This has been making the rounds, but in case you haven't seen it, Ezra Klein in 2008 laying out the strategy for Obamacare:
I'd say "shocking", but of course it isn't. This is what we expected. And the last bit about creating a system that would gently lead us to single-payer: yep, just as we suspected. Thanks, Ezra, for finally telling the truth. Now to abolish this abomination.
But the Right's case isn't so great, either. Yes, we should have better mental health policies. And it's pretty clear that the Navy Yard shooting, at least, could have been prevented with more attention to mental health. Evidently the shooter had displayed clear signs of mental illness when speaking to police just days before the shooting. But the police hadn't called mental health officials. Had the done so it's possible the shooting could have been prevented.
In general, though, would better mental health policy have much effect on gun violence? Not really. The problem is that most people with mental illness aren't extraordinarily violent, and most violence isn't perpetrated by the mentally ill. So not only is it difficult - nearly impossible - to determine who is likely to commit gun violence, even if we could keep guns out of their hands the effect would be only marginal.
This is a problem with no easy, obvious fix.
Say what you will about George W. Bush as President: he has at least been a good ex-President. He hasn't interfered with his successor, and has stayed on the sidelines, unobtrusively.
Bill Clinton has been more of an activist, but has stuck to public speeches. He did speak out against W. during his two terms, but he also teamed up with Bush Senior in several projects, and hasn't directly interfered in, say, foreign policy.
Then we come to Jimmy Carter. It's hard to think of a worse example of an ex-President. He has often directly interfered with U.S. foreign policy. During the run-up to the First Gulf War he wrote to France and China to urge them not to support the U.S. Sent by Clinton as a negotiator to Haiti, he undermined our policy and made Clinton look foolish.
And now, he makes this comment, not in the U.S., but to the foreign press: "America has no functioning democracy at this moment." One might think, perhaps, that this statement is in response to Congressional stalemate. But no: it's actually in response to Snowden, whom he seems to think is some sort of hero.
One can only hope no one takes him seriously anymore.
I've had a very long absence from posting - sorry! - but I will try to improve. There's certainly no shortage of things to say.
Recently read this story about the quality of UN peacekeepers. No huge surprises, but the extent of the incompetence is still amazing:
There was a bunch of Ukrainians, who typically rolled out of bed at noon, cracked open the vodka, and drank until dawn the next day, before going back to bed. The commander no longer bothered asking them to do anything.
Later on...
He was left to rely on a tough and professional contingent of Kenyan soldiers. What proportion of his force could he actually count on? About a third, was his answer. It would have been better for everyone if two thirds of them had stayed at home.
Remind me again what the UN's purpose is? Other than to condemn Israel, I mean.
On Friday my wife and I saw Silver Linings Playbook, the Oscar-nominated film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. It's a good movie, well-constructed, well-acted, not quite a romantic comedy but not so heavy as to be a full-on drama. Typical Hollywood ending.
But what I thought was interesting was that the climax of the movie involves the furtherance of a criminal enterprise. That's spelled out pretty explicitly, but no one in the film seems to notice or care. The father, played by Robert de Niro, has lost his pension and started a bookmaking "business", which is, of course, illegal. To hide his profits he wants to start a restaurant, through which he can funnel his illegal earnings.
His son Pat, played by Cooper, can help his father win a bet (itself, ahem, illegal) in order to obtain the capital needed to open the restaurant. Spoiler alert: they do win, and Cooper gets the girl and his father gets his restaurant. Which, we couldn't help but notice, is the front for his bookmaking operation.
The reason this is so very odd is that the story revolves around Pat's difficulties with the law. He has just come out of a court-ordered stay at a mental institution after beating his wife's lover nearly to death. Needless to say, Pat figures out a way to control himself and stay on the right side of the law. Except... does he? He ends up being an accessory to a crime, or at least enabling his father to commit one.
I suppose we aren't supposed to worry about such things, but it struck me as strange. The family could easily have had some other, less illegal, form of financial hardship. In any case, the circumstances detract only a bit from an enjoyable, if hardly profound, movie.
The US Postal Service recently announced a $15.9 billion loss for fiscal year 2012. Meanwhile, FedEx had an operating income of just over $3 billion and net income of about $2 billion, and UPS is on track to be slightly more profitable.
I'm constantly seeing ads on TV and elsewhere for shipping services via USPS. But clearly they're losing in the marketplace for shipping. And that's fine, in a way. We don't really need the USPS to make money. But it would be nice if it lost less, and there's a really simple way to do this: cut it down to size.
Do we need a government-run postal service that ships packages of all shapes and sizes to every zip code in the country? We already have privately-run companies that do this just fine and do it profitably. I get that for social cohesion it's useful to have a postal service for letters (although that's less and less obvious given the fact that even email, which has been killing postal mail for years now, seems antiquated in these days of Facebook and Twitter).
The USPS needs to do what any company deep in the red does: cut back to its core competency. This is going to be very hard to do, though, because it can be endlessly subsidized by the taxpayers. It won't have to go through bankruptcy reorganization. It's not even a "public-private partnership", a la FNMA.
This would be a perfect time to shrink the USPS, though: its raison d'etre is going away, it's losing money, and we as a nation are going broke. But I don't imagine for a second that it'll happen, for all the usual reasons: too few people care too little about shrinking it, and the few who really don't care a lot. Repeat this a few hundred times and you have a trillion dollars in annual deficit.
