Archive for May, 2007
Friendly advice
I found it somewhat ironic that the advice Communist China gets from Capitalistic US is to:
The Chinese were advised by their American friends to “create a social safety net for its population, similar to the Social Security and Medicare programs in the United States, so Chinese residents do not need to continue to save as much as 50 percent of their income for their retirement and future medical needs,” according to one trade newsletter.
I’m not a big fun of China and I’m not delusion by it’s mockery of open markets. However the last thing China needs is more government and more failing social programs. If I was into conspiracy theories I might suggest that this is part of a grand plan to weaken China, a rising competing superpower. However, since I’m not I will attribute this advice to the general incompetence of the bureaucracy.
Not so different
Jimmy Carter has backtracked from his comment suggesting that George W. Bush is the worst president in history, and let’s hope his gesture soothes relations between the two. Because if there is a place in the next world where unsuccessful presidents go to pay for their sins, Carter and Bush will be sharing a cell for a long, long time.
I couldn’t agree more with the statment above (with the entire analysis I have some reservations) noting the exception, which was highlighted by Tzvika, that Carter damage was limited, by the American voters, to 4 years.
Tags: Bush Carter Foreign Policy
Spreading the message
despite the fact that I put on my car the bumper sticker
Jeff Jarvis, of the very useful PrezVid, linked to this CNN reports:
CNN reports on who’s hot at Eventful, the site where people demand that celebrities make appearances. Obama’s No. 1, Clinton’s No. 2, and Ron Paul is No. 3; Paul’s the only one who acceded to a demand.
And although the number aren’t really high (as of the time I’m writing this post the number of eventful demand indicates 9826 people in 744 places) they indicate increasing interest, mostly among collage students, to listen to the congressman from Texas and his unconventional Libertarians ideas.
And like Barry Goldwater’s campaign was the opening move in Reagan’s victory maybe Ron Paul will seed enough with Libertarians ideas to change the course of our society and politic.
Apply the same standards
When corporations’ CEO had cook their books they can, and the do, go to jail. Are we going to apply the same standards for our representatives?
The federal government recorded a $1.3 trillion loss last year — far more than the official $248 billion deficit — when corporate-style accounting standards are used, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
The loss reflects a continued deterioration in the finances of Social Security and government retirement programs for civil servants and military personnel. The loss — equal to $11,434 per household — is more than Americans paid in income taxes in 2006.
"We’re on an unsustainable path and doing a great disservice to future generations," says Chris Chocola, a former Republican member of Congress from Indiana and corporate chief executive who is pushing for more accurate federal accounting.
I’m sure that we can find room for all of them near Ebberts and Skilling.
(H/T - The Daily Dish)
Tags: Budget Deficit Accounting Standards Social Security National Debt
The incentive of being inefficient
Like every legal immigrant in the US I had to settle my residentship through the INS. And although my case was simple, easy and had no complication at all, it took more than 3 years, and many wasted hours standing in lines, until I got my Green Card. I even had the pleasure to hold an official card with the name Temporary Permanent Resident, which seems to be fine English to the people that issue it.
But after reading this it start to make sense:
Last June, U.S. immigration officials were presented a plan that supporters said could help slash waiting times for green cards from nearly three years to three months and save 1 million applicants more than a third of the 45 hours they could expect to spend in government lines.
It would also save about $350 million.
The response? No thanks.
Leaders of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rejected key changes because ending huge immigration backlogs nationwide would rob the agency of application and renewal fees that cover 20 percent of its $1.8 billion budget, according to the plan’s author, agency ombudsman Prakash Khatri.
Current and former immigration officials dispute that, saying Khatri’s plan, based on a successful pilot program in Dallas, would be unmanageable if expanded nationwide. Still, they acknowledge financial problems and say that modernization efforts have been delayed since 1999 by money shortages, inertia, increased security demands after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the disruptive launch of the Homeland Security Department.
I’m not so convinced with the official explanation since most of my application was prior to September 11, 2001, and for the small reason that Muhamed Atta got his Visa faster, and before, me. The fact that it is a bad business for a government agency to become more efficient, unlike any private company, should set as an example for how the health care system will look if we will let Clinton/Obama/Edwards to convince us that government can manage it better than the private sector.
Tags: INS Green Card Government Efficiency The Free Market Health Care Clinton Obama Edwards
Newspeak, Campaign style
Lets take a look at Hillary Clinton’s version of newspeak, it is rather fascinating:
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined a broad economic vision Tuesday, saying it’s time to replace an "on your own" society with one based on shared responsibility and prosperity.
The Democratic senator said what the Bush administration touts as an "ownership society" really is an "on your own" society that has widened the gap between rich and poor.
"I prefer a ‘we’re all in it together’ society," she said. "I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none."
That means pairing growth with fairness, she said, to ensure that the middle-class succeeds in the global economy, not just corporate CEOs.
"There is no greater force for economic growth than free markets. But markets work best with rules that promote our values, protect our workers and give all people a chance to succeed," she said. "Fairness doesn’t just happen. It requires the right government policies."
Now lets see - what is a social program enforced by the government that takes from one and gives to another if not a special privilege? and what is Ms. Clinton’s free market if not a socialism in disguise? And we didn’t start talking about the nationalized health care, where Clinton face a fierce competition from Edwards who wants to provide us with free health care that will cost us 1 Trillion dollar to establish and Obama that suggests:
Obama, 45, an Illinois senator, would increase preventive screening, institute an electronic health records system, allow Medicare to bulk-buy prescription drugs, and provide reinsurance for catastrophic coverage — steps Obama said could save as much as $100 billion a year in health-care costs.
For those who couldn’t afford coverage, Obama would offer subsidized health insurance, expand government Medicaid and children’s plans and overhaul the insurance market, he told supporters at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
“To help pay for this, we will ask all but the smallest businesses who don’t make a meaningful contribution today to the health coverage of their employees to do so by supporting this new plan,” Obama said, according to a text of the speech. He said he would allow temporary tax cuts that President George W. Bush signed into law “for the wealthiest Americans” to expire.
I thought that the Democrat had a great chance this election to win the center - those who got scared and disgusted by Bush’s version of Conservatism. But I don’t think that the alternative offered by the leading Democrats is less grim…
The good old competition
Competition, and its benefits for consumers, can be very effective also when it comes to taxes. Apparently many European states discovering that it is better to charge lower tax rates than keeping the higher rates and not get anything:
May 29 (Bloomberg) — A tax-cut war is spreading across Europe as leaders of the continent’s biggest economies give up criticizing smaller neighbors for slashing business rates and decide to join them instead.
The move toward lower levies on corporate profits in Spain, Germany, France and the U.K. is aimed at wooing companies and reinforcing the strongest economic expansion in six years. It comes after Ireland and new European Union members from eastern Europe succeeded in attracting investment, and irking their larger rivals, with tax rates of less than 20 percent — among the world’s lowest.
[...]
Supporters of lower corporate taxes point to the success of Ireland, whose 12.5 percent rate, the lowest in the developed world, is down from 47 percent in 1988.
That proved a magnet for such U.S.-based technology companies as Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and Dell Inc. and helped Ireland’s economy grow more than three times the rate of the euro-area in the past decade, while still running a budget surplus in nine of the 10 years
A similar phenomena, although on much smaller scale, was observed in the US when many states had to reform their tax code or loose the corporations. However, and as blessed the tax cuts, several questions come to mind. First, if many in European countries start to realize the benefits of lower, and simpler, tax why aren’t they moving toward flat-tax rate?
And second, and for me this is the more important question, what about the residential taxes? The logic in the base of the welfare states was to take money from those who have it (like corporation) and use it for the benefit of those who don’t have it, or have less of it. But now these states start to take less from those who have, and the same from those who have less. shouldn’t the tax cut be done across all levels? But the move of businesses to places where the tax burden is lower expose the fallacy of the entire taxing as a wealth distribution method. Since I wasn’t under the delusion that welfare state is working, and is more efficient than the free market, I’m not surprise to see that it is running into such paradoxes.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the web
Mosif decided to infect the net across the ocean with the viral game in which a blogger tells when and how they discover the web and to invite five more bloggers to the confess how long are they Internet users. In the Israeli Blogsphare it developed rather nicely and produced very interesting posts.
In 1994, after few years in field units, I started to study at the Israeli Command and Staff Collage. As an organized person I decided that I need to finally join to the civilized world and write my future papers on a word processing software and therefore I needed to buy a computer. As an organized and motivated person I included in the new computer also a modem, the most advanced than - 14K per second, and started my addiction.
It took me a while to connect to the world wide web because the world of BBS’s was so rich, mostly for me who came from long time at the field, MSN was only a BBS - chats and forums - for subscribers from Israel, Also IOL (which doesn’t exist anymore) and another small one that had a limitation of few hours per user every day and had some celebrities like Sheli Yechimovitz (now a parliament member), Raanan Shaked and many others. But the most important use of the Internet was the ability to chat with than my girlfriend. Until I connected to the net we used to talk over the phone, and run pretty high bills, chatting online on MSN, and later using ICQ was a great deal of saving.
Now lets choose the next round of victims: Ingrid, Yaron, Yuval, Orli and last but not least the man that probably will be happy to block - or at least to regulate it to death the FCC chairman Kevin Martin.
Tags: Internet World Wide Web BBS Chat ICQ Blogsphare
Not so strong in the logic department
Every day on my way to work, and back, I’m passing near the World Trade Center construction site. It is fascinating to see how the project progress and how the hole that left after 9/11 a new tower is rising. As far as I can tell the people working in this site are hard-working people, very hard-working . So are many other people: CEO’s, investment bankers, lawyers and factory workers.
But today I learned that the only important measure to how hard-working is a person is how little that person is earning:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said the increase was overdue.
“After 10 years of indifference,” Ms. Pelosi said, “we are raising wages for the hardest-working Americans.”
What make the least earning workers the hardest-working Americans? It seems that same logic that was applied here:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did just that when she requested $25 million for a project to improve the waterfront in her home district of San Francisco. Her request did not note that her family owns interests in four buildings near the proposed Pier 35 project.
Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Pelosi, said that any suggestion of a conflict of interest is "ridiculous." He said that Pelosi was passing along a spending request from the Port of San Francisco and that she would not benefit from it.
I can understand, and still disagree, when one argue that as a society we should support those who are falling behind. But to argue that one is the increase of minimum wage is justified because it is for the hardest-working Americans is flat-out stupid.
Tags: Minimum Wages Nancy Pelosi The Free Market
Doesn’t belong?
One can agree with Dr. Paul position on non-intervention or not, but it rather interesting that he needs to defend his Republican credentials. It is sad that Neo-Conservatism is leading the Republican party but that it become, in many conservative minds, integral part of their conservatism. In the long run replacing the alliance with the Libertarian wing of the conservative movement with the Neo-Cons and the Social Conservatives will marginalise the Conservative movement and will make it irrelevant.
It seems however that Dr. Paul doing fine job representing his position, and his place in the Republican Party .
Tags: Non-intervention Foreign Policy Ron Paul, Neo Conservatism Conservatism Libertarianism