Obamacare and running out of other people’s money

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, those evil health insurance companies, refusing to enroll sick people in their individual programs (although they were covered in large group insurance), and forcing them into high risk pools. Greedy nasty capitalists, sucking our blood like the vampires they are!

Well, now we hear that the the high risk pools under Obamacare, the ones that start filling in from this Thursday until 2014 when the main feature kicks in, may have to turn people away, because the program will run out of money before 2014 otherwise:

Healthcare experts of all stripes warned during the healthcare debate that $5 billion would likely not last until 2014. Millions of Americans cannot find affordable healthcare because of their pre-existing conditions, and that amount would only cover a couple hundred thousand people, according to a recent study by the chief Medicare actuary.

Plus, many enrollees will have to pay fairly hefty premiums from the start, the exact amount depending on location and state.

Then in 2014, when the main part of Obamacare begins, and no one with a pre-existing condition can be banned, I’m sure everything will be peachy keen and hunky-dory and raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, fiscally speaking.

If you detect a note of sarcasm, you would be correct. Could it be—could it possibly be—that insurance companies, their CEOs and their actuaries and all their other employees, are no better or worse, no more cruel and rapacious, than the general run of the human race, and that their policies are dictated by market realities? And that, although those realities operate somewhat differently for the federal government (no absolute need to make a profit or even operate in the black), they still operate in their own way, and that enormous deficits and borrowing from countries such as China cannot go on indefinitely? That the piper still must be paid, even by government, and that if we ask for a comprehensive social welfare state we eventually not only run out of “other people’s money,” but our own?

[NOTE: For the historically inclined, here’s the original Margaret Thatcher quote in context:

…Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they’re now trying to control everything by other means. They’re progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people.

Hey—maybe that’s why they call themselves “progressives!”]

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Inarticulate but well-meaning spambot:

You may well have not intended to accomplish so, but I feel you have managed to express the state of mind that a ton of people are in. The sense of wanting to aid, but not knowing how or exactly where, is some thing a lot of us are proceeding via.

Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get those peepers?

The New Neo Posted on by

Where?

From an online site that sells circle contact lenses, that’s where.

Apparently, normal-sized irises are no longer big enough. Colored contacts that cover not only only the iris itself, but part of the white of the eye, are becoming tres popular for achieving that doe-eyed look characteristic of Japanese anime heroines. The contacts are most popular with Asian women, as you can see if you ask Google for images of “circle contact lenses.” But the fad has been catching on with young women of diverse ethnicities in this country:

Now that circle lenses have gone mainstream in Japan, Singapore and South Korea, they are turning up in American high schools and on college campuses. “In the past year, there’s been a sharp increase in interest here in the U.S.,” said Joyce Kim, a founder of Soompi.com, an Asian pop fan site with a forum devoted to circle lenses. “Once early adopters have adequately posted about it, discussed it and reviewed them, it’s now available to everyone.”

Ms. Kim, who lives in San Francisco and is 31, said that some friends her age wear circle lenses almost every day. “It’s like wearing mascara or eyeliner,” she said.

Well, not quite. But the desire to “improve” the human body marches on.

Predicting the economy

The New Neo Posted on by

This book sounds interesting:

Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.

Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, “This Time Is Different,” a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. It is a panoramic opus, both geographically and temporally, covering crises from 66 countries over the last 800 years.

I wish them well. But we can’t seem to learn from history, except (perhaps, every now and then, a little bit) for the history we ourselves experience personally. For example, many people such as my mother who went through the Great Depression pooh-poohed all the boom times that followed and refused to speculate even a little bit. It can be a double-edged sword for such individuals, though. For someone like my mother, it meant that they did not ride the wave and make much money during the go-go years, but it also meant they didn’t lose much when the downturn came.

For society as a whole, it’s perilous to not learn and understand economic history, but it seems to be our fate, no matter how many books are written and how many theories abound. Because who can tell which ones are correct? People would usually rather be seduced by the idea of the quick profit; they think that they will be able ride the wave and jump off at just the right time before the inevitable wipeout. The motivation for short time gain is huge, and hubris is rarely in short supply.

Which reminds me:

With the stock market lurching again, plenty of investors are nervous, and some are downright bearish. Then there’s Robert Prechter, the market forecaster and social theorist, who is in another league entirely.

Mr. Prechter is convinced that we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions ”” perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years.

In a series of phone conversations and e-mail exchanges last week, he said that no other forecaster was likely to accept his reasoning, which is based on his version of the Elliott Wave theory ”” a technical approach to market analysis that he embraces with evangelical fervor.

Right? Wrong? Who knows? He advises to get out of the market entirely and stay in cash. But for most people who got into the market at what turns out to have been the wrong times (and there turns out to have been a lot of those times), that would mean incurring a huge loss right now.

As for me, I get fatalistic about it and don’t do anything too rash either way. If the economy becomes that bad, I figure the vast majority of us will be in deep doo-doo and it doesn’t much matter what I’ve done to prepare, unless I’ve learned to become a survivalist and frontierswoman, and it’s a little late for that.

A thought for the Fourth

The New Neo Posted on by

Happy Fourth of July! I’m going to have dinner at the home of some friends, and then watch fireworks at the park tonight. How’s that for tradition?

And speaking of traditions—it occurs to me that that are two kinds of people in the world, those who value liberty very highly and those who don’t. America was founded by the first kind; I hope they still vastly outnumber the second.

Happy Fourth of July—to liberty!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. It was written in the springtime a few years ago, on a visit to New York. I thought it especially relevant today, though, because I see our liberties as increasingly at risk.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York:

brookheights2.jpg

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced from what it must be at my house, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees I don’t know the names of.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in 1965, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on every visit. So, what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth, restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me—I used to see it almost every day when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

OBama’s economic policy is clear, all right

The New Neo Posted on by

One of Obama’s biggest boosters, Eleanor Clift of Newsweek, bemoans the fact that somehow, the great articulator/communicator/orator has failed to clarify his economic policy. Oh, if only he could explain to the slow-on-the-draw people the big picture—which is, which is…what, exactly?

Clift can’t quite articulate it either. The closest she can come is this:

The straightforward Cash for Clunkers and the recently lapsed real-estate rebate are the highlights of his economic program, while the stimulus bill is tarred (unfairly) as wasted money and the administration’s mortgage-rescue program founders in a sea of red tape.

But commenter Richard Lavallee (July 2, 9:58:21 PM) offers to help Clift out, and I think he pretty much nails it:

Obama’s economic policy is crystal clear. Destroy the middle class and small businesses, nurture and seduce large corporations with bailouts in exchange for government control and large party campaign contributions, throttle the credit markets to prevent entrepreneurial activity, use massive unemployment to drive up public payrolls, drive up taxes to soak up investment potential, empower job-killing environmental radicals, force government control of carbon, and thereby control over life itself, rely on the Supreme Court appointments to further erode the property rights of european-americans, and enslave the nation to the communist Chinese with gargantuan debts.

Cloward-Piven, anyone?

[NOTE: In related news, most Americans don’t seem to have gotten the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Clift-et al memo that the stimulus really helped the economy and created jobs.]

First memories

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I came across this old post of mine the other day, and thought it might be fun to repeat it, with some added thoughts.]

I’ve always had an excellent recollection for early events in my life, with the peculiarity that my memories tend to be visual as well as auditory and emotional. That is, not only can I remember a great many incidents occurring at a very young age—what happened, what was said, how I felt—but there’s also a sort of theatrical scene-setting. I can often recall where I was standing in relation to the other players—and, more oddly, what everyone was wearing at the time.

It took me a while to learn that most people don’t remember things that way. I would be reminiscing with a friend and would say, “Don’t you remember? You were standing over there, and you were wearing that black and white suit with the red silk blouse,” and the friend would gaze at me in puzzlement, wondering what I was talking about.

Of course, no independent corroboration exists to tell me whether I’m right or wrong. So perhaps I’m full of it; there’s no way to know for sure.

I once participated in a study of first memories. The researcher’s premise was that our earliest memories are not random and that, in particular, a person’s very first memory has some significance and is a sort of theme.

I have no idea what the results of that research were, or whether the concept is true, but I find it fascinating.

As for my first memory—well, first I’ll offer the following, from commenter sergey, posted quite some time ago:

Tolstoy also writes in his authobiographical notes on his rememberance of how he was born—not only all the environment of the room, but also his sensations of the delivery itself. My own first rememberance does not runs so close to the begining, but I do remember very clear how I was weighted after being brought from the clinic to the flat of our family doctor. It was cold being sripped of swaddling bands and put on scales platform, white and cold metal trough, and I was frightened when it begin to rock to and fro under me.

Why am I posting sergey’s first memory? Because it is virtually the same as mine. Although I think mine occurred when I was older, perhaps at ten months or so, I was very surprised indeed when I read his comment. It’s the first memory of another person, one who lives halfway across the world, and yet it represents a fairly accurate rendition of my own first memory.

If so, why this first memory rather than another? The theme in my early life that I think it represents is the idea “you’re on your own, kid”—at least, in the emotional sense.

That may have been my first memory; it’s pre-verbal. There are no words because I didn’t have them yet. But my first memory that involves thinking—and it’s a pretty big thought, actually—took place in the bathroom when I was about two. I was sitting on the john, probably being toilet-trained, and my mother was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, waiting for me. It suddenly struck me that we were two different people, a thought both scary and fascinating, perhaps even exhilarating.

I remarked to her in awe: “You’re you and I’m me.” Come to think of it, it’s another extension of that same theme mentioned above: “you’re on your own, kid.”

Feel free to offer your own first memories in the comments section.

Pelosi is an embarrassment…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to the Democratic Party and to the nation. The former, however, may not realize that fact, and can’t or won’t get rid of her, due to the power she’s amassed and her ability to pass legislation that an increasingly left-leaning Democratic Congress seems to yearn for despite the fact that most Americans feel quite the opposite.

Pelosi’s latest is—well, watch for yourselves:

Here’s a transcript so you can study and savor her remarks at leisure:

…[U]nemployment insurance, we talk about it as a safety net and the rest—this is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy. Economists will tell you this money is spent quickly, it injects demand into the economy, and is job-creating. It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name, because again it is money that is needed for families to survive, and it is spent.

So it has a dual benefit. It helps those who’ve lost their jobs, but it also is a job-creator, and for that reason —for those two reasons—it should be passed, and I’m optimistic that it will. It’s impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country that would say we’re not going to have unemployment benefits, and the only people who want them are people who don’t want jobs. That’s just so contrary to what our country is about, and I reject that misrepresentation of the motivation for people to be on unemployment insurance.

Boy, I would have dearly loved for Ms. Pelosi to have directly quoted and mentioned the names of those economists who have touted the enormous and speedy job-creating effect of extending unemployment benefits, because this seems to be one of the oddest assertions I’ve heard in quite some time.

Yes, it’s good for people to have money to spend. And yes, unemployment benefits help to keep the wolf from the door of those who have been let go. But speedy jobs creation, faster than “any other initiative you can name?”

Maybe what Pelosi meant was that it does so faster than any other initiative she can name, or is willing to name, or to even think about or consider. Tax relief for businesses? Perish the thought! Holding off from changing health insurance policy in such a way that businesses become afraid to expand, and even feel it necessary to contract? Not for Nancy! Creating a general climate in which business feels government will not turn on it in a capricious manner? Not on your life!

Note that Pelosi is speaking of a bill that proposes to extend employment benefits for six extra months beyond what is already available, and that Republicans are arguing against it because they feel it would increase the deficit more than we can afford. So what’s up with attacking this straw man of people wanting to do away with unemployment benefits entirely? That’s not the issue here, and “I reject that misrepresentation” of the position of the opposition, as should everyone within earshot of Pelosi’s unctuously Orwellian output.

Meanwhile, back in the real world…even liberal shill Ezra Klein realizes the recent jobs report is sobering stuff. Of course, Nancy would say all the more reason to pass the bill extending unemployment benefits and get that speedy jobs creation thingee going!