jims musings

Solu­tions. We all want them. Here are some broad strokes to some prob­lems we face.

Health Care
I reject the idea of a “Health Care Cri­sis.” A cri­sis as such sim­ply doesn’t exist. Go to any hos­pi­tal, urgent care cen­ter or what have you, and you will receive the care you need. Nobody is turned away.
What we do have is a prob­lem of pay­ment, which is tied to our insur­ance, which is tied to our employ­ment. Note the two-step link­age; this is also a prob­lem.
Solu­tion:
1) Revoke, amend or repeal the fed­eral leg­is­la­tion which encour­ages receiv­ing health care through an employer. HIPAA only went a small way towards portable health insur­ance; we need to com­pletely decou­ple health care from employ­ers alto­gether. (Doing so would also reduce the over­head of run­ning a com­pany.) This prob­a­bly means los­ing the pre-tax excep­tion on health care pre­mi­ums, and it means peo­ple begin pay­ing the true cost of their health cov­er­age. This would be painful, but with a tran­si­tory period (say, 24 months) it would be doable.
2) Now that insur­ance is truly portable– like auto insur­ance– and costs are more trans­par­ent to the con­sumer, we can work on what insur­ance is for. Namely, health insur­ance is for emer­gen­cies. Heart attacks, can­cer, bro­ken bones and that sort of thing. Insur­ance com­pa­nies can also offer addi­tional plans for those will­ing to pay more. The point is, for the mil­lions of healthy peo­ple and fam­i­lies out there (whose demand is cur­rently hid­den by the ‘pools’ of employ­ees in com­pany insur­ance plans), plans with low pre­mi­ums and high deductibles will be offered. This is true insur­ance and dif­fers greatly from cur­rent plans, which are more akin to pre-paid med­ical care. Inter­est­ingly, plans like HSAs would prob­a­bly tran­si­tion quite well.
3) In no case is addi­tional fed­eral involve­ment needed, except per­haps to allow (under the Com­merce clause) insur­ance com­pa­nies to oper­a­tion across states. This leg­is­la­tion shouldn’t vary much from the fun­da­men­tal rules which gov­ern inter­state bank­ing.
4) Medicare and Med­ic­aid can be mod­estly expanded to cover basic pre­mi­ums for cit­i­zens who do not work, sim­i­lar to other gov­ern­ment plans which cover auto insur­ance.
There. We end up with a health care sys­tem which is avail­able to all with­out gov­ern­ment man­aged care (so-called ‘Death Panels’).

The Mid­dle East
If I were sud­denly made King of the United States, I would adopt a sim­ple plan for the mid­dle east. The plan is sim­ple, and one that we west­ern­ers are good at: igno­rance.
The prob­lem with the mid­dle east, you see, is oil. They have lots of it, and cur­rently we need it. We pay through the nose for it, too– not only at the gas pump, but in mil­i­tary involve­ment in silly places. These con­di­tions need to change, and the only way to do that is for the United States to become sov­er­eign in its energy needs.
Con­ser­va­tion is good, but doesn’t solve the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem: we sim­ply require unholy amounts of energy. There­fore, we must pro­duce more. More oil (gasp!) for the near-term (1–7 years). For the medium-term (7–30 years), we need nuclear power. We have about 100 nuke plants today. We should have 500. This would pro­duce cheap, clean energy for our entire nation– not to men­tion the con­struc­tion, engi­neer­ing and other ancil­lary jobs. You want an effec­tive ‘stim­u­lus’ bill? Take half that $787 Bil­lion and build nuclear plants.
Now, that we’re inde­pen­dent of the mid­dle east, we have a free hand to act in a man­ner that is mean­ing­ful to us and clear to the rest of the world. If we then choose to con­tinue sup­port­ing Israel, we can do so with­out fear of the oil weapon.
They can drink their oil. And, if they hap­pen to develop nuclear weapons, we can deal with that threat as a sov­er­eign nation, instead of as a depen­dent client state.
For the long term, we need to develop tech­nolo­gies which allow us to pre­serve our hydro­car­bon sup­plies, rather than burn­ing them. Oil is far too use­ful as a chem­i­cal feed­stock for us to be burn­ing it.
Per­haps one of these future tech­nolo­gies would be space-based solar power, but we need cheaper access to space for that to work.

The Envi­ron­ment
We’ve made some silly moves recently with regard to the envi­ron­ment, the most note­wor­thy of which is the politi­ciza­tion of ‘cli­mate change.’ This is not a venue for me to dis­cuss my views on this mat­ter, but I will say that changes such as this have occurred and will con­tinue to occur regard­less of what we do– I’m sure the Polar Bears will sur­vive.
I do fully agree that dump­ing bil­lions of tons of CO2 in our atmos­phere is a bad idea. Since much of this CO2 comes from burn­ing hydro­car­bons, shift­ing to a nuclear-centric power grid could only have good effects for our envi­ron­men­tal impact.
We should also con­sider National Oceanic Pre­serves– places where fish­ing is not allowed, and where marine life can find refuge for breed­ing and migra­tion. Ulti­mately, these areas will also help sup­port exist­ing fish­eries and species diversity.

Edu­ca­tion
The fed­eral gov­ern­ment should not be involved at all in pri­mary edu­ca­tion. Uni­ver­si­ties, as research insti­tu­tions, can very much use fed­eral dol­lars. Edu­ca­tional assis­tance pro­grams– Pell Grants, Stu­dent Loans and such, should be elim­i­nated. Yes, I know all about the costs of col­lege– and the pri­mary rea­son for these increas­ing costs is the avail­abil­ity of gov­ern­ment money. Think of the hous­ing bub­ble, but applied to class­room seats. The myth that every­one needs or deserves a world-class edu­ca­tion is a fan­tasy. At some point, if we con­tinue on our cur­rent course, the eco­nomic ben­e­fit of a col­lege degree will be out­weighed by the debt of acquir­ing such. What will hap­pen then?
Best to get out now and let the bub­ble deflate.

National Debt
This is the Mother of All Prob­lems. Our debt load lim­its our flex­i­bil­ity and saps future capa­bil­ity. My per­sonal incli­na­tion, if I were King, would be to fol­low the path of cut­ting busi­ness reg­u­la­tion (see the Health Care com­ments above) and elim­i­nat­ing most cor­po­rate income taxes. For cit­i­zens below a cer­tain income level, mort­gage pay­ments and per­haps even rent pay­ments would be entirely tax deducible.
Cor­po­ra­tions which pro­vide funds to sup­port National Parks, Pre­serves and other such spaces would be allowed cer­tain exemp­tions in their oper­a­tions. (This would be extended to cor­po­ra­tions like Google, which uses tremen­dous amounts of elec­tric­ity.) In short, I would do every­thing pos­si­ble to encour­age long-term eco­nomic growth. Short term ‘solu­tions’, like rais­ing taxes, only dam­age long-term growth trends and make the debt more dif­fi­cult to pay off.
Pay­ing off the debt would increase the strength and buy­ing power of the dol­lar. As this occurs, I would require a gen­eral import tar­iff– per­haps 5–10%- to hold ultra-cheap goods at bay. My goal is not pro­tec­tion­ism, but to level the play­ing field so US man­u­fac­tur­ers have a com­pet­i­tive chance.

That’s the short story, ladies and gentlemen.

The school dis­trict my chil­dren attend uses a mix­ture of phon­ics and whole word meth­ods to teach chil­dren how to read.
Hap­pily, my chil­dren were read­ing before begin­ning kinder­garten, so I have lit­tle per­sonal emo­tional involve­ment in this issue. To sum up, the Whole Word tech­nique endeav­ors to teach chil­dren to read by encour­ag­ing them to mem­o­rize entire words, their mean­ings, and how to pro­nounce them. The Phon­ics approach teaches chil­dren how to sound out words by assem­bling sounds from the let­ters in the word, and from there to deter­mine a word and its mean­ing. In sim­ple terms, they are some­what oppo­site in their approaches in teach­ing chil­dren to read.

This is a good spot for me to acknowl­edge that chil­dren are spread across a broad spec­trum of learn­ing abil­ity, and what works for one may not work for another.

Whole Word read­ing makes no sense to me. It is equiv­a­lent to teach­ing chil­dren to read hiero­glyph­ics. One of the great devel­op­ments in human his­tory, and a key advance­ment in wide­spread learn­ing, was the phonic alpha­bet. A small set of sim­ple char­ac­ters, each rep­re­sent­ing a basic sound, com­bined into word-groups to con­vey mean­ing, makes pos­si­ble cheap mov­able type. Cheap type enables cheap print­ing, and thus lots of books. A sim­ple alpha­bet also enables a flex­i­ble lex­i­con– inven­tion of new words and terms to match a growth in knowl­edge and learn­ing.
Hiero­glyph­ics leads to a small clois­tered priest­hood and a strat­i­fi­ca­tion of soci­ety between those smart enough to mem­o­rize thou­sands of unique sym­bols and those that can’t. Push­ing whole word learn­ing on chil­dren seems to be a step back­wards.
Yes, I under­stand that our brains even­tu­ally mem­o­rize thou­sands– or tens of thou­sands– of dis­crete words, which allows us to read quickly with high com­pre­hen­sion. How­ever, a phonic back­ground allows us to eas­ily man­age new words. An phonic-method abecedar­ian would get through this sen­tence with min­i­mal difficulty:

Bathykolpian women attract col­pos­in­quanon­i­acs.

A whole-word reader would be totally stumped by the new words and unable to pro­nounce them.

And yes, the ABC was intentional.