Eight facts about social security

For those who like a fact-based conversation:

"Eight Facts about Social Security"Ezra Klein on Social Security:
Among his comments, my preferred solution:
Social Security’s 75-year shortfall is manageable. In fact, it’d be almost completely erased by applying the payroll tax to income over $106,000.Source (PDF).

1) Over the next 75 years, Social Security’s shortfall is equal to about 0.7 percent of GDP. Source (PDF).

2) For the average 65-year-old retiring in 2010, Social Security replaced about 40 percent of working-age earnings. That “replacement rate” is scheduled to fall to 31 percent in the coming decades. Source.

3) Social Security’s replacement rate puts it 26th among 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations for workers with average earnings. Source.

4) Without Social Security, 45 percent of seniors would be under the poverty line. With Social Security, 10 percent of seniors are under the poverty line. Source.

5) People can start receiving Social Security benefits at age 62. But the longer they wait, up until age 70, the larger their checks. Waiting to 66 means checks that are 33 percent larger. Waiting to 70 means checks that are 76 percent larger. But most people start claiming benefits at 62, and 95 percent start by 66. Source.

6) Raising the retirement age by one year amounts to roughly a 6.66 percent cut in benefits. Source.

7) In 1935, a white male at age 60 could expect to live to 75. Today, a white male at age 60 can expect to live to 80. Source.

8) In 1972, a 60-year-old male worker in the bottom half of the income distribution had a life expectancy of 78 years. Today, it’s around 80 years. Male workers in the top half of the income distribution, by contrast, have gone from 79 years to 85 years. Source.

Brilliant politics

Faced with Republican legislators wanting to put poor Minnesotans on insufficient vouchers for health care, Sen. Goodwin offers an amendment to have legislators pilot the voucher program first.

If it's so great, why don't we try it?

Touche!

Life-size Barbie highlights large impact on body image

How Many Gays Must God Create Before We Accept That He Wants Them Around?

When the poor cheat, they get caught. We let the wealthy off easy.

And it speaks poorly of America.

Bring your judge a cookie

Because it unfortunately looks like hunger influences their decisions.

Eliminate the bell curve in math?

A teaching strategy known as Jump confronts the "myth of ability," and has nearly eliminated achievement diferences in math students where it has been used.  Amazing.  And as a math major and Upward Bound teacher, I totally believe it.

From the article:

What if Americans got to pick where their taxes went?

A fascinating thought exercise.  What if Americans could dedicate 1 percent of their taxes to any part of the federal budget?

But what interested me even more is finding out what people would spend on if allowed to choose. You think it's foreign wars and fossil-fuel subsidies? No. Lamberton sums it up as "more butter, fewer guns." Specifically:

Tough tax day for the richest

we know that in 2007, the fortunate 400 paid an effective tax rate of just 16.6 percent

Huh.

The average American paid 22.5 percent.

America in the Hands of a Professional Military

Two of a three part series, a fascinating look at the result of professionalizing and then out-sourcing America's military activity to contractors.

Things that really bother me:

• How a professional military makes it easier to go to war, because the sacrifice isn't shared. Not only do fewer people serve, but fewer people even have relatives in the military.  From the article:
• "The professional military also makes it possible to sustain wars. Long wars become possible because the boots-on-the-ground can be deployed and redeployed. In the past, to fight wars like the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, “you would have had to institute a draft in order to sustain the action that’s been going on,” Keaney says. “And that would have been a brake on any administration."
• This next quote drives the point home even more convincingly.  As even fewer members of Congress have had military service, there's less understanding of the impact and more willingness to use the military to solve problems:
• "When the Gates Commission signed off on its report, the 91st Congress had nearly 400 veterans, from World War II and Korea. The just completed 111th Congress had far fewer, 121. Only seven members of the 110th Congress had family serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.The fear is not that the military would attempt to usurp the government. “The real danger,” Betros says, “is that Americans reflexively move towards a military solution before they will try all the other elements of national power. For now, the country relies very, very heavily on its military, without asking if there is an alternative. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
   

The second article in the series looks at the privatization of U.S. warfare, with astonishing implications for our ability to control our armed conflicts. For one, the Defense Department offers no-bid contracts to companies stuffed with military veterans, and then fails to fully account for the money spent.  The use of contractors for base support, kitchen duty, etc seems to be a minor one.  But the U.S. is increasingly using contractors in armed combat, with disastrous results.

What most rankles the colonels is that contractors have only one obligation: to fulfill their contract. They answer to no chain of command; they are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice; they are not required to have U.S. military training; and they are not subject to the Law of Land Warfare or the Geneva Conventions. Contractors decide on their own rules of engagement. Those security contractors who work for “U.S. agencies” or the State Department, which will soon be taking over control of security in Iraq, are immunized from Iraqi laws, and potentially U.S. law as well. Put another way, they have license to kill.
...
Two of the largest battles of the Iraq war, which took place in Fallujah, a city of nearly half a million, occurred in part because four well-armed security contractors — who had been warned not to drive through the heart of the big city — proceeded into a no-go conflict zone and were murdered. They were on their way to deliver catering supplies.

The security contractors who were from the now infamous Blackwater USA (renamed Xe Services LLC), a private military company, were ambushed as they slowed at an intersection. A frenzied crowd then pulled the dead and wounded contractors from their vehicles and tore their bodies apart, set them on fire and hung their remains from a bridge over the Tigris.

The article goes on to talk about how private contracting has become the default option for overseas security, whether for the armed forces or the State department, and how it means ceding more control of those operations to third parties who are less under the control of our civilian-led government.

I worry that we've created a too-professional military, an entire workforce of people who require ongoing military conflict to sustain their careers, at the expense of more productive uses for our collective dollar. 

My number 1 search term

Blogger tells me that the search term that has brought me more traffic than any other (since they started keeping track in May 2010) is "tom emmer is an idiot."

I could do worse.

Why are no bank executives in prison yet?

A voluminous report on the financial crisis by the United States Senate — citing internal documents and private communications of bank executives, regulators, credit ratings agencies and investors — describes business practices that were rife with conflicts during the mortgage mania and reckless activities that were ignored inside the banks and among their federal regulators.

Read more here

Giving our meat the premium drugs

It's pretty sad when our beef and chicken has been getting more and better antibiotic treatment than we do.  Especially when it means we're more likely to get sick as a result:

A team of researchers from Arizona bought meat and poultry in five cities across the United States, tested them for bacteria, and found this: 47 percent of the samples contained the very common pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and 96 percent of those isolates were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Of more concern: 52 percent of those staph isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics that are commonly used in both veterinary and human medicine.

That is, roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the United States contained multidrug resistant staph.

Maybe they should be called ideology tanks

Instead of think tanks...

Chart: Housing Bubble in Perspective

via Economist's View

On the public teat, with no accountability

A restaurant will get a $2 million city subsidy AND a waiver from the city's living wage requirement. Unconscionable.

Why we run federal deficits

An acute observation of our current political culture, also described aptly as "our cowardly Congress" by Nicholas Kristof.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Washington antagonists executed a series of deals that included tax increases and spending reductions. But these days, due to a combination of utter Republican intransigence and Democratic wishy-washiness, no such deals are possible. The legislative and executive branches have no problem working together to massively increase deficits — think about 2009's uni-partisan stimulus package or the more recent bipartisan lame-duck to extend Bush tax cuts and enact a new payroll tax cut. But our government has an extremely difficult time making even symbolic spending cuts. Slashing about $40 billion in spending, an amount equal to 2.5 percent of this year's projected budget deficit, spurred the news networks to create shut-down clocks. And revenue enhancements? The phrase doesn't seem to be in official Washington's vocabulary. President Obama campaigned on letting the tax cuts for high earners expire at the end of 2010, swore up and down that he wanted them to expire throughout 2009 and 2010, and then meekly surrendered.

Second, even if Washington were somehow to get serious, I don't think the public is anywhere near prepared for the truth about our fiscal affairs. That's largely because nobody has bothered to tell the Americans that, as much as they feel overtaxed, the federal government, largely by design, has done an extremely poor job of collecting revenues in the past few years. That failure, as much as spending, lies at the heart of our massive structural deficits. Don't take it from me. Go to the OMB's website and check out Table 1.2, [see chart below]

...

Yes, the U.S. has a spending problem. But the federal government also has a serious taxing problem. As currently designed, the system does a poor job of collecting revenues. Receipts are unacceptably volatile. And all the political momentum is in the direction of reducing taxes. Now the size of the U.S. economy in 2010 was $14.66 trillion, which means one percent of GDP is equal to $146 billion. And so if federal taxes were anywhere near the normal rate of recent history — say at the 18.2 percent of GDP as they were as recently as 2006 — the deficit would be about $482 billion smaller than it is today.

Note how revenues and spending started to sharply diverge in 2000, around the time the Republican "no new taxes" mantra and Bush's massive tax cuts started punching a huge hole in the federal budget.

Public radio goes totally hypocritical

A California public radio station decides to suspend sponsorship spots by Planned Parenthood during the federal budget debate.  I can't count how many times I heard ads for Koch Refineries or for "increasingly clean" coal during environmental reporting on public radio.

This isn't about objectivity, but rather about trying to dodge the "liberal" label by unfairly cutting off a nonprofit family-planning organization's sponsorship rather than standing up for the truth.

Asshats.

The Economy and Budgets

A few good articles:

First, word the much-maligned financial bailout will actually end up making taxpayers some money.  I was one of those folks who reluctantly supported the idea, but it's nice to know that is also ended up doing no harm to the taxpayers. 

Of course, it's sad to realize that the bailout has helped return a lot of corporate America to profitability, but still leaves millions of Americans unemployed.  The linked article is one of the few with a progressive view on the economy (read: is more about how the average American is doing rather than the average stockholder).  And naturally, since business profits have recovered, a lot of states are already thinking about ending unemployment benefits, even though unemployment rate is still 3 percentage points higher than it was at the start of the recession.

Finally, the federal budget.  A shutdown - that would have hurt the economy and the federal budget - was narrowly averted, as were a lot of ridiculous Republican demands such as cutting off money to Planned Parenthood (whose family planning services help reduce abortions).  Furthermore, the "budget" (for those who have budgeted, you understand we use the term loosely) proposed by Rep. Ryan actually increases the federal deficit while at the same time severely slashing health care programs (Medicare and Medicaid) that help provide critical medical assistance to the elderly and poor.  And Paul Krugman, nobel economist, points out the numerous "unicorns" in Ryan's budget, such as assumptions of incredibly low unemployment and a massive housing boom.

Nicholas Kristof sums up our Congress pretty well:

What does all this mean? That we’re governed by self-absorbed, reckless children.

A few reasons our public education system needs help

Three interesting articles on education in the past month:

From Nicholas Kristof, an impassioned argument for paying teachers more, based on their disproportionate impact on the rest of our society. We used to value them more:

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

From Minnpost, a discussion of how little education policy and practice applies the lessons from research about what works.

Also in the news, Gothamschools.org highlights a new report that finds that merit pay – a favorite among education reformers, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan – didn’t work to improve test scores in a New York City experiment, and was actually connected with dropping test scores among middle school students. A Vanderbilt University study in September found largely the same thing, that offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores.

Finally, a story from Miller McCune, showing that collective bargaining for teachers helps increase average student test scores, and especially helps those students at the top, but it increases the achievement gap between whites and non-white students. A teacher union law lapsed in 1999, and the real-life experiment provided this lesson:

In many districts, pre-1999 collective bargaining agreements allowed “senior teachers — those with the most experience, who are often higher-performing teachers — to concentrate themselves in a district’s higher-income, higher-performing schools...High-poverty schools with lower-performing students, by contrast, wind up with the least-experienced (and least successful) teachers."

It's a good illustration of how teacher collective bargaining isn't always aligned with students' best interest. However, I'd argue that's reason to amend union contracts, rather than throw out teacher unions (since, as the first article points out, teachers are unfortunately low paid relative to their societal value).


Overall, these articles leave me with the feeling that our education policy is badly failing. We pay teachers too little to attract and retain the best talent, we fail to use best practices in the schools, and we have mindless attacks on unions that fail to address the major issues (student performance) and instead are more about political retribution.

Spring Cleaning: climate denialism, American exceptionalism, and Congress punts on the middle class

Oops!  Hoping to find scientific backing for their climate denialism, House Republicans got a rude surprise when a Koch Industries funded physicist reported that their research actually syncs up with existing climate change science.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth. 

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.” 

A nice article on the American (conservative) superiority complex, with a fascinating map of passport ownership by state.  Seems folks are less egotistical about their own country when they've seen others.

In other words, it’s part of the superiority complex you often encounter in U.S. politics; people just know that we’re the best, and won’t believe you when you tell them that actually they have the Internet, cell phones, and antibiotics in Europe too.

The economy hasn't really recovered (e.g. unemployment is still far above pre-recession levels), but Washington has given up on the millions of Americans still out of work.

More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed

...polls indicate that voters still care much more about jobs than they do about the budget deficit. So it’s quite remarkable that inside the Beltway, it’s just the opposite. 

...I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly. 

He hasn't been replaced

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

See the original news broadcasts of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, 53 years ago today.

Star Wars lightsaber popsicles - brilliant

Are we human or economic tools?

I just read this essay on the decline of labor unions (and middle class living standards) by David Morris. 

In the last generation, US unions have shrunk in size and influence, largely as a result of a withering attack by corporations and Republicans.  And with that shrinking influence has come a corresponding decrease in the standard of living of most Americans.  Indeed, as we shall see, the correlation between the strength of unions and the strength of the middle class is so empirically strong it might well be considered causal.

What bugs me the most is that the decline of unions has been a deliberate strategy of large corporations and the Republican Party, and that their demise undermines the middle class.  I understand that corporations might like to see us all as little cogs in their profit machine, but it's disappointing to see a political party also selling us out.

Bad-faith-based legislating

This would almost be comical, but it's just sad:

While most observers were focused on debates over private-school vouchers and the end of traditional teacher tenure rules, the House GOP leadership quietly killed most of a bill to create a statewide rating system to identify high-quality early-ed programs, steer the fragile families that rely on public child-care subsidies toward them and reward providers that deliver top results.

Authored by Rep. Jenifer Loon, an Eden Prairie Republican, the bill was revenue-neutral, meaning its implementation would not cost a cent, and it enjoyed the backing of Dayton, the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and pretty much everyone on the political continuum between them.

It did not, however, have any friends on the religious right, which declared it an attempt to usurp the rights on Minnesota parents by placing their children under the authority of a nanny state. The Minnesota Family Council and Education Liberty Watch lobbied against the measure, arguing among other things that the government has no business telling parents how to parent.

Government does have a business making sure taxpayer money is spent wisely, however.  It's sad to see that the religious right prefers to have low income parents make "faith based" rather than "fact based" decisions about their children's education.

Our food supply at risk because we're killing the bees

A humorous, short video explaining the mysterious colony collapse disorder that's killing bees, and how the American fascination with a perfectly manicured lawn (or crop) is contributing.



Hat tip Minnpost.

New airport scanners not a major health risk

I've written about airport security before and how these new scanners are a form of security theater.  However, at least one knock against them - high radiation doses - is not true.

U.S. Corporations Disgust Me

GE pays no taxes | Eric Black Ink: "

Did you perchance read the front-page piece in the Friday New York Times about GE’s taxes? It’s very long, exhaustive and a masterful piece of reporting by David Kocieniewski that must’ve taken months. I highly commend the full read if you have an hour, but if not, the main point is made in the first three short paragraphs:

“General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.”

This is the kind of crap that makes my blood boil when we run massive government budget deficits and then talk about how we can cut payments to the elderly. We have a revenue problem.

I think I'd rather GE pay their taxes than make my parents work an extra five years into their retirement.

This is MY governor

In a speech about the Republican budget strategy (draconian cuts and stealing from county tax revenues):

 

“Every one of those dollars that is cut takes away something that means something to someone’s life,” he said. “These decisions are not just about dollars and cents, they’re about our values and priorities, our values as people individually and our collective values as a society.”

 

As for Republicans’ flat refusal to consider his plan to raise income taxes on the wealthiest Minnesotans, “all of these draconian measures that are being considered or enacted now are being driven, at least by the majority view, that we cannot raise taxes one dollar on the wealthiest people in the state,” Dayton said. “That priority, protecting the richest people in Minnesota, the highest income earners, the top 5 percent, to pay one dollar more matters more than everyone else paying higher property taxes.”

 

It also “matters more” to Republican legislative leaders than police and fire departments, public libraries, school integration, special education, public transit, higher education tuition or health care for the elderly, he said. “It’s just a sheer denial of reality” that amounts to “social and economic Darwinism,” Dayton said.

Why Gas Prices are High

From one of my favorite writers, David Roberts at Grist:

Into this fog last week came a beam of light in the form of an extraordinary speech from Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), which didn't get the attention it deserved. Bingaman is not normally a talky guy. He's not a McCain or Lieberman, on Sunday talk shows so often they keep toothbrushes in the green room bathrooms. Nor is he given to grand political gestures. He's cautious by temperament (to a fault, I'd argue). Despite his reticence, though, he is among the very few senators who actually understand energy.

Apparently, he finally had enough of the overheated, unmoored ideological fantasies that pass for public discussion of gas prices. So he dropped some knowledge.

First, he explained that the price of gas follows the price of oil. Then he explained that the price of oil is set on the global market. It is largely unaffected by domestic policies like EPA carbon restrictions and Gulf oil permitting. It is only barely affected, and only at the margins, by U.S. supply, which flows from just 2 percent of the world's reserves. (After all, U.S. production has been rising even as oil prices rise too.) The price of oil is shaped by supply constraints in petrostates, demand growth in developing countries, OPEC policy, and unrest in the Middle East. None of those, you'll note, take place in America.

What follows is an inescapable conclusion (my emphasis):

But what can Congress do to help ease the burden of high prices for U.S. consumers, when oil prices are determined mostly outside our borders? I think a realistic, responsible answer has to be focused on becoming less vulnerable to oil price changes over the medium- and long-term. And we become less vulnerable by using less oil.

That's it. That's the crux of the matter. If we want to solve our problems with oil, we have to use less of it. That simple truth is what centrist Democrats generally refuse to tell their constituents.

Public Broadcasting Should Not Compete with Private

A great article:

The problem I see with Robert's thinking is it puts NPR and PBS into the "marketplace of ideas," a mythological space where news competes successfully with sex, violence, drama and comedy —  the four horsemen of entertainment that have come to pass for "the right stuff" of commercial success. I use them successfully as a screenwriter, but they don't belong as a part of news.

It is a mistake to use market economics as the sole arbiter of value in public broadcasting. There is no "marketplace of ideas" — it's a marketplace of emotions, and the confusion of the two is hurting democracy as the fourth estate is forced to compete with entertainment and, quite naturally, resorts to the emotional strategies of a) comedy and b) outrage as packaging vehicles.

The purpose of news is not to tell us what we want to hear or what stimulates us or what reaffirms our views, as Hollywood already does quite successfully, but to tell us what we don't necessarily want to hear but ought to know about anyway. This is not something that is as broadly commercial, but in a democracy it is vitally important.

U sexuality prof. wins fight: Apple pulls app | StarTribune.com

StarTribune.com: Glad to see that Apple's guidelines can be used by the forces of good, too. No more app suggesting that being gay is a perversion!

Nuclear Chain Reaction Demonstrated With Mouse Traps and Ping Pong Balls (Video)

Nuclear Chain Reaction Demonstrated With Mouse Traps and Ping Pong Balls (Video): "
Image via YouTube video screengrab

With all eyes on the news from Japan, it's easy to get frightened or confused about what exactly is happening. Luckily, TreeHugger Mike has been keeping us updated on a daily basis on everything we need to know. But sometimes it's interesting to get right down to the basics, to the things we can't remember from high school physics classes. And that includes how a nuclear chain reaction actually works. Read the full story on TreeHugger"

Consistency

If the state has to balance a budget like a family, does this GOP proposal in Minnesota mean I'm supposed to go raid my kid's piggy bank to pay the bills, or steal from a neighbor?

What we can learn from Japan's nuclear accident

Two good articles.  First, on the high risks.

An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors. The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can't contain 90 percent of meltdowns. The U.S. has six identical and 17 very similar plants.

Second, on the economics.
Instead, Americans should abandon nuclear power for its prohibitive and uncompetitive costs.

The wildly escalting costs of nuclear plants under construction in the U.S. are a perfect example. A pair of proposed nuclear power plants in Florida have "overnight" costs of $3,800 per kilowatt, but since nuclear power plants actually take eight years to construct, the total estimated project costs are closer to $6,800 per kilowatt (kW) of capacity. This figure is reinforced by an estimate for Progress Energy's two new units ($6,300 per kW, $8,800 per kW), and Georgia Power's new plants ($4,000 per kW, $6,335 per kW), both still incomplete.

What We Give the Wealthy to Screw the Middle Class

Source: Center for American Progress

Minnesota's tax system becoming more regressive | Stories

Minnesota's tax system becoming more regressive:

High-income Minnesotans continue to pay lower overall tax rates than everyone else, according to a new tax incidence study released today by the Minnesota Department of Revenue.


The overall state and local tax burden averaged 11.5 percent of income in 2008. The state's highest-income taxpayers — the 10 percent of households earning more than $130,000 — paid an effective tax rate of 10.3 percent. The remaining 90 percent of low- and middle-income households paid a substantially higher effective tax rate of 12.3 percent.

Source: Minnesota Department of Revenue

A copy of the study is available here. [PDF]

Increase proposed for motor vehicle filing fees | Political Agenda

Increase proposed for motor vehicle filing fees | Political Agenda: "It's obviously not a tax increase, because GOP lawmakers are behind it. But Minnesota residents would pay more in filing fees for car license renewals and title transfers under a bill moving through the Legislature."

Politics has really jumped the shark. Republicans recognize you can't balance a budget that is negative $5 billion without revenue, but they senselessly eschew taxes.

You might as well call this "GOP lawmakers propose fee tax increase."

Legislative Irony

"That's the difference between him and me," he added. "I'm not looking for anything bigger or better. I just want to work hard, do the right thing for Minnesota as a senator, and then return home to enjoy beautiful Lake Ida with my wife and family." 

A Republican state senator in Minnesota, shepherding legislation to allow new coal plants to be constructed and to exempt ethanol plants from environmental review.

I hope a coal plant shits in your lake.

An inspiring speech by a Wisconsin farmer

Hat tip: Gawker

Web Browser Share (Chart)

Source

Note to Michele Bachmann

If you are the self-titled leader of the Tea Party, you might want to get their history right. 

People Said Stuff, Reports New York Times

A great analysis of the harm done by modern media when it's objectivity results in "he said, she said" reporting.

"At House EPA Hearing, Both Sides Claim Science."
And it's true! Both sides did claim science. For paragraph after paragraph, Broder dutifully transcribes who said what, this side's scientists and that side's scientists, this guy's zinger and that guy's zinger. At no point in the story is there a hint that there might be facts of the matter behind the dueling quotes, that one set of assertions might be supported by more evidence than the other, that one set of scientists might have more credibility than the other. At no point in the story is there a fact about the world -- the only facts are that people said stuff.

David Roberts, the author, goes on to note that a new study provides evidence to back up the claim that this kind of reporting reduces reader's understanding of the subjects being discussed. 

What's the truth?  The media doesn't often help you find out.

Sheer legislative madness

Congressional Republicans have a bill to prevent the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide emissions, purely because they don't accept the science of climate change. The anti-truth forces are running the U.S. House:

For Congress to intervene in the scientific determinations of a public health agency is, as far as I know, unprecedented. You might think there would be urgent and compelling reasons for politicians support such a radical move. But you'd be wrong. The arguments Republicans have used in favor of it are transparently absurd, and only getting more so.

Republican class warfare

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
www.thedailyshow.com
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Teachers make too much (average $50,000) and must take pay cuts to balance budgets (Wisconsin state budget).
Households making $250,000 a year are "near poverty" and can't afford the expiration of the Bush tax cuts (Federal budget).

Republicans: inconsistency enough to smash the middle class.

Costco Pulls Threatened Fish from Stores

Costco Pulls Threatened Fish from Stores: "The retailer says it will not sell Atlantic cod, Atlantic halibut, Chilean sea bass, grouper, monkfish, redfish, swordfish, bluefin tuna or other at-risk species until a sustainable source can be identified."

A+ for Hape Toys (and Educo)

We got my son a play kitchen for his first birthday, but one of the doors warped before it was a year old and no longer closes.  I took a chance and emailed Educo (subsidiary of HAPE International) asking if they would replace the door.

Within 48 hours I got a reply that, yes, they would!

That's good service.  And it's a great toy.

Proud to be #3 for all these years

Thanks, Rick.

Supreme Court: Corporations do not enjoy personal privacy rights | Business Agenda

Supreme Court: Corporations do not enjoy personal privacy rights | Business Agenda: "

Corporations do not enjoy a right to personal privacy that would prevent disclosure of certain embarrassing documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

Class warfare - a study in irony

• In 2001, a 10-year tax cut for millionaires costing the middle class $700 billion.
• In 2011, a 2-year extension of that tax cut in the face of a $1.5 trillion deficit.
• A financial crisis caused by rich bankers playing funny with money, none of whom go to jail, but who the middle class bails out to the tune of $700 billion.  
• In three years, Wall Street profits rise 720%, while unemployment doubles and middle class home equity falls by 35%.
• Corporations pay just 10% of federal taxes (down from 30%) while income taxpayers (the middle class) contribute 40% (up from 10%).  And the rich pay half what they used to in income taxes on their highest dollar.
• A governor takes a 20 minute phone call from a rich donor (he thinks) while ignoring phone calls from elected legislators.

But class warfare?  Only happens when teachers want to keep their union so that their hourly wage barely scrapes past the federal minimum. 

Dear rich people, Fox News, and Republicans.  I'm a middle class warrior, and my class is out to take our money back.  See you in Madison.

Rationality and guns

I heard that someone recently got shot at a gun show.  The gun libertarians will suggest that the solution to shootings is to arm more folks, so that people can defend themselves.  This idea makes sense if only we can assume that people who shoot people are rational, and therefore deterred by the idea of armed victims.  Since the death penalty doesn't deter crime, why would gun proliferation?

One other thought.  If we have a goal of reducing violence, whether committed by nutters with guns or gun accidents, then gun proliferation doesn't help us much there either.  I haven't seen the firearm yet that can return a bullet back to the gun.  Having guns available to respond to violence is only an answer if you like vengeance.  And the proliferation of weapons only makes it easier to have accidents. 

When it comes to public policy, I'm fairly agnostic about firearms legislation.  I think people should have to have a permit for a firearm (just like a car!) and that weapons of mass destruction (e.g. automatic weapons and large magazines) should be restricted or banned.  But I'm tired of fighting with people who think that guns will solve all their problems.

Maybe what we really need is mandatory gun violence insurance.  Buy all the guns you want, but you have to carry liability insurance for each one, just like a car.  There's a novelty.

I'm more worried about a coporate takeover of the internet

The recently installed Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH), has no intention of finding any compromise on network neutrality. If he can't override the new rules, he will work to defund their enforcement. And if that doesn't work, he will continue railing against a "government takeover of the Internet" in speeches until something gets done. 

Where's the outcry against the corporate takeover of the internet?  Without net neutrality, browsing will look a lot more like this:

And that blows.

A favor regarding unions

The next time you hear someone in the media criticize public employee unions (and repeat the myth that they have rich salaries and benefits), ask them this: "what multiple of the median household income is your salary?"

Moldy 2

I started using Tumblr to blog, since it plays nicer with some iPhone reading apps I use.  The stuff you see up above on the main site is the feed from that blog.  Generally, what I put over there is articles with short commentary.  I'll still use Blogger for the longer posts.

In Case You Were Wondering

How I work faster

Like most jobs, mine involves a lot of repeat work.  I'm on the web and writing almost constantly, and also using spreadsheets and presenting data in charts.  Here's a few things I use to work faster:

• Firefox v4 Beta.  It's so much faster than FF 3, it's really remarkable.  Just get it.  
• FF bookmark keywords - type "pblog" to post to my blog or "gm" to open gmail.  Awesome!
• Firefox add-ons: 
• Adblock Plus - news pages load a lot faster without ads
• Table2Clipboard - get the data, ready-formatted for Excel
• Favicon Picker 3 - it's easier to find a bookmark by an image than text.  You can get rid of text entirely and just have a toolbar of images or short text reminders and get more of your bookmarks right in front.
• Pin tabs (in FF3, FaviconizeTab) - great way to make always-open tabs smaller.  
• Tinyurl Generator - get links in short format fast, for making citations.
• Remember the Milk - no better way to keep your task list up-to-date (and synced with your mobile device).  You can add tasks by Twitter, email, SMS, or on their website Smart Bar.  My favorite is to create tasks and then put in the unique URL for the email I was reading as a reference.  One click and I have all the context for "reply to Jim"
• Quicksilver (Mac) - Hit Command-Spacebar and you can move files, find files, open programs, all from this beautiful window.  My favorite is selecting several images files and dragging them, then opening Quicksilver (while holding the files with the mouse) and dropping them on the window to open my image editor.
• Punakea (Mac) - I tag all my files with this, allowing me to sort emails, web pages, pdfs, and my own documents by category without lots of nested folders.  Best tool for organizing my research, ever.

I hope some of this is useful to you!

Defending public employees

10 Things You Should Know About Gov. Walker's Class Warfare in WI

http://joshhealey.org/2011/02/17/class-warfare-in-wisconsin/

Wisconsin Power Play

As usual, Paul Krugman nails it - Gov. Walker is out to kill the middle class:

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

more...

When the Economy Sucks, People Get Mean

I've been reading about the stunning attack on unions by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker this week, essentially stripping teachers and other public employees of their collective bargaining rights in the name of cost cutting.

What really disappoints me, however, is not that a Republican would attack their political enemies, but that more non-union folks seem to be just fine with it.  The standard line goes something like this: "I'm hurting in this down economy, so those public employees (who I believe have great wages and benefits) should pay up, too."

Instead of lashing out in anger and frustration, why aren't people focusing on the fact that unions have provided working people a way to protect their wages and benefits against economic cycles?  Isn't anyone watching this and saying, "shit, if they can take away the good wages and benefits of unions, then none of us stand a chance at maintaining a middle class life." 

I'm just blown away by the shortsightedness, and I hope the union members in Wisconsin realize that it's time to fight or die.

Great graphic of Obama's federal budget proposal

https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-budget/index.html?hp

Taxes, Medicine and Public Ownership

Several thoughts on spending tax dollars wisely:

• Why do we waste money on taxpayer-funded stadiums with no factual claim to improving the economy of the city or state?
• Why do we have an entire political party with a mantra of "no new taxes" (or "Eat the Future") when it's exactly the opposite of what most Americans want of government (more services and a willingness to pay more)?  Here's how.
• And here's where taxes meet the people - property taxes.
• Speaking of government budgets, here's your chance to balance the Minnesota state budget.  I simply raised taxes: done.  Now I don't have to cut poor people off from health coverage, kids from education, or programs for protecting the environment for future generations.

It makes a lot more sense to talk honestly about how government services work, how much they cost, and how we pay for them.  

Speaking of a lack of honesty, how about modern medicine?

• Many peer-reviewed studies are simply ghost-written by drug or medical device companies with a financial interest in the conclusion.
• Even worse, many clinical trials - the gold standard for evaluating medical treatments - are performed by companies who are willing to – against science – bury unfavorable results and puff up marginal results to make money.

Okay, big tangent.  The Packers – the only publicly owned major sports team – just won the Super Bowl.  Even when they stunk, no one could threaten to move the team, they're sold out for a generation, and they have a huge fan base.  So why can no other pro sports team be publicly owned?  After all, the NFL is already socialist.  Could it work for the Mets?

And ownership matters.  Here's a great insight from Thomas Friedman, speaking of the newfound ownership Egyptians feel for their country as they try to tear it from the hands of dictators:

I spent part of the morning in the square watching and photographing a group of young Egyptian students wearing plastic gloves taking garbage in both hands and neatly scooping it into black plastic bags to keep the area clean. This touched me in particular because more than once in this column I have quoted the aphorism that “in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car.” I used it to make the point that no one has ever washed a rented country either — and for the last century Arabs have just been renting their countries from kings, dictators and colonial powers. So, they had no desire to wash them. 

Well, Egyptians have stopped renting, at least in Tahrir Square, where a sign hung Thursday said: “Tahrir — the only free place in Egypt.” So I went up to one of these young kids on garbage duty — Karim Turki, 23, who worked in a skin-care shop — and asked him: “Why did you volunteer for this?” He couldn’t get the words out in broken English fast enough: “This is my earth. This is my country. This is my home. I will clean all Egypt when Mubarak will go out.” Ownership is a beautiful thing.

One more uplifting story to end with: a woman fighting terrorism with microloans.

This was definitely me

Does this mean I have to buy a Passat?

I Love How Stats Bust (or Reinforce) Our Personal Myths

Like those myths we believe in sports

Most fascinating?  Baseball umpires shrink the strike zone with two strikes and enlarge it with 3 balls.  They are also less likely to let a famous player get called out, and more likely to favor the home team.

Walter F. Mondale was the last true deficit hawk

Americans like the idea of cutting spending rather than raising taxes, but we prefer not to cut any government program we like, which accounts for most of the budget.  See this recent CNN poll:

For each of the following federal spending categories, is it more important to make progress on reducing the deficit, or is it more important to prevent significant cuts to each of the following programs:

Program	Reduce it for deficit reduction	Avoid significant reductions in this one
Medicare	18%	81%
Medicaid	29	70
Social Security	21	78
Unemployment ben’s	31	68
Defense/military	50	49
Welfare spending	56	44
Veterans benefits	14	85
Education	25	75
Govt pensions	61	39
Roads/mass transit	39	61
Foreign aid	81	18

Foreign aid, by the way, represents less than one half of one percent of federal spending. Depending on how you group programs, the other ten categories that CNN tested are the ten costliest categories.

The pie chart to the right validates Black's assessment of budget categories.


Since we can't agree what to cut, then the honest thing to do is raise taxes to pay for what we want.  And the last politician to be straight with America about taxes was Walter F. Mondale, in a presidential debate in 1984:

Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.

And regarding Reagan, he was right.  Reagan signed several tax increases in his first term.  It was the right thing to do.

If you have an iPhone and like turn-based strategy games, buy Battle for Wesnoth now

It was worth it at $4.99 and it's currently on sale for $0.99 (curse my impatient self!).

This Sums it Up

Why the health care law is good, why Republicans are lying about it, and how the media helps them. Oh, and it's funny.

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One space or two?

Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

Attacking the Minnesota Winter Death Star

How every football game should be broadcast

Why Not Regulate Guns as Seriously as Toys?

Jared Loughner was considered too mentally unstable to attend community college. He was rejected by the Army. Yet buy a Glock handgun and a 33-round magazine? No problem.

To protect the public, we regulate cars and toys, medicines and mutual funds. So, simply as a public health matter, shouldn’t we take steps to reduce the toll from our domestic arms industry? 

Read more...

The Oatmeal: How to Make Your (Online) Shopping Cart Suck Less

Click through to read the whole comic:

How many foreclosures were illegal? FL Attorney General says A LOT

Florida Attorney General Fraudclosure Report | Unfair, Deceptive and Unconscionable Acts in Foreclosure Cases

Honoring the Constitution - the origin of big government

An incredibly insightful piece from political writer Eric Black this week, noting the irony in the House Republican reading of the Constitution last week:

Those who framed the Constitution and favored its ratification believed that the United States needed a strong federal government. That’s why they are referred to the “federalists.”

Oh history, thou art funny.

Unemployment: How to use charts to provide context

Curb Your Enthusiasm - NYTimes.com

Gov. Pawlenty's budget legacy

A nice overview of the end to the one-time budget fixes for Minnesota, now that former Gov. Pawlenty has spent them all. 

The last Congress did a lot

• Health care reform
• Financial reform
• Food safety
• Nuclear arms treaty
• Multiple economic stimulus packages
• and more...

It wasn't perfect, but that's one heck of a list

Placebo effect may make sugar pills beat "real" drugs

Science writer Steve Silberman has written a terrific background article on the “little bombshell of a study” on placebos that was published right before Christmas in the open-access medical journal PLoS One.

The study, writes Silberman, “threatens to make humble sugar pills something they’ve rarely had a chance to be in the history of medicine: a respectable, ethically sound treatment for disease that has been vetted in controlled trials.”

Read more at Minnpost.com

A little British phone humor

Hat tip to muninetworks.org.

8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study | Wired Science | Wired.com

8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study | Wired Science | Wired.com: "A group of British schoolchildren may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. In a new paper in Biology Letters, 25 8- to 10-year-old children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns."

No one is too young for science and science is fun. To quote the kid: "We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before." This is absolutely brilliant and should be part of every school curriculum.

Ban on Cribs with Drop-sides Seems Like Overreach

In the last decade, 32 infants have died in cribs with sides that can lower down, called drop-side cribs.  Because of this, and a bounty of recalls (over 7 million cribs), the U.S. government is going to essentially ban the sale of drop-side cribs. 

I agree that we have a problem when manufacturers have to recall so many cribs.  But there are approximately 8 million children who are age 0-2 and in the last decade there have been over 40 million kids in the last decade who have been ages 0-2.  That means 1 in every 1.25 million infants has died in a drop-side crib in the last 10 years.  For comparison, 2,500 infants die of SIDS each year (1 in every 1,600 infants).  And 40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents (1 in every 7,500 people).


It's a tragedy when a child dies, but enough of a tragedy to ban every drop-side crib?  I'd be more confident if we knew that cribs with fixed sides will be manufactured with more care for safety than drop-side cribs, but I doubt it (it would be interesting to know how many infants died in non-drop-side cribs in the last decade).

There are many hazards for infants, but I can think of a few (persistent endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA) that probably deserve more attention than drop-side cribs.

TSA's misdirected anti-terror efforts: a "nude awakening"

There's probably no better summary of my feelings about the latest techno-mythical anti-terror device at airports.  From a college junior, no less:

The odds of dying on an airplane as a result of a terrorist hijacking are less than 1 in 25 million — which, for all intents and purposes, is effectively zero — according to Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. By comparison, the odds of dying in a normal airplane crash, according to the OAG Aviation Database, are 1 in 9.2 million. This means that, on average, pilots are responsible for more deaths than terrorists.

In the same vein, the average American is 87 times more likely to drown than die by a terrorist attack; 50 times more likely to die by lightening; and 8 times more likely to die by a police officer, according to the National Safety Council’s 2004 estimates. I can go on, the point is this: the risk of a terrorist attack is so infinitesimal and its impact so relatively insignificant that it doesn’t make rational sense to accept the suspension of liberty for the sake of avoiding a statistical anomaly.

To cut all taxes or not?

Paul Krugman says of extending all the Bush tax cuts (including those for the wealthy) "Let's Not Make a Deal."

But Nick Silver suggests that Democrats don't necessarily have any bargaining chips, unless they're seriously prepared to let the entire $4 trillion tax cut program expire.

My vote?  Let the cuts expire and see if Republicans are willing to start fresh with tax cuts in January when they have to argue about the deficit impact.  Or just pass an entirely new program of Obama middle-class tax cuts.  Let the Republicans oppose that.

Hard to understand opposition to food safety

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This Election Celebrated Multiculturalism

From my Uncle's brilliant Christmas letter:

And – this may surprise some of you – I'm pretty darn grateful for the elections just past, not for policy reasons (considering, if you will, how well the GOP did the last time it controlled the House) but because it's pretty darn cool that, having elected a black man President, we now have a Speaker who is, well, kind of an orange color, which I think speaks well for the inclusive impulses of the American electorate.

Buy organic strawberries

California sacrifices farm workers in favor of strawberries | Grist: "Strawberry pickerAfter a long battle, the state of California has overruled its own scientists and approved the use of the powerful neurotoxic pesticide methyl iodide on strawberries as a replacement for the ozone-depleting pesticide methyl bromide. Grist has covered the issue extensively, but it was Sam Fromartz, author of Organic, Inc, who brought up the crucial point:"

Pollution Makes Gays - Support the Environmental Protection!

Pollution Making 'Male Birds Mate With Each Other': Scientists : TreeHugger

P.S. subject is very, very tongue in cheek

Close the Washington Monument

Schneier on Security: "The grand reopening of the Washington Monument will not occur when we've won the war on terror, because that will never happen. It won't even occur when we've defeated al Qaeda. Militant Islamic terrorism has fractured into small, elusive groups. We can reopen the Washington Monument when we've defeated our fears, when we've come to accept that placing safety above all other virtues cedes too much power to government and that liberty is worth the risks, and that the price of freedom is accepting the possibility of crime."

How Germany got it right on the economy

Harold Meyerson: "But then, Germans have something to honk about. Germany's economy is the strongest in the world. Its trade balance - the value of its exports over its imports - is second only to China's, which is all the more remarkable since Germany is home to just 82 million people. Its 7.5 percent unemployment rate - two percentage points below ours - is lower than at any time since right after reunification. Growth is robust, and real wages are rising."

It's quite a turnabout for an economy that American and British bankers and economists derided for years as the sick man of Europe. German banks, they insisted, were too cautious and locally focused, while the German economy needed to slim down its manufacturing sector and beef up finance.

Wisely, the Germans declined the advice. Manufacturing still accounts for nearly a quarter of the German economy; it is just 11 percent of the British and U.S. economies (one reason the United States and Britain are struggling to boost their exports). Nor have German firms been slashing wages and off-shoring - the American way of keeping competitive - to maintain profits.

Public Disinterest (in Making Media Work)

Guernica / Public Disinterest: "In 1930, the FRC made clear the meaning of public interest by denying a license renewal to a Los Angeles station used primarily to broadcast sermons that attacked Jews, Roman Catholic church officials, and law enforcement agencies. In 1949, the FCC again defined what it meant by the public interest when it introduced what later became known as the fairness doctrine. Broadcasters had to devote “a reasonable percentage of time to coverage of public issues; and [the] coverage of these issues must be fair in the sense that it provides an opportunity for the presentation of contrasting points of view.”

...

Seventy-five years after the Federal Radio Commission declared there was no room on the public airwaves for “propaganda stations” and denied a license renewal to a station that attacked Jews and law enforcement agencies, the airwaves are filled with both propaganda and venom. Today the airwaves, stripped of commons rules, feed hatred."

My Nerdy Half Has Died and Gone to Heaven