Apple's Cook

Tim Cook testified before Congress today to explain Apple's aggressive use of the 'opportunities' created by inconsistencies between different countries' tax codes to avoid paying US federal taxes. Much as Mitt Romney did before the election, he claimed that it would be irresponsible for Apple not to exploit them. But he also maintained that Apple "liked simple" which these arrangement were patently not, and that it hadn't contravened either the letter of the law (quite probably true) nor the spirit of the law (a patently absurd claim, since this implies that Congress intended for tax law to afford corporations the opportunity to pay less federal income tax). 

Of course, it is conceivable that the lobbyists and the proposers of tax legislation did indeed intend for the tax code to leave more money in corporate coffers while appearing, for the purposes of public relations, to do the opposite. 

Class struggle

The Economist described Margret Thatcher as "a clever girl and a hard worker", both qualities that are unspoken anathemas of the idle aristocracy. Toffs have historically use the world "clever" to condescend to the upwardly-mobile; like the grammar-school girl who was admitted to Oxford but who was never allowed into the club (the Oxford Union).  In aristocratic circles displays of intelligence are frowned upon as vulgar (as it hard work).

That the Economist described her in those terms in 2013 in tells us more about the Economist that it does about Margaret Thatcher.  So much for the abolition of class in Britain. Deeply held values, when no longer accepted by society at large, don't disappear; they simply go underground (rather like racism in the US).

Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Margaret Thatcher's passing from a stroke, and after a long battle with dementia, was not completely unexpected, but it does provide an opportunity for someone who lived in Britain in 1980s to reflect on the "Thatcher Years". In contrast to many American ex-presidents, she, like most ex-Prime Ministers, had been largely out of the spotlight since her ouster in 1990. Interestingly, like Al Stewart's 'old admirals', she had been hoping to be called back into service (or at least for some advice) in both the Iraq wars. A quarter century has now passed since her premiership, sufficient for a historical perspective. Commentators have of course been asking about her legacy. Some have called her the most influential Western leader of the 20th century. And there is a Churchillian grandeur, a larger than life quality that stemming from the strength of her convictions. Anticipating the Tea Party by more than 20 years, she remarked: "I am not a consensus politician. I am a conviction politician”. Pre-emtion Her close friendship with Rupert Murdoch (of Fox News fame) says something about her views of those on the left. And chillingly one of her first actions on arriving at Number 10, was to triple (you you did read that correctly - a factor of 3) police salaries. This was just before she'd stockpiled enough coal to take on Arthur Scargill without risking a backlash in public opinion when the power went off (as it had done under Edward Heath and Jim Callahan a few years before). What I found deeply disturbing was the notion that she knew just how ugly things were going to get; as dictators the world over know, when you provoke civil unrest, you need to have law enforcement firmly on your side. Legacy "They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society." she said in an interview in Women's Own in 1987. A fan of the Austrian school of economics, she was the not just the first post-war embodiment of ideas we associate today with the Tea Party, but arguably she set a new tone, a shift in values, pithily summed up by Gordon Gekko in his one line condensation of Adam Smith's the Wealth of Nations: "greed is good". An unintended but not unwelcome consequence of her rise to power has been a diminution of the class divide in Britain. And although largely hated by feminists who were generally left of center, she has removed the perception that women aren't suited to positions of leadership. On balance, while she did improve the state of Britain's economy, one has to wonder at what cost to Britain in terms of its social cohesion and to the current world view regarding the role of government in regulating business. Influential, she was. But that alone isn't enough; one has to ask what was gained and what was sacrificed.

The Chinese Internet

For two decades we have talked about "the Internet" as if it were a thing, and it's properties necessarily those of its American manifestation. Yet China show that this is a fallacy. The Internet is simply the implementation of a set of packet transport protocols, and while those network protocols may well have been developed with network redundancy and resilience as one of the designer's top priorities, tat doesn't mean that those same technologies can't be used in other configurations in networks constructed by engineers following a different set of design parameters. So we shouldn't be surprised that the Chinese Internet is less about information democracy and more about monitoring and control.    

Differences

The house in which I grew up was built in 1961, the year I was born. It's where I lived until I went to Imperial at 19 (when I moved from Linstead Hall to Hamlet Gardens and then back to Linstead). Most of my childhood memories, not surprisingly, are from here (or 153 Offington Drive or 64b Laydydell Road).

When my parents moved to Storrington in 1986, they sold the house our local GP, Dr George Dingamans. He was a fine GP with a very comforting bed-side manner. When his wife Marjorie, passed away, their children sold the house to a developer (as Marjorie had done with their old house in Goring Road). The house was torn down and replaced with a block of low rise flats (apartments).

"Kedros", the Greek word for cedar (and as it turned out, coffin), as the house was called, doesn't exist but for a few photographs. Had my father (or rather his second wife) not thrown away all the family pictures I might have a few more images, but 10 or so fairly grainy 35mm negatives are all that survive.

When my father was about my age, our family want back to Freistadt where he was born; he found, somewhat to his amazement and delight, that the house in which he had grown up was still there. It seems strange that more remains of his childhood than mine.

In Amenas

 
In Amenas has been in the news this week as an Islamist group calling itself "the Battalion of Blood" took a number of people hostage.

I was reminded of simpler times; 30+ years ago, I was on an expedition to collect data on heat exchange in the Sahara. We'd been advised by the Royal Geographical Society, among others, to take kerosene stoves for cooking since that was the only suitable fuel you could get in Algeria.

Unfortunately, the advice was a few years out of date, and Algeria had since rolled out a fairly extensive bottled gas distribution system: and no one sold kerosene. So there we were with two pricey kerosene stoves and no fuel to run them.

In Amenas was the last town before the 1,000km stretch of completely uninhabited desert before Tamanrasset, a stage of our journey that would take four days. Every vehicle setting off on that leg had to register with the local police station so that they new how many bodies to look for when you didn't arrive in Tamanrasset.

Without fuel for the stoves we didn't think we should embark on a road that was about as deserted and remote as it gets.   


As we were debating what we should do, Andy pointed out that kerosene was what propeller driven aircraft used for fuel, and that there was an airport at In Amenas. We got into one of the Land-Rovers and drove out to the airport. It was a desolate place; no VIP lounge, no customs hall, no gates, just a porta-cabin with a couple of policemen, and another which was evidently the 'control tower' / radar / radio room. The police were polite and directed us to the control tower. The controller was polite too but wasn't able to help us (at that point we hadn't offered any inducements).

As we were talking a voice on the radio asked for clearance to land; it was distinctly British. That, we reasoned, was an opportunity. We left the control tower and waited for the plane to taxi to a stop. As the crew emerged we approached them; the pilot was French and not overly sympathetic to our predicament. But the co-pilot was indeed a Brit; "let's have a jerry can", he said.  He clambered up on to the undercarriage, reached into the wing, opened a fuel drain valve and proceeded to fill at least two 20 liter jerry cans with kerosene.

And that was all we needed to avoid having to turn round and go home. Whoever you are, Mr Co-pilot, thank you from seven grateful (ex-)students.

(It's a pity I don't have any photos of the event).  

Three ply OS

A new Windows XP machine running in VirtualBox which is running on Ubuntu 10.04 which is running in VMWare player on Linux Mint 14.    

Long ago, by contrast...

Back in the days when PCs booted from floppy disks (which in those days were really 'floppy', or at least bendable), you simply hit the big red switch and walked away. No waiting for the operating system to shutdown; that was for "serious" OS' like VM, VSE, MVS...  

Not so long ago...

I have just installed Apache, Postgres and PHP on a new virtual machine. Not set up Postgres yet, but the rest is running; 5 minutes was all it took.

I was reminded of the time not so long ago when both PHP and Postgres had to be compiled from source - and that took a lot more than 5 minutes! Progress can be good, and thanks to the hard work of a lot of people dedicated to open source, I now have access to tools that I could hardly have imagined only a decade ago. I should probably spend more time reflecting on these kinds of things.        

Minty

This morning I installed Mint 14. Early days, but it comes with Oracle's JRE 1.7 which is the only JRE that seems to work with the Juniper firewall the university uses. SO that saved quite a bit of messing around.  MATE is clean and so much better than Unity. Pretty much everything up and running including updates, the LVM disks and fstab mounts, my VMs and Open Office and some menu customization in under two hours.   

Postscript:  However, there are some significant irritants. First, the text editor, gedit, is simply renamed pluma; it doesn't look or do anything different: Why? Alacarte, the menu editor that worked reasonably well in Ubuntu, seems to be broken. Getting my menus looking like they were in Ubuntu took twice as long as installing the system. The shine has worn off in less than a day.

Power and influence

Things have changed. Once, our elected representatives spent most of their time divided between four activities: drafting legislation and caucusing with colleagues on their side of the aisle; negotiating legislative changes with counterparts on the other side of the aisle, both in and out of committee; campaigning for re-election, and fund-raising.  Fund-raising which once took only 5% of their time now consumes over 35% (some estimates suggest the figure is nearer 50%)¹. Every spare moment must be devoted to arm-twisting, rubber chicken lunches and celebrity parties at which the wealthy can be relieved to their money. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I don't see an invitation to one of these glitzy events anywhere in my future since I don't have the price of entry.    

Since campaigning can't be avoided, the effect has been to dramatically reduce the two remaining activities, negotiating and legislating. As a result, compromise has become very difficult to achieve since the two sides spend almost no time exploring possible win-win solutions, and the drafting of legislation is outsourced to lobbyists. Importantly, it also means that the flow of information from the electorate (through campaigning activities) and the other party (through negotiating activities) into the legislative process has declined, while that from lobby groups and donors has increased.

It should come as no surprise that this system generates policies that favor those with a lot of money to spend on lobbying and funding congressional (and state) election campaigns. Increasingly, we have, as some wag once remarked, the best government money can buy.
¹ Figures are approximate and based on anecdotal and/or apocryphal data.       

Markets and climate change

Hurricane Sandy, 
NASA satellite image Oct 28 2012

Whether they admit it or not (and none do), insurance companies are factoring climate change into their predictive models and in turn into the design and pricing of their products. Even though they may profess to being agnostic as to the underlying cause, by extrapolating the increasing frequency of events like hurricane Sandy, the effect on their products is the same whether they attribute the change in weather patterns to global warming or not. This should be good news for the green movement, since the rising cost of insurance, particularity in areas increasingly at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent 'extreme weather events', will indirectly create political pressure for a change in policy towards carbon emission.

However, such optimism may be misplaced. Rather than raise rates generally, or for those most at risk from extreme weather events, insurers are simply excluding these climate change related risks from their policies. Take flood insurance; as the insurance market moves out of insuring those at risk of flooding, the government (at the behest of those at risk it should be noted) is forced to step in. The result is two fold. First, risk is miss-priced since correctly pricing the risk would be political unacceptable. Consequently, it leads to redistribution of wealth (Rush and co. please take note) from those living outside at risk areas to those living in them. I'm subsidizing those who choose to live in low lying areas. The provision of government flood insurance creates moral hazard by encouraging risky behaviour (living on the coast) at a cost below the cost of the associated risk.

Second, in addressing symptom and not the cause, government is now cast as delinquent and unresponsive to the people if it tries to withdraw this subsidy. To those who suggest that markets are the solution to all ills, this clearly illustrates that they are not; market failure, the unwillingness of free market actors to provide products that people want, creates the need for governments to act. The tragedy here is that government's response is incorrectly targeted and ill-conceived.

The consequences are first that nothing is being done to stem the rising tide (literally), and second that pressure will mount on government to do things that are counter productive (wealth transfer and moral hazard), while reducing the pressure to address the real problem.

Bumbed

Robert Reich posted this story on Facebook today:

"Leaving New York City yesterday bound for California on one of the last flights out of JFK before the airport closed, a flight attendant told me I was lucky to already have my ticket because the airlines had just jacked up ticket prices to $4,000 in light of the impending storm.

As a result, the flight I was on was oversold by 47 extra passengers. So the flight attendants offered money to passengers who volunteered to switch their tickets to the next flight out of NYC, whenever that might be. The first offer of $200 wasn't enough to get 47 volunteers; only a bid of $400 did the trick.

If the 47 extra passengers had each paid $4,000 to get onto the plane at the last minute, and the 47 who gave up their seats for them received only $400 in return the trade would have been "rational" in narrow market terms. The seats were "worth" $4,000 to those who bought them, and receiving $400 was "worth" it to those who gave them up.

But the transaction was also deeply exploitative. The airline netted a huge profit because of the impending storm.

I couldn't help think this was a miniature version of the America we'll have if Mitt Romney is elected president."


I'm curious as to the supposed rationale for the sudden price hike (or exploitative price gauging?). I wonder if there is one, other than that there are now people prepared to pay that much?

Is it right to charge someone dying of thirst all their worldly goods for a glass of water? (Of course, that's what we do in for-profit health care). But right and wrong have no place in a shareholder value-based model.

An open letter to telvision journalists

The media has an increasingly important role in our democracy; and it's falling down on the job.

For whatever the reason, and there are many, politicians, the people from whom we choose those will represent us in government, have learned that they will almost never be held to account for what they say and do. This is where the our media has failed us, having been hijacked by a quest ratings and a fascination with political celebrity.

Here are some symptoms: not determinedly and relentlessly confronting politicians to explain changes in their position for fear that these often mendacious, self serving individuals won't grace that anchor with their vaulted company in the future; using politicians as if they were experts to comment on other politician's statements and positions - they are seldom expert and never unbiased; filling the time with often irrelevant or unsubstantiated drivel, such as in-depth analysis of body language and 'default expressions'.

One reason for the decline in journalistic standards is the rise in power of the anchor - who need not be a good journalist, a function of the increasing shift from the written to the visual transmission of news and analysis. Another is structural; particularly influential politicians know they have considerable bargaining power, they are few (or one) while news outlets wanting to be first with a story, are many. That means politicians can set the terms of the engagement. 

Why would any serious-minded network entertain for a second the notion of devoting any air time to cover Donald Trump, an unprincipled, self-serving, self-promoting individual who in most countries would be ignored as a rather shameful carnival sideshow? Margret Thatcher knew that it wasn't necessary to give air time, 'the oxygen of publicity' to anyone with an axe to grind; and she not so quietly suggested so to the media. But our media shouldn't need any prompting. Covering the IRA is journalistically defensible; covering Mr. Trump and other relentless 'birthers' and nonsense peddlers is not.   

Time to market matters; too quick and quality suffers. That's why Jon Stewart does a better job as a journalist, albeit one with a comic take, than CNN. He and his team don't react in the moment with vacuous and generally fact free commentary; he takes a day to do his research.  And the results is a much more informed and insightful assessment of current affairs. 

What if?

I was reminded today that both presidential candidates agreed in their last debate that Al Quaeda's top leadership had been effectively wiped out, all bar one killed (I assume) in drone strikes; the exception being Osama Bin Laden who met his end in a less impersonal fashion. Which led me to wonder about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Both were embarked upon in order to eliminate Al Quaeda. But if the candidates are to be believed (and why wouldn't one), the same end could have been achieved much more cheaply, and more importantly, with no loss of American lives and with far fewer civilian casualties (or "collateral damage"), using drone strikes.

Not only would the national debt not be the problem it is today, but we might now have far more support in the Arab Spring by not having fuelled a groundswell of anti-American sentiment that has helped propel the Muslim Brotherhood to increasing prominence. We might have spent a small fraction of the $1.283 trillion the Congressional Research Service reports the wars to have cost on things like airport security, intelligence gathering, (not to mention other things, such as  Medicare and Medicaid, PEL grants, basic research, and infrastructure).  And before the macro-economists out there point out that military spending is an economic stimulus, ask yourself if the middle class is better off than it was before the wars were started 10 years ago.

And, again, 4,803 men and women from the US¹ and its coalition partners who died in Iraq², and 3,189 men and women from the US³ and its coalition partners who died in Afghanistan⁴ would all still be alive today. Not to mention the huge number (49,768) of our service men and women who were wounded in action.

Idle speculation, certainly, as we can't turn back the clock, but perhaps something for all the arm chair hawks, bravely rattling their sabres, to think about before  'volunteering' their fellow citizens into harms way? 

¹ of which 4,422 were American; source DOD
² Source CNN
³ of which 2,135 were American; source DOD
⁴ Source CNN

Freedom of choice

Some might suggest that being threatened by your employer to vote a certain way is not an infringement of civil liberty. You are, after all, free to vote as you wish, just as you are free seek employment elsewhere, more specifically in a firm whose chief executive shares your political views. (Try asking that question in your interview).

Anyway, it's a secret ballot and, theoretically at least, you can't be fired for refusing to tell your employer how you voted even if he were to draw the conclusion that you must not have voted as 'instructed' since if you had you'd have freely fessed up.

Of course, you could always lie. After all, integrity and scruples are clearly not in high demand in a company in which you are blackmailed on the way to the ballot box, while your employer cashes your vote at his bank.   

Some might also suggest that these employers are simply exercising their first amendment rights to free speech.

That said, I find this deeply troubling.

Maybe Fox News will do one of its customary week-long indignant exposés on it?

You have to hand it to Gov. Romney

... and President Obama has done just that.

What to make of the debates? All in all, a  serious strategic misjudgement by the Obama campaign team, and one that hands the election to Romney.

For the first debate, Obama was ill-prepared. He hadn't any response to Romeny's shift to a moderate centrist position, something that was entirely predictable given Romney's earlier shift to the right needed to get the nomination, and his previous moderate position required to get himself elected governor. Obama's lack of preparation showed in his inability to carefully but politely point out the shifts in Romney's position. That, something the media has failed to do, has been Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's lonely crusade.  

In the second Obama did better, challenging Romney on some of his inconsistencies.  But the in the third, Obama was again caught completely off guard. Given that the electorate broadly,  and undecided voters in particular, are likely to be those who don't take an on-going interest in politics, much less foreign relations, Romeny's objectives were not going to be to 'win', score points, and differentiate himself from the President, but rather to close the gap. Romeny needed only appear knowledgeable, and without having to articulate it, let the underlying logic of his position simply be that already developed by the President. Again, the Obama team underestimated Mitt Romney. 

All in all, Romney's team completely out manoeuvred the Obama team in the debates; and that might well make him an effective president. One might not like what he does (if we actually knew what that will be), but this episode suggests that what ever he decides to do when he gets into office, he will be more effective in getting Congress to do his bidding that Obama has been.

The next four years and a Romney presidency will be 'interesting'. Clearly, Romney is an ambitious pragmatist rather than a man of principle and conviction when it comes to politics. One can only hope that when finally confronted with the realities of the responsibilities of office, he will 'do the right thing' (if we only knew that he knows what that is).  

Click here, contribute $5...

"Click here, contribute $5, and fight for Ohio, Florida, a Democratic Senate and four more years. This is the only way we win".

This was in an email from Crystal King, Political Director at the DSCC, one of the many I get on a daily basis.

I hope this isn't true; my assumption had always been that winning an election was a function of a strong argument and a compelling case.

Ms King's assertion means either:

1. The party platform is irrelevant,
2. The candidate doesn't matter,
3. The outcome is solely a function of cash raised.    

If she's right, election outcomes are essentially for sale and we can give up and go home how. 

The Consumer Market for Health Care

Republicans are believe that market forces can bring down the cost of heath care. Their argument, if their litany of self serving sentiment and half baked ideas can be characterized as an argument, is that markets are efficient which must be good since efficiency means less waste.

Here are three problems for Republicans to consider when they stop pontificating and start thinking.

First, there may be no waste, but that's not the same as perfect competition. Buyer power is low so profits move to the more concentrated sellers.  Consumer surplus declines;  producer surplus increases. Individuals and companies (which are both numerous) buy from a few large insurance companies.

While waste is problematic, I'd rather have inefficiencies than a lean and mean delivery system, high prices and one in which private equity pockets all the created value.

Second, profit motives distort decision making at the point of delivery; despite the rhetoric about the primacy of quality care, data demonstrate clearly that profitable procedures are often used when less profitable ones may be more effective.     

Third, choosing between providers requires information - and there isn't any.  How many people died under your GP's care last year? How many surgical procedures when wrong at the hospital you use? Currently there's no way of knowing.

Forth, just because money changes hands doesn't make something a market. A protection racket involves an exchange money, but you are unlikely to get away with telling the local crime boss that you would like to look around in the market for another supplier for protection services. Perhaps the local Triad gang does a better job for less money and you'd like to check out their protection terms... 

When you've just had your teeth pulled and the dental practice sales manager (seriously - that's her title) offers you a "great deal" on dentures and a finance plan, you not really in a great position to say, "I'll get back to you". Extend the market logic, as Republicans suggest,  to health care more generally. Do you really want to have to deal with used car sales tactics when you are wondering if you are going die? When you're in the ER, hoe much choice do you really have?

Why the Dems will lose

The Democrats will lose the White House this November and quite possibly the Senate, leaving the Republicans with control of all three branches of government¹. Despite the fact that, perhaps because, Democrats are generally intelligent, fact driven thinkers, they seem completely unable to articulate clearly and succinctly why anyone should vote for them.

For example, three leading Dems on Candy Crowley's "State of the Nation" suggested

1. "We don't want to go back to the failed policies of the Bush era"; yet Paul Ryan is quite clear that he doesn't either. What he wants is to balance the budget by cutting government spending. That's not what Bush did, so this is an easy claim for the Republicans to dismiss.  
2. In answer to Crowley's question about youth unemployment among college graduates: "We want more people to go to college, not fewer and the Republicans will be cutting PEL grants". But this doesn't answer the question and is of little help of comfort either to unemployed recent college graduates with a mountain of debt, or high school graduates wondering whether a college degree really is a good investment. 

It's this inability to articulate a clear case and a compelling vision of the future that will sink the Democrats this cycle. The Dems are angry, but unlike the Tea Party, have been unable to channel that anger into a concise message. Occupy Wall Street is exhibit #1. The current flailing for an electoral life preserver is exhibit #2. 

It's tempting to say, they deserve what's coming to them were it not for the fact that most of us will be paying the price while our erstwhile representative go off to cushy lobbying gigs. We deserve better.

The Three Branches

If the Democrats loose big time in November (as I think they will), the White House will go to Mitt Romney. Both Houses will fall to the to the Tea Party. And with the Supreme Court leaning Republican and at least one Democratic appointee likely to retire in the next 4 years, the Supreme Court will be 6 to 3 constructionist / Republican oriented.

With what appears to be increasing use of legal challenges to legislation by the right, the composition of the Supreme Court is now perhaps the most important determinant of the country's future direction.   

Missing something

Simon Johnson argued in a talk yesterday (and presumably in his latest book) that the way to bring down heath care costs is to explain to CEOs that since their companies are paying for heath insurance, high health care costs represents a tax on their business, and reduces their companies' profits and therefore their remuneration.  They will then be motivated, Johnson argues, to lobby for reform that will change the relative bargaining power of buyers of health insurance relative to its suppliers.

My suspicion is that this won't work. There are two courses of action that CEOs are likely to take before lobbying for health care reform. The first is to stop paying for employee health insurance. We have already seen this  when companies started laying off people and then rehiring them as independent contractors.  A second, and even simpler option is to ship jobs over seas. Neither will lead to the desirable outcome of pressure being brought to bear on the provides of either medical medical insurance of services. 

The Rootstrikers Pledge

Market distortions

Neoclassical economists bemoan government intervention in the economy through  taxes, subsidies, quotas, price controls and the like. These distort the functioning of the free market.

The corollary, however, is the distortion of government and representative democracy by money, lobbying and incentives.

If business wants government to stop distorting its market then shouldn't government require that business not distort representative democracy?

Reaching out

As anyone who reads my reflections (probably no one) will have realized, I'm 1) talking to myself, and 2) becoming more liberal with age. This of course defies the old adage that in middle age a broad mind and a narrow waist change places; with me it's all getting broader.

Anyway, I digress. Over the last few years I've responded to email invitations from Democrats to support their re-election campaigns; the President and Elizabeth Warren, who I admire enormously, specifically.

However, it dawned on me today that of all the email I've ever received (and these days I'm getting four or five a day from the President, or the First Lady, or any one of numerous of his campaign staff), none, not a single solitary email has sought to sound out my opinion on the issues. Each and every one is simply an invitation to open my wallet.

So, I'm feeling increasingly disconnected and in an odd way disenfranchised.  Voting for the lesser of two evils, neither of which one has had any had in shaping, doesn't give one a sense of connection to ones elected representatives.

The country is being boiled slowly and hasn't realized the water is getting hot.  For the 99% it's a loosing battle. First, the cost benefit is not nearly as attractive as it is for the 1%. If you can invest $1M in lobbying to get legislation written as you want, you will make out like a bandit. For the rest of us, the ROI is nothing like as attractive.

And with increasingly favourable tax treatment and decreasing government oversight, the 1% can easily afford to redouble their lobbying.  The 99% can't keep up, the the median income of the two groups continues to diverge.

"For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."  Mark 13:12

Some things, it appears, never change.

Pay for performance

If Paul Ryan believes that a tax cut for the 1%, the entrepreneurial "job creators", will reduce unemployment, then he should support legislation that makes any tax cut contingent on the reduction in unemployment achieved.

At the end of each tax year if unemployment falls by say 2%, "job creators" get to keep their tax cut. Otherwise they pay full fare like the rest of us.

Surely this is exactly the kind of "pay for performance" that Republicans are so keen on?

Mornington Crescent

Mornington Crescent was a game invented by the BBC and played at the end of a radio game show. Wikipedia has a good description. Since the rules of play were never published, considerable energy in the listening public was devoted to deducing them. To no avail; the game was entirely random and had no rules. It was an improvisation designed to fill however much time remained to the end of the show. But people were for years convinced there was an underlying logic.

Listening to a fashion show my wife likes to watch, I see features of the same process. What is judged good or bad has little logic (at least to my untrained eye) and more to do with the improvisational dynamic of the moment; e.g., I'll generally ridicule it if you both like it or vice versa. The viewing public is left trying to make sense of the noise and impute meaning to randomness.

Almost anything is believable if said with sufficient conviction by those we have collectively (though not unanimously) chosen to regard as authority figures.  It's what allows political figures to say the most outrageous things and not be laughed off the stage and into oblivion. In many cases, a pity.