19 Şubat 2013 Salı

Take it From Calvin Coolidge on Taxes and Spending

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Following up on yesterday's post, "The Calvin Coolidge Comeback."

Here's Amity Shlaes, at WSJ, "The Coolidge Lesson on Taxes and Spending":
Only Reagan could fix this.

That's the intuitive reaction to the surge of spending and budgetary challenges in Washington today. It's hard to think of another Republican with the fortitude to push back against the outlays, to make government smaller, to lower taxes. And to show that such moves can yield prosperity.

The "only Reagan" assumption is too narrow—especially when it comes to the fiscal challenge. For while Reagan inspired and cut taxes, he did not reduce the deficit. He did not even cut the budget. But if you look back, past Dwight Eisenhower and around the curve of history, you can find a Republican who did all those things: Calvin Coolidge.

A New Englander and former Massachusetts governor, Coolidge came to Washington as vice president and moved into the White House only in 1923 after the sudden death of President Warren Harding. He later won the office himself and served until 1929. The 30th president cut the top income-tax rate to 25% (lower than the 28% of the historic Reagan cut of 1986). Coolidge reduced the national debt and balanced the budget. When he departed the White House for his home in Northampton, Mass., he left a federal budget smaller than the one he found.

Three factors gave Silent Cal the ability to cut as he did, each suggesting a governing approach that would be useful today...
Continue reading.

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About the Uses and Abuses of Paternalism

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Folks might find this interesting, for while government imposes decisions on the individual "because it's good for them" all the time, there's something extra freakish (totalitarian) to this.

From Cass Sunstein, Obama's former Czar of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, at the New York Review, "It’s For Your Own Good!":
In the United States, as in many other countries, obesity is a serious problem. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to do something about it. Influenced by many experts, he believes that soda is a contributing factor to increasing obesity rates and that large portion sizes are making the problem worse. In 2012, he proposed to ban the sale of sweetened drinks in containers larger than sixteen ounces at restaurants, delis, theaters, stadiums, and food courts. The New York City Board of Health approved the ban.

Many people were outraged by what they saw as an egregious illustration of the nanny state in action. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to choose a large bottle of Coca-Cola? The American Beverage Association responded with a vivid advertisement, depicting Mayor Bloomberg in a (scary) nanny outfit.

But self-interested industries were not the only source of ridicule. Jon Stewart is a comedian, but he was hardly amused. A representative remark from one of his commentaries: “No!…I love this idea you have of banning sodas larger than 16 ounces. It combines the draconian government overreach people love with the probable lack of results they expect.”

Many Americans abhor paternalism. They think that people should be able to go their own way, even if they end up in a ditch. When they run risks, even foolish ones, it isn’t anybody’s business that they do. In this respect, a significant strand in American culture appears to endorse the central argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. In his great essay, Mill insisted that as a general rule, government cannot legitimately coerce people if its only goal is to protect people from themselves. Mill contended that
the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.
A lot of Americans agree. In recent decades, intense controversies have erupted over apparently sensible (and lifesaving) laws requiring people to buckle their seatbelts. When states require motorcyclists to wear helmets, numerous people object. The United States is facing a series of serious disputes about the boundaries of paternalism. The most obvious example is the “individual mandate” in the Affordable Care Act, upheld by the Supreme Court by a 5–4 vote, but still opposed by many critics, who seek to portray it as a form of unacceptable paternalism. There are related controversies over anti-smoking initiatives and the “food police,” allegedly responsible for recent efforts to reduce the risks associated with obesity and unhealthy eating, including nutrition guidelines for school lunches.

Mill offered a number of independent justifications for his famous harm principle, but one of his most important claims is that individuals are in the best position to know what is good for them. In Mill’s view, the problem with outsiders, including government officials, is that they lack the necessary information. Mill insists that the individual “is the person most interested in his own well-being,” and the “ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.”

When society seeks to overrule the individual’s judgment, Mill wrote, it does so on the basis of “general presumptions,” and these “may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases.” If the goal is to ensure that people’s lives go well, Mill contends that the best solution is for public officials to allow people to find their own path. Here, then, is an enduring argument, instrumental in character, on behalf of free markets and free choice in countless situations, including those in which human beings choose to run risks that may not turn out so well.

Mill’s claim has a great deal of intuitive appeal. But is it right? That is largely an empirical question, and it cannot be adequately answered by introspection and intuition. In recent decades, some of the most important research in social science, coming from psychologists and behavioral economists, has been trying to answer it. That research is having a significant influence on public officials throughout the world. Many believe that behavioral findings are cutting away at some of the foundations of Mill’s harm principle, because they show that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.

For example, many of us show “present bias”: we tend to focus on today and neglect tomorrow. For some people, the future is a foreign country, populated by strangers. Many of us procrastinate and fail to take steps that would impose small short-term costs but produce large long-term gains. People may, for example, delay enrolling in a retirement plan, starting to diet or exercise, ceasing to smoke, going to the doctor, or using some valuable, cost-saving technology. Present bias can ensure serious long-term harm, including not merely economic losses but illness and premature death as well.

People also have a lot of trouble dealing with probability. In some of the most influential work in the last half-century of social science, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that in assessing probabilities, human beings tend to use mental shortcuts, or “heuristics,” that generally work well, but that can also get us into trouble. An example is the “availability heuristic.” When people use it, their judgments about probability—of a terrorist attack, an environmental disaster, a hurricane, a crime—are affected by whether a recent event comes readily to mind. If an event is cognitively “available”—for example, if people have recently suffered damage from a hurricane—they might well overestimate the risk. If they can recall few or no examples of harm, they might well underestimate the risk.

A great deal of research finds that most people are unrealistically optimistic, in the sense that their own predictions about their behavior and their prospects are skewed in the optimistic direction.6 In one study, over 80 percent of drivers were found to believe that they were safer and more skillful than the median driver. Many smokers have an accurate sense of the statistical risks, but some smokers have been found to believe that they personally are less likely to face lung cancer and heart disease than the average nonsmoker. Optimism is far from the worst of human characteristics, but if people are unrealistically optimistic, they may decline to take sensible precautions against real risks. Contrary to Mill, outsiders may be in a much better position to know the probabilities than people who are making choices for themselves.

Emphasizing these and related behavioral findings, many people have been arguing for a new form of paternalism, one that preserves freedom of choice, but that also steers citizens in directions that will make their lives go better by their own lights. (Full disclosure: the behavioral economist Richard Thaler and I have argued on behalf of what we call libertarian paternalism, known less formally as “nudges.") For example, cell phones, computers, privacy agreements, mortgages, and rental car contracts come with default rules that specify what happens if people do nothing at all to protect themselves. Default rules are a classic nudge, and they matter because doing nothing is exactly what people will often do. Many employees have not signed up for 401(k) plans, even when it seems clearly in their interest to do so. A promising response, successfully increasing participation and strongly promoted by President Obama, is to establish a default rule in favor of enrollment, so that employees will benefit from retirement plans unless they opt out. In many situations, default rates have large effects on outcomes, indeed larger than significant economic incentives.

Default rules are merely one kind of “choice architecture,” a phrase that may refer to the design of grocery stores, for example, so that the fresh vegetables are prominent; the order in which items are listed on a restaurant menu; visible official warnings; public education campaigns; the layout of websites; and a range of other influences on people’s choices. Such examples suggest that mildly paternalistic approaches can use choice architecture in order to improve outcomes for large numbers of people without forcing anyone to do anything.

In the United States, behavioral findings have played an unmistakable part in recent regulations involving retirement savings, fuel economy, energy efficiency, environmental protection, health care, and obesity. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron has created a Behavioural Insights Team, sometimes known as the Nudge Unit, with the specific goal of incorporating an understanding of human behavior into policy initiatives. In short, behavioral economics is having a large impact all over the world, and the emphasis on human error is raising legitimate questions about the uses and limits of paternalism.
RTWT.

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Jimmie Bise Blasts Epic Manifesto of Youth Empowerment and Independence on Twitter

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I mentioned that someone needed to curate this, and I don't see that anyone's done it, so here goes:




























































I caught Jimmie posting this manifesto midstream, but if that top tweet is any clue, it's William Jacobson who got him going: "Upworthy — or, How we are losing the internet to lowest of low information young liberals."

Jimmie's manifesto is a thing of beauty, and since I had the time to curate it, I thought, "Why in the heck not?"

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Samsung Challenges Apple's Cool

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This is something I've been thinking about more often since getting an iPhone. It's an amazing piece of technology, but what's the competition? Who makes a better device? Remember, I mentioned the iPad had a huge glitch with the browser crashing, so that experience really tarnished the user vibe for Apple products. Their stuff is still the most invulnerable from malware --- or, that's what they say. But criminal programmers will get to them sooner or later.

In any case, at the New York Times, "Samsung Emerges as a Potent Rival to Apple’s Cool":

Samsung
Apple, for the first time in years, is hearing footsteps.

The maker of iPhones, iPads and iPods has never faced a challenger able to make a truly popular and profitable smartphone or tablet — not Dell, not Hewlett-Packard, not Nokia, not BlackBerry — until Samsung Electronics.

The South Korean manufacturer’s Galaxy S III smartphone is the first device to run neck and neck with Apple’s iPhone in sales. Armed with other Galaxy phones and tablets, Samsung has emerged as a potent challenger to Apple, the top consumer electronics maker. The two companies are the only ones turning profits in the highly competitive mobile phone industry, with Apple taking 72 percent of the earnings and Samsung the rest.

Yet these two rivals, who have battled in the marketplace and in the courts worldwide, could not be more different. Samsung Electronics, a major part of South Korea’s expansive Samsung Group, makes computer chips and flat-panel displays as well as a wide range of consumer products including refrigerators, washers and dryers, cameras, vacuum cleaners, PCs, printers and TVs.

Where Apple stakes its success on creating new markets and dominating them, as it did with the iPhone and iPad, Samsung invests heavily in studying existing markets and innovating inside them.

“We get most of our ideas from the market,” said Kim Hyun-suk, an executive vice president at Samsung, in a conversation about the future of mobile devices and television. “The market is a driver, so we don’t intend to drive the market in a certain direction,” he said.

That’s in stark contrast to the philosophy of Apple’s founder Steven P. Jobs, who rejected the notion of relying on market research. He memorably said that consumers don’t know what they want.

Nearly everything at Samsung, from the way it does research to its manufacturing, is unlike Apple. It taunts Apple in its cheeky advertisements while Apple stays above the fray.

And the Korean manufacturer may even be putting some pressure on Apple’s world-class designers. Before Apple released the iPhone 5, which had a larger screen than earlier models, Samsung had already been selling phones with even bigger displays, like the 5.3-inch screen Galaxy Note, a smartphone so wide that gadget blogs call it a phablet.

Samsung outspends Apple on research and development: $10.5 billion, or 5.7 percent of revenue, compared with $3.4 billion, or 2.2 percent. (Samsung Electronics is slightly bigger than Apple in terms of revenue — $183.5 billion compared with $156.5 billion — but Apple is larger in terms of stock market value.)

Samsung has 60,000 staff members working in 34 research centers across the globe, including, Russia, Britain, India, Japan, Israel, China and Silicon Valley. It polls consumers and buys third-party research reports, but it also embeds employees in countries to study trends or merely to find inspiration for ideas.

Designers of the Galaxy S III say they drew inspiration from trips to Cambodia and Helsinki, a Salvador Dalí art exhibit and even a balloon ride in an African forest. (It employs 1,000 designers with different backgrounds like psychology, sociology, economy management and engineering.)

“The research process is unimaginable,” said Donghoon Chang, an executive vice president of Samsung who leads the company’s design efforts. “We go through all avenues to make sure we read the trends correctly.” He says that when the company researches markets for any particular product, it is also looking at trends in fashion, automobiles and interior design.
Continue reading.

And see Steve Kovach, at CNN, "How Samsung Is Out-Innovating Apple."

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San Antonio Military Base Used as Children's Shelter

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Due to an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border into the U.S., a San Antonio Air Force base has been turned into a shelter to house the children.  According to the article below, the majority of the children are from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.  A smaller number of the children are from Mexico.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/immigrant-children-air-force-base-shelter_n_1431584.html?1334749309&ref=latino-voices
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18 Şubat 2013 Pazartesi

POPE BENEDICT XVI

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STATEMENT on the RESIGNATION of
POPE BENEDICT XVI 
Cardinal Roger M. MahonyArchbishop Emeritus of Los Angeles February 11, 2013
PopeBenedict XVI has been an extraordinary Successor to St. Peter these past eightyears, and I thank God for the graces and blessings which have come to theChurch and to the world during his Pontificate.

Itwas my privilege to participate in the Conclave of April 2005 when PopeBenedict was elected.  I recall soclearly his words when he told the Cardinals that he was choosing the name ofBenedict because of his fondness for the prayerfulness and the Rule of St.Benedict, and also because Pope Benedict XV [1914—1920] served during a time ofturmoil and wars across the world.
 PopeBenedict XVI began his Petrine ministry from a firm foundation of prayer,holiness, and remarkable scholarship. Before the end of 2005 he issued DeusCaritas Est, a letter on the virtue and gift of charity and love among thedisciples of Jesus Christ.  Two morefollowed:  one on hope in 2007, the thirdon faith in 2009.
Hishomilies and addresses were so amazing because he was not speaking about JesusChrist as a topic, but he was speaking about Jesus from a deep and intimateknowledge of Jesus himself.  It was thatattraction to the person of Jesus Christ which flowed from all his manyteachings for the Church and the world.
Surelyone of his great legacies will be a continuing emphasis on the need for allCatholics to exercise their role as evangelizers in the world.  His focus upon the new evangelization willcontinue to enliven all disciples of Jesus.
TheChurch will continue to be blessed by his prayer lifted up for the needs of theworld, as well as by his writings which will continue to nourish the minds,hearts and souls of Catholics around the world.
Ilook forward to traveling to Rome soon to help thank Pope Benedict XVI for hisgifted service to the Church, and to participate in the Conclave to elect hissuccessor.
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POPE BENEDICT'S WRITINGS

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Although Pope Benedict is stepping aside as our active Pope, nonetheless his marvelous writings will continue to guide and inspire us for decades to come.

His brief meditations are among my favorites, and if you want a great companion for Lent, be sure to get a copy of The Joy of Knowing Christ.  His 55 meditations bring us ever more deeply into the life of Jesus Christ.  [Easy to purchase on line]

If you use one meditation a day during Lent you will come to know Jesus in new and palpable ways, and your friendship with him will become an amazing grace for you.

The more fully we listen to Jesus' words and instructions, and the more we watch in wonderment as he touches the lives of countless crowds with his message of God's love and mercy, then the more able you and I are to imitate Jesus in our own lives. 

The New Evangelization proposed by Benedict flows from two founts:  knowing Jesus more deeply, and sharing him in love and through actions towards others.

May Jesus accompany us day after day along our Lenten journey!
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