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Some Questions For Dick Cheney

Book-tour media rules for former Vice President Dick Cheney, who is out promoting his new memoir (The following is a list of interview questions that Mr. Cheney has agreed to answer forthrightly.):

1. What’s the title of your new book? Do you think you’ll sell more than Tina Fey?

2. Did you enjoy cowriting it with your daughter Liz?

3. Is Liz a good writer? Does she work on a Mac or a PC? Which of you two was in charge of spell-checking?

4. How’s that dog of yours? Isn’t it a yellow Lab? Are they crazy or what?

5. Do you and former President Bush chat very often? Did you send him an early copy of your book? Maybe an audio disk, or a download for his Kindle?

6. How’s your health these days? Did you get to do some trout fishing this summer in Wyoming? All things considered, do you prefer rainbows or cutthroats?

7. Do you miss being the second-most powerful person in the whole world? What’s the toughest thing about retirement? Did they give you a decent health plan or are there, like, ridiculous co-pays?

8. Who’s your favorite commentator on Fox News? And what’s your most enduring achievement as vice president?

9. On a scale of one to 100, how dangerous to the future of America and the free world is President Obama? How long would it take our country to be overrun by jihadists and North Koreans if a Republican isn’t elected to the White House in 2012?

10. Can we take a peek at your portable heart machine?

(The following is a list of questions that Mr. Cheney might answer partially, with varying degrees of deception, or not at all.)

1. In your memoir, you seem resentful toward Colin Powell. Is this because he was an actual soldier with leadership experience in the first Gulf War and possibly he knew what he was talking about, whereas you never put on a uniform in your life and had no freaking clue?

2. Would you be willing to go on the Jay Leno show and let yourself be waterboarded if you thought it would sell more books? What if Condoleezza agreed to get in the tank, too?

3. Why do you suppose nobody else in the Bush administration wanted to spontaneously bomb Syria except you? At that point, did any of your close friends or family members suggest an extended vacation? A brain scan?

4. During all those White House meetings about Iraq, did anybody ever mention what would happen to our nation’s economy if a war were launched at the same time taxes were being slashed? If so, how many seconds did it take you to change the subject?

5. Did you have trouble keeping a straight face when you kept insisting that Saddam Hussein had an “established relationship with al-Qaida?” Was it satisfying to know that many Americans were misled into believing that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks?

6. Any thoughts on those nonexistent weapons of mass destruction?

7. Why did you keep ranting about WMDs years after the CIA and the military had given up looking? Was this a period when your medication was being adjusted, or were you just spuriously trying to justify the U.S. invasion?

8. Speaking of which, remember when you went on TV and predicted that American troops would be “greeted as liberators”? Is it possible you were drunk at the time?

9. And, oh yeah, remember when you declared that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes?” Way back in 2005? Of all the dumb things to come out of your mouth, where does that whopper rank?

10. Does the number 4,465 hold any special meaning? Would you be surprised to learn that’s how many American troops have been killed in Iraq since the occupation? Just out of curiosity, have you taken a stroll through Arlington National Cemetery lately?

11. Finally, Mr. Vice President, when is the last time you were right about anything?

(Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132.)

(c) 2011, The Miami Herald Distributed by Tribune Media Services Inc.

Why Some Workers Aren’t Covered By Social Security

Q: Hey Tom — I like your style. You’ve helped clear up so many of the false stories out there about Social Security. And I realized I might have been spreading one of them!

I’ve complained for years about members of Congress excluding themselves from Social Security and setting up cushy retirement plans like none other. But one of my friends told me I was wrong. Then we got to talking about other groups not covered by Social Security, like railroad workers. I want you to set the record straight. Can you print a list of all the groups of employees in this country who are not covered by Social Security?

A: You’ll learn in a minute why I can’t give you such a list. But I can tell you now that your friend is right: Members of Congress aren’t on it. They do pay into Social Security. Here’s the story about how Social Security coverage has changed over the years.

When Social Security was born in the 1930s, most people in this country didn’t have pension plans, and a government program like Social Security was necessary for them. So just about everyone who worked for wages was covered by Social Security from day one. (Self-employed people came under Social Security’s umbrella a decade or so later.)

But some groups of employees already had pension plans in place. The two largest were railroad workers, who were covered by the railroad retirement system, and federal government employees (including members of Congress), who were covered by the civil service retirement system. Both of those pension plans had been around long before Social Security started. So it was decided to exclude these two large groups from Social Security.

In addition, Congress felt that it would be unconstitutional to force a federal government pension plan — Social Security — on state and local governments. So employees of state and local government entities were given the option of joining Social Security. Most did. About 80 percent of all such public employees became part of Social Security.

So that’s what happened when Social Security started in the 1930s. Nobody thought twice about any of these decisions, because they made sense.

But then, over the years, people started griping about the fact that members of Congress and other high-level government officials were not covered by Social Security. Just as silly and false Web rumors about Social Security exist today, stories began to circulate in the pre-Internet world that Congress had specifically excluded itself from Social Security in order to set its members up with a nice “Cadillac retirement plan.” Eventually, simply too much political pressure came to bear on Congress for it to remain outside of Social Security.

So in 1983, as part of a package of major Social Security-reform legislation, Congress passed a law mandating that all of its members, the president and vice president, all other high-level government leaders, and all federal employees hired after 1983 would be covered by Social Security.

Today, that leaves railroad workers as the only major nationwide group of employees still not covered by Social Security.

You asked for a list of other groups not covered. But that would be almost impossible. There are thousands of them. All are various state and local employee groups around the country (again, about 20 percent of the total). Those groups could be anything from a small sewer district of maybe 10 employees to a large group of thousands of employees, such as teachers. In fact, the largest groups of non-Social Security covered workers tend to be teachers — in states like California, Texas and Ohio. Also, many law enforcement agencies in these same (and some other) states are not covered by Social Security.

Today, around the country as a whole, about 93 percent of workers are covered by Social Security.

People still gripe about members of Congress and their pensions. They do get a pension that supplements their Social Security. But that’s the way the system is supposed to work.

For example, my wife was a county librarian in a state that was covered by Social Security. She gets Social Security, and she gets a pension from the county where she worked to supplement it. My neighbor worked for a large, national corporation. He gets Social Security, and he collects a nice pension from his former employer to supplement it. But as we all know, most company pensions are getting to be a thing of the past, replaced — if they are replaced at all — by 401(k) plans. That’s not the way things were supposed to work — but it’s the way this country’s retirement systems have evolved.

And one final point: As part of any upcoming reforms to Social Security, one commonly discussed proposal is what’s called “universal coverage.” That essentially means everyone in the country would be covered by Social Security. It’s an easy political fix, because it impacts only a relatively small group of people (the 7 percent of the population not covered by Social Security). But folks who work for state and local government agencies not participating in Social Security are worried that they’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into the federal pension system.

To ease their minds a bit, I would wager that any push for universal coverage will impact only newly hired employees.

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has the answer. Contact him at thomas.margenau@comcast.net. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Debt Ceiling Questions, Answered

A helpful primer for those who haven’t been following too closely:

Q. This sounds like an odd system. Do you mean that Congress can pass a budget that requires borrowing, and then argue later about whether to approve that borrowing?

A. That’s right. The system goes back to World War I, when Congress first put a limit on federal debt. The limit was part of a law that allowed the Treasury to issue Liberty Bonds to help pay for the war. The law was intended to give the Treasury greater discretion over borrowing by eliminating the need for Congress to approve each new issuance of debt. Over the years the limit has been raised repeatedly, to $14.3 trillion today from roughly $43 billion in 1940. But outside observers have noted that the failure to make increases in the debt limit part of the regular budget process can be risky.