Every morning and every evening I drive by this memorial and I am saddened. Every day that we are at war seems like one too many.

At times it feels like the forgotten war but it is coming time that the war in Afghanistan must come to an end. There is a great article in Politico which gives some hope titled "Leaving Afghanistan moves beyond left vs. right" that explains that the opposition to the war should be bi-partisan. There is a bill that has been proposed by Dennis Kucinich to make the withdrawal a reality.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) plans to use a parliamentary maneuver to force a Wednesday House vote on the removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Kucinich's resolution directs President Obama to remove troops 30 days from the day it is passed or, depending on whether troops can be removed safely in that time frame, no later than Dec. 31... There is a growing bipartisan realization that our troops are being deployed to prop up a regime Washington doesn't trust, for goals our president can't define. Concern has begun to escalate among lawmakers of both parties that this prolonged military adventure is weakening the country militarily and economically.

I am not sure that there ever were clear measurable goals that can be realistically accomplished before the war even started. That is not a good way to about trying to accomplish anything, especially now with the ever mounting costs associated with fighting the war.

To politicians of any stripe, the costs on paper of staying in Afghanistan are jarring. The Pentagon is requesting an extra $33 billion to escalate combat operations, on top of the $65 billion already authorized for FY 2010. The Pentagon found that each additional 1,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan would cost about $1 billion a year.

While there may be differences of opinion on what to do with the savings that come from ending the war the costs of the mis-adventure cannot be ignored. This to me is the real point that must be driven home:

War should no longer be a left-right issue. It's a question of scarce resources and limiting the power of government. The immense price tag for war in Afghanistan can no longer be swept under the carpet or dismissed as an issue owned by peaceniks and pacifists.

There may be a lot of things that the people of the site disagree with me upon but this should be something that we can all unite under. I urge you all to continue the fight against this war. It has gone on long enough, let your representative know that this needs to come to an end. I will leave you with a quote from the late Howard Zinn that rings very true to me, "War itself is the enemy of the human race."

I saw this editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal , it may be gated but you should be able to access it by going a Google News search for "The Lost Wages of Youth".

The argument is as follows, by raising the minimum wage you are hurting those that it is intended to help. As the accompanying graph suggests the unemployment rate for teens is up significantly higher than for the general population and black teens even more so.

Since 2007 the over all unemployment rate is up about 5.1% (4.6% Jan '07 to 9.7% Feb '10) the teen unemployment rate is about 11% (just eyeballing but it looks like 15% Jan '07 to 26% Feb '10) and the black teen unemployment rate is up even more about 17% (just eyeballing but it looks like 27% Jan '07 to 44% Feb '10). So the teen unemployment has increased twice as much and the unemployment rate for black teens three times as much as for the general population from 2007 to 2010. Over this same time the minimum wage has gone up nearly 30%. It seems that this has been a factor in the rising unemployment seen.

This is expected, when you raise the cost of something you expect people to buy less of it. In this case we are talking about generally unskilled labor and employers hiring less people when the minimum price is increased.

A higher minimum wage has the biggest impact on those with the least experience or the fewest skills. That means in particular those looking for entry-level jobs, especially teenagers. And sure enough, as nearly all economic models predict, the higher minimum has wreaked havoc with teenage job seekers, well beyond what you would expect even in a recession.  

I know that people who want a minimum wage are trying to help people but it really seems like we are cutting down on opportunities if these same people are looking for work instead of actually working and acquiring skills. This is just one example of a policy that has harsh unintended consequences that negatively effect he people it is supposed to help.

If you want to help those that are most in need in our soceity you should write your congress person to tell them to repeal the minimum wage law or at least the latest raises.  

Just saw this story come accross my twitter feed.

This guy is a dick and deserves to be having the bad day that comes with this story.

BAD: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk.

WORSE: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk AFTER LEAVING A GAY BAR.

WORSER: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar WITH ANOTHER MAN IN THE CAR.

WORST: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a MARRIED state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

WORSTER: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a married, REPUBLICAN state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

WORSTEST: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a married, Republican state senator from Southern California WITH A HISTORY OF OPPOSING GAY RIGHTS was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

It is always seems like the ones that are most opposed to Gay rights are the ones who are Gay on the down low.

Here is the actual news report that is referenced.

Updated: I changed the graph to include when recessions have happened over the last 100 years. I also added a few more thoughts down at the end.

I posted the majority of this as a comment in a diary but I thought it could use a little more thought and could warrant a full diary.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the national debt; faultguy posted an interesting article that said something to the effect that the national debt to GDP ratio is on its way to be at the highest level since 1950. So I wanted to look at what were the factors that contributed to getting to this level. My main hunch was that military spending would be a large factor.

This graph shows the relationship between gross public debt as a percentage of GDP and Defense spending as a percentage of GDP. What stood out to me as that there seems to be more or less two different eras for the debt to GDP: 1900-1979, and 1980-2010. I have also included the recessions that are shaded in grey which correspond with some of the spikes in the national debt.

From 1900-1950: increases in Defense spending as a percentage of GDP (proxy for war spending) were positively correlated with the national debt. Changes is defense spending as a percentage of GDP explained about 51.68% of the change in national debt as a percentage of GDP over the period. This suggests that a large portion of the national debt is due to war spending. The coefficient is 2.35, which means that for every 1 percent increase in defense spending as a portion of GDP the gross national debt as a percentage of GDP increase 2.35 percent.

1900-1980: I added this and it seems to have even stronger predictive power than 1900-1950 but it still is pointing in the same direction. This has an even stronger positive correlation, and explains 53.98% of the change in national debt as a percentage of GDP. The coefficient is a little larger as well at 2.497 which means that for a 1 percent increase in defense spending it increases the national debt by about 2.497 percent.

1979-2010: This is going to blow your mind because it certainly blew mine. 1979 is the point where the gross public debt/gdp ratio is at it's lowest. It reached a point of 32.26%, so from this date to the present defense spending as a percentage of GDP is still correlated only now it is negative! The explanatory power has fallen as well to about 23.4% of the changes can be explained by defense spending as a percentage of GDO for gross national debt as a percentage of GDP.

Now this is the part that will blow your mind. For an INCREASE in defense spending it will LOWER the deficit. So the interpretation is a 1 percent increase in Defense spending as a percentage of GDP will lower the gross national debt by 6.15%!

If I were interpreting this I would say that something else became the driving factor in the National debt. When you look at the percentage of the budget dedicated to defense it has been shrinking considerably since 1900. From 1900-1970 it averaged 49.02% of government spending; from 1971-2010 it has only 27.24% of spending.

This shows the percentage of the budget that is dedicated to defense. If we again look at the period 1980-2010 the amount going to defense is pretty flat and actually down.

After considering these factors I think that it is fairly safe to say that yes the previous high was due in a large part due to war/defense spending. We were spending 54% of our money on that category and were only 5 years removed from spending nearly 90% of the federal budget on that. Compared to now where we spend only 24% of the budget on defense (still a whole lot) and over the last 20 years it has been roughly flat with a max of 24.27% and a minimum of 19.55% with an average of 22.37%.

So something changed considerably from the last time the debt was at this level, then we spent a lot of money on a war and the debt came down as we lowered defense spending. Now defense spending is at among the lowest levels in the last 100 years (But trending upward) and we are still approaching record debt levels.

I think that it would be very hard to say that our current debt is due to fighting a war and it will return to manageable levels after the war is over and defense spending decreases like was the case after World War One/World War Two/Korea/Vietnam (even this is hard to see in the numbers but could be due to trying to accomplish having both "guns and butter" so increasing both war and other spending).  The other lines in the budget (namely Medicare and Social Security which together make up about 40% of the budget and growing) seem to have taken a diminished the importance of defense spending in relation to national debt.

So I do strongly believe that the National debt is something to worry about and that unlike the previous high's reached after World War Two where we could rapidly lower spending after the war was over this time it will not be so easy.

The solutions are not really palatable for either party. It would take large substantial cuts in entitlments and some form of tax increases.

The entitelments and other non-discretionary portions of the budget are large and growing and at the current projection can not be maintained, these need to be addressed. The likeleyhood of that any time soon is not good, as we can see we would rather kick the can down the road and make more promises on top of the ones that we can not pay.  

A journal article titled "Campaign Finance Laws and Political Efficacy: Evidence From the States" that finds that no large positive effects on trust in governmnet with campaign finance laws.

Supreme Court decisions upholding the
constitutionality of campaign finance regulations acknowledge that the maintenance of confidence in government can sometimes override free-speech concerns. Yet the purported link between campaign finance law and perceptions of government has never been established systematically. In fact, there is good reason to doubt the existence of such a link, as both Primo (2002) and Coleman and Manna (2000) argue that there is little or no relationship between total campaign spending in federal elections and average trust in government at the national level. In fact, Freedman, Franz, and Goldstein (2004) find that campaign advertising (and, therefore, campaign spending) increases interest levels, knowledge, and turnout, suggesting that spending may in fact be a net positive for democracy.

Some of the other findings that were pretty interesting is that more spending tends to produce more interest and more trust in governmnet.

Judicial and legislative actors have long assumed that campaign finance reforms can and do influence public perceptions about the workings of democracy. Until now, there has been no systematic study of the presumed link between campaign finance regulations and public opinion. While ours is surely not the last word on the subject, our findings are in stark contrast to what has been accepted as the common sense and self-evident connection between campaign reform and the perceived integrity of the American democratic process.

So while it may be against the conventional wisdom, more spending may be good for vibrant democracy. When there is more spending it draws more interest and encourages people to become more knoweldgable about what is going on in politics.

Some ideas to move forward with a more bipartisan health care reform package. I saw this written by economist Arnold Kling.

If I were a Republican, I would use any health care summit to set the following conditions for agreeing to support a bipartisan health plan.

1. All Medicare savings must be used to shore up Medicare. None of those savings can be used to fund new insurance subsidies or entitlements. Medicare is unsustainable, and it is going to need every dollar that we can save, and more. There is nothing to spare for a new entitlement.

2. Medical savings accounts must not be killed.

3. Catastrophic health insurance must not be killed or heavily disadvantaged relative to comprehensive insurance.

4. All new subsidies that enable people to purchase health insurance must be on budget, rather than through insurance company regulations that are likely to result in cost-shifting.

5. The bill must provide for at least one of the following:

a. Interstate competition in health insurance.

b. greatly reduce (preferably eliminate) the tax inequity between obtaining health insurance on your own and getting it through your employer.

As far as I am concerned, any bill that fails to satisfy all five of those points deserves opposition.

I think that for the most part if a reform bill included these conditions I would support that bill. To me the biggest ones would be numbers 2, 3 and both 5a and 5b.

With number 1, I think that any saving would be phantom and reversed by future Congresses anyways (similar to how now all the automatic cuts are overturned) but I think that is still a good provision to have.

Number 4 to me is more of a truth in advertising kind of thing so that costs are not shifted out of the bill and on to consumers. I think it is important but wouldn't be a show stopper for me.

As for number 5, I would think that having both would be great and I may not be so quick to say I would be satisfied with only one or the other but I guess it would depend on the rest of what is in the legislation.

I enjoyed this video and thought that I should share it with you all.

While most people are certainly fimilar with J.M. Keynes most are unfamilar with F.A. Hayek. This video is a good illistration of the debate between the two that occured in the 1930's and continues to this day between their inteletual heirs.

The video opens with Keynes and Hayek standing at the front desk of a hotel, both in town for the "World Economic Summit." The clerk is like a groupy meeting Keynes, treating him like a rock star. Keynes arrogantly announces that he needs no agenda because he is the agenda. Meanwhile, Hayek humbly notes his presence. The person behind the desk has never heard of him probably like many of you. This captures the theme of what still occurs today the world-famous Keynes vs. the unknown Austrians.

The video portrays each character similar to the way that each's theory says we should take action. The first example is when they meet in the lobby and head out, Hayek with his subway ticket in hand. Keynes orders a stretch limousine, while Hayek shakes his head in disgust.

The brunt of the argument are laid out very clearly. Hayek says business cycles are caused by "low interest rates" born of intervention, whereas Keynes wants to blame "animal spirits" loose in a market crying out for management.

Up first to explain his theory is Keynes. he says that the bust is caused by sticky wages and can only be cured by boosting aggregate demand through government spending and the printing press. The animal spirts must be guided.

To do this he proposes things such as public works, war, even broken windows which "helps the glass man have some wealth." He warns against the liquidity trap, favors deficits and finally ends that he has changed the economics profession, and concludes, "Say it loud, say it proud, we're all Keynesians now!" All the while, the viewer is witness to wild antics of drunken partying.

After that night of partying it is left to Hayek to restore reality to the discussion. He dismisses Keynes on the grounds that there is too much aggregation in his equations, which ignore human action and motivation.

Hayek compares postrecession stimulus to drinking the "hair of the dog" to cure a hangover. Trying to cure the disease with what caused it is no solution.

He points out that there can be no wealth creation without saving and investment, and he proceeds to school Keynes in the Austrian perspective.

To do this he focuses on the boom, which he regards as having planted the seeds for the bust. The boom starts with an expansion of credit created by loose monetary policy. The new money is confused with real savings and is invested in new projects like housing construction.

But there was never sufficient resources to complete these projects. They are malinvestments. The "grasping for resources reveals there's too few" and the boom turns to bust. As for the liquidity trap, that is only evidence of a broken banking system. The lesson: "You must save to invest, don't use the printing press."

This entire explanation takes place against the backdrop of Keynes trying to sleep off a hangover and then hurrying to the bathroom to throw up - the aftereffects of partying the night before. A not so subtle metaphor for a boom (the party) followed by a bust (the hangover).

A report from the Inspector General (SIGTARP) for the TARP has come out saying that "even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car." So in other words TARP hasn't really done anything but spend a lot of money that has not made anything better.

One of the most striking things in the report is the lack of problems that were supposed to be addressed but haven't.  From the executive summary:

The substantial costs of TARP - in money, moral hazard effects on the market, and Government credibility - will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or ten years' time. It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been
addressed to date.

• To the extent that huge, interconnected, "too big to fail" institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.

• To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a "heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out" mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions. This perception was reinforced when TARP was extended until October 3, 2010, thus permitting Treasury to
maintain a  war chest of potential rescue funding at the same time that banks that have shown questionable ability to return to profitability (and in some cases are posting multi-billion-dollar losses) are exiting TARP programs.

• To the extent that large institutions' risky behavior resulted from the desire to justify ever-greater bonuses - and indeed, the race appears to be on for TARP recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions - the current bonus season demonstrates that although there have been some improvements in the form that bonus compensation takes for some executives, there has been little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street.

• To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a "bubble" in the housing market, the Federal Government's concerted efforts to support home prices - as discussed more fully in Section 3 of this report - risk re-inflating that bubble in light of the Government's effective takeover of the housing market through purchases and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage market.

Further on the report says that it is now in explicit policy of the government to prop up housing and could very well re-inflate the housing bubble.

To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a "bubble" in the housing market, the Federal Government's concerted efforts to support home prices risk re-inflating that bubble in light of the Government's effective takeover of the housing market through purchases and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage market...

Supporting home prices is an explicit policy goal of the Government. As the White House stated in the announcement of HAMP for example, "President Obama's programs to prevent foreclosures will help bolster home prices."

Here are the programs that been set up to support prices and their intended consequences (click to enlarge):

For all of the support that is going into this I still think once the support is taken away the bottom will fall out and find the true bottom for what is sustainable.

I am so glad that this emergency legislation was passed by our leaders who had to act and thought that they were wise enough to take over the mortgage market. Remember this "to the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a "heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out" mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions."

Before it was only assumed that large companies wouldn't be allowed to fail now it is practically official government policy, the tax payers will get screwed over again. When politicians say "no more bailouts" they really mean that we will have perpetual bailouts.

I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately and I thought that I would share it with you all. The argument that corporations are not people and therefore they should have no rights strikes me as wrong. I read this morning and it seemed to have a nice straight forword explanation.

This line of attack demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the freedoms protected by the Constitution, which is exemplified by the facile charge that "corporations aren't human beings."

Well of course they aren't - but that's constitutionally irrelevant:  Corporations aren't "real people" in the sense that the Constitution's protection of sexual privacy or prohibition on slavery make no sense in this context, but that doesn't mean that corporate entities also lack, say, Fourth Amendment rights.  Or would the "no rights for corporations" crowd be okay with the police storming their employers' offices and carting off their (employer-owned) computers for no particular reason? - or to chill criticism of some government policy.

Or how about Fifth Amendment rights?  Can the mayor of New York exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he'd like to move his office there?

So corporations have to have some constitutional rights or nobody would form them in the first place.  The reason they have these rights isn't because they're "legal" persons, however - though much of the doctrine builds on that technical point - but instead because corporations are merely one of the ways in which rights-bearing individuals associate to better engage in a whole host of constitutionally protected activity.

I have a feeling that some of you may differ in your opinions on this matter so pose to you a question:

Under the constituation why shouldn't individuals be able to pool there money in a group and do political advocating?

Huge Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power

The proposed budgets of the President show some really bad news that is really hard to ignore and really need to be addressed.

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country's entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget's projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama's own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 - years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms - they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

Essentially it will take an economic or political miracle to get back to a level that is considered sustainable, which even at the level still has quite a large yearly deficit.

I am not optimistic that this will happen, President Bush promised much of the same (actually he promised a balanced budget by the time he left office and that was not even close to happening) to no avail and I really doubt that their will be enough political fortitude to make the hard decisions. There really is only so much borrowing or spending that a country can do before it has serious negative effects on the rest of the economy.

Increased borrowing is sure to lead to much higher interest rates before too much longer (or high inflation if the debt is monetized) because there is only so much appetite out there for our country's debt especially when we pile on more and more.

I hope things get better but these projections show a murky picture ahead, we very well could be in store for another sluggish decade.

Obama wants to end wealthy farmers' crop subsidies

Here is a great example of why I don't think that there is a lot to be optimistic about in the future regarding the budget. Obama makes a rather modest request to limit farm subsidies for rich farmers and there is an up roar. Farm subsidies are pretty sickening form of corporate welfare and really hurt American consumers not to mention farmers in developing countries and I would really like to see all of them end but this is such a small cut and it is met like it is asking people to give up their first born child.

The administration plan would end crop subsidies to people with more than $250,000 adjusted gross income (AGI) from off-farm sources or more than $500,000 on-farm AGI. The caps now are $500,000 off-farm AGI and $750,000 on-farm AGI.

AGI is calculated by subtracting expenses from income.

But the cuts will be a tough sell for Congress with mid-term elections looming. Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas Democrat, said she will oppose "cuts that will harm farmers, ranchers and rural communities."

"It is Congress's job to write the annual budget, and based on my conversations with House Leadership, no one is interested in making cuts to the Farm Bill after the battle we just fought to pass it a year and a half ago," said House Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson, Minnesota Democrat.

This would affect just a small portion of the people who receive government money. So even a minor cut is met with a huge fight but this is just how things are done and why it is so rare for any subsidy to ever end in Washington. There is not a chance that without a gun to these people's head any hard cuts will ever be made.

Now to some depressing housing news.

Cloudy Future for Fannie and Freddie

The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer.

Just let that sink in for a minute.

This is going to be a never ending bailout, the president can talk all he wants about that next time there won't be a bailout but I think that to anyone who sees the course of action will know different. There is no will to let failing entities to go bankrupt and go away. We will keep throwing money down the pit until we run out or go bankrupt too. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and forget about the sunk costs and let something that is dying just die.

And, given the alarm in some quarters over the mounting budget deficit, these two giants and their vast obligations are likely to remain conveniently - and controversially - off the federal books. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have obligations of $3.9 trillion to investors who bought bundles of mortgages that the companies assembled.

Powerful and often competing interests are grappling over the companies' futures. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, eager to demonstrate their scorn for the companies, have called for their eradication. But few policy makers are willing to take aggressive steps that might weaken the housing market. On Christmas Eve, the White House quietly disclosed that it had, in effect, given the companies a blank check by making their federal credit line unlimited; the ceiling had been $400 billion.

So here is more of the same, politicians talk tough but there is not enough will to act so instead they just keep adding to the problem. A housing bubble was at the root of the last great boom and bust but instead of letting it wind it self down politicians want to try to inflate it back to the good old days.

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for politicians to make tough choices that could be potentially unpopular as our next story will show.

Rising FHA default rate foreshadows a crush of foreclosures

For all of the talk in the above story about if they stop propping up Fannie and Freddy the housing market will tank it looks like it is trying its best to get there regardless of the actions of the politicians.

The share of borrowers who are falling seriously behind on loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration jumped by more than a third in the past year, foreshadowing a crush of foreclosures that could further buffet an agency vital to the housing market's recovery.

The way I see it is that the housing market is trying to get find its bottom and it will get there eventually. It could be quickly if we get out of the way and let things adjust or it could take a decade or longer like what has happened in Japan after there housing bubble burst and tried to prop it up. Personally I would rather let things adjust quickly with out wasting a lot of tax payer money trying to stop the inevitable and let resources move to things that are productive.

There is more and more bad news as you read the story. Here is another gloomy snippet.

Although the FHA's default rate has been climbing for months and eating into the agency's cash, the latest figures show that the FHA's woes are getting worse even as the housing market shows signs of improvement. The problems are rooted in FHA mortgages made in 2007 and 2008. Those loans are now maturing into their worst years because failures most often occur two to three years after a mortgage is made.

If the trend continues and the FHA's cash reserves are exhausted, the federal government would automatically use taxpayer money to cover the losses -- a first for the agency, which has always used the fees it charges borrowers to pay for its losses...

Adding to the trouble was a now-defunct FHA program that enabled sellers to cover the down payments of buyers. This meant many borrowers had no skin in the game and were more likely to walk away at early signs of trouble. The program resulted in excessive defaults before it was ended in late 2008, and it is projected to cost FHA an additional $10.5 billion in losses, Stevens said.

Things just keep looking better and better.

The title is in jest, this is an example of wasting taxpayer money.

The example comes from the great state of Minnesota.

The Minnesota Municipal Power Association bought 11 turbines for $300,000 each from a company in Palm Springs, Calif. Calif.

The only problem is they aren't working.

Wind turbines placed in cities across Minnesota to generate power aren't working because of the cold temperatures...

Special hydraulic fluid designed for colder temperatures was used in the turbines, but it's not working, so neither are the turbines.

Now I am not from Minnesota but I could have guessed that it is pretty cold there in the winter and would have wanted to test them out before spending $3.3 million. Because of this problem for 4-6 months out of the year these will be giant scupltures unless the hydraulic fluid is heated. To heat it will take electricity of natural gas which severly lowers the net amount of electrity produced.

Check out the kstp story for a little video on the story.

Update: Fixed The link- Thanks for letting me know

Editor's Note. Credit where credit is due.  Here's the original version.

Please see Left Take home page for more re: fair use vs. unfair use

Authours Note: Came up uncredited in my rss reader as an image file, I was lazy and didn't look up where it came from. Made some small additions/changes but largely took it from there.

I like to site sources, and I should have looked for the initial source thanks for putting it up there for me.

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Obama says "let me be clear"
Take one shot

Obama says "change isn't easy"
Take one shot

Obama says "make no mistake"
Take one shot

Obama says "Let me be clear, change isn't easy, so make no mistake..."
Take five shots because being drunk we'll make the hard truth he is about to drop easier to take.

Joe Wilson yells something
Take two shots

Obama yells back
Finish your bottle

Obama says "jobs"
Take one shot, two if you unemployed

Obama references anything "green"
Take one shot of wheatgrass

Obama says "health care"
Take your vitamins, liver replacements are not in likely in the future

Nancy Pelosi claps like a seal
Take one shot

Nancy Pelosi becomes a seal
STOP DRINKING YOU"VE HAD TOO MUCH ALREADTY

Joe Biden nods-off/laughs inappropriately/starts talking before the speech is over/starts surfing the internet
Take three shots

Obama uses the term "Congressional leadership"
Take two shots carefully; you don't want to spill after you laugh from the unintentional commedy

Most of all take every thing with a grain of salt especially if you are drinking tequilla.

It has been said that the recent Citizens United vs. FEC decision will mark a new era in corporate influence in politics. That with this decision corporations will spend freely and buy off politicians, the New York Times put it like this in an editorial, "[This decision] has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding."

However in the same paper writer David Kirkpatrick asked "legal scholars and social scientists" about corporate corruption of politics, and found that "the evidence is meager, at best."

"There is no evidence that stricter campaign finance rules reduce corruption or raise positive assessments of government," said Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It seems like such an obvious relationship but it has proven impossible to prove." [...]

Australia barely regulates political money. Individuals and corporations can give without limit. Parties can spend freely. And there is not much disclosure about who gives what to whom. But political corruption has not threatened a vibrant democracy there.

In the United States, studies comparing states like Virginia with scant regulation against those like Wisconsin with strict rules have not found much difference in levels of corruption or public trust, several scholars said. Jeff Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri, has compared states with strict bans on corporate contributions to political parties against those with no limits at all. "There is just no good evidence that campaign finance laws have any effect on actual corruption," he said.

So to sum it up, restrictions on corporations has not shown to reduce corruption and  other countries/states that do not limit spending are not marred in corruption and still have a working democracy.

Continuing on:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy noted in his opinion that no evidence was marshaled in 100,000 pages of legal briefs to show that unrestricted campaign money ever bought a lawmaker's vote. And even after Congress further tightened the rules with the landmark McCain-Feingold law in 2002, banning hundreds of millions of dollars in unlimited contributions to the political parties, public trust in government fell to new lows, according to polls.

And what about the corporations that contributed so much of that money? A review of the biggest corporate donors found that their stock prices were unaffected after they stopped giving to the parties. The results suggest that those companies did not lose their influence and may have been giving "because they were shaken down by politicians," said Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Columbia Law School who has studied the law's impact.

Read the whole thing here.

As you may have heard the Supreme court made a pretty substainal ruling today. They ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

Frankly I think that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of freedom today, that is very good news. The Court overturned a century's long ban on spending by corporations, unions and other voluntary associations of people. In what seems to be a fairly obvious decision especially after reading the first amendment which plainly states "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." This is a step in the right direction and I applaud their decision.

I am frankly appalled by the reasoning of the dissenters in this case. For example John Paul Stevens and the other justices who joined him said majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. To that what are corporations if not an association of human beings? Along the same lines the text of the first amendment makes no exceptions for who is speaking, it protects all speech and has no basis for excluding any particular speaker or types of speakers.

Another common refrain is that this will be the downfall of our Republic. That without government protections the people will be nothing more than mindless sheep who follow the best financed ideas. Then why is this not the case in states like Missouri, Utah, and Virginia where corporations already have free reign to spend as they please? If anything this will bring about a more diverse type of political speech because no matter how much money is spent to promote or oppose candidates, voters remain free to disagree with those views and vote accordingly.

This conclusion that we are at the mercy of corporate advertising is as ridiculous as it is patronizing. If corporations are capable of making the public do their bidding through advertising alone, then why isn't everyone driving their Pontiacs to Circuit City to purchase HDDVD players?

The answer, of course, is that Americans are not unthinking zombies who mindlessly succumb to corporate advertising campaigns (Which more often than not will have a force as strong on the other side battling them). We are fully capable of evaluating corporate speech on its merits; thus, we do not need "protection" from it.

What happens when union leaders threaten to derail a major piece of Democratic legislation over a tax that would hit union health benefits hard? Obviously, Democrats will reject special interest politics and stand firm in defense of what they believe to be sound policy, whoops sorry that is only during campign time. They will hand out a bribe and cut a deal that panders directly to the special interests.

There very well could be two Americans receiving the exact same benefits, but one American may be taxed and one wouldn't, and the only difference would be one of them being a member of a union. Welcome to the new health care reality, where some people are more equal than others! It just depends your political connections or the power of your vote in the senate.

Perhaps in their mind it is only special interests when they are for the other guys. Where is the outrage about rampant special interests taking over Washington? This was a constant theme during the Bush years, but now when Obama does similar things all we hear is silence from the left.

Now the right is no better, they are up in arms about this but they have no credibility on the issue either after 8 years of political pandering to their favored interests.

It is sickening to say the least and is just another bribe to grease the wheels of this horrible piece of legislation.

The following is from a New York Times article on Health care reform:

People at old-line organizations tend to rationalize the usual ways of doing business and to worry about the downsides of change. I.B.M. didn't invent Windows or the Mac. Newspapers didn't invent Craigslist

I think that this is an interesting thought about innovation and incumbancy. Incumbents do not innovate, and when it comes to health care in the United States, government is the incumbent. They control over half of health care spending and dictate a lot of decisions through regulations. To me, this suggests that real health care reform requires reducing the role of government.

What are your thoughts on this?

If you are still deluding your self into thinking that the current health care bill is fighting the special interests consider the following news.

The race to replace Ted Kennedy's senate seat is closer than many have expected, so in response the Health Care loby has come to the rescue of the Democratic canidate Martha Coakley. If Coakly were to lose it would put health care reform in seroius jepordy as the Democrats would lose their 60 seat majority.

In response, an army of lobbyists for drug companies, health insurance companies, and hospitals has teamed up to throw a high-dollar Capitol Hill fundraiser for Coakley next Tuesday night.

The people that stand to gain from this "reform" are fighting to make sure it happens.

All the leading drug companies have lobbyists on Coakley's host committee: Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Sanofi-Aventis, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Astra-Zeneca, and more. On the insurance side of things, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cigna, Humana, HealthSouth, and United Health all are represented on the host committee.

Those HMOs (like Aetna) or drug companies who don't have lobbyists in Coakley's top tier of fundraisers? They're covered, because the host committee includes four lobbyists representing the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), two representing America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), and one representing the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO)

So think of these top donors to health-care reform's 60th vote next time President Obama claims that he's battling the special interests in this battle. The army listed below is on Obama's side, and these clients will all benefit from "reform."

If this is still a suprise to you, than you really haven't been paying attention to what has been happening in this battle. The people who are left out are the American people who are getting shit on by this crappy expensive piece of legislation.

I believe that Kauclair in her Diary titled "A view into the Conservative mind" made a statement along the lines of "And as for MassHealth bankrupting the state of Massachusetts, I've heard the rumors but no one has supplied me with the evidence yet."

Well I came a across this story that goes into how it has definitly put starins on the States budget and has long term funding problems.

For the state's policymakers, rapidly rising health-care costs are the central problem with the plan. Since 2006, the cost of the state's insurance program has increased by 42 percent, or almost $600 million. According to an analysis by the Rand Corporation, "in the absence of policy change, health care spending in Massachusetts is projected to nearly double to $123 billion in 2020, increasing 8 percent faster than the state's gross domestic product (GDP)."

The system in place has done little or nothing to control insurance costs. The State has the highest insurance premiums in the Nation and among the fastest rising.

Meanwhile, the cost of insurance premiums in the state is the highest in the nation, and double-digit rate hikes are expected again in 2010.

There is bipartisan concern about the future of the program from advocates of a single payer to libertarians.

The worry, shared across the political spectrum, is that the state's health-care spending will overwhelm the state's budget. Already, it has forced service cuts that have irked those on both sides of the aisle.

Physicians for a National Health Plan, a doctor's group that supports a fully socialized, single-payer health-care system, warned in a February 2009 report that the new system had failed to reduce medical spending, and has subsequently drawn funding away from crucial health resources such as emergency room care.

Michael Tanner, a health policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute notes that huge deficits and skyrocketing public expenses already have resulted an increased cigarette tax of $1 a pack, as well as $89 million in new fees on the health-care industry.

This also should make us take pause for the current health care bill in Congress is largely based on this model. We should especially be wary of the cost estimates which in hindsight tend to be very rosy and unrealistic. Take MassHealth for example:

One problem the state has faced is that it failed to accurately anticipate the true cost of the program. At the time the program was signed into law, estimates indicated that the cost of Commonwealth Care, which is responsible for the program's biggest single cost, its health insurance subsidies, would be about $725 million per year. But by 2008, those projections had been revised. New estimates indicated that the plan was to cost $869 million in 2009 and $880 million 2010, an upwards increase of nearly 20 percent.

Another example of estimates being a little less than accurate predictors of future expenditures:

In his campaign to be President Barack Obama promised to Shine the Light on Federal Contracts, Tax Breaks and Earmarks

Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.

I took the time to check up on how things have played out so far this year. According to my calculations there have been a total of 124 bills passed and signed by the President this year. Of them 90 have had the 5 day waiting period between the date they were presendted and sigend. 53 have been posted or linked to on whitehosue.gov for 5 days before signing. And only 42 have have had both conditions met.

So a quick break down 72.58% have had a 5 day waiting period between presentation and signature.

42.74% have been posted or linked to for 5 days before the presidents signature.

And only 33.33% have been posted or linked to 5 days after presentation and had the five day wait peroid for the siganture.

There certainly could be some fo these that might be classified as "emergency" but I think that saying that explains why only 33.33% have fulfilled his full campign promise is pretty weak.

This should be a relativly easy thing for the President to make sure happens and I am displeased that it is not happening. We were promised more transparency and for the most part we have gotten more of the same with only marginal improvement. I want what was promised and that is not too much to ask.

Data on bills signed into law

I wanted you all to be among the first to have access to my latest ecominc research. It is a paper that explores the caues and responses to the financial crisis of 2007-2009. I have added in the graphs to the paper, there are still some formating problems with diferent spacing and all of that good stuff so maybe I will get around to fixing that sometime later.

 

The Financial Crisis of 2007-2009: Causes and Response