surrealization.com

Same sex marriages, No more social security

Thursday, February 26 2004

I was reading someone's technical weblog today and he had a post on allowing gay marriage. I wholeheartedly agree. I was listening to a debate on NPR on the way to work this morning (the Diane Rehm show) and they were talking about gay marriage and whether it should be allowed or not.

The liberal arguments were "the constitution clearly states equal protection and benefit under the law", "there is no good reason why it shouldn't be allowed", and some others. My favorite was someone said "no president has dared impart social doctrines on the country through the use of a constitutional amendment since the prohibition."

The conservative arguments were the expected "marriage is a sacred, religious institution" and "marriage is between a man and a woman and it has always been that way". The one that really irked me was that someone tried to prove that the nearly 50% divorce rate in the country and the amount of single-parent (never married) families is somehow caused by the gay marriage debate. My parents didn't get divorced ~14 years ago because gays had lowered the standards of marriage for everyone else. Not only that, but how sacred of an institution is marriage when you can get married in under 5 minutes by a troupe of Elvis impersonators, or better yet, by driving up to a 24-hour drive-through marriage window?

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On another note, listening to NPR yesterday, Alan Greenspan was quoted saying the demand for social security is going to rise drastically once the baby boomers start claiming it, and the only way to create a long-lasting solution is to decrease social security benefits for future retirees. Just in case you didn't quite get that, he said that because there will soon be too many people getting social security checks and not enough money to handle it in the long run, that he suggests that people in the future (my age group and people 10-15 years older than me) should receive less than expected!

Does that make any sense when Bush is attempting to put in place a permanent tax cut that costs more than 1 trillion dollars in the next decade? How many people do you know that got any serious benefit from the tax cuts? Unless you know people who make a serious amount of money, the answer is probably zero. I make more money than most of the people in the United States (did you know that the average per capita income in the US in 2002 was $30,941?!), and I noticed no significant difference between last year's and this year's taxes. Don't you think you'd rather sacrifice a bit now (and frankly I'd be the one sacrificing due to lower-income tax refunds, not the person making the national average) to ensure that things like social security are there for you in the future?

I would love to get rid of the tax cuts, let the people who make the national average and below get sizable tax returns at the end of the year (as they already do), and use that 1 trillion dollars to create a long-term solution to the problem. What do you think people who can't afford a 401(k) (such as the people making well under the national average) are going to do without a social security or social security-like institution? What do you think those people are going to do with their $200 tax refund they received in 2003 and their 1% income tax saved throughout the year? Which is fundamentally more beneficial?

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