Moderately Liberal

School Choice

2011-12-15T18:27:00.001-08:00

I live in one of the best public school districts in Michigan, rated 9 out of 10 stars by greatschools.org. Yet every day I drive my youngest child to an school in a district where the median income is about half that of where I live and the district rating is three stars. The school that my youngest son attends faces some problems: so many students are from poor homes that they just provide every child with a free breakfast and lunch, they were so short on funds for books in kindergarten that they sent home photocopied pages some weeks, students with less than stable home lives come to school unprepared and with behavioral issues.

My middle son also attends a school of choice, but it is in our district. In fact it is in the building that was my oldest son's neighborhood elementary school.

Recently I've seen several articles that decry school choice because it destroys neighborhood schools and many charters are unregulated and no more successful than the public schools which they replace. So, why do I choose to send two of my three kids to schools of choice?

School choice allows my youngest to learn in an immersion Chinese program. Research shows that learning a foreign language before the age of twelve is more effective than learning it later in life and has a host of benefits in general cognitive development. My middle son learns in a Montessori program that suits his learning style far better than a traditional classroom does.

School choice allows my middle son a learning environment better suited to his needs. It also allows students from other districts to be in his classes, making his school more diverse while affording them an opportunity they might not otherwise have.

What about the downsides of school choice mentioned above? I actually believe that they don't exist. My kids schools are regulated just like all other public schools. Neighborhood schools that are failing should be revamped instead of closed. The fact that they are closed is a consequence of a choice (a poor one in my opinion) that our society has made. In fact, instead of detracting from an inner city school system Post Oak Elementary pulled my youngest son from a relatively affluent district. My son brought with him two motivated, educated parents who can donate money for books and time for tutoring. He will ace the standardized tests.

My youngest son is learning Chinese. Additionally, I am pleased to report he ahead of where his brothers were at the same age in math and (on average) in reading. He enriches an impoverished district in many ways and it enriches him. Deregulation and closure of failing schools are awful problems but please don't conflate them with school choice. Taking away my choice won't solve those problems.

I am a JOB CREATOR

2011-10-27T16:46:00.000-07:00

I learned programming and made a lot of money as an owner of a software company. I look like a self made man, but…

My company would not have been possible without the internet (which grew out of DARPAnet), the interstates my employees used to get to work, the public schools that gave me an educated workforce, the courts that allowed me to enforce contracts with clients, the government agencies that allowed me to know my food and water and medicines were safe, the postal service…

So, while I've been a big success, I owe a lot to the government. More importantly I want my kids to have the same kind of opportunities that I had. I am the 99%

SuperFreakonomics makes an unsupported claim

2011-10-04T09:44:00.000-07:00

I finished reading SuperFreakonomics which repeatedly claimed that government solutions are more complex than necessary, with no evidence to support the assertion, so I sent them this e-mail. I'm not holding my breath waiting for a response.

I have read your books with great interest. Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics were in many ways about not accepting the conventional wisdom (drug dealers don't all get rich) and about not allowing your political views to shape your perceptions of how the world works (abortion decreases criminality). You prefer to make claims based on evidence.

Unfortunately, in SuperFreakonomics, you twice repeated an assertion that I believe is rooted in politics and is entirely unsupported by the data. Conservatives hold that government is less efficient than the private sector and that its solutions to problems are more complex than necessary.

It is unarguable that all complex human endeavors involve a large amount of waste. Government is full of bureaucrats engaged in empire building who would spend money more carefully if it were their own money that was being spent. However, I have spent time in private industry, which I can assure you is full of executives engaged in empire building who would spend money more carefully if it were their own money that was being spent.

As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that private industry is more efficient than government. Anecdotaly, we see a huge rate of small business failures (http://www.springerlink.com/content/u5218354gk84k205/). Large businesses also cause huge losses to our society, witness AIG, Enron, WorlCom, and Lehman. Management receives outsized compensation, even when performing so badly that corporate boards fire them (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/business/lets-stop-rewarding-failed-ceos-common-sense.html?_r=1&ref=business)

Private industry often provides complex solutions (like CDOs) to simple problems like home ownership. Executives laugh all the way to the bank (think Angelo Mozilo) while sticking shareholders and society with the downsides.

In fact, there are many problems for which government provides solutions that are less complex and more cost effective than the private sector (think of health care, education, parks, and highways). Many have argued, I believe correctly, that the U.S. system of delivering health care produces inferior results at greater cost than government run health care in other countries. Even if we only consider the U.S. we see Medicare and the VA providing more cost effective health care than private insurance companies. Medical billing is a private industry solution that is more complex than anything a government could dream up.

Countries without strong government programs such as Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Somalia do not see complex problems solved effectively. In the history of the world no country has made its average citizen rich relative to the citizens of other countries without a strong government - so the complex problem that government solves best is how do we make our society grow rich. Perhaps you should stop doing our society the dis-service of claiming that governmental solutions are overly complex unless there is evidence to back that claim.

Lip Service to Education

2011-05-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

I constantly hear politicians, media pundits, teachers, and philanthropists opining on how important education is. Nevertheless, the fights almost always boil down to money. The fact that almost everyone ignores proven research on things that work but don't significantly affect the costs shows that providing a better education is not what the argument is all about.

The right wants to spend less on education, so they vilify the teachers unions. They talk about merit pay (but use it as an excuse to punish not reward), and abolishing teacher tenure (because newer teachers are paid less than those with seniority). Conversely, the left talks about class size and making sure that all teachers are "highly qualified." neither of which has been demonstrated to make substantial differences in achievement (Though I would argue that classes are far too large now, but that is another essay).

Here are a few things that would not cost a lot of money and which have been proven, yet I rarely hear either side in the debate seriously advocating for them:

1. Teach foreign language in earlier grades instead of in high school. You could put me in Beijing for a year and at the end of the year I would speak Chinese abysmally, but if you put my five year old there for a year, he'd speak fluently. The reason is not that he's so much smarter than me, but that the brain changes around the age of twelve, after which it becomes far less efficient at language acquisition. So, why do we wait until students are fourteen to start teaching foreign languages?

2. Start high school later in the day. Teens are chronically sleep deprived and their educational attainment suffers as a result. Study after study finds that switching them to a later schedule that better matches their circadian rhythms results in better cognitive function, yet we routinely make high school start earlier than middle school and elementary school.

3. Get rid of over processed foods in school meals. This week, the school tried to serve my kindergartener a "oatmeal chocolate chip bar" for breakfast. Ignoring the long list of chemicals in the ingredients, I found it had 9 grams of fat and 23 grams of sugar. It is unhealthy and when the sugar high wears off, the kids crash and can not learn. A recent study in Michigan found that eating school lunch instead of sack lunch was a bigger risk factor for obesity than two extra hours in front of a screen every day. Why not feed kids healthy food? It can't be that much more expensive.

4. Abolish DARE. Study after study shows that DARE is a waste of children's time. It does not affect drug use. After each study, DARE changes the curriculum a bit and claims that the last study was flawed because it studied an old curriculum. Why spend time and money on a program that doesn't work? Only because it makes adults feel happy that they are doing something about drugs in schools and to maintain good relations between the police and school administration.

Now that I've established that excellence in education is secondary to most arguments about education, I'd like to state for the record that you get what you pay for so until we increase education funding our system will continue to deteriorate.

Talking to Tea Partiers?

2011-04-10T18:26:00.000-07:00

I would describe myself as a moderate liberal. As part of my education, which included a thorough grounding in economic theory, I received an MBA from a top 10 school. My capitalist bona fides include not just my education -- I have owned a business, worked for companies large and small, and have been very successful financially. Nevertheless, I believe in big government and nothing drives me battier than Tea Partiers railing against health care reform by screaming that the government should keep their hands off Medicare, against the deficit while supporting tax cuts for the wealthy that we can ill afford, and against the very spending (whether on Social Security, highways, or medical research) that has allowed them to achieve a lifestyle that their grandparents would never have dreamed possible.

For a long time I did not think that it was possible to talk to Tea Partiers in a rational way, let alone to find common ground with them. Lately, however, I think I have begun to better understand the thinking of a subset of Tea Partiers and believed that there may be room for some points of agreement.

What Motivates Me to Love Big Government?

I was born in the most prosperous country in the history of the world at a time when it was at the height of its prosperity. That prosperity was built on many planks. One was a shared culture and a sense of patriotism that allowed the country to move forward together. Certainly there was friction between races, between labor and capital, and between government and the private sector, and between the sexes, but all players would somehow inch forward together on the swinging pendulum of compromise.

Government served as a referee, balancing (albeit imperfectly) the need for a clean environment and decent labor standards against the needs of industry, and so on. While government may have been corrupt sometimes, it still did things that it thought advanced the cause of creating a better society and a stronger country. Sometimes those things worked (for example giving away 40 acre homesteads or mandating high school education) and sometimes they failed (think of public housing projects).

I grew up in a the most prosperous economy in the world in large part because the government mandated high school education earlier than other countries did, subsidized college education on a massive scale with the GI bill, and funded research. This created the intellectual infrastructure for our economy, a highly educated workforce. The government also created the physical infrastructure, interstate highways, universal telephone and electrical service, roads and bridges.

I have been immensely successful and I owe much of that success to big government. I was educated in universities that were created and nurtured by government. My company wrote software which was deployed on the Internet (which evolved from DARPAnet Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Government gave my business a well educated workforce, a (more or less) stable economy, and a robust infrastructure, which allowed me to contribute to society by employing dozens of people and creating new products.

What Motivates Tea Partiers to Hate Big Government?

Given the immense success that our country has had, despite being made up largely of the descendants of various waves of immigrants and the indisputable conclusion that government played a role in that success, it is hard to understand the animosity that tea-partiers feel toward the government. I'm going to ignore the more outrageous Big Government wants to take away our liberties (usually meaning not allow us all to carry our second amendment guaranteed RPG and missile launcher into our kids' school) and concentrate on the economic arguments.

Tea-partiers are afraid that government wants to tax hard workers (meaning people like them) to allow free loaders (meaning those that work for the government and the urban poor) to make irresponsible decisions and be lazy. One tea-partier I know, though she would deny the label, lived in a communist country where in the name of progress and fairness they took from those who were successful and gave to those who were in political favor. When Obama says we need to "share the wealth" she goes ballistic because she's seen what the extreme of "sharing the wealth" does - steals from anyone who is successful to allow free loaders to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor. Of course, this almost completely eliminates the incentives to work hard and society and the economy stagnate.

Tea partiers also believe that government is inherently less efficient than business because business has an incentive to make a profit. However, employees of big businesses, especially those that are publicly traded, have plenty of incentive to enrich themselves at the expense of the company. Furthermore, what is good for the company's bottom line may not be good for the world (dumping toxic waste or creating toxic assets, for example). Whenever, someone repeats to me the dogmatic idea that government is less efficient than the private sector I say that given examples like Worldcom, Enron, AIG, and General Motors that is an outrageous claim to make in the absence of any data to back it up. Of course, nobody has any such data. I've been in business for decades and the waste, fraud, and abuse I've seen in the private sector makes my head spin.

Spreading the Wealth

When I point out to my conservative friends the fact that over the last several decades all of the gains in our nation's wealth and productivity have gone to the richest, that does not sway them. From their perspective, you get what you work for. Wealth redistribution for the sake of equity just saps the motivation for the poor to try.

However, a society in which being born poor means an almost certain life sentence of poverty also saps motivation for the poor to better themselves. Unfortunately, our society has moved very far in that direction over the last several decades. To me spreading the wealth doesn't mean wholesale confiscation of my wealth, but it does mean that I should be expected to contribute enough so that my children and grandchildren can have opportunities similar to my own.

Even in my own relatively affluent community I see the effects of the anti-government, anti-tax policies that have overtaken the debate. Every year the state of Michigan cuts per-pupil funding for our public schools. When my oldest was in kindergarten I thought that it was bad because the school had to cut the reading specialist that pulled the talented readers out of class for advanced reading. In the 7 years between my oldest and youngest, not only have we not gotten back a reading specialist, class size for kindergarten has grown from 18 to 27.

Our roads are pot-holed. Our library can not construct it's own building. Students need to pay to participate in athletics or the school play. Higher education budgets get cut, making even a public college more expensive. Meanwhile, Michigan cut income tax rates for both individuals and businesses again and again.

Where Tea Partiers Should Be Able to Agree with Me

With my new understanding of the tea-party I think that I should be able to find areas where I, a liberal, agree with them. Although I am not sure that I have a good solution, none of us want to encourage generations of unwed teenage mothers. So, I think that we should all be able to support decent schools that would give the children of teenage mothers a chance at a decent education and a decent career. However, there is a real cost to education, public safety, childhood nutrition, and pre-natal care. In other words, there is a real cost to giving the poor a chance.

Inevitably, some of the money we spend will be wasted, but I can support wasting money to build the well-educated, productive work force of tomorrow. We all agree that while you may sometimes find a bargain, usually you get what you pay for. That is ostensibly why businesses pay so much for CEOs. Sure, sometimes you waste money on an Anthony Mozzilo, but if you want results you attract the best with high wages and great benefits.

A Challenge to Conservatives

So, here is my challenge to the tea party. Can you show me a country whose citizens prosper without a robust government? If not, since I don't want my kids to have to live in a society where they live in gated communities, with private roads, private security, and private schools, surrounded by growing slums how do you propose moving society forward? Decades of tax cuts for the wealthiest and deregulation have given us a collapsed economy with stagnant wages for all but the richest. Where is your path forward that keeps us from becoming a third world country with crumbling infrastructure and a tiny middle class?

The Rich are Doing Even Better Than You Thought.

2011-01-20T10:54:00.000-08:00

The income of the top 1% of the U.S. population has been growing while the income of the bottom 80% has stagnated for over a decade. Published figures claim that the top one percent garner 24% of all income (1) or 17.4% if volatile capital gains are excluded (2). Unfortunately, these figures severely underestimate the magnitude of income stratification in the U.S.

Why 29% is a Huge Underestimate.

The methodology used to determine the share of income for the top one percent of the population uses taxable income as its basis. However, not all income is taxable. Poorer taxpayers have fewer opportunities than the rich to shelter and defer income.

Some income may never be taxed (such as earnings on a 529 plan which are used to pay for qualified educational expenses or income from ROTH IRAs and ROTH 401ks). Trusts can be used to avoid estate taxes.

Income can be also be deferred with deferred compensation agreements, by not taking capital gains, increases in the value of unvested stock options, qualified retirement plans, etc.

Income can be offset with taxable losses - and those losses need not be real to be legal. For example the IRS allows you to claim that a residential building that you are renting out loses all of its value over 27.5 years (3). In the real world, we know that is not the case. Another example is that by selectively selling specific lots of stock a taxpayer can produce losses, often on investments that are actually in the black.

So, What Do the Richest 1% of Americans Really Make

If we could back out all of the tax avoidance strategies that reduce taxable income what would the real percentage of income controlled by the top 1% of the population be? It is hard to know precisely how much income is hidden in tax shelters, deferred, offset by paper losses, and so on, but changes in wealth give us a clue. Since we know that " between 1983 and 2004, in good part due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and the defeat of labor unions: Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, fully 42% of it went to the top 1%"(4) that sets a floor. Of course we need to add to that the percentage they consume and the percentage of assets that are depreciated for tax purposes but have real value or are otherwise hidden. Back of the envelope, I'd guess the top 1% of the U.S. population gets 45% of the nation's income.

Why it Matters

Republicans often argue that it is unfair that the top 1% of earners pay 38% of the Federal income tax (5). They conveniently ignore the fact that the overall percentage of taxes paid by the richest are much lower than that since payroll taxes are only charge on the first $106,800 of earnings (6)and that sales taxes take a far bigger share of income from the poor and middle class. However, even if we only consider income taxes it appears that the richest are not even paying their fair share.

(1) As of 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/08/20/business/21inequality.graphic.html?ref=economy
(2) As of 2005 http://www.demos.org/inequality/numbers.cfm
(3) http://www.smbiz.com/sbrl012.html
(4) http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
(5) http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
(6) http://hubpages.com/hub/Social-Security-Payroll-Tax-Limits

Inflation might be good right now.

2010-10-03T14:41:00.000-07:00

We are between a rock and a hard place. Normally, we should pay down debts when the economy is booming (this slows the economy) and increase government debt levels (which stimulates the economy) during lean times. Unfortunately, Bush squandered the Clinton surpluses on two wars and tax cuts, so now that we need the flexibility to increase deficit spending it doesn't look like we can do so without risking that the Chinese will worry that inflation will eat away the value of their US Treasury holdings and reduce the amount of our debt that they will finance. We'd end up with inflation, rising interest rates, and a weaker dollar. That might not be so bad.

My friend Eric was advocating for a payroll tax holiday, financed by debt but was worried that it would spark an inflationary spiral.

What would inflation do?

Inflation would reduce the number of homes that were underwater as real estate prices inflated and homeowners would have less trouble paying mortgages. This would strengthen banks with large mortgage holdings.

Our national debt would become more manageable since most is at a fixed interest rate.

If China reduced purchases of Treasuries the Yuan would strengthen, helping our balance of trade without a trade war. US manufacturers would become more internationally competitive. China might be forced to allow the standard of living to rise (to reduce the surplus they run and invest in treasuries). This would stimulate demand for imports and help the entire world's economy.

What about runaway inflation?

1. It is easier to stop an inflationary spiral than a deflationary one.
2. Runaway inflation is unlikely to take hold since there is slack in the labor and real estate markets.

What about the effect on retirees and those on fixed incomes? Many benefits (social security, medicare) will adjust. 401K stock values will inflate. Retirees will be able to invest at non-zero interest rates.

The payroll tax holiday would also help redistribute wealth, reducing the lopsided distribution we now have that leads to speculative bubbles caused by the wealthy having too much to invest and retards growth because the middle class has little room to spend. Robert Riech makes a very detailed argument for this in his latest book.

Corporations Pretending to be Green: FAIL

2009-11-26T13:21:00.000-08:00

Tomra and Schupan Recycling were so concerned that everyone do the right thing for our planet that they created large vinyl billboards which they put on the back of rented trucks that they drove around Mid-Michigan. The traffic congestion and pollution were a small price to pay to show everyone how to be green. I urge everyone to contact Tomra and Schupan to let them know how proud you are of what they are doing.

My Response to a Republican's e-mail about Tax Evasion

2009-09-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

This is the response that I sent to the e-mail in the previous post. I messed up one of the facts, It was Daschle, not Geithner who failed to report a car - and it was a car with a driver, but I am posting it as written.

I'm right in more than just theory. The IRS got information on 4,450 accounts with $18 Billion in them - that averages just over $4 Million per account. Undoubtedly there are many more "small" accounts than large ones, so the big ones will be in the hundreds of millions. In any case the numbers are huge.

You go on to make a case that " The IRS lost the right to go after tax evaders" You base this on two facts (1) There are politicians that have failed to pay taxes (in what you admit are far smaller amounts than the ones we are talking about here) and (2) there are corrupt, immoral democratic politicians.

Since the second fact is more peripheral I'll deal with it first. Yes, there are corrupt politicians on both sides of the aisle. Sometimes the system works they are caught, tried, and convicted. Sometimes it fails. We'll get back to this point later.

No politician should be above the law. This includes Ollie North in Iran Contra, president Nixon in Watergate and Bush with his warrant-less wiretaps. Once you start exempting politicians from having to follow the law, from checks and balances, you begin the slide from the rule of law to the rule of man and those systems end up serving only the people at the top (think North Korea, Communist China, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan).

So, you would think I'd be as outraged at Timothy Geithner as I am at the tax evaders with the accounts in Switzerland, but I'm not.

First, there is the question of scale. For Geithner the $43,000 (including penalties and interest) is rounding error -- it was a car provided for personal use and not declared if memory serves.

Second, there is the question of intent. I know those with Swiss accounts were trying to evade taxes. I'm not sure that Geithner was. I've got an MBA, some financial sophistication, and my taxes are surely less complex than his but I'm sure if you went through my returns with a fine toothed comb you would find mistakes.

Third, there is a question of equal treatment under the law. Even for the Swiss account holders, if they voluntarily came forward and paid up the IRS said that they would not be prosecuted -- and that is for a far more egregious offense.

Fourth, there is a question of the standard of evidence. In this country, we require evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminal charge to stick. You can argue that there is a reasonable doubt about forgetting to declare some income -- but not about hiding a million bucks in a tax haven.

Finally, I want to address the most troubling claim, that because you think there has been some unfairness in the system the IRS "gives up the right to collect taxes." As I'm sure you'll agree, this system -- democracy with checks and balances, is the best one tried on the planet to date. Sure it is imperfect and unfair at times -- it is designed and run by humans. If everyone decides that they need not pay their fair share until the system is as fair as they want it to be we'll end up with next to nobody paying. Then the things you value: aid to Israel, a strong defense, the police, etc. won't be possible. The things that I value: education, the FDA, the NIH won't be funded either. This particular paradox - conservatives claim that they don't want anarchy or tyranny but are unwilling to pay the price for democracy - that drives me crazy. They claim to love our country, but fight against our government - trying to starve it of the money it needs to run.

I don't like everything our government does. I hate some of the things our politicians do. There is injustice and waste in our system. I am happy to lobby for a more efficient, less corrupt system - but not at the price off vilifying the great system we have. I think that conservatives should feel the same way.

A Republican Response to the Rich Hiding from Taxes

2009-08-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

I posted a link to an article about UBS handing the IRS a list of tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts on Facebook. I suggested that the IRS throw the book at these unpatriotic tax evaders and got this e-mail from a conservative whose anonymity I will preserve here. I'll post my response shortly:

David,

Theoretically you are right, I really agree that those big tax evaders
should be made to pay up. However I have a few issues:

$20 billion divided over 19,000 accounts (from the article cited by you) breaks down for about $1 million per person (not hundreds of millions). It is still true that the avoided tax is a few times larger then the tax “mistakes” Geithner and Daschle made, but consider that they are not “ingenue”s but financial experts in the highest financial positions of the country. They did get away by claiming “honest mistakes” that is totally ridiculous. And not just simply they got away, but were nominated/appointed to high offices). Everyday Jack and Joe are audited for minor mistakes and prosecuted. It is like putting the wolf to guard the sheep. There should be 1 law for everyone (that unfortunately includes those weasels with the USB accounts.) The IRS lost the right to go after tax evaders when they accepted the “honest mistake” claim from leading political figures.

Also, due to space restriction on facebook I did not even mention Charles Rangel, the Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, and a Deputy Whip (look it up on Google: Mr. Rangel, who has a net worth of $566,000 to $1.2 million, according to Congressional disclosure records occupies 4 rent-stabilized apartments in New York city -the very few rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments are for small income families.

Rangel has admitted to a no-interest loan along with $75,000 in income from a rental villa in the Dominican Republic and said that he plans on repaying the owed money for his federal tax evasion.

According to the House Ethics Committee Rangel’s use of nearly $80,000 worth of campaign funds to pay his son for a sub-par website is against House Rules

According to the House Ethics Committee Rangel failed to report 28 instances of acquiring, owning, or disposing of assets between $239,026 and $831,000. These assets appeared and disappeared from his disclosures without notice,as House rules, at the time, demanded.)

Arguing with Republicans over a public health insurance OPTION

2009-08-20T23:16:00.000-07:00

I've been arguing with Republicans about including a public option in the current health-care reform proposals. Here's how the argument seems to go:

Republican: We can't have a public option, the government is going to ration health care. They'll decide your life isn't valuable enough, refuse to pay, and you die. I read that if Steven Hawking had lived in England the Government would have pulled the plug on him and let him die.(1)

Me: Your care is rationed now, by an insurance company that profits if you die. Walk in front of a bus and they can decide to cancel your coverage because you forgot to tell them about the doctor you visited for a wart ten years ago. If you don't like the way government rations health care, you can stick with the insurance company that rations your care now. By the way, Hawking is British and has lived there his whole life.

Republican: But it'll be the government running it. They can't do anything right.

Me: They won two world wars, the cold war, put a man on the moon, funded DARPANET (which turned into the Internet), educated a generation with the GI bill, and built the Interstate highways.

Republican: Yeah, but they will be inefficient because the government is running it.

Me: Why is that?

Republican: Because the free market always does things more efficiently.

Me: Leaving aside the recent debacle in the financial sector, the government is better at collecting debt (2) and more cost effective at delivering medical services, look at the (3)Medicare Advantage Program.

Republican: Everyone will love the Government program so much, that private insurance will be destroyed.

Me: You mean the inefficient, bureaucratic, rationing system will be so loved that by everyone the free market system won't be able to compete?

Republican: This plan doesn't address the real root of the problem.

Me: No, it get the 46 million uninsured into the insurance system, stops you from losing healthcare if you lose your job, stops you from being unable to buy insurance if you have a pre-existing condition, and makes an attempt (which I'll admit is weak) to begin to control costs.

Republican: No, the problem is run away malpractice suits make Medicine too expensive.

Me: Malpractice costs are less than 2% of total healthcare spending(4).

Republican: There aren't really 46 million uninsured. That includes illegal immigrants.

Me: Of the 46 million uninsured, only a fifth are immigrants (5). I think that we'd all agree that legal immigrants deserve the right to health insurance, but assuming that we want legal immigrants to be left out of our insurance system, that leave 37 million citizens with no health insurance. A number that is growing. We've got to do something about it.

Republican: Yeah, but whatever we do we can't have a public option, the government is going to ration health care. They'll decide your life isn't valuable enough, refuse to pay, and you die.

(1) "Hawking is British and has lived there his whole life. He’s a professor at Cambridge for crying out loud."

(2) "The study – supported by an independent review -- showed that it is reasonable to conclude that when working similar inventory, IRS collection is more cost effective than the contractors."

(3) "The plans now cost the government about 14% more per person than does regular Medicare, according to a recent analysis by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which recommends reimbursement rates to Congress."

(4) "represents less than 2 percent of overall health care spending."

(5) "Mr. Rove claims that one-fifth of the uninsured are illegal aliens. I can’t find the basis for this claim (which, if the numbers in the latest Census report are correct, implies that all noncitizens are illegal immigrants)."

Tea Parties: Protesting taxation with representation

2009-07-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

I was recently approached on the street by someone who urged me to come to a "tea party" at our state capitol to protest high taxes. I told her that I resented her usurping a symbol of our history and using it to represent something that it never represented in history.

"But, the Boston tea party was about taxes," she replied. "No," I corrected "it was about taxation WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. Last I checked I got to vote."

Her argument immediately shifted. She said she'd called her congressman and he was not responsive to her concerns about the deficit. She was now just exercising her rights to peacefully protest unresponsive leaders and their lack of concern about deficit spending.

I have no problem with people making their voice heard, even though she is still misappropriating a symbol from American history. Now, however, she was protesting neither taxation nor lack of representation and I still disagreed with her. So, I explained that I believed we should have good roads, great schools, a strong military, and well funded security regulators and now was not the time to raise taxes to pay for those things.

Her argument shifted again. Suddenly she was talking about Michigan State Legislators pensions and how lavish they were. That kind of spending, she explained, was why we needed to restrain taxes. I would have pointed out to her that she'd switched to the state which could not run deficits, asked if she wanted to attract the best and brightest to the legislature, etc. but my wife dragged me away and her argument would have just shifted again.

I'm left unsatisfied. So, tea partiers, what exactly are you protesting?

Sex and Violence

2009-05-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a showing of Angels and Demons with my kids. The movie, which was rated PG-13 was full of violence. The plot involves a series of murders and attempted murders including burning a man alive, poisoning, drowning, stabbing, shooting, and a car bomb. I wonder why this level of violence is considered OK by the film ratings board when sexually oriented nudity or expletives if "as must even one of those words used in a sexual context" requires an R rating.

I am willing to bet that the parents of everyone reading this have had sex and have used a dirty word. I'm also willing to bet that almost none of them has shot, set fire to, drowned, poisoned, or bombed another person. We're not killers and we have sex, so why is violence in the movies OK for 13 year olds, but sex forbidden? I'd far rather have my kids think that sex occurs frequently and murder doesn't happen often than have them watch movies that imply it's the other way around.

A Death Tax or a Birth Tax

2009-05-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

Republicans often rail against the estate tax, which they refer to as a "death tax". The Republicans, however, fail to point out that it is a tax that applies to those that have millions of dollars left when they die. They claim that the tax causes families to have to sell farms and small businesses, but specific examples and statistics are never provided - just anecdotes.

In fact, the wealthy manage to transfer significant wealth to their offspring tax free, by paying for education, gifts, trusts, and a variety of other tactics. Furthermore, there was a $1,000,000 estate tax exemption before Bush schedule a series of reductions that included a complete repeal in 2010. In 2011, estate taxes revert to what they were before the Bush reductions. Paris Hilton has to worry about being disowned more than being taxed into starvation.

The wealthy have been given immense opportunities, thanks to our society. All the estate tax does is let them give back to the society that made them so successful.

The most pernicious part of the argument against the estate tax, however, is the part that the radical right never addresses. Absent an estate tax we either need to tax the living by increasing taxes today or our children by passing on larger deficits for them to repay.

When my third child was born I calculated his "birth tax". To do so, I took

the national debt on the day he was born (6/29/2005) $7,776,435,356,595.00

the average interest rate on the national debt 4.689% on that day,

the population of the U.S. from the census bureau 293,655,404

and his life expectancy of 77.6 years

I then used Microsoft Excel's PMT function to calculate his monthly payment if he started paying the day he was born and if he waited until his 18th birthday. My poor baby was on the hook for payments totaling $99,189.61 the day he was born. In reality it is even worse, since he's not repaying his birth tax now and is unlikely to be able to start any time soon: Assuming a balanced budget from his date of birth until his 18th birthday (an assumption that now that he's almost 4 seems ludicrously optimistic) he'll need to repay $180,611.27 over his lifetime!

Handing Wall Street Yet Another Gift

2009-05-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Our government is trying to buy up toxic assets by giving non-recourse loans to private equity groups that will then buy the pools of assets for pennies on the dollar. Seems unfair that these private groups can buy the assets at a deep discount, primarily with money that you and I loan them and we can not. To counter this argument, the government includes in their solicitation for bids a request for how the private equity groups will allow public participation. Not much of a surprise that they want to package them into instruments which they can sell tot he public and upon which they can collect huge sales and management fees. We do not, however, need to hand wall street a new money maker to allow public participation in the deals.

The New York Times in their reporting on the idea of retail investors participating in buying toxic assets says: "For the investment managers, the benefits are potentially large. These big firms can charge healthy fees to investors for taking part."

The treasury department already sells a variety of notes and bonds directly to the public via it's Treasury direct website. Since, the U.S. government will already be an equity investor in the deals, retaining 50% of each one, they can either sell the public some portion of their equity or some portion of the PEGs equity in each deal directly.

You Know You are a Liberal

2009-05-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

When...	But..
You believe that a man should be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin	You support affirmative action
Believe that war is not the answer	but won't tell us how many rounds of Kumbaya it will take to get Al Quada recruits to become peace loving humanists
Believe that education and economic opportunities in the third world is all that is needed to defeat Islamic fundamentalism	Ignore the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were well off, exposed to Western ideas, and college educated.
You love to talk about America's support for authoritarian in countries like Chile and Guatemala	but have no problem with third world despots from the left like Fidel Castro
Hate factory farms, buy organic, protest against genetically modified organisms, and don't like milk from cows that got rBGH	Claim to want to feed the world and ignore the fact that without the technologies you protest we'd have mass starvation.
Enjoy criticizing America for all its failings	Never compare it to North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, or any of the countries that don't measure up
You object to big corporations sending jobs to overseas sweatshops because it costs our jobs and depresses wages	Want to ease immigration laws as if that won't depress wages
Object to capitalism because it's not equitable	Ignore the fact that it is far and away the most productive system ever used by man
Hate when conservatives ignore science and back abstinence only education, creationism, and oppose stem cell research	Treat your diseases with herbs because they are natural instead of scientifically tested pharmaceuticals. Supplements are untested and unregulated.

You Know You are a Conservative When

2009-04-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

When...	But...
You defend huge pay packages for executives because you need to pay to attract talent	Oppose increasing school funding because there is no proof that throwing money at the problem will make it better
During good economic times you want tax cuts because "it's our money and should be returned to us". During bad economic times you want tax cuts because we need to stimulate economic growth	Are shocked at the size of the deficit
You are pro-life, demonstrating for every fetus and brain dead comatose person on life support	You oppose taxes and regulation on pollution and cigarettes You oppose paying for universal health care
You say "Government is the problem, not the solution"	Still want paved roads, functioning schools, fire fighters, police, a military, diplomats, courts, a coast guard and safe food.
You gleefully celebrate the free market's successes and point to urban housing from the 60s and 70s and other government failures	Ignore WorldCom, Enron, AIG, B of A, and government successes like the GI bill, TVA, DARPAnet, and the interstate highway system.
You have no problem running huge deficits for 8 years under Bush to finance tax cuts that widen the gap between rich and poor to levels not seen since the 1920s	Take to the streets throwing "tea parties" when Obama chooses huge deficits to finance a stimulus package to ameliorate the greatest economic crisis of our generation
Remember that tea parties are to protest taxation	conveniently forget that it is to protest taxation without representation
You refuse to believe the overwhelming science behind evolution and global warming	Trust the science that makes your refrigerator, car, and Viagra work
Oppose gay marriage because the Bible and tradition say marriage is between one man and one woman and we shouldn't change tradition	Conveniently forget the traditions of polygamy in the old testament and bans on inter-racial marriage
Oppose gay marriage because every child deserves two parents of opposite sex	Never protest divorce, allowing marriage between infertile individuals, and have no problem with the fact that opposing gay marriage leaves kids in foster care
Oppose government intrusion into our private lives	but oppose legalizing assisted suicide
Oppose government intrusion into our private lives	but oppose gay marriage
Oppose government intrusion into our private lives	but support strong marijuana laws
View government regulations and regulators with hostility, claiming that eventually the market will punish bad actors so nobody will misbehave	Wonder where the regulators were when you invested with Madoff and Enron and bought those lead toys for your kids
Believe in private markets because the private sector will always do it better and cheaper	but ignore the overwhelming evidence that Meidcare is more efficient than private insurers, military contractors overcharge us, subsidized student loans are more expensive than direct....
Oppose immigration because immigrants take our jobs and depress wages	Favor free trade because off-shoring reduces a company's costs and results in lower priced goods and a higher standard of living for all
Don't want to talk to Cuba or Iran because they are run by tyrants	Want to engage China and Saudi Arabia because cultural exchange and mutual understanding can lead to positive change
Believe government power must be constrained	Support warrant-less wiretapping, detention without trial of "enemy combatants" and anything else the President decides makes us safer

Introduction To My Blog

2009-04-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

This is my answer to the conservative (and sometimes liberal) orthodoxies that we live with and which make no sense. I'll start by skewering conservatives, who have completely lost touch with reality in my first post "You Know You are a Conservative When..." and then I'll poke holes in a few liberal positions. I hope to inspire serious debate about ideas. Name calling will not be tolerated (in fact I will just moderate you out).