Ms.Snip: Hi, Snipe. Haven’t talked to you for a while. How do you see things progressing these days?
Ms. Snipe: Excuse me? Progressing? I’ll let you know if I ever see any real progress.
Ms.Snip: But, they say the economy is fabulous. The stock market is booming.
Ms. Snipe: Yes, booming, perhaps about to explode. Seems to me that happened under the watch of the last Republican President too. We’ll see what happens with the current volatile market.
Deregulation allows the greedy and selfish to take advantage and tax breaks were a big joke. They were supposed to allow companies to invest in more jobs. Many just spent the money buying back company shares. What does that do? It enables the company big wigs to get bigger bonuses and bigger retirement packages, bigger annual salaries than many middle-class workers will earn in a lifetime. Hmm. Who did that tax reduction help?
Ms.Snip: Well, I heard retirees got a raise in social security this year, didn’t you?
Ms. Snipe: I did. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite match the real cost-of-living increases. I’m not sure what is the actual basis for the amount designated as cost-of-living. I wonder if the index really looks at things like groceries, gasoline, utilities and other aspects of daily life. In fact, it didn’t quite cover the increases in the cost of health insurance. My Medicare has gone up every year since I signed up and of course the supplemental insurance has as well. My biggest monthly outlay is insurance.
Ms.Snip: Medicare is free isn’t it? I mean you have paid for it since it was first enacted. I thought that was supposed to be like a prepaid insurance policy.
Ms. Snipe: (Big laugh) Sorry for laughing. It’s really not funny. I’m just laughing at all the misinformed people who are going to depend on their years of “banking” on social security and Medicare to be adequate when they are eligible. The government has been taking money from those “trusts” for years. And then politicians with their guaranteed generous retirement packages try to denigrate those who paid in all these years. They attach the term “entitlement” as an ugly thing. Actually, those who paid in are absolutely entitled to these payments. When you put money in a fund with the understanding that your government is investing it for you, you are absolutely entitled to recover those funds and their accumulated interest.
Ms.Snip: Well, the big earners have to pay it too, don’t they? Isn’t the amount based on salary.
Ms. Snipe: That’s my understanding. And employers have to pay in for employees as well. A good plan originally but without ever raising the limits on the amount to be taxed (yes, it is a tax), the disparity grows. A middle-lass laborer might be paying a percentage of his/her entire salary while a higher-level earner pays the same percentage but only on part of his/her salary. That top limit is ridiculously low in light of today’s salaries.
Ms.Snip: Guess you have a right to be snippy. Sorry, just my inside joke. Maybe I should start paying more attention to what is being said and unsaid by our elected officials.
Ms. Snipe: You should indeed. And take that grain of salt and increase it to spread liberally over any and all words spouted by those partisan TH (talking heads).
Finally, I feel it necessary to comment on the events of the aborted (oops) infrastructure meeting that was to be held in the oval office. No matter what SQ (Spin Queen) said in her front yard appearance, that walkout by BC (Big Crybaby) was absolutely planned. If not, he must be the magician he thinks he is because in the time he walked out of the meeting to his almost immediate appearance outside there magically appeared a well-placed podium with denial signs attached and a hand-written comment sheet in his hands. Who wrote those comments? One imagines that from the spelling BC did that himself.
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