So California’s budget woes have been going on for months now but the time for action is quickly growing near. Unfortunately, while everyone agrees that action is necessary, nobody can agree on what those actions should be. We’ve got a 26.3 Billion dollar gap still to close and accomplishing that in a bi-partisan way is looking to be nearly impossible. Of course listening to statements from either side makes it seem so easy, “Just cut out our wasteful spending already!” or “Just raise taxes on the rich to where they belong!”. But when you find out that if we were to, for example, cut all state funding for the UCs and CSUs it would still only save us 1.5 Billion or that raising corporate income taxes would only net us 430 million, it starts to look a little more complex. Obviously a mixed approach will be necessary, at least until the economy begins to recover and the state’s income returns to normal levels.
The LA times has a very interesting little program on its website that allows you to try your hand at solving CA’s budget crisis. It can be found here:
It tries to include many of the options that the governor and members of the legislature are currently looking at. After working on it for a while I was able to put together a plan that worked, but not without having to choose options that I was uncomfortable with. Try it out and see what you can do.
While politicians hammer out the details of healthcare reform legislation and debate some of the more “controversial issues” (which I put in quotes because they shouldn’t be as controversial as they are) surrounding healthcare reform, the administration is busy doing things that everyone should be able to happy about. Of course good news doesn’t draw as many readers as doom and gloom so its easy to miss some of these developments if you’re just clicking through a news website or taking in a bit of CNN, so I’ve highlighted a couple of the recent positive developments after the jump. Continue reading
Well its been a while hasn’t it? Sorry about that. I’ll be posting with more regularity in the future. As many of you know I recently got back from an AMA conference in Chicago and it was a surprisingly eye-opening experience in a lot of different ways. There’s no way I can cover it all in one post so I’m just going to talk about one of the issues that was discussed at this meeting. There is a now-famous article that was recently published in the New Yorker entitled “The Cost Conundrum” which analyzes some of the drivers of high healthcare costs.
Everybody was talking about this article. The President of the AMA called the article a “watershed moment” for healthcare reform. Supposedly President Obama had everyone on his healthcare team read the article. So if you have even a passing interest in healthcare policy and reform, you should probably read it too. So for your enjoyment I’ve posted a link to it after the jump.
Breaking News! Tomorrow morning Pres. Obama is expected to announce that he has chosen John Huntsman Jr., governor of Utah and moderate republican as the new ambassador to China. And sources say Governor Huntsman has accepted the ambassador position. He learned Chinese while serving a mission for the church in Taiwan and he has an adopted daughter from China. He also served as Ambassador to Singapore under President George H.W. Bush and worked in the Reagan Whitehouse. I’ve always liked Gov. Huntsman and he seems to be extremely qualified for this position. And I’m pleased to see Pres. Obama reaching across party lines to appoint more Republicans to important positions. The full article follows:
SALT LAKE CITY — President Barack Obama intends to name Utah’s Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman, seen by many as a potential GOP presidential contender, to be ambassador to China, a source close to the governor said Friday night.
The popular moderate governor has accepted the appointment, said the source, who would speak only on condition of anonymity ahead of a White House announcement expected Saturday. Repeated messages to Huntsman’s spokeswoman and other staffers went unreturned Friday. The White House would not confirm the nomination.
Huntsman, a two-term governor, is fluent in Mandarin Chinese from his days as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan. One of his seven children, Gracie Mei, was adopted from China in 1999 after she was abandoned in a vegetable market. He made headlines recently for encouraging the Republican Party to swing in a more moderate direction if it wanted to bounce back from the 2008 elections, angering some conservatives. Continue reading
Well while I’m on the topic of the future of Healthcare here’s another one for you. The CEO of the CMA, Joe Dunn, came and spoke at the UCD School of Medicine several weeks ago and he gave a great speech. And now, through the miracle of technology, that speech is available to all of you! His speech was directed towards medical students but it really has relevance to anyone who wants to get something done in politics. Its long but he’s a very engaging and entertaining speaker and the speech really gets better as it goes along so if you have the time its definitely worth watching it through. You would be hard-pressed to find a better primer on how things get done in government.
Well with finals over and done with you can expect to get a lot more posts from me in the coming weeks! And we start out today with some very exciting news. President Obama held a press conference today for what he called, “a watershed event in the long and elusive quest for health care reform.” The American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association; PhRMA; AdvaMed; America’s Health Insurance Plans, the SEIU, and the Greater New York Hospital Association and the California Hospital Association announced a new cooperative effort to drastically reduce the rate of growth of healthcare costs beginning immediately. They pledged to cut the rate of growth by 1.5%. This may not seem like a lot but this means a cut from about 7% to 5.5%, bringing us much closer to the annual rate of income growth which tends to hover around 4-5% but which has at times grown to near 6%. And that’s what really matters, that’s really our baseline here. If healthcare costs can be reduced such that their growth is equal to the rate of income growth in the US then the future of healthcare suddenly gets a lot rosier. And this commitment brings us much closer to that goal.
And this is also great news for America’s future financial security. Many people don’t realize the huge impact that rising healthcare costs have on our country’s national budget. The reasons why that is are a subject for another article but even a savings of 1.5% will mean much smaller deficits and less national debt. One Obama aid put it this way: Continue reading
One of my absolute favorite political sites on the internet, Politifact.com, recently won a pulitzer prize! They were apparently the first exclusively online news organization to do so. And they really, really deserve it. They do top-notch fact-checking of most of the controversial statements being thrown around by public officials. They’re also running an “Obameter” where they keep track of over 500 of Obama’s campaign promises and record which ones are kept and which are broken, with comprehensive explanations for each.
Every time I start to get depressed about the sorry state of investigative journalism, the decline of objective reporting and rise of partisan pontificating, or the way our news media has devolved into a megaphone for the most apocalyptic, opinionated, and insane of our politicians and pundits, I surf on over to politifact.com and bask in their worship of sweet, sweet facts, and it gives me hope. Seriously, if you have even a passing interest in politics, you should probably bookmark politifact and check it a couple times a week. They only update every once in a while. If they expanded into a full news agency I’d probably make them my number one source of political information. Another fantastic, and equally objective, site is Factcheck.Org. I know I’ve promoted them both before but seriously, check them out:
I doubt I will ever write many articles that fit better into the theme and mission of this blog than this one. And despite the fact that the piece it’s based on is over 3 years old, it couldn’t be more topical. There was an article in the New Yorker in December of 2005 entitled “Everybody’s An Expert” that discusses a book by UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Philip Tetlock called “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”. The article is a fascinating read and I’d encourage you to go through it if you’ve got a few minutes. But it is long so I’ve tried to draw out the more important and politically relevant points and I’ve added them below, along with a little of my own commentary. Continue reading
Thanks to Joel for this tip. It turns out my old stake president from my Glenwood days, Larry Echohawk, just got asked to head up the bureau of indian affairs! Here’s a portion of the Salt Lake Tribune article about it:
President Barack Obama on Friday picked Brigham Young University law professor Larry EchoHawk to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs, making him the first high-profile Mormon and first Utahn to join the administration’s senior ranks.
EchoHawk, a member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, has lived and worked throughout the West. He made history in 1990 as the first American Indian elected to statewide office when he won Idaho’s attorney general race. After a failed bid for Gem State governor, EchoHawk, a Democrat, relocated to Utah, where he started teaching courses on criminal law and federal Indian law at BYU.
“Larry EchoHawk has the right leadership abilities, legislative experience and legal expertise,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, “to bring about the transformative improvements we all seek for Indian country.”
The rest of the article can be found after the jump. Continue reading
Hey look, a timely article for a change! Finally I’m addressing a phenomenon before it happens and not days/weeks after it has passed. Anyway, you may or may not have heard about the “tea-party” anti-tax movement that’s developing around the country. This tea-party movement consists of people gathering in various cities on April 15th holding protests about the “terrible taxes burdening americans”, and what they see as America’s coming descent into socialism. Here’s a quote from one of the two fawning FoxNews articles that were up about it today. From one of the organizers of the tea party protests:
“People are getting killed — they’re getting hammered with taxes and it’s not the way this country is supposed to be run. … We want to fight back,”
Are people really getting hammered with taxes? I don’t challenge their right to gather and protest taxes or whatever they want, but they may want to check a few facts first. And to make it convenient for them, I’ve gathered the pertinent graphs and information after the jump. I should also note before I begin that not all tea-party participants are claiming taxes are too high and that some are doing this for other reasons (to protest the stimulus, just to express their anger that McCain lost etc), I’m not addressing those concerns here. But these tea-parties are being billed as “anti-tax protests” so this is a significant part of what they’re organizing for and this article will address that issue. Anyway, as best as I can deduce, here’s some relevant historical perspective… Continue reading
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Quotes
"We do not need to judge nearly so much as we think we do. This is the age of snap judgments. … [We need] the courage to say, ‘I don’t know. I am waiting further evidence. I must hear both sides of the question.’ It is this suspended judgment that is the supreme form of charity. Someone has said that you cannot slice cheese so fine that it doesn’t have two sides."
-Dallin H. Oaks
"It is better to debate a question without settling it, than to settle a question without debating it...The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress."
-Joseph Joubert
"The more you know, the more you realise how much you don’t know — the less you know, the more you think you know."
-David Freeman
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
