Takin’ a break today

It’s rainy and yucky today.

Anyway, this one goes out to all those chemists out there who have been freed from wage slavery:

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By the way, Ezra Klein wrote something intelligent after a four year self-induced psychogenic fugue.  It appears that he has woken up to discover that he is a Democrat after all and that some of the people that Obama hangs with in Washington are not:

Of course, those who say we should raise the Social Security retirement age — either the age of eligibility or the age for full benefits — don’t get laughed at. It’s considered a very thoughtful, courageous effort to deal with our entitlement programs. People who mention it often make a joke of how brave they’re being. For instance, here’s New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) at an American Enterprise Institute event:

You are going to have to raise the retirement age for Social Security! Whoa! I just said it and I am still standing here. I did not vaporize into the carpeting.

Big applause, of course.

This is one of Washington, D.C.’s more disagreeable conceits. The people wandering around calling for a higher retirement age will never feel the bite of the policy. Think tankers and politicians and columnists don’t retire at age 62, or even age 65. They love their work, which mostly requires sitting down in air-conditioned rooms. They stick around pretty much until they’re about to die.

Too bad this awakening comes too late to do anything about it but we must be grateful for small things.

But as Ezra says:

The courage it takes to call for a higher retirement age is the courage to say that other people who don’t have it as good as you do should be the ones to pay to shore up Social Security. It’s the same kind of courage as a poor person calling for higher taxes on the rich, or a sitting congressman calling for a war he’ll never have to fight in.

Or the courage of an A list blogger to defend future social security recipients after the blogger failed to pressure the Democratic nominee he helped get elected with threats of electoral suicide if he didn’t drop the Grand Bargain plans.

Just sayin’.