Inconceivable

Fezzini: "Inconceivable!"

Montoya: "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

-The Princess Bride

If you only know Wallace Shawn from My Dinner with Andre, I'm so sorry.  If you only know Mandy Patinkin from Criminal Minds, well shame on you.  Rob Reiner's masterwork The Princess Bride is so very necessary for a lot of reasons. Shawn's portrayal of Fezzini, a self styled mastermind who is never quite as smart as he thinks he is, and Patinkin's Inigo Montoya, revenge obsessed, oft besotted master swordsman, not to mention Andre the Giant as Fezzig, rhyme loving strongman, give us so many memorable moments in the movie's first act.  Outside of Yoda's Star Wars dialogue, there is probably not much in the world of cinema that can be both very serious and seriously funny at the same time.

Fezzini's repetition of the word inconceivable is a running gag.  As mastermind and his two thugs execute a kidnapping that is supposed to go off without a hitch, they are pursued by the Man in Black who turns out to be the hero of the film.  Fezzini has built in several fail-safe features in his plan, and none of them turn out to be actually fail-safe.  Each time they do actually fail, he says, "Inconceivable!" Finally Inigo says that famous line, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

Misapprehension of what words mean is a rampant problem among humans in general, it can lead to everything from a simple misunderstanding to an actual war.  Lately,  have noticed that the political world, where words have been notoriously abused and misused pretty much forever, has been using words to start trying to break apart something that most of us are going to really regret losing if they succeed.

I know budgets and tax codes can be confusing.  I often feel a little like Fezzig and Inigo when the Fezzinis of the world get going on their wonky explanations of thing, but there a few things that I have noticed over the years that are sort of unavoidable truths about our government.  The first is that it is conceptually a lot easier to figure out where the money goes than you might have been led to believe.  There are just three wedges of the pie chart that make up almost 75% of federal spending (both mandatory and discretionary): 

That big blue wedge that is labeled "Health" is essentially Medicare and Medicaid.  To be honest, the numbers that are entailed by even the little wedges can be mind boggling to ordinary folk but the big picture tells you that if we're going to make a major impact on our government spending something is going to have to happen to the big three.  No politician in their right mind will ever recommend cutting defense spending, the closest they ever come is to maybe try and go after wasteful uses of that 16% of the spending, like the billions of dollars poured into a notoriously disastrous fighter plane in an era when the military themselves say the last thing they need is more fighter planes, or the fact that we buy thousands of tanks that we do not need because the manufacture of said tanks is good for enough representative's home districts.

For a while now, certain conservative types have been talking about the need to reform "entitlements" and end the "Welfare State." Both of these words might resonate strongly in the minds of folks who are "tired of footing the bill for people who don't want to work for a living."  As wrongheaded and frankly cruel as the whole "welfare queen," narratives were, there are a good number of people who believed and still thoroughly hold to that idea, that the bulk of our budget problem is people gaming the system, when in fact there is no such reality.  "The Welfare State," is in fact the blue and the red wedges together.

If you know anything about Social Security, you will know that it has it's own way of collecting money.  In years when I was poor enough to have no income tax liability, I still had to pay into the SS system.  It was actually kind of a shock the first year I was employed as a minister, I did my tax return on my fairly modest starting salary, and momentarily I thought I was going to get a $5000 refund, because we just had a child before the end of 2003 and thus had very little income tax liability.  Then I found out that I also have to fill out a schedule SE because Social Security considers clergy self employed, so basically, I watched $5K evaporate from my dreams to pay for Social Security.

This is the reality for almost all of the working class and most of the middle class: Social Security is always going to get theirs.  The hope is though, that when you retire, you will live long enough to get some return on that investment.  Social Security is not, in fact, welfare, it is something you pay for when you're young so that you will have some form of income when you are old.  It's not exactly a savings account though, and the Gubmint has a way of playing shenanigans with this huge chunk of cash.  They have done things that ought not to have been done, like borrowing money from it and floating bonds against it and kicking the can of fiscal responsibility down the road.

Remember this is money that you have paid out of probably every paycheck of your adult life, and it is supposed to be there for you when you age out of the working population or are put out by some disability.  If some political genius starts trying to sell you entitlement reform that includes robbing you of social security, I suggest throwing them off the cliffs of insanity before they lead you any further along in this farce.

I get that we can have disagreements about what the government should and should not do, and I am honestly not always of the opinion that the government should be bigger and more intrusive into our lives, but the thing about SSI is that most of us have already paid quite a lot into the upfront cost of it, with the good faith expectation that it was an investment in our future and in the interest of our nation.  To violate that expectation is not, by definition, reform, it is robbery.