(if I were the) King of the Forest

On 25 Feb 2009 the Boston Globe published a commentary by Alicia Munnell, a professor at Boston College, which explained why she thought that Social Security was not in trouble. As it happens, the same week Joe Conason’s column at Salon addressed pretty much the same topic and with the same general conclusion.

This week Salon published a pre-emptive strike by Michael Lind intended to minimize the impact of a dismal report by the Trustees of the Social Security Administration on the state of Social Security and Medicad by arguing that the Trustees got it wrong — that Social Security is fundamentally sound.

Once again I find myself amazed at the level of myopia the subject of Social Security elicits. And so once again I find myself trying to find a way to make people see what I see. I know, this is getting repetitive. But it’s important!

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Last spring my friend Ira Goldman, inventor of the KneeDefender™ and other interesting gadgets (I wrote about the KneeDefender™ here) wrote me a note about a personal quandary, a momentary “crisis of conservatism” brought on by some particularly noxious behavior on the part of people exercising their “free market” right to gull the innocent:

I’ve been hearing radio ads by Quicken for mortgages “that let you cut your payments”, or some such. It seems that they are not even interest-only loans — they must be negative-amortization loans. “A normal $300,000 mortgage at 7% costs you [let’s say] $2,000 per month, but at Quicken Loan that same mortgage costs only $435 per month. That means you’ll have more than $1500 extra each month in cash to spend any way you want! …” I’ve not even heard the radio equivalent of the small-print disclaimer.

Should I feel political guilt for thinking this is wrong?

I think these loans should be illegal. OR, so regulated that in a 30 second ad it would take 25 seconds to provide required disclaimers.


The subtext was, of course, “As a conservative and a believer in the free market I should accept this as unfortunate but legitimate. It is the market being the market and the price we pay for freedom and prosperity. And yet my conscience tells me, against the judgment of my reason, that the government should intervene!”

This, in two parts, was my answer to him and to this type of problem generally.

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8 October 2008

I have a home construction project looming in my future, and I decided that would be a good opportunity to upgrade my environmental footprint (and reduce my energy bills) by adding a solar electrical generation system to the mix. So I did some research on what it would cost me and what I could expect to gain from it. My summary: we aren’t there yet. Read the rest of this entry »

About a month before the election a small news story appeared about Bruce Springsteen performing a minor concert at a Barack Obama campaign rally. That brought to mind an earlier report of Barbara Streisand doing something similar and the big news from the primary season of Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement and appearance at an Obama event.

Those stories, and many less significant but similar instances of celebrities campaigning for various candidates, made me muse about the value of celebrity endorsements and how they should play into our paranoia about money and influence in political campaigns. It seemed (and seems) to me that celebrity endorsements are no less valuable when given for free to political campaigns than they would be if some company had to pay for them as part of their advertising strategy. The same is true of celebrities plying their trades on behalf of campaigns: they replace money a campaign would otherwise need to spend on publicity, yet they are not valued as money under the campaign finance rules.

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This is my question for the Presidential candidates in the upcoming debate.

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Back in August the editorial board of The Boston Globe published a diatribe about the stupidity of anyone who couldn’t see how wonderful the world would be if only we would reduce the speed limit back to 55 miles per hour.

OK, that wasn’t really what the editorial said. It was only implied. But their sanctimony annoyed me enough to prompt this response.

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In mid May Jeff Jacoby used his column in The Boston Globe (McCain’s Supreme Wrongheadedness) to criticize John McCain’s notion of the ideal Supreme Court justice as one who deferred to the legislative authority — and reminded us that enforcing the Enumerated Powers of the Constitution on both the Legislative and Executive branches of government is precisely what the Court was designed to do.

Alas, in making that legitimate (and essential) point he inadvertently gave succor to those who believe the court should go much further and in the opposite direction by nullifying the enumerated powers entirely, by supplanting legislative judgment with judical judgment whenever and wherever a court deems a legislature insufficiently enlightened and vigorous in pursuit of some social or political goal.

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In her New York Times column on 4 May 2008 (This Bud’s For You) Maureen Dowd wondered “Why does Obama, the one with the bumpy background and mixed racial heritage, the one raised by a single mother who was on food stamps, seem so forced when he mingles with the common folk?” This was my answer to her.

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In May of 2008 Edward Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe (Budgeting based on results) in which he advocated some simple rules that would make budgeting in government more effective. The thrust of his article was that results of government programs should be measured to judge their effectiveness; that budgets should be cut from year to year rather than maintained (or increased) automatically unless the results are clearly positive; and that new spending proposals should be evaluated not on whether they seem worthwhile on their face but on whether they are more worthwhile than other uses of the resources they would consume.

I felt that he had missed something in his analysis.

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Here is my take on Barack Obama and the Reverend Wright: most people and especially Obama partisans, have missed the point.

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