Police do not want to trouble illegal alliens!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/26/BA381A9A9N.DTL&tsp=1

This story will really annoy you. The San Francisco police have decided to take it easier on drivers that are driving without a driver’s license. Why? Because many of these folks are illegal aliens and the police do not want to trouble them by impounding their cars.

And of course that is the role of the police - to make it easier to remain an illegal alien in the US. Can you point to any other country in the world where it is so easy to stay illegally?

Competing with the New Public Health Insurance Agency will be like competing with the US Postal Service!

A major argument for a public option for health insurance is that it will increase competition. Does anyone really believe this? Let’s look at the track record of the US Postal Service and see how they increase competition.

The USPS is owned by the government and controlled by presidential appointees. Have you noticed that it is illegal to drop a letter that has not gone through the postal system into someone’s mail box. And it has exclusive access to non-urgent letters. It is exempt from state and federal taxes. Congress has delegated to the Postal Service the power to decide whether others may compete with it and the Postal Service has carved out an exception to its monopoly for extremely urgent letters.
The USPS Postal Inspection Service has the power to enforce the USPS monopoly by conducting search and seizure raids on entities they suspect of sending non-urgent mail through overnight delivery competitors. In 1993 the USPIS raided Equifax offices to determine if the mail they were sending through Federal express was truly “extremely urgent”. It was found that it was not and Equifax was fined $30,000.

As a quasi-governmental agency, the USPS has many special privileges including sovereign immunity (which makes it very difficult to sue when they crash into your car), eminent domain powers, exemption from most taxes, powers to negotiate postal treaties with other countries and they cannot be sued under the Sherman Anti-trust act. And they control the minimum pricing of their competitors. A letter must cost at least $3 or twice the applicable first-class rate to qualify as urgent. Does this increase competition?

Once we set up the US Health Insurance Agency what are the chances they will get this kind of special treatment?

Have you noticed that some folks get their mail delivered to their doorsteps while others have to travel miles to a community mail station? Another example of those with the loudest voices getting the most from the public trough – nothing to do with fairness, or cost of service it simply who has a congressman that will scream the loudest.

Does Cliff Clavin from Cheers really represent the average postman? I really don’t know but I do know that very few employees are ever fired from the postal service unless they “Go Postal”. It is very tough to get a job there and many folks would probably be willing to do the work for a far much smaller wage.

Proponents of this special treatment argue that eliminating or reducing the Postal Services’s competitive advantages would impact on their ability to provide affordable universal service. Does this sound familiar? This will be the same argument that is used to give special treatment to the a newly created National Health Insurance Agency.

Rural postal customers are subsidized big time. And the politics of reducing service to a remote area or closing down a remote little-used post office are enormous.

Faxes, emails, phone calls, voice mail, cell service, UPS, FedEx – are some of the competitors to the USPS. Imagine what it really cost us to deliver a letter to the boonies one at a time – and think of the carbon footprint compared to an email.

Special treatment, public employee unions, benefit packages that compensate well above the average wage – and all with bad service to boot. What if you have a letter that is very important but not actually urgent. Would you trust it to the USPS or send it via FedEx? Of course you would go with FedEx and you would be breaking the law.

Why don’t we clean up the favoritism granted to the UPSP before we create another competition killer like a Public Health Care Insurance Agency? We need new models and more competition for health care in America but creating another government “service” is not the answer.

Teacher's Unions

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-utla17-2009oct17,0,1149698.story

Interesting article about the Los Angles teacher’s union is resisting change. Is anything new? The talk of unions is always how they will help the employer be more completive in delivering services to the end user (students in this case). Does anyone really believe this klaptrap?

Talk about a public option reducing health care costs misses one major factor – unions!

All the silly talk about a public option reducing health care costs misses one major factor – unions. The only group of US workers that have been increasing union membership is the public sector (city, county and federal). The public plan for offering health care in competition with the private options will surely move towards substantially more unionized positions for both administrative positions and health care professionals than we have today. This will surely increase costs not decrease them.

In the private sector unions tend to drive the unionized business into bankruptcy or out of the country so the union excess is self-correcting. Hence few private jobs are being unionized and the ones that are unionized tend to go away. But government jobs never go away. Even when a state like California needs to cut costs they don’t lay off 20% of their workforce like the private sector would do. Instead they give everyone an unpaid day off every 10 days. On the surface this sounds like they are reducing their labor costs by 10% but when you take into account their benefits, and overhead like office space it has a negligible impact on actually reducing costs.
In California the all-in costs for government employees is about $85,000 per year and for private employees is about $45,000 per year. Frequently they have very similar base wages but when you factor in the benefits packages for public employees like the option for some employees to retire at full pay after just 20 years, and Cadillac heath care plans the cost difference is substantial.

And very few public officials are willing to play hardball with their unions. Since Ronald Reagan fired striking Air Traffic Controllers in 1981 when has a public official fought that hard to keep costs down? Most public officials really don’t want the stress and bad publicity of saying “no” to their unions. There is little personal upside for politicians and these unions include increasingly stronger voting blocks.

Obama must have been embarrassed

Obama was inaugurated on Jan 21, 2009 and was subsequently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on 2/27/09. Faster than your average bear.

This article http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704429304574467491888455498.html offers an excellent alternative Nobel Peace Prize award (for those of you who might think there were any other more deserving candidates). Unfortunately this award has gotten very political.

In general , accomplishment takes time, hard work, and most importantly results. Hard to achieve this in just 37 days. Obama must have been embarrassed about winning this award. Non-liberals (I hate the term conservative) want to recognize accomplishment, liberals want to award based on "feel good" objectives.

Some writers have trouble with simple math

http://blogs.golf.com/presstent/2009/10/tiger-im-not-a-billionaire.html

Some writers are just idiots. The original article claimed that Woods had earned $1 billion over his career. That is far different than being a billionaire. Has the writer forgotten the concept of income taxes and living expenses (which might be reasonably high for Tiger)?

Fool's Gold highly recommended!

Just finished Fool’s Gold by Gillian Tett and highly recommend it. It chronicles the creation of the credit derivative business though the near banking collapse in 2008. It shows how few people really understood these complicated devices and how the risk was shifted around, underestimated and virtually ignored by regulators and bank senior managements.

The derivatives themselves were not the problem – just a tool that was abused. The first hitch is that since there was no clearing of these trades a AAA company like AIG could take on over $500 billion in risk and not have to put up any collateral to cover its losses in the event it had to pay off. A clearing system where the instruments are standardized and every player has to put up margin would go a long way towards solving this problem. This needs to be solved soon.

A second major issue was that loans were sliced and diced in such esoteric ways that no one really knew what they had and the mathematical models radically underestimated the risk (especially the risk that the world might look different than the last several years).

And finally the ratings companies had their heads up their rear ends. What an antiquated system and this is an area that regulators have made no progress on correcting. And no one is correcting the conflicts of interests these companies had and continue to have.