The Buck Stops Here

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I am thinking about President Truman, Kansas City's favorite son, and hoping that the next president will be one that, like Harry, embraces a "buck stops here" style of leadership. Lets all hope that our new president will be a leader who does not pass the buck but accepts responsibility for decisions made in his administration.

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...originally posted in October, 2008

Is Healthcare a Moral Issue?

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Responding to the recent court events in Florida that declared federal healthcare legislation unconstitutional, Joe Scarborough, conservative host of Morning Joe on MSNBC, said this:

"Anybody that goes to an emergency room at 11 o'clock at night and sees the people who have to use that as their primary care providers, it shows two things: the inefficiency and the immorality of the system... There are two Americas when it comes to healthcare -- and it is immoral."

It got me to thinking and wondering if healthcare should be classified as a moral issue? Also caused me to ponder that old overused phrase "you cannot legislate morality". Of course we in America absolutely do legislate morality. The issue is what ideological morality are we legislating. So I think that the answer to the question will be different depending on what ideology you might embrace.

Many years ago congress passed Social Security legislation and years later Medicare was passed. The morality of these seemed to embrace the idea that people in their senior years should be cared for by our country. Later on people with disabilities were added to the roles of those covered by these two programs.

So, when I think about the 11pm emergency room scenario that Joe speaks of, I wonder if there is a moral reason to add other folks to the ranks of Medicare. Remember that legislation both reflects and defines America's morality. And it seems to me that our laws should reflect a consistent morality. Possibly the poorest amongst us should be covered by Medicare for the same reasons that seniors are covered.

Do you think healthcare is a moral issue? Please let me know why you think that it is or isn't.

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... originally posted February 2, 2011

Re-Elect No One

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I think that this H. L. Mencken quote is more appropriate than ever:

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office."

I am tired of professional politicians who have been in office for most of their lives. We really need to find a way to limit their "service" to us.

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Congressional Technophobia

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[A luddite is a person who is opposed to new technology.]

Saw this absurd image on Meet the Press this morning. Apart from Senator Carper, these congressional leaders do not do email. It is hard to think of email as "new" technology as I have been using it for 20+ years. Small wonder that leaders like these cannot relate to average Americans. That said, perhaps congress is the only place for professional luddites?

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Net Neutrality and You

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Seven things the new Net Neutrality rules won't do ...

1. They won't make your home broadband connection faster.
2. They won't eliminate your wireless data cap.
3. They won't stop your wireless carrier from throttling your service
   when you've reached your data cap.
4. They won't create competition.
5. They won't improve your Friday night Netflix viewing.
6. They won't stop the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.
7. Nothing will change as a result of these new rules.

Read more at c|net [here] and tell me what you think.

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Civil Law ≠ Moral Law

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The Libertarian Party has a great article on immigration - you can find it here. One interesting aspect of the discussion is the one that centers on the idea that our laws in America have sometimes changed - the example given is how Prohibition was law until it was repealed. Here is a clip from the piece:

"When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem. To argue that illegal immigration is bad merely because it is illegal avoids the threshold question of whether we should prohibit this kind of immigration in the first place.

We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow."

I say all of this to simply caution us from relying on civil law when we interpret events in our world. Many who argue for enforcing immigration law might advocate for overturning abortion laws in the US based on what they might consider a higher moral law. Some feel the same way about immigrants that break US law when they cross our borders.

So, in the end, I think my allegiance is first and foremost to the moral law of love. The Ten Commandments are rooted in this law and the Golden Rule speaks it concisely. Every other law can change but this one law will always be true.

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Helping Prisoners Get College Degrees

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Many of you know that I worked weekly with prisoners at a Kansas prison for three years and spent three years monthly ministering at a jail in Kansas City. So I was particularly interested to hear about NY Governor Cuomo's announcement to give inmates the opportunity to earn a college degree. Here are a few responses from Chuck Culhane (pictured below), a man who spent a total of 26 years in prison and earned most of his college credits while incarcerated.

"I wanted to see change in my life," Culhane said. "The punk that had been holding up a gas station wasn't going to cut it."
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"You find these kids on the corner dealing drugs. If I offer them a job, $25,000 a year, they'd walk away from that in a minute," Culhane said. "[College] would give them something of a self-esteem and an ability to navigate out here, if nothing else. Job creation is essential."
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Culhane said he began writing while on death row, which he credits as the start of his education. He works with a variety of prison rights groups now and often serves as a guest speaker.

I agree with Chuck. I think that a college education has the ability to change a person's life. Helping prisoners get a higher education gives them the opportunity to become a different person and stay out of jail. Even so, the program in New York will cost more dollars in the short term. Yet the long term benefits make sense to me. What do you think?

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... click here for more on the proposal and Chuck Culhane's story.

Geriatric Entitlement Rant

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I am turning 65 in a few months - I got my Medicare Card this week. So things will be changing a bit for me. As a Ma Bell retiree I currently have good health insurance - not as cheap as it once was but pretty good. Even so, I do not think that my healthcare will change that much. My rant is more about the solvency of these government geriatric programs.

My parent's generation produced twice as many kids as mine. The consequences are that my kids will have a greater tax burden as more of us Boomers retire simply because there are fewer tax payers in the system to pay for the entitlements of seniors. I think that huge changes need to be made in Social Security and Medicare to compensate. A few thoughts:

1. If they raise the eligibility to 70 (for example) that would mean that private insurers would have to cover people for an extra 5 years or so - who knows how that would play out. 
2. Another solution is to do means testing for these senior entitlements - seniors would probably feel the rug being pulled out from under them but it may be the best option to make these programs solvent.
3. And then of course there is a tremendous amount of fraud that should be dealt with - even these types of investigations are expensive and cost tax payers money.
4. Lastly, I hate to even mention it, the government could raise the earning limit (currently $117,000) for FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) taxes causing people who make more money to pay more into these geriatric programs.

I know there are other options - what do you think? I think that we are pretty much up the creek and the congress in DC is doing little to solve these massive problems. I so wish that there was a way for them to come to a consensus on these things. Yeah, I know that I am dreaming. Here endeth the rant.

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Nobody likes a Snitch

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Gotta love this cartoon - one person's whistleblower is another's snitch. Our country's fascination with Edward Snowden and whether he is a whistle-blower, spy or traitor reminds me of the adage: "Don't shoot the messenger". Interesting how the news these days seems to be all about the Messenger and not the Message. Perhaps it is simply our fascination with celebrity and our inability to grasp the complexity of the message trying to be told? I think that Sophocles said it best when he said: "None love the messenger who brings bad news."

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State Taxes and the Poor

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The Motley Fool reports that "many states have tax structures that make poor people pay a far greater percentage of their incomes in taxes than those who are better off." They identify six states that tax the poor the hardest. Perhaps you can identify which three of these seven states made the list:

1) Alaska  2) Florida  3) Nevada  4) South Dakota  5) Texas  6) Washington  7) Wyoming 

Interesting that all of these states do not have a state income tax but only three made the list of six states. Here is what the Fool says about state tax codes and how the affect the pporest amongst us.

States that rely on sales taxes more than income taxes tend to be harsher on the poor, who have to pay a greater percentage of their incomes on living expenses that are often subject to sales tax.

The writers contrast the disparity of effective tax rates in these states. The largest disparity has the poor paying 16.9% of their income in taxes, while the figure for the richest citizens is 2.8%. Interesting numbers. Wonder if this disparity is representative of how a national sales tax would affect the poor?

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The Right to Flash Headlights

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Just in from one of our local news stations:


A new lawsuit accuses police in the St. Louis County town of Ellisville of violating the rights of drivers by prosecuting those who flash headlights to warn other drivers of police presence and speed traps.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the lawsuit was filed Tuesday on behalf of Michael Elli.

In November, Elli flashed his headlights at oncoming traffic and was pulled over by an Ellisville officer. Elli was cited for flashing lights to warn of radar ahead. The charge was eventually dismissed.

The ACLU said the prosecution violates the driver's First Amendment right to free speech.


I have never thought about this as a First Amendment free speech issue. What do you think?

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Lowering Medicare Eligibility to 60?

Watched This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday and heard Steven Brill (the guy who recently wrote the Time Magazine cover story titled "Why Medical Bills are Killing Us") engage in this interesting dialog with economist (and former Obama adviser) Steve Rattner:

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RATTNER: But there's a fundamental point here, Stephen, I think your piece was great. And I think you're points are right, but I also don't want people to be confused. I don't believe that we can cut our way, change the pricing, do all the things you're talking about and still save Medicare. The average person who's at Medicare retirement age has paid in some like $122,000 in the system. They'll get back $387,000 back in benefits. That's three times. You're not going to reduce that $387,000 by hospital cuts and this and that. We have to still have fundamental Medicare reforms to make those numbers work.

BRILL: Well, if you put Medicare in the context of the larger health care system, and this is something that everybody at this table is going to think that I should go to a mental hospital when I get finished saying this, the government and all of us would actually save money if you lowered — I said lowered the age for Medicare. If the Medicare age were 60 instead of 65, the economy and the taxpayers would actually save money. And George, please don't look at me like that.

RATTNER: You're potentially right. And part of the argument — you're taking people out of the Medicare age to 67 is you're taking people out of the Medicare system.

BRILL: Right. And what you would be doing, is you would be putting the most efficient player, which is Medicare — Medicare spends 80 or 90 cents to process a claim and the health insurance companies spend $18 or $20 or $25 to process a claim. Health insurance companies pay two, three, four times what Medicare pays for various services. So if you lowered the age, you would put more people into the bucket of much more efficient health care.

And the worst part about it is, the reforms that we have now, with the president's plan, are actually going to raise the costs because all of the people who are 60, or 62, or 63, who can't afford the premiums that they're going to have now, are going to be subsidized by the taxpayer.

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Hard to argue with the logic. Especially for folks who think that Medicare holds down the type of costs that Brill writes about in his Time article. Even so, many folks would see it as a government power grab and liken it to a single payer system. What do you think should be done to help Medicare?

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Battle of the Amendments

Have you seen this quote? I think that I copied it a while back from Facebook. Activists seem to be using it lately in the gun violence debate. Some folks on the right cite the second amendment in their fight against further regulation of guns. Some on the left want to control guns but are not too interested in controlling violent games and movies because of their advocacy for the first amendment. I think that a solution is probably somewhere in the middle.

What do you think? Can our country reach a consensus on this? Or are we doomed to gridlock and violence?

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The Debt Cliff

Back in September financial poobah Peter Schiff wrote an oped titled: "The real fiscal cliff". In it he frames our current national monetary crisis in this way:

"The buyers, who legitimately can be described as “investors,” extend credit to the United States at such generous terms largely because of America’s size, power and perceived economic unassailability. If those perceptions change, 5 percent could quickly become a floor, not a ceiling, for interest rates. Given that America’s balance sheet bears more than a casual resemblance to those of both Spain and Italy, it should not be radical to assume that one day we will be asked to pay the same amount as they do for the money we borrow. The brutal truth is that 6 percent or 7 percent interest rates will force the government to either slash federal spending across the board (including cuts to politically sensitive entitlements), raise middle-class taxes significantly, default on the debt, or hit everyone with the sustained impact of high inflation. Now that’s a real fiscal cliff."

I suggest that you read the whole article here. I agree with Schiff when he says:

"By foolishly borrowing so heavily when interest rates are low, our government is driving us toward this cliff with its eyes firmly glued to the rearview mirror. Most economists downplay debt-servicing concerns with assertions that we have entered a new era of permanently low interest rates. This is a dangerously naive idea."

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Will Pot Prohibition be Repealed?

Yesterday was the 79th anniversary of the ratification of the 21st Amendment to the U.S Constitution which repealed the Prohibition of alcohol sales. Much has been made of Prohibition in the movies and how people found a way to break the law and booze it up. Some folks even made millions from selling it illegally in speakeasies and mobsters gained power during Prohibition .

The similarities to the banning of pot today seems a bit like the Prohibition days. The stuff is sold illegally today and mobsters are making money from it. So I am wondering, with the newly legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, if the nationwide Prohibition of pot will one day bite the dust.

Do you think that marijuana will soon be legalized? I think not.

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Move Over Laws

The Move Over America website indicates that only Hawaii and Delaware do not have laws that protect emergency vehicles parked on the side of the road. Laws differ from state to state but each endorses the idea that drivers, when approaching these situations, should either move to another lane or decrease their speed by 20 MPH if they cannot. Have you ever heard of this law?

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Did Obama really save GM?

George Will is one of my favorite conservative writers and pundits. A few weeks ago he framed the takeover of General Motors in a way that might make liberals, I mean progressives, cringe in his piece titled "Liberalism, as we know it".
Here is an excerpt from it:

"After a delusional proclamation — General Motors “has come roaring back” — Obama said: “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.” We have been warned.
Obama’s supposed rescue of “the auto industry” — note the definite article, “the” — is a pedal on the political organ he pumps energetically in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere. Concerning which:

He intervened to succor one of two of the U.S. auto industries. One, located in the South and elsewhere, does not have a long history of subservience to the United Auto Workers and for that reason has not needed Obama’s ministrations. He showered public money on two of three parts of the mostly Northern auto industry, the one long entangled with the UAW. He socialized the losses of GM and Chrysler. Ford was not a mendicant because it was not mismanaged.

Today, “I am GM, hear me roar” is again losing market share, and its stock, of which taxpayers own 26 percent, was trading Thursday morning at $21, below the $33 price our investor in chief paid for it and below the $53 price it would
have to reach to enable taxpayers to recover the entire $49.5 billion bailout."

The GM takeover and their subsequent performance gives me cause to pause when I hear it used as an achievement of the administration. How can a candidate boast about a deal that has lost taxpayers so much money?

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Do Missourians already have a Right to Pray?

Tomorrow Ann and I vote in our state's primary election. The following excerpt from a Christianity Today article describes one of the issues we will vote on. Do you think that the amendment is needed?  How would you vote?

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Who owns Congress?

This interesting chart from a 2010 Mother Jones article presents an interesting image of congressional donors. They purport that to the dots on the chart represents the industries which gave them the most money over their entire careers. So interesting to note the different patterns between the two congressional houses. Seems like Finance, Insurance and Real Estate are the power players. You can get the full story and dotted details here.

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Obamacare 101

From Lifehacker: How Will the New Health Care Law Affect Me?

• Individual Mandates: By 2014, every citizen in the US will be required to have health care. Medicaid will be expanded to include a wider range of people, and subsidies will be offered for those who struggle to pay for insurance.
• Employer Mandates: Employers with over 50 employees will be required to offer some type of health insurance option to employees.
• No More Pre-Existing Conditions: Insurance companies cannot deny you if you have a pre-existing condition like a chronic illness or disease. In addition, insurance companies can't drop you because of an illness.
• Children Can Stay On Parent's Plan Longer: Previously, it was up to the insurance company to decide how long a child could stay on a parent's insurance program. Now, children can stay on their parents plans until they're 26 years old, regardless of whether they're in school, married, or considered a dependent.
• No Lifetime Limit: Insurance companies used to have a lifetime limit on the amount you could spend on treatment over the course of your life. Now, that cap has been removed and your insurance company can't refuse to pay for services because you've reached a cap.

From About.com: Tax Impacts of the Supreme Court's Health Care Decision

• the requirement for individuals to maintain health insurance coverage beginning in 2014 or else pay a tax penalty;
• individual premium assistance tax credits to help low- and middle-income families purchase health insurance on state-run insurance exchanges;
• an increase in the threshold for deducting medical expenses as an itemized deduction from the current 7.5% to 10% starting in 2013;
• an increase in the tax penalty to 20% for non-qualifying distributions from Health Savings Accounts, Flexible Spending Accounts or Archer Medical Savings Accounts;
• an additional 0.9% Medicare hospital insurance tax on wages and self-employment income over $200,000 for unmarried persons and over $250,000 for married couples starting in 2013;
• an additional 3.8% Medicare hospital insurance tax, also starting in 2013, on investment income or modified adjusted gross income over $200,000 for unmarried persions and over $250,000 for married couples;
• an increase in the adoption tax credit and making this credit fully refundable, effective for the years 2010 and 2011;
• an excise tax of 10% on indoor tanning services;
• a tax exclusion for student loan repayment assistance programs for health professionals to work in underserved localities;
• a tax credit for small employers ranging from 25% to 50% for providing health insurance coverage to their employees, effective for the years 2010 through 2015;
• a decrease from $5,000 to $2,500 in the amount that can be saved pre-tax through a healthcare flexible spending account, effective starting 2013 and with the amount inflation-indexed for subsequent years;
• restriction of the definition of qualified medical expenses for healthcare flexible spending accounts, health savings accounts, health reimbursement accounts and Archer medical savings accounts so that only prescribed medications and insulin are eligible for tax-qualified disbursements, effective since 2011;
• a business tax credit of 28% of covered drug costs for employers who provide health plans offering precription coverage for retired employees, effective beginning in 2013;
• limitations in the amount that health insurance companies can deduct for any one employee's compensation to $500,000 effective beginning in 2013;
• a new economic substance penalty of either 20% or 40% for tax transactions after March 30, 2010, that do not involve a substantial change in a person's economic situation or have a substantial business purpose;
• a new excise tax of 40% on high-cost health insurance plans offered by employers starting in 2018;
• an annual fee on manufacturers and importers of brand-name prescription medicines;
• an excise tax of 2.3% on medical devices starting in 2013.

Anything in these lists surprise you? Will you be affected by it? Please share.

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