Muffingate, or how to shoot yourself in the foot

Large organizations, be they private or public are wasteful. I know this because I work for a large Fortune 500 company, and choke every day on the amount of bureaucracy I and my coworkers have to deal with. We all see waste in government as well. A recent flare up over government waste involved a report issued by the Justice Department where they stated that $4500 was spent on 250 muffins, or $16 per muffin at a conference at the Capitol Hilton. Naturally this set the Right Wingers off on a crazy diatribe about how wasteful the government is. Of course, the $16 muffins turned out to be false. $4500 was spent at the conference, but it was spent on the event space and refreshments but the original invoice just listed the total spend and the muffins. So no $16 muffins. But then the Justice Dept does an audit on this to dispel any myths about government waste and....wait for it: I present to you a 150 page audit report that defines exactly what was spent. 150 pages. WAY TO GO!!! So instead of just saying 'no we bought more than just muffins.' we get a huge report that no one reads except to get a good laugh at how dumb things can get. Here's the report. Now we DO have proof of government waste. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. I'm not against audits. It's good to check things. But instead of wasting how many thousands of dollars paying people to write a report to cover your ass, why not TRAIN your people on how to do proper inventory and invoicing? Waste is going to happen. It's human nature. But let's try to learn from it so that it won't happen again.

Save the Job Creators!

It's a classic quote from Conservatives: Too many people rely on the government. Of course, with 9.1% unemployment, people are hurting. Heck, if my wife's company doesn't find work soon, she will probably lose her job in 6 months and then be on unemployment while she searches for a job. Is that too much reliance on the government? Are you going to call me and my wife LAZY for not finding work? We were certainly dumb to buy a house in 2005, but we are current on our mortgage. If we were to walk away from that, we would be ostracized as layabouts. (Don't mention how the banks that routinely walk away from bad investments are the ones calling us lazy)

People who are protesting Wall Street are protesting the status quo, which means if you are middle class or poor, you will rack up debt just to survive and you still won't get ahead. These folks are complaining about why these bankers give them CRAP for complaining about having debt. Meanwhile these same bankers were given free reign to run around and bet OUR MONEY on anything they wanted, and in 10 years racked up a TON of leverage (debt) and nearly wiped out our economy and were BAILED OUT by US. But it's bad if we taxpayers complain about how these jerks messed everything up. We bailed them out, they not only survive, but THRIVE to the tune of 2 trillion in bonuses since 2008, yet when these protesters call foul, they are demonized as degenerate hippies.

Income inequality is a huge problem in this country. I'm going to quote an Mark Blythe, an economist that I follow:
"There’s a crisis of income growth in this country that’s papered over by credit. That’s why there’s $56-billion in student loan debt. That’s why there’s $14-trillion in mortgage debt. That’s why there’s more than $1-trillion in home equity lines of credit outstanding. Because people have been borrowing against an uncertain future to finance an ever more expensive present. At the same time income has stagnated. Let’s be clear. When you adjust wages for prices, when you look at the real wage, it’s stagnant for 40 percent of the population; and for the next 20 percent of the population it’s barely edged up over 25 years. Meanwhile the top one percent has increased its share from the late 1970s, from 9 percent of national income to 24 percent just now. You can’t say these things are not causally related… Economically, inequality is a bad thing. You don’t even need to make a moral argument. You don’t have to mention the word justice once. More equal societies grow faster."

Our country is hurting right now, but the pain is not being shared equally. The pain was created by everyone, but the burden is not being carried equally. That is why people are protesting. They want fairness.  Look at how well this country did in the 1990's, and that is when the highest tax rate was 39.5%. But if we go to that rate today, then it is Socialism! Give me a brake. The highest tax rate under Ronald Reagan was 70%. Yet he is touted as a model Republican. I don't think that Reagan would be a viable nominee in today's GOP field. These protests we are seeing are related to the Arab spring and the riots in London. People are seeing that the game is rigged, and that their voice is muffled politically. So the only option that is left is to take to the streets. I'm not saying that the country should go the way of Sweden. Some inequality is good, because some people work harder than others and should be rewarded for that. But we do believe in fairness in this country, and fairness is NOT what is going on on Wall Street, where the risks have been socialized (the bailouts) but the profits have been privitized (the bonuses). This also extends to a lot of the Fortune 500 CEOs, Boards, and executives as well. Look at HP. They just fired their last CEO who was on the job for 11 months, but he still left with a severance of millions of dollars after taking the stock and driving it into the ground. What is that? That's not capitalism.

I do not buy for one instant the idea that Social Security is going bust. It's simply not true. It needs a little bit of help, but even after payroll taxes are unable to match benefits 1-1 in 2035 it will still pay out 70% of benefits. To fix that, just raise the cap on payroll taxes from the current limit of $106,000. The real problem is healthcare costs. Note that I said healthcare and not Medicare. Medicare is expensive because healthcare in this country is ridiculously expensive. We are riding a healthcare expense bubble that is going to pop and end very badly unless we get these costs under control. To do that, we have to exact pain on an industry that is starting to run amok. And in doing so we will exact some pain on ourselves but we will end this madness. Why is healthcare so expensive? Because of competition Hospitals need to compete with each other, so they offer more services. More services are expensive. But because of the way we deal paying for our healthcare in this country, we tend to not worry about prices.

Hearing GOP leaders whine about regulations is ridiculous. Regulations just decide who pays them. The costs are already there. Ideally, regulations make those responsible deal with those costs. Of course you can go overboard, but this wholesale movement to repeal regulation is just dumb and is what helped get us into this bind in the first place.

I also find it sad that the current GOP orthodoxy is that raising taxes on the rich is a terrible thing and is the equivalent of a huge transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor yet giving the rich tax cuts is a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and that is ok. Poll after poll says that most Americans want to raise taxes on the rich, even most Republican voters agree with this.