warren · j. · dew

I kind of owe an article on how I would cut government health care expenditures in half by improving the efficiency of care. Unfortunately if I write everything I want to write, that article is going to be a long time in coming. So here's a "short" article on why I think a large fraction of all medical expenditures in the U.S. - like about half - are probably waste and could be cut out completely without affecting the quality of care, even with no other improvements in efficiency.

( Read more... )

I came across an interesting tidbit about overeager voter registration drives today. Evidently a community organizer umbrella group turned in 5000 voter registration forms in Gary, Indiana, of which the registrars found that the first 2100 were all fake before putting the rest aside to review potentially legitimate forms from other sources.

This is how the infamous Daley machine kept control of Chicago back in the 1960s, when death didn't terminate your right to vote.

One thing that occurred to me is that the electoral college tends to buffer Presidential elections from this kind of voting fraud. Since there are a lot of states with a bigger population than the popular vote edge in most presidential elections, massive voting fraud, even if local to just one of these states, could tip the popular vote. However, since the electoral vote tends to be a lot more lopsided, fraud in a limited geographical area is less likely to tip the electoral vote.

Made public on 20090509 since the election is over.

Sources:
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/09/acorn.fraud.claims/index.html
More detail but from a less objective source:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/rnc-cnn-exposes-how-acorn/story.aspx?guid=%7BE0F68C91-381A-43E8-9857-D990EFC33B34%7D&dist=hppr

For the first time in the last few years, the house has made a sensible fiscal decision.

I've been wanting to write a longer post on this, but here's the quick version: Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, sees housing crises under his bed. He and Paulson, the treasury secretary, engineer a takeover of FNMA and FHLMC that triggers a bunch of hedge contracts and causes a minor liquidity crisis and a major financial panic. They then use that panic to try to stampede Congress into approving a huge $700 Billion bank "bailout".

This is a perfect recipe for years of double digit inflation, loss of confidence in the dollar, and possibly the first depression since the 1930s.

Fortunately the House has voted against the bill. Hopefully they can hold the line in any revote that's scheduled.

For the first six years of his presidency, Bush managed to avoid vetoing even a single bill.

With the election of a Democrat majority in both houses of congress, he's started issuing vetoes. Congress has had a hard time trying to override them.

So last week, one of his vetoes was finally overridden. What hot button issue was it on? A bill that is almost entirely pork barrel water projects.

No wonder congress has an even lower approval rating than Bush does.