The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1168989
C-12 Wednesday, September 18, 2019 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond The end game My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. Reasons to quit smoking Minority View by Walter E. Williams Social Security Matters by by Russell Gloor Academic stupidity and brainwashing When will my earnings hurt my Social Security benefits? Continued on page 13 Continued on page 13 Continued on page 13 Just when we thought colleges could not spout loonier ideas, we have a new one from American Uni- versity. They hired a professor to teach other professors to grade stu- dents based on their "labor" rather than their writing ability. The pro- fessor that American University hired to teach that nonsense is As- ao B. Inoue, who is a professor at the University of Washington in Tacoma in interdisciplinary arts and scienc- es. He is also the director of the uni- versity's writing center. Inoue be- lieves that a person's writing abili- ty should not be assessed, in order to promote "anti-racist" objectives. Inoue taught American University's faculty members that their previous practices of grading writing promot- ed white language supremacy. In- oue thinks that students should be graded on the effort they put into a project. The idea to bring such a professor to American University, where parents and stu- dents fork over $48,459 a year in tuition charg- es, could not have been something thought up by saner members of its academic communi- ty. Instead, it was prob- ably the result of deep thinking by the university's diversity and cam- pus life officials. Inoue's views are not simply extreme but possibly hostile to the academic mission of most universities. Forgiving and ignoring a students' writing ability would mostly affect black students. White students' speaking and writ- ing would be judged against the King's Eng- lish, defined as stan- dard, pure or correct English grammar. Professor Noam Chomsky, called the father of modern lin- guistics, formulated the generative theory of language. Accord- ing to his theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is univer- sal for all humans and that under- lies the grammar of all human lan- guages. We analyze and interpret our environment with words and Dear Rusty: I will turn 66 in June of next year. I do not plan to stop working but I do plan on starting to collect my Social Secu- rity. How soon can I start to col- lect without having to give it back because my income is too high? And after I start collecting will I still have to pay into the program with deductions from my current salary, and if I do, will those pay- ments from me help to increase what I will be able to collect from SSA?—Signed Planning Ahead. Dear Planning Ahead: Social Security's earnings limit goes away when you reach your full retirement age (FR A), which for you is 66. So, if you claim Social Security benefits to start in June of next year you do not need to worry about your earnings caus- ing Social Security to take back benefits- you'll have reached your full retirement age (FR A) and the earnings limit disappears at your FR A. But, whether you can claim any earlier in the year without it affecting your bene- fits depends on your earnings level. Starting next year, because that will be the year you reach your FR A, the usu- al earnings limit ($17,640 for 2019) will be about 2.5 times greater, or a little more than this year's limit of $46,920 for those in their FR A year. So, if you claim benefits to start before June when you reach your FR A, you'll be subject to that higher 2020 annual limit and—depend- ing on the month you claim—per- haps a monthly limit (the annu- al limit divided by 12). Exceed- ing the annual limit will cause So- cial Security to take back some of your benefits, and if you ex- ceed the monthly lim- it you won't be enti- tled to benefits for that month. However, if your income start- ing next year won't ex- ceed those limits you can claim earlier in the year without hav- ing benefits withheld. And if you don't start your benefits before June of next year you won't be subject to an earnings limit at all next year, nor for any year there- after. And just to be sure you're aware, you can apply for Social Security about three months be- fore you want your benefits to start—but if you want to start benefits at your FR A just be sure to specify June 2020 as your ben- efit start month. For clarity, you can get benefits for the full month of June, the month you reach your FR A, regardless of the day of the month you were born. As to your question about con- tinuing to pay into the program, yes, for as long as you continue to work you will need to pay Social Security FICA payroll taxes—ev- eryone who works and earns must pay that tax. But paying Social Se- curity FICA, by itself, doesn't in- crease your benefit. What may af- fect your benefit is if your current earnings are more than the infla- tion-adjusted earnings in any of the 35 years used to compute your benefit when you start Social Se- curity. Each year, Social Securi- ty will look at your annual earn- ings and, if an increase is appro- priate because you have more re- cent higher earnings, they will automatically make that adjust- ment for you. Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker Black Americans are doing great under Trump Banned Books Week Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson I was in a Medical Clinic waiting room and was scanning around for announcements posted around the walls and spotted a material that caught my attention. It's about smoking and the title of the poster was 10 good reasons to quit smok- ing. Based on good solid scientific non-biased research and my own observation, we are fortunately winning some, a little, on the bat- tle against tobacco consumption. However, the use of marijuana and CBD and now vaping have re- placed one bad habit to another. Here's the 10 listed reasons against smoking. I did not make this up. I read it. I added some thoughts in- to each recommendation. 1. You can save money. The av- erage cost of a pack of cigarette is almost seven dollars. If you smoke one pack a day, that equates to one car payment a month. 2. You don't have to stand out in the cold to smoke. I humorously call this habit "cancer break or doing respira- tory therapy." 3. Your car, clothes, hair, house, just about everything will smell better. It's harder to sell a vehicle or a house that rinks of tobacco odor. 4. You don't have to pop a mint to talk to someone closely. 5. You won't have yellow stains on your fingers and teeth. 6. You will have fewer or no burns on your clothes, furniture and car seat. 7. Your mouth will not taste like ashtray in the morn- ing. 8. You can improve your health and not die early. 9. You can reduce your health care insur- ance premiums and I think your car and house insurance too. Many tragedies have happened from houses that have burned down and killed people because cigarettes were lit and dropped on carpets or beddings if a smoker falls asleep. 10. The number one reason you should quit smoking is for your- The August jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed more great news for all Ameri- cans. And particularly for black Americans. The nation's unemployment rate of 3.7% puts it near the lowest ever in the last half-century. Black unemployment is at an all- time low at 5.5% . Also at an all-time low is the gap between black and white unem- ployment. With white unemploy- ment at 3.4% , the gap is 2.1 per- centage points. Put in other terms, black unemployment stood 62 % higher than white unemployment. A few years ago, the Pew Re- search Center looked at BL S un- employment data back to 1954, the first year the data was broken down by race. From 1954 to 2013, white unemployment averaged 5% , and black unemployment av- eraged 9.9 % . So going back as far as we have data, the black-white unemploy- ment gap averaged a difference of 4.9 percentage points, com- pared with 2.1 points now. The black rate averaged 100 % higher than the white rate compared with 62 % now. This is good news for everyone except those who are more unhap- py that Donald Trump is president than they are happy that blacks are working. CNN's Don Lemon told blacks that their vote should be influ- enced more by what is, according to him, Trump's "racist behavior" than by the strong economy. According to the BL S report, there were 349,000 more blacks employed in August 2019 com- pared with August 2018. So these 349,000 black Amer- icans now working, who weren't working a year ago, should be thinking when they go to the vot- ing booth that Don Lemon, whose net worth, according to various online sources, is somewhere be- tween $ 3 million and $10 million, says Trump is a racist? Lemon continued on with his CNN buddies that all the credit should go to Obama. According to BL S, the average number of blacks working dur- ing 2016, the last year of Obama's presidency, was 18.2 million com- pared with 19.5 million now. My guess is these 1.3 million more black Americans now work- ing will be more prone to listen to Black Entertainment Television founder, America's first black bil- lionaire, Robert Johnson, who said on CNBC, "I think the economy is doing absolutely great, and it's particularly reaching into popula- tions that heretofore have had very bad problems in terms of jobs, un- employment and the opportunities that come with full employment, so A frican-American unemploy- ment is at its lowest level." Johnson went on to credit Pres- ident Trump and the 2017 tax cuts for stimulating the economy. The World Bank annually pub- lishes a Doing Business report, grading nations on their condi- tions for starting and doing busi- ness. Economic research shows a powerful correlation between this index and economic growth. It is exactly this — a tax and regula- tory environment more friendly to business — that the Trump ad- ministration has produced. And, as Johnson points out, every com- munity benefits. Along with the BL S, the Na- tional Federation of Indepen- dent Business, which represents the nation's small businesses, al- so issued a strong report in Au- gust, showing an increase in Au- gust over July of workers added per firm. Contrary to the message of Don Lemon, whom CNN pays a seven- figure salary to tell liberal view- ers what they want to hear, Don- ald Trump's accomplishments for black Americans are impressive. First, of course, is a great econ- Dr. Joseph Nicolosi was a warm, compassionate psycho- therapist in California whose pa- tients have attested to his lega- cy of rescued marriages, broken bondage and restored personal wholeness. He wrote books and articles for his professional colleagues, but also a paperback for laymen, which I ordered and read more than 20 years ago after I heard about it on a Christian radio pro- gram. His books, all of them, were banned by Amazon on July 2. You can still buy Mein Kampf there. You can still buy just about any book that was ever in print. But Dr. Nicolosi's works are off-lim- its, in their entirety, in perpetuity. This gentle Catholic man, you see, practiced reparative therapy for males with unwanted same- sex erotic attraction. This is dif- ferent from so-called conversion therapy, which is directed at men who are content with their homo- sexual identity and behavior. But that distinction is lost on gay hysterics intolerant of desert- ers from their ranks. A giddy Brit- ish Sodomite wrote that he was in tears (of joy) after Amazon com- plied with his social media cam- paign and an online petition to re- move Nicolosi's work. The California therapist's un- derlying assumptions about au- thentic male identity are from Scripture, of course. Gays and their allies refer to these incon- venient Bible verses as "clobber passages." Is a social media cam- paign to ban the Clobber Bible in our future? I wouldn't bet against it. Are those crickets I hear at the dec- adent American Library Associ- ation, where they're kicking off Banned Books Week this Sun- day? It's kind of hard to hear over the belch of Drag Queen Story Hour, which is the AL A's current preoccupation. What a travesty that the AL A has voluntarily trivialized its role as a guardian of intellectual free- dom and unrestricted access to controversial information. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is probably more fun than grinding out a stubborn defense of unpop- ular speech and scholarship, but the AL A is abdicating something very precious here. Nicolosi died at 70 two years ago. He was a principled, method- ical fighter for his patients' right to see themselves clearly and to make the changes they yearned for, without consulting intrusive political gays and gay allies. But he wasn't a brawler. Per- haps it's merciful that he didn't live to see 2019. But we're here. And we may have to choose be- tween brawling and surrender. Shame on us if we're unwilling to fight for our grandchildren. Quarterback Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints was assault- ed by the LGBTQ community two weeks ago for his part in the video "Bring Your Bible to School Day." His endorsement was part of a video by Focus on the Family who has been branded homophobic be- cause they support the traditional teachings of the Church concern- ing marriage and sexuality. Brees, backpedaled and caved into the pressure and said, "I do not support any group that dis- criminates or that have their own agendas that are trying to promote inequality. … That's not what I stand for." The mega-singing star Taylor Swift has jumped into the cess- pit as a social justice warrior in song and public plea for Con- gress to pass H.R.5, known as the Equal- ity Act of 2019. Her recent album in- cludes the song "You Need to Calm Down," which supports the LGBTQ community and is a call for polit- ical action. Swift and the American Chris- tian are clueless as to what the "Equality Act" would mean to the nation. The legislation has a death pill for the church tucked inside it. The act states, "The Re- ligious Freedom Res- toration Act of 1993 ... shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to claim under, a covered title, or pro- vide a basis for chal- lenging the application of enforcement of a cov- ered title." The gloves are off, and the end-goal of the LGBTQ leadership is exposed for what it is. The act reveals the real aim of Continued on page 13