Giving Thanks

Being a Contrarian is essentially reactive. I see something that strikes me as generally accepted, yet plainly stupid and chronicle it here. I could mis-read myself as plaintive or whiny, but that is only what I’ve chosen for this forum.

It is the season of Thanksgiving. I more or less lounge around the house in new clothes patriotically purchased at the Mall on Black Friday. I recall the well-known un-intellectual Dennis Prager writing that the difference between red and blue states is that people in red states are grateful while people in blue states are entitled. I am in a blue state but grateful nonetheless in this Thanksgiving season, particularly grateful for the little group we call our family.

We are all healthy. The Trophy Wife, eternally young, the Boys, and the Daughter, all for now without major complaint.

We have what we need. Beyond that we have pretty much whatever we want. The business provides. Sometimes more and sometimes less, but so far always enough.

The Children are off the payroll. #1 Son will have some choice of jobs with his soon-to-be MBA. The Daughter and #2 Son have terrific jobs in their chosen careers. I am not so self-centered as to be concerned about their social lives or any lack of offspring. Not much I can do about that.

We are all engaged in the world. We have our various activities, meeting people, going places, introducing one person to another, trying to make a contribution, reading.

We are happy, as far as I can tell. Perhaps that is the perception of the singularly unperceptive or the simply insensitive, but it works for me.

I am less grateful for other things. Call waiting, for example. For another day.

Health Care

Well, wade right in.

It is November 2009. The Democrats have enough votes in Congress to pass something they will call “health care reform” and they are now pondering and pandering bills from both houses. The Republicans are howling at the moon, and the real discussion is between Democratic constituencies.

The current bill is 1900 pages long. It appears to be founded on a series of popular concepts which will achieve political success by avoiding choices and thereby maximizing the cost, which only works because Congress proposes not to pay the cost but to borrow it.

The first concept is that health care is synonymous with health insurance. Congress proposes to provide or require first dollar health insurance for all Americans, but that is not “insurance” at all, but a prepaid health plan. Since it is first-dollar coverage with no deductible there is no incentive for any individual other than to maximize the use.

The next concept is that everyone’s coverage and choices will remain the same. The government proposes to cover 30 million presently uninsured without expanding the delivery system or bringing about any systemic reform.

A third concept is that Congress is proposing hundreds of millions of dollars of unspecified savings in future years. End of life care which consumes perhaps 25% of Medicare will not be affected, nor will tort reform be imposed. The “Times” writes that industry and consumer lobbyists outnumber legislators in Washington by something like 5 to 1 and that Congress had actually taken out all cost savings from the bills.
Fourth, it is fundamental to Congress that all the benefits will be paid for by “the other”. Every benefit is without cost to the consumer, and while some income tax imposition on the wealthy will pay for a small percentage of the cost, and the rest will be simply added to the deficit.

We will greatly celebrate “health insurance for all”. It is probably not a bad thing, but I cannot help but wish that it could be coupled with some reform which is an actual improvement or at least that we agreed to pay for it.

Zuleica Got Busted

Zuleica has cleaned our house every other Thursday for seven years, but after a routine speeding stop without a driver’s license she has quickly gone back to Brazil. That’s about all we know, except that she is hoping to come back “when the papers go through”, and we think she has gone with her one year old but without her husband.

I feel badly for Zuleica and for the baby. She has family in Brazil, but she must have stayed here because she wanted to, and her child is a US citizen whose opportunities will be greater here. What I do not know is whether I think Zuleica’s apparently forced return is “wrong” in any way that makes sense to me. At the personal level I am reminded of Alicia Silverstone’s dissertation in “Clueless” that when uninvited guests come to the dinner party we ought to be able to make room at the table.

And we are hardly innocent. We and our half dozen friends for whom Zuleica worked never asked about her citizenship status. As if it were someone else’s problem, but in fact we were deeply complicit. Also – I am supposed to know these things, but I have somehow avoided knowing how much I can pay Zuleica each year without withholding taxes, as I have avoided knowing how much I actually pay her. I did not want to fill out the paperwork and I did not want to ask Zuleica for her social security number. No heroes here.

The ladies had a nice shower for Zuleica’s baby. I hope “the papers” go through, but in the meantime Zuleica has arranged for Daniella to clean the houses. My head is in the sand, but I remain torn between sympathy for Zuleica and understanding that The Guardians of the Borders do what they do.

The German Foils

I need something new to read.

I have read four books this summer - Hope and Courage by Sid Schachnow, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Barrows and Annie Shaffer and City of Thieves by David Benioff. None of the books are about the Germans but in each book in a different way they appear, do what Germans do, and the story goes on.

Hope and Courage is an autobiography of Sid Schachnow, a retired Jewish major general in the U.S. Army who lived from age 7 to age 12 in a German concentration camp in Lithuania where much of his family was killed. His is a personal story of survival and accomplishment as a refugee in the United States. In People of the Book the story of a Haggadah in Sarajevo unravels backwards through time starting with the heroine running from and then captured by the Germans in Yugoslavia. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society tells a postwar story in the context of the lives of the islanders the Channel island occupied by the Germans from the fall of France until 1945. City of Thieves is an updated “quest” novel in which the narrator plays Sancho Paza to a mystical Russian soldier surviving during the siege of Leningrad.

All four books were placed in the context of German occupation, but all four struck me as not necessarily being about the Germans. Rather they are all in one way or another about the victims, less about the acts and facts of atrocity than about the reactions of people to the atrocities and what acts of decency can be found.

I have a sense that the Germans, while real enough are now becoming a backdrop of evil, the foils of perfect malice against which the books speak. The Germans are fact-based Borg or Lex Luthor providing a vernacular of horror variously in Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Guernsey and Russia under which the characters of the books have to live their lives, grow up, raise families and try to stay alive. The telling of biography and fiction against the gold standard of real life horror.

I need something new to read.

The End of Tax and Spend

We appear to be at the end of a rhetorical era. For 30 years or more, at least since the Reagan years we have had rhetoric against “tax and spend” government. The traditional accusation has been that liberals would impose a vast spending agenda on the backs of the taxpayers. To some extent the rhetoric has framed budget issues and affected the political dynamic, with both parties for a long time keeping spending somewhat aligned with some baseline of revenue. During the economic growth period of the Clinton years government spending could grow while taxes did not rise, and the federal deficit was greatly reduced. During the Bush years tax cuts caused the deficits to grow, but appearances were that the deficits were related to defense.

No more. President Obama has changed the paradigm, broken the Gordian Knot. There is no more “tax and spend” because we have done away with the “tax” part. The President has successfully preached that the economic situation is a crisis of a scope only surpassed by the Great Depression. With that rhetoric as background the President and the Congress have de-coupled government spending from any obligation to pay for it. The news has reported a $15 million contract to renovate a Montana border post which boasts an average of 2 cars per day. The Congress has spent $1 Trillion in benefits and corporate subsidies in 2009 and is working on another $1 Trillion in health care. If there is a limit I don't see it.

The key, however, is the still-new concept of budgeting by spending only as opposed to budgeting by balancing spending against revenue. In 2009 we have undertaken an additional trillion or so dollars of unfunded debt, much of it being programmatic spending which will have to be spent again each year, such as federal education aid which is in no way a one-time expense. For the first time we are borrowing long term funding to pay for current operating costs, and the federal government is pledging long term credit to pay state governments’ current expenses. All while the President says that taxes will be reduced for 95% of Americans.

In retrospect the 2008 TARP program to rescue Wall Street was probably a key to a new spending paradigm. If hundreds of billions of dollars can be paid to investment bankers with bonuses in the millions each year, who can require restraint for any other cause, particularly worthy causes? And if the taxpayers are not affected because we just borrow the money then who will object?

Some old-fashioned Cassandra might believe that trillion dollar annual deficits are a Trojan Horse to our economic health. Maybe so, but maybe not. Maybe we can just spend and borrow from China to pay for it for a long time. We haven’t tried it before.

Tempus Fugit - The Boys of Spring

Time flies. I need to inform the world that this year’s Little League Phillies have won the championship for a third time under our stewardship. It would behoove me to check on my prior entry “Little League” http://contrariat.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html .

My goodness, that was 3 years ago. I would not have thought it, but there it is. I started in January 2006.

The team this year was exquisite. Two veterans who we drafted in 2007 as ten year olds led the team with grace and power. We got through the monologues about Aristotle and Molly Bloom and swept the playoff series against the much feared Giants and the upstart A’s. We had our share of Little League moments, winning a game in which we got 0 hits and another in which we got 1 hit. One day we benefitted by the famous “walk-off wild pitch”. In the finale we had 9 players make defensive plays for outs, and the A’s coach lamented that they hit the ball, and while he kept waiting for some little league disaster we kept making the plays.

No.1 son was brilliant, winning at least 2 games from his perch as third base coach, manufacturing runs with stolen bases, double steals, fake and real bunts and taking extra bases. I think that this year the coaches really played a role in an excellent team.

I have spend several days basking in the glow. The championship trophy is retrieved from the dry cleaner who sponsors the much feared Giants and with its newly engraved base “2009 Phillies” it rests at the pizza shop which sponsors us and provides free pizza after each game.

I revel in our annual team letter – “E Philibus Unum – The Few, The Proud, the Phillies” and the reverberation of our team cheer which leads us onto the field each game, “For Fun, For Glory, For Pizza, GO PHILLIES”.

The trophy is at the pizza shop. All is well.

Birdathon

I have sent a check to the Audubon Society. A couple who are good friends are very much into bird watching, and this week was the annual fundraiser. This year the event is a “birdathon”.

If I’ve got this right, teams of bird watching enthusiasts are going to various bird sanctuaries around the state and trying to see as many species as they can in a day. As in a walkathon donors are requested to give by production, not in this case in dollars or cents per mile, but in dollars per species. The teams will compete for species seen and thereby for dollars raised.

My friends hope to see 180 species. In one day. Who knew that someone can first see and then recognize 180 species of birds in one day? If I thought about it I know there are a lot of birds out there, but that did surprise me.

I’m a little reluctant to take a chance on how many birds someone may see, so I decided to go for a prix fixe to support the worthy cause. I am, however, pleased to have been around long enough to see bird watching as a competitive event.