Withdrawal symptoms

People with serious additions to alcohol or some drugs face a difficult period when they quit - withdrawal symptoms include chills, fevers, delusions, pain and all sorts of other unpleasant effects. Nations addicted to debt face similar problems, as we can already see in places like Greece.

We as a nation need to cut the federal budget by about half. Set aside the problem that our politicians can't bring themselves to make the hard decisions.  When someone finally makes the decision, or is finally forced by the bond markets to make the decisions, the question will be how to manage the withdrawal effects.  Millions of people are on the federal payroll, either directly or as contractors and suppliers.  How do we ease them off the addiction to federal funds without bankrupting thousands of companies and putting million more on the unemployment rolls?

If we had enough time, we could make this a relatively soft landing by simply ceasing to hire more federal employees, slowly reducing the volume of contracts, and letting natural attrition and retirements prune the workforce.  Unfortunate, the longer we wait to face the problem, the less time there is to manage a soft landing.

Politicians, and we the voters who elect them, ought to pay attention to this problem, because it is a big one.

Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Amidst all the fuss and political theater surrounding these last minute negotiations to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff", let's keep things in perspective by remembering that whatever deal (if any) is reached at the 11th hour, it amounts to no more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it goes down.

First, nothing being proposed in the way of spending cuts or tax increases makes more than an insignificant dent in the truly massive $1 trillion+ per year federal deficit.  To even stop the debt from growing (let alone pay any of it back) we need to cut spending and/or raise taxes by something like a TRILLION dollars a year. Neither party shows any signs of tackling the real problems.  The Republicans, to their credit, at least talk about it, though when in power they didn't do anything about it.  The Democrats won't even acknowledge that the problem exists - a sort of fiscal climate-change denial.

Second, the whole point of the fiscal cliff legislation in the first place was to force Congress and the administration to finally come to grips with the deficit problem.  If they couldn't hammer out an agreement (and they couldn't) then these "automatic" cuts and tax increases would occur anyway. Now they propose to nullify the automatic cuts and tax increases as well.  So the result is, that after four years in office, the Obama administration will have done absolutely NOTHING to deal with the debt and deficit, and many things to make it worse.

 And we, stupid voters that we apparently are, just voted almost all of these people back into office despite their ineffectiveness.

The real crisis, not much discussed in the sensationalist press, is not the impending "fiscal cliff" in the next few days, but the fact that our government is still borrowing the nation into bankruptcy at the rate of about $1,000,000,000,000+ (a million million dollars+) a year and there appears to be no political motivation in either party to deal realistically and effectively with the problem.

Highly recommended: Antifragile

Nassim Taleb’s last book The Black Swan, carried forward his analysis begun in his first book Fooled by Randomness. The essence of his argument in these first two books is that most statisticians and those who use their products and models, like economists, corporate planners, policy makers and Wall Street "quants", don’t really understand the nature of random events. In particular, they have no way of accurately predicting rare, unanticipated and unexpected events (those way out on the tails of a normal distribution), and so typically discount them, or ignore them entirely in their predictions and models. The result is that they generally fail to anticipate the most severe dislocations and crises – the “Black Swans” –  that show up from time to time to disrupt the economy, the environment, and civilizations.

Taleb’s latest book, Antifragile, carries this argument to its conclusion by asserting that in fact one cannot predict many things in life (despite the pompous assertions of those who make a living by pretending to), and so the most durable systems are those that are designed not only to react to unexpected events, but to thrive on them and improve because of them – the evolution of living things being a prime example of such a system.  If one looks at most aspects of our current wonderful, complex, highly integrated and interdependent civilization from this point of view, we are setting ourselves up for disastrous crises. The very policies we pursue from the best of motives to maintain stability are in fact setting us up for eventual (and unexpected) massive instability. This is not a new idea - engineers have known for a long time that reducing the variability in a feedback system leads to instability -- variability is information, and if one reduces it one also reduces the information needed to keep the system stable.  But Taleb expands this idea, profitably, to whole new domains.

This book reads like a trip through the Lebanese souks of Taleb’s childhood – wandering from one exotic subject to another but always tied to the central theme, with the odor of Taleb’s disdain for those who profess to predict the future permeating everything. There are profound and important ideas in this book.  Many will read this book, some will understand it, but I would guess few if any will heed its warnings or apply its principles in time.

More’s the pity.

Recommended: Misery is Humanitarians’ Gift to Aleppo

Walter Russell Mead, over on the American Interest website, has a sobering article:  Misery is Humanitarian's Gift to Aleppo. It is simply another example of the old saying that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions". We Americans talk a lot about improving the world and bringing help and democracy to others, but when push comes to shove we too often make promises we can't keep, or worse yet, promises we don't keep, raising hopes (and sometimes even revolutions) and then dashing them.  Syria is a classic current example.

Worth thinking about.

More on gun laws

Two intereting articles in the past few days about the gun law issue:

In an article by William Bennett, CNN, Dec. 20, 2012: Case for Gun Rights is Stronger than you Think, Bennett makes the case that the evidence doesn't really show that banning guns increases safety. As he points out, most of the recent shooter incidents have occurred in places where guns were already banned, so the victims were unarmed even though the shooter wasn't. The 2007 shooting at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs was halted because an off-duty policeman happened to have his weapon with him and shot the intruder before he could cause any more damage. Would Newton have been different if the principle, who lunged at the shooter at the beginning (and was shot dead) had been armed instead?  Perhaps.

In The Atlantic Steven Hill and Robert Richie have an interesting article Why America Can't Pass Gun Control in which they explain why, as a matter of political calculation, it is hard to get effective gun control.  It all hinges on a small number of mostly rural House districts that are key for both Republicans and Democrats in controlling the House. These districts are solidly pro-gun-rights, so doing the "right thing" on gun control might also involve losing control of the House.  It shows that this gun control issue is not nearly as simple as it seems on the surface.

Blog comments

Many blogs allow readers to post comments. It is sometimes instructive to read the comments.  It tells you a great deal about the American public.

I just read a posting on Mark Mardell’s blog entitled “Obama Chooses Gun Control Fight”. It is a good, thoughtful piece.  Then I read a selection of the 381 comments posted to date, which are mostly childish, petulant, ill-informed rants, many going off on rants on other subjects completely.   Many of the comments are snide replies to earlier comments. It reads like what I would expect from a group of ill-educated  5^th grade boys (and the spelling and grammar is about at the same level, too).

Now granted that comment posters are a self-selected group (I almost never post comments), and probably not representative  of the population at large. Still, it is dismaying to see so much shallow thinking, so many knee-jerk ideological reactions, and such childish behavior. 

Truth to tell, much of the social media interchanges seem to be of this quality as well.  It reminds one once again of H.L. Mencken’s comment “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Committing political suicide all over again?

As if Republicans hadn't already committed political suicide once in the election that just passed, with their religiously-based social agendas and their denial of global warming, just to pick two issues on which they held unpopular positions, now they seem poised to do it all over again on gun control.

The president's initial proposal, to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines (things only needed on the battlefield, or by drug gangs, or for a shooter intent on a massacre), and require registration and background checks for all firearms sales (after all, we require car drivers to register), is a fairly moderate one. It doesn't threaten hunting weapons, and it doesn't threaten handgun ownership. Of course the NRA is absolutely against it, and will pull out all the stops to prevent ANY new restrictions.

But the real question is whether Republican politicians will accede to these reasonable and moderate restrictions, or whether they are so deep in the NRA's pockets that they will once again alienate independent voters by sticking to an indefensible ideological position, bought and paid for by a powerful lobbing group. If they do, they will continue to marginalize their party, which in the long run is not a good thing for the nation.

Gun control

The school massacre in Newtown, Conn., has (finally) reopened the gun control debate. Why previous similar events haven't already changed gun control laws is beyond my understanding, but perhaps this one will finally start a sensible debate on the topic. Then again, perhaps we will once again forget about it in week or two until the next one.

It is a hard issue. For one thing, controlling guns is not likely to really make much impact on these lone shooter events. A suicidally-inclined mentally ill person still has plenty of other ways of produce havoc in a crowded place -- bombs, gas, etc, etc.  But it would make it at least a little bit harder.

For another thing, the NRA is correct in at least one saying - "outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns". Criminal gangs, especially the violent drug gangs, will have no trouble getting guns illegally, since the world is awash in such weapons, and gun legislation isn't likely to make much difference there.

Though I am not a hunter myself, I can respect the rights of those who do want to hunt.  I don't think it is reasonable to eliminate legitimate hunting weapons from the market, though it is perfectly reasonable to (a) register them all, (b) to require comprehensive background checks of anyone purchasing them, and (c) to make owners financially and criminally liable if they don't keep them adequately locked up and out of the hands of children or others not authorized to use them.

All too often these lone shooters get their weapons from their parents or other adults who don't keep their weapons adequately locked away. What about making them criminally liable if it can be shown that their inadequacy protected weapons were stolen or borrowed and used in a crime?

I see no reason at all why any civilian ought to be allowed to own working assault rifles, any more than they ought to be allowed to own machine guns, bazookas, hand grenades, or tanks. These are not hunting weapons; they are built for only one purpose, to kill people on the battlefield.  Collectors might be allowed to own replicas or samples that have been thoroughly deactivated and made useless as weapons (and not easily returned to working order), but that is all.

 Handguns for personal protection will be a hard issue.  It is not clear if a population carrying handguns is safer because criminals never know if their victims or bystanders are armed, or less safe because armed people losing their temper in arguments can lead to gunfights.

This will be a difficult debate, but at least we ought to finally have it

The essential liberal problem

Stand back and take the long view and one realizes that liberals have in fact already achieved most of their dreams. With Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment insurance, student loan programs, food stamps, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health) regulations, and myriad other federal programs, liberals have, since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, managed to put in place most of the social protection programs they wanted.

The central liberal problem is that, having put them in place, we have discovered that we can't pay for all of them.  We are short by about a trillion dollars a year. We have papered over the problem for the past decade or so by borrowing extravagantly from the world, and more recently by simply printing money (sorry, the current euphemism for printing money is "quantitative easing"), but anyone can see this can't go on indefinitely.

So liberals face an unpleasant choice - either raise taxes substantially (like doubling them), or cut benefits substantially (like halving them).

Europeans, who got to the liberal dream faster and more completely, are of course now in dire straits financially. Hence the endless Euro zone crises.  But they face the same problem.  All the liberal social programs cost a lot of money, and the only place to get that money is from taxes, and if one raises taxes high enough, businesses and entrepreneurs quite naturally begin to leave and go somewhere else with lower taxes, thereby making the problem progressively worse.  Europe's long history of lower productivity and entrepreneurial stagnation shows what happens when one makes the business climate unfriendly enough.

That is not to say the conservatives are in any better shape, as they wander in their self-created right-wing religious wilderness.  But it is to say that liberals, having gotten what they wish for, now have to figure out how to pay for it.

Jobs and the entitlement mentality

After writing the preceding piece about the impending Michigan right to work law I was reading some of the liberal commentaries on this battle, and President Obama’s speech yesterday on the issue, in which he characterized the new law as the “right to work for less” law.  It occurred to me that all of this fuss has embedded in it an unrealistic entitlement attitude.

There is much talk about how companies should pay workers a “living wage”, and about how the government should “create jobs”.  This is simply a departure from the real world.

Companies exist for one reason only, to make money for their owners and/or shareholders.  That is their primary obligation.  If they fail to make money, they go out of business in the “creative destruction” process of capitalism, and are replaced by better-run competitors who do make money.

In this context, an employee of a company is only worth hiring if their activity makes the company more money than the employee costs in direct (wages) and indirect (pensions, management cost, facilities cost, etc) expenses.  That is why minimum wage legislation, however well-intentioned, often simply puts people out of work – some people simply are not worth the minimum wage (ie –even at minimum wage  they cost more than they make for the company), so they aren’t hired, or their job is outsourced or automated or simply eliminated as unnecessary.

In fact in a free society no company, government or individual “owes” anyone else a job, or a particular wage level.   Instead it is incumbent on each member of the society to acquire skills that are in demand in the labor market.   If one wants higher wages, one needs to acquire skills that are more in demand and therefor command a higher wage in the labor market.  If an individual feels they aren’t being paid enough, then it is incumbent on them to upgrade their own skills in order to command a higher wage level in the labor market. It is no one else’s responsibility (despite some liberal arguments) to make them more employable at a higher wage – the responsibility is their own and their own alone.

This of course means some people would need to stop spending the weekend watching reality shows or football games and go back to school if they want to be more employable or make more money.  And lots of young people would have to stay in school rather than drop out, or take night jobs to work through post high school classes or training. . They don’t have to do that, of course, because this is a free society. But if they choose not to do that, then they have to live with the consequences of their own choices, which often means lower wages, or even unemployment.

Capitalism seems like a harsh system, and it is. Nature is harsh. But this very harshness is what drives innovation and progress. We have already lived through a generation seduced by the socialist dream of a benign system in which government “takes care” of everyone.  And we have seen (unless we simply refuse to see the evidence) how dismally such systems fail and stagnate and morph into autocracies or kleptocracies or dictatorships because the incentives are all wrong. In such systems, as the old Soviet joke goes, "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".

If liberals were really concerned about improving worker's wages and making more people employable, they would get active on the side of improving our educational system, specifically the K-12 part of the system, instead of defending the obstructionist teacher's unions who are impeding progress in this area.

The Michigan right-to-work law

Much attention is being paid in the news today to the impending passage of Michigan's new "right to work" law, making it the 24th state to enact right to work legislation.. Unions are of course fighting it tooth and nail, as is the Democratic party, since union dues provide hundreds of million in campaign funds to Democratic candidates. Nevertheless, Michigan voters in this last election soundly defeated a union-sponsored proposition to embed union power in the state's constitution, so the public is clearly behind this move.  And so it should be, since states that have enacted right to work laws have seen immediate inflows of companies and jobs (from union states).

In truth, "right to work" laws are not anti-union, though of course unions describe them that way. They simply say that no worker can be forced or required to join a union in order to get a job, nor can unions automatically deduct union membership fees from a worker's pay.  In our free society one would think that would be an obvious right anyway. It is interesting that in states that enact right to work laws, a very large number of union members promptly stop paying their union dues, reasoning no doubt that the union doesn't give them enough benefit to justify the dues.

But in fact unions were always a bad idea, even at their inception.  Certainly something was needed in the early days to oppose the coercive power of big businesses and defend the basic rights of workers, but the union wasn't the right answer, though I have to admit that right off the top of my head I don't know what would have been the right answer. But certainly companies in which workers are part owners and/or shareholders get the incentive structure in the right direction.

There are three fundamental problems with the union idea:

1) Unions are, in fact, labor cartels, and have the same problems that any cartel has in a free market.  They distort prices. We prohibit corporate cartels for just that reason -- colluding to raise prices above what a free market would support distorts the market and raises prices to the consumer.  Unions do exactly the same thing, colluding among workers to raise wages above what they would be in a free market.  The increased prices of goods imposed by unions are, in fact, just a hidden tax on consumers.

2) The incentives are all wrong. The incentive for union leaders is to maintain their high-paying jobs, not to keep their worker's companies healthy and competitive. So they are always negotiating for higher pay, more benefits, more jobs and fewer layoffs for any reason.  That leads to "featherbedding" jobs (unnecessary jobs, as when the railroad unions forced railroads to keep a brakeman on each train, even after trains stopped carrying cabooses or needing brakeman.). I had a friend years ago who was a sheet rock hanger.  He joined a union job in Washington DC, and hung 120+ sheets the first day.  At the end of the first day, the union foreman came by and told him that union members never hung more than 88 sheets per day, and if he continued to exceed that, "something bad" might happen to him.  That artificial union limit of course raised the cost of construction.

The recent baker's union debacle with the Hostess company revealed that unions required different products from the very same factory to be delivered in different trucks, and that truck drivers were not allowed to unload their own truck; another union member had to do it. All of these abuses make companies less competitive, and in the end drove many companies, and even entire business segments (like domestic steel production), into extinction as more competitive foreign companies took their business.

Perhaps the most obvious current example of how the incentives are all wrong is in many of the teacher's unions across the country, which are resisting tooth and nail educational innovations that would benefit students, just because it might cost some teachers (especially senior but ineffective teachers) their jobs.  The teacher's unions talk a lot about their students, but their actions make it plain that educating students better matters a whole lot less than preserving union teacher jobs.  Clearly the incentives are wrong here.

3) The vast amount of dues money collected from members, with little or no member oversight on how it was spent, quickly attracted all sorts of abuse. The mobs quickly realized the potential, and took over many unions to plunder the funds and use the threat of strikes to extort money from businesses.  Union bosses awarded themselves extravagant salaries and lived in luxury. Some raided the pension funds. Union dues were, and still are, used as a powerful political weapon at the discretion not of the members but of the union leadership elite.  All in all it is an arrangement just begging for abuse.

So in the end it is probably inevitable, especially in this new era of austerity and global competition, that union membership and union power will continue to decline precipitously.  No doubt the fight will go on noisily, with lots of political posturing from Democratic politicians (Obama was doing just that yesterday), but the end is probably inevitable.

Quote of the week

"What is plaguing us in the United States is not the two-party system, but being stuck with the same two parties. Parties don't have organic built-in expiration dates."

Nassim Taleb, in his new book Antifragile

Go for it!

Actually, the more I think about it the more I think the best thing for the nation in the long run would be a failure of the "fiscal cliff" negotiations.  It would allow all taxes to increase (which we need), and it would impose modest cuts on spending, including military spending (which we need).  Of course all sorts of special interests will scream that the sky is falling, that little babies will die, that the nation will go back into recession, that we will lose our dominance in the world, etc etc.  But if one ignores the self-serving predictions of doom, it would actually begin to reduce the deficit a little, which neither party seems willing to do any other way.

If all the terms of the "fiscal cliff" (the the Budget Control Act of 2011) were to go into effect, it would cut next year's federal deficit, as a percentage of GDP, about in half. It would increase federal revenue by a bit over 25%, though it would cut federal spending by only a fraction of 1%. That is a significant improvement, though still not enough to eliminate the annual deficit.

Needless to say this is certainly not the ideal way to reduce our deficit.  A better deal would increase taxes less, and cut far more of the federal spending.  A better balance would be in the range of $2-$3 in cuts for every $1 in revenue increase.  But at least it is A way, and there is no evidence that either Democrats or Republicans are going to do it any other way.

Impasse

The real impasse in the current fiscal cliff negotiations can't really be blamed on either the president or the Republicans in Congress. The real culprits here are the extreme wings of both parties. House speaker Boehner is under tremendous pressure from the right not to raise any taxes.  President Obama is under tremendous pressure from the left not to cut a penny from entitlements.  Since realistically it will take both tax increases and entitlement cuts to make any difference at all in the current fiscal problem, this resistance from both extremes makes these negotiations almost impossible.

I would guess that the president is prepared to go over the fiscal cliff rather than drop his demand to raise taxes on the wealthy, even though, as I have pointed out before, taxing the wealthy more makes almost no difference to the problem. But he campaigned on this as a populist position, and seems determined to go through with it even though it is only a cosmetic change.

He would be unwise to do that, though, because he faces yet another fight in a few months when we once again reach the federal debt limit and he has to ask Congress to raise it again.  If he proves too intransigent in these talks, and leaves the Republicans embittered enough as a result, the Republicans may well decide they have nothing to lose letting the country default on the federal debt in response.

A reasonable deal would let all taxes, including middle-class taxes, increase significantly and would make significant cuts in both entitlements and military spending.  But it would phase these changes in slowly, over several years, so as to limit the drag on the slowly-recovering economy.  That would require both sides to compromise. But it's not likely to happen. 

Getting real

As we watch the orchestrated daily drama from both Democrats and Republicans on the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, with each side maneuvering to blame the other side for the stalled talks, let's not forget the real facts:

 As a number of writers have been reminding us, the real American problem is that we as voters seem to want big government services with small government taxes. Can't be done. There is no free lunch. So far we have (unwisely) let the Washington politicians buy our votes with borrowed money, but it isn't rocket science to see that can't go on forever.

Currently we are running a federal budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion per year, or about $10 trillion over 10 years. Now the highest number I have seen proposed as cuts thus far from either side is about $4 trillion over 10 years, and about half of those proposed cuts are smoke and mirrors (not real cuts, just accounting tricks). By contrast, what it would take to really eliminate the deficit -- not even paying back the $16 trillion we already owe, just stopping it from growing more -- is something on the order of $10 trillion in real cuts (not accounting tricks) over 10 years. Neither side has proposals anywhere near that figure.

Democrats of course would like to solve the problem by raising taxes. We can do that. Roughly double everyone's (personal and corporate) taxes and we would be in the right neighborhood. Would the American voter stand for having her/his taxes doubled? I doubt it.

If we had a deal such as was proposed in the Simpson-Bowles proposal, with about $2 in cuts for every $1 increase in taxes, we would need about $6.6 trillion in real cuts over the next ten years, and all our taxes would go up about 50%.   I don't see anything near that being proposed either by either party.

President Obama would like us to have a system like the Europeans have - generous pensions, free health care for everyone, federal help (and regulation) in all phases of our lives, cradle-to-grave government care. It sounds great until one looks at the fiscal mess Europe is currently in because of these policies. Somehow that doesn't seem to deter the liberals who are arguing for the European model. I guess evidence doesn't count with them.

It's too bad the Republican party has gone off the deep end with their religious right. We badly need some sound fiscally conservative politicians to help steer us away from the real fiscal cliff looming over the next few years as the real entitlement problems begin to arrive -- fiscal cliffs that make the current fiscal cliff look like a molehill.

The ObamaCare issue

Many liberals probably think that President Obama’s re-election assures once and for all that ObamaCare will be implemented. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only does the bill remain very unpopular (three-fifths of Americans disapprove of it in current polls), but some of the unwieldy and sneaky provisions written into the massive bill in its hasty preparation are already coming apart.

First, although the Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate was constitutional (but as a tax, not as a power granted under the interstate commerce clause), it also ruled that the federal government could not force states to expand Medicare, nor penalize them if they chose not to.  Many states, perhaps eventually a majority, are using that ruling to refuse to expand Medicare, since it increases the state’s Medicare costs, requiring more taxes.  Since many states are already having trouble funding their existing Medicare obligations, they are quite wisely not about to make the problem worse if they can avoid it.

Now the problem for the administration is this – hospitals, insurance companies and health care providers were counting on the subsidies and added business from this Medicare expansion to offset some of the cuts they agreed to, and some of the new features of the law, like the pre-existing condition clause.  Suddenly this offset is no longer there, and you can bet these lobbies will be back to their Congressmen to change the law to fix this somehow.

Second, ObamaCare expects the states to create health insurance exchanges (but of course without sending the states any money to fund this activity).  Contrary to the bill’s expectations, some 30 of the states have already refused to create such exchanges. Since they don’t have to (the same Supreme Court ruling reaffirmed the principle that Congress cannot command states to run a federal program), most are not going to take on the financial burden of staffing and running a federal program they don’t think they need.  The law requires the federal government to create such an exchange if the states don’t, but didn’t provide any funds for the federal government to do that either.

Now the administration’s problem with this is that these state exchanges were a sneaky way to embed and hide some $800 billion in subsidies and tax credits so that they wouldn’t count against ObamaCare’s total cost.  But suddenly this mechanism isn’t available, so the increased costs are now clearly visible. More than that, the employer penalties for not offering employees adequate insurance were tied to these state exchanges. No state exchange – no employer tax penalties. You can bet companies will soon start to move from any state with a state exchange to neighboring states without the exchanges. 

So this battle is far from over, and in the end it probably won’t be Republican opposition that sinks most of the bill, but the simple unworkability and fiscal unsustainability of it.  The math never did make sense – one cannot insure millions more people without it costing a lot more money, however hard one tries to hide the cost. One cannot expand the Medicare rolls by millions of people without it costing a lot more money, which has to come from somewhere.

Union Madness

The tale of the Hostess Baking Co. bankruptcy is a classic example of what has gone wrong with unions. Originally formed to address a very real problem - outrageous exploitation of workers by large companies, unions have long since become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. All across the country, teacher's unions are obstructing educational reform, and public service unions are driving many cities and states into bankruptcy, and unions have long since driven whole industries, like the domestic steel industry, into extinction. But the madness of the baker's union in this case is simply hard to fathom.

It is true that the company upper management voted itself huge pay and bonus raises last year, probably because they could see the handwriting on the wall for the company and wanted to cash out while they still could.  And it is also true that the market was changing and some of Hostess's products were not as popular as they once were.  But if the Baker's union had agreed to the rather modest cuts that the bankruptcy judge had proposed, at least they would still have jobs.  Instead they are all out of work, and they have put another 12,000 other people out of work as well.

Nor is this the first time the Baker's Union has done this.  Several years ago, the union led its members out on another poorly-conceived strike and drove biscotti-maker Stella D’Oro to close their Bronx facility permanently.

What could the union leadership have been thinking?  And why did the union membership let their leaders get them into this situation?  It boggles the mind!  Certainly it is clear that the union leadership's agenda didn't include keeping their members employed.   And by the way, does the Baker's union leadership also lose their jobs -- I don't think so.

Recommended: Shock the Casbah

Since I have just recommended Adam Garfinkle's ongoing series on our own national troubles, I might as well also recommend his thoughtful article on the current Israel-Palestinian mini-war: Shock the Casbah.

The Israelis really are in an impossible position. If Canada or Mexico were lobbing rockets into adjoining US states, you can bet there would be an immediate and overwhelming military response from us.  Any US administration that did anything less would be turned out of office in days, if not lynched in the streets. Yet there continue to be a vocal minority in the world who somehow sees all this as Israel's fault, with an emotional reaction to every civilian death on the Palestinian side but apparently little or no empathy for the Israeli side of the problem.  Some of this, I suppose, is endemic anti-Semitism, which is still very much alive in the world.

In truth, the successive Israeli governments haven't always made the best tactical choices, just as our own government hasn't always done the smartest thing. But they really do face an impossible situation - an enemy embedded geographically in their midst who has sworn to eradicate them from the face of the earth, and is quite willing to kill civilians and children, and even their own people, to achieve this end.  By now the Palestinians have reached the "Northern Ireland" phase, where they have a large cadre of thugs who have fought so long that they know no other life and want nothing more than to keep fighting forever.  It is pretty hard to negotiate any sort of meaningful truce, let alone a permanent peace, with such people.

Recommended: What’s Wrong, and How to Fix It

Adan Garfinkle, writing in The National Interest's blog, is in the process of producing a profoundly interesting series examining the nation's current dysfunction and problems, and proposing a way to think about correcting them. Thus far he has written four parts (which you can read as Part 1, What's Wrong and How to Fix It, Part 2, Political & Institutional, Part 3, Corruption and Plutocracy, and Part 4, Television and Politics).

These are not easy pieces, with glib, simplistic solutions. Our national dysfunction is not simple; it is very complex, rooted in fundamental changes in our culture.  If I were to try to summarize it in a short statement, I would note that democracy, as a form of government, can only work if the culture of the citizens emphasizes duty as much as rights, and we as a nation seem to have lost much of the sense of duty and exalted too much the concept of rights. The last person I can recall stating this balance correctly was President Kennedy: "Ask not what your nation can do for you; ask what you can do for your nation".

In any case, I strongly recommend reading these pieces and thinking about them.  No one, of course, has all the answers, but Garfinkle seems to me to have many good points.

What hasn't changed

Well, we are past the election (Finally, thank goodness!) and basically nothing has changed. We still have the same president, the same administration, and roughly the same Congress, all of them arguing about the same issues. The president wants $1.6 trillion in new revenue over the next decade (meaning new taxes), while the Republican's would like to see at least a token reduction in spending, but not a penny of cuts to the military budget..

But the elephant in the room that still hasn't changed and everyone is still ignoring is the $1+ trillion a year deficit that the federal government is adding to the national debt. Nothing either side is offering makes more than a token dent in that deficit, nor has either side gotten real about the unsustainable future Medicare obligations that are driving us toward a much bigger fiscal cliff than the current one.

Recommended: The GOP has lost its way. Here’s how it can return to its roots.

Here is another thoughtful piece worth reading, from Craig Shirley at The Washington Post:  The GOP has lost its way. Here’s how it can return to its roots. For example:

The Republican Party has more cultural conflicts than the Habsburg Empire. .......

There is no greater example of the contradictions within the national GOP than its position on same-sex marriage. This summer, Republicans put a plank in their convention platform calling for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Meanwhile, Obama said that while he favors gay marriage, it is up to each state to decide what to do about the issue. It is not a federal matter, in the president’s view.

Obama now apparently holds the more correct conservative position on the marriage issue. If the opposition party’s leader understands federalism better than the GOP does, is it any surprise that the Republican Party finds itself adrift, asking, “What do we do now?”

There are lots of other points in this article worth thinking about.

Recommended: The Party of Work

David Brooks, as much a sociologist as a journalist, has once again written an insightful piece, The Party Of Work, in the New York Times. He discusses our Puritan heritage as it evolved into a Southern and a Western vision of hardy independence and individualism that was for many years the bedrock appeal of the Republican party.  This vision is inherently suspicious of government, seeing it as intrusive and potentially sapping initiative.

As Brooks points out (and as the analysis of the polls in this least election bear out), an increasing proportion of the country are immigrants from other cultures who indeed believe in hard work (often far more than those who have been here for more generations, shades of the "Tiger Moms"), but who have a different view of government and don't view it with suspicion.

Republicans apparently need to do far more than just drop their nutty religious and patriotic extremism, their short-sighted immigration views, and their anti-science biases.  They need to fundamentally rethink the bedrock appeal of the Republican party if they are to reshape the party to appeal to these immigrants.

This is a good article, worth pondering.

Some people just don't get it...

Sure enough, the Tea Party thinks Romney wasn't extreme enough, even though his support grew late in the campaign as he moved to more moderate positions (but too late to help him). Excerpts from a article by Erik Wasson posted today on the website The Hill:

Conservative leaders on Wednesday lashed out at Mitt Romney, saying his attempts to paint himself as a moderate and hide his principles cost him the presidency. They vowed to wage a war to put the Tea Party in charge of the Republican Party by the time it nominates its next presidential candidate.

“The battle to take over the Republican Party begins today and the failed Republican leadership should resign,” said Richard Viguerie, a top activist and chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.

 Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots said Romney failed to make the kind of strong case for conservatism that would have won the election.

 She described Romney as a “weak, moderate candidate hand-picked by the country club elite Republican establishment.”

Well, natural selection works in politics just like it does in nature. If the Tea Party people are too dumb, or too blinded by their ideology, to understand the change in the country's demographics and the implication of that change for their party, then they will go the way of the Dodo bird......

Recommended: The Elections, Gridlock and Foreign Policy

I recommend George Friedman's post in the STRATFOR site, The Elections, Gridlock and Foreign Policy.

Several sections seemed especially interesting, including:

...... The United States cannot be the global policeman or the global social worker. The United States is responsible for pursuing its own interests at the lowest possible cost. If withdrawal is impossible, avoiding conflicts that do not involve fundamental American interests is a necessity because garrison states -- nations constantly in a state of war -- have trouble holding on to power. Knowing when to go to war is an art, the heart of which is knowing when not to go to war.

One of the hardest things for a young empire to master is the principle that, for the most part, there is nothing to be done. That is the phase in which the United States finds itself at the moment. It is coming to terms not so much with the limits of power as the nature of power. Great power derives from the understanding of the difference between those things that matter and those that don't, and from a ruthless indifference to those that don't. It is a hard thing to learn, but history is teaching it to the United States.

"Excepts from The Elections, Gridlock and Foreign Policy are republished with permission of Stratfor."

A prescription for the Republican Party

Now that the Republicans have once again been shown that their current right-wing religious extremism can’t win national elections, even against a vulnerable opponent, what prescription would a political doctor prescribe for them to cure the problem?  Here is my prescription:

• Drop the contentious religiously-motivated social issues like abortion and gay rights entirely. Believe what you will, and practice what you believe, but stop trying to force your own beliefs on the rest of the country.  An increasing majority of the country doesn’t agree with you, so continuing to push these issues is just alienating the voters you need.  If you can’t compromise on these issues, then at least keep quiet about them.

• Drop your inflexible opposition to tax increases. There is no way out of our current deficit situation without raising taxes.  Instead push for spending cuts to go along with any tax increases, and try to get as high a ratio of cuts to tax increases as possible, at least $2 in cuts for every $1 in tax increases and more if possible.

•  Learn to compromise again. Republicans used to know how to compromise; how to work across the aisle.  That is the only way democratic politics works. Give a little to get a little.  Be willing to settle for half a loaf rather than nothing. This no-compromise absolutist stand the party has adopted in recent years is just hurting all our futures, and the party’s future in particular, and gaining you almost none of the things you really want.

• Get real about immigration.  America needs immigrants. It is immigrants that are helping us avoid the demographic aging that is decimating other countries.  It is bright, innovative immigrants that are fueling the innovation and entrepreneurship that makes America the dominant economy in the world.  It is just plain dumb to let the world’s best and brightest get their higher education in American universities, and then force them to leave the country. Besides, your stand is alienating the Latino and Asian vote, which is becoming an ever larger share of the population.

•  Get real about climate change. It is by now obvious to most people that the climate is changing. Continuing to deny it just makes you look ignorant and stupid. There are reasonable disagreements about just how much humans are contributing to this change, and about what the most effective response would be, but to continue to deny the problem even exists is counterproductive.

•  Get real about reducing the federal deficit and debt. People are worried about this. Republicans are supposed to be the fiscally conservative and fiscally responsible party, and you talk about it lot on the campaign trail, but in fact the last time you held the presidency you made the problem worse, not better. You are losing credibility on this issue, when it should be one of your strongest positions.

•  Pay attention to demographics. You can’t win national elections with just older white working class male voters and the issues they care about. The demographics of the nation – age, ethnicity, educational level – are changing, and you need to adjust your positions on issues to account for that. You can only win national office if you adequately represent the issues and position of the majority of the nation.

And I strongly suggest you take this prescription right away. Otherwise your condition will continue to deteriorate and might even be fatal by the time the next presidential election comes around.

The election II

Well, President Obama won re-election, more or less as expected and as the polls predicted. No doubt there will be months of analysis and Monday-morning quarterbacking and self-examination among the Republicans, but here is what I take away from the election on the morning after:

• President Obama was highly vulnerable, given the unpopularity of Obamacare and the lackluster economic recovery.  The fact that the Republicans couldn't unseat him despite these handicaps tells us that the Republicans played a very, very weak hand in this game.

• If the original, moderate Romney had run, he might well have won.  The fact that he had to shift so far to the right to win the Republican primaries and keep the Tea Party and religious right base probably doomed his campaign right from the start and lost him much of the independent vote that might otherwise have helped him win.

• What Republicans ought to take away from this (but probably won't) is that this is a moderate country, and extreme political positions, left or right, simply can't garner enough votes to win. There simply aren't enough evangelical Christians and Tea Party stalwarts and white working class men to make a winning coalition out of that combination.  They need to move the party back toward the political center and attract more independents, women, Latinos and Asians or they will soon become irrelevant.

Will the Republicans be smart enough to see this?  I don't know.  If they are smart enough to see this, can they reshape their party in the face of extreme right ideologues and committed Evangelicals? I doubt it.

The "fiscal cliff"

Whoever wins today, the first crisis they will face is the looming "fiscal cliff", in which the Bush tax cuts expire and the "automatic sequesters" occur. If these were both to actually occur at the first of the year, the immediate shock to the economy might well push us back into recession.

But it is worth recalling how we got here.The Budget Control Act of 2011 was supposed to take steps to cut the budget deficit over the next decade by establishing the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. Their goal was actually quite modest - $1.5 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years, not enough really to make much of a dent in the problem since we are currently running annual deficits of more than $1 trillion a year. Still, it would at least have been a start.

To make sure the committee accomplished it's goal, the law established an automatic "sequester" or series of cuts to come into play if the committee didn't come to agreement.  This was supposed to be enough incentive to assure an agreement was reached -- surely Congress would prefer to select where to cut than to have automatic across-the-board cuts applied indiscriminately. But in fact the committee never could come to agreement, even on the modest goals proposed, so the "sequester" is about to come into play at the first of the year.

Probably what will happen is that Congress will find some way to avoid the "sequester" cuts.  That reduces the risk to the economy, but it means in effect that absolutely nothing at all came out of the Budget Control Act of 2011, and no effective steps at all have been taken over the past four years to reduce the deficit or the debt. The whole thing will have been a political farce.The committee didn't agree to any cuts, and Congress then voided the very incentive that was supposed to make the committee come to agreement. (though, of course, one could argue they might as well void it, since the threat didn't work anyway).

With respect to the Bush tax cuts, the Republicans would like them all extended, while President Obama would like to extend them only for incomes below $250,000 (how he decided that number divided "the rich" from the rest of us is unclear). That division displays clearly the ideological blindness of both parties -- Republicans are blindly against raising any taxes no matter what, while Democrats are oblivious to both the realities of small business (many are chapter S companies, taxed as individuals, and hence caught by the $250,000 divide) and the realities of new business investment (new investment money comes from those who have it - mostly those with high incomes).

In the end no doubt Congress will find some way of avoiding the fiscal cliff, though probably only at the very, very last moment possible, and quite possibly by simply postponing the fight a few months. That will leave us back exactly where were were before -- running an unsustainable federal deficit every year with no plan whatsoever to solve the problem.

Recommended: None of the Above

Francis Fukuyama and Walter Russell Mead have a fascinating dialog in the November/December issue of The National Interest: None of the Above. They discuss the broader picture of the current election; what is happening in the country and how does it compare to other epochs in our history.

Both see American society going through a major transition, from what might be called the "post-industrial" age to what might be called "the early information age", and to be the first society to make that transition, so that it is not surprising that we really don't know how to do it right yet.  Both think this election will not solve any of the major problems, or even make much change in the status quo.

It is an article well worth reading and thinking about.

My ideal presidential candidate

Having just complained about the choices on offer in this presidential election, perhaps I ought to suggest what I would like to have seen on offer.  My “perfect” candidate would have:

1.       Offered a plan for progressively reducing the federal deficit and debt over the next decade or so, probably by a mix of higher taxes and reduced government spending along the lines suggested by the Simpson-Bowles commission (which Obama chartered, but then pointedly ignored when he didn’t like the result).

2.       Proposed to massively simplify and reform the income tax system, eliminating all or almost all of the special interest deductions and loopholes, simplifying the nightmare complexity of the 70,000+ pages of tax code, and reducing the corporate tax rate (which almost no one pays because of all the loopholes) to something more in line with our competitors in the world market.

3.       Admitted that entitlement programs, especially Medicare, are on track to bankrupt the country in the coming decades, and proposed at the very least to start a national debate on how best to reform them to make them financially sustainable.

4.       Admitted  that the 2000+ page “Obamacare” bill, well-intentioned as it might have been, is proving to be a disaster (companies are already beginning to shift full-time jobs to part-time jobs – less than 30 hours per week– to avoid the bill’s insurance requirements) , and proposed a much more comprehensive, less ideological  examination of the entire health care issue.

5.       Admitted that private enterprise, especially small businesses, account for most of the jobs in this country and all of the federal revenue, and proposed plans to make federal government regulations less expensive, arbitrary and inflexible and more business-friendly.

6.       Admitted that America needs immigrants, and proposed immigration reforms that would (a) have made it easy for more immigrants, especially high-skill immigrants, to come to this country to work and start businesses, and (b) offered a guest worker visa program for the low skill immigrants we need to pick crops and work in meat packing plants, etc.

7.       Understood that we spend far, far too much on our military, and that we could cut the military budget in half and still spend more than the next 14 nations combined, including China and Russia.  Of course the cuts would need to be made rationally on the basis of what the military really needs, not on the basis of which Congressional delegation has the most influence.

8.       Admitted that climate change is quite evidently going on, and human activity is quite likely a major driver, and proposed at least to fund more basic research to better understand the problem and its consequences.

9.       Understood that in todays’ technologically-driven world, educating our workforce adequately is key to maintaining our economic dominance in the world, and proposed some new and innovative approaches (more than just throwing more federal dollars at the problem) to improving American education, especially in the K-12 range. And that would include breaking the teacher’s union’s opposition to reforms.

Of course, since some of these are anathema to Democrats, and some are anathema to Republicans, any candidate who held these positions would never make it through their own party’s primaries, let alone have a chance in a general election.  More’s the pity…….

The election

Well, we have finally reached election day, although no doubt the legal challenges and recounts will extend the agony for a few days more. If there was ever an example of how dysfunctional our political system has become, it is this election. Set aside the vast amount of money (apparently something like a billion dollars on each side) wasted in nasty, negative, largely untrue or distorted advertising by each side.

What is most notable is that even while our nation is faced with a number of very significant problems (growing federal debt, climate change, Iran's nuclear ambitions, high unemployment, a turbulent Middle East, etc, etc), neither presidential candidate offered any concrete plan at all to address any of these issues.  President Obama spent much of the year demonizing Governor Romney for being a successful business man, while Governor Romney flip-flopped on just about every issue of significance (though in his defense, he probably had to do that to even win the primary).

The press coverage was, predictably, stridently partisan and remarkably devoid of any serious analysis. An analysis I read today reports that the overwhelming proportion of press coverage was negative, even nasty, and often quite unfair and untrue.  And this applied equally to both parties.

And in the end we seem faced with an impossible choice - a Democrat who shows no signs of being willing to address the swelling federal deficit and debt and a Republican who is hamstrung (whatever he may believe privately) by a party captured by the religious right. And whichever one wins will probably face a Congress as bitterly divided, as dysfunctional, and as gridlocked as it has been the past few years.

This is not a hopeful scene, whatever the outcome of the election.

Intelligence

Here is a fact which is probably politically incorrect to admit, but is true anyway: people on average just aren’t very smart. Unlike the children in Lake Woebegone, half of the American public are below average in intelligence (and a good portion probably don't even get the Lake Woebegone joke).

Intelligence is a complex, poorly understood, many-faceted attribute, and intelligence tests are therefore imperfect. They are culturally biased, and tend to favor left-brain tasks. But they are nevertheless pretty good predictors of success in our culture because our culture tends to reward left-brain activities. Intelligence tends to be distributed in a “bell curve” around the average, just as are most physical attributes, like height or weight. Intelligence tests are calibrated so that the center point or average of this bell curve is at 100, and the standard deviation is about 15. The diagram below shows the bell curve divided into standard deviations, with the proportion of the population in each segment.

In general, success in undergraduate college work requires an IQ at least one standard deviation above the average (about 115 or higher), though certainly there are exceptions. Success in medical school, law school, graduate work in math or sciences or engineering or computer programming, or executive management generally requires a somewhat higher IQ, although again there are individual exceptions. That implies that only about 1/3 of the general population has the mental ability to succeed in these higher-skill and higher paying fields. This is a reality that no amount of political posturing, class warfare or political correctness can avoid.

Lots of factors can produce lower intelligence. Unfortunate genes are certainly one cause, as are prenatal damage in the womb from the mother’s malnutrition or drug abuse. Lack of adequate intellectual stimulation and/or malnutrition (the two often go together) in early childhood can lower intelligence, as can drug or alcohol abuse.

Now until the industrial revolution most people worked on farms, and it doesn’t take an especially high IQ to herd sheep or cattle, follow a horse-drawn plow, chop down trees, build wooden buildings or pick crops. Nor did it take exceptional intelligence to drive a wagon, crew a sailing ship, or load and fire a musket in the army. So there was plenty of adequately-paying work for people at the lower end of the intelligence distribution.

And even when the industrial revolution arrived, there were plenty of jobs on factory assembly lines, or driving vehicles, or in manual labor for those with less than average intelligence.

The social disruption we now face is that our increasingly-complex technologically advanced society has fewer and fewer jobs available for that majority of the population who are not intellectually capable of the higher-skill, higher-paying jobs in the technology and information industries. Increasingly factory robots are displacing the few lower-skilled people still left on the assembly lines.

It is of course politically incorrect to discuss this reality, and certainly it is in bad taste. But discuss it we must, because it poses one of the most difficult problems our society faces – how to gainfully employ, at a reasonable living wage, that majority of the population who (often through no fault of their own) lack the intellectual capacity to succeed in the higher-skill jobs. No amount of political demagoguery is going to change this distribution of intelligence, nor the social problems it poses.

Security???

Since 9/11 we have now spent billions of dollars on new security systems around the nation. Has it been worth it?

July 28^th three peace activists, including an 82 year old nun, cut through the security fences around the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility — a new windowless, half-billion-dollar building encircled by enormous guard towers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory -- splashed the building with blood and hung banners on it, and were not noticed by the multi-million dollar security network of sensors and cameras and security patrols until they walked up to a police car and voluntarily gave themselves up.

August 10^th Daniel Casillo was on a jet ski in Jamaca Bay, just off of John F. Kennedy airport when it broke down.  He swam ashore, and despite all the security cameras and sensors climbed the airport fence, and walked dripping wet all the way across the airport and the airport runways to the Delta terminal, trying all the way to get noticed and rescued. Yet the multi-million dollar security system didn’t pick him up until he went up to a baggage handler and asked for help.

Government agencies testing the TSA system by trying to smuggle guns or knives past the inspectors report success about 70% of the time at some major airports. In December 2010 Houston businessman Farid Sief accidentally brought his loaded pistol on a flight from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport. The TSA never found it, even though it was in his briefcase and should have shown up clearly in the X-ray examination. In the same month the TSA’s new director admitted that every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners at some of the airports tested.

What does this tell us?

It tells us what we have all suspected anyway going through the TSA inspections at airports – much of this money has been spent for show rather than for effective security.

Pirates buy more music

Here is an interesting study by the American Assembly at Columbia University , summarized in the chart below.

Fundamentally it shows that the very people who pirate music online are also the people who buy more music through legitimate channels. Looking at the data it makes sense -- people who love music get it any way they can, legitimate and/or pirated; people who don't care about music obviously don't care about pirating it either.

I suspect the same pattern is true for e-books.

But it does pose a cautionary tale for the recording industry when they go after music downloaders -- they may well be persecuting/prosecuting their own best customers, which might not be such smart marketing.

Bullying in schools

One of my granddaughters just showed me a paper she has written as an assignment in her writing class.  It is on bullying in schools, and presents a sobering picture, backed up by studies, of how pervasive this problem is in our schools.

Of course, schools in general are doing very little about the problem -- as little as they can get away with without being sued by parents.  I guess the idea is that bullying is just something that kids do, and kids need to get used to it -- get "hardened up" against such abuse.  And in any case, teachers and administrators feel they don't have the time to attend to such problems unless they get really out of hand (like after a suicide!).

Now what struck me is that among adults, such bullying in the form of sexual or racial harassment, or threatening behavior, is against the law in the workplace in this country.  Companies can lose lawsuits for millions if they don't maintain a safe, non-threatening workplace, or if they don't intervene promptly and aggressively against inappropriate behavior.

So why is it that we protect adults by law from such behavior, but don't feel it necessary to protect our much more vulnerable kids from such behavior?

Why Obama’s “Tax the rich more” argument doesn’t make sense

President Obama has pushed his “tax the wealthy more” argument all through this campaign, and it is certainly an appealing populist position. “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” will always seem like a good idea to Paul.

Leave aside the point that taking the entire annual income of the fabled top 1% would make a hardly noticeable dent in the federal deficit, so that President Obama’s proposal does almost nothing to solve the real deficit and debt problem we face.

The real problem is much deeper than that. Think about the logic of the economy.   Companies, big or small, who want to expand their business or invest in a new product or line of business go to the bank and borrow money (or float bonds or sell stock, which is much the same thing, borrowing directly from the bond or stock holder) to finance the expansion or new investment. But where does the bank get the money to loan? It comes from people who put money into the bank in the first place as savings.   If nobody saved in the bank, the bank would have no money to loan.

Who provides most of the money saved in the bank (or invested in bonds or stock)?  Not the poor -- they need all their money for day-to-day living.  Most of the money put into the bank (or invested directly into bonds or stocks) comes from the only people who have more money than they need to use right away – the “rich” that Obama wants to tax. Oh, and average people’s pension funds are also a source of much of the investment money as well, so even many of the 99% are in this game indirectly.

So if the government taxes that money away from the wealthy instead of leaving it for them to put into the bank or invest in stocks or bonds, there is that much less money available in the system for businesses to expand or start up new businesses. This might not matter so much if the government turned around and used that money taxed from “the rich” to loan to businesses for their expansions and start-ups.  But mostly the government doesn’t do that – it spends almost all the money for its own purposes, which usually have nothing to do with helping businesses finance their expansions or new start-ups.

European governments tax the wealthy far more than we do, and European governments have much, much less vital economies. Of course European governments do many other things which also inhibit their economies, but this is surely a major contributor.

Like so many things, “taxing the rich more” sounds appealing to people who don’t think the economic problem through beyond the first step.  But it is counterproductive.  Far more effective, if President Obama really wants to help the system, would be to clean up the tax code, which is some 71,684 pages (as of 2010) of nightmare complexity, riddled with special deals for interests groups and favored corporations, supporting thousands of (very expensive) tax accountants and tax lawyers, not to mention thousands of IRS bureaucrats, none of who contribute anything tangible or productive to the nation's wealth.