Pretty much everyone wants a better healthcare system.  The desire for change stems from two basic concerns:

1. We want every American to be have insurance (e.g. you shouldn’t have to pay for your own healthcare if you can’t afford it)
2. We think the cost of healthcare is too high

The major proponents of change would also have you believe that America has a horrible healthcare system because we have higher incidence of newborn fatalities and a lower life expectancy than other nations.  They say these are signals of a failed healthcare system.

But are they?  I’ve argued before, and I’ll argue again, that the cause of poor health in America has nothing to do with our healthcare system.  When you need critical care, there is no place better than America to get it.  America also is the runaway leader in healthcare research and generates more Nobel prize winners in Medicine than any other country.

So why do we die early?  Jamie Oliver, winner of this year’s TED Prize tells you why.  And the cost of the fix is cheap, and has nothing to do with our healthcare system.  The problem is us.  Changing insurance won’t make us live longer.  He’s a great speaker, I hope you’ll watch.

Since the Supreme Court Ruling on corporate limits last month, a lot of people have been discussing the role of lobbyists, special interests, and those that try to buy undue influence.  I’m ecstatic that this is gaining attention, because it doesn’t matter if you are liberal or conservative, I have yet to meet anyone that isn’t against this growing source of corruption in America.

Obama seems to think the ruling was wrong, and attacked the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address.  Lawrence Lessig wrote a nice article about our general lack of trust in congress, spurred by lobbyists and corruption.  He recommends the Fair Elections Now Act, which is good, but won’t prevent the corruption we have today.

Lessig follows the obvious answer – which is more spending caps and more legislation.  And while these are good ideas, they won’t work, because they don’t address real problem:

The government distributes too much money.

Why has the amount of money spent on lobbyists more than doubled in the last 10 years?  Because our government is expanding.  When we give money to the Federal Government to spend, special interests line up to assist with the distribution of those dollars.  If we just don’t let the Feds get the money in the first place, the lobbyists will disappear.   But as long as the money is there, the lobbyists will remain.

On the surface, it seems like contribution caps should be enough.  But the reality is that there are just too many loopholes.  Although the limits are allegedly $5,000 per candidate per year, it doesn’t take much browsing through OpenSecrets.org to discover that individuals, PACs and corporations are all able to openly donate much more (example1, example2, example3).  Unfortunately, legislation to close these doors is difficult at best, and impossible due to freedom of speech at worst.  There are so many back-door mechanisms to donate money (e.g. “hey, I’ll buy you a ticket to come talk here in San Francisco”, or “I can run a TV show about you”, or “I can write an article for you in my paper about how bad your opponent is”), that it just isn’t realistic to expect we can possibly close them all.

Special interest groups have figured this out.  They’re not just buying a few candidates, they’re now buying all of them.  Consider AT&T, for example, who donated $4.5M to candidates last year.  If you believed that the $5,000 per candidate contribution limit applied, that would mean they would donate to ~900 candidates.  In actuality, they donated to ~430.  And since there are only ~500 Congressmen,  that means they donated to most of them!  And AT&T is not alone.  The National Association of Realtors, and practically every union are doing exactly the same thing:  buying “access” to more than half of Congress.

Once we realize that centralizing our spending through the Federal Government is the problem, two simple solutions emerge:

1. We need to give the government less money to spend.
2. When we do give money to the government, we should federate it through states and local agencies as much as possible.  Don’t leave decision making power in Washington, where a small number of politicians can be influenced.

This realization also highlights why Obama’s entire strategy leads to more corruption, not less. Obama spent over $700B last year in “stimulus”.  Did he really believe that he could distribute such a massive amount of spending without calling out the lobbyists in droves?  Does it really surprise him that when he announced that he wanted a federal takeover of federal student loans that Sallie Mae would kick up it’s lobbying to the tune of $8M?

The unfairness and corruption is caused by the lobbyists and campaign contributions, that is true.  But they are not the root cause, and they are impossible to stop without violating our own liberties (hence the Supreme Court ruling).  When all money flows through a small funnel in Washington, corruption increases.  Take the money back, federate our spending across the states and local governments, reduce spending and reduce taxation, and the corruption will decrease.

I am so sick of hearing claims like, “this bill will save $200B by 2020”.

What does that mean?  It usually means that in order to trump up the savings benefit, the politician multiplied the annual savings by 10.  Or they did inflation adjustment, or added debt interest, or other complex additives to make the savings look bigger than it is.  At the end of the day, it is a bogus number.

I just received a letter From Senator Diane Feinstein claiming a bill will save “$176 billion from 2014 to 2023”.  What that really means is an annual savings of roughly ~$17.6B.  That’s nice, but when put in perspective to the $3.6T spending package being proposed for 2011, it’s a mere half of one percent of spending.  And she calls this reform.

It’s not just the democrats doing this – all of them seem to use this kind of lying mathematics in order to fool their constituents.  It’s dishonest at worst and deceptive at best.

OpenSecrets is a great site.  Find out for yourself where the money is flowing in politics.

Interesting was reading about Scott Brown (highly publicized Senate race in Mass) and also where healthcare companies donate their money.  You might be surprised to know that it’s mostly going to Democrats right now, but I suspect that is due to their large majority population in congress.

For tech fans, reading about Microsoft’s PAC is also interesting.

Of course, if we really want to control our own government, we need to nix all political PACs and lobbyists.  Then OpenSecrets wouldn’t be such an interesting site.

This holiday season, I’m not going to pay any California State Sales Tax.  The blood suckers in Sacramento have raised taxes to a wallet-thinning 9.25% here.  I can ship my goods from New York to here for less than that!

Instead there are countless online e-tailers that I can purchase everything I want from.  It hardly takes any effort at all.

I know it is just a matter of time before California (and other states) close the inter-state loophole, but until then – screw ‘em.

And when they do, they’ll just be fuelling to push online e-tailers off shore.  How long will it take before amazon.mx replaces amazon.com?  And you can’t tax that!  Ha!

Electric cars are coming.  Right now, the electrics that you’d want to drive cost too much.  But those prices will come down.  Are we ready to switch from gasoline to electric?

To answer the question, let’s look how States generate their electricity.  The Energy Information Administration has a nice summary table.

On average, ~50% of America’s electricity is generated from coal.  California’s largest source of electric power is natural gas, and generates only ~1.5% of its power from coal.  But, if you buy your electric car in Indiana, you’ll be trading your gasoline for electric power which is more than 90% generated from coal.

Now, I’m just doing fuzzy math, making simple assumptions based on some published statistics.  My numbers could be wrong (perhaps electric cars are charged at night, and the profile of energy sources at night is different than what is consumed today).  Maybe someone smart can correct me on that.

But on the surface, it doesn’t seem to me that switching from gas to electric will make our skies cleaner.  Why do many states and governments offer rebates to switch?

Others have noticed this problem too. 

Here’s the simple how-to guide for voting on Tuesday.

Prop 1A – NO
This confused proposition claims to limit state spending, but the first thing it does is create a “rainy day slush fund” to the tune of ~$16B.  There are only 28M Californians, folks.  That means taxes of $571 from every man, woman and child in the state.  But since only 18M of those people want to work, and another 11.5% are unemployed, each worker will get hit with ~$968!  Yes, we should limit state spending.  As far as I can tell, this is an increase in spending.

Prop 1B – NO
California has not been able to pass a budget largely because legislators have their hands tied.  Propositions like 1B mandate spending in certain areas without consideration for future events.  When crunch time hits, legislators need maneuverability.  We cannot predict the future, and guaranteed spending always hurts.  Experts agree this will be roughly a $10B tax increase starting in 2011.  Further, in order for this law to work, you need to vote yes on 1A.

Prop 1C – NO
The proposition calls itself a “lottery modernization act”, but really it is a loan from the lottery to the state for $5B to cover more spending.   This would also make lottery profits no longer guaranteed for education.  We don’t need more loans for the state to pay back later.

Prop 1D – NO
Redirects funding from 1998’s Proposition 10 so that funding can be used for purposes other than what was designed in 1998.  This is a great example of why propositions are a bad idea.  In 1998, Prop 10 passed.  But now, the state is in a jam and wants the money to use for something else.  Let’s repeal Prop 10 altogether, not amend it to create more crazy spending plans.

Prop 1E – NO
Like Prop 1D, this proposition is redirecting funds to new purposes.  Prop 1E proposes to change the funding plan for 2004’s Proposition 63, which guaranteed funding for certain mental health services.  Now, the state is in a jam and wants to spend it on something else.  Like with Prop 1D, let’s just eliminate Prop 63 rather than create more complications in our budget.

Prop 1F – NO
This law would prevent salary increases for legislators when there is a deficit.  I don’t disagree, but we don’t need such a stupid law.  It has trivial effect on our overall state economy, and we should be more strict about balancing the budget rather than creating penalties for deficits.

Conclusion
The cheat sheet for this year’s election is simple.  NO.  NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.  Get the pattern?

Several of the propositions are about changing earlier propositions (the lottery, prop 10, and prop 64) so that we can balance the budget by using those guaranteed funds for new purposes.  I agree we need to unlock funds so that we can balance our budget.   But creating new, cockamamie laws isn’t the answer.  Let’s repeal the guaranteed spending initiatives altogether.

Doesn’t look like my 64% number was right, but I still think its going to be a landslide.

President Bush asked for a little money today.  Here are some ways to put that into perspective.  I use the very handy data from the census bureau for these calculations.

• He recommends spending ~$2300 for every person in the United States.
• According to the census, there are about 33 million Americans earning less than $50K per year with mortgages.  Assuming a 10% default rate (this is huge) and an average $92,000 mortgage, we could cover all defaulted loans for $303Billion.
• There are 6,450,000 Americans living below the poverty and holding mortgages.  Their median mortgage (sorry, I don’t have the average) is $21,390.  We could roughly pay off all of these people’s homes for only $137Billion.

Putting my prediction out long before the rest of the media will (they want the drama!).

Obama’s going to win big in November – he’ll amass at least 64% of the popular vote.