video by Brian Tracy
Click here http://www.briantracy.com/wealthreport to receive my FREE REPORT: The Way to Wealth! Did you know that your attitude towards money affects your ability to learn from self-made millionaires to achieve financial freedom? Watch this video to learn about the 5 ways self-made millionaires made their millions and how you can become one of them!
"Do not burn yourself out. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks.
Why get a kidney on the black market, when you can just make one in a jar? Scientists in Europe have made groundbreaking strides in the manufacture of body parts, bioengineering noses and parts of human hearts. Their research ushers in a new era of building body parts for transplant into human bodies, instead of just waiting for a suitable donor.
MADISON, WIS. - Wisconsin authorities announced Tuesday they will shut down one of nation's most popular nude beaches on weekdays after struggling for years to curtail sex and drugs on the sandbar and surrounding woods.
The news feed is getting increasingly complex. It's evident in Salesforce Chatter, which has added a new layer to the feed for sales people to add, edit or complete deals. Unison is breaking through the added confusion of the feed by changing the metaphor and the information architecture with..
Along with a fresh start, the new year brings uncertainty about changing tax laws, growing concern over online privacy and security, and challenges for almost every demographic group—even the wealthy, who face steep tax increases. To help you get ready to tackle your own money goals for 2013, we gathered our best advice from the past 12 months and organized it into 50 bite-size steps:
1. Be a year-round discount shopper.
Specific holidays used to loom large in the world of coupon hunters, who expected to see massive discounts on July Fourth, Labor Day, Black Friday, and other big shopping days. But recently, that's been shifting as retailers are offering sales all year long, and often at unexpected times. In 2012, for example, retail experts noted that Christmas sales started in October, and continued all season, partly in response to customer demand. That means shoppers should always be on the lookout for the best deals, regardless of the calendar date.
As the economy recovers, retailers are eager to pick up the biggest share of consumers' spending what they can, and in some cases, that means adopting more flexible pricing policies. Towards the end of 2012, several big-box stores, including Target and Best Buy, launched temporary price-matching policies. That trend could continue into 2013, which means customers can be more assertive about asking stores to match prices they find elsewhere.
3. Coordinate budgeting with your partner.
Much stress can come from disagreeing with your spouse or partner about how you should be spending shared income. Indeed, in author and yoga teacher JoAnneh Nagler's case, it even contributed to divorce. But she and her husband were able to reconcile (and remarry) when they jointly agreed to a disciplined debt-free lifestyle. By scaling back on restaurant meals and other splurges, they're able to invest in what they really value, including their creative pursuits and romantic weekend getaways.
When you've built up a sizable amount of debt, it's virtually impossible to pay it off overnight, and attempting such a feat can be frustrating. That's why Nagler, who had $80,000 in credit card debt at one point, urges fellow debt-strugglers to go slowly. First, she changed her spending habits and set up individual savings accounts for each of her goals. Once she got those costs under control, she started paying off her debt.
Tax rates are likely to rise for many Americans next year, especially high-earning ones. To lessen the stress from those changes, taxpayers should adjust their spending and saving habits as early as possible to prepare to hand over more cash to Uncle Sam. Taking advantage of any credits and deductions, as well as putting more money into tax-advantaged retirement accounts, can help ease the impact.
6. Calculate your retirement number.
Just 1 in 10 Americans have done the math to figure out how much they need to save for retirement, but it's an essential step in making sure there's enough cash for those much-deserved golden years. Financial advisers generally recommend saving enough to replace 80 percent or more of your income; that means someone who earns $80,000 should probably save around $2.1 million. Online retirement calculators can crunch the numbers for you.
The tyrannosaur of the minerals, this gold nugget in quartz weighs more than 70 ounces (2 kilograms). CREDIT: Heritage Auctions Earthquakes have the Midas touch, a new study claims. Water in faults vaporizes during an earthquake, depositing gold, according to a model published in the March 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.
A federal appeals court struck down Virginia's anti-sodomy law on Tuesday, a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court banned laws prohibiting sex between consenting adults. Judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond held that the state's "crimes against nature" law was unconstitutional in light of the high court's 2003 ruling in Lawrence v.
In oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. introduced a statistical claim that he took to imply that an important provision of the Voting Rights Act has become outmoded.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is being challenged by Shelby County, Ala., in the case before the court, requires that certain states, counties and townships with a history of racial discrimination get approval (or “pre-clearance”) from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws. But Chief Justice Roberts said that Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5, has the best ratio of African-American to white turnout, while Massachusetts, which is not covered, has the worst, he said.
Chief Justice Roberts’s statistics appear to come from data compiled in 2004 by the Census Bureau, which polls Americans about their voting behavior as part of its Current Population Survey. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s survey, the turnout rate among white voting-aged citizens was 60.2 percent in Mississippi, while the turnout rate among African-Americans was higher, 66.8 percent. In Massachusetts, conversely, the Census Bureau reported the white turnout rate at 72.0 percent but the black turnout rate at just 46.5 percent.
As much as it pleases me to see statistical data introduced in the Supreme Court, the act of citing statistical factoids is not the same thing as drawing sound inferences from them. If I were the lawyer defending the Voting Rights Act, I would have responded with two queries to Chief Justice Roberts. First, are Mississippi and Massachusetts representative of a broader trend: do states covered by Section 5 in fact have higher rates of black turnout on a consistent basis? And second, what if anything does this demonstrate about the efficacy of the Voting Rights Act?
One reason to be suspicious of the representativeness of Mississippi and Massachusetts is the high margin of error associated with these calculations, as noted by Nina Totenberg of NPR.
Like other polls, the Current Population Survey is subject to sampling error, a result of collecting data among a random subsample of the population rather than everyone in the state. In states like Massachusetts that have low African-American populations, the margin of error can be especially high: it was plus-or-minus 9.6 percentage points in estimating the black turnout rate in 2004, according to the Census Bureau. Even in Mississippi, which has a larger black population, the margin of error was 5.2 percentage points.
As a general matter, I would prefer that everyone be more careful when citing statistical data, and be more explicit about describing the potential sources of error and uncertainty associated with the calculations. But the headline associated with Ms. Totenberg’s article at NPR makes a strong claim: it asserts that Chief Justice Roberts has “misconstrued” the data by ignoring the margin of error.
In fact, several things can be said in Chief Justice Roberts’s defense. Ms. Totenberg cites 2010 voting rates in her article, when the difference in black turnout between Mississippi and Massachusetts was within the margin of error. But Chief Justice Roberts appears to be referring to a lower-court brief that cited 2004 data instead, when the difference was larger and outside the margin of error.
Furthermore, estimating the degree of uncertainty associated with a statistical estimate is not quite so straightforward as it might seem. There is no bright line at which a particular piece of statistical evidence goes from being meaningful to meaningless.
For example, in a poll of 1,000 people, a candidate who is ahead 52-48 has a 90 percent chance of holding the lead (assuming that there are no other sources of uncertainty apart from sampling error). A candidate who is up 53-47 has a 97 percent chance of holding the lead.
If one applies the conventional definition of the margin of error, which usually refers to a 95 percent confidence interval, then the second candidate’s lead would be described as being outside the margin of error while the first candidate’s would be within it. Nonetheless, the first candidate is still nine times more likely to lead his opponent than to trail him. Conversely, while we can be somewhat more confident about the second candidate’s lead, there is still some chance (3 percent) that he actually trails in the race and that the poll was an outlier. Statistical certainty exists along a continuum of probabilities and not in absolutes; I am therefore reluctant to endorse arguments that rely on semantic distinctions about how terms like “margin of error” or “statistical significance” are applied.
Another problem is that sampling error refers to only one potential source of uncertainty in a poll. In surveys of voting behavior, for example, some voters give erroneous responses: lying about whether they voted, misremembering whether they did so or being uncertain about whether their ballot was ultimately counted. This measurement error is in addition to sampling error and will not be accounted for by the margin of error. Further errors can be introduced by the polling method: since some people are more likely to respond to surveys than others, the sample may be biased in some way rather than being truly random. Thus, the true degree of uncertainty in a polling result is usually larger than implied by the margin of error alone.
The debate might be more constructive if we return to the substantive questions that I posed earlier. First, are the voting rates in Massachusetts and Mississippi representative of a broader trend? If so, it seems wrong to suggest that Chief Justice Roberts misconstrued the data merely because he failed to mention the margin of error. But if Massachusetts and Mississippi are outliers, then the chief justice may be guilty as NPR contends. One might draw a parallel to last year’s election campaign, when some Web sites consistently highlighted polls that showed Mitt Romney performing well, ignoring the broader consensus of polls that had President Obama with the lead for most of the campaign in most swing states. Cherry-picking the evidence in this way is the greater statistical sin, in my view, since it involves making misleading rather than merely imprecise claims.
In fact, it would be dangerous to infer very much from Massachusetts and Mississippi. In 2004, for instance, while Mississippi was reported to have strong black turnout, black turnout was poor in Arizona and Virginia, which are also covered by Section 5.
In the chart below, I have aggregated the 2004 turnout data into two groups of states, based on whether or not they are covered by Section 5. (I ignore states like New York where some counties are subject to Section 5 but others are not.) In the states covered by Section 5, the black turnout rate was 59.2 percent in 2004, while it was 60.8 percent in the states that are not subject to it. The ratio of white-to-black was 1.09 in the states covered by Section 5, but 1.12 in the states that are not covered by it. These differences are not large enough to be meaningful in either a statistical or a practical sense.
So did Chief Justice Roberts misconstrue the data? If he meant to suggest that states covered by Section 5 consistently have better black turnout rates than those that aren’t covered by the statute, then his claim is especially dubious. However, the evidence does support the more modest claim that black turnout is no worse in states covered by Section 5. There don’t seem to be consistent differences in turnout rates based on whether states are covered by Section 5 or not.
The bigger potential flaw with Chief Justice Roberts’s argument is not with the statistics he cites but with the conclusion he draws from them.
Most of you will spot the logical fallacy in the following claim:
No aircraft departing from a United States airport has been hijacked since the Sept. 11 attacks, when stricter security standards were implemented. Therefore, the stricter security is unnecessary.
As much as I might want to be sympathetic to this claim (I fly a lot and am wary of the “security theater” at American airports), it ought not to be very convincing as a logical proposition. The lack of hijackings were in part a product of an environment in which airport security was quite strict, and says little about what would happen if these countermeasures were removed. The same data might just as easily be cited as evidence that the extra security had been effective:
No aircraft departing from a United States airport has been hijacked since the Sept. 11 attacks, when stricter security standards were implemented. Therefore, the stricter security is working.
Similarly, the fact that black turnout rates are now roughly as high in states covered by Section 5 might be taken as evidence that the Voting Rights Act has been effective. There were huge regional differences in black turnout rates in the early 1960s, before the Voting Rights Act was passed. (In the 1964 election, for example, nonwhite turnout was about 45 percent in the South, but close to 70 percent elsewhere in the country.) These differences have largely evaporated now.
How much of this is because of the Voting Rights Act, as opposed to other voter protections that have been adopted since that time, or other societal changes? And even if the Voting Rights Act has been important in facilitating the changes, how many of the gains might be lost if the Section 5 requirements were dropped now?
These are difficult questions that the Supreme Court faces. They are questions of causality – and as any good lawyer knows, establishing a chain of causality is often the most difficult chore in a case.
Statistical analysis can inform the answers if applied thoughtfully. But statistics can obscure the truth when they become divorced from the historical, legal and logical context of a case.
Living things are the most incredible machines, honed for efficiency by millions of years of evolution. Many of our most advanced technologies attempt to emulate them but, more often than not, our results are clumsy and inelegant. Airplanes and helicopters employ the same basic principles of flight as birds, bats,...
video by Colion Noir
MrColionNoir: How to Stop MASS SHOOTINGS MrColionNoir Facebook ► http://www.facebook.com/COLIONNOIR MrColionNoir Twitter ► http://twitter.com/#!/mrcolionnoir MrColionNoir Google+ ►https://plus.google.com/u/0/110417089998648921407/posts Blog► http://mrcolionnoir.com/
China broadcast the final moments of four foreign drug traffickers yesterday, right before they were put to death by lethal injection for the 2011 killings of 13 Chinese fisherman. The coverage, which lasted almost two hours, showed the prisoners being led from their cells to a final check-up by a doctor.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) minister Miao Wei announced yesterday (link via Google Translate) that the Chinese government plans to increase the number of households with broadband access, with more than 70 percent of China's Internet users getting 4M broadband service by the end of 2013.
California raised about $176 million selling GHG emissions permits in its second carbon auction, with businesses paying $13.62 per metric ton of carbon, exceeding analysts' expectations and selling at $2.91 above the reserve price. The state sold all of its 12,924,822 carbon permits for use this year.
When physicists discover new properties of matter, it usually means better technologies for the rest of us. Superconductors, liquid crystal displays like the ones found in most TVs now, medical imaging technologies that allow doctors to peer inside the human body, and magnetic levitation - which was used to create the Shanghai Maglev train - are all examples of how discoveries of new properties of matter have resulted in revolutionary products.
See Inside The Rich See a Different Internet Than the Poor
Ninety-nine percent of us live on the wrong side of a one-way mirror
By Michael Fertik
Imagine an Internet where unseen hands curate your entire experience. Where third parties predetermine the news, products and prices you see—even the people you meet. A world where you think you are making choices, but in reality, your options are narrowed and refined until you are left with merely the illusion of control.
This is not far from what is happening today. Thanks to technology that enables Google, Facebook and others to gather information about us and use it to tailor the user experience to our own personal tastes, habits and income, the Internet has become a different place for the rich and for the poor. Most of us have become unwitting actors in an unfolding drama about the tale of two Internets. There is yours and mine, theirs and ours.
Here's how it works. Advertising currently drives the vast majority of the Internet industry by volume of revenue. Silicon Valley is excellent at founding and funding companies that give you free apps and then collect and sell your data when you use them. For most of the Internet's short history, the primary goal of this data collection was classic product marketing: for example, advertisers might want to show me Nikes and my wife Manolo Blahniks. But increasingly, data collection is leapfrogging well beyond strict advertising and enabling insurance, medical and other companies to benefit from analyzing your personal, highly detailed “Big Data” record without your knowledge. Based on this analysis, these companies then make decisions about you—including whether you are even worth marketing to at all.
As a result, 99 percent of us live on the wrong side of a one-way mirror, in which the other 1 percent manipulates our experiences. Some laud this trend as “personalization”—which sounds innocuous and fun, evoking the notion that the ads we see might appear in our favorite color schemes. What we are talking about, however, is much deeper and significantly more consequential.
For example, federal regulations make it illegal to discriminate in pricing access to credit based on certain personal attributes. But, as Natasha Singer recently reported in the New York Times, technical advances in mining online and offline data have made it possible to skirt the spirit of the law: companies can simply not make any offers to less credit-attractive populations. If you live on the wrong side of the digital tracks, you won't even see a credit offer from leading lending institutions, and you won't realize that loans are available to help you with your current personal or professional priorities.
For the past decade, e-commerce sites have altered prices based on your Web habits and personal attributes. What is your geography and your past buying history? How did you arrive at the e-commerce site? What time of day are you visiting? An entire literature has emerged on the ethics, legality and economic promise of pricing optimization. And the field is advancing quickly: last September, Google received a patent on technology that lets a company dynamically price electronic content. For instance, it can push the base price of an e-book up if it determines you are more likely to buy that particular item than an average user; conversely, it can adjust the price down as an incentive if you are judged less likely to purchase. And you won't even know you are paying more than others for the exact same item.
These blind walls also appear in our digital political lives. As Eli Pariser has observed, the Internet shows us “what it thinks we want to see” by serving up content that matches the hidden profiles created about us based on our daily online interactions. This behind-the-scenes curation reinforces our political points of view through online “echo chambers” that affirm, instead of challenge, what we already believe to be true. As Harvard University scholar Cass Sunstein has written, liberals and conservatives who deliberate questions openly only with people of the same political stripe become more confident and extreme in their views.
Since the financial crisis, a raft of politicians and pundits have been calling for the breakup of too-big-to-fail banks, and a return to a simpler, less systemically dangerous time in American finance. These calls began on the left, with writers like Matt Taibbi and economists like Joe Stiglitz making the case, and eventually got picked up by an assorted coterie of industry iconoclasts. (The most notable insider to call for smaller banks is former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, but former Morgan Stanley CEO Phil Purcell and a host of assorted others have also made the case. Ezra Klein has a partial list of the more prominent bank-breakers.)
For conservatives, many of whom lobbied hard against Dodd-Frank's resolution authority clause and other regulatory backstops designed to prevent a 2008-style crisis, calling for a big-bank breakup poses ideological problems. It reeks of government overreach. It impedes the march of capitalism. And, cynically, it endangers relationships with a major donor base.
But, as populist appeals go, breaking up the banks is certainly an attractive idea. And Republicans have a natural affinity for any policy solution that could prevent another financial crisis requiring massive government intervention. So, seizing the moment, conservative Washington Post columnist George Will has figured out how to bring the idea into alignment with the GOP's platform.
Will's column from last Friday outlines his strategy, which involves some clever footwork that paints too-big-to-fail as a government creation, not a product of the banks themselves. He trots out some talking points about the dangers of big banks — they're too big to manage effectively, breaking them up could unlock value (a view Will shares with bank analyst Mike Mayo), and they require opaque and overly complex regulation in order to guarantee their solvency (or something). Here is Will's conclusion:
Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail.
Will's conversion to bank-breaking seems to have begun last fall, when he floated Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher (who came out early against big banks) for a possible Treasury spot in a Mitt Romney administration. As Simon Johnson noted then, there is an actual case to be made that breaking up the banks is a conservative project, one that reduces the risk of having to pay out massive government subsidies in a future crisis. (In other words: It's a little socialism now, to prevent a lot later on.)
Will's narrative of how Wall Street banks became huge and unwieldy is a ways off. For example, when Citicorp and Travelers Group merged in 1998, creating the modern giant known as Citigroup, it wasn't because the government arranged a shotgun marriage. In fact, the merger was technically illegal at the time, under a lingering Glass-Steagall provision that prohibited banks from merging with insurance underwriters. Sandy Weill arranged the merger, then forced Congress to change the law to make what he'd done legal — hardly a case of government dictating terms.
Still, Will's about-face (which follows Weill's own) is notable. Breaking up the banks is still seen, among Wall Street executives, as a quirky and implausible idea. And in most GOP policy circles, it still carries the stigma of having originated on the left. But now that Will and other prominent conservatives like David Vitter are giving cover to GOP lawmakers who want to call for an end to big banking, it could move from populist-wonk land into something approaching the political mainstream. That would leave only an army of lobbyists, a viable bill, and a grueling legislative process standing in the way of real reform.
Exercise can be pretty complicated, especially with a lot of misleading information going around. Fitness tech company Digifit decided to dispel a handful of common cardio workout myths and found that while you might burn more calories with a harder workout, a slower one will burn more fat:
Business Insider / Matthew Lynley Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg argues in a controversial new book that women's lack of commitment, even before they have a family, is why so few make it to the top. Is she right? In a sea of blue and black, Sheryl Sandberg, a vivacious brunette in an orange jacket, stood out.
Teachers do not need to find notable people to benefit from using Skype. Simply connecting with another classroom provides an educational experience that cannot be found in a traditional classroom setting.“This has to be one of the most powerful experiences for students as Skype enables students to connect, collaborate, and communicate with other students across the globe,” writes education expert Angela Maiers. “It creates an opportunity for students to learn from each other, to have authentic audiences for their work, and to meet others who can further their learning.”
Seventh-graders from a Jewish school in Florida used Skype to connect with students of other religions. They explained the culture and practices of Judaism to a class in Michigan that had no Jewish students. Later, they Skyped with a class at a Muslim school in Minnesota, and the students showed one another how they prayed.
One of the Jewish students reflected, “From this experience, I realized that we have more similarities than differences. We, and people of all religions, need to put our differences aside and look at our similarities. … If we take the time to get to know religions other than our own we will understand, just like I did, that we can get along.”
Bill Reilly, a social studies teacher from New York, uses Skype as part of his Global Coalition Project, which connects schools in nearly 30 around the world with the aim of promoting peace and global understanding.
Reilly told findingDulcinea, “The first time we hooked up a video camera between our school and a school in the middle of a jungle in Belize, it was the most phenomenal thing to watch. … It was like two groups meeting aliens for the first time. They were such different and diverse cultures and they had such an interest in learning about each other.”
Classroom-to-classroom Skype conferences have also proven valuable in teaching foreign languages. Students are afforded the chance to practice speaking the language with native speakers.
Language Magazine explains, “The one-on-one Skype video chats provided them with not only valuable grammar and pronunciation practice, but also improved the conversational skills, such as negotiating meaning, that are essential to excelling in a foreign language.”
Robert Johnson— Business Insider
You can’t care less about others and expect them to care more about you.
You can’t give up and find a solution anyway.
You can’t be passive aggressive and not get stabbed you in the back yourself.
You can’t hurt others with your words and still be respected by those around you.
You can can’t be lazy and lucky at the same time.
You can’t ignore good advice and still make good decisions consistently.
You can’t lead by fear and expect more than the bare minimum from those who follow.
You can’t not put in half the discipline required and realize the full reward of the competition.
You can’t expect others to give you a second chance when you won’t give them one first .
You can’t get a lot without giving a lot.
You can’t just go through the motions and be more than mediocre.
You can’t expect fairness when you don’t live with kindness.
You can’t find opportunities for greatness when you aren’t looking for them.
You can’t have it both ways.
If you want to be successful you have to do things that are hard. Life has to be uncomfortable for you at times.
That’s just how it goes.
So if you find yourself taking the easy route, know that it’s the wrong path to be on. You’re never going to end up where you want to be.
Basically, all of life comes down to a simple reality: “You can’t keep doing the wrong things and get the right results.”
This story was originally published by Edgy Conversations.
You've had it up to here with being treated more like a revenue stream than a customer by your cable internet provider and are ready to jump ship. Fantastic, but if not to a competing telco, then to where? Here are four broadband alternatives that don't require a visit from the cable guy.
Obama spoke in a ceremony to formally unveil the proposals and to sign executive orders and paperwork initiating immediate administrative actions, including steps to strengthen the existing background-check system to keep guns out of the hands of potentially dangerous people as well as to improve mental health and school safety programs.
The president also called on Congress to swiftly pass legislation to ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines for civilian use and to require universal background checks for all gun buyers. Obama’s proposals include mental health and school safety measures, as well as a tough new crackdown on gun trafficking.
Speaking before Obama, Vice President Biden said “we have a moral obligation” to diminish the prospect that tragedies such as last month’s massacre in an elementary school in Connecticut could happen again.
“I have no illusions about what we’re up against,” Biden said. But he added: “The world has changed, and it’s demanding action.”
Obama said his agenda is comprehensive and is designed to curb not only mass shootings with semiautomatic weapons but the thousands of deaths from regular handguns that abound in America’s cities.
In an emotional ceremony one month and two days after the shooting that killed 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Obama was flanked by children who wrote him letters in the days after the massacre, pleading with him to do something to curb gun violence.
Obama began by reading excerpts from the letters written by some of the children on the stage.
“This is our first task as a society,” he said, “keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged, and their voices should compel us to change.”
Obama vowed that “in the days ahead, I intend to use whatever weight this office holds” to make his proposals a reality.
One of the administration’s top priorities is strengthening background checks by closing loopholes in existing law.
“Too often, irresponsible and dangerous individuals have been able to easily get their hands on firearms,” the White House said in a fact sheet describing Obama’s proposals. “We must strengthen our efforts to keep guns from falling into the wrong hands.” It said an estimated 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from a federal requirement to check the buyer’s background.
“We should have a system where everybody has to get a background check,” said a senior administration official. “The best analogy that experts talked to us about in our meetings is that it wouldn’t make any sense at the airports to have two lanes — one where if you go to a licensed dealer you go through the metal detector and if you go to a private sale there’s no metal detector at all. This is an attempt to get everybody through the system.”
The idea of circumventing the debt ceiling via the creation of a Trillion Dollar Coin first gained momentum a couple of weeks ago after it was suggested by New York Congressman Jerry Nadler in an interview with Reid Pillifant of Capital New York.That such an outside-the-box, yet economically sound argument came from Nadler wasn't a big surprise, as Nadler (who represents much of Lower Manhattan) has a history of showing depth in his thinking beyond that of the typical Congressman.
Watching Washington deal with the debt ceiling can be a scary proposition, given the seriousness of the issue, combined with the ignorance, but there are some who get it.
In light of the death of the Trillion Dollar Coin, we caught back up with Nadler to get his take on it, and more broadly what Congress should be doing to help the economy.
On the deficit, he says what virtually no other politician will say, that it's too small: "I think the deficit is not our immediate problem, our immediate problem is unemployment and frankly, I think right now, we should be running a higher deficit, temporarily, to get the economy into high gear."
He also characterized Europe, which has been trying austerity for two years, as a rare real-time economics experiment: "I often say in my speeches, I say, it’s rare in life that you get a controlled scientific experiment. 'Cause you can’t do controlled scientific experiments with real people, normally. But you have it, and if you grasp the economics of the economic recoveries from 2007 in Europe and the United States, they matched, until 2010, when they start to collapse. And then it diverges, and we keep going up, slowly."
Given the unpopularity of more deficit spending, can the public ever be convinced we need to spend more? Here Nadler blames Obama for ceding too much ground and accepting the GOP premise that spending cuts are needed... "Because when the presidents sets the basic terms of the argument, that defines sort of the outer limit to a lot of extent."
As for the debt ceiling, he's very concerned, and he says the best hope is that Wall Street and big business will simply bring enough pressure on the GOP to wake them up.
Big thanks to BI intern Lisa Mahapatra for transcribing the below Q&A.
-----------------------------
BI: What do you think of the coin rejection?
Rep. Nadler: I don’t understand why the president unilaterally disarmed even if he doesn’t want to use it, why not just keep it in his back pocket, follow what Carney said last week... and let them think, you know, that the threat is there.
BI: Right.
Rep. Nadler: He says he’s not going to negotiate, and god knows that I hope he won't, but when it comes to the deadline and they haven’t raised the debt ceiling, what happens then?...I hope he doesn’t negotiate at that point.
BI: So you think he’ll basically have to negotiate, having taken all these off the table.
Rep. Nadler: I don’t know. Because Wall St. and big businesses are going to push very hard on the Republican party not to go into Terra incognita, which terrifies them, and it should terrify them. And the Republicans may cave to that. They may not. I hope they do, and I hope they never get to that point. If we get to that point, it would be very good if we had that, if he had that in his backpocket.
BI: Let’s just take a step back for a minute, forgetting the current debt ceiling negotiations, and what’s your general view, I mean I know like, it seems to me that you have a higher understanding of economics than many congressmen, even the fact that you understood the coin proposal and understood that it wasn’t a joke. What do you think the government’s responsibility right now is, in terms of running deficits instead of stimulating the economy.
Rep. Nadler: I think the deficit is not our immediate problem, our immediate problem is unemployment and frankly, I think right now, we should be running a higher deficit, temporarily, to get the economy into high gear.
We’re in a very slow recovery, unnecessarily so. The deficit has come down from 10.1% percentage in 2009, to 7.1% now, without doing anything. I mean if we could have unemployment down to 5%, which it was in 2005, that would reduce the deficit by 40% by itself. I think this austerity policy of chasing this whole grand bargain thing, I don’t agree with. I don’t think we should be cutting spending at all, except the spending that is really unnecessary, like the military.
And even then, cut that, but increase resourceful (resources) spending. The real reason we have this high deficit we do is because of the counter-Cyclicals, unemployment insurance, food stamps, which is what we’re supposed to do.
I think trying to reduce the deficit right now is wrong, because this position is going to keep the economy in the doldrums and keep the depression going longer and it’s self-defeating.
You look at Europe. I often say in my speeches, I say, it’s rare in life that you get a controlled scientific experiment. Cause you can’t do controlled scientific experiments with real people, normally. But you have it, and if you grasp the economics of the economic recoveries from 2007 in Europe and the United States, they matched, until 2010, when they start to collapse. And then it diverges, and we keep going up, slowly.
BI: Do you think the public could be made to understand this argument. It’s very, economists understand this very well, and the idea that we should be running higher deficits to counteract the slump, but is this a message that can get through?
Rep. Nadler: I think the problem is, it’s practically impossible to get the public to buy that, as long as the president doesn’t. If the president buying into the notion that the deficit is a big problem or that we’re going to have a grand bargain.. Do we revenues as well as cuts, but still do cuts. Very difficult to do against that from the left.
BI: Do you think that the left cedes too much, is that what you’re saying, it cedes too many of the premises of the right about the benefits of cutting spending?
Rep. Nadler: I don’t know, I said from the left meaning... I think the president seems to have ceded the basic argument. And that’s a problem for all of us. Because when the presidents sets the basic terms of the argument, that defines sort of the outer limit to a lot of extent.
BI: Where does your understanding of economics come from, most congressmen don’t grasp the stuff and don’t seem to think about it like this. Why do you understand it so well?
Rep. Nadler: I read a lot, I don’t know.
BI: Who do you like to read?
Rep. Nadler: Who do I like to read? I certainly like to read Paul Krugman, his columns, his blogs. I read, you know various books: currently I’m reading a book, the Donald Bartlett book, The Betrayal American Dream. I’ve read most of Bob Kutner's books.
BI: Are there other people in the congress that sympathize with you? You just don’t hear many politicians talk like this.
Rep. Nadler: There are people who agree. Quite a few people in the progressive caucus that if you look at the progressive caucus budgets, that we vote on every year that we get generally 90 to 100 votes, those budgets either as an alternative democratic budget, we vote the democratic budget and the progressive caucus budget, and subsequent resolutions, those budgets are based on the premises that I’ve been articulating. Based on the fact that we should not be trudging along austerity, that we should be priming the pump and doing straight Keynesian economics.
BI: Do you believe that the US could theoretically have a debt crisis or do you think premise, just the idea that that could happen in the US is incorrect?
Rep. Nadler: I don’t know about could, I assume you could conjure up far-fetched circumstances in which it could occur, but it’s certainly not a likely scenario in the relatively near future. I mean right now, we’re selling our bonds at negative interest rates. I don’t see that.
BI: Now that the coin idea has been taken off the table, you know there’s still some people that think there might be some other loopholes, like the IOU idea. Do you think the White House has any backup options at this point?
Rep. Nadler: I don’t know, I don’t understand. I read something about the IOU thing, I don’t really understand it, I don’t know. They’ve taken the 14th amendment off the table, they’ve taken the trillion dollar coin off the table. The coin, I mean the 14th amendment, I’ve read good constitutional arguments on both sides, and there’s not decent court precedent. But the coin is so clearly legal, so clearly does the job, I don’t understand why they took it off the table, I don’t understand where they are at this point. As I said, I don’t know what actions there are at this point, other than they should have Wall St., big business gets the Republicans backing down.
I should tell you, I am sponsoring a bill, introduced last September, in the last congress, I’m going to reintroduce it this week, on Wednesday, just to repeal the debt ceiling. Because it’s obviously now become a tool of extortion. But we should have done that a long time ago.'
BI: Do you believe that, when the Republicans say that hitting the debt ceiling doesn’t necessarily imply default on interest payments specifically, what do you make of that argument? Do you think prioritization is technically possible?
Rep. Nadler: I don’t know, I’m not an economic expert in the operations of the government to be able to answer that. I do know, I think I read that there were 100 million checks written, I don’t know, that it’s mostly computerized, that even if you wanted it, tried to prioritize it, it’s not going to clear if in fact you physically could. And that may be the case but even so, to say that you’re going to prioritize, to say that you’re not in default if you’re paying the interest on the bonds, but you’re not sending out social security checks, not paying the military, you’re not sending veteran’s benefits, those are defaults on contractual obligations. And legal obligations. I don’t think, the market would look very differently, if you paid the bonds’ interests and you can get away with that for a while, by not paying all the other people, government collapsed and people starved, because they’re not getting social security checks, I suspect that the markets would not brightly on that.
BI: You think the best hope is that big business and Wall Street puts pressure on the Republicans, do you see evidence of that happening in a way you didn’t see in 2011.
Rep. Nadler: Oh yeah, I think we do see evidence that. I don’t think in 2011 anyone took seriously how limiting these people were. I know that now, and i think that they’re beginning to really try to put on the pressure. Whether they, certainly work on people like Boehner, it won’t work on some of these people we’ve seen talk about prioritizing and default and so forth … how that will work out I don’t know.
BI: Thank you.
-----------------------------------------
SEE ALSO: White House rules out trillion dollar coin option >
According to Section (k) of 31 USC § 5112, the United States Secretary of the Treasury "may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time."
Thus, the idea of the Treasury minting a trillion dollar coin is being floated as a possible resolution to Republican obstructionism in raising our nation’s debt ceiling.
Is this idea crazy? Yes, that’s the point.
As Terry Goodkind, Ayn Rand enthusiast and author of "The Pillars of Creation" put it, “When the whole world is crazy, it doesn't pay to be sane.”
Although in the case of the trillion dollar coin, the insanity might be worth quite a lot, actually.
Republicans happily raised the debt ceiling 18 times when Ronald Reagan was president and 19 times when George W. Bush was president. And, by the way, not one time did they demand spending cuts to go along with the debt increase. Ronald Reagan tripled our national debt. George W. Bush doubled it. Both times, lots of the debt was for military spending and tax cuts that the GOP enthusiastically embraced, price tag and all.
Now suddenly Republicans have converted to the religion of austerity and oppose any and all spending under President Obama. Fine, that’s there prerogative. But turning an ideological soapbox into a threat to ruin our nation’s credit and destabilize our own and the world’s economy? Well, that’s just plain irresponsible and un-American. And nuts.
President Obama, for his part, could respond by altogether ignoring Republican stonewalling and adhering to the Constitutional requirement that our nation honor its debts. According to Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution:
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
That seems pretty straightforward. In fact, constitutional law scholars have argued the legal validity of this approach. And none other than Republican Bruce Barlett, who served under Reagan and George W. Bush, has wholeheartedly endorsed applying the 14th Amendment to circumvent the debt ceiling standoff altogether.And yet, President Obama quietly applying the literal text of the United States Constitution to avert a massive fiscal crisis lacks a certain flare, don'tcha think? After all, the Republicans in Congress have been so melodramatic in their threats to stall our economy, ruin our credit and potentially cause another recession all because they don’t want to pay for spending Congress has already legitimately incurred. The president could use a response that is equally dramatic and attention getting. And that’s where the coin comes in.
Of course, I worry about our government minting a trillion dollar coin. Among other things, I like the checks and balances in which neither branch of government can take extreme measures without the others’ approval. Also, I worry that on the way to deposit the coin, the Treasury employee carrying it might pass a tempting vending machine…
Still, I appreciate the point of the idea — that Republican threats to bring our government and economy to its knees because of refusals to do raise our debt ceiling now, despite gladly doing so many times before under Republican president, is so insanely reckless and irresponsible that only an equally insane idea might shake us out of this stupid standoff.
So bring on the trillion dollar coin. Many have brainstormed the faces that might grace such a coin. I vote for Bonzo the monkey — the silly creature in the "Bedtime for Bonzo" film that starred none other than Ronald Reagan. It would be a great reminder of how we got a deficit in the first place — and how silly it is that we won’t honor it and agree to pay our bills.
Sally Kohn is a Fox News contributor and writer. You can find her online at http://sallykohn.com or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sallykohn.
Physics not biology may be key to beating cancerAS THE US faces up to its "fiscal cliff" of massive spending cuts, a major issue is burgeoning health costs. High on the list of those costs is cancer therapy, with the clamour for hugely expensive drugs - many of which have little or no clinical benefit - set to grow as baby boomers age.
Cancer research swallows billions of dollars a year, but the life expectancy for someone diagnosed with cancer that has spread to other parts of the body has changed little over several decades. Therapy is often a haphazard rearguard action against the inevitable. And the search for a general cure remains as elusive as ever.
Recognising this depressing impasse, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) took a bold step in 2008 by deciding that the field might benefit from the input of mathematicians and physical scientists, whose methods and insights differ markedly from those of cancer ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.
Short URL: http://www.jbenj.com/?p=273
Posted by New Scientist - Cancer on Jan 2 2013. Filed under You be the Judge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Looking for an out-of-this-world experience? Mars One, a non-profit agency, is accepting applications for astronauts to help build the first settlement on the red planet in 2023.
Astronauts will undergo a whopping eight years of training before being deployed to Mars to build a sustainable life there, the company said. While you don't have to have an advanced degree in science, Mars One is looking for people with intelligence, good mental and physical health, and dedication.
According to its website, Mars One expects the mission to cost around $6 billion.
For a look at what some other people are doing on Mars, here's some more information on the cool stuff NASA is up to out there.
[Photo by Flickr User Andy Z]
video by Tekzilla Daily Tip
Tekzilla Daily Tip: Learn Almost Anything for Free - The Khan Academy app for Windows 8 extends one of the greatest learning sites onto your desktop. Quickly and easily find topics that interest you and get straight to learning.
Don't worry, we won't post anything.
117
128
