I'm going back over this again and again to find the actual debunking. What part of this is intended to prove that the "Republican party talking point" about General Motors' bondholders is untrue? Is your assertion intended to be that the claim that secured bondholders were denied their legal rights to be the first to have a return of their investment principal in the re-organization is untrue because "life sucks"? That can't be the case. Surely you had some actual contrary evidence that you forgot to present.

With 2969 comments, it's impossible not to say something that hasn't already been mentioned. So that's my disclaimer. Ann asks where we were when Republicans were nominating Cain? Many of us were in states that held their primaries too late to make a difference. By the time of the Ohio primary, Romney had already dropped out. Many of the rest were voting either for Romney or Huckabee. Cain only started winning pluralities when the conservative vote was getting split between the fiscal and social wings. The hope was that this time around we wouldn't be forced to choose the anointed moderate.

Paul, I thought it was fairly clear that Cain had no intention of allowing the income tax to be progressive. He has, after all, suggested that this was a first step to the Fair Tax. There are concerns about the plan, to be sure. What the actual revenue would be is anyone's guess. But your analysis doesn't really go into any of its problems in detail, which is disappointing.

Fortunately we only have to wait another 30 years and come up with tens of trillions of additional funds in the meantime. Easy peasy.

Aargh! Why is the "Flag" button on the right and the "Reply" button on the left? I accidentally flagged your post and I can't "unflag" it. My apologies. I think the way Jacoby worded "all important surpluses" indicates that he knows what is going on. He is simply leaving that topic for another discussion. I think all of us here know exactly how those surpluses have been "invested". And now that the money spigot needs to turn the other way, it is coming out of a fund in deficit rather than in surplus. 2013 will be very, very interesting.

If you read Social Security's finance reports, it all looks good. But that is because SSA is not responsible for redemption of the Treasury bills that it holds in the Trust Fund. It is the responsibility of the Treasury to redeem those bills, which means the money has to come OUT of the general fund. Since redemption of the bills is SOP (somebody else's problem), SSA doesn't concern itself with it. But the state of its fund is in not better shape that any fund that relied on bundled mortgage securities in 2008. The trust fund is invested exclusively in those Treasury bills, which means the federal government has to come up with the money.

I would agree that such a law would be a reasonable solution, had it been done several years ago. Wasn't this what Al Gore was suggesting with his Social Security lockbox? It is now too late. Social Security is projected to run a surplus this year and next year, and then be in deficit for the forseeable future. There will be no SS revenue available for the General Fund starting in 2013, making such a law redundant.

Calvin Coolidge.

Many of the refugees currently in the camps are not even the descendants of people who left Israel during the 1948 war, but were people attracted to the refugee camps by the UNRWA aid that was made available. What we currently call Palestinians are a mixture of these two groups, and no one is in a good position to identify which people belong to which group.

You have figures to back this up, right? Remember, you have to account for one-and-a-half trillion dollars. What sort of tax hikes would it take to close that deficit?