More name narcissism from yours truly. Actually, my wife was kind enough to make this for me. It’s nice and big to hold copious amounts of coffee, my caffeine delivery system of choice.

Just had to pass along this comment.

Over at our Family Blog, my wife Amy was describing someone’s blank stare as being like her looking at me when I jabber on about history. In response, my former legal assistant said, “Doug’s mind is a scary place. I use to just pretend to know what he was talking about…I think he knew I was pretending.”

They don’t know the half of it.

The Hoosier Pundit has posted a political cartoon on immigration (and, ostensibly, on the Fairness Doctrine). It’s a cartoon and mostly for laughs, so I won’t get too worked up about it, but the cartoon turns such a blind eye to the historical context of the time, I felt like commenting.

It has Paul Revere and his Fairness Doctrine mandated counterpart (FDMC) on a horse –

Revere: THE BRITISH ARE COMING!
FDMC: “No they’re not”
Revere: THE BRITISH ARE COMING!
FDMC: “To do jobs we colonists won’t.”
Revere: THE BRITISH ARE COMING!
FDMC: “Paul Revere is a bigot.”

————–
The irony* of the cartoon is that one of the charges against King George by the colonists in the Declaration of Independence was that he was too tough on immigration:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

*(I’m not an English major so I’m not sure if that’s real irony or just Alanis Morissette irony.)

According to an AP report:

A federal investigation of farm aid payments found an Indiana farmer continued to receive money nearly a decade after his death.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture made more than $200,000 in payments from 1999 to 2002 to a farm based on the ownership of a farmer who died in 1993, according to a recently released report from the Government Accountability Office.

It’s not fair to base any judgments on one incident, but this fed my feeling that I’d much rather be paying state and local taxes than federal taxes. I just feel like I get more bang for my buck with more local forms of taxation. It seems like the huge hunks of federal taxes that disappear from my paycheck go toward financing the federal debt run up in the Reagan administration, into the bottomless pit of Iraq, toward subsidizing the elimination of federal estate taxes, disaster relief for people who live in more scenic (and more volatile) regions of the U.S., and for any number of other purposes that don’t do me a lot of good.

Former Lafayette Mayor Jim Riehle has passed away. The Lafayette Journal & Courier has a nice write up. I didn’t live in Lafayette while he was mayor, but he served from 1971 to 1995, and it’s my understanding that he had a profound impact on the city. It seems to me that the city is in pretty good shape today, and I suspect that is in no small part due to his leadership.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette main page is too annoying to visit these days. I log on and immediately get choppy advertising audio piping out of my computer speakers. It’s like some kind of craptacular MySpace page. And that’s unfortunate since the Journal Gazette has traditionally done some of Indiana’s best political reporting (Thanks Niki Kelly!) I still get some of their stories through my RSS subscriptions, but I won’t be going to their site looking for stories until they do something about that push audio advertising strategy.

Daniel Lee has a story in the Indy Star citing industry experts who expect health insurance premiums to rise 10 to 15% locally this year. Forget property tax increases, this is the increase that should have people protesting in the streets. You can move to a cheaper property. Getting into a less expensive body is more problematic, and the health insurance increases have been going on for a long time now. Maybe it’s a frog in the pan phenomenon. The property tax increases have been mostly all at once. The health insurance increases have been more gradual. The article cites smoking, obesity, and the hospital boom in central Indiana for the local increases. I’m getting to the point where I have the same reaction to health insurance execs citing obesity for premium increases as I do when oil execs cite pipeline disturbances for price increases — there is a chance they’re telling the truth, but I can’t escape the nagging suspicion that there is a top executive out there angling for a way to add a couple million to his take home pay. (Think of the property tax outrage if Governor Daniels or Mayor Peterson had a 7 or 8 digit salary and was contemplating raising property taxes by 10% per year.)

For employment based health plans, the article also points to a trend toward looking into employee lifestyles – smoking, eating, exercise habits; and charging more to those who choose poorly. I have mixed feelings on this trend. It seems to make a fair amount of sense for those actions one can truly choose yeah or nay on. But how about when the insurers start charging you extra based on your genetic makeup? And this assumes that the insurer is going to administer these categories fairly. I can see paper pushers in the insurance bureaucracy getting incentives for “mistakenly” putting more folks into the higher risk categories.

I guess a fair amount of my negativity comes from the lack of transparency of the health insurance industry and my general lack of trust in the motives of those who run it. Under normal circumstances, you don’t have to trust the motives of an actor in a market situation — the market tends to correct those who are merely out to screw you. But the health insurance industry is different in that it is so opaque that it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons. Furthermore, given that health care is often times literally a matter of life and death, you don’t always have the option of simply walking away from the market as is the case with other products. Like one person interviewed for Mr. Lee’s article said, “the system is broken.”

[tags]health care[/tags]

My wife has first dibs on the new Harry Potter book, so I haven’t read it, but it’s in the house. It occurs to me that, as Voldemort has risen and Harry’s world has gone to hell, so has ours. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published in June 1997. In the book, Harry is 11, suffering at the hands of his foster family, the Dursleys, and gets rescued as he gets the opportunity to go to Hogwarts. Subsequently there is a minor disturbance at Hogwarts as Voldemort tries to get a stone that conveys immortality. Back then, things were going pretty well for us too, I think. Bill Clinton had just started his second term, OJ got nailed by the Goldmans for a big civil judgment, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was hitting new highs, Dolly had been successfully cloned, the Heaven’s Gate freaks committed mass suicide because of Hale Bopp, Timothy McVeigh was convicted, we had things so good, Google registered its domain name, and it made sense that the death of Princess Diana was the most important thing in the world. (The Cleveland Indians lost to the Marlins in Game 7 of the World Series, but that was a personal tragedy, not world wide.)

As Harry gets older and time progresses, his world gets progressively darker. We’ve seen a similar progression since 1997 in our world. In 1998, Bill Clinton is impeached, and George Bush executes Karla Faye Tucker. Matthew Shepherd is tortured and killed in Wyoming for being gay.

In 1999, Sirius Black escaped from Azkhaban and our year (in the Midwest) came in with a purpose — big snows and subzero temperatures; the Columbine Massacres followed in April. Texas Governor Bush announced he will seek the Presidency. Y2k turns out to be not that big of deal.

In 2000, we see one of the Hogwarts’ students die at the hand of Voldemort after the Goblet of Fire competition, and the Dark Lord restored fully to the living. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we saw the Supreme Court stop the vote count in Florida, leading to the selection of George W. Bush as President. Elian Gonzalez is seized from his relatives Miami home and returned to his Cuban father. Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat attempt and fail to reach an agreement at Camp David. Ariel Sharon and several hundred Israeli police visit the Temple Mount, provoking a new Palestinian intifada.

Three long years go by. When 2003 rolls around, the Order of the Phoenix has reformed, and in the end Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is dead. Harry’s world has gotten positively grim. So, too had ours. The stock market took a sharp downturn, California was plagued by rolling blackouts caused by power companies gaming the system — Enron and others were gaming the system to drive up prices while the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission looked the other way and Dick Cheney blamed the situation on California’s environmental laws. Massive corruption took down companies like Enron and Arthur Andersen. Then, al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans, destroyed the World Trade Center, and damaged the Pentagon. In response, we invaded Afghanistan, the government of which was harboring al Qaeda and refusing to bring them to justice. Anthrax was mailed to Congressional offices; the culprit never found. In 2003, inexplicably, we invaded Iraq on the pretext that its weapons of mass destruction posed a grave and gathering threat to the United States. As it turned out, there was no reason to stop the inspectors from doing their jobs; they were finding what there was to be found, which is to say, nothing. The Bush Administration had opened up an extra-judicial internment camp at Guantanamo Bay. In the name of temporary security, Americans had been asked to give up any number of liberties and entrust the executive branch with extraordinary powers. The budget had gone from something of a surplus to massive deficits and the national debt was increasing by leaps and bounds. George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring “Mission Accomplished.”

In 2005, the Half-Blood Prince was published. The book starts with the Death Eaters openly wreaking havoc in Britain. By the end, Albus Dumbledore, the most powerful good wizard is dead. In our own world, George W. Bush had been elected to the Presidency. (Like in Harry’s world, where he finally hooked up with Ginny Weasely, there was the occasional bright spot — Masson’s Blog premiered on November 15, 2004.) But, still, with the New England Patriots winning their second consecutive Super Bowl, things were fairly grim. A judge was murdered in Georgia, and Senator Cornyn suggested that “judicial activism” may have been the motive. Religious activists were especially active in attacking the judiciary. Justices Roberts and Alito are named to the US Supreme Court. The quagmire in Iraq continued unabated at a steep cost to American blood and treasure. Explosions rocked the London underground after a terrorist bombing. President Bush flew back to Washington from vacation in Texas to sign legislation to meddle in the private affairs of Terri Schiavo in an attempt to keep her husk on life support. Senate Majority Leader Dr. Bill Frist diagnosed her as having brain activity after watching a video tape. Bombings in Bali killed 26. And Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans; governmental response was anemic due at least in part to crony appointments to FEMA.

Here we are in 2007. The political situation has gotten a little bit better. The economy seems to be getting fairly lively. I haven’t read the book, but presumably Harry will save the day, though not without considerable personal sacrifice. At the end of the book, I hope Harry’s world will be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps we can do the same here as well.

This is far off my normal subject matter, but this bit is just genius:

Mary Beth Schneider, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article on the Marion County Reassessment that highlights some more issues with the Governor’s order, apparently by fiat, that properties in Marion County be reassessed.

1. Who is going to pay for the reassessment? It’s the governor’s order, apparently. (He’ll get DLGF to implement an order in 10 days or more — the required public hearing on the issue being a mere formality.) The Marion County reassessment fund is depleted. So, we have State ordered local government spending — kind of how we got in this mess in the first place.

2. Mortgage companies may or may not honor the Governor’s unilateral order. The Star article quotes one homeowner who was told, without a new tax bill, she would have to send her mortgage company an escrow amount based on the most recent 2007 property tax bill.

3. Some taxpayers had bills that decreased. Are they now obligated to make higher payments?

4. The inventory tax that was eliminated this year was on the tax bills last year. Are businesses obligated to pay the bigger bill that included the inventory tax?

5. Will local governments have to default on their obligations? Because of the freeze, “cities, counties, townships, schools, libraries and other Marion County government units will be getting $132 million less than they were expecting.” Gov. Daniels did not freeze the obligations of local government, he merely froze the means with which local government can meet its obligations.

6. With the same assessment rules in place, will the reassessment result in different values? This one is probably easier to answer — if business properties are significantly undervalued, as the reports seem to indicate, those assessment values should rise (while residential assessments probably won’t change that much). The net result will be a higher total assessed value for the county, resulting in a lower tax rate. Businesses will pay more while residential property owners will probably pay less. I wonder what the Chamber of Commerce thinks of this move.