Scrivener.net

How we know the Democrats know their health reform plan isn't worth its cost.

2009-07-13T16:19:00.006-04:00

We know from how they intend to cover its price -- by dropping the tax cost exclusively on "the rich".

The proposal calls for a surtax on individuals earning at least $280,000 in adjusted gross income and couples earning more than $350,000, said the chairman, Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York. [NYT]

Compare this to the financing scheme of Social Security, which is funded with a payroll tax that lands on all employed workers -- the same people who are intended to benefit from Social Security. Thus, the people who receive benefits pay for them. They are willing to do so because in their mind the benefits they get are worth the price they pay.

This financing method was no accident. Franklin Roosevelt famously insisted on it so that workers would view their benefits as paid for with their own money, and thus earned, providing a bedrock foundation of political stability for Social Security, "With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program", while also removing any taint of it being a rich-pay-for-poor "relief" or welfare program.

(Payroll tax financing also stabilizes benefits in the other direction, against wanton growth. When workers pay for their own benefits, politicians lose the ability to buy votes by taxing the rich to pay for a free handout to every interest group that pleads a special case. Workers as a group support only benefit expansions that pay off for them. Today's Democrats may not appreciate this, but FDR did -- he was soldly in the fiscally conservative wing of his Democratic party, a Blue Dog by today's standards).

For these reasons, from FDR's time until today, every top administrator and trustee of the Social Security Administration has insisted that this financing method be maintained -- rejecting every proposal to add general revenue (income tax) financing to Social Security, and insisting that every dollar of tax paid into Social Security be eligible to earn some benefit. This is why there is a cap on the amount of wages subject to Social Security payroll tax -- because wages above the cap level earn no benefits.

And obviously, this financing scheme has been hugely successful (at least politically) for Social Security and its Democratic champions. FDR was no dummy!

So a logical question is: Why don't Obama and Rangel and the Democrats in Congress follow this successful model set for them by FDR, their hero, with their own plan?

The answer is: For FDR's model to work -- for workers to be happy to pay to get something -- they have to believe it is worth the price. And today's Democrats clearly believe that the average people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of their health care plan won't think it is worth the price if the plan's cost drops on them.

Which is why Obama and the Democrats keep selling their health care reform to voters as "something for nothing"...

"The president is committed to enacting reform that will lower costs, protect choice of doctors and plans, and assure quality and affordable health care for all Americans," said Linda Douglass, a spokeswoman for the White House health reform office. "He has made it clear that we would not support a reform plan that would require people to leave their current insurance plans"... [AP]

Their promise is that people will get to keep everything they have to today, and get more too, plus the uninsured get insurance ... all for lower cost! But "lower cost" does not come in the form of new payroll tax subtracted from your wages to pay for it.

The Democrats have tied their political credibility to getting a health reform bill enacted. But clearly they have made the calculation that the average people whom they say would be the big winners under their plan will not provide the votes to pass it if they have to pay for it -- meaning, it would not be worth the cost to them.

Thus, to get the votes needed to pass it, they are following a time-honored political practice in all democracies: promise the many something for nothing, drop the full cost on the few.

But remember the lesson of FDR: Rich-pay-for-everyone-else benefit programs are politically unstable, tainted as being unearned "relief" or welfare, and tend to have unhappy fates. This is not the model to use if you can convince average citizens that their benefits are actually valuable enough to be worth paying for out of their own pocket.

The Democrats simply know that they can't convince the average citizenry of that.

Seen around and about...

2009-07-12T23:00:00.006-04:00

Marriage announcements of women who should not have hyphenated their names. No matter how liberated they were. Really.

You know things are getting rough in the mortgage market when banks are suing themselves over defaulting.

...court documents clearly label "Wells Fargo Bank NA" as the plaintiff and "Wells Fargo Bank NA" as a defendant ...
Wells Fargo hired Florida Default Law Group., P.L., of Tampa, Fla., to file the lawsuit against itself. And then Wells Fargo hired another Tampa law firm -- Kass, Shuler, Solomon, Spector, Foyle & Singer P.A. -- to defend itself against its own lawsuit ...
Wells Fargo's defense lawyers even filed an answer to their client's own complaint: "Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property," the answer reads. "All other allegations of the complaint are denied"...

Compuserve is dead. It was the first major commercial online service, hosted the first "chat rooms" (called "CB simulators" after CB radio channels) and trademarked the term "email" for its popular messaging service. Originally an in-house network for an insurer...

Access [by the public] was granted generally outside of business hours, when CompuServe's mainframes were normally idle. In 1981, the cost for 300 baud access was $5.00 an hour during non-peak hours (6 p.m. to 5 a.m. weekdays and all day on weekends and holidays); $22.50 an hour during peak hours (5 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays). The service was a hit ...

"It doesn't matter what kind of computer you own. You'll use Compuserve's Electronic Mail System (We call it EMail^TM) to compose, edit, and send letters ..." [advertisement]

$5 an hour in 1981 was worth $12 in today's money, $22.50 was worth $53. You probably can't even imagine how slow 300 baud was.

(Yes, I remember. I never used Compuserve myself but had business associates who did and had to contact them through it using my employer's dial-up service, and later my own. Of course, all this was long before there was anything like a "Web" or a "browser".)

For all that, it sure started something. RIP.

Site feeds, and request for suggestions

2009-07-12T16:54:00.004-04:00

The "state of the art" circa 2004 technology that this blog happily has run on until now is, under the strain of an inexplicable rise in traffic over the last few months, beginning to show signs of stress (the carved wooden template is starting to give off splinters).

So some modest upgrades are beginning. First up: site feeds. All promises are that this back-end change will be invisible to users -- but on the principle that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, be informed that should your feed be interrupted you can restore it quickly by simply hitting the subscribe button on the left.

Beyond that, if you have any suggestions you'd like to make to improve this place, either technology- or content-wise, drop them in a comment or in an e-mail to scribbler at scrivener.net. All will be appreciated. But please, start at the extreme "most result to least effort involved" end of the return curve. This blog is strictly a spare moments project. TIA.

The power of the having the marginal vote

2009-07-11T02:48:00.005-04:00

If you've been following the story of the New York State Senate clown show over the last month [one, two, three], well, things may finally be shaking out -- with a nice illustration for us all of how politics works ...

COUP PART 2:
PEDRO DEFECTS BACK TO DEMS, BREAKS TIE & GETS TOP POST

The chaotic state Senate stalemate came to a stunning end yesterday as two-time turncoat Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. of The Bronx double-crossed his GOP allies, returned to the Democratic fold -- and was rewarded with the post of majority leader...

Espada was demonized by Democrats during the past month as a "criminal" and an "extortionist," and he once vowed "never" to return to the party. Last night, he was introduced as the new majority leader under a deal that guaranteed him higher pay, substantial patronage, and power over the day-to-day operations of the Senate....

Espada, who is under investigation for funding related to a chain of government-subsidized Bronx health clinics he runs and over whether he resides in his Bronx district, will also get special access to millions of dollars in pork-barrel "member items" that will be doled out in his district...

"It was never about power, but about empowerment," Espada insisted... [NY Post]

Empowering Espada.

Get it: This guy has no seniority (is in the first year of his term, though he served a couple terms some years back), has double-crossed everybody in sight in both political parties, has been publicly damned by the Democratic senators, damned them in return, is under criminal investigaton ... and the state senate Democrats now have elected him their Majority Leader!

Why? Because he had the vote they needed to regain power.

What's politics about? Power. Not doing "what is right", but power.

Another fine example of what's been described here before...

Scrivener.net's "First Law of Politics": Every elected politician truly and sincerely desires to do what is good and right for the nation and the people as a second priority -- the first priority being to get oneself elected and one's party in power, whatever hypocritical or scabrous behavior is required, the second priority be damned. Because after all, if one doesn't get elected and gain power, one can't do anything good at all. QED.

There's another practical, profitable lesson for all in this as well: If you ever find yourself a voting member of a committee, board or legislature, set yourself up to be the marginal, swing vote. You'll do very well for yourself.

Just as all the United States Senators who right now are positioning themselves to be swing votes on Cap-and-Trade and National Health Care, issue by sub-issue, are sure to do.

Are US health care costs really rising excessively fast?

2009-07-10T01:49:00.003-04:00

The Obama Administration says "excessive growth" in health care costs threatens the government's future fiscal solvency, as the amount it has to pay for Medicare and Medicaid every year goes up, up, up.

So in lobbying to get its national health care program enacted it is arguing against all experience and logic that indicate putting the cost of more health care on the government's bill will be an extra fiscal cost, to claim that national health care is needed to reduce this dangerously excessive growth rate of health care costs. As its lobbyists and advocates are putting it, "Health Reform is Budget Reform".

But are US health care costs really rising at an excessive rate?

Data that say "maybe not!" come from Andrew Biggs. He looked at the "excessive growth" in health care costs (the amount by which they grow faster than GDP) in 23 OECD countries since 1990, and found an average of 1.62%. The rate of excessive growth in the US: 1.66% -- almost exactly the same.

The US's "excess growth" rate ranked ninth of the 23. If the national health care advocates' goal is to get this excessive growth rate down to the level of France (held up as a model by Paul Krugman) or Britain (which exerts direct government control over hospitals and medical services) the rate will go up to 1.87% (France) or 2.08% (Britain).

But if the fiscal problem with health care costs isn't their growth rate, what is it? It's their base amount to which the growth rate applies. Prof. Mankiw gave us a heads up on this just a little while back, quoting this data....

"U.S. per capita spending for physician services was the highest in the OECD in 1999: $988, compared with an OECD median of $342. Physician services accounted for 22.7 percent of total U.S. health spending in 1999, compared with 15.2 percent in the median OECD country...

"The ratio of the average income of U.S. physicians to average employee compensation for the United States as a whole was about 5.5. Germany�s was the next highest, at only 3.4; Canada, 3.2; Australia, 2.2; Switzerland, 2.1; France, 1.9; Sweden, 1.5; and the United Kingdom, 1.4..."...

Addendum: These broad issues apply not just to doctors but to other skilled healthcare workers as well. If you look here, you will find that dentists, nurses, and physiotherapists are also paid more in the United States than in other nations...

Read his whole post. There might be reasons why the US wage rate for the health profession is higher than elsewhere.

But in any event, if you think the cost of health care in the US is too dang high, the "bogeyman" you have to deal with to fix things is not the rate at which health care costs are rising here, that's world-normal -- nor is it the profits of greedy insurance companies, nor their high overhead, nor "wasteful competition"...

It is the incomes of the people in the medical profession. If you want Canadian-level health costs, you'll have to drop US doctors' incomes by half to get them down to the Canadian level. If you want French-level costs, you'll have to drop doctors' incomes by two thirds.

And not just doctors' incomes, you'll also have to slash and control the incomes of nurses, medical technicians, and of members of the United Health Care Workers Union.

Does the plan being bandied about by Obama and the Democrats address any of this? Do any of its advocates?

It's kind of ironic how national health care is being sold using such a misdiagnosis.

The New York State government clown show continues...

2009-07-09T13:54:00.008-04:00

The governor enters the center ring!

Early last evening the phone rang, I picked it up, and Governor Paterson (New York State's "accidental governor") told me he'd just named Dick Ravitch to be his lieutenant governor. This way he, through Ravitch, will have the tie-breaking vote in the continuing 31-31 State Senate standoff.

Huh? It was an autodialed call. Ravitch is an OK guy who did a tough job leading the city subway system back from ruin 20 years ago, but... as the NY press corps' senior (and best) Albany member reports...

Gov. Paterson yesterday put New York on a course to become a banana republic, with an unelected governor (himself), an unelected lieutenant governor (Richard Ravitch) and an unelected state comptroller (Tom DiNapoli), who, under pressure from Paterson, has refused to give elected senators their pay.

Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, c'mon up -- to Albany!

Maybe now we know why Paterson flunked the bar exam after three years at Hofstra Law School.

Paterson's unprecedented move -- in defiance of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and 230 years of state history -- is mind-boggling in its implications ...

New York's Constitution says the succession goes from governor to lieutenant governor and, when there is no lieutenant governor, to the elected Senate president and the elected Assembly speaker.

Paterson is taking his unprecedented action in the face of an unequivocal finding by Cuomo, New York's only elected statewide official, that such an action is unconstitutional.

Former Gov. Mario Cuomo, the father of the current attorney general and a first-class legal mind who graduated first in his class from St. John's Law School, saw his first lieutenant governor, Alfred DelBello, quit. Then-Gov. Cuomo never considered naming a replacement. He considered such an action illegal, as well as unconstitutional.

Gov. Malcolm Wilson, a Republican who, like Paterson, had been a lieutenant governor at the time a governor (Nelson Rockefeller) resigned, never considered naming his own replacement because, an associate said, he would have considered such a possibility "absurd."

If Paterson ... gets his way, New Yorkers could have a team of unelected and therefore unaccountable executives serving through Dec. 31, 2010 -- with enormous powers of spending, policy making and appointments... [NY Post]

The lawsuits have already been filed, so don't worry about that. This show is far from over...

Death by chocolate ... again!

2009-07-09T13:23:00.003-04:00

Factory Worker Dies After Falling Into Vat of Chocolate

A 22-year-old factory worker died Wednesday after he fell into a vat of boiling chocolate at a manufacturing plant in New Jersey, police said.

The Camden County prosecutor's office identified the victim as Vincent Smith II. He was a temporary worker at the Cocoa Services Inc. plant.

Smith had been in the melting pot for about 10 minutes by the time rescue crews arrived, MyFOXPhilly.com reported.

Prosecutor's spokesman Jason Laughlin says a co-worker tried to shut off the machine and two others tried to pull Smith out of the 8-foot-deep vat. He was hit and fatally injured by the agitator that mixes the chocolate.

By the time he was pulled out of the tank just after 11 a.m., he was already dead... [Fox]

Reading this, I had a feeling of deja vu -- had I seen this story before? Yes...

Worker Drowns in Vat of Chocolate
July 25, 2002

A Pennsylvania factory worker has drowned in a 1,200-gallon vat of melted milk chocolate, swallowed up by the gooey, quicksand-like mixture.

Yoni Cordon, 19, of Philadelphia, an employee of the Kargher Corp. in Hatfield Township, apparently tumbled from a platform into the 7-foot-deep vat, which is used for mixing and melting chocolate.

But nobody saw the accident, and Cordon couldn't save himself.

"It was like quicksand," said Jim Viscusi, assistant chief of the Volunteer Medical Service Corps of nearby Lansdale, which was first rescue unit on the scene.

"We found the gentleman immersed in the vat. It was not the heat - but [the chocolate] is particularly sticky." Viscusi said it would have been difficult for anyone to extricate himself from the vat without immediate help...

Cordon was pronounced dead at the scene by the Montgomery County Coroner's Office.

It was not known how long he had been in the vat... [NYDN]

The candy factory is not as safe a place as it may seem. This must be why Ooompa-Loompas get the big bucks. If you ever find a piece of shoelace in a Kit Kat bar...

I hate the politically correct "her" in writing for the public

2009-07-09T01:11:00.004-04:00

Another of countless annoying examples comes from Ezra Klien of the Washington Post...

A journalist's core competency is, in theory, her ability to write articles. But I've been interested lately ...

When did the proper reference to journalists become "her"? I do a lot of journalism and I'm not a her.

Here's a tip from my school of journalism: If you want to write in a gender-free manner, write in a gender-free manner. It's easy...

A journalist's core competency is, in theory, the ability to write articles. But I've been interested lately ...

See how easy?

To use (the factually inaccurate) "her" is nothing but a gratuitous injection of a statement of your own politics where it doesn't belong...

A journalist's core competency is, in theory, her -- see how progressive I am, sisters! -- ability to write articles. But I've been interested lately ...

If a "his" is to be scuppered because not all journalists are men and it is annoying to a minority of readers -- in spite of its usage as a universal in the English language, well, forever -- how can "her" be better?

It is just bad, egocentric, writing.

What will a Congress that couldn't run a cafeteria do with Nationalized Health Care?

2009-07-08T01:12:00.004-04:00

Hey, in all the complex debate about national health care reform, let's all remember a simple, clear fact:

The US Congress could not run a cafeteria, literally!

The great mental short-circuit suffered repeatedly by those on the left takes the form of looking at something (say medical care), thinking "market failure", and then jumping to the conclusion: "Government will make it all better!" ... which of course means "politicians will make it all better".

While they never say, or think of, "government failure".

Here's a very, very simple intellectual challenge for Paul Krugman or whomever else wants to argue that of course after politicians take further control of the health care system we will all receive more and better for less.

Look at that real-life example of Congress's inability to run its own cafeteria. List for us all the specific examples of "government failure" that contributed to and caused this inability -- you know, as one would in an answer to an exam question.

Then tell us how and why these very examples of "government failure" won't apply to the government's future, greatly expanded management of nationalized health care to create the exact same screw-ups on a trillion-dollar, rather than cafeteria, scale. Be specific.

For extra points one might refer to ways that Congress has already screwed up the US medical care system -- such as by tying medical benefits to employment; reversing any coherent insurance model for Medicare by providing first-dollar coverage for routine, predictible services (thus destroying the market for them) while leaving calamatous, lose-your-home-and-life-savings nursing home and disability care uncovered; enabling the staggering fraud rates of Medicaid, etc. -- and explain exactly why Congress will never, ever commit such screw-ups ever again!

Well ... while we are waiting for that blue book to be filled out, we might drift a bit philosophical and consider how the battle between those who see market failure but are blind to government failure, versus those who have eyes open to both kinds of failure, is endless and joined even at the level of battling Nobelists ... such as Coase versus Samuelson. Coase:

"My approach is to compare the alternatives.

"People like Samuelson like to set up a perfect world and say that the market does not bring us to this point and imply that the government should do something.

"They stop their analysis at that point."

So many do.

But it is a battle the forces of light who can see clearly in all directions must never give up.

The Shame of the World Trade Center "reconstruction" site, III.

2009-07-07T16:38:00.009-04:00

"If we don't build the most obscenely grandiose subway stations in the world, the terrorists will win!

"So forget rebuilding the dang towers..."

This coming 9/11, in the year 2009, will be eight years since the 9/11 2001 attacks, and the site of the World Trade Center still hasn't been cleared fully yet, as the wreck of the Duetsch Bank is still standing (and will into 2010)

Among many reasons, one of the biggest is the battle for bucks between Larry Silverstein, the real estate developer who owns the lease to the WTC properties, who actually wants to rebuild the towers, and the government transportation agencies that want the money to "rebuild" for themselves mega-sized, mega-cost "wonder of the world" ... subway stations.

This blog previously mentioned the New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority's disastrous bungling of the Fulton Street ~~Cathedral~~ station it is "rebuilding", six years behind schedule and $650 million (87%) over budget so far -- $1.4 billion total and counting -- sucking those millions from funds the federal government provided to rebuild the WTC area. But as the station and its infrastructure stretch far underground in all directions, other building waits (and has to be re-designed, and re-designed again) as its delays and re-workings continue.

But the big crisis that's coming to a head is courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is on the other side of Silverstein's lease. It is outright blocking construction of two of the three towers slated to be built on the WTC site because it doesn't want to put up its share of the money, for which it says it has better uses.

Silverstein just warned that he's about to break off the endless negotiations with PA and invoke his right to go to arbitration. And the PA shot back...

"It's unfortunate [Silverstein] is walking away from the negotiating table simply because the public has been unwilling to sacrifice critical transportation projects to subsidize private speculative office space," said PA Executive Director Chris Ward.... [NY Post]

What are the "critical transportation projects" that the PA deems so much more important than rebuilding "private speculative office space" in the business district of Manhattan? The big one is ... it's own subway station!

But not just any subway station -- the PA's own "PATH train" station for trains that run under the Hudson River to New Jersey, which makes the MTA's Fulton Street Cathedral look like a monk's cloister by comparison in all relevant ways: in terms of size, design grandeur, cost, cost overruns and delays...

OBSCENELY GRANDIOSE
A PATH Station Larger Than Grand Central?

Everyone knows the Port Authority's planned World Trade Center Transportation Hub is huge. The PA celebrates the fact, boasting on its Web site that the Hub "is comparable in size to Grand Central Station" ... but is is actually, and absurdly, much bigger than Grand Central's main hall, as the drawing shows.

This, even though the Hub will serve vastly fewer users than Grand Central.

The PA project is obscenely grandiose -- an elephantine edifice that likely can't be built even for its (already way-over-budget) $3.2 billion price tag. It might never be completed at all -- yet the complexities arising from its vast scale bedevil everything around it at Ground Zero.

Recent news articles have predicted the cost could top $4 billion ...

The Hub is an unconscionable waste of precious Ground Zero earth, money and energy. For starters, it's still basically just a new PATH terminal, serving a relative handful of commuters. Again, the drawing helps make the point ...

Their respective dimensions give you the picture. Grand Central's main hall is about 275 feet long, 120 feet wide.

Meanwhile, the Oculus -- the Hub's main public space, officially called the Transit Hall -- is 350 feet long and 145 feet wide at floor level, which is two levels below the street. It tapers to a "mere" 320 feet long by 100 feet wide when it reaches street level.

At its tallest point, the Oculus is 160 feet tall from the floor to the skylight roof. Grand Central is 125 feet high at its apex. ... And the Oculus represents only about half of the Hub ...

All that floor space and volume -- for what?

Grand Central's main-hall floor is traversed by 700,000 people a day ... the current temporary PATH station handles 40,000 riders a day.... [NY Post]

For perspective, the Freedom Tower, the main tower at the WTC that Silverstein is building, has a cost of $3.1 billion. The cost of the PA's PATH station is now up to $4 billion.

Priorities!

Here's a recent estimate of delays and cost overruns for various elements of the WTC rebuilding project.

Hey, the Empire State Building, from first turn-of-the-shovel to grand opening, was built in 470 days. Don't think about it.

In the news...

2009-07-06T03:06:00.003-04:00

What are the odds of getting away with murder? About 40% nationally, 30% her in tough-on-crime New York City. The story. Hey, 40% is a lot more than the impression you'd get from watching CSI, Law & Order, and all those procedural shows. The next time someone really annoys me...

Saddam's astute strategy: Be more concerned about what the Iranians might do to you than what the US might. Kick the weapons inspectors out because they �would have directly identified to the Iranians where to inflict maximum damage to Iraq.� Better to let the Iranians and everyone think maybe you really have those WMDs, as long as they can't prove it. Such he told his interrogators, who told the New York Times. The next time you think about starting a war, consider how probably everybody's misjudging everybody.

Climate change shrinks sheep. Is there anything it can't do? "It's too early to say if, in 100 years, we will have chihuahuas herding pocket-sized sheep." (It's also very good for the wild sheep, enabling more to survive harsh winters.)

Happy 4th of July

2009-07-04T12:15:00.001-04:00

Clown Show updates, East and West...

2009-07-02T21:27:00.008-04:00

In New York, some analysis of the lunatic behavior of the divided State Senate leading to the lock-up of the state government -- how all the petty factions put protecting their turf and extracting "payback" from their enemies ahead of any kind of responsible governing.

How do they imagine that they will escape accountability for this, in some future election?

Heck, they don't have to imagine it, they know they will. Key words from the story (with my emphasis)...

Yes, all of this sounds ridiculous. But key here is that lawmakers don't see any incentive to act responsibly. They know that the public rarely holds them accountable for misbehaving. By the time they're up for re-election, they figure, voters will have forgotten that they held state government hostage... [NY Post]

Not only will most voters have forgotten, but most who haven't forgotten won't care enough to do anything about it (if you are a Democrat will you vote Republican in 2010 or 2012 because Democrats closed down the government for a month in the summer of 2009?). And as to the small number who do care enough, they won't have the chance because they won't have a choice -- the state legislature is fully gerrymandered so that over 90% of legislators are guaranteed re-election.

That's why these guys are able to close down the goverment to pursue petty personal vendattas and turf wars at the cost of the citizenry -- they aren't accountable to anyone for anything.

The only consolation is, gee whiz, at least they aren't passing laws and legislating in the same way!

Meanwhile, over on the Left Coast, the great state of California finds itself paying a good number of its obligations with IOUs, instead of money, as it enters a new fiscal year with a $26 billion deficit. This after all proposals to close the deficit have been stymied by Democrats who refuse to cut spending and Republicans who refuse to increase taxes.

However, as to those obligations being paid with IOUs and money, it's interesting to see who's getting paid with what.

[] Getting IOUs: Grants to aged, blind or disabled persons; people needing temporary assistance for basic family needs, persons with developmental disablities; people in mental health treatment, small business vendors -- the needy and/or politically weak.

[] Getting cash: Legislators, legislative employees and appointees; the public employees� retirement system; health care service payments to institutional providers (as very much opposed to the people getting IOUs); the University of California -- the very legislators and interest groups ~~who own them~~ behind them who've caused the crisis.

How do these legislators imagine they can escape accountability to the public for this fiasco they have created?

Well, the California state legislature is totally gerrymandered too.

Modern American politics is dominated by the doctrine that government is the problem, not the solution ... You don't have to be a liberal to realize that this is wrong-headed.
-- Paul Krugman

Don't make your woman too happy

2009-07-02T20:37:00.005-04:00

Teenagers assault woman's sex partner after mistaking her screams of passion for cries

The sounds of a woman having sex drew an angry crew of teenagers to her rescue after they mistakenly thought she was being assaulted.

Once in her Connecticut bedroom, one of the teens used a baseball bat to club the woman's sex partner.

Police say the incident kicked off when a 16-year-old girl heard screams coming from her mother's bedroom on June 6, and thought she was in danger.

Instead of calling the cops, the youngster went to fetch her friends ... [NYDN]

We all know that children hate to think of their parents having, um, fun, but ... "Sweetie, you have some 'splaining to do".

The New York State Senate clown show continues...

2009-07-01T16:24:00.006-04:00

Democrats and Republicans remain deadlocked 31-31, with each refusing to do any business with the other, leaving the government paralyzed. [How we got here.]

Yesterday's high points:

[] When a Republican seeking a Coke walked through a chamber where the Democrats were meeting to get to the senate lounge, the Democrats claimed that his minute spent walking through them gave them a quorum -- and they "passed" 121 bills.

[] The law authorizing the current management structure of the New York City public school system expired at midnight. Management of the schools serving 1.1 million students has reverted to a Board of Education and 32 community school boards that haven't existed since 2002.

Law extending the current management structure of the school system has been passed by the State Assembly (Democratic), and its passage by the Senate has been urged by the Governor (a Democrat) and even by the teachers union, and 45 of the 62 senators are on record supporting it. But the Democratic senate "leaders" (if one may call them that) are blocking it ... why?

[] As to our Accidental Governor's contribution to the show...

Just after midday, Gov. Bumble called us into a room to announce good news. Enough senators -- finally! -- had joined together, after nearly a month of this Clown College on the Hudson, to pass some bills. Hooray!

But within five minutes, the Clown-in-Chief changed his mind. Right there, I witnessed the most surreal event I've ever seen in a press conference.

Gov. Bumble received a telephone call from state Sen. Frank Padavan. "He's on the phone now?" the gov asked. "I'll take the call!"

Two minutes later [after hearing about the can of Coke] Paterson came back, looking as if he'd been kicked...

"I will not sign any legislation passed," said Gov. Bumble, looking as if he desperately needed that margarita ... give this man a drink. [NY Post]

I can't wait for tomorrow's highlights!

2009-06-30T14:24:00.000-04:00

This-'n-that

Have Obama and the Democrats finally found someone they won't bail out?

As Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the rest of the news-in-print industry shrivels up, The Economist thrives.

Will ~~Governm...~~ General Motors have more trouble in bankruptcy than Chrysler did due to its dealers?

The story of the creation of the Prius.

Papists take over the Supreme Court. If Sotomayor is confirmed, six of the nine Justices will be Catholics under the control of Rome: Sonia plus Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, and Chief Justice Roberts. They warned us that if John Kennedy was elected President this would happen, yet hardly anybody has noticed. The Pope operates in insidious ways.

2009-06-29T01:09:00.004-04:00

An odd thing about Keynesian deficit spending to support the economy.

Keynes did not support deficit spending to support the economy. Ever. At least if one can believe the Palgrave encyclopedia of economics [1998 edition] ...

"Despite the fact that the economics of deficit finance began with the Keynesian Revolution, it has been conclusively established by Kregel (1985) that Keynes himself did not ever directly recommend government deficits as a tool of stabilization policy. Keynes played a conservative political hand and viewed budget deficits with a 'clearly enunciated lack of enthusiasm'."

Keynes advocated government spending in some circumstances to strengthen an economy -- but not deficit spending. Noted previously here was the fact that in 1937, when the unemployment rate in Britian was 11%, he opposed a government spending stimulus program.

What happened? Some of Keynes' first-generation disciples observed that the calendar year is an arbitrary time period for judging "budget balance" and concluded, not entirely unreasonably, that using the full length of the business cycle would be better -- so a deficit during one stretch of a multi-year cycle would be offset by surpluses during others, creating balance overall.

Then Keynes's second-generation disciples came along...

2009-06-28T15:39:00.002-04:00

How much does a "rubber room" of NYC public school teachers cost?

More than $65 million a year...

637 AT SCHOOLS GET 'IDLE'-IZED
43 SEX RAPS, 45 'INCOMPETENTS'

New York City high school teacher George Addison has pocketed almost $500,000 in taxpayer-funded paychecks over the last six years -- and hasn't taught a single class. Accused of fondling a 15-year-old special-ed pupil, the veteran computer teacher has been twiddling his thumbs in a "rubber room" since 2003 ...

Addison, who has also been investigated twice for corporal punishment during his 12-year career, collects a $79,531-per-year salary for sitting in one of the city's seven "teacher reassignment centers" -- or "rubber rooms" -- while he waits for his case to wind through the backlogged disciplinary system.

Other school employees have languished even longer in the Department of Education's purgatory, which costs taxpayers $65 million annually just for staffers' salaries ... [not including of the cost of one of the world's greatest benefit-and-retirement packages that these teachers keep "earning".]

Rubber-room denizens include 43 employees charged with sex-related offenses, including 14 for relationships with students, the data shows. Another 140 were accused of employee misconduct, 117 of corporal punishment and 45 for incompetence. More than 100 were banished after being arrested.

The DOE can suspend a teacher's pay in rare circumstances, but most continue to collect checks...

During a typical day, rubber roomies show up at their assigned center by 8:15 a.m. They come and go outside as they please, and go home at around 3 p.m ... [NY Post]

For any who may wonder how this can be, a former NYC public school teacher explained how the entire sorry system works.

As to other news of the schools and their unions this past week...

In what the Mayor and union spun as good news, the teachers union made modest pension concessions -- but took them out of the skin of the students by getting two more days added to their paid summer vacation, the days just before the opening of school when they prepared for classes.

Stunned principals reacted with horror Tuesday after the city agreed to have teachers return from summer break on the same day as students ....
"Do parents want their children coming into rooms where furniture is stacked up and materials packed away?" said Principal Elizabeth Phillips at Public School 321 in Brooklyn. ... Principals union President Ernest Logan said he was "dismayed" after fielding calls from angry principals "all day long."...

United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said she was not to blame ... [NYDN, more details]

Even the NY Times, which normally resides in the schools unions' pocket, stuck its head out far enough to run a story including criticism of the deal. Although that might be explained by the reaction of the principals' union, "The principals� union protest set off a spat with the 228,000-member teachers� union", which left the Times to cope with a conflict of unions. (Yes, the NYC public schools management is unionized, one more part of the problem.)

But the teachers union showed it can at least teach somebody...

UFT TEACHES POL A LESSON

It's payback time for the powerful UFT. The United Federation of Teachers blocked City Councilman Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn) from receiving an "early endorsement" from the 1.3 million-member Central Labor Council to get even with him for exposing the union's arm-twisting during a City Hall hearing on charter schools, sources said.

Felder disclosed that union reps brazenly distributed cue cards with prepared questions that legislators were supposed to ask at the April hearing. Union witnesses got the softball questions. The tough queries went to administration officials ...

"To me, it's a badge of honor," Felder said. "I think a lot of the leadership in the unions are ripping off members for their own benefit, and I don't want to have anything to do with it."... [NY Post]

2009-06-27T01:39:00.004-04:00

Seen around and about...

Pirate hunts of the rich and famous:

Wealthy punters pay �3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous waters in the world hoping to be attacked by raiders. When attacked, they retaliate with grenade launchers, machine guns and rocket launchers... [Ananova]

Dumb criminal of the week.

Think things are tough for you? Get an $11-a-day job working in hell. [via Newmark's Door]

When they have to tell you it's not hyperbole, you know it is:

"The gravity of America's health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century's bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole..." [Firedoglake, ht: Viking Pundit]

Such cheap rhetorical excess literally makes my blood boil.

The day comes to us all when we are meant to die:

"Man Drowns After Being Thrown From Lawnmower" [KETV, Omaha]

In light of which, while I don't run this blog to repeat the gratuitously nasty, it can be fun.

2009-06-26T02:35:00.006-04:00

It's a terrible time to buy US Savings Bonds. Will there ever be a good time again?

I doubt it. I mean, in case you were thinking about buying some, be warned. Don't.

"Regular" Series EE bonds being issued today pay all of 0.7% interest.

Inflation-adjusted Series I bonds being issued today pay a nifty 0.0% through this coming October 31. This amount is comprised of an almost as nifty 0.1% real permanent interest rate to be paid over the life of the bond, plus an additional amount to account for inflation that is adjusted every six months. (In the case of deflation this later amount can reduce the total combined rate to, but not below, 0.0% -- thus the current rate).

The thing about Savings Bonds is that they usually are held as long-term investments -- people give them as gifts to newborns to provide a figurative start on college savings, grandma hides a shoebox full of them in a clost to feel secure. And so on.

They aren't marketable, and if redeemed within five years there's a penalty. But these rates are awful for long-term investments. They embody Warren Buffett's warning against being invested in long-term US bonds, writ small.

When the recession ends, and a normal economy resumes, it is hard to imagine that the 0.7% rate on today's Series EE bonds will come anywhwere close to even matching inflation, much less pay any real interest return. So they will be pure money losers, long-term. Possibly serious money losers: if inflation averages only 2.5% over the next 20 years, an EE bond bought today will lose 30% of its value by its maturity date.

(Even today, bank CDs guaranteed by the government with five year maturities, the shortest penalty-free holding period for a savings bond, pay a bit over 3% -- more than four times what EE bonds pay.)

Somewhat less bad are Series I bonds, if tradition or whatever demands that you make someone a gift of Savings Bonds. At least I bonds won't actually lose value, due to their inflation protection. Though with a 0.1% real interest rate, when they mature 20 year from now they will be worth only a real $1.02 for every $1.00 invested in them today, so your gift isn't going to make anyone rich.

The base interest rates paid on newly issued EE and I bonds is reset every six months and will change this coming November 1, but that won't really change anything of substance. Savings Bonds have simply become a bad deal compared to the alternatives.

There is speculation that the Treasury is moving towards eliminating Savings Bonds altogether, as it recently dropped the limit on annual purchases to $5,000 from $30,000. At the same time it has lowered the minimum purchase price for regular US bonds, notes and T-bills to only $100, and made it easy to purchase them online with no fees or commissions at Treasury Direct. (As recently as 1998 the minimum purchase of T-bills was $10,000).

Regular US bonds, notes and bills get better rates than Savings Bonds and are the most marketable of all securities at all times (with no penalty) so they dominate Savings Bonds two ways right there. Really, you should probably never buy a Savings Bond ever again.

About the only meaningful advantage Savings Bonds have left is that you can still buy them in paper form, stick them in an envelope and hand them to someone as a gift. But then that someone can lose or forget them. (As I can attest, regarding all the bonds I got handed for my kids.) While regular Treasury securities today are recorded in electronic format.

But you can easily make a gift of a regular T-bond, note or bill, write a note saying you did, stick that in an evelope, and everybody involved will be better off.

Savings Bonds had their run -- in an era when the Treasury issued regular bonds in denominations up to $500 million each (about $4 billion or more in today's money) to save itself the trouble and cost of processing interest coupons physically clipped and sent to it from half a million $1,000 bonds for every one $500 million bond issued.

But that era is over -- one more example of the Internet changing everything.

2009-06-24T02:00:00.002-04:00

2011 model Chrysler van being road tested in Europe?

"The annual Which? Car survey is the largest survey of its kind in the U.K., and it is conducted by a publication that, like Consumer Reports, does not accept advertising and delivers the straight facts from its findings ...

"For its reliability study, Which? Car looks at models up to eight years old, thereby often reporting on years of experience with a given vehicle. Their survey tallies serious breakdowns, unscheduled repairs, and minor problems...

"Among the 38 brands featured in Which? Car, Fiat ranked 35th, followed by Renault, Land Rover, and Chrysler/Dodge ... Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge are categorized as 'Very poor.'

"In total, Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge provide similar reliability, and it isn�t good ..."
-- Consumer Reports.

2009-06-23T13:47:00.003-04:00

Will having the government run health care really reduce its cost?

What does history say about the effect on cost of government control and influence over the medical system up to now?

A look at the data is instructive. The effect of tax exemption and the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid on rising medical costs from 1946 to now is clear. According to my estimates, the two together accounted for nearly 60 percent of the total increase in cost. Tax exemption alone accounted for one-third of the increase in cost; Medicare and Medicaid, one-quarter ... [Milton Friedman]

Read the whole thing.

2009-06-23T13:37:00.003-04:00

"Poll results mean what I say they mean!"

Ezra Klein says that the latest poll results find that national health care is very popular with the public, so failing to enact it would be "resolutely, aggressively, anti-democratic" -- a denial of our responsibility in a democracy.

Paul Krugman says that the latest poll results find that the public prefers reducing the deficit over increasing government spending. But the voters "don�t know much" about policy, �So the moral for Obama is, of course, to ignore this poll" -- anything else would be a denial of our responsibility in a democracy.

Discuss.

(H/T: John Henke)

2009-06-22T14:28:00.005-04:00

Obama, Dems, environmentalists fold to farmers on the "cow gas" issue.

Or, another excellent Pigouvian tax bites the dust.

The politics....

Angered by White House decisions on everything from greenhouse gases to car dealerships, congressional Democrats from rural districts are threatening to revolt against parts of President Barack Obama�s ambitious first-year agenda. �They don�t get rural America,� said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat who represents California�s agriculture-rich Central Valley. �They form their views of the world in large cities.� ...

A rural revolt could hamper the administration�s ability to pass climate change and health care legislation ... In the House, rural Democrats threaten to marshal nearly 50 votes against the climate and energy bill backed by the administration.

... much of rural Democrats� unhappiness with the new administration has focused on the EPA ... Obama�s EPA has moved forward quickly on a host of new regulations, including limits on greenhouse gas emissions that farm lobbyists say will raise costs on farmers... [Politico]

The problem...

Agriculture interests are scrambling to cover their rears -- or more precisely, those of their cattle -- from potential new regulation, as U.S. EPA closes in on a finding that could lead to new a regime on greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
Some agriculture groups and farm-state lawmakers are concerned the federal government could be forced to impose fees on livestock operations for the methane emissions that result from the flatulence and burps from their cows or pigs.
If EPA took this route, more than 90 percent of dairy, beef and hog operations could face fines, according to farm groups, with potential losses totaling $175 per dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and $20 per hog ...
"If they do regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, then they will have to do all sources, all emitters," said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), co-sponsor of the Senate cow tax bill. "That will include livestock because of the methane created and the greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere."...
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 20 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, and a natural byproduct of the digestive process for cows and other livestock... [emphasis added] [E&E News]
~~~~

... the nation's 170 million cattle, sheep and pigs produces about one-quarter of the methane released in the U.S. each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That makes the hoofed critters the largest source of the heat-trapping gas.... [a] contributor to global warming bigger than coal mines, landfills and sewage treatment plants ..

Research has shown that changing cattle diet and boosting efficiency � such as producing the same amount of milk and beef from a smaller herd � can result in less gas, according Frank M. Mitloehner, an associate professor at the University of California at Davis, who has studied livestock gas for 15 years.
"I don't think livestock should be ignored. Every industry has to play their role," Mitloehner said. [ AP ]

But that's the difficult solution, here's the easy one...

House appropriators approved a $10.6 billion spending bill for U.S. EPA last night, tucking in several amendments aimed at insulating agricultural interests from the reach of federal climate regulations ... [including] provisions to block EPA regulations requiring factory farms to report their greenhouse gas emissions and exempt livestock operations from possible carbon regulations.

... agriculture groups and farm-state lawmakers are concerned that if EPA moves to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, EPA could impose fees on livestock operations for the methane emissions that result from the flatulence and burps from their cows or pigs..

... the amendment would prohibit EPA from requiring Clean Air Act permits for carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases emitted by livestock... [ NY Times ]

So as city people get hit with global warming taxes farmers get off free -- and cow gas remains a threat to burn the world ...

2009-06-21T15:01:00.004-04:00

Obama reconsiders his plans for America after meeting Americans at Denny's.