January 15, 2004
Social Security is on the Moon
We are all saved from the effects of the demise of Social Security in our time; we are going to build a colony on the moon. Look at the benefits, there are no known terrorists on the moon. There are, insofar as we know, no WMD bearing dictators on the moon either. Of course there is no known source of easily accessible water or air there, but then there is no pollution there either. Even better daytime lasts for 14 earth days and nighttime is equally long, so time must pass more slowly there. Then there is the lower gravity which will clearly help keep the sags from affecting us as much as they do here. It is really a lot closer to heaven than anyplace here on earth. Of course we will have to spend a trillion dollars to get the first twenty colonists there. It will probably take another trillion to set them up to support larger numbers. Then there will be the ongoing problems of colonizing a place where no McDonalds is available for half a million miles. But this is surely the way to solve the social security funding problem. Just send Alice to the moon, even if Ralph couldn’t do it after all.
Seriously folks, there has to be a way to make the moon into an old folks home in the sky. With the populations of Japan, Europe and the USA all aging fast we need a place to send those troublesome elders. If we can turn NASA into as great a success as AMTRACK it will be easy to get them there. We are sure to gain a lot by doing this and save money at the same time. In the lower gravity there, even grandma will be able to lift a couple hundred pounds with no problem. Everybody will benefit because old folks can keep working longer in such a forgiving environment. And there will be work for everyone there since air and water will have to be built out of basic elements taken from silicon dioxide and various hydrogen compounds. It will be the one place where outsourcing will take a long time to take away the work needed to keep people alive and fed!
What at first looks like another silly attempt to get voters to ignore the problems on earth this year turns out upon reflection to have a lot of merit! Who needs Social Security? Just ship us all to the moon at sixty five. Of course some old stick in the muds will want to stay here in spite of the drawbacks like war and other inconveniences of modern society, but we can always give them a choice that they can’t refuse. Something like, go to the moon or be drafted at sixty five; that should convince most of them. The rest can spend their time trying to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran and North Korea and Syria. Did I miss anybody? At least that will keep the younger folks alive and at home with their kids.
Then there is Mars where there is probably water available underground or in ice caps at the poles. Of course it is colder than Antarctica in the winter and the air is thinner than anywhere on earth but if we conquer the moon Mars will be easy. Then there are the Asteroids out a little further and there is Jupiter with its lovely moons. Both are bound to beckon once we own Mars. I see all of this as just another grand adventure and am waiting to go join up as soon as they declare the colony open for colonists. Of course I might have a little trouble convincing Nene that it is a great idea. She has informed me that she will love me forever as long as it is in California. But I have confidence that she will like the idea once I explain the benefits to her.
I wonder what a ticket will cost, hmm it says here that it will cost our Social Security, but that’s OK, we were never going to convince the next generation to fund our retirement anyway. Not at least to the tune of forty trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. Of course Medicare has to go too, but with the lower gravity and pure air and water we should be OK. Wait a minute, this is going to be a military Colony from the word go, that doesn’t sound so good. Why would we need all of those troops on a safe place like the moon? Blast the fine print, where is the magnifying glass? What is this, the contract for supplies and maintenance is already let to Halliburton? Gollie, those guys really are everywhere, aren’t they?
Oh well we will be charter members of the Many Worlds Trade Organization and all it is going to cost us is our total GNP for the first hundred years of the colony. What’s this, a reverse tariff, that means that the earthlings will be able to tax anything that they send us at any rate deemed fair, by them that is, hmm that doesn’t sound so good. What’s this, that .1 point print is really hard to read, something about providing space in our homes for their troops; that sounds bad. No bill of rights, no constitution at all, what are these guys trying to pull? It’s going to be just like here at home isn’t it? Oh well it was too good to be true anyway, I wonder if there’s a time machine laying around anywhere, I’d like to find my way back to the eighteenth century, I hear that there were a great group of colonies here then. God bless you all and keep you safe in these times of moon colonies and no security here at home.
Social Security is already dead! The government takes thousands of dollars from me every year while in the process strong arming my employer to match what I have to pay. I loose thousands of dollars every year so that the baby boomers will receive a few hundred bucks a month after they retire whether they need it or not. Sounds like a great system! How about I save for my own retirement? Oh, wait I already have to do that because Social Security is worthless!
I have a great way to solve the Social Security funding program CANCEL IT. Stop taking money from hard working young people like myself. The $3,143.71 I paid last year I would have rather had in my savings account or in a fund for either MY retirement or sending MY kids to college. And since my employer had to match my tax withholding (as well as everyone else in the company) they couldn’t afford to give me a raise. What a great program!
Henri, we will not loose social security by spending a fraction of what we do on that administration on NASA. While I agree with you on many other points, I think this last posting is a bit of a rant, especially in the fact of the realities of the NASA Budget as it is now. I pointed out, a while back, that the Defense Budget is 20 times large than NASA’s Budget. even if it is quadrupled, we will still be paying five times more to run our army than to explore the depths of space.
You can get oxygen out of moonrocks simply by baking them at high temperature. As for Water, you simply gets some hydrogen and burn it with the oxygen, and that’s water. It gets easier if the Moon has water reserves of its own. Food is going to be the difficult item on the agenda, but they may be able to grow that in specially prepared nurseries.
Look, it’s nice to imagine that in the next hundred years, every thing will stay as it is. But it won’t. Technology will change thingsutterly, once more, before our kids lay us in the ground. The question is, what will our legacy to them be- a nation isolated, past its prime, or one poised on a new frontier.
Given what you’ve said so far, I find little reason to suspect that picking the first will trully defend social security, nor picking the second end it. I will need more evidence to believe otherwise.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 15, 2004 01:28 PMDeth, do you then propose the U.S. government either breach its contract with workers who paid in all their lives by returning nothing for those years of S.S. payments, or cashing all Americans out on the amount they paid in with appropriate interest?
Just curious.
Posted by: David R. Remer at January 15, 2004 02:28 PMDeth - Even if Social Security stopped paying out to current retirees (which is about as likely as Al Sharpton becoming President and writing a Russian novel), the government is already using your SS payroll taxes. You would have to convince the pols to find the money elsewhere.
Posted by: Woody Mena at January 15, 2004 03:09 PMI would be willing to give up all of the money I have paid in so far, if I did not have to pay another cent. This would be for all of the people under 30 years old. The money saved would easily make up for the money lost.
30-50 years old -
I would give them a buyout of half what they paid in tax free if it was transferred to an IRA or an approved retirement fund. As an example my dad who has been a construction worker all of his life with no retirement savings and little money in the bank would be relieved to know he suddenly has 40,000 in his retirement fund. Oh, and by the way now it is earning interest and growing with the economy.
50-65 years old -
They would receive the full amount in an IRA or approved retirement fund.
Those people who are already on Social Security will continue to receive benefits until they and their spouse die. Their benefits will be funded from the aid money that we would normally send to foreign countries. It is time that they start fending for themselves.
The only problem is, Deth, that what goes into social security is now used almost immediately to pay out benefits. So, to pay all these people, the Government has to borrow money. This is the trillion dollar upfront cost that many in my party have already pointed out will be the cost of this program.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 15, 2004 05:09 PMStephen-
If your point is right the program is headed for loans anyway. The Baby Boomers far out number the younger generations and the birth rate in the US is the lowest ever. At this rate we will not be able to fund the program for the generations ahead of us, let alone ourselves.
Posted by: Deth Frmafar at January 15, 2004 05:18 PMWhoa, folks,
I guess I struck a nerve here. This was intended to be slightly silly but serious in the attempt to get a discussion about Social Security going. Everyone has made some good points while I was out putting some bread on the table.
First the trap for young workers is as real as Deth believes it is and worse. His generation is unlikely to ever recover their investment unless we stop using the fund to pay our other bills right now. Remember the lockbox?
The problem is irresponsible behavior by both Democrats and Republicans. Since Richard Nixon started using the surplus to pay other bills we have had a problem that was coming due. Part of why we need to clear up the problem of our illegal immigrants is so that they will contribute to our tax receipts. The payroll tax is going to be hard to remove and harder to replace if we remove it.
The number of elderly people, including Deth’s grandparents I would bet, who collected my contributions when I was young are out of the picture. Most people in their generation lived a lot better lives in retirement because of that fund but the politicans played a dirty game with those funds for the last thirty years. Now we need some radical solutions. Instead we have the most irresponsible leadership we have had in this nation for a hundred years. No conceivable return of my money now could give me back the opportunities that I lost because the government took those funds out of my paycheck all of those years.
Deth has no answer that will fly with the baby boomers at this late date and that is why the government is in such deep trouble. Privatization would work for around ten percent of the people at best. The rest would lose their money one way or another which is why the government is the insurer in this case. The only problem with the government as an insurance company is that they consume the premiums for other uses as fast as they collect them. If a private insurance company behaved this way they would be out of business long ago. The total unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare is over forty trillion dollars over the next forty years.
The issue can maybe be resolved if we can create jobs fast enough to open the floodgates for immigration. If we bring in enough workers to lower the age of the working population enough the system works again. Privatization is going to be hard to plan out and harder to implement. It would also leave us with a huge population of people who cannot take care of their own money to deal with in the future. We have a lot of poor elderly people now, that would only get worse under privatization. It is a thorny problem and no easy answer exists that I have heard as yet. Making aging more painful than it already is will not provide a real answer.
Henri
I totally symphathize with Deth though I am not in complete agreement. Henri put it best in the post ahead of me though not quite all of it. One of my biggest complaints right now is the lack of generational-justice and if I had the time I would probably post an article about it.
As a 19-year old in his first year of college much of the tax burden will be placed upon my generation and Generation X. The cost of two wars - if not more from before and after - two gigantic and foolish tax cuts considering rescent history, corporate irresponsibility, et cetera, et cetera will leave me with a much larger amount of my paycheck going to the government than needed. Not fair, not fair at all.
Posted by: Adam at January 15, 2004 09:12 PMI seem to miss the jokes sometimes. Maybe it’s just the subject matter, in this case. One of the sciences I grew up enjoying most was Astronomy, planetology in particular. Voyager’s explorations of the outer planets took place While I was growing up.
For me the question is not why should we explore the solar system, but why not? For me, it is a place rife with possiblities. To just spend decades only chunking robot probes into the heavens seems a awful waste when the dreams of science fiction seem to be on the verge of coming true.
I’m not sure Bush is the best president to be trusted with beginning such a program, because while science can handle alternate theories, it cannot create alternate realities.
When the tiles failed on Columbia, it was just heat, pressure, and the melting and kindling points of the materials that composed the shuttle.
No eloquent speech, no last minute budget reappropriation, no 11th hour bureaucratic victory was going to stop the chain reaction. From the foam slamming into the wing at 500 MPH to the superheated plasma (hot ionized gas) burning, vaporizing, and melting through the wing, to the atmospheric forces tearing apart the glider, all of this was inevitable once Columbia flew above the confines of the atmosphere.
It is the same inevitable laws of physics that will determine the final outcome of any mission to Mars or the Moon. Any weaknesses in the spacecraft or the other technology will be tested, and as always, it would be better that the minds and means of man test them than nature itself. I hope Bush, or the advisors he delegates to this, will remember that, because as Challenger and Columbia will illustrate, the laws of physics teach a harsher lesson.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 15, 2004 11:27 PMBut think about all the good this will do for Bush’s and Cheney’s friends at Raytheon and Lockheed.
If there was money to be spent on pure research then why doesn’t it go for AIDS, or if on exploration then in studying our oceans which could have even more direct benefits to those living on Earth?
This is about military posturing and about the militarization of space and money for Bush’s corporate friends.
Posted by: Toronto Tenants at January 17, 2004 10:45 AMEnvy is considered one of the deadly sins. I try in practice not to begrudge people their gains, should their service be proportional to it. Additionally, it is quite likely that any number of subcontractors will be brought into the mix, as with what happened with the previous moon effort.
As for other science, let me pose the problem to you this way- will it be easier to get people to spend that kind of money when science is hardly a concern, as it is now, or when attitudes have been reshaped by their interest in the moon mission.
The temptation is to envision this in a zero-sum sort of way, where one program’s loss is another’s gain, and although economic limits sometimes make that so, it’s not always the best way to approach these things, especially when you have the anti-intellectual forces that we have in America.
That vacillation in the intellectual community will only serve to strengthen the anti-intellectuals, who have no such stagnating conflicts amongst them.
The military posturing is long over. There’s no one left to impress with our technological prowess not already aware of it, no one unconvinced of the range of our missiles or warheads. The militarization of space is half an open question, and half a reality already.
It’s a reality in that we already command the skies with our reconnaisance satellites, with our GPS, our monitor satellites that record the detonations of nuclear satellites. It was one of those, in fact, that by accident recorded the first signs of a astronomical phenomenon called a Gamma Ray Burster. In that sense, the military not only has a foothold in space, but an active presence.
What’s not certain is how much of a role the military will play in space exploration. We could speculate in all different kinds of directions, but cost-wise and strategy wise, I would think that it won’t become a big thing until there are some extraterrestrial resources to fight about.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 18, 2004 01:16 AM
