How We've Changed

Remember the last time you heard the "Star-Spangled Banner" at a sports event? There's a good chance it was pretty bizarre, jazzed up in some way. I can understand the motivation for this: the song is played at every such event, so it's ubiquitous in our culture. Any artist is going to want to personalize it a bit. But usually the results are, as Tom Friedman might say, suboptimal.

Think about that when you read this story from 1940: Stravinsky Arrested for Rearrangement of National Anthem.

King For a Day

Tom Friedman wants the U.S. to be "like China", but just for a day. If only we were like China, he thinks, we could dispense with that messy democracy stuff and just make it so. For some reason, Jonah Goldberg doesn't like this idea. I don't know why. Friedman's idea has much merit. For example, if we'd used it during the Reagan administration, "China Day" could have been used to eliminate the Department of Education (among other things); during the (second) Bush administration, it could have been used to (partially) privatize Social Security, or maybe to overturn Roe v. Wade.

I'm sure Friedman would be completely on board and supportive of that sort of thing, since his only concern is that our messy political system produces "suboptimal" solutions, and the whim of the philosopher-king, ahem, I mean President, would be far better.

Martin Gardner, R.I.P.

Like many math-obsessed geeks who lived in the second half of the twentieth century, I read with poignant regret of the passing of Martin Gardner this past weekend.

My introduction to him was through his regular Scientific American column "Mathematical Games". During my formative years, personal computers were shifting from rarity to ubiquity, and many of his columns were well suited to computer experimentation: Conway's game of "Life", Mandelbrot's fractals, etc. I whiled away many a rainy (and not a few sunny) days writing BASIC code to bring those beautiful structures to the screen of my very own Apple IIc.

John Derbyshire writes his own tribute on the Corner. A great man, Gardner. He will be missed.

Balancing the Budget

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has created a useful budget simulation in which you get the opportunity to make the "hard choices" necessary to stabilize total U.S. debt at 60% of GDP by 2018. It's an interesting game. Here's how I did it:

Overall

• Reduce troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 60,000 by 2015
• Let Bush tax cuts expire, except that lower-rate cuts are only raised by half (this was forced; I originally tried it keeping all the tax cuts, but the numbers just didn't work out)

Defense & Diplomacy

• Cut foreign economic aid in half

Domestic Social & Economic Spending

• Cancel TARP
• Freeze unemployment benefits at 2009 levels
• Cut TANF
• Cut federal funding of K-12 education by 25%
• Eliminate New Markets Tax Credit
• Cut federal funding of school breakfast programs

Social Security

• Raise retirement age to 68
• Reduce benefits by 30% (over next 70 years)
• Use alternate measure of inflation for COLAs
• Reduce spousal benefits by 33%
• Increase Years Used to Calculate Benefits (from 35 to 40)
• Include all New State and Local Workers

Health Care

• Repeal ObamaCare but keep the Medicare/Medicaid Cuts
• Raise Medicare Premiums to 35% of Costs
• Enact Medical Malpractice Reform
• Increase Medicare Retirement Age to 67
• Reduce Medicaid Funding Matches to States

Other Spending

• Cut Federal Workforce by 5%
• Reduce Farm Subsidies
• Cut Earmarks in Half

Tax Expenditures

• Convert Mortgage Interest Deduction to a 20% Credit
• Eliminate Biofuels Subsidies
• Replace Employer Health Care Exclusion with a Flat Credit

In general, my philosophy is to cut the size of government where possible, and keep taxes low where possible. I wasn't able to cut taxes as much as I would have liked, but no doubt that's because of non-discretionary spending.

Have You Represented Mohammed Today?

In honor of Everybody Draw Mohammad Day (it's not original, but I'm no artist):

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NY Public Unions Run the State

This has ceased to become even mildly surprising. Government running out of money? Don't touch the overpaid union jobs!

U.S. House of Reps Electoral Math

Jim Geraghty of National Review provides an invaluable breakdown of 99 Congressional seats that are in play this fall. Let's start with that and apply some math.

The current breakdown of the House is 253 Democrats, 178 Republicans, and 4 open seats. So either party needs 218 seats to secure a majority. According to Geraghty, all the Republican seats except one (Joseph Cao of Louisiana) are "safe." And 158 Democratic seats are also "safe." Let's assume that all of those safe seats remain unchanged (or at least that if one or two switch sides, they will be balanced by other switches so that the total numbers remain unchanged). What is the probability that the Republicans gain control of the House?

I assumed that a "code blue" in Geraghty's construction was an 80% chance of winning, a "code green" was 65%, a "code yellow" 50%, a "code orange" 35%, and a "code red" 20%. I also placed Joseph Cao in the "code orange" category.

The Republicans need to pick up 41 seats to get a majority. If Geraghy is right and my probabilities are reasonable, that gives them a 99.5% chance of doing so. Wow! It's worth looking at how the odds break down for some other possible splits.

Split	# of GOP Pickups	Probability
DEM +1 (or more)	40 or les	0.5%
GOP +1 (or more)	41+	99.5%
GOP +5 (or more)	43+	98.5%
GOP +11 (or more)	46+	93.7%
GOP +15 (or more)	48+	86.5%
GOP +21 (or more)	51+	68.0%
GOP +25 (or more)	53+	51.8%
GOP +31 (or more)	56+	27.8%

It's certainly looking very good for the GOP right now. Just to check myself, I re-ran the study with more conservative probabilities (thus reducing the likelihood of taking over any seat), and even then the GOP has an 81% chance to end up with a 15-seat (or better) majority. It's the GOP's race to lose.