My Plan To Collectively Persuade Congress

My idea sounds familiar. I don't know why. Image credit: Crusaders Government Class via flickr.com

I was just inspired.

The Problem: Its really hard to motivate your elected representative to listen to you. If you get informed, they don’t know about it. If you fill out an internet petition, you’re ignored. Same goes if you make a phone call — staffers rarely pass on individual messages. They are much more likely to keep track of the general number of calls surrounding an issue and pass that ‘traffic’ onto the Congressperson. So individual calls make almost no impact at all. The best way to make an impact is to be physically present at the officeholder’s, ahem, office and make yourself heard. But we’re all so very busy with the rest of our lives — after all, we’re not full-time lobbyists. So I’ve got an idea.

The Solution: Build an organization, made of local residents, whose only goal is to get face time with local elected officials so the group can make noise about their own political beliefs. That is, the group should create buzz for the group’s political beliefs. And make sure the group gets heard, repeatedly, using face time with the Congressperson. That way the group can exert its power both through its own public messages and also through personal relationships it forms with said Congressperson. Then the organization could build similar organizations in other elected official’s home areas. And then all of the little organizations could coordinate together to impose their collective perspective on all kinds of elected officials. And then, if all that works, they could pool their resources and just help elect officials that share their collective political beliefs! What a great idea!

Hold on. That sounds awfully familiar. Whatever. Back to our regular posting…

More and better Democrats.

Health Care – What Did The Media Know and When Did They Know It?

Fail. As in, Media Fail. Credit: Bloody Marty Mix of flickr.com fame.

Just talked to a family friend about health care reform. Granted he isn’t a news junkie and doesn’t follow politics. Even so, I’m disappointed he didn’t know a critical fact in the debate. An indisputable fact that is central to the argument of both sides. Given the importance of such a fact, you might be surprised to find out that I don’t blame him for not knowing it. Instead, I blame the media. What is this fact of which I speak?

**That is, even though America pays twice as much for health care, we still have sicker people.**

This means we pay more and we get less. Therefore — and this is the point that should be repeated over and over and over all across the nation—by every Democrat, every health care expert, every journalist, every television pundit talking head, every elected official, every doctor. Everyone! The point they should be making is that……wait for it…….

Who Wins With Health Care Reform?

Credit: Swissfabian at flickr.com

Wow. Just saw a report, linked at Atrios’ site, that shows which states have the most to gain from health care reform and which states are likely to pay the most for it. The results? States represented by Republicans have the most to gain and states represented by Democrats will subsidize the benefit.

Now that I know the results, I wonder why it took so long for a study of this kind to get exposure. Where is the media on this kind of a thing?

Update: Apparently I’m not the only one noticing Atrios’ post.

Regarding local banks

The HuffingtonPost has a stretch of front page posts encouraging readers to withdraw their deposits from large national banks and place them in a local equivalent.

Credit: KaizenVerdant on flickr.com

Their thinking is that everyday depositors can negatively impact the bailed out banks while positively impacting the local banks who need the cash to loan to local businesses. I don’t know how much of an impact the individual deposits will have on national banking, but investing in local economies is a great idea.

Has anyone else considered doing this?

I have. One hold up, though, is the lack of web-based tools at the smaller banks. That was the primary reason I went with the large national bank. Could we have open source tools for smaller banks?

On Experience and Education

I’ve had a couple of opportunities in the last few days to highlight the importance of education versus experience. The first was with a marine, the other with an ER nurse. I guess my main contention is this: your experience is important, but you should be able to learn from experts.

The marine opposed investigations into senior US government officials OK’ing torture policies. The ER nurse said our health care problem is — and I quote — “…that illegals come over squeeze their kids out as fast as they can get Medicaid until they are 18 and use emergency rooms for primary care because they don’t want to wait 24 hours for a doctors appointment.”

Of course the ER nurse’s experiences are relevant. But I don’t think she’d want to design national health care policy on it. Maybe I’m wrong! I hope not!

Anyways, education is good because we can’t learn everything from experience. It isn’t possible and it isn’t smart. Learn from other people’s mistakes!

Dysfunction in US Government

Just read an article by Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Princeton University professor. From the article:

Paul Krugman. Photo by Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

“Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward.

It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.”

Veterans Day

For a while after college I worked at a women’s shelter. There I studied what it meant to be non-violent and how to identify violence in everyday culture. Only after that period in my life did I become aware of the pervasive role violence plays in our culture. And Veteran’s Day is no exception…

Like many Americans my family has a deep history with the military. WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I and Gulf War II have all touched my family. And its not only because of how these wars have affected my loved ones that I say we need to be cognizant of the effects of war on people, on nations. Wars happen because people decide to kill other people. And even the victor, in the end, suffers. Because of this profound truth we need to take every military-related holiday and recognize the true cost of war for both victor and vanquished.

In that regard, I’m glad to see that others recognize the true cost of war as well: Atrios, Yglesias.

Government Priorities

Just read a great post at Yglesias’ blog about federal domestic spending vs. defense spending and the effects on economic growth. Two points here:

First, he’s not the only one who thinks over zealous defense spending hastens a decline in American hegemonic influence. I took a class in graduate school and we talked specifically about this particular topic. Read America’s Half Century if you’re interested in the scholarly details.

Second, I was discussing this issue with a Pakistani friend of mine. The point is simple: if you spend a dollar on a gun, the only way you’ll make money on that dollar is to use the gun to take resources from somewhere*. If you spend a dollar on education or some kind of infrastructure project (like high speed internet access), then its easy to imagine a way to make money from that dollar. Therefore, if we are concerned about our economic growth we need to minimize dollars spent on guns and maximize those spent on education or infrastructure.

*That is assuming, of course, the gun isn’t being used to protect our ability to make money with the previous dollar. But you all knew what I meant.

Required Reading

Krugman on fiscal discipline.

Yglesias notices too.

I love it when people know their econ.

Fox News Conservative? Nah….

Rush thinks so – and isn’t corrected. I wonder why the Obama Administration is treated differently when they point it out…

h/t M. Yglesias