In fact, Hollywood's portion of the stimulus package reveals an important factor of the Recovery Act: The money is not going to areas that would more directly stimulate the economy but instead to provide ongoing life support to deficit-ridden federal, state and local agencies.
That is the main impression I have gotten when reading the stimulus jobs data base -- the fake districts and BS accounting did not catch my eye so much as the fact that all the jobs seemed to be saved jobs in government agencies. I am pretty sure that had the stimulus been originally sold with its true goals -- to help stave off financial accountability in state and local governments -- it would have had more difficulty passing.
So do you see my point. The reason so much of this infrastructure bill can be spent in the next two years is that there is no infrastructure in it, at least in the first two years! 42% of the deficit impact in 2009/2010 is tax cuts, another 44% is in transfer payments to individuals and state governments. 1% is defense. At least 5% seems to be just pumping up a number of budgets with no infrastructure impact (such as at Homeland Security). And at most 6% is infrastructure and green energy. I say at most because it is unclear if this stuff is really incremental, and much of this budget may be for planners and government departments rather than actual facilities on the ground.
Just what Windows needs - a bit of competition. I don't consider the Apple real competition, because it requires proprietary hardware to run. And Linux is way too geeky and not packaged well for the average NOOB, though some netbooks have done surprisingly well with it. Today, however, Google announced a browser-based OS built on top of Linux and entirely open source. Might not be my cup of Darjeeling, as I am skeptical of a browser dominated OS for anything larger than a phone, but it sure may keep Windows honest.
Google had a low-key event today to preview Chrome OS, its new operating system based on Linux and the Chrome browser. Things are still pretty early -- it's not even in beta yet, let alone on shipping products -- but that's the first official screen shot right there, and the big features are all roughed out. The entire system is web-based and runs in the Chrome browser -- right down to USB drive contents, which show up in a browser tab, and the notepad, which actually creates a Google Docs document. Web apps are launched from a persistent apps panel, which includes Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Hulu, among others, and background apps like Google Talk can be minimized to "panels" that dock to the bottom of the screen. Local storage is just used to speed up the system -- everything actually lives in the cloud, so all it takes to swap or borrow machines is a login, and you're good to go. Google also said it's "very committed" to Flash, and that it's looking to hardware accelerate whatever code it can -- although Google didn't have a solid answer to give when asked about Silverlight. Overall, Google was upfront in saying that Chrome OS is focused on very clear use cases for people who primarily use the web, and that it's not trying to do everything: "If you're a lawyer, editing contracts back and forth, this will not be the right machine for you."
It is totally clear to me that Obama and Pelosi will spend any amount of money to pass their key legislative initiatives. In the case of Waxman-Markey, the marginal price per vote turned out to be about $3.5 billion. But they didn't even blink at paying this. That is why I fear that some horrible form of health care "reform" may actually pass. If it does, the marginal cost per vote may be higher, but I don't think our leaders care.
What does it take to get a wavering senator to vote for health care reform?
Here's a case study.
On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for "certain states recovering from a major disaster."
The section spends two pages defining which "states" would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that "during the preceding 7 fiscal years" have been declared a "major disaster area."
I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.
In other words, the bill spends two pages describing would could be written with a single world: Louisiana. (This may also help explain why the bill is long.)
Senator Harry Reid, who drafted the bill, cannot pass it without the support of Louisiana's Mary Landrieu.
How much does it cost? According to the Congressional Budget Office: $100 million.
They will bring back this charming vista to our cities
Hanging laundry to dry is a common prescription by environmentalists. This picture is from 1900, the last year we were at some of the CO2 targets currently being proposed.
Obama specifically promises not to spend the stimulus money on dog parks (as an example of what people would consider frivolous public investment). Katherine Mangu-Ward brings us this picture of a stimulus funded dog park near her home:
I really don't need the report to tell me this. Here is the common sense answer -- before this administration embarked on the health care fiasco, we all pretty mich knew that Medicaire and Medicaid bankrupt and was going to blow a huge hole (McArdle's term) in the budget. So, since this bill at its heart is really just an expansion of Medicaire/Medicaid to cover more people, how can we expect it to do anything but blow an even bigger hole in the budget.
By the way, years ago I wrote:
...health care is not like failed Great Society housing programs. In those housing programs, only the poor got crappy government housing "” the rest of us kept what we had. Universal health care is different, because it will effectively be like forcing everyone to move into the housing projects.
Now that we know what is in the actual bills, I stand by this prediction. Here is the poll question I would still like to see:
Would you support a system of government-run universal health care that guaranteed health care access for all Americans, but would result in you personally getting inferior care than you get today in terms of longer wait times, more limited doctor choices, and with a higher probabilities of the government denying you certain procedures or medicines you have access to today.
Perhaps the scariest potential effect of the proposed health care bills is the negative effect they likely will have on innovation. And if we adopt the bill, we will never know what we have lost. Unlike budgets, which with near certainty will become overdrawn quickly, we will never be able to point to the health care innovation we didn't have.
I want to quote liberally from a Ronald Bailey post, but I encourage you to read the whole thing:
Yet, the elements of market competition that still manage to survive have had the salubrious effect of driving medical innovation and improving patient health outcomes. A new study by the free market Cato Institute, "Bending the Productivity Curve: Why America Leads the World in Medical Innovation" reports:
...In three of the four general categories of innovation examined in this paper "” basic science, diagnostics, and therapeutics "” the United States has contributed more than any other country, and in some cases, more than all other countries combined. In the last category, business models, we lack the data to say whether the United States has been more or less innovative than other nations; innovation in this area appears weak across nations....
...Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff observed:
"[I]f all countries squeezed profits in the health sector the way Europe and Canada do, there would be much less global innovation in medical technology. Today, the whole world benefits freely from advances in health technology that are driven largely by the allure of the profitable U.S. market. If the United States joins other nations in having more socialized medicine, the current pace of technology improvements might well grind to a halt."
...what if the United States had nationalized its health care system in 1960? That would be the moral equivalent of freezing (or at least drastically slowing) medical innovation at 1960 levels. The private sector and governments would not now be spending so much more money on health care. There might well have been no organ transplants, no MRIs, no laparoscopic surgery, no cholesterol lowering drugs, hepatitis C vaccine, no in vitro fertilization, no HIV treatments and so forth. Even Canadians and Britons would not be satisfied with receiving the same quality of medical care that they got 45 years ago....
As Rogoff suggests, the nationalized health care systems extolled by progressives have been living off the innovations developed by the "only country without a universal health care system." I wonder how Americans would vote if they were asked if they would be happy freezing medical care at 2005 levels forever?
Megan McArdle has two posts here and here on consumer credit and payday loans. My chief takeaway is that the majority generally benefits from the availability of diverse (though sometimes expensive) forms of consumer credit, while a minority are tragically and very visibly worse off. The question seems to boil down to whether regulation should be crafted that relatively invisibly makes the majority worse off but visibly helps a minority. This same question exists with programs from trade protectionism (where job losses due to foreign trade are more visible than the broader well-being of consumers and customer industries) to health care (where it looks like a lot of people will have worse health care to help a few people with visibly tragic stories). In all these cases are elites who are more than willing to opine that smart people like themselves should be allowed to force their "superior" decision-making on others.
The other thing I found intersting was her discussion of the Dave Ramsey anti-debt formula. She imagines a Ramsey-ite world with a high savings rate. But its a weird world with with lots of capital formation but little actual capital use. My gut feel is that it is almost certainly a poorer world, given how much technology and new wealth is created by entrepeneurship. While I am sure some do it, few great entrepeneurs created success without debt.
One thing neither post discusses is the role of loansharking and illegal forms of credit. The need for credit strikes me to be at least as strong as the need to gamble or get illegal drugs. If getting credit becomes illegal, then people will go underground for their credit, with almost certainly more dire consequences than over-paying a payday loan company.
Grinchlike union bosses are blocking at least 200 of Boston's best teachers from pocketing bonuses for their classroom heroics in a puzzling move that gets a failing grade from education experts.
The Boston Teachers Union staunchly opposes a performance bonus plan for top teachers - launched at the John D. O'Bryant School in 2008 and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Exxon Mobil foundations - insisting the dough be divvied up among all of a school's teachers, good and bad.
Andy Stern, president of one of the nations biggest labor unions, said today that America is failing, and many entrepreneurs arent loyal to the U.S.
I think the country is in a mess, Stern, president of the 2.1 million-member Service Employees International Union, said at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, a conference in Washington. I think America is failing.
Stern, the most frequent guest to the White House this year, said the U.S. economy has created a system in which the entrepreneurial class is not loyal to America. Its not wrong for the government to distribute wealth to people who need it, and labor unions can help the country do that, Stern said.
From Great Britain, which really seems to be losing its mind of late, via Daniel Mitchell of Cato
A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty". Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday "“ after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year. The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon. In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: "I didn't think for one moment I would be arrested."
"¦ The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden. In his statement, he said: "I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges. "I didn't know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him. "At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall." Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.
"¦ Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a "strict liability" charge "“ therefore Mr Clarke's allegedly honest intent was irrelevant. Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.
"¦ Judge Christopher Critchlow said: "This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge. "The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant."
I had an employee in a truck towing a pontoon boat from a marina we operate in Alabama to a marina we operate in California. Apparently, we have grossly violated the law because to haul our boat from our own facility in one state to our own facility in another requires that we register as an interstate motor carrier and put DOT numbers on all of our vehicles. Just great. Who wants to bet that this will be an enormous and expensive hassle?
I dumped the compliance task on my Chief Operating Officer, who routinely deals with a lot of really irritating compliance issues without complaining. He sent me this email this morning:
I've now left at least 5 recorded messages for USDOT employees, and spoken to 3 of them. I almost have my arms around this compliance issue. This was a very cruel assignment...will never forget this
Couldn't have illustrated the new corporate state that Obama is building better than this -- at state where large corporations, unions, and government officials conspire to use government power to enrich their contituencies to the detriment of smaller businesses, consumers, and taxpayers. WSJ via Tad DeHaven:
The government has taken on a giant role in the U.S. economy over the past year, penetrating further into the private sector than anytime since the 1930s. Some companies are treating the government's growing reach "” and ample purse "” as a giant opportunity, and are tailoring their strategies accordingly. For GE, once a symbol of boom-time capitalism, the changed landscape has left it trawling for government dollars on four continents.
"˜The government has moved in next door, and it ain't leaving,' Mr. [GE CEO Jeffrey] Immelt said at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Montreal in June. "You could fight it if you want, but society wants change. And government is not going away.'
A close look at GE's campaign to harvest stimulus money shows Mr. Immelt to be its driving force"¦ Inside GE, he pushed his managers hard to devise plans for capturing government money.
By January, Mr. Immelt had become a leading corporate voice in favor of the $787 billion stimulus bill, supporting it in op-ed pieces and speeches. Reporters who called the Obama administration for information on renewable-energy provisions in the legislation were directed to GE.
When the stimulus package was rolled out, Mr. Immelt instructed executives leading the company's major business units "to put together swat teams to get stimulus money, and [identify] who to fire if they don't get the money," says a person who heard him issue the instructions.
In February, a few days after President Obama signed the stimulus plan, GE lawyers, lobbyists and executives crowded into a conference room at GE's Washington office to figure out how to parlay billions of dollars in spending provisions into GE contracts. Staffers from coal, renewable-energy, health-care and other business units broke into small groups to figure out "how to help companies" "” its customers, in particular "” "get those funds," according to one person who attended.
From Henry Payne, in an article on the auto industry:
The Left likes having Big Industry straw men to bash whenever their socialist plans run aground, but the fact is, Big Industry is embracing the U.S.'s leftward lurch. Better to secure your place at the Rentseekers Roundtable, to lock out new competition and guarantee a never-ending stream of government welfare.
It's always impressive to see one person excel in two widely disparate activities: a first-rate mathematician who's also a world class mountaineer, or a titan of industry who conducts symphony orchestras on the side. But sometimes I think Paul Krugman is out to top them all, by excelling in two activities that are not just disparate but diametrically opposed: economics (for which he was awarded a well-deserved Nobel Prize) and obliviousness to the lessons of economics (for which he's been awarded a column at the New York Times).
It's a dazzling performance. Time after time, Krugman leaves me wide-eyed with wonder at how much economics he has to forget to write those columns.
For years I have used Adobe Premier Elements v. 3.0 to edit my videos because it worked OK and probably more importantly came in a package with Adobe Photoshop Elements (which is a very good tool, except for the organizer which I don't like). But I have a PC with a 64-bit operating system and a quad core CPU for which this older software is not optimized -- the old 3.0 was running painfully slowly even on my new computer. So I downloaded a trial edition of Premier Elements 7 and was horrified at how buggy and unstable it was, without adding any real functionality that I wanted over the old 3.0 edition. So I then downloaded the brand new v 8.0 and found it if anything even worse. In retrospect, I could have seen this in the reviews for both products on Amazon.
I have a general rule of thumb that one bad version generation happens, but two in a row means it is time for a change (the exception to this being Quickbooks, which has had about 4 versions in a row where each is worse than the last, but there is really not a good alternative for me right now).
For video editing, I eventually landed on the oddly named Sony Vegas Movie Studio, v9.0. I am extremely happy. It works a lot like Elements used to but is rock solid stable. I have been working with a 90-minute HD video for 2 days straight without a reboot and it has had no problems and is fast and has all the functionality I could want. Not for casual applications probably, but I really like it. I don't usually write posts like this, but this piece of software almost never makes it into the magazine reviews or comparisons at sites like PC Magazine or CNET. Not sure why, but its an excellent program. Thanks to the Amazon community, whose reviews again helped me make a good decision.
Postscript: I have never been wildly impressed with Adobe programming and their most recent iteration of Photoshop Elements really worries me as the organizer seems to be badly bugged. Their programs have always been pigs -- the only way they could get a tolerable load time for Elements was to break the program into four parts and start up with a menu that lets one choose one part or the other. I know they did this to fight the classic Adobe load time problem (used to have it in spades with Acrobat reader) but I think they have broken something in the process. You know Adobe programs are a pig when I get impatient for them to load from the new Intel SSD, which generally serves up programs lightening fast.
I have been having a 6-month run in with a Hawaiian bank over a land loan. Today I finally yelled at a supervisor, without really thinking about what I was saying, that it seemed like their bank was systematically given their mainland customers the shaft. Lo and behold, in 20 seconds I had a complete resolution. What I have been missing all these years as a white male!
If they want me to use less water, then raise the price beyond the ridiculously low prices we have now, prices that clearly do not match supply with demand. It is not we consumers in Arizona that are draining Lake Powell, it is politicians who price water below any kind of reasonable supply/demand clearing price to gain some incremental love at the ballot box (also, politicians prefer command and control legislation of the shower head variety to allowing the price mechanism to work automatically). More here.
I often conclude my presentations on climate that conservationists will likely look back in 10-20 years on the global warming hysteria as the worst thing that has ever happened to the environmental movement. While we focus 110% of our attention on a trace, naturally occurring atmospheric gas that our bodies exhale and plants need to live, here is what we are not focusing on.
All the problems in these pictures are ones we demonstrably know how to solve while still allowing for the economic growth that is pulling a billion Asians our of poverty. The same cannot be said for our current ability to eliminate CO2, and therefore most combustion, without imploding our economy.
I had an employee in a truck towing a pontoon boat from a marina we operate in Alabama to a marina we operate in California. Apparently, we have grossly violated the law because to haul our boat from our own facility in one state to our own facility in another requires that we register as an interstate motor carrier and put DOT numbers on all of our vehicles. Just great. Who wants to bet that this will be an enormous and expensive hassle?
Update: Credit where it is due: The application online was totally arcane (and of course the help link and instructions links were broken) but the guy at the DOT help line was remarkably helpful and walked me through it. It was pretty clear that a lot of folks who casually transport their private property across state lines gets swept up in this net, and they actually were prepared to be helpful. I did have to laugh when the very first screen of the application process was to get my credit card number - I think this clarifies the reason for this licensing process.
I have shared before the main problem with all these new fake "rights" (e.g. right to healthcare, right to a job, etc.). Our original Constitutional rights were merely checks on government - they said the government could not pass laws to prevent us from doing certain things or invade our homes without some sort of due process, etc. But these new rights require that some previously free individual be coerced into providing money or labor or both to supply others with these new rights. I often use the desert island test - if you can't have the right alone on a desert island, its not a right.
But what I had not realized until recently is that many of these new fake rights also share in common a level of compulsion on the beneficiary (not just the payer and provider). For example, you have the right to bear arms and engage in free speech, but you are not required to own a gun or speak in public. But you will be required to use, and pay for, your new "right" to health care, at the threat of a term in prison. In this light, its doubly perverse to call something like health care a "right." How can something which government uses compulsion on the payers, the providers, and the users be associated with so clean and moral a notion as a "right." Freedom of religion is a right. Health care is a want.
I got to thinking about this even more with "the right to a job at a fair wage," embodied in such laws as the Fair Labor Standards Act. Proponents of such a right would consider it a victory that employers have been compelled to not pay less than $7.25 an hour for labor. But the beneficiary is the subject of compulsion as well. This law also means that I cannot sell my labor at less than $7.25, even if I am willing (even eager) to do so. This means that if my choices are to sell my labor at $6.00 or for nothing, the government compels me to be unemployed. My son is 16 and would like a retail job, preferably around books this summer. Having real job experience and customer contact experience, for him at his age, is worth enough that he would likely work for free. But he can't work for free, because the Fair Labor Standards Act only allows compensation to be valued in monetary terms - non-monetary benefits like skills improvements don't count. So, given the economy, my son will likely not work next summer. All for his own good, of course.
According to Phil Klein of the American Spectator, Christina Romer, head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, had this to say today about the Senate's proposed excise tax on high-end health insurance policies:
"Part of the idea of how that is going to work is precisely because it does empower consumers. It empowers each of us to have an employer-sponsored plan to call our HR office and say, "˜Would you negotiate harder? Would you think about (whether this) is the most efficient plan out there, because I don't want my plan paying an excise tax.' So I think that's something that is very much empowering consumers."
