This is the best post I have ever seen on the problem of demographics and entitlement spending, which is due to explode in about a few years. I’ll summarize so that you will click through and read this post for yourself. There is almost no text in the post, it is all graphs, and they are self explanatory. It will take your about 5 minutes to scare yourself into a coma.
Summary of the post:
There are 3 entitlement programs: social security, medicare and medicaid
These programs are funded by taxes on young people who are still working
These 3 programs currently cost 9% of GDP.
By 2050, the costs will have doubled to 18% GDP.
Some of this increase will be due to excess growth in health costs
And some of this increase will be due to demographics
Let me talk more about the demographics problem:
More people are living longer
That means that benefits are being paid out over more years, per person
A huge group of babies from the Baby Boom started retiring in 2008
But the number of younger workers who pay their benefits is not growing fast enough
The number of workers needed to pay each retiree’s benefits is shrinking
Taxes will have to increase, or benefits will have to decrease
Please read the article. It will help you to put Obama’s massive spending and tax hikes in perspective. By the way, this is a great post to forward to your friends and neighbor’s who voted for Obama who do not like to read about economics and finance.
I wanted to highlight some of the Christian blogs that I’ve discovered since I started blogging.
The top one in the list is definitely Neil Simpson’s blog. I was just reading over there today and he was really hard on poor Dawn Eden, whose book on chastity I have read. I recommend it, although she doesn’t go as far as I would. Anyway, she’s responded in the comments. She is currently taking classes in philosophy and theology, so it should be a good fight between her and Neil! Dawn’s blog is here.
I also noticed this post over on Laura’s blog, but it’s cross-posted on Hot Air. Laura writes about how the left implicitly doesn’t trust parents to make decisions about how they address the topic of sex when talking to their own children. She writes about the left’s view of parents:
Our teens are political pawns for the left. They’re helpless victims of our prudery, children that the government needs to provide for at every turn with health insurance and free college tuition (but don’t deserve an adequate secondary education except when it’s time to raise taxes), socially and technologically savvy enough to make their own entertainment and political choices free from our censorship, mature and wise enough to choose abortion (but not give birth), and 18 year old babies who need to be protected from sneaky military recruiters and beer. The rallying cry may be “it’s for the children!” but the only really consistent position I see in the left is that parents do not know best; government does.
Over on Muddling Toward Maturity, he links to a Chuck Colson story on how the self-esteem movement in education and parenting has undermined civility in our children. Here is an excerpt from Chuck Colson:
Whether or not today’s kids are actually “ruder than ever,” the article and others like it reflect the sense that something has gone wrong in the way we raise our children. Specifically, it has to do with “popular parenting movements focusing on self-esteem.”
These movements produce parents who “[respond] with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way.” By “getting in the child’s way,” they mean doing anything that might make the child feel less-than-wonderful about him or herself—in the classroom, among their peers, or on the playing field.
Denyse O’Leary takes on the theistic evolutionists here at Post-Darwinist. I love it when she gets mad at them! She gets right to the heart of the issue: is there objective evidence of intelligent agency active in nature? Intelligent design supporters say YES, atheists and theistic evolutionists (but I repeat myself) say NO.
A video of Denyse talking about her book “The Spiritual Brain” here: (H/T Mindful Hack)
She talks about whether faith is good for people, and how people invent genes to explain their bad behavior.
Kreitsauce writes about the importance of self-denial and self-sacrifice in the Christian worldview, which is neglected these days now that the church has bowed to the society at large and reduced Christianity to feelings of happiness.
Discipleship, in contrast to narcissism, brings true satisfaction with life, because life gains a whole new sense of meaning and purpose. We have real freedom to do what is right, to live a life of intimacy with God. This life of discipleship and self-denial does not mean living without desire or without anything that brings pleasure. God does not call us to the monastery but to live life in the world but not of the world.
Chad at Truthbomb Apologetics has a post up that I will be writing about shortly, because it’s that good. He links to an episode of Casey Luskin’s ID The Future podcast featuring a discussion between a Darwinist and Socrates. He has an excerpt from the dialog here on his blog. The entire dialog is in a PDF on his site.
Over time human rights, now almost universally accepted among Europeans, will themselves come to be seen as so many arbitrary constructions that may, on utilitarian grounds, be revoked—because there is nothing intrinsic about human beings such that they are not to be ill-treated or violated or even killed. Even now, many do not want to be bothered with the infirm elderly or damaged infants, so we devise so-called humane ways to kill them and pretend that somehow they chose (or would have chosen) to die. Elderly patients are being killed in the Netherlands without their consent. A new protocol for euthanizing newborns with disabilities is institutionalized in the Netherlands…
The Australian utilitarian Peter Singer predicts confidently that the superstition that human life is sacred will be definitively put to rest by 2040.
…In an interview for a British magazine during the summer of 2005, Singer said that if he faced the quandary of saving from a raging fire either a mentally disabled child, an orphan child nobody wanted, or normal animals, he would save the animals. If the child had a mother who would be devastated by the child’s death, he would save the child, but unwanted orphans have no such value.
My buddy Rich and I scrap over whether chastity is better than marriage over at the Pugnacious Irishman. (He’s getting married shortly, and my friend Robb is getting married tomorrow, so it’s a hot topic for me!)
Over on the Western Experience, Jason has a post up on how Dick Cheney is taking on Obama on his lousy policies. Here’s a clip:
Unqualified teleprompter-reader versus qualified statesman. Nice Deb has a complete round-up here, featuring Michelle Malkin and others. I have to tell you, I am really liking what Liz Cheney has to say these days, as well.
WINTERY KNIGHT 