From Nancy Pelosi’s hometown paper:
What to do about mushrooming government payments as millions of Baby Boomers retire? How about a giant federal Ponzi scheme? That might work for a while.
But wait. That’s pretty much the current system. Social Security takes contributions from today’s workers and uses them to pay the old-age benefits that were promised to retirees. But there are serious concerns how long that can last.
President Barack Obama has said he’ll tackle Social Security and related “entitlement” programs when the health care overhaul is resolved. But the anger and intensity of that debate could complicate his effort.
Failure on health care could make it harder, if not impossible, for Obama to successfully tackle overhauling Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The raucous health care debate is “a bad omen for any change in social policy,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who’s also a former Senate aide.
Of course, none other than Paul Krugman, less than two years ago, called Obama a “sucker” and a “fool” for believing that there was any crisis in Social security. Never mind that Krugman himself had a long history of warning of the exact same demographic catastrophe not long before his attack on Obama.
Maybe Paul needed some better words to describe his nuanced view of the situation. Too bad he couldn’t borrow a few.
At any rate, there’s a very, very old phrase out there in the English language about ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’. There is no good etymology (if that is the correct word for a phrase rather than a word) for this phrase as far as I could find. But this comes closest, I suspect:
Its source would seem to be the following story. A man comes in late at night to a lodging house, rather the worse for wear. He sits on his bed, drags one shoe off and drops it on the floor. Guiltily remembering everyone around him trying to sleep, he takes the other one off much more carefully and quietly puts in on the floor. He then finishes undressing and gets into bed. Just as he is drifting off to sleep, a shout comes from the man in the room below: “Well, drop the other one then! I can’t sleep, waiting for you to drop the other shoe!”. This may come from music hall or vaudeville, though it would seem that nobody has been able to tie it down more precisely.
We’ve seen the Obama “stimulus” – that is doing nothing much of anything. We have seen his Herculean push for crap and tax legislation that will cause energy prices to skyrocket – Obama’s words, not mine. We have seen two American automobile companies stolen from their investors and the stolen goods gifted to the UAW. We have seen an almost unhinged push for immediate health care “reform” with trillion plus dollar price tags along with other various and sundry insane deficit spending. Now we wait for the next “improvement” to Social Security.
Like that guy in the joke, we are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
We just had no idea that the guy living upstairs was a millipede.
