Doing something about the weather...

Now they've made me mad. Sure, the bankruptcy bill is an abomination, and portraying the filibuster as an attack on people of faith is just absurd, and Tom Delay is a sleaze of the highest order, but this is too much. Rick Santorum, the junior Republican senator from Pennsylvania, wants to take away my free weather information!

The claim is that by prohibiting the National Weather Service from putting out information that competes with for-profit weather companies like AccuWeather, the NWS can focus its resources on saving life and property from hurricanes and other weather hazards. Of course, in order to predict hurricanes, the NWS would have to do exactly what it's already doing; predicting the weather all the time. The only difference would be, they wouldn't be allowed to make that daily information available to the public. You paid for it, but now Santorum wants you to pay for it again, by giving money to private companies. Incidentally, companies like AccuWeather base their forecasts in part on their own data and models, but also on the free data and models from the NWS.

Of course, there's really only one piece of information you need to know to understand why Santorum is doing this: AccuWeather is headquartered in State College, PA.

Best government money can buy!

Something's bankrupt, all right

I operate off the optimistic assumption that most people are doing the best they can, that they aren’t generally trying to harm other people as much as they’re trying to protect themselves. I’m having a hard time maintaining that optimism in the current political climate.

The bankruptcy bill passed today, and is certain to be signed by President Bush. Why did this bill pass? What great problem is being addressed by this legislation? Were credit card companies going out of business left and right because of bankruptcy declarations on the part of their customers?

It would be easy for me to sit here with my one credit card that I pay off in full each month and say, “just don’t run up credit card debt.” It is good advice, live within your means and all that, but I also have health insurance. Very good health insurance, that also covers my prescription drugs. Many families who go bankrupt these days do so because of medical costs. Sure, live within your means, but what do you do when your kid gets sick?

The Republicans are supposed to like free markets, but what they’ve given the credit card companies with this bill is a protection from the free market. They’ve insulated the credit card companies from the risks of their own actions. Nobody’s making the credit card companies give out credit cards so widely and freely, with little regard to credit worthiness. They’re choosing to do so, because as long as those non-credit worthy consumers don’t go bankrupt, but keeping paying the minimum each month, they’re making money off of them. The risk is those consumers eventually going bankrupt, and the credit card companies just had that risk mitigated for them.

So, evidently, the Republicans are for free markets when we’re talking regulation to curb excesses of capitalism, or even outright fraud (see Enron and the California “energy crisis”), but not so much for free markets when it comes to risk.

It’s hard to not be cynical when bills like this one pass.

Worthless IOUs?

"There is no trust fund, just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay," Bush said after inspecting the storage site. "Imagine - the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet."
George W. Bush

"No, but you...you...you're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house...right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred others. Why, you're lending them the money to build, and then, they're going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?"
George Bailey, in It's a Wonderful Life

Did anyone really believe there was a big pile of gold bullion in a vault that was the Social Security Trust Fund? I doubt it; we have been on the gold standard in this country for a long time. In other words, there's not even a big pile of gold bullion at Fort Knox that corresponds to each and every dollar bill in circulation. Does that mean that a dollar bill is nothing but a worthless IOU?

An IOU is just a promise. The only thing that would make it worthless is for the entity which made the promise to decide to ignore the promise, to default on the obligation. So why is President Bush telling us that there is no trust fund?

For the last twenty years, if you've paid Social Security taxes, you've paid extra, more than was necessary to meet the obligations of Social Security to current retirees. The reason you've paid extra is to build up a surplus, because there was a point in the future where the ratio of retirees to workers would be large enough that payroll taxes wouldn't be enough to meet the obligations. So, for the past twenty years, Social Security has accumulated a surplus; this is the "trust fund." The trust fund was invested in US government debt; in other words, the money was loaned to the federal government, with a promise to pay it back later.

I have money invested in US government debt; probably you do, too. So do a number of foreign governments, especially the Chinese. Are all our IOUs worthless, too?

Why is President Bush going around saying that there is no trust fund? Because otherwise, he'd have to deal with the massive deficits his administration has accrued. He wants to default on this part of the debt, because he can hide it under a smokescreen of "Social Security is broken." If he can't default on this part of the debt, if he can't just say, sorry, I don't want to pay that back, then he'll have a hard time making his pet tax cuts permanent.

Let's be clear here. If there is no trust fund, then what has happened is, a regressive payroll tax has been used to fund tax cuts which disproportinately benefit the wealthiest segment of our population. The past twenty years of over-collecting of Social Security taxes then represent a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the rich.

Cutting the capital gains tax, phasing out Social Security, eliminating the inheritance tax; this administration seems intent on undoing the American dream, that anyone can rise from poverty to riches. This administration seems intent on establishing a permanent moneyed aristocracy, on making it impossible for any kind of social mobility.

Are your investments in US Treasuries worthless IOUs? It depends; can the Republicans find a way to hide their theft of your money?

Who Is My Neighbor?

I have a theory, perhaps naive, that a lot of the difficulties in the world can be traced back to a failure to regard people different from us as our neighbor, as a fellow human being worthy of the same love and respect that we are. Whether it's someone of a different race, a different socioeconomic class, a different sexual orientation, or whatever, until we can make a personal connection with someone, it's all too easy to cast them as "the other", "not like us." Add a little fear to the mix, and it's too often a short step towards making "the other" become "the villian."

I think it's true on a larger scale, too. I think there's been a tendency in the foreign policies of the Western powers, going back to colonialism, to treat the peoples of the Middle East not as our neighbors, but as the other, and often, the villian. I'm not saying this as justification for the attacks of 9/11. But I don't think it should come as a total shock that people who feel like they haven't been listened to, have not been treated as equals, eventually react with violence.

I can't change the foreign policy of the US. But I can personally act on my theory. Blogs are everywhere now, so I went searching for a blog written by an Iraqi. There are quite a few out there, and I found one that I enjoyed reading. I don't know anything about the woman who writes it other than what appears in her blog, but from her writing, she seems like a person I would like and enjoy talking to. Seems like a pretty good place to start finding my neighbor. May I recommend Baghdad Burning?

Fairness

Faithful Progressive has been talking lately about fairness, and the government's role in ensuring fairness. This prompted a bit of discussion about the differences between how conservatives and liberals view fairness.

One conservative response to FP was that liberals tended to perceive fairness as equality of outcomes, and conservatives tended to perceive fairness as equality of opportunity. While there may be a grain of truth in that, I don't think it's really relevant to what FP was talking about. Our government, under the current administration, has favored the haves over the have-nots at almost every turn. Their solutions to every problem tend to favor the rich at the expense of the poor. Social security is in trouble? Private accounts are the answer, even though they don't even address the alleged problem. Raising the income cap on wages taxed for Social Security? Bad idea, even though it actually would impact the problem positively.

Even granting that conservatives believe in equality of opportunity, what has this government done to promote equality of opportunity? Do conservatives really believe that a poor urban kid (or poor rural kid, for that matter) enjoys equality of opportunity with an affluent suburban kid? That the working poor are just as likely to succeed as people with inherited wealth?

My experience in talking with my conservative friends about this is that they tend to think they got where they are based on their own hard work. They can't see the advantages they enjoy, or at the least, can't comprehend the impact of those advantages on their success. It's as if the advantages are so deeply ingrained as to be invisible.

This whole equality of outcomes/equality of opportunities discussion reminds me of what happened when symphony orchestras starting holding blind auditions. In the past, symphonies held auditions, and the applicant was known and visible to the people making the decision. Symphonies were overwhelmingly male. You look at outcomes, and conclude that it's possible, at least, that there's some discrimination going on. You look at opportunities, and conclude that everybody has the same chance, so there's no discrimination. Everybody performed, and they picked the best performer, right?

But then symphonies started holding blind auditions. Now the applicant was no longer visible; the people choosing could hear the person, but couldn't see any other characteristic about the person. If the opportunity truly had been equal before, then there shouldn't have been any change in hiring, right? Now, however, more females began to be hired. So maybe that opportunity had not really been equal after all...

Equality of outcome may not be something the government should guarantee, but it does give you an indication as to where to look in addressing unfairness, especially in those instances where the playing field has been so not level for so long that we don't even know what level looks like.