In a few hours I’ll begin my new job. I can’t really tell you much about it, so I’ll drop a subtle hint. It’s for a television show. It’s, uh, a prime-time show, and it’s on network TV. That’s all I can say. Oh, and it’s called “The Apprentice.” Sorry I can’t be more specific.
Anyway, my posts might be brief in the next couple of weeks, but I’ll try to keep the faith. For now:
- Iraq’s elections were a success. It’d be disingenuous to deny this. Sure, the Sunnis were terrorized from voting, the candidates’ names weren’t announced until a couple of days ago, and there was some bloodshed. But taken objectively, this is the best thing to happen to Iraq since the Sultan Omar got over his odd fear of asphyxiation and re-legalized “nighttime breathing” in 1354 AD. Does this make the invasion worthwhile and the occupation competent? No. But it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye. Which, by the way, we’d ought to stop doing.
- You don’t need me for comedy anyway. This story from the Davos summit will provide you with all the comic hi-jinx you need. It’s a “Duck Soup” style slapstick farce that’ll keep us all laughing right up until the Iran war gets underway. [By the way, we are going to war. Sorry. Still, we had some laughs.]
- President Bush is pledging to use his overwhelming mandate to shield Republicans from any flack they might get from supporting his Social Security reform. In other words, seniors, if you’re eating Alpo in ‘06, remember that Bush made your representative do it.
There, that ought to get our week started as I head off to my extremely secret new job. Don’t bother trying to guess what it is; I’ve covered my tracks with the expert assistance of a certain Mr. George Tenet. [If anyone’s interested, his rates are extremely reasonable.]
Fanny Roborat
34 comments
Murray
January 31, 2005 at 6:56 am
1OH, Jeez Adam,
Now I gotta watch The Apprentice, and endure The Donald.
Do you determine the degradation needed for the conniving weasels to deserve Donald’s benediction?
Two words.
Substitute Teacher.
Jon
January 31, 2005 at 9:53 am
2Mr. Trump probably doesn’t want to know how late you stayed up the night before your first day, especially since it impaired your ability to distinguish betwee “flack” and “flak.”
A.H.
January 31, 2005 at 10:41 am
3Who cares about SS. I have been told since I was a kid it would go brok the year before I retire. All my live I have listened to old people saying ‘In My day we had it tough.” Now I get to turn it wround. “When I am your age I will have to work, so why should I give a shit. Cancel the program and let me save for my own retirement.
Mary
January 31, 2005 at 12:30 pm
4Adam- we do TO need you for comedy. This administration is SO depressing.
As for the Davos summit- they were obviously using Chenney’s advisors. It has their sensitivity splattered all over it.
Rusty
January 31, 2005 at 12:42 pm
5You may be right, A.H. Maybe we would be best to save on our own. A better question is why aren’t you saving on your own, anyway? My personal plan is both to save on my own and to get what SS has to offer when I’m old enough to worry about it. Personally, I don’t mind paying into SS being the social animal that I am. It helps my mom and the little lonely gray-haired ladies I see in church. It is an act of grace.
As to who gives a shit… well, that is a matter of history and your place in it. SS was created during the Great Depression as part of FDR’s New Deal, a program that saved this country’s ass. People DID have personal savings before the crash… in banks and in stocks. When the market crashed, the banks closed and stocks evaporated. The only financial institution left standing was the Federal government.
We have lived in prosperity for so long that we easily forget (or tend to ignore) that we can still step off the edge. Nice to have a safety net when you need one. In that way SS is like insurance, but you have to have it in place before you step.
So, my opinion: be diversified. I have my stocks and savings. They have pretty good growth, but a depression or an Enron-style criminal act can turn those investments into ashes overnight. I kinda like my SS right where it is. I don’t expect to make a house payment with it, but it could make the difference between being starving and eating IF I need it.
Should you give a shit? Well, if you don’t now, you won’t later unless you find yourself standing in some future bread line (and I sincerely hope that never happens). I say give it the funding it needs (SS wouldn’t even be in trouble if the, ahem, administration hadn’t tapped it to pay for their damned tax cuts) and leave it where it is.
bjd
January 31, 2005 at 12:55 pm
6Who you takin’ out, Adam? George? Carolyn? The Don?
Joe
January 31, 2005 at 1:09 pm
7I think you underestimate our need for laughs in these trying times. While your posts may be brief, I’ll look forward to seeing the things you write. Good luck with the “secret job.” You are so crafty that there is no way we’ll ever be able to figure it out.
dee
January 31, 2005 at 1:13 pm
8” I got guns, you got guns, all God’s chillun got guns.”
You’re right — it IS Duck Soup.
Sue
January 31, 2005 at 2:00 pm
9Rusty & A.H.
My Dad said over 40 years ago that Social Security was meant to supplement one’s pension (it’s an obsolete term - look it up) and/or personal savings; it was not meant to fully fund one’s retirement. To that end, I think too many people have come to rely on it solely - and granted there may be folks who have little or no means to save on their own if they live paycheck to paycheck. Nonetheless, maybe the 20-somethings Shrub is trying to scare could start now to sock away some $$ and start their own private funds. I
think the suggestions that have already been made to slightly raise the retirement age, increase the amount of salary subject to SS tax, and/or change the annual increase from wages to cost of living could probably take care of a lot of the problem without furnishing Wall Street with the keys to the Lock Box.
but then furnishing Wall Street with the keys to the Lock Box is sort of the point, isn’t it?
Adam, Comic Genius and Master of Satire that you are, I know you’ll find a way to punch up, “You’re fired.”
Happy Entrails
January 31, 2005 at 2:09 pm
10Enough about Davos, SS, and all that fluffy stuff. I want to hear more about The Donald Show. I suspect Adam’s a contestant.
I’ll give you 5 bucks, Adam, to tell Donald in the first on-camera meeting: “You’re a self-absorbed jerk. I don’t like how you do business and I want no part of this prime time freak show. I QUIT!” You’re the man.
Ann
January 31, 2005 at 2:18 pm
11Biden’s wife wore “figure-hugging leather pants” and a sleeveless top at Davos? Never mind the Islamic sensibilities, that’s a stupid outfit for any formal dinner! This almost ranks with Cheney’s Auschwitz ensemble.
J. Deighton
January 31, 2005 at 2:18 pm
12And I was so hoping you’d be writing for the Gilmore Girls! Shut up people, I’m serious.
Steve
January 31, 2005 at 3:48 pm
13To A.H.:
Nice troll.
Actually, given the way we’re going, I think we have to worry more about whether the United States will be here by the time we retire.
Murray
January 31, 2005 at 4:11 pm
14A. H.
You may want to invest some of your money in a remedial English class. I guarantee it will pay off well, whenever you try to impress people with the intelligence of your thoughts.
Allison in Santa Cruz
January 31, 2005 at 4:17 pm
15You gotta be kiddin’ me, Adam. You mean I have to break my vow of never watching one of those so-called reality shows where some poor shlep gets the royal boot every week? Well, if I can do it for anyone, it would be you.
I think you should offer Mr. Trump an appointment with that Hollywood guy who uses yak hair to make TV/movie stars look better.
Auros
January 31, 2005 at 4:18 pm
16@ Ann — that’s exactly what I was going to comment on! Also, isn’t she a little old to still be wearing that kind of outfit? I know, I know, you can be old and still look good. But that’s merely allowing that it’s not impossible — most 60- or 70-something women don’t look great in that kinda getup, even if they look nicely dignified in something, well, more dignified. :-/
@ AH — the SS program, under the most conservative estimates, is still well-enough funded to continue paying its scheduled benefits out to the 2040s (by starting, in 2018, to cash in some of the T-bonds it holds, just like any holder of a matured bond can do). With minor adjustments, no more drastic than any of the half-dozen adjustments of the past, it could be made solvent out to some indefinite future. There is no crisis.
Medicare, on the other hand, has serious financial problems RIGHT NOW, at least some of which are directly Dubya’s fault. We need to be talking about healthcare reform, not SS. Kerry’s idea of catastrophic reinsurance would’ve been a fabulous start.
Lynne
January 31, 2005 at 4:24 pm
17Two words for The Donald
Flow
Be
Or is that how he cuts his hair now?
tess
January 31, 2005 at 4:42 pm
18Bother. I’ve been hearing a great deal about social security lately (though I personally want to avoid the initials simply because it reminds me of WWII), and I always heard as a kid that I can’t rely on it when I retire. Of course, what someone failed to point out to me as a kid is that under the Reagan administration, the looming disaster was fairly well averted with an increase in payroll taxes and a few other measures.
Nevertheless, I would continue to pay into the fund because it’s a security net in case my savings get wiped out by personal disasters, or if I have children and I die before they reach 18 they wouldn’t have to rely on whatever I saved necessarily. And I know people that this has happened to, and am I going to say to them, “No, you can’t have MY money because you didn’t save for your own disasters”?
Monty Zoom
January 31, 2005 at 4:49 pm
19So A.H., where is this money going to come from to take away from Social Security? You see, we put money in and the people on Social Security use that money to live. If we don’t put money in, that money must come from somewhere. Depending how much we take away from the payroll taxes that runs into the TRILLIONS of dollars. So short sighted troll-boy try living in a world with that kind of national debt and your piddly savings will be worth bubkus!
Ibid
January 31, 2005 at 5:52 pm
20Tess, what you pay in to social security has little to nothing to do with what you get out. Savings is what those whiney, socialist Europeans do. A dollar in now immediately goes to killing people in Iraq and a nice piece of paper, suitable for framing, that says the government will take money from your grandkids in 40 years and give it to you. And we all know what their promises are worth.
You’re not building your security net. You’re sticking out your arms to catch someone else. That doesn’t mean that someone else will be there to catch you.
Murray
January 31, 2005 at 7:57 pm
21Ibid, A.H. you are missing a couple of things.
Most of the money that I am putting into SS goes to my mother, the rest of it goes to a trust fund (that would have been kept intact had Gore been officially recognized as elected, [remember that lock box that people ridiculed him about?) The administration is borrowing money from this fund to cover its outrageous deficits. But these funds ARE there in the form of bonds. This is not something the government has the option of defaulting on. These are the same bonds that we are giving to the Chinese, Japanese, etc who are propping up our economy. If we go Dead Beat, our economy will flop like a bass on the dock. Any politician responsible for this kind of catastrophe would be lucky to only be tarred and feathered.
I get annoyed when people say that SS won’t be there when they retire, so why should we fund those old geezers now. If you actually believe that our government will self destruct at some time in the future, you need to leave now!
It won’t happen.
Even the insane neocons around W know there is a line that even they can’t cross.
Yes, in 15 - 20 years we baby boomers will start to pull benefits.
The government will have to make good on the bonds. It could very well mean VERY high taxes, (What do I care? I’ll be retired! And if you think that you can give us baby boomers the shaft, remember who casts the most votes).
I’m worried about my children and grandchildren. They shouldn’t have to pay for our party.
Something about privatized SS accounts.
I, like most people my age, have some of my money in money market funds. That is why the stock market took off back in the ’80s and why most people think that the market can only go up. 50 years ago only the richest folks owned stocks. Now most everyone has some. So the market boomed.
As I reach retirement, I (and those my age) will be taking money out of volatile stocks and put it into stable bonds and T bills. (You can’t afford a crash as you reach the end). As we baby boomers start to pull our money out of the market and into bonds, what do you think will happen to the market? Odds are good that this kind of mass exodus will lower things. If the market goes back down to 5000 how happy are you going to be to think that your retirement could be right there in the toilet with it.
Throw in a 20 — 30% fee to Wall Streeters to manage your account, and the cost to borrow several trillion to keep my mother and eventually me in benefits; do you really think that the market will make up the rest? If so, before I go, I’ve got a bridge you might be interested in.
tess
January 31, 2005 at 8:02 pm
22Ibid:
I understand that what I would pay out if I were working is going ultimately into current retirees/beneficiaries/survivors wallets. And it won’t necessarily be there in the future to catch me or my potential kids if I or they fall on hard times. But, I would still be willing to put money into it even if it’s not necessarily going to pay out for me in the future (really depends on what gets restructures, removed, demolished, etc.) simply because it’d be pretty shitty if I’m unwilling to help keep a few people’s heads above water.
Besides, I’d probably save whatever I can. I come from a short line of financially paranoid people who bother to save money from each paycheck to go toward the only concrete goal of “feeding the hole.” So unless the very real possiblity that inflation will outstrip the worth of my savings to equate them to ‘nil’ I’d probably have my own nest egg.
dee
January 31, 2005 at 8:26 pm
23I guess this means we have to come up with our own State of the Union Drinking Game.
David
January 31, 2005 at 10:19 pm
24“Social security won’t be there for me when I retire” was bullshit when it first started being repeated over and over ad nauseum, a lie that was all too easy to sell.
It’s bullshit now, and would be bullshit into the imaginable future except that Team Bush has decided to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their hatred for FDR’s New Deal and the fact that it rescued America’s collective ass from the Republican Big Boys’ collosal fuck-up, generally referred to as the great stock market crash of 1929, has never known any bounds. The bastards came out of the gate as soon as FDR set the New Deal in motion frothing at the mouth to kill it. For them it was an evil demon, and they never got their heads out of their asses and accepted its vital role in building and maintaining a better, healthier America.
If they are successful, another FDR will eventually have to rescue our collective asses again.
As to the question Why should I give a shit? I hope before you leave this mortal coil you realize why. It is as simple as the cliche No person is an island.
As to the elections in Iraq, no one yet knows what threshhold actually was or was not crossed.
Kind of like a starving person eating a meal, but not knowing whether there was salmonella in the food. Any decent person hopes to god there wasn’t, but hope, while incredibly important, is still just that - hope. It does, however, beat the shit out of hopelessness.
craig
January 31, 2005 at 11:29 pm
25Now that you’ve got a new job, you’re gonna have to change the subtitle of your blog to:
“Blog of writer/comedian/radio guy/newly employed in a new capacity Adam Felber”
Ananna
February 1, 2005 at 5:57 am
26Can we just start officially calling this decade (century?) the Decade (gawd, I hope it doesn’t last a century) of Greed and Cruelty? Cause that’s basically what I’m hearing from way too many people (except here where mostly people way smarter than me hang out): It’s my money and I’ll do what I want with it and I don’t care if it means the streets will be filled with dead old and some young disabled people (cause Social Security pays for that, too, or at least it’s supposed to). That seems to be generally their answer for everything. They want to keep every penny they make and not bother with stupid things like paying for 911 service or fire departments or libraries and they just don’t care about the consequences.
So, maybe 2000-2009 can be the Decade of Greed and Cruelty and 2010-2019 can be the Decade it was Time to Pay The Piper. 2020 and beyond is up for grabs, depending on us coughing up enough money to keep The Piper from sending Lennie and Natasha and Jerome over to our house to break our legs. Or maybe extra limbs (up to and including the neck, perhaps), depending on how selfish and cruel we were twenty years before that.
People can never remember what happened more than five years ago and can’t imagine the consequences of tomorrow. We’ve become a nation of petulant children. The ship of state is holed and going down with 249 million souls lost at sea.
Love,
Hanna
David
February 1, 2005 at 9:57 am
27Maybe Felberists are already on to this, but Paul Krugman has an excellent piece, “Many Unhappy Returns,” in today’s NYT, demonstrating that some NYTwits are anything but nitwits.
Auros
February 1, 2005 at 2:53 pm
28A meme worth spreading: Any time you hear that the trust fund bonds are “worthless”, point out that it’s actually unconstitutional to fail to pay off those bonds:
Amendment XIV, Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
(Emphasis added.)
Katie
February 1, 2005 at 3:51 pm
29Adam,
I second Happy Entrails’ request that you tell The Don Where to get off. I’d suggest using more appropriate words like: “solipsistic”, “narcissistic”, etc.
Thompson
February 1, 2005 at 3:59 pm
30Hm. Methinks those particular words might go right over the Donald’s head. They don’t have anything to do with a profit margin or his upcoming divorce.
Adam, what I’d like to see you do; put the Don in contact with PJ. If the irascible Irishman can’t convince the Don to stop with the serial marriages, no one can. He’s certainly got -me- half-convinced…
David
February 1, 2005 at 6:42 pm
31Auros,
Thank you, thank you. This will end one line of “reasoning” I’m hearing from otherwise reasonably intelligent friends dead in its tracks.
Murray
February 1, 2005 at 8:04 pm
32Dee,
Our new SOTU drinking game consists of;
1. see the president.
2. drink your self into a stupor
3. take anything he says as either hilarious, not that big a deal, incredibly stupid, or tragically wrong.
4. think of your hangover as being a harbinger of the union in the near future.
pjk
February 2, 2005 at 6:38 am
33I’ve skipped over a few posts, and yes I’d like it if my employer was required to add their portion of SS + Medicare, and what they pay (and deduct) for health insurance to my check, but- that ain’t-a’gonna happen.
Way back, Sue said that there may be people who live from check to check and therefore can’t save for retirement.
Yeah. Some. Add the yuppies and suburban Bush voters contributing to their retirement while maxing out their credit cards and you have Some More.
This country and its currency are flirting with an economic collapse. And AWOL boy, his monkey Greenspan, and every paid pundit/consultant are pouring gas on the fire.
Survivalists don’t really seem quite as wacked out nowadays, do they?
Bill Safire
February 3, 2005 at 9:19 pm
34Adam: Luv ya, but it’s better to use “flak” [German, from Fl(ieger)a(bwehr)k(anone), aircraft-defense gun.] for this use, “flack” for the other thing, until we decide that distinctions like this don’t matter and that the English language ought to be an homogenous gray goop.