Lots of digital ink has been spilled about JP Morgan’s $2 billion trading loss. I don’t want to add too much more, except to call out one issue that I think has been downplayed through all of this: the notion that JP Morgan “lost” the money.
I was a Political Science major in college. One of the classes I took was on state government, and as part of that class, everybody had to do a report on the politics of a randomly-assigned state. I happened to have been assigned Indiana. So I dug into the books in the library (back when that’s how you had to do research!) and read all about the huge influence of the KKK in Indiana early in the 20th century (seriously, huge influence), the Indianapolis unigov, and famous Indiana politicians: Bayh père et fils, Dan Coats, Dan Burton, Mark Souder, and of course Vice President Potatoe. Nobody had been around Indiana politics longer, though, than Tricky Dick’s “Favorite Mayor”, Dick Lugar. And tonight, he is no more.
There’s a lot of commentary about the French and Greek elections this week. Some of it is rather apoplectic (more deserved in Greece than France), but for all the talk of extremism, a lot of the debate misses the mark. What really matters, and what is just as applicable in this country as elsewhere, is that this election should be about who is being proven right about the economy, and who is not.
Watching the legislative session from the sidelines, instead of being in the trenches, is an interesting experience. It’s certainly been fun to watch the fecklessness, especially with regards to the stadium issue, which reached a new low yesterday when the super-secret GOP plan to pay for the stadium with general obligation, a.k.a. taxpayer bonds, was put forward. A plan that seemed to have the support of, well, a few people within the caucus I guess. Good enough for this legislature!
This past weekend, I went up to my hometown in Central Minnesota to visit some friends. This being Central Minnesota (also known as Michele Bachmann’s district), all sorts of fun political signs were in abundance. There were the old standbys, like hand-painted anti-abortion signs on farms and “U.S. out of the U.N.” graffiti so old it’s possible that it had been there since the U.N. itself was formed. This time, though, I noticed a new sign on I-94, stating “Fed up with Socialism? Undo it in November”. This caused me to cringe and fear for the future of this country just a little bit more than usual.
PoliticsApril 23, 2012
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There has been a lot of ink spilled about the Girls Around Me app that was introduced, and then pulled from the iPhone App Store. For those who are unaware, the app used the geolocation aspects of existing websites, such as Foursquare and Facebook, to show the user where women were located close to them. This was widely decried as creepy and stalker-y, and after Foursquare cut off access to their data, the app was essentially useless. The developer does, however, hope to bring it back sometime soon.
Was the app gross and juvenile? Perhaps. But it’s important to remember that this app was using data that was publicly available. The users who showed up were sharing, knowingly or unknowingly, their location data with everybody in the world. The whole point of Foursquare, and Facebook location tagging, is to tell people where you are: this issue here was that this data was being used in a way that people may not have agreed to, but they were making it public all the same. Plus, let’s imagine that the app wasn’t looking simply for women located close by: let’s imagine that it was looking for mothers with at least two children that have a household income of $70,000 per year. Now we’ve described a micro-targeting app that your favorite retailer of choice is most likely feverishly working on, again using public data to find what is of interest to them. Is that also creepy? Maybe, but it is the future of marketing.
Part of the argument against Obamacare is how terrible and freedom-hating and un-American the insurance mandate is. I mean, being forced to pay for something you don’t want, or don’t need? Being forced to enter into a contract? Ridiculous! Inconceivable! If the government can mandate paying for that, what can’t they mandate paying for? Ad nauseum. It’s as if people don’t realize that the health care market is already full of mandates.
PoliticsHealth careApril 06, 2012
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If you listen to the pundits, the 2012 election represents a referendum on “the fundamental role of government” (see this from one of my more favorite conservative publications, for example; Google the phrase itself and you will get thousands of hits). On one side, we have the Obama administration, which wants more taxes, more spending, more regulation, and more government interference in every aspect of your life. On the other side, we have Republicans who espouse less government, less taxes, less spending, fewer regulations, and a return to the good old days of what made America great. It’s a neat little narrative, all tied up in a bow, that’s easy for people to understand.
Except that’s not quite how would put it. This election is important (every one is, of course), but I wouldn’t say that it represents competing visions of the government’s role in our lives. Instead, this election is about different views of reality. On one side, we have a team that tries to work within the framework of the possible and the realistic, making hard decisions that sometimes make people mad, but have some greater goal in mind. On the other side, we have a team that sells empty platitudes that have little bearing on reality, that simply endeavor to tell voters what they think they want to hear without having a plan to back it up. Truly, we have a difference not based on the fundamental role of government, but the fundamental role of reality.
The federal gas tax has not been increased since 1993. It’s a fixed per-gallon tax, not a percentage of the price of gasoline like a sales tax, so as gas prices have gone up, this hasn’t led to increased gas tax revenues. On the contrary: higher gas prices and more fuel-efficient cars are leading to lower gas purchases, eroding the revenue stream even more. Our road infrastructure is crumbling and as the costs pile up, the funding dwindles. What do you do? Well, if you are Congress, you refuse to pass anything so it all falls apart March 31st.
PoliticsTax, TransportationMarch 26, 2012
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There are a lot of reasons why the photo ID constitutional amendment is a bad idea (it was sent to the house floor today), but I’m going to ignore all the policy for now and focus simply on the mechanics. No matter what you think of the concept, putting it in the constitution could make for a very complicated problem a decade down the line when photo IDs may be irrelevant. And that’s the problem with putting policy into the constitution.
PoliticsAmendments, Photo IDMarch 19, 2012
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