South Carolina to Move Up Primary

What is next? I can see it now:

SOUTH DAKOTA, MONTANA, NEW MEXICO ALL CHANGE PRIMARY RULES. JUNE 3, 2008 PRIMARY VOTE WILL BE FOR 2012 PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY
Three states decide to replace traditional 'last in nation' primaries with 'first in nation' ones....
--I mean if the nomination is already decided by then, why not get a head start on the NEXT election season?

Talking Toddlers and our Incapacity to Reason

A mother and her 19 month old child were kicked off a commuter jet because the child constantly stated, "Bye Bye Plane" for over a half an hour during the safety instructions and taxi of the turboprop.

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=local&id=5472927

Now I might understand if the little kid was warning everyone about a terrorist plot to blow up the plane (I mean obviously in these post 9/11 days, anyone saying "Bye Bye Plane" while on the plane must be trying to blow it up and you know that these Al-Qaeda people are getting younger and younger all the time).

That apparently isn't how it went down. The flight attendant apparently asked that the child be given Benedryl to quiet the kid whose noise level was about the same as a normal conversation. Great, if it were a terrorist plot, that ensures that the co-conspirator won't be able to tell us where the bomb is because he would be too sleepy!

In any case, the situation escalated and the kid and mom were asked to deplane simply because the kid couldn't stop uttering the same phrase over and over again and it made the flight attendant upset.

So now you can be kicked off a plane because you can't get a toddler to shut up. Have you ever tried to silence a 19 month old? If this flight attendant represents our first line of defense against terrorism, our capacity for reason appears to be on a par with that toddler. For me, that's almost as scary as the possibility of another terrorist plot.

Hot Oil? More like Hot Air

There are now lawsuits alledging price fixing by oil companies that costs US drivers up to $2.3 billion a year in extra costs for gasoline based on a (supposed) average annual temperature in the US of 65 degrees:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-court/hot-gas-shorting-driver_b_28625.html

Guess again:

Actually, we BENEFIT from this. Why? Because actually the average annual temperature in the US is LESS than 60 degrees: In 2006, the 2ND HOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD, the average annual temperature in the US was just 54.9 degrees...

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/us-summary.html

Well, surely, California has it worse, right?

Yes, but the temperature still doesn't reach 65 degrees. In San Diego, the average annual temperature is just 64.2 degrees.

Source: http://www.cityrating.com/citytemperature.asp?City=San+Diego
In Los Angeles, it is 63 degrees:

Source: http://www.cityrating.com/citytemperature.asp?City=Los+Angeles

In San Jose, they are actually BENEFITING FROM THIS POLICY because the average is 57.1 degrees:

http://www.cityrating.com/citytemperature.asp?City=San%20Jose

In Sacramento, it is 60.8 degrees:

http://www.cityrating.com/citytemperature.asp?City=Sacramento

Surely the Southwest is burning up (all figures come from cityrating.com and were corroborated via multiple weather websites)? Not exactly, yes, there are a few cities that are hot:

Phoenix, AZ: 72.6 degrees
Las Vegas, NV: 67.1 degrees
Tuscon, AZ: 68.4 degrees

But many are not:

Roswell, NM: 60.8 degrees.
Albuquerque, NM: 56.2 degrees
Reno, NV: 50.8 degrees
Clayton, NM: 53.2 degrees
Flagstaff, AZ: 45.8 degrees

What about the South? (all figures come from cityrating.com and were corroborated via multiple weather websites)

Atlanta 61.3 degrees
Wichita Falls, TX: 63 degrees
Birmingham, AL: 61.8 degrees
Charlotte, NC: 60.1 degrees
Charleston, SC: 55 degrees
Greensboro, NC: 57.8 degrees
Amarillo, TX: 56.9 degrees
Huntsville, AL: 60.3 degrees
Richmond, VA: 57.7 degrees
Tupelo, MS: 61.7 degrees

The Midwest?
Oklahoma City, OK: 60 degrees
Rapid City, SD: 46.6 degrees
Des Moines, IA: 49.9 degrees

And don't even get me started on the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast and Rust Belt:

Philadelphia, PA: 54.3 degrees
New York City, NY: 54.7 degrees
Boston, MA: 51.3 degrees
Buffalo, NY: 47.7 degrees
Cincinnati, OH: 51.7 degrees
Cleveland, OH: 49.6 degrees
Detroit, MI: 48.6 degrees

So for many of us, apparently, the oil companies are actually doing something to the consumer's benefit! Yet some lawyers want to use 'fuzzy math' to line their pocketbooks. In addition, this is something that consumers can work to their advantage. By gassing up in the early morning, just before going to work, the average yearly temperature will likely be lower than the figures given above.

Zagros Madjd-Sadjadi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Economics
Winston-Salem State University
sadjadizm@wssu.edu
(336) 750-2398

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Why Pardoning for Segregation-Era Law Violations is Morally Wrong

I sternly object to the mere concept of the Rosa Parks Law as written in Tennessee and other states (for further information see http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070518/NEWS01/705180402). The notion that individuals who have been convicted under an unconstitutional law should have to seek pardons from the state for committing criminal violations is ridiculous. A pardon is granted by the state to FORGIVE a person of committing a CRIME. Yet it should be clear that in this case, everything is backwards. When a law is struck down as unconstitutional, it should be the STATE that seeks FORGIVENESS, NOT THE VICTIM OF THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL LAW! No one can rightly be convicted of a crime that is unconstitutional. Therefore, all such violations of law should have been stricken from the books AUTOMATICALLY once it is established that the reason for the conviction was the exercising of a person's constitutional rights. It is the ultimate indignity to tell those who have been wronged by the state that they should seek forgiveness from the state for doing something that they had every right to do in the first place. Tell Tennessee and other states that pardons are NOT acceptable. Instead, victims of these laws should be granted a letter of apology and an automatic expulsion from their records of any such transgressions of 'law' once it is demonstrated that the original conviction was based on an unconstitutional restraint of a person's basic civil rights. That is the only reasonable thing to do.

Of course, to ensure that the disorderly conduct or other such 'crime' that was originally charged is in fact a civil rights violation, it is necessary to have individuals apply to the state. After all, the original charge may be valid for other reasons, so we have to be certain of its applicability but for the state to issue a pardon instead of an apology has the whole concept backwards.

Should We Have a Special Tax to Combat Terrorism?

Recently I came across a column by James Pethokoukis in US News and World Report that asked the question: Do We Need a Special Tax for the War on Terrorism?

The notion that deficit spending somehow is paid for by future generations is actually nonsensical. We pay for the deficit in the current period by a reduction in goods and services that we consume whether it is because we raise taxes or because we raise money through bond issuance that would otherwise have been used for other purposes. The fact is that deficit spending does not matter so long as the deficit is financed internally. In that case, Americans may have to pay higher taxes but Americans also are the beneficiaries of the bond revenues. What really happens is that bond financing ends up transferring wealth to richer Americans who purchase bonds at the expense of the taxpaying public at large. However, since most of the taxes are paid by the upper half of income earners (just as most of the bond income is paid to the upper half of income earners), deficit financing tends to be a redistribution amongst the relatively well-to-do. Thus bond holders will be made better off while similarly situated non-bond holders will be made worse off through higher taxes.

Another way of thinking of this is to think that the bondholders are agreeing to be taxed (by buying the bonds) and then we agree to pay them a subsidy in the future for that voluntary tax arrangement. In fact, if we wanted to we never have to tax anyone at all, so long as there are always willing bondholders since we can always recycle the debt into a new bond offering. Of course, if there are no willing bondholders at an interest rate that we find acceptable, there is only one option and that is to tax people.

Of course, if we finance our deficits abroad (as we currently do), we could be said to tax Americans to benefit future Chinese (or Russians or Iranians or any other country's citizens who end up purchasing our bonds). Still, the fact remains: our GDP will not be lessened based on how we finance the deficit (whether it be through taxes or bonds). Therefore, it is unclear how we can say that future generation will be paying for it. On the other hand, if we end up LOSING the war on terrorism, our GDP will definitely be lower because of the destruction of productive capacity that the terrorists will inflict upon us and the extra security measures that we will have to endure in the future. Thus the question is not whether we want future generations to pay for the war on terrorism but rather do we want future generation to pay for the fact that we LOST the war on terrorism.