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Suppose you look back at your data set of the number of coffees you purchased per week in the previous questions and realize that your consumption of coffee in Week 2 was both unhealthy and significantly higher than your "normal" coffee consumption behavior. If the 100 cups you consumed is not a good representation of your "population" behavior, what will this do the estimates of the sample mean and sample variance relative to their population values?

  Only the sample variance will be biased
  Neither the sample mean nor the variance will be biased
  Both the sample mean and variance will be biased
  Only sample mean will be biased.

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Learn more about Social Security and Medicare reform (to improve financial strength of the programs) or solvency through Internet exploration. Find an article or resource related to one of these topics. Attach the article and write a brief summary (300-400 words) of what you found. Summarize the Article.

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

U.S. Social Security reform: the clock is ticking

Clocks are seen during the performance "tck tck tck" by Global Campaign for Climate Action at the Barcelona Climate Change Talks, November 4, 2009. REUTERS/Albert Gea

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Can you count on your Social Security benefits when retirement rolls around?

Most Americans worry about this - partly due to the nonsense they hear from political opponents of Social Security and ill-informed media. You will hear that the program is bankrupt, its reserves are nothing but a bunch of IOUs, or that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

All of those claims are false, but there is one good reason for concern. Social Security faces a long-term financial imbalance that would force sharp benefit cuts in 2034 unless the government makes changes. The problem stems from falling fertility rates and labor force growth - which reduces collection of payroll taxes that fund the system - and also from the retirement of baby boomers, which increases benefit costs.

Absent reform, Social Security could continue to pay roughly 75 percent of promised benefits. The cuts would mean that the typical 65-year-old worker could expect Social Security to replace 27 percent of pre-retirement income, down from 36 percent today, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

No surprise, then, that only 37 percent of workers are “very or somewhat confident” that Social Security will be able to maintain current benefit levels in the future, according to survey research by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) - although confidence is much higher among older workers and retirees.

From a math standpoint, potential solutions to the problem are straightforward. The cuts can be avoided through increased revenue, benefit reductions or some combination of the two. But the politics are another matter.

Republicans are far from holding a unified position on the issue. For example, U.S. Representative Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, has proposed legislation containing two significant benefit cuts: gradually raising full retirement ages to 69 by 2030, and using a less generous annual cost-of-living adjustment formula known as the chained CPI.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has so far held to his campaign promise of opposing cuts. He has suggested that economic growth will solve the problem by stimulating wage growth and payroll tax collections - a position most economists dismiss as unrealistic.

REPUBLICAN ENTHUSIASM LACKING

The last major Republican reform proposal dates back to the George W. Bush administration, which proposed shifting the program to personal savings accounts - an idea that aroused Republican passion but that went down in flames.

“That was an idea that got people excited, but there hasn’t been much enthusiasm for Social Security reform among Republicans since then,” said Andrew Biggs, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Biggs worked on Social Security reform as an associate director of the White House National Economic Council.

Meanwhile, Democrats are in no mood to work with the Trump administration on anything that forces a compromise on their core values - and they have shifted significantly to the left on Social Security reform. Representative John Larson has introduced legislation that would not only restore trust fund balance but expand benefits. That is by far the best approach, since roughly half of all households have saved less than $25,000, according to EBRI. Larson’s bill is cosponsored by more than 80 percent of the Democratic House caucus - more than any previous expansion bill.

The bill would increase benefits by 2 percent across the board, shift to a more generous annual cost-of-living adjustment that reflects spending by seniors and set a new minimum benefit at 25 percent above the poverty line. It also would cut taxes for millions of retirees by boosting significantly the threshold for taxation of benefits.

The plan raises revenue by gradually increasing the payroll tax rates that fund the program. The rate hikes would begin in 2019, and by 2042, workers and employers would pay 7.4 percent each, instead of the current 6.2 percent.

Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, also proposes changes to the payroll tax cap for very wealthy beneficiaries. Currently, payroll tax is collected only on wages up to $127,200; the plan would start collecting taxes again on wages above $400,000. That exempts more income than many earlier expansion plans, which either removed the cap entirely or resumed taxation at $250,000.

The payroll tax cap feature played an important role in boosting support for expansion legislation, according to Max Richtman, CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, a progressive advocacy group that supports the bill. “It brought many of the more conservative Democratic legislators on board,” he said.

Of course, the Larson bill is going nowhere in the Republican-controlled Congress, so Social Security reform will not happen before the 2018 midterm elections at the earliest - and perhaps much later than that. But that does not mean beneficiaries should worry about draconian cuts in 2034.

Even if reform is not achieved by 2034, Biggs thinks the problem likely would be solved at the 11th hour through tax increases - simply because benefit cuts must be enacted and phased in over long periods to give beneficiaries time to adjust.

”If they were going to do this by cutting benefits, it should have been enacted 20 years ago,“ he said. ”If you want to do it by raising taxes you want to wait as long as possible, so that you get to the point where the only solution is to put more money into the program.”

But the uncertainty on Social Security policy will continue to undermine public confidence in the program - and that is worrying. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

Background When you look at news reports of any kind, there can be a tendency to take them at face value, accepting what they tell us as the truth. This is usually a grave mistake. News typically moves quickly, with tight deadlines to get information and there is almost always a bias at play. Numbers are an easy way to manipulate the truth--and truth itself can be pretty flexible when it comes to human relationships. The value of the truth can also be flexible depending on your point of view. For example, in the second quarter of 2015, the U.S. dollar is strong--meaning it has a high value against foreign currency. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? If you're a consumer, it's generally a good thing in the short-term. It means items imported to the U.S. cost us less to buy. Go us! If you are a growing business that exports, it's a bad thing because your costs make it difficult to compete with locally produced goods in foreign markets. If you're traveling out of the country, it's good because the dollar goes farther. If you have a business that benefits from foreign tourism, it's bad because visitors have less money and may chose to go to other places where their money gives them more buying power.

find an article (you might try MSN Money or CNN Money or something similar) and then write at least 600 words. how strong the position the article takes is. Questions to consider include: What are the weaknesses to the article? How are numbers used effectively? What's missing? How are the numbers being used to disguise something?

ARTIcle

President Obama slapped a stiff 35% tariff on Chinese tires in 2009 after American companies complained about unfair competition. They said China was flooding America with tires at low prices making it tough for U.S. companies to compete. The tire tariff gradually waned, and finally ended in 2012. The tariff saved 1,200 U.S. tire jobs, which had been in sharp decline. And U.S. tire production rose after a major decline. "Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires," Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union address. But a study from the Peterson Institute of International Economics found that the tariffs cost Americans in many other ways. Americans paid more for tires. Some Chinese-made tires cost as much as 26% more -- rising on average to $39 per tire, from about $31. And U.S. tire makers, facing less competition from China, also raised prices on American-made tires 3.2%. According to Peterson's model, higher prices from the tire tariff cost Americans an extra $1.1 billion, which translated to an estimated 3,731 retail jobs lost. Plus, China fought back by imposing penalties on U.S. shipments of chicken parts. The Peterson study estimates that China's retaliation cost American chicken producers $1 billion in sales. "Tire safeguards did not change Chinese policies in a helpful way, nor did they boost U.S. employment," wrote Gary Hufbauer, a trade expert at Peterson, who authored the report. Indeed, the tariffs didn't bring the tire-making jobs back to previous levels -- a similar trend that's played out for the rest of U.S. manufacturing. But they did help to stem the job losses. In 2008, there were about 60,000 American workers making tires. Now, there are about 55,000. That's better than the low point reached in 2010 but not back to pre-tariff levels. Related: Trump's 35% tariff on companies: Easier said than done An Obama administration official, who requested anonymity, disputed some of the calculations and assumptions in the Peterson study. For instance, the official claimed tire prices did not go up by as much as the study claims. Hufbauer said no one until now had contested any of his analysis in the four years since it was published. He noted that the administration official didn't provide an alternative estimate for price changes. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney criticized Obama for the tariffs in his 2010 book "No Apology." "President Obama's action to defend American tire companies from foreign competition may make good politics by repaying unions for their support of his campaign, but it is decidedly bad for the nation and our workers," Romney said. U.S. tire makers still applaud Obama's tariffs. Morry Taylor, CEO of Titan International, a U.S.-based tire company, is one of them. "He did what he should have done and he should have done more of it," says Taylor, who voted for Trump. His company has plants in Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois (they also have operations in Brazil and Russia). Related: 3 ways Trump can go after China and Mexico Taylor argues that if the tariffs weren't put in place he might not have any business today to speak of. By 2012, Taylor still had 1,800 tire-making workers, about the same amount as before the tariffs. Today, however, his firm only has a little more than 900 workers. His problem today is what he describes as unfair competition from India, where firms make cheap tires and sell in the U.S. at prices he can't afford to sell at. He hopes Trump considers higher tariffs on tires, saying it would save jobs. To be clear, Obama wasn't trying to "bring back jobs" so much as protect the ones already in America, which he accomplished. Trump wants to bring manufacturing jobs back from other countries. Some trade experts believe that would be difficult task, since many of jobs overseas are low-skill positions and many U.S. manufacturing firms now want highly skilled employees. In any case, U.S. tire production recovered but didn't surge. Instead, U.S. tire imports from all other countries excluding China rose dramatically, Hufbauer found. In other words, the Chinese tire jobs didn't come to the U.S. -- they went to the next cheapest countries. In the end, Hufbauer argues the tariffs didn't make a difference. "The best thing about the tire tariffs is that they expire," Hufbauer wrote in 2012. CNNMoney (New York) First published January 3, 2017: 3:41 PM ET

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