ThisIsCommonSense.org

We keep hearing that letting you manage your Social Security account yourself would be a “risky scheme.” Markets fluctuate. The value of a stock or bond can go down as well as up. Risky. But the key here is what happens in the long run. And the fact is, in any twenty-​year period, real return in the stock market averages more than 10 percent.

You don’t have to be an expert investor, either, because as manager of your own funds you can pick relatively conservative investment plans. And there is every reason to believe that an average investor can acquit himself quite nicely over the 45 years or so of a typical career, and earn a lot more than he’s now being promised under Social Security. Find out for yourself by visiting the socialsecurity​.org web site. The site has a calculator that lets you compare your promised Social Security benefits with what you could have earned, if only you’d been allowed to invest your social security taxes in the market instead of in politicians.

If you were born in 1948 and now earn $20,000 a year, you can expect to get $903 a month from Social Security. But if you had been investing the same funds in bonds earning 6 percent, you could expect $1,257 a month. And with stocks earning 10 percent, what your retirement income could have been shoots up to $5,930 a month. Or, to $8,895 a month if you’re now earning $30,000 a year. But don’t take my word for it. Go to the socialsecurity​.org web site and plug in your own numbers. Find out what you’re missing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

A tax by any other name is just the same. The latest method is taxation by lawsuit, and the biggest victims have been the tobacco companies.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of death by slow poison. Nor am I a big fan of the way the tobacco executives have hedged and fudged and lied about the often destructive effects of their product. But nobody forces anybody to smoke a cigarette. I hasten to add that I have nothing against smokers either. Some of my best friends and spouses are smokers. I just don’t think we should be heaping huge and devious punishment on the tobacco companies for supplying their customers with a perfectly legal product that the customers consume of their own free will. This kind of multi-​billion dollar taxation-​by-​litigation is not only arbitrary and punitive, it’s hypocritical, too.

Remember the rationale the various state governments gave for going after big tobacco? It was to pay for disease prevention, medical costs for smokers, anti-​tobacco propaganda, and so on. But, now it turns out that most of the $246 billion payoff is being spent on other “priorities.”

According to the General Accounting Office, the states are spending only about 41 percent of their share of the settlement on health-​related stuff. Most of the dough is being spent willy-​nilly by the politicians on all manner of new programs. The usual. I’d like to think this is the last bit of hypocritical taxation-​by-​litigation that we’ll see. But I doubt it. When governments find a neat new way to take our money, they tend to get addicted to it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

What a relief. By the skin of their teeth, Tennessee taxpayers have escaped a state income tax for yet another year. But you know the old saying: It ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings, or until the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last. Career politicians are nothing if not persistent.

In Tennessee, they have what they call budget problems. The career politicians want to run almost every aspect of your life, but running every aspect of your life costs money. Lots. As one state senator says, “Once people understand the implications of having an unhealthy state government fewer people with diplomas, with health care I think things will change when [the income tax] comes up again.”

I’m optimistic that Tennessee citizens can avoid being saddled with a state income tax so long as they remain vigilant. But in that case, how could the career politicians get the necessary funding to run every aspect of their lives? It’s quite a dilemma. Maybe we could do something like this: Every time a Tennessee taxpayer earns a paycheck, he could immediately sign it over to the state government. Then the state could buy everybody’s food, pay everybody’s rent and mortgages and medical care and schooling and so forth.

Because this kind of system makes the community come together, let’s call it communism. It would be inefficient and wasteful, and nobody would have “no freedom no more.” But, at least there would not be any more battles over personal income tax. And, if it goes okay in Tennessee, they could try it elsewhere.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It’s the Pop-​Tarts. They could be dangerous. And your toaster, too. What I have to tell you is a shocking tale of innocent trust, of leaving Pop-​Tarts in a toaster to drive the kids to school, and of Pop-​Tarts getting stuck in the unattended toaster and causing a fire while the person who put the Pop-​Tarts in the toaster was taking the kids to school.

This is what happened to the Hurff family. And Brenda Hurff is suing The Kellogg Company, which makes Pop-​Tarts. She is also suing Black and Decker, which makes the toaster. No word yet on whether she is suing herself for leaving the toaster unattended. Over the past ten years, the U.S. government has received 17 reports of fires involving toaster pastries. That’s an incredible 1.7 toaster-​pastry-​related fires per year. Apparently the jam in Pop-​Tarts is a little more flammable then the bread in bread. Let’s calculate the risk here.

This year the Pop-​Tart people reported $500 million in U.S. sales. It costs about $2 per box of Pop-​Tarts. If there are six pastries to a box, 15 billion Pop-​Tarts were sold this year. With tarts toasted two at a time, there were 7.5 billion opportunities this year to lose your home to Pop-​Tarts. An average 1.7 reported incidents per year means that your chances of being burned by Pop-​Tarts during any given toasting are about 1 in 4 billion. Yet, Pop-​Tarts continue to be inserted into toasters. And people also keep putting food in frying pans on stoves hamburgers, scrambled eggs, you name it. People, listen to me: Don’t play with fire. Just buy cereal. Cold cereal. It’s safer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Are you online? In the U.S., it’s getting easier all the time to ring up the Internet. Computers get cheaper and cheaper every year, more and more accessible. Never mind all the political chatter of a “digital divide” that you supposedly need politicians and bureaucrats to bridge for you.

The fact is, by the fall of 2000, some 51 percent of all U.S. homes had a computer, and about 41 percent had access to the Internet. Chances are, if you’re not online already, getting there just isn’t very high on your “to do” list.

But suppose you do want to log onto the Internet but have to watch your pennies? Well, the people who brought you the information revolution are eager to help. One thing they’ve done is set up an organization called ConnectNet ( Conectado in Spanish), which directs callers to local libraries and other organizations that provide Internet access. ConnectNet is funded by AOL Time/​Warner. They have a toll-​free hotline, 1 – 866-​583‑1234.

If there’s a true digital divide to worry about, it’s to be found elsewhere on this globe. Depending on which country you live in, you might not even have a telephone, let alone a PC and a modem. But that problem is being tackled, too, as engineers and researchers develop scaled-​down and more affordable versions of the PC that can at least hook folks up to the web.

A lot more political freedom in some of these countries couldn’t hurt either. If only we could solve the “Liberty Divide,” any so-​called Digital Divide would be gone in no time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The fellows who brought us this grand experiment in self-​government we know as America were big, I mean really BIG, on a free press. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

Today most of us get our news from TV; we listen to radio in our cars; fewer and fewer read the paper. There is no problem with that, per se, just that TV and radio are not as free under the First Amendment as newspapers are because the government, through the FCC, regulates TV and radio.

I bring this up because such trivial matters make a difference in the real world. A TV station in Bismarck, North Dakota has pulled a spot by the American Conservative Union critical of Senator Kent Conrad’s stance on Social Security. This was done at the fervent urging of, you guessed it, Senator Kent Conrad. Before talking to the senator, the TV station deemed the ad fit for broadcast, but afterwards, no.

Often there’s a controversy over ads portraying an officeholder’s position. But the public isn’t stupid. We can sort out bogus arguments from the truth provided all sides are free to speak. But today, powerful incumbents throw their weight around with broadcasters whom they ultimately regulate and effectively silence speech. Today, Senator Conrad’s ad is running countering the ACU ad he had removed from your TV set.

Kerri Houston of ACU says, “The senator seems to think that the First Amendment only applies to him.” The scariest thing is how right he is.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.