(Thom Stewart) said:
I've lived long enough to get into the funds money.


Dave wrote:
What funds money? It's already been spent. You're just collecting on IOUs.

Yep.

The IOUs happen to be Treasury bonds, the most secure investment in the
world; also the financial instrument that makes defeicit spending possible.

So- there are two good reasons to drop this particular line of malarkey.

DSK

What funds money? It's already been spent. You're just collecting on IOUs.


Yep.

The IOUs happen to be Treasury bonds, the most secure investment in the
world; also the financial instrument that makes defeicit spending possible.


Dave wrote:
Not quite. He's collecting on the IOUs represented by the guvmint's promise
to pay SS benefits.

???

Since when is that an IOU? It seems pretty straightforward to me... Thom
is qualified for SS benefits, they give him the money. No IOUs involved,
unless you think President Bush is deliberately lying when he says he's
not going to cut current benefits due.



..... Since we're paying more in in SS taxes than the
amount going out, the guvmint is spending the rest of the money

Whoa right there. "The guv'mint" isn't "spending the money." It is
paying out SS benefits... which covers a lot more than just retirees,
BTW. While the SS excess has been used for decades to mask the true size
of the deficit, the gov'mint is NOT spending SS money on other things
and it never has.

... and giving
IOUs for it in the form of bonds.

Yep... as I said, Treasury bonds, the most secure investment available
*and* the means for Bush's deficit financing.

... Once the money being paid by us working
stiffs isn't enough to pay out the current benefits, the guvmint will (it is
hoped) start paying off the bond IOUs from some combination of income taxes
on working stiffs and the proceeds of issuing more bond IOUs, so it can use
that money to pay the SS IOUs.


What a tangled web you try to weave. Why are you worried about the U.S.
government defaulting on it's debt obligations? If that does happen 1-
it will largely be because of extremely irresponsible fiscal policy by
the Bush/Cheney crowd and 2- we'll all have much worse problems, as US
default is likely to bring on a world wide economic crisis.


It's a scheme worthy of Enron.


I thought you claimed Ken Lay wasn't guilty of anything?

DSK

You don't take Rogaine...you spray it on your scalp...

"Capt. Mooron" wrote in message
news:qOn%d.80155$i6.40582@edtnps90...
No thanks.... I don't take medication unless it's absolutely required.
Maybe an aspirin once or twice a year. I rarely get headaches, maybe once
every five years.... I don't take meds for that either. If the hair wants
to go.. let it.

Anyway... I shave myself bald twice a year as it is.

CM

"katysails" wrote in message
...
Maybe you should consider Rogaine then so there is no further
depletion...

"Capt. Mooron" wrote in message
news:tDh%d.83217$fc4.81245@edtnps89...
Fear not... I have a full head of hair... albeit thinning a bit on the
crown..... but nowhere near bald. It's been like that for years.

CM

"katysails" wrote in message
...
I'm so sorry that alopecia hit you so early! Have you tried Rogaine?


"Capt. Mooron" wrote in message
news:14h%d.83201$fc4.22793@edtnps89...
I can remember a nickel admission for a movie and 5 cents for
popcorn... I can remember when the Five&Dime only charged 5 cents to 10
cents for goods. I can remember 50 cents for a pack of smokes and 10
cents for a coffee with free refills.

I'm going to be 50 this year..... I don't even have one grey hair
yet!

CM
.
"katysails" wrote in message
...
you a grandpappy...you dat old...

"Flying Tadpole" wrote in message
...
Geez THom, all that was true when I was growing up too, and bedamned
if I'm _that_ old!

Thom Stewart wrote:
God Bless Him Scotty,

Us old *******s are really from a different time, good or bad, who
knows? It is what makes us different and we know we are different.
Can't
help it. We do appreciate the love shown us

We come from a time when cigarette smoking was OK. In our day we
mowed
grass. It wasn't worth $100 / ounce. Aids were people that worked
for
free.

Fast food meant fish on Friday. We didn't know about instant
coffee.

TIME-SHARING meant moments together, like your Dad's Birthday
Party.
Hardware meant stuff from a Hardware Store. Software was like
flannel
PJ's and slippers.

Made in Japan meant junk.

Making Out meant you had a job that paid the bills. A nickel
brought an
ice cream cone, a big bar of candy, a telephone call even a postage
stamp with change.

Your Dad and I are SURVIVORS from another time so celebrate his
Birthday
and overlook the "Generation Gap" We can't help it any more than
you!

Ole Thom

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!


--
Flying Tadpole

-------------------------
http://music.download.com/timfatchen
http://music.download.com/internetopera
http://www.soundclick.com/flyingtadpolemusic.htm

OK: to set the scene, no, I was post WWII but still within the
wrong half of the 20th Century. SO:

Thom Stewart wrote:
Tad,

Do you remember gasoline at 11 cents a gallon.

No, but I remember it at 25 cents: plus 5c for the oil to run my
2-stroke DKW.

Do you remember a new
Chevy or Ford for $6oo. Do you remember damn few people could afford to
by a new car.

I have vague memories of a RUgby, and a 30's Vauxhall, but the
first car we had was second-hand, when I was 14...

We were born before Fm radio,
Yep

television

That arrived when I was 11/12
, frozen food, plastic,
Yep
polioshots,
My brother had polio. Kids my age in calipers were common. Most
of them died young.
ball point pens,
Steel nibs and inkwells at school
dishwashers, clothes driers, credit cards,
26 y.o., 40y.o. 32 y.o.
air conditioners,
Still don't have one of those (other than in the car)
electric blankets,
No, they were around for all I can remember
pantyhose, the PILL!
They weren't around when I first became interested in females;
they were once I was able to do something about my
interests...one was great but the other was a real nuisance; do
you think that was intentional?

We could get 10 cent for a Saturday afternoon movie if we could find
enough empty soda bottle to take back to the grocery store for deposit.
( Made of glass)
Still was that in the 50's. Hey, 1/3 (=12 cents) bought: a pie
or pastie for lunch, with a buttered fruit bun, and a bottle of
Coke, and a couple of biscuits for morning recess.

ROCK Music was a Grandma's lullaby sung in a rocking chair
Heh: I didn't find out about rock music till I was 13...

We knew gasoline, car tires, sugar, butter and meat rationing.
NOW you're making me feel younger. None of the above

I remember unpaved road with three ruts in them. Two made by wagon
wheels and the middle one made by the horse
Unpaved roads stretching for hundreds of miles are still a big
part of my life. Re the horses: no, no ruts, but horses used for
inner-city milk and bread deliveries, yes.

But WE SURVIVED!! If you remember life then you were born before WW2.
If you were TAD, then you are on our side of the GENERATION GAP!! You're
OLD
NO I'm not! All the above just demonstrates how much longer the
same sort of existence continued.

Some things to add:
GOing to school a few miles down the line by steam train, usually
pulled out by a 4-6-0, sometimes tender first, occasionally by
bigger steam (depending on what was on the roster) and the return
trip in a Brill car.

Riding the four-wheeler streetcars on holidays in Ballaarat.

Watching as a kid the coaster ketches Stormbird and Hawk (the
former lost--in a typhoon in the SOuth CHina Sea, from
memory--the latter still going strong as a gentleman's yacht,
back to her original rig of a Revenooer Schooner) being loaded
with bagged wheat at Edithburgh, the wharfies riding the brakes
of the little fourwheel rail trucks as they went down the slope
to the jetty (and a horse to pull empty trucks back up to the
wheat stacks on the low clifftop).

As a teenager fishing on the Port Adelaide breakwater, watching
one of the last trading 3-masted schooners sailing in: no
topmasts but still with a jib and forestaysail set. And that last
was mid 1960s.


--
Flying Tadpole

-------------------------
http://music.download.com/timfatchen
http://music.download.com/internetopera
http://www.soundclick.com/flyingtadpolemusic.htm

CM,

Sorry, 50 cents a packet makes you a kid. Go back to when they were 15c
& 20c and there weren't any vending machines.

Damn Kids don't "Remember When" I bet you don't even remember when
"Lucky Strike Green Went to War!" Do you know that Lucky Strikes use to
come in a green pack? They were one of the 20c packs

Ole Thom.




http://community.webtv.net/tassail/ThomsPage

"Dave" wrote
IOUs for it in the form of bonds. Once the money being paid by us working
stiffs isn't enough to pay out the current benefits, the guvmint will (it
is
hoped) start paying off the bond IOUs from some combination of income
taxes
on working stiffs and the proceeds of issuing more bond IOUs, so it can
use
that money to pay the SS IOUs.

Yup. Good old RR, king of the neocons, ran up huge deficites and threw a
party, just like GWB is doing right now. They call it prosperity.
Conservatives call it madness. Democrats under Clinton tried to fix the mess
but he got a BJ and that's alot worse than putting us $trillions in debt. So
when your SS taxes no longer pay benefits, then there will have to be a big
tax increase to pay the bills from RR's party - and it won't be on the rich.
Later on your kids will get to pay for GWB's fun. But the people of Iraq
will have been made free to elect an Iranian style democracy. Enjoy the
party ....

Whoa right there. "The guv'mint" isn't "spending the money." It is
paying out SS benefits... which covers a lot more than just retirees,
BTW. While the SS excess has been used for decades to mask the true size
of the deficit, the gov'mint is NOT spending SS money on other things
and it never has.


Dave wrote:
Let me get this straight. The guvmint takes more in in SS taxes than it pays
out in SS benefits. It exchanges the extra money it takes in for bonds. Now
it has the money and the SS trustees have IOUs called bonds. So what do you
say it's doing with the money it exchanges for bonds? Putting it under the
Treasury Secretary's mattress until the bonds come due? I don't think so. It
uses the money to pay salaries, buy goods and services, etc.--things we
generally call "spending."


So it's a legal money-laundering scheme. It's still not the same as
spending the SS money, any more than I can claim I paid for my
neighbor's house because his mortgage is held by a bank in which I'm a
depositor.

You should be glad that the SS Trust Fund is buying Uncle Sam's IOUs (ie
Treasury bonds, the most secure investment possible). Otherwise Bush &
Cheney's deficit spending would have to be entirely financed by the
Japanese, Chinese, French, etc etc.

DSK

I thought you claimed Ken Lay wasn't guilty of anything?


Dave wrote:
A few months ago I was more conversant with the ins and the outs of the
Enron fraud than I am now. Not sure I ever addressed Lay's culpability.
Certainly Andy Fastow was responsible for some accounting fraud, however.

Seems likely to me that the previous CFO was in on the gag too; if Lay
is guilty of nothing else he's is certainly guilty of fraud & conspiracy
to fraud.

I certainly don't know all the convoultions of SEC rules, but advising
other people to buy Enron stock when he himself was borrowing money from
Enron to buy optioned stock and immediately selling it, strikes me as
extremely fraudulent.

DSK

You should be glad that the SS Trust Fund is buying Uncle Sam's IOUs (ie
Treasury bonds, the most secure investment possible). Otherwise Bush &
Cheney's deficit spending would have to be entirely financed by the
Japanese, Chinese, French, etc etc.


Dave wrote:
You have it just backwards, Doug.

I disagree.

... Think about it for a minute.

I have, for more than that, even.

... If you have a
pension from GM, and you're concerned about whether GM will have the money
to pay it, would you rather your pension fund be invested in GM promissory
notes, or promissory notes of a bunch of other solid companies which are
extremely unlikely to all fail at the same time?


Multiple companies, of course... but how is this relevant? For one
thing, no private company can print it's own money; for another, if
Uncle Sam defaults on our debt we will have a full-blown world-wide
economic crisis to worry about; for a third, Uncle Sam is already the
guarantor of all companies private pension plans already... in fact this
is another impending blow-up...


Congress already answered that question for private pension funds. Their
ability to hold employer securities is extremely limited. If we wanted a
secure investment for the SS money to be sure the money would be there,
rather than a smoke and mirrors system, we'd be lending the excess SS
payments to the Japanese, Chinese, French, Swiss, etc., not to the outfit
that owes the SS benefits anyway.


IMHO you're the one who has it backwards... why would the Japanese,
Chinese, French, Swiss, etc etc pay private US citizens retirement
benefits when they could default at no risk?

The way the current system is set up, default is *very* risky to the
borrower. This should give a great deal of reassurance to those
dependent on the proceeds of that debt.

DSK

"Dave" wrote

But I
do remember seeing a tool in the basement for rolling your own that
dated
from WWII--I presume because the store-bought cigs were rationed.


that wasn't for tobacco, Dave.

Scotty