Sunday Musings 1/31/16

As I thought about my budget for February, I realized it was a Leap Year, which means we get one more day of news about this wacky Presidential election which has the possibility of having very unusual outcomes, particularly if certain GOP candidates become President.

One thing we know for sure, the next President will not be an atheist. 51% of voters will never vote for an atheist.  We rank lower than Communists, Socialists, and any number of other measures as being unworthy of being elected President.  Frank Bruni wasn't commenting on that survey, but he did note something similar.

"It’s impossible to know the genuineness of someone’s faith. That’s among the reasons we shouldn’t grant it center stage."

"Religion was integral to our country’s founding. It’s central to our understanding of the liberty that each of us deserves. But so are the principles that we don’t enshrine any one creed or submit anyone — including those running for office — to religious litmus tests."

Link to Bruni's GOP Holy War

God help us if the Tea Party gets elected to the White House.  They really want to dismantle the government and run it like a business.  That is what brought us lead in Flint, Michigan's water supply and that is why our infrastructure is falling apart.  You cannot replace every bridge, pipe, tunnel, sewage treatment facility in the country when it breaks down.  Replacement needs to be methodical.

And the NIH, the National Institute of Health, helps keep us healthy in ways that are very unknown to the public.  I was out to dinner with the son of a friend of ours who is going to Business School and wanted to thank those who helped put him in a position to be accepted and get a scholarship to boot.  One of his friends is in a combined MD/PhD program.  It is very hard to get into these because not only is it competitive but very smart people want to be part of it because the work is the leading edge of medical research.  And it has been funded by the NIH since the 1930's.  These students get free tuition and a small living allowance because they are becoming both Medical Dr's and scientific researchers.  The NIH created and has continued the Program because Dr's tend to focus on the here and now and see only the patients issues.  Scientists tend to function in their Ivory Tower focusing on theory.  Someone needs to bridge that divide and it is this small number of Dr Scientists who are trained by NIH funding who perform that role.  There is no profit in much of the research.  The profit comes when these guys/gals figure something out and then the Pharmacy companies try to find the drug.  If the NIH is disbanded as some Tea Party types would like to do, this program will disappear and progress on many aspects of understanding the science of disease will be retarded.

My new friend is studying infectious disease.  His current focus is drug resistant TB, but what he learns will be useful for fighting all drug resistant infectious disease.  How is that not a critical role for the government to try and provide some level of safety to its citizens?

I spent a portion of last night watching Eric Clapton's 70th Birthday show.  He played Crossroads, which was originally written by Robert Johnson in the 20's and then became a signature song for Cream in the 60's.  And I mused, how many other song writers from that era still have their music being played 100 years later with attribution to their greatness.  Other than Irving Berlin, and people like Mozart, Beethoven, etc, not very many.  So when Eric Clapton calls Robert Johnson the most important Blues Singer ever, he is really making an understatement of greatness.  I miss my records, I  had two Robert Johnson recordings, but you have to downsize and you cannot keep everything.

Please Say No to Bernie Sanders

I don't know how many liberal Democrats read this blog as many of my readers are in foreign countries, but I have a message for any who find this writing.

Please do not vote for Bernie Sanders.  I know he says things that appeal to you, but it is precisely because they appeal to you that they will scare off voters who are needed to win in Ohio, Florida and Virginia, and maybe even Wisconsin.

It would be ironic if you nominated Bernie because you want a Single Payer Health Care Plan and you want to break up big banks, tax big business, end Citizen's United; and in the process let a Republican who doesn't give a rat's ass about protecting ObamaCare or conducting a prudent global affairs policy win the Presidency and nominate another Conservative Supreme Court Justice with Ruth Badar Ginsberg retires.

I predict that if Bernie Sanders is nominated, Democrats will rue that day for the next decade.  He will win big in Blue States and lose the competitive states and the GOP will control the legislative process for the next 4 years.  I cannot imagine the harm that will come to policies that Democrats care deeply about.

All I can say is that I am glad I will only have 8 months of no affordable health insurance until I hit Medicare if ObamaCare is simply repealed and not replaced.

Why Flint, Michigan's Water is Important, Politically

There is lead in Flint, Michigan's water because local GOP officials, of all races, focused on cutting costs without thinking through other issues that needed thinking through. This was not environmental racism, although that may exist in certain places and may have existed in some individual's responses to information as it came to light, but it is not part of the defining moment here.

Background:

Flint, Michigan, a city of near 100,000, went bankrupt and was taken over administratively by the state, which has a GOP governor, who was a big time businessman.  He had to figure out a way to fix Flint's finances, while minimizing the cost to Michigan taxpayers who are not residents of Flint or part of its local economy.  So, one thing the new local administration did was switch from Detroit's water so the local river water because Detroit, also in state administration for poor financial management, was charging Flint a lot for sharing Detroit's water.

Danger of Sole Focus on Cost

What should have happened?  After deciding that the Flint river was an option, experts should have been consulted as to whether the water was safe to drink.  Apparently, water can be safe to drink but if chemicals are not added to it to protect the water pipes, the water pipes can corrode from stuff in the water from past pollution and the water pipes release stuff, including lead, into the water flowing through the pipe.  There are water experts who know that this type of analysis is standard operating procedure in well run water departments.

It is easy to see why costs were a focus, but you see in today's GOP a distrust of expertise, if such expertise thwarts a political goal.  And cutting costs so you can cut government revenues is the overriding policy of today's GOP at all levels of government.  But when you cut the cost of things that protect the public's safety, you lose the support of the public.  That is why our doomed to failure goal of zero terrorist events is unofficial policy.   Politicians of every political persuasion practice a policy of trying to achieve 100% protection against terrorism because people want to be safe.

Well, fire response, policing, national defense are no more important to the population than environmental safety.  That is the good fact that we see in both the voting population's response to Flint and the GOP governor's acknowledgment that he failed the people of Flint.  It means that the GOP, despite numerous Presidential candidate's pledging to shut down the EPA, will face a political uproar if the Democrats paint accurately just what the EPA does to protect the population and what will happen if there is no more EPA.  There will be degradation of the water and air in the country because pollution costs business nothing and the cost is spread across society; and preventing pollution costs business because they put the cost raises prices and reduces volumes, lower profits, but protecting society in ways which allow other businesses to sell products and satisfy social goods.

Why the Environment is Important

1st, lead has been removed from paint because lead is very dangerous to the development of the brain in children.  It reduces their IQ and if they ingest enough, they become so mentally disabled  they become retarded and wards of the state.  So there is a cost that local governments must pay if they try to cut costs protecting the environment.  Traditionally, lead has not been widely ingested, so, unfortunately, Flint is a major experiment in what happens to a population of all ages if there is wide spread consumption of lead in volume.

2nd,  if there was no EPA, paper companies and other industry would be dumping stuff into the water.  That is why the Flint river is polluted to begin with, the auto industry was dumping stuff into the river for decades before the Clean Water Act and the EPA forced them to stop.  But they didn't force them to clean up the sediment in the river which still has all that bad stuff in it.


Why is Flint so Important?

Society pretty much takes for granted our current state of relatively clean water and air.  Society is not divided about the need for clean drinking water and clean air.  This is where the GOP governor's response is so important, if local GOP leaders start to acknowledge the environment is important, then GOP leaders in places where the rise is sea level is going to effect communities are going to have to develop some policy position on global warming other than denial or "it is too late and too costly to do anything about it".   Society  is very divided about green house gases, and this is where leadership is needed.   Local leaders are going to have educate the population and do something to motivate a change in GOP national policy on Global Warming.

We can only hope that the Democrat's figure out a way to message all this, with a focus on costs and not on environmental racism.  Not everything is racism, people of all races are effected by the environment.

Michael Bloomberg Listens to Me

or least sees things the same way I do.

He is exploring a run for the Presidency as a third party candidate if he thinks he can be a winner and not just a spoiler.

I know I am a NY'er and even worse to both hard core liberals and Tea Party types, I believe in finance as long as it has common sense regulations and neither Bernie, nor Rubio/Trump/Cruz represent my point of view on balance in this world.

Run Mike Run!!!

Link to news

DingBat Endorses WingNut

Sarah Palin, who wants to shake things up and destroy government for reasons I cannot figure out, has endorsed Donald Trump, who thinks the world and country need an authoritarian populist leader to fix the government.

The only consistent thing I can see in this absurd situation is a desire on the part of the two principals to have as much publicity and public adulation as possible.

This is what John McCain's picking of his VP has wrought us in combination with Mitch McConnell's "principled" position of doing everything he can to make President Obama a one term President.  Together, they have made significant contributions to establishing public support for the outrageous disregard for compromise that dominates the GOP today.

We can only hope that the electorate punishes the GOP for all this in November.

A Realistic Agenda for Liberals and a Dead Philosopher on Refugees

Paul Krugman explains reality in the U.S. politics for Liberals.


Link to column



And this piece discusses the purpose of life and why/how/should one receive refugees and migrants.  I have to admit, my eyes started to glaze over in the middle but the Philosopher survived WWII as a Jew in a POW camp, lost his family to the Concentration Camps, and still found meaning in life afterward.  I didn't study much Philosophy in college and didn't take very well to what I was introduced to, but I have much more respect for it than many of U.S. conservatives who don't seem to think Philosophy has any value.

And the column was written by an Estonian, and my last post has had over 80 reads in Poland and I hope some of those people come back and read me again.  To the People in Poland and Russia who read this column, I am your fellow.  My Great Grandmother got tired of the Pogrom's in Yiddish Land (now the NW Ukraine not far from the Poland border) and brought my grandfather to NY saving my gene pool from Hitler.

Link to "What Do We Owe Each Other"

Sunday Musings 1/17/16

It was 20 years ago that I realized my time as an employee of a sell side firm was coming to an end because I had an a**hole of a boss who believed that no one older than him should work for him.  He actually had the nerve to say that to me.  So I started to network around and see what I could find with another firm.  That led to my going over to the buy side where I would last for 5+ years until I caught up in one of those inevitable corporate downsizings.  Which led to a period of unemployment but eventually I found a job in Vermont and became friends with RedStateVT as we shared observations of dysfunctional clients, while not being able to see the dysfunction in our own firm, which ultimately led to both of us being retired too young (for our ideal long term financial health).

I muse on that because we saw a play last night about the stresses globalization and Moore's Law (technology advances at an ever increasing rate) put on a work force and the different ways people react to that and how their humanity may come through.  And the play left me pondering this morning the state of our politics, the anger people feel at things they do not control, and how that can come to manifest itself with varying degrees of humanity toward our fellow man.

As I have said before, there is only so much politicians can do for people whose skill sets get left behind by globalization and technology. Society by virtue of its need to compete much always focus on the young (educate and keep them healthy) and encourage those older workers to achieve the best they can and live an honorable life within their means recognizing that they must bear responsibility for decisions they made earlier that have ramifications later on.  That was the moral of the play last night while it also explored why even these unfortunate souls deserve some support from society if they are working to be deserving of that support.

And it is that latter point that is so underdeveloped in our political discourse.  Neither party is really addressing what can society afford and how should we spend it and how do you make people happy when they have to downsize their economic needs and objectives.  If you can't get a $25 an hour job, you take a $15 an hour job, downsize your lifestyle, and find ways to be joyous.  But at the same time, the minimum wage cannot be so low that hard working people without an education cannot afford the basic necessities of life including health insurance.  That is why the Heritage Foundation, when they had a soul, designed Obamacare the way they did.

In a similar manner we are not having an honest discussion of the real problem with guns because the two sides speak past each other and do not give.  The ease of access for the criminally minded and the mentally deficient is the real problem, not 7 vs 10 bullets in a gun magazine, and as one liberal columnist pointed out this morning, not concealed weapons with a carry permit.  And how do the criminally minded get so many guns, straw man purchases in places where there are no background checks.  And how do the mentally deficient get guns, well that is a huge problem as no one has a sanity problem until they have exhibited the sanity problem and that is frequently after they already have their semi-automatic weapon.  Maybe there should be an age restriction on use of semi-automatic weapons, along with background checks on obtaining them.  It seems to be angry frustrated older teens and early 20's who shoot up movie theaters and commit acts of terrorism.  Technology with thumb print recognition systems would seem to be a place where some effective gun control policy could be created in the middle if the NRA were isolated politically.

In conclusion, once again as I write on a Sunday, I am left feeling very discouraged about our political discourse and see little hope of it improving after November.  The anger on the right is encouraging anger on the left with the result that we will not have Clinton vs. Bush III in November, we may well have Sanders vs. Cruz or Rubi and then one can only hope that Michael Bloomberg decides to run (I think he needs to make that decision very soon).  And without Bloomberg in the middle, calm rational people will have a very hard choice to make and while I would vote for Bernie in that case for the 1st time (having never voted for him while I lived in Vermont),  I am not at all sure Bernie can win Florida, Ohio or Virginia with his European Socialism.

The New York Times some years ago had a game like graphic where you could pick and choose policies to balance the budget over 5 years.  If you value the need for infrastructure, defense, providing some level of humanitarian support for all ages, controlling the percentage of GDP the government takes, you had to control the growth in Social Security and Senior Health Care (Medicaid 's worst growth is in paying for Long Term Care of people with dementia who spend down what they have saved and they have no more) and no politician wants to talk about this.  They are just going to let us spin into a crisis.

While I promised myself I wouldn't go there, the problem is not Heritage Foundation/RomneyCare/ObamaCare. That is trying to keep the cost of health insurance and the health of people under 65 affordable and effective.  The problem is dementia and the use of Medicaid to pay for it.  My mother had dementia for over 20 years and my father paid for her care until he hit the minimum wealth allowed and my mother went on Medicaid.  Her final Medicare bill was $400,000 for care that should have never occurred because of her DNR, but it did.  And I don't know exactly what Medicaid actually paid because I never saw those bills, but at $150 a day for the 10 years of her institutionalization that was another $550,000.  And now those dementia care costs are somewhere between $200 and $500 a day.  So a dementia patient can cost society close to $1 million each and if over time (the favorite government accounting technique) 30 million people end up with dementia (10%) and they end up on Medicaid, that is a potential cost of $3 trillion.

That is not trivial, and I wish our political discourse would allow a coherent holistic discussion of the demands on our budget and a balanced approach to giving ourselves a budget surplus when we have full employment and an affordable deficit when we are in a recession.  Right now we are nearing full employment, have a budget deficit of 2.5% or so, and political Armageddon between liberals and tax cutting conservatives.

Oh, and what happened to that a**hole younger boss who made me leave the sell side, he returned to N.C. ran for Congress as a Conservative GOP and lost.  So now he is on some Board of Directors enjoying the income of being a pal of rich people who appoint him to their Board's.

The Jeb Bush Press Machine Gets Going

George Will slamming Marco Rubio

Link to George Will Column on Rubio's misjudgment


Jennifer Rubin slamming Ted Cruz

Link To Rubin column on Cruz's untrustworthiness

Peter Wehner, Reagan/Bush I/Bush II official, on why he won't vote for Trump even if he is nominated

Link to Peter Wehner column on Trump


Note to RedStateVT:  This is liberal journalism?  I think the newspapers are fairly balanced when overall.  They do have a public track record that can be monitored and are accountable for mistakes, unlike Fox and Talk Radio.

Thomas Friedman Identifies the Source of Societal Anger

It probably doesn't account for all it as I think many humans get angry at society for a variety of reasons, but it might well account for some of the widespread uniform anger at government.  There isn't much government can do about either of the 1st two and until a sufficient number of conservatives decide they want to take some action on climate change, there won't be anything the government can do about Mother Nature either, which I know angers people who care about the environment and climate change.  Or as my son said a least a decade ago, "The Polar Bears are toast."


"In my view, this age of protest is driven, in part, by the fact that the three largest forces on the planet — globalization, Moore’s law and Mother Nature — are all in acceleration, creating an engine of disruption that is stressing strong countries and middle classes and blowing up weak ones, while superempowering individuals and transforming the nature of work, leadership and government all at once."

link to entire Friedman column on Protesting.

The U.S. Cannot Take Sides in the Sunni Shiite Civil War

The gung ho send the military everywhere GOP needs to remember that when the U.S. invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein, it empowered the Shiites and we need the Shiites do counter ISIS/Al Qaeda who are Sunni Radicals and dedicated to over throwing regimes friendly to the U.S. even though residents of those countries are funding the terrorist organizations.

And there will be no peace in the Israeli Palestinian confrontation unless we can cajole Iran into better behavior and get Israel to give up the Settlements on the West Bank.

Inspired by the following column.

Link to column

Wow!!! Thomas Friedman Creates a Radical Program From the Left and Right

I understand each part, but wonder what political candidate, today or in the future, could pull together the voting public segments to run on it, and then get the Congress to pass it.

Link to Friedman Column

And the following column on how even with health insurance, people can have problems paying for their health care.  My initial reaction was sympathy for them as I know a $6,000 individual max-out-pocket or $10,000 family max-out-of-pocket is unaffordable for someone making $40,000 a year unless they cut back on something else in their budget.  But then I thought about the fact that they would have probably been dead 60 years ago with the same chronic illness.  Surely, having access to some health insurance that is means tested is better than having no health insurance.  That is what ObamaCare has given us and that is what Heritage Foundation/RomneyCare/ObamaCare was designed to do.

And what can society afford to pay for this care, collectively we are paying 20% of GDP for health care, and someone in this economy is earning that 20% of GDP.  While I would like a single payer plan, the transition to it is going to be disruptive to a certain % of people and that will create a different type of financial chaos within certain families.  And how do we make a single payer plan affordable?  It cannot be free and therefore, how does it help the people in this article?

Better minds than I, who understand health care, should be writing about all this.

Anyway, this column is worth pursuing.

Link to article

Domestic Terrorism is Alive

and being committed by Christian members of the NRA in the name of protesting government overreach (in their opinion).  These people are well known to us from their Nevada protest in support of Cliven Bundy, who did not want to pay grazing fees for cattle eating government grass.

What are they protesting?  National Parks and Conservation Land and Federal Land Management established over 100 years ago.

Now the sons of Cliven Bundy and other supporters have taken over a conservation area and locked the doors on the building daring law enforcement to come after them.  Meanwhile, if there were people of color or Islamic the conservative blogsphere and police would be up in arms trying to kill them all.

What are these people doing? Either nothing or discussing how to peacefully end this.  Such respect would not be shown people of color or a different religion.

Meanwhile, which political candidates support the Bundy's?

Donald Trump, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee.

So those are the GOP candidates who support domestic terrorism.

The Tea Party Was Alive and Well 100 years ago

Ken Burn's Prohibition was rerun over the past two weeks and I watched it more completely this time.  I was struck by the similarity between the Prohibitionists and the Tea Party today.  Both were/are dominated by religious rural white people who believe in the moral superiority of their position to what the people on the other side believe.

Prohibition failed for several big reasons which include exceptions were made for religious reasons allowing Catholics and Jews to have wine made and economic reasons, farmers had to be allowed to utilize their excess apples to made hard cider.  Also, alcoholic products were allowed to be deemed as medicinal.  Domestic production to satisfy this legal demand was allowed.  Also, the U.S. is not an island excluded from the influence of what other countries allow and what the free market system will do to create a profit.  Alcohol was manufactured in other countries and smuggled into the U.S.

But this overlap of legal and illegal led to a dominance in many places of the power of the illegal profits and what was involved in the maintenance of that cash flow.  Gang warfare and the Mob grew in stature as a direct result of this.

The consequences of all this were varied, but not least of all, the wealth and power of these gangs/Mob almost certainly led to their dominance of various unions and the importation of drugs, which fostered both domestic demand and foreign production, with all the commiserate problems for lawful society in the countries where illegal drugs are produced today.

There is also a book out now on Prohibition and the book review today credits the author with identifying two critical result of Prohibition.  The 1st is how the enforcers of the Volstead Act targeted immigrant and black communities at a time when those communities were growing in number at a faster rate than the "Dry" communities were.  And that enforcement was both selective, fed corruption in the policing, and in some parts of the country a tool of racists policy enforcement.  The 2nd is how the actual law enforcement led to birth of big government.  Federal police powers grew, wire tapping was developed, jail construction was expanded and directly fed the belief that the Federal Government could develop solutions for other problems of society, such as poverty, protecting labor, and controlling racism.  The 3rd result was that the complete horror of crime, corruption, uneven enforcement, and loss of tax revenue from sin taxes generated widespread support for ending Prohibition.

What are the lessons for today?  Well, it is too soon to know how the Tea Party will play out, what success they will have in the 2016 election and which policies they might further implement that inflame widespread tolerance of newly illegal things.  But we can see the lessons in some states legalizing pot, while other states do not.  We have already seen the consequences of uneven health insurance while requiring hospitals to provide health services to the uninsured and now the uneven application of the solution.  And one can only wonder what the country will look like if there is an actual effort to find and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.

What Prohibition should teach everyone is that if a policy over reaches and there is widespread disagreement with a policy, there will be political turmoil, reactions to that turmoil, and consequences of that turmoil.

That is why policies that are implemented are best if there is support for those policies in both political parties and those solutions to problems implemented uniformly by both political parties, recognizing that at the state level regional differences will result in certain differences being tolerated.

A Republican and A Democrat Remind Me Why I Entitled This Blog Things Get Accomplished in the MIddle

Trent Lott and Tom Daschle published a nice New Year's Column, obviously hoping to spur sales of their new book.

It has a couple of priceless comments on how American Democracy works, when it works, and why the current mess in D.C. is not working.  It also highlights some of the important issues on which little progress is being made because of partisan attitudes.

"Our strength comes from the disagreement, but we need to harness it properly and use it for something beyond the destruction of the other side. Reaching for compromise is no less than the duty of our elected representatives."

"Our current officeholders are embracing the conflict and ignoring its purpose. Representative democracy is not winner-take-all. The Constitution was designed as a harmonizing system, balancing the competing interests of all the people toward something that serves everyone. We need to insist that our representatives move beyond the ideological purity that reads compromise as betrayal."

"Our leaders have stalled on the major issues of our time: immigration, cybersecurity, energy policy, tax reform. Leadership takes genuine courage, courage to act on the recognition that the choice between right and left is a false one when it comes to getting things done. We must demand of our leaders that they actually lead."

link to column