Healthcare:
Will it work? The jury’s still out and will be for quite some time. What we do know is that what we had wasn’t working. Insurance companies were dropping sick people causing the government to pick up their coverage or forcing the people to use hospital emergency rooms as initial health providers, raising the cost of their care into the stratosphere. In 2009, in the midst of the recession, healthcare Insurers made a 26% profit while canceling coverage for sick people. The old health care system was unaffordable to the user, too expensive for the country and did not create the kind of coverage necessary for the sick. For fifty years neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have had the balls to face up to the problems. Obama did, with no help from the other side. Maybe it won’t work but at least somebody stood up and did something. Hiding your head in the sand only gets you shot in the butt. We still need to reform what we have and that need will continue but we must protect the Health Care bill from the greedy insurance companies and their lobbyists.
Why has China been able to make such great progress?
Well for one thing because they had so far to go but mainly because they have a very efficient form of government. It works like a benevolent dictatorship, which every basic civics student knows is the most efficient form of government because there are no checks once a decision is made. China wants to build a dam. The prime minister says “go” and it gets built… right away. We want to build a dam and after that decision is made it has to go through approvals by dozens of agencies and be proposed to all kinds of boards for their approval. This is a very slow process and very inefficient but at least when the dam gets built, it will work for the majority of people. In China it doesn’t matter how the majority feels. That’s why they built a series of dams that pushed hundred of towns out of the way, put thousands of people out of work and made tens of thousands homeless . But the dams got done in very little time and now they have great hydro-electric potential. It depends what kind of trade-off you want.
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How Come Germany has Come back so Much Faster from the Crash than we did?
There are a umber of reasons. First the Germans didn’t go into personal debt the way we did in the past ten years. Then there is the fact that they still have a manufacturing economy and we don’t. We don’t make things anymore so we are losing our balance of trade. Even more important is the way the German’s treated the crash. They had a manufacturing base so when their paper profits turned to real paper they didn’t panic. Rather than firing workers when things went bad they reduced their running costs by cutting workers hours and reducing their pay, which allowed them to keep the workers on hand so that they were available when things picked up. They reworked their pension system, raised the retirement age, trimmed workers benefits and provided an affordable national health care system that costs half as much as ours. Our businesses did none of this. We fired workers so that we could pay bonuses to executives and then we had no trained workers ready to go when business did come back. Can you imagine the outcry from the unions if our big businesses wanted to cut hours, pensions and the like. I’m not saying they would be wrong because big business has a long history of despicable treatment of labor.
Additionally Germany has a vey refined series of tech schools and a sophisticated apprentice program that constantly feeds tech savvy workers into the positions abandoned b retiring workers. We have almost no tech schools or apprenticeship programs, mainly because our unions want everyone who walks through the door to get paid like they’ve been there for 20 years. So we have nothing to fall back on.
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More dumb Republicans
Mitch McConnell R-Kentucky, the Right Wing leader of the house is another “brilliant legislator” who has been beating the no tax cut programs drum as a solution to the debt. This weekend he was asked the same question that Sessions, Cornyn and Boehner were asked in previous weeks. “What program would you cut to balance the lack of tax revenues and help balance the budget?” He like his moronic predecessors had no answer. You’d think if they couldn’t answer the question they’d at least have enough brains not to set it up. I guess not.
Then he was asked why he thought 31% of Republicans thought that Obama was a Muslim when it’s been shown that he’s a Protestant?
His answer: “Most people are questioning the President’s faith in the government.”
Does he really think that answer goes with that question? Is he completely insane or just dumb as a post?
Is High Speed Rail Important to this Nation’s Infrastructure?
Absolutely. Maybe it shouldn’t be the top item, but it should definitely be near the top. Why? Well let’s start with the fact that it will seriously reduce road pollution and air travel. It would practically eliminate air travel up and down the eastern seaboard and it would do it with less investment than is currently spent on highways and airports. Of the world’s 32 most developed nations, the United States is last in percentage of inter-city rail travel. The U.S. has metro areas with more than a million people such as Nashville, Columbus, Phoenix and Las Vegas with no inter-city passenger rail of any kind. This is ridiculous. High speed rail reduces the carbon footprint of highway travel to almost zero, reduces traffic congestion, rejuvenates dying towns and creates millions of jobs. This is illustrated in Spain where Ciudad Real a dying city of almost 100,000 people about 100 miles south of Madrid has almost completely rejuvenated by attracting professors to the University of Castilla-La Mancha and business types for its industries from Madrid now that the over two and a half hour commute by car has been reduced to less than 50 minutes by high-speed rail.
A high-speed rail link that ran from Boston to New York, to Philadelphia, to Washington would cut travel times by almost two thirds. A high-speed train from NY to Washington, a four and a half hour car ride with no traffic would take about an hour and a half. It now takes almost four hours to get to Washington from NY by plane. The flight is less than an hour but it takes a half hour to the airport, an hour and a half at the airport and a half hour in from the airport with no traffic.
Economically, there has been much conjecture. Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser, in a much touted series in the NY Times argues that the costs far outweigh the benefits of high-speed rail travel but Yonah Freemark, a Yale research fellow describes Glaeser’s research as “a sorry mix of omission, over simplification, distortion and deficiency.” And comes up with a figure for a proposed Dallas to Houston rail line that would produce over $30M in benefits per year.
On top of this we have to consider that aviation receives billions of dollars each year in subsidies for administration, security, noise mitigation, etc., along with tax free financing for such as cargo buildings, retail stores, etc. In addition 75 to 90% of airport planning and development is covered by government grants. Our highways are subsidized with every gallon of gas we buy plus over $40B a year in construction and maintenance funds from the Federal Highway Account. Since 1983, mass transportation has received only about 1/8 of highway taxes and none went to high-speed rail. We’re really missing the boat on this one.
Big Business or Treason?
We all have come to realize that Wall Street is responsible, for the most part, for the current economic problems from which the country is suffering. But it wasn’t enough for these greedy slobs to bankrupt the country, now we find out that they have been betraying it to it’s enemies. A recent NY Times article by Robert Mazur pinpoints Barclay’s bank, ABN/Amro bank, Credit Suisse Corp., Union Bank of California, American Express Bank International, Bank Atlantic and Wachovia as laundering money for either, Libya, Sudan, Iran, Cuba, Myanmar or for various drug organizations in Mexico, Central and South America. None of this laundering is either legal or in the best interests of our country and the laundering that has involved nations that are either anti-American or that harbor our enemies must be regarded as treasonous. Despite this no one has gone to jail for any of these offenses. Many of the banks have paid huge fines (miniscule compared to the profits they made), but none of the officers of these banks are doing time. Why not? That’s the important question. Why aren’t these greedy traitors in jail? According to Mr. Mazur, the federal investigators responsible say they can’t come up with names. How dumb are these guys? The names are on every piece of paper the banks put out. They are the names of the Presidents, the CEOs the CFOs and the COOs. These are the guys responsible for what those banks do. They make the big bucks and therefore the buck has to stop with them. Every one of these criminal traitors has to go to jail. Come on Attorney General Eric Holder, get off your lazy, incompetent butt and do your job.
Michael Moore:
Congratulations to Michael Moore for his 9/15 blog, reminding us that there were almost as many liberals as conservatives that backed the war in Iraq. That among them were Al Franken and the NY Times. Thanks also for reminding us that an opposition voice like that of Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for oppossing the war.
How to Vote in NY:
The new voting system in NY seems designed for failure. I have never seen such a stupid hodge podge. Whoever designed it should be forced to stand in a corner and use it for the next ten years of his mis-spent life. The unfortunate fact is that voting in this country doesn’t come with an intelligence test. Any moron, as long as he or she is18 and a citizen can vote. Therefore the first requirement for any voting system is simplicity. We had a pretty good system. You go into the booth, you flick the little handles next to your candidates name and you pull the lever to record the vote.
Now you go to one booth where you mark a paper ballot. This first step is where the system immediately fails. You must color in a small circle. You can’t check or X your choice, you must color in the circle. Guaranteed at least half the voters will not get this right. (See my Sept. 6th piece on Glen Beck & jury duty). Then you have to take this paper to a scanner and scan it in. The confusion over which side goes up and which end goes in first will surely result in as many ballots being mutilated as will actually be recorded.
First rule of functionality: keep it simple stupid.
Second rule of functionality: every piece of the process must be indestructible.
At our voting place, most of the pole workers didn’t understand the system themselves. A few had figured it out but they, for the most part, were unable to make their slower co-workers understand. This system is a disaster. It makes hanging chads look like the work of geniuses.