Rebane's Ruminations

The Public, Healthcare, and Politics – Scattershots

George Rebane

It was bit mind boggling to watch the news last night.  Hard to tell who is more expert at playing Pander the Public.

1. Reid and Pelosi are now vilifying the health insurance industry as being terminally evil for having their profits increase 450% over the last decade.  That’s it, just that their profits increased and they’re making a lot of money.  That statement is supposed to be enough to have us assemble in the town square after dark with torches and pitchforks.  Same drill as you’ll recall with the oil companies.  The revenues of both sectors went up significantly, but their margins stayed the same.  In fact, the insurance companies at 1.5-4% margins are lower than the SP500's average margin.  So if revenues go up because people are buying more insurance (due to reasons we can only guess, but you can bet there’s a tort lawyer in there somewhere), of course the amount of profit dollars go up because the amount of insurance coverage and the premiums collected has gone up.  So Reid and Pelosi think the American voters are idiots to jump at this bait, and start tarring up their torches for the night’s rally.

2. Bill Maher, arch leftwing commentator and showhost, states unambiguously that we Americans are all ignorant knuckledraggers, especially those who are religious.  Of course, he feels that way because we don’t see the left-leaning lights at the end of the tunnel, but you get the general gist of his argument.  He is joined by many commentators on the other side of the aisle who have more problems offering such explicit assessments, even though they do point out all the causes – bad educational system, excessive self-esteem, political correctness, revisionist history, etc. – why the last couple of generations are characterized by academics as being in the “post-intellectual” era.  And always-right Bill O’Reilly seems to be totally confused about the difference between a governor's "intelligence" and how regionally entrenched ideologies helped her/him in the governing of states like Alaska and Massachusetts.

3. Gotta love ol’ Barney Frank.  That guy really lets loose with some penetrating insights in unguarded moments.  Walking down one of the Capitol hallways, he said it plain and clear on camera that to get the country into a socialist single-payer system, we have to convince the sheeple to first accept the so-called ‘public option’.  Because, contrary to Obama’s lies from the podium that you get to keep your current health plan, everyone with half a brain knows that once the government starts competing with its own subsidized plan, and also plays referee in the health insurance derby, all private suppliers will be forced out.  Now why don’t the MSM make that little bit of Democrat strategy known in banner headlines?

4. And the Republicans are totally out of new ideas about how to regain power.  As usual, the Democrats are promising everyone who votes for them a free ice cream cone paid for by someone else.  The Republicans are sticking with their historical core message, and taking it to an electorate that no longer has much skin in the wealth creation side of the equation, nor understands how that core message will help them.  Both parties are on the same basic merry-go-round.  You get to be the party in power; you screw up in spades; your opposition points out all your bads and promises a new golden age; you get kicked out of power; then you work like the dickens to shove slats into the spokes of the other guys’ bikes, and hope to hell that they screw up so that the cycle can start all over again.  Meanwhile the country sinks into greater debt, dissonance, and ignorance.  But hey, if you’re a politician, the cycle works – what goes around comes around – you just have to do whatever you must to stay on the merry-go-round.

Stimulus Shortfall and Local Contributions

George Rebane

The above chart is getting a little boring as the weeks roll by.  Nevertheless it continues to be more and more revealing – ‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.’

To add a little interest to this weekly stimulus posting, I thought that a vignette or two from real life might be of interest.  We just got word from a British friend in her late sixties that she has been diagnosed with diabetes.  Appealing to the fine British socialized healthcare system for treatment, she was told that there will be no insulin or other medicines prescribed that we would consider normal here.  Instead she got a pamphlet telling her to join a health club for exercise, and a list of foods that she should now eat.  I presume that there will be some compensation for the health club fee, and that the pamphlet ended wishing her good luck with her new regimen.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is our intended low cost Obamacare future.

Moving right on, yesterday afternoon a knock on the door revealed a PG&E technician telling me that a very large part of one of our digger pines on the other side of the house just fell off and crunched up our fence.  He and his crew had been working on the power installation for our new neighbor when they heard this 60 foot long behemoth come tearing down.  I had not heard a thing.

Upon inspection, we all confirmed that ‘yep, that was one helluva widowmaker’, and making things right is gonna provide some real fiscal stimulus to Nevada County.  I immediately called Curtis Roberts (Roberts Tree Care) who has done a great job handling our tree work for several years now.  Curtis came over right away and confirmed that this indeed would be a great fiscal stimulus for our community (multiplier effect and all that), and pointed out that the stimulus will probably be much bigger given that the remainder of the giant digger should also come down.

After some noodling on how that would be done, I agreed on the scope of the proposed stimulus package, which at this stage had expanded to hiring a crane to gently lower the huge limbs of this giant tree that stands almost a hundred feet tall and is about fifty feet from the house.  More good news for local businesses, and I had yet to include the stimulus for the responsive gentleman from Gold Country Fence who also arrived, and promised that he could make the whole thing look like it never happened.

I wonder if I can put in a proposal for a wee bit of that $787 billion for which Obama seems to have trouble finding stimulating projects - talk about shovel ready.

Let’s Not Forget Global Warming

George Rebane

Obamacare is on everyone’s mind these days.  Having more time to look at the five (yes, five) separate bills going through congressional committees makes most people now start holding their noses – the longer we look at it, the more it smells.  But we can’t overlook the other source of perhaps an even bigger disaster – Cap and Tax – the special interest designed energy bill that is supposed to combat anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Both Obamacare and Cap and Tax are two sides of an economic holocaust that add to the ongoing growth of socialism in the country where government meddling in the private sector is now rampant and increasing.  The result of impementing this program will be a devastation on our land equivalent to our having lost WW2.  But there is still hope that the socialists in Washington will fail as America begins to pay attention.

More Americans than ever are beginning to discover that no poor country takes care of its people or its environment.  A good quality of life is a benefice that only well-to-do countries can provide.  The world overflows with supporting evidence for this truth.  But one of the enduring tragedies of socialism is that it cannot see the relationships between economic growth, levels of wealth, a healthy environment, and improved quality of life for all people under systems of governance based on liberty.  (I hope we’re all past the stage where we confuse democracy and liberty.)

The Heritage Foundation has a new 40 minute video on AGW that is worth watching.  It covers the science part of the Team Gore AGW claims, and goes on to consider the economic impact – especially on the world’s poor – implementing the currently touted AGW policies.  It concludes by offering some productive alternative policies that answer the hysteria still sweeping the developed world.

(Visit NC Media Watch for your daily dose on AGW and things related.) 

Pension Pranks and Ponzis - Part 1

George Rebane

OK folks, here’s the drill.  Today, almost all government and union pension plans are in trouble.  Bottom line, they are under funded.  And having heard that explanation, you are supposed say, ‘Oh, alright.’ and act as if you understand whether you do or don’t.  Since all institutional pension plans sooner or later become playpens for major mischief, we’ll try to demystify some of the fundamentals of how a pension plan works.  Who cares?  All of us do, because there will be major grabs for your wallet by about everyone out there who believes you still have a wallet.

A legitimate vanilla pension plan works by first setting up an account into which the worker and/or employer put money on a regular basis while the worker works for the employer.  The money in the account is invested, and, hopefully, continues to grow as you work.  The fancy term is that it accrues at some rate of growth through interest, dividends, capital appreciation, and, of course, worker/employer contributions.

When you quit working for the employer, hopefully your account may still continue to grow until you retire.  It all depends on what you do with it after you quit.  If/when you retire, then the amount in your account will begin to be drawn down.  How it gets drawn down depends on what kind of bet you want or are allowed to make.  That ranges anywhere from grabbing the money and managing your own affairs from then on, to having a monthly check sent to you by some financial management outfit in charge of a lot of retirement accounts like yours.

Somewhere along the line you start thinking about the ‘what ifs’, like what if there’s less there than I had planned?  Boy, that cuts to the chase real fast.  If there’s less there to fund the payments that you expected, then doesn’t that big financial management outfit have to make up the difference?  Definitely not; all those guys are responsible for is what is known as ‘best efforts’ in investing and managing your account while not intentionally robbing you blind (although that part is not always as hard and firm as it should be).  So who is responsible for cutting you the retirement check you were told to expect when you signed on?

Ruminations - 27jul2009

George Rebane

Isn’t the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office wonderful the way it diplomatically exposes the lies of Obamacare.  Team Obama and the congressional Dems keep rolling out the bull pucky on how national healthcare will not increase deficits and actually be a “stimulus” (Pelosi) to the economy.  Then the CBO sits down in front of the microphone and presents some eye-popping numbers that quietly say ‘No it won’t.’  And then the liars turn up the volume and scream even louder into the Sunday talk shows, and today the CBO again said, ‘No it won’t.’  Your move el Presidente.

Didn’t we all get good grades in our high school civics class?  Don’t they teach that stuff any more where they tell you what our Constitution says about our three branches of government and their separation of powers?  If memory serves, Congress as the legislative branch has the power to decide what laws the country needs and write them; the President in the executive branch is charged with enforcing the laws; and the Supreme Court as the judicial branch is supposed to interpret the laws and make sure that they and their execution are cool with what is called for by the Constitution.  Where does the President come off telling Congress what laws to pass, and how fast it has to get the job done?  Doesn’t anyone inside the Beltway read that hallowed founding document any more; the document which is supposed to be the basis on which our civil society rests?  Maybe the last question has its own answer – civil society?

Every jurisdiction is cutting back spending today.  And the spending cuts are most visible in areas where the public comes in contact with government provided services.  A reader noticed that the Nevada City Post Office parking lot (probably not city property) is not up to snuff and wrote “While I don't live in Nevada City, I do visit the Post Office once a day. I don't know who has the responsibility for the up-keep of the parking lot, but no matter it's a blight on the City. There is always some pretty horrible trash in and around the hedge that borders the parking lot and the sidewalk, and the vegetation needs a good trim job. This does not present a pretty picture of the City. As a thought, some one of your future articles in The Union might suggest that a couple of the people that hang out at Callahan Park could make a positive contribution by frequently policing the place and even the Park itself.  Is this asking too much of them? Of course, how to get them to do it is another matter. Thoughts?”  Good idea, but the vision of old snowballs in Hell comes to mind when I think about when this will come to pass.

The clamor for Obama to make his birth, school, and public service records available continues on a number of fronts (for example, here).  Since we know so little about him, it sure is puzzling why the man doesn’t just do what the other Presidents have done before him.  If there’s nothing to hide, why continue paying hundreds of thousands to lawyers to file denial petitions across the land.  If there’s a reasonable answer for this secrecy, I haven’t heard it, and would sure like for someone to point it out.  Mighty strange that he’s making it seem like there’s a big dark revelation hiding somewhere under a rock.

 

Singularity’s Apprehensive Approach

George Rebane

‘Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man’ is the title of an uneven yet revealing piece in the 25jul09 NYT by John Markoff.  The article was apparently motivated by a quiet (‘secret’ sounds too sinister) conference at Asilomar on Monterey Bay sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence last February.  It was a quiet conference in comparison to the concurrent announcements at the time that preceded the opening of the Singularity University this summer.  RR’s Singularity Signposts section has kept readers up to date on this and other events that herald the Singularity as the epochal new age of Man.

The February conference was lead by Microsoft’s Dr. Eric Horvitz who also happens to be the current president of AAAI.  According to the NYT, the conference was motivated by a growing cohort of well-read people from many areas who were now “impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence”.  It focused the discussion of “a group of computer scientists … debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.”

The attendees seemed to agree that “there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors. … The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home.”

The central idea of the Singularity is the ongoing “intelligence explosion” as proclaimed by Dr. Ray Kurzweil and others.  The inevitable result of this explosion is a world in which ever smarter machines will design ever smarter machines – and this explosion is already well on its way.  The result, for the instant we call the Singularity, will be the arrival of peer intelligence (‘what if your computer were as smart as your spouse?’), and then we enter the unknown post-Singularity era.  All the rules will change.

American Sharia - Progress Report (updated)

George Rebane

The Muslim presence in North America and the US is assuming the trappings of Muslim penetrations into other western lands.  Primarily this means that the new comers are beginning to behave as settlers and not as assimilating immigrants.  We recall that settlers take and transplant their culture into the lands that they settle.

Americans are beginning to show all the resilience of our European forebears in handling Muslim settlers.  This is a pattern that we have already become comfortable with in accepting the Reconquista of our Mexican neighbors to the south.  To illustrate, this YouTube video shows the progress that the Muslims have made in America.  (H/T to RR reader) 

The standard response of the apathetic and uninterested is to explain that such incursions are just isolated and don’t signify an expanding encroachment of their target culture.  Today’s anti-American political correctness encourages these episodes as visible steps toward eliminating America as a beneficial world hegemon with its own culture, and, most certainly, confirming its approaching end as a sovereign nation-state.

Some of us bloggers who note these happenings - happenings that are even too hot for Fox News to handle - often reflect about why we post these little littanies.  Who will be informed, convinced, or (gasp!) activated from reading such commentary?  Maybe no one - for lovers of liberty it is not a hopeful present in which we live.  Perhaps, such words are meant for the anthropologists yet to come who will study the death of nations and cultures.  After all, as the price of memory plummets, we can be fairly certain that ‘what goes on the web, stays on the web’.

At the end, no one should be able to complain – ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

[update] And the beat goes on.  Now we find out that HB1388 passed and will allow the feds to spend over $20 million to bring over a passel of Hamas supporters from Gaza.  We will welcome them with more rights, benefits, and privileges than you and I have.  The MSM, of course, put this under its highest classification for news - 'Shhhh!'  H/T to a RR reader for another shovel-ready stimulus while little ol' Nevada County is sucking on the wrong end of our straw for a $60K drop out of almost $8 million that we have applied for.

Nevada County ARRA Funding - or Not

George Rebane

'A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.'  Thomas Jefferson

Cato on Obamacare Lies

George Rebane

Sometimes we small town commentators are viewed as holding extreme views.  And maybe we do when compared to people who are too busy to pay attention.  But what’s coming down from this socialist cesspool in the District of Columbia has not been seen in generations, perhaps ever.  The lies are historic and they are consequential to our republic.  We are not alone in trying to spread the word.  Here’s the latest from the prestigious Cato Institute - 'Perils of Obamacare - The Three Big Lies'.  (all emphasis in the original)

§§§

Writing in the New York Post, Cato senior fellow Michael D. Tanner outlines the three big lies of Obamacare:

1)      "If you like your current health-care plan, you can keep it."
“In the end, millions of Americans would be forced out of the insurance they have today and into the government plan. Businesses, in particular, would have every incentive to dump their workers into the public plan. The actuarial firm the Lewin Group estimates that as many as 118.5 million people, roughly two-thirds of those with insurance today, would be shifted from private to public coverage.”

2)      "You will pay less."
The Congressional Budget Office has made it clear that the reform plans now being debated will increase overall health-care costs. … The final health-    care bill is expected to cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. That means much higher taxes, and not just for the wealthy.”

3)      "Quality will improve."
“Anyone who thinks a government takeover of the health-care system will improve quality of care has only to look at the health-care programs the government already runs: The Veterans Administration is overwhelmed with problems, Medicaid is notorious for providing poor quality at a high cost — and Medicare has huge gaps in coverage.”

Suffering from AB32? Take one AB118

George Rebane

AB32 is California's chronic killer as most RR and NCMediaWatch readers know.  Recently our Assemblyman Dan Logue along with 28 co-authors introduced AB118 as an antidote.  Russ Steele has an update and lots of contact information for the relevant electeds.  Please take a look here.

Healthcare Lies – Volume 1 (updated)

George Rebane

The President’s ‘news conference’ last night was Orwellian.  The man can lie with a straight face so well it is scary, and the sheeple just believe.  Here’s an interview that former Senator Fred Thompson had on his radio show with former New York Lt Gov Betsy McCaughey.  You can download a copy of the bill now working through the House here, and read it yourself.  If you only read the pages cited in the interview, you should get a cold chill at what is in store for us – especially if you’ve already had a lot of birthdays.  This is the stuff of Hitler and Stalin, both of whom knew how to reduce healthcare costs in their populations.

Pages 16,17 will quickly convince you that, contrary to what our President and the Dems tell us, we will not be able to keep our previous healthcare insurance for long.  The conditions imposed for doing that will have your insurance provider pull the plug very quickly after Obamacare becomes law, and then you’ll be at the mercy of the government’s “public option” monopoly.

And take a look at pages 425, 426 to see what one of their tender mercies will look like.  After a given age you will have to start getting end-of-life counseling every five years to convince you that death is nigh, you shouldn’t expect to fight it with modern medicine, and here’s how you can get yourself checked into the nearest hospice so you can check out before you run up the bill too much.  This will be socialized medicine on steroids. (more analysis here)

Now you know why this “piece of s#%t” (Congressman John Boehner) needs to be rushed through Congress quickly and signed into law before too many Americans understand what is in store for us all.  And they just look at you and lie.

ps. and we haven't even started on the cost related lies.  Stay tuned.

pps. H/T to an RR reader from Washington state.

[update] Lo and behold, in today's (23jul09) WSJ Betsy McCaughey writes 'GovernmentCare's Assault on Seniors', making the case that rationing healthcare will hit seniors especially hard.

California's Budget Agreement

George Rebane

Not to worry for a wee bit longer.

The Descent of Obama

George Rebane

The White House announced yesterday that it will withhold from Congress key economic information that it generates and distributes in the normal course of affairs.  The Heritage Foundation reports that –

The White House … would be delaying release of updated financial and economic forecasts until the middle of August. In other words, its usual mid-July update of key forecasts for policy makers will not be published in time for expected House and Senate votes on health care reform. This delay matters enormously to the deliberations of Congress on this central issue. If it knew that the near-term budget picture is worsening and that it cannot count on a recovering economy to produce much needed revenues for reforming health care, it might hesitate in passing legislation that would add tremendously to the national debt. (More here)

Such withholdings in non-governmental affairs would be either outright illegal or beneath the moral character of upright individuals.  Obama is purposely letting Congress proceed with a perceived truth about the economy that he knows is materially different, i.e. a lie (see ‘philosophical aside’ below).

With this act of withholding relevant information, that the White House clearly feels will impact Congress’ Obamacare against the interests of the administration, Obama descends into the realm of the common Washington sleaze bag politician.  Obamacare, already on shaky ground in Congress and the national polls, is now being given the bum’s rush through the halls of the Capitol so that it may not receive the attention that it must.

Now Everyone is Starting to Talk About It

George Rebane

The government employee compensation and pension crisis is beginning to come up on everyone’s radar.  Well, perhaps everyone except some very closeted socialists here in our neck of the woods.  I am always amazed when I read and sometimes participate in the comment thread of an article either published on a blog or a newspaper’s website.  The comment thread of my 18jul09 editorial column – ‘Dear Government Employees’ - in The Union lived up to expectations. (also on RR here)

Many of the commenters had trouble keeping track of the editorial’s theme that made a fairly simple and widely acknowledged point.  Government employees have become an unbearable cost burden to governments at all levels.  The way that their salaries, pensions, and other benefits are compensated is no longer tenable, and that financial house of cards is now about to collapse.

Some members of the local readership however demonstrated that 1) they were unaware of this critical issue, and 2) that anyone introducing it must needs be an unsavory, selfish, and greedy kind of person who has no appreciation of the role of government in civil society.  These folks also seem to have a lively imagination, seeing attacks on their cherished collectivist beliefs where there are none.  To them it really doesn’t matter, a strong counter-attack is always the best defense, even against an imagined assault.

Singularity in Ten Years?

George Rebane

The rise of conscious machines has become an active focus of study in the artificial intelligence community.  Consciousness and intelligence can and should be viewed as independent attributes of a biological critter, and therefore by extension, of a sentient (conscious) and sapient (wise viz intelligent) machine.  RR readers are familiar with my view that such machines will not be ‘programmed’ per se, but will arise from within very complex computational environments that may or not have inputs from our real world.

We now hear of a team at the Federal Polytechnical College in Lausanne, Switzerland that has ‘assembled’ the beginnings of a virtual rat’s brain from the ground up.  (more here)  This means that they have created software structures that mimic the make-up of (a part of) the rat’s brain down to the neuronal level, with each virtual neuron having all the inter-connections that a biological neuron would have in the brain.  This creates a virtual brain with a gazillion such connections the complex firing patterns of which are thought to give rise to intelligence, and perhaps even consciousness. 

Walter Cronkite, RIP

George Rebane

Walter Cronkite defined the television journalism of my youth.  All this after he educated me with the ‘You Are There’ series that was “filled with the events that alter and illuminate our times.”  I was maximally impressed by Uncle Walter, he was reliability, goodness, and truth embodied.

And then came the dark days of Vietnam in the late sixties when our six o’clock news was full of the combat reels from the jungles that had been flown across the Pacific in the last 24 hours.  We saw the war as it was seen through the sweaty lens of combat cameramen walking through the jungle behind the infantryman when the Vietcong opened up.  And again, Walter Cronkite knit the whole picture together for us, and put it into a context that related it to the scenes of rioting on college campuses and debates in Congress.

But then we witnessed the hiccup in the man’s career.  He changed from pro-war to anti-war and decided that Vietnam was militarily unwinnable.  This altered his reportage, and we began to get a very dower picture of that far-off conflict to stop the communist dominoes.  I don’t know how much it affected his day to day reporting, but he definitely hit the nadir of journalism during the infamous Tet Offensive that North Vietnam launched in January of 1968.  The countrywide offensive was a military disaster for the communists who were beaten back with overwhelming casualties on all fronts.

Walter Cronkite and the mainstream media didn’t see it that way.  They kept listening to Secretary of Defense MacNamara and General Westmoreland giving positive assessments of our gains.  These assessments made them believe that the communists could never muster such an attack.  And when it came, we, of course, had to be the loser because we also took extraordinary casualties in beating them back.  But the big picture was settled in American living rooms with the evening news.  Walter Cronkite now pronounced the war unwinnable, and unwinnable it became.  Hearing this, President Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

Cronkite never apologized when the truth of the matter was made clear to him and anyone else who would listen.  We were then beyond listening (sorta like being beyond debate on climate change today).  I was surprised and dismayed to hear him state numerous times that he was most proud of the effect his editorializing had on our ‘cut and negotiate’ policy that ended the Vietnam War, and caused the death of at least another million Vietnamese in communist re-education camps.  He had taken lead of the liberal mainstream media.

Dear Government Employees

George Rebane

[The following piece was submitted to The Union and appears today (here) as my Other Voices column for July.]

Dear Government Employees –

These are difficult times for all, times that now shine a bright and revealing light on things hidden and unmentioned in our communal life.  Governments at all levels are broke and broken.  And they are not so because we taxpayers have failed to pay our due.  Today we know that governments are failing because they have grown too big, bewildering, and expensive.

The major cost of government turns out to be you in your sheer numbers and the compensation packages that you command from us.  Overall, you are a coddled and privileged class, buttressed between unscrupulous politicians and your public-be-damned union leaders.  You are paid wages that no private employer could afford, and your benefits are a lavish scam that will soon reveal itself - a story of its own for another time.  

We know all this because you are being fired and furloughed in unprecedented numbers by jurisdictions that can neither borrow nor print.  The feckless feds who still can are increasing your numbers.  When forced to balance accounts, our electeds know their budget busters - the salaries and benefit packages that you have quietly installed for yourselves with the help of your unions and spineless politicians.

You and your handlers (whom we also fund) frequently portray your labors as selfless sacrifices to the rest of us.  We don’t see it that way.  You provide expensive, often unwanted, ‘services’.  And even in your most dangerous jobs, you do not match the risks to life and limb that more of us encounter daily in the private sector.  (Bureau of Labor Statistics)  There is no doubt that we need some of you to be there for us.  The military, certain emergency services, and our border guards have an unquestioned role in keeping our country whole.

Proper government should enable and oil the machinery of civil society.  Today our governments have gone far beyond that, and have become the gear-grinding gravel that taxpayers must daily overcome. Whether you work in faraway offices or walk armed among us, today most of you are no longer ‘public servants’, but the instruments and apparatchiks of government that corral, control, and coerce us.  We fear it will only take one ‘word’ from our political leadership for you to become our immediate masters.  This has happened elsewhere, and, sadly, it can happen here.

Most of you and many of us don’t understand the difference between wealth generation and its consumption.  It is we in the private sector, paying the assessed taxes and levied fees, who generate the wealth.  We do this through our work and investments while risking our own time, treasure, and talents.  The dual promise of reward and ever-present risk of failure keeps our productive edges keen.

You also claim to be taxpayers and investors.  But it is hard for us to accept that, because every dollar you invest or pay in taxes was first taken from us.  And these are our dollars that we cannot spend and invest ourselves.  Today’s economic realities have made it clear that most of you are a burden not only to us, but in the larger sense, even to yourselves – you are eating the geese that lay the golden eggs.

In the final analysis things are what they are.  And at sunset, we citizen taxpayers have no one to blame but ourselves.  For it was we who first elected the politicians who promised to do for us what we should do for ourselves.  And then through our public-educated ignorance and indolence, we allowed government to fatten itself while we were too busy building businesses, buying toys, and enjoying circuses.

So now we ask those of you who still can, please join us in the private sector and help recreate the wealth that supports our common quality of life.  It is a bit colder and unforgiving out here, but you will soon find that to be a refreshing and invigorating part of life.  You will then know that your labors also contribute the wherewithal to fund properly run governments at all levels.  The nobility of the self-reliant sustainer of society will be yours.

This has been a difficult letter to write, difficult because so many of you government employees are also our friends and neighbors.  But today things are changing as they must, because business as usual is no longer possible.  We want you to understand how it looks to those of us who compensate your labors and make your jobs possible.  We believe that in the end, we all want a more prosperous and free America.

Your faithful benefactor,
The American Taxpayer

George Rebane is a retired systems scientist and entrepreneur in Nevada County who regularly expands these and other themes on Rebane’s Ruminations (www.georgerebane.com).

 

Nevada County ARRA Funding - Ho Hum

Weekly update of local fortunes from the American Restribution and Re-election Act of 2009.  For all the folks out there holding firm that government is the solution - what's wrong with this picture?

 

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those
who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson

Public Employee Pension Tsunami (developing) (updated)

George Rebane

The unfunded public pension disaster is picking up speed.  Municipalities are beginning to eye how to file Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The public employee unions in California are determined to keep milking the dying cows to the very end by trying to pass a law that (fasten seatbelts) would make it illegal for municipalities to declare bankruptcy without union approval. 

A couple of letters to the editor (here) in the 16jul09 WSJ contain a candid view of the unions’ motivations in underestimating the unfunded liabilities that will hit their memberships' benefits, and a flakey response by the union backed National Association of State Retirement Administrators.  The latter live in a la-la land where cities can raise unlimited monies to keep their pension plans funded and current, and where real world concerns about running out of cash are “irrelevant to public pensions because they and their sponsoring entities are going concerns, not subject to takeover or going out of business.”  Oh yeah?! watch Vallejo.

Regular RR readers will not be surprised as this tragi-comedy unfolds, but they will be updated and informed as we continue looking at how public employee benefits are negotiated, calculated, managed, and distributed.  It will not be a pretty picture, and it’s happening all over the country.  So what you read about happening in one far-off jurisdiction, is probably also happening closer to your own wallet.

BTW, all this is in addition to the stuff coming out of Washington.  No level of government will be left behind in requiring you to pay your ‘fair share’ of the cost of their mistakes while we were too busy to keep an eye on them.

[update]  Here's little graphic for those who want to see them foreigners walk the walk.

No Hope or Change from Sacramento

George Rebane

“death spiral” is how a learned correspondent characterized the latest Democrat rejections of starting a two-tiered Calpers program for government employees (as reported in the SacBee here).  The second tier was supposed to offer a bit more reasonable package to new state employees – not a chance with this crowd.  Their argument is that such a policy would discriminate against the recently hired if their retirement benefits were lower than that of those already on the payroll.  Well, no s%&t Red Ryder!  How else are you going to start reducing an expense that has bankrupted the state and that taxpayers can no longer afford?  This reasoning, however, is too lofty for our left-wing legislature and their state workers’ unions. 

The public employees pension fiasco is a developing story that will shake the state to its foundations.  Regular RR readers will have already fastened their seatbelts, hidden their wallets, or rented a U-Haul. 

As an aside, we read today that Calpers is suing the three credit rating agencies for leading it down the primrose path on Structured Investment Vehicles.  This comes from the world’s biggest retirement funds manager with over $170,000,000,000 in assets.  These poor babies are now crying foul (more here)  With that much money and their considerable management fees, you’d think that they would have someone on board who could rate these screwy stealth securities in-house.  Or if they couldn’t do that, alarms would go off and they wouldn’t invest in them.  Stupid is forever.

Meanwhile, we’re not too bright ourselves staying in a state that has a net loss of about 100,000 productive people a year.  Also, the Public Policy Institute of California reports that the net out migration is over 1.5 households for every household moving in.  The only thing that keeps California’s population growing is the birth rate of its minorities.  (And the influx of illegals that the Democrats now want to include in our 2010 census.)  The latest Economist has a lead piece about our death spiral.  Word definitely has gotten out.

And let’s see, what’s more important for me to do today than scream (respectfully, of course) at my state government?

California 1849 - 2009

[The following anonymous contribution, a la the Michael Jackson hoopla, was forwarded by a colleague and east coast correspondent.  Word has gotten out.  gjr]

Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009

LOS ANGELES - Millions of fans from around the globe gathered along Sunset Boulevard to pay final respects to California today, as a slow moving funeral procession transported the eccentric superstar state's remains to its final resting place in a Winchell's Donuts dumpster in Van Nuys.  The self-proclaimed 'King of Pop Culture' died last week at 160, in what coroners ruled an accidental case of financial autoerotic asphyxiation.  The death sent shock waves across the world and sparked an outpouring of grief by rabid fans.

"I don't care what the tabloids and the Wall Street Journal say," said a weeping Illinois. "I still love you, Cali!"

The 640-mile long funeral parade route was lined with flowers, candles, teddy bears, and IOUs from millions of mourners and debtors who made the somber journey to watch the passing of the state that had once ruled the box office and industrial charts.  Among them were current chart-toppers who cited California as a key influence.

‘Is it Time for the Turing Test to Retire?’

George Rebane

Definitely not.  This question is asked by Dr. Aladdin Ayesh in a brief but serious article with the above title.  I presume Dr. Ayesh is a computer scientist, but he seems to be confused about how Alan Turing proposed his test for machine intelligence or, if you wish, AI almost sixty years ago.

Ayesh states that - Back in 1950, Turing proposed that a machine can demonstrate and be proven to possess true intelligence through a simple test of conversation, in which a human user converses blindly with two entities: a machine and another human. If that user could not tell the difference between the two entities, the machine is considered to be 'intelligent'.

Turing did not offer his test as any definitive method to ‘prove’ that a machine is intelligent.  In fact, Turing did not even want to answer the seminal question, ‘What is intelligence?’  Instead, in his characteristic and deep fashion, Turing offered an operational answer to a difficult but related question that was posed to him – ‘Can a machine be intelligent?’ – by addressing the question ‘Can machines think?’

Nevada County ARRA Still on Ice

George Rebane

Well, the ARRA – aka SP787 - stimulus is performing sorta like history predicts (cf. FDR’s alphabet soup programs during the 1930s) – late, expensive, and ineffective.  Now, after launching TARP(SP700) and SP787, they’re starting to talk about “stimulus two”.  What again was that definition of insanity?

Meanwhile here in the woods we’re standing around the mailbox, with our ready shovels at port arms, waiting for some more of that ‘approved’ $4.17 million to arrive.  Hard to tell what’s really happening, except that the government bureaucracy for distributing and monitoring the stimulus funds is growing, so I guess the stimulus is working somewhere.  (All this experience will also be used as a blueprint for setting up and operating Cap n' Tax and Obamacare.  We live and learn.)

And as reported yesterday (here), it seems that we might increase the county’s take if someone called Geithner and company.  The message should be that we’re doing our damndest to turn into compliant collectivists as witnessed by last November’s election results.  All we need to become a solid blue county is a little more stimulus than the $60K they have sent us.  Our votes can be bought just as reliably as those in Detroit.

Early ARRA Results

George Rebane

USA Today reports ‘Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in '08’, specifically –

Billions of dollars in federal aid delivered directly to the local level to help revive the economy have gone overwhelmingly to places that supported President Obama in last year's presidential election. (emphasis mine)

The counter argument to all this is that this distribution result was either a coincidence or just normal redistribution of wealth through the usual channels.

That aid — about $17 billion — is the first piece of the administration's massive stimulus package that can be tracked locally. Much of it has followed a well-worn path to places that regularly collect a bigger share of federal grants and contracts, guided by formulas that have been in place for decades and leave little room for manipulation.

Either way, to me it looks bad.  There either is a payoff for this president’s election, which is due process given the history of these things, or else it’s just recognition that these constituencies have been on the permanent government teat for a very long time, mostly to no avail.  In any case, and with the Peter/Paul Principle in full force, the correct name of the law truly is the American Redistribution and Re-election Act of 2009.  People who will be made to pay the bill should deport accordingly.

'Culture and Creativity at the Edge of Nature'

Gil Mathew

There were those who scoffed at that tag line, 'Culture and Creativity at the Edge of Nature', when it was first crafted at the ERC, and some with good reason.  However at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vages last month, it was a phrase that rang true.  In the Broadcast industry, Nevada County i.e. Grass Valley is a world leader. As you stroll the aisles or sit among some of the 75,000 or so attendees at NAB everyone knows about Grass Valley, and almost all of them say the same thing.  “Of course, we know Grass Valley.  What a cool place that is and it’s pretty too”  Then when you probe deeper, you find that they not only know of the video companies that call this home, but also know the vibrant and creative talent that is collected here, and many that I spoke with wished they could live and work here.

It’s this culture of creativity that also allows new products to be brought to market.  Witness the award winning products that were announced during the April show. Telestream, the Telestream Pipeline was acclaimed by the Broadcast Engineering Magazine as an NAB Pick Hit of the show along with Grass Valley’s Kayenne switcher and the K2Dyno and Summit.   AJA Video’ Ki Pro.  Over 15% of the 34 “Pick Hits” by Broadcast Engineering Magazine came from Nevada County and when you consider we are up against, Sony, Panasonic, Adobe, etc. that’s an accomplishment.

A big winner at NAB was AJA Video and their Ki Pro.  Ki Pro was awarded the Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit Award, the DV Black Diamond Award, the TV Technology Star Award, and the Videography Magazine Vidy Award. Products awarded are selected by a panel of industry experts, engineers and journalists based on the most innovative new technologies introduced at the annual NAB conference.

Grass Valley unveiled their new look, dropping the Thomson name.  The booth was spectacular and it was the first thing you saw as you entered the South Hall.
 
Nevada County can be very proud of the contribution made by these and the other business that call this edge of nature, home.

[Gil Mathew is CEO of the Nevada County Economic Resource Council, and a Nevada County entrepreneur.  This piece first appeared in the Nevada County Business News.]