A few health care suggestions

There are tons of alternative ideas out there for health care but let me list a few. I am no health care expert but I believe these are some common sense solutions to some of the major problems.

Problem #1:
46 Million people do not have health insurance. A breakdown of those 46 million from the American Spectator website:

• 9.7 million of the uninsured are not citizens of the United States
• 14 million of the uninsured were eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP
• 17.6 million of the uninsured had annual incomes of more than $50,000 and 9.1 million earned more than $75,000.

When all of these factors are put together, the 2003 BlueCross BlueShield study determined that 8.2 million Americans are actually without coverage for the long haul, because they are too poor to purchase health care but earn too much to qualify for government assistance.

Solution:
Two proposals. The first is to expand Medicaid and SCHIP to cover those that are too poor to afford insurance. The second proposal is to give poor people a check to buy their own insurance. If we choose to give non-citizens health care it should be done in the same manner.

The problem is more difficult for people who can afford insurance but refuse to buy it. In one sense we could just say tough luck, you should have known better and been more responsible. Note that if these people get sick and go to the emergency room they will get treated (it's legally mandated) so their luck would not be as tough as one would think. We could mandate that they get coverage, but this makes people who don't get coverage criminals (something I disagree with). I say we allow the states to make this determination. This creates an environment for health care experimentation where we could objectively see which solution works the best.

Problem #2:
Health care costs are rising - some of that is a result of better medical care and greater affluence (i.e. you pay more because you get more and the richer you are the more discretionary income you are willing to pay for health care).

Solution :
Tort Reform. Defensive medicine causes costs to rise because physicians are afraid of being sued. They take every precaution, even ones that aren't really necessary to defend themselves from malpractice lawsuits. Additionally the payouts for malpractice are inherently random which makes malpractice insurance very costly. Texas is a good example of what tort reform can accomplish and Europe also has a much more rational system for malpractice lawsuits.

Solution:
Increase competition by allowing people to buy insurance across state lines. For some reason insurance cannot be bought across state lines. This limits competition by definition. Imagine if Wal Mart is lowering prices and wants to sell merchandise in Michigan. Michigan says no because they already have K-Mart. Of course that means that whatever competition Wal Mart would have provided to K-Mart cannot happen.

Additionally, many states mandate different minimum coverage for insurance companies. If a state government requires lots of coverage that people don't want, people have no choice. If the state says that to offer insurance requires mental health coverage then as a consumer you have to buy a policy with mental health coverage even if you don't need it. Allowing people to purchase insurance across state lines would allow states to compete by offering only the coverage that people desire. This would include letting people only purchase catastrophic coverage which would be especially desirable for young people (see problem #1).

Solution:
Take away the tax deduction that employers get for providing health care to their employees. Employees getting coverage through their employers is a historical accident due to wage and price controls during WWII. When you get health care from your employer this limits competition. You have to take the one plan your employer gives you with the exact coverage that is mandated in that coverage whether you need it or not. If you as an individual purchased health care, you could buy coverage which more closely matched your needs thereby reducing your premiums.

Individuals paying for their own health care with their own money have a greater incentive to shop around for the best deal. The new market created would foster more competition competing for everyone's health care dollar.

Also, you would not have to worry about losing your coverage when you switched jobs because the two would not be linked. Just like car insurance and every other kind of insurance. We as a nation are very satisfied with these other types of insurance.

None of these suggestions requires massive government intervention. They actually allow the private market to work better. If people cannot afford basic health care then we can give them money to buy some. There are other great ideas out there if you look (read the Wall Street Journal) and something is wrong when you hear all this talk about health care and none of the common sense ideas presented here are even mentioned.

Something sounds fishy to me

This weekends Wall Street Journal has an old interview of President Obama on health care

The President: I don't know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she's my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else's aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they're terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn't have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life—that would be pretty upsetting.

Mr. Leonhardt: And it's going to be hard for people who don't have the option of paying for it.

The President: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

Mr. Leonhardt: So how do you—how do we deal with it?

The President: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Who, given the choice, wouldn't give their grandmother surgery? Not you nor I and clearly not Mr. Obama. And since no one would voluntarily deny service to their grandmother only one conclusion can be drawn. The independent group's guidance must be determinative, otherwise, what's the point?

Everyone needs to feel the pain

I have a suggestion that would do wonders for our democracy: give everyone $10,000 at the beginning of the tax year and then tax them on that $10,000 at the end of the tax year. I'm not just a nice guy giving away money, I'm a man with a plan. I want to inflict pain on Americans. I want them to feel the sting of paying for the services they demand. I want their skin in the game.

Everyone one of us adapts to the present. It takes just a short while to become accustomed to our new surroundings and reevaluate our baseline. It's human nature. When we are given $10,000 we will naturally tend to think of it as our own. Quickly, we will forget where it came from or what attachments came with it. Like a lost puppy you found, you won't want to give it back.

Eventually, the boy who owns the puppy will come along. He will ask for Rex back and you will protest. You say, "His name is Scruffy". Alas, you will unwillingly give him back because your mother makes you and it will hurt. You formed a bond and that bond has been broken. You won't think of all the good times you had. Good times that wouldn't have occurred had Rex, er, Scruffy not been in your life. That would be rational. It would be rational to weigh the good and bad and see which way the scale tips. As all good behavioral economists know, we are not rational.

To a rational person giving the government back it's own money would be a non issue. Thankfully, that wouldn't be the case. People would be sensitive to how much they had to give back and it would make them understand the pain of their brothers. Those the politicians like to decry as the rich, also known as taxpayers.

There is one last thing necessary to make my plan complete. That money must be taxed at the highest tax rate available so that the interests of those very few are not sacrificed to those of the many. (Evil laugh goes here)

Obama's Townhall Meeting

The president's remarks at last nights town hall meeting:

But let's face it, now is the hard part -- because the history is clear -- every time we come close to passing health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got. They use their influence. They use their political allies to scare and mislead the American people. They start running ads. This is what they always do.

Mr. President, I can't speak for all the other special interests but I can speak for this one. You are misleading the American people. Your proposals don't pass the common sense test and all you use are scare tactics. For example:

We can't let them do it again. Not this time. Not now. Because for all the scare tactics out there, what is truly scary -- what is truly risky -- is if we do nothing. If we let this moment pass -- if we keep the system the way it is right now -- we will continue to see 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day. Your premiums will continue to skyrocket. They have gone up three times faster than your wages and they will keep on going up.

Our deficit will continue to grow because Medicare and Medicaid are on an unsustainable path. Medicare is slated to go into the red in about eight to 10 years. I don't know if people are aware of that. If I was a senior citizen, the thing I'd be worried about right now is Medicare starts running out of money because we haven't done anything to make sure that we're getting a good bang for our buck when it comes to health care. And insurance companies will continue to profit by discriminating against people for the simple crime of being sick. Now, that's not a future I want for my children. It's not a future that I want for the United States of America.

You are not trying to scare senior citizens? What other intention could you have with these remarks? Here's a dumb question, if the government programs of Medicare and Medicaid are going bankrupt as you say then why push for a public option? How about this, figure out how to fix Medicare and Medicaid, show the American people an example of government efficiency and then propose the public option. Or maybe you can start with the postal service.

Now, I recognize, though, you make a legitimate -- you raise a legitimate concern. People say, well, how can a private company compete against the government? And my answer is that if the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining -- meaning taxpayers aren't subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do -- then I think private insurers should be able to compete. They do it all the time.

I mean, if you think about -- if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It's the Post Office that's always having problems.

At any rate, debate the merits of your plan and stop attacking other people. Frankly, you don't sound presidential.

Right, it's a great question. First of all, I said I won't sign a bill that adds to the deficit or the national debt. Okay? So this will have to be paid for. That, by the way, is in contrast to the prescription drug bill that was passed that cost hundreds of billions of dollars, by the previous administration and previous Congress, that was not paid for at all, and that was a major contributor to our current national debt.

That's why you will forgive me if sometimes I chuckle a little bit when I hear all these folks saying, "oh, big-spending Obama" -- when I'm proposing something that will be paid for and they signed into law something that wasn't, and they had no problem with it. Same people, same folks. And they say with a straight face how we've got to be fiscally responsible.

At least Mr. Obama ended on a positive note.

But I want everybody to understand, though, the status quo is not working for you. (Applause.) The status quo is not working for you. And if we can set up a system, which I believe we can, that gives you options, just like members of Congress has options; that gives a little bit of help to people who currently are working hard every day but they don't have health care insurance on the job; and most importantly, if we can make sure that you, all of you who have insurance, which is probably 80 or 90 percent of you, that you are not going to be dropped because of a preexisting condition, or because you lose your job, or because you change your job -- that you're actually going to get what you paid for, that you're not going to find out when you're sick that you got cheated, that you're not going to hit a lifetime cap where you thought you were paying for insurance but after a certain amount suddenly you're paying out of pocket and bankrupting yourself and your family -- if we can set up a system that gives you some security, that's worth a lot.

Everything is Rationed

In today's health care debate there is a lot of talk about rationing. If the government takes over they will "ration". The insurance companies are "rationing", deciding what kind of procedures a patient will have. I got news for you, everything is rationed. Not just health care, EVERYTHING! According to Answers.com rationing is a:

Method for limiting the purchase or usage of an item when the quantity demanded of the item exceeds the quantity available at a specific price.

The key thing to take away from this definition is that the quantity demanded exceeds the quantity available (I'll get to price later). When this condition holds there is no alternative but to invent mechanisms to determine who gets the limited supply of goods. A simple example:
100 people want apples
There are only 50 apples
If this is the situation then one thing is clear, someone won't get as many apples as he wants. For you extra nerdy folks out there, it's the reverse pigeonhole principle (100 pigeonholes, 50 pigeons, some boxes will be empty). There are only two solutions to this problem: One is to increase the number of apples so that everyone who wants one can get one; another is to reduce how many apples are desired (I vote for shooting people).

Let's focus on the demand side since that's where rationing comes into play. Rationing is a general term for the method we choose for determining who gets the 50 apples. We could use their ages, how good looking they are, if they go to church, if they don't go to church, how hungry they are, or any other criteria to determine who gets an apple. When government rations it chooses the criteria and it makes the decisions. Now here's the important point, the free market rations too. The free market causes people to self ration based on price. People who have the money and are willing to pay for an apple, get an apple, otherwise they don't.

Rationing is a result not of the government or the free market but of the real situation. There is excess demand compared to supply. The fact that a price on something exists implies that something is limited in supply. Prices are the free market's mechanism which causes people to self ration. People reduce their demand in proportion with the price. What happens when you don't allow the price to fluctuate? Self rationing is replaced by another kind of rationing. A shortage is a form of rationing known as first come, first serve. Another form of rationing is explicit rationing by the government determining who is deserving and who is not. There are many other variations on this theme.

Rationing in and of itself is neither a good thing or a bad thing. The pricing mechanism of the free market is by far the most efficient mechanism for rationing. We should work within that system, not try to destroy it.

It's a sign

Almost eight years ago The Twin Towers were knocked down...how long before they get back up? Today's NY Times editorial reports that once again the rebuilding of Ground Zero is stalling. Why? In a word: Government.

The Twin Towers were targeted because they were a symbol of America's greatness. That greatness born of the free market. The free market is nothing more than a reflection upon man. It's profits and losses are signals telling man what he should do. The free market, more than anything, drives man to do. The free market would not, could not, let prime real estate go to waste. Someone out there, looking to make a profit, would gobble up the land and rebuild it. They wouldn't do it for the public good but for themselves. In their brazen act of selfishness they are guided by that free hand which benefits us all. In a short time, the symbol of the free market would be restored. That symbol, the embodiment of the machine that created it.

The government on the other hand is not motivated by profits and losses. With the scar of the nation still fresh, one thing is clear: government, is not motivated. Nothing happens while bureaucrats argue over the symbol they want to project and who will project it. They don't pay a price for waiting. No missed opportunity, no greed to motivate them. One day maybe, the anger of a nation will motivate them. That day is not today. This is the effectiveness of government. Eight years and we still have a hole.

Capitalism and Equality

Their are only two way to see things: The way you want them to be and the way they are. No matter how much we want it to be different, people operate in their own self interest. Morals and Rights are a result of pragmatism. Equality is a pragmatic concept.

If we go back into history we see far more gender inequality than we do today. Why? Because in the past physical prowess equaled economic prowess. The economies of the past were either hunter gatherer or agrarian based. Both of these rewarded brawn more than brain power. Because men are typically bigger and stronger than women (it's genetics, don't shoot the messenger) they were more valuable in economic terms than women. This leads to a society which treats women as inferior. As societies move away from economies based on brute strength to those based on knowledge, the inherent economic advantage men have deteriorates. This leads to societies that treat women as equals. It is not because people are better in any absolute moral sense, but from pragmatic self interest.

If you want to promote the cause of equality, it is not enough to decry inequality. You must accept the causes of inequality and change the structures that support it. To look at prejudiced man as simply an immoral being is too simplistic. That immoral man cannot be both the cause and the solution. That man is an actor playing his part in an environment. He will not change unless the environment changes. We need to change the environment to promote his good and mitigate his evil.

Paul Krugman is nuts

When a guy that smart says things so stupid, there's only one explanation: insanity. In his latest piece he flips the script and claims that government is preventing the private market from destroying health care. From the horse's mouth:

They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance. And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

Here's an obvious question, which came first, a screwed up system or government involvement? I don't know, but when has government done anything well? To Mr. Krugman everything the government does is de facto good and everything the private sector does is bad. The madness continues:

Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient’s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend.

Deny as many claims as possible? Is their any truth to this argument, no. Just his ludicrous assertion. If insurance companies are denying everybody and their mother then why do people get any insurance in the first place? If I know I am not going to get covered in my time of need then why would I or anyone else purchase it? You wouldn't. The fact that people purchase it means they must get paid out. It is simply disingenuous to claim that insurers make their money by stiffing their customers. It is apparent that this is the view he takes for all profit making enterprises. Not that they exchange value for value, but one party robs the other party.

Horror stories are legion? Yet another fatuous claim with no evidence to support it. He discredits this later with:

Still, most Americans do have health insurance, and are reasonably satisfied with it. How is that possible, when insurance markets work so badly? The answer is government intervention.

How can those same Americans who have such bad experiences be satisfied?

Avoid covering people who are likely to need care? Well, duh! Here's some reality, people who are likely to need care shouldn't get insurance. Insurance is used to mitigate rare catastrophic events. Not likely events. If we want to subsidize the care of people who already have conditions, then do it! Don't blame insurance companies for this. Either Mr. Krugman fundamentally doesn't understand the concept of insurance or he is pushing his agenda (I vote for the latter). He can read up on insurance here. Wait, I am receiving some news folks, apparently he does understand the concept of insurance.

The key thing you need to know about health care is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don’t know when or whether you’ll need treatment — but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor’s visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.

You don't know when you'll need treatment? Then why lambaste insurance companies for refusing to insure people who do know that they'll need treatment?

Here's another gem by Mr. Krugman:

Still, most Americans under 65 do have some form of private insurance. The vast majority, however, don’t buy it directly: they get it through their employers. There’s a big tax advantage to doing it that way, since employer contributions to health care aren’t considered taxable income. But to get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can’t discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees.

He says this (I assume with a straight face, his mind is obviously in knots) as if employer paid health insurance was by design. Uh, no. It was created as a work around to wage controls imposed by...government! The employer system we have today is one of the reasons our system is such a mess and he has the audacity to claim this as a good thing. I forgot, government inadvertently did it, so it must have been divine intervention.

Restrict benefits to highly paid employees. Stop the train folks. How many Nobel's does it take not to be an idiot? Apparently more than one. Regardless of who gets health care from the employer, there is only one person who pays for it? If you guessed the employee go to the head of the class. Any benefit the company gives you is less money they would have given you. There is absolutely no reason for a company to discriminate any employee because the company doesn't pay for the coverage in the first place. You do. This whole argument by Mr. Krugman is a result of his psychologically entrenched class warfare argument that has no basis in reality.

Here's the last bit of insanity (before my head explodes):

Right-wing opponents of reform would have you believe that President Obama is a wild-eyed socialist, attacking the free market. But unregulated markets don’t work for health care — never have, never will.
...
Now Mr. Obama basically proposes using additional regulation and subsidies to make decent insurance available to all of us. That’s not radical; it’s as American as, well, Medicare.

Why don't free markets work in health care? Because people want services that they don't have to pay for. That doesn't work in free markets. It doesn't work in socialist utopias. It doesn't even work in the Communist Republic of Obama. There is no free lunch!

Oh, by the way. A program that has been around for 40 years isn't exactly American like apple pie and baseball.

Executive Pay

How much is too much? I don't know, what I do know is that if I own a company I would pay the executives far less than they get paid. Why? Because they don't take the same risk as I do. Why doesn't this happen today? It's because shareholder's are passive investors and the manager's are able to skim off the top.

This is a classic case of dispersed costs, concentrated benefits. The manager's salary is huge, but as a fraction of earnings per share it is insignificant. When you have millions of shareholders they don't notice a fraction of a penny here and there. The manager notices all those pennies and therefore attempts to pad his compensation. Nothing wrong with the manager, doing exactly what any other sane person would do. This is not good for the company.

The solution is more concentrated ownership in companies. These people would feel all those pennies being siphoned away and would put a stop to it. Is there a cost? Yes, reduced capital formation. I think this is a beneficial trade off.

Managers Suck

With rapt attention, I listened to Edmund Andrews explain his wonderment at the mortgage crisis. Andrews, author of the book "Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown", was explaining the situation of companies who really should have known better than to give him, and others like him, a loan. In addition to devastating the borrowers, the companies went bankrupt. This got me thinking, is there something wrong with the market?

Yes and no. I think the free market is the best mechanism to create and allocate wealth. It has it's problems, but those problems stem from an even larger problem, people. Many have said it before and many will say it again, but people are not angels. Treating them as such is a recipe for disaster.

We have created a structure in this country call a publicly traded corporation. This entity is managed by people like you and me. Not saints nor sinners. They have their own concerns and they respond to incentives just like everyone else. So what happened in the mortgage crisis? Here is one possible explanation.

Executives like their big salaries and this means they don't like risk. They are typically judged by how well they do relative to their peers, other executives. Let's say there is a bubble forming and you as a really smart executive see it, what do you do? You can get out of the business, right? This sounds perfectly rational, but it's not. Even though you know it's a bubble, you don't know when it will burst. Let's say you get out of the business and the business continues to...bubble. At this point you are doing worse compared to your peers and you are probably going to be out of a job soon. The logical thing to do is to match what your peers do even if you know it is the wrong thing to do.

Look at it this way, when the bubble is forming the executive is in a no win situation (not really no win for him because he is compensated quite generously) with regards to his options. He can, to his own detriment, do the "right" thing for the long term success of the company. Who in their right mind would do that? Not you and your downward glare. It's human nature and only saints would be that self sacrificial. This explains why saints are so special and fiduciary responsibility such a joke.

The only solution to the problem is to change the structure and that means putting shareholders more in charge of the companies they supposedly own and knocking managers down a peg or two. Only in a backwards entity known as a public corporation are managers little gods and shareholders putty in their hands.

Prices ARE arbitrary

In "Predictably Irrational" the author talks about how a price can be anchored to an arbitrary number. He sets up experiments where he suggests a random number (your social security number for instance) and then has you assign a price to some object. The astonishing effect (you are meant to be astonished) is that the price people assign is influenced by the random number. Proof positive that people are irrational and prices arbitrary.

He is right, prices are arbitrary, but they are not irrational. Prices are the expression of our individual preferences and those preferences are arbitrary. At it's root all economic activity consists of bartering, i.e. trading. I have something you want and you have something I want. We then negotiate a certain "price", a quantity of one for the other, and trade. There is nothing absolute in this interaction, no set "price". The value I place on the items I am trading is completely arbitrary. Someone else may have totally different preferences and negotiate a completely different "price". In fact, in that simple example both parties value the traded items differently. There is nothing irrational about it.

We go to the store and look at prices and think that those prices reflect some underlying value. Not true. Value is in the eye of the beholder. There is no such thing as an absolute value of anything. Just individual preferences expressed in the form of actions. Not all prices reflect our individual preferences. I won't go and buy a Mercedes for the price charged. Does it mean it is overpriced? Yes and no. It is overpriced to me because I won't pay that much, but someone else will.

Individuals differ in their preferences. Prices reflect aggregated preferences. This means that not all prices will reflect the value that people place on those objects. Some will be high, some will be low. None will be irrational in any meaningful sense.

Another thing to consider is that our preferences are not entirely consistent. Can I say with surety how much an apple is worth to me? What would I give for an apple today, tomorrow, next week? Maybe my circumstances change, maybe I become sick, is the apple worth the same in those situations? We don't know ourselves and our preferences as well as we think. Next time you go to purchase a new flat screen television just try and figure out exactly how many apples it is worth to you?

That didn't take long

Yin and Yang, good and evil, the New York Times and sanity. In a rare moment the NY Times displays a clear voice of reason. They are dismayed at bi-partisan congressional attempts to stop the closing of auto dealerships for the formerly big two.

The White House is warning that the measure threatens the automakers’ hope for turnaround and endangers repayment of the government bailout loans. The legislation is also establishing a terrible precedent. What will the House try to micro-manage next? A Capitol prod to revive whitewall tires? Or inscribe patriotic slogans on front grilles?

I applaud their dismay but question their sanity. How many years, er...months did it take for this to happen? Anyone with an ounce of common sense saw this a mile away. For some reason the NY Times and their ilk continue to believe that "their" people are incorruptible despite insurmountable evidence to the contrary. Insanity, is the NY Times astonishment of this exercise in political expediency.

Wisdom of the crowds

In Today's Wall Street Journal the new President of Honduras lays out the details of recent events. The fact that the former President, Mr. Zelaya, is a scum bag is pretty clear. What should alarm everyone is that this guy was elected into office (so was Hitler but I digress). There was no chicanery, no deceit, only unfaithful promises made by all seasoned politicians. When the rationale for government control is the ineptitude of the governed, why should that ineptitude be trusted to elect the governers?

Why should it be easy?

While I rail against the apathy of investors, the NY Times wants to reward the apathy of voters. So in their latest editorial they moan and groan about the lackluster voter registration in this Country.

The registration rates ranged from 100 percent in Argentina and 97 percent in Belize to 68 percent in the United States. That 68 percent reflects poorly on American democracy. To live up to the ideal of the founders of a nation governed with the consent of the governed, the United States should aspire to get as close to full registration of eligible voters as possible.

Consent of the governed, how about active participation of the governed! I am a lazy guy and last I remember, registering to vote was remarkably simple. I didn't travel ten miles, in the snow, uphill both ways, and without a jacket to do it.

Apparently sacrifice is fine for the war on terror, the environment, and health care but ask a person to go to the secretary state and register, for shame. Worship to blind democracy is not a virtue. An active participatory democracy is what this country needs. Participation requires effort. It requires that people inform themselves on the issues. It requires that people have a stake in the outcome. In sum, it requires sacrifice. This country asks very little of Her citizens. Unfortunately, the NY Times is asking for even less.

Raise the minimum wage higher!

According to the NY Times, the minimum wage isn't high enough. I say they aren't bold enough. Let's increase the minimum wage to $50 per hour. Presto chango, poverty has been ended, what a country!