Quick bit of research indicates this was a male broad-headed skink. Apparently this is the same fellow I sought to identify the other day, except now he’s got a big red head. I gather this is a springtime thing.

I didn’t take photos, but the first photo below is what I just saw and the second photo is more like what he looked like a short while ago.

Update: Now he’s back and he’s found a mate. They are getting busy as I type this. She is much smaller and her head is not so red. Here’s a picture. They lounged about in the sun afterwards for quite a while before wandering off. Part of the time, they were snuggled up against one another.

The piece is about supposedly outrageous efforts by the GOP to implement new laws covering small business. The net effect, The Times believes, is to give the wealthy yet more tax breaks.

Whatever the merits of taxing or not taxing the wealthy more, they lose me immediately in the first paragraph with this line that the effect of the laws will be to ‘…starve the government of needed revenue…’. This is like denouncing calls for the fattest man on the planet to eat just 9 hamburgers instead of 10 today. 

Among other wrong-headed ideas, the piece appears to be animated by an underlying belief that the Federal government has to be much, much larger to accomplish what needs to be done. I don’t buy that at all.

Update: My friend Veronica read the piece and wrote back about another outrageous assertion they offer:

“Did I really read this????

 

“The best way to encourage [small business] success is with continued government spending to support demand”

 

OMG!!!”

They write (boldfacing added):

Never mind that reams of Congressional testimony, market analysis and academic research have shown that regulation has not been an impediment to raising capital. In fact, too little regulation has been at the root of all recent bubbles and bursts — the dot-com crash, Enron, the mortgage meltdown. Those free-for-alls created jobs and then imploded, causing mass joblessness.

To me, ‘too little’ is simply wrong.

It would be more fair to say ‘ineffective regulation’ where ‘ineffective’ means that the regulations were not well designed or did not work as intended or did not cover the specific circumstances that developed on the ground. Some might argue that some / many regulations on the books actually contributed to or served as catalysts for the dysfunction that emerged. For example, anti-discriminatory lending regulations seemed to offer a major boost to subprime lending.

Or it might be fair to say ‘poorly executed regulated’ as in that the regulations on the books were not properly or well interpreted and implemented on the ground in real time by the regulators. For example, as when Fannie and Freddie became major enablers of the surge in subprime lending.

Or even more likely, it was some of each.

But an actual shortage of regulations, I don’t think that construct offers us much insight and is, in fact, deleterious to effective interpretation and response.

And this bad idea is just one of several bad ideas contained in this short editorial. 

This issue has been highlighted in today’s news stories and it turns out the issue is well studied. Not surprisingly, there is data to illustrate the situation.

According to data published by the Institute for Energy Research, production on Federal lands has declined significantly over the past decade, including a 10%+ decline in 2011. IER is a conservative group and it’s data will, no doubt, be dismissed out of hand by the left. As I often do, I looked for alternative sources with a leftward bent, but none are to be found.

Source: Institute for Energy Research

Source: Institute for Energy Research

Source: Kaufman Foundation

Here is another chart with data updated through 2011. The chart below is tech IPOs only – that’s why the figures are systematically lower than the Kauffman chart above which includes all IPOs.

Today, there was more coverage of this issue in the Wall Street Journal – Restarting the U.S. Capital Machine. Written by a Democrat, no less. A fellow named Jack Markell, the Governor of Delaware. No doubt he will be ridiculed by his compatriots, but what he discussing is awfully important.

He notes several stats:

• US IPOs have declined from 360 annually in the 1990s to 100 or less per annum now
• Companies listed on US stock exchanges has fallen from 8,800 to under 5,000 today
• The US share of global IPOs has dropped from 48% in the late 1990s to under 10% today

He argues, quite rightly I believe, that this has a huge deleterious effect on job creation in the US. He cites a study by Grant Thornton that estimates we’ve lost 10 million jobs as a result of the IPO decline.

That’s because a large percentage of new job creation historically comes from the kind of high growth companies that go public. He notes that something like 92% of a company’s employment growth occurs after an IPO. That means we are losing all the jobs that might otherwise have occurred had we not lost our position in the global IPO marketplace.

There is also a lost cumulative effect from this – we’re voluntarily taking ourselves out of the ‘virtuous cycle’ that leads to ever greater innovations and wealth. I’m talking about the sort of dynamic that leads to places like Silicon Valley and, to a lesser extent, Boston. Even here in the US, it is very hard to create self-propelled economic centers like this. If you think of the entire US as a country-level Silicon Valley compared to the rest of the world, but we are willfully allowing that to be eroded.

It is the type of dynamic that has helped southeast Asia become the dominant hub for global manufacturing. They have built up a formidable and interconnected web of companies that can’t be easily replicated and that delivers long-term strategic advantage to the region. This was was well described in the New York Times not long ago when they wrote about Apple’s use of Foxconn for manufacturing.

Not surprisingly, he attributes this sharp falloff to some obvious problems which he thinks need to be fixed.

• Excessive regulation of the capital markets, particularly Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd Frank laws
• Unfavorable corporate tax laws compared to other countries

It also points out to me another example of where Democrats (largely) in their never ending quest to protect regular folks from the greed of corporate evil doers, often in the long run produce the opposite effect – they dampen overall growth and productivity for everyone. Another example is the inevitable increase in consumer banking fees that we’ll all be paying soon enough. I guess we are all safer and perhaps better informed for these efforts, but we are also all irreparably poorer. But apparently communal poverty is not too high a price to pay to ensure the wealthy are kept in check (and that, by the way, isn’t even really happening…).

David Brooks, New York Times

David Brooks is one of my favorite commentators. So often he gets things right – at least in my opinion.

Again today, he’s written something that resonates – The Possum Republicans.

He offers some perspective on why the Republican party behaves as it is doing. While everyone on the right profess to want to defeat President Obama, day-to-day behavior seems determined to ensure that does not happen.

I can’t begin to do his writing justice, so I will offer a few telling quotes:

Republicans on the extreme ferociously attack their fellow party members… Republicans on the extreme are willing to lose elections in order to promote their principles. Those in the mainstream are quick to fudge their principles if it will help them get a short-term win…

In the 1960s and ’70s, the fight was between conservatives and moderates. Conservatives trounced the moderates and have driven them from the party. These days the fight is between the protesters and the professionals…

Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity.

I like that last bit – ‘heresy trials’. Sure feels that way.

I also think the party orthodoxy is not flexible or creative enough to address the size and depth of the problems the country faces (same being true for the Democrats). It feels like we’d be better off with the GOP in charge, but I’m not sure we’d actually be doing as well as we could or need to.

It would take a person with tremendous powers of persuasion (and intellect) to move us collectively towards the nuanced and sometimes complicated positions that are probably in our long term best interest – and neither Romney or Santorum are demonstrating they have those powers.

One of the reasons I voted for Obama was that I thought he possibly had the potential to do this. Turns out he didn’t – or maybe he did, but he never had any intention of doing so and it was just a ploy to get elected.

Whatever the case, it is clear that the Republican candidates, Romney included, are being forced to take very hard line positions across a number of fronts that a) can’t be good for winning the general election, and b) probably aren’t great solutions anyway.

Case in point lately for me is the issue of environment vs. oil/energy. Seems to me the best position is a nuanced one where we acknowledge high standards of environmental stewardship while pursuing an aggressive pro-growth energy strategy. However, the loudest voices in each party push their leaders towards fairly extreme positions – too much environmental stuff from the left, too little of it from the right. It doesn’t appear that anybody can rise above the doctrinaire to speak in the right proportion for each thing without alienating their ‘base’.

I could be wrong (as I was about Obama), but I think in his heart of hearts, Romney wants to be more centrist, but he is simply not nimble enough verbally (and maybe intellectually) to be able to make the case. I think if he had it in him, we’d have seen glimmers of it by now.

For me, that means that even if he wins the election, instead of balanced, nuanced policy, we are going to get a sharp lurch to the right. Overall, that’s a good thing compared to where we are going now, but, in short order, the party will take it too far and make a huge swath of people on the left extremely angry. Which means they’ll soon lose whatever power they had as they get voted out of office. I guess that’s the pattern we are destined to be in for a while – lurch one direction for a while, then lurch the other direction. Maybe it has always been so.

Maureen Dowd’s column today, Ghastly Outdated Party, captures this dynamic fairly well. Naturally, she goes over the top as is her wont, but unfortunately a lot of what she says strikes me as approximately correct.

The second paragraph would be completely hilarious if it weren’t substantially true.

“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”

The paragraph that captures the essence of her point is this one:

The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it.

Her language is a bit dramatic, but I think it is essentially right.

In watching the debates, time after time, every one of them has taken a hatchet to one of the others for saying something even slightly offkey / nuanced. As this seems to work to kill candidates off, it has forced the remaining people to tow an ever harder line. I imagine if you are even slightly left of center (the people the GOP needs to capture to win), this has to look pretty scary. It often looks scary to me and I’m definitley right of center.

She also writes:

President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals.

This is also definitely true.

Possibly the eventual candidate can tack back to sanity, but if the nomination race carries on for the many more months as it seems likely to do, he won’t have much time – and the bridges may all be burnt by then in any event.

Sadly, this will not only limit chances to unseat Obama, it could have an dampening effect on all Republican candidates – i.e., for House and Senate. That would mean four more years of Obama and possibly a supercharged Obama. That is a truly frightening thought.

I think a lot of people see this, but the dynamic probably can’t be reversed.

In their piece titled A Responsible Budget, the NYT totally buys into the Democratic narrative of how the world works and what the Federal government’s priorities should be. Even as it runs up an unprecedented fourth year in a row with a $1T+ deficit, they do not question a single thing, except to assert that Obama was too soft on defense and could have found more than a measely $5b in cuts.

As is common in liberal analysis (even analysis of budgets), they use very few numbers or charts. In this case, their write-up contains a grand total of 4 numbers (dollar amounts, percentages, dates, etc.) and no charts at all. You’d think that commenting on such a numerically-driven document would require greater use of figures, but why get bogged down with objective reality? The NYT keeps their focus squarely on the liberal plotline.

Not surprisingly, the WSJ has a completely different take in their piece titled The Amazing Obama Budget. Not surprisingly, they don’t like much of anything about it – and offer solid reasons why. I agree with most of them.

Being more rigorous and quantitatively grounded, they use about 38 numbers in their write-up (dollar amounts and percentages) while citing a dozen or more dates as a basis of comparing this current budget with prior ones. They also include two charts with time-series data going back to 2000 (shown below). They use these numbers to explain to their readers what the budget actually does — what an old-fashioned idea.

I find this difference in the use of numbers striking. I see it over and over again when comparing commentary from left and right. My conclusion: Democrats are drawn to abstract narrative like moths to light and they think that numbers are for a**holes. Republicans are drawn to more rigorous analysis and believe numbers are crucial to comprehension.

This difference is one of the main reasons Republicans and Democrats cannot communicate easily, let alone formulate ‘compromises’. It’s like the idea behind the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ book: the two sides are speaking a different language borne of differences in perception and belief.

I think one big difference there was that a clearer economic argument was made to justify the shift – it was understood by most everyone, including business people, that a tremendous amount of money from private insurance plans was already being funneled off to pay for uninsured residents.

A second big difference was that the focus was on covering the relatively small percentage of the population that was not covered – I seem to recall it was 8% uncovered. Since MA had fairly extremely high coverage rates already, this seemed fairly achievable.

A related third point is that little was said about the coverage offered by private insurers to the 92% of people who had existing coverage. Maybe there are some basic rules about what should be in private policies, but I don’t believe there was any significant mandating of coverage requirements – that’s not something I saw or read about. The more I learn about ObamaCare, the more I see that it will dramatically reshape private policies – hence the controversy now roiling the Catholic Church. I don’t recall anything like that happening in MA about contraception or anything else.

Another big factor is that the MA constitution allows for the state to mandate costs to its residents and the state had already implemented such mandates before. For example, for as long as I can remember everyone with a car has had to carry auto insurance. This meant that creating an additional obligation for health care insurance was not so ground breaking as at the Federal level where it is unprecedented and of questionable legality (we’ll see what the Supreme Court rules on that in the spring).

Of course, it didn’t hurt any that the state is dominated by Democrats.

My own main concern at the time was that the law did not address another key issue: health care costs. At the time and by design, this was put off for a later date. Everyone who was paying attention understood this: coverage now, cost control later.  For myself, I was personally ok with this and I appreciated that it was explicitly discussed and recognized as being both very important and very difficult. The idea of breaking the problem down into component pieces sounded sensible.

One thing I have hugely disliked about ObamaCare is that it conflates coverage and cost. The coverage piece is arguably relatively easy, but the much harder and less well understood part is the cost control. To bind them together on the scale that ObamaCare did, all we could do was say a prayer and hope a cost control solution became apparent.

Then they went even further than this to mandate coverage standards not just for the new people they were going to insure, but for everyone. I did not appreciate the significance of this part until recently as a result of the Catholic Church brouhaha. Now I realize that they intend to reshape all policies – public and private – to meet some set of standards they are defining as they go. To my knowledge, MA law did nothing like this.

At the time when the ObamaCare bill was still in draft form, I read thru the entire thing (or very large parts of it) and was amazed that everywhere it talked about cost control, it was all pure speculation. They clearly had no concrete idea how cost could be controlled – but trust us, we’ll figure it out. Time after time, they’d reference some study that was done somewhere that showed promise about this thing or that thing. But nothing that was actually proven to work and, certainly, nothing done on any scale in real life (like in a state, for instance). It struck me as massively speculative and premature – and we will likely pay for that as time goes by.

But back to MA: Until now, I had been under the impression that the cost control piece was not working out that great – it is a very, very tough problem, much tougher than the coverage problem. I recall huge battles as the Governor, Deval Patrick, tried to impose cost escalation limits in insurer policies (a power he has that few other Governors possess). This created a firestorm as insurers complained they could not cut costs at the same time that the people they have to pay (i.e., the hospitals and other providers) were increasing them. Sounded like a tough situation.

I haven’t heard much about it lately since I left the state, but today I came across a piece from NPR that apparently aired recently (yesterday?) that updates me on cost control and other elements of the program. The article is here: Health Care In Massachusetts: ‘Abject Failure’ Or Work In Progress?

There were a few interesting points.

First, the Mass health law is not called RomneyCare in Massachusetts. It is only used at the national level, mostly by his fellow presidential candidates to discredit Romney. I never actually thought of that before, but it is certainly true. He was one of many involved with it.

Second and more important, I am most interested to learn that the cost control piece appears to be working – and not just because the state has forced prices down by fiat to the detriment of quality of care. Sounds like Patrick capping the insurance rate hikes was a ‘turning point’ that shook up the entire health care system and got everyone, including care providers, to start reworking their business models.

One promising shift has been to move a lot of patients from a fee-for-service model to a per patient model. One insurer calls it ‘global payment’. I recall this idea being discussed at the time (and it is mentioned in ObamaCare, too), but it hadn’t really been tried or proven to work in any large scale system in the USA.

The various steps seem to be working to moderate Massachusetts’ historically high health care inflation rates. “We’ve got some more work to do here,” the governor says, “but average premium increases were almost 17 percent two years ago. They are less than 2 percent right now.”

They also note that there is talk of holding health care expenses to a certain percentage of expenses. This seems to me a good idea, but I know liberals tend to dislike anything that tries to manage costs like you would in a business. For instance, they seem completely opposed to any notion that Federal government spending should be x% of the GDP. Any such measure, even if done in some sort of band to account for year-to-year variations, would hamstring their efforts to endlessly expand government. So I am surprised, but pleased to hear such a sensible idea is taking hold in MA in regards to health care. Maybe we’ll get Democrats nationwide to think in terms of fiscal responsibility one day.

Lastly, it sounds like the law is spawning lots of benefits in terms of quality of care: more people are going to the doctor, there are fewer emergency room visits, etc. This is goodness.

I have also read that the costs of the program have been higher than expected and that has created some problems. The topic isn’t mentioned here, so I assume it is getting sorted, but I’d be interested to more on that.

To me, the most remarkable thing is the time-series data that show how the share of Federal household income from government benefits programs has grown over time, especially recently.

1969: 7.8%

1979: 11.2%

1989: 11.5%

1999: 12.6%

2009: 17.6%

Federal benefits as percent household income by year

They don’t really go into this data too much, but the storyline seems to be that everything was fine beforehand and the recent jump is largely a function of the recession and that it does not relate to any permanent underlying changes in programs or economic structure. Count me as skeptical of that – I highly doubt these income levels will drop back to 12%’ish range that existed in the 1990′s and 2000′s.

They have a great chart which shows the distribution of this federal income by region across the country: The Geography of Government Benefits. The print version of this is much better because it uses different colors to highlight the steep regional variations – the online version is shades of brown.

The second thing that is remarkable about the data they use is how rapidly the beneficiaries of Federal aid programs has shifted from the poor to the middle class. They don’t have these graphics on the web that I can find, but the key learning for me is that benefits going to the poor (defined as the lowest quintile) has plummeted from 54% in 1979 to 36% in 2007. Wow!

Benefits to second lowest quintile are pretty stable at 18% – 22%. Benefits to the top 3 quintiles (top 60%) have all grown significantly – even the top quintile.

At least to my ear, Democrats seem mostly to argue that more and more money must be spent to increase benefits to the poorest among us – that there remain many, many severely disadvantaged folks that need help. This is a worthy goal, but the reality of the spending points to a different outcome – or maybe the claim is shifting: now the idea is that everyone (the 99%) is disadvantaged except the rich. We all need and deserve help.

The third remarkable set of stats concern the percentage of households that receive Federal entitlement benefits.

1998 – 37.7%

2006 – 44.5%

2009 – 48.5%

We keep this pace up for another twenty years and we’re looking at 65% – 70% percent of households receiving Federal money by 2030. No idea how one funds a social structure like that – lots of borrowing, probably.

****

In Washington, the Democrats seem intent on continuing these trends indefinitely – perhaps even to accelerate them. I see no appetite from them to even moderate the cost curve, let alone to reverse it in some way. On occasion, there is lip service about restraint, but no passion whatsoever. They are passionate mostly about two things: more benefits for everyone and taxing the rich. They also care a lot about the environment, ensuring more individual rights, and ensuring we are all safe from corporations.

One thing I don’t understand about their program is that even if we taxed the rich into oblivion, that wouldn’t cover the cost of these programs today, let alone in the future (assuming it didn’t destroy the economy in the process). So even in the best case, the majority of the money to cover entitlements has to be borrowed. This approach might feel good for a while, but I don’t see how it can play out with a happy ending . Unlike Greece, there is nobody out there to bail us out – we are simply too large, even for China.

Republicans are at least trying to shift the dynamic – even as they are called heartless and uncaring by the other side. I give them kudos (and my vote) for that.