Here's a scenario for you which also happens to be a true story.

When I was a teenager we lived out in the country; 10-15 minutes from the nearest (very) small town. One summer my father had to take a job in a city about 3 hours away. Since it made no sense to spend 6 hours per day commuting he stayed in the city during the week and only came home on the weekends. This left me, as the oldest male child, to be the "man" of the house.

Now just down the road from us lived a young married couple. About once or twice a month the husband would get rip-roaring drunk and on most of those occasions he would then proceed to viciously beat his wife. For reasons that were never quite clear to me, she always decided to seek sanctuary at our house. Inevitably when this happened the husband would stumble up to our house in a frothing rage demanding his wife's return. And so it would fall to me, a short, scrawny, nerdy, 80 lbs soaking wet, 14 year old to deal with a raging drunk 6+ ft thug out to continue beating his wife and not particularly interested in who else might be in his way.

I don't think I had an easy night's sleep that entire summer but I was thankful that I had the option to defend my family and this tragically abused young woman with lethal force if it became necessary. Fortunately it never came to that. Fortunately he never came on to our property with a weapon that I could see. But he knew I had one and he believed I would use it and that was all that was necessary to send him back to his house to sleep off his drunk until the next time.

You want to talk about love? I love my family and I didn't want to see them harmed by this criminal. Even though I didn't particularly like her, I was also showing love for this abused girl; she had a place of sanctuary.

The alternative which extreme gun-control advocates would foist upon everyone in the country was to remain defenseless against this individual. We were, at best, 15 minutes from a law enforcement officer arriving and that would have only been if they happened to be in town and waiting by the phone for our call. In reality it likely would have taken twice that long for the police to arrive. She could have pressed charges against her husband and have him locked up, but she wouldn't and didn't. If my father tried to have him locked up for trespassing, she would go bail him out.

The sad thing is you're correct: normal people shouldn't have to worry about this sort of thing. Unfortunately, it is all too often the case that the real world fails to match up with our ideals.

This. I wish we had it built into the Constitution that Congress was banned from passing (or even debating) any legislation for 60 days after any national tragedy.

I'm a fan of the XDm line but I don't own one because I also wanted a manual safety/decocker similar to the H&K USPs or the Beretta 92's.

Are you sure it's not: "Dick's is the place where the cool hang out. The rich like to play and the SWASS flaunt clout?"

Not picking on you particularly geekoid, more on the general responses to the whole Swiss gun ownership debate: must be nice to live under the protection of the American military without paying for it. Without it you'd have a lot more people with guns running around there.

Triple dog dare...duh.

I've got a very over clockable E2200 on a rig that old and I'm no where near CPU bound nor have I had to actually OC the CPU. Occasional GPU upgrades have kept me in high resolution on my 24" LCD for years. A C2D should have a lot of life left in it.

Thanks for checking my source, but please re-read it. The paragraph you quoted says exactly what I said. SS's deficit can't be covered even by completely removing the cap. You have to ALSO reduce benefits for the people who were previously above the cap in order for the system to no longer be running in deficit. Which is perfectly consistent with my original position: you've got to either inflate or cut benefits.

As for making an example of SS, you introduced that into the conversation; my original post was directed at all entitlement spending. I agree that Medicare (and actually the entire Federal "health care" apparatus) is a much much bigger problem.

If you're interested in some interesting debate on the PPACA and other health care stuff, check out: The Apothecary.

Boy is this the truth. My mortgage banker (and her company) were so ignorant of the risks of what they were doing that they couldn't comprehend why I was being such a difficult customer. I offered to come in and do some 'pro bono' security consulting for them after the deal closed but they had no interest.

Don't hold your breath expecting changes anytime soon either. After talking to quite a few people in the industry I'm learning that 99.999% of their customers just don't care. They (sign and) send whatever they're asked, however they're asked, to wherever they're asked with nary a protest or a hesitation. Often they do it without even reading the documents.

Our brokers were shocked when I told them I wanted to read all the documents. "No one does that!" and "It would take hours!" (Thankfully our title companies were a lot more clue-ful.) I found the entire experience a useful insight into the origins of the US financial crisis.

You're right, I did leave that option out and I was remiss in not explaining why: there is no amount of taxes that's going to make up for the shortfall in entitlements. There simply isn't enough money there.

Even limiting the discussion to SS: removing the tax cap doesn't fix the shortfall. If you removed the cap entirely you'd still have to limit benefits at about to rate for the current cap in order to actually fix the SS deficit. (Source: CRS. And that's just SS.

Raising tax rates also has the problem of diminishing returns. Historically tax rates have been all over the board but no matter what they've been set at we've never collected more than about 20% of GDP and we average about 18%.

The worst problem is that raising taxes, even if it would work, only continues to give the junkies their fix. Instead of attacking our serious SPENDING problems we want to keep putting off the pain of withdrawal with another tax hit (or inflation). Indeed if you look at lot of the commentary on the Internet on the idea of removing the SS tax caps it's inevitably followed by salivating over how all that extra money could be spent on more wish list items.

There is no such thing as a financial perpetual motion machine. I'm not optimistic that we're going to learn this any way other than the hard way.

The point of taxes is to pay for the commitments our governments have made to spend our money.

While I agree that anyone under 55 needs to plan on there being no SS benefits when they retire, we've already passed the point of expenditures exceeding revenues.

Here's the money shot:

"Social Security’s expenditures exceeded non-interest income in 2010 and 2011, the first such occurrences since 1983, and the Trustees estimate that these expenditures will remain greater than non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period."

  Source: SSA