Real World Economics: Using fuzzy math to debate Social Security

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Edward Lotterman

How do you know not to hire a particular financial planner? Well, if they write about Social Security that “when they started the program the average age of death was 65 — and the average person never collected Social Security,” you need to run. Fast!

But the preposterous idea is common enough that it got published and then picked up on a usually-wrong financial website.

Still, as phrased, it is not as imbecilic as Ultimate Fighting Championship “color commentator” and podcaster Joe Rogan, who calls Social Security “Franklin Roosevelt’s little scam, because nobody would get it.”

The best one can say about ignorance like this is German writer Friedrich Schiller’s observation that, “Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.”

But the belief that hardly anyone got Social Security benefits at first is widespread. It is based on a near-universal misunderstanding of “life expectancy,” which has a very specific definition. Yet failure to understand key details doesn’t excuse fatuous assertions that no “average American,” or even no one at all, got Social Security when it was established in 1935.

You don’t need highly developed critical thinking skills. Common sense should make it obvious.

So while it’s true that in 1935, “life expectancy at birth” was under 62 — lower than the retirement age of 65 in the Social Security Act — 7.8 million people over age 65 already were alive in our country. Were they somehow “abnormal?” Moreover, another 9.3 million were between 55 and 64. Were all doomed to death before getting benefits?

No, of course not! The general population back then had more common sense than now. They knew how many old people were living. They knew the rough odds of themselves eventually getting benefits. That is why the Social Security Bill was so overwhelmingly popular.

It was a Democratic party bill. Members of that party voted for it 284 to 15 in the House and 60 to 1 in the Senate. But Republicans also voted yea 81 to 15 in the House and 16 to 5 in the Senate. Such bi-partisanship was unusual back then. The GOP fought most of FDR’s proposals tooth and nail. But the electorate rightly understood that the bill would benefit a large number of them and wanted passage.

To get benefits, workers had to “contribute” over specified lengths of time. So when benefits were first paid, in 1940, only 222,000 people got checks. Yet that rose to 1.1 million by 1945, 2.93 million by 1950 and 7.56 million by 1955. Had these people somehow miraculously cheated death?

No, they hadn’t. Moreover, to comprehend these numbers, one must understand three facts.

First, a 1939 amendment added survivors, so that children and widows of qualifying workers got benefits. Secondly, most wives did not have earnings records or get benefits themselves. They did gain from their husbands’ benefits. So the number of individuals helped by the new program was substantially higher than the number of checks sent. Thirdly, farmers would not get included until 1955. In the mid-1940s they still made up nearly 30% of U.S. households. Government employees, railroad workers and ministers also were still out. So the number of beneficiaries was a substantially higher fraction of the worker groups covered by the Act than of their age group in the general population.

You don’t need a college degree to understand this. There were myriad old and aging people when the program started. Most rightly knew they or their families would benefit. Broad majorities in Congress supported it. These included anti-FDR Republicans who were not deluded about it not benefitting “average persons.”

My uncle who never got past eighth grade could have understood these simple facts in an instant.

The underlying problem is complex, however. Most people just don’t understand “life expectancy,” and perhaps the very label of this data set encourages this misunderstanding. A 2020 post on the Actuaries Digital website explains it perfectly:

“Life expectancy is a statistical calculation which estimates the average number of years individuals in a certain group will live. However, people seem to interpret it as an expert opinion that tells them exactly how long they can expect to live. This interpretation is dangerous and belies the wide range of lifespans for individuals within any group in practice.”

Succinctly, errors arise when people see an “average” without considering what it is, and how it is calculated. It is like being told “the average weight of high school students is 137 pounds” without considering differences between boys and girls or freshmen and seniors. No one would assume from this that every student weighs 137 pounds. We all know they don’t.

Same with average life expectancy. Yet millions hold contradictory beliefs: First, if the life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is 77.5 years, people believe that they, themselves, can confidently plan on living to that age and arrange affairs accordingly. Second, people assume that the large majority of people will die near that age. Neither is true.

These things are true:

• The vast majority of people living when that metric was calculated will not die at that age. Some will die decades before 77.5 and others decades after.

• Most people live longer than the “life expectancy at birth” calculated in the year they were born.

• U.S. life expectancies have edged upwards for more than a century, with COVID as an aberration.

All good, but understand what is calculated and what the numbers mean.

The definition and calculations start with a “life table” for a given year that has the death rates for people at each year of age. What percentage of live births die in their first year? How many in the second year? The fifth? The 23rd? The 49th? The one tabulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and used by the Social Security Administration continues through the 119th year.

Now, with these “age-specific” death rates, begin with 100,000 births in a given year. How many will die in their first year? their second? and so on. When you get to a point where all are dead, figure out the weighted average age of deaths. That is the life expectancy of someone born that year if these death rates for each year remained frozen over time, until the last of the 100,000 babies dies. That obviously does not happen. Death rates, and so expectancies, at birth change.

Crucially, most of the improvement of life expectancies from 62 in 1935 to near 78 in 2021 came from reductions in death rates between birth to “adulthood.” The SSA sets that at age 21. Moreover, most of the improvements in that age range came at the early end, through reductions in “young child mortality” — deaths before the fifth birthday. Within that, the greatest improvement was in infants, birth to age 1.

Put another way, people in 1935, as in 2021, were likely to live long enough to collect Social Security if they simply made it through childhood. That fewer people are dying young as infants and young children remains the primary reason for longer expectancies over the last 90 years. Health improvements in adulthood add to that in greater survival into very old ages.

So, the financial adviser and podcaster Rogan all flub what should be obvious to anyone with common sense: A low nominal life expectancy did not mean there were not many millions of people who would draw benefits from Social Security within years of its launch. Many people did die before 65, but the deaths with the greatest effect on the metric were preschoolers.

Unfortunately, failure to understand variation around an average leads to other bad advice. What if a 62-year-old man’s financial planner tells him, “your life expectancy is another 19 years so you can plan on living to 81?” If the man responds, “Okay, but what is the chance I will die before that?” he will probably get met with a blank stare. The correct answer would be, “Well, for 1,000 62-year-old men, 476 will die before their 81st birthday.  (Women who are 62 can “expect” to live another 22 years, yet 45.5% would die before reaching age 84.)

But the grim reality is that if you pose this question to 1,000 “financial advisers,” even CPAs or partners in white-shoe Minneapolis law firms, 990 will stare back blankly without the faintest idea of how to answer.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

Skywatch: Summer’s upside-down hero

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Now that we’re well into summer, I want to tell you about another of my constellation favorites: Hercules, the upside-down Hero. It’s certainly not one of the brightest constellations, but I love the celestial Hero’s classic story. Hercules is supposed to outline the figure of a mighty hero in Greek mythology, but to me, it looks more like a giant fancy handwritten capital “H” (for Hercules) hanging high in the southeastern sky.

As soon as it’s dark enough, around 10 p.m., start looking for the brightest star you can see very high in the southeast sky. That’s Vega, the brightest star in the diminutive constellation Lyra the Lyre. About 15 to 20 degrees to the upper right of Vega or about two of your fist-widths at arm’s length, look for four moderately bright stars that form a trapezoid. You should be able to see it unless there’s really a lot of light pollution from where you’re observing. That trapezoid is in the center of the Hercules, right about where you’d join to two sides of the “H.”

(Mike Lynch)

One of the best hidden celestial treasures in the entire night sky any time of the year lives within Hercules. It’s the amazing Hercules cluster between the stars that make up the upper right side of the Hercules trapezoid, as you can see in the diagram. It’s wonderful, even if you view it with a small telescope. You can almost see it with the naked eye if you’re stargazing in the super dark countryside. At first, it’ll resemble a faint smudge with a telescope using a low-power magnification eyepiece, but with more magnification, you’ll see a gorgeous spherical cluster of ancient stars known as a globular cluster. This is the best one in our skies.

M13, the Great Hercules Cluster (Mike Lynch)

The great Hercules cluster is about 25,000 light-years, or about 145,000 trillion miles, away. Well over a half million stars may be crammed in an area a little over 800 trillion miles wide. Too many stars are in the center to resolve them individually, but even a moderate telescope can see some individual stars at the edge. As it is with all telescopic viewing, look at the cluster for extended periods with your scope to let your eyes get used to the darkness of the field. I love showing off to the folks at my summer stargazing parties through my larger telescopes. The Hercules cluster is one of many globular clusters that form a halo around our Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers don’t know precisely how they were created, but globular clusters are certainly part of our galaxy’s evolution. One theory is that they could be “mini-galaxies” that the Milky Way gravitationally absorbed.

In Greek Mythology, Hercules was a mighty muscle man. He also had a massive heart for most of his life, except for a brief, awful, insane episode. Young Hercules, a teenager, fell in love with the beautiful but conniving Princess Megara. They foolishly married soon after meeting, but the honeymoon didn’t last very long. Arguments quickly broke out. Hercules felt that there was nothing he could do to please Megara. She picked at Hercules until he blew his stack and temporarily lost his sanity. With his mighty hand, he choked Princess Megara and all her attendants.

Immediately after the massacre, Hercules instantly came to his senses and realized the extent of his horrible deeds. He was beyond sick with guilt and shame and turned himself in, leaving his fate up to Eurystheus, the King of Mycenae and Megara’s father. Even though the wise and highly compassionate king was devastated by the loss of his daughter Megara, he accepted that his son-in-law was genuinely sorry for his crime and the temporary loss of his sanity. Nonetheless, Hercules had to be punished, so Eurystheus assigned Hercules to 12 arduous labors to perform to atone for his crime.

One of his labors was to slay Leo the Lion, the king of kings of all beasts. Using all his strength and brains, he slays the monster lion and completes all his other labors, including taking on a nine-headed snake stealing cattle from a monster.

Zeus, the king of the gods, and all his buddies on Mount Olympus rewarded him at the time of his death for all his great work by placing his body in heaven as the constellation we see through the summer and early fall. They didn’t want Hercules to receive full honors because of his murder conviction, so they hung his body upside down in the heavens.

Celestial hugging this week

(Mike Lynch)

Late next Saturday night, July 13, the first quarter (half moon) will cross in front of the bright star Spica in the low southwestern sky. This stellar eclipse, formally known as an occultation, will begin at 9:56 p.m. as Spica slips behind the darkened eastern half of the moon’s disk. Spica emerges from the lit-up western side of the moon at 11:13 p.m. By then, the moon and Spica will barely be above the southwestern horizon. The moon’s orbit around the earth causes it to migrate gradually to the east against the stellar background. Next Saturday night the moon will just happen to pass in front of Spica, a star over 260 light-years away. Just one light-year equals nearly 6 trillion miles!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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In lawsuit, Black pastors blame state, regional housing policies for increasing racial segregation

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When a state advisory committee associated with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission recently reviewed a strategic plan put forward by Minnesota Housing, the state financing arm for affordable housing, the Rev. Alfred Babington-Johnson was there to offer an earful. None of it was flattering.

The Rev. Alfred Babington-Johnson, chief executive officer of the Minneapolis-based Stairstep Foundation. (Courtesy of Alfred Babington-Johnson)

A prominent voice among Black Twin Cities ministers, Babington-Johnson sued Minnesota Housing and the Metropolitan Council last year, arguing that state and regional efforts to build affordable housing effectively have backfired, increasing racial segregation while concentrating poverty in poor neighborhoods.

“Whether that’s done with proven intentionality, the outcomes clearly indicate none of the disparities go away,” Babington-Johnson said in an interview Wednesday. “The educational gaps don’t close. The economic opportunities don’t materialize.”

His testimony last January followed a similar track, but Babington-Johnson — the chief executive officer of the Stairstep Foundation, which works closely with 100 Black churches — learned last month that most of his comments would not be included in the committee’s official written review, which had evolved over time to include a wide range of housing issues.

“We were blindsided,” Babington-Johnson said.

Beth Commers, the outgoing chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s Minnesota Advisory Committee, struck most of his testimony related to Minnesota Housing during a June 4 review of the draft document, calling it off-topic. All but one committee member, Will Stancil, supported that decision, she said.

Commers noted that rather than focus exclusively on Minnesota Housing, as initially intended, the advisory committee took a stronger look at the lack of statewide zoning standards that might otherwise allow for duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in suburban communities dominated by single-family homes.

Commers, who is also interim co-director of St. Paul’s Department of Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity, said Babington-Johnson is quoted elsewhere in the report speaking more generally about housing, but the subject of his lawsuit remains undecided before the courts and was not germane to the committee’s housing review.

“Our job is not to push any person’s message forward. It’s to examine the issues,” she said. “We struck one quote regarding his lawsuit against the Met Council. Is it the statewide advisory committee’s role, when the whole report was not even about Minnesota Housing? We didn’t end up examining Minnesota Housing’s effectiveness. The matter was in the court, and it was the court’s to decide, not ours.”

Babington-Johnson was taken aback. He’s been organizing Black churches around social issues under the collaborative His Works United since the 1990s, and never expected his input would be dropped.

“Excluding my claims against (Minnesota Housing) is particularly egregious because the committee pro-actively sought my testimony,” he wrote in a June 12 letter to the commission’s Minnesota Advisory Committee. “Truly addressing civil rights issues means giving voice to complaints and concerns that challenge the status quo and existing institutions.”

John A. Powell, a nationally recognized professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a 15-page letter to the committee demanding Babington-Johnson’s testimony be included. Law professor Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota, submitted a strongly worded letter of his own.

Met Council lawsuit

The flap is the latest outcropping of a racially-charged legal dispute between Babington-Johnson’s Stairstep Foundation and the Twin Cities’ leading public funders of affordable housing.

A year ago, the foundation sued the state of Minnesota, Minnesota Housing and the Metropolitan Council, arguing that state and regional efforts to build more affordable housing across the Twin Cities had concentrated that housing in low-income, high-minority neighborhoods with the fewest resources to help the poor.

The lawsuit maintains that when Minnesota Housing awards low-income housing tax credits to help city-affiliated developers construct affordable housing, those subsidies often land in Minneapolis and St. Paul, core urban areas with generally higher crime rates and less competitive public schools than suburban locations.

Nonprofit developers — many of them predominantly white in their leadership and employee rosters — use these public subsidies to keep themselves afloat financially while building low-income housing in urban areas already overloaded with needs, the lawsuit charges.

For instance, before the light rail connecting downtown St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis rolled into place in 2014, both cities came together to promote new affordable housing along the Green Line’s station stops through a housing initiative called “The Big Picture Project,” whose plans were adopted by each city and then approved by the Met Council.

A Metro Transit Green Line light rail train stops at the Hamline Avenue station on University Avenue in St. Paul on Friday, Dec. 29, 2023. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Subsidized housing developments now front Hamline Station on University Avenue, Victoria Station in Frogtown, downtown Central Station and other St. Paul stops along the Green Line, in areas where poverty already was concentrated. In response to concerns about potential gentrification, the stated goal, in part, was to ensure locals were not priced out of St. Paul neighborhoods if the train raised property values.

But the result, the foundation alleges, has limited opportunity and increased racial segregation in the Twin Cities metro, where more than 40% of all residents currently reside in census tracts that are heavily populated by one race. In tracts that are at least 70% white, there’s now one subsidized housing unit for every 35 residents; it’s one unit for every eight residents in census tracts that are at least 70% non-white.

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the numbers are even more stark, with as many as one subsidized unit for every four residents in census tracts dominated by people of color.

“If you go back in the history, particularly the Met Council, they used to use their policies to force other communities to include affordable housing in their plans and procedures,” Babington-Johnson said. “Over the years, they’ve receded from that stance.”

Stairstep’s legal complaint, which alleges violations of the Minnesota Constitution’s equal protection clause and the Minnesota Human Rights Act, seeks an injunction prohibiting state and regional efforts “from operating policies that create and perpetuate residential racial segregation.”

The latest

The exterior of the Ramsey County Courthouse in St. Paul as seen on Thursday, June 1, 2017. (Dave Orrick / Pioneer Press)

That lawsuit recently survived its first major legal hurdle. Ramsey County District Judge Sara Grewing last month rejected efforts by Minnesota Housing and the Met Council to have the case thrown out for lack of legal standing.

A spokesperson for the Met Council said Friday that it would not comment on pending litigation.

Officials with Minnesota Housing have taken issue with the Stairstep Foundation’s characterizations, noting funding for affordable housing has begun to pick up in the suburbs.

In a letter to the state advisory committee last month, Minnesota Housing Commissioner Jennifer Ho wrote that “in the last several years, 63% of the new rental units in the Twin Cities metro area that have been awarded funds through the Agency’s Consolidated Request for Proposals have been in the suburbs while 37% have been in the central cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

Ho has repeatedly said Minnesota needs to “go big” with more resources to create more affordable housing for renters and homeowners in every corner of the state.

That said, “we should not place the burden of accessing opportunity on the backs of lower-income people of color, who have been marginalized and the target of discrimination for generations,” she wrote to the committee in a previous letter in early May.

“For example,” she said, “the only avenue for lower-income parents of color to access well-resourced schools should not be making them move to a white, wealthy community, which may lack other opportunities that they value. Rather, we should invest in disinvested communities and ensure that all schools are well resourced, allowing people to achieve equity in place.”

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Letters: Fix our roads first, then maybe, maybe, bike lanes

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Roads first. Then bike lanes. Maybe

I wish I knew who made the decision to turn the Twin Cities into the biking capital of the state, if not the country. The streets in both cities are a disaster, with sometimes dangerous conditions for motorists.

Yet the politicians seem to be ignoring this problem in favor of kowtowing to the minority of citizens who bike for how long — six months of the year — maybe? Four-lane streets are becoming two lanes, which makes navigating the roadways difficult.

Attempting to buy votes? Of course not — that would never happen in Minnesota.

Fix the streets first and then maybe, maybe, create bike lanes.

Bob Hart, St. Paul

 

Not above the law

Our Constitution limits the ability of any President to commit crimes in the context of official actions. It provides for impeachment of presidents and other federal officials for the crimes of treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors.

If the House of Representatives has proof that a current or former president has committed those crimes, it can bring a bill of impeachment, prove its case, and issue a penalty. And this does not bar that previous president from being tried for those crimes proven in a successful impeachment.

The difficulty will be separating official from unofficial acts. The Supreme Court has left that to the federal appeals and district courts to work that out.

No president has ever been “above the law,” and neither is he or she now.

Dave Racer, Woodbury

 

Trump’s ‘Gish gallop’

Imagine being in a debate and having your opponent make the assertion, “The moon is more important than the sun because the moon shines at night when we really need the light.”

How would you respond? It would probably take you a while to even know where to begin. Such was the debate I watched on Thursday night.

Ex-president Donald Trump dumped so many such non-sequiturs onto the stage, one on top of the other, that President Biden wasn’t sure where to begin. This debate style actually has a name; it’s called the Gish gallop. (Def. “The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.” Wikipedia).

I’m convinced that if the 90-minute debate was printed out and read as a narrative rather than viewed visually, Biden would be the easy winner. His answers to the pre-arranged questions were to the point and honest, while the world according to Trump was 95% fictional. The moderators seemed brain-dead to this fact. In fact, subsequent talking-head commentaries all were brain-dead to this.

G.J. Mayer, Lino Lakes

 

Now, jet lag?

President Biden’s handlers have used: “a cold,” not taking his medications (for what, I wonder), his jam-packed schedule (spare me!), and now jet lag as excuses. From travel over a week before the debate? And what about the weeklong entrenchment at his hideout in Delaware, supposedly prepping for the show? From what I’ve learned in the so-called media, he’s been rehearsing (in between naps) in a hangar that seems to be run by Hollywood’s central casting. No amount of production value can obfuscate this bad actor’s ineligibility for the role he’s pretending to and wants to continue to play. This is not entertainment people. It’s tragic, and Donald Trump is not orchestrating it. They are.

The DNC, his administration (bosses?), First Lady Jill Biden and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre should all be charged with malfeasance, criminal lack of transparency (outright lying) and elder abuse. The mainstream media should all lose their official press credentials and be held in contempt of the truth, or at least turn in their Pulitzers for not understanding what facts are. More to the point, not being willing to report them, not to mention the perpetual slander of President Trump. What’s next … his dog Commander ate his homework before attacking another Secret Service babysitter?

The rats are jumping from the ship in droves now, but they’ve hitched their fortunes to a false and fallen star. They’re left with unsaleable leftovers no one wants and aren’t even electorially viable at this late date anyways. “Hoisted on their own petard” you might say. The demise of this panoply is out there for all to see I’m afraid, for those honest enough to actually see it, and the whole world is watching. Friend and foe alike.

Peter K. Cudworth, St. Paul

 

Time for a split

The red and blue gangs gave us two old men — Evil and Feeble.  It’s time to split them both. National, Economical, Liberal and Labor. Wouldn’t it be great to have a real choice?

Quentin Roggenbuck, Lauderdale

 

Compare the records

Granted, Biden did not show his best self at the recent televised debate. The next day in Raleigh, N.C., however, he made an excellent comprehensive stump speech. We shouldn’t forget his most recent passionate State of the Union Address. While Trump may have been more forceful, his bluster was filled with his typical lie-laced schtick.

We should be comparing Biden’s presidential accomplishments to those of Trump’s. Marc Thiessen, respected conservative pundit, called Biden’s first two years’ accomplishments the most productive of any president since JFK. And, that assessment didn’t factor in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan, the Election Reform Act, the CHIPS Act and the Infrastructure Plan. Of critical importance to these successes was Biden’s appointment of quality people to his cabinet and White House staff.

Trump, on the other hand, put in place a bunch of scallywags, many of whom proved jail worthy. Bottom line, compare Biden’s accomplishments the past four years with Trump’s evolving “rap sheet” of immoral and illegal behavior. Biden has earned a second term.

Pete Boelter, North Branch

 

Consequences

Much has been said about the recent presidential debate, which showed how age and stress have diminished President Biden’s ability to communicate without the aid of a teleprompter. What hasn’t received as much attention is the fact that if elected, he is  unlikely to be able to complete another four-year term.  A vote for Biden is a vote for Harris for president.

Regina Palosaari, St. Paul

 

‘Fit for office’

It is so reassuring to hear our governor report to us, after his meeting with the president, that Joe Biden is “fit for office,“ presumably for four more years. After his days running the government of Minnesota, Tim Walz will have a banner career selling used cars. Holy cow, what politics can compel people to do and say.

T. J. Sexton, St. Paul

 

Independence?

On the evening of our latest July 4, I hear the sounds of many crackles and pops of fireworks celebrating our nation’s independence. After a loud boom, I am jolted and reminded that today’s July 4 is, sadly, a celebration of a nation of dependence.

Mark Kirchner, St. Paul

 

Best court money can buy

Let me see if I understand this ruling correctly. If a president commits a crime and claims it is an official act then he is immune from justice. So much for no man is above the law. For the last 24 years l’ve witnessed the most tone deaf court ever assembled. Citizen United gave us the best Supreme Court money can buy. What’s next? If they had their way they would change the Ten Commandments to the Ten Suggestions.

Dan Mitchell, Roseville

 

More on athlete Greg Larson

Last Sunday’s Pioneer Press sports section had a very short mention of the passing of Greg Larson. His sports accomplishment in Minnesota deserve more mention.

Greg played three sports at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, and their basketball team won two state titles. He was inducted into their Hall of Fame.

He was an unrecruited walk-on player for the University of Minnesota football team. A three-year letterman, he was the team captain and All Big Ten selection when the Gophers won their last national championship in 1960. He was enshrined into the M Club Hall of Fame in 2010.

He played 13 years for the New York Giants and was named to the Pro Bowl in 1968.

This year Greg was named one of the top 100 New York Giants of their 100-year existence.

Greg turned to golf after football and won several club championships.

When he played for the Gophers he played for Murray Warmath.

Larry Sewall, Woodbury

 

Concerns about community cats

Very soon, the community cat population in the Twin Cities is going to rise. Vulnerable kittens will be found in more boats opened in the spring. Pregnant cats will give birth under more decks. Injured cats will show up at more playgrounds. More bird, rabbit, and squirrel babies will be found dismembered. Independent cat rescuers, who usually step up to help the cats and people in these situations, will no longer be able to do their part.

Independent cat rescuers are the people you see getting tagged in the Facebook post about the cat eating from the dumpster at McDonald’s. They get the text that a lactating cat got hit by a car and there are neonatal kittens crying in a garage. The neighbor knocks on their door when cats are left behind in a vacated apartment. Women, with full-time jobs and their own families and pets, do this unpaid work. They save cats on other people’s property during their own spare time. They use their own money to purchase traps, food, litter and other supplies.

The main tool in the arsenal of the independent cat rescuer is trap-neuter-return, known as TNR. By spaying and neutering the unsocialized cats in the community, independent cat rescuers (and a few organizations, like Pet Project Rescue) prevent the suffering of cats and other creatures in the community. Historically, Animal Humane Society (AHS) has been the linchpin of TNR in the Twin Cities. For a decade, AHS has provided free spay/neuter appointments for unsocialized cats in traps. The program prevented disease spread, curbed the mating and cat fight noises in the community, and stopped a next generation of cats from living outside.

AHS has been systematically dismantling the TNR program in recent years. At the high point, they were offering 90 appointments per week. Today, that number is 15. Previously, rescuers could bring cats in traps to AHS on a walk-in basis. AHS changed to using a call center where people could call during business hours and AHS would generally provide an appointment available for TNR the next day. Recently, AHS switched to a portal where people need to request appointments. The portal is generally open about 15 minutes per week. AHS then assigns an appointment several weeks in the future with no regard for the schedule of the person who is trapping the cat. AHS announced that they will start charging $75 per cat on July 1, 2024.

Independent cat rescuers do not want to lose the most important tool we have to help the cats, people, and wildlife in our community. We want our trusted partner to continue to provide vital TNR services to the community.  We don’t want cats to suffer, we don’t want songbirds to get killed, and we want to answer the calls about cats in need from people in our community.

Jada Fehn, Columbia Heights

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