Month: September 2011

Putting Alternative Energy and Government Workers First… Before Medical Care for the Poor

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California faces intense budget challenges. The budget gap is approximately $10 billion, and instead of “fixing” them, their budget has optimistic assumptions such as extra revenue due to an improving economy and many other sleight-of-hand items. The California executive and legislative branches are all solidly in the hands of Democrats, who control the agenda but must at least negotiate with the Republicans on the topic of tax increases (because a super-majority is needed to raise taxes).

I wrote here about how the State of California has a super-aggressive (and expensive) plan to move to “alternative energy” even though the cost / unit is much higher than traditional forms of energy, especially when transmission is taken into account.

In contrast with other states where the government is attempting to make their union workforce pay more for insurance and pensions, the completely captured Democratic officials don’t even attempt to reduce compensation, benefits or pensions.

Thus how does California intend to balance their budget, when they 1) won’t reduce government union worker pay or benefits 2) won’t back off their alternative energy zealotry?
By reducing medical care to the poorest citizens in their state. This article in today’s Chicago Tribune is titled “Health Law Model State Eyes Drastic Surgery” describes the situation in California’s medicare system which covers 6 million children and poorer residents.

California spends less per beneficiary than any state. It is now seeking waivers from the federal government to impose copays of $5 for office visits and prescriptions, $50 for emergency room visits and $100 for hospital stays.. (they) would drop reimbursement for a standard physician visit to less than $12.

It actually is a bit worse than that. The co-pays would have to be collected by the doctors, and if they can’t collect the money, then their reimbursement will fall further.

And what would the likely impact be of these cuts? Per the article:

Many doctors have already closed their doors to Medicaid patients. Other providers are following suit.

It is telling that the Democratic-controlled executive and legislative branches have decided that protecting the salaries and benefits of their union workers has a higher priority than providing basic medical care for the poorest residents in their state. They also believe that an incremental (and insignificant) move towards alternative power, which costs billions, rises above the needs of the poor for medicine.

This is analogous to the teachers’ unions that put their needs and benefits ahead of the children, who suffer through some of the worst schools in the country here in Chicago.

I can only imagine the smug outpouring of punditry that would occur if the Republicans abandoned a core principle to the same degree that the Democrats in California are abandoning the poor in this instance. Like this article in the Chicago Tribune and LA Times, the fact that the Democrats are abandoning the poor and instead focusing on their own direct needs isn’t even mentioned, since it apparently isn’t a fact that they believe their readers need to know. The situation is presented as a sad part of the budget sideshow rather than as a calculating prioritization decision made on the part of California’s Democrats, which it actually is.

Cross posted at LITGM

Around Chicago September 2011

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Upper left – at the Cubs for a beautiful Saturday in September for a day game. Love the trash-talking T Shirts, especially the one with a picture of Jesus on it saying “Don’t Do Nothing ‘Til I Get Back”. Upper middle – people lining up for donuts at “The Doughnut Vault“, in River North, where they start serving doughnuts at 8:30am until they are all gone. Upper right – the plaza in front of the Hancock building with a fountain and people lounging around on a Saturday night. The number of tourists now on Michigan avenue seems to be at an all-time high. Lower left – the Aon Building lit up pink, with the new Prudential building adjacent. Lower right – looking up at the Hancock, with green lights installed.

Cross posted at LITGM

A New Doctrine?

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Carter Doctrine:”The Carter Doctrine was a policy proclaimed by President of the United States Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, which stated that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf region. The doctrine was a response to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, and was intended to deter the Soviet Union—the Cold War adversary of the United States—from seeking hegemony in the Gulf. After stating that Soviet troops in Afghanistan posed “a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil,” Carter proclaimed:….”

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, as we remember the fallen and the many members of the armed services of the United States who have served for ten years of war, heroically, at great sacrifice and seldom with complaint, we also need to recall that we should not move through history as sleepwalkers. We owe it to our veterans and to ourselves not to continue to blindly walk the path of the trajectory of 9/11, but to pause and reflect on what changes in the last ten years have been for the good and which require reassessment. Or repeal. To reassert ourselves, as Americans, as masters of our own destiny rather than reacting blindly to events while carelessly ceding more and more control over our lives and our livelihoods to the whims of others and a theatric quest for perfect security. America needs to regain the initiative, remember our strengths and do a much better job of minding the store at home.

– Zenpundit, The Nine-Eleven Century

1. Canada and oil sands: “Bituminous sands, colloquially known as oil sands or tar sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. The sands contain naturally occurring mixtures of sand, clay, water, and a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as bitumen (or colloquially “tar” due to its similar appearance, odour, and colour). Oil sands are found in large amounts in many countries throughout the world, but are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.[1]”

2. Israel and Natural Gas: “In recent years, Israel has found and begun developing massive natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea. There is much more wealth underwater– the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Levant Basin contains as much as 122 trillion cubic meters of recoverable gas — and all countries around the basin want a piece of the action.”

3. Russian state oil and American oil companies: “America’s largest oil company last week reached an historic agreement with Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft. ExxonMobil now will take the place of BP (British Petroleum), whose dealings with Rosneft collapsed earlier this year.”

4. Dakotas and oil reserves: “America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.”

5. Bloom boxes: “One example to illustrate why the future is proving elusive in the USA: There is a stand-alone electricity providing unit called the Bloom Energy Server or “Bloom Box” — small, simple to use — which can power any home or commercial building. The wondrous box has already been test-driven; Google, eBay and a number of other Fortune 500 companies have a few Bloom Boxes and they’re saving fortunes in electrical bills.

In other words, the Bloom Box can make America’s electricity grid obsolete. There are only two things holding the box back from being installed in every residential, commercial and government space in the USA:

a) Bloom Energy, the company that makes the box, doesn’t have large manufacturing capacity.

b) The U.S. energy industry doesn’t want to be shoved around by a box. (The same for much of the ‘Green Jobs’ sector that the federal government has been pushing hard. The Bloom Box technology makes windmill and solar panel technologies obsolete.”

The GOP debates have been intellectually vapid and the fault does not lie entirely with our lightweight media moderators. Ladies and gentlemen, you are “auditioning” for the toughest job in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, you are genuinely interesting and accomplished people. Be leaders. Hire some decent speech coaches, do a little background wonky reading and show us your vision for the future.

Update: I made a few edits for clarity. Thanks for the comments, everyone. I don’t know squat about this topic. Carl from Chicago is definitely the “go to” guy on energy topics around here but I’ve been bored with the debates and wanted to blog about that for some time now. Also, I don’t know what the whole “ladies and gentlemen” thing is about. It’s kinda affected. Incorrect, too. Only one lady has been involved in the formal debates….so far….

The Logic of Failure, redux

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Dietrich Doerner is a professor (at Otto-Friedrich University, Bamberg) who studies the thought patterns that result in bad decision-making, resulting in outcomes ranging from lack of success to outright disaster. I reviewed his interesting book, The Logic of Failure, here.

Comes now The Social Pathologist, who links my original review and adds thoughts of his own on Doerner’s work, particularly the sociological implications thereof. Interesting reading.

Searching on Doerner’s name, I ran across this analysis of Doernerism applied to the failure of a downtown mall in Columbus, OH.

Prof Doerner’s home page is here; unfortunately it seems that most of his work is available only in German.