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6/30/09

Wish me luck

In 5 hours or so (that should make it 2 a.m. ish), I'll be in a lawn chair ?first in line at the New Haven Public Schools office to try to get O a spot in the Worthington Hooker school's second grade class. Questions you may have:

is the Hooker school that good?

are the other schools that bad?

is private school that expensive?

do you really have nothing better to do with your time?...

...to which I will reply: 'so we're told' 'so we're told' 'definitely' and 'yes' in that order.

6/23/09

Father's Day card

This is the inside of my Father's Day card from O. First of all, so we can move on, let's acknowledge either the spelling error on 'coke' or some serious Freudian issues bubbling to the surface.
Why I am a speck? -- the artist says it's because pizza, black beans and coke are my favorite foods and he wanted me to have gigantic portions of them on Father's Day.

6/20/09

new fun thing to search for in youtube

type in 'worst commercial ever.' you get some real gems like this one

6/18/09

My wife will love this one

This one sort of sneaks up on you. It's more than just a one-liner so stick around til the end. And just makes Pittsburgh that much more of an enigma.

6/12/09

Healthcare financing (more boring than baseball)

In the latest NEJM, Jonathan Gruber succintly describes a huge potential source of savings in health-care financing. This is not a new idea but based on the fact that I'm reading it in more and more places, I think it's gaining steam.

"...There is one final potential source [of savings]: the elimination or limiting of the income-tax exclusion for expenditures on employer-sponsored insurance. Ending the massive tax subsidy for such insurance would result in both the most natural source of financing for health care reform and one of the few that is clearly large enough to finance the necessary subsidies.
The $250 billion per year in foregone revenues attributable to the tax exclusion of employers' health insurance expenditures represents the federal government's second-largest health insurance expenditure (after Medicare). When my employer pays me in cash wages, I am taxed on those wages. But the roughly $10,000 per year that my employer spends on my health insurance is not taxed, and it translates into a tax break for me of about $4,000. To be clear, this exclusion represents a tax break for individuals, not for firms; firms are largely indifferent about whether they pay employees in wages or in health insurance. But employees are not indifferent: they pay taxes on the former but not on the latter.
This tax exclusion has three flaws. First, the forgone tax revenue is an enormous sum of money that could be more effectively deployed elsewhere, especially through new approaches to increasing insurance coverage. Just taxing health benefits through the income tax as we do wages would raise $2.3 trillion in federal revenues over the next decade. Second, the exclusion is a regressive entitlement, since higher-income families with higher tax rates get a bigger tax break; about three quarters of these dollars go to Americans in the top half of the income distribution. Third, this tax subsidy makes health insurance, which is bought with tax-sheltered dollars, artificially cheap relative to goods bought with taxed dollars — a phenomenon that leads to overinsurance for most Americans and overspending on medical care.
Given these limitations, no health care expert today would ever set up a health care system with such an enormous tax subsidy for a particular form of insurance coverage. So why don't we just remove it?...."

6/9/09

R.U.B.A rocks

It was quite a party folks. There was a little something for everyone. I will keep the details shrouded in mystery.... and it appears the only two generations that behaved in a way suitable for photography were the kids and the G-mas, pictured below.

6/1/09

Genius

Combining embarrassing celebrity/rich people moments with a cat-playing-keyboard outtro? This is youtube's new pinnacle. Make sure to sift through all the keyboard cat outtakes -- each one is a gem.