I am no more in favor of Republican excess spending than I am Democratic, and I think my record clearly shows that.

The one take-home fact that is continually evaded around here is that we ran a damn good country for many years on much, much less government spending and power. Even after the Great Society kicked in.

That trillion-dollar deficits are considered routine now should have people of all political persuasions crapping themselves. Wall Street? If you confiscated every dollar of the annual profits of the entire financial sector and applied it to the deficit for this year, we would still be $900 billion in the hole.

If you really think the Right will stop excessive government spending, you’re cruising for a big disappointment. These are lawyers, politicians, and businessmen. They will only cut spending they can’t profit from, and they will only cut the taxes they pay. Someone else will make up the difference.

These people are careerists. They are not professionals in love with their work, they are middlemen in love with money.

I didn’t quit my job so I could sit back and relax on my unearned benefits. I was forced to retire early, even though I was perfectly able and willing to work to full retirement and contribute to my world and my community in my chosen profession. I don’t think that was too much to ask.

But in spite of all the shortages of science and math guys, of experienced workers and people of demonstrated loyalty and dependability, not to mention all that seniority we were supposed to be lavished with, I suddenly became redundant and superfluous, unless of course, I accepted a cut in pay and benefits.

I was not abusing my extravagant benefits, I was one of the few who wasn’t forced to submit to the blackmail and put up with the humiliation because I had no choice. I got to tell the Dark Lord of the Sith to find some 22 year old slacker illiterate with a business AA to draw his maps. I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

I’ve seen the warning on the website. Darth Vader comes up and says “I have altered the deal,” and something you were counting on shifts drastically under you. It sucks.

“Mousie, thou art no thy lane,” and all that.

But it’s not the “job creators,” the capitalists, the bankers, or evil Swiss gnomes. The problem with any defined pension system is sheer, bloody math. There is simply an upper limit to how many people you can pay to not work. If a society is rich enough, that limit takes a while to reach.

Europe is drowning in this, and the social upheaval that’s resulting. I hope we still have a chance not to.

I’ll be ready, because I don’t trust them.
But if it ever comes to a war of attrition, I know I will lose. I simply can’t compete with the ‘job creators’, the best I can do is stay out of their way.

I know what happened in July, and what the employee contributions were before that and afterwards. Your timing was very good, as you have said yourself.

I don’t credit or blame people who had nothing to do with my successes or failures. Unlike a lot of other people we’re seeing right now.