Mark's quote from Elementary about Ayn Rand seemed apropos after I stumbled across an article from a couple of years back about how Objectivism ruined one woman's childhood. In it Alyssa Bereznak describes how Ayn Rand turned her father into a heartless monster.
Discussion of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism always centers around titans of industry and brilliant self-made composers and scientists. But it completely ignores the realities of everyday life; in particular, marriage and children.
If altruism is fundamentally fatal and unutterably evil, marriage is out of the question. First, the vows: love someone as you love yourself? Impossible. A betrayal of logic and reason and the basic principles of Objectivism.
From the other point of view, who would marry someone whose only goal in life is to satisfy themselves? Who would marry a person who views you only as a means for their own pleasure, a maid and employee? Answer: only another objectivist who had something to gain from the association, or a drooling fool blinded by your brilliance and willing to become your slave. Really, only a person beneath contempt, who had no real initiative of their own, would be content to merely bask in the glory of a great objectivist demigod, instead of striking out on their own path to greatness.
Since there can be no love -- I mean, foolish romantic sentimentality -- why get married at all? Just form a corporation and avoid the inevitable legal morass of divorce when the spouse can no longer one's sexual needs. (This sexual satire from about Rand the New Yorker is hilarious.)
And children? What fool would ever have children? Rand once dismissed a classmate as meaningless because the girl thought her mother was the important thing in her life (which is undeniably true for most children).
Children are a terribly inefficient investment: it takes a decade a two before you can get any useful work out of them. And then there's no guarantee they'll ever actually do anything for you after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their upbringing: if they've been paying attention to your objectivist rants, their only goal in life should be to get you to kick off as soon as possible so they can inherit your vast industrial empire so they can use it to springboard to an even vaster industrial empire. That means there's the very tangible risk of them hurrying you along to your grave...
Rand understood the worthlessness of children and the mortal danger of allowing someone to be your heir -- she had no kids. But mysteriously she remained married to the same man for fifty years, until his death. Of course, she went after for him only for his looks, though she apparently came to love him in her fashion (they had an open marriage). She had a long-standing extramarital affair with Nathaniel Branden, who with his wife operated an institute to promote Objectivism.
Realistically, this kind of amoral and licentious behavior is the only rational outcome of the Objectivist philosophy. Love and loyalty are useless, self-destructive sentiments. Yet this woman is practically deified by the likes of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul.
The most disgusting part of Bereznak's story was when her father asked Alyssa -- then a sophomore in high school -- to petition to be emancipated so that he could stop paying child support. He would then hire her at his law office and charge her rent.
Great family values.
Thursday, November 07, 2013
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
The Real Gateway Drugs
Rob Ford, the conservative mayor of Toronto, has been making news for months now as reports of a video showing him smoking crack have circulated. Now he has admitted it's true.
“You asked me a question back in May and you can repeat that question,” Mr. Ford told a crush of journalists, photographers and camera operators. “Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine. But no, do I, am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately about a year ago.”What's astonishing is how casually this man -- who echoes conservative American talking points as he rails against the government gravy train, AIDS prevention and bike lanes -- admits to "drunken stupors." This is par for the course in North American society, where we have draconian laws against cocaine and heroin, but think nothing of how millions of Americans and Canadians drink enough on a daily basis to cause brain damage.
People use "I was drunk" as an excuse for everything, as a sort of badge of honor. Getting totally trashed by drinking 21 shots on your 21st birthday is a rite of passage. But that's often enough alcohol to kill you. There are 900 cases of alcohol poisoning in the US each week, mostly in the college-age population. And they're still coming up with newer, faster ways to get drunk, from stylish vaportinis to disgusting butt-chugging.
But being drunk is not a mitigating factor. You're responsible for anything you do while drunk if you voluntarily drank yourself stupid. And stupid is the right word.
Two-thirds of violent crimes against intimates are under the influence of alcohol, and 40% of all violent crimes are committed under the influence. Fifty percent of acquaintance rapes involve alcohol. Millions of families are destroyed by alcohol abuse. In 2005, 75,000 people died from alcohol, mostly from car accidents and diseases like cirrhosis and cancer. According to the CDC, alcohol use costs America $223.5 billion a year.
I don't drink, and I've never done drugs. I think alcohol and recreational drugs are a scourge on society, along with gambling, football, NASCAR and pro wrestling. In my less charitable moments I dismiss people who use booze and drugs as mopes and dopes. But I also think the war on drugs is a total waste of money: prohibition failed in the 1930s, and today's illicit drug prohibition is an abject failure. The swillers of scotch and chuggers of beer who keep fighting to keep marijuana illegal are complete hypocrites.
The knock against marijuana is that it's the "gateway drug" that leads to cocaine, heroin and certain death. But as Rob Ford's case shows, alcohol is the real gateway drug: it's easily accessible and its consumption is widely and wildly encouraged -- it's a $400 billion industry. And it's not the only gateway drug: we have dozens now.
Parents are feeding mind-altering drugs like ritalin to their kids under the guise of helping them with attention deficit disorder, but often they just don't like dealing with rambunctious kids. Ritalin is chemically similar to cocaine (it's been considered as "methadone for cocaine addiction"), and in sufficiently high doses is just as addictive. People are becoming addicted to opioid painkillers like oxycodone by the millions, and when doctors cut them off many turn to heroin. Rush Limbaugh circumvented banking regulations to get cash to pay for his oxycodone addiction, which may have cost him his hearing.
Some states have legalized marijuana, but the federal government is still wasting billions of dollars fighting a war against a drug that for all practical purposes is impossible to overdose on. One college kid died from drinking 24 shots in two hours: but Amanda Bynes reportedly smoked 10 joints an hour (surely not a world record) before getting tossed in jail after she tossed a bong out her window. But that's nowhere near the toxicity of alcohol: a deadly dose of THC requires smoking 15,000 joints in 20 minutes. Nicotine is far more toxic: Igor Stravinsky almost died of nicotine poisoning while working on Petrushka; the nicotine in two cigarettes could kill an adult if directly absorbed.
I'm not saying we should hand out drugs like candy. Cocaine should be controlled because of the risks of heart attack, stroke, and high blood pressure. Heroin is extremely addictive (and causes constipation!), but it's an opioid just like Vicodin and Oxycontin which are legal and handed out liberally by doctors for the most minor complaints. Most of the problems with heroin abuse (hepatitis and HIV from needle sharing, poisoning from street drugs cut with crap, etc.) are due to the unsanitary practices of broke and strung-out addicts and its illegality. Crystal meth is bad news all around, but because it's so easy to make and it's illegal, it means quick cash and a top TV series. If better drugs were available, no one would risk using meth and getting meth mouth.
But there's still resistance to decriminalization and legalization because politicians are afraid of looking soft on drugs. House Republicans, always fond of the drug war because it funnels so much money into the pockets of for-profit prison corporations who contribute millions to Republican candidates, are desperate to balance the budget. (They also apparently like to drink on the House floor.)
To show their budgetary desperation and determination House Republicans voted to cut $40 billion in food stamps over the next 10 years. But the federal government spends $15 billion every year on the war on drugs, much of that to stop marijuana. States spend an additional $25 billion. We spend hundreds of billions on prisons, which are mostly filled with minor drug offenders.
If we legalized marijuana and decriminalized drug use, we could save tens of billions of dollars in enforcement efforts annually, clear out our prisons, and reduce the number of burglaries and muggings committed by addicts desperate for the cash to buy their next fix. We could cut the legs off the drug cartels in Latin America, which would eliminate the thousands of murderous criminals Joe Arpaio says are bringing drugs north and taking guns south across the border every day.
People use illicit drugs for all kinds of reasons, but the underlying factor is that drugs fill some void in their brain chemistry. We have tacitly acknowledged this biological fact with our wholesale adoption of drugs like ritalin, Cymbalta, Abilify, Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, and so on, to treat the tiniest symptoms of inattention, depression and social anxiety. And we have alcohol ever-present to give us the liquid courage to beat our wives and rape our dates.
In a country where giant pharmaceutical companies push dope during the nightly news and beer companies glorify drunken behavior during football games, it is preposterous that the DEA is still raiding legal medical marijuana dispensaries for cancer patients.
My solution? Most drugs and alcohol should be legal, though discouraged -- glamorous advertising should be banned. They should be treated like the dirty little industry they are. They should be taxed according to how much their damage costs society. That should be enough to discourage casual use but not enough to encourage criminal activity to circumvent those taxes. Distribution of drugs that cause direct mental or physical damage (incapacitatingly addictive, very high toxicity, damaging to DNA, etc.) should remain illegal, but usage should not be criminal: the users are the victims, not the perpetrators.
So, let us take the first of twelve steps. Repeat after me:
My name is America and I am an alcoholic. And a drug addict. And denying reality.
In The Black
Perhaps I was too hasty in poo-pooing comparisons of our nation's economy to an individual's economy. Certainly, there are plenty of differences that are largely ignored by the Right but there are some similarities that were illustrated quite well over at The Pragmatic Capitalist. The first piece, "The US Government is not $16 Trillion dollars in the hole," points out the obvious.
The IER estimates that total fossil fuel resources owned by the Federal government are valued at over $150 trillion alone. These assets alone are FIFTY FIVE times the amount stated in the CNBC report. But that only scratches the surface. I haven’t even looked into the huge amount of federally owned land and buildings that would surely amount into the hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars. There’s also the gold resources. And there’s the trillions of dollars in its own liabilities that it owns via the Fed and Social Security funds.
Just like an ordinary person who owns land, oil, a profitable business and other assets like gold, the US government also has a gigantic pile of assets that make us far into the black. And that's with all the future Social Security and Medicare liabilities (around $60-7$0 trillion). As PragCap show us, we are not going bankrupt and the people who claim this are simply lying because of their pathological hatred of the US government and their inability to admit fault. Their obsession with spending is essentially holding us back from economic growth and one was to wonder if this is the whole point. They want our country to fail so they can win the argument.
Of course there are still differences which the second link illustrates quite well.
The constraint for the government is different from that of a household or business who can really “run out of money”. The US government’s constraint is not that it will run out of funds, but that it could supply too much liquidity to the private sector thereby causing inflation. So the US government’s real constraint is inflation and not solvency. This is a vastly different issue than the one the US media usually harps on with regards to the budget deficit and the US government’s ability to “afford” its spending.
The USA has an institutional arrangement in which it is a contingent currency issuer. That is, while the Treasury is an operational currency user (meaning it must always have funds in its account at the Fed before it can spend those funds) it has the extraordinary power to tax and issue risk free bonds that the public will always desire to hold so long as inflation is not extraordinarily high. In addition, even in a worst case scenario, the US Treasury can always rely on the Federal Reserve to supply the funds necessary to fund its spending. Therefore, the US government can be thought of as a contingent currency issuer who can issue the funds to spend. This makes it very different from a household.
The US Treasury is a currency user, but the government as a whole can be seen as a contingent currency issuer by institutional design because of this implicit funding guarantee. So the key here is that there’s no solvency constraint as in, “running out of money”. Greece doesn’t have this arrangement. In fact, since the ECB is essentially a foreign central bank there is a real solvency constraint. So banks and private investors have become hesitant to buy Greek bonds because of this flawed institutional arrangement and the lack of an implicit guarantee. It’s apples and oranges compared to the USA.
Once again, not like Greece. Not going bankrupt. Not overspending. Not running out of money. Plenty of assets.
IN THE BLACK.
The IER estimates that total fossil fuel resources owned by the Federal government are valued at over $150 trillion alone. These assets alone are FIFTY FIVE times the amount stated in the CNBC report. But that only scratches the surface. I haven’t even looked into the huge amount of federally owned land and buildings that would surely amount into the hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars. There’s also the gold resources. And there’s the trillions of dollars in its own liabilities that it owns via the Fed and Social Security funds.
Just like an ordinary person who owns land, oil, a profitable business and other assets like gold, the US government also has a gigantic pile of assets that make us far into the black. And that's with all the future Social Security and Medicare liabilities (around $60-7$0 trillion). As PragCap show us, we are not going bankrupt and the people who claim this are simply lying because of their pathological hatred of the US government and their inability to admit fault. Their obsession with spending is essentially holding us back from economic growth and one was to wonder if this is the whole point. They want our country to fail so they can win the argument.
Of course there are still differences which the second link illustrates quite well.
The constraint for the government is different from that of a household or business who can really “run out of money”. The US government’s constraint is not that it will run out of funds, but that it could supply too much liquidity to the private sector thereby causing inflation. So the US government’s real constraint is inflation and not solvency. This is a vastly different issue than the one the US media usually harps on with regards to the budget deficit and the US government’s ability to “afford” its spending.
The USA has an institutional arrangement in which it is a contingent currency issuer. That is, while the Treasury is an operational currency user (meaning it must always have funds in its account at the Fed before it can spend those funds) it has the extraordinary power to tax and issue risk free bonds that the public will always desire to hold so long as inflation is not extraordinarily high. In addition, even in a worst case scenario, the US Treasury can always rely on the Federal Reserve to supply the funds necessary to fund its spending. Therefore, the US government can be thought of as a contingent currency issuer who can issue the funds to spend. This makes it very different from a household.
The US Treasury is a currency user, but the government as a whole can be seen as a contingent currency issuer by institutional design because of this implicit funding guarantee. So the key here is that there’s no solvency constraint as in, “running out of money”. Greece doesn’t have this arrangement. In fact, since the ECB is essentially a foreign central bank there is a real solvency constraint. So banks and private investors have become hesitant to buy Greek bonds because of this flawed institutional arrangement and the lack of an implicit guarantee. It’s apples and oranges compared to the USA.
Once again, not like Greece. Not going bankrupt. Not overspending. Not running out of money. Plenty of assets.
IN THE BLACK.
Other Shoe=Dropped
I was wondering when the other shoe would drop in terms of the hysteria over "If you like your insurance, you get to keep it." It looks like it has.
"If you're an insurance company, you're trying to hang onto the consumers you have at the highest price you can get them," Laura Etherton, a health policy analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told TPM. "You can take advantage of the confusion about what people get to have now. It's a new world. It's disappointing that insurance companies are sending confusing letters to consumers to take advantage of that confusion. The reality is that this could do real harm."
It never ceases to amaze me how folks like Mika Brzezenski get sucked in to the faux outrage. Why are they so insecure? Ah well, I used to be like that so maybe she will learn and become like Juan Williams over at Fox someday.
You should be blaming your insurance company because they have not been providing you with coverage that meets the minimum basic standards for health care. Let me put it more bluntly: your insurance companies have been taking advantage of you and the Affordable Care Act puts in place consumer protection and tells them to stop abusing people. The government did not “force” insurance companies to cancel their own substandard policies.The insurance companies chose to do that rather than do what is right and bring the policies up to code. This would be like saying the government “forces” chemical companies to dispose of toxic waste safely rather than dumping it in the river.
People should be angry that their insurance companies were not paying for these humane, common sense benefits all along. It baffles me that people are directing their anger at the ACA which rights these terrible wrongs.
There's nothing baffling about it. Our country is filled with adolescents who have problem with authority figures and would never think to blame insurance companies because they are filled with wealthy people who, by their very nature, are perfect and should be worshiped. Just blame the government...it's easy!!
So, what does happen to those people whose policies are "cancelled?"
Yeah, you'll have to excuse me if I don't fall for their bullshit again.
"If you're an insurance company, you're trying to hang onto the consumers you have at the highest price you can get them," Laura Etherton, a health policy analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told TPM. "You can take advantage of the confusion about what people get to have now. It's a new world. It's disappointing that insurance companies are sending confusing letters to consumers to take advantage of that confusion. The reality is that this could do real harm."
It never ceases to amaze me how folks like Mika Brzezenski get sucked in to the faux outrage. Why are they so insecure? Ah well, I used to be like that so maybe she will learn and become like Juan Williams over at Fox someday.
You should be blaming your insurance company because they have not been providing you with coverage that meets the minimum basic standards for health care. Let me put it more bluntly: your insurance companies have been taking advantage of you and the Affordable Care Act puts in place consumer protection and tells them to stop abusing people. The government did not “force” insurance companies to cancel their own substandard policies.The insurance companies chose to do that rather than do what is right and bring the policies up to code. This would be like saying the government “forces” chemical companies to dispose of toxic waste safely rather than dumping it in the river.
People should be angry that their insurance companies were not paying for these humane, common sense benefits all along. It baffles me that people are directing their anger at the ACA which rights these terrible wrongs.
There's nothing baffling about it. Our country is filled with adolescents who have problem with authority figures and would never think to blame insurance companies because they are filled with wealthy people who, by their very nature, are perfect and should be worshiped. Just blame the government...it's easy!!
So, what does happen to those people whose policies are "cancelled?"
Yeah, you'll have to excuse me if I don't fall for their bullshit again.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Good Words
“I said this to the RNC last summer. I’m in this to win, because if you don’t win, you can’t govern. If you can’t govern, you can’t move the country, the state, the city — whatever you’re running for — in the direction it needs to be moved in. I think we’ve had too many people [in the Republican Party] who’ve become less interested in winning an election and more interested in winning an argument.”---Governor Chris Christie, November 4, 2013
Does Governor Christie read my blog?:)
Congratulations, Governor, on your victory tonight. And congrats to Governor Elect Terry McAuliffe as well.
Does Governor Christie read my blog?:)
Congratulations, Governor, on your victory tonight. And congrats to Governor Elect Terry McAuliffe as well.
Election Day
I've had a few emails with requests to talk about today's election. I had planned on putting something anyway to encourage people to vote in off years like this so that's up first.
GO VOTE.
Turnout is so low in the odd years but these elections are where local issues (see: things that really affect your life) are of paramount importance. School Boards, City Council, Mayoral races...all of these matter so your vote counts and more so than usual because of the low turnout.
As far as Virginia and New Jersey goes, it looks like Terry McAuliffe will beat Ken Cuccinelli and Chris Christie will beat Barbara Buono so no surprises really in either of those states. If McAullife does win, the GOP can say goodbye to Virginia which pretty much puts national elections out of reach. Unless, of course, they nominate Christie which would make 2016 more competitive. What to do...what to do...pick a guy who can win a national election (and who would be good president, in my view) but isn't "pure" or pick someone like Cruz, who fulfills their porn fantasies and will win exactly five states and maybe not even his home state if Hilary runs.
Decisions decisions...
GO VOTE.
Turnout is so low in the odd years but these elections are where local issues (see: things that really affect your life) are of paramount importance. School Boards, City Council, Mayoral races...all of these matter so your vote counts and more so than usual because of the low turnout.
As far as Virginia and New Jersey goes, it looks like Terry McAuliffe will beat Ken Cuccinelli and Chris Christie will beat Barbara Buono so no surprises really in either of those states. If McAullife does win, the GOP can say goodbye to Virginia which pretty much puts national elections out of reach. Unless, of course, they nominate Christie which would make 2016 more competitive. What to do...what to do...pick a guy who can win a national election (and who would be good president, in my view) but isn't "pure" or pick someone like Cruz, who fulfills their porn fantasies and will win exactly five states and maybe not even his home state if Hilary runs.
Decisions decisions...
Hmm..
Yesterday on "Morning Joe," Zeke Emmanuel said that anyone who had an insurance policy in place before March 23rd, 2010 and has since not had any alterations to that plan, got to keep it. Is this true?
Monday, November 04, 2013
Good Words
"Philosopher-in-Chief for the intellectually bankrupt." ---Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes on the CBS drama, "Elementary" (Season 2, Episode 3, "We Are Everyone.") on the subject of Ayn Rand.
Show Him This
There are many myths about our nation's debt and most our being pushed by the Right. "We can't keep spending like this!" they whine incessantly or "sooner or later, the money will run out!!" Strange, really, because they act as though we don't control our own money supply nor have any revenue. The simple fact is we have both. We have collect just under 6 trillion dollars in revenue and enjoy a 17 trillion dollar economy.
But talking about the economy in a simplistic way is what the Right does, not the rest of us who understand the complexities of monetary policy. The truth is, as Lawrence Summers puts it, the debt isn't that big of a deal.
More fundamental is this: Current and future budget deficits are now a second-order problem relative to other, more pressing issues facing the U.S. economy. Projections that there is a major deficit problem are highly uncertain. And policies that indirectly address deficit issues by focusing on growth are sounder in economic terms and more plausible in political terms than the long-term budget deals much of the policy community is obsessed with.
The latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projection is that the federal deficit will fall to 2 percent of GDP by 2015 and that a decade from now the debt-to-GDP ratio will be below its current level of 75 percent. While the CBO projects that under current law the debt-to-GDP ratio will rise over the longer term, the rise is not large relative to the scale of the U.S. economy. It would be offset by an increase in revenue or a decrease in spending of 0.8 percent of GDP for the next 25 years and 1.7 percent of GDP for the next 75 years.
Here is our budget deficit over the last five years.
There is no doubt we are heading in the right direction. And, as I have explained many times, we have been in debt pretty much since we have started as a country. Take a look below.
Certainly, we have been in far worse spots and predictions of 100 percent debt to GDP in the last few years have not materialized. Right now we stand at just over 70 percent debt to GDP which is entirely manageable. In fact, there are perils in the philosophy of austerity as Eduardo Porter pointed out recently that illustrate the cost-benefit analysis of taking on some more debt and getting paid off in the long run with more growth and thus, less debt.
A recent analysis by the research firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that cuts to discretionary government spending — roughly everything the government spends money on except for Social Security and Medicare — trimmed growth by seven-tenths of a percentage point a year since 2010, and cost some 1.2 million jobs. The costs are mounting across the Atlantic, too, despite the contentment in London and Berlin.
A study by an economist from the European Commission published this month concluded that spending cuts put in place by governments from Greece to Germany since 2011 had stalled the economic turnaround of the entire euro area. A host of economic analyses over the last three years by researchers from different corners of the world — including Roberto Perotti at Milan’s Bocconi University, Alan Taylor and Òscar Jordá at the University of California, Davis and researchers at the I.M.F. — have concluded almost invariably that budget cutting in a depressed economy is counterproductive.
By cutting teachers or raising taxes, reducing government transfers or trimming public purchases of goods and services, austerity shrinks the economy in the short term, often more than it shrinks the burden of public debt.
Exactly right. This is why we have the anemic growth that we have right now. I suspect that many in the business wing of the GOP know this and they just want Obama to fail so they bloviate about cutting taxes and bring guys like Arthur Laffer back into the mix.
I think that Simon Wren-Lewis, a professor of economics at Oxford University, has it right. Arguing that the tiny amount of economic growth Britain has recently achieved after a years-long downturn proved austerity to be the right policy is tantamount to saying that global warming skeptics had “won the climate change argument because of recent heavy snow.” Of course, they argue that as well!
So, when your weird uncle, who, at the age of 40-60 something, still has a problem with authority, starts spouting off at the upcoming holiday gatherings about the deficit, the debt, and how it's "math," show him the information in this post and have him explain his understanding of these facts. And then read him this.
If even half the energy that has been devoted over the past five years to “budget deals” were devoted instead to “growth strategies,” we could enjoy sounder government finances and a restoration of the power of the American example. At a time when the majority of the United States thinks that it is moving in the wrong direction, and family incomes have been stagnant, a reduction in political fighting is not enough. We have to start focusing on the issues that actually are most important.
Drop me an email or put up a comment and let me know what he says:)
But talking about the economy in a simplistic way is what the Right does, not the rest of us who understand the complexities of monetary policy. The truth is, as Lawrence Summers puts it, the debt isn't that big of a deal.
More fundamental is this: Current and future budget deficits are now a second-order problem relative to other, more pressing issues facing the U.S. economy. Projections that there is a major deficit problem are highly uncertain. And policies that indirectly address deficit issues by focusing on growth are sounder in economic terms and more plausible in political terms than the long-term budget deals much of the policy community is obsessed with.
The latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projection is that the federal deficit will fall to 2 percent of GDP by 2015 and that a decade from now the debt-to-GDP ratio will be below its current level of 75 percent. While the CBO projects that under current law the debt-to-GDP ratio will rise over the longer term, the rise is not large relative to the scale of the U.S. economy. It would be offset by an increase in revenue or a decrease in spending of 0.8 percent of GDP for the next 25 years and 1.7 percent of GDP for the next 75 years.
Here is our budget deficit over the last five years.
There is no doubt we are heading in the right direction. And, as I have explained many times, we have been in debt pretty much since we have started as a country. Take a look below.
Certainly, we have been in far worse spots and predictions of 100 percent debt to GDP in the last few years have not materialized. Right now we stand at just over 70 percent debt to GDP which is entirely manageable. In fact, there are perils in the philosophy of austerity as Eduardo Porter pointed out recently that illustrate the cost-benefit analysis of taking on some more debt and getting paid off in the long run with more growth and thus, less debt.
A recent analysis by the research firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that cuts to discretionary government spending — roughly everything the government spends money on except for Social Security and Medicare — trimmed growth by seven-tenths of a percentage point a year since 2010, and cost some 1.2 million jobs. The costs are mounting across the Atlantic, too, despite the contentment in London and Berlin.
A study by an economist from the European Commission published this month concluded that spending cuts put in place by governments from Greece to Germany since 2011 had stalled the economic turnaround of the entire euro area. A host of economic analyses over the last three years by researchers from different corners of the world — including Roberto Perotti at Milan’s Bocconi University, Alan Taylor and Òscar Jordá at the University of California, Davis and researchers at the I.M.F. — have concluded almost invariably that budget cutting in a depressed economy is counterproductive.
By cutting teachers or raising taxes, reducing government transfers or trimming public purchases of goods and services, austerity shrinks the economy in the short term, often more than it shrinks the burden of public debt.
Exactly right. This is why we have the anemic growth that we have right now. I suspect that many in the business wing of the GOP know this and they just want Obama to fail so they bloviate about cutting taxes and bring guys like Arthur Laffer back into the mix.
I think that Simon Wren-Lewis, a professor of economics at Oxford University, has it right. Arguing that the tiny amount of economic growth Britain has recently achieved after a years-long downturn proved austerity to be the right policy is tantamount to saying that global warming skeptics had “won the climate change argument because of recent heavy snow.” Of course, they argue that as well!
So, when your weird uncle, who, at the age of 40-60 something, still has a problem with authority, starts spouting off at the upcoming holiday gatherings about the deficit, the debt, and how it's "math," show him the information in this post and have him explain his understanding of these facts. And then read him this.
If even half the energy that has been devoted over the past five years to “budget deals” were devoted instead to “growth strategies,” we could enjoy sounder government finances and a restoration of the power of the American example. At a time when the majority of the United States thinks that it is moving in the wrong direction, and family incomes have been stagnant, a reduction in political fighting is not enough. We have to start focusing on the issues that actually are most important.
Drop me an email or put up a comment and let me know what he says:)
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Sunday, November 03, 2013
All Too Familiar
From a story on the LAX shooter, Paul Ciancia...
In a part of the letter, addressing T.S.A. employees, he wrote that he wanted to “instill fear in your traitorous minds.”
“It was very hard for them,” said Amanda Lawson, 21, a waitress in the Broadway Diner in Pennsville, who graduated from Pennsville Memorial High School in 2010 with Mr. Ciancia’s brother. She described both brothers as “awkward.” “They had some depression issues, and they both got obsessive,” she said on Saturday.
But he had apparently turned against the government, and it seemed clear that Mr. Ciancia knew he was putting himself in a suicidal situation by marching with an assault weapon and 100 rounds of ammunition into the third-busiest airport in the country, officials said. He also sent a text message to his brother that left the family alarmed. He seemed to have a specific grudge against the T.S.A.; his handwritten note singled out the agency as a symbol of what was wrong with the government, mentioning by name the former head of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, according to a federal official. Bystanders said the gunman had appeared to be targeting T.S.A. agents in particular.
Obsessive, depression and turning against the government...sounds like TSM commenters to me! Ah well, at least his second amendment rights were protected.
In a part of the letter, addressing T.S.A. employees, he wrote that he wanted to “instill fear in your traitorous minds.”
“It was very hard for them,” said Amanda Lawson, 21, a waitress in the Broadway Diner in Pennsville, who graduated from Pennsville Memorial High School in 2010 with Mr. Ciancia’s brother. She described both brothers as “awkward.” “They had some depression issues, and they both got obsessive,” she said on Saturday.
But he had apparently turned against the government, and it seemed clear that Mr. Ciancia knew he was putting himself in a suicidal situation by marching with an assault weapon and 100 rounds of ammunition into the third-busiest airport in the country, officials said. He also sent a text message to his brother that left the family alarmed. He seemed to have a specific grudge against the T.S.A.; his handwritten note singled out the agency as a symbol of what was wrong with the government, mentioning by name the former head of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, according to a federal official. Bystanders said the gunman had appeared to be targeting T.S.A. agents in particular.
Obsessive, depression and turning against the government...sounds like TSM commenters to me! Ah well, at least his second amendment rights were protected.
Opening Minds
Reverend Jim directed me to this truly magnificent piece over at christianitytoday.com.
Yet in many ways, a version of that conversation is taking place today in the West. There are those who side with Paley against Darwin: Life is designed, and therefore did not evolve. There are those who side with Darwin against Paley: Life evolved, and therefore is not designed. There are some for whom Darwin rules out Milton: Animals and humans have always died, so there was no Eden, no Adam, no Eve, and no fall. Then there are those for whom Milton rules out Darwin: Yes, there was, so no, they haven't.
Still others agree with Darwin and Paley, but not Milton: Evolution is designed by God, but a literal fall never happened. Some even agree with Darwin and Milton but not Paley: Evolution happened, and a literal fall happened, but the design argument is just a God-of-the-gaps thing, and we shouldn't use it. And many proponents of each view get rather angry with people who hold a different one. It's all very confusing.
To make a complicated situation worse, there is a tiny minority of oddballs who think all three of them were essentially right, and who believe in the fall of Adam and Eve, the argument from design, and Darwinian evolution. Oddballs like me.
Is this an indication that some minds are opening? I hope so!
Yet in many ways, a version of that conversation is taking place today in the West. There are those who side with Paley against Darwin: Life is designed, and therefore did not evolve. There are those who side with Darwin against Paley: Life evolved, and therefore is not designed. There are some for whom Darwin rules out Milton: Animals and humans have always died, so there was no Eden, no Adam, no Eve, and no fall. Then there are those for whom Milton rules out Darwin: Yes, there was, so no, they haven't.
Still others agree with Darwin and Paley, but not Milton: Evolution is designed by God, but a literal fall never happened. Some even agree with Darwin and Milton but not Paley: Evolution happened, and a literal fall happened, but the design argument is just a God-of-the-gaps thing, and we shouldn't use it. And many proponents of each view get rather angry with people who hold a different one. It's all very confusing.
To make a complicated situation worse, there is a tiny minority of oddballs who think all three of them were essentially right, and who believe in the fall of Adam and Eve, the argument from design, and Darwinian evolution. Oddballs like me.
Is this an indication that some minds are opening? I hope so!
Great Words
"Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you" - Jesus Christ (Luke 17:21).
What does that mean to you?
What does that mean to you?
Saturday, November 02, 2013
Good Words
"I simply cannot stand with a Party where its most extreme element promote hate and division amongst people. Nothing about my platform has, nor will it change. The government shutdown was simply the straw that broke the camels back. I guess being an American just isn’t good enough anymore… I refuse to be part of an extremist movement in the GOP that only appears to thrive on fear and hate mongering of anyone and everyone who doesn’t walk their line.” (Jason Thigpen, Congressional Candidate for North Carolina's 3rd District).
According to Charlie Cook, this is an R+10 district so he will likely not defeat Walter B. Jones Jr. Nevertheless, he will pull moderate voters his way if he ends up being the nominee for the Democrats. We do have to start somewhere in that state and what better place in a deep red district. And it flies in the face of conservative "logic," right? I thought everyone was running away from the president and the Democrats. What happened?!!?
According to Charlie Cook, this is an R+10 district so he will likely not defeat Walter B. Jones Jr. Nevertheless, he will pull moderate voters his way if he ends up being the nominee for the Democrats. We do have to start somewhere in that state and what better place in a deep red district. And it flies in the face of conservative "logic," right? I thought everyone was running away from the president and the Democrats. What happened?!!?
Yawn
I'm with Joan Walsh on the latest "hyperventilating," as she puts it, about how incompetent the president is at doing his job. The people that are attempting to stoke this are the same ones that hate him anyway so for me it's a giant snoozefest. Remember how wrong they were about Benghazi and the IRS? Yeah, I think I'll resist my liberal urge to try to be sympathetic to them and reflective and simple ignore it.
In a few weeks, they'll be on to something else.
But what I will do is point out a few interesting pieces on the subject of the ACA. The first one is by Jason Linkins over at HuffPO which really puts a fine tooth comb to the "If you like your health insurance, you get to keep it" line that has elicited so much adolescent bloviation that it's hard for me to keep track of it all.
The other part of the sentence that's sitting there trying to be all razzle-dazzle instead of attaching itself to its simple meaning is the word "like." A lot of people like their health insurance plans for different reasons, but one primary reason so many people "like" their plan is that they like the low, low price of the premium. Of course, as they say, "You get what you pay for," and the insurance market is no different. There are many insurance plans with eminently likeable costs that are not so likeable once you start using the plan. Some cheap plans offer only high-deductible catastrophic coverage. Other cheap plans have lifetime caps on coverage -- which means that if you suffer a major injury or illness that requires long-term or very costly medical care, your insurance company is eventually going to hit the cap and leave you holding the bag and facing the prospect of disastrous debt.
One of the biggest mistakes the Obama administration made was to not educate the public on just how crappy their plans were. Take note of the Jonathan Chait link in the piece as well and read it. Both Linkins and Chait summarize my thoughts quite on this latest "outrage."
Of course, the problem here is really the individual market and that's explained quite well in this graphic from the Times. As I have stated previously, most of the country isn't going to care about this because it doesn't affect them. By the time the dust settles from these recent issues, everyone is going to be much better off. Here's a look at three people's experiences with the health care changes coming out of the individual market which I think is a fair and accurate assessment.
All of this has made me think again of a common misconception that has been perpetuated by the Right. They quite erroneously believe that the people that support the president view him as the perfect savior. We don't. They do this because when he makes mistakes they can gleefully exclaim, "Gotcha!" and then assert that EVERYTHING is then flawed about the president and his policies. This mindset isn't really all that surprising as that's how they actually are with their ideology. They are never wrong and to admit error means they have completely lost (also completely ridiculous). In addition, they can't stand the fact that he has succeeded at anything (they did the same thing with Bill Clinton) because they have nothing other than bloviation to offer.
So, again, we're back to where we always end up: adolescent behavior. The health care market is incredibly complex and the first guy through the wall that tries to fix our problems (President Obama) is going to get bloody through his own mistakes, those of others, and the unbelievably high level of out and out lying by his opponents. Give him credit for at least being bold enough to tackle this very difficult issue and help solve a long running problem. Rather than pile on as the Right is doing right now, they could be helpful.
As they continue with their n'yah n'ayhs, keep that in mind:)
But what I will do is point out a few interesting pieces on the subject of the ACA. The first one is by Jason Linkins over at HuffPO which really puts a fine tooth comb to the "If you like your health insurance, you get to keep it" line that has elicited so much adolescent bloviation that it's hard for me to keep track of it all.
The other part of the sentence that's sitting there trying to be all razzle-dazzle instead of attaching itself to its simple meaning is the word "like." A lot of people like their health insurance plans for different reasons, but one primary reason so many people "like" their plan is that they like the low, low price of the premium. Of course, as they say, "You get what you pay for," and the insurance market is no different. There are many insurance plans with eminently likeable costs that are not so likeable once you start using the plan. Some cheap plans offer only high-deductible catastrophic coverage. Other cheap plans have lifetime caps on coverage -- which means that if you suffer a major injury or illness that requires long-term or very costly medical care, your insurance company is eventually going to hit the cap and leave you holding the bag and facing the prospect of disastrous debt.
One of the biggest mistakes the Obama administration made was to not educate the public on just how crappy their plans were. Take note of the Jonathan Chait link in the piece as well and read it. Both Linkins and Chait summarize my thoughts quite on this latest "outrage."
Of course, the problem here is really the individual market and that's explained quite well in this graphic from the Times. As I have stated previously, most of the country isn't going to care about this because it doesn't affect them. By the time the dust settles from these recent issues, everyone is going to be much better off. Here's a look at three people's experiences with the health care changes coming out of the individual market which I think is a fair and accurate assessment.
All of this has made me think again of a common misconception that has been perpetuated by the Right. They quite erroneously believe that the people that support the president view him as the perfect savior. We don't. They do this because when he makes mistakes they can gleefully exclaim, "Gotcha!" and then assert that EVERYTHING is then flawed about the president and his policies. This mindset isn't really all that surprising as that's how they actually are with their ideology. They are never wrong and to admit error means they have completely lost (also completely ridiculous). In addition, they can't stand the fact that he has succeeded at anything (they did the same thing with Bill Clinton) because they have nothing other than bloviation to offer.
So, again, we're back to where we always end up: adolescent behavior. The health care market is incredibly complex and the first guy through the wall that tries to fix our problems (President Obama) is going to get bloody through his own mistakes, those of others, and the unbelievably high level of out and out lying by his opponents. Give him credit for at least being bold enough to tackle this very difficult issue and help solve a long running problem. Rather than pile on as the Right is doing right now, they could be helpful.
As they continue with their n'yah n'ayhs, keep that in mind:)
Friday, November 01, 2013
All Is Well!
23-year-old Paul Ciancia walked into the LA Airport this afternoon with his assault rifle and started shooting TSA agents before he himself was shot and taken into custody. Clearly mentally ill, Ciancia didn't stop to think that there are plenty of armed personnel all over the airport.
Weird. That's not what the right wing bloggers tell me. In fact, they post moonbat shit like this. Ah well, as long as nobody infringed on Ciancia's 2nd Amendment rights, all is well!
Weird. That's not what the right wing bloggers tell me. In fact, they post moonbat shit like this. Ah well, as long as nobody infringed on Ciancia's 2nd Amendment rights, all is well!
On Stiglitz: Part Ten
In the final chapter of his magnificent work, The Price of Inequality, Joseph Stiglitz details the steps we must take as a nation if we are to fix our economic problems. Before I get to some of those, though, it's very important to note that he sees two possibilities as potential catalysts for change. He defines these avenues after asking the question, "Is There Hope?"
The first possibility is that most Americans come to realize that they are being duped by the wealthy in this country. The biggest recipients of welfare in this country are the wealthy, not "lazy" poor people. Stiglitz has demonstrated this unequivocally throughout his book. Many wealthy and powerful people in this country have essentially brainwashed Americans into thinking that any sort of talk about inequality leads to communism, internment camps, and loss of freedom. Stiglitz hopes (and so do I) that people are going to wake up to this fact and call them on their bullshit. In many ways, they are the ones that are lazy and have become a drag on our society. Addressing inequality leads to a more efficient system of capitalism and, quite frankly, fairness. Americans are realizing this more and more every day that our system simply isn't fair and it needs to change. Sooner or later, they are going to demand it and we will have a sea change in Washington.
The second catalyst, and the one I see more likely in the near term, is that wealthy people themselves will come to realize that they can't enjoy their lifestyles if there is too great a degree of inequality. They also may act out of simple fear of the natives becoming too restless. Indeed, we see people like Nick Hanauer, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg expressing the need for change because it is in the wealthy's best interest. Stigliz sums up why this is so important.
Alex de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief elements of the peculiar genius of American society, something he called "self interest properly understood." The last two words were key. Everyone possesses self interest in a narrow sense: I want what's good for me right now! Self-interest "properly understood" is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else's self interest-in other, to the common welfare-is in fact a precondition for one's ultimate well being (Adam Smith understood as much. See his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). See also Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, "Adam Smith's Economics," The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith pp. 319-65, in particular p.347).
Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook. Rather, he was suggesting the opposite: it was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn't just good for the soul; it's good for business.
Again, we are talking about economic efficiency here, not just fairness. Past business leaders in our nation truly understood this. Henry Ford, for example, paid his employees more money so they could afford to buy his cars. Our economy works at top speed when the engine that fuels it (the middle class) has more money. This is exactly why we need government policy that helps them to this end.
So what changes need to be made? Here are few of the many action items Stiglitz lists.
Rent seeking needs to end immediately through curbing the financial sector of our economy. The revenue we gain from this will be able to fund many programs that can help the poor and the middle class. We need to make the banks more transparent and much smaller than they are now. No more "too big or too interconnected to fail." No more predatory lending, excessive bonuses that encourage risk taking, and offshore banking centers that essentially promote tax evasion. Speaking of taxes, the entire code needs to be reformed to a more progressive system with few loopholes for corporations. I have no problem lowering the statutory rate if we lose the loopholes and far too many breaks our nation's corporations get.
In tandem with this, we have to help out the rest, as Stiglitz puts it. We have to improve access to education so we can be more competitive in the age of globalization. We should ordinary Americans save money by creating government incentive and matching programs, for example. Continuing our efforts to have health care for all will go a long way to helping people save money. Changes to government programs like Social Security need to also be made in order to strengthen efforts that have already proven to be successful in reducing poverty.
We need a monetary policy that focuses on employment and growth as well as inflation. Our trade imbalances need to be corrected further than they already are. Our goal should be full employment. Labor needs to be thought of in a completely different way than it is today. With the reality of cheap labor markets around the world, our nation's workers need to be re-educated and put on different career paths. Our growth agenda should be centered on public investment which has shown to yield fantastic returns in our nation's history (the GI Bill, research, public works).
As of right now, we are being held back by myths and ideological intransigence fueled by adolescent hubris. Those who choose to champion these lies (and there really is no other way to put it nicely) are essentially rooting for our country to fail just so they won't be proved wrong. The 1% of this nation, and in particular the financial sector, are using these people to maintain their lifestyles. Reading through my previous entries on Stigilitz, the task is very simple.
It is now time to stop them.
The first possibility is that most Americans come to realize that they are being duped by the wealthy in this country. The biggest recipients of welfare in this country are the wealthy, not "lazy" poor people. Stiglitz has demonstrated this unequivocally throughout his book. Many wealthy and powerful people in this country have essentially brainwashed Americans into thinking that any sort of talk about inequality leads to communism, internment camps, and loss of freedom. Stiglitz hopes (and so do I) that people are going to wake up to this fact and call them on their bullshit. In many ways, they are the ones that are lazy and have become a drag on our society. Addressing inequality leads to a more efficient system of capitalism and, quite frankly, fairness. Americans are realizing this more and more every day that our system simply isn't fair and it needs to change. Sooner or later, they are going to demand it and we will have a sea change in Washington.
The second catalyst, and the one I see more likely in the near term, is that wealthy people themselves will come to realize that they can't enjoy their lifestyles if there is too great a degree of inequality. They also may act out of simple fear of the natives becoming too restless. Indeed, we see people like Nick Hanauer, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg expressing the need for change because it is in the wealthy's best interest. Stigliz sums up why this is so important.
Alex de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief elements of the peculiar genius of American society, something he called "self interest properly understood." The last two words were key. Everyone possesses self interest in a narrow sense: I want what's good for me right now! Self-interest "properly understood" is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else's self interest-in other, to the common welfare-is in fact a precondition for one's ultimate well being (Adam Smith understood as much. See his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). See also Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, "Adam Smith's Economics," The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith pp. 319-65, in particular p.347).
Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook. Rather, he was suggesting the opposite: it was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn't just good for the soul; it's good for business.
Again, we are talking about economic efficiency here, not just fairness. Past business leaders in our nation truly understood this. Henry Ford, for example, paid his employees more money so they could afford to buy his cars. Our economy works at top speed when the engine that fuels it (the middle class) has more money. This is exactly why we need government policy that helps them to this end.
So what changes need to be made? Here are few of the many action items Stiglitz lists.
Rent seeking needs to end immediately through curbing the financial sector of our economy. The revenue we gain from this will be able to fund many programs that can help the poor and the middle class. We need to make the banks more transparent and much smaller than they are now. No more "too big or too interconnected to fail." No more predatory lending, excessive bonuses that encourage risk taking, and offshore banking centers that essentially promote tax evasion. Speaking of taxes, the entire code needs to be reformed to a more progressive system with few loopholes for corporations. I have no problem lowering the statutory rate if we lose the loopholes and far too many breaks our nation's corporations get.
In tandem with this, we have to help out the rest, as Stiglitz puts it. We have to improve access to education so we can be more competitive in the age of globalization. We should ordinary Americans save money by creating government incentive and matching programs, for example. Continuing our efforts to have health care for all will go a long way to helping people save money. Changes to government programs like Social Security need to also be made in order to strengthen efforts that have already proven to be successful in reducing poverty.
We need a monetary policy that focuses on employment and growth as well as inflation. Our trade imbalances need to be corrected further than they already are. Our goal should be full employment. Labor needs to be thought of in a completely different way than it is today. With the reality of cheap labor markets around the world, our nation's workers need to be re-educated and put on different career paths. Our growth agenda should be centered on public investment which has shown to yield fantastic returns in our nation's history (the GI Bill, research, public works).
As of right now, we are being held back by myths and ideological intransigence fueled by adolescent hubris. Those who choose to champion these lies (and there really is no other way to put it nicely) are essentially rooting for our country to fail just so they won't be proved wrong. The 1% of this nation, and in particular the financial sector, are using these people to maintain their lifestyles. Reading through my previous entries on Stigilitz, the task is very simple.
It is now time to stop them.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Demons in St. Louis
It's hard to believe that my point of origin in this country had one of the most famous exorcisms in history. Apparently, people are still talking about it.
One man described living near the suburban St. Louis home where the 13-year-old boy arrived in the winter of 1949 (his Lutheran mother was a St. Louis native who married a Catholic). Another said she was a distant cousin of Father William Bowdern, who led the exorcism ritual after consulting with the archbishop of St. Louis but remained publicly silent about his experiences — though he did tell Allen it was "the real thing.
I've heard the stories myself. My grandparents were in their 30s with two little girls in West County when it all happened. Everyone was talking about it and everyone believed it. Father William Bowdern, who performed the exorcism, was viewed as a savior to the community for many years.
He drove the devil out of the Gateway to the West!
One man described living near the suburban St. Louis home where the 13-year-old boy arrived in the winter of 1949 (his Lutheran mother was a St. Louis native who married a Catholic). Another said she was a distant cousin of Father William Bowdern, who led the exorcism ritual after consulting with the archbishop of St. Louis but remained publicly silent about his experiences — though he did tell Allen it was "the real thing.
I've heard the stories myself. My grandparents were in their 30s with two little girls in West County when it all happened. Everyone was talking about it and everyone believed it. Father William Bowdern, who performed the exorcism, was viewed as a savior to the community for many years.
He drove the devil out of the Gateway to the West!
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Explaining the Zombie Apocalypse
It's Halloween and that means it's Zombie Apocalypse Time, and AMC's The Walking Dead is once again wildly popular. I stumbled upon an article that says that zombies are nothing to fear because bacteria, insects and animals would eat them alive. So to speak. David Mizejewski writes:
(Note: very minor spoilers ahead if you've never watched The Walking Dead.)
Competition
There are many types of bacteria that produce highly toxic poisons: botulinum, tetanus, staph, salmonella, and so on. The Walking Dead infection could conceivably produce a toxin that renders zombie flesh repellent to all common bacteria. Animals chomping on them would immediately spit out the distasteful flesh.
That would give the zombie infection a huge competitive advantage: they would have human corpses all to themselves.
Propagation
Viruses and bacteria propagate through the air, through food or by exchange of fluids. We know everyone in The Walking Dead is infected, but we don't know exactly how the infection spreads. We know a bite is required to turn a person directly (perhaps by delivering a lethal dose of the toxin). We know amputation can save a bite victim. We know everyone has either been drenched in zombie blood or has been in physical contact with someone who has. So it seems the infection is passed through fluid exchange.
The initial infection could have been through almost any means: toilet seats, unwashed lettuce, blood transfusion, super-soldier or immortality serum gone awry, a form of kuru transmitted by cannibalism, and so on. Anyone coming in contact with a carrier could be infected but would show no symptoms. Only when a carrier died would there be any clue that something was going on. The zombie plague could be worldwide before anyone had a clue.
One hurdle virulent blood-borne micro-organisms face is that when they kill their hosts they stop propagating. That's why ebola hasn't killed us all.
Not the zombie bug. Its carriers get up after they die and continue to spread the infection. It's an ingenious solution to the propagation problem. But how do zombies get up and walk around?
First, what's the energy source for the zombie? There's no blood circulation or respiration (zombies work just fine riddled with bullets), so there's no way to transport oxygen and nutrients to the muscles. That implies that the zombie bug is consuming the body of the zombie to provide energy.
Second, how does the zombie know what to do? How does it coordinate a broken body well enough to walk on two legs?
The zombie bug itself must provide the energy to infected tissue, perhaps some form of adenosine-triphosphate that's toxic to bacteria, allowing the corpse's most basic functions to proceed without heart or lung function.
Given that energy source the corpse's reptilian brain, eyes, ears and muscles could still function to allow the zombie to ambulate and seek food. Higher-level cognition is absent because the zombie bug feasts on the gray matter of the brain to provide that energy (naturally).
A Reprieve?
As the infection consumes its hosts, eventually the zombie hordes will wither to motionless husks. At which point the zombie problem becomes manageable.
But as the the series has shown, the biggest problem isn't the zombies, but other survivors. If they continue to behave like backwoods survivalists and shoot anything that moves, they're all doomed to chaos and solitary death.
Though The Walking Dead is fiction, it shows how important collaboration and compromise are essential for survival in dire situations, regardless of whatever differences we have.
I just wish the zombies in the Tea Party could understand this...
The thought of being eaten alive is a natural fear, and when it's your own species doing the eating, it's even more terrifying.I think Mizejewski has it all wrong way: bacteria, insects, and wildlife aren't chowing down on zombies because the infection has a superior design. It elegantly solves the two biggest problems faced by micro-organisms: competition and propagation.
Relax. Next time you're lying in bed, unable to fall asleep thanks to the vague anxiety of half-rotten corpses munching on you in the dark, remember this: if there was ever a zombie uprising, wildlife would kick its ass.
(Note: very minor spoilers ahead if you've never watched The Walking Dead.)
Competition
There are many types of bacteria that produce highly toxic poisons: botulinum, tetanus, staph, salmonella, and so on. The Walking Dead infection could conceivably produce a toxin that renders zombie flesh repellent to all common bacteria. Animals chomping on them would immediately spit out the distasteful flesh.
That would give the zombie infection a huge competitive advantage: they would have human corpses all to themselves.
Propagation
Viruses and bacteria propagate through the air, through food or by exchange of fluids. We know everyone in The Walking Dead is infected, but we don't know exactly how the infection spreads. We know a bite is required to turn a person directly (perhaps by delivering a lethal dose of the toxin). We know amputation can save a bite victim. We know everyone has either been drenched in zombie blood or has been in physical contact with someone who has. So it seems the infection is passed through fluid exchange.
The initial infection could have been through almost any means: toilet seats, unwashed lettuce, blood transfusion, super-soldier or immortality serum gone awry, a form of kuru transmitted by cannibalism, and so on. Anyone coming in contact with a carrier could be infected but would show no symptoms. Only when a carrier died would there be any clue that something was going on. The zombie plague could be worldwide before anyone had a clue.
One hurdle virulent blood-borne micro-organisms face is that when they kill their hosts they stop propagating. That's why ebola hasn't killed us all.
Not the zombie bug. Its carriers get up after they die and continue to spread the infection. It's an ingenious solution to the propagation problem. But how do zombies get up and walk around?
First, what's the energy source for the zombie? There's no blood circulation or respiration (zombies work just fine riddled with bullets), so there's no way to transport oxygen and nutrients to the muscles. That implies that the zombie bug is consuming the body of the zombie to provide energy.
Second, how does the zombie know what to do? How does it coordinate a broken body well enough to walk on two legs?
The zombie bug itself must provide the energy to infected tissue, perhaps some form of adenosine-triphosphate that's toxic to bacteria, allowing the corpse's most basic functions to proceed without heart or lung function.
Given that energy source the corpse's reptilian brain, eyes, ears and muscles could still function to allow the zombie to ambulate and seek food. Higher-level cognition is absent because the zombie bug feasts on the gray matter of the brain to provide that energy (naturally).
A Reprieve?
As the infection consumes its hosts, eventually the zombie hordes will wither to motionless husks. At which point the zombie problem becomes manageable.
But as the the series has shown, the biggest problem isn't the zombies, but other survivors. If they continue to behave like backwoods survivalists and shoot anything that moves, they're all doomed to chaos and solitary death.
Though The Walking Dead is fiction, it shows how important collaboration and compromise are essential for survival in dire situations, regardless of whatever differences we have.
I just wish the zombies in the Tea Party could understand this...
Trouble in Paradise
I am continually assured by my friends on the right that everything is just fine with their party and if they continue to run ultra conservative candidates, they are going to win. Yet two recent AP stories (here and here) suggest otherwise.
From the first piece...
A slice of corporate America thinks tea partyers have overstayed their welcome in Washington and should be shown the door in next year's congressional elections. In what could be a sign of challenges to come across the country, two U.S. House races in Michigan mark a turnabout from several years of widely heralded contests in which right-flank candidates have tried — sometimes successfully — to unseat Republican incumbents they perceive as not being conservative enough.
In the Michigan races, longtime Republican businessmen are taking on two House incumbents — hardline conservative Reps. Justin Amash and Kerry Bentivolio — in GOP primaries. The 16-day partial government shutdown and the threatened national default are bringing to a head a lot of pent-up frustration over GOP insurgents roughing up the business community's agenda.
So now the primariers are going to be primaried? Hee hee hee...
It actually makes sense when you think about it. Once the money goes away from the Tea Party (because it's not really a grass roots movement), that will pretty much be it for them.
From the second piece...
A year after losing a presidential race many Republicans thought was winnable, the party arguably is in worse shape than before. The GOP is struggling to control tensions between its tea party and establishment wings and watching approval ratings sink to record lows. It's almost quaint to recall that soon after Mitt Romney lost to President Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee recommended only one policy change: endorsing an immigration overhaul, in hopes of attracting Hispanic voters.
That immigration bill is now struggling for life and attention in the Republican-run House. The bigger worry for many party leaders is the growing rift between business-oriented Republicans and the GOP's more ideological wing. Each accuses the other of bungling the debt ceiling and government shutdown dramas, widely seen as a major Republican embarrassment.
This would be why the mistakes made by the Obama administration in regards to the ACA will largely be ignored. The American people have come to realize in the last month that the Republicans are not helping out anyone and are, in fact, causing most of the problems we have as well as actively preventing our country from solving them.
And when you lose the National Review, well, then you really up shit crick...
From the first piece...
A slice of corporate America thinks tea partyers have overstayed their welcome in Washington and should be shown the door in next year's congressional elections. In what could be a sign of challenges to come across the country, two U.S. House races in Michigan mark a turnabout from several years of widely heralded contests in which right-flank candidates have tried — sometimes successfully — to unseat Republican incumbents they perceive as not being conservative enough.
In the Michigan races, longtime Republican businessmen are taking on two House incumbents — hardline conservative Reps. Justin Amash and Kerry Bentivolio — in GOP primaries. The 16-day partial government shutdown and the threatened national default are bringing to a head a lot of pent-up frustration over GOP insurgents roughing up the business community's agenda.
So now the primariers are going to be primaried? Hee hee hee...
It actually makes sense when you think about it. Once the money goes away from the Tea Party (because it's not really a grass roots movement), that will pretty much be it for them.
From the second piece...
A year after losing a presidential race many Republicans thought was winnable, the party arguably is in worse shape than before. The GOP is struggling to control tensions between its tea party and establishment wings and watching approval ratings sink to record lows. It's almost quaint to recall that soon after Mitt Romney lost to President Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee recommended only one policy change: endorsing an immigration overhaul, in hopes of attracting Hispanic voters.
That immigration bill is now struggling for life and attention in the Republican-run House. The bigger worry for many party leaders is the growing rift between business-oriented Republicans and the GOP's more ideological wing. Each accuses the other of bungling the debt ceiling and government shutdown dramas, widely seen as a major Republican embarrassment.
This would be why the mistakes made by the Obama administration in regards to the ACA will largely be ignored. The American people have come to realize in the last month that the Republicans are not helping out anyone and are, in fact, causing most of the problems we have as well as actively preventing our country from solving them.
And when you lose the National Review, well, then you really up shit crick...
The Race is on...
Members of the House have been grilling administration officials over the healthcare.gov website's problems, demanding apologies and complaining about the site's problems. This is completely hypocritical, considering that country has been mired in the sequester for more than a year, because Congress has been unable to pass a real budget.
By most accounts the negotiations of the House-Senate budget committee will not result in any grand plan, which means we could be struggling with threats of shutdowns and defaults well into the next year.
The committee has a deadline of Dec. 13. What are the odds that the health care website will be up and running smoothly before the same people complaining about it can get their act together and pass a budget?
By most accounts the negotiations of the House-Senate budget committee will not result in any grand plan, which means we could be struggling with threats of shutdowns and defaults well into the next year.
The committee has a deadline of Dec. 13. What are the odds that the health care website will be up and running smoothly before the same people complaining about it can get their act together and pass a budget?
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Greenspan: Corporations Can't Be Trusted
The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, has released a new book about how wrong he was about the crash in 2008, The Map and the Territory. In an interview on The Daily Show, he says that he always assumed that people in the markets would behave rationally, and that they wouldn't take risks that would destroy their own companies. He now understands how completely wrong he was.
What's interesting about his analysis of the crash is that he squarely places the blame for the crazy risk-taking on the fact that the brokerages were corporations and not partnerships (starting at about 3:20):
The entire purpose of a corporation is to shield officers from any economic responsibility for the decisions they make. And it's even worse than that: officers of major corporations have contracts with golden parachutes that guarantee them a huge payoff no matter how much harm they cause the company. They have no incentives to do the right thing, and there are no consequences for incompetence and malfeasance.
When conservatives talk about personal responsibility it's always in the context of keeping poor people off welfare and denying abortions to women. But when BP is fined for ecological catastrophes in the Gulf, or JPMorgan Chase is fined for its economic calamities, conservatives characterize these slaps on the hand as revenge and shakedowns.
When are we going to hold CEOs to the same standards as welfare moms?
What's interesting about his analysis of the crash is that he squarely places the blame for the crazy risk-taking on the fact that the brokerages were corporations and not partnerships (starting at about 3:20):
Greenspan: When we began to see what was going on, you couldn't believe that there would be people that would be that disregarding of their own companies. How could you run, as you say, 30 times...
Stewart: Right. Thirty times on the leverage. Isn't it because they don't pay the penalty.
Greenspan: Yes.
Stewart: Isn't it the rewards that they were getting... the system was incentivized for these crazy short-term bursts of rewards.
Greenspan: Back in 1970, the New York Stock Exchange said that broker-dealers -- which is who all these people are -- could incorporate. Prior to then, they were all partnerships. And let me tell you something about a partnership: your partners don't let you take any risks that can affect them. And I remember they wouldn't lend you a nickel overnight.
And the system worked. You did not get anybody failing because the equity was protected. As soon as they started to go to corporations, they took risks for exactly the reason you suggest.Here we have one of the foremost proponents of capitalism telling us that corporations cannot be trusted to do the right thing, because the people who make the decisions have no skin in the game.
The entire purpose of a corporation is to shield officers from any economic responsibility for the decisions they make. And it's even worse than that: officers of major corporations have contracts with golden parachutes that guarantee them a huge payoff no matter how much harm they cause the company. They have no incentives to do the right thing, and there are no consequences for incompetence and malfeasance.
When conservatives talk about personal responsibility it's always in the context of keeping poor people off welfare and denying abortions to women. But when BP is fined for ecological catastrophes in the Gulf, or JPMorgan Chase is fined for its economic calamities, conservatives characterize these slaps on the hand as revenge and shakedowns.
When are we going to hold CEOs to the same standards as welfare moms?
Did They Like It?
Lisa Myers current story about the ACA, the president and health insurance is sure to elicit many adolescent "n'yah n'yah's" from the right wing blogsphere. Yet all the hubbub over this is missing an answer to a key question: Did people like their health insurance?
Before we dive into answering that questions, let's remember a few key facts. First, the people in question who are "losing" their insurance are those in the individual market, not the majority of Americans (85-90%) who get their health insurance through their employers. For me, this translates into most Americans not really caring about "Gotcha #538 of Infinity" because it doesn't affect them. If they liked the president before this still will. If they didn't, they won't and will accuse him of being Richard Nixon. Oh well.
Second, people aren't actually having their policies cancelled as they did in the past. They are being brought up to a certain standard so if they do have have health issues at some point in the future, they aren't going to soak the rest of us. This is a correction to a massive flaw that was in the old system of insurance. That leads us to the third point and back to the question I posed at the start of this post. The market for individual coverage sucks. Premiums rise at the whim of the insurance company, people are kicked off plans or not allowed on for preexisting conditions, rates fluctuate wildly resulting 50 percent of the people in this market are churned through it every year.
So, when the president said, if you like your insurance, you get to keep it, I have to wonder, did people actually like their insurance coverage? Of those that did, how many watch Fox News and read right wing blogs? More importantly, did these people know what was in their policies and was it in their best interest to continue with such policy? I realize that bringing up the words "best interests" is sure to cause an explosive adolescent stomp down the hallway but people who make poor choices in terms of health care affect my life, with or without the ACA, so I welcome the regulation.
If the people in the individual market do not like their insurance or have issues with their current policies, that effectively means the president is not a liar. Did they really like it?
Before we dive into answering that questions, let's remember a few key facts. First, the people in question who are "losing" their insurance are those in the individual market, not the majority of Americans (85-90%) who get their health insurance through their employers. For me, this translates into most Americans not really caring about "Gotcha #538 of Infinity" because it doesn't affect them. If they liked the president before this still will. If they didn't, they won't and will accuse him of being Richard Nixon. Oh well.
Second, people aren't actually having their policies cancelled as they did in the past. They are being brought up to a certain standard so if they do have have health issues at some point in the future, they aren't going to soak the rest of us. This is a correction to a massive flaw that was in the old system of insurance. That leads us to the third point and back to the question I posed at the start of this post. The market for individual coverage sucks. Premiums rise at the whim of the insurance company, people are kicked off plans or not allowed on for preexisting conditions, rates fluctuate wildly resulting 50 percent of the people in this market are churned through it every year.
So, when the president said, if you like your insurance, you get to keep it, I have to wonder, did people actually like their insurance coverage? Of those that did, how many watch Fox News and read right wing blogs? More importantly, did these people know what was in their policies and was it in their best interest to continue with such policy? I realize that bringing up the words "best interests" is sure to cause an explosive adolescent stomp down the hallway but people who make poor choices in terms of health care affect my life, with or without the ACA, so I welcome the regulation.
If the people in the individual market do not like their insurance or have issues with their current policies, that effectively means the president is not a liar. Did they really like it?
No Revolution
I poked my head into Kevin Baker's site, The Smallest Minority, for the first time since I was voted off and found this. Aside from the usual warped and psychotic rightwingblogspeak, I'm trying to figure out what he meant by this...
I'm reminded once again of Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, his magnum opus. I recommend you read (if you haven't) my überpost on it from January, 2010.
This will not end well.
Obviously it could be the usual bloviating anger and irrational fear backed up with absolutely nothing (why do they continue to think that posting on blogs makes you powerful and scary?) but I think perhaps that Kevin truly believes that he and his fellow cult members might need to "take back the country." To that, I say this..
There will be no revolution as long as men have titties.
I'm reminded once again of Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, his magnum opus. I recommend you read (if you haven't) my überpost on it from January, 2010.
This will not end well.
Obviously it could be the usual bloviating anger and irrational fear backed up with absolutely nothing (why do they continue to think that posting on blogs makes you powerful and scary?) but I think perhaps that Kevin truly believes that he and his fellow cult members might need to "take back the country." To that, I say this..
There will be no revolution as long as men have titties.
Monday, October 28, 2013
A Tale of Two Web Sites
Great piece on Bloomberg discussing how the state run sites are faring much better than those in the states who refused to set up their own exchanges.
Don’t tell Elisabeth Benjamin it’s tough to sign up for Obamacare. For two weeks, she has been enrolling uninsured people from her New York City office through an online marketplace created by the law.
Most recently, she helped a Bronx home-health worker in her 30s get health coverage for $70 a month. “By week two, the system was pretty smooth,” said Benjamin, who’s certified to assist people signing up for health insurance.
It does help if you live in a state that isn't actively trying to sabotage the ACA's efforts. Kentucky, the only southern state to set up their own exchange, is doing just fine.
Elizabeth Watts of Kentucky, which runs an independent exchange, had her application accepted at 12:04 a.m. on Oct. 1, making her one of the first to start the enrollment process. Because of a rare disorder, she has already had a heart attack and a stent put in place. She makes $220 a week working at a Shell service station. Previously, the only insurance she could find was for $300 a month, which was too much for her to afford. Using the exchange site, Watts learned she was eligible for Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor that was expanded under the law and will cover most of her costs. “It’s been such a relief,” said Watts, 31. The last time she saw her heart doctor, “it took 15 minutes and cost $160.”
Ms. Watts is a fantastic example of why the Right are shitting themselves right now. They know that once people like her in other deep red states start to sign up, they lose votes.
And then, they lose power.
Don’t tell Elisabeth Benjamin it’s tough to sign up for Obamacare. For two weeks, she has been enrolling uninsured people from her New York City office through an online marketplace created by the law.
Most recently, she helped a Bronx home-health worker in her 30s get health coverage for $70 a month. “By week two, the system was pretty smooth,” said Benjamin, who’s certified to assist people signing up for health insurance.
It does help if you live in a state that isn't actively trying to sabotage the ACA's efforts. Kentucky, the only southern state to set up their own exchange, is doing just fine.
Elizabeth Watts of Kentucky, which runs an independent exchange, had her application accepted at 12:04 a.m. on Oct. 1, making her one of the first to start the enrollment process. Because of a rare disorder, she has already had a heart attack and a stent put in place. She makes $220 a week working at a Shell service station. Previously, the only insurance she could find was for $300 a month, which was too much for her to afford. Using the exchange site, Watts learned she was eligible for Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor that was expanded under the law and will cover most of her costs. “It’s been such a relief,” said Watts, 31. The last time she saw her heart doctor, “it took 15 minutes and cost $160.”
Ms. Watts is a fantastic example of why the Right are shitting themselves right now. They know that once people like her in other deep red states start to sign up, they lose votes.
And then, they lose power.
This Is Spinal Fusion: a Medical Dilemma
The Washington Post has a major story about the increasing number of spinal fusions in the United States. Spinal fusion is a medical procedure that bolts vertebrae together to relieve pain and restore limb function.
The Post story looks at the large number of fusions done by a Florida neurosurgeon, Federico C. Vinas. There are suggestions that many of these procedures were not medically necessary, and Vinas did them just for profit (he makes $2 million a year). Spinal fusion is not cheap: in the United States it costs on average of $111,000.
Spinal fusion, like almost everything in American medicine, is overpriced. Based on outcomes from countries similar to the United States, the costs of medical procedures are artificially high: probably five to ten times what they should be (which is obvious from the fact that even within the United States they vary that much).
The Post talked to several patients who did not benefit from the surgery, some of whom are in severe pain and unable to walk. Others are now leading normal lives. These newspaper anecdotes are compelling, but don't really address the efficacy of spinal fusions. The problem is that there is no real consensus on the efficacy of fusion for treating nonspecific low back pain.
The Post story isn't the first on this topic: Bloomberg examined the same issue in 2010. The Bloomberg story is interesting because it's about the Twin Cities Spine Center and Ensor Transfeldt, a surgeon who examined me 20 years ago. Several years ago I had a minimally invasive cervical laminoforaminotomy by a different Twin Cities Spine surgeon. I passed on proposals by other surgeons for a fusion or a disc replacement: the Terminator-like spine model with the titanium ball-bearing design really creeped me out.
Limitations of Spinal Fusion
By its very nature spinal fusion reduces the patient's flexibility by bolting together two or three vertebrae with bone transplanted from the patient's hip or a cadaver. The fusion prevents rotation of the spine at those levels, putting stress on other parts of the spine, which can cause serious damage and pain, and potentially limits the patient's activities. It's therefore not something you should consider lightly. Other surgical procedures, such as disc replacement, still have serious limitations.
I'm therefore inclined to agree with the thrust of the Post and Bloomberg's reporting: some doctors are doing too many fusions.
Playing Golf and Tennis
The increase in the number of fusions is by no means motivated solely by profit: many people are simply not willing to suffer excruciating pain, become dependent on narcotic painkillers, or become invalids, and they look to surgery to make them mobile (from the Post):
Keeping People Active and Healthy
Ask any doctor how to prevent diabetes and heart disease, and the top two answers go hand in hand: weight control and exercise.
If you can't walk, you can't run, and you can't do any serious exercise. If you don't exercise you gain weight and your heart and lung function decline. You get diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and are at increased risk of stroke and even cancer. You lose your sense of proprioception, which is essential to avoiding falls. You experience bone loss, which makes serious fractures from even minor falls likely. In particular, hip fractures are a major factor in the decline and death of the elderly ("ma was doing great until she fell and broke her hip").
In strictly monetary terms, the question is: Are the long-term costs of treating chronic organic problems like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease caused by being sedentary greater than the costs of correcting orthopedic conditions that exacerbate those organic problems?
The cheapest solution is to keep people active and healthy, and off expensive painkillers (with their addictive and debilitating side effects), and diabetes and blood pressure meds for as long as possible.
No Responsibility for Patient Healing
The motivation shouldn't be for surgeons to do spinal fusions because they make more money. The only motivation should be to restore good health and function to the patient.
The problem with our health care system is that it's so fragmented: no one entity is responsible for healing the patient; they're all focused on their own particular specialties. That pits caregivers in different specialty areas against each other as they try to sell their own solutions to patients. There's usually no neutral arbiter with sufficient medical expertise to help a patient decide on the best solution. Patients have to decide for themselves, with only the advice of the specialists with a vested interest to go on. Often the best salesman -- not the best solution -- will win.
Practices at the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic try to resolve that issue, but they're initially expensive and geographically limited.
The Health Care Cost Spiral
Ultimately, the question of spinal fusions cannot be simply characterized as "doctors are money grubbers" and "baby boomers are getting fusions so they can play tennis." Our health care system is not focused on healing people, but on making money. The profit motive distorts medical care.
On the other side, patients want to be able to work, pick up their grandchildren, use their hands and arms, walk on their own two feet, get themselves out of bed and into the bathroom and bathe themselves. Most people would pay anything to do that.
Whenever someone talks about fixing the first problem someone yells, "Free Market!" and whenever someone talks about fixing the second problem someone yells, "Death Panels!"
Hence the problem of ever-spiraling health-care costs.
Given all the fretting about the number of nursing assistants we'll need as baby boomers age, it will probably be cheaper in the long run to to fix orthopedic problems -- back, knee and hip -- by whatever means necessary to keep an aging population mobile, healthy and self-sufficient as long as possible.
The Post story looks at the large number of fusions done by a Florida neurosurgeon, Federico C. Vinas. There are suggestions that many of these procedures were not medically necessary, and Vinas did them just for profit (he makes $2 million a year). Spinal fusion is not cheap: in the United States it costs on average of $111,000.
Spinal fusion, like almost everything in American medicine, is overpriced. Based on outcomes from countries similar to the United States, the costs of medical procedures are artificially high: probably five to ten times what they should be (which is obvious from the fact that even within the United States they vary that much).
The Post talked to several patients who did not benefit from the surgery, some of whom are in severe pain and unable to walk. Others are now leading normal lives. These newspaper anecdotes are compelling, but don't really address the efficacy of spinal fusions. The problem is that there is no real consensus on the efficacy of fusion for treating nonspecific low back pain.
The Post story isn't the first on this topic: Bloomberg examined the same issue in 2010. The Bloomberg story is interesting because it's about the Twin Cities Spine Center and Ensor Transfeldt, a surgeon who examined me 20 years ago. Several years ago I had a minimally invasive cervical laminoforaminotomy by a different Twin Cities Spine surgeon. I passed on proposals by other surgeons for a fusion or a disc replacement: the Terminator-like spine model with the titanium ball-bearing design really creeped me out.
Limitations of Spinal Fusion
By its very nature spinal fusion reduces the patient's flexibility by bolting together two or three vertebrae with bone transplanted from the patient's hip or a cadaver. The fusion prevents rotation of the spine at those levels, putting stress on other parts of the spine, which can cause serious damage and pain, and potentially limits the patient's activities. It's therefore not something you should consider lightly. Other surgical procedures, such as disc replacement, still have serious limitations.
I'm therefore inclined to agree with the thrust of the Post and Bloomberg's reporting: some doctors are doing too many fusions.
Playing Golf and Tennis
The increase in the number of fusions is by no means motivated solely by profit: many people are simply not willing to suffer excruciating pain, become dependent on narcotic painkillers, or become invalids, and they look to surgery to make them mobile (from the Post):
“Patients want to be able to play tennis and golf and go surfing at much higher ages than they did in the past,” said Gunnar Andersson, chairman emeritus of the department of orthopedic surgery at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and president-elect of the International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery, a professional group. “They are more likely to seek out treatment and more likely to accept surgery as an option.”This echoes a popular refrain: "Baby Boomers don't want to age gracefully." This attitude is dead wrong.
Keeping People Active and Healthy
Ask any doctor how to prevent diabetes and heart disease, and the top two answers go hand in hand: weight control and exercise.
If you can't walk, you can't run, and you can't do any serious exercise. If you don't exercise you gain weight and your heart and lung function decline. You get diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and are at increased risk of stroke and even cancer. You lose your sense of proprioception, which is essential to avoiding falls. You experience bone loss, which makes serious fractures from even minor falls likely. In particular, hip fractures are a major factor in the decline and death of the elderly ("ma was doing great until she fell and broke her hip").
In strictly monetary terms, the question is: Are the long-term costs of treating chronic organic problems like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease caused by being sedentary greater than the costs of correcting orthopedic conditions that exacerbate those organic problems?
The cheapest solution is to keep people active and healthy, and off expensive painkillers (with their addictive and debilitating side effects), and diabetes and blood pressure meds for as long as possible.
No Responsibility for Patient Healing
The motivation shouldn't be for surgeons to do spinal fusions because they make more money. The only motivation should be to restore good health and function to the patient.
The problem with our health care system is that it's so fragmented: no one entity is responsible for healing the patient; they're all focused on their own particular specialties. That pits caregivers in different specialty areas against each other as they try to sell their own solutions to patients. There's usually no neutral arbiter with sufficient medical expertise to help a patient decide on the best solution. Patients have to decide for themselves, with only the advice of the specialists with a vested interest to go on. Often the best salesman -- not the best solution -- will win.
Practices at the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic try to resolve that issue, but they're initially expensive and geographically limited.
The Health Care Cost Spiral
Ultimately, the question of spinal fusions cannot be simply characterized as "doctors are money grubbers" and "baby boomers are getting fusions so they can play tennis." Our health care system is not focused on healing people, but on making money. The profit motive distorts medical care.
On the other side, patients want to be able to work, pick up their grandchildren, use their hands and arms, walk on their own two feet, get themselves out of bed and into the bathroom and bathe themselves. Most people would pay anything to do that.
Whenever someone talks about fixing the first problem someone yells, "Free Market!" and whenever someone talks about fixing the second problem someone yells, "Death Panels!"
Hence the problem of ever-spiraling health-care costs.
Given all the fretting about the number of nursing assistants we'll need as baby boomers age, it will probably be cheaper in the long run to to fix orthopedic problems -- back, knee and hip -- by whatever means necessary to keep an aging population mobile, healthy and self-sufficient as long as possible.
A Change of Heart On Inflation
My latest installment on Stiglitz was heavily centered on the issue of inflation and how the Fed seems completely obsessed with keeping it low. Yet, a recent piece in the New York Times indicates that there might be a sea change with the appointment of Janet Yellin.
The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the economy is weak. Rising prices help companies increase profits; rising wages help borrowers repay debts. Inflation also encourages people and businesses to borrow money and spend it more quickly.
I agree. We have to end the inflation hawk hysteria and move towards a more balanced approach towards growth. This is exactly what Stiglitz was hoping would happen when he wrote his tome two years ago and we may finally be heading in that direction.
The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the economy is weak. Rising prices help companies increase profits; rising wages help borrowers repay debts. Inflation also encourages people and businesses to borrow money and spend it more quickly.
I agree. We have to end the inflation hawk hysteria and move towards a more balanced approach towards growth. This is exactly what Stiglitz was hoping would happen when he wrote his tome two years ago and we may finally be heading in that direction.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Your Lack Of Insight And Compassion Make You Ugly
Check out this piece from addictinginfo. Not only do the images discussed lack compassion and insight but they really show how self loathing the Right is today. I think the key to understanding why conservatives behave the way they do is to look at their relationship with their parents and how poorly the have developed as human beings after that.
Make sure you follow these four steps if you lose your job!
1. If / when you lose your job, be sure to sell all your nice electronics and luxury goods immediately and make sure you are always dressed well in public (but not too well, because then you are clearly not in need of any financial assistance and will be judged for not immediately selling all your nice clothing, too).
2. Cover up your tattoos, or people will snark that you are spending your welfare money on body art, even if you have had those tattoos for years, or you have a friend who is a tattoo artist who did them for free.
3. Are your shoes nice? Better not wear them in public, especially while at the grocery store paying for food with food stamps, because you MUST have somehow magically converted those food stamps into enough expendable income to buy those shoes. Never mind that they were a gift, or you bought them years ago, or that they actually have huge holes in the soles and tattered insoles because you can’t afford to replace them.
4. As a bonus, be sure not to have a job with flexible hours or work from home or work as a stay-at-home parent, because judgmental people will be on your ass and assume you are on welfare based on limited or non-existent evidence (even if you are not) and whine bitterly about having to contribute to social safety nets for the needy. That is right: You don’t even have to be on welfare at all, you can simply be out in public with your kid(s) during normal business hours and have total strangers assume you are on government assistance if you don’t look prosperous. Isn’t that cute?
Make sure you follow these four steps if you lose your job!
1. If / when you lose your job, be sure to sell all your nice electronics and luxury goods immediately and make sure you are always dressed well in public (but not too well, because then you are clearly not in need of any financial assistance and will be judged for not immediately selling all your nice clothing, too).
2. Cover up your tattoos, or people will snark that you are spending your welfare money on body art, even if you have had those tattoos for years, or you have a friend who is a tattoo artist who did them for free.
3. Are your shoes nice? Better not wear them in public, especially while at the grocery store paying for food with food stamps, because you MUST have somehow magically converted those food stamps into enough expendable income to buy those shoes. Never mind that they were a gift, or you bought them years ago, or that they actually have huge holes in the soles and tattered insoles because you can’t afford to replace them.
4. As a bonus, be sure not to have a job with flexible hours or work from home or work as a stay-at-home parent, because judgmental people will be on your ass and assume you are on welfare based on limited or non-existent evidence (even if you are not) and whine bitterly about having to contribute to social safety nets for the needy. That is right: You don’t even have to be on welfare at all, you can simply be out in public with your kid(s) during normal business hours and have total strangers assume you are on government assistance if you don’t look prosperous. Isn’t that cute?
Saturday, October 26, 2013
A Software Developer's Take on Healthcare.gov
As a software developer I have some experience with projects like healthcare.gov. I worked for companies that provided computerized testing. They had worldwide registration systems and transmitted exam databases and software to a network of autonomous testing centers across the world, where high-stakes exams were delivered under the supervision of proctors and the results transmitted back to our central hub.
The tragedy of software development is that the launch of the health care website is all too typical. That's not an excuse: it's a simple statement of fact.
When Target came out with its site in 2011 it had a ton of problems. Best Buy also had serious issues with its site. When United Airlines and Continental Airlines merged their reservation systems they had terrible problems (United was still having problems as recently as September, when it was charging customers $0 for tickets). Pretty much every online game has launch-day blues, ranging from minor issues to major meltdowns that can take weeks or months to fix. Who can forget the problems that Microsoft has had with every major revision of Windows, including Vista (which had a redo with Windows 7) and Windows 8 (which just came out with Windows 8.1).
And of course, there are the problems that George Bush's signature program, Medicare Part D, had when it came out. Instead of jeering on the sidelines, Democrats helped the Bush administration resolve those issues.
The reasons for these problems are usually the same: late starts, uncertain scope and scale, shifting requirements and inadequate testing. The healthcare.gov site suffered from all of these problems, many of them foisted on the project by its detractors.
Late Starts, Cast-in-Concrete Deadlines
Most software projects don't get started on time, but the deadline rarely changes. This was especially true of the ACA, which had been delayed by legal action for years. The people who claim the developers had four years to write the software are flat-out wrong. Lawyers were still duking it out in the Supreme Court in June of last year, which meant that the software developers didn't even know whether the project would really happen until 16 months before launch date. At that time the justices threw out a major portion of the law -- the Medicaid expansion -- which affected the design and implementation.
Shifting Requirements
Then there are imprecise requirements. The health care exchange was clouded by uncertainty over the exact scope of the website: the law gives the states the right to create their own exchanges, and many did so. If all the states had created their own sites, that would have dictated a much smaller design for healthcare.gov, relegating it to a simple entry portal to the state exchanges and back-end data processor and validator.
But the developers of healthcare.gov had to wait for all the states to decide what they were going to do -- and many of them didn't make a decision until December of 2012, after the Republican Governor's Association asked the Obama administration multiple times to delay the deadline. That gave healthcare.gov only 10 months after finally learning the true scope of the project. At that point they learned that they had to set up exchanges for 38 states. And only 10 months to do it. Imagine how difficult it would be to design a skyscraper without knowing how many floors it was going to have.
It's rather hypocritical that the Republicans who forced delays in the development of healthcare.gov -- through lawsuits and dillydallying on deciding whether they would create their own exchanges -- are now complaining about its rocky start.
Full-Bore Launch vs. Incremental Development
Websites that people compare healthcare.gov to -- Amazon.com, for example -- have been developed incrementally, and have been up and running for more than a decade. When Amazon began they had few customers and little visibility. They had low volume on launch day and were able to fix their problems in obscurity. They had no deadline other than their own internally imposed one. They could push the launch back without any repercussions. They could grow slowly and incrementally.
The healthcare.gov website was a huge deal that everyone was watching. Its start date was dictated by law. Millions of people and thousands of companies are depending on it. The site got hammered by millions of hits on day one, and it collapsed -- just like thousands of smaller-scale private software projects before it.
Inherently Messy Project
The job this site is trying to accomplish is much messier than ordering a coffee maker. It's not trivial to find out whether people qualify for tax credits, and you can't find out the real cost of a policy without that information. You have to make sure that the person really is who they say they are, and you have to be concerned with privacy and security. Making something simple to use and making it confidential and secure are competing -- almost contradictory -- requirements.
I'm not making excuses for the problems. I'm just saying that we've seen them before, in thousands of private and government software launches. But we've got time -- two more months before any insurance policies issued under the ACA actually go live, and three more months after that for people to sign up.
People should give Jeff Zients his month to get the problems fixed. If we're still having these problems on Dec. 1, then we can go into full histrionics mode. Until then, healthcare.gov isn't all that different from many other software launches that limp along in their early days. Except that the project is beset by millions of people hoping desperately for it to fail and actively trying to sabotage it.
The real reason that this health care rollout is so messy is that it's basically the Heritage Institute and Mitt Romney's plan to keep the insurance industry profitable. Obama didn't originally want an individual mandate; he preferred a public option that would have looked a lot like Medicare, which would have eliminated many of the problems with healthcare.gov.
Thus, the left criticizes Obama for selling out to insurance execs, and the right criticizes him for a socialist takeover of health care.
I guess that's the definition of compromise: nobody is happy.
The tragedy of software development is that the launch of the health care website is all too typical. That's not an excuse: it's a simple statement of fact.
When Target came out with its site in 2011 it had a ton of problems. Best Buy also had serious issues with its site. When United Airlines and Continental Airlines merged their reservation systems they had terrible problems (United was still having problems as recently as September, when it was charging customers $0 for tickets). Pretty much every online game has launch-day blues, ranging from minor issues to major meltdowns that can take weeks or months to fix. Who can forget the problems that Microsoft has had with every major revision of Windows, including Vista (which had a redo with Windows 7) and Windows 8 (which just came out with Windows 8.1).
And of course, there are the problems that George Bush's signature program, Medicare Part D, had when it came out. Instead of jeering on the sidelines, Democrats helped the Bush administration resolve those issues.
The reasons for these problems are usually the same: late starts, uncertain scope and scale, shifting requirements and inadequate testing. The healthcare.gov site suffered from all of these problems, many of them foisted on the project by its detractors.
Late Starts, Cast-in-Concrete Deadlines
Most software projects don't get started on time, but the deadline rarely changes. This was especially true of the ACA, which had been delayed by legal action for years. The people who claim the developers had four years to write the software are flat-out wrong. Lawyers were still duking it out in the Supreme Court in June of last year, which meant that the software developers didn't even know whether the project would really happen until 16 months before launch date. At that time the justices threw out a major portion of the law -- the Medicaid expansion -- which affected the design and implementation.
Shifting Requirements
Then there are imprecise requirements. The health care exchange was clouded by uncertainty over the exact scope of the website: the law gives the states the right to create their own exchanges, and many did so. If all the states had created their own sites, that would have dictated a much smaller design for healthcare.gov, relegating it to a simple entry portal to the state exchanges and back-end data processor and validator.
But the developers of healthcare.gov had to wait for all the states to decide what they were going to do -- and many of them didn't make a decision until December of 2012, after the Republican Governor's Association asked the Obama administration multiple times to delay the deadline. That gave healthcare.gov only 10 months after finally learning the true scope of the project. At that point they learned that they had to set up exchanges for 38 states. And only 10 months to do it. Imagine how difficult it would be to design a skyscraper without knowing how many floors it was going to have.
It's rather hypocritical that the Republicans who forced delays in the development of healthcare.gov -- through lawsuits and dillydallying on deciding whether they would create their own exchanges -- are now complaining about its rocky start.
Full-Bore Launch vs. Incremental Development
Websites that people compare healthcare.gov to -- Amazon.com, for example -- have been developed incrementally, and have been up and running for more than a decade. When Amazon began they had few customers and little visibility. They had low volume on launch day and were able to fix their problems in obscurity. They had no deadline other than their own internally imposed one. They could push the launch back without any repercussions. They could grow slowly and incrementally.
The healthcare.gov website was a huge deal that everyone was watching. Its start date was dictated by law. Millions of people and thousands of companies are depending on it. The site got hammered by millions of hits on day one, and it collapsed -- just like thousands of smaller-scale private software projects before it.
Inherently Messy Project
The job this site is trying to accomplish is much messier than ordering a coffee maker. It's not trivial to find out whether people qualify for tax credits, and you can't find out the real cost of a policy without that information. You have to make sure that the person really is who they say they are, and you have to be concerned with privacy and security. Making something simple to use and making it confidential and secure are competing -- almost contradictory -- requirements.
I'm not making excuses for the problems. I'm just saying that we've seen them before, in thousands of private and government software launches. But we've got time -- two more months before any insurance policies issued under the ACA actually go live, and three more months after that for people to sign up.
People should give Jeff Zients his month to get the problems fixed. If we're still having these problems on Dec. 1, then we can go into full histrionics mode. Until then, healthcare.gov isn't all that different from many other software launches that limp along in their early days. Except that the project is beset by millions of people hoping desperately for it to fail and actively trying to sabotage it.
The real reason that this health care rollout is so messy is that it's basically the Heritage Institute and Mitt Romney's plan to keep the insurance industry profitable. Obama didn't originally want an individual mandate; he preferred a public option that would have looked a lot like Medicare, which would have eliminated many of the problems with healthcare.gov.
Thus, the left criticizes Obama for selling out to insurance execs, and the right criticizes him for a socialist takeover of health care.
I guess that's the definition of compromise: nobody is happy.
The Gun Free Zone Lie
The evidence continues to mount that the emotionally fueled and asinine idea that gun free zones are the proverbial honey to killer bees is completely ridiculous. A disgruntled National Guard recruiter shot two military personnel at an armory outside a Navy facility near Memphis on Thursday. Yes, that's right...an ARMORY.
Let's see...that's Kirkwood City Hall, Fort Hood, the Navy Yard in DC, the gun range in Texas where Chris Kyle was killed and now this. Those are just the ones off of the top of my head. A little research shows that there have been many more.
Of course Media Matters did a piece after the Navy Yard shooting that pretty much torpedoed the gun free zone lament. This study and this study point out that there is not a single case from 1982 to 2012 that contains evidence that the shooters chose their targets because they were "gun free" and that fewer that one quarter of mass shootings in public spaces from January 2009 through January 2013 occurred in gun-free zones.
Whether or not a facility is armed is inconsequential. We should be spending more time on the mental health aspects of these cases (and keeping guns out of the hands of said individuals) and zero time entertaining the adolescent feelings of the gun community who don't like being told what to do and where. I wish they would just be honest and admit that they want to be able to carry their gun wherever they want because they have a problem with authority and are fucking children who need to have their toys with them at all times.
Let's see...that's Kirkwood City Hall, Fort Hood, the Navy Yard in DC, the gun range in Texas where Chris Kyle was killed and now this. Those are just the ones off of the top of my head. A little research shows that there have been many more.
Of course Media Matters did a piece after the Navy Yard shooting that pretty much torpedoed the gun free zone lament. This study and this study point out that there is not a single case from 1982 to 2012 that contains evidence that the shooters chose their targets because they were "gun free" and that fewer that one quarter of mass shootings in public spaces from January 2009 through January 2013 occurred in gun-free zones.
Whether or not a facility is armed is inconsequential. We should be spending more time on the mental health aspects of these cases (and keeping guns out of the hands of said individuals) and zero time entertaining the adolescent feelings of the gun community who don't like being told what to do and where. I wish they would just be honest and admit that they want to be able to carry their gun wherever they want because they have a problem with authority and are fucking children who need to have their toys with them at all times.
Friday, October 25, 2013
More Backdoor Corporate Welfare
In the last election one party chose to portray people who receive public assistance as lazy moochers and takers. But the fact is, the companies that employ those same people are mooching off the government. More than half of fast-food workers are forced to receive some sort of public assistance, according to a study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center. That includes SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, earned income tax credits, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The McDonald's employee help line McResources even advises workers to go on food stamps and Medicaid.
The total cost to American taxpayers is $7 billion a year.
And it's not just McDonald's. It's Wendy's and Burger King and Walmart, whose employees also suck up billions of dollars of public assistance annually.
These are highly profitable companies that have grown almost exponentially over the past few decades. Walmart has put thousands of smaller retailers of all types across the country out of business, sending the profits to Arkansas. McDonald's has replaced thousands of independent restaurants with franchisees who are pressured to treat employees like cattle, siphoning billions of dollars of local profits to Chicago. Profits that had previously been spent and taxed locally and contributed to the local economy.
The business models of McDonald's and Walmart are based on paying workers slave wages, forcing federal and local governments step in to make sure these workers and their children are clothed and housed and don't starve. That is an indirect government subsidy to those companies: these people couldn't work at McDonald's and Walmart without government help.
If you buy what McDonald's pretends is food or the cheap cost-reduced junk that Walmart pawns off on their customers, you too are getting a handout from the federal government. Because these companies couldn't provide you these products at the prices they do if they paid their employees what they actually cost the economy at large.
Well, actually they could quite handily: but it would require lowering their profit margins. Other companies, like Costco, Trader Joe's and QuickTrip, give their employees decent wages and benefits and still make a profit. Not quite as much as Walmart and McDonald's, admittedly. But WMT/MCD business practices are costing all of us money, not just the people who buy their stuff.
If we really need the products that those companies sell, we should be willing to pay their actual costs. It's not right that our tax dollars subsidize the incomes of the McDonald's and Walmart employees who actually do the work, while all the profits go into the pockets of the guys at the top.
The total cost to American taxpayers is $7 billion a year.
And it's not just McDonald's. It's Wendy's and Burger King and Walmart, whose employees also suck up billions of dollars of public assistance annually.
These are highly profitable companies that have grown almost exponentially over the past few decades. Walmart has put thousands of smaller retailers of all types across the country out of business, sending the profits to Arkansas. McDonald's has replaced thousands of independent restaurants with franchisees who are pressured to treat employees like cattle, siphoning billions of dollars of local profits to Chicago. Profits that had previously been spent and taxed locally and contributed to the local economy.
The business models of McDonald's and Walmart are based on paying workers slave wages, forcing federal and local governments step in to make sure these workers and their children are clothed and housed and don't starve. That is an indirect government subsidy to those companies: these people couldn't work at McDonald's and Walmart without government help.
If you buy what McDonald's pretends is food or the cheap cost-reduced junk that Walmart pawns off on their customers, you too are getting a handout from the federal government. Because these companies couldn't provide you these products at the prices they do if they paid their employees what they actually cost the economy at large.
Well, actually they could quite handily: but it would require lowering their profit margins. Other companies, like Costco, Trader Joe's and QuickTrip, give their employees decent wages and benefits and still make a profit. Not quite as much as Walmart and McDonald's, admittedly. But WMT/MCD business practices are costing all of us money, not just the people who buy their stuff.
If we really need the products that those companies sell, we should be willing to pay their actual costs. It's not right that our tax dollars subsidize the incomes of the McDonald's and Walmart employees who actually do the work, while all the profits go into the pockets of the guys at the top.
It Begins (And Ends) With The Parents
Nearly all of the challenges I face as an instructor are due to poor parenting. Parents do indeed really suck and they are getting worse. Even the number of sucky parents are on the rise as our culture becomes more and more cemented in the misplaced and harmful values of the Michael Jordan Generation. It's very clear that parents are just not doing their job.
Never was this statement more true than with the parents of the shooter in the recent Sparks, Nevada Middle School shooting. While it hasn't been fully confirmed yet, the student who killed teacher and vet Michael Landsberry and wounded two other students likely got the semi-auto 9mm from his parents. What the hell were they thinking? And what kind of a fucking country do we live in where a guy who does tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan lives through that but gets shot in his hometown? It's stuff like this that completely disgusts me.
This would be a clear example of people who should not be allowed to own guns and why our laws regarding arms need to be changed. Their license to own a gun should be taken away and they should face criminal charges. I'm wondering if they were "live free or die" types like Nancy Lanza who also thought it would be nifty to let her mentally ill sun have access to her guns.
The facts of this case have been very slow in coming but my takeaways are that it's clear there was some sort of bullying involved (more on that later), the shooter was mentally ill, and his parents are directly responsible. Further, this latest incident has led me to reflect about Newton and come to the conclusion the ideology that bloviates from the gun community is also responsible. This is particularly true in the case of Nancy Lanza who bought their lies to such a degree that she felt she needed a fucking arsenal to protect herself.
It begins and ends with the parents, folks. If they don't do their job, we end up with situations like this. And more and more of them these days are failing miserably.
Never was this statement more true than with the parents of the shooter in the recent Sparks, Nevada Middle School shooting. While it hasn't been fully confirmed yet, the student who killed teacher and vet Michael Landsberry and wounded two other students likely got the semi-auto 9mm from his parents. What the hell were they thinking? And what kind of a fucking country do we live in where a guy who does tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan lives through that but gets shot in his hometown? It's stuff like this that completely disgusts me.
This would be a clear example of people who should not be allowed to own guns and why our laws regarding arms need to be changed. Their license to own a gun should be taken away and they should face criminal charges. I'm wondering if they were "live free or die" types like Nancy Lanza who also thought it would be nifty to let her mentally ill sun have access to her guns.
The facts of this case have been very slow in coming but my takeaways are that it's clear there was some sort of bullying involved (more on that later), the shooter was mentally ill, and his parents are directly responsible. Further, this latest incident has led me to reflect about Newton and come to the conclusion the ideology that bloviates from the gun community is also responsible. This is particularly true in the case of Nancy Lanza who bought their lies to such a degree that she felt she needed a fucking arsenal to protect herself.
It begins and ends with the parents, folks. If they don't do their job, we end up with situations like this. And more and more of them these days are failing miserably.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Good Words
"In theory, lawmakers should hope that government programs work well, and if they don't, work to fix them. Elected representatives should hope that government agencies carry out their missions smoothly, and if something goes wrong, try to figure out what happened to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
Obviously that's not how things work in the United States, where one of the two parties doesn't actually believe in government. Republicans want to shrink government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub! They think there's nothing scarier than the prospect of a government employee trying to help! With beliefs like those, it's perhaps not surprising that -- with disturbing frequency -- they root for failure in order to score points." --- JULIET LAPIDOS, October 24, 2013
Obviously that's not how things work in the United States, where one of the two parties doesn't actually believe in government. Republicans want to shrink government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub! They think there's nothing scarier than the prospect of a government employee trying to help! With beliefs like those, it's perhaps not surprising that -- with disturbing frequency -- they root for failure in order to score points." --- JULIET LAPIDOS, October 24, 2013
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