I had a “duh” moment when reading a Dave Johnson post at Seeing The Forest on tax money. What he said was so obvious after I read it that I felt truly stupid for not realizing it.

Here’s the deal: the surplus that the shrubbery gave away with his tax cuts for the rich was in FICA/Social Security taxes. There was never a surplus of income taxes, even with the increases during the Clinton administration. The actual deficit that the Hedgemony has been running is at least a quarter trillion dollars larger per year than stated because they have been spending the FICA surplus. The so-called “Social Security crisis” is the point when they have to finance the government from actual tax receipts without any FICA surplus payments to hide what is going on with the budget – a very scary moment for Republicans.

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In the early hours of January 13th, 1969 I was forced to accept something that I had known for a while, but had pushed to the back of my mind: I was mortal and was going to die.

This was the first of several incidents when my chance of survival was a good deal less than 1 in 2. This wasn’t the scariest, but it was the first, and following on the heels of the terrible events of 1968, it had the biggest impact.

In the end the only “death” was an airplane, Rivet Ball, the Air Force’s only RC-135S. The military version of the Boeing 707, the fuselage broke in half, like an eggshell, on impact. A very talented pilot, John Achor, the aircraft commander, was responsible for that miracle.

Update: for those not familiar with “the terrible events of 1968”, Distributorcap NY has an outline of the main events on this fortieth anniversary.

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.