Privatizing Social Security

Intellectuals feel the need to be smarter than the truth.--Thomas Larkin


Pirates would be a lot more fun if they had any pitching at all. Today another triple A guy. A fill in for a guy on maternity leave.

Dick Groat's basketball jersey was the first ever retired by Duke. He was the third pick in the basketball draft and made the NBA all rookie team.

America is an idea. Ireland is a great country, but it’s not an idea. Great Britain is a great country, but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world, as one of the greatest ideas in human history.--Bono. Bono!
Trump's revelation that the Revolutionary troops took over "the airports" gives some idea just how forward -thinking the American Revolution really was.

Despite low rates and the "prosperity" of the stock market hitting new all time highs new vehicle deliveries, combining fleet sales and retail sales, were down 1.5% in Q2 to 4.5 million vehicles, according to Wolf Street. For the first half of the year, vehicle deliveries fell 2.4% to 8.4 million vehicles. This puts the pace for new vehicle sales on track to fall below 17 million for the year, which would be the worst level since 2014.

In Griggs v. Duke Power, the first major Supreme Court ruling to address Title VII’s employment-testing restrictions, the Court opted for a very broad reading of the anti-discrimination conditions of section 703(h). The plaintiffs averred that the high-school diploma and aptitude-testing requirements used by Duke Power Company, a public utility corporation, discriminated against African-American workers, thus violating Title VII. They also argued that section 703(h) required that employment tests be used only to measure the ability to do a specific job, thereby prohibiting more general tests and requirements. For their part, Duke Power argued the law said no such thing, as it specifically allowed a “professionally developed ability test” as long as it was not intended or used to discriminate.

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court rejected Duke Power’s argument and the lower court’s straight-letter interpretation of section 703(h). 

So, why are college application and degree requirements treated differently from other employment tests?

Olson had an opinion piece on Amash's decision to leave the Republican Party. He said this: "Rep. Justin Amash’s announcement that he is leaving the Republican Party to become an independent surprised no one who has followed the principled libertarian’s career. It shows, however, the opposite of what he intended it to demonstrate: Parties matter, and principled libertarians are too tiny to form an effective one." So the principled position is to be scorned in favor of the unprincipled one because the unprincipled one works better?

Russia confirms plans to send S-400 anti-aircraft system to Turkey. Whose idea was it to let Turkey into NATO?

On Thursday morning, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake rocked portions of southern California and southern Nevada.  The quake was so powerful that it was felt by people living in both Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  It created giant cracks in major highways, it caused countless fires, and it was even picked up by a seismograph in Pennsylvania.  We are talking about a major seismic event, and over the last 24 hours there have been an astounding 1,217 aftershocks.  

A new Progressive narrative: "Obama’s failure to adequately press for the instatement of Justice Merrick Garland in 2016, ensured the Court’s conservative majority."

Because progressivism had such high hopes for power, and because progressives had an urgent desire to free power from institutional circumscriptions, this desire translated into impatience with the constitutional architecture through which the Founders codified their prudence about power and human nature.--Will

                          Privatizing Social Security

The accumulated values of a $100 investment at the end of 1927 in: a) the S&P 500 Stock Index (including dividends), b) 3-month Treasury bills and c) 10-year Treasury bonds, over the 91-year period from 1927-2018 based on historical return data from the NYU Stern School of Business would be: S&P 500 $382,850, T-bonds $7309, T-bills $2,063.. On an annual basis over this period, the return on the S&P 500 averaged 9.5% per year, T-bonds 4.8% and T-bills 3.4%.

Social Security's trust funds are invested exclusively in Treasury securities, which is scheduled to run out of money by 2035 and has unfunded obligations of nearly $14 trillion in present value ($700 billion more than the projected deficit of $13.2 trillion a year ago) according to the latest annual report by the trustees of Social Security and Medicare?

Imagine if this huge amount of money had been invested in the economy instead of government.