Where in the world is Bethlehem, anyway?

Municipal Seal

The other day a vigilant reader gently corrected my Christmas cookies posting by writing a comment to point out that the city of Bethlehem is not truly a part of Israel--as I had stated--but is within the boundaries of the Palestinian West Bank and under Israeli control.


True enough at the current time, but my writing was not within the current geopolitical context, but rather within the geopolitical context of two millenniums past.

(In deference to East Coast readers, let me also publicly recognize that Bethlehem is immediately to the east of Allentown, PA.  Take exit 67 off of I-78 and find nearby local Bethlehem attractions such as a Holiday Inn Express Hotel and Suites, a Slovak Cemetery, the Outlets at Sands Bethlehem, a Sands Casino, and the Bethlehem Visitor Center.)

Nonetheless, it was a little sloppy on my part to describe Bethlehem as "in Israel."  More correctly, Bethlehem at that time was in the land of Judah (or Judaea, or Judea), a Jewish kingdom which had become a part of the Roman Empire through conquest.

For Christians, Bethlehem in Judah of two thousand years ago is notable as the birthplace of Jesus.  For Jews of that time--and since--it is often described as the City of David.  If that--plus everything that has happened in the last two thousand years--were all there was to the history of this small city with a 21st Century population of about 25,000, that would be sufficient to be called a fascinating heritage.

However, the origins of Bethlehem are in fact far more ancient, with at least one historical reference dating to about 1400BC indicating that it was a Canaanite city.  The reference is contained in the Amarna Letters--a collection of diplomatic correspondence during the Egyptian New Kingdom--in which it is related that the King of Jerusalem was requesting assistance from Pharaoh, his overlord, in conquering the neighboring city of Bethlehem.  If Bethlehem were worth conquering at that time--and apparently seemed inclined to present a significant enough resistance that conquest could be accomplished only with help from the superpower of the day--then it's reasonable to assume that it had already been in existence for enough years to accumulate significant wealth and stability.

Bethlehem of today is in the lands of the West Bank of the Jordan River.  Bethlehem of two thousand years ago was in Judah, a part of the Roman Empire.  Its beginnings as a Canaanite settlement seem to predate the Imperial period by at least 1400 years.  This is a very small city with a very long and complex history that includes much more than this scant summary.

All of this started with some thoughts on Christmas, didn't it?  It's interesting to see where conversations like this can take us.

Christmas cookies

It's Christmas Eve.  To be more accurate, as I sit down to write this it's the morning of the day before Christmas.  We are anticipating a friends and family Christmas Eve gathering later today at my sister's and brother-in-law's house; there will be another one tomorrow at our house.  Pies are being baked (thanks to my wife), I have made lots of my fresh cranberry relish, the refrigerator is full, the Christmas music is playing, and there are Christmas decorations all over the place.  By the way, the place smells great!  There's nothing like the aroma of pumpkin pies in the oven.


For me and most of those closest to me, this is the time of Christmas.  But if people want to say "Happy Holidays" that's good for me, too.  After all, it's not Christmas for everybody.  Well, maybe it is, but not in the same way for everybody.  As I see it, Christmastime is big enough that it can be shared among everybody who wants to participate in it.  It's a time of celebration and gathering that is both secular and religious, so there's no reason to exclude anybody, not even those who might be terminally grumpy.

Which is not to say that I am unaware of the religious significance of Christmas.  But significance is one thing, and origins and history and heritage and context are other things that are part of Christmas, too, and those other things do not belong exclusively to religious Christianity.

December 25 might be the date of birth for Jesus, or it might not be.  Nobody knows for sure.  Birth records from the domains of the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago are scarce to non-existent.  Bethlehem in Israel was a part of the Empire.  The Empire conducted a census, but it produced no birth records.

Why, then, December 25 as the date of Christmas?

It was a matter of convenience; and, also, the fact that the early princes of Christianity were no dummies when it came to public relations.

The date was chosen by the authorities of the early Christian church to take advantage of well-established celebrations of non-Christian origins.  During the later days of the Roman Empire, the festival of Saturnalia--beginning on December 17, and lasting for several days--provided a convenient time of celebration and merry-making that the new religion could connect itself to as it was gradually replacing the old one.  It was a time of transition.

Some two or three centuries later, the Western Roman Empire was a fading memory, but Christianity was rooted throughout the old realm, with one exception.  That exception was Britain, and what took place there shaped the celebration of Christmas in ways that have profoundly influenced Christmas traditions the world over.

When the last of the Roman legions departed Britain in the early 400s, the poorly-defended island became a tempting target for the expanding and migrating peoples of northern Europe, the so-called Germanic tribes.  Though they called themselves by many names, eventually we have come to know them as the Saxons.  Determined resistance by the local British population--some of which was so effective that it probably formed the beginnings of the Arthurian stories--was nonetheless eventually overwhelmed by the Saxon invaders.  After two hundred years of invasion and conflict, the land that we now know as England was a relatively stable conglomeration of several Saxon kingdoms.

Barely Christianized by the earlier Empire, and now inhabited by vigorous newcomers who were themselves only somewhat adherent to this religion that spoke of only one god--and a peaceful one at that--the rich territory of England was viewed with some alarm by the Roman Church.

And with good reason.  Consider, for a moment, that young Saxon boys were being brought up in an England which, as they would learn in stories from their elders, was conquered by their parents and their grandparents.   The stories might be told especially during December, when the land was cold, the days were short and the skies were dark.  Some might wear Christian crosses, but the old religions were still much a part of their lives, and so some would wear a Thor's hammer, too, on a thong or a chain about the neck.

The boys would hear stories of religions, too.  On the one hand, they are told of a nameless god of peace.  On the other, they learn of a host of named gods, each with a personality, and some of whom wield war hammers, lightening bolts, spears, bows and arrows.  They also hear that later in the month the dark and dreary days will be interrupted by the great pagan festival of Yule.

Which collection of religious stories do you think is more likely to grab hold of the imagination of young boys?  No surprise, then, that there was no assurance of success for Christianity in Saxon England.

Sometime in the early 600s, one of the brighter bishops of Rome--it might have been Pope Gregory I, also called Gregory the Great--directed that the Church in England should take advantage of the population's great affection for the Yule festival by declaring that Yule and Christmas were one and the same.  And a good idea it was, too, for many reasons other than the convenience of crashing an already-existing party.  Peace was plentiful during winter, if only because the weather made it so difficult to organize and supply armies for fighting, and thereby helping to lend some credibility to the preaching of the virtues of peace.  The relationship between Yule and evergreen flora was easily connected to the Christian gospel of everlasting life.

The old stories, of course, could not be stopped.  Over time, however, they changed.

England eventually became thoroughly Christianized, albeit in a way in which its popularity was in large part determined by its absorption and adaptation of pagan culture and tradition.  Christmas became so important to the Saxon English that after another two centuries had passed, King Alfred the Great--the monarch who united the Saxon kingdoms into the first cohesive English nation--is said to have decreed that it was illegal for anyone to work during the time known as the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Alfred was devout, but my guess is that he was smart enough to realize that there's always some work that has to be done.  Still, he set the stage for eight centuries' worth of Christmas celebrations--taking place at Yuletide--in England.

All of which came to a screeching halt in 1652 when, on Christmas Eve of that year, Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Lord Protector of England--and usurper of a monarchy that traced its traditions as far back as Alfred's reign--outlawed all observation of the Christmas holiday.  Shortly thereafter, the Puritan authorities in the Massachusetts colony followed suit by legally requiring that people perform work on Christmas day.  Would anybody be surprised if Alfred turned in his grave at that time?  I think not.

The official English prohibition against Christmas celebrations lasted less than ten years.  The restoration of the monarchy in 1661 also brought about the restoration of Christmas celebrations.  But they were faded celebrations in comparison to the lavish affairs of pre-Protectorate English days.

An interruption of celebratory traditions, however, does not overcome the basic human need to tell stories, and not just to re-tell the old stories, but to build on them and create new stories that in some ways reach for higher goals. 

We tell stories for a host of reasons.  Stories are fun -- they entertain and amuse.  Stories make us think and help us to understand -- they tell us who we are, what we are, and sometimes even why we are; they can tell us of our origins and shared events, and speculate on where we are going.  Exceptional stories make us wonder.  Some cause us to ask "why?"  A very few present us with the ultimate question -- "Why not?"

Christmastime has always been a time for stories.  Christmas honors an event, but as the celebration has become more than a religious commemoration, so have the stories become more than merely stories of origins and religion.

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, is my favorite Christmas story of all time, and the one that I recommend to you when you seek insight to, and comfort with, the amalgam of contemporary Christmas.  Feverishly written by Dickens in the later months of 1843, this gem of a story is as timely now as it was then.  An educated man, Dickens knew of the history that I have written about here, and it provided a basis for some of what he wrote.  A socially-aware man, Dickens was conscious of the inequalities in wealth and well-being that were the scourge of all of man's nations of his time, but especially in his homeland of England.  He felt that England could and should do much better for its people.

If you prefer to watch a story instead of reading it, then try out the 1984 film version of A Christmas Carol.  It's closely based on the Dickens story--not only in spirit (forgive the pun) but also in dialog--and it is well-adapted for contemporary times.  The film has the fine actor George C. Scott in the lead role as Ebenezer Scrooge.  If there's ever been a better performance of Scrooge, I have no idea when it could have been done.

My time for this is drawing to a close, as our Christmas celebrations are set to begin.  We don't bake cookies around here--remember the pies, instead?--so this writing substitutes as my offering of Christmas cookies.  It's bite-sized, tidy and hopefully tasty.

Merry Christmas to everybody with whatever Happy Holidays meaning is dear to you, and Best Wishes to all for 2014!

What's wrong with entitlements? We pay for them, don't we?

A friend and reader asked me those questions the other day.  Pretty good questions, aren't they?

Entitlements loom large in the political disputes over Federal government spending.  Mostly, the word "entitlements" seems to focus on two programs in particular:  Social Security and Medicare.  Even if you choose to define the word to include other social assistance programs, Social Security and Medicare are the two big gorillas of entitlements.

A simple, straight-forward answer to my friend's questions would be:  There's nothing wrong with these entitlements, as long as we pay for them, and as long as what we pay in is managed properly.  And, yes, it's pretty easy to see that each of us, individually and collectively, pays for those programs by way of taxes on earned income.

But since we're talking politics here, few things about the future of Social Security and Medicare are straight-forward.  However, I'm going to do my best to simplify and clarify by describing a few things that are not commonly heard, either in the press or in the political disputes.

Social Security -- an overview and some helpful hints

Let's be clear about something:  there is no coherent rational argument to say that these programs are fiscal basket cases and should be terminated for the good of the country.  That doesn't mean that they are perfect; what it does mean is that both programs are worthy and beneficial.

Should these entitlement programs be run so that each of us will get back from them at least as much as we have put in?  Yes, of course they should be run that way.  That's the way they are being run right now--as long as a person lives long enough--and there's no compelling fiscal reason to change that.

Do these programs need some changes to keep them solvent into the future?  Yes, I think so.  Does future solvency mean that benefits must be reduced?  Maybe so, maybe not so; there's no reason to assume that reducing benefits is the only way to assure future solvency.  Anybody who maintains that benefits reduction is the only way to assure solvency is just engaging in political theater.

Let's look at Social Security.  (I'm not going to get into Medicare right now; maybe another time.)  Every year, the Social Security tax contributions are split between deductions from an employee's paycheck, and contributions by the employer.  (Self-employed people pay the full amount that is the combination of the contributions by both the employee and the employer.)  These taxes stop being levied once the individual's gross income reaches a certain level for the year, currently $113,700.  You can see all the details about the rates, plus lots of retirement calculators and other information on the Social Security Administration's web site.

Information on the exact taxation rates for both Medicare and Social Security is currently available on this Social Security Administration web page.

The various calculators and data retrieval tools make it pretty easy for a person to find out how much he or she has paid in to Social Security (and Medicare, too), as well as obtain estimates for expected Social Security payments at various ages.

Social Security pays back what you put in -- an example

With that information in hand, all it takes is a little simple mathematics to get an idea of how much Social Security will return to an individual over time, and how that compares to the individual's Social Security contributions.

Take me, for example.  If I were to start taking Social Security benefits at age 62, I would need eleven years to have those payments equal the amount that I have already contributed to the program.  If I wait on starting benefits until age 70, then from that point on it would require a little over six years to reach that same milestone.

Which begs at least one question:  How much longer can I expect to live?

Well, accidents aside, the mortality information that I am familiar with gives me a good feeling that I can wait until age 70 to start taking Social Security benefits if I should so choose.

Of course, all of this ignores the time value of money, and the obvious fact that a dollar saved some years ago--and properly managed for investment--should be worth a whole lot more than one dollar today or at some point in the future.

But--and if you remember only one thing from reading this post, make it this one here--Social Security was never designed to be a savings account or investment program, so the concept of a time value of money, or of investment return, just doesn't really apply to it.  Social Security was designed to be pay-as-you-go, in which a portion of the earnings of the younger, more employed and more employable part of the population is transferred to the older, less employed and less employable part of the population.

Nonetheless, some people persist in asking, Wouldn't I do better with my money if I could keep it and invest it myself?

Who would have thought bureaucrats could do this good a job?

Because of the fundamental design of Social Security, the only answer to the self-investment question is, Well, maybe, and only if you are very lucky and well-disciplined; and, on top of that, you would need to reject the established need for Social Security, which, as described above, is that the older, less employed and less employable part of the population has a demonstrated need for this kind of income transfer.

Just how good a job does the Social Security Administration do in managing all that money?

Social Security is more than just a pension payment program -- it also provides disability and survivor's benefits.  As I said earlier, it was never set up as a savings and/or investment program.

However, let's take the growth of my estimated benefits between the ages of 62 and 70 and compare that with some historical investment results.

In my case--and I believe this to be applicable to everybody--my Social Security benefits at age 70 will pencil out to be about 75% greater than they will be at age 62.  If we look at this as an investment decision, then that's a pretty good compounded rate of return of about 7% or 8% annually.

For comparison, consider the mutual fund called The Growth Fund of America (from American Funds).  Its current price of about $43/share is 47% greater than was its closing price on October 14, 2005; that is to say, over eight years, money invested with this fund would have grown by 47% (not including dividends, distributions, and any reinvestment of these monies).  Admittedly, this is an imperfect comparison for numerous reasons.  But it shows that the Social Security Administration does a good job of managing our money.

How about diverting all that Social Security money into individual 401(k)s (and similar programs) instead?

The obvious answer is that any given worker is better off with both programs in place -- invest the 401(k) wisely and carefully, and depend upon Social Security both for providing supplemental retirement income, and for providing assistance for unexpected or unknowable events (disability payments, survivor's benefits).

Math, actuarial assumptions, and other gobbledy-gook

So, why does Social Security say that benefits will have to be reduced by about one-quarter beginning in 2033?

That projection is based on a grab-bag of actuarial and demographic assumptions, all of it put together and massaged with mathematics that I do not understand and probably couldn't explain here even if I did understand them.  But consider that the design of Social Security--both for benefits and for revenues--assumed that the nation's working-age population would be much larger than it now is in relation to the number of retirees, and also that the income subject to Social Security taxation would have a much broader base than it now does.

The last time Social Security tax rates were increased was in 1983.  That was done when the math wizards showed Congress that the impending retirement of the so-called "Baby Boom Generation" would drive the need for the additional funding.

As a fix to the program, that means it will be good for a half century.  That's a lot of years, and so it counts as a pretty darn good piece of legislation and behind-the-scenes technical work.

Social Security, as mentioned above, is not really a savings program, but more of a pay-as-you-go program.  As such, its design requires a certain ratio of paid workers to retirees in order to maintain the benefit payments.  Sometime around 2033 we will fall below that target ratio; at least, according to current demographic assumptions.

Those assumptions might have to be changed--hopefully for the better--if the recent uptick in the nation's fertility rate results in an unexpectedly larger workforce in twenty years or so.  Another potential influence could be an increase in the number of immigrants who could become gainfully employed (and taxed) as a result of an improved national immigration policy.

You've probably heard something about the demographics of the thing, so let's move on to the other design point mentioned above.  This is something that I have not yet seen widely-discussed; perhaps that implies that what I'm about to say is wildly off base, but it might also mean that it's one of those things that just hasn't gotten a lot of attention yet even though it deserves to have the attention.

Another downside of income inequity--read about it here first

America has a real problem with inequities in its income distribution.  For example, recent press has focused on the fact that corporate CEO's now earn about 350 times what the typical corporate employee earns.  By comparison, thirty years ago the multiplier was about 42 times.  That's a huge change, especially when we consider that there's a much larger group than just CEO's who have benefited from the tendency of wealth and income to accumulate much more with the top couple percent of the population than with the vast majority of Americans.

How did the income distribution look at the time of the design of Social Security?

That was in the mid-1930s.  At that time, the share of national income that went to the top 1% was not only significantly lower than it is now--something like 15% as compared to the current 25% or so--it was declining.  Eventually, that chart over time flattened-out with that share bouncing around the 10% figure, where it stayed for decades until beginning its inexorable rise in the early 1980s.

What this means is that a system that was designed to obtain revenues through taxation of a population where the income distribution was flatter and broader than it is now--and will be for the foreseeable future--must now be made to work in an environment where a much bigger piece of that income pie is beyond reach of the taxation authority.

In addition to the adverse effects of income inequality, we are also now in an environment--never envisioned during the design of Social Security--where significant and growing amounts of income are from the relatively elite sources of stock-holder dividends and private equity earnings.

It all adds up to an environment that favors the most fortunate at the expense of the less fortunate.

If you think this sounds like another "tax the rich" scheme, you would be right, because that's where the money is.  And, frankly, Social Security was designed to obtain its pay-as-you-go revenues from the broadest possible base of available earned monies.

There are probably lots of possible ways to improve Social Security's fiscal outlook through minimally-disruptive taxes.  One example that comes to mind is to levy the Social Security tax on dividend income, perhaps on some kind of graduated basis.  Doing away with the maximum income that is subject to the tax is another.  Any of us can probably think of additional ideas.

Maintaining Social Security's solvency through benefit reduction ought to be the choice of last resort.  Updating the program to make it current with the new realities of 21st century sources of income ought to be given first consideration.

America the weary?

The United States of America is the world’s superpower.  At the moment, though, because of the current stalemate over the Federal budget and the national debt ceiling, we are not behaving like a superpower.

Have Americans become tired of being a superpower?  Are we ambivalent about that status, and so just letting it slip away?

Superpower status must first be earned, as the United States had done by the end of World War II.  And it also must be periodically renewed—like a driver’s license—because the status brings with it the obligation of responsibilities, and the rest of the world expects the superpower to live up to those responsibilities.  As with a driver’s license, failure to fulfill the obligations implies a risk that the status is lost or revoked.

And, too, after years of driving some people opt out of the program.  The hassle of the obligations either becomes too demanding, or it just doesn’t fit in with the preferred lifestyle.  The same might be said of Americans’ interest to continue being a superpower.

Are Americans now thinking of opting out of the superpower program?  Or, are we already in the process of losing that status? 

Given the interconnected nature of today’s world—the huge amounts of easy international travel, the importance of cross-border commerce and business relationships—certain changes in America’s relations with the global community could suggest answers to these questions.  One change would be reductions in our opportunities and/or abilities to economically compete for foreign business and influence; the other, a diminishing desire on our part to reach outside the national borders for constructive engagement with the outside world.

Both changes are already taking place.

We don't always make it easy for foreigners to like us

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a significant slippage of the respect in which the overall world community holds the United States.  Much  of the world feels that we have tarnished our national image with three events:  an overly-long and chaotic armed conflict in Afghanistan; an unethical and poorly thought-out military expedition into Iraq; and, finally, promoting and imposing on others an economic system that contains the root causes and triggers for the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.  In those events, the feelings are that we showed poor national discipline in a variety of ways—Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, pooled mortgage-backed securities and derivatives; the names alone are explanatory—and, in general, conducted ourselves in ways that caused far too much harm to others.

Taken together, these events have lessened the desire of the developing nations of the world to avail themselves of the goods, services and ideas that we have to offer.  When others don’t want us in their marketplaces we cannot compete for their business and their hearts and minds.

That’s Exhibit A.  It’s bad enough by itself.

We make ourselves look inept at governing

Exhibit B might be worse.  Now, by way of our polarized and almost frozen political process, it looks to the outside world like we cannot even put together the fiscal mechanisms to run our Federal government, to the point of closing our national parks and turning away foreign visitors.  To add injury to insult, our politics have raised the specter of government default on its monetary obligations—many of which are due to foreign individuals and other nations.

There should be no surprise if this causes people in the rest of the world to think that America is failing to act as a responsible superpower.  Nor should we be surprised if others begin to feel that Americans prefer the self-indulgence of existing separate and apart from the rest of the world.

We have created an internal political environment in which America’s president has had to cancel plans to attend an Asia-Pacific leadership summit. The politics of this development are of importance only to Americans.  What is important to the Asia-Pacific nations is the loss of dialog and engagement as a result of the missing president.  This leaves a participatory vacuum, which the Chinese leadership is happy to fill.  China’s gain, America’s loss.

Perhaps Americans have grown weary of global leadership.  Many say that we should no longer be the “global policeman.”  But without America in that role it would leave a hole—another vacuum—in the world order.  As always, vacuum will suck something in to fill itself.  Before relinquishing this role, we need to ask ourselves:  “What would the world look like with some other nation as the global policeman?”

Foreign policy cannot be just about us

We tell the rest of the world that we might not pay what we already owe to others, some of whom are them, not us; that causes trust issues.  We have a domestic political environment that seems to preclude an official national leadership presence at significant international events; that causes concerns about how much importance we place in working with other nations.

We are beginning to show an apparent willful national intent to start a process of reducing American engagement with the rest of the world community.

If this continues, it is likely that a diminished American leadership presence would soon give way to the leadership of another nation.  It’s hard to see how a United States of America that would allow this to happen could continue to hold on to its superpower status for long.

Not attending one particular international leadership gathering does not by itself set a trend for the future.  Disputing an individual year’s Federal budget is not, of itself, convincing evidence that our national political system is no longer able to extend its view outside our national borders.

What will cause these events to become alarming is when most of the American public scoffs at them and dismisses them as the product of some kind of near-term dysfunction in our governmental system.  Despite any truth in that conclusion, the hidden danger is that it avoids confronting the global implications inherent in understanding—or not understanding--the responsibilities that we have as a superpower.  If we don’t accept the obligations of those responsibilities, we begin to opt out of being a superpower.

Something that we can do -- if we choose to

If America wants to remain a superpower, then we must realize that we need to renew that status with the global community.  That can be done only if we care enough to show other peoples that we are worthy—as they define that concept—to compete in their marketplaces, and if our internal politics support visible and participatory American leadership.

This can be done if we adopt a national awareness that our failures of the first decade of the century have left a legacy of unhealed harm to others.  We must develop and implement overt and visible healing actions that others regard as sincere and valuable, and be convincing about it through consistent diplomatic outreach.  That awareness and those actions must be combined with a national policy to aggressively pursue opportunities for constructive international engagement.  Our political process must recognize that such engagement deserves the highest national priority.

The only alternative is to withdraw behind our borders, avoiding the obligations of superpower responsibilities, and wait for our superpower status to be revoked.

It's a choice between anger management and perversion

Have you heard that lots of people are angry with the government?  Probably so.  Does it really amount to anything?  Well, yes, it does amount to something:  it's made a mess of the government.

Anybody who is really, truly, honestly and sincerely angry with government ought to accept responsibility for the consequences of that anger and act accordingly.  I'm not trying to belittle the sanctity of anybody's feelings here; I'm simply bewildered by people who seem to wallow in anger without taking any kind of constructive approach to resolve the origins of the anger.  Bewildered by them and, frankly, becoming fed up with them, too.

Case in point:  the current partial shut-down of the Federal government.  A recurrent theme expressed by the right-wing Republicans in the House of Representatives is that they are justified in shutting down government operations because they are angry with the government, or because their constituents are angry with government.  (If you haven't heard this, then you've been living under a rock for the last several months.)

The true feelings and emotions of any single Congressperson are an unknown to me, but insofar as the Republican constituencies are concerned they might have a point there.  A Pew Research report just recently released shows that fully 41% of respondents who identify themselves as conservative Republicans are "angry" with government.  In fact, the title of the release is "Anger at Government Most Pronounced among Conservative Republicans."  That by itself tells much of the story.

Being stewards of the public trust, therefore, the Republican members of the House of Representatives are dutifully executing their responsibilities to their home district constituents by conveying that anger through legislative actions to shut down government operations.

In other words, if you're a Republican voter, and you are angry with government, then you are causing it to be shut down.  Well, maybe your elected Representative is contributing a little bit to that event, too, because it's likely that person is also angry at government.  But, it all begins and ends with you, the angry voter.

Feel the power.

Feel the power of perversion, that is.  Because anger without management yields no constructive solution, merely continued anger.  And most truly angry people, I believe, focus their anger on external targets by blaming somebody else for the problem that is causing the anger.  The target of their anger is "the government."  It's a broad-brush indictment, with little or no identifiable and employable management that could be used to discern causes and effects.

For all its faults, we live in a democratically-governed society, and who has elected that government?  Why, come to think of it, it's the angry people who have elected at least some part of that government!  Fortunately for our future, it was the non-angry people who elected most of the government last November.  A fact, of course, that serves only to inflame the passions of the angry voter.

Human nature being what it is, angry people are not going to persist in directing their anger at themselves for long.  Therefore, since they are giving only short shrift to the root causes of their anger, they will develop nothing constructive to offer as a resolution to whatever problems they see in government.  Nonetheless, the anger demands a resolution, even if it is only temporary, and so instead of something constructive we are left with the destructive event of the shut-down.

The logic of anger requires an outlet of righteous pain caused by tear-down and destruction, instead of finding long-term benefits out of building and construction.

Be gone, angry people!  You have nothing of value to offer.  Enjoy the self-flagellating bliss of your anger, because that's the closest you are going to come to gaining satisfaction out of the puerile self-importance that angry people attach to actions of theirs that cause harm to others.

For the government shut-down is not an abstract event.  It has tangible, daily-life implications to the 800,000 or so government workers who are now unemployed, without justifiable compensation for their time and opportunities.  And so, too, for the thousands of employees of private-sector government contractors who have been laid off because of lack of budgeted funding for planned projects; a number which will grow dramatically as this shut-down drags on.

Anger is non-professional; as such, it has no right to a place in a professional work environment.  Government certainly ought to be a professional work environment.  Ah, but perhaps you know a person who is angry at government and believes that there is no such thing as a professional governmental work environment?  What a hypocrite!  The angry voter has no qualification to judge professionalism, since protracted anger precludes professional behavior and thought.  The angry voter is merely projecting his or her own non-professionalism onto others.

Anger, of course, cannot be legislated away, nor can I or anyone else make it go away through arguments such as this that appeal to rationality.  The most that can be done to it is to put it into perspective, which is this:  If we are going to be a successful democracy, it will happen in spite of voter anger, because anger without constructive resolution is non-contributory to the political process, and therefore a perversion of that process.

Which brings us to the question of the day:  How to resolve the current conflict over the Federal budget?  I suppose something will emerge over the coming days, but one side of this argument is clearly driven by anger--anger at President Obama, and anger at the Affordable Care Act--and, if the past is any guide, it just doesn't seem possible that any constructive solution elements will emerge from that anger.  The likely outcome is that the House Republicans will have to swallow their anger, contain the anger of their most conservative constituents, and capitulate.

Unless, of course, they can get control of their anger.  (When pigs fly.)

As much as I would like to see that kind of capitulation, I also have to admit that capitulation will probably lead to more anger, producing an environment that is unlikely to yield anything more constructive in the future than it has yielded so far to date.

And that is likely to be our political outlook until such time as the angry voters can learn how to do anger management, and substitute the constructive results of that management for their current perversion of the political process.

Government shutdown -- Is this the best of the GOP?

You've got to hand it to John Boehner; as Speaker of the House, he has become a pretty good politician.  Last week, as he stood at the lectern and announced that the House of Representatives--on the voting strength of the Republican majority in that legislative body--was sending a Federal budget without funding for the Affordable Care Act to the Senate, and explained that this was for the good of the American people and clearly supported by the majority of the voting public, it looked like he almost believed what he was saying.

Almost, but not quite.

Mr. Boehner has been around the block several times more than the Tea Party amateurs in his caucus. I think that he is savvy enough to know that fighting for a Republican victory by shutting down the government if Obamacare is not defunded is a losing fight for the Republican Party.

Consider the facts (facts that Mr. Boehner undoubtedly understands):  We had a presidential election last November; in that election, President Obama stood clearly for the continued implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and Mr. Romney's position was for its rejection.  President Obama won the election.  That's a pretty compelling statement of opinion by the American voting public.

What about current public opinion polls?  Well, I just saw CNBC report on their latest poll on the question of whether or not people agree with defunding Obamacare, and by lopsided margins people stated their support for funding that program, especially if the alternative is a government shutdown.

Do polls show that a majority of Americans are, in some way, not satisfied with Obamacare?  Yes, that's true.  I have seen polling that reports 54% feeling that way.  In truth, if I were polled, I would be part of that 54%.  But polls don't do a really good job of getting down to the "why" of things.  In my case--and I believe this to be true for many others in that 54%--I think that the country would be better-off with a single-payer healthcare system, instead of the current and historical fee-for-service structure.  In my case, there's no particular ideological reason for having this opinion; for me, it's a matter of national economics, and how the coldly rational mathematics of that dismal science influence the future success of the nation.  But, that's a conversation for another time.

Put all this together -- it's game, set and match for Obamacare.

Mr. Boehner certainly knows and understands all this.  I also think that he understands that good governance requires clear and consistent legislative actions based far more on what is known and understood about the demonstrated majority intents of the governed populace, and far less on the narrow interpretations of self-interest that are the motivations of many of the Republicans serving in the current House of Representatives.  These people, very simply, are afraid that anything less than intransigent opposition to President Obama's policies will spell doom for them in their next primary election.

Okay, I can understand that people want to win and not lose; that's just human nature.  But Mr. Boehner--and others in leadership positions within the Republican Party--owe it to America to lead  their team in a way that supports the democratic majority intent of the American people.  That's what leaders are supposed to do -- they are supposed to lead, even if that means setting a strategy that is not entirely in concert with the narrower interests of some of the people on the team.

Speaker Boehner, you are not leading.

Instead, you are forcing us to accept threats of a government shutdown by these narrowly-interested people if they don't get their way.  This is petulance, not governance.  Is this the best that the GOP has to offer the country?

It certainly isn't what the country deserves.

But don't listen to me on this.  Listen, instead, to the first Republican President of the United States.  Abraham Lincoln as President devoted himself to sustaining the integrity of the nation; consistent government was part of the deal for him.  You can't have a nation without a functioning government, and Mr. Lincoln bought into that concept lock, stock and barrel.

Would Mr. Lincoln, summoned from the grave and exposed to almost 150 years of changes, growth and progress, be a fan of Obamacare?  It's not for me to put words in another man's mouth, but I think that he would at least be open to the idea.  As I said a few moments ago, don't listen to me, listen to Mr. Lincoln instead:  "With malice toward none; with charity for all. . ."  That's from the closing to his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865.  Less well-known, perhaps, than his Gettysburg Address, but no less powerful.

Would Mr. Lincoln think that shutting down the government is the best that the Republican Party has to offer today?

I doubt it.  I think he would be saddened.

Syria -- war and virtue

All of mankind's great and large nations--and many of its lesser and smaller ones--have been warlike.  An unfortunate statement to make, but nonetheless true.

Even though as individuals we are mostly peaceful, war and conflict seem to be solidly ingrained into our national behaviors.  For example, take a look at one of the noblest words in the English language -- virtue.  That's a word that conveys meanings of high morals and purely clean ethics.  The word's origin, however, is from the Latin language of the ancient Romans.  For them, "virtue" meant "manliness" and "valor," and those attributes came only from fighting in battles with Rome's opponents.  To be a virtuous person required behaviors, actions and personal commitments that could come only from participation in war.

The Romans neither originated nor concluded this behavior; they notably institutionalized it, and provided it with enough meaning that after twenty-five hundred years it resists any preparations made for its retirement.

With this background--and with certain other facts, too, that will be explained later--we ask ourselves now:  Do we make war on Syria?  If so, can it be virtuous?

President Obama and his administration--with unusual support from both Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership--believe that the time has come to militarily punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war.

I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good idea.

In fact, I'm having difficulty finding any good ideas regarding Syria right now.  It looks like all of the options for action are seriously flawed, and it's been that way right from the beginning of this thing.  It doesn't seem likely that the passage of time will ever reveal any truly good ideas for actions that would yield a positive outcome.

Even if eventually the best decision turns out to be to take no action at all--tempting for its simplicity, and perhaps inevitable due to popular will--that does not mean that "best" is the same thing as "good."  It may be that it becomes the best decision only because it is the least bad decision.

Syria's civil war 

Map of Syria from the CIA World Factbook

Civil wars are always nasty and savage affairs.  It's usually best for outsiders to stay away and let the locals settle things on their own.  Outsiders who take sides in these things usually do so because they have something to gain, or to lose, from the war's outcome.  Even if they have no involved self-interest--rare, but not impossible--others will be unconvinced of motivation based on alturism.

Syria's civil war is living up to the nasty and savage image of these conflicts, perhaps worsened by the fact that both sides have had some outside help.  Neither side, of course, wants the other one to gain any more external support.  Oddly, then, the country's president--Bashar al-Assad--and his assorted military cronies have apparently taken recent actions--in using chemical weapons against their foes--that seem calculated to draw in even more outside involvement in support of their opponents.

These actions are odd--they are tragic and shameful, but also curious--because they produce very little immediate advantage, and yet the long-term result is to bring opprobrium to the perpetrator, and sympathy and support to the victims.  Since warfare use of chemical weapons is specifically banned by the rest of the world's nations outside of Syria, this use of these weapons is an open invitation to incursion for legal enforcement.  Assad and the people in his regime are not stupid; they know these things as well as we do.

Cynic alert:  here's your opening

The cynics among us will want to observe that the Assad cabal is pretty sure that they can get away with this stuff because there's nobody around who wants to do the enforcing.

That might be accurate.  Mr. Obama clearly wants to inflict punishment for the legal transgression, but the proposed punishment--lobbing a few cruise missiles at the offenders--does not equate to enforcement.  He also wants Congress to have a say in this, and the European Union insists on waiting for the report out of the United Nations on-site investigators.  These things require time, perhaps as much as a few weeks.  After our misadventures over the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq, American public opinion has become almost isolationist; there might be enough of such feelings to cause Congress to vote against any military strike.  And there's no way to predict the results of the UN investigation.

The option that is most easily chosen, of course, is to do nothing.  Nothing, that is, in the military sense.  In the short run, America would therefore be making no direct contribution to increasing the brutishness of this conflict.  And that's an important thing, not only for the innocents who are caught in the cross-fire, but also because it has always been difficult to find the "good guys" in this war, the implication being that the good guys deserve assistance to help them win, and the bad guys deserve to lose.  But, if we cannot truly identify the good guys, then how do we know whom to help?
 

The future isn't what it used to be

But what of the long term?  The long-term consequences of inaction are unknown to those who do not act; inaction does nothing to shape the future.  On the other hand, Assad's odd behavior is probably an immediate action that he intends to use to shape the future.

Consider the possibility, though, that enough has already been exposed to the world so that "nothing" is really "something."  Assad, who once enjoyed relatively high and shiny esteem among the world's autocrats, is now covered in a thick layer of tarnish.  It's doubtful that he can ever again be polished up.  Maybe he doesn't care about that because of the way in which he intends to shape the future.  It's worth thinking about.

Assad actually has friends (sort of)

What about Assad's patrons, Iran and Russia?

I think Iran might end up being a wild card in this game.  Iran has enjoyed its alliance with Syria, but for the Islamic Republic's leaders have a lot of other moving pieces on the table--Iraq, Lebanon, Hezbollah, nuclear power--that might provide them with enough replacement value so that they wouldn't feel all that badly about losing the Assad regime.  Iranian leadership is contentious, conflicted and confused; typically, it is opaque, apparently even to those who make up the leadership.  Iran is a wait-and-see player for now.

Russia is different; it's always different, isn't it?  Russia has spent centuries stewing over the geographical fact that its southern naval forces in the Black Sea are so easily restricted from entering the Mediterranean.   Syria, since 1971, has fixed that problem by providing Russia with a strategic naval base at its seaport of Tartus.  Perhaps the passage of four decades' worth of time has diminished the value of that asset, but still it represents a tangible expression of the projection of Russian influence and power; why would Russia--especially under the self-absorbed, xenophobically-nationalistic and consistently vain leadership of the occasionally-shirtless Vladimir Putin--want to lose it?  So, Russia is committed to Assad for as long as Russia feels that an anti-Assad victory would threaten its use of Tartus.  Which means that Russia will use its Security Council veto to prevent any UN-sanctioned action against Syria.

Read here for the conclusion (especially if you skipped everything else); you can always go back to learn the why of it

This story will go on.  In the meantime, here's a surprising observation:  Giving credit where credit is due, let's acknowledge that Assad is currently in the cat-bird seat because he is a national leader who is actively doing something to shape the future.

We don't know what it is that he is doing, only that it has to do with his inexplicable use of chemical weapons.

If we think that Assad's past and current behaviors in his country's civil war are morally corrupt--and I do think so--then we ought to be morally-concerned about his vision for the future.

Message to Democratic Party and Republican Party -- you're both committing too many errors

It's late August, we're getting close to the Major League Baseball playoffs to see who gets into the World Series, and the LA Dodgers have amazingly gone from worst to first.  With that kind of record I can't call the Dodgers "bums."  But if you want to know more about baseball and the Dodgers, you'll have to go look somewhere else, because the only bums I'm thinking about right now are American politicians.  This time, it's a thoroughly bipartisan thing, too. 

Some people think that America would be better-off without its traditional system of political parties, or at least better-off without the two dominant parties--Republican and Democratic.  Oddly, both parties seem to be hard at work helping to make the case for those who argue that the country would have better government without them.

You probably received mailers from both Democratic and Republican organizations during the run-up to last year's election, and my guess is that most of them ended up in the trash pretty quickly.  Earlier this year, in the aftermath of the 2012 election, both parties started sending out a different sort of mailer; one from each party is on my desk in front of me right now.  Each mailer--according to the way it presents itself--is intended to collect voter opinions to help set the party's course in preparation for the next election.  For the Democrats, it's a "survey;" to the Republicans, it's an "assessment."  Different terminologies, but they mean the same thing.

Each party survey, of course, is intended to convey the message that these are folks who are working for the best interests of the country.  Consequently, they want to understand--so they say--how people feel about the major issues.  Since these things cost a lot of money, I have to assume that they are serious about this.  In which case, I have to tell you that they are both flawed and need fixing.

It's all about what's missing.  The same thing is missing from both assessments.  You would think that after more than twenty years of continually hearing a small piece of trite wisdom, both parties would know by heart, that, yes, in fact, it really is all about "the economy, stupid!"  That simple statement is as true today as it was in 1992 when it was first uttered by a key strategist in Bill Clinton's successful campaign for the presidency.

So, perhaps each party would want to ask voters how they might want to go about having an improved economy in 2013 and beyond?  Well, don't look for this in these two voter surveys; it's not happening there.  It's really not happening anywhere else, either.

Almost unbelievably, both assessments glaringly omit any substantive query about opinions on how to improve America's economic environment.  It's not that these things are really short on space, either; each one asks approximately two dozen questions.  At least one of them could have been something exquisitely-focused on the simply-stated question of "how does the country go about getting more people employed, and how does it go about getting more people employed in better-paying jobs?"

Nope.  Not there.  And yes, I have re-read each survey just to be sure I didn't miss it.

The Democratic survey tantalizes by having an entire section titled "Part II: Economic Recovery."  It contains three questions, so at first it seems promising.  But the most direct question of that group is "Do you think the President's economic recovery plan will continue to expand the U.S. economy?"

Now, that's just an odd pitch in a hardball game.  No matter how you hit it back, it's going to go foul.  I'm a big fan of President Obama--no surprise there--but even I have to admit that his economic recovery plan cannot "continue" to do anything much more than has already been done because the part that was enacted during his first term has done pretty much all that it can do, and there's no chance that the next part will make it through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

Why not simply ask how people feel about getting some more Federal funding out into the economy for things that are directly linked to job creation?  That's what the party poobahs are really thinking about.  Or, maybe a question about different things that might be done to motivate big U.S. companies to put some of their trillion-dollar stash of cash to work by hiring more employees?  These might be riskier fast-ball types of questions, but at least they aren't the screwballs that the survey is throwing out.

As for the Republican survey, it contains just a single question on the subject:  "Do you think President Obama's government-centric economic policies have slowed job growth?"  Come on, guys, we already know that's what you believe.  Isn't it time to come up with the logical second half of that question, which would be something like "Here are our top ten new economic ideas, tell us how you would rank them in priority order?"

I don't think that either party is in danger of immediate demise because of a single flawed assessment document mailed out to selected groups of people.  What's more worrisome is that their general public pronouncements have, in both cases, tended to mute any kind of constructive conversation on "the economy, stupid!"  There are plenty of other strategic issues and initiatives that are worthy of debate--I would highlight foreign policy, immigration reform, education, the environment, healthcare (beyond the implementation of Obamacare in 2014), taxation reform and long-range Federal budget planning--but none of these, and none of the others that might be added by somebody else, can be adequately addressed without a healthy, growing American economy.

I believe that the two-party system of American politics has given us a better form of government than any other political system.  It ought to continue to do so.  But, at the moment, watching the two parties fritter away time on lost opportunities for economic development is like watching a baseball game where there's nothing but errors on the field.

Municipal bankruptcy

A judge is yet to to decide whether or not the city of Detroit can take advantage of Chapter 9 bankruptcy.  The overseer appointed by the state of Michigan's governor--not the city's elected government--has filed for municipal bankruptcy on behalf of Detroit.  Filing does not mean that bankruptcy has actually happened; it's up to a court to determine if the city is actually insolvent and--if that is so--grant the status of bankruptcy.  If that happens--I imagine it will--then the hardest work begins.  Eventually there will be clarity on the consequences of bankruptcy for the city's 700,000 or so residents, as well as for its thousands of city employees and retirees, and also for its various creditors.

This is going to be very complicated.

Detroit looms large in the American consciousness because of its civic leadership of the automobile industry from the beginning of the 20th Century until the early 1970s.  What do you think of on hearing car model names like Impala, Thunderbird, Mustang, Roadrunner, Imperial, Charger, Roadmaster, De Ville, Continental?  If you're like me, you conjure up images of sleekness and style from the '50s and the '60s.  People who lived in Detroit during its glory years have told me of its beauty, comfort, culture and dynamism.  There's only one Motor City; Detroit worked hard to earn that name.

Out of respect for such a remarkable heritage that is now being overshadowed by the unfortunate specter of bankruptcy, I think that Detroit deserves a select few observations in this space to help place current and future events into context.

Municipal bankruptcies take lots of time and are very expensive.  Stockton, here in California, filed for Chapter 9 in June 2012, and has only recently been granted that status and begun to work through the resulting processes to determine who gets paid how much.  Jefferson County in Alabama appears to be on a plan that will complete its bankruptcy late this year, which would represent about two years' worth of those proceedings.  If approved--as seems likely--Jefferson County's case will set a major precedent for municipal bondholders since they will be losing a portion of their invested principle.  All such bankruptcy cases, of course, cost the municipalities in question large sums of money; for the three mentioned here, those amounts come to millions of dollars each in legal fees and court costs.

Public employee pension obligations are only a part of the fiscal story.  How much do Detroit's retirees receive in pension payments?  According to an analysis presented by a blog in the Washington Post, most of the city's retirees receive about $1600 per month.  That's not going to make for a lavish retired lifestyle, and it doesn't seem likely that reductions to such pension amounts provide much opportunity for balancing the city's books.  Furthermore, in some states--California being one of them; I don't know about Michigan--public employee pensions substitute for Social Security payments.  In other words, those retirees receive only their pension payments, and they do not receive Social Security benefits.  Even so, there will be much said and written about retirement benefits, because for Detroit unfunded pension liabilities and unfunded retiree healthcare obligations seem to represent about half of the city's currently-known debt.

Detroit's decline is the result of more than just official monkeying-around with the numbers.  There's plenty of juicy news about how the people running Detroit and Stockton--and, for that matter, American municipalities in general--have engaged in fiscal games that I call "fun with numbers."  Of lesser renown, but probably to become more obvious to us all during the next few months and years, is the fact that having fun with numbers has been part of normal municipal governance for decades.  My guess is that we will come to realize that not only is this compelling evidence that American politics can be a bipartisan undertaking (dark humor intended) but that it has even been sanctioned by third-party independent guidance, such as actuarial and accounting "best practices."  Wherever these best practices have contributed to the current problems, they will have to be changed before the bankruptcy proceedings will produce a truly stable fiscal environment for the long term.  And that's not meant for only Detroit, either; it's for general use throughout municipalities with unfunded future liabilities. 

A successful bankruptcy outcome requires solutions that address more than just the fiscal number problems.  It's worth recognizing that a root cause of these fiscal problems is that Detroit didn't keep up with the times.  The rest of the world--that is to say, Detroit's marketplace--changed a lot faster than Detroit itself was able to change.  The Big Three auto makers--General Motors, Ford and Chrysler--lost their leadership positions sometime in the early 1970s; we all know that story well.  But the fact is that jobs, and therefore residents, started leaving Detroit in the early 1950s.  Revenues to the city declined faster than did the need to provide municipal services over a sprawling territory.  Loss of manufacturing jobs is part of the story, of course, but not all of it.  After all, there's still plenty of affluence out in those suburbs, much of which is the result of outward migration from within Detroit's city limits. Somewhere along the way during those years, the city's leadership either missed opportunities to invest in whatever new things came along with the changing times, or--and here's the really scary thought--perhaps they failed to recognize that the times were changing so much, and the city was so firmly rooted in the past, that the only hope for the future would have been some kind of radical municipal devolution.  It seems to me that Detroit--and probably many other older cities--need more than just resurgent numerical rigor to assure themselves of viability.

If you want a real economist's assessment of Detroit, then check out the essay by Joseph Stiglitz entitled  "The Wrong Lesson From Detroit's Bankruptcy."

His conclusion is that we need some type of national policy that will pump investment money for education, job training and infrastructure into our cities so as to help prevent future additional municipal bankruptcies.

Seems like a good idea, even if the devil is in the details.  At the very least, it's an idea that's worthy of consideration, and if there are any potentially better ideas out there then perhaps they will be prompted to come forth for similar consideration.

At the very least, let's not have Detroit and Stockton and others like them find that their fiscal problems are papered-over with a new type of fun-with-numbers game.  I think that would end up as a plan for obsolescence, with no plan for future growth.

And, if we treat the current crop of municipal bankruptcies in that way--with no plan for long-term growth--then I think the odds are that we will end up treating a whole bunch of new ones in the same way over the next few years.

That would be a mistake.

Coming soon to a computer near you -- Obamacare 2013

It's been a while since we've talked about Obamacare -- formally known as "Public Law 111 - 148 - Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act"  and oftentimes shortened to ACA.  Click on that link to download your very own copy.  I did.

It's hard to believe that over a year has passed since the last big excitement on this; that would be the Supreme Court's decision that was released in June 2012.  Since that time anything newsworthy on this subject has been mostly regarding the drudgery of creating the various on-line insurance exchanges that are scheduled to be active on October 1 of this year.  Not much excitement in writing about another Internet-based business, is there?

Not to let boredom reign, the various spokespeople of the Republican Party--in what we are probably expected to assume is a burst of alturistic public service--have lately been exclaiming that the date of 10/01/2013 is really the current End-of-the-World Scenario; the End will come as a result of the efforts to implement these public insurance exchanges.

Last year's "End scenario" was the Mayan Prophecies.  That turned out to be wrong -- we're still here. Do you think the odds are pretty high that this year's end-of-the-world prophecy will also turn out in the same way?  Yes, I think so, too.

The New York Times wrote about some of this in an excellent article on July 23.  I offered some other thoughts, which were accepted as a comment to the article.  Here's my comment as it appears on nytimes.com:

My oh my, what short memories we have! It wasn't all that long ago that most of us--Dems and Reps and Declines-to-States, conservatives and liberals and middle-of-the-roaders--were moaning about the high-and-getting-higher costs of healthcare, and the unfair discriminatory behavior of insurance companies that would arrogantly and arbitrarily use their absolute power to whimsically deny coverage; and finally saying "why doesn't somebody do something about this?" Rightfully so, too, as America's healthcare costs have for many years been on a trajectory to consume almost 1/5 of the nation's economic activity, while the benefits of premeditated healthcare were being denied to a growing segment of the population.

And so, since the fee-for-service, private sector model of healthcare--which we have been using for more than a century, unencumbered with government leadership--continued to sate its voracious appetite for our hard-earned dollars, somebody came along and actually did something about the problem. We defined the problem as something that was growing in an environment that had little or no national leadership, and therefore we now have a solution that involves national leadership.

Obamacare is certainly not perfect. It's a complex solution to a complex problem. Anything that's complex has lots of moving parts, and moving parts must be maintained and replaced over time; future replacements allow opportunities for improvements.

Well, you can say only so much within a 1500-character limitation; in my case, that's barely enough space to introduce myself.  If they had allowed me as much space as I wanted--and if I thought that anybody would take the time to read as much as I wanted to write--then I would have added a few other thoughts, including these:

• Features of Obamacare that most people like -- you have a pre-existing condition?  No problem now with the ACA; but it used to be a big problem if you wanted to change insurance carriers or if you were a first-time purchaser of insurance.  No charge ("co-pay") now for preventative care; that's new.  The Medicare "doughnut hole" for prescription drug coverage is finally being closed.  No more lifetime limits on how much care an individual can receive.  There's more, but that's enough for now. 
• Length -- at 906 pages the text of the law is substantially long, but how does that compare to other things that we might read?  Looking at the bookshelf, here's a copy of Executive Orders, by Tom Clancy; it's 874 pages, so that's similar.  How about Years of Upheaval, by Henry Kissinger?  That's 1283 pages, including the Index and a few pages of pictures.  James Clavell's Whirlwind is composed of 1147 pages.  And, considering that these laws get printed up with wide margins and large font size, the word count is much less than in these books.  Yeah, I know what you're thinking:  A Tom Clancy novel has lots more entertainment value than a law does.  But, on the other hand, what with all the TV (think Fox News) and Internet chatter about death panels and so on, it seems to me that Obamacare has provided a great deal of entertainment to a lot of people over the last few years.
• Speaking of death panels -- one of the reasons I have my very own copy of this law is because of all that chatter about death panels, coverage for undocumented immigrants and other nefarious things that the ACA was supposedly written to include.  You've probably seen at least one analysis of the law that was done by some so-called "expert" and which provided a page-by-page enumeration of its supposedly faulty provisions.  So, I looked at the text of the law, using the page and section numbers that were so convincingly provided in one such analysis.  What did I find?  Let's just say that as analytical experts, those folks might make pretty good writers of stories about zombies and vampires.
• What's with all the voting to repeal the law? -- At last count, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has voted 40 times to repeal or "defund" Obamacare; and yet, the law still stands!  What a waste of time and money.  That's right, the same people who preach about the virtues of fiscal restraint and austerity are the ones who are responsible for these 40 votes.  You didn't think that these things are done automatically and without cost, did you?  For each vote, Congressional staff are engaged, procedures and processes are followed, paper is printed on, bits and bytes are energized, and wheels turn.  This involves lots of time and money, and the end product is always the same, and always non-productive.  It makes a person think of that Albert Einstein comment about how insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  With that thought, go and come to your own conclusions on these continual voting events.

The insurance exchanges go on-line October 1.  HeathCare.gov is a great resource; anybody can use it regardless of whether a person already has insurance, or not; and, it includes guidance for businesses.  Also there is a state-by-state pull-down menu that links to those states that are doing their own marketplaces, such as California, Colorado, Hawaii, Minnesota, New York and others.

Everybody's entitled to their own opinions, and some of those opinions are going to continue to be something like "I don't like Obamacare."  Okay, I get it, that's not a problem for me.  Frankly, my opinion is "I like it until something better comes along."  In time, there will be something better.  It's notable that in all the votes taken by the House Republicans to repeal the ACA, none of them has included any proposed replacement that would retain the features described above that people say they like to have in their healthcare plans.  Without that kind of thoughtfulness, these elected Representatives who have cast their 40 votes have convincingly proven that they are all about show and not about substance.

In the meantime, the state and federal insurance marketplaces are being built.  They will contain a great deal of substance, and I think we can reasonably expect that they will be open for business as planned on October 1.  Will it all go perfectly?  My guess would be "no."  But, just like any business, you try for perfection as something new is being built, and when it's rolled-out you make it "good enough" to get the job done, and go on to make it better over time.