Compensation

How did I miss this?

After 9/11 an Act of Congress created the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund (VCF). Along with the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act (49 USC 40101), it was to compensate the victims of the attack (or their families) in exchange for their agreement not to sue the airline corporations involved.

OK, I understand how we all felt after 9/11, but what was this? The congress of the U. S. of the A. decided to set aside money (our tax money) to compensate the victims of this disaster.

Now I’m all in for feeling sorry about all the people who went to work that day with the worst thought of getting a paper cut rather than a jet liner plowing into their office, but don’t we all do that everyday?

I’m very aware of the airline corporations wanting to avoid being sued by thousands for allowing their vehicles to be high jacked by ‘terrorists’ and illegally flown. Suppose you were t-boned by someone who stole the car that hit you? Would you sue the automobile manufacturer for a lacking locking system?

So our sympathy turns to compensation for those who lost their lives and others who would be affected by the residual effects of tumbling buildings.

At the same time, as we always do, people from across the country were setting up foundations and fund raising for the poor souls who are suffering. Along with the flowers and prayers, there was an outpouring of cash; but what gives the government the right to take my tax dollars as a payout compensation fund?

Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by Attorney General John Ashcroft to be Special Master of the fund. He worked for 33 months pro bono. He developed the regulations governing the administration of the fund and administered all aspects of the program.

 In his book titled ‘What is Life Worth?’ Feinberg described the eight-part plan that was applied to approaching the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

1.  Identifying someone with sufficient and exceptionally broad experience is mass tort action mediation, litigation, and settlement, which Feinberg possessed through his previous personal experience as a political activist and his work in the Agent Orange compensation settlement.

2.  To support and follow the unprecedented law of Congress for the proportional compensation of victims based on estimated loss from future earnings as a key legislated criterion. Hire a full staff of accountants and attorneys to track and service each claim individually.

3.  Accumulate all the reports and applications, along with counter-claims to gauge and initiate the direct compensation process. How the compensation fund worked was in detail substantially different than the Agent Orange mass tort litigation case.

4.  The place of informed discretion in compensating claimants under the formula of keeping the domain of compensation under the rule of thumb that 85% of the money should not go to 15% of the 'richest' claimant families, under the principle of “narrow the gap” between the largest and the smallest compensations paid to claimants.

5.  With a mind to the future, the process of the program should be maintained and serviced as a precedent for future courts to defend in future compensation cases as needed. The actions taken should be uniform in their approach.

6.  There would be “no substitute for hard work and legal craftsmanship” of rigorous intellectual honesty.

7.  The support of Edward Kennedy would be recognized throughout the process that Feinberg knew since 1975.

8.  Lawsuits were to be discouraged as contrary to the spirit of an enacted Law of Congress legislated to expedite the claim process of victims of September 11.

So, as I understand it, Mr. Feinberg figured out what the potential earnings lost by the disaster and compensated the families with taxpayer cash.

The fund received 7,408 claim submissions from 75 countries. Awards were made in 5,560 of those cases and totaled over $7 billion.

The fund received 2,963 death claims. This accounted for more than 98% of the eligible families. Funds were distributed in 2,880 of these cases. The average award was $2,082,128 and went as high as $7.1 million.

The fund received 4,445 personal injury claims. Funds were distributed in 2,680 of these cases. The awards ranged from $500.00 to $8.6 million.

What about the rest of the nation who watched the scene over and over again creating PTSD, substance abuse, or however we coped with another possible attack or war. What were we worth?

The money was tax-free.

In law, damages are an award, typically of money, to be paid to a person as compensation for loss or injury. The rules for damages can and frequently do vary based on the type of claim which is presented (e.g., breach of contract versus a tort claim) and the jurisdiction.

At common law, damages are categorized into compensatory (or actual) damages, and punitive damages. Compensatory damages are further categorized into special damages, which are economic losses such as loss of earnings, property damage and medical expenses, and general damages, which are noneconomic damages such as pain and suffering and emotional distress.

Insurance purchased to cover the cost of damages does not always fulfill compensation.

When the lost of life has been caused, what is the price tag?

Punishment from judicial rulings can charge the plaintiff with fines including garnish of wages or assets or possible imprisonment time as compensation.

A salary is a form of payment from an employer to an employee, which may be specified in an employment contract. It is contrasted with piece wages, where each job, hour or other unit is paid separately, rather than on a periodic basis. Salary can also be viewed as the cost of acquiring and retaining human resources for running operations, and is then termed personnel expense or salary expense.

Salary is a fixed amount of money or compensation paid to an employee by an employer in return for work performed.

Salary is typically determined by comparing market pay rates for people performing similar work in similar industries in the same region. Salary is also determined by leveling the pay rates and salary ranges established by an individual employer. Salary is also affected by the number of people available to perform the specific job in the employer’s employment locale. The potential salary could vary from raises, new assignments, lost of interest, unemployment, disability, etc.

Workers’ compensation is a form of insurance providing wage replacement and medical benefits to employees injured in the course of employment in exchange for mandatory relinquishment of the employee's right to sue their employer for the tort of negligence. The trade-off between assured, limited coverage and lack of recourse outside the worker compensation system is known as “the compensation bargain”.

One of the problems that the compensation bargain solved is the problem of employers becoming insolvent as a result of high damage awards. The system of collective liability was created to prevent that, and thus to ensure security of compensation to the workers. Individual immunity is the necessary corollary to collective liability.

While plans differ among jurisdictions, provision can be made for weekly payments in place of wages (functioning in this case as a form of disability insurance), compensation for economic loss (past and future), reimbursement or payment of medical and like expenses (functioning in this case as a form of health insurance), and benefits payable to the dependents of workers killed during employment.

General damage for pain and suffering, and punitive damages for employer negligence, is generally not available in workers’ compensation plans, and negligence is generally not an issue in the case. 

People fall in love and get married, but it doesn’t always work out.

Alimony (also called aliment (Scotland), maintenance (England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Canada), spousal support (U.S., Canada) and spouse maintenance (Australia) is a legal obligation on a person to provide financial support to their spouse before or after marital separation or divorce. The obligation arises from the divorce law or family law of each country.

Is alimony a compensation for broken hearts?

Compassion motivates people to go out of their way to help the physical, mental, or emotional pains of another and themselves. Compassion is often regarded as having sensitivity, an emotional aspect to suffering, though when based on cerebral notions such as fairness, justice, and interdependence, it may be considered rational in nature and its application understood as an activity also based on sound judgment.

Compassion is a feeling you get if you are a true human; the desire to help or, at the very least, see what you can do. There is also an aspect of equal dimension, such that individual’s compassion is often given a property of “depth”, “vigor”, or “passion”. The etymology of “compassion” is Latin, meaning “co-suffering.” Compassion involves “feeling for another” and is a precursor to empathy, the “feeling as another” capacity for better person-centered acts of active compassion; in common parlance active compassion is the desire to alleviate another’s suffering.

Compassion involves allowing ourselves to be moved by suffering and experiencing the motivation to help alleviate and prevent it. An act of compassion is defined by its helpfulness.

Qualities of compassion are patience and wisdom; kindness and perseverance; warmth and resolve. It is often, though not inevitably, the key component in what manifests in the social context as altruism. Expression of compassion is prone to be hierarchical, paternalistic and controlling in responses. Difference between sympathy and compassion is that the former responds to suffering from sorrow and concern while the latter responds with warmth and care.

Ranked a great virtue in numerous philosophies, compassion is considered in almost all the major religious traditions as among the greatest of virtues.

Veterans are a good example. Here are boys and girls, sons and daughters, who have volunteered (or have been drafted) to go into ‘harm’s way’ to protect our country from the boogieman. Not only do they get trained how to march and polish their belt buckles but are given the best weapons money can buy allowing them to shoot at people. Unfortunately those people shoot back.

Our compassion for our fallen heroes creates a bureaucracy for compensation to their duty that no ‘mom and pop’ organization can match.

What is it all worth?

A body could be worth up to $45 million — Calculated by selling the bone marrow, DNA, lungs, kidneys, heart … as components.

What about the value of a body based around just the chemical elements that make up a corpse?

Let’s assume we possess a Superb Person Atomizing Machine (SPAM for short); a Sweeney Todd like device that can reduce a body to its elemental components. We throw a body in the top, press a red button, and out of the far end come a pile of its elemental constituents. What would come out? (Remember, we’re talking about reducing our body to its elemental components, not compounds, so whilst a body might be 61% water, we’re not looking to get H₂O out of the far end, we’re looking to split this into Hydrogen and Oxygen.)

Parts for our elemental components is worth just over $160.

The value of life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality. It is also referred to as the cost of life, value of preventing a fatality (VPF) and implied cost of averting a fatality (ICAF). In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In many studies the value also includes the quality of life, the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after the fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.

As such, it is a statistical term, the cost of reducing the average number of deaths by one. It is an important issue in a wide range of disciplines including economics, health care, adoption, political economy, insurance, worker safety, environmental impact assessment, and globalization.

In industrial nations, the justice system considers a human life “priceless”, thus illegalizing any form of slavery; i.e., humans cannot be bought at any price. However, with a limited supply of resources or infrastructural capital (e.g. ambulances), or skill at hand, it is impossible to save every life, so some trade-off must be made.

Also, this argument neglects the statistical context of the term. It is not commonly attached to lives of individuals or used to compare the value of one person’s life relative to another person’s. It is mainly used in circumstances of saving lives as opposed to taking lives or “producing” lives.

If our government decides to use our tax dollars to compensate all the shooting victims from Sandy Hook to Parkland or those flooded from Michael to Florence or the Paradise survivors, then what about the homeless or the hungry or mental illness or addicted or global warming or abandoned puppies, etc.

In this season of giving, a dollar in the red pot, gives our compassion but where is that red pot in April? If you ever donate to a fund or cause or charity, they won’t forget you and will come begging for more.

After the government hands out paper towels and checks, it is time to move onto the next disaster.

All this dependence for someone else to take care of us in time of need seems false hope. With all the humanity we have, giving blankets to people who are fleeing thousands of miles, the news cycle will turn to Saint Nick and another candle will be lit.

Empty your wallet for the mother and children on the curb only to turn the corner and find three more and across the street another dozen. Our taxes will still pay for them with law enforcement clearing the streets and endless processes leading to basic shelter reservations and soup lines as a discarded population.

Does our compensation equal our compassion?