It's 11 o'clock, do you know where your representative is?

C-SPAN has a page that shows the number of days on the floor for each senator and representative. You can sort by name, state or attendance. How many representatives have shown up on the floor less than 3 days? Ten!!!! Some of the people listed are in other positions now, such as Clinton and Ted Kennedy. But last I checked Kirsten Gillibrand isn't one of those.

Check it out

It's the message, stupid!

I hate to just link to another blog to make a point, but this one is just too emblematic. So, this is what prompts my rant today: Jackson says EPA is losing a public relations war over climate regulations 
Subtitle: It's all Bart Simpson's Fault.
This is the problem: This admin seems to think that if only they could be more articulate (or perhaps less articulate), or better at marketing, or had a good facebook page, or if voters weren't so stupid...
Never a problem with the message itself. Never that the policy is being rejected. If the idea doesn't fly, the problem is never the idea, it just hasn't been presented effectively.
So, what part of "NO!" do they not understand? Well, all of it actually. If you say no, then obviously you have missed their point.
It's a bad idea! Actually, "bad" is a qualitative judgment that is not substantiated by the facts we have selected that fully support the policy adopted by (fill in the blank agency). It is an idea, it is our idea, and therefore it will be done regardless of public opinion. Good or bad is not relevant.
We don't want it! Clearly, you have not listened. Because if you had, you would know what is good for you. If you now what's good for you, you would agree, nay, you would be out there demonstrating for us! Or at least tweeting for us.

The web behind the teensie spider

OK, lame title. But hang with me here. This is about why the healthcare package doesn't break down into little pieces and parts so well.

Start with "No pre-existing conditions." If that is the rule, then people won't get insurance until they need it. Kind of a no-brainer. Insurance companies don't like it because it presents a risk - a really large risk - that anyone applying for health insurance is actually sick to begin with. That isn't insurance folks, that's having someone else pay your bills. Insurance is for the unexpected.

Then there is removing the caps or ceilings on how much an insurance company is going to pay for someone's health care over a lifetime.  Not that the ceilings are a problem for a lot of people, but for insurance companies, it means there is no limit to the amount they have to pay, and that is simply an incalculable risk.

If insurance companies have to insure these two risks, the premiums are going to increase like you cannot imagine. They can't just say "let's see what happens" as the government requires them to carry cash reserves sufficient to cover the people they are underwriting and to reasonably measure their risks (including their investment risks). They are audited according to government standards.

But the insurance companies are going along if (big if) a lot more people, presumably young healthy people pay monthly insurance premiums. Makes sense. If they can't control the risk coming into the pool, then they want to make the pool wider and deeper - dilute it so to speak. Forget for the moment that sooner or later those young healthy people aren't going to be young and healthy anymore.

So, in order to get rid of the pre-existing condition rule, Congress has to give insurance companies a lot more paying policy holders.

But, not everyone can afford health insurance, so some people are going to require government subsidies. There is a lot of back and forth about what sort of stick goes with what sort of carrot, but bottom line, government is going to pay a big chunk of the cost for eliminating pre-existing conditions and upper limits. It's not cheap - where will the money come from? Well, it is coming in large part from medicare. Seniors on medicare will have to pay more (premiums, copays, uncovered costs) and medicare physicians are going to lose some of their medicare revenue. And that money will go to subsidize the premiums for the new (poor) people that the insurance companies need to make the numbers work. As much as people like to demonize insurance companies, the reality is that their income from premiums must be larger than their outgo in claims. If you don't get premiums from more people, then you will have to get more premiums from the people you have.

Two things are wrong with this picture.
1) What does this have to do with reducing the cost of medical care????? What exactly are we doing to solve that problem????? Nothing.
2) Why on earth would we think it is fair to take money from seniors and from their physicians and give it to insurance companies to cover other people? This is robin hood government.

Taking away money from medicare and giving it to someone else is NOT the same as reducing medicare costs. If someone steals your wallet, they aren't reducing your monthly bills any. Which shell is the pea under here? What a joke. Except it isn't funny.

TARP and the deficit

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was designed to infuse money onto bank balance sheets, replacing the assets that fell through the bottom due to the mortgage crisis. Alternatives could have been to change the way that those assets are valued (smoke and mirrors accounting), lower the standards we hold banks to for having "cash on hand," outright buying the junk, seizing the banks (bankrupt - LOL) and probably some others, but TARP is what we did. If we didn't do anything, we still would have spent that money ($700 billion or so) and maybe more to people who lost their deposits when the banks went bust.

TARP was a very substantial outlay of taxpayer money. The idea was it would be paid back. And quite a bit of it has been paid back. Because of the way the government does their budget, they can't keep TARP funds on the books as a taxpayer asset. In other words, the budget doesn't treat the money we gave to banks as a loan. If we did, then the money coming back would be applied to the line where the money went out in the first place. And, TARP would not look like another $700 billion added to the deficit. So, what to do with the money when it comes back?

TARP is NOT the recovery act, that was another $800+ BILLION on top of TARP. We don't get the recovery act money back. It's just money down the drain so to speak.

Congress and Obama want to redirect the money to other programs (what we might call pork or earmarks or whatever, some ideas might even be reasonable). The thing is, Congress did not authorize any other expenditure with that money. That is what the recovery act was all about. And given that the deficit is freakin scary right now ($1.75 Trillion in 2010 alone), you might think it would be a program worthy of the money. What to do with TARP? Pay down the deficit, duh!!!! No act of Congress required, best as I can figure.

Instead, Obama and congress want to treat it like an unappropriated slush fund for whatever voter group is unhappy (or not so unhappy) at the moment. Unappropriated, as in no act of congress, no vote you can hold your representative accountable for, is ever taken. Is this how you want the government to think of your money??? It's YOUR money! This is a bunch of Washington politicians that want you to think like they do. "Hey look here, I just found $1.5 billion on the sidewalk that fell out of the TARP bucket on the way back from the bank. Free money, whoopie!!!"

But what if there are programs that are more important than the deficit (hard for me to imagine)? Well, I believe that Congress would have to approve it just like any other expenditure. I guess our democratic leadership figures once it is out of your pocket, you shouldn't have a say in what happens.

Let me put this in some kind of personal perspective. Obama wants to take $1.5 billion and add it to the hundreds of millions set aside to help homeowners struggling with their mortgages. Forget that they can't spend the money they already have because no one likes the terms. Let's say there are 175,000,000 people employed right now. That comes down to $857 per worker. You were supposed to be giddy about the $200 that the government sent you early last year (even though it was a loan on your income tax). But you aren't supposed to be upset about $857 you now owe, plus interest? Or put another way, whatever your personal problems might be, can you see yourself asking each one of your working friends and neighbors for $857 to help you out (they have problems too, you know)?

This is the "it's not my money" problem with having the federal government running your life. It IS your money. It is inherently unfair. People who do the right things to take care of themselves are punished and the people who do dumb things are rescued from their own stupidity.

Someone called it privatizing the profits and socializing the losses, as it applies to business, like the banks with the bogus assets on their books. When federal, state and local governments are taking a third to a half of your income, I don't think you can say any profits are being privatized.

This is a new kind of "share the wealth" concept. The government is going to take $857 out of your pocket and give it to another person (not some public asset like a road). The beneficiary hasn't been asked to pay into the program in order to get the benefit (like social security, medicare/aid or unemployment). It's just free money. It goes (back) to the bank, by the way, but hey it's money the home borrower doesn't have to pay. And what a sweet program for the banks. The government loans them money, they pay it back. Then the government gives them back the money, no strings attached. Why not? Not my money.

If people had to write a check for what they are paying in taxes, I think it would be much clearer.
It comes out of our paychecks before we even touch it.
The bank pays it as part of our mortgage.
It is just another item on your cash register receipt at the grocery store.
It is on the bill of sale at the dealer (hey, it's cheaper than a sunroof, right?).
So we don't think about it and we never add it all up. Hey, it's not like our money where you need to make a conscious decision to spend or not spend. When did you ever total all of these little invasions of your wallet over the course of a year? If you had to actually open your wallet and use your ATM, debit or cash to pay each and every one of those little tax bills, would you feel any different?

Take the idea a step further. Let's say that instead of paying those taxes, they are just going to go on a credit card. You can pay a little each month. The balance on the credit card will keep going up, but your payments will increase by a smaller amount. The monthly payment isn't so painful. Or maybe it is, but the alternative, sell everything and pay off the credit card is more painful. Sooner or later, that monthly payment is going to be painful. Right now, your balance, whether you are working or not, is $40,000. Who do you think is going to pay that bill? Money from heaven? In 20 years it will be more like $100,000. And eventually, your credit is going to get cut off and you will not only have the monthly bill, but you will need to pay cash for those little tax bills you are happy ignoring today. That is the national debt. One huge balance on a credit card that will soak up all of your money just to pay the interest. Monthly bill? Try about $700 for at least 10 years. Yup, interest does that to you - doubles the payment, doubles the pain.

So... which would you prefer, a substantial payment against your credit card bill, or maybe just give it to the guy next door who signed an ARM mortgage thinking he was going to flip the house and make a cool $500K? I know my answer.

Drowning in Debt, what it means to you.

In case you still thought climate change was about science

This discussion on how science has been co-opted for a political agenda (an agenda that may have little concern with climate change), is enlightening and depressing at the same time.


Buy the Truth


Harmonic Oscillator

WUWT

I found a few more interesting links:
Skepticblog
Yale forum Note I believe they failed to make their point. First, the missing stations had more lower points on the graph than not, although it followed the same path. Second, it doesn't matter that the path is similar, what matters is the result, which isn't measured on this graph at all. The result being the line that included both sets compared with these independent lines. Third, and this is addressed by the author in the comments, there aren't enough reporting stations to offer much statistical certainty.

TED This does a good job of getting to the irrelevance of the whole debate

The resilient earth Wow, real science stuff

Trackforum This discussion goes on for 8 pages. There is a lot of data here. For a long rainy weekend.

Jerome Ravitz who is a philosopher of science (and some people think the father of the problem, not the solution). I think he lays out the credibility issue and its consequences very well.

On the irrelevance of the climate change debate

This is something of a thought experiment. There is a life analogy that says if you hold on to something so tightly you can't let go, you will not be able to grasp the next marvelous thing that comes along. Hold things loosely lest you lose out. In other words, don't let your dogma run over your karma either.

If, for a moment, the AGW proponents allowed that climate change is NOT a result of human activity and not changeable through any adjustment in human activity... Just take the human component out of the equation and consider the situation as it is.

And if the skeptics allowed that with or without an anthropogenic component, climate --or weather-- change is negatively impacting developing nations for a variety of reasons... (Simply because the populations are living much closer to the edge of starvation and disease with little resource to do anything about it.)

Then what is the rest of the world's obligation to offer assistance? Whether by confiscation or charity, some wealth will need to change hands in order to improve the lives of millions above an unreliable subsistence level. We offer such generosity in times of other natural disasters such as the earthquakes and tsunamis in Southeast Asia and Haiti. Are not some of the outcomes of climate/weather change the same, they just take longer to materialize? Tsunami/sea level rise/floods; destruction of economic means by earthquake, desert, drought or deforestation. What I am suggesting is that whether by natural disaster, natural cycles or even anthropogenic causes/poor choices (like building a city below sea level),
some people at various times will be facing likely devastation or destruction.

Energy Myths versus Reality

This article by a guest writer is very thought-provoking. Here are the 5 myths Tom Tanton explains.
Myth: Foreign Oil Provides Most of Our Energy
(You probably knew that, but read why, because you may be surprised at all the reasons.)
Myth: Renewables Will Replace Conventional Energy Sources
(He doesn't mention biofuels which is another part of this myth.) Myth: The U.S. Is a Disproportionately Large Polluter
(You may find these statistics amazing.)
Myth: Energy Efficiency Cuts Energy Use
(This is basically due to affordability, and I have written about the "oil bubble" previously.)
Myth: Increased Oil Production Can’t Be “Green”

So there you go, some really interesting information from someone who looks pretty credentialed to me. At least he isn't a railroad engineer.