Michele Healy, writing for USA Today, has an article entitled “Study: Gen X ‘slackers’ leading active lives.”

The study tracked 4,000 people born between 1961 and 1981 for 20 years. The report is here (pdf). Despite predictions that GenX was and would continue to be a generation of isolated slackers, they grew up, had families, are working reasonably hard, and have become vital members of their communities.

Near as I can figure, the youth of every generation are tagged by their elders as slackers who have it easier than their elders, listen to bad music, dress funny, and have weird haircuts. Then they step up, become productively middle aged, and worry about their own kids. Meanwhile, the elders continue to bitch about everyone younger than they are. Circle of Life.

And, the media will continue to report on worries about youth and surprise reports about how the last wave of youth turned out to be not so worthless after all.

Maureen Groppe, writing for the Indy Star, reports that Indiana is lobbying to waive new federal “medical loss” requirements. The law currently in place would require insurers to spend 80% of premium dollars on actually paying for health care instead of on other things like “profits, marketing, salaries and other administrative costs.” (The fact that the insurance industry denotes money used to pay for medical care as “medical loss” is telling.) From Maureen Groppe’s article:

If the federal government approves the state’s request to waive that new rule included in the 2010 health-care overhaul, some Hoosiers won’t get the refunds required from insurers who spend less than 80 cents of every $1 collected in premiums on medical care.

If the rule had been in place last year, Hoosiers who buy plans on their own would have received almost $24 million in rebates, according to estimates the state included in its waiver application.

Consumer Watchdog suggests that the application is based on Indiana politicians’ opposition to the healthcare reform law. The article does not really explain Indiana’s stated rationale for wanting the change. Anthem states that it will be in compliance with the law (it’s apparently at a 78% medical loss ratio, currently) but supports the state’s petition because it wants to preserve competition in the market.

Excuse me if I’m a bit skeptical about Anthem wanting a marketplace teeming with viable competitors. Certainly competition is anemic at best, currently. And, if Indiana political types want to take a stand against healthcare reform, this strikes me as a tin-eared place to do it. It’s hard to stand against the notion that most premium dollars should be spent on actual medical care instead of, say, executive compensation. Certainly, that’s not likely to be a position that resonates with the masses.

Very interesting post by David Atkins at Hullabaloo on a long time policy preference for Americans to be more invested in assets than wages. This helps explain some of the policy choices of recent decades without resorting to characterization of lawmakers as cartoonish supervillains. He keys on a passage from a 1975 Ronald Reagan speech:

Roughly 94 percent of the people in capitalist America make their living from wage or salary. Only 6 percent are true capitalists in the sense of deriving income from ownership of the means of production…We can win the argument once and for all by simply making more of our people Capitalists.

One problem with this goal is that asset based income can be very unpredictable. It’s hard to mitigate that unpredictability when your need for the income is immediate because you need to eat and whatnot.

President Obama announced that he’s bringing the remainder of the troops in Iraq home by the end of 2011. It just goes to show how easy wars are to get into and how hard they are to get out of. The authorization of force against Iraq vote was made almost exactly 9 years ago; a vote that absolutely had to take place – for some reason – in October, 2011, before the 2002 midterm elections. (Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, said “from a marketing stand point, you don’t introduce new products in August.”) All of the Republicans and about half of the Democrats in Congress supported the resolution.

What I, and I believe many others, saw as a spinelessly political vote by DLC Democrats, particularly in the Senate by the likes of Evan Bayh, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, ultimately led to the primary defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election. In 2002, the leadership of what I like to call the Daschle Democrats was just awful. This was directly responsible for the popularity of Howard Dean – not because his policies were especially liberal, they weren’t; but because he showed some spine.

Bayh, Daschle, and the other finger-to-the-wind Democratic leadership recalled the Springsteen line, “you end up like a dog that’s been beat too much; till you spend half your life just covering up.” The later career paths of Bayh and Daschle suggest that a permanent cringe wasn’t the only factor; they also had to keep the door open for cashing in when they were finished with their “public service.”

As part of the conditions of the Iraq authorization of force resolution, the Bush administration gave a pinkie swear that it would try diplomacy before going to war. When it became clear that further investigation might seriously undermine their overblown claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Bush administration charged into war without giving the UN Security Council the opportunity to vote on whether to have UN resolutions enforced.

Between October 2002 and March 2003, War against Iraq was marketed very effectively. Among other things, Bush administration repeatedly mentioned 9/11 and Iraq in conjunction with each other while being careful to avoid explicitly stating that there was a direct connection.

In October 2002 the U.S. Congress passed a “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq”. The resolution authorized the President to “use any means necessary” against Iraq, Americans polled in January 2003 widely favored further diplomacy over an invasion. Later that year, however, Americans began to agree with Bush’s plan. The U.S. government engaged in an elaborate domestic public relations campaign to market the war to its citizens. Americans overwhelmingly believed Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction: 85% said so, even though the inspectors had not uncovered those weapons. Of those who thought Iraq had weapons sequestered somewhere, about half responded that said weapons would not be found in combat. By February 2003, 74% of Americans supported taking military action to remove Hussein from power.

When the French suggested further inspections, the American response was a juvenile orgy of anti-French commentary among lawmakers, including “Freedom Fries” replacing “French fries” in the House cafeteria. Our media failed us, with ostensibly liberal (but demonstrably not) publications like the New York Times hyping administration proclamations of danger on the front pages and consigning reports undermining those claims to the back pages. Times reporter Judith Miller, in particular, gained notoriety for being a pipeline for administration propaganda masquerading as “anonymous source” reporting.

What have we gained and was it worth the cost? We’ll have to let some history pass and run the numbers to be sure; but my preliminary answers are the same as the answers I was giving when Andy Card’s marketing campaign was underway: “not much” and “no.” Saddam Hussein is dead, and that’s not nothing, but when compared to the billions of dollars spent, thousands of American lives spent (not to mention many times that many Iraqi lives spent), lost opportunities to address Afghanistan and al Qaeda earlier, the scales don’t come close to balancing. Hopefully, we can take away the lesson that optional wars of aggression aren’t worth the effort no matter how manly they make us feel and no matter how lucrative the military contracts we might award. Unfortunately, that kind of lesson tends to only have a shelf life of a generation or two.

The other day, I made a Twitter pronouncement that market forces should be embraced where 1) consumers have good access to information; 2) there is legitimate choice; and 3) the costs of production are not externalized on to people who are not parties to the transaction. (I like my blanket decrees to be in lists of three – e.g., profit should reward 1) labor; 2) creativity; or 3) risk; and government should be 1) of the people; 2) by the people; and 3) for the people.)

The process of fracking to extract oil strikes me as a market activity that doesn’t meet items #1 or #3 (of the first list). We don’t know what chemicals are in the solvent the frackers are pumping into the rock; and the frackers aren’t acknowledging, let alone paying for, the damage that is caused to those who come into contact with the waste from the process.

[Hydraulic fracturing] is the process of initiating and subsequently propagating a fracture in a rock layer, by means of a pressurized fluid, in order to release petroleum, natural gas, coal seam gas, or other substances for extraction. The fracturing, known colloquially as a frack job (or frac job), is done from a wellbore drilled into reservoir rock formations. The energy from the injection of a highly pressurized fluid, such as water, creates new channels in the rock which can increase the extraction rates and ultimate recovery of fossil fuels.

The EPA is signalling that it is getting into the business of regulating fracking. The usual suspects – industry and anti-government lawmakers – are criticizing the EPA for getting involved. But the market alone can’t keep fracking companies honest. We don’t know what, exactly, they are pumping into our streams and groundwater. We can’t honestly expect them to freely admit that they are contaminating the water that others drink or rely on for other purposes. And, the price of their product does not reflect the damage caused by such contamination.

Where the price doesn’t reflect externalized costs, the market is not efficient in allocating resources. Externalized costs are an involuntary subsidy that distorts the signals sent to the market place.

Regulation certainly has it’s problems, but I don’t think – by and large – libertarians, market enthusiasts, or anti-government ideologues are advancing effective responses to this sort of situation that do not involve a good deal of government regulation.

Cory Doctorow has an interesting item at BoingBoing. (h/t Zach Wendling).

Apparently the Indiana Election Division “sends its notices out with a small styrofoam cube in the envelope; the cube increases the envelope’s thickness to 3/4″, so it qualifies for discounted parcel-rate shipping.”

One can certainly argue that the regulations of the USPS are nonsense if they require this additional step to receive reduced pricing; but I think some kudos are in order to the Indiana Election Division for recognizing and taking advantage of an angle for saving money.

I’ve seen a fair amount of commentary about common ground between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party. I don’t think it exists, because I find the Tea Party’s grievances largely pretextual. Debt and government spending was only a problem when a Democrat took office. Much like infidelity and lying about infidelity was an impeachable offense only when a Democrat was in the White House. For a certain group of hard core partisans, a Democratic Presidency is more or less by definition, illegitimate. That has seemed to be the beating heart of the Tea Party. The rest is mostly just dressing.

But, with that theme of common ground on my mind, I read Tipsy’s remarks on Mark Cuban’s advice to OWS. Says Tipsy:

A lot of reckless crap went on at least because the risk of loss was so minimal compared to the chance of gain. This is the whole point of Corporations and LLC’s: to limit risk of loss to one’s investment – and not one cent more than one’s investment.

It’s always seemed to me that the corporate form should be anathema to Libertarians. It’s a government construct that exists for the purpose of evading personal responsibility. And, as Tipsy points out, a lot of our recent economic problems were helped along by the actions of people who stood to lose no more than their investment, even if the damage caused by their actions or those of their agents was far greater.

For this reason, it seems like the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the Libertarians should be able to find some common ground in tinkering with the corporate form. (Particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision which expanded the rights of corporate personhood in the world of political campaign finance.)

I don’t know what that corporate tinkering would look like, necessarily. Cuban suggests turning “too big to fail” banks into partnerships:

We should make all investment banks become reporting partnerships (meaning they still have the same reporting requirements they have today ). I would have no problem with our government loaning money to the partners of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and other Too Big To Fail Institutions so that they can buy back all public shares of their stock. Of course all those partners would become personally liable for repaying that money back to the government. It would probably be about 120B dollars in total to take these 2 companies private. That is far, far less than a possible bailout would cost.

Those personal guarantees would change EVERYTHING in the banking industry. It would change the decision making process across the board. There would be a moral hazard to every decision. Today , a wrong decision and they vacation on their yacht. As a partner, the wrong decision and they are protesting right next to the OWS crowd as a 99pct er. It would be the definition of having “skin in the game”

A Palladium-Item article with no by-line that I could see reported on an event with the six candidates for the three at-large Richmond Council seats. I was interested to note that I am acquainted with two of the candidates: Chris Hardie and Misty Hollis.

If I still lived in Richmond and had a vote to give, Chris would easily get my vote. He’s the kind of fresh energy that Richmond needs. The city needs something. In the 20 years since I moved away, the city feels like it’s gotten tired. Things have an air of “deferred maintenance” about them. Chris is a small business man with a strong sense of civic involvement. I’ve gotten to know him through his online activity and then in person at a conference or two.

Anyway, enough of the campaign plug. (But, since I mentioned her, my contacts with Misty suggest that she’s diligent, smart, pleasant and would make a dedicated public servant — I just know more about Chris and his ideas.)

The article spends a lot of time talking about the idea of payment in lieu of taxes for some or all non-profits. My knowledge of the issue is cursory – but, generally speaking, when the IRS designates an entity as a non-profit, this not only hurts the federal government’s revenues, it also deprives local government of property tax revenues (assuming, of course, the property would be used productively in the absence of the tax exemption.)

The problem, I think, is that some non-profits are engaged in activities that look fairly lucrative — universities and hospitals come to mind. But, others would simply go under if they had to pay property taxes: a lot of do gooder agencies are pretty much held together by spit and bailing wire. And, even if government officials think maybe they’re losing money by not getting the property taxes; they’d probably lose more if they had to perform the services of those do-gooder agencies directly. (Although there is a political subtext that some lawmakers would be just as happy if some of these services to the poor were not provided at all.)

The article concludes with a couple of “yes/no” questions that don’t serve the reader or potential voter too well. “Will you comply with open records and open meeting laws?” Not surprisingly, everyone said, “yes.” Even if a candidate intended to flout those laws in some fashion, which one is going to be stupid enough to say “no?”

(Rehashing a post I wrote in 2009):

517 519 years ago, Christopher Columbus washed up on the shores of the New World. This was bad news for the indigenous people, no doubt. But, I still don’t mind commemorating the day — as a white male of European descent, I’m a direct beneficiary, so I guess I don’t have a lot of credibility here.

The event was important. Not entirely good, of course; but not unmitigated evil, either. Columbus was a product of his time and place, with all of the arrogance and cruelty that entails. But, he also did something pretty bold. He sailed off the map, and the world hasn’t been the same since. Sure, Leif Erikson did it before Columbus. But, the fact is, his society was not ready to do anything about Erikson’s discovery. The Europe from which Columbus set sail was ready to start moving.

I’m biased by more than being of white, European descent. I’m a history buff, and the Age of Exploration is probably my favorite era. The idea of being able to hop on a boat and find places and civilizations you had not expected really captures my imagination. For me, it’s not just Columbus.

It’s Prince Henry the Navigator pouring resources into Portuguese expeditions south along the western African shore until Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. It’s Da Gama reaching India. Columbus and the New World. Magellan sailing around the world. James Cook sailing everywhere. They were motivated by greed, religion, dreams of power, and a thirst for knowledge. (One of my favorite themes for this period was the Quest for Prester John, a mythical Christian ruler with great riches — this quest combined a number of the motivating forces.) Regardless of motivations and even brutal consequences, they went into the unknown as few others had been willing or able to do before them and, more importantly, they reported back in such a way as to firmly link the world together.

For me, Columbus Day isn’t the celebration of a virtuous man who brought light to a benighted world. I don’t think Columbus was that or did that. Rather, it’s commemoration of the linking together of the planet, for all the good and bad that has done.

Seems to me there is a lot of overlap between proponents of “right to work” and opponents of smoking bans. I’m not exactly sure how you reconcile those two positions. Both, are impairments of an employer’s right to contract and right to impose conditions of employment on prospective employees.

“Right to work” isn’t a law that allows an employer to have a union free workplace. That’s already legal. It also isn’t a law that allows an employer to have union workers at a business that also has non-union workers. That’s legal as well. What it does is make it illegal for an employer to contract with a union to impose union membership as a condition of employment on other employees.

Smoking bans, obviously, prohibit a business owner from allowing patrons to smoke in their establishment. But, they are often sold as an employee safety issue — you can’t make employees work in a smoke-filled environment as a condition of employment. “Go work somewhere else,” is often the response of smoking ban opponents.

So, it’s interesting to see folks who would say “go work somewhere else” when it’s a smoke filled environment somehow don’t say “go work somewhere else” when it’s a union filled environment.

Unions: more dangerous than cancer!