How parts of the US manifest getting poorer

My local municipality monthly newsletter came in the mail over the weekend along with the local utility bill. News You Can Use put out a new snow policy and it's a statement admitting growing financial problems (at least between the lines).

Mains and secondaries will only be salted at intersections, railroad tracks, school zones, curves, bridges and around hospitals. Once the snow event has stopped, we will salt the mains and the secondaries all the way through and then we will move into the residentials. We will only salt residentials at stop signs once the snow event has stopped. We will no longer salt mid-block of the residentials

It's in little statements of service cutbacks and quietly deferred maintenance that between the lines often announce financial decay in the US. During the recent fiscal crisis, miles and miles of asphalted road were converted back to gravel. The trend is getting push back but even oil booming Texas tried it out in 2013 on two roads before public anger made them permanently shelve the idea a year later. The Texas case might be a matter of a fiscally responsible state running into the high depletion nature of shale oil wells but that circumstance seems to be an outlier.

So keep an eye out for those little announcements. Lowered salt usage on icy streets, asphalt going back to gravel, changes like these that can be pushed through relatively quietly are going to be more frequent signs than big changes like government pension cuts and municipal bankruptcy.

Chasing your tail, California Style

Instapundit today offers up a Police Chief magazine article talking about increasing revenue streams to fund policing in California. There is exactly zero attention paid to increasing economic activity. Of the twenty item list for revenue enhancers, the vast majority have a side effect of shrinking the local economy. The three exceptions are selling ride alongs, selling ad space on the police website, and allowing advertising and branding using the police department's name.

Socializing economic activity or launching government economic activity in competition with private firms occupies 7 of the 20 slots. The rest is mostly raising taxes and fees of various types.

Reducing nuisance laws in order to make economic activity cheaper (increasing ordinary tax revenue) is just nowhere in sight.

It really is just sad.

Me and my colony

It has long seemed self-evident to me but I'm not finding others talking about it so maybe this is unusual enough to write about.

Legally, we're all essentially pregnant, or at least siamese twins. That might need some unpacking.

One of the toughest legal questions around has to do with what to do when there's two inseparable individuals that legally fall into different categories, one guilty of a crime and the other innocent, or at least materially less culpable. Case law is not clear on this because it's such a rare condition that it's never come up in a common law country.

In the case of pregnancy, you have two genetically distinct humans with unequal rights. Sometimes the unborn is given a right to life. Other times no rights are assigned. Other times it's something of a case of chattel where the mother-to-be can kill the infant but nobody else can such as the case where it's a double homicide if a pregnant woman is killed but abortion is legal.

Everybody, however, hosts colonies of creatures on and inside our bodies. These colonies have no rights. In a lot of cases, the colonies are beneficial. Without our gut bacteria, we'd all be in significant digestive distress, very unpleasant distress. Other times, they get annoying, such as the various cold and flu viruses that lay us low periodically. There are mostly social sanctions in place for humans who cooperate in spreading those around and like the case of a worker sneezing into a food tray at a cafeteria there can be legal sanctions in terms of fines and operations shut downs for inadequate hygiene.

The most extreme of these legal sanctions is reserved for our hitch-hiking killers. Typhoid Mary, America's first documented asymptomatic carrier of the typhoid virus was isolated twice over the disease, the first time for three years, the second for the rest of her life. Strangely enough, her first major victim cluster was where I grew up, Mamaroneck, NY. Who knew?

Typhoid Mary was diagnosed with an infection of typhoid in her gallbladder but she refused to have the infected organ removed and without that removal she remained a public health hazard and was isolated until she died because she was so irresponsible after her first release from isolation as to change her name and continue seeking employment as a cook while refusing to wash her hands because, in her mind, she posed no threat.

The law could not force the removal of her infected organ. It could imprison her, and did. That's a very relevant distinction today. There is a difference between me and my colonies of various hitchhikers. I have rights and they don't. When they are not too noxious, they benefit from a sort of penumbra of rights. It's too difficult to separate us and they benefit. But if they are too noxious, if they even might be too noxious, I suffer a diminishment of rights. The penumbra goes the other way.

Which way the penumbra effect goes is a difficult question, one that we will never answer in a proper way so long as we do not explicitly lay out the facts as they are, that with every individual is a non-rights bearing set of organism colonies intimately locked in an embrace with our own biology. This is a legitimately hard question for which we have no final answers at the present, just a competing collection of unhappy feelings at whatever solutions are proposed by our political class, whether the disquiet at the laxity of the CDC or the outrage at the state quarantine orders nobody's entirely happy.

Judas in University Administration

It started this morning (as it often does) with Instapundit's item on bogus sexual assault numbers which pointed to Mark Perry's analysis that the rate of sexual assault (1 in 5 during university) combined with the rate of reporting (12%) didn't work. It isn't even politics, but just poor math that means at least one of those two White House numbers are wrong.

This was shortly followed by a piece examining the left's creeping totalitarianism on due process. What caught my attention is the phrase that Harvard could withstand the loss of federal funds while they fought for due process. It occurs to me that the amount of federal funds at risk, the endowment of the university, the male population being betrayed by university administration is all public information. You could make a judas index to measure how much money your rights are worth betraying.

There could be an app for that. It would be pretty useful when it comes time to pick schools.

Fixing the data loss loophole

The US Congress could, with a pretty small outlay of money, set up a web portal with an API that would allow all executive branches to report data losses within a few days of when they happened. And then we should require that they report within 5 days. We could call it Lois' law. 

Most recently this would have had the effect of chopping two years off the timeline of the IRS scandal and perhaps made it a live issue for the 2012 campaign. Big data analytics might also be deployed on this database to find "data loss hot spots" and better direct where to deploy investigative efforts. The bonus, a lot of hard drives are over $100 dollars so just destroying one is a crime sporting a ten year prison term. You have a lot of leverage at that point to play 'make a deal' in order to get at the underlying politically motivated crimes. 

World's first climate refugee loses his case

Ioane Teitiota is the world's only climate refugee, or is he? In 2010 he overstayed his visa in NZ where he's been living since 2007. He applied for climate refugee status and has just lost his appeal to be granted climate refugee status from Kiribati. He is considering appealing to the NZ Supreme Court and, if that fails, to the UN Human Rights Committee.

If this reads like a scam looking to take advantage of an ill defined process to draw out deportation proceedings and get extra time in the 1st world, you're reading it just as I am. By now, we were supposed to have 50 million climate refugees coming from global warming. Instead we have Mr Teitiota. I'm perfectly happy that we don't have the problem. I just wonder where is the accountability and where is the increased skepticism of further claims by the United Nations?

A conservative approach to problems

The US is a common law nation. We replace bits and pieces of the common law with legislation but when you strip all that away, the common law is what is left. I'm a great believer in primum non nocere, "first do no harm". So when I look at politics, at government, the first thing to ask is whether the current state of affairs created by legislation is better or worse than the common law. If it is worse, then we would be improving things by stripping out the law and returning to the status quo ante of the common law, even if the common law has not been enforced in living memory.

This leads me to ask a lot of simple questions and to hope that there were a way to automate and flag when laws actually net out to a worse result than what would happen by readopting the common law and using modern tools to enforce it. This is the sort of thing that would ideally be measured in an automated fashion to get a first order approximation and then where the results are close, a more detailed examination would proceed.

For example, how bad do the results of a police force have to be before restoring the original 'hue and cry' system would be an improvement? Are there any actual jurisdictions where this situation is a reality? How good would a modern hue and cry system be? How would such a system affect community, impede or enhance commerce, or provide justice? We don't know because we're not asking the questions.

In the vast majority of cases, the answer is going to come back that statutory law is an improvement but merely by routinely asking the question, you set a floor on performance, a standard by which government is not allowed to go below without pretty drastic consequences. And that's not a bad thing to have.

I need a license for what?

The Town of Munster in Lake county, Indiana has a bit of a training issue on how they handle their solicitation licensing. I had heard that there was a local anti-solicitation ordinance and was driving by town hall anyway so I stopped by to figure out what was going on. The ordinance itself is pretty unobjectionable. In Munster if you're going to be asking for money, you need to get a background check and let the town know what you're doing and you're limited to going to the front door. You're not allowed to go wandering around private property.

I was directed to an office and asked if starting conversations and talking to people door to door would need notice and was informed that not only that it needed notice but that I needed to pay a fee as well. The explanation was vague and unsatisfying but they were at least savvy enough to suggest I look up the law on the town website as I had 1st amendment concerns. I stopped off at the police department and they called what I was doing a gray area and that in case of complaints (which they apparently get every day), I would get a warning to stop and then a citation for a few hundred dollars.

In the end, reading the ordinance made it clear that there was no need to apply for one. The town fathers hadn't flipped their lids and violated the Constitution. The higher ups knew what they were doing. They just aren't training their front line people to be clear about what's going on and their printed materials lack the text of the law so you have to do just a bit of digging. I wonder how many people just forked over the license fee?

Multiplying fishes

We got 4.5 times the expected Pacific salmon run this year due to one weird trick. We (and by we I mean an eco entrepreneur named Russ George and a BC indian tribe, the Haida) strategically distributed 120 tons of iron sulfate in the Pacific and created an ocean paradise for the salmon to feed on. 12 men and one boat worked in 2012 to set up that feeding ground to reduce the traditional levels of starvation among migratory fish going out into the resource poor Pacific Ocean. Open-sea mariculture has been hemmed in by unfortunate treaty language that fails to distinguish between pollution and setting out fish food. The 2012 experiment results are in.

The SE Alaska Pink catch in the fall of 2013 was a stunning 226.3 million fish. This when a high number of 50 million fish were expected. Those extra ocean pasture fed fish came back because their pasture was enjoying the richest plankton blooms ever, thanks to me a[nd] 11 shipmates and our work in the summer of 2012. IT JUST WORKS.

As a side effect of the process, a great deal of carbon dioxide was sequestered as the diatoms that did not get eaten by the fish died a natural death and sank to the bottom.

Environmentalists are beside themselves with fury. They're more interested in establishing a precautionary principle regulatory framework that would have led to many tons fewer fish to feed families across North America this year if not banning the process altogether. Their global campaign made the Haida blink and Mr. George has been fired.

We can't have fish multiplying beyond all reason and solving our global food problems while knocking down CO2 levels. That might reduce the need for environmental NGOs to study the problem.

Insurance does not mean health care

Four decades ago, the US fell into a trap. We essentially adopted government pricing healthcare. It had become clear that the Treasury couldn't handle traditional fee for service medicine. With the government paying, too few made the effort to drive a good bargain. So the government took on the huge job of putting out a fee schedule. Private insurance followed the government's lead because, frankly, it was a big cost saver not to have to do the work themselves.

The problem is that the government got the prices wrong. Specifically the payment ratio of primary care codes to specialist care codes has been off. Primary care codes have been too low to attract enough primary care doctors. This has distorted US medical care. Both right and left know that these ratios are not correct. It's not a matter of partisan difference. We just don't know where to get the money to pay the primary care doctors enough to attract enough doctors to make the system work right.

The US is too poor to do everything else we've committed to and to do this right as well. As a consequence we just have lived with too few primary care doctors. Enter Obamacare.

A number of California uninsured have been assisted by their free clinics to get on the exchanges but after a few months are right back at the free clinics. Doctors who are supposed to be in their networks are either not taking new patients or deny that they even accept their insurance. But the free clinic isn't allowed to take them either. They now have insurance and free clinics are for the uninsured.

For now, human compassion has led them to be accepted. But the bureaucratic rules won't be flouted forever as budgets get stretched and the theory that health insurance equals access to health care is exposed as the fraud it always was. The free clinics will be threatened with a loss of money if they keep allowing insured patients to use their services.

Not every Obamacare story is a horror show. But we simply don't have the data to exclude the horrifying possibility that after a half century of pushing for something like Obamacare, liberals have, on net, made things worse on the health care front. That's a travesty.

How not to improve government

"Proof The Feds Are Stalling On Oil And Gas" is a boring article that isn't going to change anything about how the US Federal government handles drilling permits on federal land. It won't change anything because the approach used skips right past the foundations and prerequisites and goes straight to the charges.

To have effective, durable change, we would need to map out the entire process for drilling on federal land as a part of a larger project identifying what government does from soup to nuts. We need to insist on commitments for performance for each of them and normalize an expectation that the least efficient and effective things that government does will be heavily scrutinized for alternate arrangements.

Slow rolling permits is not something the bureaucracy is going to be happy to do when they know that to delay legitimate requests puts them at risk for unemployment. But that's not the world we live in. The world we live in has articles decrying oil drilling delays in an oil drillers website while the public blissfully goes about its business, in general rationally ignorant of the whole issue.

There needs to be a better way.

Don't skip looking up the law

The Pennsylvania special ed student who recording a bullying episode and was threatened with a wiretapping felony charge has been making the rounds. What nobody seems to be mentioning is that what he did was perfectly legal. The school officials, the police, the judge, and even all the hyperventilating commenters all seem to have skipped looking up the law.

Title 18 Section 5704 Subsection 17

Any victim, witness or private detective licensed under the act of August 21, 1953 (P.L.1273, No.361), known as The Private Detective Act of 1953, to intercept the contents of any wire, electronic or oral communication, if that person is under a reasonable suspicion that the intercepted party is committing, about to commit or has committed a crime of violence and there is reason to believe that evidence of the crime of violence may be obtained from the interception.

I'm not a lawyer. I just know how to use Google fairly decently. Bullying is a crime of violence.

The law seems pretty clear. So why did the school officials, the cop, and the judge all fail to do their basic duty? Why aren't we calling them on not enforcing the law?

The only silver lining in this whole mess is that the judge is elected and could get booted for this.

The known unknowns of taxation

Donald Rumsfeld is at it again. Like many of us, Rumsfeld has no idea whether he's actually paid his taxes accurately.

Sell Nevada

Michael Munger comes up with a very nice snapshot of the problem of too much federal land, especially out west.

Essentially the entire state of Nevada is owned by the federal government. And it seems like they're managing federal lands poorly all over the US. Utah has gone so far as to issue an ultimatum that the federal government has until the end of 2014 to hand over control to the state or else. Several other states are considering similar legislation.

It's pretty unclear whether state transfer laws are constitutional or just crazy talk. But we're likely to hear a great deal more about later this year.

We don't deserve better than Sebellius

Kathleen Sibellius' term as HHS Secretary has been a disaster according to Newt Gingrich. But I have to disagree with Nick Gillespie that we deserved better than Sibellius' incompetence. We don't deserve better. This is what we've chosen, Democrats and Republicans, over the course of decades.

Inefficiency and incompetence can strike everywhere. In a large, bureaucratized environment, humans are particularly vulnerable to these problems. Exceeding our government oversight capacity by growing government to its present size increases our vulnerability even more because fundamentally the fear of bankruptcy and ruin makes private oversight about 2% better, project after project, year after year.

Every little two bit program that is solving a problem publicly that could have been solved privately sucks up oversight time that should have been focused on the roll out of the ACA. This sort of oversight failure of a big government project is guaranteed to happen again. That's the nature of humanity. But it doesn't have to happen so often. We've grown our government so large that I would say it's guaranteed to be happening right now. It just hasn't been discovered yet.

Social Security bust

Is the US government going to keep its word to you, personally, regarding your old age pension and health care? Actuarial Study 120 plus the yearly Trustees Report from the Social Security/Medicare trustees are your keys to finding out.

Once you spend an hour or two figuring it out the first time, sorting out the yearly changes isn't too hard. But who spends those research hours? Virtually nobody, that's who. This is why I'm working on a report so you just sign up and every year get the answer based on the official numbers you've already paid to have compiled but aren't going to go out. If you'd like to sign up, say so in comments.

The basic information needed is pretty simple. What year were you born and what sex are you? Table 6 yields life expectancy figures based on sex and the summary in the Trustees Report for the latest year gives you the best guess on what year the funds run out of money and your payouts get reduced and by how much. Plug in your birth year and look it up in the right table and you're done.

According to the latest (2013) report Social Security goes belly up in 2033, 19 years from now. If you have a life expectancy of 19 or greater, you're going to have to save extra money to make up for the shortfall.

The government doesn't give up to date mortality tables for every year. They just give them for every 10 years and then projected mortality tables in the future. So you can look up the 2010 tables and the 2020 tables and blend them to get a slightly better figure. Excel is very good at this. It does occasionally make a difference.

Other Crises

We are currently on crisis overload. The mass media can't handle the number of simultaneous crises and they should change their operating procedures to fix that but they don't. Instead they just pick the biggest crisis or two and let the bottom crises just fall off the radar. So let's do a quick review of the full roster of countries that are burning:

Ukraine, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Brazil, Venezuela, at least, all have active mobs in the streets. Argentina has a currency crisis. North Korea is always in crisis. The South China Sea is in crisis with multiple participants and an unpredictable chance for sudden war among prickly, prideful locals of several countries. Russia's still dealing with violence in the Caucuses. Mexico still does not have control over all of its territory as narcotrafficantes challenge for supremacy in various ways.

What should be happening is a stress induced reform of how journalism is handled with crisp delivery of more dense information flows so the american people are well informed without having to drop what we're doing to stave off our own chance for a break in our system to watch the news 24/7. It's not happening.

News density seems not to have budged at all. This is a travesty. This is a failure of imagination and an industry that has given up on reinventing itself in a meaningful way by increasing its utility to the public.

Obamacare is the Walking Dead

The Obama administration significantly expanded the individual mandate exemption recently and the exemption looks to swallow the rule. The individual mandate, for all intents and purposes, is dead.

Before the US Supreme Court, in oral argument, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli argued that without the individual mandate, along with a number of other provisions, the entire healthcare reform law would fail. They were parts so essential that to do without was to condemn the law to failure.

President Obama just killed his own signature accomplishment. Obama killed Obamacare. At this point it's only a question of whether the GOP repeals it or the law stays and destroys the entire health insurance industry.

89,000 governments: Rough Categories

The US operates under a dual sovereignty system. That means that there are potentially 51 definitions of what is a government, the Federal definition and each state's separate definition. That doesn't mean that there are actually 51 definitions but that there are as many as 51.

The federal government maintains a census of governments which purport to count all of the United States' local governments under a uniform definition. There are five basic types of local governments.

Three are general-purpose governments: Counties, Municipalities, and Townships. The other two types are special-purpose governments: Special districts School districts.

Special purpose governments are the most diverse in character and some that make the state lists do not pass the federal tests of "Existence as Organized Entity", "Governmental Character", and "Substantial Autonomy". In less formal terms, there have to be people running the thing, it has to do something, what it does needs to be the sort of thing that a government would do, and the organization needs to be able to chart its own course at least some of the time.

State definitions of what a government is vary widely. Nobody seems to have done a survey to publish them all. This is in my bucket list.

Debt Bondage

Debt bondage or debt peonage or indentured servitude is a form of paying off debts banned by the US Constitution. Unfortunately for us all, the US political class seems to have figured a way around that bit of the 14th amendment to impose it intergenerationally.

We're awakening and discovering we've sold our children (and if we're young enough to still be alive when it all comes crashing down ourselves) into a form of debt bondage. In short, we're slow motion selling ourselves into slavery and politicians are asking for our votes in order to change the details of our upcoming bondage.