Sunday, October 4, 2015

Political Fantasy ... or ... Do I Need Kleenex with That

Drill sergeants have the answer when the young lads get a little testy.  What you do, they say, is get you a fistful of Kleenex and you take your little problem to the lah-treeeeen.

The question is one of seeing the demands of Bernie Sanders as to how will he pay for his programs but I've yet to see anything of this nature regarding how the military expenses are subjected to this requirement.

Reviewing candidates individually serves no purpose as most of them aren't worth the time but Donald Trump deserves a special mention for being the first to say today the shooting in Oregon would have been averted if the teachers were armed.

Wholesale arming of the people has worked so well elsewhere in the world, after all.



There's an apparent double standard in-play as Bernie Sanders is held to the hardest judgment whereas there is little judgment of obvious fantasies from others.  The ISIS fiasco serves well in that context as even conservative estimates placed the cost in Iraq at a trillion dollars and that was years back and money actually spent (i.e. as opposed to projections).

If there is anything which came out of that, pray tell ... what was it.  The fantasy is people believe, fervently, if America just keeps at it then eventually something good will come.


I'm willing to accept conservatives are more responsible financially but it has to be true and there is no evidence of it.  It's equally apparent Democrats are not financially responsible as saying they suck less by murdering the deficit less doesn't make me sleep better.

There is never a fundamental conceptual review in terms of just what the hell are we doing and why are we doing it.  Social Security is something which has been mentioned previously which is sound in concept but a disaster in implementation due to the way Congress butchered it.  The Social Security concept works fine when it's limited to the retirement program for which it was envisioned.  However, it is not a panacea for the failure of all other social programs.


It's the same geographically in acceptance of outlandish claims as there was the repeated statement regarding Russian troops invading Ukraine but they said they couldn't determine this for sure with the satellites (or something of that nature).  Then we review the incredible detail of the pictures of Pluto and observe they were taken from eleven thousand miles away from the planet.  If they could not see what was happening in Ukraine, they did not look.

This is another case of political fantasy and it's non-partisan as Democrats aren't Democrats anymore and the Republicans turned into something else altogether.  The Democrats didn't shift right to become Goldwater Republicans but rather missed the landing altogether and Republicans, in many cases, turned into Birchers (i.e. Get US Out of the United Nations).

In the middle of these parties is political chaos for at least fifty percent of Americans who don't vote and don't seem to identify with any party.  The confusion and anomie is immense due largely, I believe, to the wayward philosophies of the basic parties.  People may identify with political parties but, right now, no-one has any idea what they are or represent.

It's come down a level of base simplicity as some identify as conservatives because no-one's going to take my guns.  Well ...

Or some identify as liberal because no-one should prevent gay marriage.  Such base considerations are so primitive and yet they're political stock in trade ... because no-one knows what the real political stock may be.

(Ed:  how is that base?)

Obviously people want to get married, gay or straight.  It shouldn't take endless years to debate such matters.


Don't take anything personally as it's not.  The situation is one of enormous cognitive dissonance in which something is obviously bad but mob hysteria or some other bizarre phenomenon tells people it's good.  For example, there are forty-five school shootings in a year and Donald Trump says the answer is more guns.  His answer is so obviously counter-intuitive and yet it caters to what people want to hear.  Why they want to hear it is psychology almost too twisted to countenance.


Another area of enormous differences in perception is in the Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare).  For years we have heard it would cost trillions, devastate the economy, etc but my question is when.  I require validation for all claims and looked but there's not much from unbiased sources.

PolitiFact:  The federal health care law: What came true and what didn’t
FactCheck.org:  Conflating Costs of the ACA

Finally, the Daily Mail article laments the “stunning” spending figures from the “bombshell” report, but the CBO’s latest spending projections are in fact downward revisions of previous estimates.

Another from Huffington Post:  CBO: Obamacare Will Cost Less Than Projected, Cover 12 Million Uninsured People This Year

Whether the above references are representative of unbiased sources is your call but they were near the top of the list and were more approachable than tables of numbers of the Congressional Budget Office report, etc.  From what I could tell of it, the CBO report did not yield huge numbers either.

In the Huffington Post report, there's an aggregate cost over ten years of $1.38 trillion.  Lots of money, sure, but unclear why the review is of ten-year budget impact rather than annual with practically anything else.  The cost of the F-35 program over its 55-year life is $1.5 trillion.

Perhaps you have heard of conservatives shutting down the government because of that outrageous F-35 expense but, incredibly, I missed that one.  The F-35 program is one of many.


NOTE ABSOLUTELY:  I am not questioning anyone's word and that's not the point.  It's difficult to even have a word when there are so many rubbishy words and such a paper chase in-play.

Here is the finest paper chase I have ever seen and one which is even germane if you like.  As to who plays Mister Hart in this episode here in the glowing future, that's yet to be determined.  Of one thing we can all be sure:  never assume anything.

Behold the excellence.  Once, television showed what it could do.  This show was not only accepted but rather it was a smash.  It's the same idea with the blog as the object is to talk to those who understand rather than focusing, pointlessly, on those who do not.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How the F35 at about 3B per year is the same as an incomplete insurance progeam that cost 138B and still leaves 10% uninsured is useful comparasion other than both are broken government spending
I believe that 10 year averaging was to spread the start up costs instead lumpibg them into the first two years and spread the fines collected instead of heavily weighting the front end

Unknown said...

They're the same in cost a lot and not delivering anything or nothing which doesn't exist already. The F-22 has never been used for much of anything. Who knows how much they wasted on that. The point isn't so much that of overt waste but the implicit waste in the organizations which do it through poor management structures, bloated payrolls, etc.