Social sewer Social media can be a great conduit for reconnecting old friends and keeping new ones in contact. But it can also be a cesspool of gossip, cruelty and depravity. Facebook admits as much. It is settling for $52 million a lawsuit brought by current and former contract workers who claimed they were mentally damaged by having to screen some of the more objectionable material posted to that social network. The lead plaintiff, for example, developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after just nine months on the job, in which she had to watch photos and images of rape, murder, and suicide to see what content to remove. Although such damage to a person’s psyche is obvious, more insidious is what social media can do to people’s sense of self-worth, making them feel that they don’t measure up to others or that most of their relationships are unsatisfactory and superficial. User, beware. Tim Kalich Editor and Publisher Greenwood Commonwealth How will another $3 trillion be paid? Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives have no problem detailing how they want to spend $3 trillion in additional relief from the COVID-19 pandemic. What they struggle with is explaining how the country will pay for it — so much so, that they don’t even seem to bother trying. Still, it needs to be emphasized that almost all of this money would be borrowed, as was the $3 trillion Congress has already allocated to help out individuals, businesses and states during this crisis. It’s easy when talking about government spending to get lost in the zeroes. But $6 trillion would represent a trillion dollars more than the federal government spends in an entire year on everything it does — national defense, transportation, social programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, everything. It’s considered outrageous when Washington runs up a trillion-dollar deficit in a year. This is the equivalent of six years of outrageous deficits. At some point, a lot of this borrowing will have to be paid back in either higher taxes or reduced benefits, as it’s doubtful the hoped-for economic rebound will cover it all. So what taxes do the borrowers want to raise or benefits cut, a few years down the road, in order to soften the present economic calamity that federal, state and local governments willfully engineered? Let’s hear some plan about that, too. Tim Kalich Editor and Publisher Greenwood Commonwealth
