Promises and Ponzi Schemes

I'm taking a break from my break long enough to comment on the latest news . . ..

President Obama's speech last night laid out $447 billion in tax credits for businesses to hire new workers, spend more money on highways and bridges, and extend payroll tax cuts with the cost for the package to be paid for with future spending cuts to keep the debt and budget deficit down. If the speech was an effort to show that he is committed to solving the nation's employment crisis, Obama succeeded. If it was an effort to get something done, of course the Republicans will never go along with it. If the bipartisan proposals in the speech were meant to make the Republicans pay a political price for inaction, well, that might work. But then the Dow lost 303 points, in part because of more fears about European debt, but also because no one expects any of these proposals to pass, indicating that none of Obama's initiatives may matter much.

Eighteen years ago, when Bill Clinton first entered the White House, I would have heard a speech with economic proposals exactly like Obama's (I probably did) and reacted by saying "Sounds good!" After hearing excerpts of the speech after the fact (I didn't get to watch it live) I didn't want to get up and cheer. In fact, I didn't want to do anything. I simply went about my normal life.

Though, tonight, Chris Matthews declared the speech passionate and pointed, and he predicted Obama may have turned a corner. He may be right. But he may also be right when he suggested that Rick Perry could easily beat Obama in November 2012, if the economy remains bad enough.

Speaking of which, the big news to come out of the Republican presidential debate was Perry's insistence that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, which encouraged right-wing commentators to parrot their agreement without explaining what a Ponzi scheme is. A Ponzi scheme, for the record, is, according to Wikipedia, "a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors." By the way, Social Security is in surplus right now and will be for several years, and when there are fewer workers paying into the system, a few minor adjustments can be made to keep it going well into its second century.