NPR reports on the Alternative Minimum Tax:
… here’s the thing about patching the AMT: It’s expensive, which is why Congress hasn’t made the fix permanent.
I guess that depends on whether you identify with the tax collectors, or the tax payers.
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
NPR reports on the Alternative Minimum Tax:
… here’s the thing about patching the AMT: It’s expensive, which is why Congress hasn’t made the fix permanent.
I guess that depends on whether you identify with the tax collectors, or the tax payers.
Global Science Report is a weekly feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
Scientists have known for decades that, as global carbon dioxide levels increase, so too does the standing biomass of the world’s plants. Carbon dioxide is a strong plant fertilizer.
As plants grow better, they also increasingly act as carbon sinks as they convert atmospheric carbon dioxide, with a little help from water and sunshine, into carbohydrates stored as biomass. Some of that carbon is returned to the air annually through decomposition, but other portions are are stored for longer periods in the soil, downed logs, houses, etc. This plant-based carbon sink helps to offset the growth of global carbon dioxide emissions from human activities (primarily from the burning of fossil fuels). Together, the terrestrial carbon sink, along with the oceanic carbon sink, annually takes up more than half of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions—and remarkably, as global CO2 emissions have increased, so too has the global CO2 sink.
But now comes new evidence that plants may be helping to combat global warming through another mechanism as well, slowing the build-up of the atmospheric concentration of methane (a greenhouse gas some 25 times more effective than CO2 on a molecule-for-molecule bases at adding pressure for the world to warm).
As shown in the fugure below the jump, the growth rate of the atmospheric concentration of methane (CH4)—which is projected by the IPCC to be rising rapidly—began slowing down in the early 1990s and even topped out for a few years in the mid-2000s. Since about 2007, the atmospheric concentration of CH4 has been rising again, but only at about half that of the pre-1990 rate.
Figure 1. Atmospheric methane concentration (source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).This behavior is not understood by climate scientists. It contravenes alarmist scenarios of runaway global warming fueled by a positive methane feedback (the scenario for which is that warming leads to thawing of the arctic permafrost, which releases methane, which leads to more warming, and so on).
A team of scientists from Lund University and Stockholm University set out to investigate recent claims that some plants release methane and are therefore a source of global methane emissions. They set up instruments to measure methane exchange on a collection of individual branches of four different tree species in a 100-year-old forest in central Sweden. A set of control experiments was also conducted in a laboratory setting. They just published their findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Much to their surprise, the researchers found that the trees (both in the field and in the lab) were taking up methane rather than releasing it. They suggest that the presence of a “bacteria with the ability to consume [methane] would be a possible explanation for [the observed behavior].”
That’s not the only good news.
The researchers then executed the extremely risky (and oft ill-advised) maneuver of scaling up from a few tree branches in central Sweden to the level of the global forest canopy. Their research “indicates that the canopy might play an equally important role [in CH4 uptake] as the soil in the global context.” In other words, their results show that trees are playing a large (and hitherto unknown) role as a sink in the global methane cycle.
The culprit? Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
In the authors’ own words (with my emphasis):
Two recent studies give alternative explanations to the slow-down in the growth rate of atmospheric methane in the last decades. One of them indicates that it is due to a stabilization of fossil-fuel emissions (Aydin et al., 2011) whereas the other explains it by a decrease in microbial methane sources in the northern hemisphere (Kai et al., 2011). Our results offer a third explanation: that an increasing amount of CH4 has been taken up by vegetation during the last decades as a consequence of increased greenness (Myneni et al., 1997), NPP [net primary production] (Nemani et al., 2003) and GPP [gross primary production] (Chen et al., 2006) as observed by satellite remote sensing.
This is still highly a highly speculative result and one that will require a heck of a lot more study and independent confirmation. But it is a novel finding and goes to show that there is still a lot of interesting research ongoing in the field of climate (change), and that most definitely the science is not “settled.”
Sundqvist, E., et al., 2012. Atmospheric methane removal by boreal plants. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L21806, doi:10.1029/2012GL053592
A significant interest of mine is how public elementary and secondary schools—government schools—force diverse people into conflict rather than, as the gauzy mythology tells us, bringing them together. After all, unless people are prepared to ditch deeply held values and opinions about what’s best for their kids, they have no choice but to engage in political (and sometimes actual) combat. And whether it’s over evolution or “Bong Hits 4 Jesus,” engage they do.
There is a corollary to this in higher education. All taxpayers are compelled to support colleges and universities, whether through direct aid to institutions or to students. As a result, either taxpayers are forced to support all academic speech—including speech they may find abhorrent—or government must deem some academic speech unacceptable. Either way, government impinges on individual liberty.
The negative consequences of this are not nearly as apparent as in K‑12, where values-based conflicts make headlines almost every day. The reason such headlines aren’t nearly as prevalent in higher ed may be because far fewer people have strong connections to the ivory tower.
This is not to say that collisions of taxpayer funding and academic freedom never make a loud bang. When the Ward Churchill “little Eichmanns” situation blew up in 2005, Colorado Governor Bill Owens immediately seized on the compelled-support angle, stating that “no one wants to infringe on Mr. Churchill’s right to express himself. But we are not compelled to accept his pro-terrorist views at state taxpayer subsidy nor under the banner of the University of Colorado.”
Colorado taxpayers, however, were technically required to pay for Churchill’s “pro-terrorist views.” While academic impropriety—not his 9/11 essay—officially got Churchill canned, the academic accusations were almost certainly brought to the fore by Churchill’s essay-delivered infamy. Indeed, in 2009 a Colorado court concluded that Churchill had, de facto, been improperly let go due to his 9/11 essay, and awarded him $1 in damages. Just this past April, however, the state Supreme Court ruled that Churchill was neither entitled to back pay nor reinstatement.
Did you follow the clear principles guiding all those decisions, by the way? Me neither, but such is the malodorous hash you get when you try to reconcile the irreconcilable.
It is not individual cases, though, through which the death match between taxpayers’ and professors’ rights is most readily revealed. No, it is manifested most concretely in the seemingly endless war between conservatives and the politically correct academy.
There is little question that academia is a battleship of the left. Indeed, as the Higher Education Research Institute just found, its port-side tilt has recently gotten even worse. Conservatives, reasonably, find having to pay for their intellectual enemies disquieting. But the solution often proffered for this—achieving intellectual “balance” or “diversity”—is little better than the status quo.
For one thing, who would be the arbiter of proper balance, especially understanding that peoples’ views are not monolithically liberal or conservative? And even if brilliantly proportioned ideological representation could be achieved, on what grounds could the apolitical be compelled to subsidize it?
The only fully satisfactory solution to the compelled-support problem is to, well, end compelled support of higher education. But there are good, better, and best options for reducing the problem short of complete government withdrawal.
Good: End government subsidies that go directly to schools. These are pure compulsion, with no individual choice involved. It’s basically how we fund elementary and secondary education, the hottest of all culture-war battlefields.
Better: Connect all money to students, though in the form of loans, not grants. That would add a heck of a lot more choice—students would freely choose where to attend—and the decision would ultimately be paid for by the consumer. Of course, taxpayers would have no ability to choose recipients of the loans, so appreciable compulsion would remain.
Best: Move entirely to tax credits for individuals and corporations that donate to organizations providing scholarships—or perhaps even loans—to students at all levels. Donors would choose to donate and students would choose schools. There would still be government influence—your only choices would be to donate or pay taxes—but taxpayers would have the option not to subsidize higher ed at all.
Academic freedom is fantastic if it means academics have freedom from government coercion. But freedom for all is even better, and that requires ending subsidies for higher ed.
Cross-posted from SeeThruEdu.com
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been spending unknown and unauthorized amounts of taxpayer dollars to create a federal health insurance “exchange.”
Now we learn that as the result of a recent purchase, one health insurance carrier’s parent company—UnitedHealth Group—basically just bought the federal exchange that is supposed to regulate it. There’s a former exchange-planning official in the mix, yet nobody told the Securities and Exchange Commission—and now there are allegations that HHS counseled the buyers not to make that legally mandated disclosure.
Maybe a second Obama term won’t be so dull after all.
Here’s another poor, unsuccessful, election-day-related letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post (who has probably blocked my email address by now):
The Post rightly criticizes Mitt Romney’s “Contempt for voters” [editorial, Nov. 4].
But the same could be said of the Post’s argument that, because a proposed amendment to Virginia’s Constitution would make it harder for government to take voters’ property away from them, voters should oppose it [“Vote no on Ballot Question 1 in Va.,” editorial, Nov. 1].
For election day, here is a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post:
“Because of his social views,” Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson “could also steal some support away from Obama on the left” [“Gary Johnson’s third-party presidential bid: A real factor or just a footnote?” Oct. 19].
Somebody stop that man! Doesn’t he know those votes belong to President Obama?
Or perhaps we should disenfranchise those erstwhile Obama voters, who flatter themselves that they are exercising their judgment and free will, but are merely accessories to a crime.
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has filed a lawsuit challenging the Internal Revenue Service’s unlawful attempt to impose ObamaCare’s taxes on exempt employers and individuals. (Jonathan Adler and I plumb this issue in our forthcoming Health Matrix article, “Taxation Without Representation: The Illegal IRS Rule to Expand Tax Credits Under the PPACA.”)
An article in the current issue of Business Insurance cites a couple of experts on the potential impact of the lawsuit:
While the ramifications of the suit pending in the U.S. District Court in Muskogee, Okla., are huge, the challenge brought last month has gotten little attention…
What is clear is that the outcome of the lawsuit could be crucial for the future of the health care reform law, observers said.
If premium subsidies are not available in federally established exchanges, “No one would go to those exchanges. The whole structure created by the health care reform law starts to fall apart,” said Gretchen Young, senior vice president-health policy at the ERISA Industry Committee in Washington.
“The health care reform law would become a meaningless law,” added Chantel Sheaks, a principal with Buck Consultants L.L.C. in Washington.
divFor more, read here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.