Politics

I want accountability

/ hsoi

The thing about the “health care reform” that gets me is there’s no accountability.

Regarding the recently passed legislation, Nancy Pelosi said:

Health insurance reform will stand alongside Social Security and Medicare in the annals of American history.

Hrm. So it will stand alongside two failed and bankrupt Ponzi schemes. Ironic foreshadowing?

If I ran my household like our Federal Government is run, I’d be bankrupt or thrown in jail. There’s no CEO that can run a business like the government is run. Ultimately it’s all down to one thing: accountability. I’m accountable to my wife and children, to my parents, to those interested in the well-being of myself, my wife, and my children. I must run my household well, else I will pay the penalty. If a CEO runs their business in a poor manner, they will lose their job, they will lose the compensation, the stock options, and if they ran it in an illegal manner they will go to jail. But when the President, when the Congressmen and Senators, when they run things in a terrible manner… where’s the accountability?

Well, we say that it’s to the voters… that they will be voted out and lose their jobs. But the way this “reform” was pushed through? It’s evident there’s no concern for being voted out. Congressmen were promised appointments to other government jobs in exchange for their votes (e.g. Bart Gordon (D-TN) promised the job of NASA administrator, John Tanner (D-TN) US ambassador to NATO). So what’s to fear? Get voted out, big deal… they’ve got something to fall back upon. Gosh… wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all could live our lives this way? Try telling those making up the 9.7% (as of Feb. 2010) unemployment rate.

When one is directly accountable for their decisions and actions they tend to make far more thoughtful decisions and take more careful action. But when you’re spending someone else’s money, when you know behaving in one way will benefit you (even if it hurts millions of others), when you know there’s no downside or loss to you personally for making poor choices… what reason do you have to care about how you act?

This isn’t about health care. This isn’t about Democrats or Republicans. This is a long-standing problem with all the “elected officials”.

I do think the first step is to vote the bums out.

The second step is We The People need to work to improve our system to enforce greater accountability. I’m not 100% sure what the best means to accomplish that would be, but I’m open to discussion.

Vote the bastards out

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

It’s not about “health care reform” or “insurance reform” or any of that. I’m not here to debate that.

I’m here to express my outrage at what it took to get the votes last night.

The lying. The buying of votes. The shutting out of the people despite the promises to the contrary. The lack of doing their jobs — which is, representing the people that put them in office. If the majority of the country doesn’t want this, shouldn’t the Congressional vote reflect that?

If this or any bit of legislation was truly good, it would stand on its own merits. That this cannot stand on its own merit, doesn’t that tell you something?

Furthermore, is there any true concern about the cost of this, both financial and otherwise? Hell, if I tried to run my household or business like this, I’d fail within a year. It’s still amazing to me that we allow our government to run itself this way.

This isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing. They both suck. Dems may have the majority now and the Reps playing the cards they are, but rest assured if the majority was the other way the same disgusting behaviors would occur.

At this point the only solution is to vote the bastards out of office.

But the thing that troubles me more? That many of these scumbags are going to be sent back there. Which means either the citizenry is happy with scum, the citizenry is scum (and merely reflecting itself in who it elects), or the citizenry doesn’t care…. whichever way this goes, it’s a sad commentary.

*sigh*

The money in education

/ hsoi

Wife and I homeschool our children. Why? The main reason is we want the best for them. Is it that we are the best? No, but we certainly don’t view government err, public schools as the way to get there. Proof is in the pudding… it’s a failed system. We’d consider private schools but it’s too expensive. Of course, if instead of having to fork over a bundle in taxes to fund the failed system I could use that money on the free market well… that’d be different.

John Stossel discusses this:

Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.

Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student — more than $200,000 per classroom. It’s not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else?

Indeed. When will we permit competition and choice? In a sense, we do have that because we have chosen to homeschool. Of course, what facilitates that is Texas is quite a homeschool-friendly state; many states in the union and many countries make it difficult or flat out impossible to have such choice. Of course, I have no choice where my money goes… the tax man still taketh away.

To be fair, I’ve had some discussions about this with my more liberal-leaning friends that are in the education field. I must admit, I’m torn. I know the ideal of what I’d like to go for, but there are some realities that are difficult to address in that ideal. The reality is a group of people (city, state, country, etc.) does overall do better the more the entire populace of that group is educated. Look how it was hundreds of years ago where the elite did their best to keep the masses uneducated as a way to wield power over them. No, I don’t wish to return to that. But a truly open free-market system is tough to come about for education, I must admit, when you truly think through the logistics of human nature and trying to actually make things go. I don’t have the answers, but I’d love to try to find them.

Nevertheless, a lot of what this all comes down to is money. I know for a fact if I could keep more of my money I could well… do a lot more with that money. I was thinking the other day how a lot of our current financial situation is rather simple. You see, the government does nothing to earn the money it receives… it just takes, such is taxation. Plus we have no choice but to give the money to them, and if we don’t give it they will take it and make us suffer for having not given up our money. But then people scream about being taxed too much. So things get shuffled around… maybe personal taxes go down, but then business taxes go up. Or the taxes will get labeled something else, like a fee, and get quieted inserted into something else. The bottom line is, you pay no matter what you do. And in the end no matter what entity is getting taxed, ultimately folks it comes out of your pocket and off the sweat of your labor.

So there’s really only one way to make taxes go down: get government to stop spending so much.

There’s no other way.

Stossel continues:

To give the establishment its best shot, consider Head Start, which politicians view as sacred. The $166 billion program is 45 years old, so it’s had time to prove itself. But guess what: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently found no difference in first-grade test results between kids who went through Head Start and similar kids who didn’t. President Obama has repeatedly promised to “eliminate programs that don’t work,” but he wants to give Head Start a billion more dollars. The White House wouldn’t explain this contradiction to me.

Andrew Coulson, head of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Reform, said, “If Head Start (worked), we would expect now, after 45 years of this program, for graduation rates to have gone up; we would expect the gap between the kids of high school dropouts and the kids of college graduates to have shrunk; we would expect students to be learning more. None of that is true.”

So why does the money continue to be wasted?

Color me confused

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

This isn’t unique, just this particular news article happened to spur me to write about it.

Austin Top Cop Art Acevedo said:

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said increasing diversity in APD’s top ranks starts by recruiting more minorities for starting positions.

He spoke at the African American Resource Advisory Commission on Wednesday.

He said getting more minorities to join APD is just the first step.

So they need to recruit more minorities. In order to do that, you have to single people out based upon their ethnic background.

But I thought singling people out based upon ethnic background was bad and wrong?

Daley’s got a point

/ hsoi

Chicago Mayor Daley actually has a point.

The impression coming out of Tuesday’s SCOTUS McDonald hearing is that the US 2A applies to the states. Of course we won’t know SCOTUS’s decision for months, but that’s the impression. Of course, Chicago is directly impacted by this, and Mayor Daley, while not handling the potential loss all that well, actually makes a sound point:

Still, Mayor Daley isn’t giving an inch. In fact, he’s ridiculing the high court for affirming the Second Amendment right to bear arms while sitting in a protective bubble.

“Why can’t I go to the Supreme Court and sit there with a gun and listen to the arguments? If a gun is so important to us on the street or someone’s home, why can’t I go to the Supreme Court and sit there with a gun? I’m not gonna shoot anyone. But, I have a right to that gun,” Daley said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Why can’t I go see my congressman who doesn’t believe in gun laws? Why can’t I carry my gun into congressmen’s offices or go to his home and knock on his door and say, ‘Don’t be worried. I have a gun. You want me to have a gun.’ Why is it they want to be protected by all the federal money … to protect all the federal bureaucrats, but when it comes to us in the city” there’s no protection?

He is quite right. Why can’t law-abiding citizens carry into courtrooms? Why can’t law-abiding citizens carry onto Federal property? Why is there some sort of exclusivity for some and not others?  Granted, Daley doesn’t totally get it because he frames this as if law-abiding folks are suddenly going to turn bloodthirsty. But the general point is sound.

Of course, this is what people are wondering the most about what SCOTUS will say. While it seems a lock that 2A will end up being incorporated, the big question is how and to what extent. That is, could SCOTUS say “yes it applies, but the states are free to decide just how far it applies”. Think about how Heller expressly didn’t address notions of “reasonable restrictions” (whatever that is).

“When a child gets shot or killed, that is a failure of society. Adults should stand up and say, guns don’t solve things in homes or streets. If it was, then everyone here would be carrying a gun in our own corporations.” [said Daley]

Yes yes…. glad to see someone is thinking of the children. And guns don’t solve things? While certainly they aren’t the answer to every problem, they sure do solve some of them. There are decades of data supporting that.

Right now, we just have to wait and see what SCOTUS will say.

And this is why we want to carry in national parks

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

Just read the article.

SEQUOIA NATIONAL FOREST, California — Not far from Yosemite’s waterfalls and in the middle of California’s redwood forests, Mexican drug gangs are quietly commandeering U.S. public land to grow millions of marijuana plants and using smuggled immigrants to cultivate them.

Pot has been grown on public lands for decades, but Mexican traffickers have taken it to a whole new level: using armed guards and trip wires to safeguard sprawling plots that in some cases contain tens of thousands of plants offering a potential yield of more than 30 tons of pot a year.

So you’re out for a backwoods hike. You stumble into a marijuana field… and the growers won’t take kindly to that.

Many of the plots are encircled with crude explosives and are patrolled by guards armed with AK-47s who survey the perimeter from the ground and from perches high in the trees.

Of course, we knew this. But there are those that think parks are safe havens. Folks, they are no more special than anywhere else. Bad people will lurk about. Erecting artificial barriers that only keep law-abiding citizens in a submissive and weakened state (and thus embolden the bad guys)…. please, I’m still waiting for someone to show me the logic in that line of thought.

Thank God for Government Regulations

/ hsoi

What would we do if we didn’t have the government to save us from the evils of free coffee and donuts?

An anonymous customer complaint to the county brought health inspectors to the store, who determined its tradition of more than 15 years of offering coffee and doughnuts to customers violated food-handling regulations.

“We’ve been doing this since we bought the place 15 years ago and the previous owner was doing it, too,” said Randy Collins, 42, co-owner with his parents of B & B. “We simply weren’t aware we were causing a problem.”

Inspectors told Collins that unless he was willing to install stainless-steel sinks with hot and cold water and have a prep kitchen to handle the food, he was violating the law.

Wow. Thank God for those inspectors. I mean, sure for well over 15 years nothing has happened, but something might! I mean, they need a prep area to open that box of donuts. It’s the only safe way!

Years ago Wife wanted to start her own business. Being that I work in Geek Land, she wanted to make meals for geeks. Many of the geeks I worked with at the time were single and work was their life. Many couldn’t cook and lived off eating out or pre-made meals (e.g. TV dinner type stuff). Wife’s cooking is excellent, so her idea was to make batches of meals, put them into single-serving containers and freeze them. Make weekly deliveries to the geeks of food… then they just have to heat and eat and get delicious and nutritious “as close to home-cooked as they’ll get” meals. Great idea, right?

Wife looked into what it would take to make that happen. Once she saw all of the regulations required (e.g. we’d need 2 mop sinks… two) she gave up on the idea. She wanted to start small. She wanted to do this out of our home. She didn’t want to secure massive loans and property at the onset. She didn’t want to put the family well-being at too much risk in case it failed, but if it took off it would be able to build on its own. But it was just too much. According to the reams of codes and regulations, our home isn’t fit for making food for others… and neither is yours. You’d even be surprised to find out if you entertain dinner guests often enough that you’re in violation of this same code.

Yes. Let’s do all we can to encourage and enable entrepreneurship.