Here's a Rashomon moment for you. Former senator Alan Simpson emerged from the White House Debt Commission meeting and was hit with questions from an activist from Social Security Works. Breitbert links the video with "Watch Alan Simpson school a lefty" and notes "He doesn't duck. He doesn't hide. He doesn't grab the guy around the wrist or neck. And the cry-babies at Huffington Post complain that he uses profanity."
Indeed that seems to be the nub of the HuffPost review which lists the transcript of the confrontation. Simpson hits all the points that are familiar to (the handful of) readers of this blog: the program will be insolvent in 2037 and then will be able to pay only a portion of benefits, there are no "assets" in the SS Fund because it's a series of circular IOUs, raising the retirement age is a reasonable first step to modernize the program to today's life expectancies, and so on.
Instead of addressing these unassailable truisms, the lefty blogs – who have been big fans of profanity – gripe that Simpson used expletives and the term "lesser people" to refer to those of lower economic status. The comments on the blogs are noted for their typical maturity: Simpson's old, he's from Wyoming, he hates workers, he's a Rethug. Kudos to Simpson for sticking it out for eight minutes; he understands what's at issue here:
SIMPSON: Just listen, will you listen to me instead of babbling? In the year 2037, instead of getting 100% of your check, you are going to get about 75% of your check. That's if you touch nothing. If you like that, fine. You'll be picking with the chickens yourself when you're 65.Fine...wanna do nothing? The rate of return for Social Security, which is already in the low single digits, will drop firmly into negative territory when the legislation-mandated benefit cuts fall into place. When that occurs, the people most affected will be the poorer Americans who depend on the system most, the very people that clowns like Alex Lawson and Jane Hamsher allegedly support.
Extra – Legal Insurrection: "Ambush interviewer gets ambushed."
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Senator James Inhofe on President Obama's "whose ass to kick" comment:
"Right now, I think the president made a mistake in the words that he used in an interview yesterday. I think that he lost a lot of credibility there when he used words that were not very presidential."
BlogCritic Victor Lana on Joe Biden's on-mic "big F-ing deal" whisper:
"We can be certain that Mr. Biden understands the nature of cursing, and he must also know that doing it on national television at the White House is not appropriate. What message is being sent to the general public, to people in other nations around the world, and more importantly to the children who may have heard him? Is it that cursing is okay? Will kids start thinking, “If he can speak that way to the President of the United States, can’t we speak that way to our parents and teachers?”
Two words on the outraged outrage over the outrageousness of the Simpson potty mouth outrage: Puh and Leeze.
The comment you quote from Simpson, "Just listen, will you listen to me instead of babbling? In the year 2037, instead of getting 100% of your check, you are going to get about 75% of your check," was IN DIRECT RESPONSE to the questioner asking "What do you mean by 'broke'? Do you mean the surplus will go out and then it will only be able to pay 75% of its benefits?"
Kind of hard to make the case there that Alan Simpson was masterfully schooling the ignorant guy.
As for avoiding unassailable truisms, here's more from the exchange:
LAWSON: But what I'm telling you is Social Security is separate though, from the general budget, right? It's totally in the green.
SIMPSON: But it wasn't. Just four weeks ago, there wasn't as much coming in as going out.
LAWSON: Except you're not calculating the interest paid on the bonds, because, if you do include that, it's still in the green this year.
SIMPSON: Well you can go through all the sophistry of babbling that you want to.
LAWSON: It's not sophistry. It's just what the SSA says. So I'm just going on the numbers.
Alan Simpson sure likes the word "babbling."
Here's one more exchange of dueling truisms:
SIMPSON: Of course not because they thought ... the retirement ... they that you would die at 57 and that's why they set the date at 65. If you can't get through this stuff, then why do you spread this crap. The thing was setup when the life expectancy was 57 years and that's why they set 65 as the retirement date. Now the life expectancy is 78, whatever it is, and so we have to adjust that and make it work for the future people like you in the United States.
[Side track into debate about "worthless IOUs" vs. "full faith and credit of the government"]
LAWSON: But in my understanding from actually looking at the 1983 commission, they actually started prefunding the retirement of the baby boom by building up that huge surplus.
SIMPSON: They never knew there was a baby boom in '83.
Fascinating. Apparently, as of the year 1983, no one had yet identified a "baby boom" in American society. Certainly not government demographers. Nor the 1983 Greenspan Commission, which acted as described for no particular reason.
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