Category: News and Opinion

There is a Moby song which seems to be about a woman who is drowning in a sea of love and she is getting tired of swimming and just wants to rest and be released from her endeavor to persevere.  That is how many Armenians feel about the Armenian Genocide.  We are growing tired of fighting for Turkish recognition of the event yet keep pushing on determined hoping to be released from this prison of memories.

At dinner tonight, Dybbuk said he was thankful there was no Hebrew School today.  

This Thanksgiving I watched two elderly women on TV.  One was a Holocaust survivor and the other was at that time a child whose family hid the survivor from the Nazis at their own peril.  The two women, one Catholic the other Jewish, were reunited for the first time at a tearful reunion celebrating the joy of human compassion.  The scene made me cry with the childhood friends.

I try to limit links to any one blogger in any Gateway column, but Jonathan Chait not only makes the same points I’ve been making for months—a sure way to get a link from me—but he does it better and then comes up with things I’ve never thought of.    

There are two ways to approach Confucianism.  One is religious the other philosophical.  For our purposes we will take the later approach.  Many people are dismayed with the way American government is now working at the national, state and local level.  Our system of government is marked by greed, a thirst for power, inaction and corruption.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Governor Cuomo is negotiating with public employee unions to use pension funds to pay for infrastructure. So how much interest is Governor Cuomo going to pay on those loans from the pension funds? They assume an 8.0% rate of return – starting from the peak of the stock market bubble in 2000. If they didn't, New York’s state and local governments would have to admit that, for example, NYC pension contributions would have to rise far higher than the 40.0% of payroll they are now. Taxes would have to rise, and or public services would have to be further gutted, to make up the difference. Above and beyond the devastation already being visited on less politically influential New Yorkers.

Either Cuomo is looking to raid the pension funds, perhaps offering even earlier retirement in exchange, with the cost deferred. Or the pension funds are looking to raid whoever will be paying back the debt, by having the state pay a higher interest rate than it could get by just issuing bonds. Or perhaps Cuomo hopes that by locking public employee pension funds into a lower rate of return, and then jacking up local government contributions to the funds to make up for it, he can force local governments to fund the state budget. Regardless, when politicians and pension funds get together, there is no doubt who is being made worse off. Future generations of less well off people who don’t even get pensions themselves. Because both pension funds and municipal bonds are tax free, it makes no sense of pension funds to invest in municipal bonds. This is just another way for Generation Greed to defer the disaster it has created for the future, now the present, into the later future. Hey Governor, if you want to borrow, put a referendum to the voters, as the state constitution requires. If the pension funds want to invest in the bond issue at the market clearing interest rates, they would be free to do so.

Even as Generation Greed politicians in Washington fail to agree whether to charge younger generations higher taxes than they themselves were willing to pay to make up for the debts and benefits they promised themselves, or to force younger generations of Americans to suffer drastic cuts in public services and benefits to make up for their history of voting for politicians promising tax cuts, the damage has started to accumulate. They have decided it is better if younger generations don’t know how much worse off they are, and have started suppressing the evidence, reversing the internet-driven trend of more information becoming easier to get. In the future, you’ll only know what the Executive Class and the Political Class want you to know.

The federal government has published a Statistical Abstract of the United States every year since 1878. The current, 2012 edition will evidently be the last. The Census Bureau is also scaling back information on state and local government finances and employment, in part due to budget cuts, in part because state and local governments are no longer willing to cooperate by sending in the data. Perhaps the political class doesn’t want people to be able to find out how much of their tax payments are going to the retroactive pension enhancements for public employees enacted over the past 20 years. The executive class certainly doesn’t want people to know how much everyone else’s wages are going down, which is why the Republican Party has called for the elimination of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. So why can’t the federal government afford to provide information to Americans anymore? What has changed? As I did the last time there was a Presidential election, I expect to answer that question early next year using data on federal revenues and expenditures over time provided in an easily accessible format by the Statistical Abstract of the United States. Perhaps for the last time.

Grimm bravely comes out in favor of adoption. He also favors funding the Fire Department.

What guts.