17. January 2009 by admin.

On Thursday afternoon, a US Airways jetliner encountered a flock of geese shortly after takeoff.  The geese fouled both of the plane’s engines, but the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, managed to ditch the plane in the Hudson River.  All of the passengers and crew were evacuated, with only minor injuries.

Mr. Sullenberger is a hero of the sort that we don’t hear about often enough.  It seems rare to read a story in the newspaper about someone who did something right: it’s usually the other way around.

But then, the world is filled with people who do things right.  They may not be heroes, but they keep the lights on and the trains running and the supermarket shelves filled.   It’s natural that in the normal course of events that the people who make mistakes make the headlines.

What I really worry about, though, is why the people who are in authority–the people that we should be able to count on to do things right–seem to make the biggest mistakes.

• Earlier this week, I watched part of the documentary No End in Sight about the Iraq war.  One of the ground rules of warfare is to know your enemy, but we blundered into Iraq reveling in our ignorance of the enemy, thinking that a two-week show of precision munitions would leave all of Iraq happy to go along with us.  Time after time, our plans blew up in our faces, and it was only after the surge (in 2007) that things began to move in the right direction.
• Aside from Captain Sullenberger’s heroic exploits, the rest of Friday night’s network newscast was a litany of dread: bank failures, bankruptcies, and layoffs.  Our current economic difficulties seem to be the result of astonishing lapses of judgement on the part of both our political and financial leadership.  Worse, today nobody seems to know what to do about it.

If the airline pilots and subway motormen and all the other people who build and operate our physical world were one-tenth as inept as our leadership, we would be living among piles of smoldering wreckage, having to kill rats for food.

Somebody send help….

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Life Goes On | No Comments »

15. January 2009 by admin.

It’s 15 degrees Fahrenheit (-9 C) tonight in New York City, and it’s supposed to go down to about 9 degrees overnight.  When I was a kid, every winter had three or four days like this, or even colder.  I simply assumed it was part of life.

It’s been getting colder as the week has gone on: time to accustom one’s self to wearing long johns and dressing in layers.  And once you get used to it, it isn’t bad: the cold weather is invigorating.

My work today took me to Long Island via Penn Station.  As I got off the subway, the effluvium of the pizza parlors, hot-dog places, and sandwich shops assaulted me: although some of the individual stores have changed over the years, the overall smell of the place has changed little.

It took me back to a simpler time, when one of the biggest stores in the station concourse was the Station Break arcade.  I could have gone for a couple of games of pinball if it were still around.

Those were the days….

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11. January 2009 by admin.

• Yesterday’s Daily News included a full-page ad from Macy’s, indicating that their one-day sale on Saturday would be extended to a second day on Sunday because of the ‘inclement weather.’  It snowed about two inches in the city over yesterday afternoon and evening, with probably more in the suburbs: not really what qualifies as ‘inclement.’  Considering the lead time in setting up a full-page newspaper ad, I have to believe that Macy’s was going to extend their one-day sale (which was a two-day sale to begin with, as it started Friday) to Sunday from the beginning, and was just betting that since it’s January, it must be snowing somewhere.
• Our New Fearless Leader released a report claiming that his recovery plan would create between three and four million new jobs.  Unfortunately, there’s no clear description as to just what this plan would consist of.  The same report includes a graphic indicating that the unemployment rate would top out at about 8% with the recovery plan in place, but 9.5% without it.  I’ll agree that a 9.5% unemployment rate is not good, but it’s hardly the end of the world, as everyone seems to make it out to be.
• I was watching the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man yesterday evening.  The movie is set in about 2020, in a US where, due to ‘the economic collapse of 2017,’ many Americans don’t have a pot to piss in.  Arnold is an honorable Army officer who disobeys an order, is jailed, and eventually can earn his freedom if he participates in The Running Man TV show.  Besides showing Arnold breaking things and killing people, the movie is a commentary on government and the media.  In 2020, the two have converged, and they’re both flaming liars. The really distressing part (sorry for the long setup) is that we’re now two-thirds of the way from 1987 to 2020, and television is very definitely two-thirds of the way from what it was in 1987 to the world of The Running Man.  The concept of gladiatorial combat on TV was radical in 1987; it’s a much smaller step from the state of TV today.  And there was an appetite for the details of politics back then, while today the public would rather do something–anything–than try to understand the real aspects and practical details of politics.

Posted in Life Goes On, Money, Barack Obama | No Comments »

10. January 2009 by admin.

As Our New Fearless Leader is developing his plan to spend hundreds of billions to help the economy, an op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Post suggests an alternative: substantially cut Federal taxes to ‘energize the added investments, new hiring and extra risk-taking needed to move our economy’s pace from tepid to torrid.’

I’d like to believe that this would a better approach than Obama’s efforts to remake the country in his own image.  But the short answer is, ‘Isn’t that what our current Fearless Leader was pursuing for eight years, that got us into this mess?’

Either method involves Brobdingnagian (the word ‘huge’ simply doesn’t cut it) deficits, which will have to be paid for in the long run with higher taxes and/or inflation.  Moreover, the rest of the world, which has been subsidizing our deficits for the last few years, has been reluctant to continue, as they need the money for their own problems.

More specifically:

•  Added investments: in what? Nail salons?  If someone wanted to make a large infrastructure investment, in, say, a power plant, a transmission line, a factory, or a railroad, they would face a daunting gauntlet of regulations and community opposition.  Moreover, investors today want don’t want to wait years to see their profits.  This would be especially true if the tax environment would be expected to change in the next few years.
• New hiring: only fools hire employees these days.  It’s much cheaper to hire independent contractors or outsource. While hiring someone as a contractor is better than not hiring him at all, part of our problem is that employment is perceived as impermanent: if you believe that you can lose your job at any moment, you’re going to limit your spending to the necessities.
• Extra risk-taking:  It’s entirely honorable to try, and fail, and take your own lumps.  The problem arises when people take imprudent risks, don’t recognize the initial signs of trouble, fail en masse, and then expect the government to bail them out.

The basic problem underlying our difficulties–which neither Presidential candidate addressed–is that labor is seen as a cost to be minimized, rather than a productive asset to be maintained and developed.  In the modern view of business, employees really are disposable.  And until that changes–which Obama’s plans say nothing about–the outlook will continue to be dismal for those of us who are not on the ‘rich investor’ side of the equation.

All right, what should the government do?

• Tweak taxes higher for the wealthy:  The Federal government does necessary things that cost money, and someone has to pay for it.  The government also needs to be prepared for emergencies, like war or natural disaster.
• Act to moderate the very worst effects of the downturn: This includes aid to states and localities, on a limited basis, contingent on the beneficiary exercising its own fiscal restraint.  (The New York legislature, in particular, is off on its own little planet where everything is still rosy, and they can spend to their heart’s content.)  A modest stimulus payment will also help.  One aspect of Obama’s plan that I agree with is tweaking taxes to make them more progressive (lower rates in the lower brackets, higher rates in the higher brackets).
• Tweak tax policies to encourage business:  For my business, profits are poison: about half of them go up in taxes.  When I had a really good year, I was running around in December buying things for the business, because, as I told people at the time, ‘it’s either spend it or turn it over to the government.’ I can run my business to limit profits and pay less tax, but it keeps the business weak, as it can’t amass capital.
• Otherwise, sit tight and sweat it out:   We got into this snit as a result of our collective delusions, and it will take time to recover.  If we try to maintain our delusions through deficit spending, it will take us that much longer to get over them.  We did it before, in the 1980s, when we had both inflation and unemployment: under Reagan, unemployment surged at first, but things came back into balance shortly after.

OK, I still haven’t done anything about the bean-counters who see labor as a cost to be reduced.  I don’t believe that any reasonable government can directly change people’s attitudes.

However, it will lead us away from being fat, dumb, and happy, and will hopefully make us better and more productive employees.  If the bean-counters see labor as a better value for their dollar, they might be re-awakened to the value of employees as assets.

Of course, all of this will be painful in the short term, which is why it will never happen.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Money | No Comments »

9. January 2009 by admin.

No, I know that I can’t.

And I can’t say that it would make any difference if I could: New York is not a swing state, so even if I could change my vote, and get all my friends to change their vote, it wouldn’t make any difference.

And furthermore, even if McCain had won the election, I’m not sure he would be able to do anything different.

But I found President-elect Obama to be thoroughly distressing when he discussed the economy earlier this week and told us that we would be running trillion-dollar deficits for ‘years to come.’

Yes, the economy is in bad shape: the official unemployment rate in December went up to 7.2%.  I’ve written about various aspects of our bad economy in these pages before.

But Our New Fearless Leader looks like a kid in a candy store.  It’s not just an effort to stimulate the economy: he wants to remake the country in his own image.  We’ll have solar energy and computerized medical records and better education and broadband access for all and no rainy days on weekends.

Unfortunately, the government has tried to remake the country, or some facet of it, and failed miserably.  Alternate energy is an admirable goal, but after three decades (at least) of government meddling, we still import more than half of the petroleum that we use.  The Clinton administration tried to implement a national health care system.  It failed miserably.  For my part, I couldn’t understand how it was supposed to work: something about ‘alliances’ with ‘clout’ to get the lowest prices.

And a look back to our recent events is more troubling: in September, we allocated ~$700 billion to ‘unfreeze the credit markets’ by ‘buying troubled assets.’  Since then, about half of the money has been spent: none of it went to buy troubled assets, and the credit markets are still frozen.  (I’ve stopped getting pre-approved credit card notices, so I’m sure there’s something wrong.)

So I’m not convinced that the answer to our problem whose origins are in too much debt is to take out yet more debt, and to do it RIGHT NOW.  Let’s take the time to think things through: if we’re going to spend trillions, we need to make sure that we get it right, as we won’t get another chance.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Barack Obama | No Comments »

6. January 2009 by admin.

…but nothing on!

I’m working nights this week, which leads me to try and sleep at irregular hours, and when I want to sleep, somehow I can’t.  So I turn on the tube, but I find myself bitterly disappointed.

Last year, I found myself interested in some of the reality shows that showed people doing real jobs, like Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers.  But those have mostly disappeared in recent months, with nothing appealing to replace them.

I found myself watching Crime Scene Investigation in all its flavors, but that began to pall after a while.  The writers and directors of CSI took my seventh-grade English teacher’s dictum to ’show us, not tell us’ literally, so that as someone explains how the crime might have been committed, we see the process unfolding in all its gory glory.   And I’m really not into stories that revolve around criminals.

This week I’ve hit rock bottom, in that the only thing I find semi-interesting is the History Channels ‘Armageddon Week,’ filled with pseudo-documentaries about how the world is imminently coming to an end, as predicted in the Book of Revelation or by Nostradamus or whatever, coupled with scientific explanations of how all these horrible things might occur.

If I were a kid, it would give me nightmares.

But now, it’s just tedious.

Posted in Media, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »