The Athlete

So, the youngest is turning out to be the most serious athlete of the three.  She has been playing in the goal for her soccer team full time for about a year.  The team is moving from an independent D2 to join a club run by a former EPL player.  The older two both did/do sports, but never showed much interest in watching other games or the pros to improve their own game.  Not so for the youngest.  She watches EPL & La Liga all the time.  She asks me to take her out to the fields & work on technique with her.  She's serious.

This week, she had tryouts for the new club.  I can tell that she is a really good, aggressive keeper, when compared to the D2 teams we have played.  I didn't have any way to gauge how good she might be on an absolute scale.  Well, after the end of tryouts, I got a hint.  The parents and kids were standing around after listening to the head of the club cover some business.  One of the coaches/trainers approached me while I was talking to my kid & asked "is this your daughter?"  Hearing that she is, he said "she is spectacular!"  I guess she made the team.

So, umm.. yeah.  this is just a "brag on my kid" post. 

Making Connections

Yesterday was a pretty interesting day. It started with a soccer game that began sunny and then became enveloped in fog. My father came down from Dallas after and we headed over to Sitagu Vihara for a ceremony honoring Sitagu Sayadaw.

In Sayadaw's Dhamma lecture, he talked about the ability for one's name to live on after their death. He explained that one way to accomplish this "extended life" was to have a positive influence on as many people as possible while you are alive, inspiring others to view you with reverence.

After the ceremony, my father and I went to the Moody theater to listen to the Experience Hendrix 2012. This is an annual tour where various musicians perform Jimi Hendrix music. Heavy on guitarists, as you might expect. There are different lineups for different segments of the tour. For the Austin shows, Eric Johnson, Dweezil Zappa, Eric Gales, Robert Randolph, Robby Krieger of the Doors, and others were scheduled to play. One thing I saw that disappointed me was that Bootsy Collins was doing several shows, the last of which was Houston, the show before Austin. I'm a big Bootsy fan, so I was a little bummed that he wasn't coming to Austin.

Well, much to my surprise, Bootsy did show up to play in Austin! He performed several songs with Robert Randolph. At one point, during 'Purple Haze' he lead the crowd in a chant "'scuse me while I funk the blue sky, Jimi's music will never die!"

It occurred to me later that Bootsy was articulating the same message as the Buddhist monk, in a roundabout way. The fact that the tour exists, and the chant that Bootsy was leading both are indications of the positive impact that Jimi Hendrix has had on people. The people gathered there were there as much for a celebration of Jimi as they were to hear the different artists. I know from having seen some of them perform Hendrix songs in other shows, that these weren't a bunch of musicians who learned Hendrix songs for this tour. They connect with his music just as much as the fans.

It was a good day.

BooMan

I posted a link on FB, but wanted to put a few more key quotes from this

We've had thirty years of Reaganomics in this country and nothing is trickling down (if you need to read it in graph form, read it in graph form). In 2009, when taxes were at their lowest level since 1950, the right decided we are all Taxed Enough Already and formed the TEA Party. Then they complained about the deficit. It's so stupid you could cry.

Pretty succinct.
Also:

This was so predictable that Mayor Bloomberg literally predicted it just a day or two before the protests started:
“You have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs, that’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kind of riots here,” Bloomberg said on his Friday morning radio show."

and finally:

Pretty soon he'll find out why rich people have gladly paid taxes for centuries. Yeah, they need the power grids and roads and the harbors and the airports. But they also need the police and power of the State to protect them from hordes of people who will only tolerate their wealth as long as it is shared in the form of jobs and an education and opportunity.

In the end, after all the arguments have died down, taxes keep the pitchforks at bay.

Follow the links & read the whole thing.

This Debt Thing Makes Me Wonder Why I Voted For Obama. Oh, Yeah...

...This

Also note, this isn’t just about contraception. As Igor Volsky noted, HHS is also requiring free coverage of human papillomavirus testing; HIV screening; breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling; and domestic violence screening and counseling.

This is a very big deal. As Pema Levy recently explained, “It’s hard to stress just how big a deal these changes will be. Advocates have been fighting for universal contraceptive access for decades, and in a year when access to preventative care has been severely rolled back, it’s a rare and important win for women.”

And without the Affordable Care Act, this wouldn’t even be a possibility.

(emphasis added)
More detail

Other preventive services covered include:

—At least one “well-woman” preventive care visit annually.

—Screening for diabetes during pregnancy.

—Screening for the virus that causes cervical cancer for women 30 and older.

—Annual HIV counseling and screening for sexually active women.

—Screening for and counseling about domestic violence.

—Annual counseling on sexually transmitted infections for sexually active women.

—Support for breast feeding mothers, including the cost of renting pumps.

It Gets Better

This won't stop all the self appointed 'liberal base' hucksters from freaking out for maximum blog traffic. But for people who aren't dependent on continual outrage for a living, it's some good news in what appears to be a dark time.

There are two parts of the spending cuts in this package that really do matter. One is the cuts that will apply in Fiscal Year 2012. There probably won’t be very big; there will be $22 billion in spending cuts compared to the baseline for 2012, or about 0.15 percent of GDP. (That’s out of the $1 trillion in cuts that will be agreed upfront.)

A “Super Committee” will be charged with finding a further $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, and we can expect that the cuts it recommends will again be backloaded. (Indeed, if the Super Committee deadlocks, we will go to an automatic “trigger” process which involves no cuts at all until FY 2013). Discretionary spending cuts that come out of the Super Committee process will again be subject to the whims of future Congresses. Any changes to mandatory spending that come out of the Super Committee are more likely to be sticky—that’s the second part of the cuts that matters—but I’ll believe we’re getting meaningful entitlement reform when I see it.

So, liberals who are upset that this deal is destimulative, or who expect it to tank the economy, are off base. Suzy Khimm cites a study finding that a 1 percent of GDP fiscal consolidation implies a 0.5 percent reduction in GDP after two years—or a reduction in the growth rate of 0.25 percent each year. That points to a hit to annual GDP growth of roughly 0.04 percentage points from the FY 12 changes in this plan—an effect that will be impossible to pick up amidst the noise.

Hit the link at the top & read the whole thing.

Everybody freakout.....NOW

If you don't read other liberal blogs, but you are following the debt ceiling "crisis", then you're probably thinking "the President has offered all kinds of stuff to the republicans, but those idiots can't take yes for an answer." If, on the other hand, you do read liberal blogs (or watch "liberal" TV show hosts) then you're probably thinking "OH NOES!!! The President is going to sell out everything we care about & get nothing in return!!! I can't believe that (unattributed reports say) that he's offered to raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67!!! Why can't he negotiate?? WHY?? WHY???"

Exhibit A: A lovely post entitled "Barack Obama more disappointing by the day" at Daily Kos (no link love from me).

I have also come to the conclusion that Barack Obama will never fight for anything. Compromise, do what ever to go along and get along, that is him but fight, he won't. We saw it through the health care battle, we saw him cave into extending the Bush Tax Cuts (which is part of the problem that put him in this dilemma) and now we are seeing him ready to under cut his own health care law just to make a deal.

Pathetic.

I agree. It's pathetic how willing some on "the left" are to condemn the President for getting as much as he can rather than holding out for his entire wishlist. Funny how he left out the part about "caving on the Bush tax cuts" bringing an unemployment insurance extension over the holidays & the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Must have slipped his beautiful pure mind.

I'll end with this from Lawrence O'Donnell - a man not known for his abundant praise of the President.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

An Example of Why Voodoo Econ & Education Cuts Go Hand in Hand

Added The Street Light to the blog roll. It's always worth reading & presents what some view as complex subjects in a straightforward manner. This post,which was linked by some other econ blogs is a must read:

Suppose that the country – let’s call it Austerityland – has a GDP of $100/year, and a budget deficit of $10/yr, or 10% of GDP. And suppose that the government decides it wants to get the deficit down to 5% of GDP. How can it get there?

No, the answer is not “cut spending by $5/yr”. Nor is it “raise taxes by $5/yr”. And last but not least, it is also not “enact a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that total $5/yr”. To see why, let’s do just a bit of arithmetic.

If you want to talk about the deficit & especially if you want to talk about capping it as a percentage of GDP, you should understand this formula:

GDP (Y) is a sum of Consumption (C), Investment (I), Government Spending (G) and Net Exports (X - M).
Y = C + I + G + (X − M)

Knowing that, this should be easy to follow:

Recall that GDP is the sum of spending on final goods and services by domestic consumers, domestic businesses, and the government, along with net exports:
GDP = C + I + G + (X – M) = Y. Recall as well that GDP is, for our purposes, the same thing as income (Y).

If G is reduced by $5 in Austerityland, the first thing that happens is that GDP falls by $5. But then a bunch of secondary effects kick in, including:
C falls, since individuals in the economy have seen their income drop by $5. This makes GDP fall even further. This is called the “multiplier effect”, and it means that the total fall in GDP is likely to be substantially greater than $5. (Empirical research seems to usually show that the government spending multiplier is in the neighborhood of 1.5, implying that the net fall in GDP will be around $7 or $8.)
If interest rates are positive, they will tend to fall as demand diminishes, which could boost spending by businesses. But if interest rates are already at zero (as they are effectively are in the US), they will not fall, and we get no boost to private investment.
Tax revenues fall as income falls. If the effective marginal tax rate on income is 25% and income falls by $4, for example, then tax collections will fall by $1.
So, what is the budget deficit in Austerityland after a $5 reduction in government spending? If we assume a relatively modest multiplier of 1.5, and a tax rate of 25%, then we get:

ΔG = -$5
ΔY = -$7.5
ΔT = -$1.875

And the new deficit is now $6.875, which is 7.4% of the new level of GDP. Wait, I thought we were trying to get the deficit down to 5% of GDP? What happened?

What happened is that we’ve missed our target, by quite a bit, due to the multiplier effect and the fall in tax revenues that resulted from the shrinking economy. In fact, just a bit of simple algebra allows us to figure out that government spending in Austerityland will have to be cut by about $9 in order to reach a budget deficit target of 5% of GDP. In other words, the government will have to cut spending by almost twice as much as it initially thought it would in order to reach its deficit target.

(When that happens, by the way, GDP will fall from $100 to around $86. Yes, that’s a 14% drop in output. But hey, at least we’ve hit our deficit reduction target!)

If you've made it this far, here's the punch line:

Somehow, this simple exercise in macroeconomic math seems beyond the reach of policymakers around the world.

Many Republicans (and some Democrats) in Washington continue to believe that they can close a $1 trillion deficit by simply cutting $1 trillion in spending, and are apparently hoping to use the debt ceiling vote to do exactly that.

The Cameron government in the UK embarked on an austerity program last year to try to reduce its budget deficit, and now mysteriously keeps missing its deficit reduction targets as the UK economy shrinks.

The Greek government was forced into enacting a number of austerity measures last year, and... surprise, surprise... is now missing its deficit targets.
...
But when basic Macro 101 both makes good theoretical sense and also fits what we actually observe, it's really time to start looking for your handy Occam's Razor.

When you cut education funding, you are actively working to ensure that less people can recognize when dangerous/disasterous ideas are presented as facts. If you saw a politician saying we need to balance the budget by drastically reducing the size of our economy, what would your reaction be?