I came home from my Thursday afternoon volunteer job at the Museum of Photograph Arts; and as hard as it might be to believe, I hadn’t taken a single photograph all day. Sometimes you just do the best you can with what’s at hand. I took a picture of the cheesecake we’re having for dessert tonight. The cheesecake was yesterday’s project. Retirement is good. To those of you who still work in the real world at real jobs and don’t have time to make cheesecakes in the middle of the afternoon... Hang in there. Your day will come.

By the way, don’t believe that b.s. about the Social Security program being a Ponzi scheme* that the Governor of Texas was slinging before he tucked tail and retreated from his comical attempt to become the Republican presidential candidate. Forbes Magazine said Rick Perry’s story ranks right up there with the alligators-in-the-sewer fable. It’s a major problem that most people, both Democrats and Republicans, don’t know that there is bipartisan Social Security Trustees oversight of the Social Security Program. Ask any of them, even those who served during George W. Bush’s administration, and you’ll find that Perry’s fanciful tale doesn't fit the facts. It's true that the program is underfunded and must be modernized; but even if Washington does nothing, which is unlikely whichever party is in power, the young people who are now teenagers that Perry was talking about will get three-quarters of promised benefits when they reach age 65. The key information to know is that this good program must be funded adequately, and it must be appropriately modernized. The program has served Americans for many decades and it works even today remarkably well, especially considering that it has not been modernized for decades. You can probably imagine what kind of shape some of the “old people” you know in your own family would be in today if the Social Security Program had not existed for them.

You can check out the Social Security Trustees report on the WEB:
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/TR07/index.html

*A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation. The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering higher returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent.