Imagine Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghostbusters theme running in the background; I'm only selecting a few items here with just enough discussion to make my point:
- Infrastructure Spending is Economic Miracle-Gro. First, I want to acknowledge there is a legitimate issue in infrastructure maintenance; failures in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the more recent Minnesota bridge collapse have made that clear. We've also had breakdowns in terms of rolling brownouts via the national grid. Certainly there are a number of issues, particularly as roads and bridges, where capacity is being strained. In part, though, these are ongoing periodic expenses, routine maintenance, etc. Short shrift of maintenance is penny-wise, pound-foolish. There are a couple of things, though, I think we need to discuss in infrastructure, beyond a long-range plan to revitalize our existing infrastructure (including things like replacing 75-year-old water pipes). First, we need to insist on the business case for infrastructure. In the early years of the Republic, it was easy to make the case for building roads, canals, etc., as we expanded westward; if you create a new town or city, you need to invest in utility infrastructure (e.g., water, power, telecommunications, etc.) It's not quite as easy to make the same case today with cities across the US, from coast to coast, a well-developed highway system, etc. There are some cases where you could make a case for specialized needs; for example, many ethanol producers require expensive storage trucks to carry the fuels. They cannot utilize existing oil/gas pipelines. Whereas we still need to decide the issue of capacity and the tradeoff between food and fuel, hooking up distilleries to some pipeline system to gas refineries or other distribution outlets is an example of infrastructure enhancement with a clear business case. On the other hand, as I listened to Gov. Schwarzenegger on Meet the Press this Sunday, I heard him specifically discuss in passing high-speed rail; a pet project of Majority Leader Harry Reid is to connect Las Vegas with Los Angeles. I'm less sure about the business case, and in particular, I'm mindful of the perennial money-losing ways of Amtrak. Regardless of how cool the technology may be, faster is better than slower and how everybody else's government has built one, show me the business case, e.g., if high-speed rail will more than pay for itself due to much lower operating costs than alternative approaches and/or higher fare costs and sufficient traffic and/or existing railways, planes, and highways between regions are already at capacity. It's easier to make the case for high-speed rail in a smaller country like Japan than a large country with a dispersed population, e.g., hundreds of miles between San Antonio or Dallas to El Paso. Second, we need to explicitly address lessons learned. For example, Japan during the 1990's did almost exactly what US progressives have been prescribing: tons of infrastructure spending. Japan has now been in an economic funk for nearly 20 years since their own real estate bubble burst. Even if we disregard the fact that the bulk of the stimulus is not in infrastructure, where were the centrist Democrats coming out and saying, "Wait a minute: What lessons have we learned from the Japan experience and investing in infrastructure?"
- The Stimulus Bill Was a Stimulus Bill. The political spin that the Democrats have used to justify the $787B stimulus is absolutely mind-blowing. The attempt to describe state bailouts as "stimulative" is deliberately misleading. If hiring (or retaining) government employees is a stimulus, why not make everyone a government employee? Employees are costs. Governments are costs. Who pays those costs? The private sector. Why is saving a government worker's job inherently more stimulative than a private sector job? What would be "truly stimulative", in my view? How about an environment where I didn't have a manic progressive government trying to dictate how I pay my people, where instead of giving me back more of my money so I can spend it on my own business and people than being forced to pay for some ineffectual progressive agenda, not to mention likely higher energy and health care costs? How about cutting my tax rate to 24%, so I can be more competitive on the global market? How about massive federal spending not competing with my attempts to secure a business loan? How about negotiating free trade agreements to open up new markets to my goods and services? How about a permanent cut to my payroll tax burden, which lowers my cost of hiring a new worker? But what do you expect of an administration where a record low of less than 10% of Cabinet members have private sector experience, according to IBD?
- The Government Should Pick Winners and Losers in the Investment Arena. Obama still has a problem grasping the concept of the rule of law: he doesn't trust big business with an investment tax cut, but he will give tax cuts to smaller companies under a convoluted system of rules and regulations. Does he honestly believe he is helping smaller companies sell goods and services to big companies? Smaller companies expand when their actual and prospective customers are doing well and they have a stable environment. Applying class warfare to business is just as counterproductive as class warfare on the individual level. Obama needs to learn an engineering maxim--the KISS principle. ("Keep it Simple [and] Stupid!") Rough translation in a political context: Don't devise tax breaks that require the expertise of a lawyer or accountant to understand--and by limiting the number of companies that qualify, you also limit the benefits of tax reduction. Also, in many cases, e.g., startups, drug companies, etc., you may operate at a net loss for years, meaning you don't pay taxes anyway.
Apparently there was a typo in taking down information from the Nigerian terrorist's father and hence the computerized system didn't make a match. I have had extensive experience working with computer databases, so I know the general context of the problem. This is not exactly a new technical problem with queries against databases; software companies have marketed related software for decades. Sometimes it is referred to as merge/purge; a sample vendor a former employer used to work with was Group 1 Software, now a subsidiary of Pitney Bowes.
One of the things my former employer, now a subsidiary of Equifax, used to do is referred to as householding. The company, among other things, promised to save money by collapsing the number of mailings going to a particular residence or identifying customers across separate businesses (e.g., when I managed corporate databases for SBC in the year prior to deregulation) for cross-promotions (e.g., a landline customer who was not a wireless customer or a brokerage client whom doesn't have an IRA account). You might have one account (e.g., landline) under a husband's name and a separate account (say, wireless) under the wife's name. And then there are several permutations of a name--for example, mailing lists might have alternate spellings of my surname (e.g., "Guilmet":, "Guillmette", etc.), use my given name or initials, and various combinations of the street address (e.g., an apartment number).
Traditional relational database software systems (e.g., Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, DB2, etc.) use an IBM-originated language, called Structured Query Language (SQL). For example, you might have a query like this:
select suspect_id, location_street, location_city, location_country
from master_suspect_table
where suspect_name like '%MUTALLAB%'
and home_country='NIGERIA';
Suppose there was exactly one match, say, suspect_id=13501. Then you might do something like this:
update master_suspect_table
set no_fly_status='Y'
where suspect_id=13501;
commit;
Now perhaps what they are saying is something like the name in the query, a typo made in Nigeria, actually was: "where suspect_name like '%MUTALAB%;" and so there was no match. (Or you could have the reverse problem where the stored surname is misspelled.) There are a variety of strategies (which can be programmed) to expand the number of possible record hits, e.g., combinations of up to the number of unique consonants in a surname interspersed with wildcards.
I'm disappointed that matching procedures can be sidetracked by something as predictable a human error as a typo. (I would have also thought that the father would have brought a photo of his son which could be matched against a relevant image database.)
Political Cartoon
Lisa Benson--you didn't capture the suspect's response: "Aren't I entitled to a phone call to my personal physician?"
Musical Interlude: My Favorite American Idol Finale Song
Taylor Hicks, "Do I Make You Proud?"
As American Idol 2010 starts up this week (the opening episodes are especially entertaining because of the infamous train wreck vignettes), I've thought about the past several seasons. Season 5 is probably better remembered for the people whom didn't make it: particularly Chris Daughtry, whom probably has competed with Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood for the most post-Idol success (although Jennifer Hudson's Academy Award also merits a mention), and my favorite, Kellie Pickler, the adorable country girl whom notoriously doesn't like calamari and is baffled anyone would even consider eating it, has found some success on the country charts and does some occasional celebrity interviewing vignettes for Jay Leno and others. Taylor Hicks was dropped from Arista Records (the principal prize to AI is a record contract) just over a year after the release of his first album, the weakest selling of AI winners.
American Idol finale original tunes tend to be syrupy, including this one, but the song touches the heart of anyone whom sought validation of his or her efforts through a parent's approval: Did I grow up to be someone on his own whom you can respect and are proud to acknowledge? Too many people go through life desperately seeking approval from parents miserly with dispensing words of meaningful praise. It's difficult to verbalize the concept, but for example if I had a son whom was a journalist, I might keep a scrapbook of his columns, without his knowing I was following what he was doing, or send him a copy highlighting some salient insights, ask some follow-up questions, etc. I don't have issues with my parents (I've been blessed), but I hope that other parents will let their children know, in unexpected ways, they are proud of and respect the adults they've grown up to become. Life is too short to leave this earth without letting the one person whom needs to know how proud you are of him or her.
