Tag Archives: Increase

News

Women are becoming more violent towards their partners

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I noticed this story in Australia’s Daily Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Shocking figures have revealed that the number of women who have been charged with domestic violence-related assault has soared by 159 per cent over the past eight years.

The figures, from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, show 2336 women faced court on charges of domestic violence in 2007, mainly for bashing their husbands, compared with just 818 in 1999.

….The figures show that although the number of women prosecuted for general assault remained stable between 1999 and 2007, there was an increase of 11 per cent a year in the number of women prosecuted for domestic violence.

During the same period, domestic violence charges against men rose by 2.3 per cent a year.

I am at a loss to understand why this is. Does anyone have a theory about why this is happening? Leave a comment if you do.

I wrote before about the problem of domestic violence against males, on the first day I started my blog. It turns out that these Australian numbers are echoing the numbers in Canada and the UK that I cited in that post:

UK numbers:

In the event, the CASI method found relatively high levels of male victimisation, to the extent that men appear to be at equal risk to women of domestic assault (4.2% of both sexes reported an assault in the last year).

Canada numbers:

An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive new report on family violence.

Here is a related research paper on the problem of domestic violence against men, writen by Dr. Linda Kelly, a professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law.

Commentary

Keith Hennessey explains the looming crisis of entitlement spending

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This is the best post I have ever seen on the problem of demographics and entitlement spending, which is due to explode in about a few years. I’ll summarize so that you will click through and read this post for yourself. There is almost no text in the post, it is all graphs, and they are self explanatory. It will take your about 5 minutes to scare yourself into a coma.

Summary of the post:

  • There are 3 entitlement programs: social security, medicare and medicaid
  • These programs are funded by taxes on young people who are still working
  • These 3 programs currently cost 9% of GDP.
  • By 2050, the costs will have doubled to 18% GDP.
  • Some of this increase will be due to excess growth in health costs
  • And some of this increase will be due to demographics

Let me talk more about the demographics problem:

  • More people are living longer
  • That means that benefits are being paid out over more years, per person
  • A huge group of babies from the Baby Boom started retiring in 2008
  • But the number of younger workers who pay their benefits is not growing fast enough
  • The number of workers needed to pay each retiree’s benefits is shrinking
  • Taxes will have to increase, or benefits will have to decrease

Please read the article. It will help you to put Obama’s massive spending and tax hikes in perspective. By the way, this is a great post to forward to your friends and neighbor’s who voted for Obama who do not like to read about economics and finance.

News

Democrat health care bill requires 600 billion dollar tax hike

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Welcome visitors from 4Simpsons! Thanks for the link Neil!

Bloomberg reports:

Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. The measure’s cost is reaching well beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a 10-year down payment for the policy changes.

Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion over a decade, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.” Some Senate Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the costs will likely exceed $1.5 trillion.

…That won’t be enough to cover the overhaul costs. Obama said this week he plans in the coming days to disclose more proposals for raising “additional sources of revenue.” In a letter last week to Senate Democrats drafting legislation he said he will be proposing between $200 billion and $300 billion in further Medicare and Medicaid cuts.

If you think that tax hikes on “the rich” won’t affect you, you’re naive. The rich are the people you work for. If Obama starts confiscating your money, they will ship your job overseas where taxes are lower. That’s just the way it is. The most productive people in the world are not just going to hand over their money to Obama to redistribute to unions, bureaucrats, the United Nations, ACORN and Planned Parenthood.

Stem cells in India

Meanwhile, here is a neat health care story so you will know where to go for medical treatment (India) after Obama tells you that you will have to wait two years behind people who voted for him.

“It was the first time in eastern India that such a transplant was being performed on a child,” he said….Pramita’s bone marrow, which contain stem cells, was collected from her spinal cord. It was successfully transplanted in her body in April 2009. The entire process took two months during which she was kept isolated in a sterilised room with high efficient particulate air (HEPA) filter. “We will do a follow-up on her health for the next six months since she may contract infection during this period and so has to follow some restrictions. But after that she can lead a normal life and can resume her dance lessons without any problem,” Dr. Mukhopadhyay said.

For more on stem cell research, see this post.