The Binary Circumstance

When the Federal Government uses the same type of accounting they require of corporations, the debt is staggering.

From USA Today:

Modern accounting requires that corporations, state governments and local governments count expenses immediately when a transaction occurs, even if the payment will be made later.

The federal government does not follow the rule, so promises for Social Security and Medicare don’t show up when the government reports its financial condition.

Bottom line: Taxpayers are now on the hook for a record $59.1 trillion in liabilities, a 2.3% increase from 2006. That amount is equal to $516,348 for every U.S. household. By comparison, U.S. households owe an average of $112,043 for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined.

Unfunded promises made for Medicare, Social Security and federal retirement programs account for 85% of taxpayer liabilities. State and local government retirement plans account for much of the rest.

This hidden debt is the amount taxpayers would have to pay immediately to cover government’s financial obligations. Like a mortgage, it will cost more to repay the debt over time. Every U.S. household would have to pay about $31,000 a year to do so in 75 years.

Just wait until they really crank up the printing presses to pay the debt off. Inflation, inflation, inflation!

The New York Times [reg. req.] reviews The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge which is about neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself.

In bookstores, the science aisle generally lies well away from the self-help section, with hard reality on one set of shelves and wishful thinking on the other. But Norman Doidge’s fascinating synopsis of the current revolution in neuroscience straddles this gap: the age-old distinction between the brain and the mind is crumbling fast as the power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility.

The credo of this revolution is neuroplasticity — the discovery that the human brain is as malleable as a lump of wet clay not only in infancy, as scientists have long known, but well into hoary old age.

[…]

A surgeon in his 50s suffers an incapacitating stroke. He is one of the first patients to enroll in a rehabilitation clinic guided by principles of neuroplasticity: his good arm and hand are immobilized, and he is set cleaning tables. At first the task is impossible, then slowly the bad arm remembers its skills. He learns to write again, he plays tennis again: the functions of the brain areas killed in the stroke have transferred themselves to healthy regions.

An amputee has a bizarre itch in his missing hand: unscratchable, it torments him. A neuroscientist finds that the brain cells that once received input from the hand are now devoted to the man’s face; a good scratch on the cheek relieves the itch. Another amputee has 10 years of excruciating “phantom” pain in his missing elbow. When he puts his good arm into a box lined with mirrors he seems to recognize his missing arm, and he can finally stretch the cramped elbow out. Within a month his brain reorganizes its damaged circuits, and the illusion of the arm and its pain vanish.

[…]

And, of course, the implications for external re-engineering of the human brain are ominous, for if the brain is malleable it is also endlessly vulnerable, not only to its own mistakes but also to the ambitions and excesses of others, whether they are misguided parents, well-meaning cultural trendsetters or despotic national leaders.

I am inclined to believe that there is substance to this study and that parents and children with choice in schools will be happier with the education they are getting.

From The Washington Post:

If it were up to the children and their parents, there’d be no question that the District’s five-year experiment with school vouchers would be renewed for an additional five years or more.

That’s the most emphatic finding of an independent evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program published last week. “The vast majority of families participating in this study are satisfied with the OSP in general, and their choice of new schools in particular,” the report found.

Here’s how one mother expressed it to researchers from Georgetown University and the University of Arkansas: “Before . . . his grades were below average, and for the first time he made the honor roll . . . He came home, he was so proud that he made the honor roll . . . They had the awards ceremony, so I wouldn’t tell him I was coming . . . When he came out he saw [my husband and me] sitting in the first row . . . He gave us this big grin; but to see him walk up there and receive that piece of paper, I mean you could see the joy all over him.”

But I have a problem with the design of the study.

…The government provided equal amounts of new money for vouchers, charter schools and traditional public schools, so there could be no contention that the vouchers were sapping resources from public education.

Congress told the District and the federal Education Department to evaluate the results, comparing the academic achievements of children who received vouchers with a control group of children who wanted vouchers but lost out in the raffle…

By comparing students who wanted the vouchers and won the raffle with students who wanted the vouchers and lost the raffle, they have already selected for groups where one is happy from the start and one is unhappy from the start. Being chosen for something we want in life predisposes people to be happy as opposed to being rejected.

Research suggests that red wine my protect men from prostate cancer.

Science Daily — Researchers have found that men who drink an average of four to seven glasses of red wine per week are only 52% as likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer as those who do not drink red wine, reports the June 2007 issue of Harvard Men’s Health Watch. In addition, red wine appears particularly protective against advanced or aggressive cancers.

Researchers in Seattle collected information about many factors that might influence the risk of prostate cancer in men between ages 40 and 64, including alcohol consumption. At first the results for alcohol consumption seemed similar to the findings of many earlier studies: There was no relationship between overall consumption and risk.

But the scientists went one step further by evaluating each type of alcoholic beverage independently. Here the news was surprising—wine drinking was linked to a reduced risk of prostate cancer. And when white wine was compared with red, red had the most benefit. Even low amounts seemed to help, and for every additional glass of red wine per week, the relative risk declined by 6%.

That’s happy news, but in studies of this type I always wonder who paid for the research.