Bush's Social Security Plan Is "Said" to Require Vast Borrowing

Okay, I've calmed down a little.

Check out this "journalism": Bush's Social Security Plan Is Said to Require Vast Borrowing

Here's a copy of the letter I'm sending to the editor:

Dear Editor,
First, it is clear that Bush's idea for Social Security is just that, an idea, and not a plan -- if it were a plan, he would have some way to fund it, details on how these mandatory savings accounts were going to work, and solid numbers on how the movement of money would be different from the status quo. Since he has none of these, his is not a plan but a vague idea.

Second, and more importantly, this "plan" is said to require vast borrowing because it will require vast borrowing. This isn't some baseless partisan claim thrown out by some Democrats; if benefits for the unemployed and elderly aren't coming from the current payroll taxes (as in the current system) or income taxes (the only other real source of revenue the federal government has), they'd have to come from deficit spending, ie, borrowing. It is not something that "could be necessary" if this "plan" was implemented; it would be necessary. As the article itself points out, even people in favor of this idea recognize it would require borrowing at least hundred of billions of dollars!

Finally, the article fails to evaluate the "plan" from the point of view of the young people who would retire under it. Social security exists as a safety net, guaranteed by the government, so that people need not worry about how they are going to get by when they are unable to work. Under the current system, a young person like me does not need to worry about fifty years from now; my generation's children and grandchild will subsidize me at roughly the same rate I and my parents are currently subsidizing my grandparents. But investing in mutual funds, stocks, and bonds is nowhere near as certain as the status quo: what about a 65-year-old woman who had made plans to retire in late 2001, only to discover her mutual fund had overinvested in technology stocks and her $100,000 in savings was now $35,000?

On the other hand, the claims of the advocates for keeping the current system, just tweaking it in twenty years when the surplus starts to wear thin, were also left unexamined.

I am incredibly disappointed at the quality of the journalism displayed in this article. Mr. Stevenson should be ashamed at his inability to objectively evaluate the claims of his sources and actually educate his readers.

What is feminism?

Rape makes me ill. Just reading this summary makes my stomach twist and my blood boil, makes me want to scream and pick up a two-by-four and proceed to beat every man who has done this to a woman until they couldn't even be recognized by matching dental records.

I'm not being facetious. Those of you who know me personally know I'm quite the serious pacifist. But that all vanishes in face the rape. Every violent instinct I possess has been redirected towards someone who is, I think, so vile as to not even deserve to be considered human. As one comment to this piece says, rape is a crime against humanity, meaning it is a crime against every human when it is committed.

I find rape so appalling just because of the way it symbolizes the oppression of women: the victim is violently reduced to an object of sexual gratification and, in wartime, a de-individuated appendage of the enemy's community. The men who raped these women; the man who date-raped a friend of mine, drugging a fourteen-year-old's beer so she was awake but couldn't move, not even to scream; the man who drug another fourteen-year-old into the back of his van and left her in a ditch by the side of the road; these men do not deserve to be treated as persons after the way they have denied personhood to their victims, even though they were simply treating women the way societies all over the world have treated women up until this past century.

So what is feminism? Feminism is being appalled by rape, and the daily gender inequality which it represents and is born of. Feminism is recognizing that the value of a person, what is important in their life, should be decided by the free choices they make for themselves, not by what shape their genitals are, and other people think that means. Feminism is about justice, and is the antithesis of rape.

David Brooks: Let's compare apples and unicorns!

Okay, so, as everyone should know by now, David Brooks is a tool. Let's look at some statements he makes.
First,

we're in the 11th month of the most prosperous year in human history. Last week, the World Bank released a report showing that global growth "accelerated sharply" this year to a rate of about 4 percent.

Okay, let's assume for the minute that this is true. Naturally, I wouldn't trust David Brooks to hose me down if I were on fire, but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt here. However, this doesn't really mean shit. The global economy grew fantastically in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was called `imperialism', and it didn't work out so well for places that weren't Europe and the north Atlantic coast of the US.

So why does David Brooks think the current boom is so great?

This is having a wonderful effect on world poverty, because when regions grow, that growth is shared up and down the income ladder. In its report, the World Bank notes that economic growth is producing a "spectacular" decline in poverty in East and South Asia. In 1990, there were roughly 472 million people in the East Asia and Pacific region living on less than $1 a day. By 2001, there were 271 million living in extreme poverty, and by 2015, at current projections, there will only be 19 million people living under those conditions.

Because supply-side economics works, of course! Look, these irrelevant statistics prove it! (Again, I'll assume his statistics are accurate, and the comparison between 'living on less than $1 a day' and 'extreme poverty' was appropriate.)

Here's the thing: there is a broad trend towards economic integration on a global level; there is also a broad trend towards higher standards of living. But the people responsible for the second one aren't the ones responsible for the first one. Amartya Sen -- who won a Nobel prize in economics, something not even David Brooks believes David Brooks has done -- argued in Development as Freedom a few years ago that the Indian states that have improved their standard of living the most over the past 20+ years are the ones that have weighted their options carefully, not done what the Western capitalists wanted because it would supposedly make their economy go whoooosh. (As Argentina and Russia will tell you, those Western capitalists turned out to mostly be wrong.)

In other words: yeah, local economic growth is generally a good thing. But don't confuse an increased real GDP with more health care and literacy and rights for women. The people and their leaders need to channel and regulate the direction 'those guys in pinstrip suits' want to take them. And David Brooks is still an incoherent and craptacular writer.

Okay, one more

I'm going 2 blocks away for Thanksgiving, my roommates are gone and we don't have cable. What else would I be doing but posting?

If you, like me or Alton Brown, enjoy both cooking and science, here's a neat little article. The rest of you can go have hot dogs and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Bastards.

Turkey day

This is just brilliant. And insane. They tend to get along rather well.

Just for the record, I will not be eating turkey tomorrow, as animals are my friends and I don't eat my friends. I will, however, and unfortunately, be eating in the vicinity of turkey. That's what I get for going to the house of some omnivores for Thanksgiving.

Enjoy yours.

Realigning the Frame: Liberty is about 'Opportunity', not Ownership

From a diary over at Kos

'OWNERSHIP SOCIETY' IS GOP SPEAK FOR 'DEREGULATED MARKETS': Conservatives talk about ownership without bothering to talk about how the under advantage will become owners. This is dangerous. It spreads the false idea that ownership is the pure product of hard work, rather than the result of well managed social and economic opportunity.

AN 'OWNERSHIP SOCIETY' WOULD BE RULED BY ARISTOCRATS AND KINGS: Who's the symbol of an ownership society? The King of England, that's who. The framers of our constitution understood that in order for everyone to have opportunity, government must insure equal opportunity for all by limiting the ability of a few wealthy owners to slowly amass the majority of the nations wealth. Conservatives disagree with this vision held by the very founders of this country.

'OWNERSHIP SOCIETY' DOESN'T MEAN YOU'LL BE ABLE TO OWN A HOME: It means that you'll have an increasingly difficult time buying that first home because there will be no regulations in the market. Ownership will be the exclusive domain of those who already have equity--either through inheritance, access to corporate wealth, or through personal gain. To be against Bush's 'ownership society' is actually to be FOR the rights of first home buyers.

AMERICA IS THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY FOR EVERYONE, NOT A LAND WHERE A FEW WEALTHY PEOPLE OWN EVERYTHING: When Americans think about 'Liberty' they don't think about ownership, they think about the Statue of Liberty. Nobody can own liberty because it only result from freedom and opportunity for all, not the amassing of wealth.

Spread the meme ...

Then why did you vote for him?

Apparently, many Americans don't understand that, when you vote for a candidate for president, you're endorsing that person's political projects.

Across the board, the poll suggested that the outcome of the election reflected a determination by Americans that they trusted Mr. Bush more to protect them against future terrorist attacks - and that they liked him more than Mr. Kerry - rather than any kind of broad affirmation of his policies. ...

Even as two-thirds of respondents said they expected Mr. Bush to appoint judges who would vote to outlaw abortion, a majority continue to say they want the practice to remain either legal as it is now, which was Mr. Kerry's position, or to be legal but under stricter limits.

Americans said they opposed changing the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, which Mr. Bush campaigned on in the final weeks of his campaign. A majority continue to support allowing either same-sex marriages or legally recognized domestic partnerships for gay people.

So, basically, people choose their president the way they choose senior class president. I'm really, really glad I have City of Heroes and a paper on Berkeley to distract me from this, otherwise I'd be really depressed right now.

Well, this is depressing

So it turns out the average American `doesn't know what to say' about evolution.
I can't decide what this means, nor which is more depressing: that people have been shuffled through our crappy publication education system and don't understand what a `scientific theory' is, how science works, and so on; or that the people who favour ridiculously literal readings of the Bible are that prominent.

Comment: I have tried and tried to understand why contemporary evolutionary theory is a threat to fundamentalism. A hundred years ago, Darwinian biology is associated with Social Darwinism (`the rich are richer because they're better, so screw the poor!'); that's why William Jennings Bryan, an awesome Evangelical populist, argued against it during the Scopes trial. But that association's long since faded. And if you want reactionary fundamentalist moralism, you just need Paul's books, or Deuteronomy if you're Jewish; Genesis, especially the creation story, isn't going to do that much for you. Why is taking a metaphorical reading there so important?

Incidentally, you can read my defence of evolution here. I haven't reread it in a while, so I can't say I endorse all of it now, but it was well-received when I wrote it a couple years ago.

Meanwhile, ...

Bob Herbert talks about something a little more important.

William Safire's garbage

So, no surprise, William Safire starts shilling for an amendment that would allow Ahnuld to run for president. I don't have any particular opinion on this either way, actually, but here are some phrases that made me go `huh?'

That makes all naturalized citizens - including taxpayers, voters, servicemembers - slightly less than all-American. Even children born abroad of U.S. citizens have fallen under the shadow of Article II; this has caused pregnant women to race back to our shores to make certain their children's political potential is not somehow beclouded.

Now, I'm not in law school, so I could be wrong -- but I thought the children of American citizens were automatically American citizens. It doesn't matter where you were born so much as the citizenship of your parents at the time.

He's a libertarian conservative, a man of the right whose popularity is rising on the Left Coast. Under the tutelage of former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Gov. Pete Wilson, he is using his celebrity, charisma and political moxie to break up the logrolling logjam that put this state into the hands of easily rolled legislators and budget-busting initiative rule.

I haven't been following Californian politics as closely since I moved off the West Coast. But I do glance at the front page of the Chron every couple weeks, and talk about the issues of the day every so often with my admittedly liberal parents. So, again, I could be wrong -- but I don't think Ahnuld has done shit in the past year. He got some emergency bonds passed, but hasn't done anything to reign in spending; I'm not sure he was even running on anything else. Possibly the stem-cell research funding initiative was his idea, but that wasn't a legislative achievement.

Maybe after Safire leaves the Times will bring in Barbara Ehrenreich permanently. That would make me happyful.

Women vs. Wal-Mart

In Nickel and Dimed a couple years back, Barbara Ehrenreich spent some time working at Wal-Mart. Her conclusions? Wal-Mart is a shitty place to work: no benefits, crappy pay, a domineering management system. Oh, and systemically sexist. Then Wal-Mart got sued for that last one.

The way that Wal-Mart underpays women and doesn't promote them, despite the fact that so many women who work there are supporting their families, is shockingly hostile. As one of the plaintiffs pointed out, "They don't even pay you enough to pay a babysitter." In their company culture, they've always had the idea that to move into management, people have to be willing to relocate. [Uprooting the family] can be tremendously disruptive to families for either men or women. It's clearly something that can be avoided, especially now that there are so many Wal-Marts everywhere. You hardly need to be sent to another state to work at a different Wal-Mart. ... What's disturbing is that Wal-Mart is really profiting from female poverty -- both from its workers and its shoppers. Part of the problem with the Wal-Mart business model is that it requires more poverty in order to grow. They really have no incentive to improve working conditions. If they are lowering living standards everywhere they go, people have no choice but to shop at Wal-Mart.

The Republican party doesn't care about national security

So you're a Republican in the House. Which is more important to you:

(a) protecting the citizens of the United States from further terrorist attacks, by enacting the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, or

(b)protecting the political territory of your buddies in the Pentagon?

Answer here.

A Lack Of Originality!

To copy Drew, who was himself copying someone else, I have a fun experiment we can all do! Here are the first ten songs randomly selected by itunes from my library of 3011 songs:

1. The Same Old Song - The Temptations
2. Stealing From A Thief - Anthrax, The Threat Is Real! Volume 8
3. Prince - Housequake - DJ Rhettmatic, The Wedding Mixer
4. Vacant - Dream Theater, Train of Thought
5. ...And Justice For All - Metallica, ...And Justice For All
6. Born Mimic - Joe Beats Conspiracy, Reverse Discourse
7. Atlantis - Stratovarious, Dreamspace
8. What's Goin' On - Marvin Gaye
9. Silent Lucidity - Queensryche, Empire
10. One Of My Turns - Pink Floyd, The Wall

Unlike Drew, however, I invite you all to post your top tens in the comments. See, Drew has people that actually post regularly, so he doesn't have to encourage it. Keep in mind, this is supposed to be the first ten songs chosen randomly by the program.

That's a pretty good crossection of my music, though obviously in 10 songs there are some significant genres missing and Dream Theater is a little under represented considering how many albums worth of music are in the library, but feel free to tell me all about how bad my taste is in the comments!

This shit ALREADY?

Republicans on the joint committee responsible for merging the
two drafts of the spending bill into one uniform bill to be approved
by both houses of Congress have added language that would
allow hospitals, insurers, and other non-human entities to refuse to provide abortions, and not suffer any spending penalties.
Below is the text of the email I'm sending both of the senators from Illinois:

Dear Senator XXX,
The amendments to the spending bill announced this weekend, with provisions likely to further degrade womens' rights to choose, are completely inappropriate, and contrary to the expressed desires of the majority of Americans -- recall that only a small percentage of very vocal social conservatives want restrictions on access to abortion. I strongly encourage you to support Senator Boxer in her opposition to these amendments: do not vote in favor of the revised spending bill, do not vote to end the fillibuster she is likely to launch. I ask you this as a concerned citizen of Illinois.
Sincerely,
Dan Hicks

What? who?

The rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I've just had an insanely busy four weeks. Grad school's a bitch that way. Fortunately, I should be considerably less busy in the near future, and then I'll be on vacation in California for most of December, where you will once again not hear from me.

Look at it this way: no 2,000 word essays on obscure philosophers taking up three screens' worth of space until January-ish. Celebrate!

A few good things you should read:

Brand Democrat | Oliver Willis

Pandagon on Kerry's "Every Child Protected" bill (which petition I have signed)

Atrios on health insurance. The guy's an economist, isn't he? Well, you should read it anyway, get some edumacation.

Oh, and Stuff from the Bible. Because I just want to see if certain people actually read this thing like they claim they do ...

I'm Number 2! I'm Number 2!

I'm totally copying Matty Y here, but since Andrew Sullivan thinks it's sooooo important for liberal bloggers to mention the murder of Theo van Gogh, here you go. Murder is wrong kids, and people who do it are bad. And boom, I've just claimed the moral high ground.

Haven't heard about this before now and don't think this is a huge story? Yeah, you're not alone...

Flat Tax Crushed

Matty Y's got a very short, elegant take down to all the "tax simplification through a flat tax" that Bush talking about lately.

The Moral Party?

Head on over to Josh Marshall for a couple posts about how dirty the Republicans still are. In the early nineties they tried to the party of greater morals by passing a rule that any Republicans under indictment could not be in leadership posts. Now that Tom DeLay is under indictment, however, it looks like they're going to be getting rid of that silly ass rule.

Yesterday's News, Today!

Well, we seem to have fallen off the bleeding edge of the news cycle here at the ol' Staff of Ra, but in case you didn't know, Colin Powell Bush Administration official to drop out after one term, and Bush has replaced him with Condoleezza Rice. Behind Powell, evidently Rice was the person with the most credibility at the beginning of Bush's first term, but given the higher profile of the Secretary of State it's likely that, like Powell whatever little credibility she had left will be flushed.

A Tale of Two Spartans

In a great commentary on the literary life of the country, the official Halo 2 strategy guide has become one of the best selling "books" of the decade.

Incidentally, Halo 2 rules.