Many years ago, I went to Washington, D.C., as a junior legislative director for a U.S. Congressman.  At that time, all or at least the vast majority of budget authorizations and appropriations bills were being passed by both House and Senate before the end of the fiscal year.  Several terms passed, and I became the staff director for another congressman, and the fiscal year was shifted several months to the present system because Congress was having trouble passing appropriations on time.  More years passed, and, after more time as a Congressional staff director, and then as a Director of Legislation at EPA, and a stint with a D.C. consulting firm,  I left Washington.  By then Congress was failing to pass quite a number of appropriations bills and relying more and more on stop-gap continuing resolutions.

We’re now to the point where, for the past three years, Congress has been unable to pass any individual appropriations bills and has lumped everything into a continuing resolution, or several sequential resolutions. And this year, Congress couldn’t even pass something like that on time and shut down a good-sized chunk of the government for half a month.  At the same time, the annual federal budget deficit has ballooned, although, as a result of a slightly improved economy and the cuts forced by the meat-ax of the “sequester,” the deficit has dropped considerably this past year.

And in another three months or so, we’ll likely go through another version of the same manufactured crisis.

Still… I have to ask, what gives?  When I left working for Congress more than thirty years ago, computers were in their infancy and most Congressional offices relied on electric typewriters and hand calculators.  So did most government agencies.  But everything got done, generally on time, if sometimes at the last moment.  Congress currently passes more legislation than it did thirty years ago, but accomplishes less of substance, and it argues over absolutely everything, or so it seems.

The Congress can’t seem to agree on much of anything, but then, from all the polls I’ve seen, and from talking to people everywhere, this lack of agreement in Congress seems to reflect a lack of agreement among those who elect members of Congress.

So is it really the fault of Congress?  Or is it ours… and it’s just much easier to blame the people we’ve elected when we insist that they follow the majority in their state or district, or we’ll remove them from office?  

Although Congress is apparently deadlocked, all members of Congress do agree on one thing.  Someone else should pay for it.  The far right wants the poor to pay… by cutting their benefits, access to insurance and various other assistance.  The left wants the richest to pay, and those in the middle want anyone else but the middle class to pay.  Those who are more affluent are tired of paying the largest share of taxes, and they want tax cuts.  Various industries want tax subsidies, and when one industry gets a lower tax bill than another, that is indeed a goody, regardless of the rationale. The same is true of tax breaks for individuals, for whatever reason.

This is likely the road to disaster, because what gets paid for will be decided by the votes bought on the extremes.  Despite paying the lowest tax rates in almost a century, the upper one percent will fight and bribe anyone they can, legally, of course, through contributions, to keep unrealistically low tax rates low, and to lower them more, if possible.

 The poorest Americans will vote where they can for programs that often provide better benefits than those enjoyed by the working poor holding down two jobs or more.  Those in the middle, if recent events are any indication, will get more and more upset at stagnant wages and higher costs of living and are likely to throw their lot in with the one percent… which will only maintain or increase the current deficit and make the increasing numbers of the poor and working poor angrier and angrier.

Corporations and businesses under pressure to post or increase profits will continue to lobby against any program or law that adds costs to their doing business and will likely press for anything to keep labor costs low, which is why they keep hiring part-timers and oppose the ACA.  The problem there is that the corporate tax rate is so riddled with loopholes that a huge percentage of large businesses don’t pay anything near the statutory rate.  In fact, the U.S. has just about the highest corporate tax rate on the books… and close to the lowest actual tax revenue, thanks to the loopholes.

Pretty much everyone in Congress seems to ask, publicly at least, “How will we pay for what we’ve done and want to do?”  But beyond that, nothing gets done on reducing long-term federal spending because each side insists that its programs are sacrosanct and its constituents are already paying too much in the way of taxes.

Right now, of course, the Republicans are blaming the President, just as two terms ago the Democrats were blaming the previous President.  What both parties publicly ignore and what the public somehow seems to forget is that the President can’t authorize or appropriate anything.  That’s up to Congress.  No one else.

Years ago, the Supreme Court declared that the President must spend what Congress orders spent… and the Administration must collect the taxes legislated by the Congress, or not collect them if Congress has legislated tax breaks.  This mess is Congress’ doing, not President Bush’s and not President Obama’s… and a good first step toward fixing it would be to recognize just that.   

The other night I was discussing the problem of gun-related deaths and violence with some friends. One declared that he saw no need for gun owners to have fifteen or fifty bullet magazine clips or high caliber long range sniper rifles. The other immediately asked, “How many domestic murders have involved sniper rifles or expensive specialty firearms?” Off-hand, none of us could think of any, although I’m certain that there must be some. Then we wondered about background checks… and something else struck me – the underlying issue behind much of what has polarized the political system.

It’s actually pretty simple… and appalling, and I’ll get to it in a bit, but first, a few observations in the way of background. Two generations ago or so, in the United States, there weren’t near as many abortions as there are now, for several reasons. First, abortion was essentially illegal, as well as morally condemned, and unwed motherhood disgraced both the mother and her family [not the father or his family, for some reason]. But there were a great number of “shotgun” weddings and “premature” births involving recently married couples. Likewise, despite the outbursts and spectacular recent killings, the murder rate is at fifty year low, but accidental deaths from guns tends to track the number of firearms in circulation. For all that, the rate of deaths from firearms in the U.S. is almost twenty times that of the average of other industrialized nations, and the reason is very simple. Most of them simply don’t allow the number and range of personal firearms that the U.S. does. With over 300 million firearms in private hands in the U.S., banning or eliminating them is a practical impossibility. So what else can be done to reduce gun deaths? Stricter background checks? The Newtown shooting wouldn’t have been stopped by that, nor by the checks most are proposing. Nor, most likely, would the Aurora theatre shooting . Far stricter standards would be necessary, standards at which most Americans would balk.

Now… add the issue of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. What has the far right up in arms is what they see as a denial of freedom, the fact that the goal of the ACA is to require everyone to have insurance. Without such insurance more than 30 million people will not have equal access to health care, and quite a number of them will die, or die earlier, from such lack of access [and the rest of us will pay for expensive partial care for those who don’t, but that’s another issue].

There’s a pattern here, and, as I said above, it’s pretty simple… and brutal. The freedom to have guns, to have abortions, and to refuse to require to insist everyone have health insurance – and for other “freedoms” as well – results in a far higher level of deaths in our society than would otherwise be the case.

To maintain the degree of freedom that we apparently insist upon means that we will incur, as a society, a great number of deaths that would not occur if we were less “free.” And the associated question that goes with that is whether those costs are willingly being paid by those who largely incur them – the poor, the uneducated, the innocent victims, often just bystanders, of shootings – or whether those costs are being foisted off on them by those who cite their need for “freedom,” because, like it or not, the freedom to bear arms or have an abortion, or not to have health insurance imposes costs, often in lives lost, on others. So does the “freedom” to hire part-time workers instead of full-timers.

In short, the price of these kinds of freedom is paid in blood, often the blood of innocents, and more often than the price is not paid by those who lobby and tout such freedoms, but by those who don’t have the advantages of those who insist on the need for those freedoms, yet I don’t see this argument being raised, except in the case of abortion. Why not in other matters? Aren’t the lives of those already born as valuable as those of the unborn? Either way, it’s a double standard that continues to go unrecognized.

The current political stalemate between a U.S. House of Representatives dominated and, in effect, terrorized by the far right and the U.S. Senate and the President is a clear indication, at least to me, that the ultra-conservative elements in U.S. politics have more in common with the Taliban than with Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton. The far right opposes the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and has decided that, since it has been unable to prevail through the normal legislative process, it will do whatever it takes, no matter what the cost to the country and the world economy, to destroy the ACA.

In taking this stance, the far right has abandoned any pretense at principles in the pursuit of what they conveniently call principle, but which is a stand on a single issue, and nothing more, because the only principle behind opposing the ACA is to establish that access to healthcare is determined solely by economic status and  resources. Not only are the ultra-conservatives willing to destroy the economic well-being of both the nation and the world economic system to establish this “principle,” but they’re effectively bent on subverting the underlying basis of the Constitution [which they cite continually and erroneously] if they don’t get their way, despite the fact that they are in the minority. In effect, they’re demanding rule by the minority effectively outside the accepted and legal structure of our system. That makes compromise by the President and the Democrats impossible without establishing the fact that any law can be negated by a minority of members of Congress who are willing to risk destroying the system if they don’t get their way. 

In that sense, they’ve established that they’re not politicians, but political terrorists, because their actions place their “principle,” one that is not accepted by the majority through established process, above the common well-being, and they are willing to create great suffering to get their way. That’s not politics, but terrorism

The House Majority leader, John Boehner, claims that he doesn’t have enough Republican votes to pass a continuing resolution, at least not one that doesn’t defund or delay the Affordable Care Act, and the President suggested that Boehner bring up such a “clean” resolution and see.  Boehner, so far, has refused, saying that what the President demands is unconditional surrender, while the President has pointed out that giving in to the demands of a minority that cannot muster the votes to obtain what they want through the normal legislative process is blackmail, and he isn’t about to be blackmailed.

If the President gives in to the far right, it will establish the precedent that political terrorism overrides the will of the majority.  If he doesn’t, he risks great economic catastrophe on a world-wide basis and long-term higher costs for everything in the United States. 

This stalemate isn’t about federal spending.  It’s not even about Obamacare.  It’s about political terrorism and the entire future of the United States.   

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Jack Cade proposes killing all the lawyers, a passage that has been debated, interpreted, and re-interpreted a number of times, but which is most likely based on the English dissatisfaction in the fourteen century with the legal profession’s use of its skills to bolster the position of the gentry over the peasantry and middle class. The American legal system has not yet reached that nadir, since it appears to be equally willing to litigate on behalf of anyone, that is, so long as its healthy fees are paid.  There is, however, another profession whose excesses have gone less noticed…and whose “successes” have contributed greatly to the sad state of both the American economy and society.

I refer, of course, to the accountants, those bean-counters extraordinaire who know the cost and price of everything and the value of nothing.  Nor do they understand, unhappily, business or, for that matter, economics. I don’t think it is coincidental in the slightest that all too many of the CEOs of failing companies that in fact collapsed, including Borders Books, were accountants.  Calling in an accountant when a company is in trouble is like prescribing blood-letting for a victim in traumatic shock from loss of blood.  One of the “cost-saving” tricks ordered by Borders was to return inventory to publishers in order to gain credit to purchase new releases.  Let’s see… reduce the variety and depth of what you have to sell… and you think that’s going to do what?

On my last book tour, I signed at a bookstore where the events manager informed me that “management” had informed him that he could no longer order additional back-stock for authors who were doing signings.  This is typical of accountant-idiocy.  First, at least at my signings, a healthy percentage of book sales, sometimes as much as 50%, comes from the sale of new copies of older books – that is, where back-stock is available – largely because potential new readers prefer a less expensive paperback and won’t generally buy a new hardcover of an author they haven’t already read. Second, unsold books are returnable.  Third, they’ll likely sell anyway, if over a longer period.  Fourth, a percentage of those readers who bought paperbacks will return and buy more books.  In short, there’s very little downside and a considerable upside, but the accountant only sees an immediate cost-outlay. 

This sort of short-sightedness isn’t just something that affects bookselling.  What about the CEO of J.C.Penny who tried to rebrand the store by eliminating coupons and sales in the middle of the great recession? When Penny’s greatest appeal to its core market was just those sales and coupons? That, of course, just caused sales and revenues to plummet further and faster.  And then there are all those accountants who’ve decided that hiring two or three part-time employees to replace one full-time employee to save a few dollars is the way to go, but don’t think about whether all those part-timers will have enough money to buy the goods and services that keep the economy going. Then there was that former giant of the accounting field, Arthur Andersen, which certified the accounts of Enron… and then saw itself litigated into oblivion.

In 2006, the great and revered management consultant Peter Drucker made the point to a conference of CEOs that “No one, but no one, in your company knows less about your business than your CFO.”  Despite Drucker’s observation, the number of CEOs with an accounting or finance background is at an all-time high, and so are profits… but sales are flat, and good full-time jobs are down. 

Coincidence?  I don’t think so.

A reader recently complained about the $10.99 price on the electronic version of The One-Eyed Man being too high, but the retail hardcover price is $25.99,  and the discounted on-line hardcover price is $16.85 [as I write this].  So why do some readers consider a price of $10.99 so expensive for a just-released book?  Buying a currently published book should be about the story, not about the format.  Rare books are another question, I fully grant.  But, in fact, the amount that a reader pays for the story put forth in electronic format is about the same as what another reader pays for that story in a hardcover.  The price differential is the difference in cost of how it’s presented.  Those people who insist that ebooks should be hugely cheaper because the electronic costs of production are so much cheaper are confusing the cost of physical production with the costs of creating the story itself, including… ahem… paying the author, and getting that story to the point of physical production.

I’ve read enough self-published “stuff,” as well as enough manuscripts from writers and would-be writers, to say that all the work that’s done by publishers between the writer’s turning in what he or she thinks is a finished novel and when a final product is delivered does greatly improve the work, and at times turns something nearly unreadable into a gem.  Even those writers who could handle all those details benefit, because they take time, and they also take contacts and skill. I’ll grant that there are some writers who can produce finished work and who also have the technical skills, or can muster others with those skills, to self-publish a credible product. But such authors are very, very far and few between, and many of them have learned to do so through their experience with the publishing industry… and the time spent doing such tasks is time not spent creating the next book, and that’s another cost that’s often overlooked.

The demands for lower ebook prices don’t consider another valuable service provided by publishers. They greatly reduce the time and energy required to find a readable book.  Now… I’ve heard some writers and readers claim that there are sites on the internet that will or could do that as well. So far, I haven’t seen a single one that does.  I’ve seen many sites that comment on what the publishers do, but second-guessing what someone else has done is easy.  Plowing through thousands of self-published books and analyzing and reporting on them is anything but… and I suspect the economics of doing that will limit those who can do that, especially those who could do it well.  As for reader reviews… forget it. Most reader reviews are either by fans or by those who hate a book, and few of either are that valuable to a reader unfamiliar with an author… and how can a reader unfamiliar with a self-published author tell which is which?

There’s another side to ebooks as well.  They save on storage space for apartment dwellers or others with space issues for storing hardback or paperback books. For some people, this is a great advantage.  So why do readers who seek the latest IPhone ap complain about a format that provides advantages and is actually cheaper than the hardback format that doesn’t?  And a novel in e-format is cheaper than the latest movie, or close to it, and offers the advantage of being able to read it again… and again. And costs the same, or less, than the paperback format once the paperback is released?

Just a few thoughts…

Over the past weeks and months, I’ve encountered more and more examples of people either losing jobs or having their working hours cut so that their employer would not have to pay health care benefits as a result of the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.  And like many people, I’m beginning to get outraged – but not at the ACA. I’m outraged for another reason, one based on the interplay of economics and human nature.

Let us assume you have a business, one with employees, and that you provide a service or produce some physical goods, or perhaps both.  To be successful, any business must bring in more income than what it costs to provide the goods and services that generate that income.  Those costs include what you pay for raw materials, equipment, office supplies, heat, power, rent or mortgage payments for whatever property you need, parts, taxes, permits, fees for accountants, legal services …and wages and possibly benefits for employees.

If a business owner needs a lawyer or an accountant, the owner is going to have to pay more for someone with those skills and credentials.  If the business needs a mechanic, the same is true.  The only levels of employees whose wages are not “protected” in some way are those whose skills do not require specific training or credentials or those who are professionals in fields where there are substantial numbers of unemployed individuals, such as graduate academics. No one protests, or not too loudly [and if they do, few listen] about what it costs to hire a lawyer, a plumber, an accountant, a computer programmer.  But almost every business owner I know complains about the costs of lower-paid individuals, and they complain even more when the government raises those costs, through either the minimum wage or something like ACA/Obamacare, and all too many of those same business owners do everything they can to keep wage costs low for those individuals.  The same is absolutely true of state colleges and universities, with their reliance on low-paid clerical and security staff, and poorly paid teaching assistants and adjuncts.

What this shows, quite clearly, is that, at least in the United States, a sizable chunk of business, higher education, and at least certain parts of government are quite willing to squeeze everything they can out of those employees lowest on the totem pole, whether by hiring double the number of part-timers, or avoiding providing the benefits paid the higher-compensated full-timers, all the time protesting that paying living wages and health insurance for those lowest-paid employees will put them out of business, yet expecting someone else to provide health care, either government or other employers and workers [through higher health care premiums]. And, again, for the most part, those who complain the most are those most insulated from the lack of affordable health care, which, like it or not, translates into the availability of insurance for those low-paid workers.

Yet at the same time, we, as a society, make no distinction between those individuals who work hard and cannot afford health care and those who hardly work.  As a society, we have effectively determined that no one can be denied health care, even those individuals who are clear and total freeloaders.  Is that willful blindness… or hypocrisy… or some combination of both?

Interestingly enough, I also don’t see anyone asking questions on the other side of the issue.  Why should we have any interest in preserving businesses and institutions that can only survive by exploiting people who are working hard to that degree?  Or is it that we all want everything so cheaply that we don’t really care about those people?  And why do so many people vote for politicians who support that view?

The other day I was talking with people at a wedding.  The majority of them were Republicans, and all of them opposed the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.  What floored me wasn’t so much that they opposed the ACA, but the grounds on which they opposed it.  One man told me that anyone who couldn’t afford health insurance was covered by state Medicaid.  Another person insisted that if someone couldn’t afford health instance, she didn’t want to pay for it.  When I pointed out that all of us are already paying for the uninsured through higher medical prices to cover unpaid emergency room and hospital care, she said that they could go to InstaCare, as if local acute care clinics didn’t have the same problem as hospitals and emergency rooms.

 While my wife and I are fortunate enough to have health insurance and in a position where we cannot be denied coverage, we both have seen and continue to see the array of problems.  There’s the college student born with hydroencephalitis, who works minimum wage jobs and cannot get insurance nor meet the criteria for Medicaid.  There are the scores of self-supporting college students who have injuries or long-term health problems whose parents refuse to include them on their own health insurance, or whose parents themselves have no insurance. There are the Walmart employees whose hours are capped so that they cannot have health benefits.  There was the wife of a friend whose cancer treatments were not covered by his company’s health insurance policy and who died because the cancer spread while they tried to raise money for a deposit demanded by the hospitals in order to prove they could pay for the treatment.  Or the full-time retail employee who did have health insurance, but was hospitalized, required surgery, and even after insurance, still ended up owing, as a result of deductibles and exclusions, more than most of his yearly take-home pay. I could give a very long list, and not one of those I listed would be either a so-called welfare queen or deadbeat.  Beyond that, my list wouldn’t begin to deal with all the problems faced by the over 40 million Americans without health insurance.

 I can’t begin to solve these problems, but I am very much aware of them, and we’ve helped where we could, yet most of the people to whom I talked at that wedding refused even to acknowledge that such problems exist, almost as if they occurred in another world.  I’m seeing more and more of this, especially in recent years, and the current Congressional impasse over the federal budget reflects, I believe, the growing trend of Americans – and perhaps those in other industrialized countries – to deny what is happening outside their “world” – or their “bubble,” as the comedian Bill Maher terms it.  The problem with such denial is that compromise is impossible when people in different worlds refuse even to acknowledge the events that are happening to others because those events, and even facts, don’t fit into their own world.

 Put in another way – we don’t need space travel to find other worlds;  there are more than enough alien worlds right here on earth, even if no one wants to admit it.

As I write this, I’m winding up the last legs of a comparatively short – 11 day – book tour that’s beginning to feel a bit longer than that.  Last night, I ate dinner in a small and rather odd restaurant/bar at the edge of the campus of an enormous university.  The restaurant was located in a former flower shop that still retained the burned-out exterior neon lights proclaiming its previous inhabitant; the inside was loud and cacophonous; and the décor was third-rate thrift shop downscale.  The food was far better than all of those, despite the fact that the cook/chef had run out of both chicken, in all forms, and most beef. In fact, the dinner was good.  Not great, but good, and better than some meals I’ve had in far more upscale eateries.

What totally astounded me, however, were the young men I witnessed.  The young women looked, at least to me, pretty much like young female college students have looked for at least the past generation, perhaps a shade more casual, but clearly all had given some thought to their attire and personal appearance and apparent hygiene.  The men, however, were largely the most unwholesome, grubby, grimy crew I’ve witnessed in years.  I’ve seen third world poverty more than I care to remember, and these male college students looked more impoverished and certainly less well attired than most impoverished males I’ve seen in far more destitute locales. I wondered if it just happened to be the restaurant, but, no, there wasn’t too much difference between those males passing on the street and those inside.  These collegiate inhabitants – I hesitate to call them students – made the hippies of the 1960s, by comparison, look well-groomed and like sartorial savants. I’m not against beards or long hair on men, either.  Some men look far better that way, but wearing a rat’s nest on your head or chin doesn’t do much for anyone. Nor does three-and-half-day stubble.

I couldn’t believe it’s just the economy, although I know college students these days are struggling financially, but I also know that, for the most part, women students have to struggle harder financially than do men, yet the women dress far better and are far better groomed.  Is it a matter of priorities – that men now value their tech toys more than their appearance and hygiene?  Or is it other priorities – that video games and tech toys have replaced young women as the highest item on their priority list? I hadn’t the faintest idea, but I couldn’t understand where those male creatures came from, because the young men on the university campus in my town certainly didn’t look like that.  Nor could I fathom how young women could find such men even remotely attractive and interesting.

But here’s the interesting part. The next morning, when I went through the campus again, the vast majority of the collegiate males were just like the ones in my own university town… but that night, the scruffy ones returned.  Are they the new vampires… only out at night? Is it only at that one university?  I can’t really say, but it’s perhaps just as well that I don’t know.

American society is buying the so-called business model lock, stock, and barrel… and almost no one seems to understand the long-term costs, both to the economy and to society.

Effectively, the business model states that present-day costs and prices should determine all decisions… and that model works, at least partially, for business, but only in the short term.  Unfortunately, it works even less effectively in areas of society where costs and values can’t be accurately determined and quantified, or where the true costs and prices may not be apparent for years.  In addition, it’s being applied in areas where costs and prices don’t reflect actual societal requirements.

Underlying this application is the two-pronged belief that (1) resources and skills that are in short supply currently should command higher prices or (2) people with skills to generate more income are more valuable than those whose skills generate less income. 

As an example, because teachers don’t generate income directly, they’re low-paid compared to other professionals, and most ambitious students with great talent for teaching don’t consider it.  This results in lower standards for teachers, and that makes taxpayers even less likely to support higher pay… and the cycle continues. Yet society has a far greater need for good teachers than good hedge fund managers, but the “business model” rewards hedge fund managers, even bad ones, far, far, more than it does teachers, simply because there are more teachers out there.

Along the same lines, more and more often, pundits and politicians are demanding that college students major in “marketable” subjects, especially science, technology, engineering, and mathematical fields, because that’s “where the money is.”  There are more than a few problems with this approach, the first being that not all students have aptitudes for those fields.  The second problem is that overemphasizing these fields will lead to an oversupply of people with those skills and unemployment in such areas – and this is already happening in some engineering fields. High-paying fields don’t always stay that way, as witness computer programming. The third problem is that it encourages bright students who have greater aptitudes in other fields to study fields they may not like and will not do as well in, which is a loss for both the student and society. The fourth problem is that the social and economic conditions will change in the future so that the business “needs” of today may well not be those of tomorrow… when society will be short of expertise in other fields.  The fifth and possibly most important difficulty is the underlying assumption that what a student studies in college will be the only field in which he or she works – when the experience of the past thirty years has shown that the majority of workers change fields at least several times and that this trend is increasing.  Yet applying the business model to higher education essentially emphasizes near-term vocational skills over longer-term critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

For all the problems involved with using the “business model,” it is still applied almost everywhere, from the financial world, where it encourages rampant speculation over solid growth, to government, where federal expenditures on research are now continually cut on the grounds of no immediate benefit, to the pharmaceutical industry, where “large pharma” slashes basic research and tries to buy smaller companies with new products,  to the commercial power industry, which continues to fight cleaner ways of generating power in an effort to retain higher profit and dirtier coal-fired power stations for higher short-term profits… and well beyond.

So just why do politicians, educators, and citizens literally buy into a model that’s so flawed in its own field?  Because business assures them that it’s good, of course.

One of the “goals” of almost every business, regardless of size, is to increase revenue and profits, and those targets are almost always increases exceeding ten percent per year. Executives in those companies are under enormous pressure to meet such targets. For most business, such targets are not only unrealistic, but taken as a whole, the proliferation of such high target growth rates will actually hurt overall economic growth. This is a point that I’ve never seen addressed, and if it has, it’s certainly been buried.

First is the issue of realism. In hard economic terms, businesses as a whole can only increase growth by the amount that the economy and exports grow.  If, as has been the case with the United States, imports exceed exports, what that means is that any growth rate above the national average means that growth on the part of any business or set of businesses means that other businesses are growing less, or even declining.   

To meet these high profit, sales, and revenue targets, the majority of businesses in the United States, particularly in the manufacturing and service sectors, have resorted to cost-cutting through automation, greater use of part-time employees, and by eliminating or limiting wage and salary increases for all but senior executives. This process also effectively re-distributes income from workers to higher paid professionals and executives. Higher-paid individuals spend a lower percentage of their income on goods and services. Another factor that can increase demand and  income is population growth, but when the working-class wages stagnate, that also decreases the birth rate and the level of total immigration. In effect, that reduces the total income available for the purchase of goods and services, and that in turn reduces the ability of the economy to grow. 

In short, while emphasis on high growth of businesses at the expense of workers may increase profits for an individual business, it’s counter-productive for the economy as a whole.

What’s also overlooked in this equation is the question of who benefits from high profit targets. Obviously, no one benefits if a business loses money, but what happens if an already profitable business increases profits?  Where do those additional profits go, and why do businesses insist on and require such high profit margins?  Because, first executives don’t get hefty bonuses without meeting those targets.  Second, because high profits raise stock prices and dividends, and thus the returns to owners and investors.  But what’s not mentioned in this equation is who those executives, investors, and owners are… and they’re almost all in the top ten percent of earners.

In effect, high profit targets are set by those in the top income levels for the benefit of others in the same income levels… but the more this happens, the more the spiral tightens and the fewer and more highly paid are the beneficiaries because the vast majority of Americans, whose wages and salaries are stagnant, can afford to buy less and less, and, in the long run, that hurts everyone.

But then, since when have the majority of those very well off ever considered the long term… or even listened to the minority of the well-off who do see and fear the long-term consequences?

Just a little while ago, I posted a blog on some of the aspects of rising college tuition, and in the days following I’ve observed in forum after forum the fact that almost none of the supposedly highly intelligent individuals spouting forth on the subject seem to have the slightest grasp of the underlying basis of skyrocketing tuition, and that includes our esteemed President. I’ll try to make it simple.

Tuition doesn’t reflect the total cost of education and never has.  Yet too many people still equate “the cost of college” with tuition. It’s not, although it’s becoming more so. What has happened over the past fifty years is that, except for elite private colleges and universities, and even to some degree for them, the other sources of funding for colleges and universities, the majority of which are state or local government funded, have dropped from providing as much as 80% of the cost per student to less than 10%, on average. In some states that percentage of government support is below 5%.  That means that while students at state universities paid comparatively little of the cost of their education fifty years ago, and in some cases, virtually none, today they’re paying on average more than 90%.  That’s not the only reason tuition has increased, but it’s by far the largest factor.

The growth in the number and percentage of students attending college has skyrocketed.  Over the past fifty years the student enrollment in college degree programs has gone from 4.7 million students in 1963 to 21.5 million today. In other words we have 4 ½ times as many students in college today as in 1963. In 1963, only 8% of the population had a bachelor’s degree; today it’s 31%. This has required massive expansion in facilities and faculty, at a time when traditional funding sources could not keep pace.

Educational technology has changed more in the last fifty years than in any other period in human history. In 1963, there were no personal computers, no internet, no genetic sequencing machines, no VCRs, no spectrographs, and those are just a few samples of the enormous increase in technology and equipment that is now required compared to what was needed fifty years earlier. 

Parents and students are effectively demanding more facilities, programs, and services. In 1963, air conditioning was a luxury on campuses, except at schools in the deep south.  Now it’s a necessity, as is campus-wide internet service.  Athletic programs were far more modest fifty years ago, but now athletics are an integral and costly part of the college experience. With the advent of better technology and a higher standard of living for most students, colleges are expected to keep pace in all areas.

Federal and state requirements have added cost burdens.  It’s no secret that administrative overheads at colleges have ballooned, but what has been forgotten is that significant percentage if not the majority of this administrative bloating has occurred as the result of various state and federal laws and reporting requirements. 

Cost pressures have reduced the number of experienced professors.  To deal with rising costs and loss of state and local revenue, as well as the loss of income from endowments caused by the low interest rates created by the Federal Reserve’s policy of keeping interest costs down in order to stimulate the economy, state universities are hiring a greater percentage of part-time instructors or teaching assistants, so that full-time, tenured or tenure-track professors now only comprise 30%  of the faculty at state institutions as opposed to more than 60% fifty years ago.

For all that I’ve noted here, I’d wager that you won’t see many, if any, of these points discussed in the ongoing debate over college tuition… just complaints and blame… and more insistence that universities hold tuition down when they don’t control the vast majority of reasons for the increase.

I’m getting more than a little tired of the right-wing propaganda about how everything would be better if business did it.  While I’ll happily admit that sometimes government does get in the way, more often than not the reason it gets in the way is because lots of people get tired of powerful businesses running over people, the environment, and public health in general in pursuit of power and money. Government may indeed go too far at times, but the motivations behind those acts are spurred by the excesses of business.

As for the myth of “business creativity,” as pointed out in Mariana Mazzacuto’s book, The Entrepreneurial State, the basis for a great many vital corporations, particularly in the United States, was created by government funding on research and development. The U.S. armed forces pioneered the internet, GPS positioning, and the first voice-actuated computerized assistants, not to mention significant early funding for Silicon Valley. Scientists in publicly funded universities and laboratories developed the touchscreen and the HTML language, and the U.S. government funds almost 60% of pure basic research in the U.S.  The U.S. government even lent Apple half a million dollars before it went public.  A grant from the National Science Foundation funded the research that produced Google’s search algorithm.  U.S. pharmaceutical firms have reaped billions from the results of government-funded research. This is far from new in U.S. history.  The transcontinental railway system was built on the basis of federal land grants to railroads, and the federal government effectively prototyped and tested not only ironclad vessels with the U.S.S. Monitor, but proved the efficacy of the screw propeller over paddlewheels.

There is a reason why government funding is necessary for research, and that reason is simple.  In business terms, pure R&D is “wasteful.”  It discovers more often than not what doesn’t work, and even when a successful outcome occurs, that research may not further the corporation’s goals. In addition, too narrow a targeting of pure research is often a recipe for failure. But… as Mazzacutto’s book also points out, those countries that spend the least on government-funded education and R&D, even in the industrialized world (such as Greece and Italy), are the ones suffering the most in today’s economy, and that the United States, which has historically funded more education and R&D, has recovered far better than other countries. But that is likely to change because American company companies are largely abandoning basic research, and political pressures are reducing federal government R&D programs and grants.

In short, a whole lot of that so-called blue-sky, ivory-tower, “wasteful”, and useless government-funded research pays off big time… and that’s something that business, the far-right, and too many other Americans still don’t get… or don’t want to.    

When the West Wing was on network television, I tried to watch it and couldn’t, not for more than ten minutes at a stretch.  After a hiatus of more than a few years, I tried again, this time through Netflix… and had exactly the same inability to watch for any length of time, despite seeing sections of episode after episode.  After my initial reaction, I didn’t analyze why I felt the way I did, but the second time around, I did, because my wife pointed out that the acting was good, the dialogue crisp and often moving and  ironically cynical and humorous.  From my own time in national politics in Washington, D.C., I also knew that the majority, if not virtually all of the scenarios – the ones I saw anyway – were definitely realistic and representative.  So… why didn’t I like it?

Part of the answer, I know, was because it was too realistic in some ways, and called up too many painful memories… but there was more, and it took me a while to figure out what that happened to be.  The fact is… West Wing still isn’t realistic. Oh… the situations are difficult and realistic, and the series often captures, from what little I’ve seen, the infighting, the maneuvering, and even the absurdity of politics, but what the series doesn’t capture, not nearly enough, is the absolute pettiness and griminess of national politics behind the high-sounding rhetoric and superficial glamor. Being a political staffer – and this is something I know all too well from years in such positions – is anything but glamorous.  It is demanding, grinding, and usually thankless work that consumes every waking moment.  There are very good reasons why most political staffers are young, and why most of those who are not have strained marriages, if not multiple ones, or spouses who take on what amount to additional and very demanding support duties. 

The stress is endless and unremitting, and nothing you can do is ever enough. There is never enough time to do what needs to be done.  Your worst enemies are often theoretically your allies in your own party, not to mention the ambitious subordinates and superiors in the political infrastructure, and most egos of elected politicians or cabinet secretaries dwarf Mount Everest.  And no television show can truly capture more than a tiny fraction of that… and perhaps it’s just as well that it can’t.

Once upon a time, a consultant with whom I worked and I co-authored a book [The Green Progression] a near-future SF novel set in Washington, D.C., with a political/environmental theme and a plot that was part-mystery, part-thriller. The book got good reviews… and was one of the worst-selling books my publisher put out in the 1990s, but I’d like to think that it did a decent job of capturing some of what the West Wing, at least to my way of thinking, does not.  But that may well be one of the reasons for our book’s lack of popularity. It’s obviously no longer in print and not available as an ebook, and that may be for the best.

As the adage attributed to both Bismarck and Churchill goes, people who love law and sausage should not observe either being made.  And from what I’ve seen, most people really don’t want to know, at least not in realistic detail. And that, too, is a bit strange, when you consider the proliferation of grimy sex and graphic violence in all areas of visual media.

Barrack Obama spent a portion of August touring areas of New York and elsewhere championing, among other things, the need for colleges to keep tuition and costs down. He also set forth a policy and a proposal for rating colleges on their efforts to keep education “affordable.” Quite a few people have jumped on this bandwagon, including even a columnist or two, and one on the staff of The Economist, and more than a few of them are citing the need to keep the salaries of teachers and professors in line.  Yes, college costs are going up, but the President and others don’t seem to understand the causes… or don’t want to address the real problems.

To begin with, the term “costs” doesn’t really refer to the total cost of educating a student, but the costs incurred by the student.  In the past, a significant fraction of the total cost, and in some cases at state institutions almost all of it, was paid through funding from state legislatures or other sources, such as endowments at private institutions. Over the past thirty years, the share of state funding for higher education has dropped by half or more, while the percentage of high school graduates entering colleges has essentially doubled.  To make up the shortfall, tuition and fees have increased far faster than have the actual total costs, a fact that gets overlooked.

With some few exceptions, largely in “for profit” education and some elite non-profit colleges and universities, the bulk of increasing costs haven’t come about because salaries of teachers and professors have increased markedly. For the most part, except for a handful of “celebrity” professors and teachers at each institution, those individuals actually doing the teaching haven’t been getting significant raises in years.  Many haven’t gotten raises at all, and more and more teaching at the college level is being handled by grossly underpaid part-time adjuncts, who seldom if ever get benefits, and struggle along on wages more in line with the fast-food industry in hopes of getting the experience that will eventually land them a full-time position.

The second greatest single reason for increasing costs at state colleges and universities – and those are the institutions that the vast majority of students attend – is that non-educational costs have skyrocketed. It’s not the salaries of the teachers and professors that budget-cutters should be going after, but the numbers of executive level administrators and their compensation. This is also happening on the secondary school level, where high-paid executives are cutting out programs and canning teachers at the same time that their salaries are increasing. On the collegiate level, athletic programs expand year after year, and university after university tries to climb higher on the athletic totem pole, with higher–paid coaches, more facilities and assistants, while replacing retiring professors with inexperienced part-timers.  Universities also build lavish student centers and other such facilities to lure students because in most states legislative funding is based on enrollment increases.

 The third reason for increasing costs is that more than half of all incoming college students require remedial courses because they aren’t prepared for college level work, and this is despite a considerable dumbing-down of the collegiate academic requirements.  More remedial work requires more teachers and for students to spend longer in college.

Despite these various obvious and real causes, the President and others are focusing on rising tuition and threatening to punish institutions that increase tuition without focusing in the slightest on the underlying problems creating the need for such increases. State legislators demand that state colleges and universities admit more students, but they continue to cut state financial support, and then politicians at all levels, including the President of the United States, castigate those same state universities for increasing tuition.  This is nothing new.  It’s been going on for well over a decade… and no one in either the state or national political levels is willing to address the fundamental problem. More students, and more with learning difficulties or poor preparation, require more resources at a time when all too many of those resources are going to non-academic aspects of education and when states are cutting their support of higher education.

Same song, umpteenth verse; should get better, but it just gets worse.

While I was traveling, the freezer quit, and it quit over Labor Day weekend, spoiling a great deal of food.  Since I wasn’t there, and my wife was traveling part of that time [elsewhere], we lost a lot of food.  Upon my return, I set out to find a replacement. Surely, this could not be that difficult, even where I live, and finding a freezer was not, indeed, difficult.  Getting it delivered was the difficult part. 

The orange big-box store near us [you know to what I’m referring] had a freezer of the type and size we wanted, and the price was the lowest… but they couldn’t deliver for more than two weeks, and that wouldn’t work because I’d be on the road again, and they only deliver during hours when my wife couldn’t be home [Don’t ever talk to either of us about “cushy hours” for university professors in the performing arts!]. It also took the staff fifteen minutes to figure that out.  Another retailer could deliver in four days, and could give me the answers in less than five minutes, but the price was some fifteen percent higher.  Except… in either case, carting away the old freezer wasn’t going to  be that easy – because the local landfill/waste disposal site won’t take refrigeration equipment until it’s been certified to be drained of its coolant, and that costs more. In the end, I bought the more expensive unit because the “service” supposedly provided for “free” by the large big box outfit would have required waiting almost a month… if I could even count on that.

When I went to upgrade my antique cell phone – only very slightly – I had to wait a half hour for anyone to get to me… and that was at the second cell phone retailer.  At the first one, no one even noticed me.

This is far from the first time events such as these have occurred, and while I’m reluctantly willing to pay more for service that reduces the stress in our lives, what bothers me about all this is that I see those kinds of choices vanishing, and the ones remaining becoming more and more highly priced.  If you want to take enough clothes on a trip or vacation to provide a choice of what to wear – it’s going to cost you more one way or another.  If you want an appliance delivered in a short period of time, it’s going to cost you more.  If you need service on your cell phone, you’re going to wait.

At the same time, there are people who need jobs…and for all the increases in employment that the government statistics say are happening, an awful lot of them aren’t getting hired, and those same statistics don’t reveal the true costs of goods and services, which are rising.  The result is that we’re all seeing higher prices, less service, and fewer jobs, even as all the economists are claiming we’re moving to a service economy.  Come again?

On a recent book-related trip and then at a dinner after I returned I overheard two conversations remarkably similar in content, if from two dissimilar sets of individuals.  Both were discussing, often heatedly, concerns about the mistreatment of animals in the United States and the concerns about starving and suffering children in war zones and third-world nations across the globe. The underlying question posed by one person in each of those settings was, essentially, why are Americans so concerned about suffering animals in the United States when there are so many suffering people, especially children, in the world who could use the dollars and caring lavished on animals here in the U.S.?

It’s a seemingly straight-forward question that isn’t, similar in many ways to the statement made a few generations ago to children who wouldn’t “clean their plate” by parents who said, “Finish your dinner. There are millions of starving children in China,” or some variation on that theme. Just as I wondered how cleaning my plate would do anything for starving children, since I perceived no way that my uneaten dinner could get to China, so too, today, the problem remains that much of the care lavished on mistreated domestic animals in the U.S. cannot be transferred economically or practically to malnourished children, even in the U.S., let alone across the globe.

But beyond that rather practical observation, and beyond the protests that there must be a way, lie even more fundamental questions/issues. Why must some people assume that concern over mistreated or deserted animals precludes concern over maltreated, abused, starving children?  Does a preoccupation with alleviating human misery, to the extent of ignoring animal misery, reflect not only real concern, but also an innate assumption of human “superiority” and a minimization of the ills of living creatures less able to control their fate and destiny?  Given that we are a part of the ecological weft and web of the world, and that our survival requires the continuation and prosperity of that web that is also the food chain of the world, in the “grand scheme” of the universe are we really that special?  Who says so?  Besides us, that is?  More and more studies show that the more intelligent mammals, as well as some reptiles, have what we term feelings, such as concern for offspring, affection, grief, and even forms of altruism.

Add to that the fact that studies have indicated that individuals prone to mistreating animals have a far higher propensity to mistreat vulnerable humans, such as children, spouses, and the elderly, and given that, wouldn’t it be better to not to create such a firm dividing line between the need to help animals who clearly experience suffering and humans who do?  That might also have a social and political effect on those not-so-“human” individuals, not only throughout history, but even today, who characterize groups of humans that they dislike as “little more than animals,” because in a very real and absolutely physical sense, none of us are more than animals who can think and use tools better than the other animals.

I’m extraordinarily tired of single-factor solutions to all ranges of problems, and yet the more I look around, the more I see of such approaches to everything, from “repeal Obamacare and all our problems will be solved” to either “less government is the answer” or “more regulations on business are necessary.”  Universities and state legislatures are adopting the “business model” as the latest solution, despite the fact that the business model hasn’t worked all that well for business, let alone for education, especially in the area of “for profit” education which has the highest percentage of student loans and especially defaulted student loans.

The accounting department and the sales department of a business have different requirements and needs, yet all too many corporations attempt to impose the same management structures on both.  In education, the performing arts have different requirements from history or business, and the science departments differ from either, and yet administration after administration and state legislatures all seem to impose “one size fits all” requirements on colleges and universities. 

In political issues, especially the hot-button ones like abortion and immigration, the same “messianic” single-rule for all people and all situations is pushed by all too many interest groups and politicians, who ignore totally the fact that one size does not fit all.  An “illegal” immigrant who was brought into the U.S. by his or her parents as an infant in arms, and had no choice in the matter, who was raised as an American, who thinks as an American, who has never committed a crime, and who speaks no other tongue than English is a far different “illegal” than a thirtyish drug runner, but one-size-fits-all mentality either cannot grasp this or doesn’t care.  If they can’t grasp the difference, they don’t have the brains to be making or influencing policy, and if they don’t care, their attitude is little different from a psychopath, and I’m not particularly thrilled about either type deciding laws and policies.

I particularly get incensed when lawmakers go out of their way to find means to reach religious goals through the law-making process or through community-based extra-legal means. In Utah, that semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret where I live, lawmakers, business leaders, and the LDS church are particularly adept at this.  I understand that Mormons believe drink is the devil, but the convoluted liquor laws resulted in the wine industry citing the state as the most unfriendly to wine drinkers of all fifty states.  I don’t drink, and that’s a personal and health choice, and I wouldn’t want to be forced to do so, but just because I don’t drink doesn’t mean I, or anyone else, should have the right to restrict what beverages are on the market [and I’m not talking about food safety issues] and make bringing wines into Utah that the state liquor stores don’t sell a crime.  All these restrictions haven’t stopped people from drinking – all one has to do is look how much beer vanishes from the stores over a weekend and what the liquor store parking lots look like – but it raises costs and inconveniences everyone else. In Utah, we have no state lottery, again for religious reasons enshrined in state law, but Utahans travel to Idaho and Colorado to buy tens of millions of lottery tickets that support education in those states, and the net result is that Utahans still gamble, and everyone else gets the benefits.

Not that what I have to say will make any difference, because simple solutions are just so much easier to sell… and besides, according to so very many people, one size really does fit all, regardless of reality.

Just before the university at which my wife teaches began its fall term, every faculty member was sent a copy of a book [What The Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain].  Because I did spend four years teaching at the collegiate level, I also read the book.  At first, as I progressed through the book, I was intrigued, then vaguely displeased.  When I finished I was fuming. 

Why?  Because the examples that Bain chooses invariably are “inspiring” teachers.  Now, I have nothing against “inspiring” teachers, or at least not too much, but it’s absolutely clear that Bain regards the primary function of teachers is inspiring their students to learn.  All other aspects of education are secondary in his view, from what I can tell.  Just how far have we come from the reputed statement of Thomas Edison that declared that success was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration? The fact is that the majority of students – and people – learn from their failures, not their successes, and failures are usually not inspiring. Learning from them is work.  And work requires more effort than inspiration.

This is particularly important to consider, given that figures just released by ACT reveal that more than half of all entering college students lack either the reading, analytical, or mathematical skills, if not all three, adequate for college level courses.  All the inspiration in the world isn’t going to help much if students lack the grounding necessary for collegiate-level work.

In conjunction with this messianic text of praise to inspiration, the university also passed out to all faculty members a glossy color booklet entitled Extraordinary Educators, which profiled 12 faculty members for their “passion in inspiring excellence in their students.”  Since I was trained in a certain amount of analysis, I looked through the booklet and found it very interesting, and not in a particularly positive way.  Half of those profiled have been at the university five years or less, a quarter three years or less. Only two had been there more than ten years. I’m sorry, but you can’t prove excellence in just a few years. Half were women, all of them attractive, and five of the six were young.  Only two of the men and one of the women were past their late forties.  Because I have taught at the university and been active in university-connected matters and because my wife has been teaching there for twenty years, including stints as a department chair and a member of faculty senate, it’s fair to say we know a significant number of faculty members, and there are educators who are far more effective than at least half, and possibly 80% of those profiled.  Why were those educators who were profiled chosen?  Because, it would appear, they’re popular, and everyone wants into their classes. Popularity doesn’t preclude excellence, but it also doesn’t define it, and from what I’ve seen, too many college educators dumb down their classes to be popular, and administrations, at least in public universities, tacitly encourage it, in order to keep enrollments up. 

 The message I got from the book and booklet was that extraordinary educators must be young, attractive, and popular. Forget about evaluating professors on what they demand of their students or what those students actually learn.  Just look at the popularity numbers, student evaluations [which study after study has shown reward easy-grading faculty members], and class enrollments.

Inspiring educators?  How about more who require learning, effort, and perspiration?

In the United States, as Warren Buffett put it, we live in a country where valor on the battlefield is rewarded by a medal, and the best teachers get thank-you notes [except now teachers are more likely not to get thank-you notes, but blame for their failure to overcome all the obstacles placed in their way by permissive parenting, excessive and counterproductive regulations, and the need to teach to the tests in order to keep their jobs], while speculators and financial executives get millions.  And similar levels and types of rewards exist in most other industrialized countries.  As most readers know, my wife is a university professor, and this year, after several years of no increases in salary, or token raises of one percent, the faculty at the university received another one percent raise that wasn’t one.

Why not?  Because the university took it all back – and more — in other ways.  Health insurance premiums weren’t raised [that happened last year with a massive increase], but the cost to faculty still went up because the co-pay for prescription drugs was doubled; the co-pay for physician visits was increased; and the procedures covered and the amounts covered were decreased.  Faculty parking charges were instituted.  Departmental budgets were cut by another 15%.  On the other hand, the new university president will get a 15% higher salary than the departing president.

These sorts of “rewards” are far from limited to education. Despite the fact that those Americans who are working happen to be working longer hours than they were thirty years ago, family income, in real dollar terms, has decreased over the past decade for all but the top ten percent, and that decrease doesn’t include increased costs of various sorts passed on to employees in a myriad of ways.  But Goldman Sachs senior employees get hefty bonuses for figuring out how to double the price of aluminum so that the company gets a larger profit while passing the costs on to everyone else.

I don’t mind “rewards” that recognize true efficiency, where the costs for everyone go down, and profits go up without screwing someone else, but these days, all too many executive rewards are awarded for “efficiency” that results in essentially lower pay and longer hours for underlings and often even increased costs to everyone else.  That’s not efficiency, but passing the buck to those who can’t pass it to someone else.

 The last time this sort of business behavior was rampant, over a century ago, it resulted in trust-busting and corporate dismemberment.  That’s one of the very few parts of the not-so-good-old days that we ought to bring back… because it’s all too clear that American business and even large non-profits and state governments aren’t about to reform themselves on their own.  And that in itself is a shame.