Two good sentences

It's early yet, but my Reader has featured two excellent sentences.

From Bobulate:

‘I’m adding a meeting’ should really be ‘I’m subtracting an hour from your life.

And from Marginal Revolution, in a post entitled "Why don't people rock the boat in early online dating encounters?":

...What we learned from this little experiment is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they often gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain but one that no one really enjoys or benefits from.

I like smart words in the morning.

Marriage Penalties for Healthcare

Getting married? Already married? Obama has a wedding present for you as part of his healthcare plan - stiff penalties for dual-income households. Steve Moore reports in yesterday's Political Diary how mandatory coverages will cost married couples (and that's not rich married couples - it's all of them):

Take two low-wage workers who are considering marriage. In 2016, if each
has an income $11,800, they would each have to pay $248 as singles for
government-approved health insurance. Married, their joint income climbs to
$23,600 and they would have to pay $1,109 -- a ding of more than $600
annually.

Middle-class workers could get hit even harder. According to the
Congressional Budget Office, a single individual earning $35,400 -- three times
the poverty rate -- would be obligated to pay $3,611 for mandatory health
insurance. But two such individuals, if married, would lose their eligibility
for government subsidies and their mandatory health insurance payments would
rise to $13,100 -- a whopping $5,878 annual marriage penalty.

That's not how I want to spend my family budget.

New discovery

I just read kottke.org for the first time. It's really pleasant in its zaniness and has given me a renewed perspective on blogging. If I was completely non-ideological, or perhaps just more prolific with actually blogging, this is exactly what kind of blog I'd like to have. Let's see what effect that line of thinking has.

A lack of personal responsibility

If ever you have wondered if American has become an entitlement society, this headline should clear things up for you: Jobless NYC woman sues college for $70K in tuition. Apparently she hasn't gotten the career advice she expected and has no job.

Does she sue the skillet manufacturer when her stir-fry burns? The book publisher when she can't bring herself to finish a book? Or in this case, perhaps the paper company that makes her resume paper is to blame. Take them out too!

We have fallen into the misleading notion that the equality pronounced in the Declaration of Independence is a guarenteed equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. Life's tough and sometimes it isn't fair, but that doesn't mean we need to waste society's time in trying to force false equity.

This woman showed enough personal responsibility to get through college. Now its time to take a look around, realize you aren't the only one having trouble finding a job in a down economy, and take personal responsibility for fixing it - and stop casing blame where none is due.

The freedoms you will lose (yes, you)

This Fortune article is the single best piece I've read on the healthcare bills coming out of Congress. The article identifies "five freedoms" you will lose if the current legislations becomes law. This isn't think tank propaganda. This is a major business publication taking an honest look at the bill.

[T]he Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.

I didn't know a lot of the things cited in this article and I consider myself fairly well informed on the healthcare debate. I wonder if our legislators have any idea this stuff is in there? Given the hesitation to pass anything, they must have at least an inkling.

Obama says you'll be able to keep your current plan if you like it, but you won't - it just may take a year or two before you're kicked off. He says he's not going to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, but I think forcing young people to pay for coverage they don't need qualifies as a tax increase.

Read this article and see what's going on. If you aren't alarmed by the end of it, then read it again because you missed something.

That's a lot of zeros

He noticed that his debt exceeded the world GDP while making a routine balance inquiry on his online Bank of America account.

Most amusing story I read today. Perhaps he bought all of us "free" health care?

The Healthcare Fight

Could breast cancer survivors be a strong and as-yet-untapped ally in the fight to stop socialized medicine?

Some of those solutions are already the order of the day in that single-payer paradise, Britain, whose National Health Service doesn't even provide for annual screening mammograms -- something U.S. physicians strongly recommend to detect and treat breast cancer before it becomes virulent. The National Health Service allows mammograms only every three years, and then only for women between 50 and 70. The service's guidelines recognize that risk rises with age, but women over 70 must nevertheless explicitly ask to continue having the triennial scans -- a not-so-subtle way of discouraging the screening.

Early screening, of course, has saved millions of lives and will continue to do so until it isn't allowed. Why would we want to give that up? And don't expect this to be limited to necessary exams for women, either.

This comes from a L.A. Times opinion piece that provides a very good articulation of what "comparative effectiveness research" really means and the possible implications of proposed legislation. Read it and know what we're looking at.

Good to know that we have a president who will offer us the moon and the stars - but not a hip replacement for his grandmother.

But he's "Progressive"!

"Although Republicans portray it as yet another example of Obama's socialist tendencies, his G.M. plan reveals him to be deeply conservative. He can imagine a world in which the internal combustion engine is obsolete but not one in which G.M. is" -- Reason Magazine's Jacob Sullum

I liked this quote. It underscores a theme I like to occasionally hit at on this blog - the false claim in the current liberal mentality they their ideas are progressive. Progressive, to me, means moving forward to a better reality. To the New Left, progress is moving toward a stronger, more all-encompassing government and getting rid of those conservative, out-dated ideas of individual liberty, personal property, and self-determination.

That's not progress. In fact, it harkens not to the bold experiment that is America, but to the Dark Ages when centralized powers dictated how lives were to be led.

When conservatives call it a Fair Tax, it's no good...

But when liberals call it a Value-Added Tax then it's ok? Hey, a VAT is so European! How could it not be good!?

I'm willing to listen if a VAT will replace the income tax entirely - including a repeal of the 16th amendment, but not if it's lumped on top. That's not reform, it's just double taxation.

Rally around freedom

Jim DeMint is really a great American, and he's taking steps to be a great leader of the Republican party. This is from his superb op-ed in Friday's Wall Street Journal:

To win back the trust of the American people, we must be a "big tent" party. But big tents need strong poles, and the strongest pole of our party - the organizing principle and the crucial alternative to the Democrats - must be freedom. The federal government is too big, takes too much of our money, and makes too many of our decisions. If Republicans can't agree on that, elections are the least of our problems.

Freedom will mean different things to different Republicans, but it can tether a diverse coalition to inalienable principles. Republicans can welcome a vigorous debate about legalized abortion or same-sex marriage; but we should be able to agree that social policies should be set through a democratic process, not by unelected judges. Our party benefits from national-security debates; but Republicans can start from the premise that the U.S. is an exceptional nation and force for good in history. We can argue about how to rein in the federal Leviathan; but we should agree that centralized government infringes on individual liberty and that problems are best solved by the people or the government closest to them

Read the whole thing here. It's a nice reminder that the talk of conservatives/Republicans/center-right folks trying to "rebrand" themselves isn't really about rebranding so much as it is about returning to the core principles of the coalition. We can disagree on some of the ends, but the means - personal liberty and freedom, not government dicate - are the means through which we must operate.

Thank you Senator DeMint.

Arr-rony

I find it ironic that the Obama administration recently stepped up its language against the Somali pirates. This is, after all, an administration that has started a trade war with Mexico, said(at one point at least) that it wanted to revise NAFTA, and has no problems discussing tariffs and protectionist trade barriers - even sneaking them into the so-called stimulus bill. I see trade barriers and piracy as two sides of the same coin. Both impede the process of free and fair trade between willing parties through the use of force, taking their unfairly gotten gains for uncertain economic uses.


The only difference is that the pirates do their work by spitting on the rule of law. The government gets to claim it is the rule of law. And then take whatever it wants.

Maybe others should follow their lead

I was really excited about this story, though there's still a lot of entitlement mentality reflected. Out in Kauai, in Hawaii, a group of citizens rebuilt a bridge in a state park. They had been waiting around for state funds of about $4 million to rebuild, and they eventually realized that those funds might be as much as two years away.

Led by a kayaking company that realized its livelihood was at stake, a group got together and built a bridge. Didn't cost them much. And now, instead of the park being closed for another couple of years, it should open in the next few weeks.

Still, some of what was in the article reflects a bit of entitlement and government dependence.

"We can wait around for the state or federal government to make this move, or we can go out and do our part," Slack said. "Just like everyone's sitting around waiting for a stimulus check, we were waiting for this but decided we couldn't wait anymore."

"We shouldn't have to do this, but when it gets to a state level, it just gets so bureaucratic, something that took us eight days would have taken them years," said Troy Martin of Martin Steel, who donated machinery and steel for the repairs. "So we got together -- the community -- and we got it done."

The "we shouldn't have to do this" tweaks me a bit. Should it even be a state park at all? Why not make it private. It's clearly a lucrative base of operations for at least the kayak company, and perhaps others. Get the state out and run it your way.

At any rate, good job for rebuilding that bridge. Our recession might just end a little faster if we quit waiting around for the government to tell us the answers and, instead, figured them out for ourselves.

Good to know

CNN Headline: "Charles Manson spends most of his time alone."

What a funny coincidence. So do all his victims. Sadly, they didn't have a choice in the matter.

DC Hypocrisy

The AIG bonus mess exposes the serious lack of oversight and responsibility that went into creating the bailouts and the stimulus package. Chris Dodd (D-CT) now says the amendment he sponsored to the stimulus package that protects bonuses at companies receiving bailouts was forced on him by the Treasury department.

Dodd...said it was because administration officials were afraid the government would face numerous lawsuits without the new language.

Now tell me, why would a Congress and administration willing to create an ex post facto tax on contracted bonuses that they failed to discover when taking over the company be afraid of lawsuits when they already are showing a willingness to change the law to suit their desires?

All this as Obama confesses that "the buck stops" with him, but also admitted that, "nobody here was responsible for supervising AIG."

You know what, Mr. President - you own AIG now. We own AIG now. Put someone in charge of it. Otherwise don't be upset when things you don't like show up.

Gratuitous and unnecessary sentences

From an article about George Bush respectfully choosing not to say anything critical about Obama. It is a non-story fluff article. But then there's this paragraph:

Bush said he wants Obama to succeed and said it's important that he has that support. Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has said he hoped Obama would fail.

Rush is not mentioned anywhere else in the article. Except here. You know, just in case you forgot that he...what, MSNBC, hates America? Hates Obama?

Useless.

Overcoming barriers

During tax season, I start thinking more and more about finances. While our finances are currently in pretty good shape, I keep looking for new ideas on how to make sure it stays that way. One of my new favorite blogs in this vein is Get Rich Slowly. Lots of good ideas in here (and I think my wife is tired of hearing me toss them around).

Today, a guest post from the author of the upcoming I Will Teach You To Be Rich discusses how to overcome the barriers that stop us from doing the things we know we should do, like working out more or spending less. It's not enough to cognatively know we should do these things. We have to clear away the barriers standing in the way of those goals, whether they be physical, mental, or other.

Go read it and then break down a barrier today! I'm going to buy stock. I've had a barrier against buying stock not because of the economy or because I didn't know what to invest in. My barrier was figuring out the right mechanism to purchase my investment. I'm going to get around that today! Wish me luck...

Innovation

Google, that bastion of continuous improvement, suddenly, quietly, has added lots of surface streets to its traffic feature on its Maps. The Google Map I have on my iGoogle page shows Washington DC and it's set to show me the traffic (nevermind that I don't drive into work - it's still interesting and often makes me happy that I'm not driving). Now it shows traffic on 14th St and Connecticutt and Constitution and Independence - even some of the farther out arteries like 7 and route 50.

Very cool.

Managing frustration through science

Today's Dilbert cartoon makes me want to invest in the drug companies.

What's in it?

Curious what's in the stimulus bill that will be so stimulating? The Wall Street Journal now has a whole long list of every line item. Some things that seem odd to me:

- $400 million for space shuttle construction - aren't we phasing out the shuttle?

- Under the "Justice" catagory, only one line item explicitly discusses something that creates jobs.

- Homeland Security got $1 billion for "Explosive detection systems for airports." How is that stimulus and not just a straight homeland security appropriations item?

- $2 billion in "funds for communities to buy and rehabilitate foreclosed and vacant properties." I'm just amused they put this in since they can just claim eminent domain for free!

There's a lot there and it's interesting to read through. I can definitely see things that would have fit nicely into a stimulus package. I see a lot of other things that would have been better applied in a relevant regular appropriations bill. I won't hold my breath in hope that the approps bills debated later this year won't double-dip on a lot of projects.

Something scary for Friday the 13th

I've read a lot of horrible things the past few days that left me mouth agape - mostly about the "stimulus" madness - but nothing has floored me so much as this report of goings-on in San Francisco.

And these are the people we themselves progressive! If I ever try to go to San Fran, remind me of this post.