Categories
life meta

Another New Feature

I got a new plugin called In Series today. There have been a few times when I have written a series of posts that should be linked together. In the past I have tried to tie things together by referencing previous posts in the series, or by manipulating the tags so that the other posts in the series dominated the list of related posts. Neither of these methods is completely satisfactory because I prefer to avoid the “(here, here, and here)” links (not my style) and it’s hard to work in references to all the old posts if a series gets long – like my candidate endorsements series. Manipulating the related posts list only works for a series of less than 8 posts and it skews my tagging so that it is not truly representative.

After installing the new plugin I went back through my posts and added posts to various series’ as appropriate. I learned something interesting about my voucher posting, all my voucher posts have been in the last six weeks and I have written 15 times on the issue. Also, as I have read the news I have discovered that I am no longer interested in writing about vouchers ever since I came to my final decision. Like some other people I am ready to put this referendum behind us so that we can move forward on something better than HB148 and HB174.

Categories
culture politics

Speak Up

I loved seeing How to Get Involved in Political Process at KSL. It talks about how to go beyond voting and pontificating to actually making a difference politically. There are many ways to be involved between the voting and serving in an elected capacity. If you really want to make things happen you can look into being a delegate or a lobbyist. (I know – lobbyists have a bad reputation among some groups.)

Other than primary elections, political analysts say it’s one of the simplest ways to effect politics on the ground level, where anyone can help determine who gets a party’s nomination for president.”Anybody can file to become a delegate,” said Craig Axford, Democratic National Committee party organization director for Utah.

. . . To become a delegate that goes to the national convention, first you have be chosen as a county delegate at party caucus meetings or neighborhood precincts, then get elected as a state delegate. . .

Both parties will hold their caucus meetings March 25. The only difference between the two parties is the Republicans will pick county and state delegates at the same time.

If a particular bill is more important to you than a specific candidate, then maybe becoming a lobbyist is more for you.

I also learned a lot from a presentation at the American Solutions conference by Stephen Goldsmith titled Citizenship and Local Government: You Can (and Must) Make a Difference. (download his presentation and the transcript of the Q&A portion of the session.)

The overall lesson from these seems to be that we have to speak up to affect change. Anyone who tells you to pipe down does not trust democracy. Just remember that speaking up does not mean shouting down those who disagree with you. People should express their diverse opinions. If you think the prevailing message is not accurate then track down the facts and learn how to make yourself heard. If after you do that people vote differently than you, they are only exercising the very freedom that made this country great.

Categories
culture life

Are We Willing to Change?

We took the kids to Timpanogos Cave a couple of weeks ago. One of the people on our tour with us was a soldier who we learned was recently back from a tour in Iraq. At the end of our cave tour Laura took a moment to point him out to our girls and told them “He’s a soldier, he has been fighting for our country.”

He overheard her saying this and commented “Right, fighting for oil.”

This obviously stuck with Laura more than me because she brought it up again recently with this insightful observation, “What is he willing to do about it?”

This is not an indictment against this soldier, or any who feel as he does. This is a legitimate question for all of us, especially those who complain about our war for oil. Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for his crusade about the environment. He has obviously determined that he is willing to give speeches, make movies, and organize concerts to raise public awareness. So far he has not been willing to reduce his own consumption. (Purchasing carbon offsets is nice, but it does not actually reduce consumption – it’s like buying indulgences.)

It’s fun and easy to participate in publicity stunts like Live Earth or Lights Off Utah but beyond their potential for raising awareness, these events are insignificant unless we change our lifestyles to match our rhetoric. We may want to see the state go dark, or attend a popular concert, but are we willing to drive less, use public transit, bike more, walk more, turn off unused lights at home, and use CF light bulbs or other energy efficient alternatives where we do consume natural resources.

I’m not saying that everyone has to do all those things. We have done many of them in our lives, but the real point is that there is no reason to believe someone is serious about the environment so long as they continue to consume as if they are not part of the solution.

Categories
politics State

Turning a Corner

I have been a vocal supporter of vouchers previously, but I have been less than pleased with some of the tactics of those behind vouchers. My support was wavering because of my displeasure but then as I stared at the conclusion of the Legislative Fiscal Analyst’s Report that vouchers would be draining more than 40 million dollars per year once all students have become eligible for them I realized the magnitude of the flaws in our current voucher laws. In my opinion, that’s too much of a drain for an experiment. I also firmly believe that it’s much harder to change a law once it is implemented than it is to just let 40 million dollars get siphoned off from our state budget each year.

Between that financial drain and the gutter-politics associated with voucher support I can not support Referendum 1 in good conscience. I still support the idea of vouchers, and would be supportive of future efforts to implement a better implementation later. Good suggestions include using tax credits or requiring that students attend a minimum amount of time in public school before accepting vouchers. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I have one answer – I have to vote “no” on Referendum 1 in November.

Categories
Local politics State

Returning to the MVC

Things have been somewhat quiet on the MountainView Corridor issue until just before they released their Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). As soon as it was out I went to take a look at what the draft EIS said. For those who have been interested in the issue before there is nothing particularly surprising (from what I have seen so far – I’m not sure I’ll ever read all the pages in this 5 volume report).

I just wanted to put a link to the actual report in case anyone is interested in more than the newspaper analysis (actually there’s no analysis so far, just reports of the release) of what is in the draft EIS. I am encouraged by the statements within the EIS explaining the efforts of Lehi city to propose a better plan, and specifically the acknowledgment that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has not identified a preferred alternative and that UDOT and FHWA are considering the necessity of releasing a supplemental EIS once they have had a chance to more carefully study the 4800 N freeway alternative proposed by Lehi city.

I plan to use this public comment period to voice my position to UDOT, but also to encourage discussion of the issue here – I’d love to hear what others think about this plan.

Categories
National politics

SCHIP Numbers

The SCHIP politics are perfect for people with different ideals to keep political pundits happy – do you favor smaller government and oppose helping children, or do you help the helpless by taking money from everyone else? President Bush did what he said he would do and vetoed the bill. Congress failed to override the veto. So now it’s back to the drawing board without anyone having changed positions. I’m all for smaller government and that was an ambitious expansion, but the numbers didn’t add up even if I were less conservative.

. . . the vetoed bill that would have more than doubled the funding from $25 billion for the next five years to $60 billion and expanded coverage from 6.6 million children to 10 million.

So for 2.4 times the price we can ensure 1.5 times the number of children – that sounds like we’ve just introduced a lot of waste into the system.

Bush and many House Republicans . . . want the program narrowly tailored only for those making twice the poverty level or less, though they would not remove anyone making more who is already enrolled. The president says that leaves about 500,000 children who are eligible but not yet enrolled.

“I want to provide enough money to make sure those 500,000 do get covered,” Bush said Wednesday. “That ought to be the focus of our efforts.”

At first, Bush only wanted to add $5 billion in spending, but government budget analysts say that is not enough to cover the rising health care costs of those already in the state programs.

Somehow I just can’t escape the conclusion that the mentality “if it’s getting too expensive just let the government pay for you” can only lead to financial ruin for the country. Have we forgotten that funneling money through the government does not increase the amount of money available. Even if government programs cost nothing it would be a zero sum equation. If costs are rising then we need to find a way to reduce them, not just play hot-potato with the bill.

Apparently there is an alternative solution being proposed in the House that covers those under 200% of the federal poverty level and then gives tax credits for those up to 300% of the poverty level. This would give coverage to most of those who would have been covered in the original bill, but through different mechanisms – the question on this new bill is – what’s it going to cost. Even if I prefer tax credits over federal programs I don’t want to pay $65 billion to cover 10 million children with tax credits any more than I want to pay $60 billion to expand the existing government program.

Categories
National politics State

State vs Federal

Today is not the first time that I have heard this argument:

Ronald Reagan is not running this year. Then again, even before he was president, Reagan did not live up to the standard of President Reagan. . . He enacted tax increases and expanded abortion rights when he was governor of California. Yet conservatives now rightfully recognize him as one of the greatest presidents in our country’s history.

The difference today was that a new thought struck me – we should expect differences in what a candidate will do in a federal position compared to what they might have taken in state offices. These two levels of government are different and serve different roles. Our states are not meant to  mimic the federal government – they are meant to serve functions in our lives which have not been (and often should not be) addressed at the federal level.

Not only are those levels of government different but no state is an accurate reflection of the nation as a whole in all areas of policy. Our government is – and should be – a reflection of the people it governs; when those people differ so should their government. We rightly expect different solutions to come from Arizona than we would find in Delaware.

Categories
National politics

Health Insurance Isn’t Insurance

Steve Olsen started a discussion about healthcare at THE UTAH AMICUS (I’m looking forward to part II) by asking: Is “free market health insurance” a nonsense phrase? He then identifies two issues that we must face head-on if we ar to have any hope of actually pursuing a solution to this problem.

We hear a little about “this is how I’m going to pay for it” in these proposals, but very little of “this is how I’m going to eliminate waste, fraud and excessive profits”. Most independent studies have estimated between 25 and 40 percent of America’s health care dollar is spent on things other than actually providing care. . .

Not only that, improving the cost efficiency of health care has become an economic necessity. Consider Chrysler Corporation. In 1998, Daimler Benz paid $38 billion to purchase Chrysler, and earlier this year, essentially paid Cerberus to take it off their hands. Why? To escape the billions of dollars in unfunded health care obligations to employees and retirees. Basically, a major American manufacturing company was driven to insolvency because America expects employers to foot the bill for health care, something no other major industrial country does.

It is interesting that everyone seems to know that inefficiency in the system needs to be removed and yet there are no concrete ideas being presented on how to do that by any of the candidates spouting their proposals. The last time I wrote about health care I said that we need consumers to become sensitive to the costs of health care services rather than being sensitive to the costs of insurance premiums. Steve’s post reminds me that most Americans has even been insulated from the costs of insurance premiums until the last decade or so. Free markets promote efficiency but we are not going to have a free market for health care until we address the second issue that Steve discusses. (This is true no matter what Health Insurance Connector Authority we may decided to create.)

I believe one thing that hamstrings our efforts to improve health care is our insistence on using the word “insurance”. Let’s look at the dictionary definition of insurance: “A means of indemnity (transferring the responsibility for loss) against occurrence of an uncertain event.” Using the conservative definition of socialism, insurance is essentially socialistic, since it transfers personal responsibility to a larger group in society. The characteristic that allows insurance (in the traditional sense) to work in a free market system, despite being socialistic, is the fact that the event insured against is both uncertain and undesirable. . . Except for isolated cases of fraud, the undesirability of the event being insured against means collection of the benefit will not be abused.

Is health care a proper fit for the insurance paradigm? There are instances of catastrophic illness or accidents that meet the definition. But, in general, most consumption of health care services is neither uncertain nor undesired. We want that daily dose of Lipitor to keep our cholesterol down. We purposely conceive children and consume the health care services necessary to bring a new baby into the world – and we also consume birth control medicine to avoid pregnancy. Whether the illness is diabetes or bi-polar disorder, health care is often a matter of planned consumption where strong and significant consumer demand exists for the product.

People should be allowed to choose the kinds of plans that currently pass as health “insurance” but we need to wake up to the rigged system that we are working with. Insurance companies make it more expensive for doctors to operate and consumers pay that price. Worse yet, patients who don’t have insurance are charged higher prices to compensate for those extra costs because the insurance companies set their own prices on what they will pay for various treatments and office visits. This may be financially beneficial in the short run, but the result is that patients want to get their money’s worth so they expect more services. More demand means higher prices. If consumers were sensitive to the prices of individual procedures the demand would level off as the procedures got too pricey. On the other hand, more demand can lead to efficiency, but the insurance companies keep paying the same price for a procedure (and never lower their premiums) whether the system is efficient or not so the costs remain high even when doctors find ways to improve the system.

One comment from Scott Thompson asks Steve to run for Congress against Rob Bishop again. I don’t know enough about Scott to vote for him (not that it matters since that’s not my district) but I am impressed that he would come out and directly identify the central fallacy that keeps us from actually fixing our health care system.

Categories
politics State

The Real Voucher Question

In a very compelling argument against vouchers, Douglas Alder asks Are universal school vouchers consistent with Utah’s values? For the first time I had an argument that made me consider voting against vouchers. Simply put, if you believe the answer to that question is “no” then you should vote against Referendum 1. If you feel that the answer is “yes” then you should vote for it. Here is the portion of Doug’s argument that made me really consider my position:

Utah has a rather unique history regarding public schools and should be careful about it.

Between 1850 and 1880, most schools in Utah were run by the local villages. Between 1880 and 1890 the LDS leaders decided to turn their schools over to the state of Utah as part of the preparation for statehood. Later they decided to do the same thing with their high schools (academies).

The result is that today more than 90 percent of the elementary and secondary students in the state attend public schools. Thus students of all abilities and all incomes and all ethnic identities go to school together. There are a few private schools, so parents determined on the private option have that choice. Charter schools also provide choice.

Vouchers would encourage the dividing of students – particularly sending bright students to settings away from mainline youth and away from state standards. They would create “gated community” schools for the privileged. In a recent Deseret Morning News editorial, Don Gale argued that public schools are not set up to aid the elite. Vouchers are.

In many states a considerable percentage of students attend private schools. Often the result is a distinct separation from their mainline contemporaries. Thus, schools become a tool of social segregation.

I think that the history of Utah Public School as outlined above and the culture that had resulted from that history is an asset to our state. After considering my stated position on vouchers I have concluded that I already agreed that we should be supporting the public schools. However, my reason for supporting vouchers included concerns about a monopolistic attitude among public school administrators (at the higher levels – I’m not talking about the principals of individual schools) and the intrusive hand of the federal government in our local school system. Those concerns still stand.

Interestingly there was another anti-voucher article by Kory Holdaway, a state legislator and public school teacher, who states that even the members of the NEA have concerns about the top-down heavy-handedness of NCLB. Once the voucher issue is settled I would love to see the NEA take a stand against Congress passing bills like NCLB. I’m looking for more than the perpetual complaint that it’s under-funded. It’s time for the education lobby to state unequivocally that NCLB goes too far even if it were fully funded.

Categories
life

Running Around

It’s been a long time since I went three days in a row without a single post. There’s a lot going on in my head, and there was nothing out the that I just had to write about. Coming into today I was thinking that it was time to write about something. I woke up just before 6:00am and when I looked at the clock I decided that today would be a good day to do something else that I have been meaning to do for a while – run.

After the marathon I took time to recover and then I ran a couple of times before deciding to take some more time to recover. Then I took time to catch up on all the things that had suffered as a result of my training. Things got busy at work, and the kids went through another schedule adjustment with Savannah starting school (and Isaac deciding to wake up every night again). The kids decided to do the rounds of sickness. The result was that I have not been running at all since August. I’m hoping to run 1000 miles next year so I should go into the year running a little bit.

I felt that finally running was an excuse to write. Then I found some very compelling material for more political posts. Expect to see at least one more post today. I plan to write on the best argument against vouchers that I have ever encountered (in my opinion), and more thoughts on the brewing health care debate in the nation.