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Comments by YACCS

 

Or maybe not

I'm flattered by Partha's faith in me, but blogging will be spotty at best this weekend, as my Powerbook isn't cooperating. When it comes back from the home for sick little Powerbooks, then I'll be back (to coin a phrase).
posted by David Nieporent at 1/09/2003 11:58:00 PM |

 

Simply unacceptable

After reading various news stories about President Bush's stimulus plan, I see one glaring omission: No Nieporent Tax Elimination. My father pays taxes. Do we really need double taxation of Nieporents? I think not.

On a slightly less important note, is anybody else annoyed at phrases like "10-year, $674 billion plan"? For one thing, there's no such thing as a "10-year plan." Over the next ten years, we could have up to three other presidents besides W. At a minimum, we'll have one other president. Those presidents are going to have tax plans of their own. No president can plan more than four years ahead. For another, nobody has the foggiest idea what economic conditions will be like in a decade. The value of the cut is completely fictional, based on guesses about what the economy might do. We could be at war in ten years. We could have invaded France and seized all their oilcheese, giving us a world monopoly on Brie and bringing in massive tax revenues. Who knows? Nobody. So why pretend that the number $674 million is meaningful? (And you have to love the phony precision. Not $675 million. $674 million. Does anybody think they chose the latter number just because it looks slightly less made up than the former one? $675 million seems like an estimate someone pulled out of a hat. $674 million looks like a number someone took great pains to calculate.)


And for those people who don't understand what it means to say that the media is liberally biased, consider the following quote:

The administration proposes spending $364 billion over 10 years to end dividend taxation, $64 billion to accelerate the cuts in income tax rates, $58 billion to speed up the removal of the "marriage penalty," $91 billion to hasten an increase in the child tax credit, $48 billion to accelerate the shifting of lower income taxpayers to the 10 percent bracket, $29 billion to prevent more people from facing the alternative minimum tax, and $16 billion in incentives for small-business purchases.

What the Post describes as "spending" is actually lower taxes. The numbers which the paper reports are almost certainly accurate (at least as far as they go, as I discuss above), but the framing of the story is biased. Tax cuts are not "spending." If you're calculating the budget deficit (or god forbid, surplus), then cuts and increased spending may have the same net first-order effect. But they're very different.
posted by David Nieporent at 1/08/2003 06:07:00 AM |

 

If only similar penalties applied to lying politicians

The schmuck who lied to the police about being a witness during the sniper shootings last fall pleaded no contest to the resulting charges and has been sentenced to six months in jail. Although he was inside the Home Depot at the time of the shooting and didn't actually see anything he claimed to have seen, and even though everything he claimed to have seen turned out to be a lie, his defense was that he didn't make it up personally.

His attorney, Thaddeus Furlong, said that Dowdy did not see the shooting but that he did not make up the story. Furlong said Dowdy was simply relaying information he heard from a homeless friend named Linda who told him she witnessed the killing but was afraid to go to police.

"He did not seek fame; he did not seek money. . . . He was trying to help," Furlong said outside the courtroom.

Yes, and upon hearing the explanation, O.J. Simpson immediately contacted Dowdy to ask for assistance in his hunt for the real killers of Nicole and Ron.

By the way, do many homeless women shop at Home Depot?
posted by David Nieporent at 1/08/2003 05:24:00 AM |

 

Yeah, it's a cheap shot

The New York Times is doing some shuffling of its editors, bringing in a new Op-Ed page editor:

Mr. Shipley, 39, succeeds Terry Tang, who is joining the paper's news department, where she will have "significant new responsibilities," according to the announcement.

So Ms. Tang is moving from the Op/Ed page to the Times' news department? All together now: "What's the difference?"
posted by David Nieporent at 1/07/2003 05:27:00 AM |

 

We've switched this newspaper with Folger's Crystals

There's a rumor going around the blogosphere that the New York Times is preparing a hatchet piece on Glenn Reynolds. They needn't bother; Ken Layne has written the definitive parody of what such a piece would look like. Ken's headline:

A Web Pundit's Success Raises Troubling Concerns

Perfectly pompous, Times-style, isn't it?
posted by David Nieporent at 1/07/2003 04:33:00 AM |

 

Government should do something about it

Cliches are good. They help us communicate certain ideas quickly and easily. Cliches are also bad. They allow us to communicate without actually thinking about what we're saying. If we're trying to rally soldiers in battle, the good outweighs the bad. But if we're trying to formulate public policy, then we should eschew them whenever possible.

What prompts these rather banal musings is that I've heard the phrase "We need to do something immediately! It's a crisis! Health care costs are rising," one too many times. (Okay, about 1,000 too many times, but that's beside the point.) I'm sure everyone in the country knows, by now, that "health care costs are rising." But what does that expression mean? Think about all the things it could mean. It could mean that:

1. Doctors are charging more for their services than they formerly did.
   
2. Doctors are charging the same amount, but individuals are using more of their services.
   
3. Pharmaceutical companies are raising prices on their existing drugs.
   
4. Pharmaceutical companies are introducing new drugs which cost more than the old ones.
   
5. Individuals are using more drugs than in the past, as new diseases become treatable.
   
6. We're collectively living longer, so we're getting older and collectively using more health care services.

Or any combination of the above. All of those could explain the observation about costs -- and several of them do. My point here is not health care policy, though. My point here is the discussion of that policy. Each of the issues above suggests different solutions. How is the public to understand and participate in the debate, even in the broadest terms, if the issue is portrayed to them, by the media and by politicians, so vaguely?
posted by David Nieporent at 1/07/2003 03:57:00 AM |

 

Orwell would be proud

The New York Times reports on a program that offers drug addicts $200 if they agree to get sterilized or use long-term birth control. It seems like a completely unobjectionable program: it's a private program, and hence completely voluntary. And, assuming the program is effective at all -- because if it isn't, why worry about it -- it reduces the number of babies born to drug-addicted parents. Win-win. The recipients benefit, and society benefits.

And yet, the predictable crowd is unhappy with it:

"The program is fundamentally incompatible with a health care policy that respects a woman's right to choose," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "It certainly raises policy concerns for government entities to be providing referrals to this program or endorsing it in any way."

That's such doublespeak that I don't even know where to begin. Offering people a choice is incompatible with the "right to choose?" Huh? There's only one way to interpret that: when she talks about "respecting" a woman's right to choose, she means exactly the opposite: that she has no respect whatsoever for women being able to make choices, and assumes that they'll make the wrong ones if given the opportunity.

And you've got to love the gratuitous invocation of Godwin's law, by the way:

"What she's doing is suggesting there are certain neighborhoods where it is dangerous for some people to be reproducing," said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. "It suggests they are not worthy of reproducing. It is very much like the eugenics history in America. The Nazis said if you just sterilized the sick people and Jews you would improve the economy."

Uh, I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall that the Nazis started a world war and used poison gas as their preferred method of birth control. They didn't pay volunteers $200.

And it may be politically incorrect to say so, but what exactly is wrong with suggesting that drug addicts who are willing to get sterilized for $200 aren't worthy of reproducing? Do we really have to pretend that all people, no matter how irresponsible, make equally good parents? If a woman recognizes that she is not in position to raise a child, and chooses to ensure that this won't happen (and make some money at the same time), is that really something to be upset about?
posted by David Nieporent at 1/06/2003 06:45:00 AM |

 

Slightly out of touch?

I don't know what kind of news sources they have down in Washington, but apparently William Raspberry doesn't read any of them. He just discovered that under the Constitution, Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war. Then he expresses puzzlement that nobody else has noticed this, and desperation that Congress isn't asserting itself. Apparently he was asleep in October, or he would have heard that Congress already authorized war with Iraq.
posted by David Nieporent at 1/06/2003 05:01:00 AM |