Rhetoric or Reality?

This past Friday’s Ledger Dispatch contained statements from our incumbent Congressional Representative Tom McClintock and challenger Bob Derlet. Derlet’s statements conjured images of Huey Long’s demagoguery. He said that McClintock and others wanted to gut the Social Security system. While this may be effective fear mongering offering unspoken images of old people starving, it has no truth. Tom McClintock has said that Social Security needs to be phased out. He, along with more official, bipartisan reports than one can count, have stated that Social Security is actuarially (and demographically) unsound. It was a depression era quick fix based on a 66 year life span. Many counties, especially in Europe, have similar problems. The situation is best defined as how to create a system to provide retirement income, not as continually tweaking and extending something that will ultimately fail. Conservatives, moderates and liberals in the British Parliament, the California state legislature and throughout the world are discussing and implementing workable solutions. The literature regarding retirement financing ideas is vast.  If he’s not aware of these efforts as he spouts off it doesn’t speak very well of him.

Derlet further fears that McClintock, Trump and others want to turn the system over to Wall Street. If it was in their hands, they would have captured the overall return on invested capital over the past 50 or so years of about 8%. But Social Security has instead returned about 1.6% over the same time period. Derlet believes that this is: “…one of America’s greatest success stories…” Since the entire Social Security Trust Fund is invested in US Treasury debt  (no real money there, just IOU’s), the only success I can see is a scam to keep afloat an over extended deficit ridden government.  He says that “The hedge fund managers can’t wait to get their hands on your money…” While pensions sometimes use hedge funds, they are irrelevant for individual retirement programs or accounts, and not about to be approved under Labor Department rules. Also, hedge funds are doing poorly and falling out of favor as endowments and other investors are pulling their money out. The free market system is self correcting, something he doesn’t seem to grasp. This is not surprising, since he has spent his entire life working for governments or non-profits.

But he not only wants to preserve a doomed retirement income system, he want to increase benefits by closing so-called tax loopholes. This sounds like Obama’s mantra about billionaires and millionaires that don’t pay their fair share. But the IRS data tells a different story. Many people make a million dollars in a certain year; they sell a business, take capital gains on appreciated real estate or stocks, or write a hit song or novel. But they aren’t millionaires, and that million dollar year rarely reoccurs. Derlet doesn’t let reality doesn’t interfere with his rhetoric. We must all be too stupid to see what’s real.

In a stark contrast to Derlet’s factless fear mongering, incumbent Tom McClintock’s companion statement was a practical, feet on the ground exposition of his efforts to remove dead and dying trees. This includes a bipartisan effort in Congress, and the realistic awareness that overcrowded, unlogged forests bred disease. With or without the drought, the pine bark beetle would have arisen to thin our forests. The same phenomenon occurs in Japan, when rice farmers attempt to push their patties with over-planting. The rice blast disease appears and attacks the crop. This is well-documented in Masanobu Fukuoka’s “The Natural Way of Farming, The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy”. The book’s introduction states: “My greatest fear today is that of nature being made the plaything of the human intellect.” He discusses real ecology, not the pseudo science of environmentalism prevalent today.  Nature will always seek a balance just as the free market is self correcting. There is an inherent order to life that escapes the experts given their over educated ability to rationalize away common sense.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett