Category Archives: Politics & News

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I Solved the Problem!

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Lots of people believe that all they have to do is shout and they solve the problem.

Bernie Sanders hectors us on falling family income and wealth inequality and sticking it to Wall Street.

Donald Trump blusters about politicians and immigration policy and making America great again.

Oddly, this column is not about politics. I don’t care if Mr. Sanders has a higher net worth than 85% of his fellow countrymen nor what country Mr. Trump was born in.

The AARP has a great series of “Take A Stand” ads that I simply had to plug. See, their braying, trumpeting characters take us to a larger truth.

Real people point us down the same road.

“I had my say,” my friend Ashley Proctor says, satisfied. Having had her say, she can go on about her day with the warm feeling that she solved whatever problem that angered her.

Ms. Proctor thunders on regularly about how I don’t want people to get health care and the evils of non-traditional marriage and even how long it takes to defrost a turkey (longer, she thinks, in the frig than in a cooler).

Do you suppose that yelling at me about any of those will change my mind or change her life?

My friend Dean “Dino” Russell regularly rants on Facebook about ethanol in gas and solar deniers and illegal aliens. He mostly uses ALL CAPS.

I’m absolutely sure Dino knows that the people who agree with him just nod and click “Next” and those who don’t agree with him just shake their heads knowingly and click “Next,” too.

And yet we still have ethanol in our gas (and the price of corn has quintupled) and the entertainment industry still thinks E.T. should be able to vote.

I worry that soooooo many of my friends think that bombast is all it takes to change the world.

So what’s the problem? Pissing in the wind is a good thing, right?

 

Sale! Sale! Sale!

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Americans lurve sales. We shop the grocery fliers. We bargain for our cars. We go to garage sales.

I bought milk on sale Saturday because it was “on sale” but it would be “regular price” today when I actually run out. I have to buy milk every few days, sale or not, but I try to time it to match the store cycles.

On the other hand, I’m in the market for a new-to-me pickup truck and a camera lens. I don’t need either of those today so I’ve been more picky waiting for the price I’m willing to pay.

Willing to pay is the key.

Ever tried to figure out what that new car actually cost the dealer? How about what the dealer paid for that “certified pre-owned”?

I found a car on sale recently. A dealer bought the car for $9,500 and spent about $400 for repairs and reconditioning. The car went on the lot for $13,990. That’s more than a 40% markup for some “floor” space on a gravel lot.
The eventual buyer “negotiated” the price down to $12,450 for that $9,500 car.

We trust used car dealers, don’t we?

The Interwebs have exploded with people discussing Mr. Sanders and his plans to tax the rich to fund free universal health care, free college, free birth control, free housing for the poor, and more. One poster wrote:

“Obamacare is a giant bloated horrible mess. Medicare is much the same. We can’t simply toss them in the trash, though, and tell everyone, ok now, go out there and shop for insurance same as you do shoes, good luck! Because unlike the kabillion shoe-sellers competing with each other for our business, there are only a couple health insurance companies colluding to eff us all up the ass. No matter what happens, they are guaranteed to raise their rates and make more money. Nothing and no one stops them, the way things are currently structured. Obamacare never even pretended to fix this.”

Mr. Obama lied.

The NYTimes reported that, Back when he was pushing the Unaffordable Care Act, President Obama lauded Grand Junction as a model of better, cheaper health care. “You’re getting better results while wasting less money,” he told the residents.
It turned out that Grand Junction’s Medicare billings were lower than average with no impact on health outcomes. “All we have to do,” he implied “is get the rest of the country acting more like Grand Junction, to get U.S. medical costs to drop.”

Grand Junction is one of the most expensive health care markets in the country for anyone on ObamaDon’tCare or any other private insurance despite its unusually low spending on Medicare. It turns out that Grand Junction has a small enough, healthy enough Medicare population that providers can cost shift to the private plans. Grand Junction has a big enough population with little enough competition that they can charge mostly what they want.

That works because a house call used to cost one chicken but today we have no idea how much your physician will charge for the half-dozen “procedures” that go on the bill for a simple checkup.

Have you ever asked your doc what an office visit costs?

And no one every notices that Emperor Obama’s plan has no clothes.

We need a sale!

Oh. Wait. Here’s a more personal example of costs and transparency.

SWMBO had a “screening mammogram” last fall. The bills included the actual boob crushing/digital picture taking, computer analysis, more computer analysis, and an assessment. The hospital billed $402. The physician who read the “film” charged $151. Medicare paid the hospital $104 and the doc $38, about a third of the billed cost.
No one at the hospital knew how much it would cost. No one could even tell us who would “read the film” so we could ask that price.
A south Florida provider advertises “cheap” mammograms for $799. The commercial doesn’t tell us if that includes just imaging, imaging and computer assessment, imaging and computer assessment and assessment, or something else.

We had no idea how much SWMBO’s procedure cost until Medicare sent us the make good on how much they paid. It’s intriguing that the total charge (not what we paid but the total charge) was less than the “cheap” one in Florida.

Medicare is like getting medicine on sale, right?

I’ve written about cost shifting before.

ObamaDon’tCare is like getting medicine on sale, right?

Rather than reducing costs, the Unaffordable Care Act has raised the annual cost of health care from $8,299 to $9,146 last year to a looming $10,000 per person this year. That makes it a $3.2 Trillion budget item. That’s THREE POINT TWO TRILLION DOLLARS.

Mr. Sanders’ failed-plan to expand health care coverage is pretty simple arithmetic. He wants to expand health care coverage by adding or increasing specific taxes (a 6.2% income-based health care tax plus a 2.2% income-based tax, plus new progressive income tax rates, plus capital gains and dividends taxes, plus estate tax). Total government spending is about $3.8 Trillion for the Feds and $6.2 Trillion for all U.S. Federal, state, and local governments. Mr. Sanders will double the Federal budget and push government spending overall to about $10 Trillion. That’s TEN TRILLION DOLLARS.

Mr. Sanders’ “let’s pretend we can do it by soaking the rich corporations” approach takes away the retirement of seniors and guarantees poverty for everyone else working for for a living.

We need a sale!

Many pundits believe all we need is some transparency. They’re wrong, too. Just knowing how much an office visit costs is only part of the solution.

The real answer is simpler. There isn’t enough money in the U.S. economy to pay for the current model of U.S. health care whether it is nationalized a la Mr. Sanders or market-based a la the national association of used car dealers.

Back in 2009, my treatise on fixing the U.S. health care system started from a simple premise: Health care in America is fundamentally broken. The numbers in that piece are still dead bang on. In 2018, I wrote then, “health care will cost $13,000/year for every man, woman, and child in America.” It’s 2016 now and we’re at $10 grand already.

The fix is a two-part piece, starting here.

This directory lists some of the earlier  No Puffin Perspective™ articles about the Patient Protection and Unaffordable Care Act signed into law by President Obama in 2010.

 

Climate Scientists, the Phrenologists of 2016

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Sometimes I suffer from low blood pressure; I often use the Science Friday podcast to bring it back up to normal. [For the record, SWMBO says I use it to see if I can get the sphygmomanometer to pop the bulb at the top of the column.]

The bumps on my head don’t explain that, either.

Two ‘casts from December got my attention: Do Scientists Have the Duty to Speak Out? and Why Science Needs Failure to Succeed. Each focused on a new book:

In the first, Naomi Oreskes spreads more disinformation and name calling in the name of a (carbon) tax and “sensible regulations” than good science. Host Ira Flatow1 asks if the slogan, “If you see something, say something,” applies to scientists. “If they see a risk to the planet, for example, should they say something about it?” he wondered. In her book Merchants of Doubt,2 Ms. Oreskes “says some scientists undersell the conclusions of their work, and this ‘scientific conservatism has led to under-estimation of climate-related changes’.”

Underestimation?

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Al Gore said, underestimating the issue and the wealth to be looted.

The very same day, Mr. Flatow interviewed Stuart Firestein about his new book, Failure: Why Science Is So Successful,3 the neuroscientist “makes a case for science as ‘less of an edifice built on great and imponderable pillars, and more as a quite normal human activity’.” His point “one must try to fail” reminds us that “real science is a revision in progress, always. It proceeds in fits and starts of ignorance.”

The political scientists leading the AGW charge will not admit contrary data.

Phrenologists thought their science was immutable, too.

Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
— Ambrose Bierce
Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.
— Isaac Asimov
In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
— Carl Sagan

In 2014’s We Only Have 500 Days Left to Avoid Climate Chaos! I discussed the fact that climate “science” today is a Harris poll and the way the Far Green consortium has distorted real science with their religious insistence that their science is right and fixed. Their purpose is to keep the Green flowing. The green research dollars. The green investment dollars. The green tax dollars.

Science requires a comfort with being wrong, a tolerance for failure, Mr. Firestein reminded us. But political Climate Scientists have a bible that cannot fail and is never contradictable.

And that, dear friends, is why our political Climate Scientists are the Phrenologists of the 21st Century.

1 Mr. Flatow is well-known for his statement that “the science is fixed” over all anthropogenic global warming.
2 Ms. Oreskes received her Bachelor of Science in mining geology from the Royal School of Mines of Imperial College, University of London and earned her PhD from the Graduate Special Program in Geological Research and History of Science at Stanford. She is the author of or has contributed to a number of respected essays and technical reports in economic geology.
3 Stuart J. Firestein, PhD, chairs the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University where his lab researches the vertebrate olfactory receptor neuron and where he teaches neuroscience. He does accept AGW but recognizes that “uncertainty is a dirty word” in the argument.

 

Passages

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We lost a friend January 8. He was just 76.

“So sorry to have to post this… Rocketman passed away yesterday. Local favorite entertainer, musician, loving father, pirate, and friend to so many here in our islands… He most certainly was one of a kind, and the likes of him will surely never pass this way again. My condolences to his daughter, Roxanne, and all his family and friends in the Keys and all around the world. The old man certainly was right: it sure did beat 40 below, shoveling snow… And I do like it! If ever there was a life to be celebrated in style, it was Rocketman’s. Godspeed, Rocketman.”
— John Bartus


Robert Hudson played music in the late 70s and 80s in Las Vegas before coming to the Keys the same year we did. He became known as Rocketman the Pirate and he drummed, sang, and played with just about every other musician in the Keys. Between gigs he sold treasure.

“Too bad. He needs a replacement,” Rufus said. “Bartus is too accomplished. I am too fat (and I don’t live in the Keys).”

Not too fat. Too old.

I don’t think fat matters, per se. Old does. He was a legend but we need a youngster to take his place. The next Rocketman needs to be under 40.

“No way,” Rufus said. “The age was part of the attraction. Otherwise he is just another troubadour.”

The way you get to be an old troubadour is to start as a young troubadour. Not to mention our need to have somebody around for more than another couple of years.

“Aging out is American popular culture vernacular used to describe anytime a youth leaves a formal system of care designed to provide services below a certain age level.”

The troubadour has a storied history. The earliest troubadour whose work survives is the Duke of Aquitaine, portrayed as a knight, who first composed poetry on returning from the Crusades which he “related with rhythmic verses and witty measures.” Today, we think of a troubadour as a poet and singer of folk songs and rock music and other fishy ballads. Apropos of nothing, troubadour rhymes with albacore.

We are watching our favorite local artists and community leaders “age out.” Or worse.

Ben Bullington, a country doctor and singer-songwriter from Colorado, died in 2013. He was 58. He was a small town family doctor until his pancreatic cancer diagnosis; he immediately stopped practicing medicine and made as much music for as many people as he could. Vermont musician and legend John Cassel died in ’14. He was 78 and working when he suffered a heart attack after playing a show. The man of a thousand songs, Ron Hynes from Newfoundland died in November. He was 64. Blues guitarist and border legend Long John Hunter of El Paso died last week. He was 84.

I’ve been thinking about aging out a bit, ever since my family doc reminded me that he’s a year older than I. See, he’s aging out, too. That means he’s going to retire sooner than later and I’m going to have to break in some young whippersnapper.

We need to train our replacements for Dr. Bullington, Mr. Cassel, Mr. Hynes, Mr. Hunter, for the other beloved local legends. And for Rocketman.

Psychology Today rules that by dividing your own age by two and then adding seven you can find the socially-acceptable minimum age of anyone you want to date. So if you’re a 24 year-old, you can date anyone who is at least 19 (i.e., 12 + 7) but not someone who is 18. And if you’re 89 as Hugh Hefner is, you can feel free to be with anyone who is at least 19 but not someone who is 18. Oh. Wait. You can be with anyone who is at least 51-1/2 (i.e., 44-1/2 + 7) but not someone who is only 51.

When Ronald Reagan turned 75, Dennis Miller wished him a happy birthday. “Seventy-five, and he has access to the nuclear football? You know, my grandfather is 75. We don’t let him use the remote control for the TV set!”

If I have to train some young whippersnappers, I want them to stick around for the long haul. That’s why Rufus is wrong.

Over in real life, I chair a small regional arts council (known in the trade as a “Local Arts Service Organization”). I’m not quite ready to pass the microphone yet, but we are looking for a fresh face for my job, too. Out on stage last year, I introduced a number of new performers to the professional footlights. We expect to do that even more with Summer Sounds, with the county festivals, and at other venues around area. See, our top-notch musicians are all getting a little grayer, too.

Eventually, it is forced on all of us.

R.I.P., Rocky. Arrrrgh.

 

Happy New Year – Here’s the Check

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SANDERS PLAN: RAISE (U.S.) TAXES!*
SANDERS BACKS GREECE’S ‘NO’ (NEW TAXES) VOTE!**

Feel the Bern but also Feel the Pain.

It’s a pain that will come no matter whom we elect this year.

“Things are going ‘so well’ with the truth of how our system works that we are bankrupting ourselves,” wrote a concerned citizen.

Every politician since the wicked Nimrod has lied to us. Oh, some told little white lies but they lied to us nonetheless. “We know how to fix it!” they all say.

“We are not Greece, we are not Portugal,” Mr. Obama said in 2011 as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s prepared to downgrade America’s top credit status.

Yeah, they fixed it alright.

Liar, Liar, Pants on FireAccording to a new report by Kotlikoff and Michel, U.S. government debt stands at $210 trillion, not at the official $13.1 trillion nor the almost $18.9 trillion of the US Debt Clock nor the $86.8 trillion calculated by Cox and Archer.

Even using the make believe $13.1 trillion debt, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the debt will be well over 100% of GDP by 2039. When CBO incorporates its estimates of the impact of the continuing large federal deficits on the nation’s economy, it estimates that the accumulated debt held by the public will reach 180% of GDP by 2039.

For homework, try to find out if any member of Congress or the President has ever read these CBO reports.

The Feds will tell you every man, woman, and child of the 326,387,900 people now alive in the U.S. owes “only” $40,136.29 of that debt.

The reality is far different. The real debt load works out to $643,406.20 per person in the United States, 16 times higher than the current official level and 2-1/2 times our total net worth.

In 2014 the net worth of all U.S. citizens was pegged at $80.7 trillion. Wealth is commonly measured in terms of net worth, which is the quite simple sum of all assets (what you have in the bank, the market value of real estate, like your home, any stocks and stuff you own) minus what you owe on all of that. which accountants call “liabilities.”

(Including human capital such as skills, the United Nations estimated the total wealth of the United States in 2008 to be $118 trillion. The United Nations has never been good at accounting or science.)

$210 trillion in debt <==> $80 trillion in assets.

Yeah, they fixed it alright.

Mr. Sanders isn’t the only financial nincompoop. He’s just the most obvious among the economic geniuses we’ve elected.

A record Federal Reserve “reverse repo” auction on the last day of business means credit markets and mutual funds are in trouble. Like the “credit swaps” and off-balance-sheet financing that caused the Great Recession, the financial markets are again playing with numbers none of the geniuses understands.

“It is government’s fault for offering a housing finance program without making an effort to maintain underwriting standards,” then-Rep. Barny Frank (D-MA) said of the Housing Crisis.

That would be the same Barny Frank who imposed “affordable housing” requirements on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Before he did that, the government lenders had been required to buy only prime mortgages. Mr. Frank forced Fannie and Freddie to meet a government quota for bad loans to borrowers who could never repay them.

Yeah, they fixed it alright.

The Dow fell 450 points this morning, on its way to the worst opening day in 84 years. The Fed figures it can’t head off or even contain the coming financial crises.

Meanwhile China’s government-managed stock market tanked again today, too. Looks like China’s politicians are about as good at this financial stuff as ours.

And none of this helps rein in the stampeding public debt.

The Demorat’s answer to the National Debt is “there is no national debt but we’ll raise taxes anyway so we can spend more.” The Repuglican’s answer to the National Debt is “there is some national debt so we need to raise taxes so we can spend more.”

“We know how to fix it!”

Yeah, they’ll fix us right up.

How to Avoid Bankruptcy — For Dummies tells us:

  • Get your financial house in order by spending less than you take in.
  • Sell your assets.
  • Take over a large foreign country with lots of natural resources and land.

OK, I added the last one but, hey! It worked for Genghis Khan, Rome, Great Britain, and Google, right?

* Let’s get specific. How high would Bernard Sanders go on tax rates?
“We haven’t come up with an exact number yet, but it will not be as high as … 90%.”

 

** “I applaud the people of Greece for saying ‘no’ to more austerity..
“In a world of massive wealth and income inequality, Europe must support Greece’s efforts” to loot the real European economies which create jobs and income.