It’s math in the sense that you probably didn’t make arithmetic errors (I’m not gonna do similar calculations because I would make arithmetic errors!) but it doesn’t mean anything. You don’t pay into any form of insurance to get back what you paid in, you pay to get a defined benefit based on defined rules. So I don’t get your reason for describing it in these terms.

I can’t argue the calculations, because I don’t have actuarial training. But isn’t Social Security like any other insurance? Some people will collect more than they paid in, others less, or nothing depending on how long they live.

You don’t expect to get back dollar for dollar what you pay. You expect everyone to pay in and collect according to schedules built on a sound actuarial basis. That’s why Social Security payments/benefits have been re-calculated numerous times before, and need a small recalculation (raising the cap or applying to all forms of income, for example) to better meet the needs in 25 years. (And of course the fund shouldn’t be borrowed for other purposes and not paid back, but that’s another story).

Sorry if I can’t be more technically accurate on this, but I think that’s how insurance works. ??

just lurkin – but here’s Jill Stein’s jobs program

Green New Deal

We will end unemployment in America once and for all by ensuring a job at a living wage for every American willing and able to work…

Our Full Employment Program will create 16 million jobs through a community-based direct employment initiative that will be nationally funded, locally controlled, and democratically protected against conflicts of interest…

The elites in the corner offices will be ok for a while (I imagine it will be some time before the wholesale eating of the 1% by the .01%) but once debtors’ prisons are re-instated for people who can’t pay their mortgages or student loans, there may be sufficient literacy skills among prison labor to replace that $120K mailroom worker you mentioned.

I don’t think anyone should think the race to the bottom for wages, working conditions, and benefitsw is going to stop just before it gets to them.

Good paying jobs like these?

I apologize for my share in getting OT onto the war issue. But it’s always the same conversation regardless of the issue, isn’t it? The President’s critics on the left actually show him the respect of expecting him to act in a strong, courageous, principled manner, and his supposed defenders keep coming up with excuses as to why he couldn’t possibly.

Thank you for bringing the focus back to the issue at hand. We just saw the President of the United States invoke states’ rights to deny people their civil rights.

No one said anything about ordering them all out in February. He said he would bring them out one brigade at a time over the course of about 18 months. Instead he kept them there another year beyond that, and, as has been said twice already in this thread, wanted to stay beyond the GWB-negotiated deadline. It was the government of Iraq, not the President that ended the Iraq war.

What would you have said if McCain or Bush had done exactly what Obama did? Would it have been ok as long they had VP’s who didn’t make a profit from Halliburton?

This continues to illustrate the fallacy of lesser-of-2-evilism. If people keep finding reasons to endorse any amount of evil as long as they can point to a (real or possible, past or future) greater evil, then things always get more evil, not less.

You said:

Keeping troops in Iraq cannot carry the same level of dishonor as lying them into Iraq in the first place

Obama campaigned on how he was against the Iraq war from the beginning, and said he would begin withdrawing troops immediately. Instead, he kept the war going and tried to prolong it beyond the GWB-negotiated withdrawal date. Iraqis and US military continued to die. A country that represented no threat to the US continued to be ravaged. He wanted to continue doing this. On what moral scale does this measure as less dishonorable?

If you want to present a lesser-of-2-evils defense, you need to find something that’s actually less evil, not just differently evil.

Authoritarian regimes have pretty much the same goals whether in China or Wisconsin: people working for subsistence wages under poor working conditions so that the .01% can amass still more wealth and power. Fortunately for all of us, the people of Wisconsin have a long tradition of recognizing a wider and deeper vision of “value” than the one you think a CEO should be “maximizing.”

Thank you for this timely reminder of all that’s at stake right now. Thank you and good luck to the people of Wisconsin as you proceed with the elections.