A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

More Indiana Low Rankings in the News

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It seems like every morning brings a new ranking in which Indiana is bringing up the tail end. On Saturday, I mentioned the survey showing Indiana being 5th to last in national well-being, including 48th place in the subcategory of healthy behaviors, ahead of only Mississippi and Kentucky.

Now I see that Indiana ranks 2nd to last in its budget process in terms of the processes’ compatibility with balancing the budget. Reading the description on this one gave me the impression that the survey was somewhat arbitrary. Indiana got knocked around for not having a constitutional balanced budget requirement — and I don’t think it got points for its somewhat unique provision limiting the state’s ability to take on debt. The state also loses ground because the governor doesn’t have a line-item veto.

This morning comes the news that Indiana ranks next-to-last in online records.

Indiana tied with Montana, Oregon and Wyoming for the second-worst ranking in a 50-state survey of government information accessible online, conducted as part of the annual Sunshine Week campaign. The state with the sparsest information online was Mississippi.

The survey found that although official records are increasingly available on the Internet, some important information is missing.

Might I add, “God bless, Mississippi?” They keep saving us from last place. (Although according to the Tax Foundation, Mississippi ranks 19th in “business tax climate” (pdf) — so they have that going for them.)

Stewart/Cramer Interview

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I don’t know the long-term cultural impact of the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer interview. (Some have suggested the “have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last” moment from Joseph Welch to Joseph McCarthy — I have my doubts). But I think it should put a stop to the occasional moaning about how our young people get their news from The Daily Show. As it turns out, that’s a good thing, because Stewart is practicing a bit more journalism and a bit less stenography than your average news show.

To me, this might be the money quote from Stewart: “These guys at these companies were on a Sherman’s march through their companies, financed by our 401(k)s – and all the incentives at their companies were for short-term profits, and they burned the fucking house down with our money and walked away rich as hell.”

Hoosiers are Not Well (Especially Around South Bend)

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According to a wire report I saw in the Journal & Courier, Indiana ranks 5th to last in a new nationwide survey of well-being that queries people on mental, physical and economic health. We are ahead of West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio and Arkansas. Ohio surprises me, but the rest of those are traditionally dead-end states that Indiana probably doesn’t want to emulate.

The survey broke findings down by congressional district. Indiana’s 2nd District, home to South Bend, ranked 423rd out of the 435 districts nationwide for overall well-being. It ranked last for healthy behavior.

In general, the highest well-being scores came from states in the West, while the lowest were concentrated in the South.

An explanation for the survey is here. More information is available here.

These new, state-level data are the results from The AHIP State and Congressional District Resource for Well-Being. The Well-Being Index score for the nation and for each state is an average of six sub-indexes, which individually examine life evaluation, healthy behaviors, work environment, physical health, emotional health, and access to basic necessities. The questions in each sub-index are asked nightly of 1,000 national adults, aged 18 and older.

My own district, the fourth district, has the best well-being rank in the state leading in work quality and access to basic necessities. This isn’t exactly high praise, however, since that puts us at 240th out of the 435 congressional districts. Healthy behavior, however, is where Indiana really seems to fall apart. The Fourth District ranks 2nd in terms of Indiana’s Congressional Districts for healthy behavior, but nationally it is 393rd. Indiana is 48th out of 50 in terms of healthy behavior. Only Kentucky and Mississippi are worse. Generally speaking, this means we eat poorly, we smoke too much, and we don’t exercise. Maybe we should rethink opposition to things like smoking bans and health information on menus. I’m a little surprised at how aggravated being this low on a pretty controllable aspect of the index makes me. Don’t smoke, eat better, and exercise, after all, are things that are within all of our power.

Hightower on Brooks on Class War

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Jim Hightower comments on David Brooks’ notion that the poor haven’t tried to curtail the privileges of the rich from time to time in America. Says Brooks, “”The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment.”

Responds Hightower:

Whoa, professor, get a grip! Better yet, get a good history book (Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” would be an eye-opening place to start). While our schools, media and politicians rarely mention it, America’s history is replete with class rebellions against various moneyed elites who act as though they’re the top dogs and ordinary folks are just a bunch of fire hydrants.

Check out the Tenant Uprisings of 1766, Shay’s Rebellion in the 1780s, the Workingmen’s Movement of the 1830s … on into the post-Civil War populist movement that confronted the robber barons, the bloody labor battles at Haymarket and Homestead in the late 1800s, Coxey’s Army in 1894, the Bonus March of 1932, the Penny Auctions by farmers in the 1920s and ’30s, the rise of the CIO in the Depression years … and right into modern-day fights involving environmental justice, fair trade, women’s pay, workplace safety, tenant rights, janitors, farmworkers, union-busting, bank redlining, consumer gouging, clean elections and so forth.

State Finance in the Great Depression

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I haven’t read it yet and am posting this so I don’t lose the link as much as anything else. Ronald Snell, working for the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) has put out a paper entitled State Finance in the Great Depression (pdf). State spending increased during this period, though as a percentage of total government domestic spending, decreased as the federal government expanded dramatically.

Tippecanoe Rising

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Looks like the Tippecanoe River, near the Oakdale Dam and Delphi, is flooding again. It did so twice in 2008 and figures to do so again here in 2009. So far, it’s not as bad as it was last year, thankfully:

Water from the Tippecanoe River was flowing through the Oakdale Dam, which is just north of the homes that were being evacuated, at a rate greater than the flood flow rate of 13,000 cubic feet per second. Monday night, the flow was 14,350 cubic feet per second.

By comparison, in February 2008, the highest rate flowing through the Oakdale Dam was nearly 26,000 cubic feet per second.

Short term, it’s hard to know what to do for people who live in areas that are suddenly subjected to repeated flooding. (I say “suddenly,” but I guess I don’t know — seems like this frequency of flooding has to be relatively new, otherwise initial construction in these places seems unlikely.) Long term, people have to get out of these areas.

Health Care Debate Getting Started

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Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, writing for the Associated Press, has an article on the debate over the appropriate role of government in the health care insurance field. Leading Republicans apparently do not think government should be in the business of competing with health care insurers.

“I’m concerned that if the government steps in, it will eventually push out the private health care plans millions of Americans enjoy today,” Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said in the Republican weekly radio address.

I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that the average American “enjoys” his or her health care insurance – even assuming they have some.

I don’t pretend to know what the best health care system would look like. But I’m pretty well convinced that the options I’ve heard from Republicans in the past — usually either nothing or tweaking the market based system — won’t work. The current system is horribly inefficient. We spend close to the most money per capita on health care and don’t get much bang for our buck. Too many people get no health care when their ailments are manageable only to get treated when their symptoms are much more severe at the emergency room which is probably one of the most expensive places to get care. These people get charged a sort of sticker price for the services which is an order of magnitude greater than the prices charged to insurers or Medicare/Medicaid patients. These people pay what they can but the unpaid bills get passed along to the paying customers one way or another. The bureaucracy involved is staggering — the government organizations involved in health care typically require less paperwork than the for-profit insurers, for whom money actually paid for providing health care is thought of as “medical loss.”

So, doing nothing is a pretty bad option. Similarly, the market is not a great tool for pricing and allocating health care resources. Health care services aren’t commodities where pricing comparisons are easy to make. Even if they were, information on health care pricing is closely guarded by health care providers. And, finally, a guy in the middle of cardiac arrest isn’t exactly in a “strong” bargaining position.

The government advantage for insurance is that it can pool a huge amount of risk. Insurance works by taking individually unpredictable risk and making it predictable by pooling the risk in a way that can be calculated statistically. The larger the pool, the more accurate the prediction. People pay premiums into the pool according to their pro rata share of the risk. All insurance involves those who don’t suffer loss subsidizing those who do suffer loss.

It should be interesting to see how those who oppose (additional) government intervention in the health care insurance industry address these issues. There is also this: “Many Americans may not realize the government already picks up nearly half the nation’s $2.4 trillion health care bill, through programs including Medicare and Medicaid.”

More on Kepler

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DarkSyde over at Daily Kos has a nice entry on the Kepler project that provides a nice bit of background on Johannes Kepler and an overview of just what the new NASA mission is supposed to accomplish.

Kepler did the math that showed the planets revolved around the sun, much to the chagrin of many religious leaders of the day who thought the Bible, rather than observation, should govern belief of how the universe functioned.

As for the current NASA mission:

Kepler is basically a horrendously accurate photometer married to a powerful wide view telescope that will trail the earth in deep space, undeterred by earth’s shadow, designed to detect minute changes in stellar brightness as planets cross in front of a parent star. The accuracy of Kepler’s photometer is so sensitive that it could detect a moth fluttering in front of a searchlight from hundreds of miles away. Only a tiny fraction of exosolar systems are likely to align in such a way that one or more planets conveniently eclipses its sun from our local perspective, but Kepler can look at one-hundred thousand stars at once!

The instrument should be able to detect the transit of smaller, more earthlike worlds along with their larger siblings, and hopefully produce a fair estimate on their size and mass. Future space and earth-based observatories will build on Kepler’s results to obtain spectra, and maybe one day the first ever direct images, revealing the atmospheric and surface composition of some of these new planets.

Kepler Launch

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NASA launched the Kepler space craft in search of earth-like planets. I can hardly wait to burn styrofoam on a pristine new planet.

NASA has launched a spacecraft with a mission to help determine something that has been the theme for many Hollywood movies over the years: whether Earth-like planets might exist elsewhere in space.

The 15-foot tall, 2,320-pound Kepler satellite lifted off yesterday at 10:50 p.m. Eastern time atop a Delta II rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida for a three-and- a-half-year mission to find other planets that may support life, according to a NASA statement distributed by PR Newswire.

Kepler carries a photometer, a device made up of 42 highly sensitive digital light sensors that will monitor a patch of 100,000 stars to detect planets that may orbit them. Its findings will be essential in determining the course of future missions looking for extraterrestrial life, said David Koch, Kepler’s deputy principal investigator.

Legal Aid 101 “Child Support” – 3/11/09

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Tippecanoe County Legal Aid will be hosting one of its “Legal Aid 101” series at the Tippecanoe County Public Library (map) on March 11, 2009 at 6:30 p.m. A panel of attorneys will provide a short presentation and answer questions about child support. Apparently there will be free pizza and drinks as well.

The library is located at 627 South Street, Lafayette Indiana. The phone number for Tippecanoe County Legal Aid is (765) 742-1068.