Presidential Health

As long as I'm discussing physical abilities today, I might as well offer my 2  cents worth on presidential health.

There's a current controversy over the release of medical records. I quickly agreed with Kevin Drum's post on medical and financial transparency.  Latter Twitter provided more information--Bloomberg is a qualified pilot, including helicopters, and passed an FAA medical exam last year; there's not that much difference among the types of medical information provided by current and past candidates--typically a physician's summary with some data but not really complete information.That includes Sanders.

Apparently Bloomberg had two stents inserted in the past, but not as aftermath to a heart attack.  Biden has survived brain surgery, which sounds scary but apparently doesn't have any meaning for the future.

Does the ADA Apply to Airlines?

I follow John Fea at the Way of Improvement.  Today he notes the controversy over reclining airplane seats.

He's 6' 8", so naturally he hates flying.

I wonder though--the Americans with Disability Act requires reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.  Couldn't height, in the context of airplanes, be considered a disability?

Answer: Based on a layman's skim of the ADA text it isn't.  The key thing seems to be this definition of disability:as a condition which  "...substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual".

Interest Rates and Savings Rates

Saw a chart showing the US savings rate over the years today.  It's interesting.  Here's the wikipedia page, which only goes to 2010. (Is wikipedia losing its oomph?)  It shows the savings rate dropping to about 4 percent in 1998 and 2 percent in 2005, recovering to about 7 percent in 2010. Since then the rate has been in the 7 percent neighborhood.

Some of the discussion, at least on one site, is how low the rate is, when considering how much people should be saving for their retirement.  But the article where I saw the graph was emphasizing the positive, the revival of the rate since the recession, noting how low the interest rates are currently.

That caught my attention.  I know just enough about economics to know that interest is the price of money.  So my (maive) assumption is that the higher the interest rate the higher the savings rate. But that doesn't appear to be the case.  I must be missing something.

(It is interesting the fluctuations of savings--in my young adulthood it was around 10 percent, from 1975 to 85 it declined to 7 percent before its most recent drops.

"Only" Versus "Nearly"

In a Times editorial today I saw a statement to the effect that "nearly one-third of Americans think same-sex marriage is wrong".  I don't know if the statistic is right, but it struck me that it should have read "only one-third....". 

In other words, what seems most important to me is how little opposition there now is to same-sex marriage, just about 25 years after President Clinton signed legislation "defending marriage". 

I never thought popular opinion could change that fast.  Indeed, when the subject was first raised, I didn't see it as a particularly serious or important initiative.  So frankly I wished it would go away, as making it an issue was a strategy Republicans/conservatives could use to defeat Democrats/liberals.

I was wrong then. 

The IRS Budget

Trump proposes to cut IRS employees by over 1,000.

Trump proposes an increase in IRS budget.

I saw both takes online, which was very confusing.

Here's a bit of explanation:

For the Internal Revenue Service, the plan proposes $12 billion, which is about a 4% increase from fiscal 2020, yet would decrease staff levels by 1,183 full-time employees. However, with $400 million in “cap adjustments,” there would be a net increase of 1,700 positions from fiscal 2020 levels. “Cap adjustments” are spending that is allowed above the limits in the 2019 budget agreement because of its potential to generate revenue.

There's much more at the link.

The Decline? of Dairy

Is dairy farming really going to hell in a handbasket? That's what I often see, with the trend to ever-larger farms and the decline of the dairy farms of the sort I knew in my youth.

But here's another take from a blogger I follow.  She notes the decline of "English" farms of 50 cows or so over the past 20 years, but notes their replacement by Amish farms.  I'm not sure where the Amish are marketing their milk.  Is it being sold as organic?  That would seem likely.  Anyhow the post is a reminder that change is complicated. 

The Importance of Hidden Improvements

Economic historians have an ongoing debate about the reasons for the Industrial Revolution and why it happened first in the UK and Netherlands.

One thing which occurs to me is the importance of hidden inventions: the sort of things which are important but haven't gotten attention, things like:

• the invention of eyeglasses
• the improvement of lighting--when did the whaling industry develop, was it to provide whale oil to light the lamps of the UK and US? 
• the development of quarantine as a means to counter infectious diseases
• the accumulation of people--the greater density of population leading to more interchange of ideas
• the spread of literacy meaning easier communication of ideas among people and over time.

We Should Calm Down II

See this wikipedia piece on party divisions.  Despite the Democrats moaning about the advantages which gerrymandering and the structure of the Senate give to the Republicans, during my lifetime I've lived through several Congresses in which the Democrats had at least a 3/5 margin in the Senate (albeit with 2 independents) and a couple recent Congresses in which they had a bigger margin in the House than the Republicans ever have. 

The key for us is continuing our 2018 progress at the state level in 2020.

We Should Calm Down

John Fea at the Way of Improvement blog sponsors this post on divisions within America. Zack Beauchamp at Vox has this post on the ills of our democracy.

Personally I don't buy the crisis talk.  I remember the divisions in the country in the 1950's and the 1960's and the 1970's and....  Notably in the late 60's and early 70's we had riots and terrorist bombings, not to mention our strongest third party movement in a long time.   We survived, and I'm sure we will continue to survive.  Trump will leave office on or before Jan 20, 2025.  I hope we elect a Democrat in 2020 who will lower the tensions and revive many of the norms which he has broken.  But if we have to live through another 4+ years, we'll survive.

The Importance of Heritage: Klobuchar

IIRC Hubert  Humphrey was called a "happy warrior" which turns out to be a poem by Wordsworth

The label has been applied to others, notably Al Smith by FDR, but Googling "happy warrior" and "Humbert Humphrey" has 285,000 hits.

Because the voting age was 21, I couldn't vote in 1960, but Humphrey was my candidate.  He made perhaps the most important political speech ever in the 1948 Democratic convention, one on behalf of civil rights and one which meant the exodus from the convention of the Dixiecrats who ended with Strom Thurmond as their candidate.

Once elected senator he was a stalwart for liberal causes through the 1950's, serving as a bridge between LBJ and the liberals, being active in many causes.

After Humphrey Walter Mondale and then Paul Wellstone continued the heritage of Minnesota liberalism in the Senate.

Klobuchar worked as an intern for Mondale, who has been a mentor to her since.  And Wellstone encouraged her first run for office.