Time flies when you’re having fun.  It’s only 2½ months until the Atlantic hurricane season starts up.  Just to help remind us of that fact, ’tis the season for tropical weather researchers to be dragged from their groundhog dens to emerge from their computer laboratories and prognosticate about the coming season. 

Quoting Insurance Journal:

Hurricane Forecaster Joe Bastardi, with the AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center, said Wednesday that he predicts seven landfalls. Five will be hurricanes and two or three of the hurricanes will be major landfalls for the U.S.

Bastardi forecasts 16 to 18 tropical storms in total, 15 of which will likely be in the western Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico.

In a typical season, there are about 11 named storms, with only two or three impacting the coast of the United States.

The increase from the quiet season last year is being attributed to the expected end of the current El Niño.

There has been quite a bit of fuss recently over changes being made by the Texas Board of Education to the social studies curriculum in that state.  Like many non-conservatives, I am troubled by some of the changes being sought (e.g. removing Thomas Jefferson from a list of influential political philosophers), and annoyed by the silliness of others (e.g. deprecating the term “capitalism” in favor of “free enterprise”).   I could join the horde of folks railing against these changes, or the chorus of others who point out that similar games have been played from the left.

Instead, I’m going to ask a question – why do our schools need textbooks which toe a single, officially-blessed party line any more?

In this day and age, where there are campaigns to get every child a laptop, and where a person can get a tome delivered wirelessly to a hand-held device in a matter of seconds, you have to wonder if it’s time to consider moving away from big, monolithic textbooks.

Perhaps effort should go into more modular texts to help instruct certain topics (and which can, in theory, be more easily updated).  Or, for subjects which can be politicized, perhaps educators should be seeking to present material written from multiple viewpoints – including viewpoints which might be unpopular to some political groups – to encourage students to think critically and form their own opinions, with the benefit of having at least been exposed to “the other side”.

Perhaps America might be a better place if our children were encouraged to think for themselves, rather than to simply tow the party line along with the rest of the sheeple.

So, we received our census form in the mail yesterday.  I filled it out and dropped it in the mail box this morning.  Quick and easy, although I’m a little sad about the demise of the long form (killing my odd hope that the Jedi census phenomenon would come to the U.S.), and annoyed that skin color still matters enough to merit a couple of questions.

While the census folks are showing a bit more cluefulness in their P.R. campaign this year, than they did for the 2000 census, that improved wisdom didn’t prevent them from including the ominous message on the envelope: “YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW”.

Anyway, I should note that people who are frustrated by the wastefulness in government spending need to be sure to mail back their forms and eliminate the need to be called upon by census workers.  Why?  Well, the Christian Science Monitor reports:

• $0.42 versus $56. This is how much it costs the government if residents mail back their census form (42 cents each), compared with the estimated cost of obtaining a household’s census response in person if a household fails to mail back the form.

Please don’t waste my tax dollars by being too lazy to fill out the danged form.

Happy news on the newswire:

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

Just a reminder, since popular politics seems to have forgotten – Social Security as it is currently structured is fiscally unsustainable.  And, while borrowing against the trust fund may have seemed like a good idea when it was first done, given the coming draw down and the feds’ love of spending money…that light up ahead is an oncoming reality train rather than the end of the tunnel.

Seen in the Sacramento Bee:

Arriving at Harv’s Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. "They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending," says Harv’s owner, Aaron Zeff.

The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff’s on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was … 4 cents.

Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as $202.31, leaving Harv’s with an obligation of $202.35.

While I don’t want tax deadbeats to get away with not paying their fair share…I wouldn’t call someone who owes $0.04 a deadbeat.  Surely the IRS spent more than $0.04 in the accounting to determine that the penalties and interest totaled $202.31, much less sending IRS agents out to dun the businessman in person.

One of my ongoing complaints in the public debate on health reform has been the over-emphasis on expanding coverage, without regard for addressing the underlying issues of cost.

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran an editorial entitled, “If Reform Fails…”.  As can be expected, given the political leanings of the NYT’s op-ed staff, it was pro reform.  However, they did, at least, include this section:

I’M JUST WORRIED ABOUT COSTS: You should be. The cost of medical care is rising far faster than wages or inflation. And despite all of the talk about reform “bending the curve,” no one is yet sure how to do that.

Many reforms that people instinctively believe should cut costs — computerization of medical records, paying doctors for quality not quantity of services, and prevention programs to promote healthy living and head off costly illnesses — cannot yet be shown to lower costs.

Pending reform legislation, specifically the Senate bill, would launch an array of pilot projects to test reforms in delivering and paying for care. It would also create a special board to accelerate the adoption of anything that seemed to work. That seems a reasonable way to go and a lot better than standing by as costs continue to spiral out of control. The Republicans’ proposals — including their call to cap malpractice awards — would make only a small dent in the problem.

That’s a fair point.  Admittedly, I’m skeptical about the efficacy of the pilot projects – it’s very tempting to suspect that they were included in the bill to pay lip-service to the concerns of cost – but at least this editorial constitutes some public discussion of the problem of underlying cost from the pro-reform camp.

I think the column also has a point in that the Republican call to cap malpractice awards would only make a small dent in the problem.

I still wish that health reform efforts focused on the structural inefficiencies of the American health care system, as well as tackling the underlying causes of medical cost inflation.  I think that the issue of uninsurance / lack of access would be significantly improved if those core problems were addressed.  However, I’ve come to accept that those problems are too big / too complicated for politicians to tackle until they are absolutely forced to.

I suppose that the benefit of the Dem’s  reform proposal is that if it passes, and if it remains intact, it will hasten the day when Americans will be forced to do that tackling.

In case you’ve been looking forward to your virtual strip searches, the TSA has announced where you can go to indulge in a bit of exhibitionism in the name of security:

AIT units are currently being set up at Boston Logan International airport, and within a week they’ll be at Chicago O’Hare International airport. You should see the rest of the airports on this list in action by this summer:
· Boston Logan International (BOS)
· Charlotte Douglas International (CLT)
· Chicago O’Hare International (ORD)
· Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International (CVG)
· Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL)
· Kansas City International (MCI)
· Los Angeles International (LAX)
· Mineta San José International (SJC)
· Oakland International (OAK)
· Port Columbus International (CMH)
· San Diego International (SAN)

Via tweets from @eddie_smith and @PrezMike2010 (SOA President Mike McLaughlin), I came across a blog post at Newsweek highlighting a difference between the House and Senate health reform bills which could be contributing to the unwillingness of House Dems to just vote for the Senate bill.  It’s a factor which hasn’t received much attention in the press….and it’s summarized in this chart:

The reform bill is all about cost-shifting to expand coverage.  And if there isn’t consensus within the party in power as to how to shift those costs…

Seen at Business Insurance:

President Barack Obama has signed into law a measure that extends the National Flood Insurance Program through March 28.

The NFIP extension is part of measure that temporarily extends a variety of federal programs, a bill that stalled in the Senate when Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., objected to the package’s $10 billion price. The delay meant that the NFIP expired on Sunday.