Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I’ve recently been asking folks “Where are the antiwar protesters now that we need them?” (i.e., now that our economy has collapsed and we can’t really afford to rebuild the U.S., much less Iraq and Afghanistan). One of my neighbors from Cambridge said that she for one was still against the war(s). She cited the cost and said that if we weren’t meddling overseas we would easily be able to fund health care for all U.S. residents. I asked her how that could be true given the enormous and growing percentage of the U.S. GDP consumed by health care. She said “military spending is much higher than health care spending.” My memory was that health care is consuming about 18 percent of GDP and the military between 4 and 5 percent. Even cutting military spending to zero would only just barely pay for universal insurance into the present system and a couple of years of inflation, or so I thought.

The picture turns out to be a little more complex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States says that budgeted military spending is in fact 4.7 percent of GDP. However, our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as some veterans benefits, are paid for separately. We are actually spending closer to 7 percent of GDP on our military.

It might be interesting to compare these numbers to productive investment in the U.S. Total research and development spending, for example, is about 2.7 percent of GDP (source). In other words, the non-budgeted costs of running the military are comparable to the total amount that we’re investing in the R&D that is supposed to maintain our competitive edge over China and other low-wage countries (without such an edge, as far as I can tell from freshman econ, there is no reason that an American worker should earn more than a Chinese worker, a salary that would not result in a very comfortable lifestyle here).

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The government just spent billions of dollars on Cash for Clunkers and the results have come in. People traded in 10-year-old American-made cars for brand new Japanese and Korean cars. According to newspapers, the White House is saying that this will save jobs here in the U.S. I’m not sure how this is possible. A consumer driving a 10-year-old American car periodically buys replacement parts, mostly likely still made here in the U.S., and pays a mechanic, almost certainly still working here in the U.S., to install the parts. A consumer driving a new Japanese or Korean car has surely saved some jobs in Japan or Korea. He has also enriched the owner of a car dealership. But wouldn’t the net number of U.S. jobs fall when the old car needing periodic service is replaced with a new imported car that won’t need significant service for 5-10 years?

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Richard Egan, an MIT graduate and former Marine Corps helicopter pilot, died yesterday. With Roger Marino, he had founded EMC, the most successful technology company remaining in Massachusetts. Through creative design and problem-solving, he created tens of thousands of jobs worldwide and enabled the construction of information systems that save people a lot of time and effort. He was known in Massachusetts for giving friends and employees helicopter rides from the company parking lot.

Egan seems not to have been a saint. In 2006, the Bush Administration IRS forced him to pay a lot of taxes that the accounting firm KPMG had tried to shelter with an exotic Irish-based scheme. With or without that tax shelter, however, the guy paid tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes over his lifetime and the people that he employed were nicked for billions more.

We should mourn Egan if only because we will need another 5000 guys like him if we are ever to pay off the debt that our local, state, and federal governments are accumulating on our behalf.

More: AP story; local newspaper story; Boston Globe (note that the Globe reporters have not been as kind to Egan as they have been to Ted Kennedy; Egan being disciplined for being AWOL at age 18 gets a larger percentage of coverage than does Ted Kennedy’s killing of Mary Jo Kopechne when he was 37 years old, married with three children).

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Today’s New York Times has an article about New York City paying teachers not to teach, at a cost to taxpayers of $200 million per year. Note that this is separate from the “rubber room” where teachers who’ve been accused of wrongdoing or incompetence sit, often for years, costing taxpayers additional millions of dollars (story; Daily News story estimating cost at $65 million/year; full text of an August 31, 2009 New Yorker magazine article with detailed explanations of the city’s attempt to remove incompetent teachers).

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From Forbes: “Ted Kennedy’s Soviet Gambit”.

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With Ted Kennedy dominating the news and Boston’s airspace (closed to private aircraft until the Washington royalty have completed paying their respects), it seems like a good time to discuss the duty to rescue. Under traditional Common Law, a bystander who observed Ted Kennedy driving his car into the water would not have had any obligation to dive in and pull Mary Jo Kopechne out, nor to call the police or fire department. According to the Wikipedia page on the Chappaquiddick incident, Ted Kennedy was never charged with failure to carry out any duty to rescue, though a house with the lights on and a phone was just a few seconds’ walk from where Ted Kennedy emerged (source) and a rescue diver would have been able to reach the scene within 25 minutes (as he did the next morning).

An article by Peter Agulnick indicates that Ted Kennedy might have had some obligation under Common Law:

“A bystander is charged with a reasonable duty to rescue if he creates the risk or causes the dangerous situation that the victim faces. This is true whether the bystander’s endangering acts were intentional, negligent, or, as some courts have held, completely innocent.”

The article is interesting partly for its application to Ted Kennedy’s killing of Mary Jo Kopechne, but also for its discussion of why we might be better off without a strong obligation to rescue fellow citizens.

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I asked a woman recovering from surgery whether she was being given any painkillers. She replied that she was on ibuprofen. I said “That’s not a painkiller.” She demanded to know why not. I thought for a moment and then said “If Michael Jackson wasn’t taking it, it isn’t a painkiller.”

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Ted Kennedy became an American hero by working an air-conditioned desk job that millions of others would have been delighted to do. His votes in the Senate were always ones that could be expected to help him get reelected by Massachusetts Democrats (taking an anti-war position would be a risk for a senator representing Texas, but not for one from Massachusetts). He spent a lot of time with attractive young women.

A friend’s Samoyed recently asked himself how he could serve his country. Inspired by Ted Kennedy, this hero dog decided that he would not work directly with the poor, who can be both smelly and unsightly. Nor would he give more than one percent of his Milk Bones to charity (source). He tried to get his paws on some other folks’ money and then spend it to help the poor, but lacking the power to tax (or opposable thumbs), he was unable to get the $$. Sammy also decided against serving in the U.S. military in a war zone. Finding both Senatorships in Massachusetts occupied by unassailable incumbents (despite the terrible hardship of the job, some American heroes are willing to serve multiple terms in the U.S. Senate), Sammy the Samoyed had only one remaining option in order to become like his hero Ted Kennedy. With a little help from the New England Patriots cheerleaders, this photo shows Sammy enduring the kind of hardships that made Ted Kennedy Barack Obama’s hero.

[Note: this is the same dog that drove up from Norfolk, VA with me back in 2005 (old posting).]

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A Senator from Massachusetts has left office in the only manner possible for an incumbent Democrat, i.e., in a coffin. The New York Times leads off their story on Ted Kennedy’s death with “his sometimes-stormy personal life.” When I think of Ted Kennedy, though, my first thought is always sadness at the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a promising young woman killed by Kennedy, who waited more than eight hours before seeking help for her rescue. One expects politicians to impoverish constituents with reckless spending; one does not expect them to kill constituents. Some photos of Mary Jo’s hotel room and Chappaquiddick are available in the middle of my Cape Cod photo essay.

[Some friends asked today how I would have summarized Ted Kennedy’s biography, if not the way the New York Times did. I observed that he had spent his entire life either as the child of a wealthy family or as a government employee. Never having held a job in the private sector and never having been exposed to the risk of losing a job or a paycheck (either as a child or an adult), he created many new laws and regulations on private businesses (most of the laws that apply to private employers do not apply to Senators themselves in their relations with staff). In his personal life, rather than donating to charity (source) or working directly with the unfortunate, he enjoyed drinking and partying. He drove a car off a bridge, trapping a young woman inside, managed to save his own skin, left her to die, and did not attempt to summon help that could have saved her.]

Update: I just noticed that Barack Obama gave a televised speech from Martha’s Vineyard in praise of Ted Kennedy. Though he was speaking just a few miles from where Mary Jo Kopechne died, President Obama did not mention her. Barack Obama did note that there was nobody in the Senate who had earned more “respect” and that he was one of “the most accomplished Americans ever to serve our democracy.” I guess if all of our government workers were similarly accomplished we would no longer have to worry about overpopulation.

Update 2: A friend sent this article from a newspaper in the UK, with some more details on Mary Jo Kopechne.

Update 3: Another English newspaper, this time carrying a piece by Joyce Carol Oates, the American novelist.

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From today’s New York Times, a couple of interesting health care articles:

• on how the current activities in Washington aren’t doing anything to create a real market for health insurance
• on Japan and how they’ve avoided bankrupting themselves the way we are bankrupting ourselves with health care costs

Health care “reform” in Washington has become almost a caricature. Thanks to the miracle of lobbyists anyone who is currently making money from health care has to be guaranteed to make at least as much or more after “reform”. Given that kind of constraint there is no way to effect significant change.

[And in fact today’s Times has evidence of the fact that Congress and the Obama administration realize the insignificance of any potential savings from their health care bloviating. The health care costs that economists have been predicting since the 1980s will sink us are in fact going to sink us to the tune of $9 trillion (story).]

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