Here is yet another reason why there is a special place In Hell for politicians. Imagine this.
Rep. Smith (not her real name) sees overcrowded prisons and that the cost to keep someone incarcerated is more than the cost of attending Stanford. After some digging, Rep. Smith comes up with a plan – to put low-risk offenders, like drug abusers, in halfway houses, where treatment is available, and a path to rehabilitation gives them a fighting chance to become productive taxpaying citizens.
And she calculates the savings a being potentially huge! With the money NOT spent on prisons, she could help shore up schools, fix roads, add more police, and help the ailing economy.
But then, a party colleague takes Ms. Smith aside and whispers “Best not do anything that would make you look soft on crime.” WHAT?!?!?
More and more government entities are shifting to the four day work week to cut costs. Cities like El Paso and states like Utah and California are experimenting with the concept. And initial findings are promising; the financial savings are real, especially in the cost for energy.
Even automaker GM is exploring the idea of adopting the practice of a four day work week. But what if there was a widespread adoption of the four day work week? What would be the effect on our economy? Our society? The environment?
Here are some ideas to think about.
As Congress continues to debate the future of health care and as the President makes yet another compromise to motivate legislators to produce a bill he can sign, no one in the real word really knows what health care proposals are under consideration and which ones are off the table.
Meanwhile, every, and any, lobbyist who has the slightest financial, political, or religious stake in this history-shaping legislation is pulling out all the stops to make sure the new health care system is shaped in their image. Some have adopted a fear mongering “scorched Earth” approach, hoping that the average American will be so confused that they will demand nothing be done. But (using a double negative to make a point) we cannot allow “nothing to be done” because America already pays more for health care than any other nation in the developed world.
This article is not going to recount the nightmares associated with the current system if you can call it a “system.” You can go anywhere else for that. Rather, here are honest to gosh solutions. With health care, we go forward, and here’s how we do it.
The 1987 Stock Bubble. The 2000 Tech Bubble. The 2006 Mortgage Bubble. Each of these bubbles drove the economy through a manic cycle of growth to a point of irrational exuberance (quoting Alan Greenspan) only to suffer a bi-polar swing of stock market crash, job losses, and industry devaluation, along with shattered consumer confidence. The Stimulus Bubble, as some are calling it, may produce similar results.
But there is one bubble no one is paying attention to – no one except for Jenny Anderson of the New York Times. If we are to extrapolate from Ms. Anderson’s recent report, the next economic bubble is… Life Insurance!
The subprime mortgage implosion was just the beginning.
Well qualified ARM borrowers will see their loans reset soon which will make the subprime borrowers’ default rates look like child’s play. Even though recent declining mortgage interest rates have helped ARM borrowers stay afloat, the current mortgage interest rates will not last forever and will only postponing the inevitable. The next spike in foreclosures will be ARM loans, the domino affect will take housing values with it.
But that’s not even half the picture.
On a recent Memorial Day weekend, Home Depot was giving away a free compact flourescent lamp (CFL) to each customer who ventured into the store. It was a nationwide campaign that bought Home Depot a lot of environmental credibility and gave consumers of the traditional incandescent bulbs their first exposure to a “greener alternative.” Tens of millions of CFL bulbs were distributed that weekend and it was an publicity coupe for the chain whose slogan is ”you can do it and we can help.”
But if a thinking consumer sat down and actually analysed the factual consequences of Home Depot’s “greening of America” initiative, (doing the math as it were) one could only conclude that, in reality, this program was the “poisoning of America.”
Students in the US educational system listen to music and watch video on their iPhones. They read news and keep in touch using Twitter and texting. Meanwhile, hardcopy newsprint is rapidly disappearing, television is no longer subject to time slotting, and devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader are driving readers away from bookstores. Yet schoolage children lug outdated, heavy, hardbound books back and forth to school each day, books that are seriously outdated, easily vandalized, and increasingly irrelevent. America’s schools need to abandon hardcopy books, now!
Let’s get a few things clear.
Marriage is not a right. It is not a license to have sex, nor is it means to receive benefits or social recognition.
Marriage shapes the rights and obligations of bearing children. It is an institution that provides a legal, moral and biological structure to benefit offspring. Children have the right to be cared for by the two people who brought him or her into the world, whether the birth was unexpected or planned.
No pun intended but this is a game changer.
OnLive is harnessing the power of cloud computing to give its subscribers gaming on demand. The game doesn’t reside you the subscriber’s PC. Instead, the game is installed on a super high end PC located at a remote datacenter, and only the audio-video feed is streamed to the player, and the data from the player’s controls are streamed back to the datacenter.
It’s tragic really. Millions of lost jobs. Foreclosed houses at record levels resulting in plummeting home values. Our auto industry on the verge of implosion along with 7 million related jobs. IRA and 401k values shrinking and forcing employees to work longer to retire. State and local governments teetering on bankruptcy. It’s bleak and there’s a lot of pain.
But as with any pain, there are valuable lessons for all of us and hopefully we are wise enough to learn. As our economy resets, here are eighteen good consequences that will come as a result.