She has managed that with a regimen that gives new meaning to cross- training and will be music to the ears of runners who hate the labors of quarter and half-mile speed intervals. She says she hasn’t been on a track in two decades, fearing the turns will wreak havoc with an irritable “lower back and hip thing” that can aggravate the opposite knee and ankle if she compensates by altering her natural stride.
The nonreality of the current tax debate
An objective look at the reality of today’s economy, our demographics and our income distribution suggests that the current tax debate is terribly misguided.
.. the increasing tendency of Republicans to engage in reverse Robin Hoodism — paying for huge breaks for the wealthy by raising taxes or cutting spending on the poor — in an economy that generates too much inequality before taxes kick in is unjust and terrible policy
.. For Democrats, it means abandoning the notion that we can have everything we want and send the bill to the top 1 percent, and accepting that the corporate tax system is a hot mess that needs repair.
.. But “get it from the rich” can’t be the extent of every Democratic tax plan.
.. private business will provide optimal levels of public goods and services such as education, transportation, health care and retirement security, global protection (both defense and climate), the justice system, labor and financial market oversight, and anti-poverty and countercyclical policies
.. Since 1970, the federal revenue share of the gross domestic product has averaged 17.4 percent, ranging from around 15 to 20 percent. It’s just under 18 percent today. Congressional Budget Office analysis reveals that meeting the promises of Social Security and Medicare would require about 2.5 percentage points more than that by 2027.
That takes us slightly past the upper bound of the historical record, but the extent of our aging demographics is historically unique.
.. Tax reform .. should be revenue positive.
General Mattis’s Challenge
“To change anything in the Navy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.” — Franklin Roosevelt, 1940 San Diego — What the former assistant secretary of the Navy said is descriptive of the entire military. Each service’s culture, and interservice rivalries, and bureaucratic viscosity are resistant to reform. Which is why the next secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, has the most difficult management challenge in American government.
.. For about $500,000 in expenditures, the 9/11 attackers did over $2 trillion in damage to the United States and the world economy. The linked physical and cyber infrastructures of complex societies are vulnerable to such asymmetries.
.. The nation just experienced a raucous presidential campaign during which there was silence about the crisis of the entitlement state — an aging population’s pension and health-care entitlements swallowing government resources, with alarming national-security implications. But technology, pursued determinedly, has the potential to make peace through making deterrent strength less expensive.
What Aging Parents Want From Their Kids
He and his children may have different answers to the situation’s key questions: How serious a problem is the father’s driving? And how capable is the father of making his own decisions? Certainly there are situations where an adult child’s intervention in the ailing parent’s life is clearly needed, but what if this isn’t one of those times?
.. My husband and I have taken to checking the due dates of groceries prior to a visit from any of our three sons. They’ve even got the grandkids going through my spice cabinet. For them it’s a game, except I don’t feel like playing. Ten years ago, I probably would have joined in the fun. Now I’m more sensitive to being criticized.
.. “My son and daughter-in-law have made me very self-conscious about my memory,” Elinor told me. “Whenever they catch me in a lapse like not knowing the day’s date
.. “One of the scariest things to people as they age is that they don’t feel in control anymore,” says Steven Zarit, a professor of human development and family studies at Pennsylvania State University. “So if you tell your dad not to go out and shovel snow, you assume that he’ll listen. It’s the sensible thing. But his response will be to go out and shovel away … It’s a way of holding on to a life that seems to be slipping back.”
.. Plant an idea, step back, and bring it up later. Be patient.
.. study that focuses on middle-aged children and how they care for the generations above and below them. “The research shows that they have a pretty good idea of what their parents’ needs really are,” she says. “Older parents might do better to try to understand and address the child’s concerns. We found in our research that when the middle-aged adult is worried about the aging parent, the parent is both annoyed by that and feels more loved.”