Consider the following graph:
(Image courtesy of http://pw1.netcom.com/~rdavis2)
It is apparent that:
- The United States is at historical lows, when it comes to import tariffs
- That when US manufacturing was in its “golden age”, tariffs were much higher than now
- That tariffs were at historic highs during the Great Depression
I would propose that a moderate increase in tariffs (10–15%, across the board) would protect existing US manufacturing jobs, provide a non-taxpayer-based revenue stream to the Federal Government*, possibly encourage growth in domestic manufacturing sectors, and in so doing increase the taxpayer base here in these United States.
*I also note that US Government received most of its budget from import tariffs before the Personal Income Tax was instituted.
Global warming is baloney. Balderdash. Flimflam. Stinking bilge. Blue bunkum and utter claptrap. Hogwash, rubbish, and, when you get down to it, trash.
As a starting point for any sort of discussion, please provide a operational definition of the temperature of the Earth and how it is to be measured (I double dog dare you). We can go from there.
Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle had an interesting article. Somewhat distressing, actually.
A new study on physicians in California shows a glaring gap between the number of doctors of color compared with the state’s ethnically diverse population, especially among African Americans and Latinos.
At the same time, the state has a disproportionate number of Asian and white doctors, according to the UCSF study, which focuses on doctor ethnicity and language fluency.
It found that out of nearly 62,000 practicing doctors in California, only 5 percent are Latino even though Latinos comprise a third of the state’s total population. Only 3 percent of doctors in California are black, compared with 7 percent of the state’s overall black population. While Latinos and African Americans make up about 40 percent of the state’s residents, fewer than 10 percent of California’s doctors are black or Latino.
The disparity is particularly alarming because minority physicians are far more likely to practice primary care medicine and work with poor or uninsured patients in rural areas, inner cities or other communities with a chronic shortage of physicians.
“This is a critical public health issue,” said Dr. Kevin Grumbach, director of the UCSF Center for California Health Workforce Studies, which released the report Wednesday. “These patterns are real. The problem is even worse than we thought.”
In a state with more than 35 million people, fewer than 3,300 Latino and only about 2,000 African American physicians are in “active patient care,” said Grumbach.
“It brings the numbers home in a concrete and stark way,” he said.
So… according to Dr. Kevin, California has a critical public health problem because there are not enough Hispanic and black doctors. He’s not saying there is a shortage of doctors. He’s saying that it is politically incorrect that the ratios of MD’s do not match the population.
Something, of course, must be done. Absolutely.
The report included the following recommendations for solving the ethnicity gap among doctors:
– Invest in the educational pipeline preparing minority and disadvantaged students for careers in medicine and other health professions.
– Promote diversity as a key part of expanding California medical education.
– Hold health professions schools accountable for an institutional culture and environment that promotes diversity, recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities.
– Increase incentives for physicians to work in under served communities in California.
I’ll warrant that the “cure” will be worse than the problem. California will spend millions of taxpayer dollars to increase the number of minority med school students, forcing out otherwise qualified students with the wrong skin color. A larger, real crisis will slowly emerge: not enough doctors.
The quote from Dr. Satinder Swaroop says much:
“It is cultural,” said Dr. Satinder Swaroop, chair of the California Medical Association Foundation’s Network of Ethnic Physician Organizations, during a news conference Wednesday at the UC Davis School of Medicine.
“Asian families push their children,” said Swaroop, who practices in Southern California. “Five people in my family are doctors. Part of it is we feel it is the field to go to.”
Expectations (particularly from family) has a powerful influence on children. I doubt that the medically underrepresented minority groups had much in the way of either family or expectations. It is well known that the black community in America is plagued with a lack of stable families. (“Single parents accounted for almost two-thirds (65 percent) of all African American family groups with children present, compared with 35 percent among Hispanics and 25 percent among Whites.”) Low expectations produces low achievement. America has come to expect minorities to be poor and stupid, and in general that is a role they have accepted and fulfilled.
By the way, ‘minority’ has become a political codeword for “Blacks and Hispanics”; Asians, obviously, are not minorities in the normal sense because they have a tendency to excel.
If we want the racial problems to go away, we must accept certain facets of reality. First, the ideal that all races are equal (Gorrors! I expect some gentle feedback for that). Second, that government is the way to fix social ills. Third, that after 50 years of trying really hard, our current methods of handling racial issues is working. Fourth, that this (the ratio of doctors) is a problem.
But, after looking at the world through the same window for fifty years, I guess you start seeing the same thing.
Came across this perspective on the current economic situation. I’ll quote it here, credit goes to Jerry Bowyer:
Last Saturday, I was a guest on Larry Kudlow’s WABC radio program. Larry’s a good friend and we have been talking quite a bit lately on his TV and radio shows about the ways in which Federal regulations have created the sub-prime mortgage crisis. This is far and away the most underreported aspect of the mortgage story, and aside from Larry’s shows and a few conservative media outlets, such as Townhall, it has been completely missing from the discussion.
That’s a shame, because there simply was no such thing as a developed Subprime mortgage industry until the US congress created it by ordering banks to issue loans to people who were not credit worthy. Community activist groups (such as the Public Interest Research Group and Acorn) and civil rights law firms (such as Miner, Barnhill & Galland) had make their living by accusing banks of racism when the banks hesitated to approve loan requests from minority citizens with poor credit scores. Fair Housing laws, championed by American Heros like Martin Luther King, Jr., had long-ago outlawed the practice of ‘redlining’, which is refusing to sell or rent to blacks in certain neighborhoods. But a new generation of activists modified the concept of redlining, applying it not just to race-based home sale covenants, but to any refusal to lend to a minority member, even for sensible financial reasons.
The Community Reinvestment Act was created as a result. Initially the act was used, not to get banks to lend to minority households, but to get them to cut checks to ‘community groups’. Left of center activist agencies, which had pushed for the act in the first place, used it as a shakedown tool. So long as the banks kept paying off to the activists, the activists would hold off on sending complaints to the bank regulators’ CRA files.
Eventually, under Clinton, the CRA was renewed and, not surprisingly, made more punitive. Banks were required to make Subprime mortgage loans now too, or else suffer a low CRA rating and be punished accordingly. The Fed played it’s part. The Home Mortgage Disclosure rules created an unfunded mandate for banks to track and publicly disclose the race and gender of it’s mortgage clients. Now the shakedown artists had an easy source of complaints and a club with which to beat the banks into submission. The bankers complied and the Subprime mortgagage market was born.
But the bad paper remained principally on the balance sheets of the originating banks for a couple of years. The banks and their shareholders were directly hurt, but not the general public, at least in the beginning, that is until the bank regulators once again intervened and encouraged banks to push the paper out to unsuspecting investors.
First the Fed issued guidance which warned the banks that their capital requirements would be severely raised in response to the Subprime mortgages. In other words, banks were told that to the extent that they issued mortgages to high risk borrowers, to that extent they would not be allowed to put as much of their money into income-producing activities. The banks had already been told by the Fed that they would have to set aside more money for mortgages in general, and now they were being hit again for the Subprime variety.
Second, the Fed issued guidance on how to mix Subprime mortgage paper in with good paper and sell the resulting composite security to the general market. This is how the ‘toxic waste’ of bad debt was pumped out into the world. This is why credit markets are now having trouble clearing. This is why banks are taking massive write-downs of the loans which still exist on their books. This is why foreign investors don’t want to buy US mortgages, or bank stocks, and consequently don’t want to buy the dollars in which they are denominated either. If you add to this a Security and Exchange Commission ruling which compels banks to ‘mark to market’, which means they are forced to show large losses in times of market panic, you give a legal mandate for short-term thinking. You create a more serious crisis for the system and a fatal blow to the weaker banks.
This crisis has the fingerprints of congress and its bureaucratic enforcers all over it. It also has the fingerprints of a generation of activists and ‘fair housing’ lawyers as well.