ELF News Archives
March 2005- The Siren of Santiago -
President Bush's enthusiasm for Social Security privatization may have had its start on a yacht off the Italian island of Elba in June 1997. As the vessel cruised the Tyrrhenian Sea, José Piñera, once the labor minister for Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, told another passenger—a close friend of Bush's—how he had taken Chile's equivalent of Social Security private.
Mother Jones 3/30
- A Woman's Take on Social Security Overhaul -
Abdnor is the niece of former U.S. Sen. James Abdnor (R-S.D.), who served 14 years in the House and Senate...she was introduced to the gospel of privatization by Jose Pinera, Chile's former labor minister who oversaw that country's transition to a retirement system based on personal accounts. Three years later, Abdnor left Cato to launch the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, a lobbying group created by the National Assn. of Manufacturers to promote Social Security restructuring and private accounts.
LA Times 3/30
- Medicare may raise doctor visit fee -
Medicare beneficiaries may see a double-digit increase in premiums they pay for physician visits and other outpatient care...The increase means many seniors are seeing a rising share of their monthly Social Security checks eaten up by medical costs
New Kerala 3/29
- Elder abuse spreading as population ages in California -
Horrifying as the accounts are, they're becoming more commonplace in California, where the state Department of Justice estimates one in every 20 elderly people are abused or neglected but just one in five cases are reported.
Mecury News 3/29
- Year of Reform Year of Risk -
Business on Capitol Hill has a way of slowing down in presidential election years. As partisan feeling rises, the big issues tend to get put on hold. Neither party is in a mood for compromising nor cutting deals. Everyone is waiting to see who will be in charge the next year in Congress and, of course, the White House.
Keep Media 3/29
- Which Way for Liberty? -
The ideology of the late Bush regime is nationalist and culturally conservative. It is consistently anti-leftist in the sense that it rejects egalitarianism, cultural toleration, free speech, and overt appeals to socialist envy....
What makes it (government) different today is how it is united to an overarching ideology, a distinctly right-wing form of central planning, which takes careful thought to understand.
Lew Rockwell | Mises Institute 3/29
- What If Chicken Little Is Right? -
The 'Storm' report claims that in 30 years, the number of elderly in the
US, the EU and Japan will more than double, while workers paying taxes
to finance old folks benefits will only increase less than 10%, (stats
that are denied by other experts).
Sovereign Society 3/28
- How to heal health care: vouchers for everyone -
next year more than 1 out of every 25 dollars in the entire economy will be devoted to health care for just the 36 million Americans over 65 years of age.
Mercury News 3/28
- Medicare: Bad news for boomers -
The demographics of the baby boom generation are bad news for corporate pension plans, Social Security and Medicare.
Unlike Social Security, Medicare already spends more than it collects from payroll taxes.
Mercury News 3/28
- Welfare Junkies -
We are a nation of closet welfare junkies, which helps explain why we can't have an honest debate about Social Security. Social Security and Medicare are our biggest welfare programs, but because Americans regard "welfare" as shameful, we've found other labels for them. We call them "social insurance" or "entitlements." Anything but welfare.
Washington Post 3/28
- Nursing home chain agrees to auction itself -
The board of Beverly Enterprises Inc. has voted to put the nursing home operator up for auction, a move that could force a Georgia investor group vying to take over the company to raise its offer.
Beverly on Tuesday cited its improved financial performance as a reason for its decision...
Business Tech 3/23
- Alzheimer's Disease - Better Cures, Precautions, Remedies -
Your elderly spouse repeatedly forgets to lock the front door, doesn't show up for a weekly hair appointment, loses her way to a friend's house or forgets recent conversations. Is it Alzheimer's disease or might something else be wrong?
KNTimes 3/23
- Study on Nursing Homes Troubling -
Ohio Medicaid officials may be able to save taxpayers some money by following up on a study that may point to waste involving purchases of medicine for nursing home patients. But there is another reason not to let it drop: Information from the study suggests that some Medicaid patients in Ohio nursing homes may be suffering from over-medication.
The Intelligencer 3/23
- Social Security’s Malign Premise -
The president’s suggestion (no detailed proposal has been offered yet) would not give individuals anything like the control over their own incomes and retirement planning they are entitled to. People under 55 would be “allowed” to direct the government to put a small percentage of their Social Security taxes into investment accounts the composition of which would be determined by government planners. On retirement, people apparently would not be free to take the cash in a lump sum.
FFF.ORG 3/20
- The Failed Compromise -
What we have here is a classic example of the failure of compromise, a result of the fundamental intellectual incoherence of the privatization position, hatched decades ago as a means by which Republicans could roll back FDR's scheme without having to tell the truth that the whole program should and must be scrapped.
Lew Rockwell 3/20
- The Consumption Tax: A Critique -
Income taxes are collected in the course of a coercive and even brutal examination of virtually every aspect of every taxpayer's life by the all-seeing, all-powerful Internal Revenue Service. Each taxpayer, furthermore, is obliged by law to keep accurate records of his income and deductions, and then, painstakingly and truthfully, to fill out and submit the very forms that will tend to incriminate him into tax liability.
It makes far more sense to realize that the process of tax-and-expenditures creates two and only two separate, distinct, antagonistic social classes, what Calhoun brilliantly identified as the (net) taxpayers and the (net) tax-consumers, those who pay taxes and those who live off them.
Lew Rockwell 3/19
- Repealing, Not Reforming, Social Security, Part 1 -
shifting responsibility for the care of the elderly has moral overtones. There's no doubt that caring for different generations within a family can be difficult and even unpleasant. But intergenerational ties are among the most important sinews of community. Social Security weakens those links and makes it hard for a family to offer better care for its more vulnerable members. Denying younger workers the ability to achieve a higher return throughout their working lives leaves them with less money to share with their parents and older relatives.
FFF.org 3/16
- Morality and Social Security -
More and more, Social Security appears not to constitute an "insurance" program as much as a mandatory, intergenerational, wealth-transfer scheme. We must ask: Is it right that the young be taxed to enable the government to provide a generous retirement program for able-bodied older people? What are the social and moral implications of this idea?
FFF.org 3/16
- SSA’s Response to a Request for Freedom -
As President Bush tells the world, we have a new fresh air of “freedom” in this country. I felt it and so I thought I would act on it. I wrote to the Social Security Administration to see if I could get out of Social Security. Here’s SSA’s reply to my request. Enjoy, and think of it whenever Bush lectures the world about freedom.
FFF.org 3/16
- Government’s Social Security Mess -
Government investment on behalf of future retirees is like the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It never existed. As a result, in about a dozen years, when the payroll tax can’t cover benefits, the government, to keep its promises, will substantially raise taxes on workers and/or begin borrowing huge amounts of money, consuming capital that would have raised our living standard.
FFF.org 3/16
- Why Save Social Security? -
How is Social Security consistent with traditional American values? Don’t forget that early Americans, owing to their devotion to free enterprise, lived without this socialist program for some 150 years after our nation’s founding. Just a bit of Googling reveals that Social Security, enacted in 1935 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, originated with the “Iron Chancellor” of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, who himself got the idea from 19th-century German socialists. That’s undoubtedly why the Social Security Administration’s website extols Bismarck, not America’s Founding Fathers, and even has a picture of him posted there.
FFF.org 3/16
- Return of the Great Social Security Giveaway -
To qualify for American Social Security, a Mexican citizen would need to work in the US as short as just 18 months!
Lew Rockwell 3/15
- Why Trust in Social Security? -
Isn’t a central argument among those who argue for the continuation of America’s premier socialist program, Social Security, that Americans cannot be trusted to voluntarily take care of the needs of their elderly parents?
Lew Rockwell 3/15
- The Real Truth About Social Security -
The impending "crisis" in the Social Security system is surprisingly simple to explain and to understand, as are the solutions, once the distortion, mythologies, and outright lies about the system are punctured.
Lew Rockwell 3/15
- Social Security This Week: March 11, 2005 -
White House Officials: Bush Won't Take PRAs Off the Table; Boaz: "Add-On" Accounts Don't Add Up; Thrift Savings Model
Doubles Social Security's Rate of Return
Cato Institute 3/11
- Study: Dietary supplements reduce hip fracture risk in stroke patients -
The use of dietary supplements such as folate and vitamin B12 can reduce the risk of hip fracture in elderly patients following a stroke, according to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
McKnight's OnLine 3/07
- Providers concede after compromise on Arkansas “Granny cam” law -
Slight changes in an Arkansas bill to allow cameras in nursing homes to monitor patients have helped to appease nursing home operators in the state.
McKnight's OnLine 3/07
- Lawmakers need to `come together' on Social Security, adviser says -
The White House appealed Sunday for a bipartisan effort to reform Social Security, but Democrats insisted they won't allow President Bush to privatize parts of the program.
Kansas City. Com 3/07
- Behind our new series on Social Security -
nobody should miss the product of this research, a series beginning on today's front page that dissects the future of Social Security with plain language that cuts through the rhetoric now coming from all sides.
StarTribune 3/07
- Depicting nursing home nuance -
My AP government teacher used to frequently mention how other civilizations treat their elders with respect - giving them, by virtue of their age, wisdom and experience, the highest places of honor within society. Perhaps he harped on the subject at such length because of his own age, but my mentor had a point: The idea of growing old has become repugnant in the youth-obsessed culture of America.
Washington Square 3/04
- Nursing Home Cameras -
Nursing-home opposition to a bill allowing cameras to monitor patients has been defused by a compromise.
Arkansas News 3/04
- Social Security blues -
George W. Bush, who is not prone to confessing mistakes, has confided to close associates that he committed a whopper on Social Security. He admitted error in pushing for new personal accounts while not stressing the repair of the safety net for seniors.
Town Hall 3/04
- Time to bulldoze nursing homes, says expert -
LARGE nursing homes should be bulldozed and replaced with "green houses" - clusters of cottages where baby boomers would feel at home, says a visiting US expert on aged care.
AU News 3/03
- Greenspan: Fix Social Security, Medicare, Deficit -
Greenspan again endorsed the key part of President Bush's Social Security (search) overhaul to set up private accounts, but he stressed that much more needed to be done to put the giant retirement program and Medicare, which he said faced even more severe financial strains, on a more sound footing.
FOX News 3/02
- Vote On US Social Security Overhaul May Be Delayed -
Polls show Americans largely opposed to the Bush plan, which would allow younger workers to divert a portion of the taxes they pay for Social Security into private investment accounts.
VOA News 3/02
- Libertarian Party executive director joins fight against the 'death tax' -
"Death taxes -- including estate taxes and gift taxes -- are an immoral assault on our American way of life," Seehusen said. "Hardworking Americans work their whole lives to be able to leave behind a legacy to their children and their loved ones. And then, at their most vulnerable point, the Washington fat cats snatch it away from them and flush it down the drain.
LP.Org 3/01
- Cato's Daily Debunker -
In an editorial in this morning’s edition, the New York Times claims the inheritability of personal retirement accounts - one of the most attractive features of Social Security reform - is a raw deal for American workers, especially low earners.
Social Security Choice 3/01
- AARP Laying With Dogs - Fleas To Follow -
But what you might not realize is that the AARP is laying down with some of the most disturbing far-left wingers in the country, and in some cases promoting their messages.
Social Security Choice 3/01