No More Taxes! And Don’t Cut Anything, Either!

Mother Jones has an interesting story. When Americans were asked if we should raise taxes or cut services to balance the budget, a majority said we need to cut services. When asked what services they’d cut, not even a third of those polled could agree on one thing to cut — except, foreign aid, which is only 1% of our entire annual budget cycle.

Here’s a thought: how about we cut all of them?

The Justin Plan:

• Cut Social Security by raising the entitlement age to 75.
• Cut national defense by leaving the Iraqis and Afghans to sit and muddle in their own hellish sandbox alone.
• Cut Medicare by weeding out fraud.
• Cut aid to the poor by a couple percentage points.
• Cut VA benefits by not having as many veterans. See, “National Defense”.
• Cut health research by incentivizing private firms to do the research instead.
• Cut education by complete reform — if education could be fixed by throwing money at it, we’d be done by now.
• Cut highway spending by stopping the practice of building highways that go absolutely nowhere.
• Cut mass transit by building more rail lines — which are cheaper to maintain — than busses, subways or carpool lanes.
• Cut foreign aid because we can’t take care of everyone else if we can’t take care of ourselves first.
• Cut unemployment benefits by incentivizing businesses to hire more people with far-reaching tax credits.
• Cut science and technology by incentivizing private firms, just like medical firms, to do the research.
• Cut agriculture spending by ceasing the subsidies of massive factory farms and ridding ourselves of that stupid farm bill.
• Cut housing by no longer building more frickin’ houses — we have enough houses in this country. Start refurbishing and saving older homes that are built better to begin with. This will also stop urban sprawl and save money on highway and transit spending.
• Cut environmental spending by throwing down the gauntlet. Let local police do the job of policing heavy polluters with strict, straight-forward rules and regulations on what’s acceptable and what’s not.
• As a side note to the environment and leaving Iraq and the middle east – let’s do everything with what we have here to sustain ourselves. Build windmills, solar panels, nuclear power plants, drill off the coasts (since no one would actually see the dereks from land anyway) and mine for natural gas and coal. This appeases everyone because we do everything and as we develop better technologies, the older stuff (coal, gas, etc.) will fall away.

That oughta save a few trillion.

New Rule: Politicians Must Know Word and Excel

I’m in this weird spot in my life where I’m a young, urban feller but I’m also operating a business. On one hand, tax cuts (my 40% tax rate is a little sickening) sound really, really nice. And, on the other hand, not being a racist homophobe seems like a good plan for future success, too.

So, when Evan Bayh decided to step down, I thought it was a good thing – time to get some young new guy in there. Then, I saw a picture of Dan Coats in the Star who they’re calling the new front-runner for his seat. Then I realized he was old and that pissed me off.

I’ve never known a world without a Bayh, Bush, Clinton or Kennedy in power at the national level. Now, without a Bayh, Bush or Kennedy in place after this term cycle and a Clinton in no real legislative authority, I thought we were moving on. And then, our state graciously donates an old guy who used to be in the Senate two decades ago as the “front runner” to fill the seat of a guy I never really liked anyway.

Damnit. This is not hard. Part of me wants to barge into the state HQ of both parties and yell, “WHAT THE HELL!? IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO!?”

Therefore, it’s time for a new rule: people that want to run for positions of power and authority over my country and state have to at least know Word and Excel.

Oh, I Get It! They’re Idiots!

Interesting piece by the BBC that asks why Americans so often seem to vote against their best interest:

Last year, in a series of “town-hall meetings” across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms.

What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.

Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.

But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform – the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state – are often the ones it seems designed to help.

In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

This was a particularly fascinating piece:

In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.

He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: “Under the governor’s plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he’s modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries.”

Bush: “Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.

“I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math. It’s trying to scare people in the voting booth.”

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense – but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

In summary: most Americans are idiots that can’t do simple logic, reasoning or evidently, math.

Yes We Can!

Wimps:

A planned student protest against Indianapolis Public Schools’ dress code this morning appears to have fizzled.

Students at Broad Ripple High School had proposed a walkout at the beginning of the day over the district’s dress code and spread the word to other schools by Facebook. But this morning, the central office reported that it had heard of no students actually protesting.

I don’t like dress codes, just like I don’t like the idea of planned curriculums based around whatever our legislators perceive as the most important subject at the time. There’s too much emphasis on science and math and not nearly enough on the arts. Yet, since we fail so miserably at science and math, I guess our whole system is just crap-tacular.

What bothers me here is that this is a bad omen for the future. If these kids can’t even bother to stand up and protest the restrictions and regulations of one school system, how on earth are they even going to bother to stand up against possible repression by our government?

Thoughts on Obama and the State of the Union

Obama said a few things today. Generally, he came across as a smart ass which I absolutely want to see more of. As I always say, “It’s a heckuva lot better than being a dumbass.”

What gets me is that there wasn’t anything that man said that anyone should disagree with. If so, you only disagree with what you perceive as his personal agenda to “git ya”. Frankly, if anyone disagrees with these things you should go bury your head in cement:

1. Everyone should have access to healthcare – i.e., no dropping people when they’re at their weakest and don’t deny people for things that happened to them in the past.
2. The last 8 years of Republican spending have left us in a hole.
3. Obama’s current spending has caused more debt, but I (and even Mr. Anti-Deficit Gov. Mitch Daniels) credit him for at least attempting to throw something different at the wall to see if it sticks.
4. Government is here to give a voice to the minorities – you pricks that think gays should be shut out of everything in life should shut up and piss off. If you hate ‘em so bad, why not stick ‘em on the front lines so they can be shot at and killed like everyone else that wants to. How Republicans can’t get past that is beyond me.
5. Companies deserve to be “fairly compensated and rewarded”, but I don’t think our forefathers envisioned a world where a handful of companies could kill, pillage and rape the earth and our citizens like the kinds of companies we have today. (See: Monsanto, Dow Agro, Aetna, Wellpoint, News Corp, etc.)
6. People have got to stop telling the other party “NO” just because they’re of the other party. I swear, I lost all hope in this democracy when Al Franken’s “Anti-Rape” bill didn’t pass in ten seconds. Senate Republicans cock-blocked him on every possible attempt. What the heck is wrong with you people?!
7. Our nation’s universities have got to get over themselves and stop thinking of themselves as two-faced public/private entities. You can’t have it both ways. Cut your crap and make your product cheap and good.
8. Banks can go to hell.
9. Iraq has to put up or shut up. Get your shit together because we’re tired of dealing with your hell hole. We have plenty of hell holes right here in America – like Elkhart, Indiana.
10. Politicians have to grow some balls.

If nothing else, I was hoping he’d at least announce a plan to cap foreclosures. Foreclosures aren’t good for anyone. If a family of four is foreclosed on, you end up with four homeless people needing more assistance, you have a neighborhood with an empty house ready for criminals to jump into and you screw with the kids’ educational attainment because they likely get shuffled to a new school. If you get laid off or make a decent attempt at starting a rational business or get slammed with a ridiculous healthcare bill, then by god, if you can’t make your payments in a recession banks have to be forced to forgo foreclosing on you for at least 12-18 months. And, they have to give you the chance to pay back the owed payments during that time. The only people that want that foreclosed house is the people that lived there.

Also, Republicans have to stop giggling every time someone mentions Twitter of Facebook. You wonder why you’re so out of touch with young Americans (people under the age of 40). It’s because everything you do is fake and half-assed.

Democrats, again, have to grow some balls.

More, Please

INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles is trying to save drivers a trip to BMV branch offices.

The BMV said Tuesday it has started offering online driver’s license renewals at the agency’s Web site. Officials also announced the BMV will allow people to renew vehicle registrations by phone, and they can go to certain AAA Hoosier Motor Club offices to renew driver’s licenses and identification cards.

The changes are the agency’s latest efforts to give customers more choices, BMV Commissioner Andy Miller said.

Although, just across the hall at Government Center South is FSSA, which, evidently, is the epitome of automation run amok with no goals, no efforts and no clue.

Education Dollars That Shouldn’t Be Spent

This won’t win me any points with teachers and school administrators. But, I’m going to say it anyway: you’re awfully redundant.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is cutting $300 million from Indiana’s public school system. Frankly, I have a feeling there’s probably about half a billion dollars in waste across the state that could easily be found. Heck, I don’t doubt that $300 million could be cut from Lake County’s corrupt excuse for a government alone.

But, most of the state operates out of small, local schools. Like my Alma Mater down in Salem. Salem schools operates alongside two other schools in Washington County. East Washington Schools has 1,716 students. West Washington has 896 and Salem has the largest enrollment at 2,125. All together, there are just 4,373 students in all of Washington County.

There are 7 administrators in Salem’s system, 7 at East Washington and 3 at West Washington making 17 administrators. So, Salem has 7 administrators (principals, superintendents, etc.) and East Washington has 7. Yet, East Washington has about half as many students as Salem. And West Washington has about half as many students as East Washington and has 3. It should be noted that 3 is the lowest they’ve had since 1999. They had up to 5 in their hay day when they had 500 fewer students!

Clearly, something is wrong with this picture.

Let’s be conservative and say each of their superintendents makes $100,000 a year. Which, judging by the Star’s metro-area database, is rather conservative. $300,000 a year is made up of just three people. Add in principals, making say, $70,000 a year and you’ve racked up $700,000.

$1,000,000 a year in administrative salaries. That’s $229 per student in Washington County. I can assure you there probably isn’t even that much money spent annually in all of Washington County on food and water.

Don’t get me wrong. Schools need principals and superintendents. Yet, for reasons I can’t explain, Salem has two principals (not a principal and vice-principal, that’s TWO principals) for just grades K-5. They have a principal and vice-principal for grades 6-8 and ditto for 9-12.

Again, something is wrong with this.

Don’t even get me started on the number of assistants to the assistants and assistant assistants. Part of the need for all the assistants is to trudge reports and crap on to the state. Which, may or may not be useful, but much of this manual data-entry into crappy spreadsheets could be easily consolidated into automated systems that follow students rather than following schools. Get on that, IOT.

I’d go as far to argue that superintendents are redundant when you factor in school boards. It’s like having a Congress and a President. We see where that gets us.

Here’s a hallelujah idea:

• Have 1 county superintendent
• Push all administrative duties into one building in Salem. People in East and West Washington’s systems will say this is inconvenient, but it’s no different from having a county courthouse.
• Close the other, now-empty, administrative buildings and sell ‘em.
• I bet with all the consolidation, you can probably lose a couple support staffers through attrition. You don’t need 6 people to answer phones when you have two-thirds less phones.
• Assistant principals can go away through attrition. I can assure you that existing staff and the principal can do the job of discipline and walking the halls during passing periods. Not that big of a deal.
• Save $1.5 million annually.

Or, if you prefer, put half a million towards things people like. Like books. Or computers. Or teacher bonuses. Or heck, put it in savings and give the million back to the taxpayers.

One of these days I’ll get ambitious enough to research Warren Townships schools where I currently pay taxes to. I’m sure that’ll make me scream. I already loathe that they send everyone in this township a quarterly newsletter. And we’re not talking a piece of paper folded in half. It’s a full-scale publication with professional printing and mailing costs.

Maybe someday. For now, the Star has more to say.

US Government, There’s An App for That

Tim O’Reilly, popular for the O’Reilly series of tech books, has an interesting idea: make the US Government function more like the iPhone.

The best way for businesses and developers to think about Government 2.0 as a platform is to look at Apple and the iPhone, according to Mr O’Reilly.

“With government procurement it’s about working with the same group of people and saying we are going to work with trusted partners and them saying here is our handful of offerings.

The iPhone has spawned thousand of apps

“The iPhone comes out and Apple turns it into a platform and two years later there is something like 70,000 applications and 3,000 written every week. They have created a framework and infrastructure and that is the right way we should be thinking about government,” said Mr O’Reilly.

He said past examples of how the government had excelled as a platform were the internet and GPS, the global positioning system, which were both government-funded projects.

I agree with him, in principal, only because I think he has a point here even if his metaphor is a little off the mark. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has repeatedly said, “Government does not create jobs, it only creates the conditions that make jobs more or less likely.” There’s truth to that and if the US Government created something more of an infrastructure than a buddy network, maybe we’d see private sector growth explode.

Then again, this could never work. All that data being hard to find and read is a feature, not a problem. At least not to the government. Making things easy to discover would keep politicians too honest and the public too informed.

Anthem’s Death Panel

Long story short: I have another kidney stone. Or at least it’s the same one that’s been in there all week and the one that passed this week “was just some other stone”. What I wouldn’t give for a Rolling Stone — ca ching!

For all the talk of Obama’s secret “Death Panels”, it turns out Anthem has one that’s computerized! My doctor prescribed 20 more tablets of Ketorolac this morning (among others). I hopped over to CVS across the street (very strategic location CVS. Bravo.) and the pharmacist came back and said, “Here you go. Just need to you sign here and understand that your insurance only covers 20 tablets of Ketorolac each month. It looks like you came in earlier this week and ordered 15, so I could only give you 5.”

Uhh. Thanks?

Luckily, this pill is a supplemental pain control pill taken on an “as-needed” basis. I guess I can “need” it up to five times over the next 10 days. Not like my doctors know what I need or anything. Clearly Anthem has my back.

My achey, pain-ridden, stone-infested back.

Fixing Things So You Don’t Have To – Indiana University

Once upon a time, there was a recession and the government was very sad. So, the government wisely rolled back spending and curtailed expenses to make sure our little Hoosier boat didn’t sink. Then, when things like schools didn’t have any more money to cover all of their spending habits, someone at IU, Purdue, Ball State, Vincennes and Ivy Tech all stood up and said: “Fuck!”

That’s the gist of it anyway. Because the state rolled back spending, everything else should have, too. Although, our state’s smartest people evidently don’t understand money. Or, maybe they do and they just don’t understand anything else. Every public university in the state is raising its tuition rates by as much as 3%, 4% and nearly 5% in some cases. That made a couple lawmakers who evidently didn’t figure a way out of Indianapolis after the Special Session pissy, so they all stood up and yelled, “MEETING!”

Administrator after administrator cruised into Indy and said, “Yeah. Sucks, huh? Rather than stopping, you know, spending, we just decided it’d be easier to raise rates. It’s easier than, you know, saving.” Well. You can’t bleed a sun-dried tomato, my friends. I don’t care how much “administrative costs” rose last year.

So, because no one at IU or elsewhere can seem to look under the couch cushions for spare change, here are a few ideas:

• You know all that money you saved by emailing tuition bills instead of mailing them? Let’s do more of that. No more mailed newsletters, letters, announcements, certificates, flyers or other useless junk you think up. That oughta save a cool $80,000 a year.
• All those pens, pencils, erasers, highlighters and frisbees you pass around at orientation? That’s gotta cost each school at least 10k a year, if not more at IUB and IUPUI. Let’s realize that no one ever chose to go to a school based on what was printed on a frisbee, so stop wasting that money. There’s at least $30,000 a year.
• You know those buses that get spun around IUPUI during the summer when no one is on campus? How about you leave it at just one for the whole campus? In fact, make IndyGo take care of those six people in need of a bus. You made IndyGo free for students anyway! There, between two drivers and a bus for 3 months, that’s at least another $25,000.
• You know those kids you pay to sit in toll booths in the parking garages for 15 hours a day for $10 an hour? How about we get automated garages and put those kids in real jobs doing real work? There, over a year between all the garages, all the students and the hours, that’s at least $100,000, before revenue collected from the garages. Your garages could actually MAKE money!
• New rule: no more useless research. If I can answer a question using common sense and life experiences, you don’t get to do research on it. So yes, men like sex, women like to shop and kids learn better when they listen to Mozart versus Fifty Cent. System-wide, that’s probably a clean million in savings.

So there, I just saved IU $1.245 million dollars in one year. Over a four year period, that’s nearly $5 million. With that you could save students roughly $300 a year, or $1,185 over a four year degree.

And I did that in…13 minutes.