There’s a move afoot to tighten the regulations limiting naked short selling and to reinstate the uptick rule.
These reforms were prominently discussed last fall, even on this blog. So, why is it taking this long? Especially when so many other things have been fast-tracked.
Victor Davis Hanson has written another fine one.
The comments make interesting, although sobering, reading as well.
The newly appointed chairman of GM admits he don’t know nothin’ ’bout makin’ cars.
But he vows to learn.
The Treasury Department thinks Edward E. Whiteacre Jr., who spent his 43-year career at AT&T, is just the ticket for the new GM. And who knows, maybe he is. He’s got a good track record for bringing his previous company into the modern era.
However, I can’t help but imagine that there must have been someone in the auto industry who would have been a lot better, and who wouldn’t have to take a cram course in the entire auto industry. And I also can’t help but think that the Obama administration is purposely avoiding anyone with such expertise.
Why, I’m not sure: revenge on the automakers? The idea that they can control Whiteacre better than someone with more knowledge?
[ADDENDUM: Great minds think alike.]
The NY Times offers this article by David Leonhardt that purports to prove that Obama isn’t responsible for much of our projected deficit problem—although it does admit that he hasn’t done much of anything to fix it.
Is anyone the least bit surprised that, when the Times “analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II,” it came up with the idea that Obama’s programs will be responsible for only “a sliver” of it?
I’m certainly not surprised. Nor do I—or, I would wager, most people who read the article—have the economic chops to figure out for certain whether the article is the usual slanted stuff offered by that newspaper (previous experience in areas in which I am more conversant have led me to a deep distrust of the Times) or whether there’s some—or even quite a bit of—truth there.
One thing of which I am certain: the Times piece fits in quite nicely with the Obama narrative of “I inherited this so don’t blame me,” and with the general Obama-supporter mantra of “everything that goes wrong or will go wrong during the entire Obama adminstration will be by definition Bush’s fault.”
Here’s an example of some arguments for the other side (also see this). The latter piece offers a quote that rightly points out that Senator Obama supported “nearly all policies and bailouts that created” the supposedly “inherited” Bush-era debt. Hmmm.
It’s also very difficult to reconcile the conclusions reached in the Times piece (supposedly based on analyses of Congressional Budget Reports going back about a decade) with this more recent report from the Congressional Budget Office itself saying that not only did the Obama administration underestimate the deficit projections for 2010 and 2019 by about a third, but that:
…Obama’s projected deficits are more than double what they would be if the president had merely stuck with the current spending and taxation proposals left by the Bush administration.
That sure doesn’t sound to me like Obama is only responsible for a “sliver” of the projected debt. And that much stronger critique of Obama was arrived at by the very same group the Times is citing.
However, I have little doubt that, as the Times states, a great deal of the projected deficit will come from entitlement programs that were many years in the making, and to which both parties and many administrations have contributed. That’s hardly a secret; we’ve known for quite some time that things were going to get worse with the entitlement programs, and neither party has had the courage to do much about it because it’s been political poison until now.
Such reform hasn’t been accomplished in part because, until recently, we haven’t seen ourselves as being in a financial crisis. But now we are, and we have been since shortly before President Obama took office. That, to my way of thinking, is one of the huge differences between the (smaller) deficits piled up by President Bush—whose fiscal policies I believe to have been insufficiently conservative, by the way—and the much larger deficits Obama is proposing: unlike Bush, the current president is doing this in the teeth of a clear and present fiscal crisis.
The stimulus package is an excellent example. It was both expensive and unnecessary, a huge bouquet tossed by Obama and the Democrats to their favorite constituencies under the pretense of saving the economy. It was a perversion of the help it was purported to offer, a cynical ploy designed to reward Democrat special interest groups under the guise of helping us all, fast-tracked because of the emergency but most of which hasn’t even been paid out yet (some emergency, eh?)
In the latest Rasmussen poll, America seems to agree with the “expensive and unnecessary” description: more people than not now say that the rest of the stimulus ought to be canned.
Of course, all of these deficit projections are so fraught with unknowns that partisans can spin them and make of them what they will. I’ll just attempt to use what I hope is some common sense here: if a ship is taking on water and threatening to sink, you don’t help things out by adding buckets and buckets more of the stuff. That is exactly what Obama has done, and it’s not over yet.
Ah, it seems so easy.
We all know that there’s waste in health care. We all know that there are unnecessary tests and treatments, and that if we could figure out what they are and eliminate them, health care costs would lower and we would all benefit.
The problem is that it’s only ex post facto that we can know in each individual case what the unnecessary procedures might have been—and sometimes not even then. The rest of it is mere statistics, and often “garbage in, garbage out” ones at that.
If, for example, we know that back pain is common but that only a tiny percentage of cases will ever need surgery and the rest will heal on their own, how does a doctor decide what tests to run in order to find out which category Patient A fails into? I speak of back pain because it’s something with which I’m all too familiar, having hurt my back fairly severely nearly two decades ago. I never had surgery, but I didn’t lack for opinions that said I should. The only problem (well, it wasn’t the only problem, but it was one of the many problems) was that each doctor I went to over about a twelve-year period recommended a different type of surgery, and gave me different odds for post-surgical improvement.
Since all of these doctors had very fine reputations it was sobering, to say the least, to hear their disagreement. None of them was able to explain all of my symptoms, some of which were puzzling and rare. Some suggested that, without surgery, I’d continue to become worse. A few said that without surgery I was likely to improve. And initially, when I’d first been injured, the highly-recommended doctor I visited had said it was only a muscle strain and did not order an MRI until eight months of fairly severe pain had gone unmitigated, and my symptoms had actually worsened from the exercises he had me doing when he didn’t realize I had a severely herniated disc.
None of this inspired confidence, and so I postponed the decision to have surgery. And postponed it and postponed it. Then, as the years wore on, my symptoms did in fact improve. Does this mean I was correct in refusing surgery? Hardly; maybe I’d have been even better if I’d had it. Perhaps I could have gained many pain-free years during which I suffered instead, as well as removing some limitations I still face.
But perhaps not. I will never know, and I’m at peace with that. I did the best I could and the doctors did the best they could.
I’m the sort of person who does research, and so even way back then, without Google, I pored over the medical literature to help me figure out what to do. And what I found was—confusion. The research was contradictory. Much of it was poorly designed, as research with human subjects often is. And even the best of it dealt with statistics and probabilities that were far from ideal: if there was a 50% chance that someone with clinical findings and test results that more or less (but never exactly) coincided with mine would get a 50% improvement from a certain surgery, what did this tell me? How much would I have to suffer to be willing to have a go at it with odds like that?
Although the decision was ultimately up to me, it was also clear that each of my doctors brought his/her own biases and preferences into the mix. Some seemed rather knife-happy; others were ultra conservative. Some favored a certain type of surgical intervention, others had a different procedure they preferred and with which they were more comfortable. Some required a particular series of tests as part of the diagnostic workup; others thought some of those tests to be unnecessary and dangerous. And on and on and on.
I learned from this and other medical encounters that except for a fairly limited number of conditions, medical science is not in a very advanced state in terms of offering a clear path for dealing with a certain problem. This is not due to some nefarious scheme on the part of doctors to keep easy cures from us, it’s just the nature of the beast. Nor did I encounter many doctors who seemed to be eager to perform surgery just for the sake of getting money; nearly everyone seemed to be earnestly trying to give me the best advice they could in solving a knotty problem.
Which brings me back to the topic of the day: how can we cut the fat that we know is in health care? The difficulties involved in making such decisions are profound, as well I know, but it’s not as though the Obama administration is the first to confront them. Patients, doctors, insurance companies, hospitals, and researchers have been wrestling mightily with them for decades, and the evidence is still conflicted and difficult to apply.
The difficulty lies not only in our lack of clear information to guide us. Some of the problem stems from the fact that we want an impossible combination: the very best health care possible with no person left out because of inability to pay, and a system that is affordable. Since the very best health care is only affordable if a person is either very rich or very healthy (or, preferably, both), there’s an inherent contradiction there.
Which brings us back to Obamacare, which ignores the contradiction by pretending that it does not exist and/or by pretending that we can cut through the Gordian knot by relying on research to tell us exactly which procedures are necessary and which are not—and to somehow do all of this without rationing health care or limiting patient freedom of choice in a way that the public will find onerous.
And any system that injects the federal government into the decision-making mix though a public health plan is almost by definition going to be costly and inefficient, whatever the administration promises. What’s more, such a system is likely to slowly but surely (or maybe even quickly and surely) crowd out the private alternatives.
Take a look at these current suggestions for health care cost-cutting (hat tip: Maggie’s Farm):
Under the [health care providers] groups’ proposals, certain types of care could see cutbacks, potentially sparking concerns among consumers. For example, the American Medical Association, which represents doctors, is proposing to “reduce unnecessary utilization” in areas including Caesarean sections, back-pain management, antibiotic prescriptions for sinusitis and diagnostic imaging tests…
These have been tried for years, and are all subject to the sort of problems I described when speaking of the history of my back problems. And everybody knows—or should know—how poorly the Canadian system, for example, meets the needs of its chronic pain patients, and how difficult it is to get an MRI there.
If you would like to emulate Canada, see what you think of this—not only is the wait long for MRIs, but the system is nearly impossible to bypass even if a patient wants to pay out of pocket:
After one month, you can’t wait any longer. You decide to dip into your savings to pay for a private MRI. To your dismay, every healthcare facility you call turns you away (except those in Quebec because of a 2005 Canadian Supreme Court decision), claiming that it’s against the law to sidestep the public health system to purchase certain procedures privately, like MRIs.
No wonder you constantly hear of not just rich but middle-income Canadians and high-profile politicians heading south to the States to skip the line, get tests like these done privately, and pay out of pocket.
Part of the reason the Canadian system can continue to function without a revolt (aside from the general affability of Canadians) is that the United States acts as a sort of safety valve for all save the poorest of its citizens. But what will the Canadians do when we’re all in the same leaky boat?
Ah, but Obama can move the sun and earth and stars and stop the rise of the oceans. So I’m certain that he and the wise Democrats now in control of Congress can find a way to do what no previous administration and no country on earth has ever managed to accomplish—to reconcile these contradictions and make the best health care on earth both affordable and available to us all.
Justice Ginsberg has ordered a temporary stay of the Chrysler-Fiat sale.
This doesn’t mean a whole lot as yet. The decision can be easily reversed at any time and the deal allowed to go ahead. That may indeed be what will happen.
But the mere fact that the temporary stay has been issued is considered unusual, and an indication that the court is not simply going to be a rubber stamp for this particular act of presidential overreach.
A while back, Obama and his administration spoke of the displaced first-lien creditors in highly pejorative terms in their attempt to demonize them to the American people:
Last week Mr. Obama lambasted them as “a small group of speculators” who “endanger Chrysler’s future by refusing to sacrifice like everyone else.”
Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, sent reporters a statement calling the creditors “vultures” and “rouge hedge funds.” Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm piled on, taking aim during her radio address at a “few greedy hedge funds that didn’t care how much pain the company’s failure would have inflicted on families and communities everywhere.”
Ah, those nasty “speculators.” Never mind that our entire capitalist system is dependent on the existence of people who will take on added risk for added gain, that the risk assumed by these creditors was supposedly limited by the laws of bankruptcy, and that Obama is attempting to override them in the Chrysler deal to the benefit of his political supporters in the unions.
And never mind that the plaintiffs who are asking for the stay of Obama’s hand happen to be “families and communities”—in this case, Indiana teachers’ pension funds and people who may have been injured by Chrysler products. Little people of the kind Obama pretends to champion.
This lawsuit has the benefit of bringing these facts to the fore despite the Obama/Democratic rhetoric to the contrary—that is, if anyone except conservatives is listening. It would be an even bigger bonus if the stay were to be extended and the rights of these creditors protected, because it would end up protecting us all by safeguarding the sanctity of the contract system and protecting it from future power grabs such as Obama’s.
Here’s a sample of what the plaintiffs’ briefs had to say:
“The public is watching and needs to see that, particularly, when the system is under stress, the law will be honored and an independent judiciary will properly scrutinize the actions of the massively powerful executive branch,” wrote Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, who sought a stay on behalf of three state funds that will lose out if the sale goes through. He said the deal could constitute a “sub rosa Chapter 11 reorganization plan” that violates the priority status of first-lien creditors in bankruptcy, and a misuse of so-called TARP funds.
Hear, hear.
Is this news from Britain a portent of things to come here?:
Deputy Labor leader Harriet Harman conceded the European election results were a “very, very bad defeat” for Labor but said Brown, 58, was “resilient” and would fight on.
Opposition center-right Conservative leader David Cameron challenged the prime minister to call an election.
“It would give the country a fresh start where we so badly need one, with an economy that is in difficulty, with a political system that is in a mess and with a government that is so weak it is just extraordinary,” he said.
Of course, the situation here is different in a host of ways, not the least of which is the Parliamentary system vs. ours. Another difference is that Labor has been in control in Britain for twelve years, so the “throw the bums out” feeling is focused strongly on that party. In the US, the Democrats have just come to power in the legislature in 2006, matched by the executive branch in 2008.
What’s more, Obama is very skilled at blaming his predecessors for everything that is going wrong—and most likely, everything that will go wrong for his entire administration and beyond. Another difference is that Obama is a very charismatic politician (even though I seem to be immune from whatever it is that draws people to him so strongly). Gordon Brown most definitely is not.
[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on Shakespeare’s play. But could some hyper-grammarian among you explain to me why the play’s title contains an apostrophe in the second word: “Love’s Labour’s Lost?” Is it the possessive, or a contraction for “labour is?”]
This editorial in today’s WSJ points out that Obamacare rests on a number of unproven assumptions:
The main White House argument for health-care reform goes something like this: If we spend now on a hugely expensive new insurance program for the middle class, we can save later by reducing overall U.S. health spending…
The magic key is the dramatic variations in per patient health spending among U.S. regions. Often there is no relationship between spending and the quality of care, according to a vast body of academic research, most of it coming out of Dartmouth College. If the highest spending areas could be sanded down to the lowest spending areas, about 30% in “waste,” or $700 billion each year, would be saved. More than enough to pay for ObamaCare. Or so the theory goes.
The rest of the article (entitled “Obama’s health cost illusions”) is devoted to showing how stunningly little is actually known about what causes these variations in health care costs, how little evidence there is that the 30% actually represents waste, and how correspondingly difficult it will be for government planners to control costs—something they have little track record of doing even in simpler arenas than health care.
I wonder whether Obama actually believes in these illusions, or whether he’s just counting on the American public to believe them—which would be just as good for his purposes, if his goal is to get his health care reform plan passed on the basis of them.
The WSJ article is complex and somewhat boring. That’s true of all such matters, and I believe Obama is counting on this as well: the fact that most of the American public will not or cannot or haven’t the time to follow the arguments involved, or evaluate them objectively.
In addition, most newspapers aren’t making the case against Obama’s proposals, either because their journalists are so firmly in his pocket or because they themselves don’t understand the issues involved. Or perhaps both; the two are certainly not mutually exclusive. It’s no accident that this piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal, a paper specializing in financial matters, with writers who therefore have a certain amount of expertise in the field, as well as a readership interested in following such matters more closely than average.
I speak of the Obama administration as though it were a unitary thing. But, as this piece in today’s NY Times points out, there are disagreements and tensions in the group of economic advisers at the White House.
This is to be expected. There are a host of big personalities there—in particular, Larry Summers has a reputation for abrasiveness—and they each bring a different economic perspective and preference to the mix. But the results are also reflective of the lack of a coherent vision and organization, so that the different parts of the program sometimes seem to be at war with each other.
Let’s pretend for a moment that, god forbid, you break your arm. And somehow you end up with a team of doctors all trained at Obama University. As you lie there on the table in the ER, one doctor treats your arm by banging on the unbroken one with a ball-peen hammer. The second doctor takes the unusual course of setting your hair on fire. And the third one uses leeches.
Undeterred by your arm’s stubborn refusal to set, soon the doctors start blaming one another. And even though all of them are doing nothing but compounding your injury, none will take any blame. In fact, the louder you scream, the harder they go to work on you.
That, apparently, is what’s going on in the West Wing these days.
Green’s satire is, like all satire, exaggerated. But it underscores the point made by the Journal article, which is that—organized or disorganized—the President’s advisers seem to have no good idea of the actual (versus the intended) consequences of their actions in the real world.
A related point was made yesterday in a very different article on a different subject. Entitled “Think twice about ‘green’ transport, say scientists,” it points out that it is nowhere near as easy as people think to figure out the environmental cost of various forms of transportation. Those greenies who are so earnestly trying to reduce their carbon footprints may be inadvertently enlarging them instead:
Well, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study.
Its authors point out an array of factors that are often unknown to the public.
These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple “tailpipe” tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip.
Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.
It goes on, but you get the picture. These systems in general are far more “complex and challenging” than the simplistic propaganda uses made of them for political purposes would suggest.
What’s a person to do? Well, the old saying that applies to doctors might be a good guide for government policy as well: “First, do no harm.” This means that intervention in complex systems should be done with extraordinary care and only rarely. If that happens to coincide with the more conservative view of things, so be it.
Obama has made a very weak case that his health care reforms will actually save any money at all. I’m far from certain that he believes they will do so; he may just be using the best argument he can find to soothe the American people into going along. Once this is passed I cannot imagine that there will be any turning back.
As the WSJ says:
None of the complexities surrounding regional health spending variation would matter as much if the Obama Administration were merely trying to defossilize Medicare and save the federal fisc. But instead it is exploiting the looming bankruptcy of our current entitlements as a pretext to pass the largest entitlement expansion since 1965. And it is selling this agenda with a phony cost-control “plan” that doesn’t even exist.
My inescapable conclusion is that Obama knows this, and that he is using the financial crisis, and the overwhelming Democrat majority in Congress right now, to ram it home while he can.
And yes, he can.
Just read it. It’s one of his best ever—and that’s saying a lot.
And then read this, which is closely connected. And realize the truth of Kundera’s words: for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often.
Today is the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII. Here’s a video with a few grainy clips of the Allies wading ashore:
I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on, and all that.
The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And I have little doubt that our armed forces would be up to the task; the question is whether our government would.
But back to the D-day landings. About thirty years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.
But the scene was quite different in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.
The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.
This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:
…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.
The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:
Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.
In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:
Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion..
This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:
[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.
The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:
Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.
As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.
These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (particularly if under the aegis of the Bush administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.
In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read: Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred—fortunately for all of us.
…have come in from the cold.
What I find particularly interesting are the blue-blood origins of Kendall Myers and his wife, and the cozy little place he’d made for himself in elite academia all these years.
There’s also this tidbit from Myers’s recent past:
In November 2006, Myers created controversy by describing the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom a “one sided” “myth”. He said that he was “ashamed” of the treatment by US President George W. Bush toward Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In response, UK MP Denis MacShane said, “After the Republican defeat in the midterm election, every little rat who feasted during the Bush years is now leaving the ship. I would respect this gentleman, who I have never heard of, if he had had the guts to make any of these points two or five years ago.”
The US State Department distanced itself from Myers comments, stating, “He was speaking as an academic, not as a representative of the State Department.”
Such a statement on the part of Myers was nowhere near enough to get him fired from the State Department at the time. Now the revelation that he was a Cuban spy all these years might have finally accomplished that—if he hadn’t already retired in 2007. But fittingly, Myers was arrested outside of his alma mater Johns Hopkins, where he was a professor for many years and is still listed as adjunct faculty.
A little rat, indeed. The Honorable MP Denis MacShane had no idea how very correct he was. And this blogger must be feeling pretty justified, as well.
Dr. Sanity writes about Obama’s grandiose belief in the power of his own voice and persona to persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb. If in fact he even understands the difference between the two animals.