What Are These People Smoking?

I will admit that I did not watch the Republican debate last night. I couldn’t face another cage match. I have read a number of reports on the debate, and I am wondering where these candidates get their ideas. Some of their ideas have strains of a possible solution in them, but others really make me wonder.

Late last night The Washington Examiner posted a story highlighting a few things from the debate.

Here are a few things I learned from their summary:

Donald Trump suggested that as president he would finance Social Security by requiring countries that benefit from U.S. military protection to pay for the service.

“We’re the policeman of the world: We take care of Germany; we take care of Saudi Arabia; we take care of South Korea,” he said during Thursday night’s presidential debate. “Saudi Arabia was making a billion dollars a day and we were getting virtually nothing to protect them. … We are going to be in a different world. We’re going to negotiate real deals, now, and we’re going to bring the wealth back to our country.”

This was his solution for bringing solvency to Social Security. Actually it makes a certain amount of sense–Europe has managed to pay for socialism over the years because of the money they did not have to spend on their military. If they were forced to pay America for protection or develop their own military, they might have to go to a free market economy.

The article further reports:

Rubio wants to raise the retirement age to 68 years old for people of his generation and raise it to 70 years old for people who are currently children, while leaving the age alone for current retirees and people close to retirement.

“If you do not do it, we will have a debt crisis, not to mention a crisis of Social Security and medicare,” Rubio said. “Both parties have taken far too long to deal with it. It is one of the major issues confronting America. It’s barely been asked in any of these debates and we’d better deal with it or we’re going to have to explain to our children why they inherited this disaster.”

Just for the record, I would like to point out that George H.W. Bush had a viable plan for fixing Social Security. Unfortunately, it was blocked by the Democrats because they did not want him to get credit for the plan.

There are a few things I would like to note about Social Security. Congress has been spending the money taken out of paychecks for Social Security on other things since the 1960’s. That is a huge part of the problem. Secondly, there are two reasons Democrats want open borders–they want illegals to vote (they believe illegals will vote Democrat) and they believe that bringing in more workers will shore up Social Security until at least the time when the politicians who have spent the money leave office. At that point it will be someone else’s problem.

As I said, I did not watch the debate, but it sounds as if there might have been some intelligent discussion of important issues last night. That is a good thing.