Vermont Tiger

Important Event

 

 

The Future of Health Care

in Vermont

 

Featured Speakers

Sally Pipes

Author of Miracle Cure: How to Solve America's Health-Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn't the Answer, The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide,  & The Truth About Obamacare.  Ms. Pipes op-eds and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, Financial Times of London, and many other periodicals.

Joel Allumbaugh

Director, Center for Health Reform Initiatives
The Maine Heritage Policy Center
CEO, National Worksite Benefit Group

Panel Discussions on Financing & Stakeholders

Panelists: Darren Allen, VT NEA; Wendy Wilton, Rutland City treasurer; Representative Cynthia Browning, Vermont Legislature; Melbourne Boynton, M.D.; Dan McCauliffe, M.D.; Bob Gaydos, Digital Benefit Advisors; William Brownlee, businessman (panel in formation).
 
Moderators: Anson Tebbetts, News Director, WCAX; Stewart Ledbetter, senior reporter, WPTZ

Tuesday, November 8, 2011
8:30 a.m Registration
9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Hilton Burlington Hotel
Battery Street
 Burlington, Vermont

Register by October 20, 2011
$95 per person (includes lunch)
$60 legislator rate

After October 20, 2011
$125 per person

 to register online, click here

to register by mail, click here for address & to download form

If Albert Einstein Might Have Gotten It Wrong ...

then what about Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, et al?

by Tom Evslin

"No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything."
    Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York, writing in the Wall Street Journal about the slim but real possibility that a recent experiment at CERN has caught neutrinos moving faster than Einstein's famous theory of relativity says they are able to.

What about the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warning? What would happen to Dr. Kaku's career if he were writing about the possibility of that being upset despite the current "consensus" of experts? Bill Clinton recently said "If you're an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial [of anthropogenic global warming]." Context makes it clear that Clinton considers skepticism to be denial; it's not! Well, as Kaku said, there's a difference between politics and science.

See below for an account of another experiment at CERN which may be more threatening to the theory of anthropogenic warming than the neutrino experiment is to Einstein's speed limit.

This Just In

Shovel-ready jobs take time
    Politico Headline

Thanks to Tom Evslin, who went where others dared not go, many of us already knew that.

 

I Have Been Over Into The Future ...

and it is warm

Shumlin made a connection between Irene’s destruction and the failure to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. Wearing jeans and a tattersal shirt, the governor poked his fingers into the air to punctuate his warning that Irene is “an example of what lies ahead for us.” Vermont, he declared, faces a “future that’s going to see more storms, more water delivered to us in extreme forms, in great doses, as the scientists have been telling us for over two generations.”
    Seven Days

Mr. Shumlin is no recent convert to the church of global warming.  As was pointed out someplace, he has been saying things like that for at least five years now:

Any reasonable scientist will tell you that we're going to rise anywhere between another two and three degrees in the next 30 years. That means that New Jersey's climate is moving to Vermont in the next decade. That has tremendous implications in our economy's ski, maple-sugar making, leaf-peeping and the list goes on and on. So we are — I at least am — looking at this with a major sense of panic.
But resort owners and business people don't like to talk about climate change.And with good reason: tourism brings $1.3 billion to the state annually. Start telling people that Vermont's getting warmer and who's gonna come to visit?  
    (Then) Senator Peter Shumlin, 4/18/07

But  in spite of the desertification of the Green Mountains, there is still skiing in Vermont.   

The Vermont Ski Areas Association announced at its annual meeting at Sugarbush Resort that Vermont's ski resorts recorded 4,365,906 visits for the 2010-11 season, marking the best year since 2004-05 and maintaining Vermont’s ranking as the third-largest ski state in the country, behind only Colorado and California.
In what was the third snowiest season on record, Vermont ski resorts noted that they saw a substantial rebound in snowfall and consumer confidence over previous years.
    Vermont Business News

Well, as Yogi Berra may have said:  "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." 

And as "any reasonable scientist" would probably tell you, when it comes to the matter of climate change, local weather events mean nothing.

Good politics, though.

Ms, Warren's Speech

by Geoffrey Norman           

Every so often, somebody in politics will deliver a speech that becomes iconic and establishes the speaker’s identity forever.  Ronald Reagan was just an over-the-hill B-movie actor and corporate spokesman before his 1964 speech making the case for electing Barry Goldwater.  The speech didn’t do much for Goldwater’s political fortunes but it made Reagan.             

Before July 27, 2004, most Americans had never heard of Barack Obama who was a mere obscure candidate for the U.S. Senate.  Then, he gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.  That speech was, essentially, his sole qualification when he ran for President, something Hillary Clinton found exceedingly annoying.  But it worked for him.

Now comes Elizabeth Warren.  She is a professor at Harvard Law who served in the Obama administration as an advisor specializing in consumer financial protection.  She recently announced that she would be running as a Democrat against Senator Scott Brown, the Republican who now occupies what people in Massachusetts still think of as “the Kennedy seat.”

In a recent speech, Ms. Warren made the case for an American form of collectivism:          

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. 

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

The speech has, as they say, “gone viral.”  Justifiably.  Everything about it is pitch perfect to the ear of the contemporary American left including – and perhaps especially – the patronizing little touches such as, “Good for you.”Ms. Warren sounds like a dowager mother saying to a son who comes home after scoring the winning touchdown in a football game, “That’s nice, dear.  Now go wash up for dinner and don’t be late.”

"Electric Cars" - Still Shorted to Ground (cont.)

By Daniel Foty

There's a quote from the wonderful Thomas Sowell that I often use in my lectures:

Nothing is easier… than setting some arbitrary goal – preferably based on numbers – and [then going] after it, in utter disregard of the costs or the repercussions.

That observation has wide applicability - and it's certainly dead-on with regard to the continuing disembodied fantasies involving "electric cars"....

[L]ast year, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero launched a 600-million euro subsidy plan to promote the sector, and the Industry Ministry predicted that by the end of this year, more than 20,000 electric and plug-in hybrid cars would be registered in Spain. By end-2012, this number was supposed to reach 50,000.

However, between January and August of this year, only 213 electric cars were registered.

When there is that much of gap between a "plan" and reality (in this case, actual deployments being about 1% of "the plan" - and with the further caveat that similar "sales figures" elsewhere in the world have always involved sales that were either mandated or created via self-dealing), you know that something is seriously (and fundamentally) amiss.  What might that be?

While it is too early to pronounce the electric car as a failure, it is becoming clear that initial expectations were unrealistic.

No kidding.

More Around The Web

By Daniel Foty

(Truncated this week due to more work overload, more travel, construction, and a nasty "souvenir" headcold brought back from Africa.)

1.  Another great moment in "free" (i.e., collectivized) "health care."  And another.  That last has a disturbing embedded factoid that should bother everyone:

However the NHS’s rationing body in England and Wales....

Hmm.  I thought that supply was going to be unlimited!

2. Here's something that actually makes a great deal of sense:

The question facing a lot of people, and I don’t mean Republicans, independents, swing voters, but the question facing a lot of Democrats is whether they can afford a second term of Barack Obama. If your retirement savings get clobbered, and if your home is unsellable and is underwater, you haven’t got anything left. You’re literally in the position where whether you can survive Hope and Change becomes a very pressing question.

Or perhaps more succinctly,

Maybe if you're a "public service" worker or a tenured professor at Berkeley or a green-jobs racketeer or a New York Times columnist married to an heiress, you can afford Obama. But if you're not, look at your home, look at your savings, and figure out what'll be left after another four years of "stimulus."

3. Whither "Europe"?

When the history of the rise and fall of postwar Western Europe is someday written, it will come in three volumes. Title them "Hard Facts," "Convenient Fictions" and—the volume still being written—"Fraud."

And is there any sign of reality penetrating the eurosocialist fantasy worlds (both in Europe and elsewhere)?  Not yet:

It seems that the European political class still thinks that an assertion of its mystical belief can alter reality: that what it insists is so, will be so. If its idea of itself and its design for the future are in conflict with the facts of economics or life as it is actually lived, then it is those facts that will give way. (A German Christian Democrat politician once said to me, “The single currency will work because we will make it work.”)

4. Is Russia's deep original heritage as a Viking state still predominant?

5. My work took me to Zambia the week before last - and as we were leaving, election monitors were coming in to keep track of the Presidential election this past Tuesday.  In that election, the incumbent lost, and has conceded defeat to his now-designated successor.  This is finally becoming the norm in Africa - and the main benefit of political stability is economic growth.  Sub-Saharan Africa is now the region of the world that offers the best growth prospects; that's why some of us find ourselves there so regularly....

Around the web

by Art Woolf

My weekly look at interesting sites, economic and otherwise, on the web.

1.  Daniel Yergin has a new book out on oil.  Last weekend he had an interesting piece on peak oil in the Wall Street Journal (I'm not sure how long it will be outside the WSJ's pay wall). 

As proof for peak oil, its advocates argue that the discovery rate for new oil fields is declining. But this obscures a crucial point: Most of the world's supply is the result not of discoveries but of additions and extensions in existing field...

Estimates for the total global stock of oil keep growing. The world has produced about one trillion barrels of oil since the start of the industry in the 19th century. Currently, it is thought that there are at least five trillion barrels of petroleum resources in the ground, of which 1.4 trillion are deemed technically and economically accessible enough to count as reserves (proved and probable).

James Hamilton, a macroeconomist at UCSD who specializes in energy, takes issue with Yergin:

I submit that meeting the growing global demand for crude oil over the last five years has posed significant challenges for the world economy. And those who worry that the next 5-10 years might be like the last should not be dismissed as crackpots.

Both pieces are well worth reading.

 2.  With all the discussion about whether Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, it's worth reading the Social Security system's official historian's take on Ponzi--how a Ponzi scheme works and whether Social Security fits the model (not surprisingly, his answer is no).

In a section titled The Start Up Problem in Pension Programs, Vermont's own Ida May Fuller is highlighted:

The first recipient of monthly Social Security payments was Ida May Fuller.   Miss Fuller worked for about three years under the new Social Security program and paid $24.75 in payroll taxes. Her first Social Security check in January 1940 was for $22.54--she almost got her money back in her very first payment. Miss Fuller lived to be 100 years old and collected more than $22,000 in benefits.

In a lighter vein, Tim Harford channels Mr. Ponzi.

3.  Economics and the universe.  A comic strip.

Take a Hike

Do you really think your lousy five hundred million dollars buys you the right to ask us a lot of questions?

Congressional Disasters

by Art Woolf

All eyes, or at least 1.25 million Vermont eyes, have been on Congress to see whether it will vote for additional disaster relief aid, some of which will go to Vermont.  Our lone House member, Peter Welch, was one of only six House Democrats to vote for the bill, which was defeated, a couple of days ago.  It is highly likely that some form of the bill, and disaster assistance for Vermont, will eventually be passed by the Congress and signed by the President. 

On the face of it, it would seem that disaster assistance is a no-brainer.  But an academic study of disaster relief (summarized in a NY Times article here) shows that, like just about everything else Congress does, it is highly politicized.   Consider:

• There are more flood disasters in election years than in non election years.
• In 1996, an election year, President Clinton declared a record number of major disasters.
• In 2004, another election year, President Bush declared the second highest number  of major disasters.
• Once a disaster is declared, states having Congressional represenatives on one of the nine subcommittees that oversee FEMA tend to get more federal disaster relief than states without representation on those committees.
• Battleground states tend to have more disasters declared.

 And it goes without saying that some disasters are predictable.  Does anyone doubt that the Gulf Coast or South Atlantic seaboard will get hit with a category 5 hurricane sometime in the next decade or two?  And that it will lead to billions of dollars of damages, a lot which will not be covered by insurance.  And that the federal government (that is, the rest of us) will bail out homeowners (and the state of Florida's undercapitalized state flood insurance program). 

If those disasters are predictable, that's exactly what private insurance is for.  But the more the federal government takes on the role of insurance provider, the less likely people are to buy their own insurance.