Finding the Beef in Social Security with Brownback
Today, I had the unique opportunity to have lunch with Senator Brownback at Saint Anselm College’s dining hall. It was a relatively small event of about 15-20 people. Brownback was somewhat quiet shoveling beef stew down his throat and listening to his social security policy advisor.His advisor, a former captain of industry and Wall Street hawk who has retired early to “play” and wear pin stripe suits to college lunches, took a hard-nosed view on how to obviate the misfortunes of social security.His thoughts seem to be to design a quasi-privatized system that sees to it that the older you get, the more money you put into bonds. The idea is at least interesting. More interesting, however, was his thoughts on some other problems on society. Between the stock tips he was providing to the professors, I was able to ask what he thought America should do about the people who buy a home on credit, lose their job, and then cannot sell their homes because they owe more on their house than they could sell it for. His response was lackluster. To him, anyone who buys something on 100% credit is a sucker and they deserve whatever they get. They should “pay the piper.”
The lunch carried on for about 45 minutes talking about legalizing gambling and the immorality in taxes. I was unimpressed. Brownback’s squad slowly removed themselves from the table one by one, and piled into their official campaign vehicle: a silver Subaru station wagon.