Here’s their most interesting exchange regarding Citizens United where O’Conner editorializes as well [after the break]:

O’Connor: I suppose the court has had occasion to change its view on certain issues over a period of years. Do you see any on the horizon that you think the court might well reexamine as things go on?

Stevens: Well, you know, Sandra, I dissented in a lot of cases, and I’d like [the court] to reexamine them all [laughs]. I don’t expect them to, but I think they made a serious mistake in the [Citizens United] campaign-finance case, in which they overruled the portion of an opinion you and I jointly authored [on the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law]. And I think you might share my view.

O’Connor: I notice that myself, and when I am asked about it, I often say, “Well, the court overruled part of what I wrote.” And leave it there. It is a source of concern today, the extent of campaign contributions and whether corporations and unions must be held to the [same] standard as an individual. These are tough issues for the nation and the court.

Justice Stevens also presents an interesting though I think weak defense of Senators not querying nominees to the court on what their positions are. My biggest problem is that without such questions we can’t determine whether a justice is able to adapt their positions as they learn or whether they possess a conservative mind-set that has their positions firmly embedded which they’ll defend regardless of where the facts lead. So while I appreciate Justice Stevens’ own inability to take a position with confidence prior to sufficiently delving into the issues, we should learn if that’s because he possesses a fierce desire to be correct or is the nominee obfuscating in order to pose as someone who will honestly judge while actually, perhaps unconsciously, seeking opportunities to advance the unconstitutional aspects of their political ideology as we encounter Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts nearly always doing on matters most important to the conservative populace.

When I first started purchasing this edition several years ago I was astonished we’d made so much progress in a decade, let alone a year. It’s very inspiring to go through all the accomplishments though with a sprinkling of tragedies and anti-science controversies. This year’s tragedies being Discover’s #1 story, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and its #4 story, how denialists leveraged climategate to dishonestly and unfortunately, successfully misrepresent the state of climate science.

Discover also reports promising accomplishments and ventures like Craig Ventor’s Synthetic Genomic, “creating an artificial living cell by synthesizing the entire genome of a bacterium and transplanting it into another.” The #10 story reports on our new-found ability to diagnose cognitively normal people who have yet to display symptoms of Alzheimer’s and how that increases our ability to better treat Alzheimer’s.

There’s also a wonderful interview with E.O. Wilson regarding his work on the evolutionary role altruism has on populations, where Dr. Wilson reveals why he’s discrediting aspects of his previous theory in spite of some scientists continuing to defend his previous explanations.

While some of these stories are available online without a subscription, the magazine itself is well worth it given they have all the stories and who knows, maybe a fundie guest visiting you over the holidays might pick it up and ultimately better appreciate the contributions of science to society and become a bit less hostile. I got my copy laid out.

In case there’s not a sufficient supply of fresh blog posts for today’s demand of commenters, consider this an open thread.

My only blog post contribution today is that I’m celebrating the fact my grandma did not get run over by a reindeer last evening, but I did discover some reindeer know how to fly:

. . . the reindeer, which goes to great lengths to search out the hallucinogenic fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria) — the one with the white-spotted red cap that garden gnomes like to sit on. Eating the toadstool makes reindeer behave in a drunken fashion, running about aimlessly and making strange noises. Head-twitching is also common.

Given our ever-increasing concern about the rise of our federal debt relative to the size of the economy that must pay interest on this debt, it seems that increasing federal tax receipts is a no-brainer “yes” where that is a popular argument on the left given higher effective tax rate burdens in the past didn’t appear to hinder growth in business up-cycles, i.e., the later Reagan years and the Clinton years . However I think one more item is important to understand to properly frame this argument and that’s the total tax burden. So I’ve added that data to our graph.

I used a 2-order polynomial trendline for the total tax rate and publish R2. The median/average for 1950 – 1980 was 30% and 31% respectively while the values for 1980 – 2010 were 35% and 36% respectively, a 16% increase in taxes on the economy in the past thirty years relative to the prior period. And just like federal receipts, I found no correlation between total tax receipts as a percentage of GDP relative to GDP growth rates.

I’d like to point out again this increased tax burden doesn’t necessarily mean people’s discretionary income available for consumption went down accordingly since they could very well be securing far more services from the government which are now funded by taxes than the volume previously procured in the private market, e.g., healthcare, higher education.

Given these results I find it interesting that so much of our divisive debates revolve around federal taxation rates which are stable or declining while state and local taxes have risen significantly over this same period of time, though stabilizing. And while I’m sure there’s many a heated debate about taxes in certain states, do we always encounter the same passion, divisiveness, and rhetorical fallacies in those debates we experience regarding federal taxes?

Another observation I’ve made living in red-state areas though also living in moderate or liberal enclaves as well is that the policy debates I’ve encountered locally are normally rational debates and not nearly as partisan or idiotic except when discussing business ventures that impact the environment which brings out the idiocy on both sides. In fact our property taxes frequently pay for services that both require tax increases and were conservative-led initiatives.

I’m inclined to consider increases in federal taxes. I think we need to appreciate such increases within light of total taxes including taxes at the state and local level, i.e., part of budgetary reform may very well include spending cuts and resulting services which some states decide to pick-up. For example, California’s investment in stem cell research. Making a more rational budget might also require pushing some spending and attendant services onto to the states in order to free up federal receipts for more strategically necessary spending and investment initiatives where we see some states prudently pick up some of the services cut while others do not and suffer accordingly.

I also think we need to consider healthcare reform’s impact on receipts. All other factors remaining static we should see an increase in tax receipts for healthcare in order to accommodate subsidies to increase the number of individuals covered. That initiative by default doesn’t obligate us to cut spending elsewhere since the cost of some of these services are merely being transferred from within the private sector to the government, with the exception of added healthcare consumption related to increased coverage. However, I also think the old adage taught to us in our first economics courses, ‘guns or butter’, remains sound given our onerous debt levels and our rising entitlement liabilities. So I would hope increases in government expenditures are paid-for where we drop some of the guns to keep our tax receipts for non-entitlement spending at modest-enough levels which don’t risk growth rates or our ability to increase taxes to properly fund entitlements.

Sources
Federal Receipts: Office of Management and Budget Historical Table 1.1. found at this link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals/

State & Local Receipts totals from www.usgovernmentrevenue.com who sources the raw data from the U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/govs/estimate/

GDP from Christopher Chantrill’s “U.S. Government Revenue” site. That site is getting its data from: “GPO Access” which is the Government Printing Office.

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse from William Castleman on Vimeo.

The embedded link displaying his name is to the page providing the technical details of how he captured the eclipse.

H/T – Chris Bodenner @ The Daily Dish

Billfish and tuna, important commercial and recreational fish species, may be more vulnerable to fishing pressure because of shrinking habitat, according to a new study published by scientists from NOAA, The Billfish Foundation, and University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Prince et. al:

. . . confirmed that billfish prefer oxygen rich waters closer to the surface and will actively avoid waters low in oxygen. [...] . . . these zones are expanding and occurring closer to the sea surface, and are expected to continue to grow as sea temperatures rise. Less available habitat can lead to more fish being caught since the fish are concentrated near the surface. Higher catch rates from these areas may give the false appearance of more abundant fish stocks.

I’m a longtime ScienceDaily.com addict. I used to go to their homepage and just flip through the top stories. I’ve always been amazed at how much knowledge science accumulates where their site provides a great method of tapping into what’s being discovered. However several months ago I finally took the time to set-up Google Reader so I could customize my own news aggregator, and that’s where I discovered how much I was missing by mere skimming of their homepage rather than sending RSS feeds to my news aggregator. I hope science teachers in our public schools leverage ScienceDaily.com and personal aggregators to better provide their students with contemporaneous news of the subjects they teach.

Eric D. Prince, Jiangang Luo, C. Phillip Goodyear, John P. Hoolihan, Derke Snodgrass, Eric S. Orbesen, Joseph E. Serafy, Mauricio Ortiz and Michael J. Schirripa. Ocean scale hypoxia-based habitat compression of Atlantic istiophorid billfishes. Fisheries Oceanography, Volume 19, Issue 6

No decorations, no midnight Mass. Even an appearance by Santa Claus has been nixed after Iraq’s Christian leaders called off Christmas celebrations amid new al Qaeda threats on the tiny community still terrified from a bloody siege on a Baghdad church.

Christians across Iraq have been living in fear since the assault on Our Lady of Salvation Church as its Catholic congregation was celebrating Sunday Mass. Sixty-eight people were killed. Days later Islamic insurgents bombed Christian homes and neighborhoods across the capital.

In addition Christians continue to emigrate out since our invasion.

Even before the Oct. 31 church attack, thousands of Christians were fleeing Iraq. They make up more than a third of the 53,700 Iraqis resettled in the United States since 2007, according to State Department statistics.

[...]

Few reliable statistics exist on the number of Christians remaining in this nation of 29 million. A recent State Department report says Christian leaders estimate there are 400,000 to 600,000, down from a prewar level of some 1.4 million.

As bad as it is for Iraqi Christians, I think it might be overly simplistic to reactively lay all the responsibility on the 2003 U.S. invasion which is what precipitated the heightened persecution of these people. Conditions were changing in the Middle East after 9/11 and given Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical tendencies, it’s hard to determine how he would have reacted towards some of his people given these new conditions. While he mostly governed as a secularist who favored Sunni’s due to tribalism, he might very well have been tempted to frame fight against his enemies as a war between Islam and Christianity, which matches rhetoric he began to use as the looming U.S. invasion in 2003 neared.

I think still the U.S. still has culpability, but we should remember the broader context prior, during, and after as well.

U.S. House Representative John Shimkus (R-IL) is the loon’s loon’s loon’s loon – four deep into loonery. He arrogantly denies climate change without first understanding the science behind it, which on its own merely makes him a typical denialist once again illustrating the Dunning-Krueger effect. However his approach to perceiving reality also requires that he test his own uninformed and misinformed perceptions about what science understands to what he believes the Bible has to say about the matter (1). As idiotic and delusional as that is given we’ve falsified the global flood myth for the period the Noah story takes place in the Bible, it gets far worse. Given Rep. Shimkus’ near-complete ignorance regarding climate science he holds a completely misinformed perception of science’s predictions regarding global warming, that fuels his false perception that the Noah story in the Bible offers a rebuttal to the predictions the climate science community makes in its synthesis reports when in fact the Noah story does not reconcile. Rep. Shimkus’s misperception being that he falsely believes scientific consensus predicts a global flood which will “destroy the earth”. (2, 3, 4)

Unfortunately this story’s entertainment value comes at a severe cost where it appears near certain the next two years will be dark days for reality advocates who promote crucial policies based on what science understands rather than how morons misinterpret the Bible. What’s also interesting is that Rep. Shimkus’* policy rejection for mitigation due to global warming is premised on the same argument used by astroturf-financed religious right leaders in the denialist video I posted about last Sunday titled, Resisting the Green Dragon; that is that assigning the costs to mitigate the damage due to climate change to greenhouse gas producers and their consumers is unconscionable since it will harm the poor.

There’s also some really defective logic going on here which could further constrain believers such as Rep. Shimkus from accepting reality if the evidence for global warming increases and becomes more threatening to our wellbeing. Suppose the scientific consensus eventually comes to accept the Venus Syndrome notion (I’m not sure this is even a hypothesis yet, from my perspective it’s merely a notion); that would arguably directly rebut the Noah story’s predictions. Are we to conclude that if science’s developing predictions became ever more catastrophic, the level of denialism by denialist biblical inerrantists would increase? It appears so.

Cites
1) Rep. Shimkus statements in the House of Representative:

2) This is the passage Shimkus falsely claims rebuts the climate science community’s predictions; Genesis 8:20 – 22 [RSV]::

20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. 22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

2) While Rep. Shimkus did not reference this passage, it’s part of the Bible’s Noah story which also makes predictions that again do not correlate to currently held consensus predictions – Genesis 9:1 – 17 [RSV]:

1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. 2 The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. 4 Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man’s brother I will require the life of man. 6 Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image. 7 And you, be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly on the earth and multiply in it.” 8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.”

4) IPCC Fourth Assessment Report – Working Group I: Chapter 10, Global Climate Projections

*Originally misspelled as Shimus rather than the correct Shimkus.

Typically these engagements are debated on conservative terms, their advocacy for states rights and local control while their opponents argue weakly regarding the quaintness of such arguments without even leveraging the killer rebuttal. This was exactly how Matthews started so I reacted with the normal gut twitches about how moronic liberals were in failing to go for the jugular when it was staring them in the face. However he was baiting us and probably the ‘states rights’ advocates as well, all twelve of them who watch his show; his finish was masterful.

The line through receipts I chose is linear and you can see its increasing trend is very slight. I can not measure any correlation between federal receipts and GDP growth. The line through GDP growth rates was changed from a ten-year moving average in Monday’s blog post to an eight-year moving average in an attempt to better visualize the business cycle and trends from one cycle to another (H/T Shygetz).

The median and average level of federal receipts are both 19%. The last time we exceeded this average was 1996 – 2001 when receipts averaged 20.67% of GDP. It should be noted that tax rates and attendant laws are not the only factors that drive the level of receipt volume, instead tax liability variations are also a function of a change in our individual and collective income. From that perspective we should expect an increase in revenues relative to GDP during business up-cycles even if the tax laws don’t change. We also encounter a corresponding drop in receipts when GDP growth declines.

I remain bemused that advocating for receipts that effectively average in the high-teens makes one a U.S. lovin’ capitalist while arguing for receipts that average in the very-low twenties makes one a commie-fascist-socialist. Especially when we consider these effective rates differentials’ enormous impact on debt.

However and in spite of the Tea Partiers misplaced ire directed towards Democrats serving in the federal government; our tax burden doesn’t come only from federal taxes. So in the next blog post we’ll consider the total amount of government receipts including state and local taxes.

One last observation on the above graph – just because we pay more in taxes doesn’t mean we have less income available to procure goods and services. Sometimes private markets fail and its prudent to offer that good or service through the government with attendant taxes to fund this offering. If we’re paying 17% of our income on health care from the private sector, but can switch to paying taxes and receive more healthcare services where healthcare costs nominally decrease that could be a good policy change. If we chose this option we’d see a higher effective taxation rate and an increase in the percentage of government receipts relative to GDP which would appear to be a bad thing when in fact we’re getting more services for less out-of-pocket costs*.

So if we did make such a change, we’d also see another one of my metrics also go down, assuming no other economic impact (which is not true**), and that is personal discretionary (after-tax) income. So while considering whether to finance healthcare through the government which is a more productive purchasing agent of healthcare, we need to be cognizant of how certain metrics we use to measure success or failure may send failure signals that are actually the result of successful policy execution.

Here is how federal receipts parse out by source, using the OMB’s 2010 budget estimate:

Consider how powerful corporate interests are in D.C. relative to the amount of taxes they contribute. This illustrates one of several reasons why I advocate we don’t burden companies with taxes except fees to fund directly servicing their operations (e.g. gas taxes, fire protection, permits). Especially since the the market as a whole must pass these tax burdens on to consumers of the goods and services corporations market.

*James Hanley – When I noted my objective regarding median discretionary income being a good thing and you commented on a desire to use a metric that instead better measured how many goods and services we obtained and how that trended – I was with you.

**If we freed up money that was previously spent procuring less healthcare, we’d most likely see a collective increase in growth by spending it or investing it. In fact a Presidential commission on healthcare costs found (IIRC) that the net impact to GDP for universal coverage was predicted to be an annual marginal increase of 0.7% to GDP which is about $100 billion a year of increased goods and services. Some of this would come from a more productive work-force, e.g., less sick days.

Sources
Federal Receipts: Office of Management and Budget Historical Table 1.1. found at this page.

GDP from Christopher Chantrill’s “U.S. Government Revenue” site. That site is getting its data from: “GPO Access” which is the Government Printing Office.