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Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
It's Not a Rate Increase, It's a Reclassification
Should a President Expect Congressmen to Read the Bills They Pass?
It's Not a Rate Increase, It's a Reclassification
Should a President Expect Congressmen to Read the Bills They Pass?
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Monday, October 29, 2007
Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
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
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Categories: Economics, Policy & Regulation
Terry Frazier at 11:12 PM
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Monday, May 7, 2007
It's Not a Rate Increase, It's a Reclassification
The new AT&T - "We're back. And it's just like nothing has changed."According to the article, no one regulates phone card rates. Not the state of MO, not the FCC, nobody.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. [...]
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
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Categories: Business & Finance, Policy & Regulation
Terry Frazier at 11:10 AM
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Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Should a President Expect Congressmen to Read the Bills They Pass?
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
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Categories: Policy & Regulation
Terry Frazier at 3:28 PM
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