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Americans don’t really want spending cuts: This article is brutally honest, in two places.  First, this is an important point to note:

Any truly meaningful debt reduction plan must include Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Why? For the same reason criminals rob banks: That’s where the money is. Entitlements today gobble 41 percent of federal spending, and with baby boomers beginning to retire and living longer, the cost of these programs will almost certainly become unsustainable. No serious deficit reduction is possible without including entitlements.

Okay, so that’s point one – any discussion of deficit reduction without talking about painful cuts to entitlements is pointless.  I would also include Defense in this discussion, honestly. 

Any talk about things like “cutting foreign aid” (less than 1 percent of the federal budget) is pointless blather.  You want to cut that?  Go for it.  When you’re done, we’ll still have the exact same problem, but I’m sure you’ll feel better.  Also ridiculous was Obama’s crusade to root out wasteful government regulations.  A superficially noble cause, for sure, but one that would have exactly zero impact on the deficit.

The bottom line is that the massive elephants in the room are entitlements and Defense.  Every other thing fades into the background compared to those two.  And as the population grows and ages, they’re just going to get bigger and bigger.

We clear on that?  Awesome.  Here’s point two:

"Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was ‘unacceptable’ to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even Tea Party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security ‘unacceptable.’" (NBC-Wall Street Journal)

[…] A poll finds that "78 percent oppose cutting spending on Medicare as a way to chip away at the debt. On Medicaid — the government insurance program for the poor — 69 percent disapprove of cuts." (ABC-Washington Post)

[…] with debt talks between the White House and Republican lawmakers dominating the headlines, a CNN poll said resistance to cuts was even greater, with 87 percent of Americans opposing Medicare cuts, and 84 percent Social Security cuts.

Okay, so let’s recap: (1) painful spending cuts must occur, and (2) as a populace, we don’t want to make them.

And that, folks, is why are our taxes are going nowhere but up.

Going the Distance: The bar-tailed godwit is a bird that flies some ridiculous distances:

The birds were set free, now able to be tracked by the USGS scientists.  One of the birds, named “E7″ (due to its tracking code), was tracked migrating up to Alaska via China. The first leg of the flight, according to the BBC, was a record 6,340 mile trek. The second leg was a similarly impressive 3,000 mile trans-Pacific flight to Alaska.  But E7 wasn’t done yet.  On her return-trip to New Zealand, she skipped the China stop-over, and, as denoted by the red line on the right, below, went direct — an eight-day trip of approximately 7,250 miles.

Click through and check out the red lines on the globe.  The bird just jumps from continent to continent.

In California, Indian Tribes With Casino Money Cast Off Members: This very sad, but I hear about it happening more and more – Native Americans are being kicked out of their tribes due to questions about their genealogy.

For Indians who lose membership in a tribe, the financial impact can be huge. Some small tribes with casinos pay members monthly checks of $15,000 or more out of gambling profits. Many provide housing allowances and college scholarships. Children who are disenrolled can lose access to tribal schools.

The money and the immense power it has conferred on tribes that had endured grinding poverty for decades have enticed many tribal governments to consolidate control over their gambling enterprises by trimming membership rolls, critics and independent analysts say.

In some cases, tribes are disenrolling long-dead members, claiming they were never true members of the tribe. That fact automatically removes all their descendants as well.

And there is no appeal. The U.S. courts have no jurisdiction. There’s absolutely nothing they can do.

Occupy language: the struggle over meaning: This article obviously has a left-ish slant, but I enjoyed exploring the relationship between politics and semantics.  The article discusses the meaning of the words “earn” and “worth” and how they affect what we believe of certain groups:

To be sure, one of the meanings of "to earn" is "to profit financially" – but it is not the only one. The other major meaning is related to whether someone has deserved his or her gain, which may or may not be about money. Because the word has both connotations, we tend to attach both when the topic is about financial profits.

[…]  I would ban the word "worth" when "wealth" was more accurate and neutral. When we say someone is worth this much or that much money, we are (as with "earn") freighting the statement with the assumption that the person did something to deserve it, and equating wealth with human value.

I’d Rather Be an Unlucky Ducky: This paragraph intrigues me:

I’m not saying that Republicans are anarchists, only that when it comes to taxes they talk as if they are. Their default position is that there is no level of taxation below which it would be unwise to go, no tax cut too large not to be taken seriously and no justification for a government any larger than one that could be drowned in a bathtub, as the Republican activist Grover Norquist once put it. The Wall Street Journal editorial page routinely refers to those who pay no taxes as “lucky duckies,” as if zero taxation is the ideal state of nature.

I wonder about this.  Taxation in the U.S. is at historic lows, yet there’s a push to drive us lower.  Grover Norquist forbids politicians from raising taxes.  Taxes are demonized as this incredible evil.

I would be curious to know what an acceptable level of taxation is, from then perspective of the conservative Right.  When you look at the stuff we get – roads, utilities, safety, etc. – what is a (ahem) fair and balanced level of taxation for this stuff?

Obviously, we have to have some taxes, right?  But no matter how low they go, it’s apparently never low enough.  So, how low is too low?  Is there such a thing?

I try to give all political opinions a fair shake, but there is one conservative assertion that just makes me hang my head with embarrassment.  This is the assertion that cutting taxes actually increases government revenues.

No, it doesn’t.  Not at the present rate of taxation, anyway.  And now I have some evidence to back that up, beyond my hunch (keep reading).

The argument goes that by leaving the public with more money, that stimulates the economy, which results in more taxable income, which results in more tax revenue.  Wouldn’t this be awesome?

I absolutely do believe that less taxes stimulates the economy.  But not to the level required to offset the cut in revenue.  I made this exact argument over a year ago:

For the record – and before I get jumped on by someone on the Right – I do absolutely believe that tax cuts stimulate the economy.  But they can’t “just” stimulate the economy — they have to do so to such a degree that they generate enough new taxable revenue to offset themselves, and this is trickier.

Example: if you have a 25% tax rate, cutting $1 in taxes means that $1 cut has to generate $4 in taxable revenue in order to replace the $1 you just cut from actual tax revenue (25% of the $4 in newly-generated taxable revenue replaces the $1 we just cut from actual tax revenue).  With a 90% tax rate, your $1 tax cut would have to generate just $1.10 in new revenue.

No, Simon Johnson of the New York Times has given us a handy reading guide for proving this ridiculous assertion false.

Can tax cuts “pay for themselves,” inducing so much additional economic growth that government revenue actually increases, rather than decreases? The evidence clearly says no.

Johnson cites a study done in 2006 by one of George Bush’s own advisors:

Specifically, Professors. Mankiw and Weinzierl calculated that 32.4 percent of the “static” or direct revenue loss of a capital-gains tax cut and 14.7 percent of the static revenue loss of a labor tax cut could be offset in present-value terms by additional growth, ignoring short-term Keynesian effects (i.e., any immediate stimulus provided to the economy).

Those numbers again: 32.4 and 14.7 percent.  Remember, the claim is that the tax cut is offset by 100 percent.  We’re quite a bit short there.

Another study (PDF link), this time by the then-Republican-controlled CBO:

More broadly, in 2005, the Congressional Budget Office, then headed by a Republican appointee, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, estimated that the economic effects of a 10 percent cut in income taxes would offset from 1 to 22 percent of the revenue loss in the first five years; in the following five years, the economic effects might offset up to 32 percent of the revenue loss, but might also add 5 percent to the revenue loss.

The numbers there: 1 or 22 percent, or maybe 32 percent, but perhaps –5 percent.  Again, none of those numbers are 100 percent.

Five years ago, Andrew Samwick, who was once the Chief Economist on Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, wrote this on his personal blog:

You are smart people. You know that the tax cuts have not fueled record revenues. You know what it takes to establish causality. You know that the first order effect of cutting taxes is to lower tax revenues. We all agree that the ultimate reduction in tax revenues can be less than this first order effect, because lower tax rates encourage greater economic activity and thus expand the tax base. No thoughtful person believes that this possible offset more than compensated for the first effect for these tax cuts. Not a single one.

Now, look – I’m all for tax cuts.  I believe that affordable tax cuts are a great thing – it’s our money, and we should keep more of it.  So my antipathy to this argument is certainly not a moral or philosophical one.

Rather, I find myself insulted by it.  I’m insulted when someone stares me in the face (or into a TV camera) and tries to get me (or the public) to believe something as patently stupid as this.  Do I really look this dumb?

Sadly, this argument still resonates with a lot of public.  Why?  Because it’s awesome.  It’s like trickle-down economics – it’s a neat, palatable theory that makes us all happy because we get both of the things we want: less taxes and more growth.  This is the ultimate dream, so we sit around and nod our heads and don’t look critically at it lest we realize it’s a massive load of bullsh*t.

If you want to cut taxes, couch it in terms of government waste, or the immorality of higher taxes, or…something.  But please don’t tell me that cutting taxes will actual raise government revenue.  I’m just not that stupid.

4% diamond, 96% rough: I loved this peek into Ian Williams’ creative process.  Ian is a scriptwriter (screenwriter?), and he discusses how he finds “the germ”:

It is through this wide net you might catch what I will call THE GERM, which is tiny, tiny, tiny idea of something that might be cool. It can be a half-idea, and it doesn’t even need to make sense, but you know it when you feel it. The Germ can be a snippet of dialogue, or a job you’d never heard of, or an entire premise, or an unrelated fact without any context. It can be truly anything.

To do this, he keeps track of interesting stuff.  Little nuggets like these, from his notebook:

THE GREGORIAN CALENDAR FIXED ALL THE EARLY CALENDAR INACCURACIES, BUT THEY HAD TO SKIP 10 DAYS TO MAKE IT WORK. SO THERE WAS NO OCTOBER 5-14 IN THE YEAR 1582

IN GREEN BANK, WV THERE ARE NO WIFI OR CELLULAR SIGNALS IN A 13,000 SQUARE MILE RADIUS, PEOPLE FLOCK

Or:

Or take this evening, par example. The Lulubeans has been watching Dogs With Jobs on the BYU Channel (yay DirecTV!) and we saw the show featuring Wiley, the border collie/Dalmatian who chases birds off the runway for the Coast Guard on Ediz Hook in Port Angeles, WA.

But Wiley is wily, and because he’s involved in so much of the Air Station’s business, he actually has a security clearance higher than many humans who work there. That is a very cool piece of information, whether or not it will ever get used in anything.

From this, creative juices start flowing.

Ian, as some might remember, was a fellow participant at Zap Your Pram!, a conference I went to up in Prince Edward Island back in 2008.  In his recap of that conference, Ian wrote something that has stuck with me ever since:

To me, if you’re someone who relies on creativity for a living — and that goes for more of you than you might think — you have to put yourself in the way of bizarre ideas. You have to be blindsided, slightly, by subject matter you’d never find or seek on your own volition. It may not always work, but just dipping your head into the cold, bracing water of other peoples’ obsessions can occasionally give you something you didn’t even know you needed.

I love that.  I live by that.

Risk Legacy Makes Your Board Game Decisions Matter: I love this new idea for a boardgame: Risk Legacy.  The key is that the game doesn’t “reset” every time you play it.  Decisions you make during one session live on, and affect the game in future sessions.  The game changes permanently over time,

Risk Legacy takes that aspect of the game one step further by embedding all of those past victories, defeats and betrayals into the game itself. Permanent stickers will be affixed to the board to reflect the actions and outcomes of prior games, while cards are intended to be played and then ripped up and thrown away, although Daviau acknowledged that he doesn’t expect anyone will actually do that. There’s even "sealed stuff" which will have an impact on the game – although what or how that impact will be is a mystery.

Okay, it’s time to commit to my next fitness goal.  Here it is –

At the age of 40, I intend to pass the U.S. Army Ranger entrance exam.  This is the physical fitness test you have to pass to be considered for Ranger School.  (Keep in mind that this just means you might get to go to the training program, it certainly doesn’t mean to get to actually be a Ranger…)

Why do I want to pass this?  I have no idea, really.  It’s just a good set of physical fitness goals – each one a bit out of reach now, but not out of the question if I work hard – and the goals are split nicely between endurance and strength.

So, here are the six benchmarks, and how I compare as of today:

• 49 pushups in two minutes
  I’m pretty sure I’ll nail this.  As of a month ago, I could do 44, so I don’t think this will be an issue.
• 59 sit-ups in two minutes
  This one is going to be surprisingly hard.  I had been doing ab work for a while, so I figured it would be easy, but it’s full, bent-knee, elbows-behind-the-head sit-ups – the kind of which I haven’t done since high school gym.  About a month ago, I gave it a shot and got…eight.  That sucked, but progress has been good since then, and I’m up to 25 now.
• Six overhand chin-ups
  At first, this one seemed impossible.  I have long arms, so I have very little leverage and a long way to pull.  But about six months ago, I decided to just keep pulling no matter what and my body would eventually have to respond.  As of today, I can do four (-ish – the last one is a little shaky).  I’ll get this, and it will likely be the most satisfying of all of them, because it seemed the most out of reach (figuratively and literally) at the beginning.
• Five mile run in 40 minutes
  This will be very hard, but I’ve seen my running improve so much over the last six months.  I worked towards getting a 10K (6.2 miles) in less than an hour, which was a 9:40 pace.  Since then, I’ve dropped back to five miles, and currently have my pace down to 8:52.  To get this, I need to drop it all the way to 8:00, but I’m confident.  Progress here is slow, but steady.  Winter will slow me down a bit, but I’m pretty sure I’ll get this in the spring.
• Two mile run in 15 minutes, 12 seconds
  I find this requirement a little weird.  I don’t know why there are two running tests.  Regardless, this works out to a 7:06 7:36  pace.  This is super-fast, but my feeling is that if I can do five miles in an 8:00 pace, I should be able to get two miles at 7:06 7:36.  But I’ve never tried this, so I might be way off.
• 16 mile hike with 65 pounds of gear in 5 hours, 20 minutes
  I’m pretty confident about this.  When I was in the Navy, I served as a medic to a Marine Corps platoon for a while.  I hiked a lot with them, and was pretty good at it.  I’ve walked 11 miles once before, so I have to extend that, and do it with gear.  I have no idea how hard this is, but won’t start training for it until the weather gets better in the spring.  The pace is 20:00, or 3 m.p.h.

(There is actually one more test – a water safety test.  But it’s pass/fail and involves dropping into the water from a high-dive and some other things that I don’t think I can replicate with my resources, so I removed it.)

So, that’s it.  I’m publicly committing to this today.  I’ve been toying with the idea for months, but now I’m putting myself on the hook for it.

Wish me luck.

The Footage the NFL Won’t Show You: The “pull back” footage that shows what all 22 players on a football field were doing on every play exists, but is off-limits:

If you ask the league to see the footage that was taken from on high to show the entire field and what all 22 players did on every play, the response will be emphatic. "NO ONE gets that," […] This footage, added fellow league spokesman Greg Aiello, "is regarded at this point as proprietary NFL coaching information."

Apparently one of the big objections is that it would open coaches up to too much criticism.

Charley Casserly, a former general manager who was a member of the NFL’s competition committee, says he voted against releasing All-22 footage because he worried that if fans had access, it would open players and teams up to a level of criticism far beyond the current hum of talk radio. Casserly believed fans would jump to conclusions after watching one or two games in the All 22, without knowing the full story.

So, they purposely keep fans in the dark about what’s going on throughout the entire field, so the fans can’t sit around a second-guess coaching?