Over on Facebook, Tracy posts about a Townhall article where Robert Reich says ObamaCare would wreck the economy. Yes, Lyndon Johnson did lowball the costs of Medicare, something I pointed out when I spoke at the Harris County Republican townhall meeting that was held out in Pasadena the other night. I told the audience how Medicare had an 1,000 percent cost overrun in its first 25 years of enactment. Nobody has any real clue how much ObamaCare will cost taxpayers.
The problem, politically, is that I've been to five or six townhall meetings with almost all Republicans in attendance. What I've heard maybe 10-15 times now from elderly people is that they all agree on how wonderful Medicare is! They just go berserk over the idea that there may be illegals who might be eligible for something too. I told that audience last Tuesday in Pasadena that when you go on Medicare at age 65, you become a ward of the state. In other words, YOU become a welfare queen, and that you are no different than those damned illegals.
There was silence in the audience when I got done saying that. You could have heard a pin drop.
I grew a little gentler at the end of my 2 minutes of allotted time with the mike. I let the audience off by asking the panel if anybody had any cost estimates on what ObamaCare would cost, to which one panel member piped up something to the effect of, "take the Congressional Budget Office estimates and multiply it by 5 and you're on track".
One member of the audience pointed out that the Republican party didn't do anything about rolling back the welfare state when they were in power. He was right. And why was that?
Maybe it's because we are NEVER going to be able to contain government if there are millions of Republicans (much less Democrats) who love Medicare, but merely object to ObamaCare. All those so called Republicans are then doing is admitting that Lyndon Johnson was right all along and we're merely arguing over how much socialism in medicine there is going to be. But more importantly, you've already given up on the argument of whether government should be involved in health care at all. Otherwise, I don't care if I'm Republican or not. Taxpayer funded health care is good for me but not for thee!
Addendum: David Jennings at Big Jolly writes this post on the Pasadena townhall meeting. Here is the Harris County Republican Party's idea platform presentation on health care reform.
Another addendum: See and hear the Wizard himself in action! I do admit that it is impossible to hear what I or the panel members are saying.
Enjoy!
Wizard
I caught this post via the Houston Chronicle from Keep Houston Houston entitled A funny thing about transit. It was a most interesting post coming from Keep Houston Houston.
The Wizard has noted before that I can in fact reach my downtown job from where I live via Metro bus. It's just that it would add 1 hour of time to my round trip commute to do so and I've decided that it's not worth my time to put up with a 1 hour and 45 minute round trip work commute every day.
I subscribe to the Journal of Urban Economics, ergo I know there have been plenty of studies that have been done to estimate what the value of people's time is on transit trips. The learned literature strongly suggests that the in time spent in transit is valued at some 40-50 percent of their per hour wage rates, while time spent in accessing and waiting for transit vehicles is perceived at a considerably higher rate.
Another part of the transportation mobility equation for me is that I have social interests that would be a bit hard to satisfy via transit, but not by my car. My social interests are almost all located between my work place and my home, ergo I don't have to drive much in order to live what for me is a reasonably satisfying life. Now if I were to get married that would be another story.
So, KHH has much of it right, but not all of it. Transit does limit your mobility to the extent that you only get to go where Metro goes, so it alters your lifestyle in that extra dimension. It sucks up your time and it is not 24x7. Transit also limits at least some of your shopping opportunities vis-a-vis a car because it's very difficult to haul that 52 inch plasma screen TV onto a Metro Bus or rail car. Allowing jitney competition would aid in transit mobility, but it's still impossible to understand why 30 miles of rail lines have to be built when Metro already has a bus network that runs into the thousands of miles, and where we could achieve close to the same thing rail would offer via adding dedicated bus lanes to major thoroughfares which would remove much of the speed and reliability problem that transit vehicles have to contend with.
Always remember, it's added mobility, not mobility substitution that we're after. As for why the votes for Metro Solutions came from the inner city and not the suburbs, maybe that has more to do with the idea that folks in the inner city might be able to reach the Medical Center via a $1.5 billion train that would run from the Hillcroft transit center, but a suburbanite will not be able to take a train that runs from Katy to Kingwood.
Wizard
Before I go any further, I wish my older brother a belated Happy 50th birthday. I should be thankful that he made it this far.
For the past 10 days or so, the Wizard, along with untold thousands of other Houstonians, has had to put up with the fact that the illustrious Texas Department of Transportation has scrapped up the top 4-6 inches of pavement off of FM 1093, also known as Westheimer Road. Since the Wizard lives right off of Westheimer, the matter has been of some importance to me, especially since I experienced a flat tire last Thursday while driving to work. I found a nail in my old tire, had to wait for AAA to pump up my baby tire so that I could drive the following morning to a Firestone to buy a new tire. The new tire set met back $90.
And so it was. As with many people, I was left wondering exactly why it was that the powers that be decided to repave what was for all practical purposes a perfectly fine road? The official answer was posted on Channel 2 news:
TxDOT says the roadway was hardly perfect before.
"As a driver, driving down a roadway, you don't see all the little things in the pavement," TxDOT spokeswoman Karen Othon said.
Othon says Westheimer Road had cracks that workers have sealed over the years to keep moisture from causing more damage.
The last time this section of Westheimer Road was resurfaced was 2002.
"The actual life of an asphalt pavement is 7 to 10 years, so it was time for it to be resurfaced," Othon said.
We discovered Westheimer Road wasn't actually scheduled to be repaved until April 2011, but when TxDOT received $2.6 billion in federal stimulus money, the state decided to put several projects on the fast track.
"There is a criteria established with the stimulus money, and if you don't use it and go by their guidelines, then we do lose it," Othon explained. "So this is something that we definitely wanted to take part of and use the money that is offered to us."
TX-DOT's website reports that this repaving project is currently estimated to cost $9.45 million.
And yet, that still begs to ask the question. Was this really necessary? I understand probably better than anybody that Westheimer, all eight lanes of it, probably carries some 100,000 (or more) vehicles everyday. Yet the road was in perfectly fine condition. This reminded me of when I lived off of Kirby Drive, where I saw the City of Houston lay asphalt on stretches of the street 2-3 times before deciding in 2001 to tear up the street - yet again - because the City decided to lay an underground storm sewer under the median connecting Buffalo Bayou and Braes, a project now in its second stage between San Felipe and Kirby south of Interstate 59.
It's actions like this, where people decide to do something about what is a non-issue, all because they are chasing after some handout money, that drive me nuts. That money could have been used to repave Richmond Avenue, for example, but God forbid we should repave parts of a badly bruised up Richmond Avenue because we all know that Metro so desperately wants to put a train down that street. So better to spend $1.5 billion to put a 10-11 mile light rail line down Richmond, rather than spend less than one percent of that amount to smooth out the wrong street. How is it that we can so often be so penny wise and pound foolish?
The repaving of Westheimer is not only a $10 million microcosm of the $787 billion stimulus plan, it is a microcosm of irrationality and absurdity of politics as a whole. People wonder why there are skeptics out there who question whether doing stuff like this is worth passing the bill on to our children's future. It isn't.
An item of note: Bob Lemer passes on that there will be a 90 minute workshop of City of Houston finances September 25th from 11:30am - 1:00pm. Cost is $35 for Houston CPA members and $50 for members of the public.
Wizard
Last Wednesday evening, the Wizard spent the hours in the way he likes most - wiling the hours away with the Wednesday Knights, playing several rounds of 10-20 minute chess at a Houston area restaurant. The Wizard won one game and lost two, but due to a peculiar set of circumstances, I still took home the third place pidling trophy for my efforts.
Since the Wizard was doing something more important than watching TV or paying attention to politics Wednesday evening, the Wizard missed President Barak Obama's nationally televised address on whether the United States government should pass legislation on mandating that Americans must have universal health insurance coverage.
The reason why the Wizard didn't bother to watch the President's televised address was because he knew that he wouldn't miss much. That belief was validated when I picked up my old fashioned, fish wrapper version of the Houston Chronicle yesterday morning before I headed off to work. The front page story, carried from over the news wires, was of South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson, who cried out "You Lie!" when President Barak Obama stated that the new universal health insurance legislation would not cover or benefit illegal immigrants.
Much commentary has been inked and typed over Congressman Wilson's outburst, which he later offered an apology to the President that Mr. Obama accepted. Fairly typical of the commentary offered was by this guy, who complained about the halls of Congress no longer being a place of civility. The Chronicle editorial board spoke of the idea that there was no room for such rudeness in the debate over the future of health care and one-sixth of the American economy.
The Wizard takes a bit of a different view over Congressman Wilson's outburst. It wasn't that Mr. Wilson was rude to the President of the United States - he was. But plenty of people are rude to the President (or for that matter, just about any politician) every day in many sorts of ways. Often that rudeness towards others could be justified in some way. Sometimes we read about it in print, or we never hear about it as they may be words whispered between friends in private. To the Wizard however, it had a lot more to do with the idea that one man called another man a liar to his face in public.
Politicians do lots of stupid things, much like the rest of us. Age is no barrier to doing stupid things, thinking of stupid things to do, or for that matter not knowing how to run your own life. Back in 2001, the Wizard worked many hours on the City of Houston TABOR / Revenue Cap proposition drive. After City Secretary Anna Russell failed to verify, after 48 days, that we had 20,000 valid signatures to place the proposition drive on the November 2001 ballot, I suggested to our most prominent plaintiff in our lawsuit against the City of Houston that we get a mob of people out and drive our cars in circles around City Hall, honking our horns as we went. This gentleman, who happens to be older, much wealthier, and wiser than I was (and am) threw water on the idea. He said to me something that I never will forget. He told me that "Republicans just don't do that sort of thing."
I got the message, but it's a message worth repeating to myself. Even when something does not go your way, try to learn from it and move on. Don't try to act like a jackass.
So, fast forward eight years and what do I find Republicans doing? Well, I find that lots of people who call themselves Republicans acting just in the same way that I suggested they do eight years ago in front of City Hall. They are running around holding rallies, flash mobs, and acting like a bunch of jackasses. Those mobs and rallies are being attended by Republicans who tell me that they deserve their Social Security check because they've paid into it, or that they don't want politicians to touch Medicare because they like it. Every time they do that, they're acting like a jackass. Every time a Republican politician proposes some expensive new public welfare entitlement, they're acting like a jackass. In my view, that means that both Bush the elder and Bush the younger were a pair of jackasses. Arguably, the last politician who wasn't a jackass was Ronald Reagan.
And so it is. Hearing things like Congressman Wilson's outburst, or learning that California assemblyman Mike Duvall having to step down because he was caught on tape telling salacious stories of his romps with mistresses lobbyists, point to a political party that has been electing too many guys who turn into jackasses once they get into office, but has not been doing enough intellectual thinking, offering new ideas, alternatives, nor is it a party with members who have spine. Otherwise, the future of the Republican party will belong to the Mike Duvalls, and the Joe Wilsons of the world, and that's not a party worth paying attention to or voting for. Why? Because deep down, those guys (and they constituency they represent) are no different from the jackasses who happen to be sitting on the other side of the aisle.
Wizard
Addendum: In today's Houston Chronicle, the newspaper carries the AP wire story about President Obama now holding the bullhorn. The story states that
Keeping Americans safe, the president says, is "the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning; it's the last thing that I think about when I got to sleep at night."
Bush used to say the same thing.
That's too bad, because both men didn't swear an oath upon ascending to office to keep Americans safe. They swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
Further addendum: A story just came across the wires from Politico. It wonders whether petty GOP cranks are dominating the public debate.
Tory writes about the joys of Houston not hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. I chimed in that it was a good thing that Houston was passed over in the 2012 Olympic bid. Amongst other things, Olympic officials look at public transportation offered by prospective cities as a part of their bidding process, giving IOC officials who have no real reason to give a damn an opportunity to inflict all kinds of financial disasters on the hapless citizens of a host city. I read a while back that Montreal finally got around to paying off the debts incurred by their hosting of the 1976 Games 30 years later.
To wit, the Onion weighs in on the subject of cities and countries bidding for hosting the Olympic Games, noting that Haiti has made a bid to host the 2216 Olympic Games. Haitian officials are
Emphasizing the country's warm tropical climate, vibrant culture, and long-term plans to cultivate farmland capable of sustaining actual crops...
Haitian officials promised, naturally, that the 2216 Games would be the greatest ever seen given that they will have 207 years to get ready for them.
I just hope I'll be around to see them!
Wizard