Recent comments

Thank you, this back and forth has helped me understand the warped boomer thinking that has allowed us to slide into a $12 trillion federal debt hole ($18 trillion if we count the quasi-corporate entities), a $1 Trillion state debt hole and almost $2 trillion local debt hole. You pay 25%, I pay 42%, our children pick up the rest and you question why I think its not a good deal and blame others for why they need to pay 75%. Like another of your generation, Bernie Madoff, you seem to have a gift for making it seem like everything's great, why worry and deflecting the salient points of a question which probably works on most people to get them to buy in on the myth of the Ponzi scheme. I love the fact you respond to my point about doctors not being happy about medicare reimbursement rates by telling me that you pay your doctor an extra fee. This would seem to prove my point, but oh hey, let me thank you for keeping Medicare costs down. Also, I pay 13K as part of a self-insured arrangement. I pay the full plan cost (no employer contribution). Each person pays in and this covers all our costs based on last years costs for all the members in our plan (no profits, no subsidies from the government, but some reinsurance). If we used your logic of how this should work, I should pay about $3K, someone else's taxes would kick in another $5-6K annually and my children would pick up the rest in about 25 years. Sounds great for me, whats the catch? Guess my children will need to figure that one out. So yes, Bernie, I'd rather not make a deal unless the numbers are honest. I'm not interested in the interest-only loan, thank you. The problem is that no one is being honest on either side and so it happens most of the pretenders in Congress tend to be of your generation. I'll forgo asking you for the math of your individual situation, (I can see that your math likely is a 1+1=3 kind of math, but even if you're not benefiting now, it does not absolve you from the fact that you currently COULD benefit from the Madoff math of Medicare. The value of Insurance means that you could benefit if needed it is not based on how much you use. . Stopping the wars doesn't balance the budget, but even hypothetically you don't want to put this money toward the debt, you want to spend more on healthcare.... Well this makes sense. This had me doubling over in laughter. The average premium to be paid in 2010 for the Rx benefit (pre-Obama proposal) will be about $30/month or $360 a year. The average benefit has been about 4-5 times this. If you read the link i posted, you'd see if you look at page 5 of the trustees report (I'm not saying this, the government is) that premiums for Medicare D (Rx) will provide about $5 billion or 10% of the overall program cost - where is the rest of the money coming from? You seem to think your paying for it. If you were truly paying for it, your premiums should be about 10x higher. While you and your boomer Madoff crowd probably think your taxes cover the rest, we're actually borrowing about 33% of what we're spending so our kids are technically picking up about 17% of the Rx benefits. Thanks again....

<blockquote>"So, it is safe to assume that you are a vegan, wear and use only synthetic fibers?"</blockquote> Are cotton and linen synthetic? <blockquote>"Nature doesn't need help controlling the deer population?" </blockquote> Actually, it doesn't. It just doesn't always control them enough for human convenience.