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  • Sandbox – 11jun15

    [Have no idea how the last sandbox overfilled so quickly.  The foreign trade issues under the trifecta of initiatives now boiling – TPA, TPP, and the EU Services Agreement – got everyone exercised.  It was edifying to watch how the barn was circled again and again.  I come away wondering how much, if any, common ground has been identified between our polarized commenters (who, moi?).  The Righties are concerned about TPP's impact on US sovereignty, while the Lefties are worried about loss of (union) jobs.  Some are still confused about the TPA and require legislators to have a detailed knowledge of the TBD TPP before being able to cast a reasonable/defendable vote on the TPA.  But I, and maybe others, would be interested if someone would summarize the discovery of any productive common ground – or is lapping the barn just a lot of fun for its own sake?  gjr] 

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  • The Conservatarian Manifesto

    George Rebane

    Years ago as my socio-political outlook took shape, I had a hard time fitting myself into the well-defined boxes labeled Conservative and Libertarian.  When I started writing RR and sought to spell things out as unambiguously as possible – my penchant for ‘operational definitions’ – I ran into the problem of what to call myself in the lively debates that have become the hallmark of this blog.  Since my belief system was an amalgam drawn from both camps, some years back I came up with ‘conservetarianism’ (note the spelling) as a label for it.

    Well, it turns out that I’m not the only one who has had to cobble together tenets from those two political camps.  Just out is the new book The Consrvatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and fight for the Right’s future by Charles C.W. Cooke of the National Review.  (You can see an interview with him on Reason magazine here.)  From what I’ve heard about Cooke’s elucidation of this newly labeled ideology, I seem to be in accord with everything except my spelling, which I will now gladly cede to the new convention.

    The hardcopy is on order, and after reading it I will cite any exceptions I take with Cooke’s work.  But in sum, I am a social animal who has been willing to remain the lone fox in the field if necessary, but nevertheless happy now that others have also come to share similar thoughts on a new and, I believe, important dimension of socio-political ideology which has finally been nationally christened.  We shall see where all this goes in the scheme of ‘right-leaning’ politics – maybe it can accrete around it a new political party to give the Republicans a run, but only if there will arise a new left-leaning party to give the Democrats equal apprehension.  That will really turn our elections into something exciting wherein voters have a greater choice.

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  • Rich Ulery on Our Unfunded Liabilities

    [This 9jun15 email from my friend Rich Ulery is reprinted here with permission.  Mr Ulery is active in local affairs, is the former chairman of the Nevada County Republican Party, and now serves on its Executive Board.  He also chairs the Citizens Oversight Committee of NCCFD. This report is germane to reignite discussion of the county’s unfunded pension liabilities, long an issue of interest at SESF and RR.  When compared ot the state’s unfunded liabilities, our amounts are small.  However, when we compare what we will owe to our ability to pay, our unfunded liabilities are overwhelming.  gjr]

    Rich Ulery

    As you know, while I keep up with the local blogs, I have intentionally refrained from commenting. I did notice your 8 June 10:30 AM comment (see below) in the latest sandbox about George Boardman's article on unfunded pensions.

    I attended the 2June15 Board of Supervisors meeting during which Martin Polt presented the 2015-16 preliminary county budget totaling $201 million. County pension plans are now funded to the tune of 66% in the miscellaneous category and 72% in the safety category — below the total CalPERS funding ratio, currently estimated at 77%. The most shocking tidbit offered was the current Nevada County unfunded liability, which is now estimated at $190 million — over double what I had previously believed. I addressed the board about this situation and referenced a recent article in "Calpensions" which spoke of the ratio of active workers to current retiree annuitants. In California, the ratio has dropped from 2:1 in 2002 to 1.45:1 in 2012 and expected to drop to to well under 1:1 over the next couple of decades — putting even more pressure on the unfunded situation. Nevada County, by the way, is already under the 1:1 ratio, currently having more retiree annuitants than active employees.

    The article also mentioned that the few remaining corporate defined benefit programs are generally using a 4% discount rate while, as we know, CalPERS is still at 7.5%. Supervisor Anderson asked me if I was recommending that the county consider using a 4% rate in its efforts to set aside reserves to address the unfunded liabilities. I responded that if that were the case, the liabilities would explode to around $350 million. The county would be unable to make a dent without significantly impacting its ability to deliver services. Addressing underlying benefits was the only prudent way. The meeting to approve the final 2015-16 budget is scheduled for next Tuesday.

    This morning I attended the BOS meeting that included 5 resolutions to approve new MOUs. In last week's budget meeting, the board approved setting aside an additional $500K in reserves for the pension liabilities and $603K in reserves for "potential bargaining increases". I again addressed the board outlining my frustrations with the process, stating that the resolutions were merely formalities since the MOUs had already been negotiated and agreed to in closed session without any input or analysis from the public or the press. I reiterated my request for the board to adopt a COIN ordinance, which would add a greater degree of transparency to the labor negotiating process. I presented a COIN ordinance at the 28April15 BOS meeting. Unfortunately, no member of the BOS has expressed any inclination to pursue such an ordinance for Nevada County. The COIN ordinance adopted last summer by Orange County is attached. (Download Orange County COIN Ordinance) The entire subject of public pensions and what we do with unfunded liabilities might be a good blog thread to begin. The BOS needs to feel some pressure.

    *****

    ‘Sandbox – 7jun15’ comment posted by: George Rebane | 08 June 2015 at 10:30 AM

    Kudos to our George Boardman for his 8jun15 Union column. He again raises the fiscal cancer of unfunded pension liabilities that our county and city governments have (a problem long heralded and outlined in these pages); this is an issue that cannot be brought up too often these days. We recall that these cancerous pensions were installed by past supervisors and council members who knew absolutely nothing about how their handiwork would eventually metastasize. At the time those dummies just wanted peace and tranquility with their public employees so that the voters’ feathers would not be ruffled by inconvenient public employee strikes of slowdowns. In the final analysis it was, or course, we sheeple who elected the dummies and then paid no attention to what they were doing.

    Mr Boardman’s recounting of his rejection by Nevada County Peeps brings a smile to my face. Here is a website that purports to be knowledgeable about Nevada County and local issues, and then has no idea of who prominent columnist George Boardman is because the man doesn’t maintain a Facebook page with a sufficiently informative profile. Boardman’s retort to his rejection revived Groucho Marx’s famous reply about his club memberships. My own takeaway is that it looks like Peeps may not be the all-knowing site on things local that it claims to be, and therefore Mr Boardman’s rejection will really make no never-mind to folks who pay attention to local happenings.

    Anyway, the Boardman column is paywalled here –
    http://www.theunion.com/opinion/16704168-113/george-boardman-pension-burden-threatens-to-crowd-out

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  • Reflections on Directions

    George Rebane

    We are told that the Internet is forever.  The global system today is already so vast and complex that no one can map it, and no one knows what comprises all of its processors (aka bit shifters) and data storage repositories (aka bit buckets).  So we can think of entries like these as being squirreled away in some bucket(s) somewhere, perhaps purposely archived, but most certainly forgotten.  And then in some distant future a sentient sapience may come upon it accidentally or in the process of researching the happenings and attitudes of ancient times.  In that spirit, I send them greetings from this last great century of Man.

    Today the world is tightly interconnected.  By this I mean that for those who pay attention, a significant event in one part of the world can be quickly known by everyone in the world.  And this goes also for most of the not so significant happenings.  What we have called western civilization is in retreat – its cultures, values, mores, and beliefs rapidly and compliantly transforming as more aggressive civilizations, once great then declined, are reasserting themselves.  In the ‘west’ wholesale dumbth (q.v.) is the new modus vivendi.

    America’s Great Experiment is on the verge of massive failure.  Everywhere we look, ‘Can Man govern himself?’ is answered in the negative.  We are beyond the tipping point in the sense that the normal correctives of governance that restored stability in the past are now inoperative, and if the legacy of the Founders’ ideas are to be restored, it will be through a yet to be determined catharsis.  And the more likely result of such a catharsis will not be a restoration but a fundamental transformation, already an adopted objective of many who still call themselves Americans.

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  • Sandbox – 7jun15

    [Whew!  The 4jun15 sandbox got a bit rowdy.  All good thoughts from there can be continued hereunder. gjr]

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  • Sandbox – 4jun15

    [As most RR readers have seen, the sandbox 'all topics welcome' forums (fora?) in these pages have been more than well received – their comment streams quickly fill with multiple topic threads discussed among multiple participants.  Recently these sandboxes have begun 'filling' more rapidly – e.g. the 1jun15 sandbox garnered over 200 comments in three days.  This has given rise to a growing concern of mine about the readability of very long comment streams containing several live threads.  Fortunately, most commenters have started using name/time tag referents to point readers to which of the preceding comments their current comment addresses.  (However, some still believe that their particular thread is being so closely followed by everyone that no such provenance pointers are needed – hubris?)

    So I wonder if perhaps readability would be enhanced were RR to implement categorical sandboxes – national policy, local issues, foreign policy, climate change, science, education, … ??  While that approach MAY focus discussions and make them more readable, it would also detract from the apparently pleasant melee or potpourri of thoughts that readers now experience as they revisit the comment stream to have their interest piqued by some new comment/er.  Easiest would be not to 'fix' what seems to work, and to just open new sandboxes whenever the comment streams grow beyond a hundred or so.  Anyway, I invite a discussion and your thoughts on the matter.  gjr]

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  • America’s Sinister Security Circus

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 3 June 2015.]

    For weeks now we have been hearing about the need to renew the Patriot Act that has authorized the federal government to collect data on literally every phone call made in the United States.  No probable cause was needed.  Who you are, who and when you called, and how long you talked were all being recorded and stored by the National Security Agency.  This made more than a few Americans nervous about Big Brother listening in to their private conversations.  And since the government habitually lies, few believed that the actual voice content of the conversations was not also surreptitiously recorded.

    Then yesterday the Associated Press announced the results of an investigation (here) they have been conducting over the last year to find out what are all those antenna and camera laden small aircraft doing circling over our cities and towns.  Well, it turns out that the FBI operates its own secret air force of hundreds of light planes whose ownership is shielded under innocent looking private company names.  It’s as if they don’t want you to find out that they also are recording your phone conversations and taking very high definition pictures of people from a mile up; whoda thought of that?

    But the FBI is not alone.  It turns out that the Drug Enforcement Agency and the US Marshalls Service have and operate their own fleets of aircraft with similarly obscured ownership.  It’s a wonder that with so many hundreds of peeping toms up there, that they don’t bump into each other as they’re trying to get a better look.  Now if you think that’s bad enough, then you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Here come the drones, small remotely operated quad-rotors and fixed wing aircraft that can be bought and flown on the cheap, each carrying appropriate sensors to see and hear what we are doing.  We have become the most watched and worried over citizens of any country in the world.

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  • Sandbox – 1jun15

    [New month, new sandbox.  The 30may15 sandbox seems to have turned into a kitty litter box with all the congealed poop balls flying back and forth.  Perhaps the participants there will want to retain that venue for continuing those enthusiastic labors and use this new one for more edifying discourse.  I for one am interested in what readers think about the Patriot Act's renewal and the trade-offs between our liberties and security.  gjr]

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  • Medicaid – The Growing Morass

    [This article was published in the June 2015 issue of The Nugget of the Nevada County Republican Women Federated, and is reprinted here with permission.  Its author is the Legislative Chair and 2nd VP of that organization.]

    Jo Ann Rebane

    Medicaid today has been described as a costly medical insurance financing scheme jointly funded by federal and state government general funds that delivers poor quality care to “qualifying” low income people.

    A little background:  In 1965 a Democratic Congress created the Medicare parts A and B and Medicaid programs in response to President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”.  Unlike Medicare, Medicaid does not have any independent revenue source or trust fund, enjoying open ended access to the federal government’s general fund with no defined limits.  Over the years Medicaid eligibility standards have loosened and enrollment numbers have increased.  And philosophically Medicaid has been viewed by some as a first step in government supplied universal healthcare that establishes a “right” to healthcare.

    Medicaid is a means-tested program which in 2013 paid for medical and long-term care for some 72 million low income individuals, children, disabled, and elderly – one fifth of the US population.  All states have elected to participate in Medicaid, have established and administer their own programs, agree to pay for services provided to enrollees and thereby have a legal right to federal matching payments for those medical services with no upper limit.  Federal reimbursement rates to the states are a percentage tied to state per capita income.  California enjoys a 50% reimbursement rate and in 2011 received more than 12% of all federal Medicaid spending.  With enactment of Obamacare, states are encouraged to expand Medicaid to all US citizens and legal residents with income up to 138% of the poverty line, with the federal government covering all expansion costs only through 2016. 

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  • Ruminations – 30may15 (updated 2jun15)

    George Rebane

    Lowell Robinson RIP.  A sad email from a friend this morning reported the passing last night of Lowell Robinson, one of the giants of our community.  Lowell was the founder of what today we know as Robinson Enterprises, a multi-faceted business that has served Nevada County for decades.  He also put his money where his mouth was as a prominent supporter of uncounted philanthropies, local educational programs, and political causes.  We will miss his good humor, wisdom, and generosity.

    IQ scores have been rising for decades.  So we learn from the work of James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago in New Zealand.  Since IQ is a relative or a ‘normed measure’ of intelligence represented by the bell curve in which 100 is set so as to indicate the average or mean IQ, and every ten point difference from 100 is one standard deviation, your 80 or 120 IQ respectively says that about 2.5% of the population scores lower than you, or the same percentage scores higher.  But Dr Flynn reports that IQ tests have had to be made tougher over the course of the last century in order to keep the mean at 100.

    IQ scores shot up in the 1920s after WW1, then plateaued, and then shot up again after WW2.  Scores plateaued again in the 1970s (coincident with when Great Society education started kicking in).  After picking up for a quarter century, the recent rise has again slowed down.  One of the several theories to account for this ‘Flynn Effect’ is that childhoods have become longer as countries became richer during the last hundred years or so.

    Several people are beginning to notice Jonathan Rauch’s (Political Realism, 2015) development of what he has labeled “transactional politics”.  The left-leaning political commentator sounds almost like a conservative when he defends ‘political machines’ as the grease that keeps the wheels of government turning, and not grinding to a halt as seems to be the current propensity of Washington.  He observes that “American government may be less corrupt.  But it also has more difficulty getting anything done.”  One of his nostrums includes reinstatement of ‘earmarks’ as the currency which allowed (motivated?) politicians to wheel and deal and then compromise in getting major legislation through Congress.  I’ll have more to say about Rauch’s thoughts in a future post on our government’s sclerotic corruption, a dysfunction that is now beyond the tipping point as also analyzed by Charles Murray (By the People, 2015).

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