finknottle

Perhaps if he lobbies to get us both Olympics, the rugby and soccer world cups (men's and womens), and the world series of cricket, the world will open their hearts to America and roll over for us on the world stage. The Czech and Polish base agreements? Scrap 'em, don't want the Russians to get offended. But the Olympics? Who cares if we look heavy-handed, we are talking about Chicago after all!

Let me see if I understand your underlying premise. If something costs more than you want to spend, that is a problem which the nation should address. Scaling back your demands to what you are willing to pay for is not an option. Why?

What, no discussion? Obama finally decides to act like a leader by becoming personnaly engaged, and he decides to go to bat for... holding the Olympics in Chicago! Most pundits when discussing this seem focused on the political risks and payoff (if any) to Obama's prestige. I'm more interested in the implications for Foreign Policy. Consider, for example, Brazil. They are competing for the same games which, till now, were not a bilateral issue. But if the Brazilian people see POTUS actively lobbying for Chicago, it elevates it. It won't be Chicago taking the games from Rio, it will be the US taking them from Brazil. Yet another reason to hate us. How will that help us gain cooperation on such issues as climate change, drug trafficing, and Venezuela?

I should point out that it is legal to drive in VA without insurance. You pay the state a flat fee ($500) when you register the vehicle, and you can drive it at your own risk.

I'm waiting for the Democrats to say their protest is motivated by racism against the President.

Making all medical care completely free would be even better. What the heck - guarantee free everything to all citizens!

And you know this how? Or are you using your prejudicial instincts? If I had to guess, with no facts available so far, I'd bet he stumbled on illegal activity and the 'Fed' stuff is simply misdirection. In fact, if you read between the lines the article itself underscores this possibility. Where are the documented attacks on federal employees up? In the National Parks - it's not an outpouring of revolutionary ferver, it's good old fashioned crime. http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2004/2004-09-01-02.asp

How dare you say that about a Founding Father! Everything he said, intended to say, or would have said had he known anything about an issue shall be taken as the Law which Governs this Country throughout Eternity, whether it be about net neutrality, patentability of gene sequences, or if internet access constitutes a basic human right.

You might as well ask "gambling - is the state lotto becoming an insane idea in the 21st century?" A stupid waste of time and money? Obviously. Will our heads win out any time soon? Nope. There will always be plenty of people throwing their weekly fiver into the basket at the prospect of easy paradise.

The government ordered an investigation into Humana after the insurance provider sent a letter to its subscribers warning that Helath Care Reform legislation may lead to cuts in Humana's Medicaire Advantage program. The story is from Fox, and obviously slanted. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/23...-care-provider/ Unfortunately, the rest of the media no longer reports on things embarrassing to the government until they have too - they ignore them. So there is no reporting of the administrations side, lest there be an aknowledgement of a problem. All I know is that the crux of the story is true, that McConnell made such charges.

I propose that we divide the nation into 300 states of a million people each. Each will require less spending on education and social programs. The state deficit problems will be solved!

Take off your aluminum hat. The people at the IRS are not bogeymen and could care less - a flat tax would make their jobs easier, and it's not as if a government employee has to worry about being let go for lack of work. The blocks opposing this (for reasons other than ideological) are the accountants and the tax industry.

Apples and oranges. Those are not income taxes and comparing what you pay to your overall income is irrelevant. I can just as easily apply your logic to note that the rich pay a much higher percentage of their tax credit income in sales taxes, auto taxes, etc.

I have a hard enough time paying for my own insurance and subsidizing others already. How about dropping the idea that health insurance is a universal right, and levying a new tax on me to pay for it?

Why are the security costs extensive? Are there special security costs associated with posting unclassified data? Or are you suggesting that the government can't do something straight-forward without it costing 10 times as much as a commercial company?

The price is reasonable. But is this the project that is required? What people wanted and what they were promised was a place where they could go to and see how their money was being spent. A glorified news portal, basically, searchable by locality. Why must you have your own servers, IDS, etc? Why isn't hosting by a commercial service enough? Tell me what it is about this application - defined by it's intended purpose, not by the specs - that makes it more challenging than a site like realclearpolitics, which both links political news as well as extensively tabulates polling data? Or are you suggesting that realclearpolitics spends more than $3 million dollars a year on the website itself?

Absolutely true. People do not appreciate the actual cost that comes with 'not wasting your tax dollars.' A paper-clip bought through a fair and transparent bidding process from companies who have desirable ownership demographics, support unions in the workplace and have a dozen other boxes checked, will provide an acceptable infrastructure for monitoring the paper-clip aquisition process to your satisfaction, and stands prepared to alter it's design halfway through the process becomes a very expensive paperclip indeed. I admit that I had not. I based my assessment on what I see functionally at recovery.org, and what is needed for the task: a simple public repository for spending updates. That is what people were hollaring for, not a safe secure website implementing a million federal recommendations... I just skimmed their proposal: complete over-kill. The price is probably right - indeed, the government is pretty good at getting a fair price. Their failing generally lies with building in unreasonable requirements and process. IMO it stands as an ironic commentry on the stimulus package itself. The site intended to show that our money is being spent wisely - paid for with stimulus funding - is a bloated over-engineered ediface costing 20 times what it could.

Management overhead? For running a website??? As to the number of fingers in the pie making specifications, you can't use government inefficiency to excuse government inefficiency. I see very little difference between this site and one you would expect a small manufacturer to have, where maintaining the website is at most a half man job. The only difference is linking to many more news announcements, and the graphic gizmo's (one time work creating them, then you just update the data). The only real work is collecting and passing new data to the web maintainer, and that isn't part of this. Give me specs and I could create, maintain and update this site for 100k + 150k/year and feel pretty good about the deal. Recovery.gov is not a sophisticated site. In complexity it is somewhere between twobillsdrive and realclearpolitics, neither of whom spend a tenth of that amount. The bottom line is that the government is incapable of undertaking the simplest initiatives without it ballooning into a major program.

It is unclear to me that the operation of the webite is included in the contract, but let's assume it is. Let's break it down, separating the web-site from the task of collecting the documentation and generating analytical summaries (which become more documentation handed to the site). 1. What are the manpower resources to create a document repository web-site? 2. What are the annual manpower resources to maintain it? I consider half a man-year each to be way more than enough, even by bloated government standards. Here is the actual website, btw: http://www.recovery.gov/ I don't see anything requiring technical skill except the creation of the interactive maps. And while they are slick, the skills required to create and maintain those are quite common. If anybody here is a professional web-site designer, I'd be interested in their eyeball estimate to create and maintain such a site (assuming they are fed the data).

No, believe them. But you have to understand what they say and what they don't say. And that is where the analytical illiteracy of America is coming home to roost.

I brought this up a few months ago following their testimony to congress. They claimed that the release of the site would take a year longer and require significantly more funding, specifically pointing to their lack of hard drives. I thought that was a comical example of snowing congress with technical babble. But where I erred was in thinking that this was just a way of making excuses for the delay - I didn't realize it was actually about paying a company 18 million dollars to go to Best Buy and buy a drive. Collecting data is one problem. But if you have it and want to create a simple but large online database of text data and statistics, there is no excuse for not being able to do it for under 600k.

No they pay all - it's understood as part of the salary. (These are all mid-career people who wouldn't want the kind of cut-rate package that a small company could arrange. Generally speaking, if getting their own insurance is a problem then they go to the safety of a big company.)

While I'm singing the blues, let me raise another health-related pet peeve. As a small company, I offer cash instead of health insurance. My employees are professionals who would rather get a plan of their choosing anyway... But I ought at least to provide some form of HSA - that makes great sense in this scenario. And in theory, I can. But the problem is that the government say's that I can not administer the plan, I have to go to a designated company for that. Fine. They will charge me a few thousand dollars a year to administer it. That exceeds the tax benefits for only 2-4 people.

Isn't the house plan the link provided? What do you make of page 183 sec 142? It seems to say you pay a tax if you opt out, and the tax is reduced for businesses with a payroll less than 400k.

Suppose my reading is correct, and consider my semi-hypothetical S Corp. We have four engineers doing technical consulting and earning 100k each. And I average 20k corporate profit in addition to being a salaried employee. Happy employees, a small but ok return, a modest American success story, huh? But now I have a new 32k tax. I can't turn around and lower their salaries by 8k - they would quit. But if the company eats it, that means I personally eat it - all 32k of it, every year (remember, it's a pass through, so no profit is no protection). For a company whose profit ranges between -20k and 40k, that is rediculous. So the unintended consequences are as follows: the best bet financially is to let everyone go and simply fold the company. The alternative is to lower payroll by reducing employees - turn it into a low-salary high-dividend one man shop. Is this the dynamic economy we want to encourage?