Election results bad news for Florida HSR

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Ryan said:
I already get social security and medicare both of which I paid for all my life so I am against cutting that.
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In other words, "screw you guys, I got mine". Looks like GML was right.
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The logic of this response escapes me completely. From the perspective of someone drawing social security or anticipating drawing same, it is no different from withdrawing your savings or receiving the payments due from an annuity. It is not welfare, it is something that we have paid into. If you younger guys want to collect, WORK and PAY IN.
 
George Harris said:
Ryan said:
I already get social security and medicare both of which I paid for all my life so I am against cutting that.
Click to expand...
In other words, "screw you guys, I got mine". Looks like GML was right.
Click to expand...
The logic of this response escapes me completely. From the perspective of someone drawing social security or anticipating drawing same, it is no different from withdrawing your savings or receiving the payments due from an annuity. It is not welfare, it is something that we have paid into. If you younger guys want to collect, WORK and PAY IN.
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The difference is that with a savings account, it is optional. If I want to put money into a savings account, I can. If not, I don't have to.

On the other hand, most workers (except, incidentally, railroad employees among a few other categories) have to pay into Social Security.

Social security is, essentially, a pyramid scheme. People aren't paying in for their own retirement. They're paying in to cover the people who have *already* retired. When today's workers retire, they will not be taking money from what they put into social security. That money will have long since been spent. Instead, they will be taking money from the next generation of employees.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm in no way saying that Social Security is a bad thing, if only because it is somewhat of a forced savings plan for a country that doesn't seem to know what savings is. However, one cannot ignore the reality that if Social Security were optional, and today's working generation opted out, then folks like Henry would be going home empty-handed (and you couldn't blame "[us] younger guys" for it).

Frankly, retired (and soon-to-be retired) folks should thank their lucky stars that social security isn't optional. In a previous (government) job, I opted out of my company's pension plan. I did so for a number of reasons, including the fact that previous generations of employees (including some that retired while I was there) had left such a mess that I had no intention of subsidizing lazy slobs that didn't do a damn thing while they were at work (and made for a larger mess for my coworkers and me to clean up after they were gone). I figured I'd be better off investing on my own rather than paying into a dying pension that would probably go bust by the time I was of retirement age anyway.

If SS were optional, and the younger generation were upset at the state of affairs their elders left them, all they'd have to do is opt out, find their own savings/retirement plan, and plug their ears for a couple of years to drown out the screams and howls of the retirees. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but the attitudes of some of the above quotes are part of the reason why some people might just take that opinion. It *is* essentially "I've got mine, so **** you" ("I want my social security, I feel I'm entitled to it, cut something else, I don't want to have to sacrifice anything of mine, other people should make the sacrifices in these tough times, and all you young folks out there, go out and WORK and PAY IN so I can keep getting my check, but in the mean time I don't care if they cut your education benefits and force states to raise tuition to levels where you'll be in debt the rest of your life, or that we leave you with crumbling infrastructure and no money to pay to fix it, or any of the multitudes of other things you may need").
 
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Fellow train advocates. You can trash me or the government or whatever all you want, but it still doesn't solve the problem. If you make the defense budget zero you still have a deficit. Social Security whatever it's problems, is still covered by the 940 billion in payroll taxes so it's not loosing money. I assume payroll taxes are also covering most of medicare also. The government only has three main sources of revenue, income taxes, payroll taxes and corporate taxes. They are just not enough to pay the bills. In my opinion because we have just sent too many jobs overseas. We are just hemoraging jobs now every year. That is causing the governments revenue to not keep up with expenditures. We either will have to cut expenses drastically or increase taxes drastically or both. Either option is going to cause major upheaval to the economy. That is why our representatives hesitate to take the necessary actions. It will be death warrant for them. So we stumble on in the dark. Some day in the near future we will have to pay up. And the longer we wait the worse it's going to be. I don't have the answers. I don't know anyone that does.
 
George Harris said:
Ryan said:
I already get social security and medicare both of which I paid for all my life so I am against cutting that.
Click to expand...
In other words, "screw you guys, I got mine". Looks like GML was right.
Click to expand...
The logic of this response escapes me completely. From the perspective of someone drawing social security or anticipating drawing same, it is no different from withdrawing your savings or receiving the payments due from an annuity. It is not welfare, it is something that we have paid into. If you younger guys want to collect, WORK and PAY IN.
Click to expand...

Ok...well what if you can't work. Thanks to cancer I am physically unable to work, and it might be like that for the rest of my life. So what about me and others like me (I am not the only one you know) she we all rot in in hell so you can save a few dollars or whatever? When I was able to work I had to pay takes, the boy friend has to pay property taxes and stuff. We have no kids in the school system yet I am paying for other peoples brats so they can become better people. Sadly in this area most are about 3 grades below their reading level and end up dropping out. We all have to pay for things we don't like or don't use. It's life.
 
mercedeslove said:
George Harris said:
Ryan said:
I already get social security and medicare both of which I paid for all my life so I am against cutting that.
Click to expand...
In other words, "screw you guys, I got mine". Looks like GML was right.
Click to expand...
The logic of this response escapes me completely. From the perspective of someone drawing social security or anticipating drawing same, it is no different from withdrawing your savings or receiving the payments due from an annuity. It is not welfare, it is something that we have paid into. If you younger guys want to collect, WORK and PAY IN.
Click to expand...
Ok...well what if you can't work. Thanks to cancer I am physically unable to work, and it might be like that for the rest of my life. So what about me and others like me (I am not the only one you know) she we all rot in in hell so you can save a few dollars or whatever?
Click to expand...
Don't really understand your rant. No one here is complaining about disability for the truly disabled. We are bugged by those that are scamming the system, and the able but unwilling.

When I was able to work I had to pay takes, the boy friend has to pay property taxes and stuff. We have no kids in the school system yet I am paying for other peoples brats so they can become better people. Sadly in this area most are about 3 grades below their reading level and end up dropping out. We all have to pay for things we don't like or don't use. It's life.
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The basic rationale behind publically funded education is that an educated populance is of benefit to everybody, whether it is your kids getting educated or others.
We are getting way off subject here. I will say no more.
 
George Harris said:
We are bugged by those that are scamming the system, and the able but unwilling.
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Actually, that's the first time that point has been raised.

How much money do you think is wasted going to those that are scamming the system and how does it compare to the 1.1 trillion dollar hole in the budget?

Ryan said:
Answer me this, Henry - you said yourself we're in the hole 1.1 trillion and posted a link to the Federal budget. Go ahead and make a list of the "worthless departments" and how much their budgets are, and show us how we can close that hole.
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Still waiting, Henry...
 
There are lots of popular myths out there which, unfortunately, taint the public view. I'd wager that a good chunk of the population truly believes that if we eliminated "foreign aid" and "welfare" we'd save enough money to not only cut the deficit, but be able to cut taxes further.

They watched some 20/20 or 60 Minutes special 15 years ago that showed a handful of welfare recipients driving Cadillacs and immediately assume that everybody is like that, and that it must be costing us hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for people who are too lazy to work.

Then they keep that belief because it makes it easier to blame someone else for their problems.
 
henryj said:
Fellow train advocates. You can trash me or the government or whatever all you want, but it still doesn't solve the problem. If you make the defense budget zero you still have a deficit. Social Security whatever it's problems, is still covered by the 940 billion in payroll taxes so it's not loosing money. I assume payroll taxes are also covering most of medicare also. The government only has three main sources of revenue, income taxes, payroll taxes and corporate taxes. They are just not enough to pay the bills. In my opinion because we have just sent too many jobs overseas. We are just hemoraging jobs now every year. That is causing the governments revenue to not keep up with expenditures. We either will have to cut expenses drastically or increase taxes drastically or both. Either option is going to cause major upheaval to the economy. That is why our representatives hesitate to take the necessary actions. It will be death warrant for them. So we stumble on in the dark. Some day in the near future we will have to pay up. And the longer we wait the worse it's going to be. I don't have the answers. I don't know anyone that does.
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I can generally agree with quite a bit of that line of thought. Avoiding incendiary phrases like "Seig Heil" in one's own posts would however reduce the chances of being gratuitously trashed considerably :)

I'd point out that there is a fourth form of tax that the we use too, and that is excise and customs taxes. For example the so called "gas tax" is an excise tax, which is used for funding a significant proportion of highway costs.

Also, one of the reasons that jobs get off-shored is because our elected representatives in their infinite wisdom, in order to keep the riches rolling in to themselves from the corporations, have set tax laws in such a way that corporations can reduce their overall tax bill by exporting the jobs. Go figure.

I agree with the notion that there will be at least a notional upheaval when we finally get around to try to fix the problem. We still collectively believe that the laws of simple arithmetic are a myth or a vast conspiracy or something. :) It is amazing how many people believe that if you keep cutting taxes more money will get collected. While this may be true in a small area of the so called Laffer Curve, taken to an extreme it makes as much sense as believing in perpetual motion machines. OTOH, very few people are ready to give up anything on the receiving (expenditure) side of the equation.

At some point these two opposing forces will run into each other and that is when the real upheavals will happen. A possibly good proxy to sense how bad things are is to look at what the highest earner's income is as a proportion of the lowest earner's. Historically, the larger it is the closer a society has been to upheavals - even ones that finally pretty much destroyed the society. This ratio unfortunately has been growing alramingly fast in the US, and also in places like India and China too, and much less so in Europe. This will have its inevitable consequence.

In the past we (in the US) have been good at making incremental fixes that keeps the upheaval under control, but there is no saying whether we will succeed in doing so going forward. Considering that most of our proposed fixes at present tends to be based on actions that actually widen this gap, I am currently in a pessimistic bent of mind on this matter. But one thing that at least I am certain about is that creating artificial divides like young and old, or haves and have nots, which split society along fissures, and pits one half against the other, is not helpful in coming to a collective solution to a collective problem that we face.

Bringing this back to the original subject, well sort of, infrastructure is one of the lubricants that enables society to produce and trade efficiently. These are the activities that produce the riches, that is ultimately the engine that raises standards of living. Contrary to certain popular believe just trading stocks does not. Short changing productive infrastructure to fund all sorts of other activities is IMHO a fools errand, and we seem to indulge in a lot of that these days. We think that if we label something mindlessly as "pork" that makes it so, while if we keep ignoring pointless expenditures they are not harmful.

OK enough ranting from me a for a day. So now I shall descend from the soap box :)
 
George Harris said:
mercedeslove said:
George Harris said:
Ryan said:
I already get social security and medicare both of which I paid for all my life so I am against cutting that.
Click to expand...
In other words, "screw you guys, I got mine". Looks like GML was right.
Click to expand...
The logic of this response escapes me completely. From the perspective of someone drawing social security or anticipating drawing same, it is no different from withdrawing your savings or receiving the payments due from an annuity. It is not welfare, it is something that we have paid into. If you younger guys want to collect, WORK and PAY IN.
Click to expand...
Ok...well what if you can't work. Thanks to cancer I am physically unable to work, and it might be like that for the rest of my life. So what about me and others like me (I am not the only one you know) she we all rot in in hell so you can save a few dollars or whatever?
Click to expand...
Don't really understand your rant. No one here is complaining about disability for the truly disabled. We are bugged by those that are scamming the system, and the able but unwilling.

When I was able to work I had to pay takes, the boy friend has to pay property taxes and stuff. We have no kids in the school system yet I am paying for other peoples brats so they can become better people. Sadly in this area most are about 3 grades below their reading level and end up dropping out. We all have to pay for things we don't like or don't use. It's life.
Click to expand...
The basic rationale behind publically funded education is that an educated populance is of benefit to everybody, whether it is your kids getting educated or others.
We are getting way off subject here. I will say no more.
Click to expand...
Unless you have proof people are "unwilling to work" you can't say they scamming the system. I know a lot of people do that I have seen it my self, they go to walmart buy all the food they need pull out the food stamps, then suddenly pull out a couple 100 dollars to pay for the big screen TV and Playstation they just bought. They take their stuff and load it and their ten kids into the hummer and drive off into the sunset. But not everyone does that, and because there are people like us who don't like the food stamp hummer family. They shouldn't have to suffer, it's not fair.

Honestly I still don't understand where people like the "food stamp hummer family" get their extra money from, I have a few ideas but I won't mention them.
 
Here is a link to steel production by country. There is also one by company. Just go on online and look up any product you want. Try and find one that is still made in this country. How about Levis? Cell phones? TV's? You won't find many. Automobiles are assembled here, but they are not made here. The parts all come form somewhere else. No country can survive like this. Even rail parts now come from offshore. It's just amazing. Our country is just shutting down piece by piece, bit by bit, industry by industry. Soon there will be nothing left but the moochers and looters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production
 
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Considering that transportation is only ~2% of the federal budget, the idea that our defecit is stemmed by rail projects is laughable. Besides, a large portion of that 2% goes to highway and airport projects.
 
You may as well get a snickers bar, 'cause I think it's going to be a long wait.

It's very easy to throw stones and complain, yet those who complain the loudest usually have the most difficultly providing a solution. To be fair, it's a difficult question. When you actually look at the numbers, the problem becomes impossible to solve when you take the defense budget and increased tax rates off of the table.
 
Ryan said:
To be fair, it's a difficult question. When you actually look at the numbers, the problem becomes impossible to solve when you take the defense budget and increased tax rates off of the table.
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This fact is something that most people seem to be in complete denial about. Hence I suspect that people are not very good at arithmetic.
 
jis said:
This fact is something that most people seem to be in complete denial about. Hence I suspect that people are not very good at arithmetic.
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Since I was the only person in my college class that knew how to do long division, I'd say that is a generally certifiable fact. The nitwit fighting Pallone in our district actually put an ad out that could be summarized as:

"I will not cut any services or projects, will cut all wasteful spending, will cut taxes, and will balance our budget problem!"

Since wasteful is such a debatable subject, she is clearly looking to add to the larger number, subtract from the smaller number, and somehow arrive at an equal sign. Fortunately for all involved, she did not win the election.
 
What's really frustrating is that rail got bundled in with a bunch of unrelated stuff. There were more than a few states where voters were frustrated over entirely unrelated things (in Michigan, the economy leaps to mind; if IL had flipped, it would've been because of the corruption scandals tainting the Democratic Party as a whole there; and of course, health care was a biggie across the board, as was a perception of reckless government spending) and sent in an anti-rail candidate. Issue bundling, in general, stinks.
 
Green Maned Lion said:
Since I was the only person in my college class that knew how to do long division,
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Let us know where you went to college so we can avoid it, and any graduates thereof, well, unless we see if they can pass an arithmatic test. Funny, I would not have graduated from my small town Mississippi high school if my math had been that bad.

Anderson is absolutely right with

What's really frustrating is that rail got bundled in with a bunch of unrelated stuff.
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Unfortunately, it is unavoidable when you are given a choice between two or at the most threee real candidates. There have been, and I am sure will continue to be, cases where I have not voted for the "pro rail" candidate because the negatives in the person far outweighed the positives. REality says you sometimes end up voting for the least bad because the most good is not on the list of possibilities.
 
George Harris said:
Green Maned Lion said:
Since I was the only person in my college class that knew how to do long division,
Click to expand...
Let us know where you went to college so we can avoid it, and any graduates thereof, well, unless we see if they can pass an arithmatic test. Funny, I would not have graduated from my small town Mississippi high school if my math had been that bad.

Anderson is absolutely right with

What's really frustrating is that rail got bundled in with a bunch of unrelated stuff.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, it is unavoidable when you are given a choice between two or at the most threee real candidates. There have been, and I am sure will continue to be, cases where I have not voted for the "pro rail" candidate because the negatives in the person far outweighed the positives. REality says you sometimes end up voting for the least bad because the most good is not on the list of possibilities.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I voted for our incumbent Representative, even though she has an anti-rail stance. She has done a good job in represnting our issues locally. Her Democratic opponent wasn't endorsed by Democrats in the primary and has all the personality (and, seemingly, intelligence) of a bag of doorknobs. I could never have voted for him no matter what his stance on Amtrak was (which I don't know).
 
Interesting. I wonder how many supposedly "pro-rail" members proudly voted for staunchly anti-rail candidates this past election. Or if any of them bothered to get involved before the primary to promote pro-rail positions or challengers. Or how many have reconciled their decisions by taking extra time to educate the anti-rail politicians they helped elect.
 
George Harris said:
Green Maned Lion said:
Since I was the only person in my college class that knew how to do long division,
Click to expand...
Let us know where you went to college so we can avoid it, and any graduates thereof, well, unless we see if they can pass an arithmatic test. Funny, I would not have graduated from my small town Mississippi high school if my math had been that bad.
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Sad thing is, my college was one of the best colleges in my state, and one of the best colleges in the country in a few majors- including mine, Entrepreneurship.

However, since the NJ HSPT (the test you are required to pass to graduate high school in NJ) allowed the use of calculators for the entirety of its math section, one did not need to know how to do basic arithmetic to pass. As a result, my college (which is a public college) drew kids primarily from NJ, and since they didn't need to know basic math to pass the required testing, the teachers never bothered with reviewing it.

By the way, additionally, I got a 5 on my Calc AP. And I refuse, to this day, to use calculators for basic math problems. Math is one of my (few) strengths.
 
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