And now for a little silliness to brighten your day.

Follow this link to the story on the Time Magazine web site.

These aren’t entirely new findings; last year, for example, a British team found that kids with higher intelligence scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics.

For those of you who couldn’t watch the seven hours of the meeting, here is the 15 minute highlight reel.

Follow this link to videos of the meeting broken down into smaller segments.

Some people want to keep us from organizing our government to provide a control on health care costs.

Some prefer to leave it to the ‘free’ market which is exempt from anti-trust provisions. Some ‘free’ market.

Total real compensation per worker excluding health care benefits in 2009 was about $46,000. Adding a Health care benefit added about $10,000.

By 2039, the compensation excluding health care is projected to be a little over $60,000. Adding a Health care benefit added about $40,000.

Do you want 40% of your total compensation to consist of your health care insurance premiums? If so, keep putting roadblocks in the way of solving the health care crisis. This is what you get from the ‘free’ market.

The abovr graph comes from my extraction of graphs from the Economic Report Of The President – February, 2010.  My extraction of graphs also has a link to the report itself.

The key to understanding the flaw in the argument of the video is to look at the following graphs from the Economic Report Of The President – February, 2010

The graph above shows that it is the policies of the previous administration that are responsible for the acceleration of debt that the video would like to attribute to Obama.

The above graph shows how little the Recovery Act contributes to the long term deficit problem.

The response to the video can come from the Economic Report of the President released to the Congress in early February of this year.

There is an amazing wealth of data in the graphs and tables.  I have extracted some from the first five chapters of the report.  Follow this link to the graphs and tables and the key to the pages where they appear in the report.

It is not easy to summarize the 462 pages of the report, but Christina Romer makes a valiant effort in the summary A Look Inside the Economic Report of the President.

Below is a section that I selected from the actual report.

The challenging long-run budget outlook the Administration inherited has two primary causes: the policy choices of the previous eight years and projected rising spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The policy choices under the previous administration contribute a substantial amount to the high projected deficits as a share of GDP, while rising spending for health care and Social Security is the main reason the spending, continuation of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, avoiding scheduled cuts in Medicare’s physician payment rates, and holding other discretionary outlays constant as a share of GDP.

The conclusion from chapter 5 is:

Conclusion: The Distance Still to Go

The actions the Administration has taken and is proposing would reduce deficits by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years and by even more after that. These actions are significantly bolder steps toward deficit reduction than any taken in decades, and they will face serious opposition by those with vested interests. Even with these actions, however, the primary budget is forecast to remain in deficit in 2015. And the longer-run fiscal problem facing the country still centers on the growth of health care costs and the aging of the population. Thus, barring a substantial and sustained quickening of economic growth above its usual trend rate, further steps will be needed to get the deficit down to the target in the medium and long run.

Regardless of the form they take, these additional steps to reduce the deficit will involve sacrifices by a broad range of groups and significant compromise. Thus, a bipartisan effort will be essential. That is why the President is issuing an executive order creating a bipartisan fiscal commission to report back with a package of measures for additional deficit reduction. The charge to the commission is to propose both medium-term actions to close the gap between noninterest expenditures and tax revenues and additional steps to address the longer-term issues associated with rising health care costs, the aging of the population, and the persistent deficit. The commission’s recommendations will form an important foundation on which to base policy decisions moving forward.

The Administration understands that addressing the long-run fiscal challenge will be a long and difficult task requiring commitment and shared sacrifice. But the President also believes that Americans deserve for and expect policymakers to deal with the ever-rising deficit. The changes eventually enacted will be central to the long-run preservation of both America’s financial strength and the standards of living of ordinary Americans.

I voted for Obama because after reading his books I knew that he was not the most liberal Senator in the Senate. He had a strong appreciation for the strengths of capitalism and he also knew it had some weaknesses. Some liberals don’t adequately recognize the strengths. I was pretty sure and have been proven right that Obama was not one of those.

He actually had quite a bit of political experience in Illinois before coming to the Senate. I admired the managerial talent that he demonstrated in the way he ran his campaign.

There was nothing in his life that was shrouded in mystery. Everything the wingos asked for him to open up, he did. The fact that they would not accept yes for an answer did not phase me.

When the press started attacking Reverend Wright, I listened to all the sermons in question in their entirety. I also watched his entire appearance at the National Press Club. I watched interviews he did with Bill Moyers. All these videos are posted on my blog. (See also Rev Jeremiah Wright Speaks Again/) I came to realize that the press was lying through its teeth. You’d think they could correctly report on an appearance before the National Press Club, but they couldn’t even get that right. If they had got it right, they would have had to report that Rev. Wright made fools out of them.

There are people who repeatedly misinterpret my point of view even after I expressly describe what my point of view is. I cannot help that. I can only continue to explain my own point of view.

I do know that it is dangerous to assume that you know someone else’s point of view.

Someone reminded me of the old saw that Winston Churchill said, ‘If you’re young and not liberal you have no heart, when you’re older and not conservative, you have no brains.’ There is a reason why the voters in the UK eventually threw Winston Churchill out of office. Perhaps he couldn’t transition from war Prime Minister to post war Prime Minister.

It happens all the time. For instance there are many company founders that cannot adequately manage the company they founded after it has grown too large or the technology has advanced past their original invention.

Another reason why I chose to vote for President Obama is his understanding that the reasons for his policies needed constant explanation for him to get elected and for him to get them passed by Congress.

One of the problems with the Democrats who had been in power almost uninterrupted since Roosevelt got elected was that they assumed the electorate understood why they did what they did.

What they forgot was that what the electorate finally understood in 1932 could not be assumed to be understood in 1980 and beyond. Most of the 1932 electorate had been replaced with younger people by the time 1980 rolled around. Even had that not happened, people had been bombarded by the story from the other side for 50 years with diminished response from the Democrats. On top of that circumstances had changed considerably since 1932.

I think that Bill Clinton may have been the first Democrat to have an inkling of what was needed. Certainly Al Gore didn’t have Clinton’s knowledge about how to get elected or maybe it was Clinton’s instinct that Gore lacked.

It was clear that in the 2008 election, Obama had more than figured out what needed to be done. It was also clear to me that Hilary Clinton had not figured it out.

Proof that Obama knew he needed the troops to help him after he got elected was the transition of his campaign organization into Organizing For America. The same great internet social network that he had organized for the campaign is still hard at work. Now that he has brought David Plouffe back to work, it is starting to really fire on all cylinders.

It took the wake up call of his struggle over health care to make all concerned realize that it was time to kick things into high gear. This included the troops remotivating themselves.

By the way, it was clear to me in the Democratic primary for Senator that Martha Coakley did not have a clue about what it was going to take to get elected. She also didn’t recognize the value of Obama’s style of not going negative.

Mike Capuano hadn’t thought it through as completely as Obama had, but he had some of the understanding instinctively. He would have made a much better candidate.

Martha Coakley didn’t even know how much trouble she was in. The Obama organization and its troops had to ride to the rescue in the last few days of the campaign, but it was far too late. We did manage to change the result from a completely embarrassing route by Scott Brown to a merely a respectable loss.

In trying to make the case that losing 4 million jobs since Obama took office is better than losing 9 million jobs if he had not got a stimulus bill passed, people accuse me of claiming that it is good to have lost 4 million jobs. The following explanation is how I try to emphasize that I am making no such claim.

As a parent and now a grandparent I am familiar with the long car trips with the constant question ‘Are we there yet?’

In this case the question has to do with reaching the goal of complete recovery from the recession.

No, we aren’t there yet, but we are getting closer. We are on the right road. If we turn back now, we will not get to where we want to go.

As a parent, I tried to be honest and never use the trick of saying, ‘It is just around the corner’. When it turns out not to be just around the corner, your credibility is destroyed and the trick won’t work again. It is better to say, No, we are not there yet, but we are on the right road and we will get there eventually. Look on the map to see how far we came from home and how close we are to the destination.

President Obama has this same realization. That is why he won’t pretend that the problem is solved. He just keeps explaining that we are on the right path and we will get there eventually.

He is trying to prevent people from giving up just as we are approaching sight of the destination. As soon as the destination is in sight, people’s excitement for continuing the journey will take over. Then it will not require much effort to keep them going forward on the road to success.

Follow this link to the article in the Worcester T & G by Ryan J. Donmoyer of Bloomberg News.

In 2007, the last year the economy was expanding in the U.S., the average income of the 400 highest-earning households rose 31% to $345 million, fueled by capital gains and dividends.  The data, the latest available, may provide ammunition for Democrats aiming to increase the capital gains tax rate; each household paid an average rate of 16.6% – the lowest since the Internal Revenue Service started tracking data in 1992.

Given the set of articles published in the Worcester T & G this Sunday, I can only surmise that there has been a palace coup in the editorial offices of the newspaper.  To see so much information in this newspaper supporting the Democratic agenda has left me gasping for breath.