Welfare State Santa, the wisdom of Holman, the rape of the Israeli women
An episode in the 'Plop' series
Readings on Type 8 malaise
I call this the ‘Plop’ series after my favourite childhood cartoon, the politically incorrect ‘Condorito’
All articles are from the WSJ, the world’s sensible journal
Link 1: Social Security Giveaways
Information you can trust from someone who really does know.
‘Promised benefits are far in excess of lifetime payroll taxes. That’s a compelling case for reform’, by Andrew G. Biggs
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have something in common: Neither wants to touch Social Security. The program’s benefits “belong to the American people,” Mr. Biden said in February. “They earned them.” A month later Mr. Trump said: “We’re going to take care of our Social Security—people have earned that.”
Both men have used the program as a cudgel against political opponents who have supported reining in benefits to balance the program’s troubled finances. The same goes for Medicare, which the progressive group Social Security Works has described as “an EARNED benefit,” adding that “anyone who proposes cuts to this program is reaching into your pockets and stealing from you!”
Yet the numbers tell a different story. The Congressional Budget Office and Social Security Administration both find that most Americans are promised Social Security and Medicare benefits substantially exceeding the taxes they’ll pay over their lifetimes. In other words, the benefits are neither earned nor paid for. This ought to lead policy makers to consider fiscally prudent and generationally fair reforms, rather than force younger Americans to fund benefits that older Americans claim to have earned but haven’t fully paid for.
Social Security and Medicare were designed to be viewed as contributory social-insurance programs, not welfare, even though both redistribute money significantly from rich to poor. Over the years, politicians have portrayed their payouts as “earned benefits” that seniors receive via working and paying into the programs.
This framing was no accident. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that funding Social Security with a dedicated payroll tax was “politics all the way through.” “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions,” he added. “With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program.”
But consider some numbers. The Congressional Budget Office projects that when the Social Security trust funds are exhausted in 2032, benefits will have to be cut by around 25%. It likewise projects that the average American retiring in the 2030s is promised lifetime benefits 37% above the taxes he paid over his career, including interest. The Social Security Administration’s actuaries reach similar conclusions. Even letting Social Security go insolvent—which no one is proposing—would result in most retirees receiving more or less the benefits they paid for.
The disparity for Medicare is even greater. C. Eugene Steuerle and Karen Smith of the Urban Institute calculate that a middle-income couple retiring in 2035 will be eligible for lifetime Medicare benefits that exceed their taxes and premiums by $644,000.
It isn’t as if Americans weren’t warned. In 1999 President Bill Clinton said that “by 2032, the trust fund will be exhausted and Social Security will be unable to pay the full benefits older Americans have been promised.” Had Congress gradually increased the Social Security payroll tax to maintain the program’s long-term solvency, I estimate a middle-wage worker retiring in the mid-2030s would have paid an additional $123,000 over his career. That worker’s lifetime benefits would approximately match the taxes he paid, making his benefits truly earned and paid for.
Yet those tax increases never happened, because Americans preferred not to pay them and politicians preferred to get re-elected. Today those same Americans, and the politicians who seek their favor, insist that future benefits can’t be reduced because Americans “earned” them.
The debate over whether to fix entitlements through tax increases or benefit reductions has never been settled. But Americans retiring in the same decade in which Social Security and Medicare will become insolvent are promised benefits far in excess of their lifetime taxes. This reasonably counsels in favor of reducing benefits for those able to absorb the loss. Benefits shouldn’t and needn’t be cut for seniors who rely most heavily on Social Security and Medicare. But many current retirees—some of the richest in U.S. history and among the richest in the world—are slated to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars they don’t need and didn’t pay for.
Advancing this argument will take courage. Yet without it the moral framing of entitlement benefits as earned and paid for will forestall reforms necessary to ensure the government’s long-term fiscal viability.
Andrew G. Biggs is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Link 2: Holman vs silly Never-Trumpers
Never Trumpers Never Learn, by By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Their ‘dictator’ talk only invites more incompetent election meddling in 2024 and beyond.
Whataboutism is the most piercingly stupid term in American politics, cited by partisans whenever someone notices how much their behavior resembles their opponents’. It also falsifies the most basic reality of organic existence: Successful behaviors will be modeled and replicated. And the Russia collusion hoax was the most astonishingly successful political innovation of our age—an “availability cascade,” using the term coined by Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein in a seminal 1999 law review article. …
… The latest exhibit is the Kagan essay in the Washington Post. Work through its 6,000-word argument and try to discern how Mr. Trump, with his limited appeal to an uninfluential base, checks and balances, and a mobilized opposition controlling almost every establishment institution, is supposed to make himself a dictator, when, say, FDR, with the most powerful electoral coalition in history, a 75% approval rating, and a world war to fight couldn’t have done so.
It makes no sense and isn’t required to. Mr. Kagan replicates the failed strategy of the past eight years: Donald Trump is so bad, we must lie about him. The lies are so obvious and easily discovered, though, they end up validating Mr. Trump’s critique of the establishment and win him more voters. In fact, the only way not to see Mr. Kagan as dotty is to assume he’s trying deliberately to justify civil disorder and unconstitutional resistance when Mr. Trump is elected.
Interestingly, the Post itself seems to have gagged on Mr. Kagan. … It went out of its way to note that the “dictator” talk comes from Democrats desperate over Mr. Biden’s sagging polls. Maybe Trump opponents are finally wising up to their own self-defeating tactics. Seeing the ex-president for what he is but knowing something about dictators, the former CIA analyst and formidable political philosopher Martin Gurri writes at Unherd.com: “Relax. Trump is too old, too isolated, and too ADD to have a shot at dictatorship—and if he tried, the result would be comedy rather than tyranny.”
A second Trump term, in my view, would be useless for America. His opponents, as I’ve been pointing out since 2016, are nonetheless working hard to make it happen.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Link 3: Jamas Hamas
Abduction of the Sabine Women, by Nicolas Poussin (Date: 1638)
The Rape of the Israeli Women
Hamas’s crimes on Oct. 7 were deliberate and systematic. Why has the left been disbelieving, silent or equivocal? by Peggy Noonan
At first I didn’t understand. Among Hamas’s crimes of 10/7: little children and babies murdered, some burned to death; children forced to watch parents chased, beaten and shot. Old couples murdered in their homes; families who’d taken refuge in safe rooms burned out and killed. Hamas attempted to behead a kibbutz worker, and killed old women standing at a bus stop. Women were abused—raped, it seemed certain. But I didn’t understand why, from day one, the last received such emphasis. Defenders of Hamas kept demanding proof and claiming there was no evidence. It was as if they were saying: Sure we behead people and kill infants but raping someone, that’s crossing a line!
But now I understand what was done. It was grim and dreadful, but it was also systematic and deliberate. And since there’s going to be a lot of 10/7 trutherism—there already is—we have to be clear about what happened.
In the days after the attack, chaos reigned in the attack areas. At least 1,200 people had been murdered, their bodies scattered through kibbutzim and on the site of the Nova music festival. The crime scene was huge; the priority was identifying the dead and informing their families. Documentation of crimes was incomplete, forensic evidence not always recorded, evidence perishable. The testimony of witnesses, body collectors and morgue workers came in unevenly. It has built and is becoming comprehensive.
A stunning report appeared last weekend in London’s Sunday Times, by reporter Christina Lamb. Bar Yuval-Shani, a 58-year-old psychotherapist treating the families of victims, told Ms. Lamb she has been told by several witnesses of rape at the music festival. A police commander told Ms. Lamb, “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.” Ms. Lamb quotes Yoni Saadon, 39, a father of four and shift manager in a foundry who was at the music festival. He said he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.”
“We didn’t understand at first,” Ms. Lamb quoted Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a Hebrew University expert on international law, who heads a commission into the Hamas crimes. She said survivors arriving at hospitals weren’t asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits, but those who volunteered to collect bodies started reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals. The commander of a unit of a volunteer religious organization that collected the remains of the dead told Ms. Lamb they collected 1,000 bodies in 10 days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us. . . . It seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”
Israel Defense Forces sources told the paper that Hamas fighters caught in Gaza reported in police interrogations that they had been instructed by superiors to “dirty” and “whore” the women.
A few days after the Sunday Times report came one on the mounting evidence of violent sexual abuse from BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson. Several of those involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of the dead told the BBC that they had seen “multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.” Video testimony of an eyewitness to the music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, “detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.” The BBC saw “videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack.”
Israeli police have privately shown journalists filmed testimony of a woman at the music festival. She describes Hamas fighters gang-raping a woman and then mutilating her. The last of her attackers shot her in the head. She said the men cut off parts of the woman’s body during the rape. In other videos, Ms. Williamson writes, women carried away by the terrorists “appear to be naked or semi-clothed.”
Reuters on Dec. 5 quoted an Israeli reservist who worked at a makeshift morgue. “Often women came in in just their underwear,” she said. “I saw very bloody genitals on women.” Reuters spoke to seven people, first responders and those dealing with the dead, who attested to the sexual violence. Reuters quotes written testimony from one volunteer, who said he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: “Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked.”
This Monday a meeting at the United Nations laid out proof of the violent abuse. In the New York Times, reporters Katherine Rosman and Lisa Lerer quoted the testimony of Simcha Greinman, a volunteer collector of remains at the kibbutzim. He said the body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” A person’s genitals were so mutilated “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Other women had mutilated faces. The head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police was asked how many women were abused. He said, “I am talking about dozens.”
If half of this testimony is true, then what was done to the women at the music festival and in the kibbutzim wasn’t a series of isolated crimes. It happened at scale, as part of a pattern, and with a deliberateness that strongly suggests it was systematic. The rape, torture and mutilation of women looks as if it was part of the battle plan. Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon.
Why has the progressive left in the West, for two months now, been disbelieving, silent or equivocal about what Hamas did to women? One answer is that the progressive left hates Israel and feels whatever is done to Israelis is justified. … Why have women’s groups of the progressive left been silent? Because at bottom they aren’t for women; they are for the team. …
By Peggy Noonan
Plus, previously exhibited on Social Science Files: Hamas Puts Its Pogrom on Video
My thanks to the Wall Street Journal … and Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller