Archive for July, 2011
Thanksgiving 2022–Big Brother is Watching!
Posted by Tom in National Character on July 31, 2011
This sent by Ty Cobb, it’s authorship unknown, but its Winston link to Orwell’s 1984 is, well, Orwellian!
Thanksgiving 2022
“Winston, come into the dining room, it’s time to eat,” Julia yelled to her husband. “In a minute, honey, it’s a tie score,” he answered. Actually Winston wasn’t very interested in the traditional holiday football game between Detroit and Washington. Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its “unseemly violence” and the “bad example it sets for the rest of the world”, Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be. Two-hand touch wasn’t nearly as exciting.
Yet it wasn’t the game that Winston was uninterested in. It was more the thought of eating another Tofu Turkey. Even though it was the best type of VeggieMeat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mincemeat pie), it wasn’t anything like real turkey.
And ever since the government officially changed the name of “Thanksgiving Day” to “A National Day of Atonement” in 2020, to officially acknowledge the Pilgrims’ historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.
Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting. The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the Tofu Turkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold. Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats – which were monitored and controlled by the electric company – be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter.
Still, it was good getting together with family. Or at least most of the family. Winston missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up her legal allotment of life-saving medical treatment. He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Consortium, spawned when the private insurance market finally went bankrupt, and everyone was forced into the government health care program. And though he demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile effort. “The RHC’s resources are limited”, explained the government bureaucrat Winston spoke with on the phone. “Your mother received all the benefits to which she was entitled. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Ed couldn’t make it either. He had forgotten to plug in his electric car last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel Bill of 2021 outlawed the use of the combustion engines – for everyone but government officials. The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too far, and Ed didn’t want to spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between here and there. Thankfully, Winston’s brother, John, and his wife were flying in.
Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra cushions for the occasion. No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids. Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner, the TSA told Americans the added “inconvenience” was an “absolute necessity” in order to stay “one step ahead of the terrorists.” Winston’s own body had grown accustomed to such probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via Anti-Profiling Act of 2022.
That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for “unequal scrutiny,” even when probable cause was involved. Thus, cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine. Almost. The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives to leave the law intact . “A living Constitution is extremely flexible”, said the Court’s eldest member, Elena Kagan. “Europe has had laws like this one for years. We should learn from their example”, she added.
Winston’s thoughts turned to his own children. He got along fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly because she ignored him. Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that she could text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner. Their only real confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000 texts a month, explaining that was all he could afford. She whined for a week, but got over it.
His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether. Perhaps it was the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming, the bird flu, terrorism, or any of a number of other calamities were “just around the corner”, but Jason had developed a kind of nihilistic attitude that ranged between simmering surliness and outright hostility. It didn’t help that Jason had reported his father to the police for smoking a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the Smoking Control Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500 feet of another human being.
Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might have been considered excessive before the American dollar became virtually worthless as a result of QE13. The latest round of Q uantitative E asing the federal government initiated was, once again, to “spur economic growth.” This time, they promised to push unemployment below its years-long rate of 18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful. Yet the family had a lot for which to be thankful, Winston thought, before remembering it was a Day of Atonement. At least, he had his memories. He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would never know what life was like in the Good Old Days, long before government promises to make life “fair for everyone” realized their full potential.
Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized how much things could change when they didn’t happen all at once, but little by little, so people could get used to them. He wondered what might have happened if the public had stood up while there was still time, maybe back around 2011, when all the real nonsense began.
“Maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today if we’d just said ‘enough is enough’ when we had the chance,” he thought.
Maybe so, Winston. Maybe so.
July Dinner Update
Posted by Tom in Symposium Notes on July 20, 2011
Our thanks to Bob Brigham, Mayo Clinic’s Chief Administrative Officer for a great presentation on the value equation for healthcare. He picked up where he left off in August 2009, pre Obamacare, picked up with McClure’s dilemma: among the three desired wants from a health care system, high quality-low cost-and prompt access, we can only have, only afford two. Pick your poison!
Bob used his grandfather’s country doctor practice to illustrate the changes in healthcare needs and delivery and how each has been influenced by medical advances and society’s affluence. There were no knee replacements in his grandfather’s day.
He reviewed the basics of the Affordable Care Act, the 2000 page monstrosity known as Obamacare: Insurance coverage, Medicare payments, and Funding. And in fairness he finds good elements among the bad, like state and regional exchanges, which are a step toward the breakdown of state insurance silos. And he finds some embryonic pay-for-value pilots and elements; this is the favored Mayo direction. Of course, Obamacare is under fire judicially and legislatively. For conservatives, it’s not a market solution.
One key point, though, is that healthcare delivery can never be a completely market-based system. Society will not permit it. It’s socially repugnant to deny care to the destitute, the truly needy. No matter the source of their circumstances.
While that important point is undeniably true, there may be a difference between “society” and “government.” Bob went on to illustrate state government’s historical role: licensing, insurance regulation, and public health. But the federal government is where the rub is created. Whether it’s FDA regulations, strings on funding, or direct regulation, the federal role seems to be ever expanding. Witness Medicare expansion, and now Obamacare. Governments now pay 50% of all healthcare.
All said, Mayo finds many positives in Obamacare: first steps on pay for value, expanded insurance coverage, and financing. But Mayo, once the original model, did opt out of being an Accountable Care Organization because Obamacare had the tenets backwards. Mayo believes in properly organized and incented ACOs because they deliver “value”, that is “quality of outcomes” divided by “costs over a span of years.”
Our Hayek group participation especially from our doctors and economists last night was wonderful. This, clearly because of Bob’s great presentation.
NV4CFE: We also had an update on the Nevada Energy Park from Gene Humphrey. Counterintuitively, Japan’s tsunami is helping U.S. pols realize the danger in our current nuclear storage system. NV4CFE is actively promoting Yucca as a fuel-reprocessing center.
ETECHS: Mark Pingle, one of our economists, introduced us to one of his pet pro bono projects, ETECHS (Entrepreneurial-Technical, Engineering Charter High School http://www.e-techsonline.org/ ): ETECHS is a new charter high school that will start this coming fall, located at 850 Baring Blvd in Sparks (near Reed High School). As a charter high school, the tuition is free, like any public school. However, the charter designation gives the school special flexibility and ability to focus. Some features that make ETECHS unique are:
(a) Project based learning: The only class all students will have daily is math. Students meet the state standards for all other subjects by doing projects that the teachers design. For example, one of the ETECHS teachers is a former NASA test pilot, and one planned project is the construction of an actual airplane. Imagine learning geometry and algebra by actually applying it to airplane design, and learning the history of different wars by associating it with the history of airplane design. (It all actually might stick!)
(b) Focus: Students can choose one of 5 tracks and obtain a more focused education. The tracks are (1) Engineering, (2) Computer/Tech, (3) Business, (4) Medicine/Health, and (5) Aviation. All students will have more science at this school than at the typical public school.
(c) Entrepreneurship: This is a school where a student can nurture and entrepreneurial identity. All students will take an entrepreneurship course, and the project based learning environment encourages creativity and entrepreneurial thinking.
(d) Smaller school. The school will begin with 50 students in ninth and 50 students in 10th grade, accepted on a first come, first serve basis. One grade will be added each year each of the next two years, and the grade size will be expanded over time to 100 students per grade. The smaller size allows for more of a family atmosphere, and it is intended that students develop relationships not only with each other, but also with parents and partners in the scientific and business community.
(e) Job skills: While ETECHS will provide a college prep education, all students will also graduate high school with significant job skills in the area of their track. For example, in the medicine/Health track a student would graduate with skills prepared to take a variety of med tech jobs.
(f) Community involvement: This is a school that will proactively draw upon the talent of engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, computer techs and more from the community. Students will job shadow, do internships, and have people from the community visit the school as parts of projects. ETECHS grads will graduate with a network of community contacts.
This school has cleared the most significant hurdles, but still has significant needs that must be met to reach the goal of opening in late August. The hurdles that have been cleared are:
(1) Obtaining a building: The former YMCA in Sparks provides perhaps the best building a new charter high school could hope for. The lease is signed and funded. All of the inspections have been completed, not a small accomplishment.
(2) Obtaining state approval: The huge task of designing a curriculum that meets the state approval has been complete. ETECHS is a licensed State of Nevada Charter high school
(3) Much of the prep of the building for the new school year has been completed, though much still remains to be done.
The primary needs at this point are
(1) Recruiting students: Students could not legally be recruited until state approval was obtained, which occurred in May. Any help anyone can provide in terms of getting info about the school to prospective 9th and 10th graders would help.
(2) Start up fundraising: While tuition is free with a charter school, there is no state money for start up. The difficult economy has made raising money for the school difficult. Past donations have provided the building, inspections, and good portion of the supplies needed to start the school. However, finances are very tight, like they are for most startups, so donations at this time will greatly help.
(3) Various start up tasks: Volunteers have been painting, cleaning up the grounds, assembling desks, and much more. There is plenty to do if people have time to volunteer on start up tasks.
Mark reports a generous response to his presentation from our Hayek members. If you know of any 9th or 10th graders who may be interested in attending or know of any other way to help on this project, please email Mark: Pingle@unr.edu.
“Stimulus” Obfuscation…or spinning to the dummies!
Posted by Tom in Economics, Fiscal Policy, Stimulus/Bailout on July 18, 2011
Thanks to Jim Clark who has penned a follow-up to Tom Cargill’s recent post, set out in full here:
In last week’s Bonanza Jeff Quinn wrote in a column titled: “Economic Advisors’ Bafflegab” that the just released Council of Economic Advisors report on the effect of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “Stimulus” bill) stated that it: “raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been between 2.4 and 3.6 million jobs . . .” Huh?? Jeff, ever the canny CPA, calculated that this would work out to a cost of just about $300,000 per “job”. Except there are no jobs. There are instead 2.4 million less people employed today than when Obama took office.
Two years ago UC Berkeley Economist Christina Romer chaired the Council of Economic Advisors and famously advised President Obama that unless a huge stimulus bill was passed unemployment would rise above 8%. She further advised that each dollar of government stimulus spending would produce a $1.60 increase in gross domestic product. When unemployment rose to nearly 10% she departed for her ivory tower in Berkeley. It has taken almost two years to discover her second big mistake which is where UNR Economics Professor Thomas Cargill comes in.
Writing in the July 13 Reno Gazette Journal Cargill points out that at the time the stimulus package was under consideration: “there was no empirical consensus on the size of the multiplier.” (that which would supposedly create $1.60 in economic activity for every $1.00 in federal spending). “Estimates ranged from a zero multiplier to $1.60 and higher.” But, he wrote, the “stimulus efforts lacked scientific support.” This “lack of a scientific consensus suggest(s) politicians have exaggerated the ability of government spending to stimulate the economy, especially in Japan and the US,” Cargill continued. “Politicians often rationalize any lack of success to the fact government spending was not large enough or that without government spending the economy would be in worse shape” An interesting observation because Cargill wrote this before release of the current Council of Economic Advisors “bafflegab” report cited above in which they do precisely that.
“The real issue” Cargill continued “is whether an alternative policy, such as cutting marginal tax rates and simplifying the tax code, would have produced different results. Some politicians continue to argue for more government spending to stimulate the economy. Perhaps they should do their homework before committing more taxpayer funds and further increasing the size of the deficit and debt” Cargill concluded.
Yeah but in this case the politicians (all of them Democrats . . . not a single Republican voted for Obamulus) had U.C. Berkeley Whiz Christina Romer telling them everything would be wonderful if they would just borrow all that money from the Chinese and spend it.
Had the politicians “done their homework” they could have ignored Romer and simply looked at history. In 1929, when the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, unemployment was 3.14%. By 1934, after the original Keynesian stimulator, Franklin Roosevelt, had been in office for a year unemployment was 21.6%; by 1938, after 4 years of stimulus spending to create jobs unemployment was 18.9%. In 1942, as the US industry shifted to wartime production, unemployment fell to 4.7%. These statistics could lead reasonable people to conclude that government spending does not stimulate the economy. But who ever said politicians are reasonable.
The Council of Economic Advisors’ obfuscation still persists, we are up to our neck in debt and the current red hot battle in Washington is whether we should raise the debt ceiling to borrow more money to pay the interest on the money we previously borrowed to finance the stimulus that didn’t work.
Oh well, maybe we’ll get bailed out by a world war again.
Jim Clark is President of Republican Advocates, a member of the Washoe County and Nevada GOP Central Committees; he can be reached at tahoesbjc@aol.com
Rubio on Obama’s Leadership….or lack thereof!
Posted by Tom in Fiscal Policy, National Character, Politics on July 18, 2011
Big Government Means Subpar Economic Growth
Jerry O’Driscoll sent this from Dan Mitchell, his college at Cato.