Bob Hayes Online

No, no, no, no, a thousand times, NO.

If my fellow citizens want to burden themselves with some horrific tax-and-spend nightmare of socialized medicine, they may. I’ll oppose it, but there’s a right to make stupid choices.

But I will not be coerced into buying an insurance product, whether public or private, to satisfy some bureaucrat’s desire that my spending choices reflect the ones s/he thinks I should make.

Hell, no.

If this atrocity becomes law, I will stand on the steps of the US Capitol and demand to be arrested for my crime of refusing to pay. We are not children subject to the whims of a babysitter, however benevolent. We are free Americans. I will choose the course of my own life, and I do not yield that power to any man or any state.

They can have my taxes but they cannot have my conscience or my choices. Those are mine, now and forever.

End of discussion.

…and the skies are grey. I missed it when it came out, but Reason put out a survey of California’s budgetary figures for the last twenty years or so and the results are not encouraging for the “if only we’d tax more” crowd.

High points:

Since 1990, California’s spending has grown at a staggering 5.91 percent a year – a 180.9% increase. They’re almost tripling the government every twenty years. Population growth and inflation combined come to only 4.38 percent per year – meaning that spending growth has outpaced the population and cost increases. Even subtracting the population and inflation figures, there’s been an absolute growth of 35% – meaning that the government is a third bigger than it was less than a generation ago. Sometimes government has to grow (WWII) – but even liberal statists must recognize that a government that doubles in absolute size every lifespan isn’t sustainable.

Since 1990, general fund expenditures have gone from under $1500 per capita to more than $2500 per capita.

Oh, and by the way? If California had kept spending at 1990 levels plus proportional increments for inflation and population growth, they would have a $15 billion surplus this year.

And education spending has shared the upward trend. Since 1990, general fund K-12 spending has increased 191.5% – a 6.11% annual increase, outpacing both inflation + population growth AND the general fund  expenditure growth rate. (Higher ed spending trailed those figures, “only” doubling and growing at 4.18 percent a year.)

California’s problem is that they decided to grow the government more than  anybody was willing to pay for – not that greedy taxpayers aren’t willing to come across. The greedy taxpayers are coming across in huge numbers and with great big fat checks and with a strong upward growth trend (outside the current recession).

It’s just that the wishlist has grown even faster than their revenues.

Michelle Obama attended the UC Mercer commencement ceremony this year – and this very strange story details how the visit ended up costing the school more than a million dollars, ten times the original cost estimate for the commencement ceremony. What’s odd isn’t the story itself – the President or the First Lady go to these kinds of things all the time, and I’m sure the bill is reasonable – but that the story is so disjointed and logically incoherent. For example,

Private contributions and interest on a private endowment fund have helped cover the cost. UC spokeswoman Patti Waid Istas said that nonstate dollars and other contributions will be used to cover the remaining balance of around $362,338.

So private contributions covered the bulk of the cost – but not to worry, nonstate dollars and more contributions will meet the balance. This makes no sense at all. Why the odd “nonstate dollars” formulation? One suspects that some of the money is coming from a pool of money that did come from the taxpayers but is technically “nonstate” for some reason.

Another weird thing is the justification given for the expense – they had budgeted $100,000, but the event ended up topping $1,000,000. The reason? Because 12,000 people showed up for commencement – the implication being, Ms. Obama’s celebrity attracted a larger crowd. No doubt it did, to some extent – but people tend to go to commencement or not regardless of the speaker. Some additional interest I can see, but I really doubt that they had originally planned for 1,200 attendees and were surprised by a tenfold jump.

Finally, there’s this weird description of the extra costs:

The address attracted about 12,000 visitors, requiring additional transportation, audiovisual and multimedia needs and other items. Obama was neither paid for her appearance nor compensated for travel and security.

Additional audiovisual and multimedia needs – presumably to highlight their star guest – I can see, but a million bucks worth? And if OBama paid her own transportation (well, if we taxpayers paid for it in general) then where’s the “additional transportation” coming from?

I suspect that the expenses were actually used to put on a lavish reception for Ms. O, and that she and her retinue were feted. Nothing wrong with that, but they shouldn’t pretend that suddenly it costs a million dollars to host the First Lady, when she pays her own way and brings her own security team.

Greg Mankiw has the scoop. Bottom line: Medicare’s administrative costs are $509 per patient. Private plan administrative costs are $453 per patient.

If true – I’d be wary of such a strong claim simply because it is so strong, and I’d like to see the opinions of other economists – then it’s a huge blow to an underlying premise of Obama’s health care reform ideas: that the state can do it better, and thus more efficiently. That flies in the face of conventional wisdom, as well as decades of living experience. If the state-paid clinic can’t provide health care at better prices to the American people than the private sector…why switch?

A businessman finally dissents. Amen, Mr. Asness.

Obama thinks this is going to cow the business population so that they will go along with his socialist agenda. He’s probably right; business leaders have been pretty spineless through all this.

Yet, the business population and the investor population aren’t identical. Investors aren’t cowed, they’re scared shitless – presumably Obama isn’t going to gut everybody’s shareholder value, but where will the messiah’s finger next point? I’d say you’d have to be nuts to have money in health care, real estate, or transportation stocks these days. In any sector Obama thinks could do with some updating, shareholders are going to be running for the hills.

Ever get sick of the long anti-materialist “you Americans with your SUVs and your big-screen TVs” rants so popular among the hard economic left?

Him too.

Full of awesome. Go, read.

Every blogger in creation – even the ones who should instead be concentrating on earning money so they can throw Blogger Bashes – will be blogging about the inauguration of Barack Obama today. And rightly so; it’s a historic event and an achievement of which our country can justifiably be proud. If you had told me thirty years ago that one day a black man would be president…well, I wouldn’t have blinked, actually, because I was ten and very idealistic about America. But if you’d caught me a few years later, when the cynicism had set in, I would have been surprised.

Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, Mr. Obama is not, to say the least, on my political team. There is no doubt whatsoever that within a month I’ll be spluttering at the TV news and pounding out spasmodically pained editorial pieces about the latest Obama disaster and how he’s the Worst President Ever. But bearing that in mind, I do find myself with an elevated spirit today.

This is an optimistic moment for America, and – whatever policy disasters Mr. Obama leads us into – this cannot help but have a bracingly salutary effect on the racial divide in this country, which for years has been a quiet cancer on the soul of the republic. Every black child in the United States is about to see a black man taking the reins of the most powerful country of the world – a slap in the face to the still-animate ghost of a racist social order that proclaims blacks are fit only to entertain or to draw welfare checks, and a crushing blow to the “progressive” rhetoric of permanent racial oppression. To the person saying “you can’t do that because you aren’t good enough” and the person saying “you can’t do that because they won’t let you”, Barack Obama is a shining counterexample.

It’s nice to find out that my ten-year old self was the one with wisdom. Good morning, Mr. President. God bless you and godspeed.

Having a discussion with Lynn Gazis-Sax about whether the current court battles over gay marriage are going to result in polygamy being validated by the courts. I say yes, she says no; her “no” is based on how difficult it would be to integrate polygamy into current law. My “yes” is based on the fact that in my view, when it comes to sexual morality and the courts, the courts will rule on the basis of emotion, not the textual language of the Constitution or the law. So we have a bet (which this post is to memorialize): I say within ten years, a state court will create a right to polygamous marriage. If I am right, Lynn will donate $100 to the Federalist Society. If I am wrong, I will donate $100 to Amnesty International. (Now I just have to add an entry to my Google calendar for ten years from now, otherwise I’ll forget.)

I am worried about this bailout.

Not just the potential abandonment of the principle that in a free market, companies that make dumb decisions must be free to fail. That’s troublesome, but it’s not like we’ve been honoring free market principles consistently in this country in the last twenty years.

I am reminded of my time at Microsoft, in the long long ago, when I was a junior software development engineer on Microsoft Bob, MS’ ill-fated attempt to create Windows with a human face. Not long after I had joined the team, there was a crisis owing to Bob 1.0’s poor sales – the rumor mill said that the project was going to be canceled, that we would all be out on the street, etc. We had a team meeting (perhaps 40 people) to brainstorm what to do, but when we arrived at the meeting, it turned out that our senior management team – not present at the meeting, and represented by their minions – had already decided what to do. They were going to revise our spec for Bob 2.0 (the project we were working on) so that we could get it done better, quicker, cheaper – all via magic, apparently – and that was going to solve everything and instantly create a huge market for our dog of a product. Although all the previous decisions this team had made had resulted in a steaming pile of fail, they were on the job this time. Our management team was there for us. They were On The Ball.

I remember raising my hand and asking a question that, I am sure, did my Microsoft career no good, but which had a number of the developers nodding their heads. I said “So what you’re saying is, the people whose plans and ideas got us into this mess in the first place, are the same people who have a plan to get us out?”

Perhaps the world will end if we don’t do this bailout. Certainly, a huge contraction of the economy is something that we should avoid if at all possible. But I’m not really sure why letting some incompetent lenders go out of business is going to cause a bigger contraction than taxing the bejeesus out of all of us would.

And I would feel a lot better about the whole thing if the people saying they’re going to save us, weren’t the exact same people who fouled it up in the first place.

Now that just about every attack on Palin has been thumpingly rebutted by well-regarded neutrals, about the only thing left hanging over her head is Troopergate. Unfortunately for Democrats, nobody cares about Troopergate. At worst, she will be seen as bending but not breaking rules in order to get rid of someone who was protecting a wife-beating child-tasering nightmare of a cop. She was entitled to fire the guy because she didn’t like his shifty eyes; that she has any reason at all (even personal reasons) will just make it more OK with the electorate. The library thing had more potential resonance – is she a scary book-burning fundie? – and that, too, is down the drain.

More the the point, at this date she can pretty much come out and refer to Hymietown, slap a wounded returning soldier for cowardice, and take a million-dollar check from Exxon at high noon in Times Square with “bribe” written in the memo field in 100-point type, and nobody will believe it. The shotgun salvo of slime that was fired at her from day one, and which across the board has been resoundingly disproved and rebutted, in some cases humiliatingly for the media “leaders” who drank too much Kool-Aid, made it clear to the electorate that there are big chunks of the media (from blogs to glossies) who will say and do anything to smear her, out of fear that she will derail the crowning of the Chosen One. “Yeah, yeah, what other lies are you going to print today” is now the default reaction to negative Palin news, and I don’t see that changing in time to effect the election.

Here’s my call for the elections.

Obama’s convention bounce was about two points, and it dissipated as those bounces do. There was no bounce from the Republican convention, because the convention (Palin’s speech aside) was a near-disaster. (I’ve never heard more boring Republican speeches in my life, and I’ve heard a lot of boring Republican speeches.) Instead, the post-Palin shift in the polling is structural; it’s a big chunk of purple America deciding that they (a) love her and (b) hate the people who have been smearing her grotesquely from the moment she came onto the national stage, who (rightly or wrongly) are tightly bound up with Obama and his friendly media in the public view. McCain has shifted the race by as much as ten percentage points, permanently, and will go down in history as making the most electorally significant VP pick ever. (And so much for the conventional wisdom that VP picks change nothing.)

The Wilder effect is very likely operative in this election, and is probably worth about four or five points. (Voters are reluctant to tell pollsters they aren’t going to vote for a black candidate, so they lie.) On paper, McCain has been a few points behind for months; in reality, McCain has been a little bit behind or a little bit ahead all through the general season, and is now solidly ahead by at least a few points. He will win in the EC comfortably but not overwhelmingly, and will somewhat blunt the Democratic gains in the Congress.

The “why” of all this is simple. Palin is an outstanding VP candidate, and has won real votes from millions of people who previously leaned Obama or didn’t know who to vote for. In addition, enthusiasm for her has revitalized a GOP establishment which was unenthusiastic at best. On the flip side, Obama is an unqualified candidate, and everyone not enthusiastically waving banners for him knows it. He captured the nomination by winning the hearts of the party’s activist base, but cannot win in the general election. Hillary knew this and she and Bill were both crucified for daring to even allude to it; after Obama’s defeat destroys the hope of a unified Democratic administration and Congress, there will be a great deal of bitter recrimination and a lot more infighting as the finger of blame gets passed around.

Many hard-left news sources (such as the spectacularly unconvincing “Sambo” article  that’s been circling the drain for the last few days) will froth in denial of these new facts on the ground for the next couple of months, but they will convince noone but themselves; there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth on November 5. (“How could this happen when everything I read says that it wouldn’t?”)

You have to love the Democrats; they basically have every advantage they could have short of God himself descending from the Throne and announcing “Vote Democrat, all my children!”, and they’ve thrown it away. No Presidency, and what should have been veto-proof majorities in both houses will instead be just another slight pro-Dem shift. (If the Obama campaign completely implodes as their defeat looms, it might even be a neutral race in terms of Congressional outcomes, as dispirited Democratic voters don’t bother to turn out for the down-ticket races, but I don’t think they’ll completely implode.)

So, it’ll be McCain but not by a landslide, and a range of Congressional outcomes somewhere between modest Democratic gains in both houses to no major shift in either house, depending on how well the Obama campaign handles its slow-motion defeat.

You can apply a wishful-thinking discount to this if you want – I won’t pretend that this isn’t an outcome I don’t want to see. However, I’m already applying a wishful-thinking discount internally, and secretly expect a McCain blowout and no big losses in Congress for the GOP, despite our richly deserving them.