Scientists in Montana found soft tissue inside a T. Rex leg bone. (slashdot )
Having spent about every other night I’ve been home in the last two years reading about dinosaurs, and having made up a dinosaur version of the Hokey Pokey to perform at a certian five-year birthday party last weekend, I’m kind of obsessed with this.
And completely willing to withstand all sorts of bad Jurassic Park jokes if we can actually get some 35’ tall predators stalking out there.
Excerpt:
Naturally, the elderly don’t see themselves as freeloaders. They think they’ve “earned” their Social Security benefits by paying payroll taxes. As Schieber and Shoven note, the term “social insurance” dates to Bismarck in 19th-century Germany. But applying it to Social Security involved much political license. In normal usage, insurance suggests protection against something you don’t expect to happen — a house fire, a car accident. By contrast, most people expect to grow old. Using the “terminology of insurance … [was intended] to mask the huge welfare payments being made,” they write. People falsely believe they’re “only getting what they have paid for.” That is even less true of Medicare. In 2006 the Congressional Budget Office expects Medicare to cost $383 billion. Medicare premiums (paid by recipients) pay 12 percent; payroll taxes, 49 percent; general taxes and borrowing provide the rest.
This mass deception may seem harmless. After all, most Social Security recipients have been responsible citizens and productive workers. Why accuse them of living on government handouts? The answer is that today’s myths perpetuate unrealistic expectations and prevent honest debate. Americans regard “earned benefits” and “welfare” differently. The first is a right, the second a privilege. In theory, welfare should serve some public purpose and not just enrich the recipients. By admitting that Social Security and Medicare are welfare, we allow relevant questions to be raised. Do all beneficiaries “need” or “deserve” their welfare? Is the cost “unfair” to taxpayers or burdensome to the economy? Have the social and economic conditions that originally justified the welfare changed?