Left Side of the Economy

As in, Left Behind

Let’s start with an economic problem so obvious many people don’t think about it: water. We can’t live without it, and neither can people who live in developing nations. It should be but isn’t obvious that if your life is focused on basic necessities like boiling and filtering your water, you aren’t focused on productivity. A thousand million people do not have access to safe drinking water, and the problem is getting worse. Even though there are inexpensive things that can be done to improve water quality and supplies, it is expensive to make an entire country’s water supply safe. Private money, thought to be the solution, is not forthcoming. And forgive me for thinking that is a blessing in disguise. Water is too important for a profit motive to be involved.

Another thing we can’t do without — but you probably think about it from time to time — is healthcare. People who are ill generally have trouble doing their jobs well, assuming they can work at all. Well, there’s good news and bad news. It turns out that most Americans get roughly equal healthcare, regardless of race or status. Unfortunately that care is mediocre. I love these last two paragraphs:

Health experts blame the overall poor care on an overburdened, fragmented system that fails to keep close track of patients with an increasing number of multiple conditions.

Quality specialists said improvements can come with more public reporting of performance, more uniform training, more computerized checks and more coordination by patients.

So the problem is too many departments and too much work, but the solution is another department that makes more work. Right.

Now on to an underutilized resource in the United States, ironic considering how commonly it is found, the female labor pool. The summary: “We’re so far behind the rest of the world in commonsense, pro-women and pro-family policies that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to figure out what works…. The returns on investing in working families are high.”

It’s hard to have an economy when the world is coming apart. Some people have been saying for decades that ecologically friendly initiatives would hurt the economy. They are wrong. There is a lot of money to be made developing and selling green technology. And besides, if we destroy the planet, there will be no more economy.

Have you ever tried really hard to figure something out — a song title, how to solve a problem, why something works the way it does — only to have the answer mysteriously pop into your head hours or days later, usually while relaxing or thinking about something completely unrelated? You almost certainly knew your body requires regular rest, but it turns out your mind needs rest too! Time you take to relax might be the most productive time of all. And Americans don’t take very much time off at all.

So just maybe the world would be a better place if everybody had access to safe drinking water and quality healthcare, if every family could count on maternity leave, affordable childcare and other support services, if we had access to more “green” technology, and if we could just all take a break now and then.

In closing, How to get a Conservative to Lie.

Invasion of the Shorties Snatchers

Mom, can I come home? On one hand, the economy is sufficiently bad that there is a societal trend towards young adults staying at home or moving back home. On the other hand, how quickly we forget how many seasons Meathead and Gloria lived with the Bunkers, how many years it took to scrape together the money for the downpayment on the Jefferson’s old place. (Thanks to Sarah, for pointing out this story!)

Wanted: Alternative to Hillary. A fascinating piece about the intersection of money, politics, and influence. His name is Chris Korge, and he supports Hillary Clinton in 2008 — but only if she’s running.

Fifteen scientific replies to challenges by creationists. Not just a must read it’s a must understand.

The Chinese proverb is “Wealth never survives three generations.” The problem is that nobody is teaching young people to manage their money.

Go Sandra! Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has spent the last several days shaking trees and slaughtering sacred cows, showing us all what a real conservative sounds like! In one apparently brilliant speech, she blasted pro-life advocates on Terri Schiavo, cautioned against “strong-arming” the independent judiciary, and warned against the beginnings of a dictatorship.

Finally, yet another story to keep an eye on: possible mistakes — including disobeying a judge’s direct instructions — may mean accused “20th hijacker” mistrial. I am at a loss for why the prosecution would deliberately do things to jeopardize this case. After all, the Government badly needs to show that they are on top of the terrorism thing, and what better way to do that than to convict this guy? Unfortunately, I think the Christian Science Monitor has hit on an underlying and very chilling fact: “‘This [Moussaoui trial] is about whether the criminal justice system has any role in the war on terror,’ says Juliette Kayyem, a public policy expert at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.” If there is a mistrial, a retrial, or anything short of sending Moussaoui to death row, I expect to hear rhetoric about how these people, these suspected terrorists should not be tried in civilian courts at all, but rather by military tribunals. However bad terrorists may be, it is very dangerous to the rest of society to have certain crimes tried in secret courts.

Have a great week, everybody.

Feel the Mighty Power of Stat-Fu!

Bill Fleckenstein has been bearish as long as I have known of his existence, which is going on a decade now. Even he is in awe of the mighty statistical wonkistry involved in unraveling Joe and Jane Average’s dilemma: “The government tells us the economy is fine and unemployment is low, but things sure feel rough from here.” A direct quote from Mr. Fleckenstein: “I have been aware of nearly all the statistical tricks used by the government since they were implemented. Nonetheless, seeing them collectively described in one article is incredibly sobering.”

He thinks this article is so important that he is giving us the short version days before the original — economist John Williams interviewed by Kate Welling — will be available without a subscription. Some of these items are not a shock to those of you who have been reading here a while, but Williams and Fleckenstein have the numbers and methods to tell you the underlying whys and wherefores. Go read how….

* Real unemployment is more like 12%, more than twice the official Department of Labor number.

* The government literally changed the rules of how inflation is measured to get a lower number.

* That still wasn’t good enough so they started changing the items whose prices were measured.

* If they hadn’t tinkered with these numbers, Social Security checks would be 70% higher than they are now. No wonder money seems tight to Granny.

* American’s incomes are lower than reported too, because of some accounting slight of hand that assumes homeowners pay rent to themselves!

So if you would like to think I see the economy as “a glass half empty,” I would like to remind you to pay attention to what’s really in the glass. These things are even more startling when you realize that Income is not keeping pace with the official inflation numbers, and remember both those numbers are tweaked to seem as rosy as possible.

In closing: cause of death, corporate culture; new bankruptcy rules suck, even judges say so; some tips on getting health insurance coverage; and the real Cola Wars.

Updates, Welcomes, That Kinda Stuff

Don’t forget to look over at the right column on the main page. I just updated the “Stuff I Read” section and added “Webcomics I Read.”

Also, I finally joined BlogHer. A special welcome to anybody who clicked through from there! Also, a warm welcome and thanks for reading to folks who come to us through Jerry Kindall, Pure Land Mountain, Bloglines, HealthyConcerns, Down the Avenue, Elisa Camahort, World Blogs, Fecundity, Foomart, and anybody else I might have forgotten.

First (Amendment) Things First

Want to read something scary?

Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half can name at least two members of the cartoon family [“The Simpsons”], according to a survey.

No wonder we don’t mind watching our Constitutional rights slip away; too many of us don’t even know what our rights are. It gets worse: “About one in five people thought the right to own a pet was protected, and 38 percent said they believed the right against self-incrimination contained in the Fifth Amendment was a First Amendment right, the survey found.” Well, at least people know they have the right not to incriminate themselves, even if they are a little hazy on where that right comes from. You can read the whole Bill of Rights over at Cornell’s site, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to explore the First Amendment a little more:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Wikipedia tells us that “Originally, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and not to the several state governments…. However, in 1925 with Gitlow v. New York, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment (which had been adopted in 1868) made certain applications of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states. The Supreme Court then cited the Gitlow case as precedent for a series of decisions that made most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states.” So if you’d like to mentally say “The Government” where the original text says “Congress,” you would not be inaccurate. Let’s quickly look at our First Amendment rights:

Freedom of Religion means both freedom to believe whatever you want — and remember the Pilgrims were just the first of many people who came to this land looking for religious freedom — and freedom from Government dictated religion. Don’t try to argue that the Founding Fathers meant freedom to practice any kind of Christianity you like, because guys like Jefferson were well educated and knew about things like Mohammedans and the Salem Witch Trials. The same First Amendment that protects your right to practice any sect of Christianity protects your right to practice Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Satanism, Wicca, Shinto, Hinduism, Pastafarianism, or anything else you can think of. It furthermore protects all of us from the establishment of any sort of Holy Law, whether it is Sharia or Leviticus. The places where the practice of religion have been successfully superseded by the law are few, and dictated by an overriding good: in Texas it is not legal to withhold medical treatment from minors, regardless of whether the parents are Christian Science adherents; notwithstanding that some religions consider a young person to be an “adult” at 13 or so, it is still not legal to marry them off at this age. It is not a coincidence that both of these examples involve children; adults are free to do a lot of things, but they are not free to harm kids, even in the name of God.

Freedom of Speech or of the Press are kind of lumped together in the original text, so I will deal with them together. The right to say things and the right to publish what you say are closely related in any event. The Government cannot stop us from saying pretty much whatever we like, nor can they stop a newspaper from printing whatever they like. Period. The end. I fail to see how any kind of Government imposed “gag rule” can possibly be Constitutional unless issues of national security are involved. Nevertheless there are certain limits on this freedom that I think most of us can agree are a good thing: we can’t go around threatening people; we can’t incite violence or riots (the classic “Yelling fire in a crowded theatre” example); if we publish something that is demonstrably untrue, we should expect to be held accountable. However, when I say “held accountable” I mean correction statements or paying damages; we don’t normally put people in jail for publishing lies.

The right to peaceably assemble is in there too. We have the right to get together with our friends pretty much anyplace that we are allowed to be, as long as we play nice. So all those anti-loitering statutes stand on the shaky ground of assuming certain assembly to be not peaceable. And those “free speech zones” are a complete travesty. Freedom to gather together in protest is implicitly protected, again with the caveat that it must stay peaceful.

The right to petition the Government for redress of grievances is in my opinion one of the most underrated protections we have. This is the right to go to court, the right to say somebody did something wrong. And make no mistake about it, the First Amendment says the Congress and therefore the Government cannot take away your right to go to court. And here is why I think this right is underrated: Congress has passed several laws in recent years which either limit court review, or specifically say the law and/or actions of the Government cannot be challenged in court! The devil you say! Why aren’t the Jack McCoy’s of this nation standing up and challenging this affront to our liberties?

We must never forget that the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights was written by people who overthrew the legal Government.

Your Money or Your Life

I promised an item on healthcare, and here it is. As a polite reminder, the 40+ million Americans without health insurance — almost one in every 7 people — are breathing their germs on you every day.

Yesterday morning I was listening to comments to a gathering of state Governors by the CEO of Wal-Mart. And you know what? even though he may be part of the problem of healthcare insurance, he is right about one thing:

“The soaring cost of health care in America cannot be sustained over the long term by any business that offers health benefits to its employees. And every day that we do not work together to solve this challenge is a day our country becomes less competitive in the global economy.”

He went on to say that mandating he spend a certain percentage of his payroll on health coverage was just not going to work. Like it or not, I tend to think he is right.

As I listened to people commenting on what Mr. Scott had said, again and again I heard how the problem was at least in part that people had no incentive to limit their healthcare costs. This was interspersed with survey results showing that the overwhelming majority of respondents were paying more towards healthcare than they were a year ago. The commentators implied that the problem would be solved if corporate America offloaded more of the costs to the end users of healthcare, for example through HSAs and high deductibles/copays. After all — I actually heard someone say this — if people had to pay more of their healthcare costs they would think twice about “unneeded” emergency room visits or medical tests.

Let me take the spin out of that for you: the cost of healthcare will come down if you just don’t worry about that crushing pain in your chest at 3 AM. And somehow it will be more affordable if you pay for everything instead of letting the insurance company cut a deal with the hospital.

Let me start by puncturing a great myth of healthcare costs: healthcare costs are directly controlled by insurance companies, who alone determine what they will pay healthcare providers. You cannot go into your doctor’s office and say “Okay, you can run that cholesterol test, but I’m only paying you $X.” First of all, you are one person with no bargaining power. Second, it is illegal for your doctor to make such a deal with you. Your insurance company, on the other hand, has the ability to arbitrarily decide how much they will pay for any given procedure, and your doctor only has the power to accept the insurance payment, or not do business with that company. The fact that insurance companies are not able to contain costs in this environment is evidence that the system is broken.

I am going to say this again and hope it sinks in: if you want to “unload healthcare costs to consumers,” change the tax rules so everybody can deduct health insurance premiums. Couple this with state-level rules simplifying premiums and eligibility; who knows how many businesses are never started because the people involved can’t get individual coverage? This way, Joe and Jane Average can look at their employer’s health insurance plan, and if a better deal or better coverage is available elsewhere, they can just buy it. Of course, this does little to help the many people who can’t afford a few extra hundred dollars a month for private coverage or an HSA.

A better plan, one that will benefit everybody, is universal health care. You know, the CEO of Wal-Mart would look really progressive if he supported such an idea. Oh, and for the record? He supports a higher minimum wage too. He says it’s to benefit his customers, and while that may be true it will almost certainly impact the wages he pays, too. That sword cuts both ways.

If you want to read more on healthcare in general, please visit my friend Elisa Camahort and her colleagues over at Healthy Concerns.

The Incredible Shrinking Shorties

No, seriously, this one’s almost too short to be shorties. It is my hope to bang out something about healthcare tomorrow.

Karl Rove is planning on Hilary being the Democratic Presidential candidate in 2008. This is why a) she must not run;: b) she should pretend to be serious about running as long as possible. Let the Republican Machine figure out how to take her down, then pull a bait-and-switch.

Today I got an envelope from UNICEF. It had a nickel glued to the first page and the text on the envelope read “This nickel could save a child’s life.” Well for Heaven’s sake, why the heck haven’t they saved the child instead of mailing the nickel to me?? And this is supposed to make me want to give them more money. What will they do with it, mail it across the world one nickel at a time? Do I look like I’m made of nickels?

Tax time is closer than you think. Here’s tax pitfalls to avoid and the official IRS website, where you can download forms and instructions.

Finally, the Christian Science Monitor brings us this item on declining real income for “younger” Americans. By younger they mean anyone under 44: “Income fell 8 percent, adjusted for inflation, for those under 35 and 9 percent for those aged 35 to 44.”

Shorties the 13th

A cure for boredom or a prescription for insanity? You decide!

Almost 6 months later, ” Louisiana rebuilding plan unveiled.” My favorite part? “[I]t would require that people who receive housing assistance rebuild to new federal standards that haven’t been finalized.” Because it’s so easy to plan your rebuilding budget when the rules governing what you can and can’t do haven’t been written yet. According to the Washington Post, there is a take the money and run clause — I mean a mortgage buyout provision. I wonder what happened to the people who were sent to Katrina Camps.

Soon, there may be no such thing as “public records.” Good luck getting a replacement birth certificate. Or researching disease clusters. Or finding your birth parents. Or finding the health impact of industrial sites.

Within a decade, one of every 5 dollars spent in the United States will be spent on healthcare. This number may be low, as I think the expectation that prescription drug costs will go down is unrealistic. Every month new drugs are developed and patented, and there will always be a premium charged for them. Furthermore, there are hundreds of diseases being researched at any given time, meaning new drugs to treat those illnesses will soon be under development. Keep in mind this figure includes health insurance, hospital costs, drug costs, and actual fees paid to medical professionals. Oh, and if “The [Bush] administration predicts that Americans would become more thrifty consumers if they had to pay more of the upfront costs, which occurs with health savings accounts,” then they should get the tax rules and forms changed so that Joe and Jane Average can deduct premiums for individual health insurance policies.

Neo-Conservatism is dead. Long live Neo-Conservatism. Now lay down and shut up already!

And finally, Honda may start selling a “cheap” hybrid vehicle in 2007 or 2008. Unless of course they don’t.

Here, There, and Everywhere

Last night I was reading this item from Bradford Plumer, but frankly the first paragraph is very meaty:

It’s not a big secret that the developing world suffered a major slowdown in growth starting around 1980, right about the time that the IMF began leveraging Third World debt to force poor countries into adopting its preferred mix of neoliberal policies: devaluation, “free” trade, privatization, deregulation. Among developing countries, per capita income growth plummeted from 3 percent annually in the “bad” old protectionist days of 1960-1980 down to 1.5 percent in 1980-2000. (For the poorest group of countries, things were even worse—per capita GDP growth plummeted from 1.9 percent annually in 1960-1980 to negative 0.5 percent in the heady globalization decades.)

Now think about that for a moment: after the creation of the IMF, economic development in so called “developing countries” was cut in half, and in some places went negative. Here’s one of his sources complete with charts and footnotes, he also has a link to a PDF article. Lest you think this is liberal loony left-wing propaganda, traditional conservatives* like Steve Forbes have for many years been critical of the IMF, saying “the IMF has been guilty of economic malpractice in not promoting growth policies.” As for myself, I remember thinking on September 11, 2001 that it was very interesting that the terrorists chose to target a building that housed the IMF and the World Bank.

Mr. Plumer goes on to discuss “the breathtaking rise of urban poverty” and the resultant rise of slums and super-ghettos around the world, a problem which he sees as only getting worse over the next few decades. It is an excellent item that I recommend reading, but I would prefer to focus on the IMF prescription and what it means here in the United States. So let’s get back to those “neoliberal policies: devaluation, ‘free’ trade, privatization, deregulation.”

Sound familiar?

Devaluation sure sounds like what has happened to the dollar under the Bush Administration. This was aided and abetted by John Snow, our Secretary of the Treasury, who says he is for a strong dollar, and then goes on to say that means among other things that it’s hard to counterfeit.

“Free” Trade is certainly something the Bush Administration says it is for. Now, you can’t give them blame or credit for NAFTA; that was ratified under the Clinton Administration. But you can blame them for CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a document whose ramifications have yet to play out. And furthermore, it is only fair to note that President Bush himself has said repeatedly he is for “free and fair trade”. In theory, this means free trade as long as it doesn’t hurt American interests. In real life it appears to mean free trade unless big American corporations stand to make a lot of money. See also: pissing contest with China, farm subsidies, steel tariffs, etc..

Privatization has been going strong in this country. It brought us Enron. Proponents say that privatization and breaking up monopolies in telecom has worked, but can you really choose who runs phone lines to your house? We still hear talk of privatizing Social Security, but thankfully most people have realized that you can’t solve “not enough money” by giving the system less money. A very scary prospect indeed is those who favor water system privatization. The TSA would like to privatize frequent flier security, a bad idea several ways. The core idea of privatization is the old Reagan idea that government always does things badly and companies always do things better. Yeah, remember that next time you get bad service at some company. Proponents say it works better because there is profit motive. Some things are too important for “profit” to be a prime motive, particularly since that profit is not evenly distributed to the people who helped make it possible.

Deregulation is another thing that has been going on in this country for a lot of years. The underlying premise is that companies would do more stuff that stimulates the economy if it weren’t for pesky government rules. I suggest we ask the survivor of the Sago mine incident how he feels about that. There has been a lot of deregulation from the USDA, and if you’d like to read about the effects, I recommend “Fast Food Nation” or “Bushwhacked.” Speaking of the USDA, did you know that they predicted that “Electric utility deregulation could cause 19 states to have higher electricity costs, especially rural customers in those states…”? Yes, it costs money to comply with regulations, but the bottom line is that the regulations were put in place for a reason; often that reason is to protect real human beings and the environment they live in. Just a friendly reminder, Earth is the only place we know of where humans can live at all.

So, these things being so right here in the United States, we can hardly be surprised when the Guardian reports “37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty.” Nor can we be shocked to learn that wages are not growing relative to inflation. And that’s inflation as measured (or undermeasured, if you prefer) by the government.

Our old friend Ben Franklin once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Our government is doing here the same things the IMF is forcing other nations to do, and getting the same results. Either our government is insane, or it is their goal to have a large, impoverished class of virtual serfs.

In closing, an excerpted scene of Security Theatre: 9700 items of checked baggage lost on average each and every day. They can’t even figure out where your bag is, and they want to tell you that’s because they want to make sure there’s not a bomb in it? And they want to poke through your underwear — that is with you, on the plane — but not all the cargo below, when the shipper is miles away? It sure would be nice if we could apply some good old fashioned logic and common sense to this airplane security thing.

* You remember them: the guys who are for things like small government, low taxes, and reducing the federal deficit.

Shorties of the Baskervilles

Maui may be running out of sand.

Romance Filter (Happy Valentines Day): Diamonds and the ethical purchase thereof.

Real conservatives don’t shut up and drink the Kool-Aid, but they may get flamed by people who claim to be real conservatives and like their Kool-Aid.

Enjoy some taxpayer-funded prepackaged news. You would think that they could have saved some of that sixteen hundred million dollars by consolidating those 343 PR contracts. For that matter, when we are talking this kind of money, wouldn’t it be cheaper to create an in-house PR agency and in-source it?

Maybe the White House thinks the Vice President shooting somebody is funny, (yeah, freaking hilarious) but Asian news sources are calling it “a bizarre and sinister episode.” So tell me, is it funnier now, since the victim has had a heart attack because “Some of the birdshot appears to have moved and lodged into part of his heart….”?

Bad enough that the courts are split on whether it’s ok for the FBI to track where you are via your cell-phone just because, now the Federal government would like to set up a giant omnibus electronic medical records database. Never mind that even Consumer Reports says “Electronic Medical Records Have Potential for Misuse.” Even news outlets less than 200 miles from Dubya’s Crawford ranch are publishing opinions against this sort of thing. Here’s the short version: creates big commercial database; subject to misuse and outright hacking; will be used by insurance companies to deny payment or coverage; will be used by other entities to “legally” discriminate based on medical conditions past or present; will probably not result in better care, particularly in the sort of emergencies where an omnibus medical record would be darn handy. ER docs are too busy saving your life to try and figure out how to get a remote computer database to barf up your records and — since they will likely contain streams of incomprehensible but succinct billing codes — then interpret them.