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King Charles II
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On March 12, 1664, King Charles II of England granted his brother, James, Duke of York, all of the lands in the New World known as the Dutch Domain or New Netherland. The gift included land from the
... West side of the Connecticut River to the East side of Delaware Bay...
Three months later, James carved New Caesarea from that land for John, Lord Berkeley, and Sir George Carteret. This lease sealed the grant to
all that Tract of land adjacent to New England, lying and being to the Westward of Long Island and Maniatis Islands, and bounded on the East Part by the Main Sea and part by Hudson's River, and hath upon the West Delaware Bay or River extendeth Southward to the Maine Ocean as far as Cape May at the mouth of Delaware Bay. Which said Tract of land is hereafter to be called by the name or names of New Caesarea or New Jersey...
---From documents at the headquarters of the West Jersey Proprietors, Burlington, New Jersey.
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Reverend Diana Carroll
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The Reverend Diana Carroll, Assistant Rector of Holy Trinity Church on Rittenhouse Square, recently addressed the Right Angle Club about the labyrinth to be found there. The fact is, it is there because she put it there, where it is open to the public on Saturday afternoon a month. There are half a dozen other labyrinths in Philadelphia Churches, mostly forgotten, so this is a revival of a custom rather than the invention of one. St. Asaph's on City Line Avenue, St. Stephen's at 10th and Market and a few others have them, most neglected and forgotten. Reverend Carroll admits to importing the tradition to Holy Trinity, persuading everybody in charge to nurture it, and setting aside one Saturday afternoon for the public to visit each month. Labyrinths differ in their design; this one copies the design within Chartres Cathedral in France. In England, labyrinths are much more popular and have other designs.
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Labyrinth
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Contrary to popular belief, a labyrinth only has one entrance, which is also its only exit. The visitor goes in, goes round and round and comes to a dead end, and then goes back out the same way. There's no great problem about getting lost; the confusing puzzles of ancient lore are not labyrinths, they are mazes. Whether with walls or simply lines on the floor, labyrinths are designed for meditation and symbolism. It's possible to bump into other people on the way out, it's possible to be struck by the symbolism of reaching the center of things, it's possible to imagine the human condition of getting into things and then getting yourself out. Diana Carroll says the labyrinth evokes the image of feminism to her, entering or leaving the uterus. That thought might not have occurred to everyone else, but an agreement isn't central to appreciating labyrinths.
The Nazca lines, best seen from an airplane over Chile, evoked the image of labyrinths to several Right Angle members. Those lines are a couple of thousand years old, in a decidedly non-Christian environment at the time. Forty-five centuries B.C. could safely be judged to precede Christianity, so it becomes clear that this concept is discontinuous, popping up in many minds in many circumstances.
Some theologians might well contend this proves that meditation labyrinths are therefore not part of any fixed religious doctrine. But others, with equal justice, might say it proves that labyrinths are part of the essential nature of contemplative man. Or as in Reverend Carroll's case, woman.
Can it be done? What would it cost? Since no one can predict future healthcare costs, no one knows how to pay for them. Conclusions like that over-state the difficulty. It's fairly easy to predict minimum available revenue, and fairly good cost extrapolations already exist. Payment feasibility can amount to comparing "no more than" with "no less than". With luck, we can judge the relative probability of success among payment proposals. Since that still sounds like a scam, what follows is step-by-step. We apologize to actuaries and mathematicians, who may find simplified explanations tiresome.
Medical Costs. We use someone else's estimate of present costs and the foreseeable rate of growth. Blue Cross of Michigan, confirmed by federal agencies, estimates the average lifetime cost in America today roughly approximates $350,000 for a male, and about 10% more for females, using the year 2000 dollars. An 83-year overall lifespan necessarily includes history and prediction. The gender difference rests mainly on women's somewhat longer life expectancy, as well as the statistical convention of attributing all obstetrical costs to the mother; it's likely to be a stable ratio. A million dollars for a family of three is pretty daunting. Because there have been so many changes in medical care in the past century, likely to be repeated in the next century as well, $350,000 must be considered a soft number. Most extrapolation errors will arise from it, so an analysis reduces to this question: How close could we come to cover a $350,000 cost, without distorting medical care? To simplify the explanation, the cost goal is reckoned in the year 2000 dollars, so inflation and other adjustments are taken from revenue, to make them match. Inflation has remained steady at 3% in the past century, so 3% per year is accepted for the future in this analysis. Medical inflation is somewhat different; greater than 3% in the past, recently diminished. Only revenue projections are discussed, with costs taken as a given. It isn't perfect, but it can serve as a base for mid-course corrections, providing a margin for error is adequate.
Revenue, per average person. It is easier to estimate future bulk numbers for the whole nation than to predict an individual's future cost. Therefore, our approach is to take national costs, divide them by the population, and concentrate final analysis into a hypothetical "average" person. Since the goal is to compare average costs with average revenue, it is important to avoid using revenue as a basis for costs. The temptation is great, however, because of the well-known tendency of costs to rise to the level of available funding. To the extent possible, such behavioral adjustments are reserved for "dynamic scoring."
Other Data Points. Longevity has risen by 30 years in the past century but is now relatively stable at age 83. Where practical, we have extended calculations to 93, which seems a reasonable guess for where longevity might go in the coming century. How much an average person could or would be likely to accept as a personal expenditure is hard to say, just as it is hard to say how much cost the country would be willing to pay for subsidies to the poor. There is a temptation to use present costs as a surrogate because there is so much uproar about them, but that approach has too much circularity to its logic. After all, the public is complaining. So, whenever practical, we have presented a family of curves which permit the reader to choose between alternatives. The final data point is the maximum achievable interest rate, a matter of enough complexity to require special discussion, which follows after voicing an opinion about the medical future underlying this subject.
The medical side of it. There is fair reason to believe most or all late-developing diseases might originate in the dozen or so complete genes in the mitochondria of cells. These genes are only inherited through the mother and probably originated in the plant kingdom. So the conquest of our currently most expensive diseases -- diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and arteriosclerosis -- during the next century -- is not a totally unreasonable prediction. Furthermore, new cure discoveries, while generally expensive at first, eventually become cheap. Mix it all together, and while the costs of the next century may at times be towering, it seems entirely conceivable healthcare payments could become self-sustaining without financial intervention, a century from now. If we generate the means to get to that point, curiously we should give some credit to financiers, like Warren Buffett and John Bogle. If that sounds confusing, read on.
What passive investment income for a Health Savings Account is generally achievable? Essentially, this proposal advocates saving in advance instead of paying after the fact (often called "Pay as you go.") That translates into being paid interest instead of being charged interest. For this, we steer the reader toward investing his savings as much as possible in an HSA (Health Savings Account), rather than an IRA (Individual Retirement Account), or a 401(k) plan, the employer-based equivalent to IRA. There's nothing the matter with these other tax shelters; they are just not as good as an HSA. The only qualified American savings plan to contain a tax shelter on both deposits and withdrawals is the HSA, and even its tax shelter on withdrawals is limited to approved medical expenditures. The Canadian savings plans do have this dual advantage, but in every other qualified American plan, it is necessary to reduce either the deposit or the withdrawal by its estimated taxes at different ages. All graphical representations of IRAs and 401(k)s likewise require a mental adjustment for taxes. In amounts, this large, taxes make a vital difference. After-tax savings vehicles are necessarily less generous, and are not discussed.
So far, so good. Probably the greatest reluctance this proposal will encounter will come from an almost absolute need to invest the HSA in common stocks, which many people sincerely feel is a form of gambling. But to reflect on history for a moment, it took over a century for Americans to overcome their resistance to banks, which are now found on practically every street corner. Pioneer families were obedient to Shakespeare's, "neither a lender nor a borrower is," which indeed remains pretty good advice in most circumstances. But banks were also the foundation of the Industrial Revolution, and their process could also be called a form of gambling. Modern index funds are a far cry from 19th Century mining and railroad stocks. Their risks, while not totally eliminated have been tamed, so the modern economy really has no savings vehicle quite as safe for those who must live in the real world. At this particular moment in time, almost no stock is as risky as bonds, and in Europe cash in the mattress can lose 50% of its value in a month, responding to central-bank changes in currency rates. True, approximately every thirty years stocks fall almost as much, but modern investment has ways of coping with the "black swan" risk, by somewhat sacrificing some of the investment return. Every company eventually comes to an end in about a century, and the only real safety comes from wide diversification of risks substituting for agility in jumping among them. The current total-market index fund model allows for investment in the whole economy at once, counting on remorseless market pressure to purge the index of failing companies, while constantly adding new ones who are succeeding. Holding several thousand successful stocks at once is the new definition of safety. Meanwhile, the new definition of success is moderate but relentless growth, from low costs and low taxes.
John C. Bogle of Philadelphia probably did not invent the notion you can't beat the index (he means the stock market averages like Dow Jones, Standard, and Poor, Russell, etc.), but he certainly evangelized the idea. Let's explain. When you finally overcome the idea of getting rich by out-performing the stock market, the idea reverses itself. The entire stock market is a proxy for the whole economy, and although some people do get rich faster than the stock market grows, hardly anybody gets appreciably richer than the index in the stock market without using leverage , and leverage is only for gamblers who can disguise the nature of their leverage.
Professor Roger Ibbotson of Yale has compiled extensive data for the previous century and demonstrates how relentlessly the American equity stock market has grown quite linearly, varying by asset class but largely disregarding stock market crashes, or numerous wars large and small. While small stocks have grown at a rate of 12.7% per year over the past century, safer Blue chip stocks have consistently grown at about 11%. With big computers, we can see investors in stocks have only received a return of 8%, which sometimes implies the financial industry is absorbing 3% for its expenses and profits. That may not be a fair comment since a considerable portion of the 11% must be invested in lower-yielding bonds to protect against periodic black swan disasters like 1929 and 2008; this point is expanded later. Vanguard, Bogle's fund, reduces overhead cost by matching his portfolio to the index and letting it run indefinitely, a process known as passive investing, which at least minimizes taxes and expenses. Perhaps, over time, ways can be found to widen the investor's lifetime return to more than 8%, but for the time being one must be satisfied with 8%, and 11% remains the ultimate goal for the far future. Warren Buffett does better than that by buying whole insurance companies and leveraging with their cash float; that's not exactly possible for other people. To rephrase the whole business, a total-market index fund offers the 8% current safe limit to passive investing, within a bumpy unsafe 11% world. Furthermore, the 8% contains steady 3% inflation, so investors better not count on more than 5% spendable return. A disappointingly low five percent, relatively safe, after-tax and after-inflation, return. What will that achieve toward paying an average lifetime cost of $350,000? Remember, this is compounded , which has a magic of its own.
Table xxx plots how $400 will grow in response to compounding, starting at birth and ending at 83 to 93 years, at 5% to 12% compound investment return. We've already described why 83, 93, and 5% were chosen, but why $400? It's a personal guess, shown at the bottom of a family of curves which go up to 12%, the current maximum. It represents the amount I guess would be privately regarded as within almost everyone's reach, and if lost wouldn't financially cripple them forever. It would admittedly have to come as a government subsidy for handicapped people who could never support themselves. And since it would be at birth, it would have to seem bearable to young parents. Also included in this family of curves, are 12% (the limit of growth in the stock market over the past century) and other 1% levels down to 5%, so the effect of taxes, overhead, inflation, and bond protection against stock crashes, can be judged. Note in particular how the curves widen around age 60, exposing the new opportunity created by the 30-year increase in longevity during the past century. The consequence of every improvement in the investment return is multiplied appreciably after you reach that bend in the curve. In my personal opinion, this growth is both staggeringly large, but disappointingly inadequate to pay for all future health care with enough margin to justify committing the whole country to risk it. It will pay for a big chunk of it, however.
Another central point of the graph, however, is that a lifetime of investing a relatively small amount -- at reasonably achievable interest rate -- has apparently come within our grasp. In my view, however, we have to do better than this. We have to tweak this basic idea enough to generate more than $400 at birth. Although prosperous people could use it to make a large reduction in their lifetime medical costs, there is not enough room for error, to permit the nation to risk so much for millions of people with only a marginal income. In the following sections, we apply a variety of other variations to convert an attractive idea into a widely useful one.
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Compound interest always surprises people with its power, and in this example, 5% just about makes the goal. There's not much room for error or contingencies. All of the known factors are conservatively estimated, and it passes the test. What isn't covered is the unknown factor, the atom wars, a stock market collapse, an invasion from Argentina. To be on the safe side, we had better not count on this approach to pay for all of the health care. Just a big chunk, like 25%, does seem feasible. In the immediately following section, we examine the first "technical" problem. The first year of life is just as expensive as the last year of life, and you can't dip into savings.
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Minister David Cameron
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In June 2016, Great Britain voted by a million plurality, to withdraw from the European Union. The plebiscite was not binding on Parliament, but Prime Minister David Cameron promptly resigned, and there remains little discussion of anything but going ahead with "Brexit". It will take at least two years to accomplish the matter, and there remains great uncertainty about the terms of separation. The British stock market took a sharp dip. Stock markets always hate uncertainty, and from the start, there was little doubt Britain would experience some economic hardship, but still they went ahead with it.
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Archbishop of Canterbury
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By the greatest stroke of good luck, I happened to be in London for this event. It had been barely noted in the Americana press before I left, and indeed a discussion group hadn't even put it on the agenda after my return. But let me tell you, the British public was talking about nothing else. From the lowest barmaid in a pub to the Archbishop of Canterbury, there was only one topic of conversation and a very real understanding that Britain might well vote to leave the EU. Once the vote had been taken, of course, even the American public appreciated its significance and its resemblance to the headlong tumult in our own political parties. Donald Trump might well win the election, and logic or rhetoric had little to do with it. Other countries, Scotland in particular, were teetering in the same direction of demonstrating how far a democracy was from a republic when each "leader" had a million constituents. And how well the public appreciated the tendency of elected representatives to forget who elected them. Or else, in more rational moments, to appreciate how difficult it is for elected representatives to communicate with constituents.
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Ben Franklin London Townhome
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To go on with this insight for a moment, my Washington daughter tells me Democrat congressmen are required to spend thirty-six hours every week in a call center, soliciting campaign funds; where do they find time to legislate? But the central background reflection I happened to have about Brexit was how enduring the political split apparently was between the Whigs and the Tories. This thought came to me from one of the real reasons I was in London, to visit Ben Franklin's imposing rowhouse on Craven Street, fifty feet from the National Museum on Piccadilly. Franklin lived there for most of eighteen years, in a style quite different from the two-penny loaf of bread in Philadelphia. He was personal friends with five kings, Voltaire, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as Priestly, Lavoisier, and Hume. Townsend may indeed have passed the Stamp Act, but he invited Franklin to spend the weekend at his hundred-room castle. The neighbors on Craven Street easily recognized the carriage of the Prime Minister when he came to call on Franklin on Craven Street. From the point of view of this social set, the uproar over the colonies was whether England should conquer them and send their raw materials to British factories (the Tory view), or should instead colonize them with Brits, give them the vote, and rule the world as a commonwealth (the Whig view). Naturally, Franklin supported the Whigs, but his loyalty to his good friend George III never wavered until 1775. And then, lightning struck St. Paul's Cathedral.
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King George III
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Quite logically, the King asked Franklin's advice. The King, however, insisted on a brass ball on the top of the church. Franklin resisted, saying a spire was much more effective. We don't have the exact words exchanged, but essentially the King said he was going to have his way, while Franklin in effect asked him who he thought he was talking to. In those days, far less direct wording was needed to give offense on such a central issue of the king having the last word whenever he wanted. It is intimated the King suggested to Wedderburn he should take care of the issue for him, and within a few weeks, Franklin was subjected to public humiliation in the cockpit at Whitehall, threatened with arrest, and fled to America to start the war. I had never heard this story, before.
The point leaves me with is not that Franklin lost his cool and should have known better than to express his opinion. Rather, it is the reflection that never before had a king been challenged on his divine opinion on any subject. Just think of the shock this must have caused him, to have to realize this was the first snowflake in a blizzard. With the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the world was going to be full of experts, who could make a fool of any king by disagreeing with him in public. This particular king was able to have his way, no matter what, but the day was soon approaching when any science editor, any university professor, and ultimately every barmaid in a pub, could pontificate to the Pontiff.
In 1919, the Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission was created to construct a bridge across the Delaware River connecting New Jersey and Philadelphia. The Delaware River Bridge was completed on July 1, 1926, and was renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in 1956. From the time of its completion in 1926 until 1929, the Delaware River Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world.
The original design called for six vehicular lanes, two streetcar lanes, and provisions for heavy rail in each direction outboard of the bridge's stiffening trusses. The design also specified two pedestrian walks located above the main deck level.
Included in the project design were streetcar stations with elevators integrated into the bridge anchorages. These stations, along with the streetcars, were never commissioned into service on the bridge due to the increased popularity of the automobile along with the limited amount of pedestrian traffic.
Initially, the bridge conveyed 35,000 vehicles a day, with a toll of 25 cents to cross the Delaware River. During its first three months in operation, bridge use increased to two million vehicles, twice the amount forecasted for that period. With traffic volumes continuing to grow through the late 1920s, officials suggested adding two additional traffic lanes in each direction by utilizing the then unused outboard structures. The proposal, which would have increased vehicular capacity to ten lanes, never progressed beyond the discussion stage.
The provisions for heavy rail were put into place with the expectation that either New Jersey or Pennsylvania would extend their respective system across the bridge. When this did not occur, the Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission decided to construct its own high-speed transit system called the "Bridge Line" connecting Camden and Philadelphia.
On July 17, 1951, President Harry S. Truman signed a bill that created the current Delaware River Port Authority, which succeeded the Delaware River Joint Commission. In September 1967, the Delaware River Port Authority established the Port Authority Transit Corporation to operate the PATCO Speedline, which began service on February 15, 1969, replacing the Bridge Lineas the rapid rail service between Southern New Jersey and Center City Philadelphia.
Image provided by The Delaware River Port Authority, courtesy of Michael Howard.
REFERENCES
| The Benjamin Franklin Bridge (Images of America) Michael Howard,‎ Maureen Howard ISBN-13: 978-0738562582 |
Amazon |
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.