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Archive for the ‘Social’ Category

Each year since Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, it took more money through payroll taxes it paid. That is, until last year.

Social security is now officially gone negative cash, which means a nation that has borrowed the surplus Social Security revenues for decades will begin to repay that money.

Over the years, Social Security collected about 2,500 billion dollars more than what he paid. These additional funds were used to purchase special obligations of the Treasury Department, to build what came to be known as the Social Security Trust Fund.

What about That Lockbox?
When George W. Bush first ran for president a little more than a decade ago, he proposed taking a trillion dollars’ worth of bonds out of that fund to put into private investments. At a debate with Democrat Al Gore in St. Louis, Bush dismissed concerns that his plan might weaken Social Security.

“Now remember, Social Security revenue exceeds expenses up until 2015,” Bush said. “People are going to get paid.”

But Gore had a very different proposal: “putting both Social Security and Medicare in an ironclad lockbox, where the politicians can’t touch them.

“To me,” he said, “that kind of common sense is a family value. Hands off!”

Neither the lockbox nor the private investments ever came to pass. Nor did Bush’s prediction that Social Security revenues would outstrip expenses until 2015. At a recent Senate Budget Committee hearing on the nation’s economic outlook, Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) noted there’s been a sea change in Social Security’s finances.

“My staff informs me under the new report; Social Security has gone permanently cash negative now. Is that the case?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” came the response from Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf, whose agency prepared the report.

Conrad added that the time had finally come for the money Social Security has lent the federal government to be paid back.

“How’s it going to be paid back? It’s going to be paid back by the other general expenditure of the federal government having to be reduced to make way for the payments that we’re going to have to make on those bonds,” he said.

Time to Revise?
Lawrence Lindsey, who was Bush’s chief economic adviser, says the purchase of the bonds came from Social Security revenue, “so you’re just paying back something you owe.”

But Lindsey readily acknowledges the money that must now be paid back to Social Security has all been spent.

“That’s a flaw in the design of the … fiscal system. I think it points up one of the reasons why you do not want to have the nation’s retirement based simply on Social Security,” he says.

Republicans say the time has come to revise the Social Security program.

“It’s very significant that this year, Social Security has more money going out than coming in,” says Lamar Alexander, a member of the Senate GOP leadership team. “And it’s very significant that in the next 10 years, Social Security will add half-trillion dollars to the deficit. Social Security would be a good place to start when dealing with these mandatory entitlement programs that are 57 percent of our budget.”

But some prominent Democrats are pushing back:

“Social Security has not contributed one penny to the debt, and as I’ve said before, people should leave Social Security alone,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said earlier this month. “I will do everything that I can in throwing my legislative body in front of any efforts to weaken Social Security.”

Politics’ Third Rail
Republicans, for their part, say Democrats should make the first move on Social Security. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is waiting for President Obama to make that move.

“There will be no entitlement reform without presidential leadership, and to the extent that the president is willing to join with us, and discuss how we deal with these long-term unfunded liabilities, I think virtually every Republican is ready to have that discussion,” McConnell said.

McConnell’s deference to the president is hardly surprising. It’s not for nothing that Social Security is known as politics’ third rail touching it can prove politically perilous.

But the program is now functionally red, a new wave of baby boomers retire and live longer, and the proceeds to further reduce the high rate of unemployment and tax cuts on wages, there are some who think that social security is not vulnerable today than ever before.

If all schools have to worry about these days was the establishment of common standards for curriculum and agree on how to measure student progress and teacher effectiveness, our national image education will be completely rosy.

But the growing social problems, which are more demanding of students and the shortage of school social workers – usually the only resource dedicated to helping student’s personal concerns – and you’re looking at another major, but rarely noticed, the issue of education.

The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights just issued complete guidelines descriptive the liability of educational institutions in the prevention of discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, color, sexual orientation or disability.

That action, itself a result of several high-profile bullying-related suicides, spurred New Jersey to provide suicide prevention courses for students and make school districts codify a comprehensive policy on anti-bullying and harassment.

In Illinois, the governor is considering legislation to reduce child sexual abuse that would establish age-appropriate instruction for public school students in kindergarten through fifth grade and training for school workers on identifying and dealing with abused youngsters.

These topics are being programmed into the classroom because they, along with direct instruction on sexual health, emotional balance and social behavior — lessons that teachers a generation ago would have expected students to learn at home — have landed on the doorstep of public schools.

Teachers who never imagined having to address the multifaceted issues of sexuality, suicide or bullying are ever more leaning on school social workers who are already stretched to their limits.

The latest U.S. Department of Health and Human Service report on the topic found that one in five children and adolescents will experience during their school years a significant mental health problem such as stress, anxiety, bullying, family problems, depression, learning disabilities or alcohol and substance abuse.

Serious mental health problems such as self-injurious behaviors and suicide attempts are on the rise. A Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report in 2005 found that nearly 60 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 17 who reported a major depressive episode didn’t receive any treatment. And of the kids who did look for help, two-thirds received that help only in school.

Other studies have shown that in many states, school social workers are the major providers of mental health services to children and in some cases, such as rural or inner city areas, schools are the only mental health service provider in the community.

Yet only about 5 percent of the nation’s approximately half-million social workers work in public schools, according to the National Association of Social Workers. That organization recently went before a congressional committee to brief legislators on the need for additional federal and state investments to overcome the challenges of recruiting, educating and keeping social workers.

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, at least 100,000 more social workers will be needed by 2018 just to keep pace with the volume of social needs in communities.

The evidence so far is only anecdotal, but states all over the country are facing hard decisions to cut programs. College and career guidance counselors, testing and special education-focused school psychologists, and social workers are at high risk because their roles tend not to be widely understood in communities.

Cross your fingers that school social workers across the country will survive reduced budgets and continue to help students and teachers navigate these perilous times we’re all living through.

Most of the Investors are recognizing the transformative power of payment billing and billing using social network strategies, growing to billion dollar industries.

After rumors that PayPal has been an investment of $ 16 million in Tradeshift, after a few week later a subscription billing provider Zuora announced that it has received $ 20 million in a Series C round of funding.

It is expected that industry after industry moves to the Subscription Economy: Business Enterprises and consumers to immediately buy the outright to subscription to huge libraries of products and solutions.

Many companies are rethinking their core products and value propositions as services and investing rapidly in subscription revenue models, including:

• Cloud computing is disrupting the $3.4 trillion technology industry as enterprises move to elastic compute clouds that are enabled by subscription billing’s ability to meter, price, and bill cloud services.
• App marketplaces, led by Microsoft, Google, saleforce.com, Apple, PayPal and others, are creating more opportunities for developers to offer software-as-a-service.
• The media industry recognizes it needs to monetize online content, and it requires billing to create promotions and bundles of digital and physical content that push out to multiple devices and platforms.
• Online consumer service providers are using subscriptions to innovate the pricing and packaging of premium, try-before-you-buy, and cross-sell service models that best meet consumer demand.
• Telecom and wireless technologies in WiMax, satellite, geo-location and 4G are creating a new wave of telecom services and service providers which are being enabled by subscription billing.

It’s interesting to watch how this is going to develop in Europe towards and after the 2013 e-invoicing liberalization.

Social Bookmarking websites are principally the sites that store and categorize ‘bookmark links’ for a specific website with specific tags. Most of the people go to social bookmarking web-sites and search for a specific information. The main idea about social bookmarking is to put the links that land on your web-site on those social bookmarking sites. Afterwards, you specify the tags which will be categorizing your web-site.

Some Bookmarking software is designed for making social bookmarking easier and more effective. In general, social bookmarking is too time consuming and tedious. Bookmarking Software solves those two problems and helps you to increase adsense income, product sales and affiliate commissions. The price for the software is the lowest on the market. Bookmarking Software also does not require any monthly fees and the updates are free of charge.

One of the users of the Bookmarking software, Jeffery, says: “automatic social bookmarking software have a powerful randomization system that helps to randomize all descriptions and incoming anchored links and even set the customization level. This beat the crap out of those expensive social bookmarking submission services. The ability to add my own scuttle social bookmarking list is a bonus.

The public is fuming that the economy still isn’t emergent fast enough to create any substantial number of jobs, in next month’s election; the Republicans are expected to take control of the House (and possibly the Senate)

No matter who is elected in November, the economy is preordained to a slow, agonizing, relatively jobless recovery. Their political victory isn’t likely to translate into any noticeable improvement in the economy any time soon, however.

It’ll take years before the unemployment rate drops to an acceptable level, years before the banking system is fully functioning, and years before the crippled housing market returns to health.

That’s not to say that the right government policies couldn’t make a big difference, it’s just that nothing the Republicans have proposed would help much, even if they could enact their economic platform on their first day in office.

And that’s not going to happen. President Obama still has the power of the veto. The more likely outcome of the election will be further gridlock, with neither party able to change public policy at will. That’ll mean more uncertainty, not less.

Given their built-in advantages this year, Republican candidates have been understandably vague about their plans to change economic policy. Many Republican candidates have endorsed John Boehner’s “Pledge to America,” which is full of lofty principles but short on policy details. Read more about the pledge.

Big government’s fault

Inspired by the tea party, the Republicans are pledging to become fiscal conservatives again, to limit the size of government, and to reduce taxes and red tape. In the Republican view, there’s nothing wrong with the economy that isn’t the fault of big government.

However, many of the Republican proposals would actually hurt — not help — the economy if they could be enacted.

Slashing government spending right now would be crippling to an economy that doesn’t have any other source of demand. Keeping taxes low for the richest Americans wouldn’t create many jobs, and would keep the deficits growing. The Republicans’ pledge to repeal the new health-care law and other government regulations would only add to the uncertainty that businesses say is keeping them on the sidelines.

The Republicans say they want to reduce government spending, but they are vague about exactly what should be cut, except to say that discretionary, non-defense spending should be rolled back to pre-recession levels. That category includes only about 15% of all federal spending, and isn’t the part of the budget that’s the problem.

If the deficit is an ocean-sized problem, the Republicans have proposed a solution that would fit in a thimble.

Being vague is probably good politics. A recent poll by Bloomberg News shows that 55% of likely voters agree that the deficit is out of control, but most voters are against specific measures to reduce it, especially the big changes that would be needed to bring the budget into balance.

It turns out that we like the things government does for us, and we also don’t want to pay the taxes necessary to buy those things.

California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina wouldn’t name a single program, or identify any entitlement program that should be scaled back when asked repeatedly by Chris Wallace of Fox News what she’d like to cut from the government. Instead, Fiorina leaned on that old standby of political hacks: “waste, fraud and inefficiency.”

Mark Zuckerberg the Facebook founder particularly said that “the era of privacy is over.” And the government wants to guarantee that, it seems.

An Electronics Frontier Foundation freedom of information request exposed a memo heartening agents to try to befriend people on an assortment of social networks in order to take lead of their readiness to share — and spy on them.

“Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities,” according to the memo obtained by Valleywag.

According to the website, the EFF wrote that “this memo suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation.”

Electronics Frontier Foundation says the government is spying on other websites include Twitter, MySpace, Craigslist and Wikipedia.

The Great Recession is officially over — and has been for more than a year.

The panel of economists that is the widely accepted arbiter of business cycles has called an end to what is now officially the longest U.S. economic downturn of the post-World War II era. The recession ended in June 2009, 18 months after it began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s business cycle dating committee.

But the committee took pains to make clear that it was not asserting that the economy has returned to full health.

“In determining that a trough occurred in June 2009, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity,” the committee said in statement published on the NBER’s Web site. “Rather, the committee determined only that the recession ended and a recovery began in that month.”

In other words, economic activity peaked at the end of 2007, fell for a year and a half, and has been rising since then. But it hasn’t risen back to its pre-recession levels yet. Moreover, the committee said, “any future downturn of the economy would be a new recession and not a continuation of the recession that began in December 2007.”

The committee moves slowly and cautiously in its pronouncements, aiming not to characterize the economy in real time but rather to establish historical benchmarks for when periods of economic expansion and contraction begin and end. It waits until ample economic data is available and has been revised, and hence there are often long delays between the onset or end of a recession and the NBER’s call. The recession that began in December 2007 was not formally designated one until a year later.

The committee defines a recession as “a period of falling economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.” The designation of June 2009 as an end date for the recession conforms to a view that many economic analysts have held for some time.

According to the committee, such indicators as gross domestic product and industrial production appear to have bottomed out in June 2009. Others, however, particularly involving employment, did not begin expanding until December 2009.

The business cycle dating committee consists of eight top macroeconomists, chaired by Stanford University’s Robert Hall. Only seven participated in the decision, however: David Romer, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is on leave as his wife, Christina Romer, was until recently serving as a top adviser to President Obama.

It was a miniscule number of voters in just one slice of the US political spectrum, but a weekend straw poll gives insight into how Republican hopefuls stack up for the 2012 presidential race.

On Saturday, at least, social conservatives within the GOP favored Rep. Mike Pence. The Indiana lawmaker won 24 percent of the 723 votes cast, just ahead of last year’s winner, Mike Huckabee, who drew 22 percent. Farther back in the back were Mitt Romney (13 percent), Newt Gingrich (10 percent), and Sarah Palin (7 percent).

“I am a Christian, a conservative and a Republican – in that order,” Pence told some 2,000 people at the two-day Values Voter Summit in Washington, an annual affair whose lead sponsor is the conservative Family Research Council, for whom social issues are a prominent focus. Those at the summit named abortion, government spending, and the repeal of President Obama’s health care reform as their top issues.

Depending upon how those tea leaves are read, there can be two conclusions: That this socially conservative GOP base is not exactly in line with the tea party insurgency shaking up the political scene. (Many libertarians are pro-choice on abortion.) Or that looking at the list of recent winners in Republican primaries – most recently Christine O’Donnell in Delaware – social conservatives can easily ride the tea party wave.

O’Donnell was one of the main stars at the event, having just beat establishment favorite Rep. Michael Castle in the Republican primary to fill the US senate seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden.

To thunderous applause and multiple standing ovations, she said of the conservative insurgency’s skeptics and critics, “They don’t get it. We’re not trying to take back our country. We are our country.”

Sarah Palin, to whom O’Donnell has been likened in style, may have been down in the straw poll because she was not there. Instead, she was the keynote speaker at the Iowa Republican Party’s “Ronald Reagan Dinner,” where she made teasing jokes about running in 2012.

In his speech to social conservatives, Romney emphasized the economy.

“Since the Obama stimulus was passed, 127,000 government jobs have been created, but more than 2.4 million private sector jobs have been lost,” he said. “There are now nearly 15 million Americans that are out of work: if they stood in a single unemployment line, it would stretch from the coast of California to Washington D.C. and then back again! If that’s their vaunted ‘recovery summer,’ heaven help us from their recovery winter!”

Two years before the next presidential election, stressing the economy is a political calculation and campaign strategy favored by the Republican establishment.

“Any issue that takes peoples eye off of unemployment, job creation, economic growth, taxes, spending, deficits, debts is taking your eye off the ball,” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, chair of the Republican Governors Association, said at a recent Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters.

But to those who say the GOP needs to downplay social issues in the 2010 and 2012 elections, conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly says, “That’s not only wrong, that’s dumb because we need the social conservatives as well as the fiscal conservatives to take those seats in November.”

Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said on Friday that the planned web filter by the government would not slow down internet speeds but simply ensure that child pornography would not invade Australian households hooked up on the national broadband network (NBN).

Senator Conroy pointed to successful precedents in Europe where countries such as UK, Finland and Sweden established filters that up to 95 percent of online users have to go through yet no considerable complaints on web connection slow downs were ever pushed forward, effectively underpinning the accuracy of the initiative.

He rejected earlier claims of his opposition counterpart Malcolm Turnbull that the proposed internet filter would do nothing but slow down broadband connections and only give Australian parents a false sense of security, countering that “it has no impact on speed and anybody who makes a claim that it has an impact on speed is misleading people.”

Senator Conroy argued that the actual threat on Australia’s internet speed is the Coalition’s intent to block the NBN’s full implementation on claims that the project is a huge waste of money that otherwise be used for the national government’s more pressing social services.

Opposition leader Tony Abbot labelled the federal project as a white elephant in the making and put Mr Turnbull in charge to lead the Coalition’s campaign of sidelining the Labor government’s pet project, with hopes of eventually reducing it to oblivion.

The Coalition said that a more viable alternative could have been implemented had their leaderships were given the chance to take the lead in the government as Mr Turnbull assailed the NBN plan as lacking in sound business and financial sense that would only drain taxpayers’ money from federal coffers.

The communications minister, however, countered that contrary to the Coalition’s claims, the NBN is poised to spark substantial improvements in the country’s economic activities, which was outlined in the $25 million McKinsey report, that the Liberals may have failed to appreciate, according to Senator Conroy.

He said that Mr Turnbull’s claim that Australians could enjoy the same amount of speed offered by mobile online access was based on questionable facts as the technology that supports the fixed-line broadband capacity is way ahead from the capacity that is being carried by wireless networks.

Senator Conroy maintained that the fibre-optics being utilised by NBN as the backbone of its network would soon ease out the current copper lines widely used in the country as he added that once fully operational, the NBN would spawn economic productivity and advantages in areas such as e-health and telecommuting.

Also, the communication minister said that reports of only 50 percent of residents in a number of Tasmanian towns should not be a cause for alarm now as he stressed that NBN would eventually realise its 93 percent footprint target for the state once the deal with Telstra takes its full course, which is for the telco giant to retire its copper network to make way for the superior fibre-optics network of NBN.

It’s common knowledge that you can catch computer viruses on porn Web sites. But did you know it’s also risky to surf the Web searching for free movies or music?

A study from McAfee to be released on Tuesday finds that adding the word “free” when looking for entertainment content in search engines greatly increases the chances of landing on a site hosting malware.

For instance, searching for free music ringtones increases the chances of hitting a malicious site by 300 percent, according to the report, “Digital Music & Movies Report: The True Cost of Free Entertainment.” (PDF)

Searching for “lyrics” for a particular artist is twice as risky on average as searching for “ringtones” for the same artist for the first five pages of results, the report found.

And including the term “MP3″ increases the riskiness of music searches in general. There has been a 40 percent increase in the number of Web sites that are delivering infected MP3 files or that seem to be built for purposes of financial fraud or delivering malware, according to the report.

Meanwhile, McAfee found malware associated with a number of Web sites around the world advertising free downloads of sports games, movies, and TV shows.

Twelve percent of sites that distribute unauthorized content are distributing malware, and 7 percent of sites offering unauthorized content have associations with cybercrime organizations, the report concluded.

“The sites often look very professional and attempt to lure the user with the idea of a ‘trial period’ or even some nominal fee that is much less than what may ultimately be charged,” the report says. “Once the user agrees, they have to authorize their computer to access and interact with computers that are involved in a wide range of schemes–from money laundering to stealing credentials such as user names and passwords. In addition, with this access, your computer is profiled–with all of its software versions, user agents, and any other date–and this information can be provided to third parties for malicious purposes. (This is often called ‘fingerprinting.’)”

To reduce the chances of landing on malicious sites, McAfee recommends avoiding the use of the word “free” in searches for entertainment content, avoiding clicking on links in banner ads on content sites that aren’t well established, not clicking on links posted in forums and on fan pages, keeping security software up to date, and using safe search plug-ins like McAfee Site Advisor that warns of potentially risky sites.