Ouch!

I've been a lazy guy lately, and it's started to show. And with the holidays coming up, it's only going to get worse unless I force myself to do something about it.

So today at noon I headed over to the Y and started a new workout program: Stronglifts 5x5.It's hard to believe that a 40 minute workout with no weights on the bar could leave me feeling this much pain. Pain isn't really the right word... it's not the "Something is very wrong, call 911" kind of pain. Just the aches that result from working every muscle group to the point where it can't do another rep.

I just hope the results are comensurate with the soreness.

Where were you when wood became a felony?

This is what happens when congress passes legistlation that is so bloated and complex, we mere mortals are unable to comprehend all of it. The Farm Bill passed in 2008 contains provisions that make possession of wood a felony. Henceforth, all wood is to be a federally regulated, suspect substance. Either raw wood, lumber, or anything made of wood, from tables and chairs, to flooring, siding, particle board, to handles on knives, baskets, chopsticks, or even toothpicks has to have a label naming the genus and species of the tree that it came from and the country of origin. Incorrect labeling becomes a federal felony, and the law does not just apply to wood newly entering the country, but any wood that is in interstate commerce within the country.

And the Federal Government hasn't wasted any time in using this law to protect us from unlicensed wood:

Gibson Guitar Plant Raided by Feds

An international crackdown on the use of endangered woods from the world's rain forests to make musical instruments bubbled over to Music City on Tuesday with a federal raid on Gibson Guitar's manufacturing plant, but no arrests.

Agents of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service made a midday appearance and served a search warrant on company officials at Gibson's Massman Drive manufacturing plant, where it makes acoustic and electric guitars.

Gibson issued a statement saying it is "fully cooperating with agents of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as it pertains to an issue with harvested wood." The company said it did nothing wrong.

363,000 Words

That's how long the latest version of the health care bill is.

That's 80 times longer than the Constitution (not counting amendments).

That's twice as long as the Bible.

Can anyone know everything that is in there? Can anyone possibly have read the whole thing? I think we can agree that the answer to those two questions is "no." It's just not possible for any single person to have read every word in that document at this time.

Given that we don't know what's in it, is it really a good idea to make it the law of the land? Would you sign a 363,000 word contract without reading it?

President Obama is not Evil

Dick Cheney is not evil, either.

THIS is evil.

What's wrong with this picture?

Taken during Veteran's day ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers:

Perverse Incentives

The unintended consequence of America's anti-poverty program is to penalize poor people for working. When you take into account the loss of means-tested benefits (e.g., cash assistance, food stamps, housing subsidies, and health insurance), and the taxes that people pay on earned income, the return to working is essentially zero for those in the lower two quintiles of the income distribution.

This chart (Source) shows income after taxes and transfers as a function of earned income. Below about $38,000, income after taxes and transfers is roughly flat. Indeed, it could even fall. The bottom line: If you are poor, the government is ensuring that you have little incentive to try to improve your condition.

Obamacare: Unintended Consequences

According to Martin Feldstein, the healthcare bill just passed will have the unintended effects of increasing the cost of insurance, and decreasing the number of insured.

Why?

One of the key features of the bill prevents insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. This is a well-intentioned feature, but it provides a strong incentive for a healthy person to drop insurance coverage. After all, they can easily obtain coverage if they become seriously ill. As healthy people drop coverage, the insured population becomes sicker and sicker, requiring higher premiums to cover the cost. The higher premiums encourage even more people to drop coverage, leaving an even sicker insured population, requiring even higher premiums... until premiums spiral out of control and only people with cancer have insurance.

In an attempt to prevent this death spiral, the bill requires companies to provide insurance, and requires individuals to obtain insurance. But the consequences of not complying are insignificant, compared to the costs of complying.

For example (my example, not Feldstein's), an employer who doesn't provide insurance must pay a tax equal to 8% of payroll. But my employer currently spends 12% of my salary on insurance. It would be much less expensive for him to drop my coverage and pay the tax. He could even give me a substantial raise and still come out ahead.

Feldstein does the math for families and individuals without employer-provided coverage, and shows that they come out substantially ahead by paying the tax instead of buying insurance. And there's no risk, since they can always purchase coverage if they become ill.

Rational consumers will respond to these incentives in the predictable way, leading to ever-increasing costs and more uninsured.

James Madison on the health care bill

Obviously, James Madison never wrote about the health care bill. But given that the current bill is 1,990 pages long and few of the representatives voting on it have actually read it, he seems remarkably prescient:

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they can not be read, or so incoherent that they can not be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow."

From The Federalist Papers

Cheaper health care without higher taxes

The problem with the government trying to "fix" healthcare is that it's the government that broke it in the first place. And they are trying to fix it by doing more of what they did to break it.

It's true that many Americans can't find affordable health insurance. But it's largely because of government-imposed barriers that keep the cost of insurance so high.

Here are a few ways we can provide lower-cost insurance without raising taxes:

1) Allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines. According to the University of Minnesota, 12 million more Americans would be able to buy coverage if this simple solution was enacted. Excessive state regulations artificially increase the cost of health insurance by requiring companies to provide coverage for such things as fertility treatments and massage therapy. Let's allow people to shop for the coverage they really need!

2) Let people take the cash their employer uses to purchase health care and shop for a plan on their own. Currently, employer-provided health insurance is not taxed. But if you opt out of your employer-provided coverage and shop for your own, you pay for it with after-tax dollars. If people could shop for the best deals, insurance companies would be forced to innovate and control costs (or lose market share to companies that do).

Those two ideas are just a start. They wouldn't cost a dime and would allow lower costs for those who have health insurance, and would allow more people to afford insurance.

Surviving the end of the world

The movie 2012 is opening Friday. According to the film's website, it's "an epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors."

Am I the only one who sees a glaring problem with that sentence?

I mean, if there are survivors, it's not exactly the end of the world, is it?

I love a good post-apocalyptic story. I even enjoyed The Postman, although the book was better than the movie. (I mean, Tom Petty as the mayor of the city in the treetops? What were they thinking?) But I think I'll skip this one. If the promo materials are that bad, how good can the movie be? And that goes double for any movie with Woody Harrelson in it.

Dads make us human

Robin Nixon, writing in LiveScience, says fathers are the key to making us human.

Some 95 percent of male mammals have little to no interaction with their children. Homo sapiens are one of the most notable exceptions, leading some scientists to think fatherhood is an important part of what makes us human.

Most theories for the family involvement of fathers invoke the familiar "Man the Hunter" characterization, in which dad protects and provides for his young.

While fathers do play key roles in securing the physical health of their children, they also can be important for the optimum development of psychological and emotional traits considered to be primarily human, such as empathy, emotional control and the ability to navigate complex social relationships.

Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

Jason Richwine points out a peer-reviewed study that indicates they are.

Lazar Stankov, a visiting professor at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, published “Conservatism and Cognitive Ability” earlier this year in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence. Here is a quote from the article’s abstract:

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated … At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, vocabulary, and analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education … and performance on mathematics and reading assessments.

But there are a couple of caveats worth noting: First, by “conservatism” Stankov does not necessarily mean people who favor free market economics. He has in mind a kind of traditionalism probably best described as social conservatism. The second caveat is that social conservatives do not always vote for conservative candidates. Most black Americans, for example, clearly exhibit “the Conservative syndrome” as Stankov defined it—70 percent voted to abolish gay marriage in California—but they routinely give about 90 percent of their votes to the Democratic Party.

The Obama Effect

From Gallup:

"Among blacks, optimism about an eventual solution to race-relations problems has decreased since last summer, from 50% to 42%. In fact, the current 42% is essentially the same percentage that Gallup measured among blacks on several previous occasions."