adrian is rad

So the state of the union deal was last night. Blah blah we all hate bushy yada yada.

He proposed a reform to Social Security. People are up in arms about it, of course. He outlined some apparent principles of this thing and I will regurgitate them from memory and add my thoughts:

• can’t change the benefits for those who have retired or about to retire. yeah, okay.
• any changes should be gradual so that people can have time to adjust. sounds reasonable.
• the money will be yours and the government can never take it away. well, it’ll be in the government’s hands, which is not quite as good as in my pocket, but in principle it’s nice that some administration or congress can’t decide that it wants the money I’m about to retire on.
• the money will grow faster in a private account. I remember back in economics class many years ago that the economy will do better in identical situations if people have their money than if the government taxes some of it then spends it/ redistributes it. I mean, the government basically wastes some of the money in overhead and things like that. It would seem to follow that the same would be true in private vs. goverment run retirement accounts. This says nothing about if it’s better for the rich or the poor or who ever; that’s another topic entirely.

Now, I don’t know the details of the plan itself, but it seems to me that if I get to choose where my withheld money goes and it’s stays mine, that’s almost as good as it being in my pocket and me getting to put it into my 401K or Roth IRA or whatever. Are mandatory withholdings good? In the end, probably yes. It would probably cost the taxpayers more to have retirees going onto welfare or other government programs because they didn’t save enough.

Again, I’m making assumptions. This time that the Social Security system needs to become zero-sum. I don’t think it can last with the young funding the old, etc.

I think basically most of this comes down to the thought that I’m doing reasonably financially and saving money under my own volition for the future because I want to and other people could be doing the same if they wanted to badly enough. I can make you a giant list of (non-MIT) people who are smarter than me, but I am here, at a job that I enjoy, making a reasonable wage, because I worked really freaking hard for the last ten years to the edge of insanity (literally) multiple times.

Or maybe I’m just trying to justify my way out of the guilt I feel for being in my situation. My head is starting to do this floaty/ detached thing, which means it’s time to stop now.

Today’s playlist. I did a good show. Nice flow. Started with some post-rocky sort of stuff and that seemed to work well.

But the big news of the day was that I got a caller (Jon Werberg—I tried earlier in the show with Jesse but failed) on the air. He gave a traffic report of one corner in the Bronx. Pretty exciting stuff. It’s not an easy process at KZSU (it was just about impossible to do in the A-Studio of WMBR when I was there and since I basically only broadcast out of A, I didn’t learn), but I figured it out. I’m so proud of myself.

The original plan was to get Dale to call in from the traffic on the 101 and give an “in-the-action traffic report” (and say how all those stations that use helicopters or cameras are totally in the past—why be in the air when you could be in the action! those guys in the chopper can’t see what’s really happeneing.)

Maybe next week on that one.