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My father told me that families in his neighborhood paid no income tax before WW II, because the zero bracket amount was high enough to exclude most everyday working folks. Looks like we're going back to that topheavy ratio of income to workers.
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If the welfare cycle ever existed, Clinton ended it by signing welfare reform -- putting a two year lifetime limit on collecting welfare -- into law. But not without consequence: I remember reading the story of one Michigan mother, who instead of staying at home, had to catch a bus in the pre-dawn to get to her job at a faraway shopping mall. She had no place to leave her kid (not being Mrs. Mitt Romney, she could not stay at home and do the real work of making a home and raising her family), so she would drop her little first grader off with her brother, the crack dealer, who would make sure Junior got off to school.
But, being bored as children are, Junior made his own activity as children do, and explored Uncle Crack's house. Lo and behold, he found a handgun, which he memorably took to school and shot and killed a little girl classmate with. (Cashpoor, he handgun's previous owner had bartered it for crack.)
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Tax rates in Greece are far lower than the percent of GDP spent on government. We are headed down the Greek road as long as we volunteer to be the world's policeman without getting the world to pay for it. In Italy everyone fiddles their taxes, knowing that the cost of auditing everyone is prohibitive. Can't say about Iberia or Ireland.
If people are only going to read one book in their lives, why can't it be Sinclair's The Jungle, instead of Rand's Atlas Shrugged?
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There's lots of stuff we could do: tort reform, generic drugs, free clinics run by nurse practitioners, serious prosecution for fraud. None politically possible.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Well, we now have a huge supply of cheap natural gas, so cheap that nuclear doesn't look very appealing any more.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
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If we eliminated malpractice claims entirely we could save 2% of health care costs:
While Obama vowed to address physicians=92 malpractice worries in a speech yesterday, annual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to =93a drop in the bucket=94 in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, said Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard University economist. Chandra estimated the cost at $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion, in a 2005 study. Insurer WellPoint Inc. said last month that liability wasn=92t driving premiums.
generic drugs,
Do you not understand how the profit motive drives drug development? Drug developers enjoy the full 20 year term of patent protection in this country -- would you prefer short patent terms to benefit drug copiers?
Because nurses work for free? All NPs work under a doctor's supervision. Moreover, an NP here makes the kind of money a medical doctor does in Greece. The US needs more doctors -- much fewer doctors per person here than most countries in Europe, and the doctors here see far fewer patients per year than doctors in Japan. Importing third- world trained doctors who would work for NP salaries would be the most appealing solution -- comparable to issuing endless H-1Bs to software jockeys.
Because the cost of litigation is so affordable?
Certainly shortening patent terms would be politically impossible, as well as a huge disincentive to new drug development. But any cost savings from tort reform would be lost in the noise -- like advising a family facing foreclosure to collect cans for the deposit and give up their landline. NPs could be used more to leverage expensive physicians, but why not just get some physicians happy to work cheaper? Fraud prosecution makes sense only for the most egregious cases -- perhaps some on a "spotcheck" basis.
While not at the level of burning coal, burning fossilized methane still adds to the sum of carbon in the atmosphere, pushing it further out of equilibrium.
Now if you want to capture and burn methane generated from landfill and manure piles, that would not disrupt the equilibrium of atmospheric and plant carbon.
Natural gas makes about half the CO2 as coal. It's immensely better as regards important stuff like mercury and particulates and radioactive isotopes. And there's no solid waste.
CO2 is good for us.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
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-- Cheers, James Arthur
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That's not where the cost is. I'd hazard that half of testing and
2/3rds of the paperwork is CYA. Oh, and extra visits, and so forth that result. That's where the tort cost is--fear. None of that's productive or improves care--it's expensive, clogs up the system, and it's waste.Right now, if you move to another state, you lose your policy and have to re-apply elsewhere. That shouldn't be. Congress did that. We ought to allow insurance sales across state boundaries.
And, we should treat individuals and employees equally, tax-wise, not tie your 30% (tax) discount to your job.
Change those two things and you'd own your own policy. Change jobs or location and take your policy--the one you like--wherever you want to go.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
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Oh,It's worse than that. I've been working in another state for five months (commuting home on weekends). We recently bought a house near the new workplace and my wife will likely move in a couple of months. If I change my address for my retirement and 401K stuff, I lose my health insurance and have to reapply. By only changing bits in a computer, I'll reset the annual deductibles to zero; same insurance coverage, same person paying, same everything. Thank you Uncle Sam.
The only way to do it is to have full deductibility of "health" expenses. No way the Demonicrats will buy into that, though. It's much more profitable for them to just take it over.
The problem with everyone having their own is economies of scale. It's a lot easier for an entity with hundreds of thousands of employees to get a "deal" than an individual (or self-insure). There is no reason to disallow it, either.
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Non-corrupt legislature? What dream world do you live in Bill?
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I don't know what government on what planet you are talking about. They are all full of empire builders which dominate the organization to be = ever bigger by being ever less efficient.
Not to the empire builders, they get more money (operating budget) by having bigger empires.
?-)
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Stuff and nonsense. Just go observe any government office for a few months. They are full of empire builders, riddled by incompetents, and somehow get the work done with about 15% honest, though often plodding, workers. Not that businesses do not have these problems but that they = can get rid of most of the problem people and thus have a much higher productive fraction, like 75%. Thus higher efficiency. I have seen plenty of both kinds of places.
?-)
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There is very little that goes on in the world today that doesn't use, and depend on, electronics.
Name some scientific experiments that don't use electronics in their execution and analysis. Not many people still use balance scales and mercury thermometers and clipboards to acquire data. Astronomers don't use film and microscopes much any more. We use some dumb machines in our lives, like barbeque pits and beds and baseball bats, but there are microprocesors in practically everything, including the technology icon, the toaster.
We are fabbing, each year, over a billion transistors per person on the planet. The average US home has around 150 microprocessors, plus another 50 roughly per car. Most non-physically-present inter-personal communications is now electronic. Most research is online. Most of the information that you store someplace other than in your brain, you now store electronically. Probably less than 1% of the music heard on the planet is heard live; the rest is electronic.
We are living in the Age of Electronics. Fun!
Negative feedback is fundamental to chemical, physical, social, political, and natural systems. Engineeers generally understand how feedback dynamics works, whereas the general population, which includes politicians, generally don't. As one simple example, most people, when presented with a description of a positive feedback, assume that it must run away. And most people, presented with a description of a negative feedback situation, will assume that it oscillates. They don't teach control theory to political science or journalism majors; it should be required.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
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Really? Check against this and its sources:
?-)
had
persons.
Because different schools choose different books every few years for required reading. In some years in some places it is "Catcher in the Rye", or maybe "Typee" and Omoo" in others instead, or any number of "famous" tomes. Try "The Discarded Image" if you dare.
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Well let's check that:
for starters.
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It's negative feedback that isn't a universal solution. Electronics is helpful in a wide variety of applications, but doesn't do the whole job either.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
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