Miscellany: 4/30/12

Quote of the Day

You cannot do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Monthly Blog Readership

Blogger since May 2010 has provided readership pageview statistics on the blog. On the surface, this past month I got the largest number of pageviews since November 2010. However, over the past 6 months, I started getting suspicious numbers of pageviews from Russia. Over the past month, I've been reviewing results from a different, more reliable Google service and confirmed no "real" Russian readers: it's been mostly what is called referrer spam.

Follow-Up Odds and Ends

In Saturday's post commentary "The UBL Operation and Obama's 'Courageous' Decision", I had this to say over the Obama campaign's unethical ad (which even liberal Arianna Huffington has condemned as despicable):

Third, the issue would not have been Obama's decision to go after public enemy #1, once we finally knew where he was; the issue would be what the American public's reaction would have been to know that Obama had solid intelligence on UBL and didn't do anything about it when he had the chance. What if the Procrastinator-in-Chief, by waiting as long as he did, had let UBL go through his fingers from some tip off while Obama had him in that mansion? I bet dollars to doughnuts (and I'm a big boy so I like my doughnuts, even though I don't regularly eat them because of the carbs) that Romney would have pulled the trigger far sooner than Obama did...

If you read Saturday's blog at the time, that is what you read; it is not an edit. Now I may not have been the only one to make that point, although it did not surface when I was doing background for the commentary, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the following excerpt from TODAY'S Daily Mail:

A former intelligence official who was serving in the US government when bin Laden was killed said that the Obama administration knew about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts in October 2010 but delayed taking action and risked letting him escape.

‘In the end, Obama was forced to make a decision and do it. He knew that if he didn’t do it the political risks in not taking action were huge. Mitt Romney would have made the call but he would have made it earlier – as would George W. Bush.’

That is almost VERBATIM what I wrote Saturday. How do I know Romney would have done it sooner? In  25 years of business executive experience, Romney has had to make tough decisions such as layoffs, including the replacement of the founding partners of Bain Capital's parent company:

In 1990, Romney was asked to return to Bain & Company, which was facing financial collapse. He was announced as its new CEO in January 1991 (but drew only a symbolic salary of one dollar). Romney managed an effort to restructure the firm's employee stock-ownership plan, real-estate deals and bank loans, while rallying the firm's thousand employees, imposing a new governing structure that included Bain and the other founding partners giving up control, and increasing fiscal transparency.

We already know how long it took for Barack Obama to come to a decision on the Afghan surge operation (and it was a convoluted solution with a concurrent withdrawal decision announced before feedback on the operation), and Obama waited until less than a month before the Bush tax cuts expired to compromise on a 2-year extension. All of this is incontrovertible, on the record.

I know about decision making because I've had to go to client IT managers and tell them things they didn't want to hear, knowing that they could respond by firing me from the gig. I went into two failing projects, one for the State of Oklahoma, the other for a Wisconsin county, my predecessors no longer there, and turned them around. I know what leadership and decision making is; I've done it, and I see the same qualities in Romney. Obama? Not so much.

It's not personal. I can honestly say that if I had been elected President in 2008, I would have been positively thrilled by the challenge. It would have given me an opportunity to demonstrate the stuff I was made of. I certainly wouldn't have been finger-pointing at Bush. Don't get me wrong; I've been critical of Bush. But if someone asked me about my performance in office, I wouldn't make excuses--and Romney is the same way. Recall what he said in last Tuesday's victory speech?

You might not have heard that our business helped start other businesses, like Staples and Sports Authority and a new steel mill and a learning center called Bright Horizons. And I’d tell you that not every business made it and there were good days and bad days, but every day was a lesson.  

Just to give an anecdote that makes the point. I visited my youngest brother and his family several years back. I could tell that the young kids were excited by my visit. I was sitting at one end of the dining table for dinner one evening when my older nephew accidentally knocked over a full glass of milk. Instantly, the entire dinner table was quiet. I could tell my brother wasn't happy, but he probably didn't want to rebuke his son in front of me. My nephew froze, uncertain what to do, looking back and forth for his parents' reactions. The milk was beginning to spread and  drip over the table edge. I finally decided to say something. "[Nephew], why don't you get a dish towel and mop up the milk?" He immediately ran to the kitchen to retrieve a towel.

So when I heard the Romney Seamus Canadian visit story and how Romney calmly stopped at a nearby service station, hosed down the car and tended to his pet, I had to smile--because I would have probably reacted very similarly under the circumstances. Romney will make a great President.

By the way, I'm apparently not the only person going around saying "President Romney" by accident; he simply looks and sounds like a President, a natural-born leader. I have heard Bill Kristol and others likewise unintentionally make the same slip of the tongue:



Sunday Talk Soup and 77 Cents On the Dollar

Is there a reader whom doesn't know what I'm referring to in the section title? It's probably the most overly referenced statistic over the past 7 years. It comes from a 2005 US Census Report (Figure 2, page 7), comparing gender median income (15 years or older since 1960), referring to female to male income.

Progressives use these sorts of statistics in a misleading way all the time; it leads to a false inference--e.g., that we are talking apples-to-apples in terms of jobs and that is not the case. Public unions engage in this same sort of intellectually dishonest exercise when arguing that public monopoly school teachers are "underpaid". For example, they won't compare the compensation of public high school math teachers to Catholic high school math teachers; they'll try to compare 9-month school years to questionably linked 12-month private sector jobs. They'll compare salaries to salaries versus compensation to compensation (knowing, for instance, public sector benefit packages are far more generous than those in the private sector: and as I've repeatedly stated in this blog, MONEY IS FUNGIBLE, not to mention the fact that public employment is far more secure than private-sector employment: there's a reason, for instance, why corporations usually have to pay more interest than the federal government on bonds).

There are many factors going on here, that explain all or a major portion of the differences; there are some statistics that men work more hours on average than women; women often select jobs with more security (e.g., government) or choose jobs with attractive (but costly) benefits, e.g., flextime, child care, etc. They also tend to choose less-lucrative professions (where there's more supply than demand, like teaching, white collar vs. manual, more dangerous work, e.g., along the Alaska pipeline).

Enter Sunday's Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow and this made-up GOP "War on Women" . [Is there any worse thing than letting the likes of Rachel Maddow or Maureen Dowd waste precious minutes of your life with their banal ideological nonsense?] My God, the political spin is so predictable. The progressives all read off the same memorized political spin sound bites. I've written about the Ledbetter Act before. Just a brief reminder here: the question has more to do with business record keeping and women like Ms. Ledbetter making allegations years after the fact (in this case around the time of retirement). There are often statutes of limitations, the IRS audits you for the last few years, etc. It is moral hazard for Ms. Ledbetter or others to procrastinate on filing grievances or claims: it is unfair to the business which would otherwise address the problem. For instance, suppose that a company wasn't aware of a supervisor not following company compensation guidelines; they could reassign or discharge the manager more expeditiously and limit the extent to any more liability, e.g., with other female employees.

(A similar thing happened to me; California "lost" their copies of my W-2's and disallowed my claim for excess SDI, which had maxed with my first employer that year. They didn't question my multiple sources of  income, but their excuse was that employers gave them lump sum disbursements (not by employee). My second employer didn't know that I had already maxed out my SDI. Somehow my copies were misplaced during a subsequent move to Illinois. In the interim, my second employer had filed for bankruptcy. California was inflexible, insisting they would only settle for my W-2 copies. That's part of the reason I'll never work in California again; I'm not about to enable spendthrift California Democratic politicians.)

Going back the pay issue, I have a sister and a niece, both of whom are registered nurses whom have earned more than their husbands without college degrees ; although I don't know the exact compensation of the individuals, there are enough websites to estimate market rate for their husbands' occupations that I can make educated guesses. For instance, my sister was an Air Force nurse/officer whom fell in love with and married one of the enlisted men working at the hospital. The military pay system is not gender specific; I don't know the specific ranks while they were dating, but suppose for the sake of argument she was an O-2 and he was E-4 and consider the 2013 military pay chart.

Now I could go on for several pages talking about specific comparisons, but there are often different career paths you could take with the same degree. For example, I have a couple of math degrees. Many women with math degrees go into teaching (where ordinary supply/demand  compensation differences are not allowed by public sector union contracts, say, for more scarce math/science teachers may be paid the same as, say, an English or history major); I didn't teach math for a living but I did earn a living as an IT professional which has probably been more lucrative. Of course, I've often had to work nights, evenings, weekends and holidays and travel on business. I remember doing a gig near Provo, Utah (gorgeous place, by the way). (It was a client that manufactured sophisticated pumps and I was working on their ERP upgrade.)  Who would have ever figured out that most restaurants in the area close early in the evening? (There are lots of Mormons in Utah; I went to a client company picnic, and I never saw so many blonds in one place in all my life...)  So I would usually get off work (I was only paid for 8 hours, of course) in the late evening, so my dinner options were usually between an all-night diner or I think there was a Taco Bell open until 1AM. I sometimes went to Wendy's, but I think they closed at midnight. When I was commuting between Chicago and Santa Clara, I would take a 5:30PM flight out of SFO Friday night and arrive in Chicago at 2AM. I had to go to my suburb post office later that morning to get my P.O. Box mail. And then I would get on a plane 4PM or so on Sunday to head back to California. Now to be frank, I've met a number of single women whom have done the road warrior bit, but most I've met are men.

If you look at the oil boom in west North Dakota, you might make $70-100K a year for physically demanding work, and you can also find good paying jobs on rigs in the Gulf (remember what happened during the BP spill? Not as safe as driving to the office.) I remember at one time my youngest brother, whom doesn't have a college degree, once flirted with the idea of moving to Alaska to make good money in the energy industry. There have been movies about Alaskan men finding it hard to meet eligible women.

Let's mention a few inconvenient truths not mentioned by most feminist ideologues:

• "Most physically dangerous jobs require more physical strength than the vast majority of women possess. People, regardless of gender, tend receive higher pay for work that puts life and limb in jeopardy. According to US Department of Labor statistics for 2006, 54% of workers were men and 46% women while 92% of those killed on the job were men and only 8% women. The 23-cent gap between men’s and women’s incomes is to a large extent a reflection of the workplace death gap."
• "Males are the majority of the homeless, the incarcerated and the alcoholic. They are the majority of those who actually commit suicide. In America, men have shorter life expectancies than women."
• "Women are about half of those in medical and law school and the majority of those receiving bachelor’s degrees."
• "Women are more likely to move in and out of the labor market than men." (Like the longer number of hours, longer tenure at a job tends to be directly related to compensation.")
• "Women commonly prefer jobs with shorter and more flexible hours to accommodate the demands of family. Compared to men, [the majority of] women generally favor jobs that involve little danger, no travel and good social skills. Such jobs generally pay less.” For women who earn over $100,000 per year, Farrell says they are more likely [than men at the same pay] to give up a portion of pay to spend more time with their families. "
• "According to Farrell, the median salaries of women exceeded that of men's by at least 5 percent, and in some careers, up to 43 percent in 39 occupations. Some of the 39 professions include: sales engineers, statisticians, legislators, transportation workers, automotive service technicians and mechanics, speech-language pathologists and library assistants."
• “Female students tended to study areas with lower pay, such as education, health and psychology, while male students dominated higher-paying fields such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences.”

Mark J. Perry of Carpe Diem often posts on gender differences in colleges; here is a sample excerpt from his current post: "Gender equity for college degrees was achieved back in 1981 and women since then have earned an increasingly larger share of college degrees compared to men in almost every, so that men have become the "second sex" in higher eduction.  [There is a] huge and growing "degree gap" over the last 30 years in favor of women (140 women earning a college degree this year for every 100 men). By 2021 women will earn 148 college degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men, with especially huge gender imbalances for associate's degrees (179 women for every 100 men) and master's degrees (154 women for every 100 men). "

There are some anecdotal observations also noted among the above-cited sources. For example, there may be a moderating effect by marital status (e.g., married women making less than either single men or women). Also men may be more aggressive in dickering for a higher salary versus "settle-for-an-initial-offer" women. (I recall seeing a news magazine show on men more likely to haggle over a new car price.) I've sometimes successfully negotiated raises after managerial turnover (but the company didn't do so on its own initiative).

I've seen numerous news articles over the past decade about young single women with college degrees making more than their male counterparts in metropolitan areas, e.g.:

"Single, childless women in their twenties are finding success in the city: They're out-earning their male counterparts in the USA's biggest metropolitan areas. Women ages 22 to 30 with no husband and no kids earn a median $27,000 a year, 8% more than comparable men in the top 366 metropolitan areas, according to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau data crunched by the New York research firm Reach Advisors and released Wednesday....Education is the key: "Young women are going to college in droves," Reach Advisors reports. "Nearly three-quarters of girls who graduate from high school head to college, vs. two-thirds of the boys. But they don't stop there. Women are now 1.5 times more likely than men to graduate from college or earn advanced degrees." Armed with degrees, young women command higher salaries.

If there is a legitimate gripe, it may involve the case for married women and/or women with children. This may involve women making lifestyle choices about hours or continuity of employment. For example, it may well be that women who take time off to raise young children may not keep their knowledge and skills current and/or miss training opportunities and relevant project experiences valuable to the employer.

I am a free marketer. If I was hiring a partner or employee, I would be willing to hire a green Martian hermaphrodite at a generous salary if I cleared more market share and profit with him than without him. (Of course, media conservatives would attack me for hiring illegal aliens.)

Political Humor

"We're learning more and more about that whole Secret Service scandal. Apparently, the prostitutes in Colombia had code names for the different Secret Service guys they were seeing. The main guy, the guy who wanted to keep putting off paying for stuff until later? His nickname was Obama." - Jay Leno

[And the guy who called ahead? Spitzer.]

"After appearing on our show this week, President Obama has officially become the most televised president in history. Even Ryan Seacrest is like 'Dude, scale it back!'" - Jimmy Fallon

[In other news, Fox News Channel continues to swamp other cable news in the ratings. When asked the reason for their success, the company credits their new motto: "Fair, Balanced, and Now Obama-Free".]

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"

Miscellany: 4/29/12

Quote of the Day

I am learning all the time.
The tombstone will be my diploma.
Eartha Kitt

Jonah Goldberg/Washington Post, 
"Top Five Cliches That Liberals Use To Avoid Real 
Arguments": Some Reflections

The original op-ed should be read in its entirety, but in short, Goldberg discusses (in my terms):

• racial/ethnic/socioeconomic diversity is axiomatically worthy
• conflict is the result of insufficient diplomacy
• the Constitution must be interpreted in contemporary context
• criticisms of social programs are based on a core system of social Darwinism
• the justice system must be assessed  on how it protects the falsely accused

Let me start by discussing the social Darwinism charge which I've discussed in past posts. The idea is to take a phrase coined by a libertarian, Herbert Spencer ("survival of the fittest"), not Darwin. But the phrase was co-opted or misinterpreted by others out of context. Conservatives and libertarians have never believed  in abandoning the poor, as Obama and other progressive demagogues imply (e.g., a Scrooge-like "let them die then and decrease the surplus population"): we suggest that related government programs are inefficient and ineffective--if not in fact counterproductive, by serving as a moral hazard in the long run. More compassionate, effective temporary, as-needed care is often provided by friends and family, churches and charitable, non-profit or intrinsically motivated volunteer (e.g., civic) organizations, not by government bureaucrats whom are vested in perpetual programs.

Most conservatives and libertarians accept scientific theories (including evolution). In fact, we argue that traditional institutions (such as marriage) have evolved through thousands of years of societal evolution. A Burkean conservatism would minimize discontinuities of policies from the status quo. As for certain high-profile populist conservatives espousing critiques of relevant scientific theories, I expect that has more to do with political posturing.

My personal opinion on affirmative action is that in a country where we already see people of different races and cultures represented at high levels of business, entertainment and government, whatever "training wheels" which at one time served a useful purpose are no longer necessary. We need to be at a place where we may more attention to the quality of one's words and actions than his or her individual characteristics. During my professional career I've used references by multiple DBA's of color and Indian colleagues. Three of my best friends over the past 30 years are a Baptist, a Jew and a Hindu, all of whom have known I'm Catholic. My only academic co-author is a Taiwanese-American woman.

I think that liberals have unrealistic expectations regarding the possibilities of diplomacy. Other parties negotiate in bad faith: negotiations may result in a face-saving agreement with no real compromises for political purposes, serve as little more than a delay tactic and a finger-pointing pretext for subsequent actions (including the use of force), or yield an agreement signed by a party with no real intention of honoring terms (e.g., Saddam Hussein), holding the other party responsible for breaking the agreement.

For example, in 2007 then Senator Barack Obama participated  in immigration reform talks, but in subsequent Senate floor action, Obama supported amendments striking down key Democratic concessions in the compromise, killing the measure. Another example of bad faith negotiations was the 111th Congress where Democrats, with huge majorities in both chambers, did not feel the need to engage in compromise and routinely voted down GOP amendments. The only tool that the GOP had to slow the juggernaut of partisan bill making was the filibuster tool. The Democrats then and to this day audaciously blame the Senate Republicans of  "obstructionism" for using the filibuster (a classic example of bad faith negotiations, in this case by the Democrats). In fact, the Senate Democrats during the Bush Administration used the filibuster in an unconventional way to obstruct floor votes on President Bush's judicial nominees (i.e., the Constitution does not specify super-majority confirmation of judicial nominees), a minority's abuse of privilege. In a similar way, the Wisconsin state senate Democrats last year similarly used unconventional tactics in an attempt to sideline long-overdue public employee collective bargaining reform.

In fact, we conservatives found it was all but impossible to get this Senate and President to accept even a modest year-over-year budget cut in a period we were spending 40 cents on the dollar which we don't have, but our own children will have to pay back one day (in addition to their own government spending).

As for the Constitution, we see the "living Constitution" as a convenient concept where ideological judges do an end run around the legislative branch. The Constitution already includes a mechanism for change--the amendment process.

Already progressives are seeking to strike back at the Citizens United decision (where the constitutional rights of corporations and unions were given equal protection to free speech granted to other groups or privately-owned companies). Why should we be surprised by the schemes of progressives trying to revoke the economic and other liberties of their fellow Americans? Apparently progressives are afraid of the free market of ideas where Barack Obama can't outspend his GOP opposition 4-to-1... Isn't intuitively obvious that his right to "buy an election" is "more equal"? This proposed amendment is dead on arrival.

There are other topics that Goldberg doesn't bring up in his article. He is correct, of course, that liberals bring up "Mom, apple pie and Chevrolet" ideas that no one seriously disputes--what I call  "Political Trivial Pursuit".  Obviously as a libertarian, I am concerned about the possibility of unjust charges, prosecutions and convictions based on problematic circumstantial (vs. direct or substantive) evidence or mistaken identity, later rightly reversed by DNA or other grounds. On the other hand, the idea of throwing out the baby with the bathwater--of allowing others whom have violated the unalienable rights of others and may do so again--to stay or go free is hardly in the best interests of public safety.

Obama's speeches are full of vacuous "insights" and truisms. As Goldberg implies, Obama evades real conversations and debates about serious issues like REAL budget cuts or dealing with nearly $50T in unfunded entitlement liabilities. Like any empty suit, he defers the hard decisions to subsequent administrations, nibbles at baked-in budget increases, posturing net increases as "spending cuts", delegates other cuts to unaccountable commissions, and claims unrealistic cost cuts, like 30% cuts in physician payments via CMS.

There are other things that Goldberg doesn't really discuss, like the condescending rhetoric and  the ad hominem and petitio principii arguments. I introduce some alternative insights in the next section.

Guillemette's Observations of Liberal/Progressive Politics  
Part I

• If a progressive has no enemy, he'll invent one
• The progressive always assumes no unintended consequences to his policies.
• The failure of any progressive policy is never attributable to its concept or design.
• Any progressive policy is axiomatically virtuous: it is, by definition, fair, balanced, and necessary. Hence, it follows that any opposition is arbitrary.
• Any spending cut is translatable to a social program's worthiest recipients or public servants.
• A progressive politician is just another bourgeois king expanding the reach of his empire under the veneer of democracy and high-sounding rhetoric.

Political Humor
White House Correspondents Dinner Edition



 Obama: “Four years ago, I was locked in a brutal primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Four years later she won’t stop drunk-texting me from Cartegana.”

[It's those time zones; she didn't realize that it was 3AM at the White House...]

 Obama: “What is the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? A pitbull is delicious.”

[Romney: "On Canadian vacations, hockey moms get to ride inside the car."]

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

The Rolling Stone, "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadow"

Miscellany: 4/28/12

Quote of the Day

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
Daniel Webster

The UBL Operation and Obama's "Courageous" Decision

I think many of my fellow conservatives take issue with my leanings towards non-interventionist foreign policy. The fact is, I've never been a supporter of activist government. I want a smaller government footprint across the board; I view the proper role of government like a good waiter: it's there when needed without being asked, it doesn't interrupt the flow of the occasion,  it resolves any differences I may have with the chef over the dinner transaction, and it  keeps away bothersome diners whom would intrude on my dining experience. In exchange for those services, I'm willing to pay a reasonable fee.

The Founding Fathers had struggled with the concept of a standing military: on the one hand, they understood that raising a military only after attack might provide a tempting target for aggressors eyeing our natural resources, a captive market for their exports, a foothold for imperial expansion, etc. After all, pulling together a poorly trained and led, inexperienced military after the fact of invasion by experienced warriors knowledgeable in the art of war would be too little, too late. On the other hand, a standing military might be used for more than purely defensive purposes, expanding its global reach in a more proactive manner to establish more remote firewalls and to protect vital economic and other interests.

There's a wisdom in knowing one's limitations or locus of control,  the boundaries of your freedom and interests versus another's. I have certain values; I don't smoke, gamble, use drugs or drink to excess; I don't approve of sexually indulgent lifestyles, the ways some parents raise their kids or certain husbands treat their wives, or the activities of certain groups (e.g., Westboro Baptists). Would I ever intervene? It depends on the context: my resources and physical limitations, the nature and extent of the other party's behavior, and the probability of success and unintended consequences (among other things). My general orientation is not to interfere in the internal matters of others. Generally I won't complain about other people smoking unless I'm directly affected by secondary smoke. I might give my opinion on smoking to an indulgent friend or family member whom smokes but not to the point it becomes counterproductive to the relationship.

Similar considerations go into international matters. I realize that our Bill of Rights (or related Universal Declaration of Human Rights) is not recognized globally, and many, if not most, countries do not have as robust a judicial system. But in the end, where there is injustice in other lands, we can, at best, serve only as a catalyst for change: the people must ultimately assert their own authority and their governance by consent.

For years, I've noticed one puzzling American intervention after another, particularly in the Western Hemisphere (e.g., Grenada and Panama); if we could reconcile decades ago with Communist China, why not Cuba? I would like to see an Americas' free trade zone.

It was difficult for me to see what compelling self-defense rationale there was for intervention in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, Panama, and Iraq. (I will say, though, that Hussein's subsequent attempt to assassinate former President George HW Bush did constitute, in my judgment, an act of war.)  This is not to say that I approved of the target countries' de facto government or policies; the question had more to do with our serving as a proxy for relevant global or regional efforts which I saw more in terms of moral hazard

Afghanistan? The fact of the matter was that Al Qaeda had declared war on the US in the mid-1990's, rationalizing it based on US bases on Saudi Arabian soil. On this issue, I have a difference with Ron Paul: I might question the necessity or prudence of any such bases, but I don't recognize the legitimacy of a dissident group on diplomatic matters. The fact is that the Iraq government under Hussein did threaten military action against Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Al Qaeda acted on multiple military actions against the US (e.g.,. the military barracks attack, the USS Cole, and the 9/11 atrocities), and the Taliban regime was tied to Al Qaeda leadership. I think that the US had the right to intervene insofar as Al Qaeda remained a credible threat inside Afghanistan; I never saw our role as nation building inside Afghanistan.

On the other hand, I never bought into the Democrats' favorite talking point, in trying to rationalize their opposition to the second operation against Iraq, i.e., despite the fact that we have one of the largest armed forces in the world, despite the victory of the US and her allies in WWII on two fronts (Europe and Asia), the Democrats incoherently argued that manpower for Afghanistan and the pursuit of Al Qaeda was in a zero-sum relationship with our Iraq occupation activities: we were fighting the "wrong" war.  (In fact, I recall reading one account by an alleged UBL escort that one American GI walked past a cave where they were hiding.)

Whereas UBL was clearly enemy #1 in the eyes of almost all Americans, I always thought that the Democrats' spin was hopelessly naive and, in fact, dangerous. The Bush Administration clearly stymied Al Qaeda's intent for a second attack on the American homeland, and UBL was in hiding. The fact of the matter is that it is not easy to catch a fugitive; it took some time to capture Saddam Hussein after the liberation of Iraq. Putting more cooks in the kitchen does not make the water boil faster. Most of the information used to eventually capture UBL was gathered during the Bush Administration. The idea that any Republican leader, whether George W. Bush, John McCain or Mitt Romney, wouldn't have made the decision to take UBL dead or alive given the opportunity,  is absolutely preposterous.

Why dangerous and naive? Because UBL was just one person, admittedly a very symbolic leader, of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda still exists and remains dangerous. I was concerned about autonomous reprisal attacks by independent cells after the UBL operation. Now Obama implicitly acknowledges it by the expansion of his drone missions over Pakistan, Yemen, and (yes) Iran (which wasn't too smart given the fact that any downed drone provides an opportunity to reverse engineer our drone technology).

I think Romney and others can speak for themselves. Even though I have differences with Romney's stances on the military and foreign policy, he is unambiguous in his support for a strong US defense. If anyone should be questioned over credibility on UBL, how could we rely on an unabashed President going around the world his first year in office apologizing for the actions of his predecessors, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize: could we expect him to intervene militarily without knowledge or consent of our ally, Pakistan, about an operation within a few miles of the Pakistan capital?

The Obama campaign is trying to smear Romney by arguing he would not have had the testicular fortitude to make a decision to go after UBL based on this 2007 statement:

The campaign suggests Romney would not have ordered the raid by pointing to a 2007 interview with The Associated Press in which Romney said: "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."

The fact that a spendthrift President, who has gone $5T in debt in order to achieve one of the weakest jobless recoveries in American history, doesn't understand the difference between the "big picture" of dealing with anti-American terrorists, which go over and beyond UBL, and a largely neutralized solitary figure living on the run is not surprising. 

Yes, it was cathartic to know this international criminal was brought to justice for his crimes against humanity. And in fact, as The Hill notes, Romney responded with class towards the Navy SEAL operation (for which, I believe, President Obama takes far too much credit):

At the time of the raid, Romney congratulated Obama, the military and the intelligence community for "an extraordinary accomplishment.” He called it an "American" accomplishment as well, as opposed to a political victory. 

How desperate, pathetic, indecent, and hypocritical is the Obama campaign? Let us remember the 2008 campaign, when the Clinton campaign went after Obama on the 3AM call:

On the eve of the 2008 Pennsylvania primary, Clinton’s campaign released a television commercial featuring an image of bin Laden and invoking President Harry S. Truman’s quote: “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.” “Who do you think has what it takes?” the ad’s narrator says as an image of Clinton flashes on the screen. (The ad showed a brief clip of bin Laden as well as images of Pearl Harbor, the 1920′s stock market crash, Fidel Castro, the fall of the Berlin Wall). “You need to be ready for anything, especially now.”

So four years later, after bitterly complaining against the Clinton campaign use of UBL, the Obama campaign comes with this statement:

"The commander-in-chief gets one chance to make the right decision," reads the text in the video. It goes on to ask: "What path would Mitt Romney have taken?"

The campaign tries to rationalize Obama's allegedly adroit decision making as Commander in Chief, with Bill Clinton arguing that the operation could have failed: why, our allies, the Pakistanis, could have fired on American troops! (To a certain extent, I can understand how Democrats feel that way given the pattern of behavior when hapless Democratic Presidents have botched military operations, e.g., JFK and the Bay of Pigs, LBJ's micromanagement of the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter and Operation Eagle Claw, and Bill Clinton's perfunctory pursuit of UBL...) It's bad enough that Barack Obama engages in constant banal rhetoric; we need the political genius of Bill Clinton to point out there are risks to military operations.

First of all, Bill Clinton--shut your mouth! Who was it whom did squat after the Khobar Towers bombing and the USS Cole, whom let UBL slip through his fingers on multiple occasions? Have you no shame, no sense of responsibility that maybe if UBL had been taken out under your watch, things might have turned out differently?

Second, don't lecture to us about the decision-making prowess of the Ditherer-in-Chief: we have seen his "leadership" on things like earmarks he supposedly opposed in the stimulus and/or budget, the budget itself, the corrupt health care bill (complete with Gator-Aid, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Cornhusker Kickback) that he cheered from behind (because he didn't have the testicular fortitude to put forth his own plan which would have been shot down in flames), not to mention Dodd N. Frankenstein reform.

Third, the issue would not have been Obama's decision to go after public enemy #1, once we finally knew where he was; the issue would be what the American public's reaction would have been to know that Obama had solid intelligence on UBL and didn't do anything about it when he had the chance. What if the Procrastinator-in-Chief, by waiting as long as he did, had let UBL go through his fingers from some tip off while Obama had him in that mansion? I bet dollars to doughnuts (and I'm a big boy so I like my doughnuts, even though I don't regularly eat them because of the carbs) that Romney would have pulled the trigger far sooner than Obama did...

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

The Rolling Stones, "Lady Jane". The Stones showed that they could write classic rock ballads with the best of them. My personal favorite is "She's Like a Rainbow"; other classics include the immortal "Angie", "Out of Tears", and "Fool to Cry".

Miscellany: 4/27/12

Quote of the Day 

If you want to really know what your friends and family think of you
—die broke, and then see who shows up for the funeral.
Gregory Nunn

GDP Numbers Disappoint: 
From 3.0% (Q4 2011) to 2.2% (Q1 2012)

The consensus had been a lesser drop to 2.5%. Now to provide some context, there is Okun's law, law in the sense of being a heuristic or rule of thumb. Let me quote from a CBO report: "'Okun’s Law' has been included in a list of “core ideas” that are widely accepted in the economics profession. Over the postwar period, economic growth of about 3.5% has been associated with a stable unemployment rate."  In essence, if we assume at full employment (roughly 5%), we expect a 2-1 ratio between economic growth and unemployment percentage points from the 3.2-3.5% trend in GDP growth. For example, if we drop 1 percentage point from a long-term GDP growth trend of 3.2% to 2.2%, we should expect a half-point increase in the unemployment rate, say from 5% to 5.5%. There have been well-known anomalies to this general observation: for example, economists did not expect 2009's sharp increase in unemployment: while real GDP was flat versus, say, its long-term trend of 3.2 percentage points, we should have seen unemployment increase by 1.6%, but instead it increased almost the same number of points that growth dropped (i.e., around 3 points). Why? Primarily it had to do with very high labor productivity increases (plus  a drop in labor force, as discouraged workers moved out of official statistics). (Labor productivity has a less reliable trend over time.)

One should never take a single data point out of context. Certainly 2.2% is better than zero growth. There is some good news in terms of auto sales. But with Spain's recent debt rating drop and the worrisome prospects of a socialist winning the French Presidency from Nicolas Sarkozy, whom has played a strong role with German Chancellor Merkle in a leadership role during the European crisis, we could see the American economy itself adversely affected by Europe's problems, something Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently acknowledged.

Politically? This is not good news for Obama--or any of us, really. It's unlikely Obama will even reach the unemployment rate he inherited from Bush (and I argue we should be using the November 2008 numbers, because employers were not considering lame duck Bush's policies in 2009 planning). More importantly, Obama has seen a sky high increase in long-term unemployment, which is much more difficult to resolve.

The biggest hang over the economy (I'll ignore Obama's policies for the moment)? Recovering from the housing bubble. Obama and the Democrats have seen their chickens come home to roost. By subordinating risk assessment to social policy goals and championing the federal government's exposure in the real estate market (through implicit federal guarantees behind the GSE's), and given the fact that most American families' biggest investment is their home, we now see millions of people with little or no equity in their homes, and with a fragile jobless growth economy, Americans are going to spend more cautiously, which makes for a slow comeback--too slow to save Obama this fall, no matter how promising the polls today suggest; if this time Obama experiences Economic Tsunami v. 2 over the next 6 months, it almost doesn't matter what Romney says or does: Romney will win in a landslide. It could be anything, e.g., the Iran crisis and an oil price shock that makes 2008 look trivial.

I don't think the public will soon forget what happened when they put the Democrats in charge of all the Congress and the White House. I think everyone knows that the national debt is another bubble; it's one thing when the bubble is stocks or real estate--but what government is going to save us when the government itself is in its own bubble?

I am absolutely convinced that Obama and the Democrats blew it from a big picture perspective. The smart thing would have been to focus on the knitting: things like maintaining the existing safety net, getting out of the way of the private sector and engaging in genuine compromise. By focusing on ideological goals like health care and financial reform, neither of which was a significant priority for the majority of the American people, they forgot the bitter lessons of Clinton's first two years in office.

Follow-Up Odds and Ends

I am initiating a new cross-referenced feature called 'follow-up odds and ends'

Miscellany: 4/26/12:

• A Nightmare on K Street (real estate bubble): "Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration combined to purchase or guarantee (with taxpayer money) 95 percent of all new mortgages in 2011. This is largely because the GSEs are able to price out competition, particularly since the maximum loan size Fannie and Freddie can purchase expanded from $417,000 in 2008 to as high as $729,750 in mid-2011, but only back down to $625,500 at the end of 2011."  See page 6 of Reason's newly released 2011 federal privatization report. The GSE's are able to undercut private market because the private sector can't match the "free" GSE advantages of cheap government debt and/or loan guarantees/subsidies. (I.e., a guarantee is a form of insurance that protects creditors (just like the FDIC protects depositors), and there are costs to guarantees, e.g., outstanding balance on default or non-performing loans plus administrative costs. We can estimate the value of the guarantee by the market price difference for a given level of risk.)
• Student Loan Subsidies?  I thought about pointing out the average aggregate loan was about the equivalent of a new car loan. Obama has a number of Trojan horse proposals (e.g., the unreasonable capping of loan payments as a percentage of future income--where do we find these terms in the loan industry? Are car loan payments capped on a percentage of income, including loan forgiveness?) which are blatant pandering for the young adult vote and put the taxpayer at undue risk: why should the federal government subsidize certain loans versus others? Is the federal government's claim on future college graduate income a lower priority than their paying other expenses, e.g., paying off a car loan or a credit card? (Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead: no idea what the Demagogue-in-Chief will do if I unintentionally give him new ideas--e.g., as an incentive to graduate, Obama could extend similar terms to college graduate new Government Motors auto purchases...)

Miscellany: 2/21/12:

• The ICC/MD200: I wrote "People do all sorts of weird things while sitting in traffic; I pass the time thinking of things like--I wonder if they ever thought of taking HOV lanes and converting them into toll lanes." There are, in fact, a number of relevant projects under the name of "HOT (high occupancy toll) Lanes" or a more recent, general term "Managed Lanes". Reason's newly released 2011 surface transportation report discusses these in part 5; there does seem to be political resistance against converting existing lanes to toll lanes and instead reserving the concept for new lanes. (I disagree--with the restriction.)

NB: I mentioned in this segment two sections of the new Reason 2011 privatization report; other section reports are available and can be downloaded without (any Reason) cost here.

Political Humor

"Bring Your Child to Work Day — that's how we got George W. Bush." - David Letterman

[That's how New York got Andrew Cuomo. That's how California got stuck with Jerry Brown... 


Maybe taxpayers should agree to cover birth control expenses for Democratic politicians and their spouses. We could call it 'preventive government debt care'...]

"Today is the 20th annual Bring Your Child to Work Day — or as it's known in China, Thursday." - Jimmy Kimmel

[It's bad enough that the Democrats want parents to foot the bill for their adult children's health care, but do the Dems really expect parents to also be their chauffeurs?]

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

The Rolling Stones, "Mothers Little Helper"

Miscellany: 4/26/12

Quote of the Day 

Advice is like snow; 
the softer it falls, 
the longer it dwells upon, 
and the deeper it sinks into, 
the mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Nightmare From K Street

Regular readers know I've coined some colorful recurring feature titles, e.g., Sunday Talk Soup, Political Potpourri, Obama Narcissistic Behavior Watch, and Wonderful World of Obama. I'm ready to announce a new one: "A Nightmare From K Street". K Street, of course, is the legendary address synonymous with lobbyists. I don't resent lobbyists doing their job anymore than I blame Charlie Brown's little sister Sally for wanting her fair share.

I hold government responsible: you are talking about an organization spending nearly a quarter of GDP. It's an asymmetric relationship: government is a monopoly, and government imposes rules on businesses, not the other way around. I've been sounding a familiar theme over the past few weeks: increasing, unsustainable government scope creep, the road to serfdom, economic fascism, i.e., a government-dominated economy. Government does not have to own businesses to pull their strings. This feature will focus on perverse, corrupting nature of government intervention in the economy.

AEI's Wallison and Pinto authored a well-written article on the housing bubble. Some basic takeaways:

• "The United States is the only developed country with a significant government role in housing policy. Most other countries leave housing finance largely to the private sector, have less volatility in housing starts and house prices, and do not suffer the recurring crises characteristic of the US market."
• "A private US market would offer homeowners interest rate reductions for substantial down payments, limits on refinancing, and more rapid amortization."
• "In less than twenty-five years, average home equity plunged from 45 percent to 7 percent. Since 1986, residential mortgage debt has increased from 39 percent of gross domestic product to 50 percent in 1999 and then to 75 percent in 2007. "
• "The private housing finance system has virtually disappeared, and the government system that remains is pursuing the same policies that produced the current problems."
• "Government policies are also to blame for the deterioration in the US housing market, including affordable housing goals imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992, the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, the mortgage interest tax deduction, the right to refinance without penalty, and the Community Reinvestment Act."
• "In 2009, one in four taxpayers itemized mortgage interest; on average, families stay in their homes for only seven years."
• "The FHA has increased its market share of home purchase loans, from 8 percent in 2007 to 43 percent in 2010."
• "One factor may have been an income tax law change in 1997, which made speculating in homes a vocation for many homeowners. A married couple could live in a home for two years and pay zero tax on the first $500,000 of capital gain."
• "Between 1995 and 2004, the US homeownership rate rose from 64 percent—where it had been for thirty years—to more than 69 percent."

Warning: reading this article may raise your blood pressure. The Three Stooges are clearly Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. I think what's particularly obscene is the fact that even after the meltdown, Democrats and Barack Obama have continued to grow the government's footprint into lending (look at the FHA bullet point above). Oh, yes, they want to bash the favorite whipping boy, the banks. No doubt that some banks took imprudent risks, but Obama in a still tough economy was handing out new FHA loans with low down payments like candy: without housing prices at a bottom and job security tenuous at best given high unemployment,  it's like catching a falling knife and exacerbates the government's losses.

It's difficult to explain these facts in any way short of gross incompetence by the Congress and the Presidents. Why were the GSE's lending out fixed mortgages at 30 years, knowing the average housing tenure ownership was 7 years? Why was the government subsidizing rapid turnover in housing ownership? Why, just years after investors were hyping absurd Internet company valuations in terms like "we are in a new economy where profits don't matter", is Bush rejoicing at the highest percentage ownership of housing (in a tepid growth economy) as if the long-term historical average of ownership didn't matter? What about the declining amount of average home equity, the historically high relative exposure of the government to risk?

Here we are in an allegedly "free market" economy. Yet, just like we're among the last countries not to privatize the post office yet, we're also the only major economy to intervene in the housing market. Why haven't all the other developed nations intervened in the same way as our government has? In fact, ownership is comparable--without policy adjustments or exposure of the public sector to similar risks.

It's time for government to GET OUT OF THE BANKING BUSINESS. It's time to repeal laws that subordinate risk of home ownership to social policy considerations. It's time for home purchases to be treated like any other purchase--without the government bribing the prospective homeowner.  

The US Government's Role in Building and Bursting the Housing Bubble

View more presentations from AEI

[4/28/12: See here for an update.]

Student Loan Subsidies? Thumbs DOWN!

This may seem like a strange coming from a former professor, but I oppose subsidies for student loans (without Congressional action, interest rates will double from 3.4% to 6.8% this summer). I am concerned about the risk of losses, especially given the fact that we are talking about the federal government's exposure to student loans being up to a trillion dollars; worthy students should be able to get loans, especially from the private sector.

Speaker Boehner is willing to do a deal doing a quid pro quo of interest rate subsidies with the healthcare preventive care fund (which, of course, Democrats will heatedly oppose), and Romney has also signaled support. I think Boehner and Romney are just trying to co-opt Obama on the issue. Boehner is talking about pay-go, but I see all of this as politics and business as usual. (An Internet search didn't reveal Ron Paul's position on this issue, which is intriguing because Paul gets strong support from college-age voters. I would think Paul's position is similar to mine on principle; it may well be that he thinks his position is obvious or my query was poorly written.)

I personally believe that colleges factor subsidies into pricing decisions. We already know a number of students receiving subsidized loans and/or Pell grants never complete their degree problem. I think the more we do this kind of thing, particularly with Obama unconscionably selling college like snake oil, we end up contributing to yet another bubble (as if we haven't learned enough from stocks and real estate!), and sooner or later, the day of reckoning is coming, because the college cost bubble is unsustainable.

[4/28/12: See here for an update.]

Rubio's Revised DREAM Act? Thumbs UP!

Senator Rubio (R-FL) would provide similar legislation to the failed DREAM Act  of the 111th Congress, with a principal difference being no guaranteed special path to citizenship (i.e., an unauthorized dependent would be allowed to attend college or work and get a terminal residency status). I voiced a similar concern at the time, because I wanted equal protection when it comes to granting citizenship. Note that citizenship is still possible through Mexico's legal immigration agreement with the US, but they won't get privileged status as in the Dems' version. Speaker Boehner is ambivalent given well-known activist opposition to any softening of a position on unauthorized aliens. I think Boehner should get behind it: Dems are under pressure from the Latino community to make progress on the issue, and I think they would reluctantly agree to half a loaf vs. no loaf.

By some polls, Romney is down over 2 to 1 among Latinos; I expect Romney over the weeks ahead to bring up visiting worker visa reforms (which the labor unions have routinely vetoed). But I think his support of the Rubio legislation is a no-brainer, because, among other things, it boxes Obama in. Romney is probably worried by a media conservative backlash.

Political Potpourri

I was puzzled about the fact that the WSJ delegate count shows no Romney bump in Pennsylvania following his big victory there, but I ran across an article which said that Pennsylvania delegates were running officially unpledged.  I'm still baffled by what seems to have to be a big bounce for Obama in the Gallup poll, going from about 5 points behind Romney to 6 ahead. Fox News shows a tie and Rasmussen has Romney up by 3. Romney is struggling in the battleground states but we're still over 6 months until the election. Clearly Romney needs to pick up support among Latinos. See. my discussion of Rubio's DREAM compromise above.

Public School Teacher Abuse of Students:
ZERO TOLERANCE

Teaching has its moments. Two moments particularly stand out at my alma mater at UH. Probably the most personally embarrassing happened in the context of my undergraduate decision support systems. I required my students to give a presentation on their class project. So one day this clean-shaven guy with a recent haircut in a nice suit came into my classroom and approaches me at the head of the class. I honestly didn't recognize him and thought that he was in the wrong class; the whole class started roaring with laughter at me. The student thought that I was putting him on; I had never seen him without facial hair, long hair, and jeans.

The second, also at UH, was the most bizarre; I've never heard or seen this happen in any other college classroom. I was teaching in an auditorium style classroom. There was this one coed whom was a dead ringer for my 14-month younger little sister, only taller. She was sitting roughly halfway up in the center of class. Sometime during the last 15 minutes of class, she started doing something inappropriate, and it felt like I was invading my sister's privacy: I wanted to wash my brain out with soap. I wasn't quite sure how to handle it: I didn't want to draw attention to what she was doing or embarrass her in front of the class. Do I discuss it with her after class, given pervasive ideological feminism and my being a single white male? No-win situation.  I spent the rest of lecture looking at the floor. (In case you're wondering, I came to the next lecture with blank drop slips in hand and said that I would exercise my instructor's prerogative if the nonsense didn't stop. A handful of concerned students, including Sister Clone, approached me after class. No more student problems, and no one was dropped from class.)

The following two videos (the second is a few months old, the first is currently a viral video) reflect teachers and teacher aides in special education classes. (The second video is actually a composite of 2 clips.) In all these cases, there were secret recordings made of encounters between the children and their teachers.

I generally have good self-control. In all the classes I've taught, I've been very careful not to criticize or mock a student in front of his or her peers; in fact, in one class, a coed literally had a temper tantrum in front of the class (I had issued a brief rebuke at the start of lecture that I caught two unidentified students whom turned in the same work; she openly questioned whether she was one of the persons involved: talk about self-incrimination!) and I responded with patience. I never raised my hand to nephews or nieces when babysitting them, no matter how they misbehaved.

I have repeatedly stated in my posts that children are gifts from God. In a world where raising a typical child is challenging enough, I can't imagine how much harder it is to raise children with special needs or children whom look different. All kids want to fit in, and making friends is hard enough without individual differences.  I have a lot of political differences with Sarah Palin, but the way she loves her youngest child with special needs tells me volumes about her character; I'll always respect her for her decision to bring that precious little boy into the world.

I've never known an autistic person like Akian Chaifetz. One of the incidents in the tape of 10-year-old Akian involved his seeking reassurance that he would be seeing his dad again after visiting his separated mother over the weekend, and instead of getting reassurance, the teacher broke his spirit. It was totally unnecessary and heartless. It was cruel and unusual punishment by someone whom knew exactly what she was doing. There is no excuse for that: she's a trained teacher; we expect a higher, not lower standard of behavior. You know (at least I knew) that this wasn't an isolated incident. These incidents are off the charts in terms of what I would expect from any legitimate teacher even if she was having a bad day. I think Stu recorded the video in an angry mood, but I don't blame him.

As for Cheyanne: I know how sensitive teenage girls are about their appearance, and I know at least one niece went through a very tough time. It's bad enough that Cheyanne has to deal with likely cruel comments from others because of her special needs. (I think she's a beautiful gift from God.) It broke my heart to hear someone she trusted undermine her positive self-image. I have no idea if and when it's ever appropriate for a teacher to discuss a student's appearance under normal circumstances (obviously if the child looks ill, injured, has a disheveled appearance, etc., a teacher should  address the matter). I never discussed my female students' appearance. But I would rely on the old saying, 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.'

For Julio: I think it's a matter of civility: when someone asks to be addressed in a certain way, you respect that person's wishes. I mentioned before in the blog, I once had a student whom addressed me as 'Ron'; I corrected him:  'Dr. Guillemette'.  He defiantly called me 'Ron' again. And a third time. Eventually he figured out that he wasn't getting anywhere and said 'Dr. Guillemette' in a very contemptuous tone. It was more a matter of context: I was his teacher, not his drinking buddy.  In the professional ranks I have never been addressed as 'Dr. Guillemette'; a lot of well-mannered people will inquire whether I prefer  'Ron' or 'Ronald'. (In my family, 'Ron' is my baby sister's spouse, and only Aunt Bea used to get away with calling me "Ronnie".)

Julio's teacher is a piece of work. No excuses: you don't address a student with profanity; you don't threaten to kick his ass.

I think a couple of teachers have been reassigned but not terminated. NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I think it's sad that the administrators were absolutely clueless as to what was really going on.

There are lots of good teachers looking for work. That these jerks were not fired for cause is inexcusable; any union protecting these "professionals" undermines its own credibility. Hard-earned tax dollars paying the salary for some ineffectual, unprincipled "professional" whom doesn't like children? NO WAY.

• Akian and Stu Chaifetz: Public School Teacher Abuse

•  Clip 1: 14 year old student Cheyanne bullied of Ohio's Miami Trace Middle School bully; Clip 2: 15 year old  Julio bullied at New Jersey's Bankbridge Regional School . 

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

The Rolling Stones, "Paint It Black".  My favorite Stones' rock hit.

Miscellany: 4/25/12

Quote of the Day 

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
Anais Nin

Hypocrisy of Obamanomics Exposed Yet Again....

Any faithful reader of this blog notes that time and again, I've argued for consistent, simpler, lower tax policy across industries, sizes, etc. Obama doesn't understand a very simple pragmatic point: workers at the start of the Great Recession were hired across a diverse economy. Some jobs can be highly specialized (e.g., in very large companies, by technologies, etc.), and many businesses sell not directly to consumers but to other companies. When, say, Big Energy is discriminated against, being targeted for high-cost, even special-purpose taxes or regulations, it affects customers (whom ultimately pay those costs), employees, and suppliers.

Obama and his Democratic cronies are disrupting the economy by choosing winners and losers. Reuters earlier this month ran a story about how Australia, with more robust Asia-focused economic growth, has started to recruit Americans (as well as Europeans and Indians) for various tradesmen NOT requiring college degrees (electricians, plumbers, and builders) as well as health care professionals and social workers. These types of policies are a variation on what Austrian School economists refer to as malinvestments. In essence, you can create labor bubbles; even if health care is a sixth of the economy, there's the remaining five-sixths of the economy. I have three relatives whom are registered nurses--and they didn't need federal intervention. One of them even had to go to another state to find a school with an opening into their nursing degree program. When you promote college like snake oil, you will end up with oversupplies of, say, school teachers or lawyers where there's already a glut. (I personally know three college graduates with education degrees (over 20 years ago) whom never got a related job offer.) Obama from the get-go was pushing for education, infrastructure, and green energy--hardly representative of the American economy as it exists.

We sometimes find that we have to adjust to the economy as it exists. Some readers might wonder, why did I double-major in math and philosophy? It wasn't due to those high-paying pure math or applied philosopher jobs on the market. I initially started out with the idea of becoming a priest--and philosophy is a typical major for those pursuing the priesthood. I also had the idea of becoming a high school math teacher, within a religious order like the Jesuits. Only life gets in the way. Like being a 19-year-old college graduate whom never never had a date in high school and had been attending a college two-thirds coed. Thoughts of the priesthood and high school teaching had drifted away; I had discovered a new vocation: becoming a college professor. To this day, my middle brother never did understand why I hadn't chosen, like he did, a career as an engineer. He, not then married, already owned a house in Beaumont, while I struggled to get by on modest monthly stipends as a UH graduate fellow teaching a couple of classes a semester.

So here we have, on both sides of the aisle, e.g., Obama on the left and (no longer running) Santorum on the right, both pushing special tax breaks for manufacturing. So imagine how pleased I am to read notable economist Gary Becker and Carpe Diem economist blogger M. J. Perry echo free market themes of low, consistent tax policy, rejecting this misguided attempt to influence the economy instead of accepting it as it exists.

Of course, Obama and his Democratic cronies are trying to take claim for manufacturing gains! What hubris! Pure economic illiteracy and intentionally misleading propaganda: the Democrats have been pushing to retain unsustainable low-margin, low-value-added factories, not the high-end, value-added manufacturing at the heart of the current boom, which has more to do with tax policies that the progressive Democrats fought every step of the way. We have been talking about favorable investment tax policies that GOP-controlled Houses passed at their initiative separately under Clinton and Bush. The idea that Democrats can try to claim credit at manufacturing gains when, in fact, they've dumped a record number of regulations on American business in general while fighting each step of the way to increase investment tax rates, income/business tax rates on small business owners and other job creators, is simply audacious and morally outrageous.

The point I'm trying to make is instead of building this porous, convoluted tax system where all the special interests (including unions, green energy, and other companies which President Obama and Democrats conveniently insist are NOT what they call special interests) get "their fair share" via thousands of lobbyists and political contributors (on BOTH sides of the aisle), KISS--keep it simple, stupid! I disdain the notion of this allegedly symbiotic relationship between government and various businesses or other constituent special-interest groups. I have been arguing against farm subsidies, PERIOD--and farm states generally support the GOP nominee for President, generally more supportive of free market concepts. If businesses are doing well, they'll invest in their IT infrastructure--and I'll benefit. I've had it with Obama's picking winners and losers in business: we need an "everyone wins" consistent, simple tax policy.

Mark Perry sarcastically notes that  the Democrats would ideologically call for "windfall profits" taxes (see an impressive chart of manufacturer aggregate profits via the above link) except that unlike the case of Big Oil, manufacturers are supported by unions.

Hypocrisy of Dems? Of course.

Drawing on Personal Experiences With Recessions

I have extensive experience as an Oracle DBA with ERP application systems (integrated software across the enterprise--accounting, human resources, manufacturing, etc.) When we had the stock market bust (starting in the spring of 2000 with the pricking of the Nasdaq bubble, companies reacted by doing things like freezing or canceling IT projects (including ERP upgrades). Many companies (particularly Internet businesses and consulting companies) went out of business. Most companies weren't hiring IT consultants: they were wary about retaining "overqualified" personnel if and when the economy turned the corner, and if they did, they could be highly selective. I found myself having to compete for commodity-priced core Oracle DBA assignments which were not worthy of my multifaceted knowledge, ability and skill sets.  My best hopes for more suitable professional assignments were with a more robust recovery, giving business executives enough confidence to take deferred projects off the back burner.

I thought about reentering academia during this period, but many universities had frozen hiring. I remember after the end of my one-year contract with ISU (this position went away with state budget cuts during the Bush 41 recession) with no follow-up academic job offers, one Michigan university tried to contact me halfway through the fall semester about possible interest about filling in for a faculty member, whom for some unknown (medical?) reason was on the shelf for an indefinite but finite period of time: the college made it clear this opening was not a tenure-track position. I was pursuing other faculty opportunities at late fall semester conferences; I thought with my PhD in hand, 8 years of teaching a large number of courses under my belt, and a very competitive number of publications for a junior professor in MIS, I would surely get selected over, say, ABD ("all but dissertation") candidates. I didn't want to have to move for a fourth time in 4 years; finding another academic job is huge sinkhole of time, taking over another professor's class in the middle of a semester in a new university would be very time-consuming and difficult. Woulda, coulda, shoulda: I had no idea then that I wouldn't get an offer for the second consecutive year. (I should point out that the Michigan college never made an offer; they were just floating the idea, and for all I knew, they were interviewing other substitutes as well.)

I should point out stories like mine were not at all that exceptional. A few months back, I was contacted by a tech recruiter in the Michigan area. There are 3 states years ago I swore I would never consider moving to: California, New York, and Michigan. (There are a variety of reasons for the latter; I once went on a campus visit to Grand Valley State, and they declined to make an offer, which is sort of like a presumptuous homely girl you never wanted to date telling everybody that she isn't interested in dating you. Yes, that actually happened to me once; it's embarrassing.) It turned out that this recruiter has a PhD in math and once had a well-paying job doing some mathematical modeling for one of the Big Three automakers. Presumably he was let go during a downsizing move and now was earning a living as a headhunter. (No comment except to say I would rather mop floors than be a tech recruiter.) He quickly reassured me we weren't talking about Detroit--but Ann Arbor, a college town. He had placed the IT manager at this thriving business there a while back, and they needed someone with my background. Several days later: yup, the same old same old "overqualified", a second rejection from an ugly girl.

I'm not saying these two examples are typical. But there's this myth from high tech firms that they can't find suitable candidates. During that slow period in Chicago I mentioned above, I was discussing a position with a consulting company (subsequently acquired by a Japanese high tech conglomerate) out of its Milwaukee office, maybe an hour's drive away; in fact I had commuted to a location west of Milwaukee for months in 2001. I had a lease but told the recruiter I was willing to relocate after my lease expired. I wasn't going to get an apartment lease without an offer, but she refused to present me until I lived in the Milwaukee area. So a couple of weeks later, I end up getting a call from the hiring manager for the very same position. No, not through the recruiter. He needed a subcontractor for a Chicago area gig he was staffing, and this Indian body shop I was working with forwarded a copy of my resume. He ended up filling that job through another internal resource but called me directly to discuss the perm position he had been trying to fill for 6 months. I then told him about my experience with the HR recruiter. He laughed and said that he didn't care where I lived so long as I lived near an airport and was willing to travel. Still, he had to have me work through the recruiter from an internal standpoint (I knew that was a mistake from the get-go because the recruiter had a vested interest in my rejection). Needless to say, the HR recruiter didn't respond well to this development, being forced to process someone she had specifically rejected. Obviously this did not reflect well on her judgment and was a major loss of face; she predictably reacted by manipulating the recruitment process (i.e., the tech screen I had focused on things not in the resume, and I knew that the hiring manager already told me he wanted to hire me), and then issuing a typical "we have found a candidate better suited to our needs" rejection letter.

I still had the hiring manager's contact information; he told me they had only interviewed two people and I had been ranked the better candidate and he couldn't explain why the tech screen was rigged against my experience or the rejection, done without his knowledge or consent. This was all about office politics, but I assure you this kind of stuff happens all the time. He finally agreed to give me a subcontract for a limited engagement while trying to navigate a path for an offer. I subsequently had a payment dispute with the account manager, whom didn't want to pay me until after the client paid its invoice for my services on net 30 terms--which in essence passed on me all the risk for customer collection. The manager should have anticipated the issue and eventually resolved the issue to pay me on a similar timetable as his own employees but passively aggressively blamed me for scotching his attempts at securing me a full-time offer. I finally resigned the subcontract in order to move to the Baltimore/DC area to take a federal subcontracting gig at National Archives.

I wanted to rant about this because I am sympathetic to free market immigration. In part, you have to blame short-sighted IT managers, whom can be penny-wise and pound-foolish. There have been gigs where I've been turned down  paying a quarter of what Oracle was billing for my services as a senior principal a little over a decade ago; it never even got to an interview process. I have repeatedly diagnosed, fixed and cleaned up after serious DBA problems the clients never even knew existed. Because managers really don't have the technical expertise, they don't realize sometimes they were living on borrowed time.

Let me give a very simple example: one of the first things I discovered at National Archives was this RAID-5 device was "running on its spare tire" (to use a driving analogy). If a second drive fails, your file system (and any dependent database) is toast; furthermore, this was on a production server. Who knows how long it was that way? Probably months. There were government employees and contractors walking past the servers every day. Not one of them noticed an amber (vs. green) light: how do you NOT see that? Have they never encountered a dead disk before? Even if they didn't maintain those servers, those servers were owned by the US government--not its contractors. You would have thought at least one competent person would have done or said something. This is a classic example of the perverse effects of commonly owned property; nobody had a vested interest in taking care of the problem. I did something about it. The buck stopped with me.

Most executives do not realize that a gifted IT professional, unlike manual professionals, can literally do the same amount (only better) work than 8 or more average ones (I seem to recall an IBM programmer productivity study to that effect years ago). John D. Cook has a very readable, short discussion of this issue with respect to programmers (faithful readers will remember that I used to be an APL programmer/analyst when I started my MBA part-time in the 1980's at UH), but the same concepts operate in other IT professional contexts (including DBA work) (I wrote my own dynamic hot backup scripts and database alert notifiers before Oracle offered related standard functionality.) (my edits):

The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers.  If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?...Extreme productivity may not be obvious. Software output cannot be measured as easily as dollars or bricks. The best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code and they certainly do not work 10x longer hours. Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. It may take a while to realize that someone routinely comes up with such time-saving insights.

A great DBA is like great documentation: people may not realize it until they need the resource (e.g., a database goes down and doesn't come back up right away). There are opportunity costs most people never realize. I was the corporate DBA for the American subsidiary of a Japanese chip testing equipment manufacturer. Over a 13-month period I won a record 3 CEO awards, but I'm prouder of two technical feats which never got recognized. I never told my best friend, an Indian whom later became the company's IT manager, about one of these. About two or 3 years later, he wrote me an unsolicited email gushing over this customization I had written for Oracle EBS which barely needed any tweaking during an Apps upgrade--and this guy is also a software entrepreneur and has worked as a contractor at places like Cisco.

There are a couple of other examples to make my point. At an east LA sugar processor, I wrote a simple application in less than 4 hours  (in addition to my assigned tasks for the same number of hours) to provide custom functionality integrating data from other plants; Oracle wanted to charge $30K in licensing fees for an EDI solution, not including consulting work to implement and annual maintenance fees.

Second, I worked at a private company before its purchase by Equifax. I had been deliberately excluded from the team designing an application designed to create a mailing list of millions (they were probably afraid I would dominate the meetings); the end task was to take place over the Fourth of July weekend. The meetings and work took place over a few months. They designed, implemented and tested their solution. The mailing list was due on Monday. They kicked off the application on Friday or Saturday. I got a call on Saturday afternoon, one that they would have given anything to avoid, but they knew I was the only guy in the company whom could pull it off. Their process, which had never been tested for scalability, was yielding one record every 15 minutes. In literally less than 15 minutes and no advance preparation time, I completely redesigned and implemented an alternative process operating at the table versus row level of granularity--with minimal briefings on the problem statement and data structures. And, of course, my solution worked like a charm, and it did not take long for me to generate the mailing list. A single person had designed a better application off the top of his head than an entire team over a few months.

I also probably explained another example while I was a National Archives subcontractor. We had a military records procurement Siebel application running on an Oracle database. There were something like 400-450 clerical people in the St. Louis area supporting the application. Every once in a while, there would be a network outage between College Park and St. Louis. This hosed the client sessions--still running from an Oracle standpoint; if and when connections resumed, clients would start up new sessions: but the problem was that we needed to free up old connections so everybody could connect to an Oracle session. My predecessors had simply decided to reboot the database, which took an estimated 20 minutes and took out both old and new connections--that meant St. Louis employees couldn't do their jobs (but they were still on the clock). I devised a script that cleaned out all the old sessions while keeping the new ones up, in a matter of a couple of seconds. I think the civil servant in charge of the application estimated an outage as costing $10,000 an hour. That means rebooting the database cost over $3300 in lost employee productivity--which my little script saved time and again. The client manager never asked me to do this, and I never got any recognition. I guess if some people talk about 'random acts of kindness', call my effort a 'random act of patriotism'.


CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act):
Thumbs DOWN!

Any collusion between Big Business and Big Government, bypassing the Courts (i.e., the Bill of Rights, including all applicable unalienable enumerated and unenumerated negative rights) is fundamentally unacceptable; I have zero tolerance for the private sector being subordinated under Big Government Knows Best under a blank check "War on Terror"; I am increasingly skeptical of this bogeyman. The backdoor approach of economic fascism (in short, a government-dominated economy) must be resisted at all costs. Ron Paul, as usual, is quite elegant in making the case against CISPA. Along with Ron Paul, a brilliant patriot, let me point the interested reader to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Unconstitutional Executive Orders: Thumbs DOWN!
The Bill of Rights Applies To ALL US Citizens

Again, using a blank check "War on Terror" to make the Bill of Rights "paper, just paper" is a moral outrage. An American citizen is guaranteed due process regarding his unalienable right to live. Any President or any other individual believing that he has the authority to act unilaterally to kill an American citizen, bypassing the Judicial Branch, is acting without the authority of the Constitution; these acts are murderous and, in my judgment, an impeachable offense.



The Obama Credit Limit Has Maxed Out....
Time To Turn Out the Lights in the Obama White House



Can We FINALLY Have a Reasonable Conversation
About Immigration Policy?

The Pew Hispanic Center has published a new report showing for a number of reasons, including a more robust Mexican economy, changing demographics (smaller Mexican families), a stagnant US economy and various changes in border protection and immigration policy enforcement, we have seen attempts of unauthorized entry shrinking to a fraction of the rate just 7 years ago.

The Obama Administration has claimed credit for slowing unauthorized immigration, and I agree to a certain extent they are correct. No, not the unethical double standard where some unauthorized immigrants (say, criminals) are less equal than others (what I deem "catch-and-release") (an unconstitutional process violating equal protection principles), but if you so thoroughly mismanage the domestic economy as Obama has done during his 3.5 year tenure, you can make life unbearable for anyone to want to stay here, including foreign-born, American-educated entrepreneurs and in-demand professionals, millionaires and unauthorized immigrants.

I find it frankly morally unacceptable to treat Mexican immigrants any differently than previous waves of Irish or German immigrants. Yes, we need an orderly process, but anti-immigrant xenophobes are treating the symptoms, not the disease; the blame is not with Mexicans but with dysfunctional American policy, being manipulated by special interests such as unions. We need to treat all visitors to American, authorized or not, respectfully and not make foreign visitors scapegoats for dysfunctional public policy beyond their control and responsibility; remember, if we are visiting other lands, we ourselves expect to be treated with all due respect, dignity and due process.

Yes, Mexican immigrants need to conform with bilaterally negotiated immigration policy. In many cases, we have legal chained immigrants (i.e., eligible for lawful entry) having to wait for years for reunification with their loved ones, and they are trying to work around government bottlenecks and an obsolete quota system. (As for the influx of criminal aliens: perhaps we need to do something  about dysfunctional drug prohibition policies luring them here with the promise of obscene profits.)

Let me go beyond just compassionate reasons: immigration policy can be misused to interfere with economic rights, including a business owner's ability to contract for labor services in a timely manner. Unions in particular want to engage in protectionist policies, e.g., to manipulate the number of manual laborers in order to create or maintain artificially high labor rates. This stand is fundamentally anti-consumer: it creates deadweight loss. All that labor unions achieve by this is to divert investment and jobs overseas.



Political Humor

"Political analysts are saying that President Obama doesn't want to be too critical of the Secret Service because their agents protect him every day — which explains why today President Obama said it was fiscally responsible to refuse to pay the prostitute." - Conan O'Brien

[The Secret Service agent thought that he had protection, too. Except he had to take money out of his wallet to make room for the condoms...


Obama doesn't want to be too critical of the Secret Service. They know things... If getting drunk in Colombia results in $800/night prostitutes, just imagine how much Obama has to drink to spend over $3.7T... Americans are paying too high a price to get screwed every April 15... 


No doubt the Big Brothels in Nevada's sanctioned counties are upset at government-paid employees spending hard-earned taxpayer revenues on expensive foreign tricks: government johns should be investing in good-paying jobs for domestic working girls...]

"For the first time in 40 years, more Mexicans are leaving the United States than are coming to it. Not because of our economy. Because they're sick and tired of explaining that Taco Bell isn't real Mexican food." - Conan O'Brien

[Even illegal immigrants are finding it hard to find work under the Obama Recovery. Not only are college graduates competing for hourly work in restaurants, construction and hotels, but the price of Mexican diet staple corn has nearly quadrupled over the past dozen years, courtesy of the Federal Reserve's loose money policy and Obama's corn-based ethanol subsidies and tariffs. Another four years of this?]

"It now appears that as many as a dozen members of the Secret Service were involved in that Colombian prostitution scandal. Now six of the agents have been reassigned. The other six are now party planners for the GSA." - Jay Leno

[Jay, that was supposed to be a secret... No doubt a tip from WikiCondomLeaks.


The new party planners are already paying benefits. For instance, they didn't need a scouting trip (just the Internet) to discover that prostitution in Las Vegas isn't legal; however, phone sex is an available option at only $4.99 per minute.]



Methinks that the old, fat Gray Lady is getting ready to sing; she won't be eating cat food--but maybe her own dog food courtesy of her own columnists. Here's an idea: now that you've discovered what the rest of corporate America discovered years ago, that defined-benefit pension programs are unsustainable given the massive wave of in-process retiring, longer-living Baby Boomers, perhaps you'll say, hey, why are government workers entitled to defined-benefit pensions if we, like the rest of corporate America, can't afford them? As for sweetheart, golden parachute deals for incompetent former CEO's whom failed to adjust to changing Times (pun intended), and for reporters whom couldn't smell out the story behind their own company: as McLuhan would say, "The medium is the message."



Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

The Rolling Stones, "19th Nervous Breakdown"