The Fat and the Poor

http://techcentralstation.com/082704D.html

"...A few years ago, Stephen F. Venti and David Wise examined the relationship between income and wealth for people nearing retirement age. If everyone had approximately the same savings behavior, then you would expect that most of the variation in wealth would be due to variation in lifetime income. High earners would have accumulated much more wealth than low earners, but within an income group the differences would be small.



What Venti and Wise found instead was that much of the variation was within an income group. You could find high-income people who had managed to accumulate very little wealth, and vice-versa. As Hal Varian noted, "Mr. Venti and Mr. Wise started their analysis by estimating the lifetime income of each household, then sorted the households into 10 equal-sized groups based on their estimate. Their most striking observation was the extreme variation in total asset accumulation within each income group. For example, the wealth held by the top 10 percent of households in the group just below the median was 35 times the wealth held by the bottom 10 percent of that same income group." To understand this observation, imagine two families with virtually identical incomes annual incomes of $40,000. After several decades one family has accumulated $700,000 in savings for retirement and the other winds up with just $20,000 in savings for retirement...."

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"...There is a parallel between the problems of middle-class squeeze and obesity. Self-control is required in order to live within one's means financially and in order to maintain a low body weight.

.... did you know that the entire increase [in American obesity[ can be explained by three Oreo cookies a day? The trouble is that calories accumulate so holding caloric expenditures constant even a small permanent increase in calories consumed can lead to serious weight gain over long periods of time."

Small changes in lifestyle can have large cumulative effects. A family that spends 92 percent of its after-tax income will accumulate substantial savings, while a family that spends 98 percent of its disposable income will not. On the surface, their lifestyles might not seem to differ, but eventually they will end up in very different circumstances.

Similarly, someone may consume 99 percent of the calories that her body needs each day, and someone else may consume 102 percent of the necessary calories. While they appear to be eating almost identical amounts, those two people will end up with very different body masses after several years..."

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no subject

Via ehintz:

Garrison Keillor writes in (We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore):

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?
...

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.

Lincoln was no friend of liberty:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.

-- Abraham Lincoln

In other words, Lincoln didn't particularly care about slavery one way or the other -- he was simply using the slavery issue as a way to maintain power by preventing the Southern states from seceding.

I would argue that the Republicans are returning to the policies of Lincoln--strong centralized government-- and abandoning their more recent support for decentralized power. They've also adopted Lincoln's disrespect for constitutional safeguards:

"...[Lincoln] suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, the only personal liberty law in the Constitution, and ordered the military to arrest tens of thousands of Northern citizens for merely voicing opposition to his administration. This number included hundreds of Northern newspaper editors and owners who criticized the Lincoln administration. None of these individuals was ever served a warrant and some spent four years in military prison without any due process. ..."

Sound familiar?

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Celebrity druggies?

My friend Jon pointed out that part of the reason that celebrities seem to have drug or alcohol problems more than most is that lot's of people want to sleep with them. And one way to get somebody to sleep with you is to get them stoned or drunk. So celebrities are offered drugs and alcohol much more often than most people. [1]

[1] There are probably lot's of other reasons celebrities become addicts. This is offered as only part of the explanation.