It's Great To Be A Senior Now That The US House Is Leaning Left -- March 4, 2019

Open book test.

Multiple choice question: with a left-leaning US House and Bernie Sanders at the top among those running to be the Democratic nominee for president, will US seniors see better days ahead with regard to social security?

__ better days
__ much better days

An op-ed from The WSJ helps clarify.

Among the many tax increases Democrats are now pushing is the Social Security 2100 Act sponsored by John Larson of House Ways and Means. The plan would raise average benefits by 2% and ties cost-of-living raises to a highly generous and experimental measure of inflation for the elderly known as CPI-E. The payroll tax rate for Social Security would rise steadily over two decades to 14.8% from 12.4% for all workers, and Democrats would also apply the tax to income above $400,000. 

I could be wrong, but I believe the "social security tax" levied on employees/workers is a regressive tax.

Wiki suggests that

• social security taxes are regressive
• social security benefits are progressive

And:

The proponents are also sneaky in the way they lift the income cap on Social Security taxes. The Social Security tax currently applies only on income up to $132,900, an amount that rises each year with inflation. But the new payroll tax on income above $400,000 isn’t indexed to inflation, which means the tax would ensnare ever more taxpayers over time. This isn’t a drafting error. Democrats claim they only want to tax the rich but they know there aren’t enough rich to finance their redistribution plans. They want their hooks deeper into the middle class without middle-class voters figuring that out.

It should be noted that a lot of these "sneaky" details aren't "sneaky" at all. They are bargaining chips.

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Pompous Little Twit

From twitter today:

Patrick Moore was the co-founder of Greenpeace, Inc.

Not sure which is worse? Pompous? Little? or Twit?

Twelve years. That's all we have left. It's hard to believe that we were born just in time to see this happen.

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The Book Page

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, c. 1986.

Every day I read 10 - 20 pages. An incredible book.

It is amazing to see how little physicists knew about the atom in 1941 and how far they came by 1945. The "science was never settled."

It is amazing to see how "compartmentalized" the researchers were, not only among countries (Germany, Britain, US, Russian, Japan, France) but also within countries.