Let's start spending, but not too much

It's time for Americans to buy more, but not a lot more. Many pundits say improvements in the economy depend on consumers, especially wealthy ones, starting to spend again. Excessive spending is part of what got us in trouble.

The past two decades or so, we have gone from about 60% of the non-military economy being consumer buying, to about 67%. We did this while dropping our average savings rate a tad below zero. That is, we borrowed—buying plasma TVs, SUVs and stuff like that. Now we have flipped to a savings mode.

That is a reaction to current financial troubles, but the stock market bottomed in early March, a measure of how we feel generally, and it is now back to where it was a year ago, before people began to panic. We will start to spend, but we should go back only to the 60% level, and save some money.

In turn, that money can be turned by the banks into bond loans to states and cities, so over the next twenty or more years they can repair the sewers, water lines, roadways and schools which, ignored, are literally rotting. Just like the Interstates and the school construction of the 1950s through 1970s, this construction will provide jobs, provide great infrastructure to undergird the economy, and be paid for gradually by those who in the future use the facilities. The savings will provide for retirements when needed. Just a small change in buying and saving will do the trick.

Kim Jong Il will be replaced soon

Somebody flogging his own book suggested in the Washington Post a few weeks ago that Mr. Obama invite Kim Jong Il of North Korea to the US for a week or two. Cute, but not effective. Yes, it somewhat thawed relations when Eisenhower (on Nixon's suggestion) invited Mr. Khrushchev in 1959, but he was merely crude, not post-stroke. Besides, the warmth lasted about two weeks with Khrushchev, and then he reverted to the hooligan he was.

Mr. Kim is not thinking straight, perhaps due to lesions in his frontal cortex that manages, e.g., risk/benefit analysis.

China and Russia lead an effort that imposed even greater economic sanctions on North Korea. By themselves, Sanctions will not have much effect, being as North Korea is already an economic mess. Not the point. Two communist countries were saying to a 'comrade' that they are not happy with all the nuke rattling, being as each has a presence near North Korea, China lying just across a river.

The message was not for Kim but for the advisors around him (every dictator has a group of advisors). The message was 'chill this guy' and put someone else in charge before you blow it. Soon Kim will have a medical problem like Mr. Arafat's a few years a go (when he was lethally poisoned). He will need to get medical attention and some other people will take over, and tamp things down to a dull roar. Count on it, especially if you are Kim Jong Il or his 20-x son.

Disturbing the peace of the police

Basic police training is to control by force of personality whatever situation you are in. The problem is many police do not understand that they do not necessarily have a legal right to dominate everyone anywhere they go, at least not in America.

Some police, therefore, take offense when someone verbally disputes the lawfulness of their orders, and arrest people at that point. It is often for the 'holy trinity' of disorderly conduct, failure to obey a police order, and resisting arrest. Faced with all that hassle, most people back down and pay a fine, reinforcing bad police conduct. The officer in the Prof. Gates matter has made it quite clear in recorded interviews that he took offense at Prof. Gates' resistance to being further hassled in his own house after he showed proof he belonged there. When he took offense, he arrested.

Frankly, although it is more often people of color who face this, white teenagers also do, and sometimes other whites. We need to be more careful choosing police recruits to avoid those who crave authority for personal reasons. And train police that a disturbing of their personal peace is not a disturbance of the public peace justifying an arrest.

Let's talk health care

Sarah Palin's report recently that the Obama Health Plan includes a death panel for people with congenital disorders is of course false. (Read her statement: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434.)

Ms. Palin's is only a variation on the euthanasia scare pitch coming from the Republican-Insurance Company cartel. And the euthanasia story is only the worst of the distortions the cartel is pitching. But all this garbage is not what we should be discussing.

We should talk about providing health care to the roughly one of six Americans with no insurance who must therefore use emergency departments as doctor's offices, so the ED's are near collapse.

We should talk about providing health care to people who do have insurance but whose carriers have found ways to deny converge, often stories about pre-existing conditions that would make a used car salesman blush.

We should talk about the excellent health care plans members of Congress have that they refuse so far to share.

We should talk about the drug part of health care that will still not have the government negotiate drug prices with the manufacturers, when drugs are often the most expensive part of health care.

We should talk about helping America catch up with other developed countries with national health care that have longer life expectancy and lower neo-natal death rates than the U.S.

We should talk about a federal health care option that would provide a standard against which to measure private insurance plans.

We should talk about how the most expensive proposals for health care now on the table would cost the federal government only about $100 billion a year, about ¼ of the defense budget. How can we have a secure nation when we don't care for our ill?