A number of people have brought this paper or one of the several articles about it, for example, this one at The Atlantic on education and the growing divide between rich and poor to my attention.

From the paper:

As the income gap between high- and low-income families has widened, has the achievement gap between children in high- and low-income families also widened?

The answer, in brief, is yes. The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier.

From the article:

The children of the wealthy are pulling away from their lower-class peers — the same way their parents are pulling away from their peers’ parents. When it comes to college completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50% since the 1980s. Upper income families are also spending vastly more on their children compared to the poor than they did 40 years ago, and spending more time as parents cultivating their intellectual development.

It may not simply be a matter of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer — although that certainly is a part of it. The growing differences in student achievement don’t strictly mimic the way income inequality has skyrocketed since the middle of the 20th century. It’s actually worse than that. Today, there’s a much stronger connection between income and a child’s academic success than in the past. Having money is simply more important than it used to be when it comes to getting a good education. Or, as Reardon puts it, “a dollar of income…appears to buy more academic achievement than it did several decades a ago.”

Even more discouraging: The differences start early in a child’s life, then linger. Reardon notes another study which found that the rich-poor achievement gap between students is already big when they start kindergarden, and doesn’t change much over time. His own analysis shows a similar pattern.

The study (and the articles derived from it) appear to be a sort of Rorschach test. People draw the conclusions from it that best support their views. So, for example, those who believe that the naturally talented are garnering higher incomes and, not surprisingly, have greater academic achievement see that in the study.

From my vantage point the study is mostly a teaser for the author’s book which I strongly suspect I will never read and, consequently, not particularly helpful or interesting. I can’t actually tell from the paper itself but he does not appear to control for some things that I would think to be significant. So, for example, he doesn’t appear to control either for command of the English language or for certain areas in which there has been extraordinary income growth over the last forty years and require high levels of academic achievement. Speaking English is closely correlated both to income and academic achievement. Physicians need to do better in school than more than half of the population and they have high incomes. Their incomes have growth so rapidly over the last 40 years and there are enough of them that it must certainly skew all sorts of findings.

Is the paper just another way of saying that we’ve had a high rate of immigration over the last several decades and physicians have high incomes?

To see the lack of a meeting of minds in the argument over whether forcing Catholic hospitals, schools, and other institutions that aren’t houses of worship per se is a violation of religious liberty you need only contrast John Holbo’s recent post at Crooked Timbers with an open letter signed by members of the faculty of Notre Dame Law School.

Mr. Holbo notes:

Religious liberty is individual liberty. It should now be possible to illustrate how McConnell’s proposal violates this principle without making it sound as though you are worried about creeping sharia, etc. (If two consenting adults want to submit to binding arbitration by an expert in sharia law, or something like that, that’s generally ok. Stuff like that. Group rights grow out of individual rights in this way, without fundamentally abrogating them.) You can explain that you are in favor of same-sex marriage (if you are) not just because someone somewhere says it’s religiously ok – so Bam! it is. For them. Rather, same-sex marriage is justified because it’s a voluntary association between two consenting adults, so forth. All this flows from consistent commitment to optimizing the supply of individual liberty. That means: making sure everyone has as much of the stuff as possible, consistent with everyone having it. When you give groups the right to restrict the religious liberties of individuals, you sacrifice this principle. (Americans are ok with some people having a lot more economic liberty than others, in effect, due to being richer. But I don’t think they think some people should have a lot more religious liberty than others, due to being richer.)

and

Suppose alcohol is made illegal, on purely religious grounds. I think it’s fair to say that forcing people not to drink amounts to compelling a kind of religious observance. (A negative observance, to be sure. But that’s still a form of observance.) Compelling religious observance is a violation of religious liberty, which includes the right not to be observant of any given religion. Suppose it’s just a ‘sin’ tax, not an outright ban. Alcohol is made hugely expensive. Well, if the sin in question is purely religious – if we aren’t making the case that the state has some compelling civic or secular reason for trying to discourage alcohol consumption – then I take it forcing someone to pay more, purely on the grounds that they are ‘sinning’, imposes a religious restriction on them. Purely religious ‘sin’ taxes ought to be regarded as violations of individual religious liberty. See, for example, the history of special taxes on Jews in European history.

Now, the pill. Yes, employees can go out and buy the stuff even if it isn’t covered by employers. But, since it would be free otherwise, by law, the church groups are, in effect, imposing a ‘sin’ tax, to express religious disapproval of what these individual are up to. Surely that’s a violation of religious liberty: to wit, the right not to regard being on the pill as sinful. If the Catholic church wanted to impose a voluntary sin tax on practicing Catholics – if the Bishops said all Catholics who use birth control should pay a bit extra, to atone for this sin – that would be acceptable (at least legally non-objectionable, in the eyes of the government). But the church can’t ask the state to compel payment of this tax, unless there has been some kind of binding contract to pay. The church can’t compel the state to help them extract payment even just from Catholics, let along non-Catholics. It’s not the government’s business. Quite the contrary.

That is, the issue is not one of religious liberty but of individual liberty competing with group liberty and the individual liberty should prevail.

On the other side the law school faculty:

It is morally obtuse for the administration to suggest (as it does) that this is a meaningful accommodation of religious liberty because the insurance company will be the one to inform the employee that she is entitled to the embryo-destroying “five day after pill” pursuant to the insurance contract purchased by the religious employer. It does not matter who explains the terms of the policy purchased by the religiously affiliated or observant employer. What matters is what services the policy covers.

and

The simple fact is that the Obama administration is compelling religious people and institutions who are employers to purchase a health insurance contract that provides abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization. This is a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand. It is an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept an assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.

That last is significant. Subsuming sterilization and abortifacients into a single category with the Pill as “contraception” and then tailoring the argument solely to the Pill, as much of the news and blogospheric commentary has done, is certainly cherry picking.

Is this just the tip of the iceberg? What other controversial rulings will HHS promulgate? For example, what fertility treatments must be covered by an acceptable insurance policy? That’s likely to be as problematic for Catholic institutions as the broadly-conceived contraception provision is. I’ve been unable to locate a consolidated statement of the specific requirements of an acceptable insurance plan. I’m guessing that the details are emerging piecemeal and there currently isn’t such a consolidated statement.

Are the provisions really the minimum requirement? Or are they trying to define some sort of optimal plan?

One final point: I really think there is a lack of meeting of minds on the subject of compromise. The Catholic Church is not a consensus-based institution. What most Catholics do is utterly irrelevant. If the church hierarchy elects to dig in its heels, the Obama Administration will have entered into a struggle from which the most it will exact is a pyrrhic victory.

I was asked a question in comments:

What are three things you have absolutely worked the hardest on in your lives? I mean long and hard, nothing gonna stop you.

and I decided to respond here rather than in the comment thread.

I suppose (as was suggested in comments) that the question hinges on the operative definitions of “long”, “hard”, and “worked”. I’ve worked extremely hard on some things over the years so I probably won’t stop at just three.

When I was in college I put more than 100 hours of research each into two papers, different fields, neither my major. One paper weighed in at 80 pages, the other at 150. The professors for whose classes I had written the papers each called me into his office and told me that with a few revisions he could get the paper published. I demurred.

Indeed, I worked pretty hard all the way through college and grad school. In addition to being a full-time student carrying a course load with extra credits I worked 30 hours a week.

Under rather odd circumstances I was hired as a consultant by a department other than the one I managed to manage a major product roll-out. It was a 24 hour a day job that took several weeks to complete. I worked one twelve hour shift, the department’s manager the other. In the process I redesigned some basic components of the product.

For another employer I worked for six weeks, sixteen hours a day, designing and managing the development of a new product on behalf of a prospective customer. The effort resulted in closing the largest sale in the history of the (Fortune 500) company.

On another occasion we had three weeks to complete a project for the Federal Reserve—scanning, indexing, and processing a half million pages worth of documents. Another round-the-clock project. I managed the project in addition to working a solid shift manning the scanner, a grueling, physical job.

I spent one summer in Huntsville, Alabama producing a product for my Fortune 500 client on behalf of their Fortune 500 customer. I’d fly down on the earliest flight on Monday morning, work twelve hours a day Monday through Friday, and then fly out on the last flight to leave Huntsville on Friday. I did that for three months. I think the product is still in use in some form or other and any number of you may actually have used it.

There were other intensive efforts for shorter periods. For example, I once worked 36 hours running. I had uncovered a major problem in an order being prepared for an important customer of the steel mill for which I worked at the time. Top management came out to hear me explain what I had found and why it was important. Standing on the skids in the pouring rain at 3:00am in the morning. I was later told my efforts had saved the account.

Back in my liturgical music director days every Holy Week (Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter) I put in something like 40 hours in planning, preparation, practice, and the liturgies themselves. On Saturday and Sunday I worked straight through from 9:00pm in the evening on Saturday through about noon on Sunday. That’s on top of holding down a full-time real job. I did that for about 15 years.

Most recently, after my mom died I worked two days a week, twelve hours a day for about four months after my mom died sorting, cataloguing, and boxing my mom’s possessions for distribution among my siblings and me. It was hard, miserable work, much of it alone, in grief, and in an empty house. Maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Marriage? It’s been a joy. My wife is the one who’s had the hard work.

or, why I’m the loneliest guy in town.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a registered Democrat and some people have wondered why. The answer is easy. In Chicago there is no effective Republican Party. The choices are you’re either a Democrat or uninterested in politics. One of my neighbors (very active politically) once described me as an independent who want his trash to get picked up.

In Chicago the political action is in the infighting among factions of the Democratic Party. There’s a North Side faction and a South Side faction. There are racial factions: white ethnics vs. blacks vs. Hispanics. There are ideological and governance factions: what I’ve deemed “regular Democrats”, “reform Democrats”, and “independent Democrats”. The former Mayor Richard (“Richie”) Daley is a regular Democrat. The present incumbent governor is, essentially, a reform Democrat although you’d hardly know it from his tenure as governor. Cook County Clerk David Orr is another example of a reform Democrat, I think. I would characterize myself as being closest to the independent Democrats. As you might expect there aren’t a lot of them in office.

I’m more concerned about policy than politics, anyway. Let me use my views on healthcare, education, immigration, taxation, and trade as examples of my approach and views. As a rule I form my views based on what the legitimate needs are, how they can best and most practically be satisfied, and whose ox gets gored.

I think we need a major overhaul of our healthcare system. Incentives are completely messed up and, as long as healthcare providers are paid for performing procedures instead of helping people get healthier we’ll continue to see healthcare costs rise out of control. I think that policy should be more about increasing the total amount of healthcare, applying what’s available more efficiently and effectively, and paying a heckuva lot less for it than it is about divvying up the heatlhcare that exists more equitably.

Education, too, is in need of a major overhaul. The problem is similar to the one in healthcare: it’s not that we’re not spending enough but that the incentives are screwed up, we’re just writing off far too many of our young people, and the system just isn’t producing people with the skills our economy needs or even life skills. The system has so many core missions at cross-purposes and perverse incentives it’s a wonder that it produces anything at all.

I don’t think we have a generalized immigration problem. I think we have a Mexican immigration problem. I think we should accept just about anybody with a higher degree who wants to come, increase the number of work visas available to Mexicans dramatically, an order of magnitude or more, eliminate family re-unification as a core principle of our immigration policy, de-emphasize border enforcement, and do a lot more workplace enforcement accompanied by genuinely serious civil penalties on employers who employ those without legitimate work visas. I’m undecided on birthright citizenship. I don’t think we should accept dual citizenship.

I think the problem with our tax system has been poorly framed as one of the optimal marginal rate. I think that how you calculate income is a lot more important. My preference would be to eliminate corporate income taxes (which would induce a revolution in business formation) and start taxing compensation rather than income. The home mortgage interest deduction should be eliminated or capped at a fairly low level. The present deduction is welfare for people in the upper income brackets.

While I understand the benefits of free trade, I don’t think what we’re doing is accomplishing that. My preference: reciprocity. We should put quotas and duties on imports from other countries precisely equal to the quotas and duties they impose on goods coming from the U. S. I don’t any way to rationalize trade with China as long as they impose duties well into the double digits on our goods while we impose duties in the low single digits on theirs. They’re happy with the current system. They should be.

The problem with all of my preferences is that they gore a lot of very powerful oxen. I don’t think any serious candidate will ever run on my preferences let alone see that they come to pass.

So I’ll stay lonely.

Karl Smith has a post that’s relevant to a discussion we’ve been having here:

We can talk about the relative influence of genes, prenatal care, nutrition, early childhood education, lead, etc. However, I didn’t think they would dispute that your IQ is determined before what most people would think of as your moral agency. If so, can it reasonably be your fault that you are stupid?

As it happened I was also debating Bryan Caplan, who I thought and still think, would admit that one’s actual level of conscientiousness is probably genetically determined. And, further that this personality attribute underlies most of what the normal world would call “laziness.”

And so again, if one is sympathetic towards those born blind does it not follow that one should be sympathetic towards those born lazy?

The problem with this line of reasoning, of course, is that it is not possible for someone born blind to start seeing if only he or she tried hard enough but it is possible for someone born lazy to transcend it and work hard. The question is less can he or she but why would he or she?

Despite self-absorbed, uncaring parents and an environment hardly conducive to hard productive legitimate work, my dad through a combination of hard productive legitimate work and ability became the first in his family to graduate not just from law school but from college, high school, and even 8th grade. Similarly, my mom, despite improvident and, in all honesty, shiftless but loving parents, through a combination of hard work and ability became the first in her family not just to earn an advanced degree but the first to graduate from college, high school, and even 8th grade. Without any models for parenting they somehow managed become wonderful, loving parents—the best imaginable in my biased opinion. The only fault I could find with them is they gave me too much freedom. They weren’t just good parents. I think they’re heroes and such heroism isn’t innate: it requires you to transcend your limitations.

They worked hard but it was enormous good luck for me. I didn’t earn or deserve such wonderful parents.

We distinguish between physical handicaps and moral failures. Being born blind is a physical handicap. It’s a limitation. You can adjust for it, compensate for it, prevent it from holding you down, but you can’t avoid it.

Being born lazy may have physical underpinnings but we consider it a moral failure and, I think, rightly so because it can be avoided. It may take significantly more effort for someone born lazy (if such a thing exists) to be in fact industrious than it would someone without that physical limitation. Life is not fair.

This morning former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama Administration Peter Orszag’s op-ed at Bloomberg on automatic stabilizers caught my eye:

According to early forecasts, the U.S. economy should already have recovered from the financial crisis. Despite some recent encouraging news, though, we still don’t know when things will be back to normal.

What have we learned from this delay? That in devising public policy to respond to the recession, it would have been smart to minimize the guesswork by relying more on automatic economic stabilizers.

This lesson is immediately applicable: Rather than simply extend the payroll-tax holiday for the rest of the year, Congress should link it to the unemployment rate.

Automatic stabilizers are components of the budget that cushion the blow from an economic decline, without the need for emergency congressional action. For example, when the economy weakens, tax revenue falls and certain forms of spending — such as unemployment insurance — automatically increase. The net result is to attenuate the impact of a recession, by providing stimulus right when it’s needed. As the economy recovers, the stabilizers recede, mitigating the longer-term effect on the budget deficit.

What’s crucial is that, once the automatic stabilizers are put in place, they do the work. They remove the need both to guess about the economy and to overcome legislative inertia.

In general I’m in favor of rules-based systems. The U. S. Constitution is, or at least used to be, such a rules-based system. A government of laws and not of men in John Adams’s phrase provides automatic political stabilizers against the foibles, agendas, errors, and ideologies of individual human beings.

However, a problem arises in his example:

So now imagine if more of the 2009 Recovery Act had been in the form of automatic stabilizers — provisions linked to the unemployment rate — rather than predetermined to fit a shorter and less severe decline than we have experienced. About two- thirds of the 2009 Recovery Act took the form of tax cuts, temporary relief to state governments, food assistance to the poor, and additional unemployment compensation. And all these provisions were set to end within a year or two.

Imagine, instead, that they had been written to remain in full effect as long as the unemployment rate was higher than, say, 7.5 percent, and then to phase out gradually below that threshold. In January 2009, the CBO would still have assigned a very low cost to such an approach for 2012, because its projections assumed a much lower jobless rate. (The budget office would have shown some modest cost to reflect the probability that unemployment would stay above the threshold.)

There is no direct way to measure the unemployment rate. Consequently, there are many, competing ways of calculating it that produce different results. The unemployment rate is, therefore, analysis rather than data. The same is true, BTW, of gross domestic product and the rate of inflation.

More automatic stabilizers based on analysis will not necessarily produce better results. It will merely move the action from the elected representatives of the people or the elected executive and his aides to economic analysts. Economic analysts, too, are human begins with preferences, agendas, prejudices, foibles, and who make errors.

If an economic analyst, armed with knowledge of his field and of his colleagues, comes to me with the plea to limit and reduce the power of economic analysts, I sit up and take notice. When he or she comes to me pointing to the advantages of giving him or her more power, I’m skeptical. Why are there so many people who believe that if only they were given more power to enforce their preferred programs over the disagreements of their opponents, that all would be well?

As information and communications technology improve we will have more and more data and more and more things that are now the products of economic analysis will actually be measurable. So, for example, the Billion Price Project is a step in the direction of real-time direct measurement of prices and inflation. Someday it may be possible to measure inflation, unemployment, and gross domestic product directly. When and if that happy day arrives there will be significantly less need for economic analysts.

If Dr. Orszag had come to me with a plan to tie the ARRA to something that could be measured directly, say, Internal Revenue Service receipts of payroll taxes, which is a fair (not good) proxy for the unmeasurable unemployment rate, I’d think he was on to something. As it is, not so much.

Note that arguendo I have accepted his notion of the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus. Rather than being established fact that itself is a a matter of contentious dispute.

Yesterday when I watched ABC’s This Week and heard Dr. Lawrence Summers, former Director of the Obama Administration’s National Economic Council, characterize the economy as “on the right track&148; I nearly flipped my lid. This was, apparently, a reaction by him to the recent BLS report that stating that the economy had created 243,000 jobs in January and that the unemployment rate had declined to 8.3%. That put me, essentially, in agreement with Paul Krugman, something that occurs two or three times a year:

In a better world — specifically, a world with a better policy elite — a good jobs report would be cause for unalloyed celebration. In the world we actually inhabit, however, every silver lining comes with a cloud. Friday’s report was, in fact, much better than expected, and has made many people, myself included, more optimistic. But there’s a real danger that this optimism will be self-defeating, because it will encourage and empower the purge-and-liquidate crowd.

That’s just about where my agreement ended, however.

If you believe the BLS report, something which IMO requires a nearly superhuman suspension of disbelief, the number of jobs created exceeded the number of jobs required just to keep up with the natural increase by just 120,000. At that rate, sustained continually every month, it would take roughly eight years to put all of the people who are still looking for jobs back to work. Further, virtually all of the decline in the unemployment rate is due to people giving up looking for work. If the number of people looking were the same as it was just two years ago, the unemployment rate would be over 9%.

In response to Dr. Krugman’s remarks on the sustainability of the growth, two points. First, the BLS always reports high job growth in January. It’s an artifact of their reporting system. Second, if housing prices actually started to rise, something I don’t anticipate for a number of years, a flood of houses would come back onto the market, increasing the “overhang”. We wouldn’t see a spate of new construction.

We are not on the right track. Claiming we are is as feckless and poorly advised as saying you don’t care about the poorest people.

Update

Bruce Krasting saw the problem, too:

Larry Summers is a possible candidate as the next Treasury Secretary. He has all the credentials. He knows where the bathroom is; he’s had the job before. But he blew it on the issue of what happened to the LFPR this month. He gave the wrong answer, with 10mm people watching.

Let me add one observation: the decline in the labor force participation rate is extremely bad news on many grounds. One of the grounds rarely mentioned is the impact on revenue. With income falling (as it has) and the LFPR falling (as it has) that means that the federal government won’t see revenues return to their 2007 levels for a long, long time. That means that, absent a sudden unlikely spasm of frugality, we’ll borrow more and pay more interest than we otherwise would have done. In particular, the Social Security Trust Fund will go into the red years ahead of schedule.

Update 2

Barry Ritholtz responds to the naysayers on the most recent BLS report:

Ignore the economic foolishness of the biased political hacks and perma-bears. If you want an excuse to be cautious on the markets, then look at the mixed earnings near a cyclical peak, the overbought condition of indices, and the headaches in Europe. There are always plenty of reasons to be concerned and worried — but the January NonFarm payrolls isn’t one of them.

To restate my position: of course 243,000 more jobs is better than 120,000 new jobs and an unemployment rate of 8.3% is better than one of 8.6%. Consequently, the January report is a good one. I’m uncomfortable with the BLS’s various fudge factors; I wish there were more transparency than there is and even the BLS itself admits to problems with the birth-death model. I’m dismayed with the decline in the LFPR.

Well, Steven Taylor really stepped in it yesterday at Outside the Beltway. It all began with an op-ed by Glenn Reynolds at Washington Examiner, “It’s takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning”.

Glenn’s op-ed starts with a hat tip to a book by Charles Sykes, A Nation Of Moochers, contrasts “takers”, those who receive government subsidies with “makers”, presumably those who don’t, and continues with specific and generalized complaints about the state of Uncle Sugar. Here’s a pretty representative sample:

With federal borrowing at unsustainable levels, with the bailed-out auto companies and banks not looking particularly healthy, and with the steady drip-drip of financial scandals moving toward the point that even an Obama-friendly media will have to cover them, we appear to be approaching a crisis point.

and Glenn then gave his op-ed a bit of publicity at his popular blog, Instapundit. That’s when the fun began. My colleague at OTB, Steven Taylor, responded with what I thought was a pretty mild and temperate critique of the op-ed:

A fatal flaw in the maker/taker dichotomy (and which renders it useless) is that we do not have a situation in which Group A is made up those who only “take” and Group B is those who only “make.” Even if we start off with the example that Reynolds uses to launch his column (farm subsidies), the bottom line is that this does not fit the maker/taker categories. If we consult a list of the top recipients of farm subsidies we get a list of corporations (see here). So, on the one hand they are “takers” of government subsidies, and yet on the other it is nonsensical to not also call them “makers.” Of course, the fact that Reynolds’ evidence of this particular problem are lyrics from a country song, perhaps I am expecting too much nuance.

Dr. Taylor concludes:

It is ideology, not analysis. It certainly eschews the realities of policymaking. This is a failing I assume from politicians on the stump. It is not one that I expect from law professors.

I didn’t see this as a slur but, rather, hortatory, a call for greater rigor. Glenn saw it differently and said so on his blog:

APPARENTLY, MY “MAKERS AND TAKERS” COLUMN SUCKS, and I should kill myself or something.

at which point Glenn’s fans descended into the comments thread of Steven’s post, dinging other comments with which they disagreed and making comments of their own, some substantive, some not.

To be honest I think there are far too many takers and far too few makers. As Elbert Hubbard (an early 20th century writer, not the guy who invented Scientology) put it “When 51% of the people want to give rather than get, I’ll be a socialist”. At the top of the list of takers I’d put most of the members of Congress, far too many of whom enter the Congress virtually as paupers and emerge after 30 years as millionaires, lobbyists (I would amend the Constitution in ways that would render the modern practice of lobbying impractical), and technocrats and apparatchiks of all stripes. I have a little list.

However, here’s my question: how do you tell the makers from the takers? Like Steven I don’t think there’s a bright line. Let me give a few case studies.

My mom spent her career as a public school teacher, deliberately seeking out the toughest, poorest schools in St. Louis. When she retired she collected a small pension, received no healthcare benefits, and received a small payment from the Social Security payment (a result of my dad’s contributions). The Medicare system probably paid out less on her behalf throughout her life than she had paid in. She avoided doctors, took almost no medications, elected for palliative care only in her final days, and never had any of the expensive, acute care that runs up massive medical bills.

Maker or taker?

I have never attended a public school, never had a child who attended a public school, never worked for the government, and have paid into Social Security and Medicare for most of the last 50 years. I collect no payments of any kind from the federal government. I have had a few government contracts over the years from the city, state, and federal governments, I worked darned hard to fulfill them, and I was paid reasonably for my efforts. I am defended by the American military, the air I breathe is clearer due to federal laws and enforcement, Lake Michigan is a lot cleaner than it was forty years ago due to federal laws and enforcement, and I drive on public roads (since this is Illinois I frequently pay tolls, most of which go to pay the pensions of retired highway system employees).

I plan to follow my mom’s example on healthcare and although it’s mathematically possible for me to recoup what I’ve paid into the Social Security system, it’s unlikely.

Maker or taker?

IMO a little more introspection is called for by all and sundry. Nearly all of us are takers at some point in our lives. Some of us, through the grace of God, are makers.

Update

James Joyner weighs in with a typically reasonable, temperate analysis of the issue and the discussion:

First, Glenn’s summary on Steven’s post–”and I should kill myself or something”–is great for driving traffic (thanks, again!) but an unfair reading, to put it mildly. Rather, Steven found the core argument of the column simplistic and expected more nuance from someone of Glenn’s stature. Yes, Glenn is most famous as a pundit–an insta-pundit, no less–but he’s an enormously accomplished legal thinker, not a talk radio host.

He continues with four more considered, substantive points.

I predict that for the forty-sixth consecutive year I will not watch the Super Bowl. I will also not be disappointed by its half-time show or overeat at a Super Bowl party.

In my travels yesterday I did notice a remarkable volume of traffic on the streets and custom in the stores. I don’t have (or want) the hard statistics to back this up but I think that Super Bowl Sunday may have become the most important American holiday, overtaking Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years, Easter, the Fourth of July, or Labor Day.

Illustrating, once again, that I am truculently and defiantly out of touch with American popular culture. I also don’t watch American Idol or Survivor but I will confess to watching fifteen minutes of The Bachelor once with my niece who was staying with us at the time. My reaction to it was that it was not unlike professional wrestling (which I also don’t watch) except with walks on the beach at sunset instead of throwing people out of rings and breaking chairs over their heads.

Update

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but my experience has been that on Super Bowl Sunday you can frequently just walk and be seated in in that hard-to-get-into restaurant you’ve never bothered making a months-in-ahead reservation for.