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July 26, 2010 03:09 PM UTC

Monday Open Thread

  • 55 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”

–Charles Dickens

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55 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

  1. from National Journal

    Largely because of Medicare and Social Security, Washington now spends $7 per senior citizen for each $1 it spends per child, according to a 2009 report by Julia Isaacs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Even including spending by state and local governments, which fund most education costs, government at all levels still spends more than twice as much per capita on seniors (about $22,000) than on children (about $9,000). To compound the inequity, she says, young people are not only slighted for investment now, they are also likely to face a “tax burden … much higher than current tax rates” to fund the retirement benefits promised to seniors.

    …

    In that world, the generational and racial implications of the choices between tax cuts and spending reductions, and between public spending aimed at the old or the young, could grow increasingly explicit and explosive. Rosenberg isn’t alone in believing that the way the United States sorts through those options will powerfully shape not only its economic but also its social future. “The challenge for us in the next few years is creating a politics of investment during a time of potential austerity to make sure that we’re … funding the future and not the past,” Rosenberg says. “This is going to be a titanic battle not only at the federal level but at the state level as well.”

    1. I think that there is a fundamental flaw here of apples and oranges.  At the two ends of the life spectrum, needs are completely different.  Also underlying vitality.

      Most children never need expensive health care procedures.  Give ’em their shots, do some dental work perhaps, some 90% plus (a guess, I admit) reach adult hood w/o surgery or long term meds.  Oh, I do say this pre-fat kids epidemic.  OTOH, they do consume a lot of education dollars.

      Old people, as we all know, consume a LOT of health care dollars.

      What I find most egregious about seniors and their burden on society is the constant whining and harping about being on “a fixed income” and all of the real and alleged significance of that.  The reality is that that fixed income is also a guaranteed income with guaranteed health care.  I’m sure lots of young and middle aged parent would find that an attractive trade off.

      What I get most upset about is the constant clamor (read, lotsa voters) for all kinds of tax breaks based solely on age and perhaps length of property ownership.  Florida’s tax laws are a nightmare of convolution because (lotsa voters)approved an amendment so that one’s home tax benefits can be rolled over into new homes.  

      I haven’t seen many youth centers in a long time, but there are senior centers everywhere.  Many seniors get Section 8 housing subsidies and Medicare premium subsidies, too.

      No, we can’t keep this up forever.  See: Germany, Greece, Spain, etc.

      What to do? Re-establish pre-Reagan income taxes.  

      Tax off shore American corporations.  California taxes corporations based on world wide income if they even have a door in California.  Of course, companies leave CA because of that, but if all nations did it, it would be inescapable.  

      Reverse the trend of American corporations paying but a fraction of the taxes that they used to.  

      Be a little more niggardly with unwarranted but politically popular benefits to seniors.

      Rationally, pretty easy to fix.  Politically, close to impossible.  

      1. The oligarchy (where some 400 families added approximately 1.4 Trillion $’s to their net worth over the last decade or so, while the rest of the citizens were losing their jobs and homes)is also unsustainable, so your comments on taxes (both domestic and foreign) is certainly apropos.

        The health care reform needs to continue, as well. Too much waste, fraud and abuse. Also, too much money spent on futile medicine at end of life. I’m not talking death panels, I’m talking wise and informed decision making.

        Nice to hear from you.

      2. if you find us so egregious. The laws are unfair but as one senior I can tell you I have voted for and supported and/or consulted on every school bond issue but one in the last 20 years in the Grand Valley.  I’m a working senior that gets Social Security and still must pay taxes on the work I do.  My children made it through college thank you very much and my grandchildren are either in college or high school. Two on the GI bill after multiple tours in Iraq and Afghan.  One also served in Korea early on.  

        I don’t mind agreeing changes need to be made in our priority levels of funding for childhood education and health care.  I wish to hell it was better but all seniors aren’t whiners.  We get out and actually work for change that delivers.  What have you done lately?  

          1. Started SS in March.

            That’s why I so freely criticize.

            Growing up in Sarasota, oldest large county in America, gave me way more opportunities to see how the Senior Bloc operates.

            Now that I’m older, finer honed, and hopefully wiser, it’s all even so much more apparent.

            Don’t forget the average senior on SS uses up all of his/her contributions including compounded interest by the time they are 68. After that, it’s “Work, baby, work!” to my kids!

            1. Social Security was never designed to have the retiree’s benefits come from his/her own contributions.  It was set up to provide a relatively immediate security net, so there wasn’t time to set up the system so that its users paid for themselves.

              Users do pay in some small part for themselves now, to make up for the flaws in the funding formula that came to light around the Reagan years.  But Social Security is still funded on the presumption that population growth is relatively steady over extended periods of time (and easily compensated-for because of the slow rate of change).

    2. Kids not only are less expensive medically and social security net wise, but they are also largely supported by their parents’ income.  Trying to compare the two in relationship to their tax burden is impossible and the National Journal should be ashamed of itself for creating the false equivalency.

      However, they are right: we are under-taxing and over-spending in our current generation, and our children are going to wind up paying for it.  It is time to revisit some of the most lucrative tax breaks, rates, and loopholes to make them pay the way.  And it’s time to start reigning in spending in areas where we’re wasting money.  That has to include both wars, defense spending in general, and waste and fraud in benefits programs.

  5. from Paul Abrams (venture capitalist)

    For nearly two decades I have been an entrepreneur, founding, running and also investing my own money in new technology start-up businesses. Tax rates have never played a role, positively or negatively, in the ability to raise capital or decisions to invest it. Other general economic factors surely have, but not tax rates.

    …

    What were the tax rates when Bill Gates started Microsoft, or Steve Jobs created Apple? There are two answers to that question. One is the rates — 70% on ordinary income, 28% on capital gains, both far higher than what they will rise to when the Bush cuts expire. The other, more important answer — neither Gates nor Jobs likely knew, and certainly did not care.

      1. on things like Ref C but she now finds it convenient to reinvent.

        Saw somewhere, maybe in a local paper that may rhyme with toast but the short term memory isn’t what it used to be, that a coalition of Tea Party and 9/12 group leaders wants Tank to drop the High Noon Theater threat.  They say he urged them to work within the system, to use the party instead of splitting it going into caucus season. They want him to do the same. They clearly mistook Tank for someone who is not a completely self serving flim flam man.  There is apparently more daylight between the Tea Party groups and Tank than between them and the establishment GOP when push comes to shove.  

        Also recall something about 21 state Tea Party groups with about 10,000 members between them.  According to some unscientific survey (and really for, in the words of Ken Buck, “dumb asses” who are still pushing the birther nonsense isn’t that the best kind?) 66% wouldn’t vote for Tank in the governor race.  So maybe the GOP shouldn’t sweat it too much.  He might not be a strong enough 3rd party candidate to make all that much of a difference and their chances are lousy anyway.

        1. They appear somewhat disenchanted that Tancredo has gone back on his word about running or backing a 3rd party candidate.

          Showdown in the Governor’s Race

          On Thursday, former Congressman Tom Tancredo threw down the gauntlet.  His demands?  Both GOP gubernatorial candidates, Dan Maes and Scott McInnis, must bow out of the governor’s race by high noon on Monday, July 26th and replace the GOP nominee (with himself?).  If the GOP candidates do not meet his demands, he will usurp the nomination of American Constitution Party candidate Benjamin Goss and run on a third party ticket.

          Both Dan Maes and Scott McInnis have stated that they have no intentions of leaving the primary race.

          In an open letter to Tea Party and 9/12 activists sent back in November, Tom Tancredo issued this statement:

          “Some patriots are tempted to launch a third political party or back one of the existing small parties that never attract more than one or two percent of the vote in state races. I strongly believe that such a course is suicidal and would only result in splitting the conservative vote and guaranteeing the re-election of liberals and socialists.”

          Read Tancredo’s press release issued on Thursday on our website.

          1. heartfelt pleas of the Tea Party and 9/12 groups as an excuse to drop his High Noon threat and who thinks he’s going to give everyone a big screw you very much?

      1. Birthers are dumb-asses?  Hell, they’d need to study hard to work their way up to being dumb-asses!  But at least he called it right,

    3. Apparently the time for tea partiers is whenever there are no cameras.  

      Their place? In the voting booth, quietly pulling the “Buck” lever.

  8. The problem is not teaching to the test, the problem is the test itself. If the tests measure exactly what should be taught, then teaching to the test is exactly what we want.

    The Creativity Crisis has bad news:

    Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America-from kindergarten through sixth grade-for whom the decline is “most serious.”

    But also some very good news – creativity can be taught:

    The good news is that creativity training that aligns with the new science works surprisingly well. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University each independently conducted a large-scale analysis of such programs. All three teams of scholars concluded that creativity training can have a strong effect. “Creativity can be taught,” says James C. Kaufman, professor at California State University, San Bernardino.

    And it can be measured:

    Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

    This should be a key part of how classes are designed and teachers are evaluated. And this addresses one of the major complaints of CSAP – that no time is left for creativity. Instead CSAP can insure creativity is taught.

    2. but only school districts serving very progressive polities have any chance of implementing district-wide creativity standards and benchmarks. This is a big part of the problem with the overstandardization and overmechanization of public education; it makes the political football easier to kick, and it is rarely if ever kicked in positive directions.

        1. but I don’t see it happening. After all, how do you measure creativity on a standardized test? Even if you can, it just sounds like an oxymoron.

          And it’s a fox news story that writes itself:

          “Schools punished because the don’t teach enough creativity.”

          or

          “Teacher fired because students aren’t creative enough.”

          And all it will take is one out-of-context quote to drive the final nail in the coffin. So, no matter how valid it is to teach creativity, I don’t think that you’ll ever see it in education standards that are subject to testing.

          1. But, to the extent that we professionalize  (as opposed to politicize) education, and equip well-selected and trained teachers with a well-designed tool kit of “best practices” that they can they draw on the way that doctors draw on diagnostic and treatment data bases, the more these ideas, to the extent that they are truly useful, would be implemented.

  10. THANK YOU WIKILEAKS!  

    You are patriots of the highest order!  The veil of lies is now off for good!  No more fig leaf!

    It is tim to immediately invade Pakistan or get the FUCK OUT of the entire region for good.  We cannot wait one more day!!!

    1. ….and with the exception of a Special Ops unit, there’s NOTHING in here that folks didn’t already know.

      And thanks to Private Dumbass, the one thing that might get PFC Bergdahl (and now Sailor) out is totally blown.

      I mean, is anyone shocked to find out the Afghan National Army & Police are corrupt? The ISI is helping the Taliban? And the SAM thing is still uncofirmed, but probably true.

      The only certain thing is that Private Dumbass who leaked this mess is going to the Correctional Barracks for a LONG LONG Time. He had good intentions with the trigger-happy Apache pilots video. but the rest was all to feed his ego.

        1. …I’ve heard rumors from good sources about these guys, and in the interests of OPSEC I’m gonna leave it at that.

          Along with the normal Spook missions of recon and assassination, there was serious effort toward tracking down where the Taliban has PFC Bergdahl (and probably one non-driving Sailor) stashed away.

          I’m not close enough to Wallyworld anymore to know the details, and even if I did, I wouldn’t post it here. Even with the release of these G-level transmits, they’re not blown. It’s gonna make their job that much harder, but they’re still in the game.

          For the rest of our studio audience, think about this – did you really think that all of these drone Hellfire strikes were directed by satellite? Someone on the ground is always going to be there with eyeballs on the target…

      3. run suicide bombing runs sounds pretty notable to me.

        This a lot of stuff that wasn’t known or was from unreliable sources.

        If the parts that the public should have known had been disclosed, I suspect that it wouldn’t have been leaked at all.  Leakers are usually countering perceived coverups.

  12. I gotta give it to the Brits – they know how to f*ck someone over…..

    BP’s Hayward to leave as CEO; Russia job in works

    NEW ORLEANS – Tony Hayward, who became the face of BP’s flailing efforts to contain the massive Gulf oil spill, will step down as chief executive in October and be offered a job with the company’s joint venture in Russia, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/201…

    “In Russia, oil field drills YOU!”

    1. A candidate should not have to sell everything they’ve earned their entire life just to have a chance at competing.

      On the flip side, it shows incredible dedication to his effort and he clearly thinks the final vote is going to be close. I hope for his sake that’s a realistic view and not just wishful thinking.

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