Put This On My "Not To Do" List

Somewhere near the top of my "Not To Do" list should be "Debate Max Sawicky on Social Security reform".  Arnold Kling gave it a try (and found a fan!), but the "Why this, why now?" question is a toughie.

[Thanks to Glenn.]

Comments

[Appalled Moderate]

Here's my quote from Sawicky and bottom line on this debate:

"An obsession with a program shortfall in 2042 that is smaller (as a share of GDP) than the deficit right in front of our face amounts to a huge distraction."

Sort of like the guy who's making minimum payments on his 3 MasterCards with the $10,000 balance obsessing over getting his homeowners loan paid early.

[Paul Zrimsek]

In fact, "Why this, why now?" is such a good question that I intend to ask it from now on whenever any Democrat proposes doing anything at all other than saving Medicare. If nothing else, I'll find out whether their concern about Medicare now is any more sincere than their concern about North Korea was two years ago.

[TM]

I'm actually going to have an answer to that. The gist will be that (a) Washington is not particularly bipartisan right now; (b) Dems don't really want Bush to tackle Medicare or taxes either, and would rather leave all of these issues for President Hillary! (or, much later, Presaident Obama), and (c) Bush is not going to oblige Dems by resigning.

Consequently, Washington will work on the problems it can, not necessarily the problems it "ought" to. Sort of like with the "road map" in Israel, some of the smaller issues will be tackled first, with the tough nuts left for later.

So, in order to practice working on real problems, Soc Sec will be attempted as a warm-up.

Somewhere in there I should mention that the Medicare challenge, while huge, does not have an obvious answer. My impression is that it is a truly complicated problem and that there is not a consensus within either party or across parties as to how to "fix" it.

[Jim Glass]

"... the 'Why this, why now?' question is a toughie ..."

No it's not. Not at all. Consider this:

By 2030 income taxes will have to be raised 63% from today's level just to fund Social Security and Medicare benefits.

A good 23 points of that will be due to the cost of the SS trust fund and paying down those bonds in it.

Another 12 points will be due to the cost the *other* trust fund that's financed with payroll taxes from your paycheck -- the Medicare HI trust fund financed by the 2.9% Medicare hospital insurance tax, which on top of SS brings your payroll tax to 15.3%.

So these trust funds that supposedly, in the popular imagination, will be paying *for* these benefits in fact will *by themselves* be costing us a 35% increase in income taxes come 2030. Ain't trust funds great? ;-)

Now 2030 is long before 2042 -- which is the date until which the Sawickys and Drums and their kind say there is *nothing* to be concerned about, everything's all financed hunky dory. ;-)

And we will all need to decide well *before* 2030 whether we actually want to pay that 60% (and rising forever more) increase in income taxes -- or to maybe cut some benefits as an alternative.

Figures from the SS and Medicare Trustees regarding this 60% income tax increase are at:

http://www.scrivener.net/2005/01/question-how-much-will-federal-income.html

Where will *you* be in 2030?

As to Sawicky-the-debater, anybody who drags out that old "dependency ratio" argument loses by default in my book.

The SS Advisory Commission of '94 looked at that and found the government spends more on retirees than children by something like 9-1, IIRC (with Medicare it's probably gone up significantly since) and that argument was put to empricial death then.

Anybody who hasn't updated his talking points within ten years isn't serious.

[Appalled Moderate]

Jim:

If it's bad as all that, and only Bush has the vision to see it, why the tax cuts?

[Norman Rogers]

I was going to make the points that Jim Glass did.

My question is why Arnold didn't.

To restate, we've been living off the SS surplus (thanks to Daniel Patrick Moynihan) since the early nineties. As my generation retires (I was born in '46), SS transfer payments will take a bigger slice of general revenues.

THERE IS NO TRUST FUND! As outlays increase due to my generations retirements, monies must be found to make the transfer payments. Sure, there are markers in the "Trust Fund", but the money to redeem them must be raised by taxation. Why didn't Arnold make this point?

[Paul Zrimsek]

AM, how can you even be thinking about Bush's tax cuts at a time when the looming Medicare shortfall is so much more important?

I'm loving this tactic already.

[Appalled Moderate]

But, Paul. How can you be thinking about well-fed seniors who want to steal drugs from innocent Canadians, when there are children starving in Africa?

This tactic isn't exactly a new one....

[Ravi]

Paul, the reason the tax cuts matter is obvious. The budget deficit is the immediate problem. If it were effectively dealt with, that would give us more time to figure out what the best way to deal with our (many) health care problems.

[Ravi]

Jim, 23 + 12 does not equal 63. What are the other 28 points of tax increase used for?

[Ravi]

Nevermind, the link is clear - the other 28 points go towards funding the part of Medicare not backed by a trust fund. That being said, I find the case made quite deceptive.

I'm particularly impressed how (by focusing on income taxes) it neglects the other half of the federal governments tax base: taxes on corporate income and on "production and imports" (and I'm still not including taxes collected for social insurance programs). So in other words the percentage increase in non-social insurance federal taxes is half of what is claimed (31-32%), and only about half of that (17%) actually goes towards honoring the trust fund obligations. Pretty good effort at overstating the size of the problem.

And all of that, of course, assumes that none of the additional expenditure can be financed with borrowing. I know I'm sounding like a broken record at this point, but if we act sooner to close our budget deficit, we would be in an overall stronger fiscal position come 2030 and would have more options (including judicious borrowing). We'd of course have been in an even stronger fiscal position had not cut taxes so recklessly in the past 4 years, but, sadly 2001-2004 are in the books now.

As always, my fiscal priorities (in order) remain the same:
1. The current, structural general fund deficit (most recently estimated at 4.9% of GDP according to the CBO).
2. Health care restructuring (including Medicare and Medicaid)
3. Social Security

That the current administration is focused on #3, made #1 worse by pushing for yearly tax cuts (which, according to Grover Norquist, will continue) and made #2 more complicated by enacting a complicated (and inefficient) prescription drug benefit makes be believe they are more interested in ideology and rewarding their campaign contributors than in a genuine effort to improve the nation's fiscal situation.

[Les Nessman]

Tax cuts = bad?

How much should people pay in taxes?

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

'Somewhere near the top of my "Not To Do" list should be "Debate Max Sawicky on Social Security reform".'

There are some on Max's list of 'not to debate' too. He just deletes their comments from his blog, when he doesn't have answers.

[Jim Glass]

I'm particularly impressed how (by focusing on income taxes) it neglects the other half of the federal governments tax base: taxes on corporate income and on "production and imports"
~~~~~

Read more carefully. I did include corporate income tax in the income tax that has to be increased 63%, as stated several times over.

As to "production and imports", I suspect you are looking at the BEA table including state taxes. For as far as being the "other half" of federal taxes goes, they are more like the other 8%.

[Max]

Nobody in his right mind would want Bush messing with Medicare, true enough. They would love for him to address our absurdly low tax revenues, as well as the bloated defense budget. The notion that Bush is concerned about unfunded liabilities is clearly a crock, seeing what was done with the drug benefit, as well as the expansion of unfundedness from tax cuts and spending increases. The targeting of SS is obviously an ideological decision. That's 'why this.' Why now is because the president's power in the second term ebbs with each passing month. In general, this promises to be one hell of a "warm-up."

Like Arnold, Jim has to fold in Medicare to bolster the case for nailing SS. As to the dependency ratio, that was a throwaway line. If you want to use dumb ratios of workers to old folks, it's no dumber.

Norman, see my posts on Leninist-Expropriationism. It's so you.

Les -- taxes should be high enough so that the spending Congress determines does not cause debt to grow more rapidly than GDP (on average). Absent spending cuts, we need another two percentage points of GDP in taxes.

Re: Mr. Sullivan, I delete stupid comments if they contain little more than gratuitous insults of me or other commenters, just as if somebody visited my house and made such remarks, I would throw his ass out the door.

Have a nice day!

[Buckaroo]

A good 23 points of that will be due to the cost of the SS trust fund and paying down those bonds in it.

If you are concerned about our ability to make good on benefit payments from the Social Security trust, you might be absolutely shocked to learn that the President's most likely Social Security reform, according to the President's own report , would increase our annual general government deficit by about 1% of GDP for each year between now and 2050. That's an increase beyond what would happen if we simply leave SS alone for more or less the next half century.

Revenue from payroll tax would fall short of meeting current obligations immediately, and would remain more negative every year than if we do nothing at all until around mid-century. The trust fund would run out around 2028, but transfers from "general revenues" are supposed to make up the difference for another 22 years.

The President's report estimated the peak increase in debt as a fraction of GDP as about 23% of GDP, in 2036. Though it's not stated, at that time, we'd probably have issued about $15 Trillion of new publicly held debt, with several $Trillion more to go.

That's a heck of a big "transition cost", given that things wouldn't start to get better until most of us are long gone. Then, it would theoretically get better because Uncle Sam would start calling in those margin loans made to folks who opted to privatize a portion of their benefits, on top of the whopping big benefit cuts scheduled for all new retirees by that time.

If you've got some secret plan to reform Medicare, this would be a good time to reveal it. Until then, what's that got to do with Social Security, aside from the fact that the prescription drug benefit alone will cost more than making SS solvent for the next 75 years?

And, by the way, why do all of those charts that show expenditures going to 150% or some other whacked out portion of GDP always show the one thing growing exponentially out of control to be interest payments, while pretty much everything else is more or less linear?

As long as we're going there, do you have a copy of one of those charts showing what the interest payments would be if we continue to spend more than a buck fourty for every buck of revenue "on budget" for a few more years?

[Aaron]

Bush will reform the income tax as well...so perhaps we will see some loopholes close and more revenue then.

I do like Max's comment

<>

Why not cut spending?

Let's start with HEADSTART.

[Les Nessman]

Max
"Les -- taxes should be high enough so that the spending Congress determines does not cause debt to grow more rapidly than GDP (on average). Absent spending cuts, we need another two percentage points of GDP in taxes."

Thank you for that example of backwards thinking.

Taxes should be high enough that Congress can't spend it all? No.

Congress shouldn't spend more than the taxes that come in.

[Cecil Turner]

"An obsession with a program shortfall in 2042 that is smaller (as a share of GDP) than the deficit right in front of our face amounts to a huge distraction."

The problem with this logic is that it's not two separate shortfalls, but additive. When you also add in other projected budget growth (especially social programs), the projected future deficit becomes unmanageable--and SS is a significant part of the problem.

"Re: Mr. Sullivan, I delete stupid comments if they contain little more than gratuitous insults of me or other commenters, just as if somebody visited my house and made such remarks, I would throw his ass out the door."

Generally I believe hosts are too tentative in enforcing civil behavior among commenters. However, being familiar with Mr Sullivan, and judging by the tone of the rest of this comment, I'd suggest you might want to reevaluate whether your standards were a bit partisan in application.

[Appalled Moderate]

Cecil:

If you accept that the SS Trust Fund is a myth (and most folks who are not trying to advance a political agenda do), then you realy are in a situation of coping with projected deficit tomorrow, while generally enacting policies that make the current deficit worse. If the problem is to avoid increasing taxes to fund ever increasing obligations at some date in the future, wouldn't a prudent person worry about constantly incurring debt that will continue to compound (and increase national obligations)as the years go by?

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

"our absurdly low tax revenues"

It's been between 17-19% of GDP each year, with very few exceptions, since the end of WWII. Under a bewildering array of tax schemes. With marginal income tax rates as high as 90%, and as low as 28%.

We're heading toward Federal spending of 30% of GDP (specifically endorsed by Brad DeLong, btw). There's no way that's gonna happen.

Actually Max, you remind me of the lady scientist who was overcome by the vapours when Larry Summers spoke of a well known statistical difference between male and female math aptitude. A characteristic that I notice only in leftwing intellectuals. Why is that?

[Paul Zrimsek]

OMB expects federal debt held by the public to peak at 40.2% of GDP in 2007-- a lower figure than in most years since 1940. (Numbers here.) Why anyone would consider this a problem, much less an immediate problem, I cannot imagine.

At any rate, the discounted net obligations of SS are accumulating at a rate which exceeds the deficit. If Medicare's problems render the SS shortfall trivial by comparison, then they render the budget deficit even more trivial.

[Cecil Turner]

"If the problem is to avoid increasing taxes to fund ever increasing obligations at some date in the future, wouldn't a prudent person worry about constantly incurring debt that will continue to compound (and increase national obligations)as the years go by?"

Absolutely. And the fastest growing part of spending is social programs (esp. SS and Medicare)--so the logical approach is to get a handle on them. On the SS sub-problem, fully privatizing it would be optimum (getting it off the budget entirely), but that's clearly not doable politically, even if the transition costs were manageable. But anything that reduces the slope of the curve in the long-term would be helpful.

[Appalled Moderate]

Cecil:

Medicare does not seem to be on the table -- alas -- probably, because we passed a bill about that last year. It is surely a more immediate problem than Social Security. (And made worse by the drug benefit.)Problem is that health care policy is usually the fine art of figuring how to push costs to another payor, rather than solving any underlying problems.

As for Social Security, remember that appearences matter. An administration devoted to cutting taxes all the live long day without regard to ITS future responsibilities is not credible when it starts talking about fiscal responsibility and taking ownership of your retirement. Is the reduction in the capital gains rate more important to sustain than the current Social Security program? Is freedom from the hideous "death tax" more important to future generations than an unreduced Social Security entitlement?

The tendency I see in these comments is to avoid these comparisons, or figure that the revenue lost is so small that the tide of unfunded entitlements will dwarf them. But Democrat politicians, who are at least skilled in the art of entitlement defence, will be offering them.

[Buckaroo]

Patrick, while tax receipts have fit into a fairly narrow range since WWII, the rate for the past three years has averaged below that 17% bottom end, with 2004 rate under 16%.

That's been happening in a context in which outlays, which had fallen below the post-war average at the end of the 1990s, have climbed back above average.

Income tax revenues for 2004, adjusted for inflation, were lower than any year since 1996. We've had real economic growth of 28% since 1996, so we've slashed revenues by 28% since then.

Part of the cut is business cycle related, but most is simply that we've cut income tax rates to an unsustainably low level given the amount of on-budget spending Congress and the President have approved.

[Cecil Turner]

"The tendency I see in these comments is to avoid these comparisons, or figure that the revenue lost is so small that the tide of unfunded entitlements will dwarf them."

IMO they're two separate issues--the short term one is the deficit, the long term one is projected spending rising at a faster rate than GDP, meaning the real rate of taxation must rise (as a percentage of GDP) or costs will continue outpacing tax revenues. Obviously the short term problem impacts the long term (especially interest), but it appears to be manageable. The long term problem is not.

Simply raising tax rates won't work. For one thing, there's an obvious problem to ad-infinitum tax increases. Mr Sullivan is correct above when he says: "It's been between 17-19% of GDP each year, with very few exceptions, since the end of WWII." Spending varies considerably . . . history suggests available tax revenues do not. Also, tax rates affect GDP growth. One of the flyers in recent data is the year 2000, where tax revenues increased to 20.9 percent of GDP . . . and a recession followed. It should be obvious tax rates stifling GDP growth are unacceptable. The recent CBO analysis gives an idea of how sensitive budget projections are to GDP growth:

"All told, growth in real GDP that was 0.1 percentage point a year lower than the rate assumed in CBO’s baseline would boost deficits by a total of $236 billion over the 2005-2014 period."

In other words, the "revenue lost" by a tax cut may well be offset by increased growth. At any rate, tax relief during a recession or recovery is surely defensible if it spurs growth--which this one appears to've done.

[Buckaroo]

Paul, the problem is that the gross debt, and the publicly held debt, fell as a fraction of GDP almost linearly between the end of WW II and 1980, but since then, fiscal discipline has been spotty.

In 1980, the public debt was 26% of GDP, and gross debt was 33% of GDP. Then debt, both gross and public, spiked upward, with public debt reaching 49% of GDP in 1992. We paid down 10 points of the gross debt after that, but since 2001, spiked upward again.

The debt that matters is the gross debt, because the gross debt represents true future obligations to repay. That will hit 72% of GDP in 2009.

That's not a crippling level, given our historical experience with a gross debt of 125% of GDP after WW II, but it's a level at which we should be thinking hard about the sustainability of spending over $1.40 for every dollar of revenue the government brings in.

We could, though, reach a crippling level of publicly held debt if we follow through with "Plan II" to privatize Social Security, because that plan would increase the deficit by about 1% of GDP every year from now through nearly mid-century, with the maximum increment of publicly held debt projected by the President's report as 23% of GDP around 2036.

[Buckaroo]

Year 2000 tax revenues were high as a fraction of GDP mainly because a lot of people cashed out capital gains and stock options, and a lot of other people chose to convert their IRAs to Roth.

Did you disagree with the policy choice to create Roth IRA's? Did you disagree with the policy choice to cut the capital gains tax rate in 1997, during a time when the Federal Reserve chairman was already concerned about "irrational exuberance"?

Those were the two biggest changes in tax policy immediately preceeding year 2000's tax take as a fraction of GDP. Thus, if you believe tax policy changes caused the 2001 recession, those are the two changes in tax policy most likely to be linked to the recession.

My sense is that the capital gains tax cut contributed to the froth and subsequent misallocation of capital during the stock market boom and bust. In hindsight, if you believe we were over-taxing capital gains in 1996, we'd have probably done better to delay the tax cut until a more appropriate time in the business and market cycles.

The Roth IRA law, though, probably didn't have much of an impact on the business cycle, though it did generate a spike in revenue.

[Cecil Turner]

"Those were the two biggest changes in tax policy immediately preceeding year 2000's tax take as a fraction of GDP. Thus, if you believe tax policy changes caused the 2001 recession, those are the two changes in tax policy most likely to be linked to the recession."

I'm a proponent of a simpler view: as taxes rise (especially above a certain percentage of GDP), they create a drain on the economy. The sharp rise in income tax in the late 90's (8.1% GDP in '95 to 10.3% GDP in '00) immediately preceded the recession. Whether that's bracket creep, "cashing out," or some counterintuitive result of the policy changes you mention (which I find doubtful), the real effect is less cash in taxpayers' hands. And while I'm leery of a post hoc ergo prompter hoc argument, it certainly seems suggestive.

Similarly, though several of the various tax-rates-versus-GDP-growth studies (e.g., here) appear to me to rely on unprovable assertions, there's little doubt that at some point, increased tax rates (as a percentage of GDP) stifle growth. And to parallel one of your earlier arguments, there are no charts showing how to balance the budget during a period of zero or negative GDP growth.

[Buckaroo]

It takes a pretty unusual angle of view to discount five consecutive years (1996 through 2000) when GDP growth considerably exceeded both recent and long term trends and then blame a recession that began a year later on a rising tax burden, when tax law had been little changed for the previous eight years.

If you're looking for a simpler view, it's a lot simpler to correlate business cycle recessions to federal reserve policy.

[Cecil Turner]

"It takes a pretty unusual angle of view to discount five consecutive years (1996 through 2000) when GDP growth considerably exceeded both recent and long term trends and then blame a recession that began a year later on a rising tax burden, when tax law had been little changed for the previous eight years."

Not sure why. Obviously there'd be some lag from tax burden to recession, and taxes hit their peak in 2000. (And I'm less than impressed with the "recession that began a year later" argument . . . the economy began contracting in the third quarter of 2000, and only the "two quarters of negative growth" definition of a recession allows the claim that it began in 2001.) Also, I'm not claiming that it's the only factor, merely that it is one. (And I don't think you seriously want to argue tax rates have no impact on economic growth.

BTW, the "tax law had been little changed" argument is a non-sequitur. If there is, as many argue, an optimum tax rate as a percentage of GDP, the effective rate is the only thing that matters. And that rate typically rises in the absence of tax law changes (in this case, a very significant 2% of GDP from '96 to '00). Whether laws change or not may impact planning . . . but the direct impact on the amount of capital siphoned off through taxation is a different subject.

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

"we've cut income tax rates to an unsustainably low level given the amount of on-budget spending Congress and the President have approved."

I think you've missed my point. Max would think even the 17-19% of GDP figure, 'absurdly low'. Especially as he wants to see federal spending drastically increased (I don't recall him disagreeing with DeLong's 30% of GDP argument).

He thinks European style government is just dandy. But, Americans won't pay those costs--such as 10% unemployment--and you yourself realize that the 21% of GDP in taxes in 2000 was a fluke (as are, probably, the 2001-04 numbers).

We're not going to fix the problem by raising taxes. Europe is even worse off than we are.

[Paul Zrimsek]

The difference between gross debt and debt in the hands of the public represents government's true future obligations to repay itself. Whether THAT matters is something about which reasonable people can be skeptical.

[TM]

Europe is even worse off than we are.

Patrick Sullivan, CIA plant.

[Jim Glass]

"He thinks European style government is just dandy. But, Americans won't pay those costs -- such as 10% unemployment"

Hey, just consider that liesure. Liesure is a benefit.

We need the government to allocate benefits like that.

People are always complaining about how they can't obtain enough of it on their own.

[Ravi]

Jim, thanks for the catch about looking at the wrong table. So, I agree, if we can't borrow money in 2030 we have to raise non-social insurance taxes by roughly 30% to honor our obligations to the trust funds.

So your 63% figure still overstates the problem in two important ways:

1. The obligations to the trust funds are politically (and morally) different than our obligations to programs funded out of general revenue. If you disagree, I'd suggest calling your Congressman about sponsoring a resolution stating that the bonds in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are an accounting fiction and that the US government has no obligation to ever redeem them. Once the staff member you're talking to stops laughing (or has hung up in shock), try calling your Senators. Note, if you can actually get any of your congressional representives on the record in support of your position, please let me know. I'd like to make sure the DCCC (or DSCC), as appropriate, has access to that material.

2. The "if we can't borrow money in 2030" qualifier is huge. The primary reason we wouldn't be able to borrow money in 2030 is because of our structural general fund deficit. So, yes, if we maintain a structural general fund deficit of several percent of GDP for 25 more years, we are eventually going to have to raise taxes enormously to close it. This is news? I thought most people understood borrowed money has to be paid back, with interest. Look at it another way - if we hadn't been running general fund deficits all this time we'd have plenty of borrowing capacity to spare in 2030 (to smooth out our taxation path even though our consumption path is not smooth). Now I agree, that past is in the books (sadly), but I can still fight for a more fiscally responsible future.

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

"The obligations to the trust funds are politically (and morally) different than our obligations to programs funded out of general revenue.'

Different, yes. But, the question is; "How important, compared to....?"

In a world with nutcases like Osama bin Laden, I'd guess not as important as defense and homeland security, for starters.

[Aaron]

Max wants Medicaid handled first.

"Bush to Seek Cuts in Medicaid, Benefits"

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20050122/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_benefit_cuts

I guess he's listening to you, Max.

[Ravi]

Well, I'll be honest, Patrick. I agree that funding defense and homeland security are important. I just wish the administration did. I still remember the the 2004 debates, when Kerry was talking about spending money on nuclear non-proliferation, port security, first-responders, securing chemical plants... And what was our President's reponse: "I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises. It's like a huge tax gap." Living in a city at a very high risk for a terrorist attack (at least according to insurers, not to mention the terror alert this week), that sure makes me feel a lot safer.

But you're raising a side issue. I didn't propose slashing defense and homeland security spending so that we'd be prepared for our trust fund obligations - I just said that we should find some way of eliminating our general fund deficit so we'd be prepared to do that (and there are plenty of other alternatives). I'll also note that a persistent deficit and growing debt is itself a national security risk - partly because it makes it hard to fund national security priorities and partly because when we become dependent on external financing from potential adversaries (like China) it can weaken our position in future conflicts.

[Les Nessman]

"I agree that funding defense and homeland security are important. I just wish the administration did."

So you are saying the administration doesn't find it important.

Statements like that make you sound very immature and partisan, Ravi. I guess I don't mind admitted partisans but the immmaturity does not inspire confidence.

"Living in a city at a very high risk for a terrorist attack (at least according to insurers, not to mention the terror alert this week), that sure makes me feel a lot safer."

Yes, but ARE you safer? Your feelings may have been bruised by quoting one sentence out of context from the thousands of sentences uttered by this administration but has your city suffered a terrorist attack?

This admin has done a good job protecting us. Anything the gov't does could be improved, but don't give us this 'Bush doesn't care about our security' bullshit.

[Ravi]

My first point was trading off funding Social Security and Medicare against defense and homeland security funding was a red herring (especially as I hadn't proposed cutting that funding to redeem the trust fund bonds). So I raised a situation where someone actually talked about trading off security spending against something else (note that none of the security priorities discussed have been funded).

But a debate on defense and homeland security policy is pretty far off-topic (even though I have plenty to say) so I'll stop here except for noting one thing: historically terrorist attacks (particularly successful ones on US soil) are low-probability events so it is important to evaluate a counterterrorism policy by how the risk and potential severity of an attack is changing, rather than just the simply asking whether or not there has been an attack.

[Les Nessman]

How about just admitting the 'I just wish the administration did' and 'that sure makes me feel a lot safer' bits were pure snarkiness, and move on?

[threats]

http://www.hueber-breuer.com/wwwboard/messages/57.html gentilitywelcomingwhereupon

[kim]

Who's your doc?
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