The Incidental Economist has an interesting series of posts on health care spending in the U.S. (h/t Buzzcut). From country-to-country, pretty much without regard to the structure of the health care system, health expenditures rise consistently as a function of GDP. Except for the U.S. Even accounting for our greater GDP, we still spend substantially more on health care. (And our results aren’t notably better.) Apparently there is no single bad guy against whom we can deploy the torches and pitchforks.

The Associated Press has an article on Indiana’s obligation to pay penalties and interest on the loans for the State’s unemployment insurance shortfall.

The state will begin paying millions of dollars in penalties and interest to the federal government next year because it has borrowed nearly $2 billion to pay for jobless benefits, an Indiana unemployment official says.
. . .
[T]he state will have to pay $80 million to $100 million in interest in 2011. The first payment of about $60 million will be due Sept. 30.

The Journal Gazette of Fort Wayne and The Times of Munster reported that Indiana businesses in January also will begin paying a penalty of $21 per worker because Indiana has not yet repaid the loans. The business penalty increases by $21 per worker per year until the loan is nearly paid off.

We’re hardly the only state having economic trouble, but if you hear folks saying that our state budget is balanced, it’s only because their squinting and turning their head just right when they look at it.

The Lafayette Journal & Courier makes the point that social security recipients shouldn’t grump about a second year with no cost of living adjustment (COLA). The COLA is designed to help social security recipients maintain their standard of living in the face of inflation. In years with essentially zero inflation, no COLA should be forthcoming. That’s true, but it ignores the fact that a good number of Americans are basically innumerate. It’s the whole Nigel Tufnel, “but ours go to eleven” thing:

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and…

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don’t know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

These social security recipients just want their check to go to eleven, not thinking much about whether that higher number actually buys them any more stuff.

Having suggested that people are dumb with numbers, I’ll have to confess that I’m no genius about this stuff. I can’t figure out who, exactly, wins and who loses when inflation is minimal. For example, I know that my home loan is locked in with nominal dollars and a fixed interest rate. If, down the road, I got paid more dollars because of inflation for the same work; that would make my home loan a smaller percentage of my income and, in that sense, I would benefit. (Though the other consequences to me from inflation might offset that benefit.) Speaking very generally, it seems to me that inflation benefits long term debtors and hurts long term creditors.

And, if I were really smart, I’d digress into a discussion about quantitative easing which I’ve recently heard a lot about but which, to me, sounds an awful lot like just printing money dressed up with a fancy name.

John Russell has a good story in the Indy Star about the cozy relationship between Duke Energy and the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission’s general counsel who recently took a job with Duke. What is more interesting to me are the raw e-mails posted by the Star. (h/t Indiana Law Blog).

Option #1, clearly, is not to get so cozy with the people you’re supposed to be regulating. Be friendly – you have to work with the people; there’s no shame in polite chit chat here and there, but these e-mails seem to reflect a camaraderie that goes beyond the pale.

Option #2, don’t put this yukking it up between government entity and regulatory agency in e-mails going to the government e-mail account. At that point, you’re not even trying.

And both of these things don’t even address the horrible conflicts presented by having a job offer on the table from what is (or should be), in effect, a party adverse to your client.

Today is apparently National Coming Out Day. My thinking has really evolved over the years on the issue of gay rights. (“Gay rights” is something of a misnomer, I think — what I mean by it is basically the notion that you should treat gays with the same respect and decency that you’d show to anyone else.) I grew up thinking I was homophobic, probably into college somewhere.

Anyway, I think my evolution on the subject was triggered when I actually knew real people who were gay – gays weren’t just abstract, notional others upon whom I could project fears and prejudices. Once they were real people, I had to start thinking about them as such.

The thinking went from “gays are bad and icky; I dislike them.” To, “that guy seems pretty decent; oh, he’s gay; no skin off my nose.” After that first encounter, and the advent of Facebook, I came to learn that I knew a lot of gay men. (Oddly, the only friends I know to be lesbians are online – as opposed to in-person – acquaintances.) I suppose I don’t know what I would have done with that information had I known they were gay in high school or college or whatever. (Maybe they weren’t quite sure, themselves.) Regardless, I’m glad they are friends now. From my perspective, the value of gays “coming out” is that most of us have an easier time hating abstract strangers who are different; it’s a whole different story when it is your friends and family. Maybe when we have a more accurate idea of how many people, and who, are actually gay; we will treat the issue a little more rationally. A guy can dream anyway.

A lot of the antipathy toward government comes from a sense that it is something alien, spending our money outside of the tribe. I’ve been trying to figure out what I see as a disconnect between stated reasons for disliking government spending and the things that actually seem to get people riled up. Some kinds of spending seem to get folks agitated – e.g., Reagan’s famous Cadillac driving welfare queen and the young bucks eating T-bones. Others, not so much, e.g., bombing foreigners. (The latter often seems draw opposition based more on anti-war sentiments than a visceral reaction to the money spent on bombers.)

I don’t think people generally mind spending more in taxes than they personally get back, necessarily. What they mind is having their money taken for the benefit of what they regard as people who are more properly characterized as “them” than “us.” And if the money is being spent for “them,” then pretty much any amount is too much.

So, I think one’s animosity toward government is a decent gauge of whether a person thinks of government as being “of the people, for the people, and by the people;” or as an alien force, subjugating “us” for the benefit of “them.”

A Pew Study on religion has been making some headlines. It finds that atheists know more about religion than theists. Heather Horn has a pretty good round up in the Atlantic on some of the reaction.

I suppose the catty reaction is to suggest that the more you learn about a religion, the less likely you are to believe. But, my guess is that it’s a correlation thing, and not a causation thing. I’d suggest that (with plenty of exceptions), it’s the type of folks who are most likely to think hard about religious issues and study what various religions have to offer as answers are also the type of folks who are most comfortable reconsidering whatever it was their parents taught them and more comfortable making their way in the world without religion.

At a relatively early age, I found it telling that most people followed whatever religion their parents followed. That was a pretty good indication that people didn’t subscribe to a particular religion because they considered the evidence, weighed the options, and picked a winner. I also found notable that most religions tend to indoctrinate kids at an early age as part of their program. I was raised Presbyterian, and even though my folks were never fire breathers about their religion, I still found it difficult to finally admit to myself (let alone to others) that I didn’t believe the stuff I had been taught. There is a huge social pressure to go along to get along. And most people just aren’t that inclined to buck the pressure and really consider closely whether their religion is most likely to be true.

To me, a good bit of religious language seems to reflect this sort of unfocused thinking. The words come together like a salad and don’t convey a lot of meaning. At least not to me. Taking something pretty well at random off the Internet:

“In Him [Christ], you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.”

If you parse this and diagram it, you could probably turn it into something coherent. But, my guess is that your average listener just lets something like this wash over them. Maybe the average person’s faith is something like Stephen Colbert’s truthiness, a truth a person knows intuitively, “from the gut,” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. But, maybe I’m wrong. That’s just what it looks like from the from the outside. Obviously I can’t crawl inside someone’s mind and know how closely they’ve examined what their parents told them about religion.

Matt Taibbi has an article in Rolling Stone entitled Tea & Crackers. He highlights a fundamental flaw in the Tea Party movement. It’s not that they’re predominantly white or they’re too angry or they’re insufficiently concerned with the plight of others. It’s that they are full of crap.

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about[.]
. . .
[T]he Tea Party doesn’t really care about issues — it’s about something deep down and psychological, something that can’t be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are (“radical leftists” is the term they prefer), and they’re coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.

But, Taibbi goes on to predict, no matter what the Tea Party thinks it’s doing, it will ultimately be castrated and co-opted into the two party system the way any other grass-roots movement is. “Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP’s campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.”

Tea Party 1.0 was the (whatever his other faults) honest Ron Paul, anti- war, pro-legalization Republican. Tea Party 2.0 got rolling with Rick Santelli’s CNBC rant, not against the billions going to prop up Goldman Sachs and AIG, but rather the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan which was 1/100th the size of those financial institution bailouts. Supporters of Tea Party 2.0 were conspicuously silent about that spending as well as the previous administration’s “gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires.”

So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul “Tea Parties,” but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey “unconstitutional” orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It’s a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

O.k., I find myself wanting to blockquote the whole thing, so I’ll just stop. It’s good reading.

Just noodling here, but one of the crises we’ve been told is going to cause enormous problems for us is the aging of America. The ratio of young people to old people is decreasing which means there will be fewer young people bearing the burden of paying for the care of more old people.

Not to be too ghoulish, but it occurs to me that, one consequence of this ought to be –sooner or later– more people dying. As the dead have no need of their property, this would also mean more estates available for taxation. Seems to me that the estate tax is the rational means of compensating for the decreased ratio of young-to-old. Sort of a use tax on the aging of America, if you will.

Just a thought.