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Here’s a report from a day spent in Washington, D.C. earlier this week.

Washington can be one of the best places in the U.S. to enjoy the positive results of human cooperation. There is no better example than the crochet coral reef exhibit currently at the National Museum of Natural History. Each reef is made by dozens of volunteers. See it before April 24, 2011.

If you can’t afford a trip to France, Austria, and Sweden (or indeed, at current exchange rates, a Diet Coke in any of those countries), see the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo at the National Gallery of Art through January 9, 2011 (photo1; photo2). The downloadable brochure has all of the paintings (some high res versions on Wikipedia), which include a very modern-looking “Librarian” and late works such as Vertumnus (brochure cover; completed when the artist was 64 or 65 years old). The online video is also worth watching.

The mood in the imperial city is ebullient. Never have the bureaucrats had so much money to spend and never have they been able to control so many aspects of American life. The opportunities for reforming the chaotic and incompetent achievements of hayseeds in the taxpaying states are literally giddying. I pointed out that running $1.4 trillion deficits (White House forecast) might not be sustainable. The response from Obama-supporters (and nearly everyone I met in D.C. supports the ruler) was that “Bush also had deficits”. I’m not quite sure why this is a reassuring response. The Congressional Budget Office’s chart shows that the 2009 and 2010 deficits take us into uncharted territory (the 2005 deficit, for example, was about $320 billion). Even if we decide that $1.4 trillion is approximately equal to $320 billion, I’m still not sure why that should make us sanguine about deficit spending. The Bush deficits did not result in sustained economic prosperity. Also, the Bush debts were incurred at a time when the average estimate of America’s future prosperity was higher. A college student borrowing money in expectation of having a higher salary at age 35 is smart; a 55-year-old borrowing money in expectation of paying it back during his retirement is crazy.

Activity at Logan and Reagan National airports was a bit more brisk than I remember, so perhaps the economy is picking up. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that our system can handle an increased number of passengers. I flew mid-day on Monday and mid-day on Wednesday, which is traditionally one of the slowest days of the week and at the slowest time. Despite dozens of TSA’s 56,000 finest on duty at each checkpoint, the security lines required 15 or 20 minutes to clear and extended beyond the ropes (see Droid 2 phone photo below).

I’m wondering if the TSA’s new technology is slowing things down. I observed three TSA officers using a fancy backscatter X-ray machine to expose a terrorist disguised as an 80-year-old native-born grandmother whose replacement hip had set off the metal detector. They were also assiduously going through the luggage of terrorists disguised as middle-aged business travelers with 20 years of frequent flyer mileage history. After swabbing a packed suit in a roll-on case with a piece of fabric, they would wait for an explosives residue test to run. Advice: show up three hours early if you’re flying around Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My ground transportation experience in D.C. was in a rented 2011 Toyota Sienna minivan. The $30,000 machine was brand new with 368 miles on the odometer. How smart is a $30,000 brand-new U.S.-made automobile with a massive battery and at least a dozen microprocessors? The car did not know where it was (no GPS chip, though it had an LCD screen for the backup camera). The car did not know where the traffic jams were and hence could not offer routing advice to save time and fuel. The car did not know where it was relative to nearby cars and hence could not warn of an impending accident. The car did not know if it had been stolen and had no way to communicate with its owner if separated by more than the range of the keychain. The car did not know where nearby hotels and restaurants were (you’d think car makers would have put in a hotel and restaurant booking system if only to collect commissions). The car did not know if it was dark or light outside or if it was past sunset. The car did not know the speed limit of the road on which one was driving. The car did not have a way of identifying itself to a municipality or private business for automated toll or parking fee collection (instead the city of Washington, D.C. had recently gone on a spending spree to install inconvenient “pay to park” terminals all over the place; one parks, walks to the machine, inserts a credit card, waits, takes a printed piece of paper (i.e., some government worker or contractor is paid to replace the paper roll periodically), walks back to the car, reopens the car, places the paper on the dashboard, locks the car, and walks away (and then has to remember to go back to the car at an appointed time).

Perhaps the young people of Washington, D.C. will grow up and work to remove some of these inefficiencies from our economy? The D.C. public schools are statistically the nation’s worst and Michelle Rhee, the chancellor who had started to make a few changes, just got the axe.

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According to this Wall Street Journal article, a single public employee union is now the biggest spender in the 2010 elections, aside from candidates themselves. I.e., a union representing 1.6 million government workers is spending $87.5 million to encourage voters to reelect the politicians who give them pensions, pay raises, and other benefits. That’s more than the political spending of the entire U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3 million tax-paying businesses that collectively must employ tens of millions of private-sector workers. In “History of Public Employee Unions” (2009 posting), I learned that the idea that public employees could or should unionize is relatively new, less than 50 years old in most parts of the U.S. Thus after 50 years we may have reached a point in which politicians and government workers constitute a fully self-contained system in which politicians are guaranteed reelection and the workers are guaranteed much higher pay and benefits than private-sector taxpayers.

Related video: fireman talks to citizen.

Related analyses: several interesting articles in the Cato Journal, 30(1).

[These statistics aren’t the full story, since most unionized government workers belong to unions other than the one profiled in the WSJ (the New York Times says that there were approximately 7.9 million unionized government workers in 2009) and those unions will be spending independently. Companies that give money to the Chamber of Commerce to spend on political activities may separately support particular candidates (though really they are better off doing it through the Chamber because a company that supports one politician or party may alienate customers).]

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New Yorker magazine gives some sample definitions from the Google dictionary: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/10/18/101018sh_shouts_rich

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I got a credit card in the mail today from Chase. I had no idea that this account existed and I don’t need a thicker wallet (well, thicker with cash would be nice, but not thicker with plastic), so I called them up to cancel. I expected the agent to ask me why I wanted to cancel, offer me a higher credit limit, or make some other attempt to retain me as a customer. Instead, he said “Thank you. We’ll notify the credit reporting agencies within 30-60 days that this account has been canceled.”

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Here’s my report from a week of copiloting a friend’s fancy airplane.

First overnight stop was Las Vegas, which meant that we got to see the Grand Canyon, a spectacular sight even from 30,000′. One of the few dog-friendly hotels that I could find was the Loews resort in Lake Las Vegas, an artificial lake whose water is sucked out of adjacent Lake Mead and then pumped back in. It is pretty far from the Strip and was intended to be a self-contained dreamland of irrigated golf courses, Italianate condo complexes, and luxury hotels. They went bankrupt in 2008, sticking creditors (i.e., probably the U.S. taxpayer) with $1 billion in debt that would never be repaid. The casino and former Ritz Carlton hotel are both shut down. There are major gaps around the lake where the land was bulldozed in preparation for condo development, but no buildings were ever constructed. The condos that were built are about 5 percent occupied, based on my survey of evening lights in windows. Condo fees are $1 per month per square foot, or about $1000 per month on a two-bedroom apartment. They’ll have to go much higher unless a lot more people move in, since effectively the owner of one condo will have to pay for maintenance on about 20,000 square feet of space.

I took Ollie (four month old Border Collie) for a walk on the bluffs that formerly looked over Lake Mead. The lake is about half empty due to a combination of drought and the Southwest’s thirst for Colorado River water. It is expected to dry up completely in the next 10-20 years. A family of coyotes was living on what had been a boat ramp. Perhaps they are waiting for the humans to abandon Lake Mead and Lake Las Vegas and they’ll move into the condos. In a fit of optimism back in the 1950s and 1960s, the government built Glen Canyon Dam, upstream from Lake Mead but on the same river. The chance of there ever being enough water to fill both reservoirs is minute (the dams were built and water allocated based on data taken from the wettest century in 1000 or so years (source)).

Ollie enjoyed a trip to his first dog park in Henderson, Nevada. This is a fantastically efficient use of tax dollars in my opinion, creating a gathering place for taxpayers to enjoy each others’ company. Instead of a $14 billion tunnel to nowhere, the city built a few fences, put in some rugged agility equipment, and provided some shade and freshwater. I hadn’t been there too long before 30 police cars arrived to the development across the street and then four armored cars with “SWAT” painted on the side. The woman next to me said “Everyone in Las Vegas is first generation money. These people came from trailer parks. The wife got a job in a casino and the husband in construction. They had two kids, bought three cars, two jetskis, two ATVs, and kept taking out mortgages to pay for it all. When the economy headed south they just couldn’t handle being poor.” The incident barely made the news when I checked. A guy upset about his divorce was holed up in a house threatening to kill himself. He ultimate set the house on fire and ran out, but was apprehended.

We proceeded on to Minden, Nevada, just east of Lake Tahoe, where the soaring is some of the best in the U.S. We took a few glider lessons at Soar Minden, but unfortunately there wasn’t much lift. We left Ollie with the gals behind the desk at the Holiday Inn and went out for Basque food at JT’s. Minden and Gardnerville are home to at least three Basque restaurants due to an original community of Basque sheep herders who moved there when the West was settled (invaded?) by Europeans.

Seattle was mostly devoted to keeping Ollie entertained and killing off his intestinal parasites. I stayed at the University Inn, a simple hotel next to the University of Washington. The U has a literally awesome campus, with massive concrete buildings that tower above pedestrians. They have a tiled “Red Square” that is big enough to land a spaceship. I’ve already covered the scene at the dog park and at Norm’s, a dog-friendly restaurant, so I’ll limit myself to writing about the university neighborhood. Aside from a few sandwich shops, the restaurants around the university seemed all to be Asian or Middle Eastern. A lot of students were themselves Asian or Middle Eastern (complete with Islamic headgear for the women), but not nearly as high a percentage as you’d think from seeing all of the Teriyaki, Korean, and Falafel restaurants. Unlike Harvard and MIT students, most of the UW undergraduates had little or no interest in a puppy. What they were interested in was a visit by Barack Obama (story), which shut down much of the city and all of the airports for nearly 24 hours (a “revenue holiday” for area flight schools, charter operators, and other aviation businesses; we’re getting one here in New England on Monday (see this temporary flight restriction); our last Obama-imposed day off was a week ago when he came to Boston for a Democratic Party fundraiser (story)). I thought it was odd that students would be so enthusiastic about a politician who is spending all of their future income on gold-plated public works projects, unsuccessful wars, and expensive health care and pensions for older Americans. Then I reflected on the fact that if this generation isn’t well educated enough to get a job after graduation perhaps they recognize that they aren’t well educated enough to spend their own money; they need a wise government to spend it for them.

My one cultural excursion in Seattle was attending an outdoor rehearsal of Titanium Sporkestra, a tattooed marching band (video) undeterred by the cool evening air down by the waterfront. Ollie turns out not to be a huge fan of the bass drum.

After Obama had departed we were able to get access to our airplane at Boeing Field, fuel up, and depart. Air Force One was gone, but we taxied past Air Force cargo planes that had been ferried down from Alaska to carry SUVs for Obama and his entourage. We enjoyed a beautiful flight over the Cascades and Montana Rockies with the setting sun behind us, then landed around 9 pm in Fargo, North Dakota. The Holiday Inn there was hopping with a Shriner’s convention. In the morning we departed for Hanscom Field and arrived to find the wind at 20 knots gusting up to 27 knots, the most challenging conditions of the entire trip. My friend handled the landing beautifully, carrying a bit of extra airspeed and pulling back the power a little slower than usual. The touchdown was smooth and we hardly used any runway. Ollie ran from the airplane into the East Coast Aero Club maintenance hangar to see his friends, whining with delight at the sight of Claire.

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Never having served in the military, I did not have an opinion regarding the Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Traveling with a Border Collie puppy who yips and barks in a mournful manner when left alone for even a few minutes in a hotel room, however, I now realize the value of the idea.

After a haircut (for me) in a dog-friendly barber shop, Ollie and I had dinner this evening at Norm’s Eatery and Ale House (yelp). There were a lot of dogs underneath the tables in the restaurant. How can that be legal in dogophobic America? The restaurant doesn’t ask whether or not an incoming dog is a service animal. The patrons don’t tell the restaurant whether or not an incoming dog is a service animal. Ergo, as far as the restaurant knows, all of the dogs in the restaurant are service animals.

[I do wonder why Americans are so paranoid about dogs to the point that it would be illegal in nearly all states for a restaurant to say “we allow dogs”, giving the dogophobes fair warning. No dog has ever given a human AIDS, swine flu, a cold, malaria, herpes, or any of the other contagious diseases that occupy folks’ imaginations.]

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Back in May, I posted an entry about my $83 physical checkup that took six months to schedule and required skilled negotiators at both the doctor’s office and the insurance company to bring the bill down from $510. A paper invoice was mailed to my house and a paper check for $15 mailed back in response.

This morning I called a veterinarian in Seattle to ask if she could see my four month-old Border Collie and investigate his tummy problems. The receptionist offered an appointment not six months later but six hours later. Instead of a multi-page HIPAA form, insurance forms, and demands for my Social Security number, the animal hospital asked for my street address and phone number. Instead of waiting for 20-60 minutes to see the doctor, I was seen at the appointed time. I paid the $67 checkup bill on the spot with a debit card.

[How’s the animal, you may ask? I’m awaiting the results of a test for parasites. His stomach problems don’t seem to be interfering with his demonic energy, as shown in this Motorola Droid 2 videos, captured shortly after the vet visit: with adult Border Collie; with another puppy]

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The Economist has this article on U.S. pension obligations. The chart is interesting. Assuming that the pension funds are able to achieve their most optimistic dreams of an 8 percent annual return on investment, the U.S. states in the chart will run out of money in their pension funds in between 8 and 20 years. Once the funds are exhausted, the pension obligations will consume between 30 and 55 percent of forecast tax revenues.

Separately, an NBER researcher says that we shouldn’t fund public pensions at all, but simply raise taxes when the money is due (PDF paper). Towards the end he simplifies his argument: “Why should taxpayers vote to accumulate assets in a public retirement plans that buys Treasury notes yielding, say, 2% when they are paying 15% interest on their credit cards and 7% on car loans?” If the state needs money in 2020, why should taxpayers borrow money now to pay higher taxes when instead the taxpayers could borrow less and pay higher taxes in 2020? If this guy is right, our public employee pension funds are ridiculously overfunded.

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A few recent articles related to government spending on infrastructure projects.

The first is a New York Times article about Japan’s failure to recover from its early 1990s slowdown. The article does not mention the fact that the U.S. government has been doing exactly what the Japanese government did, i.e., spending money on expensive infrastructure projects and on protecting big established companies (like the Detroit automaker bailout).

As an example of where government stimulus money goes, here’s an article on a $500 million project to build a few miles of light rail in Detroit. It seems odd that anyone would want to build additional transportation infrastructure in a city that is depopulating as rapidly as Detroit. One would naively think that the existing road network would be more than ample for a city whose population is about half of what it was when the roads were laid out (source). See also: this video.

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One of the things that has confused me most about Barack Obama is how he has failed to act on his expressed personal convictions. I would have thought that one of the luxuries of being President of the U.S. is that one would be able to do whatever one wanted, mostly, at least for four years. For example, Obama has said that he is against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He could have ended both with the stroke of a pen and brought he troops home on January 21, 2009. Yet he did not.

In some ways the latest argument over gays in the military is even harder to understand. Obama has said that he is against any restrictions on gays serving in the military. A federal judge handed him exactly what he said that he wanted, i.e., an injunction preventing the military from treating gay soldiers differently from straight soldiers. You would think that he would have checked that one off his list of goals and proceeded to work on other stuff. Instead, we learn from this nytimes article that Obama is mobilizing a swarm of government lawyers to fight the judge’s ruling and preserve the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

It seems odd that Obama has put so much effort into expanding government power in areas never previously imagined, e.g., to force every American to buy health insurance, but won’t use the powers that everyone agrees that a U.S. President has had for 200+ years, e.g., to bring troops home or to let a judge’s ruling stand unchallenged.

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