It would be interesting to see the above graph reproduced for adopted children only. I bet that the curve would be a lot flatter.David Cesarini, an economics professor at MIT, provides him with the desired graph:
The graph shows how parent income at the time of adoption relates to child income for the adopted and "biological" (non-adopted) children. The income of biological children increases strongly with parental income but the income of adoptive children is flat in parent income. What does this mean?So... is the debate over? No.
The graph does not say that adopted children necessarily have low income. On the contrary, some have high and some have low income and the same is true of biological children. What the graph says is that higher parental income predicts higher child income but only for biological children and not for adoptees.
Now what about education? Sacerdote looks at that as well. He doesn't have a child SAT-score, parent-income correlation but he does find:Having a college educated mother increases an adoptee's probability of graduating from college by 7 percentage points, but raises a biological child's probability of graduating from college by 26 percentage points.The effect for father's years of education is even larger; about a ten times larger effect on biological children than on adoptees. Similarly, parent income has a negligible effect, small and not statistically significant, on an adoptee completing college but an 8 times larger and statistically significant effect on a biological child completing college (Table 4, column 3).
1. It's all socialized medicine out there.To give you a taste of the facts he provides:
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.
4. Cost controls stifle innovation.
5. Health insurance has to be cruel.
The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000. ...If you want to get a broader perspective, and some facts, on health care, read this article.
Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.
The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight. You’ll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.
Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.
Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, peace; with the fourth, a Danish.
The Torah says, Love your neighbor as yourself. The Buddha says, There is no self. So … maybe we’re off the hook?
... surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.Go read the whole article. There are more details about lobbyists and the corruption of politics.
No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.
But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.
As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.
Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.
So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?
Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?
But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.
There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.
It's time to embrace American royaltyThere is some social mobility in the US, but the joke is that there is more mobility in Europe today than in the US. They myths of crusty aristocracy in Europe and a vibrant immigrant society of upwardly mobile social climbers in the US are just that, myths.
We're obviously hungry to live with royal and aristocratic families so we should really just go ahead and formally declare it:Bush daughter Jenna Hager becomes 'Today' reporterThey should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.
NBC's "Today" show has hired someone with White House experience as a new correspondent — former first daughter Jenna Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush. . . . She "just sort of popped to us as a natural presence, comfortable" on the air, [Executive Producer Jim] Bell said. Hager will work out of NBC's Washington bureau.
UPDATE: Just to underscore a very important, related point: all of the above-listed people are examples of America's Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work -- The American Way. By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor -- who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice -- is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.
I just want to make sure that's clear.
I have a lot of friends who spent a great deal of money, and went into a lot of debt, to learn how to be professional broadcast journalists. They are now struggling to find work in a profession that is -- to put it bluntly -- contracting. So when I first heard that Jenna Bush Hager, the former President's daughter, was getting a job with The Today Show, I wondered what her qualifications were.Hager, a 27-year-old teacher in Baltimore, said she has always wanted to be a teacher and a writer, and has already authored two books. But she was intrigued by the idea of getting into television when Bell contacted her.Oh. She "always wanted to be a teacher," and was "intrigued" by television, so I guess that qualifies her to be an education reporter over all those journalists with actual experience and education who are struggling to find jobs.
As Glenn Greenwald writes, there's unlikely to be any outrage on the right over Hager getting a job she's manifestly unqualified for simply because she's the former President's daughter, despite right-wing affectations toward "meritocracy." There's something revealing here about the right's attitude towards those who succeed despite not being privileged -- the only way they can make sense of someone like Sonia Sotomayor rising to excellence from modest beginnings is through "preferential treatment," because what does it say about their own privilege, intelligence, or ability if that's not the case?
In an earlier post, I explain why virtually all stereotypes are empirically true. Stereotypes come from the aggregation and generalization of the daily experiences of millions of people, so they cannot possibly fail to be true. Stereotypes are based on massive empirical data, and empirical data don't lie. However, I also explain that one of the very few stereotypes that are not empirically true is the aphorism "You can't judge a book by its cover." Contrary to popular belief, you can very accurately judge people's character just by looking at them.First of all, the necessary disclaimer: I am not a scientist and don't have background in the above fields. But the above doesn't pass the smell test.
There have been a large number of experiments conducted in recent years to show that altruists (people who tend to cooperate in situations where self-interested behavior might benefit them personally) and egoists (people who tend not to cooperate in such situations) genuinely look different, and people can tell them apart simply by looking at them. These studies show that people pay more attention to the faces of cheaters, and later remember their faces more accurately, even when they don't know who are cooperators and who are defectors. The latest in the series of such experiments has just been published in the September 2009 issue of the journal Human Nature, with the very descriptive title "Altruism Can Be Assessed Correctly Based on Impression."
The study, conducted by Ryo Oda of the Nagoya Institute of Technology and his colleagues, clearly demonstrates that you can judge a book by its cover. ... In their study, a large number of male undergraduate students complete a self-reported altruism scale. Those in the top 10% on the altruism scores are designated as "altruists," and those in the bottom 10% are designated as "egoists." These "altruists" and "egoists" are then individually videotaped during a normal conversation with a blind confederate in a closeup shot. The first 30 seconds of the videotaped conversation are then shown to different groups of students at a university more than 800 miles away (in order to eliminate the possibility that the perceivers may personally know the targets). The video clips of the targets are shown to the perceivers without sound, to prevent the targets from betraying their level of altruism by verbal cues.
Their study shows that the perceives, when asked to estimate the targets' levels of altruism, can accurately guess who are altruists and who are egoists. Interestingly, even though perceivers who are themselves altruists tend to think that others are more altruistic in general than perceivers who are themselves egoists, both types of perceives can nonetheless accurately judge who are altruists and who are egoists among the targets. Surprisingly, men and women in their study are equally good at estimating the altruism level of total strangers. (There are theoretical reasons to believe that women are better judges of character than men in general.) Further, altruists are judged to be significantly more active, more generous, more responsible, friendlier, kinder, more extroverted, and as giving better impression than are egoists, but altruists are not judged to be more discreet, more hurried or more intelligent. Further analyses of Oda et al.'s data show that the key to detecting altruists is genuine smile, which is under involuntary control and is therefore difficult to fake. Altruists genuinely smile more frequently than egoists during natural conversations.
Oda et al.'s study is only the latest in the series of experiments which demonstrate that we can indeed judge a book by its cover. Nice, altruistic, and cooperative people look nice, altruistic, and cooperative; nasty, egoistic and uncooperative people look nasty, egoistic, and uncooperative. And we (both altruists and egoists, both men and women) have the capacity to tell them apart, after looking at them for only 30 seconds without sound! In retrospect, this should come as no surprise. We have been dealing with potential cheaters throughout evolutionary history, and being duped and deceived by them has always carried tremendous costs. In other words, the presence of cheaters has exerted strong selection pressure on our ancestors. It would be a miracle if a capacity to judge people's character based on their appearance did not evolve sometime during the course of human evolution.
Why does this happen? I suspect several reasons.So that's why you can have a "health care" debate and nobody knows what the issues are in health care!
1. It’s easier to research horse-race stuff. To report on policy, a reporter has to master the policy issues fairly well. That’s not easy, especially for journalists who have specialized in up close and personal rather than wonkery...
2. It’s easier to write horse-race stuff. Even if you know the policy issues, writing them so you don’t totally lose your audience is really tricky — I’ve spent years trying to learn the craft, and it still often comes out way too dry. On the other hand, horse-race stuff can be full of personal details.
3. It’s safer to cover the race. If you cover policy, and go beyond dueling quotes, you have to make some factual assertions — and people who prefer to believe otherwise will get mad. ... Much safer to report on ups and downs in the conventional wisdom.
The upshot, of course, is that we’re having a crucial national policy debate in which the great bulk of the news coverage tells people nothing at all about the policy issues.
There Are Not Many Rich People Who Lack Access to DoctorsNot much to add to this. He nails it: a "scare story" pushed to advance the interest of doctors and hospitals to keep their income & profits high.
One often repeated comment in the health care debate is that doctors/hospitals can't get by on Medicare's compensation rates. They argue, as reported in the Post today, that if a large public plan offered Medicare-type reimbursement rates, they would be forced to just abandon public sector programs and work for rich people.
That should be a serious concern in the health care debate, if there were a lot of rich people who do not currently enjoy access to medical care. However, that does not seem likely. All the rich people I know are able to get all the health care they want.
What this means is that if doctors in large numbers were to abandon their current hospitals to serve the rich, most would find themselves unemployed. The rich are already being served. While some doctors may have the connections or skills to find employment providing boutique treatment to the rich, for the most part they would be displacing doctors who already serve the rich. These displaced doctors would then have no choice but to work for inadequate pay in hospitals serving the public health care plans.
(There is also the threat that doctors will leave medicine altogether for another profession, But since physicians are already the top paid profession, they can only go down from there. It is unlikely that many doctors want to become shoe salespeople.)
In short, the scare story pushed by the hospitals and doctors might be useful to advance their ends (high public compensation for their services) but they have no basis in reality. Responsible reporting should point this fact out to readers.
Africa is still something of a demographic outlier compared with the rest of the developing world. Long berated (or loved) as the sleepiest continent, it has now become the fastest-growing and fastest-urbanising one. Its population has grown from 110m in 1850 to 1 billion today. Its fertility rate is still high: the average woman born today can expect to have five children in her child-bearing years, compared with just 1.7 in East Asia. Barring catastrophe, Africa’s population will reach 2 billion by 2050. To get a sense of this kind of increase, consider that in 1950 there were two Europeans for every African; by 2050, on present trends, there will be two Africans for every European.
There are three main reasons for pessimism. The first is that even today it struggles to provide for its people. ... Africa today produces less food per head than at any time since independence. Farms are getting smaller, sometimes farcically so. Dividing village plots among sons is like cutting up postage stamps. The average smallholding of just over half an acre (0.25 hectares) is too small to feed a family—hence the continent’s widespread stunting. Africa’s disease burden extends to its animals and crops. ...Go read the article. It has interesting details and facts.
... the second reason for pessimism: Africa’s families are under greater strain than Asia’s or Latin America’s were when their demographic transitions first began. That means, pessimists fear, that African countries may fail to navigate the virtuous cycle of industrialisation, growing employment, increasing productivity and prosperity. ...
The third reason for pessimism is Africa’s political violence, corruption and weak or non-existent governing institutions. ... In the worst cases, civil war has meant that the demographic transition has not even begun. Fertility in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone—all torn apart by internecine fighting—has barely fallen. In Congo the rate is still six, just as it was in 1950. In the worst places, fecundity tends to track instability. Africa’s highest fertility rates are in the refugee and internally displaced camps in Sudan and Somalia, then in those countries recovering from war, then in famine-pocked patches of desert and scrub stretching from Mauritania to Kenya.
The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is set for a massive election victory, exit polls suggest.This is long overdue. The strength of democracy is the ability to "throw the rascals out", i.e. not allow one clique to get too great a stranglehold on society. Turnover is good. Fresh blood. New ideas.
The DPJ has won 300 seats in the 480-seat lower house, ending 50 years of almost unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), NHK TV says.
The DPJ says it will shift the focus of government from supporting corporations to helping consumers and workers. ...
The DPJ leader, Yukio Hatoyama, has promised to boost welfare, reform the bureaucracy, and seek a more balanced relationship with the United States.
Mr Hatoyama is the wealthy grandson of the founder of Bridgestone tyres, whose other grandfather was a former LDP prime minister. ...
Unemployment is at the highest level it ever has been and by the end of next year Japan will no longer be the second biggest economy in the world - that will be China.
Almost a third of the people here will be pensioners and therefore there will be fewer taxes coming in, more money going out.
Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning syndicated columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. She is based in New York.As you can tell from the above talk, she is refreshingly straightforward.
Before she moved to the U.S. in 2000, Ms Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, including in Cairo and Jerusalem as a correspondent for Reuters and she reported from the region for The Guardian and U.S. News and World Report.
She is one of a few writers whose essays appear regularly in both the western and Arab press. Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper and Qatar’s Al-Arab.
In 2006, the Next Century Foundation awarded Ms Eltahawy its Cutting Edge Prize for distinguished contribution to the coverage of the Middle East and in recognition of her “continuing efforts to sustain standards of journalism that would help reduce levels of misunderstanding”.
Average wages in manufactuing stood at $0.55 in 1930, at $0.51 in 1931--an 8% cut--and $0.44 in 1932--a 20% cut. Coal miners' hourly wages went from $0.66 in 1930 to $0.63 in 1931 to $0.50 in 1932--a 25% cut. Skilled male manufacturing workers' wages went from $0.66 an hour in 1930 to $0.63 in 1931 and $0.56 in 1932. You had the same 20% cut in nominal wages over 1930-1932 as you had over 1920-22 (but a 50% decline in industrial production in the 1930 and only a 30% decline in industrial production in the 1920s).Add to the above the fact that unemployment hit a 25% rate:
Ask yourself: if everybody's salary in America were to be cut right now by 25 percent -- but everyone's mortgage payment, everyone's credit card balance and interest payment, and every corporation's debt interest payments remained the same--would we see a recovery or another chain of financial bankruptcies that would push the economy down further?Economies are not "self-correcting" and don't have an "optimal set point". They are dynamic entities that can go up or down and settle at many different local minima. The argument for an activist government policy is to encourage the economy to settle at a better set point than a worse one. We've seen what a "hands off" deregulationist government can do to wreck an economy (George Bush). Why don't we give the alternative a decent go at it, say eight year, and then decide which is better.
The Canadian Federation of Students has issued a press release disclosing a disturbing incident just prior to last night's townhall in Toronto. CFS says that students attempted to distribute a flyer outlining the organization's position on fair copyright outside the townhall. The students involved were approached by private security guards who threatened to remove them from the hotel if they continued to do so. The CFS decided to distribute the flyers specifically because of the limited number of speaking slots and the fear that they would not be called upon to speak (they were not). It is hard to understand how distributing relevant materials outside a public, government-run townhall is viewed as grounds for ejection. As the chair of CFS-Ontario notes, "it is ironic that while students are concerned that new legislation may allow copyright owners to lock up information, the government is locking up its own consultations."The Canadian government under the Conservatives believes in a Potemkin village style of public consultation. Lots of fanfare, save the seats for the big corporate interests, and if any real people show up gag them and hustle them quickly out the back door. (At least they don't yet have the police beat them in the back alley and throw them in jail while throwing away the key. We can thank the heavens for the gentle soul of Stephen Harper who feels those measures are not yet needed to "manage" the on-going public "consultation".)
Update: NDP MP Olivia Chow reports that she faced the same threats when she tried to distribute documents outlining Charlie Angus' position on copyright.
There has been some criticism over the past week about perceived "A" lists for those invited to roundtables and those excluded. My view is that the only list that really matters is the list of people who take the time to make a public submission. That process is open to everyone and this is the ideal opportunity to ensure that Canadians voices are heard.You can see public submissions at the government web site here. Read through these and draw your own conclusions about where the public stands on the proposed changes to copyright law.
The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday.So much for the political slogan of Change You Can Believe In. What I've come to believe is that politicians are all alive: say what it takes to get elected, the stick a thumb in the eye of the electorate.
Human rights advocates condemned the decision, saying that continuing the practice, known as rendition, would still allow the transfer of prisoners to countries with a history of torture. They said that promises from other countries of humane treatment, called “diplomatic assurances,” were no protection against abuse.
“It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture,” said Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush.
...
Though the Obama administration previously signaled that it would continue the use of renditions, some civil liberties groups were disappointed because, as a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama had strongly suggested he might end the practice. In an article in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 2007, Mr. Obama wrote, “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people.”
Mr. Obama continued, “This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.” In January, the president ordered secret prisons run by the C.I.A. to be shut down.
Starting from Tuesday, September 1st, 2009, the EU companies won't be allowed to produce and the shops won't be allowed to sell any conventional light bulbs with a milky or otherwise obscured surface as well as the transparent classic 100-Watt incandescent light bulbs - or any light bulbs above 80 Watts: see e.g. UPI. In one or two years, the cutoff will be lowered and new light bulbs will be banned, and so on. In 2012, only "efficient" light bulbs will be allowed and by 2016, they want to ban even the halogen lamps.Lumi, as a citizen of an ex-Communist country, knows what it is like to have bureaucrats decide for you what you can and can't do, when, how much, where, and in whose company. Nuts! I detest the "greens" because they are moral bullies. They think they have a stranglehold on morality, but they are extremists (OK, some of them are decent people, but they belong to a movement that has lost contact with reality).
While Fidel Castro had some rational economic justifications for his decision (well, he simply wanted to reduce recurring blackouts), the reason behind the same policy in Europe is that the Eurocratic wise men think that American imperialist Thomas Alva Edison is causing a catastrophic global warming. ;-) Well, there are cases in which Fidel Castro looks relatively sensible, moderate, friendly to America, and pragmatic.
It's pretty clear that the total "warming" that classic light bulbs may have contributed since the birth of Edison was less than 0.01 °C, i.e. also less than a one-day fluctuation. Only a relatively small portion of the "man-made" CO2 comes from electricity production; only a very small portion of electricity is used for light (most are electric motors): this reduces the figure by more than an order of magnitude; only a part of light came from these light bulbs; only a part of the electricity is produced in coal-burning plants. ...
As he was christening his new book, Klaus [the Czech President] explained that it is a fatal silliness for the political leaders to dictate the citizens what they should do, what they are allowed to buy, and how many times a day they should turn on the light bulb: video in Czech.
Klaus said that this conclusion is self-evident and if he were a normal citizen, he would go to a shopping mall before September 1st and he would buy a sufficient reserve of the good old Edisonian light bulbs, in order to have enough of them - a sustainable supply - until the end of his, surely "no longer so long", life. Because he's a president, he will probably kindly ask someone else to do this job for him.
Well, even before they heard Klaus's recommendation, the Europeans already began the hoarding of the soon-to-be a scarce commodity, as the retailers have observed. ;-) This is so similar to the hoarding of various products during the communist era! And it has the same underlying reason, too: arrogant imbeciles who think that they're able to control the society in a better way than its own mechanisms. ...
As a conscious citizen of Europe, I have filled my stocks with the 100-Watt "standard light" sources, as they're still being called. The clerks claim that they will be able to order them even after September 1st. There's some confusion because some sources indicate that only bulbs strictly above 100 Watts (not 100-Watt ones) will be banned since Tuesday.
Republicans Complain Obama Will "Bury" Our Children With Reagan Era Debt BurdensI find it funny that most people can't connect the dots. Big deficits under Reagan/Bush and Bush II were OK. They cut taxes for the rich. But budget deficits by Obama to save the economy and provide work for the unemployed. Well, that is pushing every over the edge into the Abyss.
That could have been the headline of an article on the new economic and budget projections. After all, the article included a quote from John Boehner, the leader of of the House Republicans: “the Democrats’ out-of-control spending binge is burying our children and grandchildren under a mountain of unsustainable debt.”
If we look at the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), they show that the interest burden of the debt in 2019, the last year for their projections, will be $722 billion. That comes to 3.4 percent of projected GDP.
If our children will be buried under this burden, then their parents must have been comparable strangled by the debt burden created in the Reagan-Bush presidencies. The interest burden from the debt run up in these years peaked at 3.3 percent of GDP in 1991.
It would be helpful for readers to put these budget and deficit projections into some context. Unlike reporters, most readers do have other jobs. Therefore they may not have the time to look up the data that shows Mr. Boehner's complaint is just empty rhetoric.
In choosing a surgeon I had less information to go on than a typical sports fan has on a player. In baseball you get all kinds of stats to help you evaluate the player. In modern medicine, the professional societies and the hospitals refuse to disclose any facts on with a rational decision can be made. You have no information about experience and outcomes in selecting a surgeon. The surgeon is under no constraints to give you real options. The hospital is not required to disclose how many "accidents" or failed treatments they have had. In short, you have to make life-and-death decisions in a void. The professional societies and the medical organizations refuse to give you the kind of basic information that you can get from an innocuous pastime like baseball. It is shocking.Addendum: My Father died within a month of my Mother. He caught the H. Influenzae that my Mother caught at the hospital. In fact my brother and I caught it as well. This was too much for my 87 year old father, so he had to be hospitalized. He spent two weeks in hospital, two weeks in nursing home care, and was released and had one week at home before he died. I put his death down to "treatment" by modern medicine. He had been doing just fine until he was swept up in the maelstrom of "modern medicine" and driven to his end. I just hope that I can avoid the "care" offered by modern medicine.
These professionals and institutions have an interest in keeping things opaque. A surgeon makes a living selling surgeries. Why discuss other treatment options. A hospital makes its money "treating" you and if it doesn't have to explain what it is doing or any options you might have, then they can set up things to meet the hospital's needs. Of course the hospital thinks this is best for the patient, but is it really? Just like the police shouldn't investigate police misconduct. A hospital is not really set up to monitor quality and effectiveness. Nor is the medical society. But in both cases, governments have given these institutions -- because they are "professionals" -- a self-regulatory power. That is just plain crazy. Why would they give themselves a hard time? Why would they look for a "better way". It is all too cozy for the incumbents.
