Appreciation can make a day,
even change a life.
Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.
Margaret Cousins
Enough!
[The US invasion of Iraq] has cost more than $1.7 trillion, and when all is said and done including interest the cost may well be $6 trillion. Some $212 billion was spent on Iraqi reconstruction with nothing to show for it. Total deaths from US war on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been at least 329, 000 [most non-combatant].Ten years ago the US invaded Iraq under the influence of neo-conservative [policy]. Those [ideas] continued to promote US military action in places like Libya, and next on their agenda is Syria and then on to Iran. It is time for the American people to shout “enough!" - Ron PaulReason Magazine Preview
I want to comment briefly on what I've in the past referred to the Procrustean approach of micromanaging businesses, and yes within that context, doctors. This was an issue I explored in my own interdisciplinary research drawing on human factors and ergonomics. End users do not like or perform well with less natural interfaces. Many traditionally designed IT interfaces were designed from more of a technologist's perspective; users were distracted from the work they were doing to deal with technically-oriented busywork. Similarly, we can view government paperwork and regulations as a Procrustean-designed government elitist hubris, a system designed by and for the convenience of bureaucrats, nothing that materially contributes to health quality outcomes, inconvenient to doctors and patients. We want more usable interfaces for doctors; by that, I mean one that minimally infringes on the time of the doctor, limits paperwork and government micromanagement getting in the way of the doctor's knowledge, experience and related patient treatment and relationship. Any relevant system should be flexible to accommodate industry innovation: novel techniques, meds, etc.
One of my favorite economists, George Mason professor Walter E. Williams, has an awesome weblinks page; one of those is for the more market-oriented American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (Sen. Rand Paul is a member), There is a brilliant essay in the spring AAPS Journal by Lawrence Huttoon: "Time to Stop Tyranny in Medicine."
Busting Liberal Myths:
Union, Statist Propaganda and Distortion
Earworms: How to Get Rid of Songs Repeating in Your Mind: Next Validation: Do Techniques Work On Obama Soundbites?
Since I regularly embed music, this little science news story interested me (hopefully not done at taxpayer expense). I can't relate to current music performers sampled in the study (Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, etc.: people with a good taste in music are immune from contemporary earworms), although they included a couple of Beatles' red album classics (although I would have probably chosen 'Help', 'Yesterday', 'Hey, Jude' and 'Let It Be') I do like the suggestion one of the Telegraph's commentators, overthecoastline, whom suggested a mechanism that works for me: "Whenever I get any song stuck in my head, I think of the very real possibility of Obama being in office for the rest of his miserable life, and that sobers me up quickly, and dispenses with any other thought, song pattern or shred of happiness I previously had in my head. "
I can think of a number of songs of that fit the mode; one commentator suggested "My Sharona", but other 80's tunes, off the top of my head: 'Come On, Eileen' and 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'. But how can you ignore The King's classic chorus that goes on forever:
Normally rational adults should be panicked over an amateur in the White House whose solution to any problem is to spend future tax revenues or to steal even more seed corn needed for economic growth. He and his party have repeated almost every policy mistake from Hoover and FDR in the 1930's. He is unable to learn from his mistakes; he engages in deceptive double-speak where "compromise" refers to capitulation to one-sided progressive "solutions" with at most token concessions (which for instance might amount to little more than pilot programs of necessary, overdue reforms.)
Let me just take into consideration Medicare, which I discussed in some detail in yesterday's post. I've seen a lot of taxpayer-paid promo spots paying lip service to improved government controls. Let's point out that Medicare's costs have been blowing past projections from the get-go, back from its inception, the Democrats have controlled one or both chambers of Congress almost continually since then.
The game playing is very sophisticated--just like Pomzi schemes. The Democrats pay lip service to transparency, but in fact unfunded liabilities are off the balance sheets, not unlike Enron on steroids. If you look at progressive rigged comparisons of administrative costs (Cato's Mike Cannon does a good job discussing this point), private insurers take on costs related to fraud prevention and comprehensive patient care the public sector piecemeal FFS system doesn't.
If you are a nonprofit, you don't really have an intrinsic incentive to invest in new, labor-saving technologies, re-engineer business processes, etc. Often the government adds costly stipulations for reimbursements which reflect political, not economic priorities (the ObamaCare "free birth control" mandate is a classic example). There are other things: for example, physicians could be tempted to schedule more office visits to make up for reduced fees. Cannon brings up a point I have mentioned independently in past posts (because of ubiquitous motorized scooter ads (which promise to help qualifying applicants with government paperwork, etc. while they end up with the product at little, if any out-of-pocket costs); he discusses a quid pro quo for physician referrals
This is not a partisan diatribe, but remember when Obama and Democrats hyped transparency. To them special interests are things like a decades-old tax treatment (percentage depletion) of natural resource depletion (which in the LONG RUN could result in more deductions than under cost depletion), but they don't count as special interests giveaways to crony Big Green Energy, e.g., ethanol subsidies. Almost anything you can think of--guaranteed deposits, loans, pensions; farm, transit, school lunch subsidies; federal government set-asides (as Ted Dehaven points out: "Because set-asides effectively limit the competition for a government contract, taxpayers can end up paying even more – especially when economies of scale would have allowed a larger business to offer a lower-cost alternative. Cato adjunct scholar, Dr. Veronique de Rugy, has found that 'no more than 1 percent of [all] small business loans each year are SBA loans. The private sector finances most loans without government guarantee and, hence, the SBA is largely irrelevant in the capital market.”' Moreover, because SBA financed loans have below market rates, small businesses who aren’t subsidized by the government are placed at a competitive disadvantage."
In fact, the whole Democratic economic agenda has been about picking winners and losers in the marketplace--not to mention de facto nationalizations of home loans, student loans, health care, retirement programs, flood insurance. Every single progressive initiative, whether we are talking about overcapacity, poorly maintained highways and bridges past their lifecycle, public sector pension plans or entitlement programs, almost every single government agency overseeing guarantees, not to mention hundreds of billions in dysfunctional anti-poverty and education programs, with nothing to show but high dropout rates or socially promoted graduates, many with poor math and literacy skills; a deterioration of family structures in inner cities, a high percentage of pregnancies by unmarried women... I could go on and on. And voters keep returning the same idiots or related partisans to office wanting to throw even more of their grandchildren's good tax money after bad at failed "solutions".
Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats treat voters like a mother-in-law coming over for a visit: they sweep things under the rug or into closets. They aren't like the Frito-Lay salesman taking expired merchandise off the shelf. No private toll operator would ever let roads fall into disrepair, because people won't pay to use the roads. The people know that they pay a high gas tax--but they don't realize that gas-sipper vehicle owners don't pay their fair share of maintenance costs and they are also paying to subsidize transit riders. (A lot of yuppies and city residents vote Democrat, but of course they aren't "special interests".)
In fact, Obama has done virtually nothing proactive on the debt even after the credit raters downgraded US debt for the first time in history. He has not come forward with a social security solution, 8 years after Bush made it the first item of his second term, and more than 2 years after social security first ran a pay-go deficit, years ahead of schedule. Medicare is in even worse shape (Cannon of Cato scorns the Obama point about extending the Medicare "trust fund": the government is running a trillion dollars in debt: if the trust fund cashes in a Treasury IOU, it's not like the government has the cash--in essence, it converts government-held debt to publicly-held debt. From a total debt perspective, of course, the transaction is a wash.)
Why solve these iceberg-below-the-surface problems sooner than later? It's a moral issue--first of all, I want to privatize all these government programs, but short of that, we current workers are not pulling our weight. That shifts the burden to future generations. I'm still several years away from retirement, but the idea that I'll be getting $3 for every $1 I put into the Medicare system means the other $2 are coming out of someone else's pocket. (I hope that my nephews and nieces remember I'm an awesome uncle...) I worry the next generation is going to run into one government program bailout after the next out of general revenues.
Political Cartoon
With all due respect to Glenn, I would have had had Obama and the elephant on a hunting trip, where Obama shoots skeet and the elephant shoots himself in the foot.
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| Courtesy of Glenn McCoy and Townhall |
Backstreet Boys, "All I Have to Give"
