Are you red or blue?

Democrat vs Republican.  Left vs Right.  Liberal vs Conservative.  Donkey vs Elephant. Blue vs Red.

We all scream and squeal and whine like little girls at members of the alternative political affiliation, but have you ever really stopped to think about what the difference is?  Maybe you’re not quite sure WHAT you believe and wished there was a test for which school of thought with which you should align yourself.

Are you for lower taxes?  You’d be crazy not to be!  So maybe you’re a republican.  But you also realize that the earth is a fragile place that needs to be protected.  So maybe you’re a democrat.

I’d like to propose what I believe to be the single deep-rooted issue behind the schism of political self-righteous; the fundamental view of the world which ultimately determines which side of the philosophical line on which we fall.

Question #1 (of 1): Which do you feel to be more important, optimizing society for the individual or for the collective?

Neither is “better” in the absolute sense.  It’s like asking whether a Ferrari or a Bentley is a better car.  Both have their merits, but the answer can only come from knowing more about the question.  Are you looking for performance or luxury?  Speed or space?

While the question doesn’t hold up for all political differences, it’s a pretty good starting point.  I’ll be expanding on a few examples over the next couple weeks.  On which side do you stand on the major issues?  Are you an individualist or a collectivist?  Consider taxes, education, re-distribution of wealth, CEO pay, healthcare, unions, entitlement programs, foreign policy, etc.

More to follow.

Balance the budget!

Continuing to borrow just to operate the government is a recipe for disaster.  Especially $1.5T per year.  So instead of whining, here’s my plan:

1. Institute a flat tax (no deductions at all)

          The simplicity in the tax code spurs busn development and allows you to…

2. Dismantle the IRS (your tax return will be on a 3X5 postcard)

          Should save us around $10B

3. Completely cancel the Dept of Education – it’s a state issue

          $45B

4. Change the social security age to 70 (65 for partial withdrawal) and decrease payouts for all those who have not filed yet. 

          As life expectancies increase, the SS eligibility age should as well.  1% decrease in payouts each of the next 5 years; all those currently collecting will keep their current rates

5. Entitlement reform

          Allow private companies to invest the SS nest egg.  Close loopholes which provide entitlements to illegals (turn them away at the ER)

6. There would have to be plenty of smaller reforms within the big 3 entitlement programs as well (too many to get into)

7. Institute a federal sales tax on all internet commerce

          There is approx $175B/year in e-commerce that goes untaxed.  I suggest a 5% federal sales tax.  That would bring in $9B (and will increase each year)

8. Require random drug testing for all receipients of govt entitlements

          This will decrease drug use, entitlement spending, and fraud (taxpayer spending to treat an addict).  Win win win. 

9. Legalize marajuana and tax the crap out of it

          Increases tax revenue (state and local level), and vastly decreases federal expenditures on the drug war.  Fight heroin, not marajuana. 

10. End the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, but vastly increase the size of special operations forces and intelligence teams.

          We spend $2-3B/week on the iraq war alone.  Our mission is done.  Lets wrap it up.  In afghanistan, the mission isn’t done, but I disagree with the counterinsurgency strategy.  We get a lot better bang for our buck by employing a counterterrorism strategy.  Bring home the huge ground forces.  Screw the hearts and minds.  Let’s work with intel, special ops, and drones.  If you cross us, you die… and no, i’m not going to build you a well before I kill you. 

11. Amnesty for all illegals here (so they pay taxes), stiffen border control

          Not a popular conservative point of view, but it makes economic sense.  Stop the senseless border war spending.  Let them stay, but make them pay taxes.  If you want to use our ERs and collect our social security, then you’ll pay taxes.  Stiffen border security so we know who’s coming and going.  I’ll let you in, but you agree not to use any services in this country for 5 years.  If you’re here that long, you can become a citizen. 

Follow my plan and the country will prosper.  If you’re a congressman or senator and you’re reading this, call me and we can talk about my consultancy fee.  I’ll write the legislation myself.

The President is not a Politician

If the President of the US wants to be a leader of this country, then he shouldn’t be involved in politics.  We don’t elect the leader of the free world to cozy up next to all of his cronies and use every lectern as an opportunity to bash the other side.  Grow up, act as big as the office you hold, and lead from the center.  Sometimes the republicans are right, and sometimes the democrats are right.  Push for what’s right for the country, not what’s right for your party or your donors.  I can live with a president who has ideological differences from me, but I think it’s petty and shows a lack of vision to toe the party line in every case.

In addition, it is criminally wasteful to allow the president to campaign for other candidates.  That’s not his job!!!  I support a law making it illegal for elected officials to campaign on behalf of candidates at any level.  How many millions of dollars does it cost the president and his entourage to travel to who-knows-where Idaho to campaign for some idiot who obviously can’t hack it on his own?  I want the political party to pay me back for those tax dollars it cost me.  Have the president on screen through skype.  Or maybe he can get a free trial of gotomeeting.

Either way, the president, by definition, should be an a-political figure.  Anything else degrades the office.

p.s. This has nothing to do with President Obama.  All presidents do it (some are worse than others), and it sucks.

Circular Logic

So let me get this straight… the Community Reinvestment Act (Congress) and its various amendments pushed banks like Goldman Sachs to offer loans and investment vehicles they thought were too risky.  They wanted it to be more affordable for middle and low class families to own a home, but instead prices went through the roof followed by a precipitous drop.  Then the very same Congress that forced these risky behaviors goes for the jugular like a rabid dog when a bank like Goldman runs into problems caused by excessively risky behavior?

President Obama has been calling Wall St every dirty word in the book since he’s been in the national spotlight – he must not realize that his democrat buddies were the ones who created this sub-prime mortgage market in the first place.

Only in Washington…

It’s the most reactive bunch of morons I’ve ever seen.  That goes for you too, Republicans.

God and Science

I am a scientist.

I am a Christian.

Any apparent different between the bible and scientific discovery is our misinterpretation of one or the other.  Full stop.  If you have to read that sentence again, do so.

The on-going argument about whether the universe has a creator is now and forever unanswerable.  Deists will tell you that’s because God does not reveal himself to us (anymore).  From the atheist’s perspective this is awfully “convenient”.  Their counterpoint is that the burden of proof is on the believer (it’s impossible to prove that something that doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist).  This is absolutely true – the burden lies with we deists to convince others that a creator exists.  This is no small feat, but I have a few thoughts:

It’s intensely emotional for most theists, who believe in a creator on an intuitive level as opposed to a logical level. There in-lies a huge disconnect between the believing and non-believing communities. The vast majority of deists argue their case emotionally, where the atheists argue the counterpoint logically. There can be no meaningful dialog with that as the backdrop.

It’s also a topic where people are distinctively untrue to themselves.  Many uninformed theists believe because they believe. When asked why, they retort “I dont know… i just feel it” or something like that.  The overwhelming majority are not scientists and they have an intense distrust for science because they perceive it as an affront to their morality and religious views.  The most glaring example is the young-earth creationists vs the overwhelming scientific evidence that the earth is almost 15 billion years old.  Because it’s such a personal and emotional topic, both sides try to “win” the argument, but are blinded by their intense feelings on the subject. Most atheists want logical or scientific proof and are turned off by the witless sheep that blindly follow a fairy tale.

It’s a serious problem for those of us who are both scientists (physics) and deists. My arguments are encumbered by the thousands of scientifically unaware whose impassioned but irrational arguments for a God hurt my cause more than help.

Morality, Faith, and God

The growing sentiment among Atheists is being blasted in a media campaign – you can be “good” without God.

While I believe this is completely true, I also think it’s a bit misleading and misses the central point of the discussion.  USA Today reported on a study published in the Journal of Cognitive Sciences which states that there are “…no differences between religious and atheist answers to moral dilemmas.”

Atheists are using this study to conclude that being religious or having faith in a higher power does not make you a good person, or even a better person.  Looking at their data myopically, that’s easy to conclude, but there’s a larger question.  To me, it merely proves the fact that morality is inherent, not learned or faith-dependent.  We’re all born moral beings, but our life choices sometimes cause us to stray from being inherently good.  Those of faith are called to live the morality that they’re already hardwired with, but we all know that both the religious and non-religious live lives representing the full spectrum of morality.

What this study ignores is the evolutionary implications of morality and faith. What other creatures have morals?  Do snakes live in a “do not kill” society? Do wombats open the door for their wives?  Obviously not.

So why are humans inherently moral?

If you don’t believe in God, then morality the opposite of what would make sense in a survival sense.  Moral acts are giving of yourself and open you up to get “killed” by other creatures.  Being nice is opposite from what ensures survival. So the fact that we’re moral beings suggests that God exists by itself.  Being good without God is taking the inherent morality that God hard-wired into you and hijacking it for political reasons.  Shame on you, Atheists.

How I’d Fix Healthcare

Is healthcare a “problem” in this country? Yes.  Is it a “knock your socks off, the world is going to end” problem?  No.  Either way, here’s my official proposal for how the system would work best for all parties.

1. Allow healthcare to be purchased across state lines.

No brainer.  Republicans have been trumpeting this for years.  Here’s why it works:  Competition makes all firms work as hard as they can to cut costs and find efficient yet effective ways of doing things.  If a customer can jump ship for another health insurance provider, then the consumer’s current provider has to be on their best behavior.  The customer regains the upper hand.

2.  Make it illegal for businesses to buy healthcare for their employees

Now hear me out…  Instead of businesses paying for huge employee plans, they would increase the salary of each employee to cover the cost of an individual plan (wouldn’t cost the company any more).  The only reason individual plans are so expensive now, is because insurance providers’ corporate structures are not set up for that business model.  By making this shift, the market would reward those companies who could provide individual plans the most efficiently and would focus the industry back onto the consumer and his/her doctor.

This would have a few second-order effects.  First, it would allow people greater freedom in what jobs to accept, since healthcare benefits won’t play into the decision.  Second (and similar), it allows more people to finally pull the trigger and start their own business.  The harsh reality is that healthcare is sometimes the singular thing between someone striking it out on their own and sticking with the 9-5.  More small businesses create more national wealth, create more tax revenue, create more jobs, etc.

3.  Tort reform

Another slam-dunk.  I’m not saying that consumers should feel helpless against bad doctors – they should be sued when they truly make a mistake.  What they shouldn’t be sued for is missing an obscure Chilean disease carried only by the Mongolian fruit fly on Tuesdays in the winter.  Doctors order expensive tests on patients against their instincts solely to cover the butts from lawsuit.  It costs the healthcare system $billions every year.

4.  Regulation to protect consumers against being dropped or denied for pre-existing conditions

This is a social issue – some patients will cost insurance companies $millions and they’ll lose a lot of money, but others will never get sick and pay their premiums for 50 years.  It’s the way the entire insurance construct works.  People pay their premiums for years so that when they get sick, they’ll be covered.  Insurance providers shouldn’t be able to drop people arbitrarily.  Same deal with pre-existing conditions – it’s just the right thing to do.

5.  Require disaster coverage for ALL Americans

ER visits are a necessity of life.  If we get into a car accident or fall off a ladder, we need healthcare ASAP.  It’s not fair for some of us to have to pay for ER visits, and others have free healthcare through ERs any time they want.  For the poorest Americans, this will probably be subsidized, but the requirement should still hold.  This would only cover emergency events, and would have varying caps based on your premium.  For example, for $20/month, you get $250K worth of emergency coverage, but for $50/mo you’re covered up to $1M.

6.  Federal government sets health insurance “classes”

Health insurance is a product; those with more money should have access to more/better coverage.  The government should define what class 1, class 2, and class 3 coverage is, then insurance companies can offer different plans.  The CEO of Mundie Inc can clearly afford class 3 coverage, while a 23-year-old recent college grad is probably going to start with a class 1 plan.  It’s important for the government to set the definition of each class, so that it’s fair for the consumer.  Health care has too much room for swindling fine-print.

I can see it now – www.buyyourhealthinsurancehere.com.  You’d be able to go on there, search through a myriad of plans for vastly differing prices with vastly different coverage.  If you want to spend a lot and have a doctor at your fingertips, feel free.  If you want to go with a bare-bones plan, that’s in there too.  It puts healthcare control back in the hands of the ones who use it and who make 99.999% of the health-related decisions in this country – citizens.

So go ahead.  Poke holes in my plan – I dare you.

At the Brink

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less capitalistic.

-       Not Robert Frost

So the way I see it, we are at a crossroads.  We are sinking further and further into a European style of government (I won’t call it socialism yet) characterized by high taxes and heavy government intervention.  Between Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, this sucks up over half of the US federal govt spending.  The problem with entitlement programs like these is that they cannot and will not be cut back or cut off because the system will not allow it.  I’ll explain:

There are 45M Medicare beneficiaries alone.  If a politician campaigned on canceling Medicare, he would automatically meet resistance from 45M people, even if the move is best for the country and those on Medicare.  Social security is a similar beast.  It sports over 52M beneficiaries, none of which would agree to cancel Social Security, nor would the millions who have been paying into it for most of their lives.  The reality is that all Americans would be better off by keeping their SS contributions and investing it themselves, but America could never be convinced of that.  But if a candidate campaigned on decreased government spending and large cutbacks, all those receiving entitlements would vote against him/her.

The bigger government gets, the harder it is to make it smaller again.

This is a huge problem for those of us who oppose big govt.  Even if the increased spending doesn’t really help many people, politicians measure their effectiveness by what they “accomplished”… what bills they passed, what money they spent, what people they “helped” (with govt money).  It’s garbage, but it’s the way things work.

Spending as a percentage of GDP has risen steadily since WWII.  I see 2 possible outcomes:

1. European style government

or

1. A big-tent style govt cutback tea party revival

The first would be ugly.  European governments like Germany, France, Spain, etc spend so much on services, that the people feel entitled.  They feel that certain services are more “rights” than “privileges”, and that it’s government’s job to provide them.  Once a government has gone to this dark-side, it cannot go back.  All those who have lived under such a “benevolent” government, are too squeamish to return to a more self sufficient form of rule.  Unfortunately, this creates a country where people aren’t self-starting capitalists, but lazy consumers who prefer to work for the man than take entrepreneurial chances.  There is absolutely a point of no return, where a country cannot physically return to capitalism.  This happens when enough of the population is in bed with the government (through handouts, entitlements, employment, etc) that there is no national voice to cut back on spending.  Most of Europe is past that point, because it the natural progression of government to get bigger.  European governments are far older than ours.  Hopefully, we can stave off the big government beast forever, but it takes citizens to be smart to the process and the implications of spending.

The second is unlikely.  We may be able to force a level-off of spending, but a cutback is nearly impossible because of the reasons above.  YOU try and be the one who runs on a platform of cuts to entitlement programs.  You’d get laughed out of the race no matter how dynamic and engaging you are.  I do feel that now is the most likely this option has been in quite some time (if not ever).  The tea party movement is a true groundswell which doesn’t seem to be dissipating.  The republican candidate who can embody the ideals of these disenfranchised is the one who will bulldoze the primaries and coast into the White House.  I believe this person will be someone you never expect – it will have to be.  Any of the “usual suspects” will be too entrenched in Washintonism and will be rejected by the tea party voters.

My official prediction: the next President of the US will be a Republican you’ve not heard of yet (unless you’re very politically aware).

The US was founded as a place free from government bureaucracy, but has slowly “grown” into a country which typifies what it originally rejected.  The constitution is chock full of checks and balances against big government control.  The original Articles of Confederation had even less federal government, but it ended up failing because it had too little federal government even to defend the nation.

Personally, I’ll be using my vote to support those who promise to fight the expansion of govt spending.  I ask you to do the same.

More Healthcare Thoughts…

Healthcare premiums are rising, but it has nothing to do with insurance companies. Doctors are ordering every test known to man (uber-expensive) bc they’re scared of “missing” something and getting sued. We all know that med malpractice is rampant in this country. Where’s the stipulation in this bill to do something about junk lawsuits?? It doesnt exist bc lawyers give over 90% of their campaign contributions to the dems.

The govt would be worse than private industry at funding preventative care. There was actually a govt panel that came out about a month ago saying that getting a mamogram starting at age 40 was excessive. Women should wait until they’re 50 (link here). After serious backlash (and the Sec of Health and Human Services – a woman – scoffed at the idea of waiting that long), they backed off on that statement. But the bill hasnt even passed, and this administration is already showing their hand. That’s the kind of crap they’re going to try to pull bc it saves money.

When has govt been able to do anything as efficiently as the private sector? I’ll give you a hint. It never ever ever ever ever ever happens. Post Office? Broke, losing $billions each year. Amtrak? Same thing. Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac? Same. Social Security? Broke. Medicare? Only pays hospitals 70% of the costs, and is still somehow going bankrupt. You could give some “fat cat executive” $250 a month or you could give the govt $500/month. Take your pick. In addition, healthcare has a profit margin of 3.4%. It’s the 82nd highest sector in the nation. So who’s getting rich? Their margins are razor thin.

Executives make a lot of money in every sector. Any CEO of any company the size of the large insurance corporations will make millions. It’s just what a CEO of a large corp makes. If you paid all the top executives nothing, and spread that money out so that it would reduce the cost of everyone’s premiums, it would save you a laughable amount of money.  For example, the largest health insurance company in America is UnitedHealth Group which has 70M individual customers, but its CEO’s 2008 compensation was less than $3.5M.  If you made him work for $0, it would decrease each member’s annual premium by exactly $0.05.  Even if you added a bevy of senior executives making nearly that much, you’d still only drop premiums by $1.00 or so.  Argument officially busted.

Just because YOUR plan may not be good, doesn’t mean the system is bad. Recently polling shows 89% of Americans were satisfied with their own personal medical care, 93% of insured Americans who had recently suffered a serious illness were satisfied with their health care, and so were 95% of those who suffered from chronic illness.  It also showed that 70% of the UNinsured were getting the care they needed.  You should do some reading on the problems of healthcare in Canada and England. It’s an absolute train wreck.  65% purchase supplemental plans bc the govt system is lacking.

Mundie solution: We should control junk lawsuits and allow people to buy their health insurance across state lines. Costs will go down big-time.

I really don’t understand why republicans in Congress haven’t introduced amendments detailing both of these ideas.  Of course they would be defeated, but then they could make democrats explain themselves as to why they voted against them.  They’re win-win for everyone except ambulance-chasers.

I’m fine with the democrats believing that bigger govt and healthcare mandates are the way to go, but I’m disappointed with republicans and their response.  They’re on the defensive, which they have to know is fruitless.  They’re outnumbered as the Spartans in the pass.  They have to take the fight to the people.  Not only should they introduce amendment after amendment and force the dems to vote them down, they should introduce a separate bill altogether.  If/when the dems vote it down, they should make a huge deal about it.  Go on every TV show that’ll have you… create a website with conservative answers to the healthcare “problem”.  Repubs are seen right now as the foot-dragging party with no answers.  GO ON THE OFFENSIVE!!

Amendment: Congress, Cabinet, President required to use public option

A senate amendment which will be introduced tomorrow would require not only Congress, but the President, VP, Cabinet, and all political staff to enroll in whatever plan comes out of the final bill.

This is an interesting amendment for the social implications, more than the guilt it’s designed to create.

Do lawmakers really believe that a single-payer same-for-everyone plan is best for the country?  This is the socialist avenue.

Or do lawmakers believe that those who have more money should have access to better healthcare?  This is the capitalist avenue.

If the supporters of this amendment frame the argument correctly, then we’ll be able to determine congress’ true feelings about health care in America based on their vote.

Each vote against the amendment is a vote for capitalism.