(if I were the) King of the Forest

My wife and I are worried about having enough money for a comfortable retirement. With the states of the economy and the world as they are we have been quite anxious. So I’ve come up with a plan:

I find this indifference to the very real cash-flow obligations with which we are saddling our children and grandchildren dismaying. I wrote this as yet another attempt to convince them – and their equally insouciant readers – to take those obligations seriously

There may be aspects of the new tax proposals that would shift tax burden from rich to poor, but the elimination of deductions for state and local taxes would not seem to be among them. Could it be that the primary outrage is not with the plan itself but with the fact that George Bush and the Republican Congress are the ones who get to propose it?

Here’s what the Democrats really need to acknowledge: “values” – whatever they may be – are a huge part of our “interests” and most of us are willing to sacrifice some (or even a lot) of economic advantage to have the “values” of society reflect our own – or at least to secure our freedom to live by our “values” without interference from people who think they know better than we.

Because of the way the last few presidential elections have turned out calls for abolishing the Electoral College have once again become popular. Unfortunately in the discussion of the Electoral College I rarely, if ever, hear a proper defense of the institution or of its historical reasons for being.

Even if those justices are right that the law as written is probably neither fair nor what Congress really intended, why does it not frighten ‘liberals’ to hand the authority to make that determination — and to re-write the law — to five appointed officials (a court majority) with lifetime tenure? Wouldn’t we all be better served if the Court instead pointed out the contradiction in the law to our elected representatives in Congress and allowed the legislative process to address it? Isn’t that how democratic government is supposed to work?

And if it did, wouldn’t the prospect of new Supreme Court appointments be a lot less terrifying for those on the losing side of the election — whichever side that might be?

Since I spent many years working within large bureaucracies – the United States Air Force and Abbot Laboratories – and participated in endless rounds of reorganization and “quality improvement” programs in vain attempts to make those bureaucracies “efficient” and “effective”, I have some insight into how such bureaucratic organizations – and our intelligence services fit that description – fail.

For that reason, and because I am outside the political fray and therefore somewhat more dispassionate than our elected representatives, I prepared a proposal for restructuring the intelligence services that I believe balances the conflicting demands we place on them. I admit I have no experience in intelligence collection or analysis, and so my thinking is based strictly on my observations of our political culture, my experience with large bureaucratic organizations, and my imagination about how intelligence works. Further, I am not arrogant enough to believe that my proposal is optimum or even very good. But it seems to me better than what I’ve heard so far coming from Washington, and I hope it might provide some useful insights to improve the other schemes that are being debated.

At some point in listening to the endless debates over how much the government should spend and how that spending should be allocated – in other words, in the debate over the fundamental operations of government – it occurred to me that one of the problems we have in discussing such things is that very few people actually know what we spend already. ‘Conservatives’ decry “welfare spending” and want to beef up defense; ‘liberals’ demand “butter before guns”, convinced that we spend only a pittance on social needs and a fortune on the military. But when I looked at the actual numbers (for FY2004 at the CBO web-site) I was somewhat surprised at how the money is actually allocated, and I would bet that most people share my ignorance. I would further bet that if you asked ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ to guess at the allocation of federal resources you would get vastly different estimates, with ‘conservatives’ grossly over-estimating and ‘liberals’ grossly under-estimating the relative weight assigned to “social programs” (and with them reversed on “defense”).

At one point during the Bush/Kerry presidential campaign, well after it was clear we would not find any significant stash of chemical or biological or nuclear agents in Iraq, The Boston Globe published an editorial in which they opined that what we needed to know about John Kerry was what he would have done about Iraq “knowing what he knows now”. I thought the suggestion was rather stupid: no one ever gets to go back and redo their important decisions based on what he learns later. The question we really needed answered was how John Kerry would make decisions in the face of inevitable ambiguity, not how he would re-think those decisions in the clarity of hindsight.

When the commission investigating the events leading up to the World Trade Center attack released their interim staff report headlines across the country declared that it “contradicted” what the President had said about Iraqi involvement in the attacks – and when the President and his staff disputed that contention the story became the “dispute” between he and the commission rather than what the commission had actually found.

After looking at what the report actually said I concluded that there was not, in fact, a dispute: what the report said and what President Bush had said were consistent; the only contradiction was between what the report said and the words that the news media, against the evidence, insisted on putting into the President’s mouth. I believe that represents a kind of bias that ill-serves us. When we are debating such important matters as war and peace we need and deserve the unblemished truth.