real de catorce in Clark's car

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Clark,

You may remember that you spoke not long ago
of my coming with you in your car to Real de
Catorce. Offer still good?

Mike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Clark Santos" <clarksantos@argolink.net>
To: "Remembrances of Austin Ghetto" <GHETTO2@LISTS.WHATHELPS.COM>;
<austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net>
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 12:15 PM
Subject: Fwd: usa broke?


>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> > From: Clark Santos <clarksantos@argolink.net>
> > Date: September 23, 2004 12:05:39 PM CDT
> > To: Remembrances of Austin Ghetto <GHETTO2@LISTS.WHATHELPS.COM>,
> > austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net
> > Subject: Fwd: usa broke?
> >
> >
> >
> > Begin forwarded message:
> >
> >> From: Clark Santos <clarksantos@argolink.net>
> >> Date: September 23, 2004 11:59:25 AM CDT
> >> To: Remembrances of Austin Ghetto <GHETTO2@LISTS.WHATHELPS.COM>,
> >> austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net
> >> Subject: Re: usa broke?
> >>
> >> It seems logical we should encourage the politicians to double or
> >> triple the Social Security benefits and lower medicare eligibility to
> >> age 60, to benefit every one on the ghetto 2 and even the ghetto
> >> pair-list. According to my calculations as a CPA, there is plenty of
> >> cash to cover the additional government expense, even considering the
> >> current administrations fuckups, to get us to December 21, 2012. Need
> >> I say more....
> >>
> >> We could all observe the Mayan event together at the big Sagittarius
> >> Birthday Party in Real de Catorce. When Ed, Humberto, and I will be
> >> 70 (Fontaine less, Igor more). Even our younger non retired friends
> >> and relatives can all come since they won't be afraid to take off
> >> from work.
> >>
> >> El Patron
> >>
> >> p.s. You can't start planning a party to quickly, I might even write
> >> Lucano a hot check for several busses to hall everybody we know down,
> >> Rodger and Bauldauf could handle the Austin ones. Imagine seeing the
> >> end of some kind of error on peyote !!
> >>
> >>         !!!!
> >>
> >>               !!!!!!
> >> On Sep 23, 2004, at 10:32 AM, telebob wrote:
> >>
> >>> Obviously this is not an election year issue. Yet it should be.
> >>>
> >>> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/
> >>> 2004/09/12
> >>> /MNG2S8NOI21.DTL
> >>>
> >>> Washington -- The first of the 77 million-strong Baby Boom
> >>> generation will
> >>> begin to retire in just four years. The economic consequences of this
> >>> fact -- as scary as they are foreseeable -- are all but ignored by
> >>> President
> >>> Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, who discuss just about
> >>> everything
> >>> but the biggest fiscal challenge of modern times.
> >>> Yet whoever wins the 2004 race will become the first U.S. president
> >>> to
> >>> confront what sober-minded experts across the political spectrum
> >>> describe as
> >>> an impending "fiscal catastrophe" lying right around the corner.
> >>> Astronomical federal debt, coming due as the Baby Boom generation
> >>> collects
> >>> Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, is enormous enough to swamp
> >>> the
> >>> promises both candidates are making to voters, whether for tax cuts,
> >>> health
> >>> care, 40,000 more troops or anything else.
> >>> "Chilling" is the word U.S. Comptroller General David Walker uses to
> >>> describe the budget outlook.
> >>> "The long-term budget projections are just horrifying," added Leonard
> >>> Burman, co-director of tax policy for the Urban Institute. "I've got
> >>> four
> >>> children and it really disturbs me. I just think it's irresponsible
> >>> what
> >>> we're doing to them."
> >>> What these numbers portend are crippling tax increases on workers,
> >>> slashed
> >>> benefits for retirees, gutted budgets for homeland security,
> >>> highways,
> >>> research and everything else, and an economic decline or a financial
> >>> collapse that devastates the middle class, as happened recently in
> >>> debt-strapped Argentina. Eventually, analysts insist, someone -- 
> >>> today's
> >>> children or tomorrow's elderly or both -- will pay this debt.
> >>> Traditional budget measures used by politicians and the press give
> >>> what
> >>> Walker and many others call a highly misleading view of the U.S.
> >>> debt. These
> >>> focus on publicly held debt already incurred, now at $4.5 trillion,
> >>> or
> >>> 10-year budget forecasts like the one released last week by the
> >>> Congressional Budget Office showing a record $422 billion deficit
> >>> this year
> >>> and a $2.3 trillion 10- year deficit.
> >>> 'Fiscal gap' in the trillions
> >>> But these figures, worrisome enough, are deceptive because they
> >>> ignore
> >>> future liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare payments to
> >>> the Baby
> >>> Boomers. An array of government and private analysts put the actual
> >>> U.S.
> >>> "fiscal gap," which means all future receipts minus all future
> >>> obligations,
> >>> at $40 trillion (Government Accountability Office) to $72 trillion
> >>> (Social
> >>> Security Board of Trustees).
> >>> These are not sums, but present-value figures, heavily discounted to
> >>> show in
> >>> today's dollars what it would cost to pay off the debt immediately.
> >>> The
> >>> International Monetary Fund estimates the gap at $47 trillion, the
> >>> Brookings
> >>> Institution at $60 trillion.
> >>> "To give you idea how big the problem is," said Laurence Kotlikoff,
> >>> economics chairman at Boston University, who has written extensively
> >>> on the
> >>> subject, to close a $51 trillion fiscal gap, "you'd have to have an
> >>> immediate and permanent 78 percent hike in the federal income tax."
> >>> These obligations are not imaginary. And unlike the 1980s and 1990s,
> >>> economic growth cannot bail out the government because the Baby Boom
> >>> retirement is at hand. Those born in 1946 will reach age 62 in 2008,
> >>> allowing them to take early retirement and receive Social Security
> >>> benefits.
> >>> "It's a number that's so large that people find it implausible, and
> >>> so they
> >>> don't think about it," said Alan Auerbach, a UC Berkeley economist
> >>> who
> >>> studies the issue and consults for the Kerry campaign. "But it's
> >>> based
> >>> simply on the projections we have for Social Security and Medicare.
> >>> People
> >>> aren't making these numbers up."
> >>> A pathbreaking study by Jagadeesh Gokhale of the Federal Reserve
> >>> Bank of
> >>> Cleveland and Kent Smetters, a former deputy assistant secretary at
> >>> the
> >>> Treasury -- commissioned by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill --
> >>> estimated a $44 trillion fiscal gap. It laid out a few painful
> >>> options on
> >>> how to meet the liabilities:
> >>> -- More than double the payroll tax, immediately and forever, from
> >>> 15.3
> >>> percent of wages to nearly 32 percent;
> >>> -- Raise income taxes by two-thirds, immediately and forever;
> >>> -- Cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 45 percent,
> >>> immediately and
> >>> forever;
> >>> -- Or eliminate forever all discretionary spending, which includes
> >>> the
> >>> military, homeland security, highways, courts, national parks and
> >>> most of
> >>> what the federal government does outside of the transfer of payments
> >>> to the
> >>> elderly.
> >>> Such corrective actions grow more severe each year. Waiting just
> >>> until 2008,
> >>> the end of the next presidency, would mean raising the payroll tax
> >>> to 33. 5
> >>> percent instead of 32 percent, the study found.
> >>> Gokhale said that fresh numbers from the Medicare trustees show the
> >>> fiscal
> >>> gap has since grown to $72 trillion, $10 trillion of that for Social
> >>> Security and an astonishing $62 trillion for Medicare, the
> >>> government health
> >>> care program for the elderly.
> >>> "The long-term picture is pretty bad," Gokhale said.
> >>> Election's absent issue
> >>> These numbers are seldom discussed, least of all in the 2004
> >>> presidential
> >>> race. Ironically, as the Baby Boom retirement has neared -- and the
> >>> remedies
> >>> grow more painful -- political discussion has faded. Gone is Ross
> >>> Perot's
> >>> anti-deficit crusade. Gone is Newt Gingrich's call for Medicare
> >>> restraint.
> >>> Gone is Al Gore's "lockbox" for the Social Security surplus.
> >>> Instead, Kerry and Bush promise only to halve the current deficit in
> >>> four
> >>> years -- "both (of them) relying on pretty imaginative accounting to
> >>> get
> >>> there" said Burman -- while promising more spending and more tax
> >>> cuts.
> >>> Yet today's deficit is a tiny fraction of the government's actual
> >>> liabilities, which are so daunting they promise to make Bush's tax
> >>> cuts a
> >>> distant memory and Kerry's health care plan a fantasy.
> >>> While Bush and Kerry propose to address parts of the problem, "the
> >>> numbers
> >>> don't add up on either side," Walker said.
> >>> Medicare makes up the bulk of these liabilities, driven mainly by the
> >>> expanding elderly population and rapidly rising health costs. Social
> >>> Security, more often discussed as a looming problem, actually
> >>> accounts for
> >>> far less in future debt.
> >>> While Congress squabbles over whether the administration hid the new
> >>> prescription drug benefit's 10-year cost -- pegged by the White
> >>> House at
> >>> $534 billion versus CBO's $395 billion -- the actual liability
> >>> incurred by
> >>> the new drug benefit is estimated at $8 trillion to $12 trillion.
> >>> Kerry and Democrats call the drug benefit inadequate. They would do
> >>> little
> >>> to restrain Medicare costs other than allowing the importation of
> >>> price-
> >>> controlled drugs from Canada.
> >>> Bush and Republicans added the drug benefit along with costly
> >>> subsidies to
> >>> providers. Even optimists do not expect their modest market reforms
> >>> to cut
> >>> costs.
> >>> Promises, promises
> >>> Kerry has promised not to cut Social Security. "I will not cut
> >>> benefits," he
> >>> said recently. "I will not raise the retirement age."
> >>> Democrats generally cite "trust fund" numbers that show Social
> >>> Security - -
> >>> and Medicare to a lesser extent -- remaining solvent for decades,
> >>> even
> >>> though government officials repeatedly call the numbers an accounting
> >>> fiction. CBO director Douglas Holzt-Eakin last week said the funds
> >>> contain
> >>> nothing but "electronic chits" that measure government obligations to
> >>> itself.
> >>> Bush proposes adding private accounts to Social Security for younger
> >>> workers, which could reduce future government obligations, but would
> >>> do so
> >>> by diverting a portion of the payroll tax, adding $1 trillion to the
> >>> short-term deficit. That might have been feasible when Bush took
> >>> office in
> >>> 2000 facing a projected $5.6 trillion surplus, but the surplus is
> >>> gone.
> >>> Similar plans in Congress that instead rely more on benefit cuts
> >>> have gone
> >>> nowhere.
> >>> "The country's absolutely broke, and both Bush and Kerry are being
> >>> irresponsible in not addressing this problem," Kotlikoff said. "This
> >>> administration and previous administrations have set us up for a
> >>> major
> >>> financial crisis on the order of what Argentina experienced a couple
> >>> of
> >>> years ago."
> >>> If this sounds far-fetched, former Bush Treasury Undersecretary
> >>> Peter Fisher
> >>> and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin both alluded to
> >>> such a
> >>> scenario at a June budget forum in Washington.
> >>> "Having been involved in markets for a long, long time," Rubin said,
> >>> "I can
> >>> tell you these things can change unexpectedly and without warning,"
> >>> referring to potential financial market reactions to the U.S. fiscal
> >>> position.
> >>> Fisher warned of a "pivot point" when "the collective wisdom of bond
> >>> traders
> >>> thinks that the deficit horizon has turned," adding, "Both Bob and I
> >>> are
> >>> nervous."
> >>> The world has seen fiscal imbalances of this sort before, in Asia
> >>> and Russia
> >>> in the late 1990s and more recently in South America. Such financial
> >>> panics
> >>> can be triggered by any number of events -- a flight from Treasury
> >>> bonds by
> >>> the foreigners who buy much of the U.S. debt, for example -- if
> >>> investors'
> >>> views of the market, which are focused on the short term, suddenly
> >>> change.
> >>> "If you look at financial crises, they occur seemingly overnight,"
> >>> said
> >>> Kotlikoff. "More and more pieces of straw drop on the camel's back,
> >>> and all
> >>> of a sudden, the camel collapses. ... Nobody knew exactly what day
> >>> Argentina
> >>> was going to go south or exactly what day Russia was going to
> >>> default. The
> >>> timing is up for grabs."
> >>> But early signs of a problem are now appearing, analysts said,
> >>> starting with
> >>> the mounting deficits under Bush caused not just by the recession and
> >>> terrorist attacks, but also by enormous spending increases and tax
> >>> cuts. The
> >>> brief window of surpluses that appeared during the late 1990s
> >>> economic boom
> >>> offered a chance to address long-range liabilities, but those
> >>> surpluses now
> >>> are gone.
> >>> "Maybe the public doesn't want to hear it," Kotlikoff said. "Maybe
> >>> politicians think ... the American public can't understand the truth
> >>> or hear
> >>> the truth or bear the truth. I think this is garbage. I think that
> >>> people
> >>> care about their kids and grandchildren and need to know the dangers
> >>> facing
> >>> them --
> >>> and us."
> >>>
>