3 ms·

Once my (bright, Valedictorian, PBK, 'Summa Cum Laude', Woodrow Wilson, NSF, Ph.D.) wife gave me a question: We were running a little consulting company, and

by graycat 13y ago

Once my (bright, Valedictorian, PBK, 'Summa Cum Laude', Woodrow Wilson, NSF, Ph.D.) wife gave me a question: We were running a little consulting company, and one of our clients was from a wealthy family. My wife asked me about that client, "What has he actually done himself?" that is, that he didn't mostly get just handed to him from his position in the wealth and power of his family? That was a good question. Prescient. Indeed, when he started making decisions really on his own, he made just awful decisions and lost again and again, in total a bundle, a big fraction of his share of the family's wealth. Not unexpected: The great American novel is rags to rags in three generations! Okay, look at Ohama: What has he actually done besides have several smart and/or wealthy people help him ride a wave to get elected? From what I can see, generally his approach is when there is an issue in the news, have his writers formulate some cliches on the issue, mouth the cliches, and then do nothing or nothing significant and wait until the MSM, etc. forget about the issue. In one step more detail, he has in mind a coalition -- that's one role of a politician, to form a winning coalition. So, e.g., one of the groups he wants in his coalition are the greenies. So, back early in 2008 he gave an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle where he said that his idea was to have carbon "cap and trade" and slowly "ratchet up" the standards until the coal fired electric generating plants were "bankrupt". When I read that, I went into orbit somewhere in the outer planets before returning to earth. Why? Easy enough to find in Department of Energy reports was that then 49% of all of our electric power and, as I recall, 23% of all our energy was coming from coal. So, in simple, stark terms, his "bankrupt", taken literally, would do more damage to the US economy than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ever hoped. And Obama admitted the effect, that electric rates would "skyrocket". But eventually I understood that I had gotten all excited over next to nothing: Yes, apparently some old coal fired plants have been shut down -- a good report would be of interest but I don't have a reference to one. But electric rates have not gone up like a "skyrocket". I doubt that the coal plant shutdowns have amounted to much. Indeed, Buffett recently bought Burlington Northern Railroad which is big in hauling coal to coal plants. So, no doubt Buffett took Obama's SF Chronicle interview as, to quote the movie All the President's Men, "total BS". So, what the heck did he do? Well, he got some greenies all happy for a while and likely got some political donations. With the happy greenies, he got freedom to aim some of the TARP II and stimulus money (supposedly $92 billion and later another $45 billion) to green projects that likely resulted in some political power and campaign donations. Big, huge waste, right? Well, yes, but maybe not totally useless: Heck in WWII we got out of The Great Depression in about 90 days by pouring money into guns and bullets that were junk by 1945 (suddenly had 1-3 jobs for everyone who could work, women included, especially if they could learn to use a rivet gun). So, maybe pouring $92 billion plus $45 billion into projects that might, unfortunately, be just junk soon enough might help get the economy going, e.g., as that money soon gets spent for the usual things -- food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care, education, .... Or, it was like the helicopter solution -- fly over the US and drop money until the economy is going again. Maybe the greenies are less than 20% of the population. So, what about the 80+% of the population not greenies who don't want to see 49% of our electric utility industry destroyed? Well, apparently that 80+% just didn't pay attention to the Obama greenie remarks and otherwise didn't take him seriously. And one step more, as soon as shutting down our electric power started to pinch, people would scream bloody murder and the situation would be turned around. So, net, curiously, the 20-% get all excited and contribute to a coalition long enough to win an election; the 80+% mostly pay no attention; and soon enough everyone forgets about the issue. So, can build a coalition, say, long enough to get elected: (1) Pick a list of controversial issues and, for each, pick a small group of highly concerned citizens. (2) In some speeches, feed each group some radical raw meat cliches that they will really like. (3) In reality, do next to nothing or nothing on the cliches. (4) Let time pass, new issues dominate the news, and the old issues fade into the background. Then what about the real work? (1) Wait until others propose solutions. (2) Wait until some such solutions get some traction. (3a) If the solution is really popular in the country, then support it. (3b) If the solution is just to be implemented in the Executive Branch, then let it but don't publicly support it; if the solution flops, blame the lower level people who implemented it; if the solution is successful, take credit. But, mostly don't actually have a vision and push it and bet own political capital on it. If Obama has a vision, then my guess is that he just wants as much more money and power in DC as he can bring there so that DC can take the US by the horns and lead it somewhere, say, to social justice. Otherwise he gets time to work on his golf game and jump shot. What's wrong? He's not really leading. He's not really out in front with solutions. He mostly is just letting things happen from others and avoiding being close enough to get blamed. So, there's not much coordination. Mostly he's avoiding blame. Why don't people notice what he's doing? Because things, especially the economy and wars, are not bad enough for people to be interrupting the rest of their lives to raise hell insisting on something better. And, people do pay a lot of attention to the MSM, and the MSM has a very short attention span. E.g., for the Benghazi controversy? The NSA controversy pushed that out of the headlines. For the NSA controversy? Issue cliches and otherwise let Clapper, General Alexander, and Biden meet the public. For Snowden, mostly just f'get about him. Back to the golf game and jump shot. Or, "How to be President without Really Trying". Works as long as the voters put up with it and there's no crisis that demands more. Crisis? What about hurricane Sandy? As at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy "Hurricane Sandy was the deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, as well as the second-costliest hurricane in United States history." So, with hurricane Katrina, W got excoriated, eviscerated, drawn, quartered, etc. With hurricane Sandy Governor Christie got some publicity, Mayor Bloomberg was busy, but Obama got no blame. Cute.

pekk 13y ago
How is this different from every President since and including Reagan?
- graycat 13y ago
  It is different, very different. Obama avoids blame. He's terrific at avoiding blame. E.g., at Harvard Law, he was editor of the Law Review but didn't write anything so never got criticized for writing anything. In the Illinois Senate, he voted "present" some huge number of times and, again, avoided any blame. Reagan? He got blamed for Iran-Contra. Obama's not getting blamed for NSA, Snowden, Benghazi, Morsi, Syria, etc. Obama is uniquely good at avoiding blame. Also Obama is uniquely good at pulling together a coalition with the technique I described. Obama managed to avoid any significant role or blame for the response to hurricane Sandy. W seemed to be involved in responding to Katrina and then took everything that went wrong in the neck. I like the remark in the movie Hunt for Red October: "I'm a politician which means that I'm a liar and a cheat and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollypops. But it also means I keep my options open.". In other words, avoid taking a public position. If a president has a vision or program he feels strongly about, then he will do all he can to push it, expend his political capital, and maybe get something done. But another approach is just to step back and keep fingerprints off things that might not work. In Obama's case, it also helps, maybe has been crucial, that long the MSM was on his side.
  - DoubleMalt 13y ago
    There is one point to his credit, and this seems to actually be his one and only priority: The Affordable Care Act. He realy stuck his neck out for this. And I think it is a laudable effort.
    - graycat 13y ago
      If Obamacare really is better for US health care and patients, both soon and long term, and not wildly more expensive, then fine with me. I don't know how much Obama's for Obamacare: He has made lots of supportive comments, but he also claims to want to shut down the coal plants. He's going to do next to nothing on the second, so maybe on the first he's just spouting stuff. From his remarks that the American College of Surgeons shot down, I doubt that Obama really knows enough about US health care to like Obamacare very much. For Obama "stuck his neck out", I don't see it. The bill passed due to the Dem majority in both houses of Congress and the pushing of Pelosi, Reid, and Emanuel, and from all I can tell Obama had little to do with it. Now that the bill is law, he can praise it. As Obamacare, Obama's name got attached to the bill and the effort, but that was mostly just politics by people who don't like either Obama or the bill and similar to what was done with Hillary care because it was obvious that we shouldn't trust our health care system to Hillary. And nearly no one would really want to trust their health care to anything designed or implemented by Obama. On the act itself, no doubt US health care could be improved. Just how to do that is a serious question. There is the academic health care systems analysis economic optimization planning community with Karen Davis, etc., but I've been too close to such academics and wouldn't trust them to hand me a band aid. Maybe what Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden have is better. It appears that lots of people complain about what England and Canada have. I was for improving the US health care system, but when I saw the sausage making that resulted in Obamacare, I concluded that the hard work of designing a better system had not been done. E.g., I saw that what was proposed had been taken off the shelf from some work by Senator Kennedy's health care planning staff. Kennedy was dreaming; such dreams are a good way to kill patients and waste money. My fear is that as Obamacare goes into implementation, it will seriously hurt US health care and millions of patients -- some soon, much more later. And as the IRS goes around plucking money from checking accounts, people might get torqued. Pelosi's remark "got to pass it to see what's in it" may have a point: It may be that heavily what the implementation is will be from regulations written by rows, columns, and layers of paper pushers in some big building about 70 miles from the Washington Monument. So, Obamacare will be implemented slowly. Maybe as problems become obvious and people scream, the paper pushers will modify the system. I hope so. Due to the slow implementation, there will be some time to modify the system as it is implemented. Here is some of what I suspect will happen. In the short term, people won't like the changes if only because they are changes. Then people will really not like the role of the IRS. In the long term, I suspect that a lot of the best people and companies will leave health care and, then, quality will fall. Getting the quality back will be super tough. I suspect that the flow of new, advanced, powerful biomedical products -- drugs, devices -- will greatly slow. I believe that a lot of seniors will get much worst medical care. The Palin image of "death panels" is not really wrong. US health care is a patchwork system pulled together piece by piece over nearly all the decades of modern medicine. In some ways, the system works great, likely the best in the world. In some other ways, it's not very good. So, improvements are possible. But improvements are not going to be easy, that is, without damaging a lot that is good or spending too much money. My fear of Obamacare is that it was mostly just a political football and from nothing like a serious effort to design a better system. Instead, the political part was, really, just the Kennedy dream, a dream of 'good health care as a basic right for everyone' or some such essentially socialistic notion. Pelosi? She wants more socialism from a bigger government. With Obamacare she was as happy as the lead high school cheerleader just named Homecoming Queen. The political part is that Pelosi took the old Kennedy dream and pushed it through, that is, pushed through that the US is on the way to socialized medicine. So, in the US socialized medicine is now a fact that will be difficult to change. That's what Pelosi wanted -- the principle of socialized medicine, that the Federal Government is directly responsible for the health care of everyone. Just what the details will be and how it will work, Pelosi didn't care. Instead she will let the Executive Branch iron out any winkles and have Congress modify the law in places if necessary. But what she wants is socialized medicine; she's confident it will be better. So, again, especially to Pelosi, Obamacare was politics, that is, socialized medicine, socialism, having the central government directly responsible for each person's health care, and not really about how to design a better health care system. Good, bad, or otherwise, Pelosi wants socialized medicine and just trusts that it will be good. Socialism keeps being attractive; has been around the world for about 100 years. Some of the attractions are that everyone gets together, joins hands, sings Kumbayah, and sets up the central government as responsible for some aspect of their financial, material, etc. security. They assume that, with everyone joined together, the idea can't fail. So, no more rich people, no more poor people, everyone just the same and good. The sales pitch has worked off and on seriously for about 100 years. That's what Pelosi wants -- socialism. She's a true believer. Mostly people who try socialism find that it's darned expensive -- have the central government spending ballpark 50% of GDP and doing the spending as politics and, thus, inefficiently. The Thatcher remark was "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money". In the USSR the workers concluded "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.". Russia finally totally gave up and went back to a wild west show. East Germany got rid of socialism ASAP. France keeps struggling with high costs, slow economic growth, high unemployment. Switzerland? It's wealthy with a lot of healthy people. So, they have a shot at pulling off socialized medicine. The Scandinavian countries? They are big into socialism and are accepting their central government spending ballpark 50% of GDP. Also the countries are small and culturally homogeneous, and where they are not so homogeneous recently they have been encountering big problems. In the end I believe that you will discover that Obamacare is really not about health care, really is a threat to good US health care, and really was and is about politics, in particular, some of the dreams of socialism. One of the dreams of socialism is a basic income for everyone with an opportunity for more for anyone who wants to work for more. Fine with me except for one little point -- arithmetic. So far in the US, it doesn't add up. That is, productivity is not high enough. Instead, it is still the case that for the productivity the US needs to keep the cars moving and the store shelves stocked, the hospitals and schools working, the software written and the Web sites up, etc., some people have to work darned hard and with the "basic income" provided wouldn't. So, we still need the motivation of free enterprise. Hopefully with more robots we will have enough productivity to make the arithmetic work. I believe that, as health care, Obamacare gets a grade of D- for its design work, that it really is not about health care but is about politics, really a socialistic dream of Pelosi; I believe that socialism won't work yet in the US, and the Obamacare, due heavily to its bad design work, will both in the short term and especially in the longer term seriously hurt US health care. My prediction is that as people scream, Obamacare will just get repealed. For Obama, he will likely be out of office then!

by graycat 13y ago

pekk 13y ago

How is this different from every President since and including Reagan?

graycat 13y ago
It is different, very different. Obama avoids blame. He's terrific at avoiding blame. E.g., at Harvard Law, he was editor of the Law Review but didn't write anything so never got criticized for writing anything. In the Illinois Senate, he voted "present" some huge number of times and, again, avoided any blame. Reagan? He got blamed for Iran-Contra. Obama's not getting blamed for NSA, Snowden, Benghazi, Morsi, Syria, etc. Obama is uniquely good at avoiding blame. Also Obama is uniquely good at pulling together a coalition with the technique I described. Obama managed to avoid any significant role or blame for the response to hurricane Sandy. W seemed to be involved in responding to Katrina and then took everything that went wrong in the neck. I like the remark in the movie Hunt for Red October: "I'm a politician which means that I'm a liar and a cheat and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollypops. But it also means I keep my options open.". In other words, avoid taking a public position. If a president has a vision or program he feels strongly about, then he will do all he can to push it, expend his political capital, and maybe get something done. But another approach is just to step back and keep fingerprints off things that might not work. In Obama's case, it also helps, maybe has been crucial, that long the MSM was on his side.
- DoubleMalt 13y ago
  There is one point to his credit, and this seems to actually be his one and only priority: The Affordable Care Act. He realy stuck his neck out for this. And I think it is a laudable effort.
  - graycat 13y ago
    If Obamacare really is better for US health care and patients, both soon and long term, and not wildly more expensive, then fine with me. I don't know how much Obama's for Obamacare: He has made lots of supportive comments, but he also claims to want to shut down the coal plants. He's going to do next to nothing on the second, so maybe on the first he's just spouting stuff. From his remarks that the American College of Surgeons shot down, I doubt that Obama really knows enough about US health care to like Obamacare very much. For Obama "stuck his neck out", I don't see it. The bill passed due to the Dem majority in both houses of Congress and the pushing of Pelosi, Reid, and Emanuel, and from all I can tell Obama had little to do with it. Now that the bill is law, he can praise it. As Obamacare, Obama's name got attached to the bill and the effort, but that was mostly just politics by people who don't like either Obama or the bill and similar to what was done with Hillary care because it was obvious that we shouldn't trust our health care system to Hillary. And nearly no one would really want to trust their health care to anything designed or implemented by Obama. On the act itself, no doubt US health care could be improved. Just how to do that is a serious question. There is the academic health care systems analysis economic optimization planning community with Karen Davis, etc., but I've been too close to such academics and wouldn't trust them to hand me a band aid. Maybe what Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden have is better. It appears that lots of people complain about what England and Canada have. I was for improving the US health care system, but when I saw the sausage making that resulted in Obamacare, I concluded that the hard work of designing a better system had not been done. E.g., I saw that what was proposed had been taken off the shelf from some work by Senator Kennedy's health care planning staff. Kennedy was dreaming; such dreams are a good way to kill patients and waste money. My fear is that as Obamacare goes into implementation, it will seriously hurt US health care and millions of patients -- some soon, much more later. And as the IRS goes around plucking money from checking accounts, people might get torqued. Pelosi's remark "got to pass it to see what's in it" may have a point: It may be that heavily what the implementation is will be from regulations written by rows, columns, and layers of paper pushers in some big building about 70 miles from the Washington Monument. So, Obamacare will be implemented slowly. Maybe as problems become obvious and people scream, the paper pushers will modify the system. I hope so. Due to the slow implementation, there will be some time to modify the system as it is implemented. Here is some of what I suspect will happen. In the short term, people won't like the changes if only because they are changes. Then people will really not like the role of the IRS. In the long term, I suspect that a lot of the best people and companies will leave health care and, then, quality will fall. Getting the quality back will be super tough. I suspect that the flow of new, advanced, powerful biomedical products -- drugs, devices -- will greatly slow. I believe that a lot of seniors will get much worst medical care. The Palin image of "death panels" is not really wrong. US health care is a patchwork system pulled together piece by piece over nearly all the decades of modern medicine. In some ways, the system works great, likely the best in the world. In some other ways, it's not very good. So, improvements are possible. But improvements are not going to be easy, that is, without damaging a lot that is good or spending too much money. My fear of Obamacare is that it was mostly just a political football and from nothing like a serious effort to design a better system. Instead, the political part was, really, just the Kennedy dream, a dream of 'good health care as a basic right for everyone' or some such essentially socialistic notion. Pelosi? She wants more socialism from a bigger government. With Obamacare she was as happy as the lead high school cheerleader just named Homecoming Queen. The political part is that Pelosi took the old Kennedy dream and pushed it through, that is, pushed through that the US is on the way to socialized medicine. So, in the US socialized medicine is now a fact that will be difficult to change. That's what Pelosi wanted -- the principle of socialized medicine, that the Federal Government is directly responsible for the health care of everyone. Just what the details will be and how it will work, Pelosi didn't care. Instead she will let the Executive Branch iron out any winkles and have Congress modify the law in places if necessary. But what she wants is socialized medicine; she's confident it will be better. So, again, especially to Pelosi, Obamacare was politics, that is, socialized medicine, socialism, having the central government directly responsible for each person's health care, and not really about how to design a better health care system. Good, bad, or otherwise, Pelosi wants socialized medicine and just trusts that it will be good. Socialism keeps being attractive; has been around the world for about 100 years. Some of the attractions are that everyone gets together, joins hands, sings Kumbayah, and sets up the central government as responsible for some aspect of their financial, material, etc. security. They assume that, with everyone joined together, the idea can't fail. So, no more rich people, no more poor people, everyone just the same and good. The sales pitch has worked off and on seriously for about 100 years. That's what Pelosi wants -- socialism. She's a true believer. Mostly people who try socialism find that it's darned expensive -- have the central government spending ballpark 50% of GDP and doing the spending as politics and, thus, inefficiently. The Thatcher remark was "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money". In the USSR the workers concluded "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.". Russia finally totally gave up and went back to a wild west show. East Germany got rid of socialism ASAP. France keeps struggling with high costs, slow economic growth, high unemployment. Switzerland? It's wealthy with a lot of healthy people. So, they have a shot at pulling off socialized medicine. The Scandinavian countries? They are big into socialism and are accepting their central government spending ballpark 50% of GDP. Also the countries are small and culturally homogeneous, and where they are not so homogeneous recently they have been encountering big problems. In the end I believe that you will discover that Obamacare is really not about health care, really is a threat to good US health care, and really was and is about politics, in particular, some of the dreams of socialism. One of the dreams of socialism is a basic income for everyone with an opportunity for more for anyone who wants to work for more. Fine with me except for one little point -- arithmetic. So far in the US, it doesn't add up. That is, productivity is not high enough. Instead, it is still the case that for the productivity the US needs to keep the cars moving and the store shelves stocked, the hospitals and schools working, the software written and the Web sites up, etc., some people have to work darned hard and with the "basic income" provided wouldn't. So, we still need the motivation of free enterprise. Hopefully with more robots we will have enough productivity to make the arithmetic work. I believe that, as health care, Obamacare gets a grade of D- for its design work, that it really is not about health care but is about politics, really a socialistic dream of Pelosi; I believe that socialism won't work yet in the US, and the Obamacare, due heavily to its bad design work, will both in the short term and especially in the longer term seriously hurt US health care. My prediction is that as people scream, Obamacare will just get repealed. For Obama, he will likely be out of office then!