Lance Armstrong, the Baseball Hall of Fame: I just don't get it

While I still haven't gone back to looking at the news, I do watch ESPN during my morning hour of exercise. Last week the reporting was dominated by major league baseball's not voting into the hall of fame some of history's greatest players joining Pete Rose as pariahs in the sport. I am a baseball fan. My trips to Cooperstown to the Hall of Fame are among my favorite memories. Sure Rose is a jerk, Barry Bonds is a jerk and Roger Clemens is a psycho jerk but what did that have to do with their accomplishments? The baseball writers will say that Bonds, Clemens and those in the doping era cheated and would not have obtained greatness otherwise. Yet the question is "if it was not illegal to dope and almost everyone was doing it, then why the indictment now"? I remember when a reporter was interviewing Mark McGuire and a bottle of androstenedione (Andro) was openly displayed on the shelf of his locker. When asked, McGuire said that he was not taking it to increase strength but it allowed him to recover more quickly from injury and for the first time in his career was able to play a full season. At the time, Andro was not a banned substance but McGuire is denied admission to the hall of fame because of it. Bonds has been linked to steroid use. Clemens has been indicted and subsequently acquitted. But the question remains: if at the time the use of steroids was not banned, then why deny admittance to the hall? As to Pete Rose, his sin was that he bet on baseball - although he contends that he did not bet on his own games. This does not affect the fact that he is baseball's hits leader. For the hits leader not to be in the hall is ludicrous. The same is true for stripping Lance Armstrong of his Tour de France titles. Cycling is a sport in which virtually everyone doped. In other sports, if the winner is disqualified then second place is given the prize - see Ben Johnson in the Olympics. Yet in cycling no one is declared the winner of Armstrong's Tour de France since they can't find anyone who is clean. So I ask the question again: if everyone is cheating, then is anyone cheating?

Fiscal Follies: We have been conned again

To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling: If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, perhaps you have misjudged the situation. Remember when the Congress kicked the fiscal can down the road by creating a joint committee to resolve the debt ceiling crisis of 2010? The committee was to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over a ten year period. Mind you, that is $120 billion a year while the deficit is $1.3 trillion a year. This amounts to only $55 b is annual cuts for both defense and non-defense. So what the Congress was fighting over is a deficit that would still be in excess of $1 trillion after the "reductions". So to quote Stevie Wonder "whats the fuss"? I am reminded of the saying that the fights in academics are so fierce because the stakes are so small. The same is true for politics. The cuts could only occur in "discretionary" spending. But the majority of the budget is "non-discretionary". Of course, non-discretionary can be changed to discretionary if the congress so chooses. For example in FY 2013 $3.8 trillion dollar budget Non-discretionary spending: (65%) $820 billion (22%) Social Security payments $811 billion (21%) Medicare/Medicaid/SCHIP payments $246 billion ( 6%) interest on the National Debt $583 billion (15%) other ‘mandatory’ payments This totals to $2.5 trillion in "non-discretionary" spending. During the fiscal year, receipts are "only" $2.9 billion leaving $400 billion to fund the rest of the government. Look at discretionary spending: Discretionary spending: (35%) $700 billion (18%) national defense ($55b is 7.8%) $565 billion (15%) other ‘discretionary spending’ ($55b is 10.3%) $ 97 billion ( 3%) Overseas Contingency Operations Needless to say the total of $1.36 trillion is a wee bit more than $2.9 billion or for that matter the puny $120 billion that the congress found impossible to cut. In their infinite wisdom, the "fiscal cliff" was averted by increasing taxes while postponing the sequestration of funds until March 2013. The deal passed by the congress only addresses the revenue side and ignores the sequestration of the $120 b postponing it until March. The key elements of the deal are: 1. reinstatement of the payroll tax by two percentage points to 6.2% for income up to $113,700 2. reversal of the Bush tax cuts for individuals making more than $400,000 and couples making over $450,000 (which entails the top rate reverting from 35% to 39.5%). 3. increase in the tax on investment income from 15% to 23.8% for filers in the top income bracket and a 3.8% surtax on investment income for individuals earning more than $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000. 4. Limiting deductions for incomes over $250,000 for individuals and $300,000 for married couples. The legislation would raise roughly $600 billion in new "revenues" over 10 years, according to various estimates. (That is $60 b per year which is also a wee bit less than the $1.36 trillion mentioned above). Federal "revenues" are typically 18 percent of GDP regardless of the tax code. Now its about 16 percent because of the recession. CBO estimated that the new changes would cause "revenues" to increase to 19.8 percent of GDP over the next three years. But those figures assume an increase in economic growth going forward. The deficit con: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that current plan includes $330.3 in new spending during the next ten years, and it will increase the deficit by $3.9 trillion in that time period despite raising taxes on 77.1% of U.S. households. Bloomberg reports, "More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes. Among the households facing higher taxes, the average increase would be $1,635. If the current laws slated for 2013 had become law, the combination of higher taxes and spending cuts would reduce the deficit by an estimated $560 billion - leaving the deficit at around $1 trillion. Essentially what this means is that the deal actually increases the deficit my more than if we went over the so-called fiscal cliff. Of course, we haven't attacked spending yet, but I am taking bets that I know the outcome already. So the last hope lies in saying no to the increase in the debt ceiling coming in March. Last time, the press screamed that not increasing the ceiling would result in the government defaulting. The president said that social security checks might be delayed. Of course both are wrong. There are enough incoming tax receipts to pay the principal and interest payments on the debt, to pay social security, medicare and the military. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) actually introduced legislation in 2010 that would mandate that these be paid and the cuts come elsewhere. The press and the president were simply resorting to scare tactics to force an increase in the ceiling. As it stands, the debt ceiling is the only realistic barrier to increased spending. The government could no longer spend by borrowing more and more. We have seen that the congress does not have the will to decrease spending no matter how small. The spending will only be limited if the republicans in the House heed Nancy Reagan with regard to the debt ceiling and "just say no."

Changing the education paradigm: Part 1

For about the past year I have been working at changing the education paradigm in Knox County. If you go to the education consumers foundation website you can pull up the reading scores for Knox county. The state minimum is 45% while the state average is 60%. In Knoxville, twenty five schools are above the state average while twenty two are below the state average. At the bottom are two mostly black schools with only 12.4% and 14% proficiency. Traditionally, it has been easy to ignore such failure. Indeed, in the strike of teachers in Chicago last year, the head of the teachers' union say that they would continue to oppose subjecting teachers to the achievement levels of the students because "inner city children do not have the capacity to learn." Now understand this is a black woman talking about black children. However, these kids do have a capacity to learn but don't because the delivery system is flawed. I have asked teachers, why is it that their slowest learner could somehow know all the words to the most complicated rap upon a couple of listenings if they lacked the capacity to learn? The answer lies in the delivery method. The traditional method is what I call the boring method and is what is taught in our colleges of education. There is an alternative method called direct instruction that has proven successful in teaching at-risk kids and is being used by Elgin Foundation of Knoxville in systems in Virginia and Kentucky and achieving 90 percent efficiency. These are schools in poor mostly coal mining communities and one county in which 60 percent of the children do no live with their biological parents. Elgin has found that to teach effectively one needs to change the education paradigm. The use a method called Direct Instruction (see http://vimeo.com/5293093). It is interesting that the method of instruction in our schools has basically been unchanged since the invention of the printing press - and probably unchanged from the beginning of time. It is essentially mass produced and mass delivered. We herd all our kids into a building, separate them by age and teach them all the same stuff. What is interesting is that we are doing less and less of this mass production in other industries. Automobiles are essentially custom built with the buyer deciding on what extras and accessories come on the vehicle. You can get a custom made suit or shirt for almost the cost of one off the shelf. We now have just in time production and supply chain management. Yet we have brought few if any of these innovations into our schools. I know that I was taught mainly at home by my parents after I got out of school. I did the same with my children. That is their education was customized to fit them and not for the convenience of some school system that they happened to be attending. We must rescue all our children from the clutches of outdated obsolete school systems. Today the only party in the schools who do not have an advocate are the children themselves. I am working with a group of concerned citizens to advocate for the children. More on that later but for now look at this video on the education paradigm. http://www.youtube..com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

No lame duck congress

There should be no lame duck congresses. In the election year the term of the congress should end the day of the election rather than at the end of the calendar year. The terms of the congress and the president are defined in the 20th amendment as

Section 1. The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

Not being a constitutional scholar, I presume that in order to change the terms of the congress, we would need another amendment. Some would be appalled and say, “What would happen between election day of the even numbered years and January 3rd? The answer is “thankfully nothing” since the congress would not be in session. This would force the congress not to have any unfinished business and we would not be treated to the brinkmanship exhibited in the fiscal cliff and budget discussions. We would also remove from the process all the defeated politicians voting on bills for which they would not have to face the voters.

Happy anniversary Emancipation Proclamation

January 1st marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Although universally acknowledged as an important historical document, the reasons for its importance are not at all clear. I remember being taught in high school that Lincoln freed the slaves and immediately getting into an argument (which I lost) with the teacher. I contended that Lincoln could not have freed the slaves since the slaves were freed by the 13th amendment which was ratified after Lincoln’s death. She, of course, was referring to the Emancipation Proclamation as the document which freed the slaves. However, I remember a conversation I had with my great grandmother (Ma Mat) who said she was in December 1864 picking cotton on Bonner’s Hill in Clinton, Ga “when Sherman marched up the hill”. She also said that when she heard of the Emancipation the previous year, the slaves all of a sudden did not starting running around shouting “Lawdy we is free”. Rather it was business – or servitude – as normal. Even after "Sherman" had left Clinton headed to Savannah, the slaves remained in bondage. Although later I learned that it was not Sherman but rather Oliver O. Howard’s (Howard University) wing that marched up Bonner’s Hill, it still did not detract from Ma Mat’s powerful imagery. So armed with that information from my great grandmother I confronted my high school history teacher. Later at home I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica to actually read the Emancipation Proclamation and sure enough it stated that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” Since those states had declared their independence, the Proclamation did not have any force of law. Indeed, so as not to offend the neutral states and territories that allowed slavery (Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and the western counties of Virginia) Lincoln had carefully crafted his words. However, there was one very important provision of the proclamation, that was to have the Federal forces to “recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” This was of extreme importance since in earlier years or the war, runaway slaves were often not aided by the federals and were sometimes returned back to the confederate lines. Also after the proclamation, the federals started wholesale enlistments of black troops. Although the vast majority were freemen, many were runaways. In the end, more than 200,000 blacks wore union blue and their most historians find that the superiority of manpower of the federals enhanced by the blacks in blue, hastened the end of the war. Finally, did my history teacher concede? No. She simply stated that Lincoln through the emancipation laid the foundation for freedom and had motivated the 135th amendment which was passed in the Senate before Lincoln’s assassination. Selah.

Congress postpones making real decisions

Knoxville News Sentinel Sunday, January 6, 2013 Happy New Year. While the country was treated to the latest edition of our government in Washington behaving badly, I purposely ignored anything related to the "fiscal cliff" until Jan. 1. It did not take any insight to forecast that Congress would wait until the last second to do something, and what would be done would be to continue to kick the can down the road. Not only was Congress dealing with the fiscal cliff, lawmakers also were dealing with approaching yet another debt ceiling. So, typically, Congress decided to take action on neither. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has stated that he will do some creative accounting (which he is famous for in preparing his own taxes) to push the ceiling date out for two more months, at which time we will be treated to the same absurd theater that we saw in 2010 with the debate on raising the ceiling. In the case of the fiscal cliff, Congress only addressed the tax issue and postponed the spending issue. Was anyone surprised? On the revenue side, there was a suggestion made by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney that deserved some serious attention. It was to limit deductions. Some of us are old enough to remember the Tax Reform Act of 1986 signed by Ronald Reagan, which lowered personal tax rates at the top and raised them at the bottom. It also took away personal interest deductions and basically left only the mortgage interest deduction for households. Romney's suggestion to limit deductions would have been a compromise for those who want to increase taxes on the "wealthy" and those who do not want to raise taxes at all. By limiting deductions, the tax rates would stay unchanged, satisfying the no-tax crowd, while revenues would increase temporarily, satisfying the bigger government crowd. The Tax Policy Center estimated that if all deductions were eliminated and all tax rates were cut by 20 percent, plus the Alternative Minimum Tax were eliminated, then $2 trillion in additional revenue would be raised over 10 years. However, such a proposal is too simple to be enacted by our politicians. The Tax Policy Center estimated that if deductions were limited to $17,000, revenue would increase by $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Limiting deductions to $25,000 would raise $1.3 trillion, and limiting deductions to $50,000 would raise $760 billion. In the Senate bill, which passed, 89-8, there is a limit on deductions, but the bill, not surprisingly, was suboptimal, linked to incomes rather than to total deductions. As to sequestration of federal spending? It was delayed for two months. That means we can look forward to the government again acting even worse when it has to deal with both sequestration and the debt ceiling. Scripps Lighthouse By Dr. Harold Black Sunday, January 6, 2013 Happy New Year. While the country was treated to the latest edition of our government in Washington behaving badly, I purposely ignored anything related to the "fiscal cliff" until Jan. 1. It did not take any insight to forecast that Congress would wait until the last second to do something, and what would be done would be to continue to kick the can down the road. Not only was Congress dealing with the fiscal cliff, lawmakers also were dealing with approaching yet another debt ceiling. So, typically, Congress decided to take action on neither. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has stated that he will do some creative accounting (which he is famous for in preparing his own taxes) to push the ceiling date out for two more months, at which time we will be treated to the same absurd theater that we saw in 2010 with the debate on raising the ceiling. In the case of the fiscal cliff, Congress only addressed the tax issue and postponed the spending issue. Was anyone surprised? On the revenue side, there was a suggestion made by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney that deserved some serious attention. It was to limit deductions. Some of us are old enough to remember the Tax Reform Act of 1986 signed by Ronald Reagan, which lowered personal tax rates at the top and raised them at the bottom. It also took away personal interest deductions and basically left only the mortgage interest deduction for households. Romney's suggestion to limit deductions would have been a compromise for those who want to increase taxes on the "wealthy" and those who do not want to raise taxes at all. By limiting deductions, the tax rates would stay unchanged, satisfying the no-tax crowd, while revenues would increase temporarily, satisfying the bigger government crowd. The Tax Policy Center estimated that if all deductions were eliminated and all tax rates were cut by 20 percent, plus the Alternative Minimum Tax were eliminated, then $2 trillion in additional revenue would be raised over 10 years. However, such a proposal is too simple to be enacted by our politicians. The Tax Policy Center estimated that if deductions were limited to $17,000, revenue would increase by $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Limiting deductions to $25,000 would raise $1.3 trillion, and limiting deductions to $50,000 would raise $760 billion. In the Senate bill, which passed, 89-8, there is a limit on deductions, but the bill, not surprisingly, was suboptimal, linked to incomes rather than to total deductions. As to sequestration of federal spending? It was delayed for two months. That means we can look forward to the government again acting even worse when it has to deal with both sequestration and the debt ceiling.

Random Thoughts

• There are 5 BCS bowls so why don’t the top 10 BCS teams play in them? • Tom Cruise is Jack Reacher? If you have read any of Lee Child’s novels you know something is wrong. o First, the movie would be simply “Reacher” since the title character generally goes by only his last name. o Second, Reacher is physically imposing – 6’5” 250 lbs - and uses his size to intimidate. Isn’t Tom Cruise a little guy? • I said that I was taking a break after the election and I have. o I haven’t watched a single newscast. o I haven’t read a single newspaper. o I haven’t listened to talk radio. o I haven’t missed it. • You know you are getting old when o The TV shows you watch only air commercials about ED, debt reduction, class action lawsuits and stool softeners. o On the stations you seldom watch, you haven’t a clue what anyone is talking about. o Your grandchildren are in college. • Its been a productive deer season thus far – I won’t burden you with pictures. But after last year being the worse ever, its nice to have a good one. As some of you know, I have not eaten what my grandfather used to call “store bought meat” in 30 years. I have enough venison in my freezers to last until next year and still give a good bit away to friends and family. • I hope you and yours have a Merry Christmas.