Month: January 2010

It does not take much to get the average American – particularly men – excited about military spending. That is why in the midst of a pitched three-month battle over a $90 billion/year piece of health care legislation Congress was able to pass a $700 billion dollar Pentagon budget with not one iota of public debate. And that's for 12 months. And that's not even close to enough, of course, and we'll be treated to numerous "emergency" and "supplemental" expenditures throughout the year. You can never have too many armor-piercing, bunker-busting, laser-guided doodads.
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Just think of all the great gun camera footage we can look forward to this season on The Military Channel.

I've got an idea. It will require about 0.001% of the military budget and, unlike the rest of it, might actually provide some benefits in the long run.
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So, Haiti. Tens of thousands dead, and all of the nation's hospitals destroyed. The international aid agencies, specifically Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, are out of supplies.
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Both the port and the airport in Port-au-Prince are destroyed, hampering any effort to bring in more. The Pentagon, like the iPhone, has an app for this.

Here is a piece of military hardware to get Ed all worked up: the USNS Comfort. It is a hospital ship with a helipad so it can serve areas without ports or airstrips. It is as large as a supercarrier and has the facilities to rival any hospital on Earth. Beds for 1000 patients. 12 fully equipped operating rooms. Four distilleries to make 300,000 gallons of drinking water per day. A complete pharmacy and radiology lab. Complete labs for dental, optometry, and trauma patients. Two oxygen-producing plants.

Oh my, I'm getting a little excited.

Not pictured: shit gettin' blowed up
Stationed in Baltimore, the Comfort can be ready to sail in five days and it'll take a couple more to reach Haiti. A lot of people who could have been saved will have died in the interim. So here's my idea. Let's build five of them. Staff them with medical students and military doctors, distribute them around the world (Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, etc.) and have them on duty 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Make calls in poor countries and provide medical care for people who have nothing. When disasters happen, the ships can be there in hours, not a week. You know, doing stuff that might make people around the world less likely to hate us. If we can maintain military bases in 30 different countries around the world we can afford a handful of ships. But without any guns, it would be a hard sell on both Congress and the public.

Isn't the military always going on and on about that "winning the hearts and minds" shit after they turn some nation into rubble? That might work – one of these decades. Or we could spend a tiny fraction of our obscene military budget on, you know, helping people. But that doesn't interest us. We want to do as we please and then find some way to make people like us afterward. It worked well in Vietnam and Iraq, so why change now?

(Preface: Being an Arizona Cardinals fan has ups and downs, to say the least, and one of the primary drawbacks is that their games often leave one emotionally and physically drained. Just watching these guys is exhausting. 31-10 is a safe lead for 99.9% of the football teams in the world, but not us. The Cardinals relish in finding ways to make everything far more gut-wrenching than necessary, and Sunday's 51-45 gunfight with Green Bay was as ridiculous and improbable as they come. I had to struggle to achieve any kind of coherence with this short piece. My brain is not working. If you like to gamble on sports – I do not, but to each his own – I have free advice for the Arizona-New Orleans game: take the "over.")

Two weeks ago in the wake of the failed Underpants Bomber I noted that with even the most strident efforts to secure commercial air travel the bomber will always get through. Matthew L. forwarded me a recent Wall Street Journal piece suggesting that calculated fatalism about terrorism in the air isn't so outlandish an idea. The author makes a number of obvious but often overlooked points about the diminutive risk posed by terrorist attacks (compared, for example, to dying in an auto accident or being murdered in the U.S.). I'm most intrigued, however, by his use of the apt phrase "security theater." The pointless efforts to reassure panicky idiots that "increased security measures are being implemented" is dishonest at best and achieves nothing except making everyone more miserable and whittling away at what little remains of our privacy in a modern airport.

It would have been silly to expect any kind of calm, level-headed response to the Underpants Bomber. We got the predictable foaming-at-mouth "Liberals put America in danger!" reaction from the Teabagging crowd followed by the inevitable "We have to look like we're tough!
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Do something!" response from the White House and Congress. Even if we recognize the fact that most anti-terrorism measures in airports are strictly for show, the reaction to this latest incident still stands out as mind-bogglingly stupid. Two examples illustrate the point.

First, on inbound international flights passengers are now required to spend the last hour before landing in their seats and without any "personal items" in their laps. Think about that for a second. We all have to spend the last hour of a 9 or 12 (or 18 or 20) hour flight sitting bolt-upright in an uncomfortable coach seat staring straight ahead and doing nothing. No reading, no iPod, nothing. In what possible hypothetical situation could this add any security whatsoever to international flights? I guess future Underpants Bombers will have a mere 9 hours to execute their plan on that Amsterdam-Detroit flight instead of 10. The cost in misery is substantial. The benefits aren't even plausible let alone realistic.
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Second, two flights in the past week have received F-16 fighter jet escorts because of "unruly" passengers who were probably trying to, you know, read a magazine during the last hour of the flight. Most recently, an AirTran flight to San Francisco was escorted by two armed F-16s because…a drunk locked himself in the bathroom. OK, let's give The System the benefit of the doubt and assume they did not know he was just a harmless drunk.
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Implausible, but let's go ahead and accept that premise. What in the hell are two F-16s supposed to contribute to this situation? If the guy is in the bathroom mixing an Underpants Bomb is the F-16 supposed to fire a missile into the plane and blow it to bits before the terrorist can…ignite a bomb and blow the plane to bits? That'll learn 'em.

An F-16 burns 150 gallons of fuel to take off and ten gallons per minute thereafter. Combined with the other (astronomical) parts and labor costs involved in operating that kind of aircraft we might question the benefit of this policy. Either the Unruly Passenger is a harmless false alarm or it is a real terrorist who will or will not succeed in his plot irrespective of the presence of armed fighter escorts. Armed escorts could have been relevant on 9/11, but what are the odds of a cockpit incursion happening again? Since those events I think a pilot would fly the plane into the ground before allowing a hijacker to commandeer the aircraft and use it as a missile. So, like armies prepare themselves to fight the previous war, our Security Theater seems to be responding to the threat of terrorists from 2001.

We stopped improving airport security sometime in mid-2002. Everything since then has served only to waste money, waste time, and make everyone more miserable. It is a race we can't win, as security measures inevitably focus on past, not future, attacks. Soon we'll be subject to "Total Body Imaging" scanners to catch underpants bombers…and how long do you think it will take would-be bombers to figure out how to beat that? All it will do is make airport lines longer, make people feel more like cattle, and make the next would-be bomber swallow or "keester" a tube of explosives rather than sewing it into his underwear.

I feel safer already.

I purposely avoided doing much end-of-year stuff last month let alone any end-of-decade stuff. This is mostly because I have nothing good to say about the aughts. There is a reason the Washington Post called it "a lost decade." Economically, politically, and culturally it was nearly an unmitigated disaster. What sucked? Take your pick. Zero net job creation. 9/11. A Vietnam War redux, only with the public swallowing the transparently idiotic case for war without hesitation and asking for seconds. Eight years of a White House that made Reagan look like a libertine Marxist. A previously unthinkable degree of decline in the tenor of public discourse in a single decade.

People started paying for mp3s. Reality programming took over television. The Black-Eyed Peas existed and people seemed to approve.
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Twitter and texting did immeasurable damage to our already feeble writing skills while iPhones and Blackberii eliminated whatever reasons remained for people to converse with one another in public places. Independent music became Indie Rock^tm, an insufferably twee, ball-less amalgam of fake "retro" and fake Americana. Glenn Beck became the most trusted name in news. The internet became ubiquitous and made traditional media irrelevant, thus allowing each American to find and consume his or her own version of reality. The American auto industry finally committed suicide. Mind of Mencia existed – for three fucking seasons. Pluto lost planet status. AutoTune.

I can wring out a few positives, too. Record companies became essentially irrelevant from the perspective of working bands. Non-traditional media ensured that someone hit the important stories, even if no one was listening.

This nation of morons was actually smart enough to avoid putting Sarah Palin one 71 year-old man's heartbeat away from the presidency. Barack Obama managed to not get assassinated by some psychotic teabagger asshole, which is a pleasant surprise. The American auto industry finally committed suicide. NASA laid out an ambitious human spaceflight agenda, even though we probably can't afford it. The mean survival time for people infected with HIV (and with access to multidrug therapy) doubled and is now over 20 years. Pinochet died. Michael Jackson followed. Some sort of health care reform passed Congress, albeit a toothless and questionably useful one.
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The decade was a mixed bag personally. I quit a job I hated, entered a profession I thought would allow me to make a living, and now, after six years of training and a Ph.D., I make almost three-quarters of what I made in 2000 (actually it's barely half if I take inflation into account) in a field that suddenly offers almost no hope of anything better than temp work. I'm happier despite all that. I became an uncle three times over. I got engaged, de-engaged, and re-engaged. I lost touch with some people and met others. This site went from five unique visitors per month to fifteen or twenty thousand. I got something published in an academic journal, and thus some evidence that I existed could be located if I died tomorrow. My friends and family all did well for themselves personally, professionally, or both. No one, including me, died. I was introduced to rats.

Let's open up the floor – not to our personal ups and downs, but for nominations for the Bests and Worsts of the 00s. I know I missed a lot; the list of Bests feels particularly skimpy (which says a good deal about my personality). Let's do our best to remember a few things about the decade we can't wait to forget.

Regular readers know that, among other things, I could be described as a sports fan. Many of you probably find that annoying and consider sports to be low brow or flat-out stupid. But I feel the need to preface today's post with a reminder that I like watching football on TV, attending a baseball game, or playing a little basketball as much as anyone. Maybe moreso. I will talk endlessly about historical baseball statistics or the logic of zone blitzing at the slightest provocation. I've been to the World Series and the Super Bowl at considerable cost. I decidedly am not That Guy Who Hates Sports.

OK? OK.

Illinois recently became the latest state with a University system in crisis. On January 5th the interim President of the UI system released a dire assessment of their financial status and announced the kind of draconian cuts becoming common in public universities. His strongly worded statement was no doubt intended to goad the state legislature into action, but it is jarring to see things like this:

"The state’s credit rating has been recently downgraded and among the 50 states only California is worse."

"The consequences for our University and others in this state are unprecedented and worsening. In our case, the University of Illinois has received only 7% of this years state appropriation since the first of July. The shortfall is more than $400 million and mounting. At some point we will be unable to meet payroll and complete the academic year unless there are significant payments from the state as promised."

"In anticipation of next years challenges, academic and administrative support units should consider issuing notifications of non-reappointment for selected individuals in employee classes whose terms and conditions of employment require advance notice of termination."

Thus Illinois joins California, Georgia, Wisconsin, and many other large public university systems in instituting furloughs (which is a nicer way of saying "paycut"), hiring freezes, and tuition hikes to cover substantial budget shortfalls. I understand clearly that state legislatures are cutting funding for higher education because they're broke. They're cutting everywhere they are legally able to make cuts. Fine.

Here is my question: why do broke Universities still have athletic departments? Simply put, programs unessential to the core mission of the university should be eliminated or cut to the bone before a single penny is taken out of academics and research.

The vast majority of athletic programs lose money. And by "the vast majority" I mean almost every single one. The most recent NCAA summary report states that 103 of 119 Division I athletic programs lost money, an average of $8 million per program. And not a single Division I-AA program made a profit. All 118 lost money, many losing over million.
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Keep in mind that I-AA schools are traditionally small, regional public schools that are poorly funded to begin with.

One of two things needs to happen. First, athletic departments can be subject to the same draconian logic applied elsewhere on campus and forced to make cuts until they break even. This will undoubtedly upset the balance of male and female athletic scholarships mandated in Title IX, as football teams will be far more likely to make money than a track or diving team. If that bothers anyone, here's the second option: do away with all of it. The number of programs that can make money on their own is much smaller than you'd think; just because the football team draws 50,000 fans per game doesn't mean they're not losing money. So off with all of their heads. None of it is essential to a university's mission. The highest paid state employee in any state is inevitably a coach at one of the public universities. The Governor makes $200,000 and Steve Spurrier or Urban Meyer or "Coach K" are signed for 5 years, $25 million. If Illinois is so broke that it is legitimately worried about finishing the academic year, why is it paying a few million to its high profile football and basketball coaches?
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I like to say that each constituent group of a university is motivated by a single concern. For students, it's drinking. For faculty, it's parking. And for the alumni, it's football. The pressure to maintain athletic programs (and pump money into them until they are good) comes overwhelmingly from alumni, overgrown fratboys who made some oil money and like having their ass kissed when they return to campus. Fine. Make the alumni cough up the money to run the programs at break even or abolish it all. While we're at it, why do the pro sports leagues, from the NFL to the WNBA, get to make billions while using the NCAA as a free developmental minor league?
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How about this: every time a pro league drafts a college player, the team or league is required to donate $100,000 to the general fund of his or her university along with one full athletic scholarship in that sport.

If drastic times call for drastic measures, why is the least important part of a university exempt from making Tough Choices? The last time I checked, the University of Illinois campuses have basketball teams. Football teams. Women's speed skating teams. All of it costs money and none of it is necessary. If professors are taking 10% paycuts and non-academic staff – administrators, people who clean your kid's dorm, and so on – are being fired, there is no justification for athletic department expenses beyond on-campus recreational/intramural sports. Enough with the bullshit about how "Athletic budgets are separate! They don't take money away from academics!" That sleight-of-hand bookkeeping insults the intelligence of everyone who sees it. Universities have a finite amount of money available and they divert large portions of it to sports. It is a zero-sum game. Tuition is going up, salaries are going down, people are getting fired, and classes are going to get a hell of a lot larger.
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Athletics, as enjoyable as they may be, are a luxury that we simply cannot afford if the apocalyptic predictions of our policymakers are accurate.

What differentiates the current economic malaise from recessions past, in my opinion, is the lack of an obvious exit strategy. People who know a lot more about economics than I do have suggested that our situation is uncomfortably similar to Japan's real estate bubble in the early 1990s – the one that initiated a fifteen year recession from which the nation never quite emerged. Policymakers seem ill-prepared to address the fact that we may be entering a lengthy period in an economic trough as opposed to a sharp but brief recession from which we'll emerge Better and Stronger than before, as was the case with the early 1990s recession in the U.
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S.

What is the exit strategy? Sure, real estate prices will probably bounce back at some point (although not to the ridiculous levels of the previous decade) and the financial sector will stabilize. But what is the big growth industry that will fuel our economic recovery? It is beginning to feel realistic rather than pointlessly alarmist to suggest that instead of a "recession" we are actually seeing a downshifting of our equilibrium level of prosperity. Policymakers are beginning to recognize the elephant in the room – the possibility that we might not get back to our previous standard of living.
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Not this year, and maybe never. Like Americans in the 1970s had to face the fact that the good times of the 1950s were gone for good, today we have to wonder if even the unequally distributed "good times" of the 1990s are better than we can ever hope to see again.

Michigan leads the nation with an official unemployment rate of 14.7% – and a real-world rate that might be twice that. Among other factors, the collapse of the domestic auto industry has hit the state hard. I feel for the state's elected officials. Honestly, what in the hell are they supposed to do? Michigan hasn't stumbled into some sort of temporary economic torpor.
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It is, for all intents and purposes, dying. The auto industry is never coming back; any growth the "domestic" automakers experience in the future will be driven by production in low-wage countries or, if domestic, low-wage southern states. Michigan has no natural resources that can sustain it the way Texans rely on oil money in hard times. It has no other industry of note. It has a poorly-educated population that most potential employers would avoid at all costs. There is nothing in the state to fuel a recovery and nothing for it to do but sit back and watch its population fall year after depressing year.

Their options are few. Unlike economic sinkholes in the south, Michigan can't even sell itself as a tourist/retiree destination. "Visit Flint" and "Come to Kalamazoo, where it snows so much you'll wish you were fucking dead" don't strike me as winning ad campaigns. Instead they'll probably go the route of Ohio in the Rust Belt eighties – deluding themselves into thinking that they can lure a bunch of "high tech" industry to the state's abandoned cities.
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As Ohio found out, there are 49 other states with the exact same plan competing for the exact same employers. And since everyone's offering the same deal – tax breaks, free land, eager workforce, etc etc – it's hard to see how Michigan can compete.

I don't mean to pick on our friends in Michigan, and certainly many other states in the Northeast and upper Midwest face the same dilemma. It is a microcosm of our national dilemma – what exactly are we good at anymore? Now that businesses are confronted with such strong incentives to ship jobs overseas, we've created an economic void that hasn't been filled. And we don't even have a half-decent idea of how to start filling it. Without some sort of speculative bubble, be it dot-com stocks or housing prices, to create the illusion of prosperity we as a nation are going to confront the same dilemma with which a few states like Michigan are already faced. The economy we had is gone, maybe forever. And no one appears to have the faintest idea how to replace it. The Clinton-era balm of re-training and educating workers in some vague and unspecified way for some vague and unspecified jobs has been exposed as a fraud. Now we don't even have a half-decent lie to peddle.