Debt Reduction By Doing Nothing

ThinkProgress:

Given the amount of griping about debt reduction in Washington, it’s remarkable how little attention is paid to the fact that doing nothing solves the medium-term problem:

When we argue about the long-term deficit, we’re arguing about health care costs. But when we argue about the medium-term deficit, we’re primarily arguing about how to keep the deficit manageable consistent with extending a bunch of tax cuts. Politicians who are genuinely obsessed with the deficit as such should simply be saying, “I won’t vote for any tax cuts or spending increases that aren’t offset.”

The AMT is the alternative minimum tax which is supposed to prevent the wealthy from being able to pay no taxes by claiming numerous loopholes that are available to them, but which sometimes hits upper-middle income families with tax breaks for having children. The SGR is the 'sustainable growth rate' for Medicare reimbursements to doctors who want higher payments than the current law. "Continuing current policy" would require that we pass new laws to prevent Bush and Obama tax cuts from expiring as they were intended when these cuts were originally passed into law.

A Life’s Value

As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret

As the players here remake the nation’s vast regulatory system, they have been grappling with a subject that is more the province of poets and philosophers than bureaucrats: what is the value of a human life? The answer determines how much spending the government should require to prevent a single death.

To protests from business and praise from unions, environmentalists and consumer groups, one agency after another has ratcheted up the price of life, justifying tougher — and more costly — standards.
The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the George W. Bush administration.
The Food and Drug Administration declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of cancer victims.
The Transportation Department has used values of around $6 million to justify recent decisions to impose regulations that the Bush administration had rejected as too expensive, like requiring stronger roofs on cars.

And the numbers may keep climbing. In December, the E.P.A. said it might set the value of preventing cancer deaths 50 percent higher than other deaths, because cancer kills slowly. A report last year financed by the Department of Homeland Security suggested that the value of preventing deaths from terrorism might be 100 percent higher than other deaths.


...“Agencies have been using numbers that I thought were just too low,” said W. Kip Viscusi, a professor of economics at Vanderbilt University whose research is cited by most of the federal agencies as the basis for their calculations.

...some industry representatives said assigning a value to life was inherently subjective, and that the recent changes were driven by the administration’s pursuit of its regulatory agenda rather than scientific considerations.

“It looks like they just cooked the books — they just doubled the numbers,” said Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, a trade group for the trucking industry, which faces higher costs under some of the Transportation Department’s new rules.

...The current rise in the value of life is based on the work of Professor Viscusi, who wrote his first paper on cost-benefit analysis as a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1970s. ...

The idea he and others have since developed in a long string of studies is that differences in wages show the value that workers place on avoiding the risk of death. Say that companies must pay lumberjacks an additional $1,000 a year to perform work that generally kills one in 1,000 workers. It follows that most Americans would forgo $1,000 a year to avoid that risk — and that 1,000 Americans will collectively forgo $1 million to avoid the same risk entirely. That number is said to be the “statistical value of life.”
Professor Viscusi’s work pegs it at around $8.7 million in current dollars.
Before the current administration, only the E.P.A. had fully embraced this methodology. Other agencies relied instead on the results of surveys asking Americans how much they would spend to avoid a given risk. This technique tends to produce significantly lower results. An even older technique, which yields even lower numbers, is to sum the wages lost when a worker dies.

The Value of a Human Life: $129,000 - TIME: 

In theory, a year of human life is priceless. In reality, it's worth $50,000.
That's the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of 'quality life' for $50,000 or less. New research, however, would argue that that figure is far too low.

The Value of a Human Life | Mother Jones:

Though calculating the "value of a statistical life" (VSL) may sound callous or morbid, it can lead to stronger safety and environmental regulations. For example, auto safety rules that would cost $100 million to implement but might protect $500 million worth of lives (say, 100 people at $5 million a pop) are seen as a good deal, cost-benefit-wise.
VSLs can vary widely, depending on the agency crunching the numbers and the administration in office. As this chart shows, the feds currently think each of us is worth somewhere between $5 million and $9.1 million.

Growth of Government Megatrend

TheMoneyIllusion » 100 years of statism, 100 years of neoliberalism:

I’d like to argue that to understand what’s going on in the world, one needs to understand the megatrends. Yes, I know that ‘megatrend’ is a rather disreputable term, associated with crackpots. But I’m going to use it anyway. Here’s my basic hypothesis:
1. For nearly 100 years statism was on the advance in the US, and indeed in almost every country.
2. In the US the period of growth of government started at least as far back as 1887 (the ICC) and continued until 1977, after which deregulation, free trade agreements, and MTR cuts kicked in. In other countries one saw MTR cuts, deregulation and privatization.
3. During the statism megatrend, the term ‘reform’ implicitly meant bigger government. That’s how governments reacted to crises. During the current (neoliberalism) megatrend, the tern ‘reform’ implicitly means less government.
4. In the US this pattern has recently been hidden by health care, which is one aspect of the welfare state that was never completed in the statist era (although it was completed in all other developed countries.)
5. During the megatrends, there are periods of consolidation, which are falsely viewed as countertrends. They are not countertrends. The trend is still intact. In the US the 1920s and 1950s were falsely viewed as countertrends. Don’t be fooled, we are only 1/3 of the way through the neoliberalism megatrend.