The Illinois Retirement Savings Program: what could go wrong?

The retirement savings program in Illinois has just been signed by Governor Quinn.  “(T)he state won’t have access to the money because it will be pooled as the private property of the workers outside of the state treasury.”  What is missing here is that this ‘private property’ has to be invested.  Any money that is invested in state bonds will be trading hard cash for state IOUs.  So technically the money won’t be in the state treasury, but that money will be gone nonetheless.

Comparing the United States with other countries

The Sun-Times editorial (January 5) noted that our country now ranks 16^th in the world in livability where we were number one as recently as 1988.  It’s “time to start climbing from no. 16 ranking,” though the article didn’t tell us how but did offer several noble reasons why it is so hard to stay on top.

It’s hard to be livable when we are “absorbing large immigrant populations” [their words, not mine] and “trying to make multiculturalism work.”

But we have always had a large immigrant population.  Isn’t that what we keep hearing, that we are a nation of immigrants and that immigrants built our country?  We didn’t just start doing this in 1988 after we last led the list. 

And why is trying to make multiculturalism work such a good idea?  That just means that we believe we have no uniquely American culture, American values or identity, or at least one that we want newcomers to our country to embrace.  One culture is as good as another.  Is that a good thing?  Exactly what is it that made our country the one that more people want to go to than any other in the first place? 

The editorial gives the various reasons why Switzerland is the number one country for livability:

1)         The Swiss have money.  Our government has decided to be responsible for the welfare of 300 million people and is now over $18 trillion in debt.  Many people, including in the media, don’t see what the problem with that is.  For one thing, debt makes everything that you buy more expensive, so you are wasting money that could be spent better elsewhere.  And this takes money out of the economy, meaning your pockets, to pay for all this. 

2)         The Swiss not only have a low crime rate, but people feel safer there.  We used to teach morals to our kids, but that involved religion, and we don’t want any part of that anymore.  And there is nobody at home anymore to raise the kids, because if there are two parents there, they both need to work just to get by, and the rest of the homes only have one person there, and, well, kids do better with two.  Kids are raised today more by their peers and the media than by parents’ role modelling and personal instruction.

3)         The Swiss can find decent work.  We sent millions of good paying, decent jobs overseas.  We call it free trade.  The idea of free trade sounds so noble, so American, but instead of other countries sending their goods to us without being taxed, we just sent our companies and our jobs over there to send our own goods back to us.  But didn’t this help our export business?  No export business will exceed what a country needs to produce just to meet the needs of its own people.  How much of our products were they expecting that we would sell overseas anyway, especially with our higher labor costs?

4)         The Swiss have good schools.  We used to have good schools, the best in the world, until we started the federal Department of Education to run our schools.  They are mediocre at best today.  We need to get rid of that department and return education to the local level.  Homeschooled kids regularly do better than public schools students.

5)         The Swiss don’t retire broke.  We used to have people who could live off the interest of their savings.  But now with the government debt so high, they manipulate the interest rates so that they stay low, so people don’t see the true cost of the massive debt of our government.  So any money left in banks loses value.  And with our manufacturing jobs gone, people aren’t making enough to save anything let alone money for retirement.

The editorial then names two other factors that are taken into consideration here: the health of family life and trust in public institutions.

1)         We have no family to speak of anymore.  We have made the idea of a stay-at-home mom demeaning, and we have even made it impractical as well, since it is becoming harder all the time to provide for a family on one income.  We have encouraged children without marriage and children without their natural parents, so children are more along the line of pets that only need a minimum of care. 

2)         Trust in our public institutions is at an all-time low.  ‘But then it is not surprising.  The President of the United States has shown himself to be an inveterate liar, but the public and the media shrug it off as overselling or politics.  The government seems to be a world unto itself, finding new ways to spend money it doesn’t’ have to gain the favor of different groups of people who they want to vote for them in the future.  

The game is how to gain benefits for themselves and close allies in ways that don’t attract the public attention. 

Now the editorial asks us to start climbing out of this mess.  But how?

I contend that our problems stem from the idea that our country is supposed to be a secular nation, and anything religious must be strictly private and totally absent from anything having to do with government.

Why is this the problem?  Because it is hard to talk about yet alone teach morals apart from talking about God or a Higher Power.  So our schools are bereft of moral instruction, and our families, what’s left of them, have little time or energy for that either.  After several generations of this, we have a population whose only morals are pragmatism and tolerance.   No one’s looking out for anyone else anymore, because that is a religious concept, so it’s everyone out for themselves. 

There is a lot more that can be said, but this is a letter and not a book.

The Obama Presidential Library

If Chicago must have the Obama library, then I fully agree with the reader who said that it should be on the site of the former US Steel company site, if only for symbolic reasons.

The site is a reminder of the time when the United States led the world in manufacturing and standard of living.  The North won the Civil War, and we won World War 2 in large part because of our manufacturing strength.  Obama’s era is the time when more people left the work force than probably any time in our nation’s history.  I think it is fair to say the President Obama prefers that the United States doesn’t lead the world in anything.

The real war on women

I think the real war on women is when we tell them they should have careers more than a family, that they need a career to be fulfilled or equal and families are unimportant.  They can have a child later if they really want one, but a job is the priority.  

I am more convinced than ever that children need a parent in the home all the time.  We say they can go back to work when the kids are in school but then the kids come home to an empty house, and both parents are tired at the end of the day, and they let peers and the media raise the kids.

The Electoral College and why we should keep it

There are two purposes of the Electoral College, which to me demand its retention.  The first is that through the Electoral College, it is the states that elect the President and not individuals.  This way the President represents the whole country and not just a few parts.  I have seen election maps where a candidate won maybe 99% of the counties in a state or the country and the popular vote was very close.  That’s why every state has two Senators, regardless of size.  To represent states equally and not based on their respective populations.

I am a believer in the original use of the Electoral College.  The legislators chose electors, who were not affiliated in any way with the government, and they voted for the person they believed was the best person for that position.  No campaigns, no speeches, no fundraising, no media ads.  They could have chosen a college president, a CEO, a philosopher,a professor, an author, or a talk show host.  Just the best person they thought for the job.  Of course, the person ultimately chosen had to have the majority of all the votes and not just be the highest vote-getter.  The Federalist Papers describes the process in detail.  

Stealing and cheating

The Sun-Times reported (January 5) on theft and cheating in the Chicago Public School system.  What I found surprising is that it seems everybody seems surprised about it.  I’m not surprised at all.  I am sure there is a lot more that they haven’t uncovered yet.

Why am I not surprised?  Stealing and cheating, while certainly not victimless crimes, are attempts by people to gain some advantage or personal gain in situations where there appears little chance of getting caught and where there are essentially nameless, faceless victims.  Is this so bad?  Doesn’t everybody want to get ahead or look better in the eyes of others? 

Why not steal and cheat once in a while?  Doesn’t everybody, given the right opportunity?

To complain about this, to me, is invoking a higher authority, like there is a standard of right and wrong that has nothing to do with risk of getting caught, the magnitude of a crime, or whether anyone is actually being hurt.  Like things are just right or wrong in themselves.

All this seems to me like a carryover from the old days when our society believed in God and the Ten Commandments.  But we have relegated all that to the wishful thinking of the unenlightened past.  Science has shown us that there was no God that created us and who consequently holds us responsible for our lives.  Trying to get ahead seems to me like that survival of the fittest we keep hearing about that was responsible for us being here in the first place.  

The biggest problem with our elections and what to do about it

The biggest problem with our electoral system is that most elections are made for only two candidates.  If there are more than two candidates, many people who would have voted for one candidate vote for another, and the other candidate who would have lost often ends up winning the election with less than 50% of the vote.  This is wrong, but don’t expect lawmakers to change this.  This would completely revolutionize our electoral system and lessen the chances that most politicians currently in office would keep their jobs.  People could finally vote their conscience and not just for the candidate pundits say has the best chance of winning.

Any election where no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote should require a runoff election of the two highest vote getters.  An alternative to this is to allow voters to rank or otherwise show preferences for more than one candidate on their original ballots, so that votes can be shifted from a person’s first choice to their second choice if there is no clear winner on the first ballot.  This is especially pertinent in Presidential elections where a third party candidate splits the vote in a state, so nobody gets a majority.  You don’t want to wait for a runoff election before finding out who won that state.

This principle applies particularly to primaries, where often there can be a large field of candidates.  In the last Presidential primary, the large number of candidates failed to show a clear winner.  I don’t think any candidate ever had more than 50% of the vote, so we didn’t ever really know which candidate had the most support of all the potential voters.

My suggestion:  Say we have ten Republican candidates and ten debates.  After the first debate, have the Tea Party and the Republican Party each conduct a poll of likely voters.  This would be necessary to keep both parties honest here.  Then after the second debate, let them conduct the same poll but without the name of the person who got the least number of votes the first time.  After the third debate, conduct another poll but again eliminate the name of the candidate who got the fewest number of votes the last time.  I wouldn’t ask these candidates who got those least votes to drop out or be removed from the debates just yet.  Some of them may still be unknown to the voters.  After the fourth or fifth debate, you could ask on the poll if any of the dropped candidates should be brought back, but I think things should be getter clearer.  After the fourth or fifth debate, these candidates could be asked to withdraw from the debates.

But the final candidate should have a majority of the likely Republican voters and not just be the best of three or four leading candidates.

So I agree with you that more candidates running for office is better than fewer.  It’s just that our system is not currently constructed to best handle that.