Every now and again, I stumble across an article that just gets me going. Today was one such day, and this was one such article. Robert Samuelson takes aim at the baby boomers and their entitlement mentality in the Washington Post:

As someone born in late 1945, I say this to the 76 million or so subsequent baby boomers and particularly to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, our generation’s leading politicians: Shame on us. We are trying to rob our children and grandchildren, putting the country’s future at risk in the process. On one of the great issues of our time, the social and economic costs of our retirement, we have adopted a policy of selfish silence...

...It’s no secret that the 65-and-over population will double by 2030 (to almost 72 million, or 20 percent of the total population), but hardly anyone wants to face the implications:

• By comparison, other budget issues, including the notorious earmarks, are trivial. In 2005, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (the main programs for the elderly) cost $1.034 trillion, twice the amount of defense spending and more than two-fifths of the total federal budget. These programs are projected to equal about three-quarters of the budget by 2030, if it remains constant as a share of national income.
• Preserving present retirement benefits automatically imposes huge costs on the young -- costs that are economically unsound and socially unjust. The tax increases required by 2030 could hit 50 percent, if other spending is maintained as a share of national income. Or much of the rest of government (from defense to national parks) would have to be shut down or crippled. Or budget deficits would balloon to quadruple today’s level...

No need to fear, however, because our brave and principled political leaders are stepping up to the plate... and refusing to do anything:

Any reform plan would have to make its way through the Senate Finance Committee, which will be chaired in the new Congress by Montana Democrat Max Baucus. He’s a guy the White House thought at one point might be a vote in favor of Bush’s plan to carve out personal savings accounts as a way to make Social Security a better deal for younger workers.

But I have to say that a brief chat I had late yesterday afternoon with Baucus didn’t imbue me with much confidence. I asked him flat out if there would be major Social Security reform in this new Congress. Baucus slowly and rather unenthusiastically replied, “Oh, I don’t know. The trust fund doesn’t reach zero until 2042.”

What about Medicare reform?

The federal government should join the state of Massachusetts in enacting universal health coverage, said Sen. Edward Kennedy, the new chairman of the Senate committee with jurisdiction over numerous health issues.

Kennedy’s home state is the first to require everyone to have health insurance, just as drivers must have automobile coverage.

Kennedy has his own version of what universal health coverage would look like. He wants to extend Medicare to all.

Well, that should help to keep the program solvent and affordable for many years to come! Although, to be fair, perhaps Senator Kennedy isn’t ignoring reality, and is actually proposing this expansion of Medicare in order to speed the imminent demise of the program and force a crisis which he can then solve...

Naaah.

So we’re left with a looming crisis that everyone knows is coming but no one with the ability to do anything about it will acknowledge it for fear of the political consequences. And in the meantime, I get to look at my paycheck and see hundreds of dollars fall away every month into programs that will be long gone by the time I would get to the age of eligibility. I try not to think what my 401k or IRA would look like right now if I had just been able to funnel that money in that direction; that way lies anger, and you know what Yoda said about anger: It eventually leads to suffering.

But why should I wallow in anger and self-pity? This is America, the Land of Opportunity - and have I got an opportunity for all of you baby boomers out there! Since you’re going to be helping yourselves to a generous portion of my money over the coming years (barring some sort of political miracle), I’d like to give you the opportunity to say thanks in a tangible way: by contributing to the Fund for Redistribution and Entitlement Equality/Retirement Income Doubling Enterprise (or FREE RIDE for short), a new initiative that I’ve set up to ensure that the boomers have the same opportunity to contribute to retirement security that my generation has. Well, not quite the same - it’s voluntary, whereas my income is confiscated - but still, I have to believe that you’re just as concerned with my retirement security as you are with yours, right?

Just make your check out to me and send them care of the Acton Institute (the address is here), and you’ll be able to rest easy knowing that you’ve helped to ensure the retirement security of at least one future senior.

With all this talk of health care reform this year, I couldn’t help but do some digging into the real aspects of the proposals. Ranging from the completely disruptive universal medical care plan from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the socialist-like plan from Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) in the 110th congress, health care is big on the agenda for 2007. I am afraid that if the policies proposed by Schwarzenegger and Kennedy are passed, future generations will witness a detrimental effect on our economy. Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts, being the first state to provide universal health care to its citizens, has already seen negative aspects in regards to business and job creation.

These arguments for universal health care come disguised in many forms, but all contribute negatively to the economy. The idea of making health care affordable and available to citizens is an excellent idea, however, Governor Schwarzenegger’s and Senator Kennedy’s ideas are the wrong way to go.

Forcing employers to provide health care and penalizing them for not providing coverage is not the right direction to head.

The state of Massachusetts employs a combination of subsidies and penalties to make insurance more affordable and to force people to buy it. The law requires employers with 11 or more full-time employees to offer health coverage or be subject to a $295 fee for each employee, as well as face being billed for services their uninsured employees get.

Because of this policy, employees are going to lose other benefits and suffer pay cuts, or even be fired. The cost of medical insurance is extremely high. The real solution rests in not forcing employers to provide coverage, but to make insurance more affordable.

The answer lies in eliminating all of the fraudulent law suits filed every day by money-hungry lawyers who are completely destroying the medical system. As lawyers sue doctors, malpractice insurance premiums increase. The number of personal injury litigations has steadily increased at a rate of 12% since 1975.

Jury Verdict Research, a database of plaintiff and defense verdicts, says awards in medical liability cases increased 43 percent in 1999, from $700,000 to $1,000,000. Jury awards in medical malpractice claims jumped 43 percent in one year—from $700,000 in 1999 to $1 million in 2000. Juries are compensating plaintiffs more generously than in the past. From 1994 to 2000, Jury Verdict Research found that more than half of medical malpractice jury awards were for $500,000 or more.

Seeing the direct correlation between health care cost and the cost of medical malpractice insurance for doctors (driven up by law suits), the root of the problem is obvious. This must be attacked before anything else. If Senator Kennedy and Governor Schwarzenegger want to see real progress, their plans must be disregarded and tort abuse must be solved first. There are various other aspects to their plans that are also misinformed and misdirected, but I’ll save that for another time.

A part of the pornification of culture is the pornification of technology.

G4TV, a cable network owned by Comcast Corp., has been covering the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from Las Vegas this week and kicks off prime time special coverage tonight at 9pm ET. Of course, hip new gadgets like the iPhone (which actually was debuted at Macworld 2007) aren’t enough to appeal to “the male 18-34 audience and their fascination with video games, the Internet, broadband, technology, comics and animation.”

What’s missing from that list of interest? Porn, of course. That’s where the Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) comes in, serendipitously timed to match up with CES. G4TV is advertising dual coverage of both CES and AEE as “two days of gadgets and girls.”

But as one commenter in a G4 forum notes, “You know, there are female gamers/sci-fi fans too. Like, people who prefer to be thought of as more than pieces of sexy sex meat.”

She continues,

But, silly me, why should G4 care if women like games, right? So much easier to play to stereotypes and make commercials about how men need ‘balance’ (like tech and ‘sex’ (meaning, clearly, scantily clad skinny white women) equals ‘balance’). Yay for G4! Who cares about women!

Poo to your advertisements and your stupid anti-girl sex shows. I guess I’ll need to start looking elsewhere for my gaming and sci-fi needs.

You go, girl.

Of course, the ubiquity of pornography on the Internet is the stuff of legend (although often of the urban variety). While pornographic websites on the web are estimated to do over $2.5 billion in business annually and about one-quarter of web searches are porn related, a recent government study has found that 1% of Internet sites are porn-related (other estimates have put the range at 10% or higher).

Even so, 20 percent of men and 13 percent of women admit accessing porn at work. This has led some, such as PJ Doland (HT: Slashdot), to entertain the idea of a NSFW (“not safe for work”) HTML attribute or tag that could be added to questionable content. Doland writes:

This isn’t about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a[n objectionable] link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel more comfortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content.

An idea like this has the potential to achieve through voluntary measures what the proponents of the .xxx domain extension had hoped to accomplish by segregating explicit material from the rest of the web by an obvious marker.

Some church groups opposed the idea of a .xxx domain because they thought it would lend credibility to Internet pornography, and ICANN temporarily shelved the idea (although it may be revived).

Christian philosopher Albert Borgmann has written that “underneath the surface of technological liberty and prosperity there is a sense of captivity and deprivation.”

Augustine described the relationship between desire and deprivation in his Confessions this way:

The truth is that disordered lust springs from a perverted will; when lust is pandered to, a habit is formed; when habit is not checked, it hardens into compulsion. These were like interlinking rings forming what I have described as a chain, and my harsh servitude used it to keep me under duress (8.5.10).

It would be hard to imagine something on the Internet that contributes as much to this binding of the will to sin than pornography, making the work of groups like the XXXChurch (who are covering the AEE in their own way) all the more pressing.