Social Security Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

July rambling: Dr. SCOTUS

Gleichschaltung

Dr. SCOTUS Will Now See Your Next Patient – Ron Harman King fears our healthcare lies with those in black robes, not white coats.

Cory Doctorow: Unpersoned about romance writer K Renee and others locked out of their Google docs

CrowdStrike blames test software for taking down 8.5 million Windows machines.

Teaching the Bible in Public Schools

Disputing Errors on Your Tenant Background Check Report

Succeeding in the Post-Wayfair Landscape: Top 3 Trends in Sales Tax Six Years On (yes, this is interesting to a geeky business librarian)

The Nation’s Data at Risk: Meeting America’s Information Needs for the 21st Century

Why Paper Checks Refuse To Die

A neurological disorder stole her voice. Jennifer Wexton takes it back on the House floor.

Quieting Your Inner Critic – Self-Compassion and Other Methods

Navy exonerates Black sailors unjustly punished in 1944 after a deadly California port explosion.

Bob Newhart Was an Everyman With a Comic Voice Like No Other. The 25 best TV series finales ever. Newhart is #22 and should be much higher. I watched him on Ed Sullivan and his three CBS shows

Whitney Rybeck, ‘Friday the 13th’ Actor and Crash Test Dummy in Seat Belt Ads, Dies at 79

The Worm Charmers: A Florida family coaxes earthworms from the forest floor

Homicide: Life on the Street Finally Gets Streaming Home at Peacock. This was one of my favorite programs.

Oscars: What To Do When You Lose

Now I Know: The Dirty Lyric Snuck Onto The Radio and The Pencil That Told Kids To Do Something They Shouldn’t and A Mountainous Problem With Instant Noodles

Kelly and Sunday Stealing

SSA

“Soon, you will no longer be able to sign in to your online Social Security account using your Social Security username and password. To access Social Security online services, including my Social Security, you will need to create a Login.gov or ID.me account.”

This is a real thing, reported on AARP and CBS Mornings.

“The change affects about 46 million of the roughly 86 million people who have My Social Security accounts, according to an SSA spokesperson.”

POLLYTICKS

How Joe Biden launched his career by beating two unbeatable Republicans

Thank You, President Biden

Weekly Sift: Resolutions and The Two Kinds of Unity, in which I was introduced to the word Gleichschaltung. “It’s an old German engineering term for when you wire a bunch of electrical circuits together under a common master switch. It got applied to German politics in 1933, for reasons that you may recall from history books.” Also, the Kamala surge and Couches, Cat Ladies, and J. D. Vance.

djt Returns to Bad Form — and Gives the Democrats Hope

Immigration, Crime, Politics, and lies and Fact-checking djt’s lies during his RNC acceptance speech

RNC & “Migrant Crime”: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Demagoguery repeats itself

djt Sells Sneakers, Coins, and Trading Cards Imprinted with his Bloody Face

How Kamala’s name is pronounced; even a child can do it

From way back on July 15: ‘Terrified’ – Americans in NZ react to Trump shooting, Biden uncertainty

Borowitz Reports repeats: New Conspiracy Theory Links Wide Availability of Guns to People Getting Shot

MUSIC

Anything Goes – Peter Sprague featuring Rebecca Jade

Look At Me, I’m MTG!– A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

John Mayall, British Blues-Rock Legend and 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, Dies at 90. Room To Move

Flivver Ten Million by Frederick Converse, performance is by the Buffalo Philharmonic,

Coverville 1495: Cover Stories for Marc Cohn and Simple Minds and 1496: The Trevor Horn Cover Story II

The Great Curve – Talking Heads

K-Chuck Radio: Gaze into the crystal ball …

Coast -Kim Deal

You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away– Peter Sprague, featuring Allison Adams Tucker.

Patterns – Laura Marling

Several versions of Sit Down, You’re Rocking The Boat here and here and here and here (1992 Tonys – Nicely-Nicely (Walter Bobbie) plus Nathan Lane and J.K. Simmons) and here and here (current London revival) and probably more here

Knee Deep Blues – Caleb Caudle:

Breath Out – Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn –

This LOST 1986 Song Went Viral…But for Years-NOBODY Knew WHO Sang it—UNTIL Today!–Professor of Rock

Sometimes it works out

The G.I. Bill Restoration Act

This is one of those Day In The Life posts I’m calling Sometimes it works out. It is about April 26, 2022, which started with Wordle in 3 (HEIST).

My Bible guys have been meeting remotely since the start of the pandemic. Given the demographics – I’m the youngest of the group – I’m guessing that’s the way it’ll remain. One of the seven was traveling, one had an appointment. Another had trouble getting on ZOOM. Yet we persevere.

One of the readings was 1 Corinthians 15, which is a long chapter. Very familiar. No. 46 of Handel’s Messiah is Since by man came death, from verses 21 and 22. Then No. 47 through 51 show up in verses 51 to 57, starting with Behold, I shew you a mystery.

This led to a question, Who selected the libretto? I knew it wasn’t Handel but forgot it was Charles Jennens, “an English aristocrat who collaborated with Handel on several other oratorios.”

Lost money

While looking for my bus pass – which turned out to be in the wrong part of my wallet from its usual place – I found a stale-dated check for $18.71 on my dresser. If it had been a larger amount, I probably would have remembered to look for it. What it was doing on my dresser, as opposed to my wallet or my mail drawer, I don’t know.

The weird thing is that I can remember the amount without looking again because it is the second calendar year of the Franco-Prussian War, although the event actually lasted less than 12 months. Why I couldn’t use Mrs. O’Leary’s cow as a device… the mind does what it does.

The talk

The Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library have just restarted their weekly book review/book talk. A hole in the schedule developed and I volunteered to talk about The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which I talked about at church adult ed ZOOM a year ago.

I was going to use the 17-minute video Segregated by Design, narrated by Rothstein, but I couldn’t get the sound to work; nor could three library techies.

So I vamped a bit before abandoning the possibility of the video, and talked about The G.I. Bill Restoration Act, “recently introduced in the House of Representatives. This legislation would give financial benefits to descendants and spouses of Black veterans who fought in WWII, but were excluded from aid outlined in the original G.I. Bill.”

This led to conversations about my father, who never lived in a house of his own until 1972, and made me wonder whether he had tried to utilize the original G.I. Bill. Over a million black World War II vets were denied from using it. This led to my sharing a story of my father’s experiences in Germany. I found I LIKED talking about my dad.

Oh, I left the book at the library, but I got it back the following week.

Social Security

I went to the Social Security office. My wife is working on financial stuff for my daughter’s college and needs how much I received from Social Security in 2020. The amount I got in automatic deposits I know, but the amount paid for Part B Medicare IDK. The 2021 breakdown is on the Social Security page, but not the year before.

After getting the info from the agent, I asked about money owed to my daughter for the three months between her 18th birthday and her high school graduation. The paperwork had been submitted in early February but rejected in March because she wasn’t in high school. Except that she WAS/IS. I had to appeal this before May 3.

The agent suggested that the agency hadn’t received the proper form from the high school, which I had put in the mail in February. But they looked on the computer for a few minutes. They said the info was indeed there but that the agency had not processed it for reasons unclear to me. I took the bus, only mildly confident that my daughter would get the payments in a timely manner.

There you go

That was a someone atypical Tuesday. Unrelated, as I wrote to someone, “If you forget things on a daily basis, you should try remembering them weakly.”

Worrying about the fate of Social Security

FICA

There was a television ad from the White House incumbent’s campaign I’ve seen several times. It said that he’d always support Social Security and Medicare. As someone who is dependent on both, I was wary.

An article in USA Today addressed this a few months ago. He did not say he would terminate Social Security. “The posts [from Social Security Works] came after Trump signed a series of executive orders on August 8 intended to provide relief from the detrimental economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.”

The concern comes from the fact that “the vast majority of Social Security is financed through the payroll tax, according to the Social Security Administration.

“One of the Aug. 8 executive orders instructed the Treasury Department to allow employers to defer payment of payroll taxes for employees who make less than $100,000 each year… The order also instructed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to “explore avenues, including legislation, to eliminate the obligation to pay the taxes deferred.”

Where’s the money?

And the regime promised to eliminate the payroll tax altogether. “It’s a tremendous saving for people. And we’re going to be doing it, and we intend to terminate it at the end of the appropriate period of time.”

Where would the revenue come from then? “We’ll be paying into Social Security through the general fund.” And that is scary to me. If re-elected, he “could continue to defer the payroll tax with executive orders.”

However, “he could not eliminate the payroll tax entirely or provide a new source of funding for Social Security without support from Congress.” Right. A dysfunctional Congress dealing with massive debt from a pandemic.

As USA Today admitted, “In defense of its posts, Social Security Works argued that advocating for termination of the payroll tax and termination of Social Security are the same. The payroll tax is known as the Federal Insurance Contribution Act tax, after all.”

In the October 2020 AARP Bulletin, the incumbent repeated the claim that he would not cut Social Security. “I’m looking at numbers now that look like the best quarter ever in terms of hiring people.” In other words, Social Security will be paid for by projected economic growth. Of course, he has been known to…let’s say, abandon the truth.

Conversely, his opponent, Joe Biden said in the same publication that he “would not change payroll taxes for anyone making less than $4000,000. However, “everyone making more than that will pay the same payroll tax on wages over $400,000 ss they pay on their first $137,000.” This would, Biden claims, make Social Security “secure for a long, long time.”

As Buffalo Springfield once sang, “You know what they say about a bird in the hand.” I like my safety nets paid for.

November rambling: triple plays

Rebecca Jade And The Cold Fact

The Violent History of the U.S.-Mexico Border

The Revolution Isn’t Being Televised

Stephen Miller E-Mails Show How He Promoted White Nationalist Ideology In Media, going back to when he worked for then-Senator Jeff Sessions

How women fall into the white supremacist movement

Maligned in black and white– Southern newspapers played a major role in racial violence. Do they owe their communities an apology?

Religious Freedom for Loganists!

My Childhood in a Cult

Republicans want to out the whistleblower because they can’t defend him on the merits

His tortured English

The Obama date-night controversy

Amazon’s Absence from Worker Safety Alliance Highlights Dangers of Unsafe Supply Chains

How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With an $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby

Charles à Court Repington and when did we start to refer to the horrors of the 1914-1918 conflict as ‘The First World War’?

Weekly Sift: Sacrifices

Yvette Lundy: French Resistance member who survived Nazi camps dies at 103

UK halts fracking, effective immediately

The Untold Story of the 2018 Olympics Cyberattack, the Most Deceptive Hack in History

AIER: Questions for Immigration Skeptics

Court Allows Police Full Access to Online Genealogy Database

In a rural Wisconsin village, the doctor makes house calls — and sees some of the rarest diseases on Earth

Dial 911 if there’s an emergency, not 112

Social Security and SSI Benefits Are Increasing in 2020

Wealth Is About Much More than Physical Things

New Airplane Feature Could Save You If Your Pilot Can’t

There’s no reason to cross the U.S. by train. But I did so anyway.

Fully Accessible Guide to Smart Home Tech for Disabled and Elderly

That’s entertainment

Washington Grays baseball, in honor of the Homestead Grays, a Negro League Team

All 720 Triple Plays in Major League Baseball history

Beany and Cecil

The accidental brilliance of Silly Putty

Four toy commercials from the sixties – I definitely had a Slinky, and I know I played someone’s Rock ’em, Sock ’em Robots

Tips on attending TV Tapings

Amy Biancolli: I Really Don’t Care

Now I Know: The Last Army Pillow Fight and Why Filmmakers Use That Black and White Flapped Board and The Ark That Went Full Circle

MUSIC

Rebecca Jade And The Cold Fact: Songs From Their New Album ‘Running Out Of Time’ and Gonna Be Alright and how they began

Viola Sonata in D minor by Mikhail Glinka.

The Wolf Glen scene from the opera Der Freischutz by Carl Maria von Weber

Coverville 1284: Cover Stories for Grace Slick and Katy Perry

Go up Moses – Roberta Flack

Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper! by Jaromir Weinberger

How to Play Guitar Like Keith Richards

What Does ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ Really Mean?

Retiring is an exhausting process

chores involving Social Security, Medicare…

I was surprised to discover that retiring, which I have been looking forward to, is an exhausting process. Maybe I thought it’d be better because my employer has engaged a company to make it “easier.”

The company, which I will call Noah, had a representative contact me a week before our scheduled phone meeting. He said, “Hey, do you want to put your medical providers in the database? It’ll help you decide what coverage to get after you retire.”

“Sure.” I’m always willing to let other people do tedious work for me. Later, I put in my medications in the system. Then a couple weeks after that, I got an email from Noah, requesting that I put the list of medical providers in the database.

I go to into the system, and sure enough, the provider list is no longer there. Stuff happens, no big deal. I try to re-enter the list of doctors. No luck.

I call Noah, and that rep can’t enter the information either. This guy tells me he’ll have someone call me when it’s fixed, probably later that day. A week and a half later, I finally get the message. I STILL need to enter that info.

Oh, and I have chores involving Social Security, Medicare, my current insurance company, my credit union (for automatic deposit), and a bunch of other things. If I were RETIRED, I’d have time for all this.

Another rant, related only in that I wanted a working DVD player for retirement. I ordered one online in March. We put in a disc, which plays great. But it doesn’t eject, yet the screen says the slot is empty. After too much of a back-and-forth, I’m STILL waiting for a box to ship it back to get repaired.

All of this is an exhausting process. What will I do when I finally DO retire? All the things I’ve postponed the past month to do “later.”