Monthly Archive for February, 2010

Transportation infrastructure work finally arrives as part of the jobs bill. Well, if the jobs bill happens. It’s just $1.5 billion, but it’s a start. From the DOT website:

The winning TIGER projects highlighted the diversity of transportation needs throughout the U.S. from grand Moynihan Station in New York City, which will carry millions of train and subway riders each year to “the most beautiful drive in America” – Wyoming’s Beartooth Highway – the gateway to Yellowstone National Park. They ranged from major billion dollar freight rail corridors in the Midwest and South, to bridge repairs in Oklahoma and South Carolina to port projects in Maine and Hawaii.

TIGER funds will also help construct the Union Passenger Terminal/Loyola Streetcar Loop in New Orleans, make safety improvements to a key highway in New Mexico Navajo country and spur economic growth in Appalachia through the Appalachian Regional Short Line Rail Project and the Gateway Project.

Let China, Japan, and Europe have bullet trains! We’ll lick them by having the best trolleys in the world! We’ll show ‘em that nobody beats us on 19th century technology!

Sigh.

Readers that have been with me for awhile know that I’m a two-time cancer survivor. In 2003 I was diagnosed with ocular melanoma. More recently, my thyroid gland proved to be cancerous, possibly as a result of the radiation that treated the first cancer. I have lost the vision in one eye and my thyroid hormone now come out of a bottle, which provokes other problems, and I’ll be at risk for metastatic cancer for the rest of my life, but on the whole I have been very, very lucky.

I use the word luck because I have had access to insurance for the entire period of my illness, and the access to regular medical treatment that it provides has repeatedly saved my life. Both of my cancers were largely asymptomatic. In both cases, they were discovered by doctors before they could spread far beyond the original site of corruption, and that makes all the difference between life and death in cancer cases. In November, 2003, I discovered a tiny speck in my vision. I was very tempted to ignore it–it was only an annoyance, they happen for benign reasons–and if a visit to the doctor was an expense beyond a co-pay, perhaps I would have. But I could afford to have it investigated and so I did. The speck was blood coming off of the tumor, one easily seen by the doctor–but the key decision was that I asked him to look. Had I waited, had I needed to hoard some money before I went for what is called “preventative care,” I would have been a dead man, riddled with a cancer for which there is little in the way of treatment.

Since my original cancer, I have been forced to spend a great deal of time in various doctors’ offices being screened for that metastatic cancer risk. I am regularly scanned for lung and liver cancer–these are the organs where melanoma likes to hide. My bad eye is checked to make sure that the original tumor stays dead and my good eye is checked because it is at some risk of going the way the bad one went. My lymph nodes and thyroid levels must be checked. I see eye specialists, radiologists, oncologists, endocrinologists. It is all very expensive, but because I have insurance, my wife and I don’t have to bear the full brunt of it.

I have little doubt that the insurance company would drop me if they could. I’m a loser for them. But look at what the consequences would be. My thyroid cancer was discovered accidentally, showing up as the result of a test related to my original cancer. Without follow-up care, I would have missed it. Access is everything.

The tangle of our economic and health care problems are difficult and apparently beyond people smarter and more educated than I am, and even when someone suggests a program that makes sense to me, someone has a counterargument for why it won’t work, why we will sink into a morass of debt. All I know is that whatever we do, there has to be a more humane solution than the present system. Every day there are people like me dying, people who had diseases that, with timely intervention, didn’t have to kill them. You can frame the imperative to get those people care in any number of ways–moral, economic (chucking away adults in the prime of life is damaging to productivity) — I don’t really care what premise you use. All I know is that we are killing people through a kind of quiet negligence.

Every day that the health care debate goes on, I am painfully aware of my good fortune. I am by no means wealthy, but I am rich in the one thing that matters. In this country we argue a lot about the right to life, but we have yet to secure the right to live. That shouldn’t be something you have to be able to afford, but something we provide to each other as a society.

Down in the comments to our first entry back (and boy, am I glad we still have comments after the long layoff), reader Ian says:

The administration’s optimistic projections call for a debt/GDP ratio of around 80% by the end of the decade. President Obama is trying to tell us that by adding a new entitlement that guarantees health insurance for 30 million Americans, that debt burden will be reduced. This is the left’s version of the Laffer curve. This fabrication alone makes this administration beneath contempt, and I wish you recognized that.

And also:

I’m all in favor of deficit commissions, even if they’ve never worked before. But that hardly compensates for Obama’s strenuous efforts to further saddle me and my ever growing brood with enormous new debt. It is debt that felled all the great powers throughout history, and we are almost certainly going to join them all.

This is where you would expect me to take issue with Ian, but I’m going to agree with him, although we get to the end result via different paths. For me, the issue isn’t the current deficit spending, which is something that we can come back from, having done it before, as after World War II, as after Ronald Reagan. I believe that spending is necessary to get the economy back on track. The problem, and here is where Ian and I agree, is that ultimately the deficit will have to be dealt with.

Normally, that would mean raising taxes in better times, when/as/if they come. Now, we no longer have governments, we just have infestations by politicians who never quite achieve the butterfly/caterpillar transition into statesmen. When the time comes to raise taxes, which party is going to do it? Which is going to be willing to tell us the hard truths? Which is going to have the will to do what needs to be done?

If you chose “C,” none of the above, you answered correctly. Neither political party is going to do it, either out of fear, intellectual bankruptcy, cockeyed philosophy, or all three. And at that moment, this republic becomes a banana republic, just another country that can’t get it together to pay off its debts.

That’s my issue. The deficit doesn’t frighten me. It’s just a thing to be dealt with, however difficult. It’s the people who are going to be asked to deal with it that scare the hell out of me.

As quoted at Eschaton:

“President Obama was in a grade school classroom speaking to elementary school children and he was using a teleprompter,” Pawlenty said Friday in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he added. “That’s not a joke. That’s a real story.”

Actually, it’s not. The tale spread by bloggers over the Internet and in some media, including the Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart, blended together two Obama appearances Jan. 19 at the Graham Road Elementary School in Falls Church, Virginia, to make it appear he used the teleprompter when speaking to a classroom of 30 pupils.

Tread carefully, Tim: the easy response to this is, “Maybe he was using a teleprompter, but at least he wasn’t sitting glassy-eyed pretending to read “My Pet Goat” while thousands died in New York.