I just read about the new book, Solving America's Health Care Crisis by Dan Perrin and Pat Rooney, in the Downsize DC newsletter. Downsize DC is an organization with principles of downsizing government and personal responsibility that I support. So I went to Amazon to check out the reader reviews. The book is new - released May 2 - so there aren't a lot, but all eight of them are 5-star ratings.

I'll be checking this out. Health care in the US clearly needs an overhaul, and Euro-style social medicine is equally clearly not a useful answer. Government never, ever, runs anything like health care (or education, welfare, or anything else) effectively, instead creating an ever-growing bureaucracy that produces less and less for more and more dollars. Hopefully Perrin and Rooney and provided a roadmap to a system that gets people the health care they need with the proper incentives to keep costs under control.

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Terry Frazier at 6:54 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Health, Policy & Regulation

Monday, October 29, 2007

Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?

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For anyone who's managed to miss the news for the past 6 months, the southeast US is in a 100-year drought. As we are wont to do in such cases, we have ignored this for the past several years until now all our lakes and reservoirs are nearly empty. Suddenly, we have a crisis.

Imagine that.

So what do our vaunted civil servants do in this precarious situation? They implement outdoor watering bans. They argue with other states. They complain to the Army Corps of Engineers. They shutdown car washes and landscape companies. They go on TV and tell us how dreadful it is, and how sorry they are that people must lose jobs, and that they just can't help this awful, awful situation.

All the while they completely ignore the blindingly obvious, brain-dead simple, straightforward, and guaranteed 100% foolproof solution to the problem. Any 3rd-grader could suggest this.

Raise the price of water!!!

Oh, I know we can't raise the price. After all, it's completely unfair to the poor.

Bullshit.

The average person can live comfortably on 1,000 gallons/month. They don't even need to be particularly conservative to do that. We could probably survive well on 750, but let's say 1,000 to be compassionate. So for a family of four you need 4,000 gallons.

Let's be really, really compassionate for the poor. Set the price for the first 5,000 gallons at $10. Set the price for the next 1,000 at $10. That's $20 for up to 6,000 gallons - enough to serve a family of 7.

Set the price for the next 1,000 at $20. The next 1,000 at $30 and so on. At 10,000 gallons you're paying $150. By the time you get to 15,000 gallons (a typical amount of water used in one month watering a yard) the cost is now $550. Nobody gets a pass. Everybody pays.

You think people won't stop using excess water once they get a $550 bill? I sure will. If they won't (or don't), raise the incremental price to $20 per thousand. I don't know anyone who would spend $1,100/mo on water. If you have that kind of money more power to you - there aren't going to be enough of you to significantly raise total usage and we can all get on with our lives without these self-serving, jackass politicians grandstanding on TV with all their new emergency regulations.

Car wash owners would have to run out and change their coin-ops from $2 to $10. Or $20. That will hurt business, but people who want to spend $10 or $20 can still wash their car now and then. And maybe the owners will figure out they need to recycle. Ditto for industrial users and the power company. Office building managers will have to figure out how to actually operate their sprinkler systems, or turn them off. And landscapers will have to stop guaranteeing their plants. But we'll get over it.

It's absurd to try and reduce the use of limited resources in every way imaginable except the one way that is best designed for managing limited resources - economics.

But this is the government. I wish I could be surprised.

Posted by:

Terry Frazier at 11:12 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Economics, Policy & Regulation

Monday, May 7, 2007

It's Not a Rate Increase, It's a Reclassification

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The new AT&T - "We're back. And it's just like nothing has changed."

AT&T now charges eight minutes for one of these one-minute calls in Missouri
Jo Ann Weitkamp knew something was wrong. The minutes on her prepaid telephone calling card were disappearing faster than she was talking.

Weitkamp, 72, lives in an apartment for seniors in Warrenton. Every few months, she visits a Sam's Club store and pays about $28 to add 1,000 minutes to her calling card. She's found that an inexpensive way to keep in touch with family members.

Until now.

Since February, AT&T has been charging Missouri customers eight minutes on their prepaid calling cards for each minute they talk to someone in Missouri.

The charge formerly was one minute for each minute called.

[...]

"We're following the law, and this is something we're required to do by the FCC," said Amanda Ray, a spokeswoman in Dallas for AT&T.

She says the change is not a rate increase.

"It's a reclassification," Ray said. [...]

According to the article, no one regulates phone card rates. Not the state of MO, not the FCC, nobody.

The problem here isn't the rate, it's the deception. AT&T wants to be allowed to change rates without state permission. Fine. Do that. But don't lie about it. Don't throw in some bogus multiplication factor when you agreed to provide per-minute charges.

There are two industries that deserve to be uttelry destroyed - the music industry and the telcos. They are both saturated with an entitlement mentality that defies description, and are populated by lying rat-bastards of the highest order. Good riddance to them both.

Posted by:

Terry Frazier at 11:10 AM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Business & Finance, Policy & Regulation

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Should a President Expect Congressmen to Read the Bills They Pass?

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Politico.com is having a public poll to help determine questions to be asked of candidates in tomorrow's Republican Presidential Candidate Debate. I just cast my vote for the question:

Do you believe that Congress should have to read the bills they pass? In other words, do you support adoption of the "Read the Bills Act"?

There are many important issues but, frankly, none of them matter if we don't get some way of forcing politicians to actually read, understand, and acknowledge the full contents of bills for which they vote. At present, Congress camouflages bills with euphemistic, patriotic-sounding names that are completely irrelevant to the contents and impact. But the name is just about all most Congressmen know about a bill before they vote on it.

Whether your issue is Iraq, torture, WMDs, global warming, or whatever you should understand that as long as Congress keeps score by how many bills they pass, and that in most cases they have absolutely no clue what's actually in the bills on which they vote, your issue is never, ever going to be treated in the open fashion any and every serious issue deserves.

If you're interested, go to Politico.com and cast your vote for the questions you think are important, or submit one of your own.

Posted by:

Terry Frazier at 3:28 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Policy & Regulation

Friday, April 27, 2007

Read The Bills

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There are 160 pages of Congressional bills listed at WashingtonWatch.com. 160 pages, at ~20 bills per page.

Keeping up with legislation, cyberstyle

WashingtonWatch is a site that summarizes legislation pending before Congress, and allows user comments on each piece of legislation. The site is nice and clean, and the explanations proposed laws are clear and understandable.

The home page lists all the legislation currently pending, but grouped by tabs for categories such as: Most Popular, Newest, Greatest Cost, and Greatest Savings. If you click on a proposed law it will take you to a page where you can leave a comment about the legislation. Also, users can edit the section that describes why the legislation should or shouldn't be passed. Sort of like Wikidpedia, except probably with more controversy as the site becomes more popular.

What’s wrong with this picture? This is a great site, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we don’t need 635 largely self-serving, ego-centric, half-witted politicians voting on 3,000+ ways to pick our pockets and screw up our lives. Because you know - you just know – they haven’t actually read any of them.

The only bill any of these clowns should be voting for right now is this one – Read The Bills Act. Of course, the Law of Unintended Consequences says even this bill will make things worse. Hat tip to Ernie.

Posted by:

Terry Frazier at 11:21 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Policy & Regulation

Friday, April 20, 2007

Signing Up for the DEA

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Today I registered for the DEA. I bought some cold medicine. Thanks to the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 I got to show ID and register for the DEA to purchase one $5 package of Tylenol Cold & Sinus.

NPR proclaims this law a fabulous success. In an article titled "Mexican 'Ice' Replaces Home-Cooked Meth in U.S." NPR says:

The nation's war on drugs has at least one successful battle: State and federal laws limiting access to cold medicines containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine have dramatically curtailed small "mom and pop" meth labs.

Of course, the article notes that the home-cooked product has just been replaced with a newer, more powerful form of the drug from Mexico.

Congratulations to our politicians. We have once again assaulted the liberties of average, law-abiding citizens while simultaneously making both over-the-counter cold medicines and the drug problem worse. It seems almost inarguable to me that the more power we grant to bureaucrats the less safe and productive our lives become. The last law passed by Congress that actually improved things was in 1964. 43 years is a long, long time to go without a single useful act by our government. You'd think we would eventually figure out that less is more.

Posted by:

Terry Frazier at 6:42 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Policy & Regulation, War on Drugs

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Screwdriver, Matches, Vaseline, and a Note

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All it takes to get a fighter jet escort these days is a small handful of normal, everyday items that anyone in America could be carrying in their pocket. Oh, and a note with the word al-Qaida somewhere on it.

Anyone who thinks we are actually more secure with these ninnies scrambling fighter jets every time someone looks at them wrong is nuts. The TSA buffoons are now confiscating nasal spray. Vicks Sinex Nasal Spray, for christ's sake!

I realize it's all part of the, "If we can't do something useful let's at least do something visible" mentality that permeates our security efforts, but it really is stupid and makes these people look like abject morons.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- A London-to-Washington flight was diverted to Boston's Logan Airport after a distraught passenger pulled out potentially dangerous items, according to a media report on Wednesday. Fighter jets escorted the flight after the woman produced a screw driver, matches, Vaseline and a note referencing al-Qaida, the Associated Press reported, citing an airport spokesman. United Flight 923 landed safely, Logan spokesman Phil Orlandella said, the AP reported.

Posted by:

Terry Frazier at 11:35 AM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Homeland Security, Policy & Regulation

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