How do liberals think?

I've just been exchanging posts with a teacher on a web forum I participate in. This guy is very liberal but also very reasonable.

After a few posts, I realized that we were completely talking at cross-purposes. And I realized I had no idea where he was coming from. As a reformed liberal, I thought I could get inside liberals' minds to figure out where they were coming from, useful for honing one's arguments. But suddenly, I can't do that any more. Moreover, apparently they can't see inside my mind, either. This really scares me. One cannot effectively fight what one does not understand.

This reminds me of women and men who are so closely identified with their own sexes that the other is a complete mystery, and they just sort of bumble through life hoping for the best when they have to interact with the opposite sex.

When I "reformed" as a liberal, it wasn't me that changed. I used to be a Democrat, but I felt the Democrat Party left me behind as it veered ever leftward. I don't feel I've changed in any way. Now the Democrat Party seems to me to have veered SO far left that it has come all the way around to being exceedingly reactionary--let the government run everything because "the masses" are too stupid and greedy to be trusted with anything.

investing in the future

I know someone who once bragged to me that he was investing X amount of money per month in some mutual funds; he was pleased that at his young age he was already putting money away for his retirement.  In the same conversation, he confided that he had $30,000 in credit card debt.  I couldn't believe that this otherwise incredibly bright young man did not realize that his investments were pointless.  The math is simple:  Say you earn 8% (typical) or even 10% (optimistic) on your investments per year but you're paying 12% interest (optimistic on the low side) in interest on your debt.  The compounded interest on the debt is more than offsetting the compounded interest (earnings) on the investment, and that's if you're not accruing more debt in the meantime.

This is precisely what Obama is proposing only worse.  His "investments" are education, science, green energy, etc., and he thinks the increased revenue from those investments will more than offset the expense of the debt.  

But let's look at that debt.  It's not just sitting there accruing interest--it's much, much worse than that.  First, he is adding to that debt, the equivalent of my young friend continuing to make purchases with his credit cards.  Second, he is borrowing money to just to pay the interest on the debt, so not only is he adding to the debt itself but to the interest as well.  I don't blame Obama for this--he really did inherit this, although accelerating this practice sure isn't going to help.  This would be equivalent to my young friend borrowing money to make the minimum payments on his credit cards.  Finally, he is borrowing money to make the investments.  This would be the equivalent to my young friend borrowing money to invest for his retirement.  The amount he would sock away and earn on that retirement wouldn't even come close to paying off the loan.

Obama has presented no evidence that the payoffs on the investments will actually generate enough revenue to offset even the additional expediture on those investments, much less offset the additional debt to finance the additional interest and the acceleration of "normal" budgetary expenses.  In fact, there is quite a lot of data that additional expenditures in green energy and education will not significantly increase revenues in the future at all, much less by the extraordinary amounts his plan requires.

 I despair.

Mixing it up

I haven't exactly done a scientific study, but it seems to me that the country does best when the President is in one party and the Congress dominated by the other, certainly in my lifetime (Reagan, Clinton).  I've been trying to figure out why this is, and it seems to me that it's because they bring different strengths to governing (despite the fact that they are alarmingly similar in some ways).  Republicans "get" the big picture about economics and foreign affairs and put more emphasis on the macro issues.  Democrats concentrate on the small pictures of human rights and individual suffering.  The big picture without the humanizing effect of the small picture leads to imperialism of all kinds of stripes, where as the small picture without the realism of the big picture leads to inefficiency and overspending trying to fix things that will never be fixed (i.e., "The poor are always with us").

Taking responsibility

Last week, at various points, Barack Obama and Tim Geithner said they "took full responsibility" for the blow-up regarding AIG.  I've heard this a lot now, it seems, and I've come to realize that it means nothing.  I'm sure a lot of people do what I did, which is hear those words and go, "well, that's all right, then, at least they're admitting they screwed up".  But finally I realized, no, they're doing nothing of the sort.  If they are admitting they screwed up, then to put force behind their admission, they must act.  But neither has done anything.  Obama's the worst.  He comes out firing, expressing outrage about the bonuses, but then when Congress actually puts together a tax bill to eliminate bonuses and he starts hearing from the very people who are needed to bail the country out, he starts backpedaling.  Taking full responsibility would mean either helping write and then signing the bill or defending the bonuses.  But, like all politicians, he's trying to have it both ways.  So much for change.  

Saying you take full responsibility without taking positive action to reverse the implied error is meaningless.

When a hero dies

Sparky Imeson was a pilot who literally wrote the book on mountain flying for those of us who fly little airplanes.  The mountains are a special environment, both for their beauty, which is especially relished from the air, and for their dangers.  Sparky opened up a whole new world for pilots and saved a lot of lives.  I was privileged to meet him a couple of years ago when he gave a seminar for a group of my pilot friends.  He was a remarkable man, already in his 70s, who had had an illustrious career and, until just a few months before, had never had an accident.  He related his accident and did not spare himself in criticism, as he had left behind some critical survival equipment that would have made getting out of the area he crashed a whole lot easier.  We all learned a lot, and some of us changed our habits as a result.

A few days ago, he died in a crash quite close to his home.  It's always dangerous to speculate on causes until the investigation is finished, but a picture of his airplane strongly suggests he had an in-flight fire, which can be extremely dangerous.  As reliable as aircraft are today, they still can have problems, and very rarely, these problems can be unsurvivable, even for pilots as good and careful as Sparky.  This kind of things ripples throughout the pilot community, and I am very sad.

RIP, Sparky.

the world to be

Great column by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal this past week (mid-March, 2009) about a vague discontent that many Americans are feeling.  She surmised that it is that people feel that things are changing and that the country they love is going to be irretrievably lost.  So where is this coming from?

A lot (all?) could just be aging.  There are a lot of baby boomers and they are getting older.  It is natural for people to remember the "good old days" as they get older, and this seems to happen whether the "old days" were, objectively, good or bad.  Societal values are always changing, and there seems to be something about the common values when one was young that keeps tugging at us as we age.  As a baby boomer myself, I'm not sure I can separate this process within myself from my perception of what it happening.

But I also feel this discontent and concern, and I wonder a lot about where society is going.  I worry about the increasing dependence on government, the loss of self-reliance.  I was heartened by the reaction of a lot of New Yorkers after 9/11--I saw promising glimmers of the self-reliance that made this country great.  But it too rapidly disappeared under the seemingly ever-urgent need to find someone to blame, preferably ourselves.  Yes, there was someone to blame--the hijackers.  How that got twisted into it all being our fault (nevermind the idiotic conspiracy theories that it was all engineered by our own government) is beyond me.  But some of this isn't all that new in my lifetime--it didn't take long for conspiracy theorists to come out of the woodwork after JFK was shot.

I also worry about the cult of victimology.  This does seem to be new, or at least I sure don't remember anything like this when I was young.  Right now one of the big issues is homosexual marriage.  I keep seeing complaints about how homosexuals are oppressed.  Regardless of how you feel about marriages between homosexuals, the idea that they are oppressed is ridiculous on its face.  Yes, I have absolutely no doubt that they face discrimination from time to time and that there are jerks out there who cannot accept homosexuals no matter what and are loud about it.  But I know many gay people, and objectively, none of them is suffering from oppression.  One (who unfortunately passed away in an accident) was one of the most prominent men in his field--worldwide.  Hardly oppressed.  

When did being compassionate become self-indulgent?  I am very mindful of Shelby Steele's admonition that white folks need black folks to remain victims, another form of subservience, in order to feel good about helping them.  This applies to all victim groups.  We want to fancy ourselves compassionate, but without victims, we have no one to be compassionate for.  I also blame some "victim" groups for taking advantage of this.  A great example is people who are obese.  Some of them have run into jerks who are insensitive enough to joke about their weight, or who conjure up bizarre reasoning to deny them employment, or whatever.  But just because there are jerks out there does not mean that obese people are a victim class.  It's gotten beyond bizarre.

This world isn't the world I grew up in.  When I was growing up, women were systematically discriminated against, but that didn't stop a lot of women.  They bulled ahead and did what they wanted and succeeded.  They set the example against which such discrimination could not be sustained.  I know of no successful woman who got ahead by complaining.  The got ahead the old-fashioned way--by being competent and working hard.  People of all types "made it" and didn't expect society to change for them.  I think they knew inside that they could change society, and they did.  But then, and I'm sorry to be so blunt, the slackers decided they could succeed by becoming victims.  Pure self-indulgence.

National Tax Tea Party

CAVU found this link today.  They are explicitly trying to leverage the success of the tea parties that have happened recently.  Regardless of your political stripe, it's worth spending some time thinking about the growing tax liability.  Once we commit to growing it, it's extremely hard to reverse.

On a similar note, CAVU is pleased to see that some governors are trying to set aside some of the stimulus money for rainy day funds.  They have seen right through the Democrats' plan to make the states dependent.  They do not want to use one-time money to start ongoing programs.  Whether future spending for such programs will come from the federal government or from the states hardly matters.  Either way, they would require huge tax increases.  

Relief in the stock market

Well, we got a little relief in the stock market yesterday.  I suspect it will tank again today because of profit taking, but I might be wrong.  I wonder if it's because Congress is suddenly queasy about spending so much money.  Don't know if it's true that the omnibus bill (the one that will get us through the end of FY2009) is really 19% over the original bill not signed by GWB, as I heard, but if so, it's not just "last year's business" but a different bill altogether with a bunch more pork hanging off it.  I'm envisioning a Christmas tree with ham hocks for ornaments.  Better get another cup of coffee.....

When it's not CAVU

Finally got current on instruments again.  I wasn't too badly out of currency, but I did need some time with a safety pilot.  I've got to study up on VOR approaches with a GPS, because I don't know what the GPS was trying to do.  VOR approach was much better when I used the VOR instead of the GPS.  My ILS approaches and precision GPS approaches were good.  Like riding a bicycle (not really).

Giving Obama a chance

A lot of people have been complaining that Obama isn't being given a chance to solve the financial crisis. While in general I agree that intense criticism after a few weeks isn't warranted, I can't help but think of the following analogy:

When kids become teenagers, if we're good parents, we want them to start making their own decisions and choices. When they fail to make good choices, their privileges are reduced in proportion to how bad the choices were.

Obama strikes me as a teenager who, when finally given freedom, skips all the intermediate steps and launches immediately into sleeping around, drinking, and using drugs. Are you going to let your kid keep doing that, hoping she'll realize the errors of her ways, because up until then she's always been a perfect kid? Of course not. You're going to clamp down on her so far and so fast she'll think she'll never be free again. Maybe if Obama wanted to be given a chance, he should have taken things a little more slowly. I've already talked about whether this was really a crisis demanding immediate attention on a massive scale. Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial that provided some evidence that we were already starting to come out the recession even before he took office and arguing why Obama's policies are going to stifle that.

Obama's acting like a teenager whose parents have, for the first time, left him home in the house to go on a long trip.

Another thought: Although I haven't heard him use the word "mandate", it's been implicit in some of his statements. ("We won. Get over it.") From where I sit, it seems to me there were two kinds of people who voted for Obama: the true believers and the people who were mad at Bush for spending too much money and horrified when the stockmarket started to fall drastically right before the election (talk about good timing--for Obama!). Those very same people are now really mad and demonstrating in the streets. The midterm elections in 2010 should be very interesting. My guess is that, unless Obama turns out to have been a financial genius (always possible--we are in uncharted territory), the Democrats are going to lose Congress again.

The current political situation

I am now angrier at my government than I have been since the Vietnam War and more scared of my government than I've been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. (I guess this dates me!)

Why?

President Obama is pushing through some very major changes very quickly. Why this worries me is very involved, but I will try to keep this short.

(1) A democracy (used loosely to include our system of government) requires time for deliberation. The current administration is running a dromocracy, i.e., rule by speed. If you've never heard of this word, go here for a great explanation. Note particularly his notions regarding speed and power. No complex crisis--as opposed to simple crises like Hurricane Katrina--requires instantaneous reaction. The fiscal crisis that we are in is a complex crisis. Past history has shown that rapid responses to complex and rare crises often lead to the responses, in the long run, being worse than the crises themselves. Time is needed to deliberate on consequences. A full analysis is not needed nor should the deliberation go on forever--after all, we are talking about crisis. But voting on a massive spending bill without reading it is folly.

(2) There has been a lack of information on the rationale for the administration's actions. Bush made a lot of mistakes--big ones. But I always felt I knew why he was taking certain actions, even if I didn't agree with them, and much of the argument about Bush's actions centered around whether his rationale was correct (unless it was simply Bush-bashing, of course). This was also true of Clinton and, in fact, every president in my lifetime except maybe Nixon, whose disagreeable actions were often hidden and therefore not subject to discussion until found out. I have tried in vain to understand the rationale behind the push, behind some of the elements of the stimulus package (other than pork), and so on. And by rationale, I mean something deeper than arm-waving about creating millions of jobs. I mean how the actions taken will create those jobs. I want this to work, if only for the selfish reason that I've just seen my plans to retire in a few years go up in smoke.

Why has there been so little information? First, the administration has not exactly been forthcoming with details. Second, the media habit of coverage-by-soundbite does not lend itself to coverage of complex details even if they were offered. Third, I haven't noticed much effort on the part of the media, except possibly by FoxNews--at least they mention the lack of detail and some reporters have discussed efforts they've made.

What is one to conclude from this? A couple of thoughts come to mind: (a) The administration really doesn't have a clue what it is doing. The idea that Obama might be in over his head is not a new one nor has it been expressed solely by conservatives. (b) The media accept everything the administration on blind faith.

If this package really might not work (I believe it was Biden, representing Obama, who said it has only a 30% chance of working), then that is an unconscionable gamble with our nation's future. I do not believe that staying the course and letting things hammer themselves out would have been worse.

(3) Bereft of details, and not being one to accept things on blind faith, I am angry at the administration because I fear that they are leading this country to financial ruin. Yes, Bush overspent. But I just don't get why doubling or tripling the Bush deficit is a cure, nevermind a justification to spend even more. I've yet to read an article by an eonomist that explains how it can be a cure. Even economists who are avid supporters of Obama offer nothing concrete when lauding his plan. If the administration would just offer concrete responses to the criticisms of excellent (including some Nobel Prize-winning) economists, everyone would feel much better.

(4) I am scared because if things get as bad as both Obama and many economists keep saying, then everything I (and many others) have worked hard for is gone, thus rendering much of my life not only irrelevant but futile and, indeed, wrong-headed. That I should ever wish I had lived a life of dissipation and irresponsibility in order to get help from my government is, to me, the worst possible coda.

Good thing I'm an optimist at heart!

High Flight

If you aren't a pilot, and want to know the hold flying has on pilots, read the poem "High Flight" here.

If this poem doesn't make your heart soar, then you may have trouble understanding what motivates a lot of pilots, especially those who don't make a living flying (although the poem certainly sings to a lot who do!).