Category: Politics and Government

Poor People Rights

Decades ago, someone rather hostility questioned … well, what they assumed to be my stance on abortion since it wasn’t like we’d ever had a conversation even tangentially related to abortion. They demanded to know why I, as a women, wouldn’t support women’s rights. Women’s rights?!? I asked. You’re talking about *poor people’s* rights.

You don’t need to discuss a controversial procedure like abortion or euthanasia. Consider a hypothetical scenario where LASIK eye surgery is outlawed in the United States. Medical tourism is already a thing in SouthEast Asia – so anyone who wants their vision surgically corrected now needs a week off from work, a couple grand to cover the flight and hotel, and a couple more grand to cover the surgery. It isn’t like the immigration officer is going to be issuing eye exams to determine if your vision when you left matches your arrival (or you fake the exam). Which means outlawing LASIK has only prevented people without significant disposable income from undergoing the procedure.

Removing a federal regulation allowing something and leaving each individual state maintain its own policy just lowers the cash/time requirements. It’s cheaper and quicker to pop over to California than Thailand.

Trump’s 20/20 interview brought this discussion to mind — while he says same-sex marriage has been decided by the supreme court and is unlikely to be overturned (it’s hard to find someone who has sustained ‘personal and individual’ injury by someone else’s marriage and therefore has standing to initiate a suit, so I’ll give him that) he also thinks Row should be overturned (I suspect the male parent could argue standing) and each state should have the power to decide for themselves . To decide what the poorer people who live in their state can or cannot do is the part that gets omitted from the debate.

I wonder, too, if there’s not some even subconscious belief that people are poor because of bad decisions. It’s OK that affluent people can avail themselves to the procedure — they can be trusted to make good decisions. It’s really just the poor people, whose poor decision making is evidenced by their economic situation, about whom we need to concern ourselves.

A friend of mine once observed that people who are out there LOUDLY proclaiming what God wants … odd how God’s will always follows that individual’s ideas too. The God Hates Fags folks who are sure the whole Luke 6:37 (“Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven”) thing doesn’t apply too condemning others based on their sexual preferences. Wasn’t the whole manifest destiny God’s will that the USA spread out to the Pacific?

Updated Federal Budget Distribution – 2016

I’d published a breakout of the federal budget … and thought I’d update the pie charts with the 2016 budget numbers. Again, there’s discretionary spending — spending from appropriation bills and the full budget which includes spending for things like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid which vary depending on the number of recipients and how much each recipient is being paid. This doesn’t mean the non-discretionary components couldn’t be changed — there’s been discussion of means testing Social Security payments and Medicare eligibility — but these changes are generally considered politically untenable (would you vote for the guy who just reduced your SS cheque because you happened to have a pension or money saved in a retirement account?).

Here’s the full budget breakout, updated for 2016

And the discretionary budget

Shocked

I sincerely hope my fear of Trump’s plans prove to be unfounded — hopefully he’s been playing a part during the primaries and general election. Over the top promises made as an act, not because he actually plans to ban Muslims and Mexicans en toto. Or create the Great Wall Prime. Or racial profiling. Or religious tests for entry into the country. Or stop-and-frisk. Or launching military action when another country’s navy makes rude gestures at our sailors. Or any number of outlandish statements he’s made.

And if the current vote totals stay similar once every vote has come in, I hope this is enough to end the electoral college system. If Bush/Gore was not sufficient, I don’t hold out much hope. Especially since I don’t see ANYONE talking about the POPULAR vote where Clinton is leading. The focus is all on the EC points – but I don’t see anyone asking why the EC is there in the first place. But maybe, once the final numbers come in, focus will shift to the system that allows someone to have more votes than their competitors and lose the election.

Walls

I find the idea of a wall to stop illegal immigration to be … beyond silly. As a military barricade — that is, to prevent large-scale movements across a border — it can be effective (it can also be completely INeffective, see: Maginot Line). But if there were thousands of people marching across the Mexican/Texan desert, we could watch for heat signatures & deploy border patrol to intercept. Illegal immigration won’t look like a Mongol army marching across the steppes.

Reviewing walls that have been erected throughout history, the only truly effective method to prevent small scale involves a lot of manpower and a dead-zone. The fourth generation Berlin Wall is a good example of an effective stop to emmigration. But it had over 100 watchtowers in less than 100 miles and several bunkers housing the troops who guarded the wall. There were also two walls with a “death strip” in the middle – material that provided no cover or camouflage for anyone attempting to sneak across. Scaling the Berlin Wall configuration to a 2,000 mile border would require thousands of additional border guards, twice as much material as a single wall, and more than twice the land. Still wouldn’t stop persons wishing to illegally enter the United States from taking to waterways and entering through California and the Gulf coast states. To say nothing of people who come in through proper channels and simply overstay their visa.

But let’s assume that a significant portion of illegal immigration does come by land across the Mexican border at points that are not proper border crossings. For far less than the low-ball estimated cost of a wall being provided, we could have fifty thousand of autonomous drones (I’ve watched enough movies to advocate for unarmed drones) and solar charging stations. Existing border patrol agents would be notified when a target is acquired. Because we have SO many drones available, when a drone acquires a target it would signal for a new patrol drone to launch and then track the target until a border patrol agent detains the person.

If we’re that worried about people tunneling under to avoid detection, add drones with ground penetrating radar. If we’re worried about people coming in through Baja or Corpus Christi, extend the drone patrol line up the coast.

I don’t know if this proposed wall is meant to be a monument to American power (silly, but that’s kind of what the Great Wall is in China) or the sort of WPA project that Republicans actually like. But as an effective deterrent to illegal border crossings, it is an enormous waste of money, resources, time, and space.

Bad Deal

A friend of mine posted a graphic that basically said ten years and six trillion dollars later, we’ve got ISIS in Iraq instead of Hussein and we’ve got the Taliban in Afghanistan instead of … oh, wait, the Taliban. I understand the six trillion dollar figure looks at long term costs for veteran care *and* direct costs of the occupation. Still, the graphic got me to wondering — could we have simply purchased the country for the amount of money we will eventually spend? Iraq is 108,000,000 acres. That’s an average of 33,333$ per acre — now there are some fertile areas, some developed areas … which may well go for more than 30k per acre. But there’s a lot of desert too – not in an oil rich area – which wouldn’t go for anything like 30k an acre.

Population is something like 33,420,000 people. We could have saved near a trillion dollars ( 987,000,000,000) by giving each person in Iraq 150,000$ to do whatever we asked of them. Sure, a few would have held out … but if the alternative clearly was a foreign invasion and no 150k, I’m thinking we could have literally overthrown a government by just bribing the citizens to revolt.

Real People

When I was in college, I went out to a bar with some friends. They had a friend, who had graduated a year or two previously, visiting; this guy came out with us. This friend-of-a-friend and I were sitting at a table while everyone else was getting a drink, and the guy said he wanted to meet a beautiful girl like me … but he doesn’t know how to approach one. What, he asked me, would be the best “pick up line”? To which I quickly answered “Hi, I’m Eric”. Why is speaking to a cute girl different than talking to any other human being?

I subsequently learned that, indeed, young attractive women are treated a lot differently — the sort of things people assume are acceptable make the 2005 ‘grab them by the pussy’ recording … well, not surprising. My office at the University had been a photography darkroom. It had two separate rooms — an antechamber and the darkroom part. A friend of mine and I were in the darkroom part, and she was on the phone with someone. Glenn, one of my work-study students came in to speak with me. Not wanting to interrupt her conversation, I asked him to come into the antechamber. He proceeded to back me into a chair, physically restrain me by sitting on me, and kiss me on the mouth. My rather loud entreaty for my friend to come into the other room was met with an annoyed “I’m on the PHONE”. Luckily she finished her call before the student got beyond unwanted kissing, and he backed off when he heard her walking.

And to people who say “but no one reported it happening, so it didn’t happen”. I didn’t report the student either — there’s no evidence. There’s nothing beyond my say-so. And I’m sure he’s going to say it never happened. And that’s a scenario where I at least knew the person. Random guys at a club who take similar liberties — how would that work? Gently move his hand from my crotch to the table, then ask for his name and number? Remove yourself from the situation, and make sure a friend stays close to you at the club — that was my realistic solution.

Loopholes

When Mitt Romney was running for President, I recall some disclosure about his 401(k) value — something like 20-100 million dollars. The guy was like 65 years old. Even if he’d started contributing in 1978 & dropped in the full 30k you could do at the time … that’d be 1.2 mil in contributions over the course of his lifetime. Which is an amazing rate of return if you factor in normal market performance over the 34 years. Contribution limits sure aren’t 30k per year anymore! How do you get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in an account? You get a special class of stock priced at one penny, put in 15k worth of it (1,500,000 shares) into your 401(k). And then revalue the stock at 10$ a share. Giving you 15 million dollars when there’s a 15k contribution limit.

Donald Trump’s billion dollar loss (great business acumen, huh?) — assuming it was a legit loss (and I think we know why the guy gets audited every year. If he’s still carrying forward his billion dollar loss … he’s got something funky on each return that may well flag it for audit) and it’s actually debt (not just loss of value) — where is that debt? That’s what reminded me of Romney’s 401(k) … if you are dealing with internal funny money, can you then proceed to buy that debt for pennies on the dollar (I’ll sell you this billion dollars of debt for a mere million dollars) and then never attempt to collect it? The debt still exists, your earnings are tax free as they are offset by that loss … but really there isn’t even debt.

Tax End Run

Donald Trump’s massive tax deduction explains why he so wants to get rid of estate taxes — you can take depreciation on buildings *but* you get bit when you sell the property (if I bought it for 1 million, took a quarter mil in depreciation, but then sold the thing for 2 million dollars … your net gain is 1.25 million dollars). Or when you die and it goes through probate.

*But* if we get rid of the estate tax … then someone without financial need to sell their buildings can avoid taxes due to depreciation, hand the properties over to their beneficiaries without incurring tax … and, bonus, those beneficiaries can continue writing off depreciation against their earnings.

Non-solutions

This post takes as a priori knowledge (i.e. not something I necessarily believe to be true based on my experience) that white flight is still a thing – that African Americans primarily live in urban centers – and that these urban centers are an absolute wreck of violent crime and disintegration.

I’ll admit to being advantaged by a lot of implicit bias — I’m a grown up white person. A female, though … and a female in science/technology fields … so it is something I’ve experienced occasionally. The first major company for which I worked, a top-level manager in the IT org hired in a lot of his at-the-time girlfriends. The new girl showing up was assumed to be incompetent, and it is a lot harder to convince someone of your competence if they start out knowing that you are only here because you are sleeping with the boss. Frustrating, but nowhere near the level of “the cops got called when I was standing at my front door trying to find my key”.

My specifics don’t give me a lot of understanding of minorities who suffer implicit bias, racial profiling, and outright discrimination … but I cannot fathom how “stop and frisk” is meant to solve either problem. Even if 25% of the people who live here are degenerate criminals, 75% of the people aren’t. Statistically you spend a lot of time hassling innocents — who may well not consider it a worthwhile trade-off to eliminate one burglar.

The nearest analogy in my life-experience is DUI and seat-belt check-points. I remember being late to work one morning because a seat-belt check-point was on my route. Slowed down traffic quite a bit, stopped on the queue waiting for my turn. Plus it took a couple of minutes for the check itself (they were doing about the nosiest check-point I’d ever seen — basically taking as much time as they could to peruse the plain-sight contents of your vehicle, asking questions, etc). There’s a sanctity of human life argument that says that the potential to save one life has more weight than a hundred people being delayed for twenty minutes that morning. Which, as a one-off … whatever. How many times, though, could I be detained before *I* don’t care all that much about the life of some goober who intentionally refused to fasten their seat belt.

And there’s a difference between reducing and relocating crime. New York City got very “tough on crime” and was able to reduce crime significantly. But Philadelphia saw a dramatic increase in crime — NY didn’t stop people from committing crime, they just stopped people from committing crimes *in NYC*. I don’t see stop-and-frisk having the slightest chance of reducing crime. Relocating, sure, but not reducing.

Knee-jerk reactions

Companies for whom I have worked have blown many millions of dollars on knee-jerk reactions to bad situations. Some of the biggest expenses never even addressed the problem at hand — but the business directive was essentially that we had a big problem and needed to be seen spending money “fixing it” even if a more nuanced study of the situation and solution showed a complete disconnect. No one outside the company could even see the details of Project CYA, and everyone inside the company was complicit in perpetrating the belief that Project CYA did whatever you needed it to do today.

I appreciate the need to do something immediately, but it seems more sensible to me that the immediate action be a stop-gap solution to provide time for a more thorough review of the situation. One of the most egregious examples was a situation where an employee was terminated under bad circumstances, drove over to one of our retail stores, and asked to borrow the logged on computer of a sales guy. Who let him use it. The guy then proceeded to credit thousands of dollars to his friends’ accounts. We spent a year and quite a bit of money implementing an identity management system — one that had many benefits, but didn’t stop an employee from letting someone else use their already logged on terminal whilst they went back and grabbed a cup of coffee. My proposal was a termination alert & photo e-mailed to all employees working within X miles of the terminated employee’s location code be sent for a few weeks while options (beyond the obvious “don’t let anyone use your logged on terminal – log off & let them go in under their ID) were explored. It would have taken a day of coding, but we already have each employee’s photograph in the security system for ID badges, a feed of terminated employees, and a work address for all employees. Sure, not everyone is going to read the message right away … but someone in the store is apt to have read it in the two hours between the guy’s manager bringing him in for the unhappy talk and the guy’s arrival at the retail store.

Reliance on knee-jerk solutions was the biggest fault I saw in George W Bush’s governance — the “trust my gut” and “go with my instincts” methodology. Without the hubris to come along later and analyze how those instinctive decisions worked out.

Trump makes George W seem positively restrained and self-aware. Beyond his constant self-aggrandizing, self-serving tax and regulation policies, and middle school bully approach to inter-social relationships … I cannot fathom how this man will lurch from manufactured crisis (the Iranians gave us the finger!?!) to manufactured crisis (Some world leader won’t meet me on the tarmac, I’m going home) to real crisis (Russia invades the Eastern Bloc, Pakistan and India decide to nuke each other, manufacturing continues to collapse even after illegal duties are slapped on everything brought into this country, Iraqis object to our plundering their oilfields and a whole host of other countries who fear the same thing join their defense against us).