Bluexit, Pizza Sneakers and Other Good and Bad Ideas
Kevin Baker's recent article in the New Republic contains loads of really good ideas.
He proposes that blue states simply surrender to red state visions of what the
United States should be like. He's hardly the first to observe that the
"United" part of our national formulation is more idealistic than
real: the United States increasingly looks like Yugoslavia for the 21st
century. But Baker thinks there may be a way to salvage some semblance of
unity. Call it a you-go-your-red-way-I'll-go-my-blue-way strategy. In Baker's
words, we can envision this as either the "New Federalism" or
"virtual secession." Baker suggests we should cut taxes to the bone,
but insist that each state pay its own freight.
Like many blue-staters, Baker notes that the more charitable
the blue states have been, the more they've been reviled. Among his findings:
--Hillary
Clinton won just 487 counties in 2016, but those same places generate 2/3 of
all the nation's economic income
--Red
states are twice as likely to depend upon the government for funding
He
suggests that the blue state zones (Maine to Virginia; the West Coast plus
Nevada and Hawaii; and the Rockies from Colorado to New Mexico) should operate
as autonomous cultural and economic enclaves with the proviso that these states
get to keep all the revenue they generate and spend it within the region. The
implications of this include:
--If
red staters want to use the Mayo Clinic, they will have to pay higher rates to
do so
--States
will have to foot their own bill when a disaster occurs
--The
military will have to be pared back to World War One levels (about 125,00
troops)
I
like this show-us-our-own-money approach. Here are the states that pay more
than a dollar in federal taxes for each dollar of services they receive (blue
states in blue):
CA, MA, WY,
OK, NJ, UT,
CO, NY, KN,
OH, NB, IL, MN, DE
Here
are the welfare bums of America, listed in order of those drinking deeply from
the public trough (blues states in blue;
ratios = discrepancy between what they get/pay):
SC
(8:1), ND (>6:1), FL (5:1), LA, AL, MS (40% of entire state income), HI, NM, KY, WV, IN
It's
evident that blue states are, for the most part, footing the bill for a bunch
of welfare states. And why is oil-rich North Dakota getting so much government
largess?
The
situation becomes starker when we look at the states in which 10% or more of
the population receives food stamps. That's the case in twenty-four states, of
which just ten are blue.
I recently spent five uncomfortable
nights in an electric hospital bed, which is a decidedly bad idea. They are supposed to be ergonomic, but if you're not of
"average" height and weight, they turn you into a human pretzel.
Every time one moves, the bed "adjusts" by using a series of electric
motors to change the bed's alignment and "support" whatever body
parts have moved.
Shall
we start with the fact that said motors retard sleep efforts? If only that were
the worst problem. In use, various body parts are raised or dropped according
to preprogrammed notions of comfort and in disregard of human variations. If,
like me, you are four inches and forty pounds short of "average,"
you're confined to a device straight out of Torquemada." Want to cut
medical costs? Start with dumping these $16,000+ monstrosities in favor of
decent mattresses and beds that crank into the desired position and stay there.
On
the good ideas side of the ledger,
University of Illinois professor Kathryn Anthony has written a new book titled Defined By Design in which she concludes
that much modern design is about designers and marketers, not consumers. This
explains why so many clothes and shoes are no-size-fits-anyone nightmares, why
childproof caps are the norm (even though there are more cap-related injuries
than there have ever been accidental poisonings), why non-recyclable and
cut-inducing clamshell packaging is on everything, and why most products somehow
discriminate by gender, age, and somatotype. Anthony's work is long overdue. Let's hope it inspires the
formation of consumer and public groups that will force designers to subject
ideas, buildings, and products to public scrutiny rather than constructing
things that are extensions of their own egos.
Obamacare
is turning out to be a miscible hybrid of good
and bad ideas. On the good side,
Obamacare has brought medical coverage to tens of millions who'd otherwise have
none. On the bad side, the best that can be said of it is that it's better than
no coverage. Republicans have vowed to kill the program since Day One, which
makes it poignantly ironic that Republicans might be the ones to salvage it.
Many Republicans, especially governors, are discovering that the US medical
system is so broken that flawed Obamacare is better than anything else they can
cobble together. The real answer, of course, is universal healthcare, but until
things change to make that more than magical thinking, Obamacare is as good as it gets.
Sometimes
ideas germinate that are just so incredibly dumb that they stretch conceptions
of bad. Exhibit A: Pizza Hut's introduction
of "Pie Tops," a sneaker with embedded apps that allows your shoes to
order 'za through Twitter or Amazon Echo. This sounds like a discarded Monty
Python routine. Who pays if the shoes order a large mushroom and onion that its
wearer didn't intend?
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