Little to do About Nothing

If memory serves me correctly, it was about 2006 when the environmentalist groups began complaining that our use of paper products, specifically multi-layered toilet tissue, was adversely impacting the environment. In recent weeks, the alarm has been renewed. Overuse of any natural resource is arguably worthy of serious discussion. We should make every effort to responsibly manage every aspect of our natural resources. The exponential growth in population throughout the world, which is perhaps the largest adverse environmental impact factor of all, will inevitably exhaust all natural resources at some future point in time. But apparently that’s something far too difficult to control and paper seems a less challenging target.
The wonder of it all is why the “green” people put so much energy into something like rationing toilet tissue instead of focusing on something more immediately critical? Something like our ability to grow enough food to feed our ever increasing population? Over the past ten years, as much at 1000 square miles of arable land on which we formerly produced food in California’s San Joaquin Valley has been decimated. Farm land destroyed to construct housing and lay pavement to create nothing more than residential comfort for commuters from the San Francisco bay area who can’t afford to live in the city. Reducing our ability to produce food and increasing the run-off that pollutes our waterways.
If “green” people want to do something meaningful they might want to put more emphasis on something more critical than the amount of paper being used in the manufacture of toilet tissue

A Rose if a Rose

While we Twitter the days away or engage in similar amusements, our elected representatives are working very hard to assume an ever increasing degree of control over our every day lives. Currently, the most critical issue at risk is our loss of control over our own health care services.
At every level, the government in this country has a miserable record of running (controlling) anything. Medicare and social security are failures. Public assistance programs consume public funds like chaff in a powerful wind while the leadership gives lip service to “closing the loopholes” that never go away. Now, the United States government wants to provide health care for everyone. But the underlying truth is that it’s not about providing a much needed improved health care system, it’s about control. If you control health care you can ration it. In fact, if the government provides health care for “everyone” it will have to ration it out of sheer necessity. Much like the way it’s currently rationed in Canada and the UK.
The most vivid indicator of this probability is the current rationing of a vaccine to protect against the H1N1 virus. According to a 2006 study by the American Journal of Epidemiology, an average of over 41,000 Americans die from common strains of influenza each year (data collected between 1997 and 2001). But the government tells us that the H1N1 strain is not your typical influenza strain - it’s a “pandemic” of a much more powerful and incredibly more dangerous virus that is expected to infect between sixty and ninety million Americans (statistical extraction from data attributed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) this flu season. But there isn’t enough vaccine to go around. Now what? Well, we ration it. Certain groups of people, based upon statistical probabilities of which groups are likely to experience the highest level of terminal infection from this virus, will receive access to the vaccine before anyone else. Those who are not among the statistically high risk group population will either go without the vaccine or gain access to it at some future date, depending on its availability.
That, my friend, is rationing. You can slice it with the grain or across the grain; it’s still rationing. When the government controls health care, it’ll be rationed. That’s because, without rationing, a government run “health care for all” system will bankrupt this country.

Easy on the Throttle Obama

Within a seven month period, Barrack Obama has assembled a “plan” for National Health Care. I remember having to spend more time working on an annual budget for a municipality than Obama has spent on writing a deeply penetrating and wide ranging health plan. The legislation, allegedly more than a thousand pages of legal verbiage which apparently nobody in a position to vote for or against (and some attorneys) fully understands, is being pushed through Congress as if it were the Ten Commandments. A National Health Care Plan that affects only the uninsured is one thing; a plan that will impact every citizen of the United States is quite another. Obama’s explanations of how the plan would work and how flexible it would be have been essentially empty, superficial, and arrogant. It would be too expensive to send every citizen a copy of the plan, but it would be quite simple (and inexpensive) for Obama to post the 1000 pages of the plan on the Internet for all of us to read. I’d like to read it before I have to live under it as law. Chill out, Obama. Let’s not rush headlong into another mismanaged far reaching government fiasco.

Rethinking Term Limits

California voters enacted term limits for members of the California State Assembly and Senate with Proposition 140 in 1990. We did that to eliminate the career politician and to encourage what we believed might be something closer to a citizen legislature. Well, that didn’t work. We now have a legislature that is no better, and perhaps worse, than the one we had without term limits. So if these people are no better than their predecessors, what did we achieve? If we achieved anything, it is less than obvious to most observers.

So now we think we can solve the problem by amending the California State Constitution to once again establish a citizen legislature instead of the full time, albeit limited term legislators we’re stuck with today.

Once an advocate of the idea for a Citizens Legislature, I’ve been rethinking the idea; I’m not so sure we want to go there.

Depending upon whose statistics you want to use, California was the 5th or 6th largest economy in the entire world just one year ago. By my own calculations, it comes in about 8th; but let’s not argue about a couple of billion dollars one way or the other. Let’s focus on the fact that California is in the trillion dollar bracket and a trillion bucks needs to be managed by people who understand how to run a trillion dollar plus business instead of looking at it as a trillion dollar bank account from which they can draw (or borrow upon) at will to support each of their special projects. The average experience for a member of the Senate is currently 4 years; for a member of the Assembly, 3 years. How can any group with such limited experience understand the long range implications of their day to day decisions? They spend more time fighting over territory than they do on trying to take a futuristic view of California.

My current theory is that we don’t need to overhaul the way we select, maintain or schedule the activities of our legislature. What we need to do is work harder on ensuring that our legislature is made up of a more balanced group of representatives. How do we do that? We do it through insisting that reapportionment is accomplished in a fair and equitable manner with as near a 50/50 mix of major political parties as possible in each district.

We’re not going to achieve very much by carrying signs in parades, gathering in protest groups, writing and/or calling our legislative representatives or using similar tactics to protest taxes, budget cuts, or other issues near and dear to our hearts. I think we’re wasting a lot of energy by focusing on those issues and not placing enough time and effort on monitoring and fighting for thoughtful and meaningful reapportionment.

The California State Senate and Assembly are dominated by members of the democrat party at a margin of about 5:3. It’s a bit less for the Assembly but the dominance of democrats in the Assembly is clearly visible. That’s a 25/15 split in the Senate and a 29/48 (there’s an Independent in this group) in the Assembly.

Realizing that we may rarely see a perfectly even distribution of political party representation in the California State Legislature, I believe we can do better than the current statistics on membership suggest.

What about career politicians? Well, term limits didn’t stop that. Between the Senate, with its two term limit for a total of eight years, and the Assembly with its three term limit for six years, a fourteen year career in California politics is still possible. The fringe benefits and retirement possibilities ain’t bad either.

Presidential Inheritance

President Barack Obama is fond of reminding the public that he “inherited” the current financial crisis in this country. He’d like everyone to believe that he inherited it from President George W. Bush, but that simply isn’t true. The current financial crisis did have its start during the Bush administration. But it was the Democrat party in Congress that exacerbated the problem.

In April, 2001, President Bush warned Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies could cause substantial repercussions in financial markets.

Again, in 2003, the White House warned Congress that Fannie and Freddie policies were a potential threat to the economy which could spread far beyond the housing market.

In the fall of 2003, the Bush administration pressed Congress to create an agency to oversee the policies of Fannie and Freddie. Treasury Secretary John Snow testified before Congress that a strong regulatory agency was needed to maintain better control over the GSE (namely Freddie and Fannie).

Democrat Congressman Barney Frank denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in a crisis and scoffed at the notion that greater controls were needed. Conversely, he said that the GSE should work harder to qualify low income families as homeowners.

In February, 2005, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified before Congress that Fannie and Freddie were “placing the financial system of the future at a substantial risk”. In April of that same year, Democrat Congressman Charles Schumer dismissed Greenspan’s comments, claiming that the GSE was doing a “very, very good job.”

In May of 2006, Senator John McCain co-sponsored legislation in an attempt to establish stronger controls over the GSE. The bill made it through the Senate banking committee, but was pigeon holed for lack of bi-partisan support on the floor of the Senate. During that period, the then "Senator" Obama showed no interest in the proposed legislation or the need for better control over the GSE.

Barack Obama did inherit the financial crisis, but he didn’t inherit it from George Bush. He inherited it from members of his own party in Congress who ignored the early warning signs. So much for the value of “liberal thinking” (an oxymoron) and partisan politics.