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Social Security Reform: Legal Analysis of Social Security Benefit Entitlement Issues
[Excerpt] Calculations indicating that in the long run the Social Security program will not be financially sustainable under the present statutory scheme have fueled the current debate regarding Social Security reform. This report addresses selected legal issues which may be raised regarding entitlement to Social Security benefits as Congress considers possible changes to the Social Security program, and in view of projected long-range shortfalls in the Social Security Trust Funds
Recommended from our members
Social Security Reform: Legal Analysis of Social Security Benefit Entitlement Issues
[Excerpt] Calculations indicating that the current Social Security program will not be financially sustainable in the long run under the present statutory scheme have fueled the current debate regarding Social Security reform. This report addresses selected legal issues that may be raised regarding entitlement to Social Security benefits as Congress considers possible changes to the Social Security program in view of projected long-range shortfalls in the Social Security Trust Funds.
Social Security benefits are administered pursuant to Title II of the Social Security Act, known as the Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program. Title II is part of a larger social insurance program in which Congress uses its power to tax and spend for the general welfare to promote the social goals of aiding the aged, survivors of workers, disabled persons, and persons of limited means. Beneficiaries under Title II have a legal entitlement to receive Social Security benefits as set forth by the Social Security Act and as administered by the Social Security Administration (SSA), an independent agency in the executive branch.
An individual’s right to Social Security benefits is in a sense “earned,” since there is a general relationship between OASDI benefits and wages earned and the tax paid thereon. However, benefits are not directly measured by the amount of payments made through the years into the system. Thus, the fact that Social Security benefits are financed by taxes on an employee’s wages does not provide a limit on Congress’s power to fix the levels of benefits under the Social Security Act, or the conditions upon which they may be paid
Monads in Double Categories
We extend the basic concepts of Street's formal theory of monads from the
setting of 2-categories to that of double categories. In particular, we
introduce the double category Mnd(C) of monads in a double category C and
define what it means for a double category to admit the construction of free
monads. Our main theorem shows that, under some mild conditions, a double
category that is a framed bicategory admits the construction of free monads if
its horizontal 2-category does. We apply this result to obtain double
adjunctions which extend the adjunction between graphs and categories and the
adjunction between polynomial endofunctors and polynomial monads.Comment: 30 pages; v2: accepted for publication in the Journal of Pure and
Applied Algebra; added hypothesis in Theorem 3.7 that source and target
functors preserve equalizers; on page 18, bottom, in the statement concerning
the existence of a left adjoint, "if and only if" was replaced by "a
sufficient condition"; acknowledgements expande
Double Adjunctions and Free Monads
We characterize double adjunctions in terms of presheaves and universal
squares, and then apply these characterizations to free monads and
Eilenberg--Moore objects in double categories. We improve upon our earlier
result in "Monads in Double Categories", JPAA 215:6, pages 1174-1197, 2011, to
conclude: if a double category with cofolding admits the construction of free
monads in its horizontal 2-category, then it also admits the construction of
free monads as a double category. We also prove that a double category admits
Eilenberg--Moore objects if and only if a certain parameterized presheaf is
representable. Along the way, we develop parameterized presheaves on double
categories and prove a double-categorical Yoneda Lemma.Comment: 52 page
Approximate KMS states for scalar and spinor fields in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetimes
We construct and discuss Hadamard states for both scalar and Dirac spinor
fields in a large class of spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetimes
characterised by an initial phase either of exponential or of power-law
expansion. The states we obtain can be interpreted as being in thermal
equilibrium at the time when the scale factor a has a specific value a=a_0. In
the case a_0=0, these states fulfil a strict KMS condition on the boundary of
the spacetime, which is either a cosmological horizon, or a Big Bang
hypersurface. Furthermore, in the conformally invariant case, they are
conformal KMS states on the full spacetime. However, they provide a natural
notion of an approximate KMS state also in the remaining cases, especially for
massive fields. On the technical side, our results are based on a
bulk-to-boundary reconstruction technique already successfully applied in the
scalar case and here proven to be suitable also for spinor fields. The
potential applications of the states we find range over a broad spectrum, but
they appear to be suited to discuss in particular thermal phenomena such as the
cosmic neutrino background or the quantum state of dark matter.Comment: 42 page
Computing Preferred Answer Sets by Meta-Interpretation in Answer Set Programming
Most recently, Answer Set Programming (ASP) is attracting interest as a new
paradigm for problem solving. An important aspect which needs to be supported
is the handling of preferences between rules, for which several approaches have
been presented. In this paper, we consider the problem of implementing
preference handling approaches by means of meta-interpreters in Answer Set
Programming. In particular, we consider the preferred answer set approaches by
Brewka and Eiter, by Delgrande, Schaub and Tompits, and by Wang, Zhou and Lin.
We present suitable meta-interpreters for these semantics using DLV, which is
an efficient engine for ASP. Moreover, we also present a meta-interpreter for
the weakly preferred answer set approach by Brewka and Eiter, which uses the
weak constraint feature of DLV as a tool for expressing and solving an
underlying optimization problem. We also consider advanced meta-interpreters,
which make use of graph-based characterizations and often allow for more
efficient computations. Our approach shows the suitability of ASP in general
and of DLV in particular for fast prototyping. This can be fruitfully exploited
for experimenting with new languages and knowledge-representation formalisms.Comment: 34 pages, appeared as a Technical Report at KBS of the Vienna
University of Technology, see http://www.kr.tuwien.ac.at/research/reports
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