27. January 2010 by admin.

The Obama administration indicated yesterday that the President would call for a three-year freeze on discretionary spending as part of the State of the Union address tonight.  It’s official: he’s now just another politician, and not even a very good one.

Every President in modern memory, except one, has jumped up and down and insisted that the deficit be reduced.  (The only exception was Clinton: we were flush with the Peace Dividend and actually ran surpluses.)  And every President who jumped up and down about deficit reduction never actually accomplished it.

The freeze in discretionary spending affects less than $500 billion of a $3.5 trillion budget.  (Can’t anyone divide?  The press is reporting that the freeze affects 17% of the budget, but when I went to school, 500/3500 = 1/7 = about 14%!)  Of course, the sacred cows of defense and entitlements are off the table.  Projected savings from this measure in the first year are estimated to be $10 to $15 billion, or less than 0.5 %.  It’s like saying that I’ll balance my family budget by giving up magazines, books, and movies.

On the other hand, deficit spending (whether actual spending increases or tax cuts) is the government’s most useful tool for dealing with a bad economy.  The spending has to be chosen wisely, which didn’t happen with last year’s stimulus package (in which the Democratic Congress ran around like kids in a candy store).  Bad deficit spending is worse than flushing the money down the toilet, because the recipients of the money will have reason to expect more in the future. But good deficit spending (say, investments in infrastructure) can be genuinely useful.

More than I’m disappointed by the substance of the move, I’m disappointed that our President seems to be displaying no leadership at all.  He’s getting the buzz that people are worried about the deficits, so he’s serving up some old blather to suggest that people shouldn’t worry.

I wish President Obama would:

• Pick a direction.  For all that I railed against President Bush, he at least did this part right.  If Obama wants to temper his decisions to make them more acceptable to the opposition, it should be done before taking the plans to the public.  Setting forth a big plan, and then conceding later, looks wishy-washy.
• Articulate a clear vision of what he’s trying to do, going beyond the sound bites and addressing reasonable concerns from the other side.
• Do NOT then throw the issue over the fence and let Congress hash out the details.  Architects don’t draw up plans and then say, “OK, my work is finished, it’s now the contractor’s job.”  They generally have a role in managing the construction project, keeping things on track, and fixing glitches that pop up.

Obama also disappointed me with his remark that he’d ‘rather be a really good one-term President, than a mediocre two-term President.’  The only way you can get to be a mediocre two-term President is to get re-elected, and for that you have to be a good one-term President.

Looking back, when was the last mediocre two-term President?  Not Clinton: he presided over peace and prosperity, as well as bringing us the ongoing drama of the impeachment that wasn’t.  Not Reagan: he helped end the Cold War.  Not Nixon: he didn’t serve two full terms, and he resigned in disgrace: definitely not mediocre.  Not Johnson: he brought us civil rights and Big Government: the latter was perhaps not a good thing, but still not mediocre.  (Johnson also didn’t serve two full terms.)  Maybe Eisenhower, but that was before I was born, so I can’t really say.

But I’ll grant the possibility that someone might get re-elected to the Presidency, then go to sleep, and end up a mediocre two-term President.  Unfortunately, the only sure methods of being a great one-term President without running the risk of being a mediocre two-term President are to either (1) refuse to run for re-election or (2) die in office.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Money, Barack Obama | No Comments »

26. January 2010 by admin.

Seen in the subway station near my office:

1. If someone were running advertising extolling the virtue of being smart, we would think it a form of government mind control.  But extolling stupidity is cool.
2. As you go about your life, with food in the stores and power at the socket, consider all the people who make that happen.  Would you prefer that they be smart or stupid?
3. For my part, I think ’stupid’ (in the uncool sense) is spending over $150 for a pair of jeans.  But that’s just me.

Posted in Advertising | No Comments »

18. January 2010 by admin.

Sunday’s New York Post brought the story that Governor Paterson was seen in a New Jersey restaurant, being affectionate with a woman not his wife.  The governor asserted that it was a business meeting, but it didn’t appear that way to a reasonable observer.

I’m disappointed.  Not because the reporter didn’t get to the bottom of the governor’s relationship with the woman, nor because it’s yet another example of the stupidfication of the news.  Shortly after Governor Paterson replaced the previous governor, he reported, as a pre-emptive strike to the gossip columnists, that he had had affairs in the past, but the past was past, and he was now having a happy, or at least functional, marriage.  And now that seems in doubt.

But why should I care?

After all, if the governor cheats on his wife, she is the only real victim of the event, and it’s her decision as to how to handle it.  It really doesn’t affect the rest of us.

Well, maybe.

I expect my leaders to have integrity and a sense of personal honor.  Now I can’t follow the governor around and watch him make all his governmental decisions.  And even if I could, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to observe his actions and determine that he had handled every situation honorably.

But I can observe how he handles what is, for many of us, a deep personal commitment.  If he behaves honorably with respect to his marriage, I’m more willing to believe that he will handle his executive responsibilities with honor.  It’s not foolproof, of course, but it’s a useful indication.

But then again, he works in Albany.  What should I expect?

Posted in New York State, Navel-gazing | No Comments »

7. January 2010 by admin.

A few years ago, I was preparing training for electrical technicians.  I had written some multiple-choice test questions, and when I delivered the training, some of the trainees did not do well on the test, despite responding well in class.  On discussing the issue with the training staff, it turned out that even fairly short questions (two or three lines) were so hard for the trainees to digest that they could not respond correctly… even though they knew the answer.

Purveyors of the printed word have fallen on hard times, and the most successful newspapers seem to be the throwaways, mostly filled with advertising, that one picks up before one’s morning commute.  But now people listen to their iPods, or just sit there.

The latest computer gizmo, coming out this year, will be the ’slate:’ a non-folding laptop computer with a touch screen and no keyboard.   Since we don’t need a keyboard any more to maintain the computer (which has been true for a while now), if you don’t actually need to write anything, what good is the keyboard at all?  (You can pop up a virtual keyboard for the occasional Web address or credit card number.)

I write this blog mostly to vent, and to help me clarify things in my own mind.  I’m not sure if anyone reads it; what I understand about how people view the Web suggests that they probably don’t.  As a practical matter, I don’t really care.

But I worry about my son.  He finished college, but is casting about to find a job without success.   Although he studied something else in school, he’s a writer.  The market for writers has come crashing down like everything else.  But beyond that, what will happen in the future when we decide we don’t need the written word anymore?

Last week, I watched Fahrenheit 451 on the tube.  The film posits a world where the written word has been outlawed.  Not only do firemen go on runs to burn books, but there is no written advertising, no product names on packages, no safety advisories on public transit vehicles… nothing.

“Your file is incomplete, Montag,” his supervisor tells him, in the movie.  “We need twelve back views you your head, but we have only six.”

But I suppose that will never happen: people still write text messages and Twitter each other.

Posted in Language, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »

4. January 2010 by admin.

When I went into business for myself a few years ago, I expected that, at first, the business would not earn enough to cover my living expenses, and I’d have to go into debt.  And that, indeed, is what happened.  But I got past that, and now I earn a pretty good living, and I’m making progress at paying off the debt.

So I was taken aback when I got a missive from my bank today that they were refusing to renew my Visa card.  OK; it’s not quite as bad as that: they lowered its credit limit to just over the current balance,  so that I can’t make any substantial purchases.  They also didn’t send me a new card when the old one expired at the end of the year.

It isn’t an emergency: in the last few months, I’ve actually started saving money again, so I don’t need the card for current expenses.  But not having it is an inconvenience, and if something should happen that wipes out my savings, I’m screwed.

15 months ago, when we were worried that the economy was about to go off the rails, we were told that the problem was that the banks had become illiquid and couldn’t lend.   And we turned over billions upon billions of dollars in bailouts so the banks wouldn’t go kablooie.

And now everything’s rosy again, and the banks have mostly returned their bailout money, and now they cut me off, after I paid my bills faithfully every month for years.

Oh yes, we’re recovering, all right….

Posted in Money | No Comments »

1. January 2010 by admin.

“Why would you want to be in a relationship?” my son asked me.  “You can’t do what you want.”

I considered his remarks as I went out with my wife this afternoon to the Museum of Modern Art.  Left to my own devices, I’m not much of a museum-goer; when I was living alone in the early 1990s, and I had a free weekend, I would go to see a movie and prowl the bookstores for a couple of hours.

But if all doors stood open, and I had the choice of doing what I wanted to do by myself or going to the museum with my wife, which would I choose?

It isn’t even close.

Things go much better with a  companion.

Posted in Navel-gazing, Life Goes On | No Comments »