Random Thoughts

OK - It's been a month since I last blogged, and I'm bothered by what I am seeing in America. No, I'm not going to talk about issues such as abortion, "gay marriage", or the war in the Mideast. But I will discuss something important to me - America's lack of seriousness about preparing for its future.

Years ago, we had an elite that practiced a form of chivalry. Couple this with "the Protestant Work Ethic", and America had a recipe for success. The elite considered itself fortunate to be in its position, and didn't try to extract the last penny of wealth from the less fortunate. Today, many in our elite feel that they have no responsibility to those less fortunate than themselves - they extract every penny of wealth and expect that the golden goose will keep laying eggs.

America has made a big mistake. We have pursued the mantra that cheaper is better. So we cut costs by using cheaper labor - and quality suffers. Over time, we no longer have the money to buy slightly lesser cost goods with lower quality, as workers can not amortize the expense of a good education. Does this make sense? Trying to remove all the slack from the system has made us all poorer in one way or another.

We are moving into an age where knowledge workers won't just be those who manipulate abstract ideas. But it will include those workers who know how to design physical processes, and the products that result from those processes. And yet, we do an extremely poor job of educating those future workers because we assume that we can fix our schools in isolation from the rest of society's ills.

Take a disadvantaged family (either from a rural area or an urban area) and you'll find people who often have poor communications skills, poor education, poor social skills and behavior, and are barely one step ahead of the creditors (if they are that lucky). How can we expect to educate the children from these communities if we don't take care of the problems affecting the family?

Should government be the employer of last resort? Progressives will answer YES, while conservatives answer NO. But, when businesses ask the government for help, shouldn't that help come with strings attached? Why should we have bailed out the banks, unless they could find work for a given number of unemployed people?

What about health care? If we want to get the government out of mandating health care insurance, shouldn't we relieve the hospitals of the responsibility of providing emergency care to the indigent? This would provide the market force check and balance to hospital prices that conservatives claim they want. If we consider health care as a right, shouldn't we make this a government function - and go further than Obamacare has done? Let's have an honest discussion of these issues, and stop shouting partisan rhetoric which drowns out serious talk.

Of course, we have an extreme debt problem in both state and federal governments. I expect to see the states (most of them) go bankrupt in all but name, and be bailed out by Uncle Sam. But will the federal government take to the printing press? I hope not. But when the public is polled, they refuse to allow defense or social welfare (including social security and medicare) to be cut. Does it make sense to cut grandpa's blood pressure medication to allow your daughter to live life without paying the debts of two or three generations of deadbeats? Does it make sense to cut G.I. Joe's ammunition ration, and have him come home in a body bag? Of course not! But what do we do? Again, we need honest communication which is not happening.

So it's no wonder why the Tea Party movement is gaining in popularity. But they do not have enough focus to get things to change. They need real solutions, not rhetoric. Give me examples of social spending changes and defense budget changes they propose before we take them seriously. Yet, the Tea Party movement is valuable simply because it upsets the apple cart of politics. The thought of them winning brings an old Wile E. Cyote/Roadrunner cartton to mind - where Wile E. catches the Roadrunner. Below the scene (where Wile E. is holding the Roadrunner's leg) is the statement: "You've always wanted this. Now, what do we do?????"

Mosques

It's been about a month, and not much is going on - save a tempest in a teapot.

I'm concerned about how people are willing to sacrifice the 1st Amendment to the constitution at the altar of propriety. Do Muslims have the same rights as Christians and Jews to worship as they please? Our constitution says YES. But people are associating Islam with the attacks of 9/11. Is this right? NO. Yet it is happening anyway.

I'll admit to a prejudice against Arab culture. But that bias has been shared among many great Americans - George S. Patton for one. This allows us to separate our feelings about Arabs from the religion most practice. Americans often do not realize that a sizable number of Muslims are not Arab and do not see the world as severely as Arabs. Yet, we're tainting these peaceful Muslims who want to build a Mosque in Lower Manhattan with the same stain that we are using against Arabs. This is not right - people should always be judged as individuals - even if they belong to groups with whom we are not at ease....

So what do we do? I choose to live by the principle of our law - even if I am not happy with one of the results of that law. And I hope that more people choose to do so. I'd prefer that the mosque be built elsewhere - but there are many other problems with which I am more concerned....

Oil's well that ends welled!

Finally - "Mission Accomplished" in the gulf!!!!

We've capped one oil well but have not taken realistic steps to prevent the problem from happening again. What frightens me is that we have bigger exploration rigs still active - and we don't know what the risks are which are a byproduct of these super sized wells....

Just because the well has been capped, does not mean that the problems caused by the leak are gone. There's still a lot of cleanup to be done. Let's hope we see real results soon.....

Government Blocking News Reporting

OK - If you've thought that we're in deep shit with the oil spill, and that mainstream media wasn't giving us all the news, then look at what government is doing to block accurate reporting of the news.

In the news article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/us/10access.html?hp

the NY Times reports that various levels of government are blocking access by the media to view the spill zones. Yes, some media may be getting into "ground zero" to report the news. But other media is being denied "fly-over" access, as if Uncle Sam is helping BP with managing its spin.

What bothers me now is not BP declaring bankruptcy, but that the bankruptcy will be prepackaged. This means that BP will supply a one time funding of a trust to pay out oil spill related claims against the old BP, sever the link between the old and new BP, and preserve stockholder assets at the expense of the gulf coast inhabitants and businesses they have screwed. This is not right.

We must make sure that if BP declares bankruptcy, that all of its assets are liquidated, and the proceeds from the liquidation be dedicated solely to restoring the health of the gulf coast - as long as there is money in the liquidation fund. I don't know about other people, but this is one time I intend to write my congressman and senators about an issue....

Ecological Disaster

I wonder how many people have seen the projections on how the oil spill will flow into the Atlantic. I have, and it is scary. It looks like much of the key Atlantic fishing areas are about to become a dead zone.

Are we hearing much about this in the mainstream media? NO - Of course not! The media and the government are afraid to tell the people the truth - the situation is FUBAR! (For those who are not familiar with the expression "FUBAR", it means - Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.) What is going to happen when we can no longer eat North American lobster and other shellfish? What is going to happen to our already decimated herds of whales in the North Atlantic? Can they survive? We know so little about what will happen to marine life - and we depend on it so much.

In today's news, the mainstream media finally noted that government has no knowledge of what to do about the oil spill - all knowledge is in the hands of the oil companies. Why didn't government take on an active observation role, and help develop mandatory best practices? Why did we let BP, one of the worst violators of safety standards, drill an extremely risky well? Even the Canadians have better mandated practices than we have. What would it have taken for current and previous administrations to convince business to invest more in remediation technology? (I just learned that much of the oil spill remediation technology we have was developed in the late 1970's/early 1980's - not much has been developed or enhanced in 30 years!!!!) This seems like a multigenerational screw up to the maximum degree!!!!

Of course, we're now seeing a criminal investigation of BP. But will they ever be able to extract much money from the oil company. The other day, I heard an estimate for EPA criminal penalties for this oil spill of $12 billion. Does anyone think we'll get more than a fraction of this figure? I don't.....

Ineptitude and Confusion

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, The Outliers, notes that it takes about 10,000 hours of "practice" to become expert practitioner in almost any field. For most of us, this means that once we enter the work force, it takes about 5 years to develop expertise in our craft.

Most of us talk about common sense when it comes to preventing problems. But when it came to the "O Rings" on the Challenger space shuttle, did we heed the call of the engineer who wanted to call off the launch? Or, did we heed the needs of the politicians who wanted to send the bird up on schedule? Common sense gets thrown away when large institutions get involved with doing anything, as they have too many competing interests.

Right now, we're seeing the American right wing make a lot of noise about Obama not doing what America needs. Do they expect a "Superman"? And what about the "dittoheads" who parrot what Rush Limbaugh says? Could any of them do any better? It's a miracle that Obama has not crashed and burned, given less than 2 years on the job and the fires he has had to fight.

Both political parties are responsible for the mess we're in. The oil spill has shown how corrupt the MMR department became, because the United States has had no energy policy (except to buy it from risky areas such as the Middle East) and has had no intention of pursuing one. The law in Arizona shows what the lack of a real immigration policy has done to the United States - We depend on the illegal aliens who do much of the grunt work native Americans no longer do. When was the last time we went to a diner which didn't have illegal staff where the public didn't see them? What about many of our gardening services - I'll bet that many of their workers are illegally here as well. Do we want to kick them all out and end up paying more for these services? Most people will say NO to that. So what do we do?

Let's focus on immigration first. (I've covered Resource/Energy policy in a previous posting.) The people who want us to seal the border are correct. How can we have a serious immigration policy when we can't control who is immigrating to the United States? We need realistic penalties for those employers who hire illegal help. This also means that we need an easy (100% accurate) way to validate a prospective employee's right to look for work in this country. This is likely to be a big problem, but not an unmanageable one - I don't hear of any problems with US Passports being issued to illegal aliens. A similar document could be used as proof as our right to work here, and it could have biometric validation for safety.

But what about our dependency on the illegal work force? It would be inhumane to send these people home to countries where no work is available *and* it would disrupt much of the service sector economy we depend on these days. The conservatives are right when they talk of these immigrants as having broken laws. Why should they be first on line to be legalized? Once legal, why should they be first on line to become citizens? They have shown us a great disrespect by breaking the law for the first action they do on American soil.

I propose that any program developed as part of a real immigration policy consist of the following:

1. Building an effective border "fence" to keep people from crossing our Southern border illegally.

2. Create a foolproof way to validate that a person has the right to work here, and have meaningful penalties for those employers who hire illegals without appropriate due diligence.

3. For a one year period, create a temporary amnesty, where people illegally resident in the United States could apply for residency (not leading to US Citizenship for them or their children once legal residents). This application may not be done on United States soil, but must be sent to the United States from foreign soil. (In short, the illegals must go home to apply for legalization of their status.)

4. Only legal immigrants and their offspring may gain United States citizenship. (We may need to clarify this with an amendment to the constitution.) However, illegal aliens (and their children) who filed for legal residency (according to rules of #3 above) may only become American Nationals - they may carry American passports (like residents of some Pacific islands), work in the United States, travel freely, but NOT vote or hold public office. In short, they gain permanent green cards and American passports.

Even with these changes, this is the tip of the iceberg. We need the labor, and they need the work. All I'm proposing is a humane way of breaking the political deadlock and making political reality reflect the reality we all see every day.

Spill, Baby, Spill!!!!

OK - It's been over a month since the oil rig disaster started, and little seems to have changed since day one. What is so frustrating is that there is nothing government could do once the disaster started - it had no experts with enough knowledge to take charge of things.

So what do we do?

First, let's stop all the noise making and really look for policy changes that will help prevent problems like this from happening, or will lessen the degree of headaches they will cause.

Second, let's get the Army Corps of Engineers involved with developing "best practices" for every risky technology. That will mean that over a period of 20 years or so, they will have to be in-place observers of industry, learning by doing - but not part of industry. We can then use the list of practices just built for a repeatable set of procedures which industry can follow to prevent disaster.

Third, let's clean up MMR. At first, we'll still have political hacks in charge. But over time, we can find places for the elite from the Army Corps to enter civilian life, and regulate the industries they observed as honest umpires and rule makers. (Even Lou Durocher believed in having good rules, so he'd have an idea of how he could cheat.)

Fourth, to gradually eliminate the need for imported or high risk oil, let's take this as an opportunity to enact Pickens' Plan - a gradual conversion to a natural gas and wind power economy. We have enough natural gas for a 200 year supply, and we export this gas to the rest of the world. Wind power is inexhaustible.

These are simple changes for which we have a short window of opportunity to get politicians to do our will.... So let's write legislative representatives and get things moving!!!!

Arizona

It's important to note that most Americans are pro-immigration. They simply want government to enforce its immigration laws. Sadly, both political parties are paralyzed because they covet the Latino vote - and that a clampdown on illegal immigration will cause the party responsible to lose the Latino vote for a generation. Arizona is on the front line - and can not afford to pay the price for Federal government inaction. So it made the right move - pass a very popular law (for Anglos) and unpopular law (for Latinos) which forces the Federal political infrastructure to take notice of a major problem.

Before people criticize Arizonans for passing this law, they should examine Mexico's treatment of illegal immigrants at its own Southern border. If they did, Arizona's actions seem quite tame. If one looks at Mexico as two regions, North and South, one would see that the South is under control of the central government, and prospers because of remittances sent from its citizens living in the USA. In Mexico's North, the narcotics "industry" rules - and Mexico's leadership also prospers because of this. Illegal drugs are shipped to the USA, and dollars are repatriated to Mexico. The Mexican drug industry has diversified, and has now gone into the business of transporting illegal immigrants into the USA - with the tacit approval of the Mexican government.

Should Arizona pay for the Federal government's irresponsibility - NO! But in an ideal world, only the US Federal government would need to take actions regarding immigration policy. Sadly, this is not an ideal world. I think the result of Arizona's law will cause other states to take similar actions, causing the immigration battle to go to the Supreme Court of the USA.

Most of the illegal immigrants are here because they want to work. Much of this work is that which native Americans don't want to do. And we prosper because of these immigrants. But if we shut off the pipeline for these immigrants, we'll see wages go up - as happened down South. (A slaughterhouse was raided, and about 400+ illegal immigrants were rounded up. As a result, wages in the area went up, and Walmart increased its hourly wage by $2.00+ per hour due to a labor shortage.)

These illegal immigrants (and I must stress that they have no right to be here) are pawns in a bigger game - Big business wants labor who is underpaid and who will not fight for safe, healthy, well paid work. Elected officials want votes, but are afraid to alienate any important political bloc. The general public simply wants to be safe in their homes, safe on their property, and safe in their community. And the illegal immigrant simply wants to work hard and take care of his/her family. How will this mess get sorted out? I'm not sure, but forcing the Federal government's hand is a good start - even though it turns innocent people into pawns. Hopefully, we'll end up with a rational immigration policy, where more legal immigration will be authorized for law abiding people, where the value of one's labor is a factor in deciding who can come here, and where government again works for the people to make the hard decisions that we ask it to make....

Paying for it all....

In another blog, I note that my niece's generation will be expected to pay for the Boomers' Social Security needs. The problem with this is that this generation is being expected to pay for the sins of their parents and grandparents. Is this fair? To the young adults now graduating from college, the social contract is a rip off. Many of these adults are crippled with student debt, and there are few jobs available for them to earn the money to pay off this debt. Couple this with increasing Social Security taxes (which will shift wealth from the relatively frugal young to the wasteful older generations) and you may see major (but passive) social disruption.

What will happen if the younger generation decides not to work as hard as their forbears, as they will not get their full rewards for working hard or for taking risks? If they decide to live on lower salaries (because good jobs are no longer available) and within their means (because cheap credit is no longer available), what will happen to the Ponzi scheme (read: Social Security) that the older generations now depend?

We know that most of the low income jobs out there do not provide medical benefits. Would it make sense for young Americans to consider leaving the United States for opportunities in better managed countries (with better social safety nets)? I'm beginning to think that it no longer makes sense for the average young American to limit his/her horizons to the United States. But what does this mean?

Let's say that someone of my niece's age decides to move to Canada. The Loonie (read: Canadian Dollar) has traded at near parity with the American Dollar during the past year, and is likely to do it again. Since nominal Canadian salaries are in the same dollar range as American salaries, it might make sense for a person who wants greater stability to leave the USA for the land of Tim Horton's Donuts and Coffee. Let's now say that the person wants to take greater risks for greater rewards. American ex-pats are doing very well in many places across the globe - as long as they are knowledge workers whose trades follow them around.

Right now, I don't think the United States will self destruct. But I think we must address these important issues:

1. How do we pay off our debts without bankrupting our younger, and soon to be child-bearing generation?
   
2. How do we provide this generation with enough opportunities, so that they can afford to have children (and reproduce above ZPG)?
3. How do we provide this and future generations with the confidence they will need to prosper, whatever the world hands to them?

I don't have any easy answers. But I think it is the responsibility of the Boomers to see that their needs do not take priority over the needs of their children. The Boomers must also make it possible for their children to afford to have children of their own - lest we solely depend on immigration to have a growing work force. And lastly, the Boomers should make quiet sacrifices for their offspring, so that their offspring will know challenges - and have the confidence to overcome those challenges.

Stalemate - The all American way

It's been several months since our president floated the balloons which he hoped would morph into an American health care system - and I'm very disappointed at the results. Not only do we have nothing we can be proud of, but we've shown that our political system is completely dysfunctional. Even the pundits on Sunday Morning talk shows are starting to talk about the need for a third party - to break the log jam and address many of the issues America needs to tackle now.

The so called "tea parties" are showing increased voter frustration at government. Right now, they tend to tag the Democrats with the responsibility for our mess. But once they put the Republicans in charge, they will find them just as impotent in getting an agenda passed. When will they learn that Washington itself is the problem? But even if they realize this, it will not be enough. Approximately 80% of Federal spending is mandated - Who wants to tell our seniors that they have to die earlier so that we don't spend as much paying for their health care? I certainly don't. Who wants to tell our seniors that they can't retire on time, because we've squandered the "investments" which were meant to pay for their retirements? I certainly don't. But who wants to pay more into a system to cover expenses which were inadequately funded that are now coming due with the Baby Boomer retirements? I certainly don't. And if the rest of America is like me, then we have problems. We are going to be forced into making some very hard and unpopular choices - and will have hell to pay for decades of inaction.

I propose some simple actions:

1. Immediately push forward the dates to collect social security at full benefit levels by three years. Early retirement would take place at 65 instead of 62.
2. For those who have already retired and are collecting Social Security before the enaction of proposal #1 above, a new Federal Estate tax of 10% (on all affected persons' estates) to bulk up the coffers of Social Security.
3. Increasing the quotas for new immigrants, so that they can bulk up the funding for Social Security. (If we aren't growing our population by native birth rate, we might as well import new immigrants to help pay for current expenses.)
4. Implementing an import tariff based on the balance of payments. When we are earning more money from exports than we are paying out for imports - there is no tariff change, or there will be a slight reduction to put the payments in balance. When we are not earning enough money from exports to pay for the goods and services we import, we raise the tariff enough to buy fewer enough foreign goods to being our payments into balance.
5. Replacing a significant portion of America's income taxes with equivalent consumption taxes to spur investment. We could use a floor, where everyone gets a consumption tax rebate, so that the net tax change to our poor would be nil - yet, we'd discourage the needless consumption of underpriced foreign goods that are putting American workers on the unemployment lines.
6. Implementing the "Pickens Plan" to shift America's energy use from expensive imported oil to renewable resources such as wind power.

One problem - do we trust our government NOT to hide net tax increases to fund their pet pork projects?

The disgruntled blogger.

The desk of a typical blogger

This is what my desk looks like on a typical day.

Not much to look at, but it is my desk. (You should have seen the mess when I still had my cat!)