Month: March 2009

Budget 2009

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President Obama just released his budget proposal for 2010. Here’s some notes I made last year on the 2009 budget of the Bush administration.

The fiscal year of the U.S. is not the calendar year but October to September. So the 2009 fiscal year starts in Oct 2008 and ends in Sept 2009. The 2009 budget estimates that, in Sept 2009, the U.S. will owe the Social Security (SS) trust fund $2.6T (pg 350). That’s ‘T’ for trillion, a thousand billion. For many years, taxpayers have been paying more in SS taxes than the Social Security Administration (SSA) has been paying out to retirees. In 2007, the SSA paid out almost $600B but collected more than that in SS taxes. Each year our Congress and President have “borrowed” that extra money. In 2007, they borrowed $175B from the SS fund. In 2008 and 2009, they will borrow about $200B in each year. As the “boomer” generation (born 1946 to 1964) starts retiring in 2009, there will be more retirees and retirees are living longer. In 2010 or 2011, there won’t be any extra SS tax money for the Congress and President to borrow. As the number of living retirees continues to grow, the SS fund will need to be paid back with current year tax revenues. To do that, tax revenues will have to increase somehow.

Federal Employees

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President Ronald Reagan famously said “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Given that sentiment, I had thought that Reagan had shrunk the size of the federal government during his tenure. The 1997 Fact Book, published by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, has a table of federal employment totals from 1982 to 1996. In 1982, there were 2.8 million federal employees. By the end of Reagan’s presidency in 1988, there were 3.1 million employees.

Alzheimer’s Disease

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Ron Winslow in Wall St. Journal (WSJ), pg D3, on 2/19/09, reports that Genentech researchers propose a new theory about Alzheimer’s disease based on some early lab and mouse experiments. Further testing will need to be done to explore their theory that Alzheimer’s may be a natural process similar to one that occurs in the prenatal brain to prune excess nerve cells and fibers. Genentech hopes that further experiments will reveal what happens in the older adult brain to trigger this natural prenatal process. The current prevailing model of Alzheimer’s is that it is the buildup in the brain of beta amyloid plaques, a fragment of a larger protein called APP. Genentech’s research, as well as research done at the Salk Institute, shows that APP playes a naturally destructive process in prenatal development. Beta amyloid is not involved in the naturally occurring prenatal process but is involved in the onset of Alzheimer’s.
For some context: we have the most brain cells before birth and many are destroyed during development in the womb. Although the process is not clear, neighboring brain cells learn to “get along” with each other, to communicate with their neighbors, and the ones that don’t are destroyed.

Welcome

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This blog highlights brief economic and political details that pique my interest. My attention is drawn to the patterns and contradictions of ideas and human behavior. Some references may include articles from the Wall St. Journal (WSJ), some of whose content is available online without a subscription.

“Wealth is no proof of moral character; nor poverty of the want of it.” Thomas Paine, Chap 13, Dissertation on the First Principles of Government.

Many of us probably would agree with this idea for we regard America as the founding of democracy. When Paine wrote this in 1795, it was not a widely held belief among Americans. It wasn’t till the 1820s that New York, one of the original 13 colonies, extended the right to vote to all white males, regardless of whether they owned or rented property.