Abooga Rooga?

May 25, 2004

It's hard to improve upon the opening to this dry, tiny Reuters report:

Of Mice and Men

May 24, 2004

The above-cited study, from the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, makes for chilling reading. Because mice weren't the main victims of World Trade Center dust -- that toxic cocktail launched into the air of New York city by 90,000 liters of jet fuel burning at above 1,000 degrees Celsius, and then by the collapse of the towers. New Yorkers were breathing soot, metals, hydrochloric acid; cement dust, glass fibers, asbestos; lead, PCBs, dioxins and more. In fact, air sampling of the plume of smoke rising from the site found it to have a pH level of 9 or 10 -- roughly that of ammonia.

So what happens when New Yorkers for miles around are breathing in acids and asbestos and worse?

The Risk of a Lifetime

May 21, 2004

When do things break down? When they're new -- or when they're old. It's a law of engineering. Plotted graphically, it can be expressed as a Bathtub Curve.

So check out the new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, "The Risk of a Lifetime." UCS makes a compelling case for stepping up government regulation of our aging reactor fleet. That isn't happening now. (It costs money, which is more important than public health or safety.)

No doubt after the next big nuclear accident, the press and the public will rediscover ignored warnings like these. But it'd be nice to catch at least one such disaster-in-waiting the first time around, wouldn't it?

Irrational Rationing

May 20, 2004

Imagine that you own a business that develops and markets a wildly successful diet pill. Profits are soaring, the stock market takes note and you are poised to make gazillions. Suddenly, some people who take your pill start to develop an undesirable side-effect. Roughly every 100th customer who spends a few months on the pill spontaneously combusts.

Luckily for you, my entrepreneurial friend, Americans are lunatics about work-free weight loss. Your profits slip -- but they are still enormous, as men and women everywhere shrug at a 1-in-100 risk of going up in a poof of flames, and continue popping your pills.

Enter the Feds. Naturally, they are going to aggressively regulate a product that brings a messy death to thousands of customers. Let's say that they suspend your business, study it, and then insist you include a proven-yet-costly ingredient that heads off the bursting-into-flames side-effect -- an ingredient so expensive that it severely curtails your profits.

Bushonomics!

May 19, 2004

As President George W. Bush last year went a-hawking his "Magick Elixir for All Thy Ails" -- give federal money to the most affluent -- he toured the Midwest. In St. Louis, he stumped from the floor of a factory among stacks of boxes stamped "Made in China" -- so the President's advance team hung up a painting of stacks of boxes that read "Made in the USA", and for good measure plastered white tape over all of the "Made in China" labels.

That was an early signal of how Bushonomics was going to work: It would involve papering over problems and hoping they'd go away. (Much like papering "Mission Accomplished!" over Iraq was supposed to make that problem go away, too.)

Three months later, Bush took his snake oil sales pitch to Canton, Ohio, where from the floor of another factory -- a bearing-manufacturing plant headed by an enthusiastic Bush-Cheney supporter -- he told the workers his tax cuts were going to rejuvenate the economy.

$87 Billion in Debt

May 18, 2004

If you pay taxes, you probably know about the child tax credit. That's the $1,000-per-child break you can get from the government if your family income is $110,000 or less. It's Uncle Sam's tiny (very tiny) way of helping out parents. (Above $110,000, the credit progressively phases out, to zero for those making over $149,000. Since it's the tax code, nothing's ever easy, so there are also small adjustments for multiple children.)

There is one other category of parents -- other than the affluent -- that gets no child tax credit: The working poor. Families that earn less than $10,750 a year aren't eligible for it. According to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities (CBPP), full-time work at the minimum wage -- which has been stagnate for years at $5.15 an hour -- pays $10,300 a year.

(By the way: if the minimum wage had risen as quickly as CEO pay has since 1990, today it would be $15.71 per hour. A family with a full-time minimum-wage earner would be living not on $10,300 a year, but $31,420.)

Why? Because They Can

May 17, 2004

It was the perfect vehicle: A piece of legislation so deathly boring that one could slip anything into it.

So they did. In fact, they stuffed in some of the worst moments of the Energy Bill -- a dead monster that just won't stay dead. Since it couldn't be passed via democratic means, they snuck it through.

Here's what the bill says at the top: "A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to comply with the World Trade Organization rulings on blah blah blah."