You Are Entitled to Bankruptcy

I love just looking at numbers like $53 Trillion. It really keeps you regular:

Let me give you three numbers that will put this economic asteroid into perspective: $200 billion, $14.1 trillion, and $53 trillion.

• $200 billion is the approximate total amount of write-downs announced so far as a result of the current credit crisis.


• $14.1 trillion is the size of the entire U.S. economy


• And $53 trillion is (drum roll please) the approximate size of this country's bill for the Social Security and Medicare promises we've made.

While no one will ever mistake me for Alan Greenspan, it seems to me that the third number is quite a bit larger than the other two. It also seems very few people care.

Am I the only person who's basic reaction is "holy fucking shit?" Seriously, how devastating does the impending crisis have to be before we take a serious look at it? The thing that infuriates me most is the demagogic retardity of the opposition to privatization of Social Security (or any other common-sense response). They haven't proffered one good motherfucking reason for not doing it except that volunteers for the program may invest so poorly as to defy decades of reliable growth in the stock market.

Boo-fucking-hoo.

Life is full of ridiculous risks and I'm sick and fucking tired of being told which ones are government approved. It's my money and I'll donate it to the U.N. if I want to (I can't think of a bigger waste of money off the top of my head). If this results in me being a penniless geezer, so fucking be it. I never asked you to take care of me and I'd thank you to stop worrying about my retirement. That is and always has been my responsibility; all of our own responsibilities.

What I do know is that this problem isn't going away and when it comes to a head I strongly suspect the liberal shit-sniffers that won't let us privatize it are really not going to like the concensus solution.

It won't be more taxes.