How much is a billion? A trillion?

The GAO estimates that Medicare lost $60 billion in fraudulent charges in 2014. Thus far we have spent about $4 trillion on our assorted wars in the Middle East including long-term veteran’s pensions and medical care. The US national debt stands at about $19 trillion. The US military budget for 2016 is about $600 billion. The Chicago public pension fund currently is $104.6 billion short.    It is hard to get one’s head around such big numbers – millions, billions, trillions.

A billion is a thousand million (the British used to have a million million in a billion, but they have converted to the US system now.)

A trillion is a thousand billion, or a thousand thousand million. So how much money is that?

Parkland Memorial hospital in Dallas Texas is a newly-built major teaching hospital with 862 beds and about 2 million square feet of space, and it cost $1.3 billion to build. So for what Medicare lost in fraud in 2014 alone we could have built 46 such hospitals, almost one per state.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated in 2015 that it would cost about $3.6 trillion to bring the entire US infrastructure (roads, bridges, train tracks, power lines, phone systems, high-speed internet, water systems, sewer systems airports, seaports, etc) up to good condition. So for what we have spent and committed in our Middle East wars we could have fixed all the infrastructure in the nation with enough left over to perhaps build one or two major new airports or another interstate highway or two across the entire nation.

The average 4 year cost at a private college these days is about $130,000.  So the $19 trillion US national debt is equivalent to putting a little more than 146 million people – about half the entire US population – through an undergraduate degree at a high-priced private college.  Another way of looking at the debt is that every US man, woman and child owes about $60,230.

Nationwide (obviously there are large local variations) the average cost to build a 2000 square foot house is about $300,000. So the $600 billion US military budget could build about 4.6 million average-sized houses per year.

The average public school teacher salary in the US is between $42,000 and $49,000, depending on grade level, experience and specialties.  So let’s say the total average is about $45,000. The amount that the Chicago public pension fund is short would pay the annual salaries of about 2.3 million new teachers.

Or as Senator Everett Dirksen (Illinois) is supposed to have said (though apparently he never did), "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money."

Makes one think, doesn’t it?

Obamacare and the Public Option

Now that it is becoming increasingly obvious, even to diehard defenders, that Obamacare is failing, I see the usual suspects are once again raising the suggestions of (a) a public option, and (b) universal federal health care.

The public option essentially involves the government putting up its own insurance company. Why liberals think the government, with absolutely no experience in the field, can make money or at least break even when professional insurance companies can’t is beyond me.  So really the public option involves the taxpayers (ie – the rest of us) subsidizing yet another, probably inefficient government agency.  I don’t think so!

We already know how the government would do with universal federal health care, because they already run two such systems – Medicare and the VA system.  The Veteran’s Administration health care has been a scandal for years now, and despite lots of embarrassing revelation over the past two years, it STILL isn’t fixed. In Phoenix this year, for example, the average wait time for a first appointment with a doctor was still 115 days, almost 4 months, and 1700 veterans were simply “lost” from the waiting lists.

So that is one model of how a federal health care system might look.

Medicare works better, but is economically unsustainable in the long run. In 2014 Medicare accounted for nearly $600 billion in the federal budget, or about 14% of the total budget. This year’s report from the trustees estimates that the fund will be depleted by 2028. And it is so poorly run that the Government Accounting Office recently estimated  that in 2014 it lost over $60 billion (yes, BILLION) in fraudulent charges

So yes, the nation’s health care system badly needs a major overhaul, but turning it into another expensive, bloated, inefficient, and unresponsive government agency is likely to make the problem worse, not better.

A Hillary Presidency

As things stand now, I would judge it more likely than not that Hillary Clinton will be our next president. I suppose we might have a Brexit-like surprise, or Wikileaks might release an “October surprise” – something so damming from all the hacked Clinton files and emails that even yellow-dog Democrats would have to rethink their support.  But that seems unlikely. Trump’s campaign seems to stumble from one error to the next, and Hillary seems finally to have learned Napoleon’s maxim: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake”. Every time there is another damaging revelation about Hillary – which is almost daily – Trump manages to upstage the news cycle with another dumb statement so that the Hillary revelation loses its punch.

So what might we expect from a Clinton presidency? She certainly won’t have a mandate from the voters, most of whom voted against her crazy opponent rather than for her. She also is highly unlikely to have a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, and perhaps not even a veto-proof majority in the Senate. So she will face the same Republican obstructionism that Obama has been facing the past six years, except that many Republicans in Congress hate her more than they hated Obama.

Nor will the bad news about her questionable ethics stop coming just because the election is over.  In fact, once there isn’t Trump to distract everyone, her questionable past dealings, especially with the pay-for-access issues with the Clinton Foundation, will probably continue to fester.

On foreign policy she will no doubt remain a hawk, meaning she will likely get us even more involved in the Middle East wars.  The Saudi Arabian royal family are heavy supporters of her campaign and the Clinton Foundation slush fund, and she is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds her so generously, so presumably she will tailor her policies in that area to support them.  That actually may be a bit difficult for her, because as Secretary of State she supported the Iran deal, which the Saudis vehemently opposed, and which they blame for Iran’s new aggressiveness.

On domestic policy she espouses the standard economically-unsustainable Democratic progressive ideas that have been failing so miserably for years.  Consider that almost all the big cities in the US have been governed by Democrats for decades – and almost all of them are in terrible financial straits, with bankrupt public pension funds, endemic corruption, miserable school systems controlled by powerful teacher’s unions, dangerous racial tensions, and crumbling infrastructures.  I never fault progressives for trying new ideas to improve things, but I do fault them for never paying attention to whether those new ideas are working or not.

Needless to say, I don't expect her to propose any legislation that would seriously inconveniences the Wall Street firms who paid her so handsomely for her speeches.

She will face several very serious problems early in her tenure. Obamacare, despite the repeated, almost hysterical denials by the administration and its supporters, is crumbling fast. Obamacare insurance rates for next year will rise 30-40% or more in a number of states. Aetna, United Healthcare, Humana, and Blue Cross are all withdrawing from most of the markets next year because they are losing so much money. 12 of the 23 original federally-financed Obamacare state insurance co-ops have already gone bankrupt (costing the taxpayers $2.5 billion), and 8 more of those remaining 11 are expected to fail this year. It’s getting pretty hard to ignore the collapse, even for those who are determined to keep their heads in the sand.

The job market will continue to be weak, due mostly to automation but also a bit due to the trade agreements that she supported so strongly as Secretary of State (but now says she opposes). So the anger that fueled the Bernie Sanders movement will continue to dog her.  She has made lots of vague promises, but in fact the president has relatively little control over these events, so she will get blamed – whether fairly or not - by a large and angry portion of the population when those promises come to nothing.

Internationally, besides the long-standing Middle East mess and the increasing unhelpful influence of Iran and Russia in that part of the world, she will have to contend with the increasingly aggressive Chinese in the South China Sea, continuing Russian provocations along its borders, and especially in the Ukraine, the weakness of NATO, the weakness and upheavals in the European Union, and continuing terrorist activities across the world.

Finally, she will have to deal with her health problems. Her campaign continues to insist that she is fine, but clearly she isn’t fine. She looks wildly different from day to day, so something about her medication and/or her metabolism is swinging wildly from day to day.  A few insiders have admitted privately that she suffers from serious mood swings, and is even at times incoherent.  She manages to hide this in public, but the stresses of the job will take their toll, so whatever it is she is suffering from will probably get worse during her term as president.  She isn’t the first presidential candidate, by the way, to lie about her condition. We now know President Kennedy, when he was a candidate, paid four physicians to give him a clean bill of health when they knew he suffered from colitis, prostatitis, and Addison's disease, among other conditions, and took painkillers, antianxiety agents, stimulants and sleeping pills, as well as hormones, in order to function.

Of course, she may not really care. She will have achieved her goal - to become the first female president of the United States.  And no doubt she and Bill will  enrich themselves handsomely during her time in office, and even after, from the access the two of them can sell.

Encryption keys

Federal law enforcement officials are still arguing for a US encryption standard that includes secret “backdoor keys” that would let law enforcement – presumably with a warrant – unlock people’s encrypted files and messages. In theory the government would hold these “secret keys” safely somewhere. That was what was behind the recent demand that Apple “un-encrypt” the contents of a terrorist’s cell phone.

Could the government actually do this? Could they actually manage to keep such “secret keys” safe? They couldn’t manage to keep safe the TSA “master keys” – the keys that let the TSA open those cute little TSA-approved luggage locks. They couldn’t manage to keep the highly private security clearance files of 22.1 million people safe from hackers. And now it turns out even the highly-secretive NSA – the very people who would presumably keep those government “secret keys” – has had some of their most sensitive hacking tools stolen online by hackers, who are offering them at auction over the internet.  The level of government incompetence here is absolutely mind-boggling.

Of course the whole exercise is fruitless anyway.  If the government approves an encryption standard with a backdoor into it people who don’t want the government to access their files and messages will simply not use it, or will encrypt their message with other software first before encrypting the result with the government’s standard.  It isn’t hard to find good encryption software that hasn’t been meddled with (and we know it hasn’t been “fixed” because the source code is open to inspection by everyone).

This is another one of those issues (of which there are many these days) where it is clear that the government policy-makers are simply so ignorant about the technology they are trying to control that their efforts are laughably ineffective.

Recommended: Rumsfeld's Rules

Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense twice (1975-1977 under Gerald Ford and 2001-2006 under George W. Bush), as well as CEO of pharmaceutical giant Searle and later CEO of General Instrument. I certainly didn't agree with all of his decisions (especially the decision to use less manpower than his generals recommended in the Iraq war), but he is an unusually bright guy well worth learning from.

His 2013 book Rumsfeld's Rules is full of sound, hard-headed advice about running large organizations, whether they be the Defense Department or a large corporation. For all the bad press he got, largely from liberals who were against the Iraq war, he does in fact have quite a good sense of dry humor and a commendable level of humility, especially for a high-level Washington type.  And as far as I can see his advice in this book is spot on.  He emphasizes over and over that events are unpredictable, the source of his very perceptive statement about "unknown unknowns" that was so widely ridiculed by the press, who clearly weren't smart enough to understand it.  Of course when Nassim Talib reframed the same statement in terms of "Black Swans" the same press thought it was brilliant.

And by the way, I have always admired his behavior on 9/11.  When the plane hit the Pentagon his staff wanted to rush him off to a safe place, but he insisted on going out and helping with the rescue efforts.  That, I thought, told a lot about who he really was.

I highly recommend this book.

The double standard

We are about to see just how much of a double standard we have in our government.  The Department of Justice decided Hillary Clinton's e-mail transgressions, which included exposing over 1300 classified emails to potential hackers of her unsecured home server, didn't warrant any legal action.

Now a U.S. submarine sailor, who took six selfies of himself in a secured portion of a submarine, is facing up to 78 months in prison for the act. See the full story here. His lawyer is arguing for probation, on the grounds that Hillary got away with far worse.  It will be interesting to see what the judge decides.

My guess is that he will get significant jail time.  He is, after all, just a young kid, not a well-connected Washington insider. The government would certainly not like to establish a precedent based on Hillary's case, or it will be unable to prosecute any security leaks.  On the other hand, if he does get jail time, it will be yet more proof that our government is rigged in favor of the well-connected.

More on Clinton

If it seems like I am focusing more on Clinton than on Trump, that is because by now it is obvious to a majority of people that he is thoroughly unsuitable for the office of president, whereas despite all odds there still seem to be a group of die-hard, yellow-dog Democrats who think Hillary would be a wonderful president. To those people I recommend Marc Thiessen's summary in today's Washington Post , excerpted below:

The problem is that Hillary Clinton is also morally unfit for any office, high or low. She is, to quote the late, great William Safire, a “congenital liar” who misled the American people about Benghzai, made false statements about not sending or receiving classified information on her private email server and continues to falsely assert that FBI Director James Comey said she was truthful — a claim The Post’s fact checker gave “Four Pinocchios” and PolitiFact gave a “Pants on Fire” rating.

Add to her dishonesty the cloud of corruption that hovers over her. Just look at the $26.4 million in speaking fees from foreign governments and corporations that Hillary and Bill Clinton failed to disclose — in violation of the ethics agreement the Clinton Foundation signed with the Obama administration before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state. Or the evidence that their speeches may have intersected with Hillary Clinton’s work at the State Department. Or the evidence that Hillary Clinton may have had off-the-books overseas meetings with Clinton Foundation donors at taxpayers’ expense. Or the recent email revelations that expose how Clinton Foundation donors got access at Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Or the allegation that the Clinton Foundation steered money improperly to for-profit companies owned by friends. The dossier of Clinton scandals is seemingly endless. Look at all this, and ask yourself whether you want someone like her in the Oval Office. 

And he doesn't even mention the older scandals (the Rose Law firm records that mysteriously disappeared from their offices and then mysteriously were found in the Clinton's White House family quarters, showing that Hillary had double charged some of her clients, or the $1000 investment she turned into $100,000 in a few months with "help" from a corporation who supported her husband, or the White House travel office issues, or, or, or, or.....).

It is amazing that the Republicans, who should have been able to win this election in a walk given the voter's tendency to change parties every eight years, and given the incredible weakness of Hillary as a candidate, seem nevertheless poised to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory".

Hillary Clinton's "experience"

A friend, reading my last post, suggested that Hillary’s experience counted for something here. A reasonable argument.  So let’s look at her much-touted “experience”.

As Bill Clinton’s “first lady” she tried to institute a major health care initiative in 1993 that went nowhere, but managed to antagonize all sides in the debate.

As a US Senator from New York (though she was born in Illinois and lived in Arkansas) from 2001 to 2009 she tried to create jobs in New York with a number of Federal programs, none of which seem to have been the least bit effective.  She did, though, thoroughly support Bush’s ill-advised Iraq invasion, which is what one would expect from a Cold War hawk.

As Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, she seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time planning Chelsea’s wedding (on the basis of her own claim that the 30,000 emails she deleted from her home server were “only personal, having to do with things like planning Chelsea’s wedding”). The heavy lifting in the State Department during her term was mostly done by “Czars” that Obama appointed – Richard Holbrook for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Carol Browner for energy and climate change, Ron Klain for Ebola response, Fred Daniel for Guantanamo, Dennis Ross for Iran, Mary Ryckman for international trade, etc, etc, etc.  Hillary herself seems to have had relatively little influence on any of the major issues of the day.  Compared to the current hard-working Secretary of State, John Kerry, she appears to have been remarkably uninvolved in the really worrysome issues - perhaps by choice, since she knew she would be running for president.

So I have to say I am not much impressed with her “experience”.

Democrats vs Republicans

As many people have already noted, the two political parties have both nominated thoroughly unsuitable sociopaths as their presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  But I do notice one interesting difference across the parties.  Many prominent Republicans are dismayed with their choice of Trump, and many are distancing themselves from him in public and openly chiding him for his more excessive statements.

On the Democratic side, on the other hand, no such revulsion is apparent. The Democratic establishment seems perfectly willing to go along with Hillary's obvious ethical issues and daily lying. Indeed, they spend a lot of time trying to spin the daily bad news on her in a positive light.

Why is that? The two candidates are equally unsuitable, though for slightly different reasons. Why are the Republicans so obviously upset with their candidate (as they should be) but the Democrats meekly following and covering up for their equally unsuitable candidate? 

Recommended: 6 Feminist Myths That Will Not Die

Scott Adams, in his blog, has pointed out an interesting article. Christina Hoff Sommers, writing in Time Magazine, has a fascinating piece: 6 Feminist MythsThat Will Not Die. These are 6 widely quoted statistics that are just plain wrong.

It is not just these 6 statistics that are important, though they are important in their own right. It is the fact that the media is full of these pseudo-scientific facts and statistics peddled by one advocacy group or another to support their pitches.  And the public is gullible enough to believe them without any effort to check the original sources - where there even are any.

Some years ago it turned out that the popular claim  - still circulating - that everyone should drink 8 glasses of water a day to stay healthy was thought up by a young Senate staffer on the basis of  no evidence whatever – he just needed such a fact to support a political pitch he was preparing for his Senator.  Many – perhaps even most - of the “facts” and statistics being wielded by both parties in this election are just as spurious.

People believe them, though, especially if they support a position that they already hold or want to believe. More fool they!