In the article Assessing midterm losses, Democrats ask whether Obama’s White House fully grasped voters’ fears By Karen Tumulty and Dan Balz Washington Post staff writers, I found a paragraph that triggers my disdain for how political reporting is done.  I sent the authors the following email:

The following quote epitomizes what is wrong with political reporting these days.

“But there will be many tough calls to make as Obama tries to decide how far he can go toward compromising with the Republicans without alienating the left in his own party.”

You think that politics is all about wining and losing elections. Did you ever stop to think that politics is about governing the country?

You could just as easily have said:

“But there will be many tough calls to make as Obama tries to decide how far he can go toward compromising with the Republicans without destroying his plan for repairing the country’s economy.”

Both statements may be true. One shows that politics is a game of winning and losing. The other shows that politics is about governing to promote the success of the country.

If cynicism has deprived you of the ability to relate to what is important, perhaps it is time to transfer to a different beat.

I cannot imagine Walter Cronkite or any of the leading news anchors of his time (except perhaps for David Brinkley) treating, on the air, the serious issues of politics and governing of this country as something to laugh at and trivialize while ignoring the importance of the impact on the future of the country and the world.

President Barack Obama has learned the lesson.  He is putting more effort into explaining what he is doing.  In The New York Times column Exporting Our Way to Stability, he explains the reason for his Asian trip.

AS the United States recovers from this recession, the biggest mistake we could make would be to rebuild our economy on the same pile of debt or the paper profits of financial speculation. We need to rebuild on a new, stronger foundation for economic growth. And part of that foundation involves doing what Americans have always done best: discovering, creating and building products that are sold all over the world.

Perhaps you read the idea of exports powering our way to the future on this very blog. In my August 2 post titled Defining Prosperity Down, I said the following addressed to my friend ScottC:

So what will power our economy in the future?  It has to be exports.  There are places in the world where this over consumption from a real estate bubble did not happen.  In fact there is under consumption in these places compared to the rising real wealth (standard of living) of the people in those countries.  You probably know from your own experience with coworkers and customers that India, China, Korea, and Viet Nam are growth areas, to name a few.

Also look at the April post Romer: Recovery to be export fueled and the January post Capitalism Is The Path To Prosperity.

The Los Angeles Times published the “news” story, A tale of two housing busts: Why is California recovering and Florida still struggling? Now here is a newspaper with a story to sell, oops tell.

On page 1 of the story, you have:

But in the last year or so, California’s housing market, though still weak, has begun recovering, while Florida’s remains on the critical list.

There are several reasons for the difference, but many experts say a key one is the approach to foreclosure.

California keeps things less complicated and largely outside the courtroom, making it easier for banks to seize and resell homes. Like 22 other states, Florida requires that repossessions be approved by judges, which some argue provides extra protection for homeowners but can delay the process for months.

Other reasons they say.  What could they possibly be?  They give you two pages to think of your own other reasons.  Then on page 3, they say:

Faster foreclosures are only one factor boosting California’s housing market. The industry has been buoyed by the state’s more diverse and dynamic economy, and the coastal cities didn’t get the kind of unrestrained development that Florida’s beachfront cities saw.

“The enormous amount of speculation that occurred in Florida certainly contributed mightily to the decline, whereas in California you never had quite the tremendous supply of condominiums, and certainly there weren’t as many along the water,” said Lewis M. Goodkin, president of Goodkin Consulting Corp., a real estate research and advisory firm in Miami.

“Prices jumped dramatically, and now people are buying for 50 cents on the dollar, and I still don’t think it’s a bargain,” he said.

Did I mention the trouble buying hurricane insurance in Florida while there has been no problem with earthquake insurance in California?  I guess I didn’t, and neither did the Los Angeles Time.

I found the article Americans Outlive English, Study Finds on webMD. The sub headline was “Despite Being Less Healthy, Americans Live Longer Than U.K. Residents”.

Older Americans are not quite as healthy as their English counterparts, but do live just as long, if not longer, according to a new study in Demographics.

In the new study, Americans aged 55 to 64 and 70 to 80 had higher rates of chronic diseases than same-aged English people, but they died at about the same rate. And Americans aged 65 and older — while still sicker than their English peers — actually lived longer than similar-aged people in England.

The article concluded with:

The researchers speculate that this may be because these same illnesses are more likely to be fatal in England than in America, or that English people may be diagnosed at later stages in their disease, which would result in a higher mortality rate.

“Both of these explanations imply that there is higher-quality medical care in the United States than in England, at least in the sense that these chronic illnesses are less likely to cause death among people living in the United States,” Smith says.

I think it was Nicholas Taleb who said it is one thing to present data, but quite another thing to think you know the explanation for the data.

I kept thinking that there must be other possible explanations.  Then it hit me.

Perhaps the English health care system focuses on preventing disease while the US system focuses on prolonging life at the end.  This very focus in the US is where a large amount of our costs for health care are spent.  So the English may be getting about the same longevity for far less cost. Moreover, is it better to be healthy as long as you can and then go quickly when your time comes, or is it better to be sickly all your life and prolong your last agonizing days as long as possible with heroic but degrading mechanical efforts to keep you “alive”?

Upon further thought, I came up with the possibility that our fee for service model makes it financially better for the health care provider to administer expensive end-of-life care procedures than it does for maintaining good health up to that end stage.

In following Nicholas Taleb’s warning, all I said was that perhaps my explanation could be an alternative.

After coming up with these thoughts, I decided to write this post. While trying to retrieve the link to the WebMD article for this posting, I stumbled across another article.

U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Behind Major Countries, Despite Highest Health Spending

The researchers say that the failure of the U.S. to make greater gains in survival rates with its greater spending on health care may be attributable to flaws in the overall health care system. Specifically, they point to the role of unregulated fee-for-service payments and our reliance on specialty care as possible drivers of high spending without commensurate gains in life expectancy.

“It was shocking to see the U.S. falling behind other countries even as costs soared ahead of them,” said lead author Peter Muennig, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health.

More than conjecturing an explanation similar to mine, this study seems to even contradict the raw findings of the story I alluded to first.

Today the Worcester T & G carried Clive McFarlane’s column, Reversing Course To Disaster.

The only significant disagreement that I have with the column is his closing paragraph:

If this reversing of course is what the Republicans plan to do for the next two years, the president can only hope that the country in two years speaks the way Massachusetts voters spoke in this midterm election — that they may be afraid of the present and concerned about the future, but they are not stupid.

My response tried to show that stupidity on the part of the electorate is not the issue. The issue is the idea that the only thing President Obama can do is to hope for a sudden awakening.  Here is what I wrote:

The President said that the Republicans have been politicking for the last two years while he has been trying to govern.

For Barack Obama, that shows an unusually bad understanding of something so basic.

What the Republicans know that Obama doesn’t seem to grasp is that part of the job of governing is to get the electorate to be enthusiastic about your governing agenda.  Not only do you have to get them there, you have to keep them there.

For two years the Republicans have been aggressively selling their point of view, while Obama quietly went about his business.  With his lack of salesmanship, the following that he established in 2008 started slipping away.

For the majority of citizens who do not follow politics closely, the only message they get is the one that is most loudly thrust upon them.  If the message is one sided, you cannot blame them for succumbing to it.

I used to blame the media for not providing the balance.  All they seem to do is report what the various sides say.  Now I realize that the Republicans have figured out how to play in that environment while the Democrats have not.  So the blame really does have to fall on the Democrats for not knowing how the political world works.

If you want the media to represent your side of the issues, you have to say something about your side so that the media has something to report.  If you don’t say it, the media aren’t going to dig it up and feature it all by themselves.

Oh sure, the media might run the occasional story to set the record straight.  However the opposition is out there on a daily if not hourly basis trying to tilt the record in their favor.

This reversal in fortune shows how tenuous political accomplishments can be if you don’t foster enthusiastic backing from the electorate for the programs you put in place.

The article I found on Yahoo! Finance, Financial Improprieties Abound as Stocks Rally, is dated November 04,2010. After you see the quotes below, you might understand why I have told you that the article is a current one.

It seems like survival of the fittest like forces have turned a government of, by and for the people into a government of, for and by special interest groups.

As stocks quickly tumbled to Dow 7,500, the government became desperate. Real estate related losses were piling up; investors lost confidence in the financial system and drove Washington Mutual out of business.

The problem was too big to fix, so the administration forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board to change rule 157. Obviously, the fix is only topical. If it wasn’t, why would Fannie and Freddie need an additional $215 billion in aid?

The ‘new and improved’ rule 157 allowed Banksters to value assets at what they might be worth in the future. If bank A purchased a portfolio of real estate (NYSEArca: IYR – News) for $10 million in 2006 and lost $6 million because the assets turned toxic, bank A is allowed to value the portfolio just below $10 million. The very real loss is not included in the current earnings numbers.

The real question is whether you can trust reported earnings? If Berkshire, along with most banks and financial conglomerates, has the legal right to fudge their earnings we may rightly wonder who else is employing this convenient accounting trick? Some would call them stupid if they didn’t.

To emphasize, Citigroup reducing its bad loan reserves would be like an insurance company reducing its natural disaster fund right before hurricane season.

Five days before the election.Rachel Maddow had a commentary on the prospects for compromise between Republicans and Democrats.

I did not post it then because it made me too angry to think straight.  I got angry not because she was wrong, but because she was right.  I got angry not because she had divined the hidden meaning in what Republican politicians were saying, but because she put together a montage of the obvious.  She made it even more painful by adding to the montage the words of various Democrats that showed how deep into denial they were.

I have seen a few headlines about what she is saying today, but that may be even more painful to watch.

Thinking about these items and comparing them to what Obama had to say in his press conference shows that the denial did not end election night.

The question now should be what will it take for the Democratic politicians to wake up?

I have relented and started looking at her comments tonight.

I stumbled across “Bill Moyers speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010, as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series.”

Just to give you a flavor, here is one revelation he made:

On another site –“thinkprogress.com” [thinkprogress.org – ssg] – you can find out how the multibillionaire Koch brothers – also big oil polluters and Tea Party supporters – are recruiting “captains of industry” to fund the right-wing infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. Now, hold on to your seats, because this can blow away the faint-hearted: Among the right-wing luminaries who showed up among Koch’s ‘secretive network of Republican donors’ were two Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. That’s right: 2 of the 5 votes to enable the final corporate takeover of government came from justices who were present as members of the plutocracy hatched their schemes for doing so.

I have seen a lot of the TV shows and writings of Bill Moyers over the years, but this may be the most hard hitting thing I have seen from him.

If you suffer from high-blood pressure, don’t read the rest of his speech. I don’t want to be blamed for anyone’s stroke. Instead, you might want to view the shortened version from his last TV broadcast in the clip below.

I realize now that I did not make this post at all clear as to the extent of the ground that Bill Moyers covered in his speech. The part of about Scalia, Thomas, and the Koch brothers was but a teeny part of it.

The essence of the speech was more about how the age of the Robber Barons is returning and how far this is from what the founders of this country had wanted.

In his column in The New York Times, Mugged by the Moralizers, Paul Krugman gives the usual explanation for increased government spending during a recession.

The key thing to bear in mind is that for the world as a whole, spending equals income. If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.

Yet those parts of the private sector not burdened by high levels of debt see little reason to increase spending. Corporations are flush with cash — but why expand when so much of the capacity they already have is sitting idle? Consumers who didn’t overborrow can get loans at low rates — but that incentive to spend is more than outweighed by worries about a weak job market. Nobody in the private sector is willing to fill the hole created by the debt overhang.

So what should we be doing? First, governments should be spending while the private sector won’t, so that debtors can pay down their debts without perpetuating a global slump. Second, governments should be promoting widespread debt relief: reducing obligations to levels the debtors can handle is the fastest way to eliminate that debt overhang.

He further goes on to mention the President’s failing:

John Boehner, the House minority leader, was widely mocked last year when he declared that “It’s time for government to tighten their belts” — in the face of depressed private spending, the government should spend more, not less. But since then President Obama has repeatedly used the same metaphor, promising to match private belt-tightening with public belt-tightening. Does he lack the courage to challenge popular misconceptions, or is this just intellectual laziness? Either way, if the president won’t defend the logic of his own policies, who will?

Perhaps it is time to look for better explanations if this one seems to fall on deaf ears.

Of course my explanation probably won’t fare much better.

The American Society of Civil Engineers in its 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure estimates that we need to spend $2.2 trillion dollars over the next 5 years repairing our infrastructure just to prevent it from failing.  If we know we need to spend this money at some point in the future, when would be the best time to spend it? I claim that now is the best time.  When private spending is underperforming, there is no better time for public spending.  There is little competition for the borrowing capacity.  The infrastructure use is at the lowest ebb that it is going to be (not that it is low, but relatively it is).  There is idle labor, equipment, and raw materials, so construction prices are low. There is little risk of inflation because there is so much idle capacity in the system

It is much better to do the work now than wait until the economy booms.  Borrowing will be expensive then as the private sector is competing for loans as they are borrowing to increase capacity.  Workers will be scarce and therefore expensive.  Raw materials will be costlier. Adding government spending to private spending at that time will stoke the fires of inflation.

Why would we pass up such a golden opportunity to do work that we know has to get done?

This video and accompanying text is on the Whitehouse Web site

I see that the President is still struggling to learn what I was saying in my previous post, Explain! Explain! Explain!. I hope he gets it soon. If you have to get fewer specific programs accomplished, but you have more of the people with you on the ones you do accomplish, then I think that is an excellent political trade-off. The President may actually have to try to do less, but explain more.

In my previous post Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum, I said that Schwab’s last sentence finally convinced me that he got it. I didn’t post it then, but that last sentence was:

I would say political leadership today is very much an educational job

This came in response to Charlie Rose’s lead in:

The best leadership I know has the capacity to level and have a conversation with those people it wants to lead. The ability to take complex issues so that the vast majority of people can understand what’s at stake for them and what’s the challenge for them as participants in the process

Before he got to his very last sentence, Klaus Schwab replied to Charlie Rose:

I fully agree. I think we have now a tendency where politicians have a tendency to simplify the issues instead of being straight forward.