Social security - why is GWB ignoring the obvious solution?

Some of my child-free (that opposed to child-less) friends will scream, but it has to be said: why is George Bush ignoring the obvious, pro-life solution to his supposed "social security crisis"? That is, wait for it... more babies. I mean, the Christian Right should be asking him why he is pushing some ill-defined massively expensive financial solution involving money changers, debt, fund pushers and intangible results when all they have to do is get down and procreate?

It's not that I believe rampant procreation is the right solution (basically I think its the last thing we need), I'm firmly behind adjusting taxes, payments, benefits and doing some good old fashioned borrowing to keep the fund on an even keel until demographics sort themselves out. But I am wondering why we're not hearing a chorous of "lets boom like its the sixties" from Bush's supposedly pro-life base that he keeps pandering to at every opportunity.

One other alternative would be massive immigation - say add twenty million extra working age, social security paying immigrants. If I recall correctly the US already has about ten million of them under the radar not paying taxes at the moment, if it would only just legalize them and bring in a few more...

Friends don't let friends...

Friends don't let friends watch "Fox News". Just pop around to their house and tap the Fox News channel blocker into their cable feed while they are not looking. Check the comments on the product site for a laugh - Fox actually want the people who are selling the blocker to appear on the O'Reilly Factor.

Must read reportage

Thanks to Hateful Things for pointing me to "Confessions of a Car Salesman". It is a rolling epic in nine parts that tells the story of one of their writers who went under cover for a month to be a car salesman. You'll laugh, you'll cry and most of all you'll be better armed next time you're at the car dealership waiting to be fleeced.

Halliburton does Babylon

Oy, Halliburton is at it again... landing helicopters on the Ishtar Gate and generally turning Babylon into a military base, that's like building a Wal-Mart in Vatican City.

Voting with your feet: WalMart and WarMart

Today I listened to radio show that was discussing the recent California court decision that basically said, environmental impact reports must consider the economic impact of new development. It also came down against doing two developments simultaneously and having impact reports for each that do not consider the other.

Actually for an public radio show talking about WalMart and big-box development in general it was surprisingly calm and balance, even the attorney who represents big-box stores seemed to have her leash on. In fact I've heard Ms. Shimco represent retail developers in real life in a local situation and she was being very calm and restrained in her comments, as was the economics professor from San Francisco.

One comment that came up time and time again was "well if you don't like WalMart or any other retailer then they should just vote with their feet and not shop there". As they say, no one is forcing people to shop at WalMart. Well that's true up to a point - right up to the point where there are no other stores to shop at and you have to shop at WalMart or move somewhere else. Which brings one to the second objection to saying people should vote with their feet: it assumes a well informed voting population. Basic economics says people make "the economic choice" but they do so with the information they have at hand. What if there are hidden externalities that they don't know about?

On a different aspect of "voting with their feet" it seems American men and women are failing to point their feet in the direction of the local Armed Forces recruiting center. Why not? Well naturally Americans are just making the economic choice again since many, if not most recruits join primarily for financial reasons. Now they are starting to realize there are a few hidden costs to signing up - like maybe actually being put in harms way and dying. That's not going to do much good for your future income potential. Or perhaps realizing that the "seeing the world" promise isn't quite ringing so true any more when all you're likely to see is the inside of a Hummer for the next two years.

I don't blame people for making the economic choice, but just remember when the supply of willing and able has run out there are interventionists in high places with one word on their minds and a big stick behind their backs. Does anyone feel the draft?

Reach for the stars - the American way

I love obscure statistics but I think many people just read or rattle off numbers without any comprehension of what they mean. So when I was perusing the latest figures from the Beureau of Transportation, ostensibly to find out how many people drive cars in the USA (answer: 191 million license holders) one figure stuck in my mind:

In 2003 American drivers drove an estimate total of 2,880,000 million miles.

The first time I read that figure I incorrectly translated the multiplier to mean a total of 2.88 billion miles, but no, its 2.88 trillion miles and that's a very long way, in fact it seemed almost astronomical! A quick trip to Google proved that yes indeed it is astronomical: 2.88 trillion miles is 0.49 light years. That's about a tenth of the way to the nearest star, Alpha Centuri which is 4.4 light years away. Talk about reaching for the stars - Americans are driving themselves to them!

Note that 2003 was a vehicle miles record for the USA, 3% up on the 2000 figure, 34% up on the 1990 figure, 89% up on the 1980 figure, 160% up on the 1970 figure and a staggering 300% more than the 1960 figure. Now isn't that what you call progress? These figures tie in nicely with a great graph from the Senate energy bill that shows historical and predicted oil consumption (see below) with transportation demand and future output from the ANWR drilling. When you look at that you'll realize what a teeny tiny impact digging up ANWR will have and what a massive impact our driving habits have. By 2020 if we'd all just drive 5% less, or our cars used 5% less gas ANWR drilling would be rendered completely superfluous.

Perhaps it is time for everyone to check out The End of Suburbia and get a clue as to what all those miles we're driving mean for society.

Sorry!

I confess, I come from a sorry nation. And I'll hasten to add I mean I come from a nation that likes to say "sorry" not a sorry-assed nation (although many Americans might think and say otherwise about Britain when they feel sufficiently peeved at their ancestors old-aged petulance). Anyway, the reason I mention it was last week I was listen to some commentary on a suggestion made in Washington on how to ease the medical lawsuit problem in the USA.

The solution was simple - just encourage doctors to admit and apologize for their mistakes. Yes, doctors do make mistakes, they are after all only human (although Erin over at Chicken or Beef will tell us some believe they can walk on water and perform other miracles). Currently when doctors make mistakes they are trained, perhaps even required, to deny any wrong doing and frequently break off all contact with the patient or the patients relatives. The assumption is that a lawsuit will be forthcoming and you don't want to be opening your mouth and saying anything as stupid as "oopsy, I made a mistake - my bad" because you know, that's just asking for a lawsuit.

However the rationale behind the admit and apologize theory is that it is precisely doctors refusal to admit any blame, and their willingness to run away from an awkward situation that infuriates patients and relatives who are on the receiving end. If the doctor can show some humility and stay involved in the patient treatment process after the fact then perhaps the instinct to sue until you're blue can be appeased.

They question is, will it work?

Well it seems those in the know in Washington seemed to think this was just not going to fly. You see what we need is more legislation, more paper work, more limits, more legal fees. Yes, just solve the problems of legal costs with more legal papering over the cracks...

From my perspective sorry goes a long way. Not in the face of willful negligence of course, but for an honest mistake or accident, one that is learned from and not repeated ad-infinitum (see "The Fog of War") what can you do? However that's just my quaint perspective on the problem because as I mentioned before, I come from a sorry nation. From the day I arrived in the USA the fear of litigation was rammed down my throats - everyone was quick to instruct me on how not to say anything, not anything, if I got in an accident. "Don't apologize!", they would say, "that implies guilt which implies blame and may be used in evidence..." etc. etc.

As an empath who would normally be quick to apologize even for other peoples mistakes that came as a hard lesson but after about 10 years my instinct to apologize has mostly been wrung out of me. Was that a good thing? Hardly I would say. From my memories of that sorry nation I came from I would say life in an apologetic attitude that may suffer the occasional empty sorry is a better than that in a nation of fear of litigation that rarely if ever offers a true and sincere apology.

Buy, sell, up, down... in the end its only round and round

So the Federal Reserve Bank is going to raise interest rates again. Yippi-kai-o. Or not as the case may be. I'm going to be reading the news reports tomorrow to see if any of the mainstream new sources even hint at the real reason interests rates are going up - to prop up the sagging dollar. For the last few months the euro and pound have maintained comfortably high levels against the formerly mighty greenback. Furthermore we've had a few currency exchange scares over rumours, and only rumours mind you, that the big overseas dollar holders might be about to cash in their chips.

It turns out that China has accumulated over $800 billion in dollar reserves. My what a dent in our economy that would make if they started dumping it all. But they wont - or at least not yet since it would hurt considerably too. However that doesn't mean they can't stop investing, and the same appplies all over the world. Who would want to invest in Team USA right now?

When virtually every other currency is doing quite nicely thank you very much against the dollar wouldn't you just want to cut and run? But all the time the USA is buying scads of overseas goods and services with its dollars which means somone must be taking those dollars off our hands in exchange for the foreign currencies we need - like Euros. Not forgetting to mention our biggest problem - deficit spending which means getting people to loan us even more money.

So more healthy increases in the dollar interest rate will be needed to keep people interested in taking the dollar off our hands. And recent small decline in Euro and Pound values is nicely explained by anticipation of the rise in dollar rates. In a week or two when the excitment of a Fed rate hike has worked its way out of the system those currencies will both be off to the races again and guess what... we'll be looking at another rate hike, and another, and another. The question is will all the rate hikes eventually cause inflation? At my economics class they told us about cost-push and demand-pull inflation, but they never talked about deficit driven inflation. It seems to me if the economy isn't grown and the idiots in charge are spending like crazy but not kick starting the economy then all the high interest rates will just stiffle the economy even more. If costs rise due to higher borrowing costs then I think that was what was known as stagflation, something that haunted the US economy back in the good old 1970's.

Why does radio need advertising anyway?

When a movie contains a product placement the movie company gets paid by that company, when a TV channel plays a commercial for a product they get paid by that company. So someone explain this to me - when a radio station plays music by a band its essentially providing free publicity for that band and free advertising for the bands record label. So why don't radio stations get paid by record companies every time they play music?

Instead we have this bizarre state of affairs where they have to pay the record companies to pay music. WTF?

Maybe once apon a time people didn't actually have much music at home, most of their music consumption was from the radio so radio was providing the primary performance medium for music. But that's hardly true these days, increasingly most people are buying their music in CDs or online and listen to it at their leisure. Radio has just become a way to hear the latest and greatest output (usually over and over again), and occasionally catch some golden oldies from your youth - that perhaps now you're middle aged and bored you'll go and buy on CD or iTunes since you no longer have a tape player to play all those tapes you used to haul around in the car (and in any case they are most likely beyond replay anyway).

If radio isn't such a stimulus for music sales why are record companies always so enthusiastic to get airplay for their latest and greatest progeny? And why are all those services that tell you what's playing on the radio so you can go buy it so popular too? In England you can even hold your phone up to the radio and it'll tell you what the band is and give you the opportunity to buy it then and there!

I don't think any musician now would seriously suggest that radio play of tracks is dramatically harming its revenue. Its like RIAA saying that someone who downloads an album to sample it before buying (because until the new Napster came along you couldn't do that anywhere else) is robbing them of one CDs worth of revenue. Get over it guys, that person would never have bought the CD in the first place.

So, seriously, I think radio stations should all stop playing any music for a week and let RIAA get an idea of the true positive impact radio play is having on their sales. Then they can put out their hands and get paid for playing music the radio and providing all that music advertising. Then they could just ditch all the regular product commercials, not have to suck up to all those product companies and play even more money making music slots. Oh, I forgot, doesn't ClearChannel own all the radio stations now anyway and I expect ClearChannel and RIAA are pretty much in each others pockets so that would never happen

Just another brick in the Wal*Mart

In case you hadn't heard, the Canadian Wal-Mart store that I previously reported as being on the verge of unionizing actually did, only to be told Wal-Mart is going to shut the store down. Wal-Mart claims its because the store is not profitable although its not clear if this was before or after hiring the extra 30 or more employees the union thinks is necessary.

Either way Wal-Mart's action has not been good for its already tarnished image and prompted them to run full page ads in several Canadian papers claiming that employees are the cornerstone of the company. If that is so why is it then that many States are finding they are footing a very heavy bill to provide healthcare for Wal-Mart's employees? Wal-Mart does provide medical benefits but only pays for 52% of the premium - something that isn't going to fly for you average mother with a family working at their stores making close to minimum wage.

In the meantime Wal-Mart just squared away $19 billion in profit last year (including the $10 billion they ploughed back into building new stores). Even with 1,500,000 employees worldwide they could easily fork over several thousand each to pay for the best healthcare plan possible and have billions and billions left in the bank. Indeed $19 billion represents a profit of over $12,000 per employee - heck they could even give all their employees a raise and an extra week of vacation per year...

If you'd like some more information on the antics of the worlds biggest, baddest retailer click on the bumper sticker below.

Thom Hartmann on "History repeats"

I just read an interesting article called When Democracy Failed - 2005 by Thom Hartmann. In it Hartmann re-tells how Hitler rose to power on the back of fear of terrorism, corporate welfare, propaganda and media control, pre-emptive strikes against other nations, and painting all dissenters as unpatriotic and un-German.

The process was kicked off by an act of terrorism on February 27th 1933 - the firebombing of the German parliament building (Reichstag) by Marinus van der Lubbe. Van der Lubbe confessed to the crime under torture, and was tried with four communists who were acquitted. Van der Lubbe was executed by beheading January 10th 1934.

Interestingly there is a "2/27 Hitler knew" conspiracy theory (cf. the "9/11 Bush Knew" theory) about the events claiming the Reichstag fire was actually set by agents working for Hermann Göring and that Lubbe and the rest were set up. Whether or not they were, the rest, as they say, is history. As Hartmann points out, at the moment it is we the people who now have the choice of letting history repeat or not.