Sunday Book Review #76 – Better than Normal

Psychiatrist Dr. Dale Archer is on a mission to convince Americans that there is nothing wrong with having personality traits that, in their severe form, might be diagnosed as a mental disorder requiring treatment.  In fact, these traits might serve you well in living a fulfilling life.  That explains why Archer’s book, Better Than Normal, is subtitled, “How What Makes You Different Can Make You Exceptional.”   

Better Than Normal is essentially a very simple book.  In each of eight chapters, Archer takes a famous mental disorder and describes how individuals with personality traits commonly associated with the disorder, but without a full-blown affliction, can actually use those traits to achieve and accomplish.

For example, the first mental disorder described is Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity.  The so-called ascendant strengths associated with this disorder are energy, playfulness, adventurous, need for high levels of stimulation, and divergent thinking.

In addition to listing ascendant strengths, most chapters also discuss (a) careers that would benefit from those strengths, (b) the effect of those traits on a personal life, and (c) the evolutionary imperative (Garner’s best guess as to why the oft-genetic disorders were not weeded out by evolution).    

In addition to ADHD, the other seven mental disorders discussed are OCD (obsessive/compulsive), social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, histrionic, narcissistic, bipolar, and schizophrenia. 

I think Dr. Archer is on a noble mission.  Strong personality traits should not be routinely muzzled as long as those traits do not trample on the rights of others.  Instead, these traits should be encouraged to flourish in beneficial ways. 

There’s an old saying about being comfortable in your own skin, and I think Dr. Archer is working in that direction.

Saturday Night at the Movies #26 – Manhattan, Once, Man on Wire, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Taxi to the Dark Side

Manhattan is a 1979 Woody Allen romantic comedy, co-starring his long-time girlfriend Diane Keaton, plus Mariel Hemingway and Meryl Steep.  The Netflix jacket calls it “as much a paean to the city he calls home as it is a tale of [Allen’s] romantic foibles.”  That’s enough to sell me because Manhattan is my favorite place in the world.

Allen’s character is only 42-years old at the time of the movie, and its interesting seeing him as a relatively young person with some bounce in his step.  He is dating and sleeping with a 17-year old Hemingway, which seems a bit scandalous, especially in light of his eventual real-life coupling with his girlfriend Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter.  Allen eventually married Soon-Yi Previn, and they have been married for 14 years, with two adopted children.

Allen’s character is typically witty and more confident, less neurotic than in his typical movie, but I was especially impressed with his complete honesty in dealing with two complicated romantic relationships.  There are numerous scenes where I expect him to fudge the truth in a way that avoids short-term difficulties while making things worse long-term.  But instead he is utterly honest.  The other characters, however, engage in rationalizations that are relatively mild, but become glaring compared to Allen’s uprightness. 

Allen’s uprightness reminds me of a saying that I just read on someone’s Facebook wall – Honesty is a very expensive gift; don’t expect it from cheap people.”  One of my major character flaws is a propensity to shade my statements to tell listeners what they want to hear, especially when telling the unadorned truth will disappoint the listener or make me look bad.  I really need to get better at telling unadorned truth. 

Rotten Tomatoes critics gave the movie a 98% score, while its audience gave it 91%.  I agree and give it three and a half stars out of four.  The only weakness is that neither Hemingway nor Keaton stirred my drink.

My drink was stirred by Once.  This 2006 low-budget ($160k) Irish musical shot in Dublin is utterly charming and is a musical only in the sense that George Strait’s Pure Country is a musical – i.e., the movie is about musicians playing their music.  The musicians in Once are Glen Hansard from the Irish folk-rock band The Frames and Marketa Irglova.  They wrote and performed most of the songs in the movie and one of the songs – Falling Slowly – won an Academy Award for Best Song.  The singing and acting are both understated, so the relative inexperience of the actors fits with the other aspects of the movie.  The story is absorbing, the characters are appealing, and the ending is perfect.  It’s Rotten Tomato scores – 97% from the critics and 90% from the audience – are virtually identical to the Manhattan scores, but I liked it better, so instead of three and a half stars that I gave Manhattan, I give Once a solid four stars.  The only reason I give a slight edge to the Before Sunrise/Sunset movies is that the couple in those movies were capable of traditional success but chose a different path, while the couple in Once were typical of dropouts.  I related better to traditional people who get off the beaten path than to people who never have been able to fit in.

After noticing the exceptionally high Rotten Tomato scores of Manhattan and Once, I decided to learn which movies of all time had received the highest Rotten Tomato scores.  As luck would have it, the Rotten Tomato website had a list of 100 movies that had received favorable ratings from every critic who had reviewed the movie, and to break the 100-way tie, the movies were listed in order of those that had been reviewed the most times.  At the top of the list was Man on Wire, a 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary about a Frenchman, Philippe Petit, who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974. 

I agree with the critics and found the movie to be interesting, entertaining and exciting.  But I also agree with the Rotten Tomato audience, which gave it a relatively diminished ranking of 88%. 

These numbers reveal the flaw of the Rotten Tomato rankings – i.e., they are essentially pass-fail.  Even though 100% of the critics thought Man on Wire was a good movie, their average rating is 8.4 out of 10.  Its Audience rating is 88% or 4.1 out of five.  By contrast, The Godfather is number 7 on the list because it only has 74 reviews, but its average Critics rating is 9.1 and its Audience rating is 97% or 4.4 out of five.  Citizen Kane has an even higher Critic rating of 9.4, although its Audience rating is only 91% or 4.1 out of five.     

My only disappointment with Man on Wire is that it glamourizes dare-devilish publicity stunts.  Although I do not share an interest in proving that undoable things can be done, I can understand why some people want to rise to the challenge, but Man on Wire is not doing an undoable thing.  The only thing that makes this feat exceptional is that Petit and his crew were able to surreptitiously gain access to the Twin Towers and that he risked his life in performing the stunt.  Sounds like Petit was merely a successor to Evel Knievel.     

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a 1988 movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a womanizing Prague doctor during the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  Day-Lewis’s principal love interests are Juliette Binoche (naïve and histrionic) and Lena Olin (worldly, yet passionate), and they form a virtual ménage a trois.

The movie is interesting in depicting life in Prague before and after the invasion, but the storytelling is sometimes clunky in a way that commonly afflicts books that are adapted into movies.  Often you suspect that a scene in the movie does not fully make sense because you are lacking context that was included in the book.  In fact, Wikipedia states that the book of the same title is about two men and two women, while its description of the movie is about one man and two women.  The missing man, Franz, had a major role in the book and a relatively insignificant one in the movie.

The critics liked the movie more than the audience did – 94% of the critics liked it while 83% of the audience did.  I enjoyed the movie, but was disappointed with Daniel Day-Lewis because he came across as a bit effeminate.  Worse, he chose to be with the naïve and histrionic Binoche instead of the worldly, yet passionate Olin.  That wouldn’t make sense for a real man, but like I said, he was a bit effeminate.  I give the movie two and a half stars out of four.

Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 documentary that examines the use of torture by the U.S. following 9/11.  The movie is based on the story of an Afghanistan taxi driver who was “detained” for being a suspected terrorist and then was murdered by American soldiers while in custody.  The theme of the film is that, while some low-ranking soldiers were prosecuted for the killing, the high-ranking people who were ultimately responsible for allowing and even encouraging this sort of conduct completely avoided responsibility.

Because the documentary won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, I am mystified why I had never heard of it until I saw it on the Rotten Tomato list of movies with a 100% rating from the critics.  The audience gave it a solid 88% rating.

I reviewed a book on torture in my blog in early 2011, and this documentary takes a similar position against the enhanced interrogation techniques.  The documentary, however, was more effective because I finished reading the book still feeling ambivalent, but after watching the documentary, I am persuaded that America shouldn’t lower itself to such cruelty.

Keeping the interest rate on student loans artificially low

I recently blogged about Pell Grants after learning that my youngest son was not eligible because his parents apparently made too much money or had too many assets.    In my blog, I took the magnanimous position that, although government spending that enabled poor kids to afford college was money well spent, I had no objection to stopping that spending for kids (and their families) who could already afford it.  The federal government, after all, doesn’t have unlimited resources.

Today a friend forwarded a related opinion article by Mike Brownfield from the Heritage Foundry.  In the article Brownfield criticized President Obama for proposing that the federal government should continue to subsidize the student-loan interest rate so that its stays artificially low at 3.4% instead of rising to its free-market level of 6.8%.  Brownfield said Obama’s proposal was election-year pandering.  I’m surprised Brownfield didn’t mention how critical Obama was of John McCain in 2008 when McCain proposed suspending the federal gas tax.  Obama called McCain a panderer for his gas-tax proposal, yet four years later Obama is making a proposal that is highly analogous.  Does the word hypocrite come to mind?

My friend forwarded the article to me because he thought Brownfield made some devastating points, but I disagree.  In my opinion, Brownfield is making irrational and/or cheap political points.

For instance, Brownfield criticizes Obama for proposing to fund the $5.9, one-year extension by taking money out of ObamaCare.  In almost the same breath, Brownfield asserts that ObamaCare needs to be repealed.  There is an old saying that one shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Instead of criticizing the downsizing of ObamaCare, Brownfield should graciously accept this small improvement.  Isn’t it a better idea to spend $5.9 billion on subsidizing poor kids’ college loans instead of having ObamaCare’s Prevention and Public Health Fund spend the money?

And to show that he is not the only pundit who rhetorically believes that the perfect can be the enemy of the good, Brownfield quotes approvingly from another pundit:

                The supposed benefits of keeping the interest rates at 3.4 percent are largely illusory, and the president is selling students a bag of magic beans. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin explains on National Review‘s “The Corner”:

• “[The interest rate increase] sounds serious. After all, there are 39 million Americans with student loans owing over a trillion dollars of debt, and interest rates doubling from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent would be a huge hit at a time when households are already struggling.  Serious, except that the president’s plan would apply only to those 23 million loans being borrowed directly from the federal government. Except that not all of those would benefit; it would apply only to the 9.5 million loans being borrowed through the so-called subsidized Stafford loans. Except the lower rate would apply only to new borrowers who apply this year. Except that no payments are made until after graduation, so it would not help anyone for several years. Except that it would lower monthly payments by an average of only $7.”

              In other words, for an incredibly high cost, students are realizing very little benefit.

 Actually in other words the program doesn’t help enough kids, therefore it should be eliminated?  That would be like arguing that the current Pell Grants should be going to more kids (currently they go only to kids from families that make less than $50k a year) and because America can’t afford to extend it to kids from families making between $50k and $100k, we should end it for all kids.  I wonder where Brownfield and Holtz-Eiken learned logic and reasoning.  Hmmm – Brownfield has a J.D. from Loyola Law and Holtz-Eiken has a Ph.D. from Princeton.  That figures.  Only someone with a doctorate could think such crazy thoughts.   

Brownfield concludes his column by arguing that government subsidies are a bad idea for two reasons:

1. None of this is to say that the federal government should spend even more to subsidize student loans in an effort to make college more affordable. It absolutely should not. Federally subsidized student loans are handed out to millions of college students regardless of risk — let alone whether they can handle college-level work. Thanks to taxpayer backing, the loans are offered at rates far below what private lenders would offer. When the students can’t afford to pay, the American people are stuck with the bill.
2. On top of all this, government intervention in the higher education marketplace hasn’t even succeeded in bringing down college costs. In fact, the price of a degree has risen right along with government spending. Pell grants have increased 475 percent since 1980, and yet the cost of attending college has increased 439 percent since 1982. It’s a vicious cycle that will only get worse with more government subsidies.

I disagree with Brownfield’s first argument because, as Ronald Reagan said, when you subsidize something, you get more of it.  America wants more kids going to college.  Of course, there are some kids going to college that are not motivated and are financially irresponsible (also, there are predatory, for-profit schools), and the government programs should be tweaked to address those problems.  But to recall an old public-policy cliché – mend it; don’t end it.

I disagree with Brownfield’s second argument because, unlike the housing bubble that resulted from too-easy money, I don’t think reasonable people believe that the college industry is in the midst of a pricing bubble artificially propped up by kids with too much “easy money.”

I hope my conservative friend who forwarded Brownfield’s keen observations to me doesn’t read this posting.  My friend already calls me a RINO and pretty soon he will be calling me a deserter or at least AWOL.

Saturday Night at the Movies #20 – Before Sunset

After Sunset (2004) was a movie recommended to me by Netflix.  It is a sequel to Before Sunrise (1995), and even though I had never heard of either movie, I decided to view them because they star Ethan Hawke, one of my favorite actors, and were favorably reviewed.  I was planning to watch Before Sunrise first, but Netflix mailed me Before Sunrise first, so what was I to do?

What a movie!  Before Sunrise involves American Ethan Hawke having a fantastic one-night stand with French Julie Delphy in Vienna and then agreeing to meet again in six months (like An Affair to Remember) as the movie ends.  Before Sunset begins nine years later with Hawke, now a successful author, having a book-signing event in Paris and Delphy showing up at the event.  For the next 90 minutes, they played catch-up by having a non-stop 90 minute conversation, and that conversation between two people was the entire movie. 

Delphy’s first question was whether Hawke had shown up in Vienna.  She hadn’t because her grandmother died the day before.  Hawke initially said he hadn’t, and Delphy was saddened.  But then Hawke eventually admitted that he had, and Delphy was even more saddened.  Incredible!  As someone who loves philosophical, romantic conversation, I was in heaven the entire time. 

As their conversation got deeper over time, both Hawke and Delphy revealed that the connection that they made that one night in Vienna put a shadow on all their future relationships (Hawke was married to a teacher and had a son; Delphy was an environmental activist in a committed relationship with a musician).  Hawke mentioned that he was actually thinking on his wedding day that Delphy would show up and stop the ceremony, and Delphy described some similar incidents in her life.  As the movie draws to a conclusion, you wonder how the characters, with nine additional years of wisdom, will act differently that their younger selves.

Before Sunset received a Rotten Tomato rating of 95% from the critics and 89% from the audience, which is almost as good as Before Sunrise’s 100% from the critics and 92% from the audience.  I can’t wait to see Before Sunrise.  I give Before Sunset four stars out of four.

Saturday Night at the Movies #16 – Game Change

Game Change was literally Saturday Night at the Movies when it premiered on HBO last night.  The movie, which is based on a best-selling book of the same name by respected journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, focuses on the game-changing role played by Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential election.  When I reviewed the book, I blogged that the book was primarily about the Democratic primary contest, but that it did say the following about Palin:

• McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was an example of risky, gut-based behavior.  For several weeks, McCain was planning to pick qualified, liberal senator Joe Lieberman, but that pick was derailed shortly before the planned announcement.  With only a week to select a replacement, McCain reacted by selecting Palin, and because Palin hadn’t even been on his short-list, she received only a five-day vetting.  When the chief vetter concluded that Palin was, “high risk, high reward,” McCain responded that the vetter shouldn’t have phrased it that way because McCain always loved to gamble.

At the end of the blog review, I concluded the following:

• Early in this review, I suggested that reading Game Change was unlikely to change many votes. Did it change mine? No, I voted for Obama and would do so again. My rationale was that McCain behaved erratically during the campaign, not only by picking Palin, but also by proposing a gas-tax moratorium and suspending his campaign to address the financial crisis, but then doing nothing to address it. By way of contrast, Obama was steady and analytical. Obama is like a calculating athlete who works hard to put himself in the best position to succeed, whereas McCain doesn’t put a lot of stock into preparation and instead excels at playing the game. McCain has been able to succeed in life because of his common sense, good judgment, and the force of his personality.

The HBO movie Game Change accurately reflected the tone of the book – Sarah Palin is a wonderfully talented politician with the charisma of a Ronald Reagan, but she was woefully unprepared to be on the ticket as a vice-presidential candidate.  Julianne Moore plays Palin, and the other major actors are Ed Burns as McCain and Woody Harrelson as McCain’s leading advisor Steve Schmidt.  Harrelson has almost as much screen time as Moore, and you almost get the feeling that this story is being told from his perspective, although he was only one of 300 sources that the book’s authors relied on.   

Many Republican partisans have already lambasted the movie as false, a criticism they leveled at the book, too.  But two leading McCain partisans have confirmed the accuracy of the movie.  As reported in Wikipedia:

• However, Steve Schmidt, the campaign’s chief strategist, stated: “Ten weeks of the campaign are condensed into a two-hour movie. But it tells the truth of the campaign. That is the story of what happened.”  He later said that watching the film was tantamount to “an out-of-body experience.”
• Nicolle Wallace, a chief Palin 2008 aide, said she found Game Change highly credible, saying the film “captured the spirit and emotion of the campaign.”[

Wikipedia also reports that Moore does a better job of capturing Palin than does SNL’s Tina Fey:

• David Hinckley of The New York Daily News wrote, “Julianne Moore’s physical Palin in Game Change, which debuts March 10, is even more dead-on than Tina Fey’s.”  The comedian Tina Fey, who was noted for her physical resemblance to Palin, won an Emmy Award in 2009 for her satirical impersonation of Palin on the sketch comedy TV show Saturday Night Live.

I agree with Hinckley, but I am also reminded of SNL’s Fey saying that she was not nearly as attractive as Palin.  I have been watching Palin make regular appearances on Sean Hannity’s TV show on Fox, and she is an incredibly attractive person.  Julianne Moore may be more attractive than Tina Fey, but she pales in comparison to the real thing, Sarah Palin.

Ronald Reagan lost his first attempt to get on the Republican ticket, and end up as a Republican icon.  Although this movie does nothing good for the Palin brand, I would hold off on printing her political obituary.

Aphorism of the Week #12 – He may be wrong, but he’s never in doubt.

The aphorism, “He may be wrong, but he’s never in doubt” was one of my favorite put-downs of decisive alpha-males that I encountered during my career in insurance.  Of course, the appellation was not limited to men.  In fact, it seemed that women in management had to be even more alpha than the men to overcompensate the weaker-sex stereotype. 

Although cautious types like me prefer looking, listening, and thinking before we stick our necks out, leadership manuals often warn that most people are more likely to follow a dumb person who is certain than a smart person who is unsure.

My conclusion is that a truly smart person will learn how to do three things:

• Debunk the false confidence of the dummy;
• Reveal the smart person’s uncertainty only on a need-to-know basis; and
• Act as decisively as appropriate for the situation.

The Hispanic vote and the Republican Party

There has been talk for months and years that the demographics of America favor the Democratic Party because of the growing Hispanic population.  Most of this conjecture is based on the assumption that most Hispanics will vote Democratic, especially with the Republican Party taking such a strong position against illegal immigrants.  Although many moderates in the Republican Party accept this worrisome prognosis, there are others who claim that most Hispanics have conservative values (social and fiscal) and this ultimately will dictate their political destination.  I think both viewpoints contain some truth. 

An analogous situation involves union workers.  These people have conservative values, but are attracted to the political party that wants to treat them as a special interest.  The result is that union organizations have absolute fealty to the Democratic Party and a significant number of union voters vote Democratic. But the Republicans have been earning a significant percentage of union voters ever since McGovern scared them toward Nixon.

I think the same thing will be true of Hispanic voters in the future.  Hispanic organizations will kowtow to the Democratic Party and Hispanic voters will vote Democratic more often than justified by a concordance of values.  But because of a concordance of values, Republican candidates will also amass large numbers of Hispanic voters even as the illegal-immigration mess percolates, and those numbers will grow significantly after the mess is resolved.

Incidentally, with all this talk of the ascendancy of the Democratic Party, I have noticed that actual facts seem to be going in the other direction, at least in Texas.  A few months ago, an Hispanic Democratic state legislator from the Valley, Aaron Pena, switched to the Republican Party.  Then last week, the Texas Tribune announced another switch from South Texas – J.M. Lozano.  Could it be that these legislators know more about what is happening than do the pundits?  That wouldn’t be the first time?

A conservative’s reform of Medicare

Earlier this week, I stumbled across a link to an article written by Yuval Levin in The Weekly Standard that was described as the conservative solution to Medicare.  What an enticing description for a conservative like me who sees the structural deficit as America’s greatest problem and, in turn, Medicare as the biggest cause of America’s structural deficit.

Like a dog with a bone, I buried the link in one of my files, savoring the thought that I could read the delectable article at my pleasure as soon as the Joe Paterno matter settled down.  Well, by Friday, the Paterno matter had settled down some, and I finally had the time to read and digest the article.

How was the article?  In a word – excellent.  The article was strong in describing the problem, and then did some tweaking of RyanCare to produce a more conservative solution.

One of the article’s strengths was its clarity in describing how Medicare got to be such a problem and why it is so difficult to fix.  It described the following as Medicare’s three most serious foundational flaws (no, this is not a Rick Perry joke):

• It provides essentially unlimited medical coverage to older Americans.
• The cost of that unlimited medical coverage is exploding because of increased prices and increased utilization of medical services.
• The aging of America results in an increasing number of beneficiaries and a relatively declining number of people paying into the system.

As currently structured, Medicare provides such gold-plated medical coverage that many American oldsters actually look forward to the day they turn 65.  I recently blogged about such a person, a self-employed writer who, prior to turning 65, had to purchase expensive medical coverage that provided limited, managed coverage through a small band of medical providers.  Since turning 65, she has received inexpensive coverage through Medicare that allows her to see virtually any doctor she wants and to receive virtually any treatment she and her doctor want, regardless of cost.

It’s no wonder that oldsters will fight to the death over any significant cuts to Medicare.  If you watch much TV, you have probably noticed the numerous ads of oldster organizations threatening Congressmen that any cuts to Medicare will be remembered in the fall elections.  As far as the oldsters are concerned, they have already paid for their gold-plated Medicare benefits, and any reduction of these benefits would be a breach of contract.  They deny (or ignore) the fact that Medicare has always been actuarially unsound and that their past contributions were not nearly enough to pay from their current or future benefits.

Regardless of oldster expectations, Medicare needs reformed or its cost will continue to escalate to the point that more than half of the government budget will be absorbed by Medicare and Medicaid.  Paul Ryan has suggested capping the cost of Medicare through the use of vouchers.  His RyanCare plan, not only caps the federal exposure, but also shifts the program away from government insurance to private insurance.

RyanCare attempted to defuse any pushback from the oldsters by providing that the changes would not affect anyone at least 55-years old, but this defensive strategy was wildly ineffective.  Oldsters were easily brainwashed into thinking that RyanCare would be “destroying Medicare as we know it.”   Although this reaction seems patently irrational to me, I suspect there is some rational basis for it, such as a slippery-slope argument.

Regarding The Weekly Standard prescription for Medicare reform, it resembles RyanCare.  Essentially, they both would have the federal government get out of the business of providing medical coverage to oldsters and would instead provide money to oldsters so that they could purchase their coverage from private medical-insurance companies.  RyanCare was lambasted by its opponents for its so-called “voucher” mechanism, whereas The Weekly Standard calls it a premium-support subsidy.

Liberals are concerned with vouchers under RyanCare because government could use this technique to arbitrarily shift costs from the government to the beneficiaries – i.e., payments could be reduced for budgetary reasons even if the cost of the coverage goes up.  The Weekly Standard proposal is not vulnerable to that criticism because its premium-support subsidy would be based on the cost of the private insurance policies actually available to Medicare beneficiaries.

The real essence of The Weekly Standard proposal is that the cost of providing medical care to America’s oldsters can be driven down, not only by getting the federal government out of the business of providing medical insurance, but also by eliminating the fee-for-service system that currently permeates the American medical-care industry.  Furthermore, the elimination of this system would reduce not only Medicare costs, but also Medicaid and private medical costs across the country.

Currently, Medicare is such a large percentage of medical care in America that there is a huge economic incentive for the providers of non-Medicare treatment and services to operate in a way that is consistent with the provision of Medicare treatment and services.  An analogy would be the practice for school-textbook manufacturers to produce nationwide books that comply with Texas requirements because Texas is such a large consumer.

The Weekly Standard article posits that, “If Medicare is going to shape the economics of health care, it should at least do so in a way that comports with modern economics​—​creating efficiency through consumer pressure, competition, and innovation, not through central planning and price controls.”  It believes that premium-support subsidies will facilitate consumer pressure, competition, and innovation, which, in turn, will result in lower costs.  It also believes that ObamaCare, which relies on central planning and price controls, is doomed to fail in the long-term.

Incidentally, The Weekly Standard article suggested that RyanCare included vouchers instead of premium-support subsidies because Ryan was working within the scoring conventions of the Congressional Budget Office:

• “Put simply, CBO refuses to estimate the effects of competition on prices​—​or indeed the effects of any policy on the behavior of consumers or providers….  So while CBO is perfectly happy to offer a (perfectly meaningless) projection of what the unemployment rate will be in the year 2083 (5 percent, by the way), it declines to assume that having insurers compete for customers will result in lower costs than having the government pay a universal preset rate for every medical procedure. The agency has acknowledged that its failure to account for such market effects is, as its director has put it, ‘a gap in our toolkit,’ but it has so far not sought to fill that gap.”

Talk about the tail wagging the dog.  It seems that every major spending bill includes accounting gimmicks that take advantage of CBO scoring rules to present a number that can be misrepresented to the public.  Although Obama and ObamaCare are prime examples of this, the practice is clearly a bipartisan one.

As a conservative, I believe that competition in the market is more effective than government monopoly.  Based on that philosophy, I think The Weekly Standard article provides an excellent framework for reforming Medicare.

Jack Abramoff and 60 Minutes

Must-see TV – tonight’s segment on “60 Minutes” showing how easily Jack Abramoff was able to “buy” a Congressman.

Abramoff’s modus operandi? Offer to provide a high-paying lobbying job to a congressmen or his staffer at some future date when they decide to end their “public service.”  Apparently, the prospects of that job sometime down the road is enough to earn the favor of those Congressmen and staffers from that day forward.  At his prime, Abramoff claimed to have his foot in the door of over 100 congressional offices.

While listening to Abramoff describe this bribery scheme, Leslie Stahl said that his conduct infuriated her because it was corrupting our wonderful democracy.  I was irritated that Leslie failed to show similar outrage when she interviewed a congressman and his chief of staff who Abramoff had bought off to secure favorable gambling legislation for an Indian tribe.  America should be able to expect more from
our public servants than we can expect from lobbyists.

Abramoff’s prescription for this mess?  Instead of hyper-focusing on campaign contributions and gifts, Congress should prohibit its members and staffers from ever working for lobbyists.  Abramoff emphasized a point that I have previously made – i.e., “public service” should not be a temporary assignment on your personal road to wealth and affluence.  Eliminate the revolving door.  When you are done serving, go back home.  Otherwise, there is too much conflict of interest.

Right on, Jack.

Equal opportunity in America

America faces two remarkably dissimilar challenges that threaten its ability to remain the world’s shining light – (1) burgeoning debt and (2) diminished opportunity for the disadvantaged:

• The debt problem is like an aggressive cancer that must be addressed immediately or it will become exponentially more difficult to solve.  But the way to solve the debt problem is not complicated.  As Mitch Daniels has stated, it won’t take a rocket scientist to develop a plan to get control of our budget.  But it will take a great leader.
• By contrast, our equal-opportunity problem is like a slow-growing cancer that affords us the luxury of time to act.  Ironically, however, this luxury of time exacerbates the problem because there is a natural tendency to do nothing and maintain the status quo, especially when there is no obvious course of action to solve the problem.

Because of these characteristics, the debt problem has deservedly received the lion’s share of attention in the media.  But we need to keep working on the equal-opportunity problem, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its media connections, seems to be having some success with that.  The best example of that success is this week’s cover story in Time magazine – “Can You Still Move Up in America,” subtitled “Whatever happened to upward mobility?”

Everyone agrees that equal opportunity is an essential part of America’s DNA, but that is pretty much all we can agree on.  Among the things we disagree on – (a) how bad is our current problem, and (b) how do we create more opportunity for the disadvantaged.

The Time magazine article provides several benchmarks that help assess the severity of our equal-opportunity problem.  Absolute inequality (e.g., the wealth and income of the top brackets vs. the wealth and income of the bottom brackets) is one of those benchmarks that most people reject because it favors the modern welfare states with their generous safety nets.  (Equal opportunity does not require equal results.)

The better benchmark concerns the extent to which individuals or their children in lower brackets can move to higher brackets, and unfortunately, the article provides only spotty information in this regard.  For example, it reports that those born in 1970 in the bottom fifth have only a 17% chance of making it to the upper two fifths.  My first reaction to this number was that it sounded about right.  Then the article quickly disabused me of that notion by stating, “That’s not good by international standards.” But the article provided no factual support for its conclusion.  I would be interested in seeing the conclusion supported and in knowing how these numbers for America have changed in the past few decades.

When the subject shifts away from “how bad is the problem” to “how do we create more opportunity,” the solution naturally depends on how you measured the extent of the problem.  If you think that large income inequality is inherently problematic, then you can ameliorate the problem by redistributing income and wealth.  For those who go a bit deeper, however, the solution is more elusive.

The article gets extremely mushy when it delves into solutions.  It cites only one study – on the effect of the rise of India and China on the diminution of America’s middle class – and then states the obvious – “The best hope in fighting the machines is to improve education, the factor that is more closely correlated with upward mobility than any other.”

Instead of devoting any energy in describing that correlation or how to effectively “improve education,” the article quickly asserted that, “There are many other lessons to be learned from the most mobile nations”:

• “Funding universal health care without tying it to jobs can increase labor flexibility and reduce the chance that people will fall into poverty because of medical emergencies.”
• “Europe’s higher spending on social safety nets has certainly bolstered the middle and working classes.”
• “The final lesson that might be learned is in tax policy.  The more-mobile European nations have fewer corporate loopholes, more redistribution to the poor and middle class via
  consumption taxes and fare less complication.”

If you suspect these conclusions reveal some partisan, liberal bias, you may be correct.  In fact, such a bias was suggested early on it the article when it relied heavily on the quintessential liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution, for much of its facts and expert quotations.  But the article also displayed a fair amount of open-mindedness when it said:

• “Yet it is important to understand that when you compare Europe and America, you are comparing very different societies.  High-growth Nordic nations with good social safety nets, which have the greatest leads in social mobility over the U.S., are small and homogeneous.  On average, only 7% of their populations are ethnic minorities (who are often poorer and thus less mobile than the overall populations), compared with 28% in the U.S.  Even bigger nations like Germany don’t have to deal with populations as socially and economically diverse as America’s.”

In conclusion, thanks Time magazine for the effort, but I will need to keep looking for the practical ways to “improve education” so that it enables more socio-economic mobility.