Category Archives: Politics

Economics, Politics

What a Waste

Each year, the federal government wastes billions of American taxpayers’ dollars on improper payments to individuals, organizations, and contractors.  These are payments made in the wrong amounts, to the wrong person, or for the wrong reason.  In 2009, improper payments totaled $98 billion, with $54 billion stemming from Medicare and Medicaid.  We cannot afford nor should we tolerate this waste of taxpayer dollars and in our health care system.

From the White House

Let’s see, $3,830 Billion budget –  $98 Billion waste. That’s about  2.6% percent waste. Not the best of numbers, but certainly not worth going into a paralytic fury about.  I suppose it is easier for some people to grasp a much smaller number than the almost $4 trillion dollar federal budget. Why not allocate another $1 Billion to Inspector General offices to reduce the waste. If they can reduce the waste by 2% or more they more than pay for them selves.

The 2011 Medicare/Medicaid budget seems to be about $755 Billion. with $54 Billion in waste that is over 7% fraud. HHS is planning to increase their Fraud unit budget $250 million in 2011 to $561 million. Maybe that will reduce the waste a bit.

That leaves $44 Billion in waste for the remaining $3075 Billion  budget, or 1.4% waste.

I was going through the federal budget looking to see who had Inspectors General in their budget items. I was surprised to see that not all departments have an Inspector General. Especially surprised the Department of the Interior doesn’t have one large enough to have its own budget line item. Somewhere in the text write up the Inspector General is mentioned. I guess that explains why billions of dollars from the Indian Trust funds have gone missing. But Interior not only has the BIA but they also oversee our royalty payments from the industries extracting minerals from public lands.

At least GAO gives the citizens a chance to report the fraud they see.

Politics

Back to Representation

Every time I write a bit on Congress, I go back to thinking about Representation. I am rethinking my original idea on making it 1 representative for every 100,000 citizens. The Constitution sets a lower limit of 30,000 per representative but it doesn’t set an upper limit. Evidently, 100 years ago Congress fixed the House of Representatives at 435 because they ran out of room in their chamber. This leads to one representative for over 700,000 citizens, on average, with Montana having one representative for over 950,000, today.

While 1/100K is a reasonable number – I think it give the citizens of each district a better chance to meet and know their representative and to share their views with them – I am willing to work with other numbers. 210,000 is about as high as I would like to go.  Close to what the level was when congress fixed the number of Representatives. People still have an opportunity to know their rep. Montana would have 5 representatives (OK there is a down side to most ideas). We would be closer to a representative democracy, closer than the country has been in a hundred years.

Of course, if We the People don’t do our job, nothing much will change in Washington.

Politics

Term Limits

I would like to suggest that we just restrict anyone from serving more than 6 consecutive years in Congress and they must sit out one congress (2 years) before returning.

I know that one of the biggest complaints against term limits is the loss of experience and knowledge that is gained by time in the job, but if the Congressmen return after the next general election, then they are bringing back their experience and knowledge and it can grow if they can continue to beat all the young challengers that crop up during their hiatus.

Politics

Why not let them filibuster?

I understand that the Senate rules allows a Senator to speak for as long as they can and that it takes  3/5 of the members to close the filibuster. I guess what wasn’t clear is that just the threat of filibuster is good enough to keep an item off the floor for discussion. This is as so not to impede the other flow of Senatorial business. In regard to the Health Care Reform debate, why not let the Republicans actually filibuster? Let them impede the flow of other Senatorial business. It will help keep the issue at the forefront of the news cycle and may actually cause the press to better present the issues being discussed. Not likely, but possible.

And if they want to keep the filibuster running all summer up to the mid-term elections, so much the better. After all that time I would hope the electorate would have a better realization of what they are voting into office.

I even have a Campaign Slogan < Just Say No! – Vote Republican >

I would also suggest that the Democrats put together the best health care package they can that will get 51 votes in the Senate  and not worry about currying favor with the Democratic outliers.

Economics, Politics

A health care option

I guess I would have to put myself in the single payer camp on health care. I would like to see an expanded Medicare system be the primary basic health care insurer/provider. Everyone will get a Medicare account at birth and keep it until they die, and beyond. We will pay for it with a payroll tax such that Medicare and FICA will be 15% of a pay-check. That should provide enough income to both systems to grow flourish as the baby boomers hit their retirement age.

A condition for this payroll tax is that the monies go into the Medicare and FICA trust funds and not into the general fund.  As away to ameliorate the impact on household incomes, I would also suggest that every household get a deduction equal to the median household income.  (I believe that is somewhere about $50K today). No other deductions, just one flat deduction and then tax everyone above the average household income what is needed to balance the rest of the budget.

Politics

Reform we can live with

The Supreme Court recently reversed a long-standing tradition that corporations couldn’t directly fund political advertising. I believe the core argument for the reversal is that the restrictions impinged on the corporation’s right to free speech, as though a corporation is a person.

Alarmists are warning that corporations will flood the airwaves  with political commercials in the days before an election to promote their bought and paid-for candidate, or to denounce the candidate they couldn’t buy. That may be, but what is the price of Free Speech, enshrined in our holy founding documents? 10 billion dollars? 100 billion dollars? We shall soon find out.

I would like to suggest a political finance reform.

Only registered voters are allowed to donate to political campaigns or to fund political advertising. I would allow unrestricted amounts to be donated, with the caveat that all donations must be made publicly available within 24 hours with a means to uniquely identify the donor. Using the name and address and precinct where  they are registered should be sufficient. And publicly available means something like an election board website, generally available to the general public and not hidden away in some hard-to-access site that only policy wogs are likely to know about.  I want to know who is trying to buy my representative; you can tell a lot about a candidate by who is paying to support them.

This includes contributions to PACs. As a collective they are allowed to accept contributions from registered voters and to use those contributions for a common goal. They also have to disclose the source of their contributions – same list. And any other political entity, like: Party, Committee to elect or re-elect, etc.

PS. For any corporations that I hold shares in- I do not approve of the use of corporate funds for political advertising.

Economics, Politics

Just Compensating

Daniel Gross, at Slate, wrote a Moneybox commentary on Wall Street bonuses. He makes a point in it that I did not realize:

At most companies, bonuses are paid out of profits. No end-of-year profits, no bonuses. But on the island nation of Wall Street, they’re paid out of revenues.

Bonuses out of revenues, what sort of nonsense is that? No wonder they can pull down ridiculously obscene compensation. Let’s see – we are doing a 10 billion dollar refinancing, we want 10% to do it and 50% of that will go into the bonus pool. The other 50% will go to pay for the office building, the corporate jets,  the million dollar salaries; your basic operating expenses. Anything left over would be profit. How do they get away with it?

Since the 1980s, notes Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, it’s been the standard for half of revenues to be devoted to compensation. So long as these outfits were private partnerships, that practice didn’t really matter to the rest of us. But since the 1990s, when investment banks went public, compensation has evolved into a zero-sum game between employees and shareholders. Guess who lost?

Any compensation in excess of the annual presidential salary is not deductible from corporate ledgers and the corporation must pay corporate taxes on excessive compensation.

Economics, Politics, Preparing for the worst

Can we start here?

I keep hearing about people trying to shout down health care discussions- and most of the shouters don’t appear to understand what they are talking about. Can we start with this article by Paul Krugman and work from there?

A friend sent me  a link to HR3200 (all 1017 pages) and to a short 35 page summary of the bill (more of a short explanation of each section). Or is it fair to get into a complicated discussion with an informed base?

I don’t see anything on ‘death panels’ in the bill, but maybe I don’t know the right codewords to read it correctly – could:

A BILL To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.

be the sinister code words we are looking for? What are those ‘other purposes’? Oh, they appear to be revising the tax code, providing credits for small businesses, and improving Medicare and Medicaid.

I think I found the sinister part that  is so disturbing the American Citizenry :

The bill would prevent foreign multinational corporations incorporated in tax haven countries from avoiding tax on income earned in the United States by routing their income through structures in which a United States subsidiary of the foreign multinational corporation makes a deductible payment to a country with which the United States has a tax treaty before ultimately repatriating these earning in the tax haven country. (from section 451 of the explanation)

Yes, this is decidedly sinister.

Politics

Or what about…

“Representative Democracy? We don’ need no stinkin’ Representative Democracy.”

and

“Well, I don’t care who is in charge as long as I don’t have to pay for anything, but I get everything”