Coyote Blog

A while back I wrote that the State of Arizona was continuing to maintain, year in and year out, an expensive process demanding overtime and extra work just to avoid "giving back" a one-time budget gain they took several years ago.  It appears the feds are playing the same game:

The bureaucratic brainstorm was straightforward "”
simple-minded is, perhaps, a more appropriate description "” don't pay
doctors, hospitals and their army of auxiliaries tending to indisposed
old folks and the afflicted disabled for their labors in the last nine
days of the current fiscal year. Instead, send them a check for what
you owe them, sometime after the first of October, the start of the
government's fiscal '07. In essence, those doctors, hospitals et al.
are making an involuntary loan of nine days' pay without interest.

 

That way, point out the gleeful budgeteers and Medicare pooh-bahs,
all of whom presumably are glowing with health, Uncle Sam's Medicare
tab this fading fiscal year will be $5.2 billion less than it otherwise
would have been. Or at least would seem to be $5.2 billion less "” in
Washington, as we all know, appearance and reality are not invariably
the same phenomena.

My only objection to Drum's post is his implication that this is a uniquely Bush-White-House maneuver.  I get tired of partisans on both sides of the aisle that try to blame crap like this on the other party.  This kind of thing is inherent in politics and government.  The Arizona example, which is entirely parallel and perhaps even worse given the year-after-year costs, was an invention of a Democratic governor.

In May of this year I got a form from the Arizona Department of Revenue that said my company was now large enough to make estimated sales tax pre-payments.  Some states do this when you are large enough - they don't like you holding their sales tax money a whole month until the reporting deadline, they want their cash in hand.  It's a pain, so I sighed, but we did it.  We prepaid estimated full-month June sales tax in mid-June as required, rather than in mid-July when the payment would normally be due.  Note that we still have to fill out all the sales tax reports in July, so paperwork is doubled, not to mention the extra work to reconcile between the estimate and actual results.

So this month, I was looking for the July pre-payment form.  I figured the July pre-payment must be due soon, so I called the Department of Revenue and asked where my form was.  They said there was no form for July.  The pre-payment is only one time.  I said, "its only for June?" and they said yes.

Then it dawned on me:  Arizona is on a June 30 fiscal year.  The entire point of this exercise is to pull July revenues into June to artificially inflate the prior fiscal year financials.  Wow - all those pious government workers artificially manipulating results just like an evil old corporation.  Because there is absolutely no other reason to do this for just one month.  The time value of money gained is dwarfed by the costs of changing your payment processing approach for just one month, and is certainly dwarfed if you consider the extra taxpayer effort required (which of course the government never does).

But it's even worse!  Because, in effect, this only worked one time -- the first time.  The first time they did this, they helped the fiscal year.  But now, pulling forward July this year just offsets losing the July revenues from last year.  So politicians have saddled us with a tax process that costs the government more money and the taxpayer more time and has no benefit beyond generating a slightly more positive press release about the budget for some politician several
years ago (whatever year this was first implemented).

I have been stuck in rural Colorado a few days, my stay extended by a pretty good spring snowstorm up in the high country.  I was visiting our new Colorado marina.  Finally getting to the airport, I found a backlog of unapproved comments, which I have passed through in mass.  Sorry for the delay, but blame spam-bots.  I hate having to approve comments to filter spam as much as you must hate the delay in seing your comments appear.

The other day in this post I, for the first and last time, wrote that my commenters needed to educate themselves.  I knew this was a stupid thing to write, leading with my chin, as it were.  I have posted all kinds of dumb stuff, and a number of things that I have been informed were outright errors (see the update to that same post, for example).  My commenters are great and often more knowlegeable than I am, so it was a dumb tone to adopt.  My only excuse is that I had about 5 emails in a row that confused the trade deficit with the federal budget deficit and the national debt, and I was ready to scream. 

I'm sorry.

There are probably a lot of reasons out there to criticize Las Vegas, but one thing it is great for is that it is perhaps the best and least expensive place in the country for a small business like mine to put on a national managers meeting.

We bring 60 managers in from all over the country.  We held our event at a hotel/casino a mile or two off the strip called the Orleans, where two years running we have gotten nice clean rooms and great service.  Beyond the good service and more-than-acceptable rooms, we get:

• $60 room rates for mini-suites
• Two days of lunches, breakfasts, snacks, coffee, an open bar with appetizers, and a meeting room all for less than $100 per person
• Bar none, the best airline connections of any destination city except maybe Chicago, and they are all cheap (lots of America West and Southwest flights)

On top of all this, my people love it there.  Anyone running a national meeting on a budget should definitely consider it.

The NY Times has a fairly scary (though not particularly surprising) article about unfunded retirement obligations of government bodies.

Thousands of government bodies, including states, cities, towns, school
districts and water authorities, are in for the same kind of shock in the next
year or so. For years, governments have been promising generous medical benefits
to millions of schoolteachers, firefighters and other employees when they
retire, yet experts say that virtually none of these governments have kept track
of the mounting price tag. The usual practice is to budget for health care a
year at a time, and to leave the rest for the future.

Off the government balance sheets - out of sight and out of mind - those
obligations have been ballooning as health care costs have spiraled and as the
baby-boom generation has approached retirement. And now the accounting rulemaker
for the public sector, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, says it is
time for every government to do what Duluth has done: to come to grips with the
total value of its promises, and to report it to their taxpayers and
bondholders.

Its not too surprising to most of us that the government, which is actively putting Enron managers in jail for hiding liabilities off-balance-sheet, turns out to be a far worse offender at the same practice.  The few agencies that have performed the actuarial calculation are coming up with staggering numbers:

Stephen T. McElhaney, an actuary and principal at Mercer Human Resources, a
benefits consulting firm that advises states and local governments, estimated
that the national total could be $1 trillion. "This is a huge liability," said
Jan Lazar, an independent benefits consultant in Lansing, Mich. "If anybody
understands it, they'll freak out."...

Maryland, for example, now spends about $311 million annually on retiree health
premiums. But when that state calculated the value of the retirement benefits it
has promised to current employees, the total was $20.4 billion. And the yearly
cost will jump to $1.9 billion under the new rule, according to an analysis for
the state by actuaries at Aon
Consulting, which advises companies on benefits.

I usually severely discount consultant scare numbers like "$1 trillion", particularly after the year 2000 bug orgy of doomsaying, but if Maryland, an average size state, is facing $20 billion, then a trillion may only account for state governments.  The number may well be higher when you include cities, counties, school districts, etc. 

While this is clearly bad news, there is also a silver lining.  Politicians for years have given away richer and richer public employee retirement benefits because they appeared "free"  (free to a politician being anything that doesn't have to be paid for when he/she is in office).  By changing accounting standards to force acknowledgment of this liability, politicos will at least have to address true costs of any future giveaways.

As a minimum, most public authorities are looking to change benefits for new employees, which is an entirely reasonable response that should have been taken years ago.  Just as past changes in public accounting for pensions caused agencies to shift benefits to 401K's from defined benefit pensions, so this rule-changes in retiree medical care will certainly change benefits packages.

However, that being said, I have a much bigger problem with several state's proposals to retroactively reduce benefits for existing retirees and employees.  These retirement benefits are a contract, and should not be allowed to be changed casually, any more than could an agency just choose to renege on a municipal bond payment.  Sure, the commitments may have been irresponsible, but that does not make them automatically void.  Private companies from time to time get themselves in a similar mess, and the only way for them to relieve themselves of some of this liability is through the bankruptcy process.  Public agencies should be forced to do the same.  They should not be able to use their coercive legislative power to just make these obligations disappear at the stroke of a pen -- they need to go through the pain of a bankruptcy, where all creditors, not just pensioners selectively, will need to share in the haircut.

Imagine that you are in a budget meeting at your company.  You and a number of other department heads have been called together to make spending cuts due to a cyclical downturn in revenue.  In your department, you have maybe 20 projects being worked on by 10 people, all (both people and projects) of varying quality.   So the boss says "We have to cut 5%, what can you do?"  What do you think her reaction would be if you said "well, the first thing I would have to cut is my best project and I would lay off the best employee in my department". 

If this response seems nuts to you, why do we let politicians get away with this ALL THE TIME?  Every time that politicians are fighting against budget cuts or for a tax increase, they always threaten that the most critical possible services will be cut.  Its always emergency workers that are going to be cut or the Washington Monument that is going to be closed.  Its never the egg license program that has to be cut. 

I am reminded of this in driving long distance this weekend and I picked up, by one of those random late night AM skip-distance things, a station in Colorado, and it was full of commercials threatening dire consequences (old people will go hungry, kids won't get an education, emergency workers won't be there for your heart attack) if voters don't overturn TABOR, which is the tax plan that has, for over a decade, limited tax revenue collections to population growth plus inflation.  When I was in Colorado, I loved TABOR (the Cato institute has a nice article on why you should too) and really loved the tax refunds I often got because of it.

TABOR provides a fairly constant revenue stream to the government, in good times and bad.  When times are good, the government is flush, and when times are bad the government runs short (due to unemployment payments, more welfare, etc.).  Many of us in cyclical businesses deal with this all the time, and seem to be able to cut marginal programs added in good times that we can no longer fund in bad times.  Politicians are incapable of this.  Many businesses also underspend revenues by a wide margin in good times, knowing they will need the reserves in bad times.  Politicians are also incapable of this.

On Tuesday, Colorado voters will decide if they will require Colorado politicians to take the same responsibility for fiscal management that everyone else does in their private business lives, or if they will bail them out of their incompetance with more of their money. 

Going back to my example of suggesting in a budget meeting that you will cut your best programs and people in a budget crisis, would you expect to get more budget or to be fired?  Why can't we do the same with politicians?

Update: Bummer.  Coloradans voted to roll back TABOR.  Glad I don't live there anymore.  Roundup at Hit and Run.

I am not really a huge baseball fan, but we generally watch the World Series, and the Astros pitching decisions in the seventh inning had me yelling at my TV again.

In a previous post, I talked about my pet peeve of the closer position.  For non-baseball fans, here is the background:  Typically, starting pitchers make it about 6 innings on average, leaving a need for other pitchers to cover the last three innings.  Most relief pitchers who cover these later innings are not as good as the starting pitchers, or else they would be starting pitchers.  The exception is that most teams have a "closer", typically their best relief pitcher who is reserved for pitching the last inning (thus the name "closer").  I asked before why the closer always pitched the 9th, rather than whichever inning of the last three that the toughest batters were expected.  The answer I came up with was this:

the explanation must lie in metrics.  If a manager loses a game in the
7th, it is just a loss.  If a manager loses a game in the 9th, the game
was "blown".  Newspapers and talk shows keep and publish stats on games
blown in the 9th, but not games lost in the 7th and 8th.  Games lost in
the 9th are in a sense portrayed as more of a management failure than
games lost in the 7th, and this is made worse by the fact that a game
lost in the 9th is somehow more psychologically devastating for fans
and media.  Managers are not dumb - recognizing that they get dinged on
their performance rating more for a game lost in the 9th than the 8th,
they have invented the closer role.  General managers take a
disproportionately large part of their salary budget for relief
pitching and dedicate it to this closer role.

You can even see this effect today, as everyone talks about Brad Lidge giving up a 1-run homer in the 9th, rather than talking about the grand slam the bull pen gave up in the 7th.

So here is what specifically drove me nuts last night:  Bottom of the 7th, the White Sox trailing 4-2, the Sox had managed to load the bases with two outs and had Paul Konerko, one of their best sluggers, up to bat.  The Astros were clearly going to switch pitchers, since the current guy had just walked two batters in a row.  The question was, who to bring in?  One announcer suggested they bring in Brad Lidge, their closer and the best guy available (short of bringing in a starting pitcher). The other announcer said, no, you can't do that, he will never make it all the way to the 9th.  You can't, he said, bring your closer in this early.

Well why the hell not?  Are you really going to face a more dangerous situation than bases loaded with Paul Konerko up to bat later in the game?  Lidge, if he is their best guy, should have been in then, and pitched the 8th, and then they could have patched guys together for the 9th.  Instead, they sent in some other guy and boom, grand slam.

Now, I will admit that Lidge's giving up the game-winning home run in the 9th taints my argument a tad, if only to make the point that Lidge may have not been as hands down superior to the rest of the bullpen as we may have thought a few innings earlier.  But that does not change the facts of the 7th inning:  The Astros were facing the most dangerous possible situation, in the heart of the Sox order, one worse than anything they were likely to face in later innings, but they chose not to put the person they thought of as their best available pitcher out of homage to this weird baseball conventional wisdom called the closer.

Via Glenn Reynolds:

Rep. Mark Udall has joined Republican budget hawks on legislation
that would give the White House new authority to pare congressional
spending bills. . . .

It would authorize the president to pull specific items out of
massive appropriations bills and then force Congress to hold up-or-down
votes on the proposed cuts. It would apply to fiscal year 2006 spending
bills, plus the huge, multiyear transportation plan that critics have
said is loaded with wasteful, pork barrel projects.

Doesn't mean a thing.  A)  Congress will never pass it.  B)  There is no evidence that Bush cares one whit about spending control and C)  There is absolutely no evidence that Bush is willing to veto anything out of Congress, since he already holds the veto pen rust award.

President Bush's call for Katrina spending to be offset by budget cuts has spurred a blogosphere effort to identify local pork urge Congress to cut the pork.  I am 98% behind this effort (the missing 2% being that the effort is spurred by a desire to spend the money somewhere else, rather than sending it back to taxpayers where it belongs).  Glenn Reynolds post that got the ball rolling is here.  His followup posts are here and here.  I will note the irony that I recently compared Don Young (of Alaska bridge to nowhere fame) to Huey Long (of multiple bridges to nowhere fame), given that we are looking to cut Don Young's pork to help Huey Long's old stomping ground.

Edward at Zonitics has already identified one of the most visible chunks of AZ pork, that is our earmarks in the recent highway bill.  These include nearly five million for a couple of pedestrian bridges, plus hundreds of millions for a rail system to run empty trains to compete with our empty buses.  Why does the rest of the country need to pay for Phoenix's growth?  Heck, we just took the money the feds saved us on this junk and spent it subsidizing a stadium for the Cardinals, for god's sakes.   I will note that of the mere 8 people who voted against the highway bill, 2 were from Arizona, including my 3rd district Congressman John Shadegg and libertarian Jeff Flake.  Flake, consistent with his libertarian principles (or in retribution for them?) represents the only district in the country without an earmark in the highway bill.

So, to push the ball forward, I will add another bit of Arizona pork.  I wanted to include some items form the energy bill, but I can't find a state by state impact.  But I can find, thanks to the environmental working group, a nice summary of farm subsidies to Arizona.  Here is a summary for the most recent year they have data:

And here is the same data but cut by recipient, with just the top 20 included:

I don't know all these folks, but I can say that all of the first three have extremely profitable casinos they operate.

I am writing my letter now to the my Congressman and Senators, and will post a copy as an update when I am done.  The ubiquitous NZ Bear has a data base he is building of pork identified.

Technorati tag:  porkbusters.

This is my first and probably last baseball post - read this blog if you want more baseball.

I am fascinated with the psychology of the closer position.  Some background:  The best baseball pitchers start games, and on average get through about 6 innings of 9.  The baseball manager's job is to stitch together a number of less talented pitchers to cover the 7th, 8th and 9th innings.  One would expect that the manager would flexibly match pitcher skills against the lineup he is facing.  For example, if the most dangerous batters for the opposing team are scheduled up in the 8th inning, he might send in his best relief pitcher in that inning.  One would not expect to see any particular emphasis on one inning or another:  after all, a game lost in the 7th counts the same as a game lost in the 9th.

This, however, is not how most managers operate.  Most managers have one very highly paid and more talented relief pitcher they call the "closer" that they pitch solely in the 9th inning.  Why?  Why is the 9th more important and deserving of a valuable player than the 8th?

The answer is part baseball conventional wisdom, which is as strong as in any old-line industry.  However, the other part of the explanation must lie in metrics.  If a manager loses a game in the 7th, it is just a loss.  If a manager loses a game in the 9th, the game was "blown".  Newspapers and talk shows keep and publish stats on games blown in the 9th, but not games lost in the 7th and 8th.  Games lost in the 9th are in a sense portrayed as more of a management failure than games lost in the 7th, and this is made worse by the fact that a game lost in the 9th is somehow more psychologically devastating for fans and media.  Managers are not dumb - recognizing that they get dinged on their performance rating more for a game lost in the 9th than the 8th, they have invented the closer role.  General managers take a disproportionately large part of their salary budget for relief pitching and dedicate it to this closer role.

A guy named Theo Epstein a couple of years ago, as a general manager, challenged this conventional wisdom.  He observed that more games were lost in the 7th and the 8th than the 9th, so hypothesized that relief pitching emphasis and salary dollars should be spread more evenly across the three innings.  One of his consultants was the famous Bill James, who has challenged baseball conventional wisdom with facts for years.  Epstein was roundly criticized by media and local fans alike for his "Closer by Committee" approach.  Eventually he was forgiven, when in the following year he brought his town its first world championship in 86 years.

For more on this and similar baseball topics, the book Moneyball is fabulous, and tells this story of the clash of fact-based analysis and baseball conventional wisdom, in a way that might be familiar to change agents in any number of Fortune 500 companies.

Reason has a good article on helping Africa.  To some extent, their arguments echo the ones I made in my previous post:

Despite political pressures, increasing the U.S. foreign aid budget would be a
mistake. The true cause of Africa's poverty is the continent's long history of
crippling misgovernance"”a problem that is exacerbated by rich countries' trade
protectionism, particularly with respect to agriculture....

The aid is ineffective because of the appalling way in which Africa is
governed. In recent decades, of each dollar given to Africa in aid, 80 cents
were stolen by corrupt leaders and transferred back into Western bank accounts.
In total, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo estimated, "corrupt African
leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the [four]
decades since independence." All that is left when these regimes eventually
collapse is a massive public debt.

The article discusses how US and European agricultural subsidies really hurt the poorest nations:

While advocates of current market-distorting agricultural policies do not
intend to harm developing nations, the collective effect of U.S. farm policies
is devastating for producers of agricultural goods worldwide. American farm
policies might provide short-term benefits for agricultural producers in the
U.S., but those benefits are more than offset by the cost to American consumers
who pay higher taxes to support the U.S. farmers and higher prices for
agricultural products. Meanwhile, U.S. tariffs, quotas, and export subsidies
exacerbate poverty in regions like sub-Saharan Africa where people are heavily
dependent upon agriculture....

U.S. agriculture policy undermines U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty because
it drives down global agricultural prices, which in turn cost developing
countries hundreds of millions of dollars in lost export earnings. The losses
associated with cotton subsidies alone exceed the value of U.S. aid programs to
the countries concerned. The British aid organization Oxfam charges that U.S.
subsidies directly led to losses of more than $300 million in potential revenue
in sub-Saharan Africa during the 2001/02 season. More than 12 million people in
this region depend directly on the crop, with a typical small-scale producer
making less than $400 on an annual cotton harvest. By damaging the livelihoods
of people already on the edge of subsistence, U.S. agricultural policies take
away with the right hand what the left hand gives in aid and development
assistance.

Again, small government libertarians like myself, who held their nose and voted Republican in the last election, have been used.  From the NY Post today:

THE Republican promise of smaller,
less-intrusive government is getting harder and harder to believe.
Especially when a more plausible plot line is unfolding every day: that
the GOP has put aside the ideals of Reagan and Goldwater in order to
pursue a political strategy based on big spending.

For the latest, check out a report just released by the
libertarian Cato Institute that tells a striking story about just how
out-of-control spending has gotten under President Bush.

Cato finds that:

* Bush has presided over the largest increase in federal spending since Lyndon Johnson.

* Even excluding defense and homeland security spending, Bush is the biggest-spending president in 30 years.

* The federal budget grew from 18.5 percent of the Gross
Domestic Product on President Bill Clinton's last day in office to 20.3
percent at the end of Bush's first term.

Add to that Bush's massive Medicare prescription-drug
benefit, expected to cost $720 billion-plus over the next 10 years.
(The money for that new entitlement, the first created by a president
in a generation, will start flowing this year.)

It is not in the least bit comforting to have my suspicions confirmed by Cato, whose whole report is here.  Bring back divided government!  I will take Reagan-Democrat Congress or Clinton-Republican Congress over this any day.

I am about at the end of my rope on listening to the current filibuster debate, all the more so because whatever side some Senator is on today, you can bet a pile of money that they were on exactly the opposite side 10 years ago, when the majority-minority positions of the two major parties was reversed.  Senators from both sides can argue all day that their current stand is "on principle", but this is crap.  If all these people's stands were "on principle", then about 100 Senators have completely changed their principles in the last 10 years. 

Before I take my shot at truly coming up with a solution "on principle", here is but one example of this switch of sides.  I will use the NY Times as an example, mainly because they are so much fun to criticize.  Thanks to Powerline for pointers to some of these editorials.

In their editorial titled "Senate on the Brink", dated March 6, 2005 the Times stated:

To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the
filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare
majority of senators from running roughshod.

and further:

Now [the White House] threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill
their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order
to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be
inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress.

Wow! Its sure good that we have this filibuster thingie to protect our way of life.  And its great to have champions like the NY Times who are stalwart defenders of this procedure. 

Except when they are not.  Back when the majorities were reversed almost exactly a decade ago, on January 1, 1995 the NY times editorialized:

The U.S. Senate likes to call itself the world's greatest deliberative body. The
greatest obstructive body is more like it. In the last season of Congress, the
Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the
will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition
so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to
forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him.

For years Senate filibusters--when they weren't conjuring up romantic images
of Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith, passing out from exhaustion on the Senate
floor--consisted mainly of negative feats of endurance. Senator Sam Ervin once
spoke for 22 hours straight. Outrage over these tactics and their ability to
bring Senate business to a halt led to the current so-called two-track system,
whereby a senator can hold up one piece of legislation while other business goes
on as usual.

and further (note the Senators who are players in this quote 10 years ago):

Mr. Harkin, along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, now
proposes to make such obstruction harder. Mr. Harkin says reasonably that there
must come a point in the process where the majority rules. This may not sit well
with some of his Democratic colleagues. They are now perfectly positioned to
exact revenge by frustrating the Republican agenda as efficiently as Republicans
frustrated Democrats in 1994.

Admirably, Mr. Harkin says he does not want to do that. He proposes to change
the rules so that if a vote for cloture fails to attract the necessary 60 votes,
the number of votes needed to close off debate would be reduced by three in each
subsequent vote. By the time the measure came to a fourth vote--with votes
occurring no more frequently than every second day--cloture could be invoked
with only a simple majority. Under the Harkin plan, minority members who feel
passionately about a given measure could still hold it up, but not indefinitely....

The Harkin plan, along with some of Mr. Mitchell's proposals, would go a long
way toward making the Senate a more productive place to conduct the nation's
business. Republicans surely dread the kind of obstructionism they themselves
practiced during the last Congress. Now is the perfect moment for them to unite
with like-minded Democrats to get rid of an archaic rule that frustrates
democracy and serves no useful purpose.

Gee, now I'm starting to think this filibuster thingie might not be so good.  I kindof get confused as to which principled stand by the NY Times I should get behind.

My Plan

First, recognize that I am not a lawyer, nor a constitutional scholar, nor do I play one on TV.  But seeing as the "experts" are tripping over themselves in their hypocrisy, there is not reason I can't jump in the fray too.

My idea for this started when I found out something about filibuster rules -- there are already certain votes that by Senate rules have been made immune to filibuster.  Thank God for blogs, because you won't find this anywhere in the MSM, though its apparently common knowledge.  Everyone treats a change in filibuster rules for judge confirmations as "a break in the dam" or a "slippery slope" which will wipe out the entire filibuster rule.   However, such exceptions have already been made.  The most used one is for budget votes - neither party may filibuster certain budget votes.  The logic for this is obvious - no one want to let 41 people shut down the government.  The majority party should be able to pass their budget.  This exemption is why Senate leaders often bury controversial provisions (recent example:  ANWR drilling) in the budget -- so they can't get filibustered.  Other votes exempt from filibuster include votes under the War Power Act and a number of really trivial things that I can't remember right now - I am looking for a link and would appreciate help.

This leads me to what seems like a fairly obvious, moderately principled position on filibuster:  Change the Senate rules to allow filibuster on new legislation, but exempt votes from filibuster that are required to keep the basic functions of government running.  This latter exempt category would include things like approving budgets, raising the debt ceiling, and voting on nominees of all types.

Postscript:  By the way, as a libertarian, I am generally all for seeing the government shut down, and don't shed many tears when the Senate does nothing.  However, I think my proposal is pretty true to the intentions of the Constitution.  In particular, of all the functions that are currently being shut down by the filibuster, it is galling that it is the court system that is being ground to a halt, since the courts are one of the few institutions where even a hard core libertarian like myself accepts a strong role for government.  Which is not to say that I am happy with the power courts and judges have been taking on themselves of late.

Update:  Here is a further good proposal that I am not sure why no one is talking about - if they are going to filibuster, lets make them actually filibuster, i.e. keep talking and talking:

  However, I think that these Princeton students have the right idea:  If you are going to filibuster, then you should have to filibuster.
Filibusters should come at some personal and political cost. We should
abolish the candy-ass filibusters of modern times, and require that if
debate is not closed it must therefore happen. 

The
prospect of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy bloviating for
hours on C-SPAN would deter filibusters except when the stakes are
dire, if for no other reason than the risk that long debate would
create a huge amount of fodder for negative advertising. If Frist were
to enact the "reform" of the filibuster instead of its repeal, he would
sieze the high ground. He could take the position that the Republicans
are merely rolling back the "worst excesses" of the long period of
Democratic majority in the Congress, and that filibusters will still be
possible if Senators are willing to lay it all on the line. Indeed,
even the students at Princeton would be hard-pressed to argue against
such a reform of the filibuster, since extended speechifying is
precisely the means they have used to make their point.

I have always thought that the media tends to support big government.  I have never understood if that is because the media is dominated by big-government liberals, as conservatives claim, or if there is some shared self interest between media and a large government, since so much of what is newsworthy flows from the government.  After all, look how dull the news gets in August when Congress lets out.  Anyway, I have always been frustrated by the unhelpful media coverage of budget debates.  In particular, the media seems to systematically want to call a slowing of spending growth a "cut".  Patterico's Pontifications has an example.

I don't know whether it warrants the "crisis" moniker (to me, government is always in a disastrous state), but Social Security is indeed facing an enormous cash flow shortfall in just a few years.  Those who use bogus government accounting to say that there is no problem until 2042 are either disingenuous or delusional.  People making this argument are saying that yes, cash flow will be negative, but those negative cash flows will come out of the huge Social Security trust fund, which won't be depleted until 2042.

Um, the only problem with this is that... there is no Social Security trust fund.  I mean yes, there is such a thing on paper with a large number next to it, but there is no actual pool of cash or investments to draw on.  The "trust fund" is full of government IOU's to itself - the actual cash was spent for general budget needs over the years.  As a result, in just a few years, Social Security will require:

• Massive new taxes
• Large benefits cuts
• A complete restructuring of all parts of the program
• More government borrowing

Good post at Assymetrical Information goes into it in more depth.

I found this interview with Dave Berry in Reason Magazine while cleaning up some of my IE favorites.  Its a bit old, but still fun to read.  A sample:

If we're spending $853 trillion on some program now, and next year we spend any less, that's "budget-cutting" to them. For them, the question is always, "What kind of government intervention should we impose on the world?" They never think that maybe we shouldn't.

It gives me a real advantage as a humorist because I get credit for having insight and understanding--and I don't. I don't have any insight or understanding on anything about the government. All I think is that it' s stupid--which is the one perspective that' s almost completely lacking in Washington.

His discussion of why libertarianism won't lead to everyone having sex with dogs is priceless.  No, I am not going to explain this, you have to read it.

Via Scrappleface, here is an AP report of some of the special interest spending items in the most recent budget.  Ughh.

"”Alabama: $4 million for the International Fertilizer Development Center in Muscle Shoals.

"”Alaska: $443,000 to develop salmon-fortified baby food.

Oh, just read them all.  Not sure any branch of government needs to do most of these things, but certainly if they need to be done, they should be funded by local taxpayers who get the benefit, not the rest of us.