This page was last updated on April 13, 2011.
Put the real blame where it belongs; William A. Alexander; Beaver County Times; April 13, 2011.
Mr. Alexander has written at least 33 letters (See the archives for more examples.) since December 2004, and all but three (one fawning over Rep. Jason Altmire [D-PA], one critical of local funding for JROTC, and another upset about the Air Force awarding a contract to Airbus instead of Boeing) bashed Republicans for something. Another letter was entitled “Blame Republicans for today’s messes.” Despite this record, Mr. Alexander is a Democrat/leftist who wants us to believe he’s really a disenchanted Republican. In “Can’t wait for Hart to lose,” Mr. Alexander told us he was a “registered Republican.”
Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.
“In response to recent letters complaining about and blaming Social Security, Medicare and other problems on President Barack Obama:
“The GOP wants to privatize Social Security and now Medicare, and Democrats just want to make small changes to the former so it will be available when our grandchildren need it.”
[RWC] In a country built by the private sector, when did “privatizing” something become a bad thing? In any case, there are no GOP proposals “to privatize Social Security and now Medicare.”
Regarding Socialist Security, Mr. Alexander’s definition of “privatize” is allowing taxpayers have the option to invest a very small portion (4%) of their SS taxes in personal accounts, but still under the oversight and rules of the SS Administration. Unlike the rest of SS benefits, the amount in the personal account would actually belong to the individual taxpayer and could not be taken by feds to spend on other stuff as happened with SS and Medicare tax revenue. Heck, Democrats themselves proposed and supported personal accounts in the late 1990s. Remember the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), former Sen. Hillary Clinton’s immediate predecessor? This was also a recommendation of the bipartisan President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security in 2001.
Regarding Medicare, the only thing I’ve heard is a proposal to change from Medicare paying service providers to providing beneficiaries with a sufficient grant to buy their own Medicare-approved insurance plan from private insurers. The idea is to promote competition to help keep costs down and allow individual beneficiaries to tailor their benefits to their needs. It’s similar to what happened with Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit. Though I opposed Medicare Part D, it has the distinction of being just about the only entitlement program, or any program for that matter, to come in under spending estimates, from $694 million over 10 years to about $395 million over 10 years. The other part of this is the changes would affect only those currently 54 years old and younger when they eventually become eligible to collect benefits at age 65 or whatever. That is, anyone currently 55 and older would receive benefits exactly the same as today.
As for the Democrats’ “small changes,” we’ve been making those same changes to SS since 1950. Since then, Congress increased the Socialist Security tax rate 20 times! Ignoring this year’s SS tax holiday, the current SS tax rate is 12.4%, 6.2 times its original 2%. Further, the max taxed earnings cap increases every year by law and is now more than twice what it was in 1990 ($51,300). In constant dollars, the original earnings cap of $3,000 in 1937 should be $46,106 today, not the $106,800 it is. The reason the “small changes” fail to fix anything is SS is a Ponzi scheme. As designed from the beginning, SS requires an ever-growing SS taxpaying population and a high multiple of current SS taxpayers relative to current SS beneficiaries, and/or ever-increasing SS tax rates, and/or ever-decreasing benefits. Any such system has failure built in. Medicare works the same way.
“Obama’s vacations are nothing like the two Bushes took, especially George W. Bush, who was on vacation out of the White House 25 percent of his presidency. Some of us feel he was on vacation most of the time he was in the White House.”
[RWC] Will Edward Hum write a letter taking Mr. Alexander to task for these vacation comments? <g> I won’t hold my breath waiting.
“If he hadn’t forgotten about winning Afghanistan and gone to war with Iraq, Afghanistan would be a better place today.”
[RWC] As for “winning Afghanistan,” that’s a red herring. I don’t know about Mr. Alexander specifically, but the so-called “peace” and anti-Bush crowds opposed attacking al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Afghanistan didn’t become “the justifiable action” or “the good war” until we invaded Iraq.
“As far as shutting down the Federal Reserve, there would be no currency, set interest rates and a lot of bank failures. What should we do, barter for everything?”
[RWC] Is Mr. Alexander serious? The Federal Reserve didn’t exist until 1913. What does Mr. Alexander think happened before 1913?
Why does someone have to “set interest rates?” Let the marketplace do it. FYI, the only interest rate The Fed “sets” is the rate banks charge each other for interbank loans. Another way The Fed influences interest rates is by printing money, aka “quantitative easing.”
As for “bank failures,” why shouldn’t we allow bad banks to fail as should any other bad business? I thought everyone was angry about taxpayers bailing out “Wall Street.” If Mr. Alexander is concerned about individual depositors, the FDIC takes care of them and it’s not part of The Fed.
“Homeland Security might be improved, but it is needed to coordinate all the different agencies that have a finger in national security.
“Most of our current problems are the result of decades of not facing reality and the worst was Bush, never setting a budget for the wars except once a year was over.”
[RWC] There’s something wrong with this sentence. Anyway, how often is the President supposed to set war budgets? What is President Obama doing differently in this area?
As for “the result of decades of not facing reality,” that’s mostly true. In the case of the current economic situation, it’s not entirely accurate. You’ll find the Bush administration raised numerous alarms beginning with its first budget in 2001 as did then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Congressional Democrats, on the other hand, claimed nothing was wrong, attacked regulators during hearings, and played the race card to silence those raising the alarms. Should the Republicans have endured the charges of racism and pressed the issue to resolution? Absolutely.
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