JayB

Yea - pretty much runs the gamut of the factors that coalesced into modernity. Renaissance, Enlightenment, constitutional government, separation of powers, scientific method and all of the fruits thereof, art, literature, philosophy, etc, etc, etc. The extent to which economic processes which established powerful interests that were independent of the church and the crown shouldn't be underestimated either. Ingersoll hinted at the idea that most of what moderated the stridency of religious certitude originated from sources outside the established religion back in the nineteenth century. I can't recall a passage where he states this explicitly, but there's a passage that gets close that I can recall. From, "The Devil,": "Many of the clergy are now ashamed to say that they believe in devils. The belief has become ignorant and vulgar. They are ashamed of the lake of fire and brimstone. It is too savage. At the same time they do not wish to give up the inspiration of the Bible. They give new meanings to the inspired words. Now they say that devils were only personifications of evil. If the devils were only personifications of evil what were the angels? Was the angel who told Joseph who the father of Christ was, a personification? Was the Holy Ghost only the personification of a father? Was the angel who told Joseph that Herod was dead a personification of news? Were the angels who rolled away the stone and sat clothed in shining garments in the empty sepulcher of Christ a couple of personifications? Were all the angels described in the Old Testament imaginary shadows -- bodiless personifications? If the angels of the Bible are real angels, the devils are real devils. Let us be honest with ourselves and each other and give to the Bible its natural, obvious meaning. Let us admit that the writers believed what they wrote. If we believe that they were mistaken, let us have the honesty and courage to say so. Certainly we have no right to change or avoid their meaning, or to dishonestly correct their mistakes. Timid preachers sully their own souls when they change what the writers of the Bible believed to be facts to allegories, parables, poems and myths. It is impossible for any man who believes in the inspiration of the Bible to explain away the Devil. If the Bible is true the Devil exists. There is no escape from this. If the Devil does not exist the Bible is not true. There is no escape from this." http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/devil.html Worth reading all of it, and following the link to the many other essays. Worth noting that he was a prominent figure in the Republican party at the time...

The essential point is that the forces that have moderated religious fanaticism have generally had their origin and their strongest reservoirs of support outside of religion itself.

If you are describing his argument correctly, Richard Dawkins clearly does not understand a key aspect of Christianity: Christians are not bound by the old testament law. Christians really only have one law: love thy neighbour. If Dawkins doesn't understand this, it brings the whole bookinto question. Private religion? I have to say that while I'm not terribly impressed by Moses, I'm not a huge fan Leegnar, the warrior priest who channeled the divine wisdom of Rixtnosophlib, the vengeful goat-man-python god at the heart of the Quixtanthor people who fluorished briefly in a remote corner of what is now French Guiana 1500 years ago, before being wiped out by a catastrophic mudslide. I hope I haven't offended anyone.

This was one of the more interesting tidbits in that article: "Two years later, in the tax-reform act of 1986, Congress ended the deductibility of interest on credit-card and other consumer loans; it left the mortgage deduction in place."

Bullshit. Certain individuals here are doing far more than avoiding a religious taboo. Saying "fuck Moses" is far beyond merely refusing to abide by some taboo, it's intentionally maximizing offensiveness and contempt. In such a case just about any response - including those images - can hardly be faulted as "over the bounds". The bounds have already been overshot. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. What distinguishes your position here from the Muslims upset about cartoon images of Mohammed in Danish newspapers? I'm not suggesting that they're completely identitical, but what, in your opinion, distinguishes your arguments from theirs on this point? Those muslims have every right to be offended. They can boycott companies that publish or broadcast the images, they can send letters to the editor, they can have peaceful protests. They can even tell all of us who laugh at the images and mock them to go fuck ourselves. They can NOT make death threats, set off bombs, call for jihad, etc. It's pretty fucking clear, no? I agree - they are free to do all of those things, but it seems like the entire spectrum of actions that we've seen from them have their genesis in the same sense of outrage at others mocking some particular aspect of their faith that they deem sacred. I'm not sure how much of what we know about Jesus the historical figure is accurate, but how well does the outrage and anger that you feel square with the picture that believers have constructed over many centuries? Would Jesus - as you understand him - be overcome with anger if he saw someone taking a leak on his image or mocking some element of his faith?

You may have heard the expression: "is nothing sacred"? The answer is, yes, some things are to many people, and very deeply so(including at least six million people who were murdered for their religious beliefs or associated ethnicity.) In a free society, you can piss all over Christianity, Judaism, or whatever, but again, don't expect that you won't be called out on it. You should be. Some of us don't believe in sitting around and watching it treated like some big joke. By responding, at least the awareness is being spread that some people really care about this stuff and maybe you'll reconsider the nature of your ugly comments next time. I doubt it, but maybe. Outside of the settings I mentioned previously - particular religious ceremonies that you are attending as a guest, when you are a guest in a religious persons home - etc, what moral case can be made for a state of affairs in which those outside of a particular religion have to treat a particular belief or figure associated with that religion as sacred? I've run across people who believe that refusing to provide the appropriate medical care that their children need to live is as sacred and inviolable as your fondness for Moses. Is this, and the many other occasions in which a particular set of religious convictions intrude on public life or on matters of public concern also off limits?

Bullshit. Certain individuals here are doing far more than avoiding a religious taboo. Saying "fuck Moses" is far beyond merely refusing to abide by some taboo, it's intentionally maximizing offensiveness and contempt. In such a case just about any response - including those images - can hardly be faulted as "over the bounds". The bounds have already been overshot. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. What distinguishes your position here from the Muslims upset about cartoon images of Mohammed in Danish newspapers? I'm not suggesting that they're completely identitical, but what, in your opinion, distinguishes your arguments from theirs on this point?

For once, I agree with KK here. Well - you're going to like this one bit, then: " Open Letter To Kansas School Board I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design. Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him. It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith. Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease. I’m sure you now realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory. It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t. You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature. In conclusion, thank you for taking the time to hear our views and beliefs. I hope I was able to convey the importance of teaching this theory to your students. We will of course be able to train the teachers in this alternate theory. I am eagerly awaiting your response, and hope dearly that no legal action will need to be taken. I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence. Sincerely Yours, Bobby Henderson, concerned citizen. P.S. I have included an artistic drawing of Him creating a mountain, trees, and a midget. Remember, we are all His creatures." http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/

less offensive to you because you're not religious. Duh. Yea - but there's a significant moral distinction between the two. Refusing to honor other people's religious taboos strikes me as something entirely different than using images of people that died in concentration camps for theatrical purposes. Most religious people don't abide by the taboos of rival faiths, and it's unreasonable to expect them to do so. I don't think that non-believers taking the same liberty with all faiths that believers take with particular elements of other faiths is all that egregious an offense. I also think that context is important. It's reasonable to expect non-believers or persons adhering to different faiths to keep their comments to themselves at particular times and in particular settings - like when one is attending their weddings, paying your respects at their funerals, sitting in on a service wherever they worship, when you are a guest in their home. It's not reasonable to expect this deference in many other settings, including most internet message boards.

Isn't Raindawg's posts here really the other side of the coin from that T'vash added? Both are seeking to be be provocative just because it is fun to poke somebody in the eyes. Perhaps there is something about Dawg's post that you find manipulative or dishonest in some small way, but hey: isn't that the norm for spray postings? How is any of this any worse than the daily spew of insults and lies that we have come to expect in the Spray forum and some seem to think can rightfully spill over to other areas of the board? I'm afraid I have to disagree. Cracking jokes about religion to be provocative and using images of people slaughtered in the Holocaust than for no reason other than to "draw attention" to one's offended religious sensibilities strike me as profoundly different things, with latter much offensive than the former. Heaven help us if we lose the capacity to make distinctions between someone critiquing someone's claim of a carbon neutral Denali ascent, and someone appropriating Holocaust imagery to dramatize his hurt feelings.

From the NYT. Worth reading in full. "March 5, 2006 Tax Break Who Needs the Mortgage-Interest Deduction? By ROGER LOWENSTEIN One of the first financial lessons I learned from my father was that when you buy a house, you get a tax break from deducting the interest on your mortgage. Therefore, he would explain as if it were as natural as pivoting at second base on a throw from shortstop, a person could afford to pay more for a house that he owned than he would on a residence that he was only renting and on which he didn't get the tax break. I didn't know why the government had chosen to influence my decision in this manner, and even less did I consider how it might affect the people on the other side — the people who might be selling me a house, or lending me the money, or, for that matter, the guy who might have liked to have rented me an apartment if the Internal Revenue Code hadn't been tilted against him. But it was a lesson I took to heart. When I was considering buying my very first dwelling, a 1BR w/EIK on West 79th Street with, for those who were sufficiently agile, a faint glimpse of the Hudson River, I vaguely remember that I scratched out the monthly cost of the mortgage payment, after which Dad made some quick calculations to demonstrate that the "after-tax cost" of the mortgage actually was within my budget. From then on, deducting the interest became an indispensable tactic (in fact, it was the only tactic I had) in my forays into real estate. The houses got steadily bigger, and so did the mortgages. Last year, when my new wife and I bought a modern colonial in suburban Boston that was intended to accommodate a majority of the children we had accumulated from our first marriages, not to mention a plurality of our itinerant relatives, I took out an "interest only" mortgage, a big attraction of which was that the payments (all interest, no principal) were entirely deductible. By then, I did know something about what the government was up to. Or at least I thought I did. Some fellow in the Treasury Department had long ago decided it would be a good thing for families like ours not to suffer through our lives as tenants. In fact, he (whoever he was) decided it would be good for our neighbors and for society in general if we could be owners and not just dwellers. In early America, only those who owned property were eligible to vote, and the notion that tenants were only provisional citizens, or at least had a lesser stake in things, has somehow endured. According to studies, people who own their homes take better care of them; they fix the roof more often and plant more lilacs. They join more clubs and community groups; they vote more often; they move around less often; and their kids do better in school. The government is subsidizing my house so I will do more gardening. Or something like that. But when exactly did the interest deduction begin? I had often heard my father rhapsodize about the G.I. Bill of Rights, which was enacted in 1944, when he was serving in the Pacific, and which a few years later was paying his tuition at law school; the mortgage-interest deduction came to be joined in my mind as an adjunct piece of social policy. One got you an education and the other got you a house: together, they bought entree to the middle class. Since the great migration to the suburbs also occurred after World War II, I assumed that the interest deduction was of a similar postwar vintage. Over the years, it has become an American folk legend: the government invented the mortgage-interest deduction to help people buy their own homes, and the level of homeownership has risen ever since. What part of the legend is true? Basically, none of it. Economists don't agree on much, but they do agree on this: the interest deduction doesn't do a thing for homeownership rates. If you eliminated the deduction tomorrow, America would have the same number of homeowners, the same social networks, the same number of gardens. The deduction might help some people (like me) to purchase bigger homes than they otherwise would. And it certainly helps people who are selling mansions to get a higher price. But it is hardly the democratic subsidy people think. In fact, it's patently regressive. More than 70 percent of tax filers don't get any benefit from the deduction at all. O.K., many of them are renters. But even among homeowners, only about half claim the deduction. And for the 37 million individuals and couples who do, the rewards, at least on average, are surprisingly modest — just under $2,000 per return. (Figure it like this: the median home, as computed by the Bureau of the Census in 2003, is valued at $140,000. If you finance 80 percent of it with a 6 percent mortgage, your interest bill is $6,720 a year. A taxpayer in the 25 percent bracket would save one quarter, or $1,680.) But cumulatively, the deduction is a big deal. This year, it is expected to cost the Treasury $76 billion. And the rewards are greatly skewed in favor of the moderately to the conspicuously rich. On a million-dollar mortgage (the people with those really need help, right?), the tax benefit is worth approximately $21,000 a year. And according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a little over half of the benefit is taken by just 12 percent of taxpayers, or those with incomes of $100,000 or more. This is a social policy? It's hard to imagine that Congress would intentionally legislate such a rich-get-richer handout, but the origins of the deduction are so obscure that the myth about it persists. David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, explained the history of the deduction by observing matter-of-factly: "Homeownership is something this country desires. If you read the tax codes over the last 100 years, you'll see the favoring of the housing sector and all the reasons Congress was giving for it." Congress has indeed done plenty of things over the years to support homeownership, but the deduction wasn't one of them. That mole in the Treasury Department who invented the deduction so I could buy a house — he never existed. In fact, as Steven Bourassa, of the University of Louisville, and William Grigsby, at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in "Housing Policy Debate," a Fannie Mae publication, the mortgage deduction "was largely accidental." The first modern federal income tax was created in 1894. Interest — all forms of interest — was deductible; the Supreme Court, however, quickly ruled that the tax was unconstitutional. In 1913, the Constitution was amended and a new income tax was enacted. Once again, interest was deductible. There is no evidence, however, that Congress thought much about this provision. It certainly wasn't thinking of the interest deduction as a stepping-stone to middle-class homeownership, because the tax excluded the first $3,000 (or for married couples, $4,000) of income; less than 1 percent of the population earned more than that. The people paying taxes — Andrew Carnegie and such — did not need the deduction to afford their homes or their yachts. There is another reason Congress could not have had homeownership in mind. The great majority of people who owned a home did not have a mortgage. The exceptions were farmers. But most folks bought their homes with cash; they had no mortgage interest to deduct. When Congress made interest deductible, it was probably thinking of business interest. Just as today, the aim was to tax a business's profits after expenses had been netted out, and interest was an expense like any other. In a nation of small proprietors, basically all interest looked like business interest. Whether it was interest on a farm mortgage, or interest on a loan to purchase a tractor, or interest charged to a general store that purchased its inventory on credit, it all would have looked like a business expense. Credit cards did not exist. So Congress just said, "Deduct it." It was not until the 1920's and the spread of the automobile that home mortgages outnumbered farm mortgages. In the 1930's, the mortgage industry got a huge assist from the feds — not from the tax deduction, but from agencies like the Federal Housing Administration, which insured 30-year loans, and, over time, the newly created Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae. Before then, the corner bank would issue a mortgage and wait for the homeowner to pay them back; now savings and loans could replenish their capital by selling their mortgages to Fannie Mae — meaning they could turn around and issue a new mortgage to someone else. By the time the G.I.'s returned from World War II, bursting with dreams of homeownership, the mortgage industry was ready for them. It wasn't until after 1950 that the majority of homeowners had mortgages. And thanks to this ready financing, renters suddenly became owners. After hovering around 45 percent for the first half of the 20th century, the proportion of owner-occupied homes soared. By 1960, 62 percent of Americans owned their homes. (Today, the figure is only slightly higher: 69 percent.) Of course, it was in those postwar years, when people were getting their first mortgages and also their first homes, that Americans discovered the joy of the interest deduction. Over time, it evolved into a birthright — almost like owning a home itself. Perhaps it was that confluence of trends that led people to suppose, as Daniel Gross did last year in the online journal Slate, that the U.S.'s "enviably high rate of homeownership" is a product of the deduction. But the existence of credit was a much greater catalyst than the longstanding ability to deduct it. Homeowners who genuflect to the deduction should probably be giving their thanks to mortgage bankers instead. In any case, the growth of credit cards in the 70's began to turn the interest deduction into a serious loophole. People were becoming plastic junkies; if you paid for a washing machine on credit, the I.R.S. would give you a subsidy. By the 1980's, this threatened the entire system of revenue collection. There was some talk that the Treasury was looking at eliminating deductions, including, possibly, the interest deduction. Economists thought it was a good idea. "Tax economists tend to be skeptical about preferences in the tax," says Joseph Thorndike, the director of the Tax History Project at the nonpartisan Tax Analysts. "Are they targeted to the right people? We give tax breaks for college; do we send more kids to college or help middle-class kids who are going to college anyway?" Fine and well, but was an elected official really going to risk fooling with the mortgage deduction? President Reagan was not. Addressing the National Association of Realtors in 1984, he said, "I want you to know that we will preserve the part of the American dream which the home-mortgage-interest deduction symbolizes." He didn't mention that it also symbolized the American love affair with debt; after all, it encourages people to pay for their homes with a mortgage instead of with equity. Two years later, in the tax-reform act of 1986, Congress ended the deductibility of interest on credit-card and other consumer loans; it left the mortgage deduction in place. But Congress did set a cap. Today, a taxpayer can deduct the interest on mortgages worth up to a total of $1 million on his or her first or second homes. Also, you can deduct up to $100,000 on a home-equity loan. (And what prevents you from using a home-equity line to buy a flat-screen TV and then deducting the interest? Absolutely nothing; go for it.) At the beginning of 2005, flush from his election victory, President Bush envisioned another major tax reform, somewhat similar to that of 1986. Simplifying the tax code was a major goal, as was winnowing out the tax breaks that were again eating a hole through the Treasury. Bush appointed a nine-member, bipartisan panel to drum up a proposal. The president ordered the panel to "recognize the importance of homeownership." People figured the interest deduction was off limits. But the panel, with former Senator Connie Mack III as chairman, asked the taboo question of whether homeownership and the interest deduction were related. It decided that they weren't. One reason is that homeownership in the U.S. is about the same as it is in Canada, Australia and England, where interest isn't deductible. Another reason is just common sense. If you want to increase homeownership, you have to do something so that renters become owners. But just over two-thirds of all taxpayers, including most renters, don't itemize their deductions, generally because they don't earn enough; they simply take the "standard deduction." The mortgage deduction doesn't help them. Most taxpayers who do itemize come from the wealthiest one-third; they would own a home regardless. Some have been using the deduction to buy boats ("houseboats," for accounting purposes). The panel wasn't interested in helping people buy boats or palatial estates. "Why," asks Charles Rossotti, a former I.R.S. commissioner and panelist, "would you want an abnormally large subsidy for people who have abnormally large mortgages?" The panel's charge was to make the tax code simpler and "fairer" while keeping it as progressive as it is now — and without, on a net basis, losing any revenue. Bush also wanted it to be pro-growth, not surprisingly, and thus the panel resolved to reduce the scope of the Alternative Minimum Tax, a sort of shadow tax that has come to be levied on more and more filers every year and that confuses just about everyone who has to pay it. But to eliminate the A.M.T., the experts on the panel had to find an alternate source of revenue. The most obvious place was what the Joint Committee calls "federal tax expenditures" — deductions and loopholes that cause the Treasury to lose revenue. The Joint Committee produces a list of such expenditures; it runs for many pages and it is a fearsome document. The tax code currently helps (in no particular order) veterans, the disabled and Americans living abroad; it gives a break to science research, oil and gas developers, alcohol-fuel blenders and biodiesel blenders; it helps agriculture and dairy farms; it helps Blue Cross and Blue Shield; it helps film companies and railroads; it helps students and teachers; it assists New Yorkers and District of Columbians and Native Americans and many, many others. The interest deduction is one of the biggest breaks, right behind health-care premiums paid by corporations, which are tax-free to the employees. A slightly different type of exemption protects corporate retirement plans. In all, such foregone tax collections, or tax expenditures, amount to more than half of the income tax that the Treasury does collect. In the panel's view, though many or most of the deductions help some worthy individual or group, they come at a large total cost to everyone else. And so, last November, the panel did what had been asked of it: it proposed a simplified tax code with fewer deductions and, in return, lower individual and corporate rates and an end to the A.M.T. The proposal included a thunderbolt: the U.S. should scrap the mortgage-interest deduction and replace it with a smaller tax credit, available to every homeowner. Under the panel's scheme, taxpayers would receive a credit equal to 15 percent of their mortgage interest. However, the credit would be capped at a level at which the owner of an above-average-sized home could take full advantage. The maximum break would be several thousand dollars a year, and only principal residences — not ski condos — would qualify. The panel's courage was met with predictable howls of protest. Real-estate agents screamed that ending the sacred interest deduction would set off a slump in the housing market — a pillar in an otherwise weak economy and so forth. Donald Trump, who knows everything, said that eliminating the deduction would result in "a total catastrophe" for the U.S. economy. "It will lead to a major recession, if not a depression." The panel considered this. It also debated the uniqueness of the deduction — a tax provision that has become embedded in mainstream culture — but in the end, according to James Poterba, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "We wanted to wipe the slate clean." The package, he and the others surely hoped, would be judged on its overall equity, not on a provision-by-provision basis. Since 1986, there have been some 15,000 amendments to the tax code, always to help some interest or other but each time distorting free-market incentives. To an economist, when someone invests for profit, that's good. When they invest to take advantage of a tax break, that's bad. "It's a standard canon of economics," Poterba says. It means that capital is being diverted from its best use, and the economy suffers as a result. You can think of the mortgage deduction as a distortion that has helped potential home sellers — not buyers or owners — and this is why the housing industry is so agitated. Research suggests that without the deduction, people would still buy the houses they do now; they would just cost a little less. In effect, the market would adjust downward to reflect some of the decrease in buyers' purchasing power. Though no one knows, a plausible estimate is that prices at the upper end of the housing spectrum would fall by 10 to 15 percent. Prices of less expensive houses would probably rise a bit, because people who don't get a break now would get the tax credit and thus could spend a little more. To cushion the impact, the panel recommended phasing the change in over five years. That might not be very palatable if you happened to have just bought (and financed) a seven-figure home, but remember, the extra money paid into the Treasury wouldn't disappear; it would be returned to taxpayers who would no longer be subject to the A.M.T. The money would still be there, only now it would be in everybody's pockets, not just those of luxury homeowners. You wouldn't have to invest in a house to benefit; you could invest where you wanted. That's called a free market. The real-estate industry logically prefers a protected market to a free one. It argues that capital would drain out of housing. "This is antihousing," says Jerry Howard, chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders. "You will do some serious damage to states with strong vacation economies." You can see why home builders are upset: their margins are fattest on luxury homes; a policy that pushes prices toward the middle, as egalitarian as it might sound, would end their party. But tax policy was never intended to function as a price support. Even less should it support a putative housing bubble. Even the president's directive mentioned sustaining housing ownership — not sustaining housing prices. High prices may even be a disincentive to ownership. And the housing market, the panel concluded, is overcapitalized anyway. Thanks to the interest deduction and other breaks, the effective tax rate on owner-occupied real estate in the U.S. is estimated to be only a fraction of the tax on business. Some of the capital being plowed into McMansions with Olympic-size lap pools would earn a higher return (tax considerations aside) in medical research or pollution control. If you scratch deeply enough, not even the real-estate lobby thinks that the interest deduction makes much sense economically. It's just a goody that homeowners, not to mention real-estate agents, have grown used to. Lereah, the economist for the National Association of Realtors, said: "If you're rewriting the book of Genesis, I might have a different approach. But if you make changes in the middle of the game, it's going to have a negative impact of the value of property . . .reduce people's retirement nest egg, funds they have available for college. You're going to cause a great dislocation." I asked Lereah if we could ever try a new approach — clean the slate — and he repeated that it's too late now to "rewrite Genesis." It would seem that any deduction that survived the biblical Flood is off limits. As absurd as this may sound, Lereah's organization represents 1.2 million real-estate agents, and they have made their displeasure known. Lereah predicted that repeal would be "dead on arrival in Congress." And so, more or less, did everyone else. The only people who seemed to like what the panel did were other experts, principally economists. Joel Slemrod, at the University of Michigan business school, said: "What they're proposing is a good idea. Owning stocks is good for society, too," he noted, but stockbrokers don't get a handout from the feds. "Right now, our tax code says, 'Don't build a factory, build a mansion,' " says Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute. "The deduction is the perfect break for bobos in paradise." Hassett didn't say whether he was referring to elected representatives or to their wealthier constituents, but the purpose of an advisory panel, of course, is to suggest things that mere politicians would not. "There was a feeling that the job of our commission was not to take the political temperature," Poterba told me. "If you can't inject principles into a discussion like this, you never will." Connie Mack, the chairman, actually maintained that the proposal had a chance. He pointed out — as he did to the secretary of the Treasury — that the panel, which included liberals as well as conservatives, had achieved the rare feat of unanimity. He was hoping the secretary would get the ball rolling and that the president would begin a major tax-reform initiative — maybe in the State of the Union. A fine idea. But the State of the Union came and went, and if President Bush was thinking of implementing his panel's agenda — much less of repealing the interest deduction — he didn't get around to saying so. Maybe the president has too much on his plate; maybe he reckoned a financing technique that homeowners have been schooled on by their dads for a couple of generations wasn't an appealing target. "There is a question of what is myth and what is reality," Rossotti, the former I.R.S. commissioner observed. "Some people think we're undermining a fundamental piece of America." A more salable approach would be to kill the deduction in stages, by gradually reducing the $1 million ceiling over many years. Over time, it would simply disappear. Congress could do that; it should do it. The deduction is overrated as an icon, and as tax policy it is misdirected and unfair. But don't hold your breath. Homeownership and a level playing field are always good for a speech. But they are nothing compared with propping up housing prices. And that is what the mortgage deduction is all about. Roger Lowenstein is a contributing writer. His last article for the magazine was about pensions." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/305deduction.1.html?pagewanted=print

Whatever. I never called anyone anti-semitic or a Nazi....THE POST WAS A REALITY CHECK for some of you who have no idea how utterly offensive your little "11th commandment" comment is. The pictures from the camp were to get your attention and make a point. I won't lecture you on the roles of Moses and the Torah in Judaism; if you're not aware already, you can educate yourself. You can spout out most anything you want in this country, but don't expect NOT to be called on it. Minus twenty points for "Some of my best friends are_________[fill in the blank]." It doesn't excuse you from anything. You haven't helped your case. Use of holocaust imagery for no other purpose than to illustrate how offended you are at Tvash's ridicule or mockery of your religious beliefs is hardly more defensible than perceiving antisemitism where there is none. Nice way to honor their memory.

Yup. Can't be justified on economic or social grounds - but the deduction is here to stay, and the subsidies are likely to become more extravagant shortly.

Tvash and I have had and will have disagreements on everything from politics to fluoridation, but I have to chime in on his behalf here. There's absolutely nothing that the guy said that in any way even *hints* at excusing or denying or promoting antisemitism, much less the Holocaust. Using such a marginal pretense to level those accusations at the guy, much less introducing those images into the conversation, was both unfair and in incredibly poor taste. If you want to attack him for many other reasons, be my guest, but that was just lame.

It's pretty clear that there are systemic problems in the real estate market resulting from information asymmetry. There are two primary asymmetries that catalyzed the current implosion. The first involves discrepancies between what real-estate agents, mortgage brokers, and escrow agents know about the home buying process and what consumers know about it. The second involves what the people involved in originating the loans ultimately bundled into mortgage backed securities know about the quality of the loans and collateral bundled into them. I think that had there been better rules in place on either end of the transaction, they would have likely tempered some of the worst excesses - but nothing short of denying people the opportunity to take risks would have prevented the bubble from occurring. There are reasonably good - although far from perfect - checks on information asymmetry in the retail securities market, and millions of people still behaved in a way that can only be described as gambling, and for many the outcome was disastrous. I had a front row seat during the tech bubble, and I can tell you that there's a substantial portion of the public that not only doesn't pay attention when you are making the required disclosure of the risks, they actually become annoyed. I suspect that those loan officers who actually attempted to disclose the risks to people trying to finance a home purchase that was outside of their reach encountered the same phenomenon. If people want put their money in a risky stock, or buy more home than they can afford in the expectation of realizing a financial gain - chances are they'll find a way to do it in any regulatory environment that allows individuals a significant role in making these choices for themselves. The fact that the housing bubble is a global phenomenon - and that the excesses are even more staggering in many parts of Europe and Asia attests to this fact. Poorly constructed rules can ease the formation of a bubble, but it takes greed triumphing over fear in the majority of the individuals that participate in a given market to create it.

I think that there are incentive structures that would minimize these problems, but I'll have to leave that for later. I certainly wouldn't deny that doctors take making a living into account, but I also think that a patient centered model would align the incentives of doctors and patients more closely than the current insurance-driven model.

I think the biggest problem with your proposed model is you assume the average patient can be an arbiter of what tests/treatments he or she might need to treat their malady. We go to the doctor precisely because we do NOT know how to do that. We do not know what we do not know and if a doctor omits a critical test/procedure from the list of options presented to us is he somehow now free from liability because we made our own decisions? I guess what I envision isn't a situation where the doctor withholds any information about his diagnosis, or omits any tests and procedures from the list that he or she presents to the patient - or withholds any advice concerning what he or she thinks the best course of action is, why he or she thinks that the tests are necessary, etc. I don't think that this is terribly different than what happens today, except that the patient gains more control, and considerations centering on legal liability and what the insurance company will pay for become less significant. I'd love to expand on this a bit more, but I have an appointment of my own to get to...

I'd be interested in hearing why you think it's a good idea for medicine, and a bad idea for legal services. I think you've misread the second portion of my post. I think that the incentives at work in the medical system are such that medical decisions are significantly distorted by considerations centering around the following questions. "What will prevent a lawsuit?," and "what will the insurance companies pay for?" I think that the model I've proposed has the potential to reduce the extent to which either distortion enters into the medical decision-making process, at least for non-catastrophic situations.

The answer to the first is that "the mechanism" would be whatever combination of taxation and centralized administration that the proponents of single payer health-care dream up - and then apply it to attorneys. In the second case, since I've been privy to several hundred hours of off-the-record gossip by all kinds of doctors, I can tell you that most of them dream of a world where they can exercise independent clinical judgment and only order those tests that they think are necessary - but since that's not the world we live in, they do what they need to do in order to avoid being sued. I don't think that this is an altogether bad thing, as I've said before that I think that the prospect of liability in the event of malpractice is important. I also think that it's also made things more expensive - not necessarily because of higher premiums - but because the manner in which malpractice claims are adjudicated is such that there are more incentives to cover your ass by ordering a battery of tests than there are to restrict the testing to what you deem medically necessary. I personally think that you could align the incentives of doctors and patients much more effectively under a (progressively subsidized) high-deductible scheme, where patients both pay for and have final say over which tests they opt for. I'm convinced that would diminish some of the distortions that arise from concerns over malpractice liability and from the compensation schemes administered by insurance companies.

Now - getting back to Rudy's job situation... Dude - it sounds like you're probably fairly important to whoever you work for if they're entrusting you with this much responsibility. If that's the case, I have to think that there's a reasonably high probability that that want to keep you employed there, and avoid subjecting you to a level of stress that'd make you inclined to burn out or seek employment elsewhere. If you can't bring this stuff up with your boss, there's gotta be someone there (HR?) that you can discuss this stuff with and develop a plan to ease the strain a bit. If not - maybe start working on a plan to take your talents elsewhere? Sometimes even the knowledge that you've got a plan to extricate yourself can make the day-to-day stuff much easier to bear. That was definitely the case for me at a previous job. Once I had a plan, and could see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, both my morale and my performance improved - at least over what they'd have been if I didn't know when it would all end.

Yes. Just need this image on the "autosampler injection" and it will all make sense...

Do you have a graph or a flow chart you could use to explain this further? As luck would have it...

Naturally, I'm quite relieved to hear that, Chuck. Since this is nothing personal, I'm obliged to inform you that there are several instances of posters making slightly off-topic contributions without the thread author's stated consent in one or more threads in each of the 1597 other pages in this forum, and I expect that you'll bring the same highminded impartiality to the task of retroactively correcting them in those cases where their behavior deviates from your personal standards of etiquette that you displayed here...

Something tells me this is less about a highminded concern for the subtleties of spray etiquette, and more about the ways in which Chuck's personal hostilities towards me manifest themselves on the board from time to time.

Yeah - right. If either person asked me to keep the thread drift out of their spray threads, I'd gladly oblige. You - I'll ignore, unless they've appointed you their personal thread chaperone.