In a message board thread in response to a Worcester T & G Political cartoon, I was explaining why stimulus aid from the federal government to state and local governments was beneficial.

Unlike state governments, the federal government is allowed to do deficit spending.

This is a time shifting mechanism that allows the money to be spent when it is needed and the taxes to be collected when the economy can afford it.

The states have no legal means for such time shifting strategies. The states are also too small by themselves to do this in such away that the feedback on the global economy is beneficial.

The federal government which is all 50 states acting together can do this.

We are in this mess because the former government time shifted spending and taxes in exactly the wrong way. They refused to collect taxes when the economy could afford it (in fact the economy needed a LITTLE draining to prevent the bubbles.) This former administration also spent when the economy didn’t need it, thus competing with the private sector.

When properly done the government spending fills in for weak private spending and then retreats when private spending is strong. When done bass ackwards, the policy is a disaster. In future histories, the recent past Republican administrations will be used as prime examples of how to mess it up.

Listen to President Obama’s recent public conversation with the Republican congressional conference to learn about the two ways to run things.

It then occurred to me that a playground swing is a perfect example of when doing something at the right time is beneficial but doing the same thing at the wrong time gets you nowhere.

I thought about the actions that you take to get a swing moving. If you do those actions at the wrong time, you don’t move. I figured someone on the web has already looked into this.

Follow this link to a fascinating explanation including videos of experiments to show you why you can get a swing to swing.  I took a physics course or two in my life ( to put it mildly ) and I must admit it took looking at the videos to fully digest the early parts.  I learned a thing or two.  I don’t know if the non-physics oriented person will be able to handle the heavier explanations at the end.  Give it a try anyway.  The videos are great.

The President pledges to rein the deficit, citing three specific steps to this end. He praises the Senate for restoring the pay-as-you-go law, discusses his proposal for a freeze in discretionary spending, and calls for a bipartisan Fiscal Commission to hammer out further concrete deficit reduction proposals.

I received an email about Representatives Chellie Pingree and Jared Polis who stood up to demand the Senate pass a public option using budget reconciliation.

Follow this link to see the Pingree/Polis letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In the link to the current set of 64 supporters, I found some interesting names from the state where I now live and from the state where I lived before this one.

Rep. Michael Capuano    MA-08   Supporter
Rep. Bill Delahunt      MA-10   Supporter
Rep. Barney Frank       MA-04   Supporter
Rep. Ed Markey          MA-07   Supporter
Rep. Jim McGovern       MA-03   Supporter
Rep. John Olver         MA-01   Supporter

Rep. Earl Blumenauer    OR-03   Supporter
Rep. Peter DeFazio      OR-04   Supporter
Rep. David Wu           OR-01   Supporter

Way to go Michael Capuano, my preference for the Democrat who should have won the primary for Massachusetts Senator in the recent special election.

I note that David Wu was my representative when we lived in Oregon.

In the post Going Nuclear – Path To Passing Health Care Reform, I noted my telephone call to Richard Neal.

Rep. Richard Neal       MA-02   Unknown

I just made another phone call. In a voice mail message to Rep. Neil’s chief of staff, Anna Jablon, I noted the Massachusetts Democrats who had already signed on.  I said I would like to see Rep. Neal’s name on the list.

Here is the email I mentioned above:

Follow this link to the story How Not to Counter Terrorism by Ex-FBI Agent Coleen Rowley and Other Intelligence Veterans January 14, 2010 (Originally Posted June 18, 2007)

This is yet another story that adds fuel to my observation that fixing the failure to analyze massive amounts of data is not done by increasing the amount of data. This was part of my comment in the previous post Consider How Well We’ve Done Against Terrorism Since 2001.

Also in the article they mention that one of the reasons for the FBI having a 10 Most Wanted List, is to have a way of focusing on what they consider to be the most important cases and not try to concentrate their resources on everything.

This reminds me of a situation that I observed when working for a semiconductor company in Texas.  We had a pilot line that processed integrated circuits that were being designed by our development engineers.  There were certain projects that were very important and time sensitive.  These were put on the priority list of the pilot line so that these devices could be processed ahead of other items that were before them in the queue.  Soon pretty much everything was on the priority list.

In response to this a hot list was put in place for the truly important projects. When everything got onto the hot list, they just changed the name again.

If they had thought of a top ten list, there just would have be item 1, item 1a, etc. until everything was on the top 10 list.

This behavior is just human nature. The reactions to this were just management’s human natured response to try to get ahead of the engineers’ human nature. It is a never ending battle to try to remember that there are priorities and not everything can be an emergency.

Of course a real top 10 list enforced by really strong management would have insisted that if a new item went on the top 10 list then an item that was already on the list would have to go. This would have forced people to make a decision when it is much easier to avoid making decisions.  The department could have ground to a halt with constant meetings about juggling a real top 10 list.  Sometimes it is just easier to pretend than it is to fight human nature.

I answered RicardoH’s question about my take on the speech with the following email reply:

We watch all of these things on CSPAN. We also turn off the TV after the event is over so that we do not listen to the phone calls that they take afterwards.

I don’t need no stinkin talkin heads to tell me what I just saw or what I thought about it.

We were very much pleased by the address. Emmie really should have watched. It sounds like she could have used the pick-me-up.

We were waiting for him to say, OK, Senate, the House is doing its jobs, so get off yer arse and get moving.

As I have been doing in several places, he explained the plan – We do deficit spending until the economy recovers and then we pay back what we borrowed and then some. This is a nice counter to all the naysayers who are complaining that our children and their children will be paying for this deficit for generations. He stated the positive case for the plan on his terms rather than countering the naysayers on their terms. Is this putting the right framing to the issue? Or, as I like to say, force the opposition to debate your issues rather than debating their issues.

I wonder if Martha Coakley noticed the difference.

He should have added that this paying back what we borrowed is exactly the action we must take to prevent the next bubble. So it has this additional virtue besides just paying our debts.

It was way into the speech and I kept waiting for it, but he did finally get to the point that health care reform (or whatever words he used) is part of deficit reduction, not part of the deficit problem. Another example of getting the debate onto his turf and away from the opponent’s turf.

I am not saying that this idea of refocusing the debate is my idea that somehow Obama has picked up on. In fact, just the opposite. I identified what it is that Obama does to make his rhetoric so effective, put it into words that I can understand, and have tried to adopt this approach whenever I have enough self-awareness to control my words.

This morning when I posted this item, you could read the entire WSJ article without having to register or sign in.

Now you seem to get only a couple of paragraphs. Maybe they didn’t like my backhanded compliment about their news compared to their editorials. 🙂

The article is now listed as subscriber content. If this is really the new model for accessing the WSJ on the internet, then I won’t have to feel guilty linking to them anymore. I just won’t do it.

I have sort of boycotted such practices in the past. I am hoping that sites that take this attitude measure how many hits they get on the preview and how few follow-ups they get to the subscriber only content.

This is the usual battle over price between the seller and the buyer. I don’t know which side is going to prevail, but I am going to hold out as long as I can. I’ve pretty much done without the WSJ for close to 67 years. I can probably hold out a little longer.

Follow this link to the AP version of the news story. You get much of what the WSJ reported in this version of the story.

Follow this link to an article in the Wall Street Journal that explains the issue with the sticking gas pedal.

Beginning in October last year, Toyota became aware of sticking accelerator pedals in the U.S. and Canada. The company realized that the material used in the gas pedals was the same as in Europe, prompting last week’s U.S. recall, according to Toyota’s submission to NHTSA.

While the editorials in the WSJ are obviously biased and penned by ignoramuses, I find the news stories usually to be amazingly bias free.  This seems to be a news story and not an editorial.

Follow this link to the article in Slate about getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate.

I didn’t pay any attention to the details of how it could be done when the Republicans proposed this in 2005.  This article lays out the possible procedures and some possible dangers.

The Republicans got what they wanted out of the Democrats just be threatening to do this.  I doubt that the Republicans would cave so easily.  Of course we could go back to the old filibuster rules which required the stamina to keep talking without stop to keep the filibuster alive.  This seemed to hold the number of filibusters down to a reasonable level before the change in 1975.

In the meantime, at the suggestion of MoveOn.org, I made a call to my representative, Rep. Richard Neal, urging him to go along with the plan to get the health care reform done through reconciliation.  Before I called, his position had been to slow this health care reform process.  I told his office that the political dangers to him were the same whether he voted for the reconciliation process or not.  If he was going to suffer the danger anyway, he might as well get an accomplishment out of it.

They promised to pass the message on to Rep. Neal.