People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.
I don't believe in circumstances.
The people who get on in this world are
the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and,
if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
The Conservative Future Project
One of the smears I despise is the characterization of conservatives as anti-science, anti-evolution, etc. It simply isn't true; for example, Pope Francis is a former high school chemistry teacher. This isn't to say there isn't a vocal minority, particularly on the single issue creationist front; I have used this blog to blast any ideological tampering with public school curricula, whether it's creationists, climate change alarmists, multiculturalist ideologues, etc.
I'm enthusiastic about all sorts of projects, including the development of synthetic organs and plastic blood: imagine, for instance, recurring issues of limited supply for people with rarer blood types. . I've been pushing to shrink the critical path of FDA and patent approvals.
This is an excerpt from their biotech page:
- Expounding upon the positive, ethical, and utilitarian implications of augmentation and advanced gene therapy
- Analyzing ways to reduce the often crippling burdens that FDA Phase I and II clinical trials place upon biotechnology companies, especially for small businesses.
- Evaluating onerous tax burdens placed on small biotech companies, like the medical device excise tax (MDET)
- Produce a white paper incorporating anticipated scientific and medical advancements in order to better prepare strategies to streamline their legalization for testing and commercialization.
The Disability Industrial Complex
Probably the best-known example of social security disability fraud personally involved the most notorious fiscal hawk in Washington--Tom Coburn (R-OK). Coburn had hired a local tree trimmer to do some physically demanding work around his property. After the work was complete, the worker asked Coburn to make the check out to his mother; he explained that he had filed for social security disability Coburn reported that he managed to convince the man to withdraw his application. (There is a group of lawyers dedicated to help people fight for disability claims. Here is an example of a vested-interest blogger whom basically argues, in the context of Coburn's tree trimmer, that the world is complex, e.g., some disabled people can do work over short periods of time, but it's not sustainable. Yeah, right: the man wasn't trying to mislead the government about his health and his ability to work; he knew getting paid by Coburn would be a red flag for investigators.)
Ironically NPR has published some interesting work on this issue here. There are a couple of key exhibits in the piece: one shows a correlation between unemployment and disability fillings, and the second shows that health claim categories have changed in distributions over time. For example, nearly 40% today involve back pain or related issues--nearly 4 rimes the percentage 50 years ago; mental health has also exploded. The following example from the author (Chana Joffe-Walt) is telling:
Four years ago, when I was working as a reporter in Seattle, I did that story. I stood with workers in a dead mill in Aberdeen, Washington and memorialized the era when you could graduate from high school and get a job at a mill and live a good life. That was the end of the story.
But after I got interested in disability, I followed up with some of the guys to see what happened to them after the mill closed. One of them, Scott Birdsall, went to lots of meetings where he learned about retraining programs and educational opportunities. At one meeting, he says, a staff member pulled him aside.
"Scotty, I'm gonna be honest with you," the guy told him. "There's nobody gonna hire you … We're just hiding you guys." The staff member's advice to Scott was blunt: "Just suck all the benefits you can out of the system until everything is gone, and then you're on your own."
Scott, who was 56 years old at the time, says it was the most real thing anyone had said to him in a while.
Scott tried school for a while, but hated it. So he took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the system. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, "Since I've had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won't have worry to about this stuff anymore." It worked; Scott is now on disability. It wasn't just Scott. I talked to a bunch of mill guys who took this path -- one who shattered the bones in his ankle and leg, one with diabetes, another with a heart attack. When the mill shut down, they all went on disability.Joffe-Walt also mentions a doctor whom asked about his patients' education level: he was more likely to judge disability for those people without a college degree, i.e., more employable. (Of course, that's not a valid reason for a medical opinion--I consider that a violation of professional ethics, if not aiding and abetting fraud.)
Forbes' Avik Roy puts some numbers to this scam: about $200B a year. The program will exhaust its trust fund in about 3 years. Roy cites a study debunking the usual rationalization that it reflects an aging Baby Boomer population; much more prominent factors are Reagan's approval of liberalized health criteria (1984), benefit generosity, and overall economic conditions.
Fascinating exchange below, but as just one response to the former social security commissioner Michael Astrue, I guarantee numbers back in the mid-1990's did not reflect sustained low-economic/job growth under the Bush and Obama Administrations.
I think at minimum like Roy suggests, we need to revisit eligibility criteria, review morally hazardous compensation levels, and provide private-sector quality fraud detection procedures (if not outsource the effort to competitive bid)
Public Employee Pension Transparency Act: Thumbs UP!
GOP Senators Coburn (OK), Thune (SD), and Burr (NC) have a bill which puts states and local governments on notice there will be no federal bailout of their pension programs and will force them to be more explicit about unfunded pension obligations. I enthusiastically concur and would add I would like to see the same with federal pension schemes.
Coburn Puts the Spotlight on Federal Employees-In-Name-Only
We really need an end to public sector unions, period. You know when I'll be convinced there is a public sector employment problem? When schools run out of applicants for elementary school teachers, when there aren't waiting lists to get a federal government desk job, when government employees surrender their job security and retirement benefits for those "higher paying" jobs, at will, in the private sector.
I have worked with government workers at the local, state and federal level. My experiences aren't necessarily representative, but I remember working in an open cubicle in 2004 while a federal employee was loudly playing the latest JibJab video in his cubicle with other employees around him, and I overheard them talking about a work slowdown until "President Kerry" was in office. I had scheduled meetings postponed because employees, without the professional courtesy of notification, decided to go to work out at the gym or get her dog's nails clipped; we aren't talking about a lunch break--the middle of the afternoon. I have seen senior-level consultants, billing at higher rates, spending one-on-one time answering elementary questions on COTS functionality (with plenty of documentation and training materials available). I know one government worker whom was depending on me to figure out how many software licenses were in use at the base when I had access to only a fraction of servers and almost no paperwork. There have been hopelessly incompetent government project managers whom didn't understand broad conceptual issues (for instance, in one case an Oracle Application Server upgrade meant application reports had to be converted to new standard output types). In two cases I've had to deal with government DBA's running obsolete backup scripts, in another case I know government network administrators whom never tested tape backups from a malfunctioning tape drive until a visiting vendor ran into a technical issue requiring recovery from backup.
I know of one ERP upgrade project where the city required 3 test upgrade cycles within 3 months before going live, and the consulting company not only had failed to complete one cycle within 6 weeks (in fact, they never even got to the point of running the upgrade driver patch), but a requisition order hadn't even been cut for a Microsoft compiler which was a prerequisite for payroll processing in the upgraded software; now clearly the vendor was at fault (the vendor project manager, who allegedly held a PhD but was vested in the hiring of incompetent project DBA's, was dismissive of my detailed concerns, attributing them to my being a "control freak"; my fear was a botched upgrade, leaving me firefighting problems for months after the project contractors rolled off, and I repeatedly requested that he have an independent DBA review my concerns), but the local agency IT manager and project manager were failing to monitor and control the process--and neither asked for my input. (I did give my input to my operational manager; I was the operational DBA whom had done multiple upgrades, with operational experience before and after upgrades; I was in daily project status meetings.)
In another case, I was alerted by a colleague that several of the servers I managed had rebooted; I caught a government auditor in the act of pulling out a tape drive out of my main production server rack; he was unapologetic, demanding to know the functionality of the device (Why are you messing with a piece of hardware you know nothing about? It's insane.) There were over 450 hourly workers in St. Louis depending on my main production server being up, and this guy didn't know what he was doing; he had not bothered to go through my civil servant boss in St. Louis or contact me. There is no excuse for his incompetence leading to the reboot of servers. He would have been terminated for cause in the private sector for that alone.
The previous list is just off the top of my head (I'll admit I've seen issues in the private sector, but they tend to be different in frequency, nature and scope--often involving bureaucracy and office politics).
In any event, Sen. Coburn thinks it's high time, given the air traffic controller furlough issue, we start looking at the costs of civil servants whom don't show up to work or are doing union work on the taxpayer dime. I agree.
Political Cartoon
 |
| Couttesy of Henry Payne |
The Temptations, "Get Ready". This is the last of my Temptations retrospective. Next up: Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band.I didn't realize until I reviewed his discography that he has never hit #1 on the Hot 100. I used to buy each new album unheard, even indulgent ones like Nebraska--I wasn't a fan of his more acoustic pieces. I won't sample much from his political era material. I don't mind Springsteen having differing political views, but when he used his celebrity to promote those views and banal politicians, he lost me as a fan. I think the only original (vs. compilation) album I've purchased over the past 20 years is The Rising.
