I'm stunned by all the outrage. We've got three choices.

1. Take over AIG (and any other person we're loaning TARP money to). Of course we don't want to do this, not so much for the fears of nationalizing the businesses but for the politics of owning a company that provides services to Americans. Imagine, cutting jobs or restricting policies and then going in front of a Congressional subcommittee to explain why. Not to mention all the bad decisions that would get made in the name of "fairness".

2. Pull the investment. Think of AIG as like South Africa back in the day. If you don't like the fact that they are paying bonuses, pull your investment (or call the loans). Sure this will cause them to collapse and the government will be the proximate cause of all that pain but it's the second legitimate option.

3. Stop complaining. If you aren't willing to do either of the first two then stop complaining. We invested in a company that pays bonuses. There's no particular reason to expect them to stop, any more than we would expect them to stop investing in the investments that earn the highest return. That's what they do.

I guess there's a fourth option which is making a lot of noise with no effect. In the end, this one doesn't do anything other than provide fodder for bloggers, but that is a bit fun I'll admit as long as you don't take it too seriously.

Been thinking lately about the state of our political discourse and I think it comes down to a simple clash of values.  In one corner is freedom, the idea that the individual should be free to choose his or her actions as long as it does no harm to others.  In the other corner is fairness, the notion that outcomes should have a certain distribution that is equitable to all people participating.  In today's world, fairness is winning and that ought to frighten all of us.

Why do I say fairness is winning?  The tax debate is the first plank.  Hats off to Robert Reich and a few other "progressives" for giving voice to what most actually feel.  Many conservatives continue to argue that because the "rich" however you define it have paid more of the overall tax burden over time, they should not have to pay even more.  It's a pretty convincing argument, if you accept that the goal of taxation is to pay for the government.  However, many progressives, including Reich, don't accept that goal.  Rather, they argue that the goal of taxation is to redistribute wealth.  The issue with the wealthy is not that they don't pay too much in taxes but rather that they have too much wealth and the outcome produced by the market is not fair.  Even though it is the result of free association, it is not fair so it needs to be changed.

The second argument often deployed by those in favor of fairness is that ordinary people don't have the ability to make good decisions and therefore need to be saved from themselves.  Why are seatbelts mandatory?  Why are airbags?  Why does my shower have to have a low flow device inserted into it (unless of course I removed it)?  These are all examples of someone making a decision about what the "right" or "fair" decision is and enforcing it on me in the name of them knowing better or of fairness.  All of this is an erosion of our freedoms.

One very substantial problem with fairness of course is that it is impossible to define.  Try asking a "progressive" what amount of the total tax burden should be borne by the top 10% of wage earners.  Few will answer specifically and even fewer have anything that purports to be an argument as to why that specific number is correct.  Lots of philosophers, maybe the most famous of whom was John Rawls have tried to develop approaches to determine fair outcomes.  Most make interesting reading but are completely impossible to do except as thought experiments. 

Despite this, fairness is increasingly running our lives.  Every kid gets a soccer trophy because it would be a shame to make a kid who participated feel badly about his participation.  Both of my kids play sports.  When they play well, I tell them.  When the mess up, I tell them that too.  I don't congratulate them for trying.  The world does not award A's for effort.  A's are for achievement and our society of fairness simply does not recognize this.

Make no mistake, the trial of our lives is about the fight between fairness and freedom.  Freedom has slept quietly for a long time.  It needs a wakeup call.

Of late I’ve been reading a number of people who were outraged about the fact that the members of Congress did not read the recent Stimulus bill before voting on it.  Acting on that fact, I decided to pull the bill up myself and maybe spend a few hours reading through it to try to get a general sense of what was in there.

 

Fat Chance!

So I got the first half of the bill up (the part that apparently deals with the spending in the bill and a few other associated matters).  It runs 496 pages according to my current version of Adobe Reader (I suspect this is accurate as I did go all the way to the end at one point).  The good news started right up front.  The first few pages really didn’t say anything except for a table of contents (without page references of course so what good is it) and a bunch of statements about what the purpose of the bill was that included gems like “To assist those most impacted by the recession” and “To stabilize State and local government budgets, in order to minimize and avoid reductions in essential services and counterproductive state and local tax increases.”  After all why should state and local governments increase taxes (counterproductively) when the Federal government can borrow the money and give it to them.

Then of course there was the obligatory languages that indicated that all of this was an emergency and the rules that Congress had set out previously requiring spending increases or tax reductions to be offset didn’t apply.  So far so good and I was already up to page 5.  Things did slow down quite a bit after that however.  I wound up going through an entire list of places where we were going to spend money, complete with lots and lots of zeros.  The first out of the gate was “For an additional amount for ‘Agricultural Buildings and Facilities and Rental Payments’, $24,000,000 for necessary construction, repair, and improvement activities.”  Not sure what that means but I can’t argue it’s a great place to put $24,000,000. 

After that, I must admit it’s all a bit of a blur.  A few things were kind of funny.  There was a nice round $1,000,000,000 ‘Periodic Censuses and Programs’.  In my life, things never quite total up that way but in government accounting, it’s probably not worth worrying about the accounting error of a couple million dollars since it all evens out in the end.  Of course, oddly enough, that was in Title II talking about “Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies”.  Since the Census now reports to the Chief of Staff, I wonder why the money was there.  It probably doesn’t matter.  Your billion is my billion as they must say in Washington.  By that way, that part was all the way to page 36.

Then there was the nice bit about settop converter boxes, another $650 million.  Of course of that amount $90,000,000 “may be for education and outreach, including grants to organizations for programs to educate vulnerable populations, including senior citizens, minority communities, people with disabilities, low-income individuals, and people living in rural communities about the transition and to provide one-on-one assistance to vulnerable populations, including help with converter box installation:”.  Now I don’t know about you, but I’m guessing if they had called up Best Buy, they could have had the Geek Squad guys handle the whole thing for a mere $500,000,000 or maybe even a bit less.  Are you kidding me, vulnerable populations about cable TV conversion?  $90 million dollars?!?

Then there was the cool part (on page 42) where they gave NASA another billion (another round number there) but helpfully split it into $400,000,000 for ‘Science’, $150,000,000 for ‘Aeronautics’, $400,000,000 for ‘Exploration’, and $50,000,000 for ‘Cross Agency Support’.  There was literally no other detail other than those words.  I’m sure the time that was spent creating that breakdown was well worth it.  I mean why give NASA a billion dollars when you can split it into 4 things that add up to a billion instead.

I must admit that after that I got a bit bored.  I did stumble across the part that says the Secretary of HHS can have people pay for your electronic health records for any reason that he or she deems consistent with the ones that were specifically outlined in the bill.  That made me feel a lot more comfortable.  That was actually rather near the end (I don’t want to go back and look for the page as I was just messing around at that point).

The long and the short of all of this is to say three things.

1.  I didn’t read the bill.  Nobody could read and understand the bill unless they had a whole lot of time of their hands.  2 days probably wouldn’t do it, assuming you worked 8 hour days and had any chance of understanding what you read.

2.  I did read enough of the bill to label it completely stupid, not so much on the basis of the individual items I referenced above (although most of them are pretty stupid), but on the basis that no single person could know or process the amount of information that’s in here and vote in a rational way on it.  You could give most people 2 weeks and they couldn’t do it.  As a result, any member of Congress who says, “Well, there were clearly things I didn’t like but, on balance, I thought it was a good bill” must be lying, at least about the second part.  You simply cannot comprehend such a massive thing at the level necessary to make that kind of a judgment.

3.  Our government it broken well beyond what I appreciated.  Everyone really should read bits and pieces of this bill, not to pass judgment on the specifics but to understand the cavalier way in which people are spending millions and billions of dollars with no rhyme or reason.

That is the true tragedy of the stimulus bill and why I didn’t (and couldn’t) read it.