Think about that. The older part is really the scarier idea. Along with the usual ailments of old age, the retired of the future probably will be broke.

David Ignatius in the Washington Post warns that the whiny Baby Boomers of today (I’m one) will be the poverty-stricken retirees of tomorrow. Many were counting on their pensions, but, alas, those pensions are rapidly disappearing.

Let’s start with the basic fact that only about half of Americans have any employer-sponsored retirement plan at all. The other folks will have to depend on Social Security. For a typical boomer worker, that would mean a monthly benefit of about $2,400 at a retirement age of 66 in 2020. On that, you won’t be able to afford many Starbucks lattes.

But let’s assume that our average worker is one of the lucky ones with an employer-sponsored pension. Not so long ago, that usually would have meant a “defined benefit” pension at retirement. About 80 percent of employees in medium-size and large companies had such plans in 1985, according to the Labor Department. By 2000, defined-benfit recipients totaled just 36 percent.

What’s happened is that employees have taken on the investment and actuarial risks as their employers shifted to “defined contribution” formulas. Employers now contribute to 401(k) plans that are managed by the employees. Unfortunately, workers often don’t do a good job as investors. They underestimate what they will need in retirement, and they underfund their 401(k) plans. And as for shifting out of stocks before the market tanks, well, let’s just forget about that. . . .

Now think of an older population, many of them struggling to keep up with the cost of living. Now imagine a tax liability of state and federal governments deep in debt.

It’s not a rosy future. If the downturn today is bad, what happens when the demands on government growth by Baby Boom proportions.

Well, if you take a look at who the contributors to Max Baucus’ 2008 Senate campaign, the protesters have a point. Baucus is the committee’s chairman and many see him as a point man in getting health care reform through Congress. But how much of a reform?

According to Opensecrets.org, Baucus raised $11,602,479 for re-election to the Senate from Montana. Of the Democrat’s top five contributors, three were related to the health or insurance industries. The top five industries giving to him were: securities, lawyers, insurance, health professionals and pharmaceuticals.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or left-winger to recognize the problems in all this.

Just for the record: Delaware’s Tom Carper is on the same committee and will play a part in developing any health reform that comes out of Congress.

Carper , according to Opensecrets.org, received $4,718,702 in his 2006 race for re-election. Of his top five contributors, three were banks or financial services (that’s right, MBNA was one of them), one rail company, and Hercules Inc. His top five industry contributors: lawyers, insurance, commercial banks, securities, and real estate.

A group of physicians and others protested at a Senate hearing on health care on Tuesday. They were pretty shrewd, standing up one by one, forcing the police to escort them out one at a time. As soon as one was out the door, another stood up and protested. From the one on this link, it was about politicians being in cahoots with insurers. The real people weren’t being represented.

OK, but what did they mean by single-payer system? The government, as in Medicare for everyone?

Will that be any better than the current system? If you call it Medicare for everyone, or Medicare E, as some advocates dub it, the position might be popular. Medicare is popular among the people who get it. (Their grandchildren may not appreciate the long-term bill.)

But what makes the advocates of a single-payer system sure it will work with so many people involved?

A single-payer system would cover everyone, or so I presume. Otherwise, why have it.

With an estimated 47 million people uninsured, that would knock that problem off the nation’s agenda. But so far I haven’t heard answers on how to pay for it.

As I said at the beginning of this post, we are going to hear a lot of the phrase single-payer in next few months. Some in Congress predict the two chambers will vote on a health-care bill by the end of July or early August.

It guarantees a hot summer.

Here’s how the Washington Post described it:

Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama’s administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?

Here’s her answer:

“Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country,” she said. “But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country.”

Give her credit for answering the question. But give the kid credit too.

According to the Post:

Misha’s mother, Inna Lerner, said the question her son had initially come up with was even tougher: “If you would work for Obama’s administration, would you push for toture?”

“They wanted him to soften it and take out the word ‘toture.’ But the essence of it was the same,” Lerner said.

How can you teach a kid Algebra 2 when he never passed Alegbra 1?

Yesterday someone had the really cool suggestion that states publish each high school’s COLLEGE success rates as well as high school completion rates (particularly for urban schools). That would balance the state’s interest in two quite different high school goals. One is completion for the half inclined drop out. The other — usually given short shrift — is legit college readiness for the half who don’t. Great idea.

The guy’s got guts. He was willing to mix it up with the education establishment at the Democratic Convention last August. Now he is stating the obvious about his home state … something no other New Jersey poitician has the guts to do.

Booker said New Jersey can’t afford it’s government.

“New Jersey will go bankrupt in 10 to 20 years because we cannot afford our employees as a state,” Booker said. “I’m talking about every worker from the cities and counties to the state government. Eventually, we’re going to price ourselves out as a government or tax ourselves to death.”

Here are a couple of background paragraphs from the Bloomberg News story:

Governor Jon Corzine in March proposed a $29.8 billion spending plan for next fiscal year that includes $4.3 billion to operate state government. Seventy percent of that, $3 billion, is for salaries and wages. Corzine, a first-term Democrat facing re-election in November, is seeking unpaid leaves and an 18- month wage freeze to save $400 million.

In Newark, Booker said he is looking to cut “hundreds” of jobs from the city’s 4,000-person workforce as he seeks to create a long-term balance in the municipality’s budget, which is currently $659 million. The mayor also wants to force city employees to take 18 unpaid days off to help reduce expenses and close an $180 million deficit by 2012.

The mayor gets even more honest:

“There should be a tax revolt in the state of New Jersey,” Booker said. “We’re the most inefficient state in the country. We have more government per person than we need. You would never manage a business the way we manage our government — we have overlapping provision of services and in my opinion, it’s insane.”

My prediction: There won’t be a revolt. The people with money will just leave.

That’s not a solution. It’s a reaction.

Read the whole story here.

From Wired’s automobile blog:

A New Jersey widow is heartbroken that one of the mourners at her husband’s funeral was neither a friend nor loved one, but a process server sent by Chrysler to claim her late husband’s body.

When he died last week, Harold St. John of Cranbury, N.J. was in the middle of a lawsuit over the very lung disease that took his life. The 67-year old claimed that his mesothelioma was the result of installing asbestos automobile brake linings on Imperials and DeSotos during the 1950s, and named both Honeywell and Chrysler as defendants in a lawsuit that was due to go to trial today. Sadly, St. John died before the case could be heard, but the wheels of the legal system kept turning. That’s when things got really ugly.

According to the Detroit News:

General Motors Corp. will stop bankrolling movies made by PBS filmmaker Ken Burns as it tries to conserve cash and survive the worst sales market in 27 years.

GM, as we know, is tottering on extinction. As bad that is, the company’s struggle to stay alive, indeed, the whole Detroit region’s struggle, is taking on a bit of class bitterness. Joel Kotkin, a student of such things, said that the battle between the gentry and the populists.

Kotkin notes:

Broadly speaking, there is a long-standing conflict inside the Democratic Party between gentry liberals and populists. This division is not the same as in the 1960s, when the major conflicts revolved around culture and race as well as on foreign policy. Today the emerging fault-lines follow mostly regional, geographical and, most importantly, class differences.

Gentry liberals cluster largely in cities, wealthy suburbs and college towns. They include disproportionately those with graduate educations and people living on the coasts. Populists tend to be located more in middle- and working-class suburbs, the Great Plains and industrial Midwest. They include a wider spectrum of Americans, including many whose political views are somewhat changeable and less subject to ideological rigor.

The Detroit auto dilemma fits right into that gap. Many Americans want GM to go into bankruptcy at this point. But in Detroit and thereabouts, that thought is sacrilegious. There’s a lot or resentment out there. (The Detroit Free Press is asking readers: What would you tell the Obama car team now visiting the city? Here are the answers. They’re hot.)

What happens if President Obama chooses to let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt? (Full disclosure: We ran an editorial today that says bankruptcy is probably inevitable.) He’ll have a political problem. Michigan is a blue state. Will its residents feel betrayed? But then, the Republicans from the South seem to be doing their to alienate Motor City fans by bad mouthing that portion of the American auto industry. (It’s not as if they don’t have a dog in the fight.)

The Free Press auto columnist Tom Walsh sends off a cry of the heart, one filled with class bitterness:

Big shots at GM, Chrysler and the UAW probably won’t talk so bluntly to you today, when they show off their whiz-bang technology and green vehicles of the future.

That’s because the big shots are afraid of you, afraid to seem too pushy or too defensive. That’s why Detroit’s automakers sit meekly and quietly by, refusing to rebut even obvious nonsense such as that spouted by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on “Face the Nation” a week ago, when he said GM and Chrysler “never invested in alternative-energy cars.”

There’s a tremendous frustration abroad in greater Detroit, which you would hear unfiltered if you stop in at a few local saloons, deli counters or chili-dog joints.

Suppliers are mad at GM for shipping off work to Mexico and China; GM is mad at Ford Motor Co. for acting uppity just because it hasn’t asked for federal rescue loans yet; the UAW is mad at chief executive officers and bondholders and Southern U.S. senators, and everybody is mad at the banks and the government.

Still, not everyone sees bankruptcy as a complete downer:

Bankruptcy would help GM accomplish what it needs to do. In addition to building more popular cars, GM needs to renegotiate billions in debt, slash the number of dealers, and reduce costly healthcare benefits for workers and retirees. It’s been trying to do that for years – but the glacial pace of negotiations has made it impossible to move fast enough. A Chapter 11 filing would give a bankruptcy judge and appointed stewards of the company the power to force concessions that otherwise might take years longer to achieve – or never happen at all.

Does that mean GM would be free to screw the workers?

But that’s not was is cancelling Ken Burns. It’s the money.

The cash crunch ends a 22-year relationship between GM and Burns, a graduate of Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School and award-winning filmmaker who has created documentaries for public television about the nation’s wars, jazz and baseball, among others. Under a 10-year deal that started in 1999, GM paid for 35 percent of each film’s budget and funded educational outreach programs tied to each documentary.

While exact figures were not available, GM has spent millions underwriting Burns’ films. The last film made under the deal is “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” a six-part series that airs this fall.

A good ride it was, too.

Well, neither could the Atlantic magazine.

The writer there called her crazy.

Here’s from a live blog:

Her questions to the bankers are so bizarre that they don’t know what to do. Ken Lewis looks like a deer in the headlights as Waters asks her about offshore loss mitigation efforts. He can’t even figure out what she’s talking about, and neither can I. She also asks the bankers, few of whom are in the credit card business, how many of them have cut credit limits to people on the basis of where they shop. It’s like watching your crazy aunt challenge your boyfriend to prove that fairies aren’treal.

The Washington Post is more polite, but more detailed:

Finally, Waters went after fees that she said the banks paid themselves for processing the bailout money.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lewis said.

“Do any of you understand what I’m talking about?” she asked.

Pandit offered that what Waters was talking about was “underwriting fees” paid to a “number of underwriters,” including Citigroup.

“You absolutely collect fees,” Waters concluded, as her time ran out.

These are from Maria Bartiromo.

Here’s a sample of the exchange:

So are you comfortable with a $500,000 cap on the salaries of top managers?
I don’t feel good about the $500,000 cap. And it’s not about me — I’ll take $500,000. However, you will have talented individuals, particularly revenue producers, going to foreign banks and other asset management firms. That’s a problem.