Planet Utah

This isn't much of a trick, either

When Republicans were in power, I used to marvel that Democrats never said the following when the GOP would tout tax cuts: "It's not much of a trick to to cut taxes and run up massive deficits. Anyone can do that. Show us you can cut taxes and balance the budget, and then we'll be impressed." And that would indeed be impressive, because Americans seem to want a lot more government than they want to pay for.

Well, along comes Barack Obama. He promises 95 percent of Americans a tax cut, and massive new spending on health care, education, and climate change/alternative energy initiatives. Into this barrel of sugar water, the president drops a spoonful of medicine in the form of a tax increase on corporations and the wealthiest five percent of Americans. The net result is unprecedented deficits and levels of debt. But because the American public doesn't seem to vote with deficits/debt in mind, and because 95 percent of them are going to see their taxes cut, and because there will be visible, tangible increases in federal spending on goods and services, President Obama is likely to enjoy a significant political windfall--barring a longer-than-expected downturn in the economy.

Being a good politician, the president will make sure that voters don't forget what he's done for them: "We cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, and made vital investments in this, and that, and that other thing..." All of that will be true, but it won't be much of a trick, either. The trick would be to do those things while also making real progress on the long-term deficit and debt situation. President Obama lacks either the skill, the will, or both to pull that rabbit out of his hat.

Please support Southwest Airlines

I do a fair amount of traveling for business and pleasure, and I almost always fly Southwest. Because I rarely fly anyone else, I'm not sure how Southwest's fares compare. I can tell you, though, that I almost never look up a Southwest flight and say, "Wow, that's going to cost more than I thought." Even when it does cost more than I thought, though, it's worth it. Why? Here are a few of the customer-friendly services Southwest provides:

• You can check into your flight and get your boarding pass online. This means that if you don't have luggage to check, you never have to stand in line at the airport (other than the security line). Plus, enough people do NOT check in online that it's virtually always possible to get a sufficiently high number that you can sit wherever you'd like (window, aisle, or middle), rather than wherever the airline tells you to sit.

• If you miss your flight for whatever reason, you basically get a travel credit equal to the amount of the cost of the ticket for the flight you missed. It's not like the old days when you lost your money if you missed your flight.

• If you want to change a flight, you can do so at any time without paying a change fee. I do this ALL the time. If the change you make puts you on a flight that costs more than the original flight you had booked, you have to pay the difference. But if the change you make puts you on a flight that costs less, your account is credited with the difference. How great is that?

I mention all of this because Southwest's commitment to customer convenience is rare, and I would like to see it rewarded. So, if you have the choice between Southwest and some other airline, I hope you will choose Southwest.

What's wrong with a single, massive health care market?

I know very little about health care policy, so what I'm going to suggest probably falls into the category of already been tried, hopelessly naive, clearly unworkable, downright stupid, or some combination. Well, tough noogies--I'm throwing it out there anyway.

When it comes to health care, Democrats want universal coverage more than anything else. Republicans want...well, I'm not sure what they want, but I know they tend to support individual choice and market-based incentives, and they worry about government control of health care ultimately compromising the quality of care. If you want to appeal to both sides, then, how about this as a five-point plan:

1. Abolish all existing government-run health care programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP.

2. Enact a universal health insurance requirement (that is, a requirement that everyone have a health insurance policy).

3. Require insurers to offer a variety of individual health care policy options at varying prices, all having at least some minimum/standardized set of benefits.


4. Allow individuals to choose from among the different policy options and different prices, just as they do now for, say, car insurance.


5. Subsidize the purchase of a policy for those with limited means.

I realize that there are hundreds of unanswered questions here. The main one, I think, would be how to control costs. When individuals are responsible for purchasing their own insurance policies (as opposed to simply enrolling in a program funded by government or an employer), they will quickly begin crying about costs. And with government on the hook for billions of dollars in individual policy subsidies, policymakers, too, will be acutely aware of the price tag for all of this.

The reflexive response will be for the federal government to say to insurers, "If you want to participate in this program, you can only charge X dollars per policy." Insurers will then say in turn, "If we can only charge X dollars, we can't afford to be in business." As a next step, then, government will turn to individual providers (doctors, nurses, hospitals, long-term care centers, etc.) and say, "If you want to receive reimbursements from insurers participating in this program, you can only charge X dollars for this procedure/service." Then health care providers will say, "If we can only charge X dollars for that procedure/service, we can't afford to provide it all, or if we do provide it, the quality will be much lower than it is now." Then government will turn to the drug companies and manufacturers of medical equipment, and they'll respond the same way.

I honestly don't know if there's a way past this sticking point on costs. My guess is that there is, but that it won't sit very well with politicians or the public. I'm talking about a tiered health care system in which the more money you have, the better quality care you have access to. Everyone would have access to some minimum level of benefits and services through their individual policy, but if you were willing and able to pay more for a higher level and quality of care, you could.

If this isn't something we can tolerate as the price of universal coverage, then a single-payer system may be our only option.

When philosopher-kings rule

During the presidential campaign, when I made comments about Barack Obama's lack of experience, I generally heard one or more of the following responses: a) what about Sarah Palin?! (my response to that: what about John Edwards?); b) he couldn't be any worse than Bush (author's note: that was actually my response); c) he may not have experience, but at least he's smart; and d) he may not have experience, but at least he'll appoint smart people.

There was an implicit assumption in my comments about Obama's experience: namely, that lots of experience is good, and that inexperience is bad. This, I believe, is true, but it is a ceteris paribus truth. That is, if two candidates are equally matched in terms of qualities other than experience, I prefer the one with more experience. But people with lots of experience can certainly make bad decisions (see, for example, Donald Rumsfeld and Joe Biden).

There was also an implicit assumption in the "smart people" arguments: namely, that the smarter you are, the better president you are likely to be. For those who buy into that point of view, I think Obama and his crew fit the ideal of who should be running the country: smart, well educated, thoughtful, analytical. In other words, best and brightest sorts--more technocratic than ideological.

If you've read my blog over the years, you know that I don't put a whole lot of faith in intellectual firepower as a predictor of presidential success. But now we've got almost a pure natural experiment on this issue: can a very bright, very well educated, very thoughtful person succeed as president when his chief assets are not experience or a coherent governing philosophy/ideology, but instead are his intelligence, his education, and his thoughtfulness?

Discuss among yourselves.

Footnote: You want my answer, right? Here it is: Politically, yes, he can succeed. By that I mean that he can be reelected, he can be well-liked, he can sustain generally high approval ratings, etc. In policy terms, though, I'm very skeptical that he can succeed. In other words, I strongly doubt that a president in the very smart but inexperienced and non-ideological mold can succeed in successfully addressing the country's primary problems through the federal government, or in persuading people that the federal government is not the appropriate vehicle through which to address those problems.

Two political notes

First note: does anyone else think it's weird that Timothy Geithner published the outlines of his bank plan in the Wall Street Journal under the title, "My Plan for Bad Bank Assets"? I mean, I'm sure he came up with the plan, but shouldn't it be described as the Obama administration's plan? Back during the Bush years, I don't remember Donald Rumsfeld talking about "my Iraq plan"...

Second note: the Congressional Budget Office has now estimated that budget deficits during a first and possible second Obama administration will be just as bad as those under President Reagan (in GDP terms), and worse than those under George W. Bush. Given the Democrats' (including Obama) criticism of Reagan and Bush budget deficits--not to mention their faith in the CBO as an honest broker in discussions of the economy and the budget--this leaves them in a difficult position.

Actually, if they're serious about fiscal responsibility, then their position isn't difficult at all. This is what they need to say, and do: "If the CBO numbers turn out to be correct, we'll either have to raise taxes or cut spending to keep the deficit within acceptable levels."

Will President Obama and his allies in Congress say that? More important, will they do it? I hope so, but I think not.

Is all of this technology worth it?

One of my favorite Web sites is Lifehacker. It's the ultimate "get organized, make life easier, get things done" site. Much of the content has to do with technology, and much of the technology is designed along these lines: "Use this gizmo or that software package to simplify and streamline your life."

That sounds great in theory, but lately I've found myself losing HUGE chunks of time to technology set-up and maintenance. I'll give you a few quick examples, though I could probably give you dozens.

I recently took a trip to Florida. When I returned home, I found that my wireless router had stopped working. Six hours of concentrated effort later, everything was up and running again. That's SIX HOURS, people.

While on my trip, I decided to call my brother. When I went to look up his name in the address book on my phone, though, it wasn't there. Something had gone haywire with the nifty system I had set up to keep my Outlook, my Google account, and my Blackberry synchronized. That system took me about five hours to research and set up, and another hour today to repair.

Final example: last week I accidentally sat on the remote for my cool new HDTV. All of a sudden, closed captioning appeared on my screen. I got rid of it after about 15 minutes of screwing around, but not without returning everything on the TV to the factory settings. That means that all of the THX calibration I had done, the naming of various components, the sound adjustments, the channel selections...all of that was gone.

Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking, "Well, maybe if you weren't such a nimrod..." (And some of you may also be thinking, "Why don't you just pay someone to do this stuff?" Answer: I'm generous when it comes to others, but cheap when it comes to me.) Nimrod or not, I think it's inevitable that unless you've got a sheepskin from DeVry, you're going to lose hours and hours and hours to: a) technology set-up; and b) the inevitable breakdowns (whether due to operator error, metal-eating weevils, or both).

It makes me wonder if perhaps Thoreau and the Unabomber were onto something.

The solution is solutions

Over the past week or so, I read the same idea in a few different places. The idea was this: if the GOP wants to reverse its political fortunes, it needs to start coming up with realistic solutions to the country's problems.

That might seem an obvious thing to say, but a lot of Republican and conservative commentators don't find it that obvious. Instead, they're looking at ways of carving up different voting constituencies, of picking off states the GOP lost in 2008, etc. In that respect, I think they're like the proverbial generals fighting the last war. Thinking about "going upscale" vs. "going downscale," or how to win an additional five percent of the black vote, or whether the word "socialism" tests well in focus groups strikes me as waaaaaay too small-minded. The country is facing a number of severe problems and is looking to government for help. Conservatives (like me) may not like that, but the times are what they are. It doesn't make sense to pretend that this is the late 1970s, that the American public has just experienced a decade of failed liberal activism, that it is distrustful of government, that it is in a conservative mood, and that Ronald Reagan is tan, rested, and ready. None of that is true. Accordingly, Republicans and conservatives need to start offering a governing agenda that consists of better answers to our problems than what the Democrats have produced.

That shouldn't be hard.

Footnote: Tap a random Republican senator or representative on the knee, and he or she will grunt, "tax cuts." Yeah, we had a good run with tax cuts, but we pretty much won that battle. (When Democrats run on "tax cuts for 95 percent of working families," you know it's game over.) Time to find the next silver bullet. Jack Kemp, you got any ideas?

If you're gonna bet, bet big

Tonight I was talking to a former Wall Street energy trader who seemed to have a good feel for the subprime crisis. I asked him how so many ostensibly smart people could have made such big bets on mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, despite the inherent risk. (I say "despite the inherent risk" because there were lots of signs in the first half of the decade that we were creating a housing bubble, not just a healthy, vigorous housing market.) He said, "Well, there's a rule on Wall Street. If you're going to place a really risky bet, you better bet big. If the bet pays off, you'll be considered a genius, and you'll make an obscene amount of money. If the bet doesn't pay off, the consequences will be so dire for so many people, somebody will find a way to pull your chestnuts out of the fire--if only to save their own skin."

I guess Ann Coulter doesn't think we're stupid after all

I think about Ann Coulter the same way I think about Rush Limbaugh. First, not very often. Second, primarily as a "media personality" rather than a serious political thinker, and therefore not someone worth getting upset about.

If you know a few things about Rush Limbaugh, you probably know that he's overweight, that he's conservative, that he's got a hugely successful talk radio show, and that Democrats are currently trying to argue that he's the leader of the Republican Party (which is so ridiculous as not even to require refutation). If you know a few things about Ann Coulter, you probably know that she's blond, that she's famous for saying inflammatory things, and that she often refers to President Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama."

During the campaign, when people started calling Coulter on her use of Obama's middle name, she would say something along these lines: "Yeah, and I say 'Franklin Delano Roosevelt,' too. So what?" Or she would say, "That's how his name is listed on his official bio. If you've got a problem with that, talk to him."

These were pretty lame explanations. I mean, everybody calls FDR "Franklin Delano Roosevelt," but Coulter's one of only a few people who say "Barack Hussein Obama." Plus, you can find various bios that list Ronald Reagan's name as "Ronald Wilson Reagan," but Coulter doesn't routinely refer to him that way.

Anyhoo, I just saw this recent quote from Ms. Coulter, which, whatever else you may think of it, at least seems to be honest (for a change): “Doesn’t the middle name ‘Hussein’ in a Democrat reinforce the impression of the Democrats being soft on Islamic terrorism?”

Footnote: There are those who would say that this new explanation still isn't honest. They would say that by using Obama's middle name, Coulter is trying to create an impression of strangeness, of "otherness"; trying to make people think that Obama is not one of us; and possibly even trying to keep alive those Internet rumors that Obama is secretly a Muslim. Is she above all of that? Hell no. But then, neither are Democrats. You may remember them referring to Dan Quayle as "J. Danforth Quayle," as in this Dukakis ad (I don't think the sound works, but there's a button you can click to read the transcript), or more recently, to Bobby Jindal as "Piyush 'Bobby' Jindal." (You can see an example here, courtesy of the Louisiana Democratic Party. It's worth noting that Jindal has gone by the nickname "Bobby" since he was four years old.)

First my battery died, then I solved all of the GOP's problems

About a month ago, my battery decided that it had had enough of Phoenix and Austin summers. When it went dead, the power to my car's electrical system was completely lost. When I got a new battery and started my car, my stereo prompted me to input some sort of anti-theft code. I screwed around with it sufficiently that it eventually locked me out entirely. Now I have no car stereo. That means that when I drive around, there's really nothing for me to do but: a) drive, and b) think. In the course of doing the latter, I solved all of the GOP's current problems...or at least I made them much easier to solve. Watch now, as I reveal the whole thing in the space of one short paragraph.

The GOP needs an agenda. Republicans on the national level will never support a tax increase, and they should support a balanced budget, so they know how much money they have available to support their agenda--however much money the government brings in every year. They also know that part of that money has to go to national defense and debt service. They can use whatever is left to fund the rest of their agenda. How do they figure out what the rest of their agenda is? The same way they figured out the first two items (national defense and debt service): by asking what things are absolutely critical for the health and survival of the country, and what things can only be done properly at the federal level. Once they identify the items in the overlapping areas of those two circles, they can say, "These things get first dibs on our revenues. If we have money left over after paying for them, we can talk about some other stuff. If we don't have enough money to pay for the things that get first dibs, then either: a) we'll have to scale back our ambitions for some of them; or b) we'll have to raise taxes." If individual Republicans find it more distasteful to raise taxes than to scale back their ambitions on their mission-critical issues, then that's a choice they can make. Presumably, that's the choice that an overwhelming majority would make (would make, that is, if they were genuinely committed to a balanced budget; if they were not committed to a balanced budget, they'd just keep borrowing money).

So, that was the explanatory paragraph. Let me give you a highly simplified example. Let's say that we've got $100 in federal revenues. Republicans say, "Okay, that's what we have to spend. To service our debt and to fund our national defense to the level that we think is appropriate, we'll have to spend $30. That leaves $70 to pay for everything else. So, what are the other critical things that the federal government needs to do, and that only the federal government can do properly? Probably: 1) make sure that everybody has health care, through either public or private sources; 2) make sure that every kid and every adult has access to an education that will allow him or her to be self-sufficient; 3) make sure that old people are taken care of through either public or private sources; 4) seal our southern border; and 5) start paying down our national debt. All of that will cost $60. That leaves $10 to fund the operations of government, put away for a rainy day, etc."

Okay, now a few points. Whatever agenda the GOP comes up with (which will almost certainly not be the one I came up with as an example), someone will say, "But what about THIS? You haven't allocated any money to it." A good "this" from my example would be basic welfare programs for the poor--cash assistance, food assistance, wage subsidies, child care and transportation subsidies, etc. I haven't set aside money for any of that. But the leverage in this exercise comes from two things: 1) you know you want to balance the budget; and 2) you start building your agenda based on the amount of money you have, not on all of the perceived needs out there. That way, whenever someone says, "But what about X?", you can say, "We don't have enough money for X. So, if you want X, either we're going to have to raise taxes in order to keep the budget balanced, or we're going to have to get rid of Y. As Republicans, though, we're not prepared to raise taxes, and we think Y is more important than X. If you disagree with us, you can vote for the Democrats."

See what I'm getting at? It's a world of nearly infinite problems, but of finite resources. If the GOP wants to balance the budget, then they've got a much smaller pot of money to play with than they've been playing with for the last 30 years or so. That pot of money can only fund a handful of the most important large-scale federal undertakings. That makes the job of constructing a Republican policy agenda pretty easy.

So, Republicans, pick your handful of issues, make the case for those issues being the top three or four or five out there, present your center-right solutions to them, tell people that these issue solutions are necessities that have to be paid for before we can start paying for luxuries, and tell people who want more than your handful of solutions that what they're saying, in effect, is that they want to raise taxes or continue borrowing from future generations, neither of which the GOP is prepared to support. And if you lose following this approach, you lose--that means either that you picked the wrong issues, politically speaking, which is something that can be remedied, or that the public doesn't support a basically conservative federal policy agenda, so there's not much point in there being a national Republican party anyway.