Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I asked friends to explain their rationale for voting before and after the recent Massachusetts election that sent Republican Scott Brown to fill a U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Democrats since 1954. Opinions of Coakley ranged from “mediocre party hack” to “evil opponent of citizens’ rights to, for example, videotape the police making arrests.” Nonetheless, all voted for Coakley with the expectation that she would hold the Senate seat until her death or retirement. The main reason cited was that they wanted her to be in the Senate to vote for the latest $1 trillion health care spending bill. I.e., they were electing her for decades, regardless of her fitness for the job, because they thought that her one vote on one bill would be so important.

I pointed out that the health care bill wouldn’t change anything in Massachusetts. We already have a similar state law that requires residents to purchase health insurance and, if they can’t afford it, sticks taxpayers with the bill (this increased demand for health insurance has resulted in insurers raising premiums to the highest prices in the U.S., and probably the world). “But people in other states won’t have guaranteed insurance,” was the response. I pointed out that the federal bill would still leave tens of millions uninsured (earlier post). “It will be a lot better than what they have now.”

I then reminded the Coakley voter that Massachusetts gets back only 82 cents of every federal tax dollar (source). Did he or she really want to pay for health insurance for some guy in Alabama ($1.66 back for every dollar put in)? The answer was a resounding “Yes!” If we wanted to be altruistic, was it truly better to buy gold-plated medical care for people in other states than to help out folks in Haiti who have nothing? The answer was that we can easily afford to do both.

Separately, a look at the election results map revealed that there was a fairly strong correlation between being bled by the government and voting for the Republican and being fattened by the government and voting for the Democrat. Economic basketcase towns such as Springfield, where the primary sources of income are Welfare or government jobs, were solidly for Coakley. Inner city districts where people live in public housing (perhaps next door to Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni) voted for additional government expansion; suburban districts where people work long hours at private employers and pay heavy taxes to support 35-hour/week government workers voted for Brown. What can the Democrats learn from this? If they can somehow ensure that 51 percent of voters are collecting Welfare, working for the government, or somehow else being net beneficiaries of government spending, they should be able to control the U.S. indefinitely.

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… to prevent folks practicing Orthodox Jewcraft from being booted off the plane: story. The crew thought the weird-looking teenager’s Tefillin were bombs and made a precautionary landing so that the plane would blow up in Philadelphia rather than Louisville. Counting up the extra takeoff, landing, fuel, aircraft time, crew time, passenger delays, value of passenger time, cost of paying law enforcement officials to question passengers, etc., this probably took $25,000 out of the U.S. economy.

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After dropping off our first round of supplies for a 6000-person tent city being set up by an American church group led by an upstate NY builder (more), it was time to return to Florida from Provo (MBPV) in the Turks and Caicos. We had to pick up more tents and bring them back! I struggled with filling out an ICAO flight plan form. If you work at an airline, this is done by the superbly trained dispatchers who use powerful custom software. If you fly your own plane, you use various free Web services that fill these out and submit them for you. In Provo, you fill it out on paper and it gets faxed over to the tower. You’re supposed to know all kinds of codes for electronics in the plane and survival gear. I hadn’t looked at one of these for nearly two years. A friendly experienced Pilatus PC-12 pilot was standing next to me and graciously answered my questions one at a time. After about the fourth question, without a hint of malice, he asked “Are you a pilot?”

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Back in August 2009, this blog discussed a new contract for U.S. air traffic controllers, bumping their pay up from a median of $117,000 per year (post). When you read this piece from the Times of London about Spanish air traffic controller pay, it becomes clear why the U.S. union felt that their members are underpaid. For reference, Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, with 43 percent of young people who are looking for jobs unable to find one (nytimes). Mancur Olson would have predicted that, in a mature country such as Spain, for every young person struggling to get on that first rung of the work ladder there would be a highly paid older worker stepping on the kid’s hands. The Times seems to have found some of those older workers. The unionized controllers in Spain have an “average basic salary” of nearly $300,000 per year, “but most double or triple this amount by working overtime.” The ten highest paid controllers are earning around $1.2 million per year, handling flights carrying Spanish citizens who earn an average of $25,500 per year.

[How busy are the Spanish controllers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World’s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic shows that the Madrid airport is one of the world’s 30 busiest, handling about half as many passengers as Atlanta and 50 percent more than Minneapolis or Charlotte. Spain has 2,300 controllers, according to the Times article, one for every 17,400 residents. The U.S. has 26,000 according to the BLS, one for every 11,540 residents. So in theory the Spanish controllers are working harder, serving more people. I could not find any statistics for the total number of flights by country, but I suspect that the U.S. has many more flights per capita. The U.S. has larger distances to cover and fewer good alternatives for ground transportation. The U.S. has a vibrant general aviation sector, including thousands of training aircraft that do practice instrument approaches and landings all day every day. The U.S. needs air freight to deliver mail and packages overnight; Spain is smaller than Texas. The general aviation component is what makes U.S. controllers so busy. Spain has 153 airports (source); the U.S. has more than 15,000. I did find this report from the Spanish airport authority. The Barcelona airport, for example, which is Spain’s 2nd busiest, handled an average of 1000 operations per day in 2007. Teterboro, NJ, with no commercial flights, handles 500 per day, even after the Collapse of 2008. The Palo Alto, CA airport, with a 2400′ runway (suitable for 4-seat Cessnas and Pipers; a jet airport would typically have 7,000′ or more), also handles 500 operations per day. Reed-Hillview, a training airport east of the main San Jose, CA airport, handles 630 operations per day. In fact, it looks as though there are more takeoffs and landings in the San Francisco Bay Area than in all of Spain.]

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A friend who owns what a passenger might call a “real airplane” (two jet engines instead of one propeller) has volunteered his airplane for a Haitian relief flight. We’ll be picking up 50 lb. tents in West Palm Beach (KPBI) and flying them to Providenciales (MBPV) in the Turks and Caicos. From there the tents will be ferried over to a dirt strip in Haiti in a King Air turboprop. We’ll make at least a couple of round-trips and then return home to Boston.

To give you some idea of the hardships that we will be enduring when not in our air-conditioned pressurized airplane…

• the FBO in Provo (they helped me a lot back in 2002 when I wrote “flying the Caribbean”)
• photo gallery with scenes of life in Provo outside of the airport

Departing in about 9 hours and should be back by Friday at the latest.

Separately, I had dinner this evening with a friend who is an emergency room doctor. We were talking about the Haitian tragedy and she said “I might have volunteered to go over there if I were single and childless, but why would I take that kind of risk now that I have children?”

And finally… I’ve been providing some advice and assistance to a couple of non-profit organizations that work in Haiti. One is Partners in Health. They could really use the loan of a Cessna Caravan or similar airplane to ferry supplies between the main international airport and a dirt strip adjacent to their main hospital in the countryside. Contact me if you have the Caravan or the money to lease one and I’ll put you in touch with my friend at Partners in Health (he is a fully trained medical doctor who is not on their Form 990‘s list of five highest paid employees, which means he is earning less than $67,000 per year).

[Update: I made a short video during our tent run. A few days after we got back, the New York Times ran a story saying that “Tents, tents, tents” were what was needed in Haiti. I’ve volunteered to go back and fly helicopters for a Midwestern hospital-based group, but I’m not sure that my offer will be accepted.]

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It is snowing here in Massachusetts, with temperatures close to freezing. Perfect weather for driving a pavement-melting SUV to the polls and not very good for a Prius or Smart Car. If the only people who can get out and vote are those who are comfortable getting 10 mpg, this may favor the Republican candidacy of Scott Brown. There are, of course, plenty of Democrats who are destroying the earth with their Volvo SUVs, but I would say that monster SUV owners are more likely than the average Massachusetts voter to reject the idea that an ever larger government will make the U.S. a better place to live and work. This is not good for Martha Coakley.

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An interesting piece by John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, on corporate governance. For those too busy to read the Wall Street Journal, I can summarize it as “shareholders in public companies won’t be happy unless the managers give them a share of the profits.”

[It would be nice if modesty prevented me from pointing out that my economic recovery plan, from November 2008, included some of the same ideas.]

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… if Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have to show up to Massachusetts to generate some excitement for her (nytimes). The state has not elected a Republican senator since 1972, i.e., 38 years ago. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab could probably win an election here, if running as a Democrat. Nearly every voter in the state knew that whoever the Democrats nominated was sure to win this election. Therefore if assuring victory requires the presence of the two most charismatic American politicians alive today, it is safe to assume that Coakley is truly unfit for office (not to mention that Clinton and Obama had to divert their attention from the challenges in Haiti).

It is tough to know what is so bad about Coakley. Her background is similar to that of many current senators. Her most memorable act was as a principal in the LED panic of 2007 here in Boston, which resulted in the shutdown of highways, bridges, and mass transit (prompting her predecessor, Ted Kennedy, to introduce S.735, The Terrorist Hoax Improvements Act of 2007, in the U.S. Senate). Driving off a bridge, escaping the car, leaving young Mary Jo Kopechne trapped inside to suffocate and drown, walking right by a house with a light on and not calling for help, and the rest of the Chappaquiddick mess was not sufficient to disqualify an earlier Democrat candidate for senator. What has Martha Coakley done that is apparently worse in the eyes of voters?

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Obviously we need to use the U.S. government’s resources to provide aid to Haiti, especially given the vast military capability that we have built up that is well-suited to the task. But can we feel morally superior for having done so?

Sandra Bullock has given $1 million of the money that she has earned from her talent and hard work. She is certainly entitled to feel better about herself and I sincerely hope that it helps her bid for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Note that Bullock’s donation is a comparable sum to what many foreign countries have pledged (source).)

How about adult Americans and American politicians? Can we feel better about ourselves because we have authorized government aid for Haiti? I don’t think so. Prior to the earthquake, the U.S. government was spending approximately 12 percent more than it was taking in (source). Therefore, as with any other new federal program, all of the billions of dollars that the U.S. government is spending are being borrowed from children, the yet-to-be-born, and the yet-to-immigrate. So moral credit is due, but not to any current politicians or adults. Our children and their children are the ones being generous with their future earnings.

An alternative formulation: If I borrow your car and donate it to charity, does that make me a charitable person?

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Take a $500 Blu-ray player, wrap it in a fancy case, and sell it for $3500 (full story; I am betting that Lexicon is going to be sending an angry letter to Tim Berners-Lee for developing the World Wide Web).

To go with your new player, here’s a helpful list of speakers that cost more than $100,000 per pair.

Related: my article on high-end audio

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