Choosy mothers may not choose Jif any more 1 .
The price Jif is going up by more than FORTY percent today, according to published reports.
Social Security checks are going up by less than FOUR percent, according to published reports.
Decades before she collected Social Security, my (very choosy) mom branded us a Skippy Peanut Butter household. After all Jif is just creamed peanuts in a jar but Skippy is peanutbutter.com.
Monthly Social Security for more than 60 million Americans will increase by 3.6 percent starting with checks issued January 1, 2012 (the Supplemental Security Income increase starts with checks issued December 31 of this year).
The San Antonio Express News reported that “the Cost of Living Adjustment ensures that the purchasing power of Social Security and SSI benefits is not eroded by inflation. It is based on the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) from the third quarter of the last year a COLA was determined to the third quarter of the current year. If there is no increase, there can be no COLA. There was no COLA in 2010 and 2011 because the CPI-W, as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Department of Labor, for those years did not increase above the level of the third quarter of 2008, the last year a COLA was determined.”
Some recipients, may see their Social Security partially or completely eaten by the rising Medicare premiums.
Is Lie to Me Real?
Lie to Me was a Fox television series that spanned three seasons from 2009 into 2011. The show centered on human lie detection based on applied psychology including interpreting microexpressions, a Facial Action Coding System, and body language. Lie to Me was cancelled by Fox in May but probably not because people can’t detect liars.
Nearly 80% of Americans said they do not trust the government to do what is right, according to a Pew Research Center public opinion survey released in 2010. It was the highest level of distrust of Washington in half a century.
That was 2010.
A New York Times and CBS poll released last week shows now, just 18 months later, 89% of Americans do not trust government to do the right thing and 74% of us say that we believe the nation is on the wrong track. That’s higher than the highest level of distrust of Washington in more than 60 years.
There are plenty of partisan political reasons for discontent but I figure it is simpler than ideology.
Uncle Sam lies.
From Vietnam body counts to “I am not a crook” to “I did not have sex with that woman,” we have become lost in a misery of misstatements, mistruths, misdirections. Lies.
I don’t believe the statistics that show my cost of living has risen only 3.6% since 2008. Somebody monkeyed with the numbers. Somebody lied.
I don’t believe Harry Reid who said “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers,” last week while pimping a $35 billion bailout for public employee unions. Somebody monkeyed with the numbers poorly. Somebody lied.
I don’t believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming. Lots of somebodies monkeyed with the numbers to make that case. Somebody lied.
Of course it may be entirely because that well-known inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, lied to us in order to feather his own very noble but lightbulb-intense mansion.
Unfortunately, the result of the lies is that choosy mothers can’t afford Jif and really really choosy mothers will have to give up on Skippy for the peanut butter cookies in my Halloween basket.
