What do you get when you have a $5 trillion spending agenda and a $65 trillion entitlement deficit?
The need for a very targeted stimulus. Basically, the $5 trillion has to revitalize the economy adequatey to pay off the $65 trillion entitlement deficit.
Oh, and maybe we should pay down some of the $10 trillion recently run up in Federal deficits. Then we can go to work on state and local unfunded debt.
Anyway it is clear the Stimulus has a lot of work to do. The models being used now to estimate impact have proven inadequate for decades. Only by incorporating advances from actuarial and complexity science will they have a chance of adequately targeting expentures to maximixze the multiplier effect over time.
Lee
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Monday, December 15, 2008
Republican Think Tank
Now that's an interesting idea. What in the world do they think about? How their heroes, the Bushes and Reagan, have quadrupled the budget deficit in a mere 20 years of governance?
When Reagan came to power in 1980 the deficit wasn't even a trillion dollars. "W" has done that in a year.
By 1992, when Clinton came unto office, it had ballooned to over $4 trillion. Under "W" it grew another $4 trillion to $10 trillion.
The unpaid obligations run up by Bush will add at least another trillion. And that doesn't count the unfunded programs like Social Security and Medicare which continue to balloon out of control. The Medicare Part D disaster which came in under Bush will add billions.
Oh yeah, what about tax reform and regulatory relief for small business?
Of course, the $10 trillion figure often used for the debt is as phony as Groucho Marx's glasses. The true debt under reasonable accounting standards is probably at least five times as high. Much of the difference is in unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations resulting from benefit increases which were not offset by revenue increases.
Welcome to our world children. You must fund the programs we enjoyed in a global economy which will enjoy increasing population and declining resources.
Of course our "anti-government" Republicans are not content to take away our economic freedoms.They want government mandates to replace individual freedon in decisions about healthcare, religion, and speech.
What about the Democrats? Well they are complicit in out of control spending, but they don't preach about limited government and lower taxes, much less moral superiority (Can you say Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Ted Stevens, Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay...?)
At least Republicans know the difference between Shiites's and Suni's. Woops. Hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to replace one with the other in Iraq. Welcome President Al Sadr.
What about healthcare, science, the economy, the environment, foreign relations...?
Nice stewardship "W".
Well, we elected a President who seems to have intellect and compassion. He seems to want to return government to the people. He seems to appreciate the role of science, the arts, and education in Americaan life. He has a plan to transform the economy and put us back on the path of world leadership.
Yes we can.
Lee
When Reagan came to power in 1980 the deficit wasn't even a trillion dollars. "W" has done that in a year.
By 1992, when Clinton came unto office, it had ballooned to over $4 trillion. Under "W" it grew another $4 trillion to $10 trillion.
The unpaid obligations run up by Bush will add at least another trillion. And that doesn't count the unfunded programs like Social Security and Medicare which continue to balloon out of control. The Medicare Part D disaster which came in under Bush will add billions.
Oh yeah, what about tax reform and regulatory relief for small business?
Of course, the $10 trillion figure often used for the debt is as phony as Groucho Marx's glasses. The true debt under reasonable accounting standards is probably at least five times as high. Much of the difference is in unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations resulting from benefit increases which were not offset by revenue increases.
Welcome to our world children. You must fund the programs we enjoyed in a global economy which will enjoy increasing population and declining resources.
Of course our "anti-government" Republicans are not content to take away our economic freedoms.They want government mandates to replace individual freedon in decisions about healthcare, religion, and speech.
What about the Democrats? Well they are complicit in out of control spending, but they don't preach about limited government and lower taxes, much less moral superiority (Can you say Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Ted Stevens, Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay...?)
At least Republicans know the difference between Shiites's and Suni's. Woops. Hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to replace one with the other in Iraq. Welcome President Al Sadr.
What about healthcare, science, the economy, the environment, foreign relations...?
Nice stewardship "W".
Well, we elected a President who seems to have intellect and compassion. He seems to want to return government to the people. He seems to appreciate the role of science, the arts, and education in Americaan life. He has a plan to transform the economy and put us back on the path of world leadership.
Yes we can.
Lee
Friday, December 12, 2008
The Science of Philosophy
In The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant said, "...philosophy only accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science...good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death...".
The fact is, science and philosophy have been converging for decades. With developmnets in relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and complexity science in particular, the line between them has blurred or even disappeared.
The objects of science are as ethereal as the traditional objects of philosophy. Mind, matter, waves, particles, subjective, objective, fields, spaces, all transcendent entities. Of course the mathematics behind the scientific ideas is more developed than that behind idas traditonally considered philosophical. But those very mathematical structures are themselves ethreal.
More importantly, mathematical structures are emerging which are bridging the gap between the mathematics of science and the mathemtics of philosophy.
What is a Dirac Sea? A Schrodinger Wave? A Fractal?
What is a Lagrangian? A Hamiltonian? A Fourier Transform?
Because Calabi-Yau manifolds break symmetries and compact topologies "properly"they are often best for some versions of string theory. Lagrangians may be invariant under an SU(2) symmetry or a U(1) transformation.
The Golden Rule is universal if we are all connected.
Lee
The fact is, science and philosophy have been converging for decades. With developmnets in relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and complexity science in particular, the line between them has blurred or even disappeared.
The objects of science are as ethereal as the traditional objects of philosophy. Mind, matter, waves, particles, subjective, objective, fields, spaces, all transcendent entities. Of course the mathematics behind the scientific ideas is more developed than that behind idas traditonally considered philosophical. But those very mathematical structures are themselves ethreal.
More importantly, mathematical structures are emerging which are bridging the gap between the mathematics of science and the mathemtics of philosophy.
What is a Dirac Sea? A Schrodinger Wave? A Fractal?
What is a Lagrangian? A Hamiltonian? A Fourier Transform?
Because Calabi-Yau manifolds break symmetries and compact topologies "properly"they are often best for some versions of string theory. Lagrangians may be invariant under an SU(2) symmetry or a U(1) transformation.
The Golden Rule is universal if we are all connected.
Lee
Art and the Science of Zen
In Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, Rabkin shows how Shakespeare poses reality as , "...pairs of polar opposites...". He goes on to develop the notion of complementarity as a core world vision. "...there are phenomena which physicists can understand only by treating light as waves and others which they can interpret only by treating it as quanta...". Shakepeare's vision is portrayed in a discussion of Richard II, "...the complementarity of it protagonists virtues..."
In The Surrealist Revolution...Gershman says, "...The vital element in a myth...They express ...the feeling that there is a duality in nature...In a true surrealist work there is no message, only an invitation...to acknowledge the only true values in a fraudulent world, liberty, love and the poetry which expresses them...".
In the Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin says, "...The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition...striving for an integration between the subject-matter and the form in which it is expressed that separates the Theatre of the Absurd from the Existentialist Theatre".
The history of art, like that of science and philosophy is about a search for core values, truth, beauty, justice, love, harmony...Now, modern science has uncovered truths that transcend all historical thought. The twists and turns and dilemmas which surfaced in the historical search for truth are now seen in a new context.
As we are able to penetrate deeper and deeper into the nucleus of the atom what we find are mathematical structures and relationships which point to a multi-dimensional, interconnected universe. The fields, waves, quarks, photons, electrons and other fuzzy metaphors extracted from the mathematical and scientific data are just signs of a reality not to be understood by our senses or intellect.
What does this say about the nature of god...man...woman...being...? How do we now answer the age old questions...what is real...what is just...what is beautiful?
The answers are at least partially buried in the mathematical structures which continue to evolve and emerge at all levels of study.
Lee
In The Surrealist Revolution...Gershman says, "...The vital element in a myth...They express ...the feeling that there is a duality in nature...In a true surrealist work there is no message, only an invitation...to acknowledge the only true values in a fraudulent world, liberty, love and the poetry which expresses them...".
In the Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin says, "...The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition...striving for an integration between the subject-matter and the form in which it is expressed that separates the Theatre of the Absurd from the Existentialist Theatre".
The history of art, like that of science and philosophy is about a search for core values, truth, beauty, justice, love, harmony...Now, modern science has uncovered truths that transcend all historical thought. The twists and turns and dilemmas which surfaced in the historical search for truth are now seen in a new context.
As we are able to penetrate deeper and deeper into the nucleus of the atom what we find are mathematical structures and relationships which point to a multi-dimensional, interconnected universe. The fields, waves, quarks, photons, electrons and other fuzzy metaphors extracted from the mathematical and scientific data are just signs of a reality not to be understood by our senses or intellect.
What does this say about the nature of god...man...woman...being...? How do we now answer the age old questions...what is real...what is just...what is beautiful?
The answers are at least partially buried in the mathematical structures which continue to evolve and emerge at all levels of study.
Lee
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