus.

But I hope their stomachs start rumbling soon. We now know that stimulus works, but we aren’t doing nearly enough of it. For the sake of today’s unemployed, and for the sake of the nation’s future, we need to do much more.

abu muqawama: From the Dept. of People Who Need to Go Away

American Street: One of the biggest enemies our troops face in Iraq seems to be our own military contractors.

State of the Day: J. Sidney McCain lll says America's neighborhoods are like Baghdad

Consortiumblog: Bush, Columbia, and Narco-politics

Slate: Corporate America's long-term investments in the federal judiciary are yielding impressive returns.

Halfway There: Praise the Lord...and pass the ammunition

Download | play Download | play (thanks to BillW)

What a horrible, terrible, very bad, no good day Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL) is having. Facing questions about ethics over some Nicaraguan investments, Weller announced this morning the old stand by of wanting to spend more time with his family and opting not to run again.

If Weller had hoped that taking his ball and going home would stop the questions about his ethical failings, he was wrong. Chicago's CBS2 Political Editor Mike Flannery followed after Weller to get a statement on his investments in Nicaragua. The raw video is hard to make out, but Flannery is claiming that one of Weller's aides pushed him down the stairs and into a woman in the stairwell. He has said he will press charges.

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve no doubt seen recent reports about the frustrating, and so far unsuccessful, search for six trapped miners at the Crandall Canyon Mine in Huntington, Utah. Rescue teams have been drilling where they hope the miners might be, but it’s largely been guesswork.

It’s not a political issue, per se, but the NYT ran an editorial today about Republican policies failed to take important steps on mine safety.

For too long, the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress allowed mine operators to put off making needed investments to ensure their workers’ safety. And last year when a string of coal-mining disasters — that killed 48 miners — forced Congress to enact new safety legislation, it still gave companies far too much time to install communications systems that might have helped find the Utah miners.

Dems have proposed forcing mine operators to adopt, quickly, emergency communications systems that could track and communicate with workers in the event of an accident. Congressional Republicans and the Bush administration have opposed the Democrats’ efforts. It’s another example of what Rick Perlstein has labeled “E. coli conservatism.”

I think it's important to remember that there's a whole world out there while the media focuses solely on Beltway politics. Here's a chance for you to encourage responsibility and humanity from American corporations (don't snicker) for Darfur

I think we may need to keep a list on who actually isn't indicted:

Lester Crawford, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who resigned suddenly in September 2005, was indicted in U.S. court for making false statements related to his investments and conflict of interest. U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor announced the indictment in a court filing today in Washington.

The Bush administration dismissed the security concerns of local officials yesterday and restated its approval of a deal that will give a company based in Dubai a major role in operating ports in and around New York City...read on

georgia10: "Dubai Ports World is controlled by the UAE royal family. The decision to grant the $6.8 billion sale to Dubai was made by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States . Who sits on the committee?...read on"

Think Progress has more facts about the UAE.

Russert smears Arianna: Remind you of anyone?

I seem to remember FOX news running to the NY Post to try and smear Andrea Mackris before they finally settled the O'Reilly sexual harassment lawsuit for millions of dollars.

FDL spotted this last night:

"Big white bwana man went whimpering to Lloyd Grove at the New York Daily News this morning, resurrecting his rather phantasmagorical 1996 claim that Arianna hired a private detective to follow his wife around. An assertion for which he has no proof other than something he read in an Ed Rollins book...read on

Arianna's response:

"Somebody's feeling the heat...How else to explain the widely-off-the-mark responses from NBC's PR department in Lloyd Grove's column to our reporting on Russert's multitude of journalistic ethical conflicts. Instead of dealing with the charges head on, the media giant and its Washington bureau chief Tim Russert have astonishingly decided to get down and dirty, dredging up and faxing to at least one reporter a 12-year-old false claim that I hired a private detective to snoop on Russert's wife Maureen Orth while she was preparing a hit piece on me for Vanity Fair in 1994. ...read on

The Moderate Voice: These news operations have huge investments in the images of these news personalities. Both, at this point, are damaged goods. Can the damage be repaired?

via MaxSpeak : Nothing like a little peer review from a fellow conservative.

When I first saw Luskin on television a few months ago forcefully advocating private accounts, I did a double-take. The last time I remembered seeing or hearing about him previously was several years ago, but I did not remember much about him. A fast internet search brought it all back in a few seconds. For those not familiar with Luskin's past, in 1999 he started a mutual fund firm called MetaMarkets.com. The results were ugly; the company's two funds quickly lost a shocking percentage of investor funds, and had to be shuttered...read on

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Another example of the hypocrisy that surrounds this issue: Consider the case of the rapidly disappearing campaign fund of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn). Judging by the staggering losses Senator Frist's fund has incurred in its stock market investments, one might think he had the misfortune of investing in Don Luskin's funds. The Washington Post dissected this disaster here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26558-2004Dec1.html

According to the article, Frist's investment losses were so severe that the fund was unable to cover a large bank loan.