Election politics

Well, this is Wednesday morning after the 2012 election -- and President Obama was re-elected for a second term.  It appears that sufficiently many voters have had sense enough to reject the Romney-Ryan ticket.  (And it worked despite efforts to thwart the voting process by deploying malfunctioning voting machines in several voting stations, as was reported occasionally.)

So what is below is only of historical interest ... maybe with some suggestions for changing the voting system here.

The Romney-Ryan ticket came out with some data saying that "Nearly half of all publicly held debt is held by foreign countries, led by China. When countries that don’t have our best interests at heart own this much of our debt, our independence is threatened." 

The "debt held by public" numbers increased from 1970 from 0.28 tr$ to 2.4 tr$ in 1990 and reaching 11.1 tr$ mid-year 2012.  It is interesting that starting with Nixon in 1969, Reps had 7 four-year periods and Dems so far only 4 in office, and Clinton ended with a budget surplus.  What does that tell us about reckless spending?

There is another thing, unrelated to this but equally indicative of misdirection, that strikes me as curious:  In the proposal to change Medicare and Social Security benefits, Romney states that the excellent system he will implement as president will not be applied to seniors above the age of 55 -- so that no one who is already, or soon going to be, using the current system will have to change.
Well, why not?  If it's so much better, then especially those people who are using it should be the first to benefit from the better system ... Why deprive them of the advantages of the voucher system under which public health would improve?  Can we get any specifics on that -- perhaps tonight at the first presidential debate.

Well, that debate was sort of a flop for the Dems. The vice-presidential debate was much better, and the second and third debate clearly showed that Obama is the superior person one would like to have as president. His reposte to Romney's suggestion that the state of our Navy had declined since there are now fewer ships than there were in 1916 has become a classic: "We also have fewer horses and bayonets. ..." (I paraphrase - it's on the interent) and went on to explain that there are airplane carriers where planes can start and land, and there are submarines -- it was a beautiful moment.

And then there came Sandy, the hurricane that was downgraded to a huge tropical storm(more than 1000 miles in diameter) by the time it made landfall on the New Jersey shore. She put nearly 10 million households in the dark and later flooded Manhattan with seawater 4.2 m above normal. The best effect was that for the first time after such a disaster commentators and analysts on radio and tv talked about the neglected infrastructure of the country: Why can a storm cut so many power lines? - Why did the emergency power generators malfunction? And for the first time the USA was compared to a a third-world country that is helpless after a natural catastrophe.

Then Mayor Bloomberg from NYC declared himself a supporter of Obama because he now feels the current president can handle the effects of global warming, man-made or other, better than Romney. The unspoken thought behind it was, of course, that the majority of Republicans and their 'leaders' do not think that (i) global warming is really happening, and (ii) if it does, it's certainly not man-made, and even if there were some effect there, it is really (iii) not related to the burning of fossil fuel and the generation of carbon monoxide. The rest of the world is sadly amused.

What the world thinks though about which US leader it would prefer to deal with in the next four years has been dug up by a poll conducted by BBC World News in 21 countries: Only in Pakistan more people would like to see Romney than Obama as the next president. The link is to one of NPR's blogs where the results and source information is available. Here is one salient result:

Typically, Poland gives Romney the second most points, directly behind Kenya.  

The economy

With the Republican candidate for president of the United States of America, Mitt Romney, and his running mate, Paul Ryan, the candidate for vice president officially announced in late August, and the elections coming closer—6 November 2012—the possible consequences of a Republican takeover of the government appear to be more and more detrimental, even dangerous for life and prosperity. One reason for this dire outlook is the general misunderstanding of the free-market economy that the Romney–Ryan team displays.

This misunderstanding is on a level with the Republican mantra of reducing taxes for corporations, and also for the rich, in order to create jobs and to stimulate the economy. It has been widely shown that this doesn't work anymore when taxes are already low compared with other industrial countries. There is another angle to this: the extremely high salaries and bonuses chief executives of companies are paid, increasing the gap between common employees and executives ever more. 

There are several examples why CEOs are not doing their jobs here despite the extraordinary remunerations they receive. One is the comparison of effort by the work force to generate a country's GDP. In the US, employees work longer hours, have fewer holidays each year, and much less vacation days for comparable seniority than, for instance, in  Europe.  France has a 35-hour work week,  Germany about twenty holidays per year. Vacation is 5 weeks per year, at full pay; this is a legally required minimum, not set by individual companies. Yet the economic efficiency in Europe is higher than in the US. Obviously, those highly paid managers here are not doing their job in optimizing the work force efficiency even though the pay gap between management and work force is about a factor of 20 in Europe while in the US it is about a factor of 350.  

The high pay scale prevalent in in the U.S. appears to be a consequence of an escalating effort by companies to retain their top executives, as was discussed by Gretchen Morgensohn in an article that appeared in The New York Times on 23 September 2012 in the Sunday Business section on page 1.

One can well imagine that the exorbitant amount of money a top executive takes home every month provides a small incentive to make long-term decisions that are beneficial for the company, or consider any far reaching projects at all, since their need to maintain a steady income after a few years of work is essentially nil and their personal retirement package usually in excellent shape. Therefore, the drive for innovations to improve efficiency of open new markets with attractive products is low and the executive mentality is complacent.

My conclusion is that American top managers are just incapable of organizing the manufacturing and service industries in the US in an effective way so that the gross domestic product is generated efficiently. One contributing factor which is widely ignored is the level of benefits the work force enjoys; good mental and physical health combined with an attractive work–life balance would by itself improve morale substantially and increase output.

In Morgenson's article another factor is discussed that is seen as a cause behind the inflated salaries of top manageres: Peer-group benchmarking of executives' compensation.  This applies to hiring managers away from companies with attractive financial offers in the assumption that those managers can improve the performance of a company in their new jobs. However, studies cited by Morgenson have shown that this "theory of transferability of talent" in the peer group is false. (See the work published by Charles M. Elson and Craig K. Ferrere.) It was found that "CEO skills are very firm-specific. CEOs don't mover often, but when they do, they're flops."

In any case, the economic health, jobs and unemployment along with GDP, appears to be bad not because the President doesn't create jobs (is this really part of the job description, as Republican candidates for this job claim ... despite their insistence that government interference in public and economic endeavors needs to be reduced?) but because management is ineffective, and even incapable, unsuitable for the task. Along with the dire state into which our educational system has manoeuvered itself—so that in the long run there is no supply of a capable and well–trained work force—all this spells doom for the economy of the USA.  We will sink to the level of a third–world country during this century.

Radical politics

Seeing the field of the GOP's presidential candidates evolve—or rather disintegrate, as it were—with several of the remaining ones proposing wild and seemingly simple plans of reducing the deficit or balancing the budget or reducing the federal government and its effect on people's lives, whatever the daily fad turns out to be, one cannot help but thinking about likewise desperate measures to demonstrate convincingly that those plans not only will not work but will ruin the country, set back the US in the sciences, advanced technologies, the economy, in personal health, and as a society, to name just the most visible aspects.

So what could be done? What is the problem with these proposals?  It is, of course, that all these ideas and measures touted as remedy for perceived ills in our nation are based on theoretical models of usually narrowly defined parts of society, or commerce, or economy, or finances, etc.  That is, of course, a general problem with theory:  It is hard predict what the outcome would exactly be, and difficult to make an estimate of the "unintended consequences" in other areas affected by the model.

There is, however, a general solution for deciding whether a theoretical model of reality is correct or wrong, a solution which has long been established in the sciences, in particular in physics. That solution is to do an experiment.  But how could this method be practically transferred from the sciences to politics, in this particular case, in this situation in which we currently find ourselves in the USA?  Well, it is actually quite obvious: Let's elect Santorum or Gingrich or Paul president and also make sure that the GOP has the majority in both houses of Congress. Then let's all support the motions for laws and acts and other political tools that the Republican Party puts on the table by not raising any rational objections, by resisting the urge to point out fallacies in their thinking or to extrapolate the effect of certain measures beyond a year or two.

The more support the whole nation gives the GOP the faster and more deeply the implemented measures will take effect. It can be hoped that before the second term of the new president comes to an end, so many people in our nation will be in so dire straits, demonstrably caused by the new policies that were implemented, that there will be either a revolution by the deprived masses that overthrows the GOP's government or at least a populist consensus on the reasons nothing in the society works anymore and a new political paradigm would have to be installed under which one could have a real democracy here as originally intended.

That means politicians will be completely independent from any interest groups, would have a proven capability to collaborate, would be well educated in the specific area of expertise they represent in the gremiums that propose laws (so that such gaffes as happened with accepting the fact of global warming and consequent climate changes would not take so long that affordable countermeasures would be coming too late).  Another desirable feature of the new politics would be a third party that could balance the political spectrum and represent the interests of the people rather than that of the establishment or of the backward religious right and that would not be afraid to look around in the world to find out how other countries with a much higher level of education, science, health, and societal structure are running their affairs.