Who Needs Government Regulation?

Politicians on the left repeat their gospel of government regulation. It is a mantra so often repeated that it’s a rule by which they govern. But all it does is provide power for them to dispense largess and thus control voting blocs.

Regulations destroy small business which cannot cope with them. They therefore appeal to large corporations which detest them, but, unlike small business, have the funds to hire lobbyists who can contend with the government bureaucrats.

Dodd-Frank is a perfect example of legislation which builds an ever-festering self-generating nuclei of ever-growing regulatory bodies, none of which have ever been approved by voters.

The “Green” Deception

The Federal Trade Commission has been looking into charges that many products are not truly “green.”

A whole profession of “green” experts has grown, having been trained by colleges, which are now marketing environmental courses and specialties. All based on the premise that our planet is being savaged by polluters and greedy merchandisers.

The FTC has slowly come to the conclusion that many who are promoting these progressive “solutions” to the perceived environmental problems are, themselves, deceiving the public.

Their “green” products and services may have little to do with improving the planet.

Health Care Misconceptions and ObamaCare

An Institute of Medicine study concludes that about 40% of premature deaths in the U.S. are due to bad behavior. Only about 10% are because of poor medical care.

Social and physical environment contribute about 20% to the premature death figure and genetics 30%. So why take a wrecking ball such as ObamaCare to remedy what can be done easily?

Give people without insurance who cannot afford it free insurance vouchers, and see that everyone gets insurance, even if not currently insurable.

And finally, and most importantly, put a cap on insurance payoffs by having malpractice tort reform.

Further ObamaCare Suggestions

The Obama administration contends that only government can offer insurance for the non-insurable.

Private insurance for all is possible, if the pool is large enough. To do so, states and the federal government must break down the barriers they place on insurance companies.

Permit the sale of health insurance across state lines. To this very day, despite thousands of pages of federal legislation, it isn’t possible. Make private health insurance groups large enough to spread risk.

And immediately legislate tort reform, including mandatory arbitration by special courts to process patient claims. This would eliminate huge legal fees, over and above a reduction in needless tests and doctor malpractice premium charges.

Past Media-Induced Panics

America has always had its share of catastrophic financial panics and urgent business problems. Many were brought on by special concerns and, occasionally, special interests. Follow the money or political trail and you get to see the inception of each.

Some examples: DDT poisoning, generically modified foods, global warming, killer bees, mad cow disease, over-population concerns, ozone holes, toxic tampons, the y2k disaster, and so on.

All of these were or are still problematic or ill-conceived but are media-swept and promoted to produce a frenzy among their proponents.

ObamaCare Tort Reform

Malpractice lawsuits induce defensive medicine that costs a fortune for insurance companies, the doctors and other providers covered and, ultimately you, the public. This is a fact ObamaCare conveniently overlooks.

A Massachusetts Medical Society study found that five out of six doctors order procedures and referrals that amount to about 25% of total medical costs, for the sole purpose of doctor legal protection. According to the Pacific Research Institute, defensive medicine wastes more than $200 billion a year.

Therefore, the entire medical-malpractice system has to be changed. There could be a no-fault system, a pool to reimburse those injured from medical errors or accidents. Judges would be medical experts, not inexpert juries, who are swayed by sharp trial lawyers, seeking one third of the proceeds. The no-fault pool would be funded by a small tax on health-insurance premiums.

The major problem to this simple solution is that over 90% of tort lawyer political contributions go to the Democrat party. This accounts for the fact tort reform is never one of the necessary reforms the consumer gets.

Hollywood’s View of Business Activity

What Hollywood and other fiction contributors have to say about business and finance unfortunately extend beyond entertainment, They have become ingrained education. A substitute for our formal schooling system which has become an expensive taxpayer and family budget farce.

The media’s subtle hype adds to this imposed fictional education; it has accomplished this over the years.

What comes out of Hollywood and fiction is therefore anti-business. It features pro-plaintive lawyers, fighting criminal big business executives, on behalf of “little guys”. The templates may vary slightly but the plots are much the same.

Left-leaning politicians see their opportunity from all this and orate and demagogue and legislate accordingly.

Health Care Swiss-Style vs ObamaCare

The Swiss health care system is worth noting. The American public can use its example to repair parts of our newly imposed ObamaCare coverage.

It’s more efficient and will eventually cost less than what we now have.

Under the Swiss plan, everyone is covered by private insurance. There is no government-managed or employer-provided coverage. The poor are assisted in buying the insurance they cannot afford.

Employees under a U.S. plan could receive in cash, tax free, what their employers currently spend on premiums, provided they used the money for insurance on health care. The poor, including past Medicaid recipients, would get government vouchers to buy insurance. There would be no discrimination against anyone on account of existing or past illness.

The plan would not socialize medicine as ObamaCare. True interstate competition among insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors, would bring costs down over time.

Patients could really choose the best and lowest cost providers on the basis of published outcomes. Insurance companies and providers would bid for clients and customers, as to needs and cost.

The government's role would merely be to oversee transparency, The government would create an information system, with regard to insurance companies and providers.

What Controls Retail Gasoline Prices

Gasoline prices are set within OPEC supply controls, which adjust to demand. They also are affected by the value of the U.S. dollar.because they’re priced in dollars.

Gas stations actually have little to do with pricing. Stations earn an average between 10 and 15 cents on a gallon. When prices climb, gas stations see their profit margins shrink in order to remain competitive; they then earn less per gallon.

Their credit card fees are about 2 ½% of all purchases, a significant factor affecting their margins.

Furthermore, gasoline prices go up faster than they go down. That is the way supply and demand normally influence wholesale and retail gas pricing.

Yet gas station operators usually are blamed when high gas prices occur.

Political Climate Change

The Left would prefer that there be restrictions on industry under the premise of climate control, despite apparent scientific doubts and the uncovering of a scientific hoax.

How much has the left’s position to do with actual climate and how much with the in-gathering of taxes, with which to implement other purposes?

The main goal of the Left is always to control government, to accomplish whatever the Left wants to achieve.

But other so-called international polluters won’t agree to do what the U.S. is asking its citizens to do. They say we ought to tighten our pollution belts because of our past industrialization. China and India, are only starting at the industrialization game. They want us to give them some slack.

But the U.S. says China/India are going to pollute hereafter with a vengeance because their populations and industry are growing much faster.

Apparently our left-leaning politicians will eventually concede to Chinese and Indian thinking.

Peace-Time Budget Deficits at War-Time Levels

During World War II, American government spending as a percentage of GDP was about 45%. It is over 20% now, with the Obama administration spending habits. We can, in fact, become another Greece-like world mendicant.

What does this mean for small and large businesses? Especially those who cannot compete with big government competition, in politically-favored industries?

Government spending displaces funds available for the private sector, particularly as interest rates rise. When that occurs, firms seeking funds are less likely to get them. Yet, they are the entities which mainly create worthwhile jobs.

Rampant Inflation

Fundamentals for massive inflation are in place. Enormous budget deficits and heavy government borrowing to meet unprecedented, massive budget deficits, have done that.

But the present recessionary doldrums, despite what the Washington cheerleaders say, will hold the huge inflationary consequences back only for a while. That is, until the economy recovers a bit more.

Despite occasional reassurances from government officials, there will be no way to unwind the debt build-up in an acceptable manner. Therefore, real inflation is inevitable

Unless we make huge budgetary cuts, soon.

Advising Franchise Purchases

It’s amazing to note so many publications offering advice on how to buy franchises. They are done, I feel. for two reasons.

The primary one is to fill space. It’s a winner for getting attention. Lots of folks are interested into entering business for themselves. Give them ideas and make it sound easy, while reducing disadvantages to a minimum, and you have attracted an audience.

But the second reason why these articles appear, is the ignorance factor. They are written by those with poor knowledge of practical franchise experience from a franchisee’s viewpoint.

How many tell you how poorly the average franchisee does? How the average franchisee eventually wants out of his or her contract?

Many cost too much at the outset and each year? And fail to provide the promised management assistance. And, in vast instances, offer little name recognition.

Health Care Ideas to Combat ObamaCare

Ideally the U.S. health care system ought to remain entirely private. No Trojan Horse, shadow public plan of any sort should be in the wings as it is now with ObamaCare.

Changes should still be made with regard to extensive tort reform and arbitration of malpractice claims.

And most importantly, an arrangement, where citizens get to pay for coverage with direct tax-deductible dollars.

If you want some sort of state arrangement of health care for those with no coverage at all, have each state administer its own system. Damages can then be localized. You can have a central data bank for important medical information, but each state should enforce what it wants for its own citizens.

Health Care Cost Constructs

The Obama administration has been intent on making the U. S. like the rest of the world when it comes to health care.

Germany leads in universal care. As of 2008, 52% of its employee costs went to government for social services and health care. France was right behind at 49% and Italy at 47%.

The reason why foreign governments are able to operate within strict health budgets is rationing. Such rationing of services keeps costs within the government-construct levels. And the number of doctors supplied for that demand.

Plaintiff Lawyers Against All Investment Opinion

Lawyers have to eat. Many want to become billionaires the easy way. A pathway they can all use, is to sue any financial adviser who can make an honest mistake when it comes to advice. That is not allowed in the financial industry according to plaintiff lawyers.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has just ruled to uphold a lower court’s dismissal of a case against credit agencies who had given securities opinions.

That will set back, at least for a while, the ability of such lawyers who have or want to become quick billionaires the easy way.

The Wisdom of Higher Minimum Wages?

Increasing the minimum wage when jobs are scarce is so stupid, it is almost an annual campaign for liberal politicians to unwrap as a new idea.

Gauge how wise such a politician is. Because research shows minimum wage increases always cost jobs of entry level workers. It is criminal to impose higher minimums during a recession. That stymies the possibility of stimulating any increase in job opportunities.

Yet, those at lower levels generally leave for higher wages or get raises with time. It’s usually not the same worker remaining at that level. A fact proponents conveniently overlook. The vast majority of folks do not remain at that level forever.

Moreover, minimum wage increases cost jobs. Employers must think twice in estimating the value and affordability of their workers. Especially small businesses who are responsible for the bulk of American employment.

The minimum wage is a ploy of powerful unions whose contracts are then automatically revised up from minimum wage levels.

All Federal Guarantees Ought to be Budgeted

This is not a new thought; it’s been around but the media never puts legs on it.

Marvin Phaup, a research scholar at George Washington University who examines federal budgeting, is the one who is pushing the concept, which I feel is valid.

As an expert on government guarantees, he feels that government bailout costs ought to be measured and should appear in the budget. We ought to budget for possible losses on the tremendous amounts we guarantee.

Mr. Phaup was the researcher at the Congressional Budget Office in 1996 who made the initial effort to assign a value to the implied federal guarantee backing Fannie and Freddie.

Had we done this we would have been far better prepared to meet the resolution of the financial meltdown. And to realize the extent of the risk we were taking with the mortgage markets.

Entrepreneurs More Often Than Not Lose Out

Highly creative entrepreneurs often build a business from scratch and do extremely well quickly, expand rapidly, only to see their business suddenly fail.

There are generally three major reasons for such failure.

Many entrepreneurs are poor planners from the start. They often lack an efficient business plan, to guide them in their financial start-up planning.

Plus, they lack sufficient funds. Because of poor planning many entrepreneurs are in the dark about the amount of capital they will need.

And many entrepreneurs are incapable of managing a rapidly expanding business, or getting an adept manager who can.

Childbirth Insurance

A distinction should be made when buying insurance, for the need for catastrophic insurance; that is, coverage for a probable event, as opposed to catastrophic, potential events. You buy insurance should you have an automobile accident and not for the purchase of gasoline.

In the same way, you buy health insurance in case you suffer an illness worse than a common cold. If you get married and intend to have several kids, you are not courting serious sickness. You are anticipating having need just for that. It’s not anticipating an accident or getting chronically ill. Unless childbirth evolves into a medical emergency.

Routine childbirth costs can be reduced under competitive insurance bidding, apart from other insurance coverage, at much lower prices than they are today, without government interference.

Should there be means of separating these two kinds of coverage.

Inaccurate Unemployment Measures

Unemployment numbers can be very misleading. They can be adjusted after publication because of errors and short-term occurrences. And other considerations must be part of the analysis.

Such as job creation. Look at that alongside the unemployment figure.

Other factors must always be considered as well: The length of time folks are unemployed. The number of those taking unpaid leave from existing jobs. People who have given up looking for work. Those who may have taken early retirement. The possible diminishing size of the average work week.

All of these affect what we note as unemployment figures.

Forecasters are Usually Wrong

Surveys show that forecasts of the future economy made about 25 years ago were usually proven wrong almost without exception. So why do we accept opinions of all the purveyors of future prognostication? Good point.

One prediction ought to be a sure thing for the future of America. Inflation, brought on by unprecedented budget deficits. Deficits that csnnot produce a viable economy, especially if politicians look to taxation as a means of reducing them.

Deficits have never been reduced by taxation before.

Privatized Social Security

The question of privatizing Social Security will never be resolved if the financial and general media gets away with mishandling the subject.

There are facts which never get through the leftist rhetoric the media helps expound.

Point One: It has been tried in other countries and in some states and it works.

Folks get to own their own investments in a genuine lockbox. Come hell or hot water, the funds belong to them or their heirs.

Point Two: The subject should have little to do with the vagaries or the volatility of the stock market.

An option for all is ownership in U.S. bonds, which can be tied to the inflation rate, for those who don’t like to buy stocks.

The Coming Doctor Shortage

ObamaCare seeks a clinic environment to save costs. That will supposedly reduce the need to overcome the oncoming severe shortage of primary care doctors. Patients will be seeing more nurses when they visit those clinics, being referred to actual doctors only when in dire need.

Physicians are expected to be imported, as they will not be in ample supply from our schools. They will come from countries where education is cheaper and prospective doctors are willing to work for less.

I cannot vouch for their educational credentials as a means of ramping up their supply.

There will be affirmative action for more minority doctors in this country. A lowering of certification standards is already underway in the U.S., according to some specialists, to get more doctors into practice, despite official denials to the contrary.

Nuclear Power Practicality

It’s expensive to build a nuclear power plant, but atomic power is cheaper to produce once the plant is built. And the taxpayers do not have to constantly subsidize operations as they do alternative “green” energy sources, such as wind and solar power.

And It took a tsunami PLUS an earthquake to cause the century-rare earthquake damage that occurred in Japan. This can be easily avoided in the U.S..

Atomic waste can be used so that it is minimized. We have a vast mountain in Nevada to store what little there is. The bulk of French electric power comes from atomic sources. They store their relatively little waste in one room in a small town.

Tests prove a passenger jet at full speed could not dent the walls of an atomic installation. Only past misconceptions cause prejudice that prevails against atomic power, particularly on the political Left.

Those Who Love Alternate Energy at Any Cost

The Obama administration has been sponsoring what it calls clean, alternative energy. So it is going full steam ahead in its attempt to achieve “green” sources at any cost. Despite the fact we are in the midst of a stagnant economy when industry cannot afford added costs that subtract directly from economic growth.

Apart from the damage of the mad dash for high-cost, taxpayer-subsidized alternate energy, there are social burdens. Such as the fact the commercial windmills used for energy make lots of noise. So much noise that folks living near them find them unbearable? Any residence has to be well over a mile away.

And that thousands of birds are often killed at a time in recurring incidents.

And then you have the landscape eyesore.

Intended Regulatory Rules and Real Life

A review of the Dodd-Frank Legislation is always in order as a lesson as to why intended regulatory rules never work in real life.

Such rules give regulators unlimited powers to do what corporate experts have always found difficult to accomplish. Still, politically-oriented bureaucrat attempt to undertake the tasks anyway, despite their lack of business acumen.

A Treasury committee determination of which financial entities pose systemic risk to our economic system is impossible in the real world, where risk is hard to identify. This cannot be easily done in the political world. Determining potential systemic risk is 100% conjecture. What steps to take, and when to take them, in order to eliminate problems, is not a practical matter.

Few experts in the business world have had the foresight to make the decisions for past incidents. Rarely do bureaucrats at the Fed or Treasury have the ability or objectivity.

The Fed and the Treasury did a poor job with the past financial meltdown and bailout function up to now.

Bank Bailouts and the Dodd-Frank Folly

The bank bailout idea was a theoretical and practical failure; done by academics, in combination with Wall Street insiders with only securities trading background. Real banking acumen was missing.

They saw to it that banks acquired more clean capital and reserves, having gotten rid of some, not all of their questionable assets.

Government honchos have seen to it that banks now earn interest kept on reserves over at the Federal Reserve. Banks can borrow from the Fed at practically no cost.

That adds to bank earnings. But regulators cannot force banks to make loans to their customers. Not when customers are spooked by anti-business Obama administration tax and anti-industrial rhetoric and policy.

In fact, banks are now sitting with loads of available cash for industry and consumers but relatively little is getting out. Because they are still afraid to lend it as they do in normal times. They can make more, investing in securities.

So much for the smart guys in government with trillions of inflationary bail out money. All they had to do to bail out banks in the first place, apart from seeing that banks added to capital, was guarantee their assets.

No inflationary bailout loot required.

Athlete Income

Hiring, firing and controlling employee wages by government bureaucracy is now an American fact of life and has just recently been evidenced by the forced firing of a pharmaceutical CEO who has not been found guilty of a crime.

Yet you must also consider how government stimulus funds affected even entertainers such as sports stars. Government can be very uneven-handed and injudicious.

Athletes probably get far too much salary for what they do. Considerably more earnings than top-notch CEOs. But they are under the public’s radar. So the media, in its ignorance, let’s them get away with the notoriety executives must suffer.

Ballparks and ball clubs are subsidized by state and local taxpayers. Each time a new ballpark is built, some government body has provided long-term assistance in the financing, via cash, tax abatement or bond funding.

Federal stimulus funds backed local and state entities. So funds were made available to fund ball clubs.

Remember: Money is fungible. The payment does not have to be direct. Money can be substituted from one recipient’s pocket to the other, to hide the source of funding. It all adds up to the same total outlay.

The public complains about an executive getting more than is “fair.” What about a ball player who operates no business, and hires no one, who makes up to thirty million, and more a year? And may actually be a loser on the field?

Government Controls of Industry and State Socialism in Italy

I have noted in my reports how the present government has set wages of some employees. How they fire some employees, as the feds have done with General Motors and Chrysler. Or how bank management are controlled. Right now Boeing is being told where to build a new plane in order to give preference to its union employees.

This happens with excessive federal government politics, and it is one of the problems encountered in such forms of state socialism.

If you think I am exaggerating, look up the discussion of state socialism in an encyclopedia. Review your history of Italy under Benito Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s. It will be an eye-opener for every American today, who worries about the government controlling or influencing industry.

How to Resolve The Enormous Debt Problem

How will we be able to ever surmount the extraordinary U.S. debt? Despite what the politicians on the left say and the Federal Reserve attempts to reassure us, there is probably only one way governments do it. Inflation. Governments inflate themselves out of the debt.

Jobs and a booming economy can produce tax revenues without increasing tax rates. But I’m talking 7% to 10% growth not 2%.

You can be sure of certain events that never happen. You cannot tax yourself out of debt. It has never been done before.