America's last hope was Ron Paul
(media.scored.co)
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Most people have a pet government department that they think they can't live without. This is a real pitfall for honest libertarians. Remember, W Bush was elected to muck with education from the top. Something tells me Republicans didn't want to abolish Education back then. As is often observed, if you talk about doing anything with Social Security, even fixing it, old-NPCs vote against you. Plenty of Republicans at least used to balk at the idea of making any cuts to Defense, as if foreign entanglements are as American as Bud light.
I was a kid, so all I remember was left-leaning teachers ragging on Bush, Iraq War, and NCLB + standardized testing, years later piecing together that they ignored how NCLB was very bipartisan. Right now, I'm mad having just learned that it had a limited provision for vouchers that was gutted out of the bill. Regressives never want to be like Europe when it's inconvenient to partisan orthodoxy.
Social security reform was one of the few authentic things a recent president has attempted, and the NPCs of both parties just gulped the propaganda down. Even George Carlin, who can be characteristically contrarian, just repeated the cliches in his otherwise great segment about the big club. I get the indirect point about Wall St. power brokers not giving a shit about us, but not even allowing younger Americans to take some of their own money out of the Social Security Trust is so parasitically two-faced.
I thought there wasn't any money in SS, which is why young Americans can't take any out. It was created as a pay-as-you-go system because FDR was a socialist conman. There's no investment involved; it's just transfer payments from young to old. Was/is my understanding. I understand there may have been some surplus saved up when boomers were young which is probably now disappearing.