||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
WHY BOOMERS AREN'T THE MAJOR PROBLEM OF MEDICARE
DEAN BAKER, COMMON SENSE - Over the last two decades, there has been an
effort by the enemies of Social Security and Medicare to demonize the
baby boomers as a threat to country's prosperity and the well-being of
our children and grandchildren. They have repeatedly warned of the
enormous projected cost of Social Security and Medicare and called on
the current or future elderly to sacrifice their benefits under these
programs for the common good. . .
Those of us who challenged this story now have an important ally in
Peter Orszag, the new director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Orszag has made a point of distinguishing the extent to which costs are
projected to rise due to aging and the extent to which they are
projected to rise as a result of the rising cost of health care in the
United States. As he recently said at a press event, "The long-term
fiscal problem truly is fundamentally one involving the rate at which
health care costs grow and much less about the aging of the population."
This is hugely important. The way to deal with scary long-term budget
projections is to fix our health care system, not to gut Social Security
and Medicare. . . If health care costs in the United States looked more
like those in any other wealthy country, we wouldn't have to look at
scary budget projections.
The moral of Orszag's analysis is that those who are concerned about the
huge deficits projected for future decades should be working first and
foremost on reforming the health care system. If we fix our health care
system, then our other budget problems are manageable. If we don't fix
the health care system, we can look forward to a future of bad health
care and a weak economy. We will also have insoluble budget problems.
http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/stop_blaming_baby_boomers_deficits
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
STUDY: STEROIDS CAN BOOST HOME RUNS 50%
NEWSWISE - Steroid use by a Major League Baseball slugger may produce
only modest increases in muscle mass and bat and ball speed but still
boost home run production by 50 percent or more, according to a new
study by Tufts University physicist Roger Tobin. Tobin, a specialist in
condensed matter physics with a long-time interest in the physics of
baseball, will publish his paper "On the potential of a chemical Bonds:
Possible effects of steroids on home run production in baseball" in an
upcoming issue of the American Journal of Physics.
As Tobin's paper notes, Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs in a single
season stood for 34 years until Roger Maris hit 61 homers in 1961. For
the next 35 years, no player hit more than 52 home runs in one season.
But between 1998 and 2006, players hit more than 60 home runs in a
season six times. Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001-topping Maris'
mark by an astonishing 20 percent.
According to Tobin, the explosion in home runs coincides with the dawn
of the "steroid era" in sports in the mid-1990s, and that surge quickly
dropped to historic levels in 2003, when Major League Baseball
instituted steroid testing. . .
"A change of only a few percent in the average speed of the batted ball,
which can reasonably be expected from steroid use, is enough to increase
home run production by at least 50 percent," he says. This
disproportionate effect arises because home runs are relatively rare
events that occur on the "tail of the range distribution" of batted
balls.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/533530/?sc=dwhr
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
WHY BOOMERS AREN'T THE MAJOR PROBLEM OF MEDICARE
DEAN BAKER, COMMON SENSE - Over the last two decades, there has been an
effort by the enemies of Social Security and Medicare to demonize the
baby boomers as a threat to country's prosperity and the well-being of
our children and grandchildren. They have repeatedly warned of the
enormous projected cost of Social Security and Medicare and called on
the current or future elderly to sacrifice their benefits under these
programs for the common good. . .
Those of us who challenged this story now have an important ally in
Peter Orszag, the new director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Orszag has made a point of distinguishing the extent to which costs are
projected to rise due to aging and the extent to which they are
projected to rise as a result of the rising cost of health care in the
United States. As he recently said at a press event, "The long-term
fiscal problem truly is fundamentally one involving the rate at which
health care costs grow and much less about the aging of the population."
This is hugely important. The way to deal with scary long-term budget
projections is to fix our health care system, not to gut Social Security
and Medicare. . . If health care costs in the United States looked more
like those in any other wealthy country, we wouldn't have to look at
scary budget projections.
The moral of Orszag's analysis is that those who are concerned about the
huge deficits projected for future decades should be working first and
foremost on reforming the health care system. If we fix our health care
system, then our other budget problems are manageable. If we don't fix
the health care system, we can look forward to a future of bad health
care and a weak economy. We will also have insoluble budget problems.
http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/stop_blaming_baby_boomers_deficits
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
STUDY: STEROIDS CAN BOOST HOME RUNS 50%
NEWSWISE - Steroid use by a Major League Baseball slugger may produce
only modest increases in muscle mass and bat and ball speed but still
boost home run production by 50 percent or more, according to a new
study by Tufts University physicist Roger Tobin. Tobin, a specialist in
condensed matter physics with a long-time interest in the physics of
baseball, will publish his paper "On the potential of a chemical Bonds:
Possible effects of steroids on home run production in baseball" in an
upcoming issue of the American Journal of Physics.
As Tobin's paper notes, Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs in a single
season stood for 34 years until Roger Maris hit 61 homers in 1961. For
the next 35 years, no player hit more than 52 home runs in one season.
But between 1998 and 2006, players hit more than 60 home runs in a
season six times. Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001-topping Maris'
mark by an astonishing 20 percent.
According to Tobin, the explosion in home runs coincides with the dawn
of the "steroid era" in sports in the mid-1990s, and that surge quickly
dropped to historic levels in 2003, when Major League Baseball
instituted steroid testing. . .
"A change of only a few percent in the average speed of the batted ball,
which can reasonably be expected from steroid use, is enough to increase
home run production by at least 50 percent," he says. This
disproportionate effect arises because home runs are relatively rare
events that occur on the "tail of the range distribution" of batted
balls.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/533530/?sc=dwhr
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment