Posts from — November 2010

When you fly across the country in an airliner you receive a radiation dose equal to a chest x-ray. You are above the denser atmosphere that normally shields you from the radiation coming in from space.

Pilots, especially those with military experience, know this, which is one of the reasons they don’t want to go through the full-body scanners. No one will tell them how much or what kind of radiation the scanners use, so they have no way of knowing how much additional radiation they are receiving.

The machines used to scan the carry on baggage at the check point probably leak like a sieve, like the early microwave ovens that would knock out pacemakers. Who knows if anyone has has ever scanned them for leaks. I would assume that the only time there is any maintenance on them is when they fail.

You can’t make an informed decision if no one will provide you with facts.

James Fallows of the Atlantic asks Where Did Our Debt Come From?. To find out he asks Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney, long-time Pentagon budget analyst and deficit hawk, who makes it obvious with the table – Reagan and the two Bushes.

… is found in the movies of Mel Brooks and Monty Python.

By now you have read about the new Republican Congresscritter from Maryland who is upset because he has to wait a month to get his taxpayer subsidized health insurance. I guess his $10K+ monthly salary isn’t enough to cover him for that month.

In Hostage Situation Anglachel looks at Paul Krugman’s latest column, The World as He Finds It, and while agreeing in principle with Krugman, she is reminded of the hostage scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff takes himself hostage.

I would note that one of the few intelligence utterances from the Shrubbery was “I don’t negotiate with myself.” It was usually misapplied to the situation that was involved, but the principle is sound.

Frankly I find the simplest answer to what has occurred during the first two years of the Obama Presidency is that he is a Republican, who ran as a Democrat because that was the quickest way to fulfill his ambition. He never presented any real policies that he intended to implement, he simply talked about bi-partisanship, as if process were more important that policy. There is no indication that he is any less shallow than his predecessor.

It is amazing how difficult it is to get through to the people who go to Washington. They insulate themselves from the world as soon as they enter the Twilight Zone of the “Very Serious People”. Actually this is a function of their staffs who are on loan from lobbyists.

Following the lead from the VSPs, the media only covers or discusses the list of approved topics, like the deficit and taxes. Where is the discussion of the lack of jobs in this country?

Duncan Black noted it in his post, Out Of Touch, but he has been hammering the point about jobs for months.

CBS conducted a poll on Veterans Day, and it shows the same thing that Duncan and other members of the reality-based community have been saying all along.

The most important issues for Americans are the economy and/or jobs 56% and health care 14%. Only 4% think the deficit is important, and 2% are concerned with taxes. With a margin of error of plus or minus 3%, the main topics in DC aren’t important enough to be any list until something is done about jobs.

Why did we have the money to create a commission on the deficit, which only concerns 4% of the country, and there is no one doing any serious work on jobs?

Government employees pay taxes!

This is apparently unknown to the general public, that working for the government doesn’t exclude you from the tax rolls.

When people would tell me “I pay your salary”, my response was, “We have that in common, SIR, because my taxes pay my salary too.” I would then continue to process them in the manner prescribed by law, because I like my employees to do their job. 😈

Here’s another News Flash: Elected officials make the decisions on what public money is spent on, not public employees. If you don’t like the choices, blame the voters who elected those officials.

I realize that elected officials avoid taking responsibility for their actions, and will blame everything that goes wrong on “bureaucrats”, but get a grip – all government expenditures are approved initially by the elected officials. If they don’t approve the budget, there is no money to spend.

Take some responsibility people – you elected these clowns, so it’s your fault.

One of the selling points for tax cuts for the upper 2% is that they will invest the extra money and businesses will expand.

Back on September 13, 2010 Timothy R. Homan of Bloomberg wrote that Rich Americans Save Tax Cuts Instead of Spending, Moody’s Says

Give the wealthiest Americans a tax cut and history suggests they will save the money rather than spend it.

Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich, according to data from Moody’s Analytics Inc. When taxes were raised under Bill Clinton, the saving rate fell.

They aren’t spending or investing the tax cuts, they are “stuffing the money in their mattresses”, a lot of this in the form of Treasury bills. They don’t listen to the pundits that are always wrong, or to fools like Greenspan, who was shocked to discover that the financial sector was filled with a greedy criminal class, they made their money and keep it by paying people to tell them what is really happening. They know that they will greatly increase their real assets by hoarding money in the face of the coming deflation. They are also funding the propaganda about the threat of inflation to dump their inflation hedges, like gold and art, things they intend to buy back after the prices tank.

Selling high and buying low is just as good as the normal way it is expressed. No matter which order you do it in, you make money.

It was pointed out that the use of “Cat Food Commission” in reference to attacks on the US Social Security system is very much an Americanism, and a historical reference for younger readers.

It may have started before the Reagan Social Security “fix” in the 1980s”, but that is when I remember it was used most prominently. It is definitely propaganda, and definitely effective.

The usage requires the stereotyping of the Social Security recipient as an elderly widow who lives alone with her cat, and states that those attempting to change the system will force the widow into eating cat food as a cheaper alternative to regular food.

It is necessary to know that the US had an extended period of high inflation at the time, and Social Security recipients were in trouble with the rising costs while living on a fixed income.

The net result was the doubling of the withholding tax and a rise in the retirement age to build up a surplus to cover the retirement of the Baby Boom. Boomers paid for their parents and themselves, breaking the pattern of each generation paying for its parents’ generation.

Boomers agreed to this, so we are not receptive to any more games by the same Wall Street crowd that destroyed the private retirement programs that companies once offered.

From the litter box of the MSM –

Dan Eggen of the Washington Post tells us that Many deficit commission staffers paid by outside groups. Can you say “lobbyist wrote this turkey”? I thought you could.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times crunches the numbers of The Hijacked Commission: “Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class.”

Same as it ever was – Reagan supply side / trickle down / voodoo economics in the hallowed spirit of the Revelation of the Cocktail Napkin of Laffer™ – the perverse idea that leads one to conclude that as tax rates approach zero, tax revenues approach infinity.

As an added bonus I include yet another person with real world experience, Dave Johnson, explaining Businesses Do Not Create Jobs. Maybe his version will help people understand what Badtux, Steve Bates, and I don’t seem to be able to get across – it is all about DEMAND. You don’t hire people unless you have the demand to justify doing it.

On a related note, I saw that Cisco Systems has taken a hit because of the austerity budgets of state and local governments. With about a 10% cut in demand, they will probably be laying people off in manufacturing.

Richard Mauer of The Anchorage Daily News provides another example: Miller challenged Murkowski write-ins in wrong court, Alaska says

The state says that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller has no business going into federal court now to challenge the counting of write-in ballots for his opponent and urged a federal judge to dismiss the case he filed this week.

State courts are the proper forum to interpret Alaska election law and the actions of state officials, Assistant Attorney General Margaret Paton Walsh said in her motion to dismiss. Until the Alaska Supreme Court has spoken, Miller has no legal basis to make a federal case out of the issue, she said.
…

As a candidate, one of Miller’s central messages was that the federal government has overreached into areas that should be run by the states, whether that was Social Security, health care, education or resource protection. Now the state says it is Miller who is overreaching by asking a federal court to interfere in what should be an Alaska affair.

It’s only an issue if other people do it, not if Tea Partiers do it. States only have rights if they agree with the prejudices of the Tea Party, not as a matter of any fundamental principle.

Miller’s representatives at the write-in count challenged a ballot that has the correct spelling of Lisa Murkowski, but the “L” was cursive, while the rest was block printed.

A Rare Event

Just stop it!

[Editor: Getting all three of them, Property, Excise and Income [in the back] together in the same frame almost never happens any more. Income’s eyes are even open so you can see the gold color. It didn’t last as Excise realized that his sister was in reach, so he did and they exploded off their perch.

Friday Ark

From the Social Security Administration website: Age To Receive Full Social Security Retirement Benefits

Here’s how it works. If your full retirement age is 67, the reduction for starting your benefits at

• 62 is about 30 percent;
• age 63 is about 25 percent;
• age 64 is about 20 percent;
• age 65 is about 13 and 1/3 percent; and
• age 66 is about 6 and 2/3 percent.

They are cutting benefits without admitting to doing it, and they have admitted that they are aware that Social Security and Medicare have no affect on the deficit. Both are covered by a separate tax and budget system. The most important thing that can be done for these programs is to get people back to work as soon as possible.

The only possible “tweak” needed for the Social Security system to maintain the status quo forever is to raise the cap.

Medicare does need work, primarily in two areas: Part C – Medicare Advantage and Part D – the Prescription Drug benefit.

Part C should be eliminated as it is not as efficient as the traditional system and it is more expensive. The reason is simple – private, for-profit health insurance companies are involved and not one of them is as efficient as traditional Medicare. Some will point out the additional services available under Medicare Advantage plans, but they aren’t universally available to all Medicare recipients, and they cost the program more per recipient. The extra features can be obtained by private Medigap insurance with the costs borne by those that want them.

Part D should be rolled in with other existing government programs, like the VA and the DoD Tricare system, and negotiate for drug pricing as one group. The fragmented system just increases costs and injects private insurance companies into the process without adding any value. This isn’t about bailing out private corporations, most of whom are now foreign owned, it is about providing medication to people who need it at the best price… you know – capitalism.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities takes on Tax Cuts: Myths and Realities. Using Congressional Budget Office data they demonstrate that tax cuts are far and away the largest single cause of the deficit, with “security” spending in second place.

The Clinton “surplus” that the Shrubbery gave to the wealthy in tax cuts, was the planned surplus in withholding taxes to pay for the retirements of the Boomers – the Republicans looted the Social Security trust fund.

Reducing taxes, as proposed by the Cat Food Commission, will further increase the deficit, not decrease it. Changing the tax rate on corporation is totally irrelevant as they don’t pay taxes under the current system. Google manages to maintain its tax rate at 6% 2.4% by laundering money through Ireland and the Netherlands. Exxon made a $19 billion profit one year and received a tax rebate in excess of $150 million. There is no connection between the corporate tax rate and the rate that corporations actually pay.

Executive Session

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 the guns fell silent. The Great War, The War to End All Wars, was over…for a couple of decades.

The red poppies of Flanders fields became a symbol of that war and the veterans that returned from it. Known as Remembrance Day in much of the world, the poppies will be in evidence. Remembrance Day observances have more in common with the American Memorial Day as a day to honor those who have died in war.

First called Armistice Day in the United States, the name was changed to Veterans Day, and its purpose changed to honoring those who are serving, or have served in the military. The change was made to avoid a conflict with the existing Memorial Day observance that goes back to the Civil War era.

A heart felt salute to everyone who managed to survive basic training. We can hope that sooner, rather than later, there will be no need for another generation to put on uniforms.