Uncategorized
SOLUTIONS TO THE RETIREMENT CRISIS: PART 3
“...as soon as 2025, as many as 30 million Americans, many of them originally middle class, will find themselves either poor or “near-poor.”
From “How to Solve the Retirement Crisis: A Politico Working Group Report”
“The great lie is that the 401(k) was capable of replacing the old system of pensions,” Gerald Facciani former head of the American Society of Pension Actuaries (quoted in the Wall Street Journal)
Continuing our look at the retirement crisis, this article discusses several proposals to provide secure pensions to all ...
WHEN A VILLAGE STANDS BEHIND OUR CHILDREN
Parenting.
It’s just a word to a young couple thinking about maybe having kids. Then, it happens. The kids, I mean. Everything getting real, fast. The jitters hit us—a ton of bricks in a diaper. Some check out parenting gurus. Some wing it. Some are red. Some are blue. All are green. All soldier on.
And finally, we become expert, after the fact, with that first one. Our first-timer false starts and miscues aside, we’ve got the next one covered. There’s a swagger in our step. We’ve got this. Except, of course, that our next child isn’t anything like the ...
ORION RISES IN THE SOUTHEASTERN SKY IN DECEMBER
I’m excited to write about the constellation Orion for the December issue. Orion is the favorite constellation of many people. Orion’s stars are brilliant. Furthermore, the constellation lies across the Celestial Equator, so it can be seen by anybody anywhere on Earth at the right time of year.
We need a few definitions. These are taken from www.skymaps.com.
Constellation: “a defined area of the sky containing a star pattern” (such as a person, animal or object).
Galaxy: “A mass of several billion stars (or more) held together by gravity.”...
I AM SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER
When I was a kid, our influencers were people we knew. We didn’t just see them on a video, we saw them in real life. Not to say that there weren’t celebrities that we admired, but the people we tended to emulate were those whom we had regular interactions with. That included teachers, and maybe that one special school principal.
“You can remember the difference between principle and principal, because one is your ‘pal.’” That was one of the mnemonic devices I learned while attending Grove Elementary. It might not have stuck with me if Yvonne Ellie ...
FREE FOR ALL
Truth stands revealed to all.
I may cover up my eyes,
turn my back, stamp my feet:
but truth is what it is.
Or I may hide it from others,
steer them along another road, impose a censorship;
but they will find truth somewhere,
and their discovery will uncover my deception.
And then again, I may declare that only I have truth
But truth will out.
it cannot be suppressed, or hidden;
it has no favorites.
Let me, then, have confidence in freedom
for truth cannot be over-thrown by error.
...
THE RIFLE
(reprinted from January 27, 2015 MW issue)
Born in the late 40’s, I grew up in a family of hunters. Fair shots most of them, I remember standing next to my father when a spooked buck crossed our path at a dead run. Dad shot twice, hit twice, and the buck went down. It was near Hatfield, in central Wisconsin.
Dad’s rifle was an old, iron sight, pump action, 30 Remington. It has killed (we kill deer – corn and oats are harvested) a few deer since my father died in ‘94. My sons have used the rifle. It was never a popular caliber and bullets are no longer ...
FIXING RETIREMENT: PART 2
“When tens of millions of people all have the same problem, it’s not a failure of individual initiative.” Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne L. Alstott, law professors and authors
In our last issue, we looked at why many people are not going to have enough money to retire. Wisconsin treasurer Sarah Godlewski is establishing a task force to study and make recommendations on retirement. This effort will likely not address all possible solutions in order to make its recommendations more politically palatable to the Republican-controlled legislature. But the people ...
NATIONAL SECURITY RISKS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Former Defense Secretary James Mattis has been on talk shows promoting his book “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead.”
In his interviews, in direct contrast to messaging from the White House and most Congressional Republicans, Mattis warns us of the national security risks of climate change and reprimands our political leaders for not tackling the issue.
Mattis long held the opinion that climate change is a threat to the nation and remained resolute in that opinion while serving in the Trump administration. Since resigning as Defense Secretary, it is clear he feels ...
NEWSPEAK
(Denele blogs from Arkansas. You can read more at www.denelecampbell.com)
Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a fictional totalitarian state and the setting of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, free will — that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the ...
PUBLIC BANKING UNIT VI: TOWARD A BRIGHTER FUTURE
“I am opposed to the United States Government, which possesses the sovereign and exclusive privilege of creating money, paying private bankers for the use of its own money. These private bankers do not hire [lend] their own money to the Government; the hire [lend] only the Government’s money to the government, and collect an interest charge annually. I insist it is absolutely wrong for this committee to permit this condition to continue and saddle the taxpayers of this Nation with a burden of debt that they will not be able to liquidate in a hundred years or ...