Monthly Archives: April 2014

How Can You Miss Me If I Won’t Go Away?

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My urge to save the world one post at a time waxes and wanes. Lately, it’s waned.

Its waning could be a response to the daffodils blooming:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

                               — William Wordsworth

But did you know that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) strikes some of us in the spring or early summer, not in the dark days of winter?

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

                               — T. S. Eliot

Life in itself 
Is nothing 
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs, 
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, 
April 
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

                              — Edna St. Vincent Millay

But first, these messages:

Gravity was nominated for seven Oscars and 97% of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked it, but it’s not a good movie. They spent millions and millions making it look great but seem to have thrown the script together over a long weekend. One miraculous escape after another eats away at the suspense. And that capsule should have landed on a giant heap of corn.

it’s a simple fact of arithmetic that one person’s vote hardly ever matters. How many elections are decided by one vote? Since voting makes no sense from a practical perspective, we need to stop thinking of voting in practical terms. Instead, we should view voting as a democratic ritual. Ritual behavior doesn’t have to be practical. If everyone in this country – at least those of us who don’t have to wait in line for hours to vote – treated voting as a symbolic celebration of democracy, something that every citizen just does as a matter of course, we in the majority (those of us who favor less military spending, for example) could make a difference. Accepting that voting is impractical but doing it anyway would be a very practical thing to do.

Glenn Greenwald is one of the journalists selected by Edward Snowden to receive those secret National Security Agency files. Greenwald now has a website called The Intercept. The site includes links to “top secret” documents. For example, there’s a set of slides from the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) called “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations”. It suggests ways to discredit people or organizations by applying “The 4 D’s: Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive” (apparently, the NSA and GCHQ don’t merely listen; they also manipulate). There are also some light-hearted internal blog posts, like this one from the NSA regarding SIGINT (Signals Intelligence):

So, SIGINT is downright cool! As much as we complain about our “Big Data Problem”, collection/processing issues, dismal infrastructure/outdated browsers/OS’s, our ability to pull bits out of random places of the Internet, bring them back to the mother-base to evaluate and build intelligence off of is just plain awesome!

In conclusion, please don’t expect too much from Gravity, remember to vote, and visit The Intercept. As for everything else, I’ve got nothing (as of now anyway).

Farndale Daffodil Field

Why We Immunize Our Children

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From the Facebook page of Meghan Mcnutt-Anderson:

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THIS IS WHY YOU IMMUNIZE YOUR CHILDREN! This is my 5 week old daughter, Brielle. She has contracted Pertussis aka whooping cough, which is contracted through unimmunized people, generally children. We have spent the last 3 days in the hospital at her bedside holding her up and patting her back as she coughs. You see, every time she coughs she stops breathing, turns blue and goes limp. She has too much mucous and her airways are too small to cough it up and they become blocked and we have to manually help her pass it. We will likely be doing this to Brielle for the next 2 weeks at least. Brielle is too young to be immunized yet and children whose parents chose not to immunize them, put small babies like Brielle, as well as others with compromised immune systems, at risk. Had we not brought her to the hospital when we did, I don’t doubt she could have easily died with one bad coughing fit. Please feel free to share and spread the word. If you are considering not immunizing your children, think first about the people you put at risk who CAN’T get the immunization. If our story makes one parent choose to immunize their children that otherwise wouldn’t have, lives can be saved.

Update April 8/14: Wow! When I wrote this I had no idea how far it would be shared. I would like to give a heartfelt thank you for the hundreds of private messages I’ve received of well wishes from across the globe. I truly appreciate each and every one of them. For those that have asked, we are located in Ontario, Canada.

Brielle is on day 10 in the hospital and is doing OK. She is still having frequent choking spells but less of them are causing her to turn blue. Pertussis babies take a long time to fully recover so we are taking one day at a time. We will be allowed to go home after there are no choking spells for 48 hours. 

Of course, there shouldn’t be any need to have this discussion in 2014. But there’s a theory going around that parents who oppose vaccination are too young to remember the diseases we thought we got rid of, like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70vKmDWmqQ8

The Plutocratic Party and Social Security

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The latest Republican budget plan has a section on Social Security. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have read it, but Michael Hiltzik, a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote an article called “Paul Ryan Rehashes An Old Social Security Lie”. 

The lie in question appears in the second paragraph below. I think it’s worth reading the surrounding paragraphs too (all of which appear on page 66 of the Republican’s budget document):

An all-too-common reaction to the fiscal problem in Social Security has been denial that a problem exists. It is claimed that the Social Security Trust Fund will remain solvent for at least a decade, at which point the government could theoretically cover any shortfall by raising taxes. Others downplay the necessity for change, contending that sustained economic growth could take care of the problem all by itself.

Neither is correct. First, any value in the balances in the Social Security Trust Fund is derived from dubious government accounting. The trust fund is not a real savings account. From 1983 to 2010, it collected more Social Security taxes than it paid out in Social Security benefits. But the government borrowed all of these surpluses and spent them on other government programs unrelated to Social Security. The Trust Fund holds Treasury securities, but the ability to redeem these securities is completely dependent on the Treasury’s ability to raise money through taxes or borrowing.

Social Security is currently paying out more in benefits than it collected in taxes–in other words, running cash deficits–a trend that will worsen as the baby boomers continue to retire. To pay full benefits, the government must pay back the money it owes Social Security. In testimony before the House Budget Committee, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf stated that:

“Well, again, Congressman, on a unified budget basis, taking account of just the tax revenues, the dedicated tax revenues, and the benefits, [Social Security] is contributing [to] the deficit now. If one instead looks at just the balance in the Social Security Trust Fund, that balance is, the annual balance is positive now, but will be negative within about a half dozen years.”

Given how difficult it is to predict the future, it isn’t clear exactly when Social Security would have trouble paying 100% of everybody’s promised benefits. As Ryan’s document says, however, the government could “theoretically” raise Social Security taxes at some point to make up the difference. The “theory” in this case is arithmetic.

Not everyone knows this, but as of 2014, Social Security taxes are only applied to the first $117,000 of a person’s income. Here’s what the Center for Economic Policy and Research says about raising that threshold and thereby putting more money into Social Security:

There have recently been several pieces of proposed legislation to raise or do away with the payroll tax cap. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter DeFazio have sponsored legislation that would raise the cap to income above $250,000 while Sen. Mark Begich and Rep. Ted Deutch’s proposal  would fully eliminate the cap, with a small portion of earnings above the current cap going toward benefits. If enacted, proposals like these could almost entirely close Social Security’s projected long-term funding gap without reducing benefits nor increasing taxes on the vast majority of American workers.

Of course, applying the Social Security tax to the highest incomes would also partly address the problem of economic inequality in America, a worthy goal in itself.

The statement in the second paragraph that “any value” in the Social Security Trust fund is “dubious” is the one that Michael Hitzlik called a lie (it’s good that reputable journalists are finally getting around to using that word). I’ve heard this claim before – that somehow the Social Security Trust Fund doesn’t have real money in it – but never understood how such a thing could be true. As Hitzlik explains, the Trust Fund holds almost $3 trillion (not billion, but trillion) worth of government bonds. In fact, as of December 31, 2013, the Department of the Treasury said these bonds were paying an interest rate of 3.626% and were worth 2,765,212,571 dollars (give or take a penny).

So why aren’t these bonds worth anything, according to the Republicans? Their idea seems to be that since the Trust Fund paid cash for those government bonds, and the government used that cash for various non-Social Security purposes like watering the White House lawn and paying Paul Ryan’s salary, the government has already spent the money in the Trust Fund. So it’s gone!

However, in the real world, when someone purchases a bond, whether the buyer is the Trust Fund or an individual investor, the bond pays interest (for example, 3.6%) and can eventually be redeemed (converted back into cash). That’s how investing in bonds works. Whatever the government did with the cash it got from the Trust Fund is irrelevant, so long as the government keeps paying interest and redeems its bonds when they mature.

The second “reason” they offer for saying all those bonds are worthless is that the government could stop paying interest on them and not redeem them when they mature. That’s what’s known as the U.S. government “defaulting” on its financial obligations.

As the Republicans say, the government’s ability to meet its obligations depends on raising revenue, either by taxing or borrowing (or selling stuff like national forests). But that’s what the government has been doing for more than 200 years. Is there any reason to think that the federal government will eventually become unable to pay its debts, including its debts to the Social Security Trust Fund? No, the United States is the richest country in the world. Investors all over the world, including foreign governments, believe our government’s bonds are very safe investments.

In fact, the only remotely likely scenario in which the government fails to pay its debts is if Republican extremists somehow manage to shut down the government again for an even longer period of time, which stops the government from levying taxes and selling more bonds! That’s what the Republicans recently threatened to do, many of them arguing that a government default wouldn’t be a very big deal. So on one hand, the Republicans claim to worry that the government won’t pay its debts to the Social Security Trust Fund, but on the other hand, they think it might be o.k. if the government didn’t pay its debts. (These people truly are amazing.)

The quotation above ends with the Republicans making the point that Social Security is running a deficit and the deficit is expected to get worse. That’s true, and that’s why raising the income cap would “theoretically” be a good idea. They then quote some testimony from the head of the Congressional Budget Office. I had to read that paragraph several times to see if it somehow supported the Republican contention that Social Security is in deep trouble. It doesn’t.

What the head of the CBO is saying is that Social Security is affecting the overall federal deficit now (since the government is paying what it owes to Social Security) and the Trust Fund itself will start running an annual deficit in about six years. What the Republicans don’t bother mentioning is that the Trust Fund is expected to have money in it until 2033 (and that’s if nothing is done in the meantime to put more money into the Trust Fund). Plus, even if the Trust Fund were to run out of money, Social Security would still pay about 75% of everyone’s promised benefit, since working people would still be paying Social Security taxes (reference here).

The Republicans go on to suggest limiting benefits for upper income Social Security beneficiaries (certainly a possibility) and hint that maybe the retirement age should be raised because people are living longer (which is a bad idea, because it wouldn’t save much money and lots of people – unlike politicians – can’t keep working or can’t find jobs by the time they reach 65 or so).

For all their fear-mongering, Ryan and his colleagues don’t offer a solution to this supposed crisis, except to suggest that the President go first by making some specific recommendations (which they can then use to attack him as an enemy of Social Security). The Republicans even suggest that benefits should be increased for low-income retirees (another good idea, but one more often made by us “tax and spend” Democrats). 

Michael Hiltzik thinks this budget document is evidence that Republicans don’t want the government to make good on its debt to Social Security:

When you hear people like Paul Ryan talk as though the country can’t afford to pay back the money by redeeming the bonds in the trust fund, what you’re hearing is the sound of the wealthy preparing to stiff the working class. If the income tax has to be raised to turn those T-bonds into cash for payment of benefits over the next couple of decades, that’s how the rich will be made to repay the people who lent them the money. Some people love to claim that the government has “stolen” the trust fund. The correct reply to that is: “Not yet.” But if Ryan has his way, yes, the money will be stolen. It’s up to you and me to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The idea would be, I guess, that if the Trust Fund doesn’t have any real money in it now, we won’t miss it when it’s gone. I’m not convinced that’s the Republican plan. But I’ve given up trying to understand whether people like Ryan are knaves (unscrupulous and dishonest) or fools or both. What’s clear is that their principal goal as politicians is to serve the needs of the wealthy. The surprising thing is that so many voters, in particular, the Tea Party types who don’t want the government messing with their Medicare or Social Security, continue to vote for the Plutocratic Party. 

For more on Social Security (if you can stand it), there was a recent article at Salon written by a so-called “Millennial”. He rejects what most of his generation believe: that Social Security will go bankrupt before the Millennials can collect any benefits. He also argues that it makes no sense to be a “social conservative and economic liberal”.

PS — Ryan Budget Gets 69 Percent of Its Cuts from Low-Income Programs

Pain, Rigor and Clarity (or How a Pain in the Foot Can Be a Pain in the Neck)

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Frank Jackson is a distinguished philosopher who teaches in Australia. He does “analytic” philosophy, the kind most academic philosophers in the U.S. and U.K. do. Analytic philosophers tend to take science seriously, try to offer logical arguments for their positions and often analyze the meanings of common linguistic expressions. They also generally aim for both clarity and rigor in their written work.

Being interested in the philosophy of perception, I’ve been reading Perception: A Representative Theory, one of Professor Jackson’s books. It deals with traditional philosophical questions like this: “Since science tells us that physical objects like apples and oranges aren’t really colored – they only look colored when we perceive them – and there aren’t any colors inside our brain cells – neurons don’t have tiny red and orange pictures inside them – where exactly are the colors we see?”

In a chapter called “The Existence of Mental Objects”, Jackson spends several pages discussing bodily pain, in particular, whether pains have locations in the same way that things like fruit and furniture do. For various reasons, some philosophers have denied that pains have spatial locations. So a pain in my foot, for example, isn’t literally “in my foot”.

All of which I’ve mentioned so far, simply as a preliminary to sharing the following sentence from Jackson’s book (page 84):

It is certainly not the case that “I had a pain in my foot” entails that if I had not known that the cause of my pain was not in my foot, then I would have believed that the cause was in my foot; for one way of not knowing that the cause is not in my foot is having no opinion on whether the cause is or is not in my foot, so it might well have been the case that if I had not known the cause was not in my foot, I would neither have believed that it was or that it was not in my foot.

Having read this sentence quite a few times, it is my contention that, in this case, Professor Jackson chose rigor over clarity.

More Budget Baloney From a Leading Political Party

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Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, issued his proposed federal budget yesterday. The Republican majority on the Budget Committee is expected to approve it. Fortunately, even if the full House of Representatives approves it, the Senate won’t.

Nevertheless, Ryan’s budget is worth knowing about. It will influence the budget Congress eventually agrees on and it offers yet another clear statement of the Republican Party’s insane priorities. 

In brief, the Ryan budget calls for a big tax cut on high incomes, a lot more spending on the military, and a lot less spending on programs like Medicare and food stamps. In addition, Ryan would repeal the Affordable Care Act, even though there are now some 10 million people who have health insurance because of that law (via private insurance or Medicaid).

Ryan claims his budget will eliminate the federal deficit in ten years, despite the tax cuts and increased military spending, because he makes stuff up.

One part of the Republican budget document deals with Social Security. I plan to write more about that in a future post, but for now, consider this amazing sentence from page 66: 

Any value in the balances in the Social Security Trust Fund is derived from dubious government accounting. 

The Treasury Department says the government bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund were worth almost three trillion (not billion, but trillion) dollars at the end of December and were paying the Trust Fund an average interest rate of 3.6%. But, according to the authors of the Republican budget document, those bonds are basically worthless. They’re an accounting fiction. Such is the financial insight demonstrated by Congressman Ryan and his Republican colleagues as they go about planning our economic future.