Telepathic rats team up across continents – FT.com: Rats have collaborated telepathically across continents in the first use of neurotechnology to transmit thoughts directly between animals’ brains. Scientists trained rats in Durham, North Carolina and Natal, Brazil to work together to solve problems in return for a drink of water. In the first experiment they had to press the correct lever corresponding to a particular indicator light; in the second they had to distinguish between wide and narrow openings. Electrodes picked up the brain activity of the first rat, the “encoder”, and fed it over the internet into the brain of its partner, the “decoder”, which had the same levers in its cage but received no visual cues about which one to press. The best decoder rats correctly mimicked their corresponding encoder partners 70 per cent of the time.
Prof Nicolelis said the experiments could lead to the creation of a biological computer – or “brain-net” – linking multiple brains. “We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net,” he said. “In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves. One animal might even incorporate another’s sense of self.”
As an avid reader of Science Fiction since I was a small boy of 7 back in 1964 and so exposed to all of Golden Age SF, TVs Outer Limits, and 30s-60s Hollywood Hooror movies at a time when girls had Cooties I have one response.
“Gosh? What could POSSIBLY go WRONG?!!”
Actually it all reminds me of a Little Johnnie joke about rats. One that in 1964 would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap. And might now except my Mom doesn’t like driving Bridge and Freeway traffic from Marin to Berkeley.
Anyway I am not sure I am the only one with caveats about turning over Turing Tests to a self-aware intercontinental network of rats. Or did 50 bazillion cheesy films, TV episodes, and pulp fiction stories lead me wrong over the last half a century?
Francis Crick, in the introduction to a Scientific American issue devoted to the brain in the early 80s, explained how memory worked in the brain. It sounded a lot like a radio tuner.
He said all our memories are firing or transmitting simultaneously and the memory that most closely resembles our current thought becomes our next thought. He called it “parallel waveforms.”
Sounds similar to how a radio tuner works — you tune the receiving circuit to the frequency of one sending station so that the station signal that you want to receive can be efficiently induced in that circuity because it is compatible with that wavelength (the circuit carries the signal with no inefficiency) — but other stations are out of sync.
If two rats brains are similar enough, maybe recording the waves emitted near one rat’s brain and playing them back near the the brain of another rat can do something similar.
I do not wish to be, uh, condescending but I may be the only one here who has personal, day-to-day street (or rather house) experience with the species.
Upon moving into our hell-hole, rail road apartment in New ‘s East Village apartment in 1966 the first thing myself and my brother saw down the other end was a big rat sitting in the middle of the kitchen, not in any big hurry to move off.
The trick to catching them was to set the trap at a hair trigger — by squeezing the catch that the bar fit under so almost flat that it was hard to put it down of the floor without going off.
When we killed one — when we woke up in the morning — we just threw it out the fourth floor window — the alley cats would finish it off before you could get downstairs (“New York, New York; it’s a wonderful … “)
The book goes along to work with myriad New York City exterminators who all profess the impossibility of removing the infestation.
Not true. Some of my brothers teenage friends brought a blind, albino rabbit with them to nearby Tompkins Square park to try to attract girls. Didn’t work.
So they left it with us. As it could not see, I suppose, it just sat in a corner eating, ___ting and eating its own ___t (cud).
The rabbit would eat 50 cent a head lettuce but not 25 cent a head cabbage. It would also eat the linoleum out of the floor, the Sunday New York Times, the pockets out of my brother’s suede coat, the kitchen broom, but not cabbage.
Anyway, city rats being from the slums did not know what a rabbit was (or they would have ate it) — they must have thought it was a giant rodent (not a ruminant) so from then on they stayed away.
So I know more about the thinking of rats than most people might immediately suspect. 🙂
can someone explain to me how the sequestered cuts came to be $85 billion? (as is now widely quoted)
my understanding was that the budget control act specified $1.2 tillion over ten years; with the imputed interest on the debt savings, that would amount to $92.1 trillion a year in cuts, which was the figure widely used by the press and analysts last year as we approached the “fiscal cliff”…
The GOTeaparty whines that the pentagon trough has been reduced to 18% of federal outlays [Brits the other large spender in NATO is 6%], things are very confusing!!
Sequestration in Military Industry Congress Complex, I have not gone into other discretionary, is between $500B and $1,200B over $7800 in budgetary dreams.
DoD Budgets executed one year at a time, are developed for 2 or 3 years. Programs are done for the budget years plus 3 years. Longest programs go is 6 or 7 years. Where the 10 year dreams come from is planning. DoD has a 50 year plan to plunder entitlements.
Federal budgets and plans are described in either ‘then’ year or ‘budget’ year dollars. The sum of a program in ‘budget’ year dollars should give you the present value of its spending spree. The sum of program in ‘then’ year dollars gives the nominal appropriation request for the future years.
I suspect the figures are ‘then’ year which makes them seem to be much deeper cuts.
I read a Congressional Research Service report on sequestration and gleaned from it that agencies can “claim” as cuts their reductions in unobligated balances of any of their appropriations. Except military pay and allowances which is not subject to sequester.
In DoD one year appropriations pay for operations, there is two year appropriations, money to pay R&D and there is three year appropriations, money to procure things. In R&D money they can reduce unobligated balances of 2012 money in 2013 and claim they meet 2013 sequestration. In procurement they can reduce unobligated balances of 2011 money and claim it in 2013.
It is all very confusing, so they can keep plundering entitlements.
Is there any way by which the sequestration of funds can be rank ordered in terms of implementation, if not varied by percentage of program reduction? If the rank ordering can be implemented, can the reduction and/or complete elimination of funds be first applied to Congressional Committees budgets and then to elected Congressional and Senatorial member salaries? It occurs to me that given that the Congress is currently not doing any functionally effective work, no funds ought be squandered on their efforts or lack thereof.
quoting an article from yesterday, jack, the sequestration calls for a 7.8% cut in non-exempt defense discretionary funds and 5% cut in non-exempt non-defense discretionary funding. It also calls for 2% cuts to Medicare, 5.1% to other non-exempt non-defense mandatory programs and 7.9% to non-exempt defense mandatory programs.
it’s pretty much across the board…includes mandatory unpaid leave for most federal employees…IRS doesnt take their time off till after 4/15, though…
A friend of mine in MD who works for the DOD says that they will get formal notice on Monday that will probably tell them to take one day a week unpaid leave starting in 30 days but their health insurance, etc. will still be the same deduction out of their lower paychecks.
In this case it seems like a cross the board 20% reduction. For the agency, it is hard to know just what %/employee this is since they still have prefunding of retirement, employer share of health care, life insurance, etc.
“…but members of the Senate and House will not be furloughed.”
But they’ ve already furloughed themselves and they seem to have been on furlough for quite a long while now when measured by anything being accomplished.
And Krasting, What need is there to reduce benefits to the one and maybe the only persistently successful government run program ever. It has its own funding stream, or have you once again conveniently forgotten that fact. It may run a deficit and its “savings” fund may run out in twenty years? OK, then increase the FICA deduction rate by the very tiny amount needed to offset those future deficiencies. Problems require the simplest soloutions, not the most draconian. And what do you propose that workers do in order to assure themselves of some retirement income?
Krasting, the numbers would look even better if we simply halved or eliminated the annual cost of living increase. We’re wasting a lot of time and effort on this silly chained CPI metric to try to conceal the sole goal of cutting benefits–in this case, cutting benefits as the recipient ages.
I call “chained” CPI “cascade” CPI. If people get paid less or welfare drops they eat more rice and less pork. Then, the CPI reports inflation lower than the real price rises of both foods because folks are eating more of the cheaper food. In turn, people get even poorer as their pay or welfare lowers even more so they eat even more rice and even less pork, etc., etc., etc.
Reminds me of the Republican plan — “hedonics”; should have been called “headonics” — to give Social Security retirees less money to eat because they were getting a better deal every year on computers and such — same overall value in their stipend (also same hidden value in the taxpayers’ left over money, so no real unfairness).
here’s a 70-page white house report to congress accompanying the sequestration cuts order and detailing the reductions they’ll make, agency by agency and program by program:
go to the back of the class. we covered this last Monday while you were throwing spit wads at the girls.
it’s not a big deal to you because you are not trying to live on a thousand dollars or less a month.
and the fact remains that it is not necessary: the “actuarial deficit” can be eliminated entirely by raising the payroll tax eighty cents per week for the people who will get the benefits,.
that’s eighty cents per week.
eight cents.
what’s wrong with that is that it wouldn’t hurt anybody. and your friends WANT to hurt the poor.
and, sadly, some of my friends WANT to hurt the rich.
it’s a big deal to me because it is thoroughly dishonest.
the chained cpi amounts to saying… we think you can live on less. all you have to do is switch to cat food. it’s a matter of hedonics you see.
krasting at least is only an idiot. the lying bastards who are proposing the chained cpi are the sort of evil that cannot be forgiven: they know their proposal is designed to hurt people who cannot defend themselves. and they know they are lying with the intent to hurt people.
Krasting, you appear to believe that we need to cut SS benefits more than zero percent and less than (a draconian) 25 percent. Do you have a number that you like, for some reason? While you think of a number, let me suppose it’s 20 percent–would you object to accomplishing this via a simple 20 percent income tax imposed on SS benefits, which would be sent to the SSA?
Krasting: “Any thoughts on the CBO report re using chained CPI that came out late Friday?
The numbers presented make a pretty good case for making a change??”
Webb: “No.”
Krasting CBO doesn’t make policy and only on rare occasions does it suggest policy, and then obliquely by such things as inventing the “Alternative Scenario Baseline” that implicitly make judgements about the likely future behavior of Congress.
What CBO does is score proposals. Which produces numbers. And numbers don’t make cases, people do by plugging those numbers into their own assumptions.
Anyone could predict that the adoption of Chained/Superlative CPI would cut expenditures, and it is relatively trivial to calculate what an approximate 0.3% cut per year compounded would do to the ten year spending score. CBOs projection of such a ten year score would only come as some sort of surprise or have any implications for policy if it was radically different than the calculations done by everyone else. In this case it wasn’t, being within 10% or so of any number I have seen for the SS component.
So how in the world can this Report be spun as “making a case”?
Now we do have instances of CBO Reports with policy implications. A few years ago Senator Hatch submitted an alternative plan to Obamacare that focused on tort reform. http://www.cbo.gov/publication/41334 The result was pretty laughable, with total effects on Federal budgets a reduction of $41 billion over ten years plus an increase in revenue of $13 billion mostly due to physicians pocketing previously pre-tax insurance premiums as taxable income. That amount of reduction was so out of scope with the cost control problem ostensibly being addressed that no one has seriously put forth tort reform as a major alternative since this 2009 letter and subsequent score.
So it is possible for numbers to make a case. Mostly when they come as a surprise or as a debunking of excessive off the cuff claims.
But what about this $127 billion over ten year number counts as either? I mean you cut spending X by Y% and spending totals drop by .YY x X. This is policy guidance?
“Right now, given reasonable estimates of likely future growth and inflation, we would have a stable or declining ratio of debt to G.D.P. even if we had a $400 billion deficit.” *** “If you do the math, it seems likely that full economic recovery would raise revenue by at least $450 billion.” *** A reasonable estimate is that economic recovery would reduce federal spending on such programs by at least $150 billion. *** Which brings us back to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.” ****** BTW, Why cutting a trillion dollars out of the federal deficit in a national economy which will produce over two hundred trillion dollars over the same span is so super crucial is a little lost on me — but everybody says so, so there must be “something” to it. ???
Federal civil service unions should be screaming bloody murder over the furloughs which seem to be set for 5 Apr onward.
Obama is letting the generals reduce civil pay, while he is keeping all the expensive, hard to to maintain equipment coming, which will not be supported as the 8% is a permanent reduction and so procurement needs to be reduced to reflect the reduced support budgets.
The more reasonable cut in DoD is to procurement, because the numbers of unreliable stuff bought will have less money for support, and the support budgets will not deliver “readiness”. Good thing there are no enemies!
The cuts should include reducing Air Combat forces by 50% and Naval aviation by 6 aircraft carriers. Their decks are not needed and the cancelled planes are more expensive than the carriers. Mechanized brigades should be reduced by 50% as well.
But those needed reductions would hurt Lockheed, Boeing, GD….. profits.
I won’t even go into the generals’ threats to stop lying about readiness and tell how bad it really is and falsely blaming sequestration.
The 8% is not permanent in any real sense. No Congress can bind the hands of future Congresses and cuts for future years were always left in the hands of the Appropriators. And if they feel too squeezed can simply pass new legislation voiding these particular Budget restrictions.
NPR is it clear that it is really binding on this Congress. Not only has their been legislation introduced that would simply overturn it, I see no reason why it couldn’t be modified in the course of approving the Continuing Resolution that needs to happen by month’s end to avert a total shutdown. House R’s may be talking a good game about holding the line and maybe even pushing back on current year spending even further in exchange for the Continuing Resolution but whether that works seems to me an open question.
Given that the showdown over the Shutdown will have to be resolved before civilian layoffs under Sequestration could actually go into effect (30 day notice being required in most cases) it makes both practical and Game Playing sense to focus cuts on the easiest sector from which to back them off. And furloughs can be turned off overnight if things break right while contract cancellations/modifications can’t be, or at least not as easily.
So while I am right with Ilsm on the big picture I just don’t see this potential four week blip as being the right opportunity to overhaul the entire military-industrial complex. To me that is the mirror image of R’s trying to tie repeal of Obamacare into every little legislative sticking point: “okay we will raise the Debt Limit for a month, all you have to give up is health insurance coverage for 50 million Americans”.
In both cases there is just not enough leverage given the standing point, the pole, and the object to be moved.
the chained CPI will eventually cut up to 9% of benefits.
krasting says that is not draconian.
but a 25% cut is.
and elsewhere he has argued that a 100% cut for those who can’t pass his “means test” is the preferred solution.
because, you see, taking away what the people have paid for is “more fair” than letting them pay an extra eighty cents per week to keep benefits at a level that will keep “the poor” out of the cat food aisle.
all of this because he can’t get it into his head that Social Security has nothing to do with the government debt.
in this respect he is no better than the “progressives” who say “you can’t take away the workers SS because they paid for it themselves. instead you should make the rich pay for it.”
Interesting you find that DoD has 800,000 civilian employees. The OPM counts in the neighborhood of 500,000. I have seen the 800,000 figure in letters from the DoD.
Where are the other 300,000? Not temps or other appointments. The other 300,000 are likely contractors working on contracts to deliver performance of “services, non personal”. In my experience these contractors work in DoD spaces, and are doing a lot more than “services, non personal”. If DoD plans to furlough them that indicates the DoD has an employer employee relationship. Affecting an employer relationship is out of scope of the contracts. If a contractor does out of scope work he/she is performing voluntary services. It could be the demanding of voluntary services which violates: 31 USC 1342. The Title 31 has serious implications.
In any event there is a serious amount of waste, fraud and abuse in those 300,000 the DoD thinks are employees who are actually on contract. At roughly $200,000 a year per full tiem equivalent, which is how a lot of these are “ordered” there are a lot of saving! coberly,
Good news AARP, whom I do not support is opposed to the chained cpi!
ilsm, i really dont know, and havent followed DoD closely enough to venture an opinion; i had just been working on figuring out the effects of the sequester when your initial comment came up, & pulled that defense dept civilian employees number out of an article at the federal times that i had open at the time & linked to above…i cant vouch for its accuracy…
Webb – I thought it was interesting that CBO did a review without specific legislation to score. They just tossed it out for discussion.
Yes, it was easy to estimate what it would do to SS benefits. But the report also shows how this would change the revenue side.
Yes SS goes down by 127b, but revenues go up by 123b. The combined affect will make it more palatable.
The only way out of the sequester/ continuing resolution box is for a change on entitlements. I think the chained CPI is the bargaining chip. The CBO teed it up for exactly that reason.
Krasting CBO issues all kinds of Reports and scores for all kinds of reasons. Certainly they score legislation but also issue annual reports on the Economic Outlook and Long Term Projections for Social Security and various updates thereto. Then again they respond to letters and requests from Congress.
This report is one of a series of ‘Cost Estimates’ http://www.cbo.gov/cost-estimates/search?filters=all%3A1 CBO explains the intent as follows: “Each year, CBO provides the Congress with several hundred formal cost estimates that analyze the likely effects of proposed legislation on the federal budget. The estimates are posted on CBO’s website in chronological order, and they are searchable by bill number, title, committee, and program area; each generally includes a description of the legislation, a statement about its estimated budgetary impact, and an explanation of the basis for that estimate.
CBO’s analysts also provide Congressional staff with thousands of informal estimates each year, generally to help staff draft proposals early in the legislative process or to indicate the budgetary impact of proposed amendments to pending legislation.”
Given this your attempt to insert CBO into the process as some sort of conscious political actor seems under supported by the evidence.
Plus that $123.7 billion in revenue has nothing to do with Social Security and everything to do with increasing taxes on or cutting subsidies to the middle class:
“e. Includes revenue changes from indexing parameters of the tax code and changes in the revenue portion of refundable tax credits for health insurance purchased through exchanges, as well as other effects on revenues of ACA provisions related to insurance coverage”
How those revenue provisions add to the impetus to introduce ‘entitlements reform’ is beyond me. It is almost like you didn’t bother to read anything except the top line numbers in this Report. Or didn’t expect anyone else to check your work. Or both.
as noted in an earlier comment, using chained CPI is an element of the president’s plan to replace the sequester…it also would affect the alternative minimum tax, not just COLAs
NOT TRYING TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT — JUST MOMENTARILY BACK TO MY OBSESSIONS:
If the federal minimum wage had not shrunk 30 percent (figures rounded) — from $10.50/hr to $7.25/hr — between 1968 and 2013, then, Wal-Mart prices would be only 1 1/2% higher today and Wal-Mart workers would be earning 17% more (wages 10% of costs), McDonald’s prices would be about 15% higher but McDonald’s employees would be earning 45% more (wages 33% of costs), and overall prices today would be 1 1/2% higher for the kind of folks who read this message (by the minimum wage alone — and not counting rippling push-ups which might not amount to much). Who would be hurt; who would be helped if we had maintained a $10.50/hr minimum wage — as average income grew 100%?
If the federal minimum wage had grown 43% instead — from $10.50/hr to $$15/hr — Wal-Mart prices would now be about 5% higher than if the minimum stayed stuck in 1968 (6.5% prices higher than today) but Wal-Mart employees would be earning 43% more (66% more than today), McDonald’s prices would be about 15% higher than in 1968 (35% higher than today) but McDonald’s workers would be earning 43% more than in 1968 (107% more than today). Overall prices up 2% (3 1/2% higher than today). Who would be hurt; who would be helped? ************
This morning I was shocked out of my scalp to read female, progressive economist of the Berkeley faculty, Christina D. Romer, writing this kind of stuff in the New York Times, yet: “Often, the customers paying those prices — including some of the diners at McDonald’s and the shoppers at Walmart — have very low family incomes. Thus this price effect may harm the very people whom a minimum wage is supposed to help.” “If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone — perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times.”
As to the latter, right down the road from the Berkeley faculty, on College Avenue, the workers at Albertson’s supermarket (like supermarkets all across the nation) have accepted a two-tier contract: new employees earn substantially less — goodbye supermarket jobs as a bulwark of middle class income — Wal-Mart pays less so supermarkets are forced to follow. (Note well: Wal-Mart closed 88 big boxes in Germany because it could not survive paying the same as other employers under legally mandated, sector-wide labor agreements.)
If this 18 year old’s understanding of the minimum wage and the US labor market is forthcoming from a prominent Berkeley supposed progressive economist (President’s Economic Council no less): WHO YA GONNA CALL?
While this appears to be a small amount in the overall scheme of things, it does mean more to the recipients than it does overall. More and more, the middle and lower income elderly (the bulk of the population) are again sinking into poverty. The $10 to $20 taken from them is very much the meals for the day or other necescities of life and for what??? So we can finane tax reductions for the 2 percent of the taxpayers making >$300,000, a defense department whose budget growth has exceeded the growth in GDP consistently, more corporate donations, etc? Apply the chained CPI to the growth in the Defense department budget.
Krasting, thanks for the answer. I agree. If only because most SS beneficiaries don’t have much if any income above their rather meager benefits, I tend to think we shouldn’t tax these benefits and certainly not tax every dollar of benefits. (And we don’t, except above certain incomes.) I asked my question because any reduction in scheduled benefits is equivalent to taxing scheduled benefits but, for some reason, people seem to be more willing to cut benefits than to tax them.
I have to admit your tax question had me baffled. until Krasting walked right into it.
Good one sir!
(and extendable. How many Republicans are willing to die on the last hill of no increases in marginal rates, but blithely advocate means testing Medicare for the ‘wealthy’?)
(actually there is a logic behind opposing increases in top rates and supporting means testing, it all has to do with a little concept called ‘incidence’, topic for. Gazillion potential posts)
MY COMMENT ON MARK THOMA’S TAKE ON CRISTINE ROMER’S MINIMUM WAGE ESSAY ON HIS “ECONOMIST’S VIEW” BLOG.
AFTER POSTING MY NEW EIGHTH-GRADE MATH ON THE TOPIC: The problem with academic progressives analyzing minimum wage effects is that they don’t catch on that workers could receive twice the wages they get for current productivity — because the minimum wage has fallen so CRAZILY FAR below what the market might willingly bear. Neither does anybody else (but this washed-up taxi driver? :=]).
The old story of boiling a frog comes to mind: put a frog into boiling water and it jumps right out — put it into cool water and gradually raise it to boiling and the frog wont notice. Not sure if this is true for frogs but the eighth-grade math proves something very much like this must have happened to Americans across the board — including, puzzlingly, even the author of this blog? ???
maybe i read it too fast, but Christina is worried because some stores will be paying nine dollars an hour while some others will be paying eight and getting all the business..
does she not understand what “minimum” means?
as well as all those poor people eating up their wage increase by consuming an equivalent amount of happy meals..
can you tell when someone is lying through their teeth and saying they think you are stupid at the same time?
Republicans and many economists argue for shifting to a more accurate inflation measure, called the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI). President Obama would support a version as part of a fiscal grand bargain. Because Social Security benefits would likely grow more slowly under this measure, many Democrats and social insurance advocates strongly oppose the idea.
But a new Congressional Budget Office estimate shows fiscal effects that chained CPI backers might not want to see. It turns out that shifting to the new inflation measure would raise taxes by nearly as much as it would slow Social Security spending over the next decade. Indeed, after 2021, the adjustment would raise taxes more than it would cut projected Social Security benefits.
just something to mull over:
Telepathic rats team up across continents – FT.com: Rats have collaborated telepathically across continents in the first use of neurotechnology to transmit thoughts directly between animals’ brains. Scientists trained rats in Durham, North Carolina and Natal, Brazil to work together to solve problems in return for a drink of water. In the first experiment they had to press the correct lever corresponding to a particular indicator light; in the second they had to distinguish between wide and narrow openings. Electrodes picked up the brain activity of the first rat, the “encoder”, and fed it over the internet into the brain of its partner, the “decoder”, which had the same levers in its cage but received no visual cues about which one to press. The best decoder rats correctly mimicked their corresponding encoder partners 70 per cent of the time.
Prof Nicolelis said the experiments could lead to the creation of a biological computer – or “brain-net” – linking multiple brains. “We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net,” he said. “In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves. One animal might even incorporate another’s sense of self.”
As an avid reader of Science Fiction since I was a small boy of 7 back in 1964 and so exposed to all of Golden Age SF, TVs Outer Limits, and 30s-60s Hollywood Hooror movies at a time when girls had Cooties I have one response.
“Gosh? What could POSSIBLY go WRONG?!!”
Actually it all reminds me of a Little Johnnie joke about rats. One that in 1964 would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap. And might now except my Mom doesn’t like driving Bridge and Freeway traffic from Marin to Berkeley.
Anyway I am not sure I am the only one with caveats about turning over Turing Tests to a self-aware intercontinental network of rats. Or did 50 bazillion cheesy films, TV episodes, and pulp fiction stories lead me wrong over the last half a century?
Francis Crick, in the introduction to a Scientific American issue devoted to the brain in the early 80s, explained how memory worked in the brain. It sounded a lot like a radio tuner.
He said all our memories are firing or transmitting simultaneously and the memory that most closely resembles our current thought becomes our next thought. He called it “parallel waveforms.”
Sounds similar to how a radio tuner works — you tune the receiving circuit to the frequency of one sending station so that the station signal that you want to receive can be efficiently induced in that circuity because it is compatible with that wavelength (the circuit carries the signal with no inefficiency) — but other stations are out of sync.
If two rats brains are similar enough, maybe recording the waves emitted near one rat’s brain and playing them back near the the brain of another rat can do something similar.
not sure i know enough to contradict mr crick. and the “experiment” certainly sounds … uh… paradigm changing
but at least as a first approximation, the “nearly simultaneous” firing of a billion or so neurons and multiples of that “synapses”
would be expected to in some ways resemble radio tuning… but don’t expect the actual mechanism to be the same.
and i am not ready to accept “brain waves’ (yes i know all about ekg’s. well, not “all” about them, but…)
I do not wish to be, uh, condescending but I may be the only one here who has personal, day-to-day street (or rather house) experience with the species.
Upon moving into our hell-hole, rail road apartment in New ‘s East Village apartment in 1966 the first thing myself and my brother saw down the other end was a big rat sitting in the middle of the kitchen, not in any big hurry to move off.
The trick to catching them was to set the trap at a hair trigger — by squeezing the catch that the bar fit under so almost flat that it was hard to put it down of the floor without going off.
When we killed one — when we woke up in the morning — we just threw it out the fourth floor window — the alley cats would finish it off before you could get downstairs (“New York, New York; it’s a wonderful … “)
An in-law recently gave he the book “Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan (Mar 24, 2005)” for a Christmas present. (I don’t think he meant anything by it — he had previously given me “Guns, Germs and Steel.”)
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=rats&index=blended&link_code=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=mozilla-20
The book goes along to work with myriad New York City exterminators who all profess the impossibility of removing the infestation.
Not true. Some of my brothers teenage friends brought a blind, albino rabbit with them to nearby Tompkins Square park to try to attract girls. Didn’t work.
So they left it with us. As it could not see, I suppose, it just sat in a corner eating, ___ting and eating its own ___t (cud).
The rabbit would eat 50 cent a head lettuce but not 25 cent a head cabbage. It would also eat the linoleum out of the floor, the Sunday New York Times, the pockets out of my brother’s suede coat, the kitchen broom, but not cabbage.
Anyway, city rats being from the slums did not know what a rabbit was (or they would have ate it) — they must have thought it was a giant rodent (not a ruminant) so from then on they stayed away.
So I know more about the thinking of rats than most people might immediately suspect. 🙂
well, changing topics…
can someone explain to me how the sequestered cuts came to be $85 billion? (as is now widely quoted)
my understanding was that the budget control act specified $1.2 tillion over ten years; with the imputed interest on the debt savings, that would amount to $92.1 trillion a year in cuts, which was the figure widely used by the press and analysts last year as we approached the “fiscal cliff”…
& even earlier last year, this year’s cuts had been scored at $109.3 billion per year by the CBPP…
so how did we get to $85 billion? deflation?
The GOTeaparty whines that the pentagon trough has been reduced to 18% of federal outlays [Brits the other large spender in NATO is 6%], things are very confusing!!
Sequestration in Military Industry Congress Complex, I have not gone into other discretionary, is between $500B and $1,200B over $7800 in budgetary dreams.
DoD Budgets executed one year at a time, are developed for 2 or 3 years. Programs are done for the budget years plus 3 years. Longest programs go is 6 or 7 years. Where the 10 year dreams come from is planning. DoD has a 50 year plan to plunder entitlements.
Federal budgets and plans are described in either ‘then’ year or ‘budget’ year dollars. The sum of a program in ‘budget’ year dollars should give you the present value of its spending spree. The sum of program in ‘then’ year dollars gives the nominal appropriation request for the future years.
I suspect the figures are ‘then’ year which makes them seem to be much deeper cuts.
I read a Congressional Research Service report on sequestration and gleaned from it that agencies can “claim” as cuts their reductions in unobligated balances of any of their appropriations. Except military pay and allowances which is not subject to sequester.
In DoD one year appropriations pay for operations, there is two year appropriations, money to pay R&D and there is three year appropriations, money to procure things. In R&D money they can reduce unobligated balances of 2012 money in 2013 and claim they meet 2013 sequestration. In procurement they can reduce unobligated balances of 2011 money and claim it in 2013.
It is all very confusing, so they can keep plundering entitlements.
Is there any way by which the sequestration of funds can be rank ordered in terms of implementation, if not varied by percentage of program reduction? If the rank ordering can be implemented, can the reduction and/or complete elimination of funds be first applied to Congressional Committees budgets and then to elected Congressional and Senatorial member salaries? It occurs to me that given that the Congress is currently not doing any functionally effective work, no funds ought be squandered on their efforts or lack thereof.
quoting an article from yesterday, jack, the sequestration calls for a 7.8% cut in non-exempt defense discretionary funds and 5% cut in non-exempt non-defense discretionary funding. It also calls for 2% cuts to Medicare, 5.1% to other non-exempt non-defense mandatory programs and 7.9% to non-exempt defense mandatory programs.
it’s pretty much across the board…includes mandatory unpaid leave for most federal employees…IRS doesnt take their time off till after 4/15, though…
rjs,
But what about Congressional committee budgets and Congressional salaries?
Any thoughts on the CBO report re using chained CPI that came out late Friday?
The numbers presented make a pretty good case for making a change??
CBO projects it will reduce benefits by $127B in the first ten years.
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43965
Congressional budgets must absorb cuts during the sequester, and congressional staff may be furloughed to do this, but members of the Senate and House will not be furloughed. http://news.yahoo.com/why-congress-protected-own-pay-115411807.html
A friend of mine in MD who works for the DOD says that they will get formal notice on Monday that will probably tell them to take one day a week unpaid leave starting in 30 days but their health insurance, etc. will still be the same deduction out of their lower paychecks.
In this case it seems like a cross the board 20% reduction. For the agency, it is hard to know just what %/employee this is since they still have prefunding of retirement, employer share of health care, life insurance, etc.
“…but members of the Senate and House will not be furloughed.”
But they’ ve already furloughed themselves and they seem to have been on furlough for quite a long while now when measured by anything being accomplished.
And Krasting,
What need is there to reduce benefits to the one and maybe the only persistently successful government run program ever. It has its own funding stream, or have you once again conveniently forgotten that fact. It may run a deficit and its “savings” fund may run out in twenty years? OK, then increase the FICA deduction rate by the very tiny amount needed to offset those future deficiencies. Problems require the simplest soloutions, not the most draconian. And what do you propose that workers do in order to assure themselves of some retirement income?
Jack, I asked a question. I did not propose any solutions.
Look at the numbers. Do you really think this makes that much of a difference? Draconian? Nah…
Krasting, the numbers would look even better if we simply halved or eliminated the annual cost of living increase. We’re wasting a lot of time and effort on this silly chained CPI metric to try to conceal the sole goal of cutting benefits–in this case, cutting benefits as the recipient ages.
PJR, it’s not “chained CPI” anymore; in the president’s plan to replace the sequester it’s now called “Superlative CPI”…
I call “chained” CPI “cascade” CPI. If people get paid less or welfare drops they eat more rice and less pork. Then, the CPI reports inflation lower than the real price rises of both foods because folks are eating more of the cheaper food. In turn, people get even poorer as their pay or welfare lowers even more so they eat even more rice and even less pork, etc., etc., etc.
Reminds me of the Republican plan — “hedonics”; should have been called “headonics” — to give Social Security retirees less money to eat because they were getting a better deal every year on computers and such — same overall value in their stipend (also same hidden value in the taxpayers’ left over money, so no real unfairness).
here’s a 70-page white house report to congress accompanying the sequestration cuts order and detailing the reductions they’ll make, agency by agency and program by program:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/legislative_reports/fy13ombjcsequestrationreport.pdf
Krasting
go to the back of the class. we covered this last Monday while you were throwing spit wads at the girls.
it’s not a big deal to you because you are not trying to live on a thousand dollars or less a month.
and the fact remains that it is not necessary: the “actuarial deficit” can be eliminated entirely by raising the payroll tax eighty cents per week for the people who will get the benefits,.
that’s eighty cents per week.
eight cents.
what’s wrong with that is that it wouldn’t hurt anybody. and your friends WANT to hurt the poor.
and, sadly, some of my friends WANT to hurt the rich.
guess who will get hurt.
oh, i should add
it’s a big deal to me because it is thoroughly dishonest.
the chained cpi amounts to saying… we think you can live on less. all you have to do is switch to cat food. it’s a matter of hedonics you see.
krasting at least is only an idiot. the lying bastards who are proposing the chained cpi are the sort of evil that cannot be forgiven: they know their proposal is designed to hurt people who cannot defend themselves. and they know they are lying with the intent to hurt people.
Coberly you a laugh. You make it like I wrote the CBO report. I just asked what you thought of it.
This is what I thought of it:
http://brucekrasting.com/cola-changes-pro-and-con/
Krasting
you did say “draconian? nah.”
i can only go by what you say. too bad you can’t.
I repeat, the consequences of the chained CPI is not Draconian. A 25% across the board cut back, as is now set up to happen, is Draconian
Krasting, you appear to believe that we need to cut SS benefits more than zero percent and less than (a draconian) 25 percent. Do you have a number that you like, for some reason? While you think of a number, let me suppose it’s 20 percent–would you object to accomplishing this via a simple 20 percent income tax imposed on SS benefits, which would be sent to the SSA?
Krasting: “Any thoughts on the CBO report re using chained CPI that came out late Friday?
The numbers presented make a pretty good case for making a change??”
Webb: “No.”
Krasting CBO doesn’t make policy and only on rare occasions does it suggest policy, and then obliquely by such things as inventing the “Alternative Scenario Baseline” that implicitly make judgements about the likely future behavior of Congress.
What CBO does is score proposals. Which produces numbers. And numbers don’t make cases, people do by plugging those numbers into their own assumptions.
Anyone could predict that the adoption of Chained/Superlative CPI would cut expenditures, and it is relatively trivial to calculate what an approximate 0.3% cut per year compounded would do to the ten year spending score. CBOs projection of such a ten year score would only come as some sort of surprise or have any implications for policy if it was radically different than the calculations done by everyone else. In this case it wasn’t, being within 10% or so of any number I have seen for the SS component.
So how in the world can this Report be spun as “making a case”?
Now we do have instances of CBO Reports with policy implications. A few years ago Senator Hatch submitted an alternative plan to Obamacare that focused on tort reform.
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/41334
The result was pretty laughable, with total effects on Federal budgets a reduction of $41 billion over ten years plus an increase in revenue of $13 billion mostly due to physicians pocketing previously pre-tax insurance premiums as taxable income. That amount of reduction was so out of scope with the cost control problem ostensibly being addressed that no one has seriously put forth tort reform as a major alternative since this 2009 letter and subsequent score.
So it is possible for numbers to make a case. Mostly when they come as a surprise or as a debunking of excessive off the cuff claims.
But what about this $127 billion over ten year number counts as either? I mean you cut spending X by Y% and spending totals drop by .YY x X. This is policy guidance?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/opinion/krugman-that-terrible-trillion.html
“Right now, given reasonable estimates of likely future growth and inflation, we would have a stable or declining ratio of debt to G.D.P. even if we had a $400 billion deficit.”
***
“If you do the math, it seems likely that full economic recovery would raise revenue by at least $450 billion.”
***
A reasonable estimate is that economic recovery would reduce federal spending on such programs by at least $150 billion.
***
Which brings us back to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.”
******
BTW, Why cutting a trillion dollars out of the federal deficit in a national economy which will produce over two hundred trillion dollars over the same span is so super crucial is a little lost on me — but everybody says so, so there must be “something” to it. ???
Federal civil service unions should be screaming bloody murder over the furloughs which seem to be set for 5 Apr onward.
Obama is letting the generals reduce civil pay, while he is keeping all the expensive, hard to to maintain equipment coming, which will not be supported as the 8% is a permanent reduction and so procurement needs to be reduced to reflect the reduced support budgets.
The more reasonable cut in DoD is to procurement, because the numbers of unreliable stuff bought will have less money for support, and the support budgets will not deliver “readiness”. Good thing there are no enemies!
The cuts should include reducing Air Combat forces by 50% and Naval aviation by 6 aircraft carriers. Their decks are not needed and the cancelled planes are more expensive than the carriers. Mechanized brigades should be reduced by 50% as well.
But those needed reductions would hurt Lockheed, Boeing, GD….. profits.
I won’t even go into the generals’ threats to stop lying about readiness and tell how bad it really is and falsely blaming sequestration.
as i read it, most employees on a federal government payroll will be forced to take a number of days of unpaid leave, which will vary by department; for instance, many as 800,000 civilian employees of the defense department will be required to take 22 days of unpaid leave before Oct. 1st…
The 8% is not permanent in any real sense. No Congress can bind the hands of future Congresses and cuts for future years were always left in the hands of the Appropriators. And if they feel too squeezed can simply pass new legislation voiding these particular Budget restrictions.
NPR is it clear that it is really binding on this Congress. Not only has their been legislation introduced that would simply overturn it, I see no reason why it couldn’t be modified in the course of approving the Continuing Resolution that needs to happen by month’s end to avert a total shutdown. House R’s may be talking a good game about holding the line and maybe even pushing back on current year spending even further in exchange for the Continuing Resolution but whether that works seems to me an open question.
Given that the showdown over the Shutdown will have to be resolved before civilian layoffs under Sequestration could actually go into effect (30 day notice being required in most cases) it makes both practical and Game Playing sense to focus cuts on the easiest sector from which to back them off. And furloughs can be turned off overnight if things break right while contract cancellations/modifications can’t be, or at least not as easily.
So while I am right with Ilsm on the big picture I just don’t see this potential four week blip as being the right opportunity to overhaul the entire military-industrial complex. To me that is the mirror image of R’s trying to tie repeal of Obamacare into every little legislative sticking point: “okay we will raise the Debt Limit for a month, all you have to give up is health insurance coverage for 50 million Americans”.
In both cases there is just not enough leverage given the standing point, the pole, and the object to be moved.
the heartbreak of being krasting:
Krasting says”I just asked what you thought of it”
coberly says, “no. you said it was not draconian.”
krasting says “I repeat, the consequences of the chained CPI is not Draconian.”
and thinks he has scored a point.
this poor boy can’t remember what he said, and thinks he wins the argument by contradicting himself.
and i am trying to break myself of calling him an idiot.
by the way
the chained CPI will eventually cut up to 9% of benefits.
krasting says that is not draconian.
but a 25% cut is.
and elsewhere he has argued that a 100% cut for those who can’t pass his “means test” is the preferred solution.
because, you see, taking away what the people have paid for is “more fair” than letting them pay an extra eighty cents per week to keep benefits at a level that will keep “the poor” out of the cat food aisle.
all of this because he can’t get it into his head that Social Security has nothing to do with the government debt.
in this respect he is no better than the “progressives” who say “you can’t take away the workers SS because they paid for it themselves. instead you should make the rich pay for it.”
rjs,
Interesting you find that DoD has 800,000 civilian employees. The OPM counts in the neighborhood of 500,000. I have seen the 800,000 figure in letters from the DoD.
Where are the other 300,000? Not temps or other appointments. The other 300,000 are likely contractors working on contracts to deliver performance of “services, non personal”. In my experience these contractors work in DoD spaces, and are doing a lot more than “services, non personal”. If DoD plans to furlough them that indicates the DoD has an employer employee relationship. Affecting an employer relationship is out of scope of the contracts. If a contractor does out of scope work he/she is performing voluntary services. It could be the demanding of voluntary services which violates: 31 USC 1342. The Title 31 has serious implications.
In any event there is a serious amount of waste, fraud and abuse in those 300,000 the DoD thinks are employees who are actually on contract. At roughly $200,000 a year per full tiem equivalent, which is how a lot of these are “ordered” there are a lot of saving!
coberly,
Good news AARP, whom I do not support is opposed to the chained cpi!
ilsm, i really dont know, and havent followed DoD closely enough to venture an opinion; i had just been working on figuring out the effects of the sequester when your initial comment came up, & pulled that defense dept civilian employees number out of an article at the federal times that i had open at the time & linked to above…i cant vouch for its accuracy…
rjs,
I fact checked myself!
I took the 500,000 from a blog post, sorry now I did not check it.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals A good source of lots of stuff.
OMB Budget Historical table 17.1 has executive branch civilian employee full time equivalents for 50 years or so.
Lowest Dod feds was at a low of650,000 in 2002 it has risen to 764,000 in 2013 estimate.
Totsal fed civilains was 1.756,000 in 2002 and 2,100,000 in 2012 est.
Looks like I was wrong and a fair amount of job growth in the federal sector.
Contractors have grown in Dod as well. Harder to track.
Interesting now I have found it again:
Defense investment was $67,5B in 2002 and $139.9B in 2012 (not adjusted for infaltion)
The peace dividend this time should be 35% cut to 2013 baselines.
Webb – I thought it was interesting that CBO did a review without specific legislation to score. They just tossed it out for discussion.
Yes, it was easy to estimate what it would do to SS benefits. But the report also shows how this would change the revenue side.
Yes SS goes down by 127b, but revenues go up by 123b. The combined affect will make it more palatable.
The only way out of the sequester/ continuing resolution box is for a change on entitlements. I think the chained CPI is the bargaining chip. The CBO teed it up for exactly that reason.
PJR – You ask:
would you object to accomplishing this via a simple 20 percent income tax imposed on SS benefits, which would be sent to the SSA?
No, I’m no happy with this. When would this 20% tax kick in? $40k? $50K?
While this approach is better than across the board cuts in benefits, it creates its own set of problems.
A guy losing 20% of his benefits because he has 50k of other income doesn’t seem all that fair.
If you juiced this up to $150k or $200k for a couple it would get “fairer”. But at that level the 20% tax would not generate much revenue.
You have to tax benefits at 100%, but you have to have a higher threshold ($200k or assets >$3m).
Krasting CBO issues all kinds of Reports and scores for all kinds of reasons. Certainly they score legislation but also issue annual reports on the Economic Outlook and Long Term Projections for Social Security and various updates thereto. Then again they respond to letters and requests from Congress.
This report is one of a series of ‘Cost Estimates’
http://www.cbo.gov/cost-estimates/search?filters=all%3A1
CBO explains the intent as follows:
“Each year, CBO provides the Congress with several hundred formal cost estimates that analyze the likely effects of proposed legislation on the federal budget. The estimates are posted on CBO’s website in chronological order, and they are searchable by bill number, title, committee, and program area; each generally includes a description of the legislation, a statement about its estimated budgetary impact, and an explanation of the basis for that estimate.
CBO’s analysts also provide Congressional staff with thousands of informal estimates each year, generally to help staff draft proposals early in the legislative process or to indicate the budgetary impact of proposed amendments to pending legislation.”
Given this your attempt to insert CBO into the process as some sort of conscious political actor seems under supported by the evidence.
Plus that $123.7 billion in revenue has nothing to do with Social Security and everything to do with increasing taxes on or cutting subsidies to the middle class:
“e. Includes revenue changes from indexing parameters of the tax code and changes in the revenue portion of refundable tax credits for health insurance
purchased through exchanges, as well as other effects on revenues of ACA provisions related to insurance coverage”
How those revenue provisions add to the impetus to introduce ‘entitlements reform’ is beyond me. It is almost like you didn’t bother to read anything except the top line numbers in this Report. Or didn’t expect anyone else to check your work. Or both.
as noted in an earlier comment, using chained CPI is an element of the president’s plan to replace the sequester…it also would affect the alternative minimum tax, not just COLAs
NOT TRYING TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT — JUST MOMENTARILY BACK TO MY OBSESSIONS:
If the federal minimum wage had not shrunk 30 percent (figures rounded) — from $10.50/hr to $7.25/hr — between 1968 and 2013, then, Wal-Mart prices would be only 1 1/2% higher today and Wal-Mart workers would be earning 17% more (wages 10% of costs), McDonald’s prices would be about 15% higher but McDonald’s employees would be earning 45% more (wages 33% of costs), and overall prices today would be 1 1/2% higher for the kind of folks who read this message (by the minimum wage alone — and not counting rippling push-ups which might not amount to much). Who would be hurt; who would be helped if we had maintained a $10.50/hr minimum wage — as average income grew 100%?
If the federal minimum wage had grown 43% instead — from $10.50/hr to $$15/hr — Wal-Mart prices would now be about 5% higher than if the minimum stayed stuck in 1968 (6.5% prices higher than today) but Wal-Mart employees would be earning 43% more (66% more than today), McDonald’s prices would be about 15% higher than in 1968 (35% higher than today) but McDonald’s workers would be earning 43% more than in 1968 (107% more than today). Overall prices up 2% (3 1/2% higher than today). Who would be hurt; who would be helped?
************
This morning I was shocked out of my scalp to read female, progressive economist of the Berkeley faculty, Christina D. Romer, writing this kind of stuff in the New York Times, yet:
“Often, the customers paying those prices — including some of the diners at McDonald’s and the shoppers at Walmart — have very low family incomes. Thus this price effect may harm the very people whom a minimum wage is supposed to help.”
“If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone — perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times.”
As to the latter, right down the road from the Berkeley faculty, on College Avenue, the workers at Albertson’s supermarket (like supermarkets all across the nation) have accepted a two-tier contract: new employees earn substantially less — goodbye supermarket jobs as a bulwark of middle class income — Wal-Mart pays less so supermarkets are forced to follow. (Note well: Wal-Mart closed 88 big boxes in Germany because it could not survive paying the same as other employers under legally mandated, sector-wide labor agreements.)
If this 18 year old’s understanding of the minimum wage and the US labor market is forthcoming from a prominent Berkeley supposed progressive economist (President’s Economic Council no less): WHO YA GONNA CALL?
Ok, I’ll bite:
“Any thoughts on the CBO report re using chained CPI that came out late Friday?
The numbers presented make a pretty good case for making a change??
CBO projects it will reduce benefits by $127B in the first ten years.” http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43965
While this appears to be a small amount in the overall scheme of things, it does mean more to the recipients than it does overall. More and more, the middle and lower income elderly (the bulk of the population) are again sinking into poverty. The $10 to $20 taken from them is very much the meals for the day or other necescities of life and for what??? So we can finane tax reductions for the 2 percent of the taxpayers making >$300,000, a defense department whose budget growth has exceeded the growth in GDP consistently, more corporate donations, etc? Apply the chained CPI to the growth in the Defense department budget.
Krasting, thanks for the answer. I agree. If only because most SS beneficiaries don’t have much if any income above their rather meager benefits, I tend to think we shouldn’t tax these benefits and certainly not tax every dollar of benefits. (And we don’t, except above certain incomes.) I asked my question because any reduction in scheduled benefits is equivalent to taxing scheduled benefits but, for some reason, people seem to be more willing to cut benefits than to tax them.
PJR oh SNAP!
I have to admit your tax question had me baffled. until Krasting walked right into it.
Good one sir!
(and extendable. How many Republicans are willing to die on the last hill of no increases in marginal rates, but blithely advocate means testing Medicare for the ‘wealthy’?)
(actually there is a logic behind opposing increases in top rates and supporting means testing, it all has to do with a little concept called ‘incidence’, topic for. Gazillion potential posts)
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MY COMMENT ON MARK THOMA’S TAKE ON CRISTINE ROMER’S MINIMUM WAGE ESSAY ON HIS “ECONOMIST’S VIEW” BLOG.
AFTER POSTING MY NEW EIGHTH-GRADE MATH ON THE TOPIC:
The problem with academic progressives analyzing minimum wage effects is that they don’t catch on that workers could receive twice the wages they get for current productivity — because the minimum wage has fallen so CRAZILY FAR below what the market might willingly bear. Neither does anybody else (but this washed-up taxi driver? :=]).
The old story of boiling a frog comes to mind: put a frog into boiling water and it jumps right out — put it into cool water and gradually raise it to boiling and the frog wont notice. Not sure if this is true for frogs but the eighth-grade math proves something very much like this must have happened to Americans across the board — including, puzzlingly, even the author of this blog? ???
maybe i read it too fast, but Christina is worried because some stores will be paying nine dollars an hour while some others will be paying eight and getting all the business..
does she not understand what “minimum” means?
as well as all those poor people eating up their wage increase by consuming an equivalent amount of happy meals..
can you tell when someone is lying through their teeth and saying they think you are stupid at the same time?
sounds like some mankiw would agree with…
the tax policy center on the CBO report cited by Krasting (as proposed by obama):
Republicans and many economists argue for shifting to a more accurate inflation measure, called the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI). President Obama would support a version as part of a fiscal grand bargain. Because Social Security benefits would likely grow more slowly under this measure, many Democrats and social insurance advocates strongly oppose the idea.
But a new Congressional Budget Office estimate shows fiscal effects that chained CPI backers might not want to see. It turns out that shifting to the new inflation measure would raise taxes by nearly as much as it would slow Social Security spending over the next decade. Indeed, after 2021, the adjustment would raise taxes more than it would cut projected Social Security benefits.