Marc Gayle

I am creating compversions with blood, sweat and care.

Compversions allows you - as a designer/photographer/creative person - to help your clients make faster decisions, which makes your life easier.

Beware though, everything here is 100% unadulterated opinion.

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President Obama You Lied

Please don't get me wrong. I am one of those people that supported your nascent campaign once you declared in Illinois. If I could have voted in 2008, I would have voted for you.

Even though I am not Congressman Wilson, I have to say it, you lied! 

You have said that you would rather be a really good one-term president, than a mediocre two-term president.

As is evidenced from the way you recklessly managed the debt ceiling issue, you clearly had the 2012 re-election campaign in your sights.

The right thing for the country, and the world, would have been for you to stick to loose fiscal policy in the immediate-short term, and lay out a credible medium term plan for reigning in the deficits and paying down the debt once the economy has fully recovered. But you did just the opposite - with allowing the Republicans to cajoling you into short-term spending cuts and shirking the responsibility for the real tough decisions (like tackling social security, and medicare reform) to a Congressional Committee.

The ironic thing is, as you can see from the markets reaction, if the economy continues to deteriorate and slips back into a recession just in the nick of time of the next re-election - you will likely be the worst combination of what you wanted. 

A mediocre one-term president.

That would be a travesty, because you had so much potential.

A simple solution to America's Social Security Problem

TL;DR - Legalize all illegal immigrants and have an open immigration policy that makes up for the shortfall in the workforce.

Long version

The way Social Security works is, every dollar you pay in taxes today, goes to paying the check for a retiree.

To get a full appreciation for the Social Security Problem, let's run some quick math.

Let's assume that each Baby Boomer is retiring at the age of 65. Also assume that each retiree lives for 30 years after retirement.

Also assume that each retiree is expecting to get $45K/year - which is likely to be VERY conservative, but, for simplicity's sake let's just use $45K/year.

Each retiree would have to be paid $45K * 30 years = $1.35M during retirement (let's round it up to $1.5M to make it easier on the math).

Also assume that there is a gap of about 30 million people, meaning there are 30 million more people retiring (i.e. baby boomers) than there are replacing them (i.e. young people entering the work force for the first time) - and the gap could be wider, but for math's sake, let's go with that.

That means, it's: 30,000,000 people * $1.5M = $45,000,000,000,000 (i.e. $30 Trillion)

This ignores the health care related expenses for those retirees. This is a major problem, and this is what people mean when they say that Social Security is 'unfunded'. i.e. there is a chunk of retirees that have no one just entering the workforce that will support them.

Solution: Expand the workforce to be greater than the number of retirees. i.e. Legalize all the illegal immigrants and open the gates so anyone can come and work in America....up to a comfortable number over and above the number of retirees. 

Obviously, I know there are political consequences to making a move like this and other repercussions, but if America's leaders were honest enough about this solution they would start having this debate and figuring out how to solve it properly. This solution would also have to be done in tandem with other things like raising the retirement age, migrating from Defined Benefits to Defined Contribution, etc. But, by far, this solution would take care of the major driver of the problem - that more people are retiring than entering the workforce. 

It really is that simple.

You can follow me on Twitter here. 

The Legal System in America is Broken

There is something badly broken.

The US Congress - House of Representatives - have just passed, by a good margin (269 - 161), a bill that would raise the debt ceiling.

That's not the part that is 'broken' - although, that is up for debate.

However, this excerpt from the Wallstreet Journal article about the bill really struck me as odd:

As leaders on both sides worked to sell the package to their members, they disagreed over whether it allows for tax increases.

"I think the big win here for us and for the American people is the fact that there are no tax hikes in this package," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.).

Democrats disagreed.

"We've had our lawyers go over this very carefully," Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) said on MSNBC. "It is really very clear that [new] revenue can be part of any solution that the special committee develops."

While the agreement does suggest that the deficit-cutting committee could propose increasing taxes, it would face multiple barriers to doing so.

One is that the committee is using Congressional Budget Office projections that assume revenue will rise with the expiration of the Bush-era tax rates and current middle-class relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax. In effect, the panel would have to look for additional tax increases to achieve any deficit reduction, which could prove politically difficult.

So...let me get this straight. The lawyers (i.e. professionals paid to interpret laws) of the writers of this law, don't even agree on the interpretation of this new law created by their clients - even before it is passed into law?

Uhh...am I missing something here? There has to be a better way to do this.

I am not so sure that having lawyers running a country, really is the best thing after all. 

This is kinda ridiculous.


You can follow me on Twitter here.