From: Google Voice [mailto:voice-noreply@google.com]
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 3:28 PM
To: Jim Garven
Subject: New voicemail from Unknown Caller at 3:25 PM
Voicemail from: Unknown Caller at 3:25 PM
Hello James, This is U. S. Senator John morning and I’m reaching out to you IN your neighbors in Austin to let you know that 4 too long, total spending is gone nearly on checked by in reducing about was budget amendment to the Constitution. I’m fighting possibility to Washington, the taxes families and small businesses practice every day. The president is liberal allies in Congress think they can taxes spend their way into prosperity in Texas. We know that won’t work. I won’t stand Ford and I hope you won’t either your votes important so please vote early for me, John, Corning, so I can protect taxpayers. While taxes to keep more money in our walls, instead of sitting at the Washington this Call’s been paid for but my campaign Texas for Senator John Corning, 85124948535.
All I can say is, thank God for Google Voice. The Texas Primary Election is scheduled for March 4, 2014, and since the automated robo-calls that the political candidates are spamming “we the taxpayers” with are typically configured to generate “Unknown” caller ID’s, all I had to do in Google Voice was to set it up to automatically reject all such callers. The voicemail then automatically gets routed to an appropriate location (AKA my email Spam folder J)…
From: Google Voice [mailto:voice-noreply@google.com] Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 3:28 PM To: Jim Garven Subject: New voicemail from Unknown Caller at 3:25 PM
Voicemail from: Unknown Caller at 3:25 PM
Hello James, This is U. S. Senator John morning and I’m reaching out to you IN your neighbors in Austin to let you know that 4 too long, total spending is gone nearly on checked by in reducing about was budget amendment to the Constitution. I’m fighting possibility to Washington, the taxes families and small businesses practice every day. The president is liberal allies in Congress think they can taxes spend their way into prosperity in Texas. We know that won’t work. I won’t stand Ford and I hope you won’t either your votes important so please vote early for me, John, Corning, so I can protect taxpayers. While taxes to keep more money in our walls, instead of sitting at the Washington this Call’s been paid for but my campaign Texas for Senator John Corning, 85124948535.
The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog recently posted an article entitled “Should the Minimum Wage Be Raised? Economists Weigh In” @ http://on.wsj.com/1kYgJj6.
I am most convinced by the recent (July 2013) survey article entitled “Revisiting the Minimum Wage-Employment Debate: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater?” (available from http://bit.ly/1dNSMao) which documents that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others. I am particularly fond of the following quote from that article: “We revisit the minimum wage-employment debate, which is as old as the Department of Labor” (historical note: the US Department of Labor was founded March 4, 1913 :-))
This article from The Atlantic is well worth reading; quoting from this article,
“… when asked what they wish they’d done differently in college, “choosing a different major” wasn’t the top answer. The most popular answer, given by half of all respondents, was “gaining more work experience.” Choosing a different major was the fourth most popular response, after “studying harder” and “looking for work sooner.”
The underlying idea behind “Options Away” is quite interesting. I can’t help but wonder why the airlines and/or the various intermediaries such as Expedia and Orbitz haven’t already implemented similar arrangements.
The “insurance” described in the article referenced below is different from traditional travel insurance which requires purchasing a ticket prior to buying the insurance. Here, one can purchase a call option that locks in a favorable fare today without obligating the consumer to actually purchase the ticket.
“Options Away… will sell you the right to buy a plane ticket within a certain timeframe at a certain price. If the airfare goes up within your option’s time frame, good for you—you can buy the ticket, paying your optioned fare, and Options Away pays the difference. If the airfare goes down within your option’s timeframe, you simply ignore your option and buy your ticket at its now lower fare. Either way, you’re out the option fee, but you are not obligated to buy the ticket.”
About Social Security’s future…
Social Security is a compact between generations. Since 1935, America has kept the promise of security for its workers and their families. Now, however, the Social Security system is facing serious financial problems, and action is needed soon to make sure the system will be sound when today’s younger workers are ready for retirement.
Without changes, in 2033 the Social Security Trust Fund will be able to pay only about 77 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits.* We need to resolve these issues soon to make sure Social Security continues to provide a foundation of protection for future generations.
* These estimates are based on the intermediate assumptions from the Social Security Trustees’ Annual Report to the Congress.
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Quoting from my annual Social Security Statement; I can’t help but wonder what the numbers are for “optimistic” assumptions and for “pessimistic” assumptions (see the “fine print” by the asterisk below):
About Social Security’s future…
Social Security is a compact between generations. Since 1935, America has kept the promise of security for its workers and their families. Now, however, the Social Security system is facing serious financial problems, and action is needed soon to make sure the system will be sound when today’s younger workers are ready for retirement.
Without changes, in 2033 the Social Security Trust Fund will be able to pay only about 77 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits.* We need to resolve these issues soon to make sure Social Security continues to provide a foundation of protection for future generations.
* These estimates are based on the intermediate assumptions from the Social Security Trustees’ Annual Report to the Congress.
The key problem with the “77 cents on the dollar statistic” cited in President Obama’s SOTU speech is that it is based upon a naive comparison of average earnings for females compared with males. There are a number of other wage determinants (e.g., differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, hours worked, etc.) which must also be taken into consideration. AEI scholar Christine Sommers notes (in the Daily Beast article linked below): “When all.. relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers.”
“It’s the bogus statistic that won’t die—and president deployed it during the State of the Union—but women do not make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns.”
