On 5/06/05 2:36, in article
1117931777.858607.142590@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, "Carmen L. Abruzzi"
wrote:
> Do not move to Hillsdale, however. Hillsdale is disgusting, a bland
> tan stucco square blocky complex of condos--by far the worst example of
> bland suburban blah that I've ever seen. Let's call it "hellsdale"
> shall we? There's a tan one and a tan one and another tan one too,
> and they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the
> same.
I would class the San Diego as having the nation's best weather.
We lived in Los Gatos for years before moving to France 30 years ago,
I thought Los Gatos and the Santa Cruz mountain areas not bad at all,
except the rain fall varies a lot. I was on the faculty at UC Santa
Cruz and the lower end of the campus had the reputation of having 30 inches
of rain, the upper end, 60! The rainfall in Santa Clara Valley varies
in the same fashion going from the west to east side, a lot less. It is
really a mega-city.
The problem with the Bay area now is that the traffic is crazy, the area is
a victim of "sprawl". Population growth has stagnated and the price
of housing is very very high by national standards.
From a weather stand point San Diego is better, and if the US had
"liberated" Baja California when it liberated California from the
Mexicans, Baja would have been better. Warm but not too warm and low
humidity.
The other area which receive upbeat comments are, of course, Arizona but
I found it too cold in the winter! Especially the nights. Phoenix also
suffers from the "sprawl" Tucson less so. South Florida is generally good
weather, except for hurricanes. We have been there a couple of times
and "not bad" but the weather is humid. It also has a sprawl problem.
The SF Bay area is insulated from the sprawl on the peninsula, no where
to build. Silicon Valley is occupied. The coastal area (Half Moon Bay)
is cold and fog bound.
Milton Friedman commented today on SF.
****
Friedman's 'heresy' hits mainstream
Private Social Security accounts were his idea
-Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, June 5, 2005
San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed
the privatization of Social Security.
Asked why he dwells in liberalism's den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel
laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn't skip a beat.
"Not much competition here," he quipped.
"The people I see in the Safeway don't go around yelling, 'I'm a left wing
Democrat,' even if they are," he said. "This is a very nice city to live
in."
Living atop Nob Hill for the past 28 years with his wife and collaborator,
Rose, who fell in love with the city as a young woman, Friedman is
considered perhaps the most influential economist since John Maynard
Keynes.
Keynes, the British economist whose ideas propelled the New Deal, was to
Republicans what Friedman, son of poor Jewish Brooklyn immigrants from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, is to Democrats: a font of heresy.
It was Friedman who in 1962, with the publication of "Capitalism and
Freedom," first proposed the abolition of Social Security, not because it
was going bankrupt, but because he considered it immoral.
"We may wish to help poor people," he wrote. "Is there any justification
for helping people whether they are poor or not because they happen to be a
certain age?"
President Bush's proposal to incorporate private accounts in the giant
retirement program is easily traced to Friedman.
"He's the originator of it and all the discussion can be traced back to
him," said the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner, a leading advocate of
partial privatization.
"I've always been opposed to Social Security," Friedman said in a recent
interview at his home in San Francisco. "I think it's a very unethical
program. "
Friedman's work clearly influenced Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, now
the chief intellectual force behind privatization, said Thomas Saving, a
recent Social Security trustee. Feldstein, often mentioned as a likely
candidate to replace Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, cites Friedman
in his article on the subject in the American Economic Review.
"He's the guy who got people asking the question," Saving said, "because at
the time it was a question you couldn't ask."
The late Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, whom Friedman advised,
found that out in 1964 when he suggested during his presidential campaign
that Social Security be made voluntary.
Goldwater was pilloried, not only by editorial pages but his own party. He
lost in a landslide to Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who went on to
create Medicare, the big health care program for the elderly, in 1965.
Friedman calls Social Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt in
1935, a Ponzi game.
Charles Ponzi was the 1920s Boston swindler who collected money from
"investors" to whom he paid out large "profits" from the proceeds of later
investors. The scheme inevitably collapses when there are not enough new
entrants to pay earlier ones.
That Social Security operates on a similar basis is not really in dispute.
Paul Samuelson, who won his Nobel Prize in economics six years before
Friedman and shared a Newsweek column with him in the 1960s, called Social
Security "a Ponzi scheme that works."
"The beauty about social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound,"
Samuelson wrote in an oft-quoted 1967 column. "Everyone who reaches
retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has
paid in ... A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived."
Today, 38 years after Samuelson wrote this, the number of people collecting
benefits is about to rise steeply as Baby Boomers retire, reversing the
flow of the system's finances. And it is Friedman's intellectual framework
that now reigns at the White House.
"Everybody goes around talking about the problems created by the declining
number of workers per retiree," he said. "How come life insurance companies
aren't in any problem?"
The question is quintessential Friedman: simple, accessible and formidable.
Life insurance companies take premium payments and invest them in factories
and buildings and other income-producing assets, Friedman said. These
accumulate in a growing fund that can then pay benefits. Social Security, by
contrast, operates pay-as-you-go, collecting payroll taxes from workers
that immediately go to pay retirees.
The biggest misconception about the program, he argues, is that workers
believe it works like insurance, with the government depositing taxes in a
trust fund.
"I've always thought it disgraceful that the government should be
essentially lying about what it was doing," he said.
"How did you ever get the Democrats, who supposedly were in favor of
progressive taxation, to pass a tax that is biased against low-income people
- - which is on income up to a maximum and no more?" he asked, referring to
the $90,000 ceiling on which Social Security taxes are levied. "Only by
clothing it in this idea that it's not really a tax, it's an insurance
payment."
Asked why, if Social Security is so terrible, it is the most popular
government program in American history, Friedman replied, "Well, because why
does a Ponzi game work? It's easy to understand why it's popular. So far, on
the average, retirees have gotten more out of the system than they put into
it. "
What about the fact that Social Security has reduced poverty among the
elderly?
"Well," he replied, "what it has done is transfer a lot of income from the
young to the old. It is certainly true it has made the old people of the
United States the best treated old people in the world."
But why is that a bad thing? "Oh," he replied. "It's not a bad thing for
them, but what about the young?"
Friedman supported Bush's first-term candidacy, but he is more accurately
libertarian than conservative and not a reliable Bush ally.
Progress in his goal of rolling back the role of government, he said, is
"being greatly threatened, unfortunately, by this notion that the U.S. has a
mission to promote democracy around the world," a big Bush objective.
"War is a friend of the state," Friedman said. It is always expensive,
requiring higher taxes, and, "In time of war, government will take powers
and do things that it would not ordinarily do."
He also said it was no coincidence that budget surpluses appeared during
the Clinton administration, when a Democratic president faced a Republican
Congress.
"There were no big spending programs during the Clinton administration," he
said. "As a result, government spending tended to stay down, the economy
grew like mad, taxes went up, spending did not, and lo and behold, the
deficit was turned into a surplus."
The problem now, he said, is that Republicans control both ends of
Washington.
"There's no question if we're holding down spending, a Democratic president
and a Republican House and Senate is the proper combination."
He calls himself an innate optimist, despite the unpopularity of many of
his ideas.
When he moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, the city was debating rent
control, he recalled. So he wrote a letter to The Chronicle saying, "Anybody
who has examined the evidence about the effects of rent control, and still
votes for it, is either a knave or a fool."
What happened? "They immediately passed it," he laughed.
****
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