For the last four years, President Obama has been pushing his plan to raise tax rates on people’s income over $250,000, but a new poll indicates that most people still don’t understand one of the plan’s most basic concepts.
Ross Douthat argues convincingly that if we eliminated the link between contributions and benefits it would be much easier politically to cut Social Security. Of course he thinks ending the link would be a good idea for that reason, but his logic is certainly on the mark, people will more strongly protect benefits that they feel they have earned.
Douthat is off on a few other points. He tells readers:
Israelis are congratulating themselves on the success of their Iron Dome missile shield. But across Israel these past years has fallen a different kind of iron dome, one that isolates the country rather than protects it, which shields its people from the realities of the Middle East, from Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world.Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak.
Once again, the apparently insoluble struggle between Israel and Palestine has flared up before flickering into uneasy standoff. As usual, world leaders issued fierce warnings, diplomats flew in and the media flooded the region to cover the mayhem as both sides spewed out the empty cliches of conflict.
I know what it’s like to be hounded by bill collectors. And regardless of how I feel about the Tea Party’s politics, if they spearheaded an initiative to abolish the $6,000 in medical debt I had racked up in Houston, Texas after breaking my elbow with no health insurance, and did the same with thousands of others’ debt out of sheer desire to do good, I would feel radically different about the Tea Party.
The oceans have risen and fallen throughout Earth’s history, following the planet’s natural temperature cycles. Twenty thousand years ago, what is now New York City was at the edge of a giant ice sheet, and the sea was roughly 400 feet lower. But as the last ice age thawed, the sea rose to where it is today.
Hurricane Sandy ravaged much of the eastern seaboard, leaving some dead, many without shelter, and all of us wondering how such an event could happen. What we realized, though, is that we can no longer ignore how climate change affects public health and the environment.
