Swatch Day

This cold, grey, awful, wintery, wonderful day I will sit by my fireplace and knit swatches! I’ll swatch for the history book, I’ll swatch for the men knitting book, and I’ll swatch for some new submissions. And I’ll sketch, too. With a cup of tea and a book on CD, I will retire from the world for the day. See you tomorrow! In the mean time, here are a few answers to earlier comments:

Man & Superman

Thanks to Jerry for his welcome to the Male Knitters Ring (I’m a friend!) and for his kind, supportive comments. (FYI – I’ve moved my ring link to the lower right side – near the other ring links.)

In regards to the whole you are not a man non-issue “controversy” – I’m 6′ tall and take testosterone (& estrogen) as part of my recovery from Ovarian Cancer, so I’m partly there… Just joking. I’m all woman, natch!

I know that I’m not overreaching, patronizing or being presumtious. I simply want to publish some of my better men’s designs (since they’re not being published elsewhere) and add a few dog sweaters. If I can pay a few months of the mortgage, so much the better!

I figured as long as I was going ahead with the book, why not use male knitters to work up as many samples as possible, to add a more realistic angle to the project!

Social Insecurity?

In an earlier post I talked about the widening gap between rich and poor (Gilded Age) and received a comment regarding Social Security.

I certainly don’t blame the commentor for being afraid about the future of Social Security. The current administration is doing their level best to instill a false sense of insecurity in each of us. Once we’re terrified that we’ll be 70 year old papers, the neo-cons can do whatever they will with the most successful social program ever in the history of the US.

Paul Krugman writes an excellent piece in the New York times about the actual future of social security. Here’s a quote:

Today let’s focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social Security faces an imminent crisis.

That claim is simply false. Yet much of the press has reported the falsehood as a fact. For example, The Washington Post recently described 2018, when benefit payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenues, as a “day of reckoning.”

Here’s the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund.

When benefit payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052, says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many economists, who point out that these projections assume that the economy will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.

The truth is that the neo conservatives hate the program, hate what they label as a ‘government handout’ and want to end it. They also want to guarantee a HUGE payday for Wall Street when all of those fees for all of those accounts are paid to brokers. What a windfall THAT will be! Of course, we’ll still have the administrative costs for the social security program because not all of the money will go to Wall Street, In effect, Bush will have once again increased the size of government AND will have given a good portion of OUR taxes to a private sector.

The truth is that Bush, et al, have been BORROWING from the Social Security fund (remember all of Bush’s jokes about Gore’s earnestness in saying he’d put the SS funds in a “lockbox” during the 2000 election? In essence reducing this very important point to a running gag?) Well, the SS funds are NOT safe – not from Bush and his profligate spending.

The truth is that SS is like a ship on the sea that needs to make a small correction in it’s course to arrive at the shore. Bush would like to have everyone abandon ship and try to make it in lifeboats. What we need to realize is that Bush et all have motorized yachts as their lifeboats, and the rest of us will have to make do. Many of us won’t make it.

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