Social security skills...

for all the attention that Lileks gets, it seems his excellent Newhouse columns don't get as much attention as they should.

I mean, who can argue with this statement about Alexander:
And it's not as though the movie has no hetero appeal; it has great dollops of Angelina Jolie, America's favorite demonstrably unhinged sex bomb. A great many red-state-blooded American males would sit through a six-hour documentary about the Gay Men's Chorus if they knew Angelina showed up naked in the final reel.

And his column on Harry Ried hits the nail on the head too, and not just because he describes Ried as someone who comes off as someone who got a grant to explain calculus to chimps, and thinks the key is speaking very slowly.

Social Security has always amazed me in the sense that nobody (especially nobody my age) is as pissed off about it as they should be. Here you have a program that takes 15% of my paycheck (when you factor in the "employer's contribution", which would otherwise be paid to the employer) and gives you a negative return, assuming you live long enough to get anything back, and nobody seems to care. There is a widely mentioned stat, whose acuracy I have no idea of, that more young people believe in UFO's than that they will see a penny of Social Security. It make sense -there is no proof that UFO's DON'T exist, while simple math reveals that Social Security will at some point run out of money if no changes are made to it - and nobody wants to change it because they know that the very suggestion will send the AARP into calling for elderly woman to beat them with their purse.

The fact that if you die before you retire, you get none of what has been taken from you back, is one of my pet peeves. It makes the program biased against men, and African Americans, who have shorter average lifespans than women and whites, respectivly. It also hurts anyone with half a brain who can figure out how to put away money. You could make more with a savings account than you do on social security.

But despite the obvious issues with social security, nobody seems to care. It's a car that's about to plunge off a cliff, but the Dems seem to be kicking anyone who reaches for the steering wheel.

(that analogy just asked me to stop tourturing it)