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Good News, March 1-15, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

3/14/2001  glimmers of hope -

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Ex-Bain partner starts buyout fund in San Francisco, by Beth Healy, Boston Globe, D12.
   A former partner of Boston's Bain Capital has launched a $700m buyout fund in San Francisco that counts Bain's former chief Mitt Romney among its investors. David Dominik left Bain Capital last spring to start Golden Gate Capital, along with Jesse Rogers, a former executive of Bain & Co., the consultancy that spawned Bain Capital in 1984. They took a year to [complete] their new fund, which aims to invest in growing, mid-sized companies....

2. The bear takes a breather as all major gauges rise - The professionals hunt for bargains but give the amateurs a warning, by Hakim & Fuerbringer, NYT, C1.
   The bear market eased with a slim revival yesterday after Monday's steep selloff, but Wall Street has learned to be skeptical of such rallies.
   [Good thing, cuz we heard on the radio on Wed. aft that the Dow went down 300&something on Wed. and closed below 10,000.]
   As analysts and investors let out a mild sigh of relief that stocks did not fall further yesterday, they talked about Monday's broad sell-off and what drove it. The slowing economy and weaker corporate earnings still weigh heavily on the stock market, they conclude.... Though professional investors are gingerly picking through the carnage, they are not encouraging individual to wade in with force.... Technology and telecommunications have been leading the market down for months. On Monday, "we saw it broaden out to every sector," Mr. Ghriskey said....
   [This could be the big one, and if it is, let's get it right this time and SHARE THE VANISHING WORK.]

• If they'd known Jack..., editorial, Boston Globe, A18.
  Republican efforts to enlist John F. Kennedy in support of President Bush's oversized tax cut proposal have moved from the banal to the bizarre. Bush...during his televised budget address to Congress on Feb. 27...noted that both John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had advanced significant tax reductions to, "in President Kennedy's words, 'get this country moving again.'"... But now a group of Republican campaign operatives...has mounted a series of radio ads that use Kennedy's own recorded voice to plump for Bush's deep tax cuts.
  [The liberal Boston Globe in the heart of Kennedy country is outraged at this comparison between Saint JFK and Baby Bush. And not coincidentally, so are a couple of others -]
  Senator Edward M. Kennedy [in all his majesty] is mad as a hornet, and rightly so.... Senator Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy, the president's daughter, yesterday asked the creators of the ads, Issues Management Center of Alexandria, Va., to pull them.
  Keith Appel, a spokesman for the Center, said the ads would continue to run. He noted that in 1963 the top [income tax] rate was cut from 91% to 65% - a large [29%] drop....
  [It never ceases to amaze us that it was a Democrat who began the dismantling of the admittedly inefficient and arbitrary (compared to Timesizing) but still strongest centrifuge mechanism on income that existed in the American economy since World War II, a mechanism that, with the GI Bill and the Federal Highways Program, essentially carried the fairly solid boom that lasted almost until the oil crisis of the early 1970s. And apparently Kennedy laid down the bogus rationale that taxcuts would "get this country moving again," which Republicans have used ever since, when actually it was the money-centrifuging effects of those steeply graduated income taxes, passed during the War, that had enabled the USA to emerge from the Depression as nothing in the New Deal had done. And the Globe has a further compromising quote from JFK -]
  Early in 1963 President Kennedy said: "Tax reduction alone is not enough to strengthen our society." He called for more investment in education and health..\..
  [So Saint JFK apparently started - or reinforced - two other big faves of the Republicans ever since, identifying taxcuts with "strengthening our society," and calling for tax cuts and more government spending at one and the same time - a contradiction that was to become known as "voodoo economics" early in Saint Reagan's reign (so dubbed by Bush Sr! before he was drafted into the Reagan "team"). This is why many of us voted for Ralph Nader. Both the Republicans and Democrats have become sooo full of doublespeak - now it's about a bogus budget "surplus" - that they're even fooling themselves these days. The horrified Kennedys and the Globe strain to articulate a huge difference between JFK's sharp initial weakening of the graduated income tax (which was vehemently opposed by John Kenneth Galbraith in a famous debate - was it with Walter Heller?), and Baby Bush's further weakening thereof -]
  But the Kennedys point out that the highest rate today is a more modest 39.6%...
  ["Modest" indeed. Over halfway gutted. So, ah, isn't that an argument against themselves? After all, it was JFK that started "gutting the graduation" of the income tax.]
  ...and that only 6% of the 1963 cut went to the very wealthy (those making over $300,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars), compared with 43% in Bush's plan....
  [Sounds like quibbling to us. JFK, a "Democrat," opened Pandora's box to coddle the rich and flatten the income tax. Money began it's astronomical concentration which would eventually reconstruct every precondition of the Great Depression. JFK, a "Democrat," started leaving the super-wealthy with money they could not possibly spend because they had concentrated so much of it. JFK, a "Democrat," started unravelling the major solution to the Great Depression that it took a World War to get passed in the first place. And so it is that neither the Kennedy's, the Democrats, nor the Globe are in any position to quibble about the fact that the Republicans have stolen this strategy from them and have been riding it for all it's worth ever since. But the Globe strains to elevate this quibble into high moral dudgeon regardless -]
  For [Bush] and his GOP cronies to dragoon a revered former president into their service in such a misleading fashion is not only bad taste but leaves the impression that they know their case is weak.
  [Takes a weak case to know a weak case, and as for the argument from "taste," oh please. "Taste" in today's politics? Give us a break. The Globe did not even have the "taste" to include the Republican [Hyde] in the big TV debate they co-sponsored (with "public" TV) in the 1998 race for the 8th Mass. Congressional District, let alone the independent [Schinella] and the Socialist Worker [Morrell]. They restricted it to only the 10 Democratic candidates, as if including three more chairs on stage would have been such a hardship. And did they sponsor a debate for the six Mass. Senatorial candidates in 2000? No way - the incumbent, the "revered" former president's brother, was not to be so inconvenienced. So it is that "Democrats" erode democracy with reverence. But whether by flatter taxes or by undeserved reverence, what's the difference - democracy is still getting eroded.]

1. Poverty and education, letter to editor by Prof. Daniel Weisman of Rhode Island College in Providence, NYT, A18.
   Re "Seeing achievement gains by an attack on poverty," by Richard Rothstein (Lessons column, March 7): Untreated dental cavities, lead poisoning, teenage smoking and housing transiency are...factors that interfere with students' learning, but they are consequences of poverty more than causes. Treating them...wouldn't noticeably reduce poverty.
   Educators and policy makers should look instead at "welfare reform" that prepares people for real jobs that will support their families,...
   [i.e., job training, especially on-the-job training]
   safe and affordable housing,...
   [If we do the training in conjunction with workweek trimming, market forces will respond to the reduced labor surplus by raising pay levels and we won't have to spoonfeed and micromanage on housing.]
   and universal child care that would include health screening and early prevention.
   [If we implement universal health care on the model of Hawaii's program in the early 90s before they spoiled it by adjusting it toward what they thought the Clinton's program was going to be like, we won't have to spoonfeed and micromanage universal child care that would include child health care. We've got to drop all the ditsy micromanagement in government.]

2. Future of Medicare, letter to editor by Jim Woolsey of Sierra Vista AZ, NYT, A18.
   Paul Krugman ("Bashing the boomers," column, March 7) has identified the defining issue of the proposed Bush tax cut. Many baby boomers, including those who now have private health insurance, do not realize that at age 65 their primary care will become Medicare.
   They would be well advised to think carefully about the health issues facing the elderly today. If Medicare coverage now lacks many of the benefits granted to younger people with private coverage today, what will it be like in 10 years, when the number of enrollees starts to surge? If benefits have to be cut, supplemental insurance will become much more expensive, out of reach for many who have private coverage today. Now is the time to fortify Social Security and Medicare, while the surpluses are real.
   [We repeat, if we implement universal health care on the model of Hawaii's program in the early 90s, we won't have to spoonfeed and micromanage universal elder health care. If the surpluses in Social Security are indeed real, it's time to do it right and cut the expense of sharpshooting it. The Clintons could have done it if (A) they hadn't started out burning up political capital tackling Gays In The Military and (B) if they hadn't developed a plan that hurt small business. We were so close. We're still close.]
   It is not time to distribute large portions of the country's treasure to wealthy campaign contributors.
   [Amen. But little robot Baby Bush has to exonerate Daddy Bush for breaking his promise about No New Taxes. There's no reasoning with him. He's programmed.]

1. A taxing debate, op ed by Gail Collins, NYT, A21.
   The House passed a tax-cut bill yesterday. We're well on the way, [said] Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, to "putting more money back into the hands of people who will buy homes and cars and bigger homes and bigger cars."
   If American cars get any bigger, we'll have to start giving them their own addresses. Anyway, it's hard to imagine this bill sending a whole lot of people racing to the showroom. The House is only planning to ship us $180 per capita right now. The other $900B in cuts would creep in gradually, over the next 10 years, by which time current members of Congress will have gone to lobbyist heaven and somebody else will have to figure out how to balance the budget.
   So it's a daunting task we're being given, folks - jump-starting the economy of $180 a head. But Mr. O'Neill trusts the American public to do the patriotic thing and go into debt, leveraging the hope of a couple hundred dollars into a 15-year car loan or sizable addition to the family mortgage....
   [And according to a headline yesterday, the American public is falling for this unsustainable "sucker" strategy - "Consumer borrowing accelerated in January," Bloomberg via 3/08 NYT, C4.]

2. Lamenting a loss for injured workers, letter to editor by Assoc. Prof. Marianne Fahs of the mgmt section of the New School , NYT, A20.
   Re "House joins Senate in repealing rules on workplace injuries" (news article, March 8):
   Congress denigrates all workers, especially women, in overturning protections against work-related injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome. The emotional, physical and economic effects of carpal tunnel syndrome are devastating, costing the U.S. more than $20B a year in lost productivity.
   [Kate recalls that our friend Patrice Ryder had both wrists in casts for 3 months a few years back.]
   Workers' compensation offers insufficient recourse. Fear of job loss often overrides reporting pain, increasing severity. And it often takes years before a claim is approved.
   Prevention is the only solution. If Pres. Bush signs this legislation repealing workplace safety regulations, he contributes to the onset of dependency and the cycle of poverty.
   [And the more dependency and poverty we generate, the more we strangle our domestic demand, our consumer base and our markets.]

3. ["Good, but" -]
   Jobless claims fall by 4,000, by Jeannine Aversa, AP-NY-03-08-01 1118EST via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON - New claims for state unemployment insurance fell last week but still hovered at a level suggesting that employers' demand for workers had eased. The Labor Dept. reported Thursday [3/08] that initial applications for jobless benefits declined by 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 370,000 for the week ending March 3.... Oklahoma had the biggest decline, 2,715.... The state with the biggest increase in new claims was Massachusetts with a 4,860 gain. Officials blamed the rise on layoffs in the service industry....
   [But isn't the service industry the 'great white hope'? It certainly can't be manufacturing or agriculture.]

4. Click here for today's roundup of timesizing stories - 3/09/2001.

1. 5 UPsizings, with unspecified new jobs -
   1. Landstar System Inc., NYT, C4.
      ...Jacksonville, Fla., a freight carrier, [has] opened a truck equipment repair and inspection center in Laredo, Tex., to handle an expected increase in shipments between the U.S. and Mexico....
   2. Baxter International, NYT, C4.
      ...Deerfield, Ill., a leading manufacturer of medical supplies, [will] build a $170m plant to expand production of vaccines....
   3. Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, NYT, C4.
      ...Arlington, Va., an investment banking firm, [will] open an office in New York, as it looks to expand its work force. The New York office will be the 12th for the business and will open by the end of the month....
   4. Etc., Globe staff, BG, E7.
      ...Burlington MA-based iBasis, which carries voice and fax calls over the Internet for several major global phone companies...opened its second network operations center in Hong Kong to support its growing Asian business and signed a deal to carry traffic for Hutchison Corporate Access, a big business carrier based in Hong Kong....
   5. Etc., Globe staff, BG, E7.
      ...Clarendon Photonics, an optical networking component start-up formerly based in Boston that recently got $18m in venture capital funding...has opened a 24,000-square-foot headquarters in Newton Highlands that includes pilot manufacturing facilities.

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Mercury Air Group, NYT, C4.
   ...Los Angeles, an aviation services company...plan[s] to spin off and list separately its fuel sales and services unit by August 2001.

3. Economic scene - Forget taxing Internet sales. In fact, just forget sales taxes altogether, by Prof. Hal Varian of UCal Berkeley, NYT, C2.
   ...Sales taxes are a relatively recent phenomenon; most of them were enacted between 1935 and 1937 as temporary measures to raise revenues during the Depression. [They were] "rejected by most economists as medieval anachronisms," the economist John F. Due wrote in 1950....
   [But they've now been embraced and taken for granted by most economists, in fulfilment of their usual role of cheerleaders for the status quo.]
   ...Sales taxes have three big defects from an economic point of view.
   1. ...Only 40% of expenditures are actually subject to sales tax because purchases of many forms of food and services are exempt in most places. Economic theory shows that the distortion of economic activity resulting from a sales tax increase is the square of the tax rate. This means that it would be better to have a 3.2% tax on all consumption expenditures than an 8% tax on 40% of them.
      
   2. ...Sales tax...imposes double taxation on business purchases. If a business buys office furniture, it typically has to pay a sales tax. This increases the cost of doing business, which is ultimately reflected in higher prices for consumers. Businesses pay about 40% of all sales taxes collected, so almost half of our consumption expenditures are taxed twice.
      [We have never been impressed with the double taxation argument. All VATs (value-added taxes) involve multiple taxation. The question is, in moving from unfair general taxation to pay for government services for various groups of people, to government fees for services rendered, where if anywhere do sales taxes fit it? All they do is dampen sales.]
   3. ...Sales tax [creates a problem with] remote purchases. One economic cost of taxing local and remote sales differently is that this distorts business's decisions about where to lcoate. Amazon.com has bought warehouses in Nevada near the California border to serve the West Coast market, even though a warehouse in California's Central Valley would probably be more cost-effective.
      [Not to say, more ecological.]
      But a physical presence in California would make Amazon responsible for collecting sales taxes on items sold to Californians, something Amazon would like to avoid.
   [Conventional economists strain out gnats and swallow camels. Hal's three "reasons" pale in comparison with the major reason sales taxes are self-destructive for an economy - they further weaken the centrifugal forces on money, that "free" market forces are constantly weakening anyway, in what conventional economists euphemistically call the business "cycle," even though there is nothing cyclical about it - it always requires a non-economic "outside" force, such as war, plague, famine, emigration, or a better system of sharing the limited aggregate of market-demanded employment in the immediate term, to correct a depression. Sales taxes are not progressive like graduated income taxes that strengthen the centrifugal forces. They are not even "neutral" like flat taxes which at least leave the centrifugal forces alone. They are destructive taxes that confiscate disproportionately more of the spending power of low-wage-earners and (astronomically!) disproportionately less of the unspendably concentrated spending power of high-wage-earners and the idle rich. Since "the more concentration, the less circulation" and "the more centrifugation, the more circulation," sales taxes curtail circulation, i.e., economic activity or dynamism.]
   If the sales tax is so bad, why is it so widely used? In the minds of politicians, the sales tax has one huge advantage that outweighs its problems [which pols don't really have to pay for anyway]: it is a hidden tax. You know how much income tax and property tax you pay each year, but you probably have no idea how much sales tax you pay....

4. Ford pays out $733m for workers' profit sharing, AP via BG, E6.
   ...to more than 103,000 workers.... [The] $6,700 average payout [per worker] was the second-highest in the program's 18-year history....

5. Click here for today's roundup of timesizing stories - 3/08/2001.

1. [1 UPsizing, or rather, UNdownsizing -]
   Schools chief rescinds layoffs, by Anemona Hartocollis, NYT, A19.
   The New York City schools chancellor, Harold O. Levy, stepped in yesterday to reverse the layoffs of dozens of part-time teachers and restore after-school programs on the Upper West Side and in Harlem, giving the community school district a year to straighten out what Mr. Levy revealed was a $2m deficit.... "There will be no layoffs, and there will be after-school as anticipated," Mr. Levy said..\..
   Community School District 3's superintendent, Patricia Romandetto...
   [or should that be Vendetta - against kids & P-T teachers?]
   ...agreed to make budget cuts in areas that would not hurt children - such as deferring equipment purchases and limiting travel and conferences by staff....

2. ["You don't say!" Dept. -]
   Reducing poverty could increase school achievement, by Richard Rothstein, NYT, A18.
   [Well, just make it a helluva lot easier for parents to earn a good living in this age of unprecedented worksaving technology, by timesizing, not downsizing! And this reporter has a much teensier suggestion, actually several -]
   ...The surgeon general, David Satcher, reported last May that more than a third of poor children have untreated dental cavities. Pupils taking tests with toothaches are unlikely to score as well as those undistracted by pain.
   [Never mind occasional tests, what about just sitting in class trying to learn things all the time?]
   Offering school-based dental services is relatively inexpensive....[est.] $175 per pupil....less than $2 billion.
   [Sounds expensive, but -]
   ..\..President Bush's education plan [calls for] new spending of $25 billion over five years, a total of about $500 per pupil over current annual levels [and] we might get a bigger score bounce from [dental] spending than from educational programs costing far more.
   Alleviating lead poisoning is even less expensive.... The GAO says about 10% of poor children have dangerous levels of lead in their blood, likely to "cause reductions in IQ and attention span, reading and learning disabilities, hyperactivity and behavioral problems. Yet fewer than one in five children of low-income families have been screened for lead [which] would add about $75 per pupil to district budgets....
   [The reporter goes on to list smoking by pregnant teens and pupil transience from poor housing.]
   Somehow, both Republicans and Democrats have become convinced that schools can be immune to social environments....
   [The reporter himself has somehow become convinced that social environments and poverty can be solved by this kind of sharp-shooting at individual detailed issues on an ad-hoc basis, with no deep-structure analysis of whether there might be a single central issue that would solve a host of issues on the list all at once. Somehow reporter Richard Rothstein, like so many people today, does not realize what waves of labor-saving technology have meant to ordinary working people. Let's hear it from Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief (Scientific American, Sept/82): "Until the middle 1940's the easing of man's labor was enjoyed in the progressive shortening of the working day, working week and working year. Increased leisure is not counted in the official adding up of goods and services in the GNP. It has nonetheless contributed greatly to the well-being of blue-collar workers and salaried employees.... The reduction of the average work week in manufacturing from 67 hours [in 1860] to somewhat less than 42 hours [in 1946] must also be recognized as the withdrawal of many millions of working hours from the labor market." This, of course, made labor hours scarcer and market forces took over to make labor price aka wages higher. When wages were higher, poverty decreased. What went wrong? - Leontief again: "Since the end of World War II, however, the work week has remained almost constant." In other words, we stopped cutting the workweek as worksaving technology poured in. Result? Ripples of poverty that no amount of scattershot government programs - whether focused on dental care, lead paint, pregnant teen smoking, housing, childcare, health insurance, food stamps, block grants, enterprize zones, libraries, on and on with the everlasting micromanagement of the New Deal and its successors - are ever going to catch up with. The New Deal failed in the 1930s without the "lucky" arrival of World War II to "take care of" the vast surplus of labor hours, and all the New Deal's successors have been increasingly costly failures ever since. It's time to take a more strategic and intelligent approach to solving poverty and test scores. What could that possibly be, duh? Let's ask a few of people who crafted the New Deal, a few of FDR's own brainstrusters what in the world could possibly presume to replace the whole huge straggling bureaucracy-laden effort of the New Deal.
   • Raymond Moley ("After Seven Years," 1939, p. 186): "This decision [to do nothing as yet] went out the window on April 6th [1933].... That day the Senate suddenly passed the Black Thirty-hour Week bill - an utterly impractical attempt to insure work-spreading by legislating a shorter work week. Realizing the paralyzing effect on industry such an inflexible law would have,...and fearing that the Black bill would carry in the House, the President let his hand be forced. He immediately appointed a Cabinet committee, headed by Secretary Perkins, to work out a substitute for the Black bill. This substitute provided for a thirty-hour week for most industries, with a forty-hour week as a maximum...." (Same basic idea so far.)
   • What's Secretary Frances Perkins herself, in "The Roosevelt I Knew," 1946, pp.196,210, have to say? FDR "was committed to the principle but not to this particular program. The Black bill did not go through. Instead, the National Industrial Recovery Act [NIRA or just NRA] was evolved and adapted." "In some people's minds the New Deal and the NRA were almost the same thing." (Here is pinpointed the disastrous transition from a general but comprehensive time focus for progress, giving the vast majority of individuals in the economy more time and more money to improve things, to a blizzard of ad-hoc topdown fixes, bandaids, bureaucracies, and spoonfeeding, all financed by borrow&spend or tax&spend - the birth of Keynesianism and welfare - or "crutch" - economics.)
   • And Leon Keyserling, a protege of brainstruster Rexford Tugwell? The core of the NRA "emerged through a series of haphazard accidents reflecting the desire to get rid of the Black bill and to put something in to satisfy labor." (Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, "Politics of Upheaval," 1960, p.691.)
   • And Representative William Connery, who led the doomed House fight for the Black bill? "The New Deal had a coherence, a reason for happening when and as it did, that was lost on others not so positioned [as insiders]. ...The New Deal was what it was because of its opposition to 30 hours." (Noted in Ben Hunnicutt, "Work Without End," 1988, p.249.)
   • And last (but not least), FDR himself? Roosevelt later "voiced regret that he did not get behind the Black-Connery Thirty Hour Week Bill and push it through Congress." (Noted in "Labor," Oct. 8, 1935.)
   So we can say with some confidence that the whole of reformers' and progressives' zeal has been directed away from a single powerful change that could have saved them and us mountains of time and money - by using technology the right way and making it a lot easier for everyone to earn a good living with shorter working hours. We can't healthily share the money first - that just generates dependency. We must first share the work and the skills. And the most flexible and market-oriented way of doing that, a virtual overhaul and update of the Black Bill combined with Walter Reuther's flexible adjustment of the workweek and Phil Hyde's overtime-to-training conversion, is Timesizing.]

3. Inventor's clues fuel talk that ideal engine is near, by Gareth Cook, Boston Globe, front page.
   New Hampshire inventor Dean Kamen, who sparked worldwide excitement in January when word leaked of his mysterious new invention, code named "Ginger," appears to be working on a revolutionary engine that could introduce an era of cheap, efficient power.
   Investigative journalist Adam Pennenberg, author of a book on industrial espionage, said yesterday that he has found clues [e.g., Kamen's firm registered "stirlingengine.com"] that prove Kamen is working on a Stirling engine, a device that engineers have been trying to perfect for more than a century....
   [...without getting snuffed by Big Oil. The older one gets, the more one discovers that all the wild rumors from one's youth really didn't reflect the half the strangeness of the truth.]

4. Click here for today's roundup of timesizing stories - 3/07/2001.

• Who owns the debt?, letter to editor by Erwin Taurke of Bradenton FL, NYT, A22.
  A March 2 letter asks to whom the national debt belongs if, as the Republicans insist, the surplus belongs to the taxpayers. The answer, of course, is that the debt belongs to our children. And President Bush and the Republicans are happy and eager to provide us with instant gratification at our children's expense.
  [But nothing matters except that Junior Bush exonerate his father for saying No New Taxes and then passing one.]

• Amid talk of surplus, contrarian senator sees a deficit of reality, by Wayne Washington, Boston Globe, A3.
  WASHINGTON - There's a party going on, and Senator Ernest Hollings wants nothing to do with it. Now that Pres. Bush has unveiled his budget priorities, he and Congress are jostling over how to spend a projected 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion. Tax cuts or new programs? A big pay raise for military personnel or prescription drug benefits for seniors? The Congressional Budget Office [an agency of incumbent federal politicians - ed.] and the Office of Management and Budget, which crunches numbers for the White House [and has a big investment in making whatever incumbent is in the White House look good] say there is a surplus..\..
  There is just one problem, said Hollings...a fiscal conservative who scorns free trade,..\..a Democrat from South Carolina and the former chairman of the Senate Budget Committee [who] was first elected to the Senate in 1966..\..: "There is no surplus." ...
  "We have had a deficit each year since 1969, when Lyndon Johnson balanced the budget," he said..\.. "We're bilingual when we talk about budgets, and truth is the second language."... Hollings...wants a spending freeze... [He] believes the surplus is a mirage, because the government [is using] "excess money" [our quotes - ed.] from nearly a dozen trust funds to pay for other programs. Until recently, even money from the Social Security trust fund was [being used] on other programs.
  [What a corrupt and lying gang of charlatans our government has become. The fact that it's even necessary for someone to say the following words -]
  Hollings says that all trust fund money - whether it's collected for Social Security, unemployment, aviation or highway costs - should be spent only on those specific [areas].
  Without that money, the government would be spending far more than it is taking in, Hollings argues. "Under corporate law, it's a felony to pay off the company debt with the pension fund," he said. "But in Washington, we pay down the public debt with trust funds and call it a surplus. It's like paying off your MasterCard with your Visa card and saying you don't owe anything."
  Hollings' view of the budget is about as popular in Washington [right] now as tax increases. But even critics say there is a measure of truth in what he is saying. "In some ways, Hollings' point is right from an accounting sense, but it's economically irrelevant," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition.
  [So when did you lose your brain, Bob? We all know that economics has zero long-term view à la Keynes' "In the long run, we're all dead." And we all know that the whole "edifice" of mainstream economics (which looks - and smells - more and more like a rambling string/gambling ring of jerry-built outhouses) is ecologically irrelevant, and ecology is what counts at the dawn of the Third Millennium, not economics. On with the smokescreen -]
  One reason is [that] the government can't currently spend all of the trust fund money it collects.
  [So what.]
  Social Security is a good example, Bixby said....
  [Oh yeah?]
  Bixby said: There are not enough people receiving Social Security benefits to spend all of the money currently collected for the program.
  [But] that won't be the case in a dozen years from now, when the baby boomers begin retiring and the financial strain on the program grows.
  Meanwhile, the Social Security and other trust fund money has been used to pay down the national debt.
  [which had been built up by Reagan to pay for his huge Pentagon buildup and to bail out his pals in the S&Ls.]
  Hollings says Washington politicians are simply painting a rosy picture. Pulling money from the various trust funds creates large IOUs, ones that Hollings [believes] will eventually threaten important programs and put a strain on the country's economy. And besides, [he] argues, it's not fair: "Why should they use my retirement money to cut taxes?"...
  Some of Hollings' Democratic colleagues disagree with his stand.... Said Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, "He's sort of strict in his interpretation...."
  [Or is it that you're sort of loose, John - criminally loose.]
  "Those trust funds have not been treated like a trust fund at a law firm...."
  [So federal government trust funds deserve less respect than any little trust funds at any old law firm??! John, you're in the wrong job. Go back into your law firm where your respect resides.]
  "...It has not put us at risk."
  [John, you're married to the Heinz heiress. Nothing puts you at risk. And maybe there's another reason for your corrupt short-term self-serving accounting -]
  Told of Kerry's view, Hollings laughed, "He's running for president.... He doesn't want to talk about problems like this."
  Hollings believes that forecasts for the 10-year surplus are fantasies....
  [For one thing, they're outdated. They were based on the dead assumption that the economic bubble would last.]
  Some of his Democratic colleagues [agree]. "I think we should have a healthy skepticism about whether this projected surplus will actually materialize," said Rep. Martin Meehan, the Lowell Democrat. "Our tax and spending policies should contain a certain amount of breathing room."
  Meanwhile, Hollings watches the competition for [the "surplus"] funds and waits. "If they really had a surplus, I told my colleagues I'd jump off the Capitol Dome," [he] said. He hasn't even begun to [check] parachute..\..price[s].

1. The stunning greening of the California GOP, op ed by Martin Nolan, Boston Globe, A15.
   ...Making a virtue of necessity...
   [ain't it amazing what we can do when we HAVE to?!]
   ...the GOP now touts renewable, energy-saving measures it scorned in the 1970s.... "The first speech I ever gave in the Legislature was about solar power," says..\..James Brulte, the Republican floor leader in the Senate [who is sponsoring a bill that] provides a 50% tax credit for solar and wind projects between 10 and 200 kilowatts..\..
   [Betcha he's a member of the "Green Elephants" - Martha Marks' great *Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP).]
   Endorsing this bill were..\..Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat...and [Ralph Nader's] California Public Interest Research Group, not usually cheerleaders for GOP ideas.... When he ran the George W. Bush campaign here last year, Brulte said that "Ralph Nader is our secret weapon." [for diluting the vote for Gore? But] the GOP is now more Naderite than Neanderthal. California now takes seriously the opening questions of the Green Party platform:
   • "How can we operate human societies with the understanding that we are part of nature, not on top of it?
   • "How can we live within the ecological and resource limits of the planet, applying our technological knowledge to the challenge of an energy-efficient economy?"
   [All our values, ethics and morals are going to be coming from ecology in this new Ecological Age adawning - for one reason only - necessity. The old religions will either get in line with this or marginalize. And by the way, the answer to the two Green Party questions is, we progressively integrate our self-interest with flexible, large-scale sharing systems that will make it easier for us to share the vanishing resources, starting with sharing the vanishing work as technology takes it over and moving on to share income, wealth, credit, credibility/reputation, celebrity/name.... The first step, that marries continuous training with worksharing, is Timesizing. The Greens would be smart to jump on this issue to give their otherwise ungainly platform some focus. Worksharing is the cutting edge of the Green agenda, just as worktime economics is the actionable policyfront of ecological economics. With worksharing, the fear of job loss that so often greets big ecological initiatives vanishes, and with more money and more free time, everyone can look a little further into the long loooong term.]

2. Click here for today's roundup of timesizing stories - 3/01/2001.