CNN is also "fair and balanced"

Sicko may be a piece of political advocacy, but according to CNN that means they fudged the facts. Fascinatingly, Moore's fact checkers show who the fudgers really are.

But thanks for the great reporting CNN!

When overcoming disability becomes liability

This article shares the story of an Olympic hopeful, a man who has been running for years and who hopes to travel to China in 2008 with the South African Olympic team. There's one significant difference between Oscar Pistorius and your typical sprinter, however. He's got two prosthetic legs.

Despite the incredible feat of overcoming the loss of both his legs from a birth defect, the international track and field organization (IAAF) are now considering banning him from competition, because they postulate that his prosthetic limbs may give him a competitive advantage. However, the facts suggest otherwise:

According to Gailey [an associate professor of physical therapy at the University of Miami Medical School], a prosthetic leg returns only about 80 percent of the energy absorbed in each stride, while a natural leg returns up to 240 percent, providing much more spring...

...There are many disadvantages to sprinting on carbon-fiber legs, Pistorius and his coach said. After a cumbersome start, he needs about 30 meters to gain his rhythm. His knees do not flex as readily, limiting his power output. His grip can be unsure in the rain. And when he runs into a headwind or grows fatigued, he must fight rotational forces that turn his prosthetic devices sideways, said Ampie Louw, who coaches Pistorius.

In other words, Pistorius is actually at a disadvantage. The arguments get steadily more inane:

Foremost among the I.A.A.F.’s concerns is that Pistorius’s prosthetic limbs may make him taller than he would have been on natural legs and may unfairly lengthen his stride, allowing him to lower his best times by several seconds in the past three years, while most elite sprinters improve by hundredths of a second.

His legs aren't getting any longer, dummies. And Pistorius is hardly a giant, standing 6 feet, 1.25 inches with his prosthetics. Despite the science of the prosthetic and the inanity of the IAAF complaints, the typical slippery slope arguments follow:

A sobering question was posed recently on the Web site of the Connecticut-based Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. “Given the arms race nature of competition,” will technological advantages cause “athletes to do something as seemingly radical as having their healthy natural limbs replaced by artificial ones?” wrote George Dvorsky, a member of the institute’s board of directors. “Is it self-mutilation when you’re getting a better limb?”

How about this rule. You can only compete in prosthetics that are used to replace bum legs (or no legs). And you can only sit on the IAAF if you've had your brain removed. So far we're batting .500.

The bunk about the "death tax"

With Democrats in control of Congress, this issue has finally been back-burnered (in an era of record budget deficits, it should never have been on the front). However, I just saw a nice analysis of the estate tax's impact on family farms that should put to rest the concerns of so many Republicans that this tax destroys family farms.

Agricultural economist Daryll Ray summarizes a Congressional Budget Office study that found that in the year 2000, only 138 family farms lacked the liquid assets (cash) to pay off the estate taxes immediately. Ray notes that these 138 farm families don't even have to pay the tax immediately, they have 14 years to do so.

So, at the 2000 exemption level of $675,000, the estate tax puts 138 farms at risk every year. That's 0.007% of the over 2 million farms in the United States. Raise the exemption level to $1.5 million (part of the Bush tax cuts that took effect in 2005) and you reduce the number of farms without sufficient liquid assets to pay the estate tax to 27 (0.001%).

On the other hand, the estate tax is projected to capture $745 billion over the period 2011-2021. As I've mentioned previously, there are several major commitments by the federal government (Medicare, Social Security) and unfunded mandates (special education), as well as deficits that should be covered with estate tax monies.

Note: the debate on the estate tax is complicated by President Bush's tax cuts, which all sunset after 2010. In fact, the estate tax is quietly being phased out by 2010, only to return in its original form in 2011. This odd policy was developed to hide the full cost of the tax cuts and to force someone else to take responsibility for them in 2011.

All fiscal considerations aside, the estate tax is a piece of making a level playing field for achieving the American Dream. Giving everyone a fair shot at the American Dream means that even the progeny of the richest should have to earn their way up the income ladder.