President Barack Obama just won reelection a few weeks ago. There has been a lot of speculation by people on the right about how Romney lost. Most of it is of execrable quality. I want to look at it from the other side, from the Obama perspective. And I am going to start far afield with Gerrymandering. What is Gerrymandering and how does it work? Let's start with how it works.
Consider a hypothetical state that has 10 congressional districts. Assume that the state is evenly split between the Red party (R voters) and the Blue party (B voters) and that the Red party controls the levers of state government, thus putting them in charge of redistricting, resetting the district boundaries after the census that happens every 10 years. For simplicity let's further assume that the state has 100 voters. In a real scenario we can think of each of our hypothetical voters as standing in for 1% of the actual population. So in our case we have 50 R voters and 50 B voters.
Each district would then end up with 10 voters in it. In an ideal situation each district would end up with 5 R voters and 5 B voters and each election would be a heavily contested affair with the candidate for each party having a 50-50 chance. We would expect that the Red candidate would win half the time and the Blue candidate would win half the time. This would result in the state being represented by a delegation consisting of 5 Red congressmen and 5 Blue congressmen. But the Red state officials would like for things to turn out better for their party and also be less subject to the vagaries of luck. Here's how they would go about getting their wish.
They would put 6 R voters and 4 B voters in the first district. They would do the same thing with districts 2 through 8. At this point they would have allocated 48 R voters and 32 B voters. They would then put 1 R voter and 9 B voters in district 9. They would do the same thing in district 10. All 100 voters would be assigned to a district. Each district would have exactly 10 voters in it. But now 8 of the districts would elect Red congressmen and only 2 would elect Blue ones. All of a sudden a very balanced state ends up with a very unbalanced delegation.
That's how you Gerrymander. You create as many districts as you can that tilt in your favor by a small margin. The remaining few districts now tilt in favor of the other guys by a large margin. The result is that more politicians that you support win (by a small margin) and fewer politicians that you oppose win (by a large margin). There are now computer software packages that you can download from the Internet that will do this for you automatically. You plug in the election results from each precinct in the state. The software then builds a large number of districts that are tilted in your favor by a small margin and a small number of districts that are tilted toward your opponent by a large margin. There are other considerations. But the software packages can handle many of them. So Gerrymandering is now simple to achieve if you control the process for drawing districts.
In our case we were able to tilt things so that what should have been a 5-5 situation becomes an 8-2 situation. If you have more districts to work with and if you can accurately predict how voters will tilt you can do even better. So Gerrymandering is a technique to create an unfair advantage in favor of the party that can control how districts are drawn. The only thing you need to know is the distribution of voters that will support or oppose your preferred group of politicians.
Now this is something both parties do. But in the recent election the Republicans were much more effective at it. Why? Because they controlled the legislatures of way more states than the Democrats in 2011. This is the year when redistricting was done based on the 2010 census. Censuses are done on a ten year cycle so redistricting is done on a ten year cycle. The result of Republican Gerrymandering efforts was that the Democrats had many more votes cast for their candidates in the 2012 elections for the various races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But the Republicans won many more seats anyhow. It is unusual for one party to control the redistricting process in way more states than the other party. But it happens. And it happened in the most recent redistricting cycle.
My state (Washington) has a "nonpartisan" redistricting commission. But I live in a district that tilts heavily Democratic. This should have made it possible for Republican representatives to win more races in other districts by winning closely. It didn't actually happen. In my state Democrats won a number of close races in supposedly "slightly Republican leaning" districts. This was actually unexpected. Most of the smart money said that the Republicans had won the "redistricting war" in my state. So the smart money expected the Republicans to do better than they actually did. But my state was an exception. The Republicans did as well or better than expected in most states. And they were expected to do well due to Gerrymandering. So the U.S. House of Representatives for the session that starts in January of 2013 has many more Republican representatives, a comfortable majority in fact, than the overall vote would predict.
So the principles of how to Gerrymander are simple. Theoretically, the math necessary to pull it off is hard. But with "off the shelf" software available on the Internet this does not represent a real practical difficulty. In the past it was easy to spot Gerrymandering. Some districts would look like abstract art creations, not congressional districts. But, if you are willing to settle for getting a good Gerrymander rather then the best possible Gerrymander, even this obvious give away can be avoided. That leaves only one possible problem.
In our little artificial example we assumed we could accurately predict who voters would support. There is a term of art, a "yellow dog Democrat". This is a voter who will vote Democratic even if his candidate is a "yellow dog lying in the road". And, of course, one can imagine yellow dog Republicans. There are a number of Democratic voters who always vote Democratic and a number of voters who always vote Republican. These people are frequently described as "hard core" Democratic/Republican voters. In my example I have assumed that all my voters were hard core voters. In the real world not all voters are hard core voters. In fact, pundits talk interminably about "swing" voters. There are the opposite of hard core. They sometimes vote for the Democrat and sometimes for the Republican. Supposedly they are "convincable".
Most of the "informed opinion", baloney for short, had it that the election was all about swing voters. In fact the field was narrower than that. It was about swing voters in swing states. One "expert" went so far as to say that the whole election boiled down to swing voters in one county in Ohio. But polling suggests that people the experts identified as swing voters went for Romney. So expert opinion got it wrong. Their swing voters should have determined the outcome of the election but they didn't. This doesn't necessarily mean that the experts did a bad job of identifying who were swing voters. But if they did the identification correctly, it means there was something else going on that turned out to be more important than the whole "swing voter" thing.
Now, the publicly available estimates are that the Obama campaign spent about a billion dollars. This was matched by about a billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign and a billion dollars spent by "independent groups", actually a dozen or so very rich people. So three billion dollars were spent to influence the vote of perhaps a hundred thousand voters (swing voters in Ohio). That's about $30,000 per vote. If this were how the election truly worked then each vote cost roughly a year's salary for a typical middle class family. (Assume 1.5 independents per family and you get very close to the median family income of same). Spending this kind of money on the people who are supposed to determine the outcome only to find out that actually other people would determine the outcome is bad, very bad. If the Romney people spent their money influencing the wrong group of people while the Obama people spent their money influencing the right group of people then that would explain the outcome. But it doesn't tell us anything about the people that the Obama campaign targeted, apparently correctly.
We can understand what's going on by returning to our little Gerrymandering lesson. We learned that you can work magic if you know how people will vote. One approach a Gerrymandering group can take is to put people into three groups: us, them, and swing voters, also called "independents". If the independent group is large then it's hard to Gerrymander. You can't make a lot of close districts because you have to put in a big enough cushion to allow for the possibility of the independents going heavily for the other guy. And people don't walk around with a big "R" or "B" tattooed on their forehead. So the usual technique is to use results from previous elections. Precinct by precinct election tallies are available. Theoretically, all you need is to pick one statewide office, say Governor and tally the R and B votes for each precinct. But if you go with one race, you may have a "good candidate" or "bad candidate" effect. Let me take a minute to expand on what I am talking about.
I am not talking about "the issues". I am talking about non-issue oriented attributes of a candidate. Voters like candidates that are good looking, articulate, and relatable. Good looks are particularly important for female candidates. Most successful female candidates are blonds with a full but trim figure. Height is particularly important in male candidates. Tall men tend to beat short men. Height is less important for women and handsomeness is less important for men. Voters like candidates that give a good speech. So being articulate helps. But in this context "articulate" is more related to smooth delivery and an ability to use humor effectively than it is an ability to put together and deliver a well reasoned argument. In fact, appearing too brainy is a liability. A "good old boy" will beat a "professor" almost every time. Voters like a candidate that they think can see things from their point of view. Bill Clinton is the undisputed master of this. But if a voter decides a candidate "just doesn't understand my situation", that candidate is in a lot of trouble.
Another attribute voters don't value is actual honesty. They don't want to be told what they don't want to hear. They prefer candidates that will make a plausible sounding argument for what the voter wants to believe. But voters don't like this kind of deception to be rubbed in their faces. The usual candidate strategy for dealing with this is to be as vague as possible. Say something bland and meaningless instead of telling the voter what they don't want to hear. Unfortunately, if a voter agrees with a candidate's position on 9 out of 10 issues he will still vote for the other guy if the other guy throws up enough fog so that the voter doesn't notice points of disagreement. Effective candidates can expound at great length (here defined as about 3 minutes) while appearing to say something in any situation and in response to any question. A candidate that has not mastered the effective use of this skill will not be successful.
Gerrymandering committees will put the R, B, and S data for each precinct into the computer model along with whatever other information they think is important and a nice Gerrymander will be produced. The computer can even figure out how big a cushion each of your districts needs to be safe. Given that the Republicans did this in 2011, and did it well, there must be more to the story when it comes to the Presidential campaign.
Some elections are high turnout (a relatively high percentage of eligible voters actually cast a ballot) elections and other races are low turnout elections. The 2008 election was a high turnout election and the 2010 election was a low turnout election. Polls indicated that the general population had not changed their opinions on the issues by much in the intervening two years but Democrats did very well in 2008 and Republicans did very well in 2010. What happened? In the simplest terms, Democrats stayed home in large numbers in 2010 compared to 2008 but the Republican turnout dipped far less between the same two elections. If you don't vote your vote doesn't count. The absolute number of Republican votes dipped in 2010 but the absolute number of Democratic votes dipped more. So the Republicans won a large number of races in 2010 that they had lost in 2008.
Voters hate negative ads. But they have come to dominate campaigns. Why? The general consensus is that negative ads depress the turnout for whoever the ad is aimed at. If you can depress the number of votes for the other guy more than he can depress the number of votes you get then that gives you an advantage. All you have to do to win is get more votes than the other guy And, as the saying goes, "winning is everything".
Republicans have had a long term strategy of catering to voting blocks that reliably turn out and vote. In relative terms, young people don't vote. Old people do. Minorities don't vote. White people do. Women don't vote. Men do. So the core constituency of the Republican base is old white men. This has worked very well for them, particularly since the "Reagan revolution". Historically, white blue collar men, particularly union members, voted for Democrats. Reagan in the 1980 campaign convinced this group that they had been sold down the river by the Democrats and that Republicans would take much better care of them. They bought the claim and came over to the Republican party in large numbers. Union leaders would strongly support Democratic candidates. But the rank and file would vote Republican in large numbers. One thing that helped with this argument is that this group is socially conservative and strongly religious. Democrats had put a lot of effort into liberal causes (civil rights, women's rights, anti-war - viewed by this group as being unpatriotic) and were less effective in implementing changes that were seen as both positive and important to this group. Republicans were able to put conservative social positions in the forefront and successfully divert attention away from Republican anti-union and pro-business policies that this group would have disliked. With this block added to their other constituencies, Republicans have been very successful winning elections since 1980.
But Obama has won twice now, and the recent win was the more surprising of the two. In 2008 the Republicans were coming off of 8 years of what ultimately became a very unpopular President in George W. Bush. Then the financial crisis hit. Most people blamed Republican policies much more than Democratic ones. And Obama was a charismatic figure who ran a very well regarded campaign. McCain's campaign was not as nearly as well regarded and he was bucking the "W" currents. So it was not a big surprise when he lost. 2012 was supposed to be a Republican year. Obama was seen as an ineffective legislator and the economy was in poor shape. The theory was that an "I'm not Obama" campaign would not have much trouble winning. So what went wrong?
The conventional wisdom is that Romney ran a poor campaign from a technical point of view and that he was a bad campaigner. While extremely weak on the economy, Obama was seen to have an advantage elsewhere. He was seen as being on the "right" side of many issues. But losing candidates have often been on the right side of issues and have still lost. Many Republicans, Romney most prominent among them, also disagreed with the characterization that Romney ran a poor campaign from a technical point of view. They thought they had a strategy that would be successful and that they implemented their strategy well. But they lost. Why?
In a nut shell those things that I said above about who votes turned out to be wrong, at least relatively speaking. Obama got large numbers of young people to vote and vote for him. He got large numbers of minorities to vote and to vote for him. He also got large numbers of women, particularly single women, to vote and to vote for him. Taken together, these groups put him over the top. So why did the Romney people miss all this?
The Republican party has had a very effective messaging machine for decades now. They started out by convincing large numbers of white blue collar men, frequently union men, to vote for them. They did this by catering to them on social issues while implementing anti-union and pro-business (and pro rich people) policies. They used their superior messaging machine to successfully deflect attention away from their unpopular policies. They have now been able to hold on to this block for about 30 years. And a number of the social issues they have championed, anti-"women's libber" and anti-immigrant/minority issues in particular, are popular with this group. But you eventually alienate women and minorities by doing this.
They have also been anti-entitlement. George W. Bush famously championed drastic changes to Social Security in 2005, for instance. More recently, Republicans have attacked Medicare in its current form. Many of the Republican core constituency depend heavily on Social Security and Medicare. Their efforts in these areas have not been completely successful. But a large number of this core constituency have stuck with them due to the herculean efforts of the messaging machine to frame these initiatives as "necessary reform" whether or not these initiatives really are either necessary or a reform (e.g. improvement).
Republicans have also made a careful calculation that they can keep a large percentage of women on board. The theory is that husbands will sway married women in sufficient numbers to keep the loss manageable. As to the young, minorities, and single women, they don't vote (in very large numbers) so they don't count. This kind of calculus has worked very well for them for decades. Experts have predicted the death of this strategy for almost as long as it has been around. So anyone opining that "time's up" for this strategy can be rebutted with the many past predictions of its demise that turned out to be incorrect.
Republicans have had electoral success for many years in spite of pushing unpopular positions. The thing that has made this possible has been their messaging machine. It has been able to cover up or paper over innumerable unpopular positions. As a result, politicians associated with many of these unpopular positions in the past have garnered success at the polls anyhow. Why should this not continue? And Republicans have also not been shy about trying to use various techniques in the past to keep the turnout low among the groups listed above. They have been past masters of negative campaigning. They have long championed voter registration policies that make it hard for the young, who move around a lot, and minorities who are concentrated in a few areas, to register and vote. The fact that these groups have long been categorized as "groups who don't vote" is testament to their success. A voter who would normally vote for the other guy but stays home is effectively a vote for your guy.
The Obama campaign made a specific effort to counter all this. First they did what a traditional campaign would do. They concentrated their efforts in about ten swing states. The Romney people did the same thing. The vast majority of us who lived in one of the "other forty" saw a far different campaign than the swing staters did. But this was not a differentiators. As I said, both campaigns did this.
The strategy that the Obama campaign successfully implemented that won them the election was to Get Out The Vote (GOTV, in politics-speak) among traditionally low turnout groups, specifically young people, minorities, and single women. Everyone, but especially the Romney people, missed this. The actual Obama vote outdid predictions based on the standard polls by about 2%. More people voted for him than the pollsters thought would. Romney, on the other hand, underperformed relative to the standard polls, and way underperformed relative to Romney internal polls. Why was this?
Well, you remember the discussion above about Gerrymandering. And how important it is to know which bucket to put voters in, e.g. R, B, or S. And remember the discussion about how negative advertising depresses turnout. The Romney campaign assumed that the Republican juju would work one more time. In the past many polls have overestimated the Democratic turnout and underestimated the Republican turnout. This campaign was heavily negative by both sides. That should result in a low turnout election like 2010. In a low turnout election only hard core voters turn out. So the Romney people tracked sentiment among hard core voters and figured they were in good shape. They also tailored the Romney message toward hard core Republican voters for the most part. If turnout had gone as the Romney people expected he would have won and he and his people would have looked brilliant.
But the Obama campaign saw an opportunity to turn out a large number of people who are the opposite of the traditional hard core voter. They are young, minority, single women. They put together a very sophisticated turn out machine designed to get these people to register and vote. They also devoted a significant part of their traditional campaign to issues important to these people. In the case of minorities they highlighted immigration and voter suppression. In the case of single women they highlighted Republican anti-abortion and anti-birth control activities. They highlighted student loan reforms already implemented and support for science, education, and the environment, issues important to young people.
Campaigning, like most other things, is captive to technological issues. Historically, the best way to reach people has been TV ads. So campaigns for the last 50 years have invested heavily in TV ads. Both the Obama and the Romney people spent a lot of money on TV this time too. But the Obama campaign put a lot more effort into social media and did it better than the Romney campaign. They invested in things like Twitter and Facebook. They invested in an extremely sophisticated GOTV tools. The Obama tools were better and they worked.
And the biggest irony about the Obama win is that they learned their strategy from Carl Rove. Rove's nickname is "Bush's brain". In 2004 he headed up the Bush reelection campaign. It looked like a bad year for the Republicans. Rove decided to go after a group of voters and see if he could increase Republican turnout. He picked a group he was confident were in the Bush camp, evangelicals. He then put together a sophisticated campaign to reach these people and turn them out. In his case, he used the informal network evangelical churches use to communicate with each other. This network is invisible to the Washington punditocracy so he could go about his business out of the public spotlight. The campaign was not invisible. The Kerry people figured out what he was doing. It looked like Rove could turn out 4 million additional Bush voters this way. So they set out to find enough Kerry voters to counter this. Their effort was successful. So why did he lose the election? Because Rove was able to turn out 8 million new evangelicals. The additional 4 million overwhelmed the Kerry response and he lost.
I'm sure the Romney people were aware of what the Obama people were up to. But in the same way the Kerry people underestimated how successful Rove would be, the Romney people underestimated how successful the Obama people would be. In the case of the Kerry people, you can hardly blame them. They were not wired into the evangelical community so they couldn't accurately gage how successful Rove was being. And the same is true of the Romney people. But Romney had an additional problem. The Republican messaging machine, recently dubbed the "Conservative Entertainment Complex" by David From, a prominent conservative intellectual, has been very successful at lying (Frum's characterization) to the Republican base (and the rest of us) for a long time now.
This operation is also referred to as the "Conservative Media Bubble". A lot of conservatives genuinely believed that Romney would win the election. Why? Because a lot of people in the Conservative Entertainment Complex/Conservative Media Bubble said Romney would win. Democrats do not have an equivalent Bubble. They have been forced by Republicans to live in the real world. So I am sure that a lot of people in the Kerry campaign thought their guy would win. But some of them had their doubts. And I am sure that none of them believed that a loss was impossible. So far no one has found anyone in the Romney organization who thought it was possible for Romney to lose.
Besides the win itself, there is another thing that seems to have come out of the election. One of the themes that the Obama campaign hammered on continuously was that conservatives in general and Romney in particular was dishonest. This idea was definitely reinforced by the spectacular and very public failure of the Conservative Entertainment Complex (Fox TV, Rush Limbaugh and others on the radio, etc.) to predict the outcome of the election. It is definitely possible that this reputation for dishonesty will dissipate. But what if it doesn't? Credibility is important in the short run and critical in the long run.
Political parties and movements come back from the dead all the time. Republicans did it in 2010 after being beat badly in 2008, way more badly than they were beat in 2012. But the key to a comeback is to have a message that works and to have people believe the message. If people think an individual or group is dishonest then they will think "that's just old so and so mouthing off again" and not pay attention to what he is saying. I don't know how you make a comeback if no one is paying attention to what you say. Republicans have come back from setbacks far worse than the 2012 election results before. They have done it by coming up with a popular message and then getting it out using their messaging machine. But this will not work if no one believes the message machine. In this environment they become responsible for their many unpopular policies. This makes it even harder for them to come back.
It is way to soon to write off the Republican messaging machine. But if it turns out that the Obama campaign has severely damaged it then 2012 may turn out to be a "sea change" election like 1980.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Legal Marijuana
I live in Washington State, one of two states (the other is Colorado) that recently legalized Marijuana at the state level. The process has been and will continue to be "very interesting".
I was a teenager in the '60s when Pot, as it is colloquially known, first became popular. Before then a few beatniks (fringe musicians) were known to smoke Pot. Rumor had it that it was fairly popular in what is now referred to as the "black community". But at that time blacks were ghettoized in places like Harlem. Unlike today, the rest of society had little overlap and contact with black culture. So whatever was going on there was generally invisible to the culture at large. Today blacks are trend setters in many areas of culture and trends that are incubating in the black community quickly break out into mainstream consciousness.
Anyhow, at the time there was a lot of turmoil as a result of the Civil Rights movement and later the Vietnam Antiwar movement. Youth were feeling rebellious to an extent unimaginable today. That led to a lot of experimentation and one of the things that got experimented on was Pot.
As part of a reaction to this unrest politicians like Richard Nixon came to prominence. One of his themes was that the country was going to Hell and "law and order" needed to be restored. Part of the law and order agenda was to crack down on drugs. Pot was certainly one of the high profile drugs that Nixon and other like minded politicians went after but it was not the only one. The other two drugs whose popularity rapidly increased were Cocaine and LSD. Cocaine is still with us but LSD has largely faded from the scene. So let me talk about it a little.
LSD was the first big psychoactive drug. If you "dropped" LSD, also commonly referred to as Acid, it did strange things to your perceptions. For some people the otherworldly experience was very enjoyable. But for others it was very scary and horrible. It took several years for LSD to become popular enough that a lot of people had taken it. Once this had happened large numbers of people concluded that for enough people the bad far outweighed the good and its popularity declined, again over several years.
The LSD experience is informative. In effect, a large scientific experiment was run. It answered the question: is the typical experience with this drug a good one or a bad one. This experiment was run with a large "sample size" (all the people who tried LSD) and the consensus was that the bad far outweighed the good. And for this to be true there had to be a lot of bad.
In the last decade or so we have run a similar experiment. In this case the drug is Methamphetamine, or "Meth" for short. The popular form is now referred to as "Crystal Meth". Again, one way or the other a lot of people have now taken Meth. And the results have been similar to that of LSD. Most people agree that on balance Meth is a bad thing. The problem with Meth is that it appears to be very addictive. So it appears that for whatever reason, a lot of people try Meth. They quickly figure out it is a bad thing but it is too late. They are addicted. Fortunately for that previous generation, LSD was not addictive. So when people decided it was a bad thing it disappeared pretty completely.
We have been running a much larger experiment with Pot. Far more people have taken it. If it was going to turn out to be another LSD, or worse yet, another Meth, we would long since all be aware of that. But there are no large populations of Pot users suffering severe problems in our mental hospitals. There are no "Pot heads" with severe physical problems in our regular hospitals. There are lots of Pot smokers in our criminal justice system but few if any in our health system. Pot is just not in a class with LSD or Meth.
Does that mean that Pot has no negative effects. No! But where people get into trouble is with making absolute comparisons rather than relative comparisons. Compared to some hypothetical standard of physical, mental, and emotional health, are there negative effects associated with Pot? Yes! But that's the wrong comparison. A more appropriate comparison is with tobacco and alcohol. The process of smoking Pot is very similar to the process of smoking a tobacco cigarette. Cigarettes are addictive because one of their main ingredients is addictive. By some measures Nicotine is more addictive than Meth. And the tars and other ingredients in cigarettes smoke causes lung cancer. So cigarettes have very bad effects. And these bad effects are well known. Yet cigarettes are legal.
Alcohol also has many well known negative effects. It impairs your ability to drive well. It causes personality changes that may be very destructive. The cost of purchasing alcohol can have a bad economic effect on a family directly through the cost of the alcoholic beverages and indirectly due to the personality changes and physical changes that may result in reduced employment or complete unemployment.
This country experimented with a legal ban on alcohol. The many negative effects formed the basis for the case for it being outlawed. But the result was disastrous. Lawlessness became rampant. Availability became even more widespread even though it was now illegal. In this environment, the negative effects became even more pronounced compared to the old days when it was legal. After about a decade Federal efforts to make Alcohol consumption illegal were abandoned.
The country has gone down the same path with Pot and other drugs as with alcohol. In the late '60s a crackdown was initiated on Pot, Cocaine, and other "recreational drugs". Part of this program involved classifying Pot as a "Schedule 1" drug. Schedule 1 drugs are the most dangerous. They are drugs like Meth which are both addictive and destructive. But 50 years into our Pot science experiment it is obvious to everyone that Pot is not a Schedule 1 drug. It is not addictive to any extent and it is not destructive either physically or mentally in the way Meth is. It is not possible to characterize putting Pot on the Schedule 1 list or, as time has passed, keeping it on the Schedule 1 list as anything but stupid. Based on the actual characteristics of Pot it should be in the Schedule 5 list along with cough syrups that contain small amounts of Codeine. If you smoke Pot once a month it will have no long term effects. But you probably shouldn't drive until the effect wears off. If you smoke Pot frequently the negative effects will likely be similar in intensity to taking a cough syrup that contains small amounts of Codeine frequently.
Frankly, only a tiny minority of people, experts or otherwise, believe that Pot is highly dangerous, e.g. that its negative effects are on a par with Meth. There are a large group of people, frequently heavy Pot smokers who believe that Pot is all good. There is a very large group that believes that occasional Pot smoking is either a good thing or that the harm is small. Many people think that even heavy Pot smoking has, at worst a small amount of negative effect. The anti-Pot people have expended a large amount of effort ensuring that little or no large scale scientific research is done on Pot. It turns out there is a very good reason for this.
As I said, a lot of people have smoked a lot of Pot over the years. If there was a large negative effect associated with Pot this effect would be noticeable enough to be generally known. But the argument I am now making is unscientific. The conclusion is not based on properly done scientific experiments so it is suspect. This leaves intact the argument that "there is no scientific basis for saying that Pot is reasonably safe". More importantly, this active hostility to any scientific efforts to study Pot have meant that there is no well founded scientific research that Pot has beneficial effects. But if we remove the phrase "well founded" from the previous statement things change drastically. There are a number of small scientific studies that indicate that Pot makes a very good anti-nausea drug. This is also supported by a large amount of unscientific experimentation by the general public. Lots of people claim that Pot is a much better anti-nausea drug than anything available legally.
We have gotten ourselves into a spiral. As a society we have invested a tremendous effort in the idea that Pot should be illegal. We have spent fantastic amounts of money. We have put vast numbers of people in jail solely because they smoked Pot or sold small amounts of it. This incarceration and criminal record activity has ruined the lives of many people. The U.S. incarcerates more people as a percentage of its population than any other country in the world. And most of these inmates are behind bars directly or indirectly because recreational drugs are illegal. The largest subgroup of these drug criminals are only criminals because Pot is illegal.
The U.S. had a bad experience with making alcohol illegal. Beyond the direct effects it had a toxic effect on the criminal justice system. There was lots of money in the booze business. A lot of that money was deployed paying off cops, judges, lawyers, politicians, and otherwise doing harm directly to the criminal justice enterprise. But it also harmed it indirectly. Citizens lost trust in its operation. And "law abiding" citizens broke the law in large numbers over and over. The law was thrown into disrepute.
All this has happened as a result of the enforcement of the anti-Pot laws. Drug cartels have lots of money. It has been spent in part on bribery. We have large numbers of "law abiding" citizens breaking the law, in many cases over and over. And, as in the case of liquor, the effort to suppress Pot has been a complete failure. Pot is more broadly available, at higher quality, and at lower cost, than it ever was. The whole idea has looked stupid for a long time.
This has resulted in a novel work around. With some evidence to support the beneficial effects of Pot we have seen a "Medical Marijuana" movement. Washington has been one of the many states who have passed some kind of Medical Marijuana legislation. At the state level, it is more or less legal to consume Pot "for medical purposes". The specific rules and regulations vary considerably from state to state. But Pot consumption, even for medical purposes is still illegal according to federal law. This has led to some truly "Alice in Wonderland" situations.
For instance, the Washington State legislature decided that Medical Marijuana was getting out of control. Pot dispensaries, police, pretty much everyone in the state agreed. So the legislature set about crafting regulations to govern the Medical Marijuana business in the state. Everything was going fine until the Feds, in the person of the local Federal Prosecutor stepped in and started making threats. Specifically the Federal Prosecutor threatened to throw various state employees in jail if they engaged in the activities (e.g. inspections, issuing licenses, collecting taxes, etc.) that the legislature was laying out as part of the comprehensive law. As a direct result of this threat the Governor vetoed large parts of that law leaving a mess behind. Her logic was flawless. If she vetoed any less of the law she was asking state employees to perform duties that would result in them going to jail in Federal Prison.
The result of all this was that a group of people got together and created an Initiative. The pro-Pot community was divided on the result. They felt there were too many restrictions. For instance, you had to be over 21, you could get a "drunk driving" type ticket if you failed a test for how much Pot you had in your system. etc. But in the end the measure passed anyhow. It passed largely because of the support of people like me. I don't smoke Pot. I'm sure I know people who smoke Pot but I don't know who they are. But I think we need to end the insanity. And voting to legalize Pot was something I could do.
I don't know what is going to happen next. The Federal government has not said anything. They haven't told the state it is OK to proceed. They haven't told the state they will oppose implementation. They haven't said anything. And, trust me, a number of state officials have asked a number of Federal officials what they should expect. So far all of the Federal officials have provided absolutely no guidance. I think this is because no one at the Federal level has any idea how to deal with this.
In its first term, the Obama Administration has been very pro law and order. They aggressively enforced the immigration laws until Obama issued his executive order on the "Dream" people. The Obama Administration has not proposed any laws tightening gun laws. In fact, they have loosened gun laws in a couple of small areas. Threatening the Governor of our state is not the only action the Obama Administration has made on the drug front. Generally these actions have been in the direction of more enforcement of existing drug laws. They have gone after Medical Marijuana dispensaries and Washington State and in California that I know of. They have not tried to move Pot from the Schedule 1 list to one of the lower schedules.
So I don't know how this is going to play out. I know it is a good thing that two states made this move at the same time. It removed the "it's only one nutty state" argument from the table. Lots of states are going to be watching to see what happens. Oregon defeated a "legalize Pot" law. If Washington and Colorado end up having a positive experience as all this shakes down I expect Oregon to come back with a law closely modeled on the Washington or Colorado model. And I expect it to pass. That is likely to open the floodgates.
We need to move to making Pot legal and regulated. Frankly, I don't know what to do with Cocaine. It seems more dangerous and less popular to me than Pot. But ultimately drug cartels make almost all their profits from Pot and Cocaine. They now make a significant amount of money off of Meth. But imagine a world where all the law enforcement effort is taken away from the current targets of Pot and Cocaine? Vast amounts of money and, more importantly, cover will be removed from these organizations. There is general agreement that Meth is bad stuff. Only bad people would involve themselves in the Meth business. So the political cover is gone. The resources available to the cartels are vastly diminished. And, even if we cut way back on the law enforcement resources dedicated to going after Meth, the amount of resource focused on Meth will be greater than it is now. In that environment it might even be possible to have some success. Once the liquor money was taken away from the mobs they became a much smaller and much more manageable problem. And government stopped putting out a lot of money trying to stop the liquor trade and was able to bring in a lot of money in the form of taxes and fees. There isn't enough drug money out there to single handedly close the current Federal deficit. But a little "Pot tax" revenue wouldn't hurt.
I was a teenager in the '60s when Pot, as it is colloquially known, first became popular. Before then a few beatniks (fringe musicians) were known to smoke Pot. Rumor had it that it was fairly popular in what is now referred to as the "black community". But at that time blacks were ghettoized in places like Harlem. Unlike today, the rest of society had little overlap and contact with black culture. So whatever was going on there was generally invisible to the culture at large. Today blacks are trend setters in many areas of culture and trends that are incubating in the black community quickly break out into mainstream consciousness.
Anyhow, at the time there was a lot of turmoil as a result of the Civil Rights movement and later the Vietnam Antiwar movement. Youth were feeling rebellious to an extent unimaginable today. That led to a lot of experimentation and one of the things that got experimented on was Pot.
As part of a reaction to this unrest politicians like Richard Nixon came to prominence. One of his themes was that the country was going to Hell and "law and order" needed to be restored. Part of the law and order agenda was to crack down on drugs. Pot was certainly one of the high profile drugs that Nixon and other like minded politicians went after but it was not the only one. The other two drugs whose popularity rapidly increased were Cocaine and LSD. Cocaine is still with us but LSD has largely faded from the scene. So let me talk about it a little.
LSD was the first big psychoactive drug. If you "dropped" LSD, also commonly referred to as Acid, it did strange things to your perceptions. For some people the otherworldly experience was very enjoyable. But for others it was very scary and horrible. It took several years for LSD to become popular enough that a lot of people had taken it. Once this had happened large numbers of people concluded that for enough people the bad far outweighed the good and its popularity declined, again over several years.
The LSD experience is informative. In effect, a large scientific experiment was run. It answered the question: is the typical experience with this drug a good one or a bad one. This experiment was run with a large "sample size" (all the people who tried LSD) and the consensus was that the bad far outweighed the good. And for this to be true there had to be a lot of bad.
In the last decade or so we have run a similar experiment. In this case the drug is Methamphetamine, or "Meth" for short. The popular form is now referred to as "Crystal Meth". Again, one way or the other a lot of people have now taken Meth. And the results have been similar to that of LSD. Most people agree that on balance Meth is a bad thing. The problem with Meth is that it appears to be very addictive. So it appears that for whatever reason, a lot of people try Meth. They quickly figure out it is a bad thing but it is too late. They are addicted. Fortunately for that previous generation, LSD was not addictive. So when people decided it was a bad thing it disappeared pretty completely.
We have been running a much larger experiment with Pot. Far more people have taken it. If it was going to turn out to be another LSD, or worse yet, another Meth, we would long since all be aware of that. But there are no large populations of Pot users suffering severe problems in our mental hospitals. There are no "Pot heads" with severe physical problems in our regular hospitals. There are lots of Pot smokers in our criminal justice system but few if any in our health system. Pot is just not in a class with LSD or Meth.
Does that mean that Pot has no negative effects. No! But where people get into trouble is with making absolute comparisons rather than relative comparisons. Compared to some hypothetical standard of physical, mental, and emotional health, are there negative effects associated with Pot? Yes! But that's the wrong comparison. A more appropriate comparison is with tobacco and alcohol. The process of smoking Pot is very similar to the process of smoking a tobacco cigarette. Cigarettes are addictive because one of their main ingredients is addictive. By some measures Nicotine is more addictive than Meth. And the tars and other ingredients in cigarettes smoke causes lung cancer. So cigarettes have very bad effects. And these bad effects are well known. Yet cigarettes are legal.
Alcohol also has many well known negative effects. It impairs your ability to drive well. It causes personality changes that may be very destructive. The cost of purchasing alcohol can have a bad economic effect on a family directly through the cost of the alcoholic beverages and indirectly due to the personality changes and physical changes that may result in reduced employment or complete unemployment.
This country experimented with a legal ban on alcohol. The many negative effects formed the basis for the case for it being outlawed. But the result was disastrous. Lawlessness became rampant. Availability became even more widespread even though it was now illegal. In this environment, the negative effects became even more pronounced compared to the old days when it was legal. After about a decade Federal efforts to make Alcohol consumption illegal were abandoned.
The country has gone down the same path with Pot and other drugs as with alcohol. In the late '60s a crackdown was initiated on Pot, Cocaine, and other "recreational drugs". Part of this program involved classifying Pot as a "Schedule 1" drug. Schedule 1 drugs are the most dangerous. They are drugs like Meth which are both addictive and destructive. But 50 years into our Pot science experiment it is obvious to everyone that Pot is not a Schedule 1 drug. It is not addictive to any extent and it is not destructive either physically or mentally in the way Meth is. It is not possible to characterize putting Pot on the Schedule 1 list or, as time has passed, keeping it on the Schedule 1 list as anything but stupid. Based on the actual characteristics of Pot it should be in the Schedule 5 list along with cough syrups that contain small amounts of Codeine. If you smoke Pot once a month it will have no long term effects. But you probably shouldn't drive until the effect wears off. If you smoke Pot frequently the negative effects will likely be similar in intensity to taking a cough syrup that contains small amounts of Codeine frequently.
Frankly, only a tiny minority of people, experts or otherwise, believe that Pot is highly dangerous, e.g. that its negative effects are on a par with Meth. There are a large group of people, frequently heavy Pot smokers who believe that Pot is all good. There is a very large group that believes that occasional Pot smoking is either a good thing or that the harm is small. Many people think that even heavy Pot smoking has, at worst a small amount of negative effect. The anti-Pot people have expended a large amount of effort ensuring that little or no large scale scientific research is done on Pot. It turns out there is a very good reason for this.
As I said, a lot of people have smoked a lot of Pot over the years. If there was a large negative effect associated with Pot this effect would be noticeable enough to be generally known. But the argument I am now making is unscientific. The conclusion is not based on properly done scientific experiments so it is suspect. This leaves intact the argument that "there is no scientific basis for saying that Pot is reasonably safe". More importantly, this active hostility to any scientific efforts to study Pot have meant that there is no well founded scientific research that Pot has beneficial effects. But if we remove the phrase "well founded" from the previous statement things change drastically. There are a number of small scientific studies that indicate that Pot makes a very good anti-nausea drug. This is also supported by a large amount of unscientific experimentation by the general public. Lots of people claim that Pot is a much better anti-nausea drug than anything available legally.
We have gotten ourselves into a spiral. As a society we have invested a tremendous effort in the idea that Pot should be illegal. We have spent fantastic amounts of money. We have put vast numbers of people in jail solely because they smoked Pot or sold small amounts of it. This incarceration and criminal record activity has ruined the lives of many people. The U.S. incarcerates more people as a percentage of its population than any other country in the world. And most of these inmates are behind bars directly or indirectly because recreational drugs are illegal. The largest subgroup of these drug criminals are only criminals because Pot is illegal.
The U.S. had a bad experience with making alcohol illegal. Beyond the direct effects it had a toxic effect on the criminal justice system. There was lots of money in the booze business. A lot of that money was deployed paying off cops, judges, lawyers, politicians, and otherwise doing harm directly to the criminal justice enterprise. But it also harmed it indirectly. Citizens lost trust in its operation. And "law abiding" citizens broke the law in large numbers over and over. The law was thrown into disrepute.
All this has happened as a result of the enforcement of the anti-Pot laws. Drug cartels have lots of money. It has been spent in part on bribery. We have large numbers of "law abiding" citizens breaking the law, in many cases over and over. And, as in the case of liquor, the effort to suppress Pot has been a complete failure. Pot is more broadly available, at higher quality, and at lower cost, than it ever was. The whole idea has looked stupid for a long time.
This has resulted in a novel work around. With some evidence to support the beneficial effects of Pot we have seen a "Medical Marijuana" movement. Washington has been one of the many states who have passed some kind of Medical Marijuana legislation. At the state level, it is more or less legal to consume Pot "for medical purposes". The specific rules and regulations vary considerably from state to state. But Pot consumption, even for medical purposes is still illegal according to federal law. This has led to some truly "Alice in Wonderland" situations.
For instance, the Washington State legislature decided that Medical Marijuana was getting out of control. Pot dispensaries, police, pretty much everyone in the state agreed. So the legislature set about crafting regulations to govern the Medical Marijuana business in the state. Everything was going fine until the Feds, in the person of the local Federal Prosecutor stepped in and started making threats. Specifically the Federal Prosecutor threatened to throw various state employees in jail if they engaged in the activities (e.g. inspections, issuing licenses, collecting taxes, etc.) that the legislature was laying out as part of the comprehensive law. As a direct result of this threat the Governor vetoed large parts of that law leaving a mess behind. Her logic was flawless. If she vetoed any less of the law she was asking state employees to perform duties that would result in them going to jail in Federal Prison.
The result of all this was that a group of people got together and created an Initiative. The pro-Pot community was divided on the result. They felt there were too many restrictions. For instance, you had to be over 21, you could get a "drunk driving" type ticket if you failed a test for how much Pot you had in your system. etc. But in the end the measure passed anyhow. It passed largely because of the support of people like me. I don't smoke Pot. I'm sure I know people who smoke Pot but I don't know who they are. But I think we need to end the insanity. And voting to legalize Pot was something I could do.
I don't know what is going to happen next. The Federal government has not said anything. They haven't told the state it is OK to proceed. They haven't told the state they will oppose implementation. They haven't said anything. And, trust me, a number of state officials have asked a number of Federal officials what they should expect. So far all of the Federal officials have provided absolutely no guidance. I think this is because no one at the Federal level has any idea how to deal with this.
In its first term, the Obama Administration has been very pro law and order. They aggressively enforced the immigration laws until Obama issued his executive order on the "Dream" people. The Obama Administration has not proposed any laws tightening gun laws. In fact, they have loosened gun laws in a couple of small areas. Threatening the Governor of our state is not the only action the Obama Administration has made on the drug front. Generally these actions have been in the direction of more enforcement of existing drug laws. They have gone after Medical Marijuana dispensaries and Washington State and in California that I know of. They have not tried to move Pot from the Schedule 1 list to one of the lower schedules.
So I don't know how this is going to play out. I know it is a good thing that two states made this move at the same time. It removed the "it's only one nutty state" argument from the table. Lots of states are going to be watching to see what happens. Oregon defeated a "legalize Pot" law. If Washington and Colorado end up having a positive experience as all this shakes down I expect Oregon to come back with a law closely modeled on the Washington or Colorado model. And I expect it to pass. That is likely to open the floodgates.
We need to move to making Pot legal and regulated. Frankly, I don't know what to do with Cocaine. It seems more dangerous and less popular to me than Pot. But ultimately drug cartels make almost all their profits from Pot and Cocaine. They now make a significant amount of money off of Meth. But imagine a world where all the law enforcement effort is taken away from the current targets of Pot and Cocaine? Vast amounts of money and, more importantly, cover will be removed from these organizations. There is general agreement that Meth is bad stuff. Only bad people would involve themselves in the Meth business. So the political cover is gone. The resources available to the cartels are vastly diminished. And, even if we cut way back on the law enforcement resources dedicated to going after Meth, the amount of resource focused on Meth will be greater than it is now. In that environment it might even be possible to have some success. Once the liquor money was taken away from the mobs they became a much smaller and much more manageable problem. And government stopped putting out a lot of money trying to stop the liquor trade and was able to bring in a lot of money in the form of taxes and fees. There isn't enough drug money out there to single handedly close the current Federal deficit. But a little "Pot tax" revenue wouldn't hurt.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
James Bond Martini
The new James Bond film "Skyfall" just came out. I saw it yesterday and liked it. The imminent release of a new James Bond film got me into a Bond frame of mind so I recently reread the first James Bond book, "Casino Royale". This book introduced the subject of the Martini into the Bond cannon. As the books and movies rolled on we all became familiar with the James Bond take on the Cocktail Lounge classic. It is a standard Martini but made with Vodka instead of Gin, and "shaken not stirred". But the original "Bond Martini" specified an entirely different recipe. I haven't reread the rest of the books that Ian Fleming wrote so I don't know where or when the above recipe came to dominate. And the change might be traceable to the movies. But when Bond tells a bartender early in the book he wants "a dry Martini" here is the recipe he specifies:
"Casino Royale" was originally published in 1953. Then and now the design of a "Martini Glass" has remained the same. But in 1953 Champagne glasses looked very different than they do today. Then they were had a very shallow bowl. Think of a Martini glass. But instead of a funnel shaped bowl think of a bowl of about the same depth but with a rounded bottom. That was the long accepted proper shape for a Champagne glass. You can see it in "Fred and Ginger" movies from the '30s. In fact, my mother had some Champagne glasses from the '40s that differed only in that they had a hollow stem. The stem was of a fairly narrow diameter but the very center was hollow. This created a narrow tube of a couple of inches in length. The tube facilitated the creation of a stream of bubbles that rose in a nearly straight line up the center of the glass. But the bowl shape was the long accepted one.
Champagne glasses are now much taller and considerably narrower. Why? Nose. The best glass for a drink that has an aromatic component is one that requires you to put your nose into a semi-enclosed space above the surface of the liquid while you are taking a sip. The classic example is Brandy. Some components of Brandy start evaporating as soon as it is exposed to the open air. If you pour Brandy into a balloon glass then the volume above the surface of the Brandy is ideal for collecting these aromatic components. Then you put your nose into this volume when you are sipping the drink. This makes it easy for your nose to get a nice strong dose of these aromatic components. As a result, the Brandy "tastes" wonderful.
Gin has little or no aromatic component. So putting Gin, the principal component of a Martini, into a glass that does not have a semi-enclosed volume above the surface of the liquid works fine. Apparently, people used to put Champagne into this same non-aromatic category. So the proper glass was one that did not have the semi-enclosed volume. Somewhere, well after the 1950's, someone wised up. So we saw a shift in design to a glass that had a semi-enclosed volume. A modern Champagne glass is not as well designed for this purpose as a Brandy snifter but it's not bad. So, if you are drinking Champagne and you don't have access to a modern Champagne glass, go for a Brandy snifter rather than a martini glass or a classic Champagne glass.
And this brings to the end a long digression whose bottom line is that I don't know exactly what the shape of the glass Bond was recommending but it is definitely not a classic Martini glass. That's one difference. To see what other differences there might be let's look at the recipe for a standard classic Martini:
Historically, a Martini was referred to as a "Dry Martini" because it used Dry Vermouth rather than Sweet Vermouth. But over time the use of Sweet Vermouth was discontinued in favor of Dry Vermouth and "Dry" came to mean a high proportion of Gin and a low proportion of Vermouth. By the usual definitions of what now constitutes "Dry", Bond's recipe qualifies. The ratio of Gin+Vodka to Vermouth is 8 to 1. So to that extent Bond's recipe is in line with a standard Martini. But:
Then and now, the most popular brand of Vermouth is Martini & Rossi. And we now have lots of super premium brands of Gin. My mother is partial to Diamond Sapphire, for instance. And there is a whole cult around Vodka now. The most well known super premium brand now is Stolichnaya. I don't know if Bond would have been down with trading with the enemy. But if he had specified "Stoli", as it is popularly referred to now, and especially if he had asked for "Stoli Elit", he would been happy to know that it is a grain Vodka (wheat and rye) and not a lowly potato Vodka.
Finally, I am not a Martini drinker but that hasn't stopped me from collecting a couple of recipes for how to make a really dry "Dry Martini". Try them and see what you think:
Forbin Martini - This comes from the book and movie of the same name, "The Forbin Project":
Tugboat Martini - I got this from an old family friend:
Both of these drinks are easy to prepare. Enjoy.
Update (08/30/2015) -
I have now reread the Bond cannon through "Dr. No" (#6 - published March 31, 1958). At this point Bond is specifying a Martini that conforms to pretty much what we now expect. It consists of Vodka (Polish or Russian - no more talk of potato versus grain), Vermouth, "shaken - not stirred", and the "twist of Lemon". The proportion of the ingredients is no longer specified (apparently left to the discression of the bartender) and he has apparently left behind the Gin and the Kina Lillet of the original recipe. If one is an aficionado of modern bar culture when it comes to Martinis it is now routine to specify Vodka instead of Gin and various twists ,including but not restricted to Lemon, are ok as a substitute for the olive. So Bond is now main stream (except that pretty much nobody thinks the "shaken - not stirred" specification is a good idea).
And at this point in his evolution Bond's choice of other potables is now also pretty middle of the road. The brands he specifies are a step up from bottom of the line "bar" brands but they are not anything special. A modern Bond should be drinking some kind of super-premium single malt scotch. The same would be true of his Vodka preference. There are now lots of quite fancy Vodkas. If you want to avoid Eastern Europe, for instance, you can go with Grey Goose, a French brand. The basic version is several steps above a "bar" Vodka. But Grey Goose also has a "VX" super-premium version that goes for about three times the price of the regular version. If super-premium booze existed at the time, Bond (or more likely Fleming) was not familiar with it.
And, thanks to work by my brother Mike, I can also report some results on what Martini drinkers think of the Tugboat recipe reproduced above. Neither he nor I are Martini drinkers but he has friends who are. He prepared some Tugboat Martinis and had them do a taste test. The results were not good for the Tugboat concept. No one was a fan. From this I conclude that Martini drinkers are not just looking for an excuse to drink straight Gin. Both the Tugboat and the Forbin recipe result in a super-dry drink that is only a tiny step away from straight Gin. For most Martini drinkers the step is not far enough. Apparently there is such a thing as a Martini that is too dry. Dry is good. Super-dry is bad.
- In a deep Champagne goblet
- Three measures of Gordon's (a Gin)
- One measure of Vodka
- 1/2 measure of Kina Lillet
- Shake until very cold then pour into the glass
- Add a slice of lemon peel
- Finally, he advises the use of "grain" Vodka, not "potato" Vodka
"Casino Royale" was originally published in 1953. Then and now the design of a "Martini Glass" has remained the same. But in 1953 Champagne glasses looked very different than they do today. Then they were had a very shallow bowl. Think of a Martini glass. But instead of a funnel shaped bowl think of a bowl of about the same depth but with a rounded bottom. That was the long accepted proper shape for a Champagne glass. You can see it in "Fred and Ginger" movies from the '30s. In fact, my mother had some Champagne glasses from the '40s that differed only in that they had a hollow stem. The stem was of a fairly narrow diameter but the very center was hollow. This created a narrow tube of a couple of inches in length. The tube facilitated the creation of a stream of bubbles that rose in a nearly straight line up the center of the glass. But the bowl shape was the long accepted one.
Champagne glasses are now much taller and considerably narrower. Why? Nose. The best glass for a drink that has an aromatic component is one that requires you to put your nose into a semi-enclosed space above the surface of the liquid while you are taking a sip. The classic example is Brandy. Some components of Brandy start evaporating as soon as it is exposed to the open air. If you pour Brandy into a balloon glass then the volume above the surface of the Brandy is ideal for collecting these aromatic components. Then you put your nose into this volume when you are sipping the drink. This makes it easy for your nose to get a nice strong dose of these aromatic components. As a result, the Brandy "tastes" wonderful.
Gin has little or no aromatic component. So putting Gin, the principal component of a Martini, into a glass that does not have a semi-enclosed volume above the surface of the liquid works fine. Apparently, people used to put Champagne into this same non-aromatic category. So the proper glass was one that did not have the semi-enclosed volume. Somewhere, well after the 1950's, someone wised up. So we saw a shift in design to a glass that had a semi-enclosed volume. A modern Champagne glass is not as well designed for this purpose as a Brandy snifter but it's not bad. So, if you are drinking Champagne and you don't have access to a modern Champagne glass, go for a Brandy snifter rather than a martini glass or a classic Champagne glass.
And this brings to the end a long digression whose bottom line is that I don't know exactly what the shape of the glass Bond was recommending but it is definitely not a classic Martini glass. That's one difference. To see what other differences there might be let's look at the recipe for a standard classic Martini:
- Into a small pitcher pour Gin and Dry Vermouth in appropriate proportions.
- A small amount of ice may be present in the pitcher to keep everything cool.
- Stir the ingredients together.
- Decant into a cold Martini glass leaving all the ice behind.
- Add a Green Olive on a toothpick as a garnish.
Historically, a Martini was referred to as a "Dry Martini" because it used Dry Vermouth rather than Sweet Vermouth. But over time the use of Sweet Vermouth was discontinued in favor of Dry Vermouth and "Dry" came to mean a high proportion of Gin and a low proportion of Vermouth. By the usual definitions of what now constitutes "Dry", Bond's recipe qualifies. The ratio of Gin+Vodka to Vermouth is 8 to 1. So to that extent Bond's recipe is in line with a standard Martini. But:
- As noted above Bond specifies a non-standard glass.
- He specifies a mixture of Gin and Vodka. A standard Martini contains only Gin.
- He specifies Kina Lillet, a very unusual and uncommon Vermouth.
- He specifies "shaken not stirred".
- He specifies a Lemon Slice rather than the traditional Green Olive.
Then and now, the most popular brand of Vermouth is Martini & Rossi. And we now have lots of super premium brands of Gin. My mother is partial to Diamond Sapphire, for instance. And there is a whole cult around Vodka now. The most well known super premium brand now is Stolichnaya. I don't know if Bond would have been down with trading with the enemy. But if he had specified "Stoli", as it is popularly referred to now, and especially if he had asked for "Stoli Elit", he would been happy to know that it is a grain Vodka (wheat and rye) and not a lowly potato Vodka.
Finally, I am not a Martini drinker but that hasn't stopped me from collecting a couple of recipes for how to make a really dry "Dry Martini". Try them and see what you think:
Forbin Martini - This comes from the book and movie of the same name, "The Forbin Project":
- Fill a funnel with ice.
- Hold the Ice filled funnel over a pitcher and drizzle Vermouth over the ice.
- Hold the funnel over a chilled Martini glass and pour Gin through the ice and into the glass.
- Add the traditional Olive garnish.
- Serve.
- (Discard the Vermouth in the pitcher and the ice in the funnel).
Tugboat Martini - I got this from an old family friend:
- A week or more before the Martini will be served drain all the liquid out of the bottle containing the Green Olives. Discard the liquid.
- Fill the bottle with Vermouth instead.
- Refrigerate the bottle with the Olive and Vermouth combination for at least a week.
- Remove a chilled Martini glass from the Freezer.
- Pour the Gin (hopefully also chilled) straight into the glass filling it most of the way to the top.
- Using a toothpick skewer one or more Olives from the jar in the refrigerator and add as a garnish.
- Serve.
Both of these drinks are easy to prepare. Enjoy.
Update (08/30/2015) -
I have now reread the Bond cannon through "Dr. No" (#6 - published March 31, 1958). At this point Bond is specifying a Martini that conforms to pretty much what we now expect. It consists of Vodka (Polish or Russian - no more talk of potato versus grain), Vermouth, "shaken - not stirred", and the "twist of Lemon". The proportion of the ingredients is no longer specified (apparently left to the discression of the bartender) and he has apparently left behind the Gin and the Kina Lillet of the original recipe. If one is an aficionado of modern bar culture when it comes to Martinis it is now routine to specify Vodka instead of Gin and various twists ,including but not restricted to Lemon, are ok as a substitute for the olive. So Bond is now main stream (except that pretty much nobody thinks the "shaken - not stirred" specification is a good idea).
And at this point in his evolution Bond's choice of other potables is now also pretty middle of the road. The brands he specifies are a step up from bottom of the line "bar" brands but they are not anything special. A modern Bond should be drinking some kind of super-premium single malt scotch. The same would be true of his Vodka preference. There are now lots of quite fancy Vodkas. If you want to avoid Eastern Europe, for instance, you can go with Grey Goose, a French brand. The basic version is several steps above a "bar" Vodka. But Grey Goose also has a "VX" super-premium version that goes for about three times the price of the regular version. If super-premium booze existed at the time, Bond (or more likely Fleming) was not familiar with it.
And, thanks to work by my brother Mike, I can also report some results on what Martini drinkers think of the Tugboat recipe reproduced above. Neither he nor I are Martini drinkers but he has friends who are. He prepared some Tugboat Martinis and had them do a taste test. The results were not good for the Tugboat concept. No one was a fan. From this I conclude that Martini drinkers are not just looking for an excuse to drink straight Gin. Both the Tugboat and the Forbin recipe result in a super-dry drink that is only a tiny step away from straight Gin. For most Martini drinkers the step is not far enough. Apparently there is such a thing as a Martini that is too dry. Dry is good. Super-dry is bad.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Off the Cliff
Now that the election is over there is now a lot of talk about the "Fiscal Cliff". Discussion of this general subject actually goes back to at least to the "lame duck" congressional session that happened between the midterm elections of early November of 2010 and the new congress being seated in early 2011. There has been some talk among politics junkies in the run up to the election that just took place on November 6, 2012. But with the election out of the way this subject has moved to center stage.
So what is the Fiscal Cliff all about? Well, the "scare" version of the story is that on January 1, 2013 all kinds of bad things will immediately happen causing the economy to crash causing the immediate end of all we hold dear. As you might imagine this is not an accurate characterization of the situation. A more accurate characterization of the situation is that if no laws are changed between now and January 1 then federal taxes will go up somewhat and federal spending will go down somewhat. So why is this the end of life as we know it? Because the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimate is that this will stall the current anemic rate growth that the U.S. economy is now experiencing and throw us into a very mild recession. Do we know for sure this is going to happen? No! It's just a best guess by a usually reliable source.
So, assuming politics in our nation's capital continues to gridlock, what actually happens? Several things:
Finally, there is a theoretically unrelated event that will affect the federal budget that will happen at roughly the same time and often gets lumped in with everything else. The U.S. has a "debt ceiling" law. The federal debt is only allowed to raise to a certain level. We are near that level. There are various tricks and gimmicks that can be used to keep things going once the limit is reached. But this trickery will only work for a short period of time, a few months. The best current estimate is that the debt ceiling needs to be raised by February 2013. There was a big fight the last time the debt ceiling needed to be raised. There is no reason to think that this time around will be any different. Many people have suggested that a debt ceiling increase be rolled into the same legislative package that would address the fiscal cliff.
So how did we get here? It actually goes back to the early part of the Bush '43 Administration. They wanted to do a big tax cut. But whenever a tax cut is under serious consideration the CBO does an analysis of the impact over a 20 year time horizon. Had the CBO done this the number would have been truly scary and it would have been harder for the bill to pass. So the Bush tax cut was made "temporary". It would expire in 2010. Since taxes and, therefore, revenues would revert to the old amounts, the cost of the tax cut was way less scary and the bill was passed and was signed into law. This worked so well that the Bush Administration pulled the same trick with s second tax cut they put through a couple of years later. They also made it expire in 2010. Now notice that 2010 is after the end of a two term Bush Administration. It becomes someone else's problem. And the cynical calculation was that the tax cut would never actually get repealed so the Administration got to have their cake and eat it too. So far the prediction is working out. A deal was done in the 2010 "lame duck" session to extend all provisions of both tax cuts for two more years. So now they expire at the end of 2012.
When the Obama Administration came in they were faced with an economy that was truly a disaster. Their first response was to pass a "stimulus" bill. One of the provisions of this bill was a "temporary" reduction in Social Security withholding. Normally 6.2% of an employee's salary is withheld for Social Security. This is matched by the employer, except that self employed people have to pay the "employer" part too. The "stim" reduced the employee amount to 4.2%. This saved an individual making $50,000 per year $1,000. As part of the deal that was made in the 2010 lame duck this provision was extended for 2 years so it expires in 2012 now too.
As a result of a political deal made a couple of years ago a "super committee" consisting of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans and equal numbers of Senators and Representatives was formed. To encourage them to come to a bipartisan deficit reduction deal a provision in the enabling legislation was included that said if they failed then starting in 2013 "draconian" (that was the design objective) cuts would be automatically mandated. To spur on Republicans one of the cuts was $55 billion per year to the Defense budget. To spur on Democrats the other cut was $55 Billion per year to "non-defense discretionary" programs. What is in and out of this latter category is spelled out but it is complicated. It's things like the NASA, Education, etc. Social Security and Medicare were specifically exempted. Needless to say, the super committee failed so the cuts are scheduled to go into effect if something is not done right away.
I have left out a lot of detail and I'm sure I have put most of you to sleep anyhow. So let's just move on to what should be done. We are now living in a political world at the federal level where everything is pushed to the limit so what should be minor or routine actions are blocked or delayed to the last minute and beyond. If we had a functioning political system many of the components of the fiscal cliff would have long since been taken care of. I lay almost 100% of the blame for this brinkmanship on the doorstep of the Republicans.
As a simple example, they forced a confrontation the last time the debt ceiling need to be raised. This has historically been a routine activity. There is usually some posturing but neither side does anything to stop the ceiling from being raised in a timely and predictable manner. The last time around the Republicans brought the entire country to within hours of a total default of the government. And that was after the Treasury pulled every trick and gimmick that anyone could think of to stave off what would normally have been the default date. I could cite several other examples of Republican brinkmanship. But if you don't want to agree with my characterization of the "debt debacle" then you aren't going to buy my analysis of the other events. And, if you agree with my "debt debacle" analysis, then you can take my word for it that the other events are there and happened too.
So it is important to recognize that we have not only a "fiscal cliff" problem but we also have a Republican intransigence problem. If we don't do something about both of them we don't make any real progress. So what should be done?
Option 1 is to do what the Republicans say they want. That would be to continue all the tax cuts (the Bush tax cuts, the Obama tax cuts, and the other tax provisions I haven't gone into). They would also repeal and replace the "sequester". They would make no cuts to the Defense budget. Instead they would make very large cuts to "non-defense discretionary" and additional cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That is what they would do as best I can make it out. They have not been very specific.
Option 2 is to do what President Obama wants to do. He too has been pretty vague. He would increase taxes on people making more than $250,000 per year. He would preserve all the tax cuts for people making less. As far as I can tell, he would leave the sequester in place. This is good as far as it goes. I am all in favor of the increase in taxes on rich people. The problem is that it does not raise enough money. I think we should raise taxes on the wealthy anyhow on fairness grounds.
Option 3 is to go off the cliff. Let everything expire or go into effect.
Before continuing, let me state the obvious. All of these pure positions are seriously flawed. It is a bad idea to do any of them in their purest simplest form. But they give us a starting point for discussion. So let's discuss.
Option 1 is the most ridiculous. The oratorical way the Republicans square the circle on this proposal is they offer to close loopholes in the tax code. I am all in favor of this as a general principle but the devil is in the details. And so far the Republicans have provided no details. Well that's not completely true. One Republican or another has taken pretty much all the big loopholes off the table. My idea of "low hanging fruit" is various loopholes that favor the Oil industry. Democrats have put together bills that close one or more of these loopholes. None of these efforts has garnered a single Republican vote. Two big loopholes that affect individuals are deductions for education expenses and mortgage expenses. Various Republicans have taken both of these off the table. There is the "carried interest" loophole. This allows Hedge Fund managers to treat their multimillion dollar bonuses as Capital Gaines taxed at 15% rather than as ordinary income taxed at 35%. Republicans have shot down the idea of closing the carried interest loophole.
In fact, you can find various Republicans taking all the big loopholes, corporate and individual, off the table at one time or other. And no Republican has publicly supported eliminating a single specific loophole. I am absolutely convinced that had Mitt Romney won the election and succeeded in getting his tax and budget programs enacted into law then no loopholes would have been closed, defense spending would have gone up, tax rates might have been cut, discretionary spending and entitlements would have been cut, and the deficit would have grown enormously. That's what history says Republicans do when they get into the White House.
Option 2 is better but not by a lot. The President has been short on detail in public. As I have indicated above, raising rates on high income people is a good idea but it only solves a small part of the problem. Apparently the President tentatively agreed to a package that included entitlement cuts (styled as "reforms") and cuts to discretionary programs. But we don't know the details. If the Republicans actually came up with some loopholes to close, and they were reasonable loopholes, I'm sure the President would go along with them. Besides the ones listed above, there is another loophole I would like to see closed. I would like for mortgage interest to be only deductible on a singe primary residence, as in you would have to live in the house for it to be deductible. This would not bring in a lot of money but I still think its a good idea.
Now lets talk about options 3. Actually, I want to talk about two variants. Option 3a is the "limited" version. We let everything go into effect. That defines a new base case. Then, after the new congress goes into session in early January, we enact legislation reversing or modifying the components we don't like. This is the version advocated by Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC, for instance. Why would we want to do this? In a word (actually two) Grover Norquist. Norquist put together a "no tax increases, ever" pledge and got almost all Republicans to sign it. Increasing the tax rate on rich people counts as a violation of the pledge and would result in bad things happening to the Republican in question, if the past is any guide. Enacting tax increases on rich people (i.e. the Obama plan) violates the pledge if it is done before January 1. But after January 1 all those higher rates have already gone into effect. So leaving the rate high on rich people is not a violation of the pledge. And cutting the rates on non-rich people is fine and dandy. Finally, if the new laws are passed and put into effect in the first month or two of 2013 the damage to the economy is tiny. And many provisions can be made retroactive to January 1, causing even less harm to the economy.
The other version, option 3b, is to let the various provisions expire or go into effect and then do nothing. This is supposed to be very bad for the economy. But it might not be. I cite the example of the first couple of years of the Reagan Administration. Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers in a labor dispute. The Fed drove up interest rates. These, combined with some other actions, drove the economy into recession. But it was a short sharp recession. The economic problem at the time was a wage/price spiral that resulted in high inflation. The recession cured the inflation and within two years the economy started growing robustly.
The Republican view is that the economy is doing poorly for two reasons. First, the deficit is too high. Second, there is a lot of economic uncertainty. Option 3b attacks both of these issues. It would cut the deficit by more than in half in the short run and put us on track toward a balanced budget in the long run. That's what the Republicans say they want. Since this plan requires no new legislation is it definitely feasible in this "gridlock" political environment. So uncertainty is removed. People may be unhappy with the higher taxes but they know what the future looks like and can plan accordingly.
Large U.S. corporations are literally sitting on more than a Trillion dollars of cash. If, due to the certainty of the budget and tax situation, they start spending this pile of cash then the economy could take off and quickly. The CBO analysis of this option assumes there will be no change in corporate behavior and that individuals will cut back on their spending because they will have less disposable income. But if the economy picks up due to higher corporate investment then this will put money directly into the pockets of people hired by these corporations. Their income will go up so their spending will go up. If the economy picks up in general then the income of the employees that are not directly involved in this increased corporate spending may well see their income go up more than enough to compensate for their higher tax load. So we could easily see spending rise rather than dip and the economy growing rather than shrinking.
So option 3b may not be as bad as the CBO estimates. But let's say the CBO is right. Everyone will adjust. So I predict a short mild recession. After we exit from the recession we have a federal government that is on a sound and sustainable course. So growth should be robust and sustained. So even the bad version of options 3b is not so bad.
I find it very unlikely that either options 1 or 2 will happen. It is possible that some blend of options 1 and 2 will come out of a genuine effort by the Republicans to compromise. But it is very hard to imagine such a deal coming together quickly enough to be implemented before the end of the year. So I see option 3 as what we will see. And I don't see it as all that scary an option. So what will we actually see, option 3a or option 3b? I actually favor some version that is much closer to 3b than 3a. I have skipped over a bunch of details when outlining the situation. And, while I am comfortable about all of the major provisions that I outlined above, there are several minor provisions that I think need addressing.
One is the AMT, Alternative Minimum Tax. This was a good idea when it was first enacted. It was designed to close some loopholes used only by the rich. But the provisions were not indexed. As inflation has worked its magic more and more middle class people, people not intended as targets of the AMT provisions are effected. Congress had dealt with this by enacting a series of annual AMT "patch" laws. But the AMT needs to be fixed or repealed. The problem is a political one. A permanent AMT fix is scored by the CBO as a big tax cut as the CBO is forced every year to assume AMT is part of the baseline and, since it hits a lot of people, it theoretically raises a lot of revenue. So the political problem is getting beat up about the high theoretical cost of fixing it.
Another problem is the "doc fix" to Medicare. A few years ago it became obvious that doctors wouldn't take Medicare patients because the compensation rate was too low. So the rate was raised, again temporarily, by 27%. It needs to be permanently raised. Again, on one has wanted to take the political hit for "blowing up the medicare budget" that a permanent fix would entail.
I have mentioned the debt limit above. It needs to be raised.
The implementation of the "sequester" is a robotic "cut everything by the same amount". I think it would be healthy to cut the Defense budget by $55 Billion a year. But I would like a more intelligent approach to how the money is cut. Barney Frank has suggested we can scale back our overseas commitments, especially troops in Europe and Japan, by a lot safely. I agree. This also cuts the money shipped over seas, where it doesn't help our domestic economy much. There are weapons systems (e.g. tanks) that can be cut and bases that can be closed. The money is there.
I am less happy about the "non-defense discretionary" cuts. But if they are the price for the rest of the package I can live with them. But again the "cut everything by the same amount" rule needs to be replaced with cuts that total to the same amount but are applied more intelligently. Personally, I would like to take a big whack out of farm subsidies. Almost all of the money goes to large corporate farms. And, at the other end, I see no reason to subsidize small hobby farms. Most farms that are small enough to look like a traditional family farm are actually hobby farms. The group in the middle, relatively small farms that do support the rural lifestyle, are too hard a target to hit. And a lot of them are already in some commodity that is not part of the farm subsidy program. The only parts of the system that look like they might be a good investment to me are the extension service and research programs at "ag" colleges. I don't know where the Department of Homeland Security fits in all this. But I think there is more "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" in this department than in the Department of Defense, normally the "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" poster child. I think a big whack can be taken out of the Homeland Security budget and, if done intelligently, would result in an increase in the security of the homeland.
There are numerous fixes that should be made to other items affected by the fiscal cliff. But you have to ask yourself: Are these fixes more or less likely to happen if we avoid going off the cliff? I find it extremely hard to believe that they will be approached in an intelligent way if some grand bargain is made and going off the cliff is avoided.
So let's all go off the cliff. It should be a hell of a ride.
So what is the Fiscal Cliff all about? Well, the "scare" version of the story is that on January 1, 2013 all kinds of bad things will immediately happen causing the economy to crash causing the immediate end of all we hold dear. As you might imagine this is not an accurate characterization of the situation. A more accurate characterization of the situation is that if no laws are changed between now and January 1 then federal taxes will go up somewhat and federal spending will go down somewhat. So why is this the end of life as we know it? Because the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimate is that this will stall the current anemic rate growth that the U.S. economy is now experiencing and throw us into a very mild recession. Do we know for sure this is going to happen? No! It's just a best guess by a usually reliable source.
So, assuming politics in our nation's capital continues to gridlock, what actually happens? Several things:
- The Bush tax cuts expire. This will cause tax rates to be raised on pretty much everybody. If you currently pay income taxes, those taxes will likely be higher.
- The Obama Social Security withholding rates go back up to the rates they were a few years ago. This means that an additional two percent of most people's salary will be withheld.
- The "sequester" will kick in. The Defense Department budget will be cut by $55 billion per year. Funding for "non-defense discretionary spending" will be cut by $55 billion per year. These are characterized as "draconian" by the people who passed the bill that causes these cuts.
Finally, there is a theoretically unrelated event that will affect the federal budget that will happen at roughly the same time and often gets lumped in with everything else. The U.S. has a "debt ceiling" law. The federal debt is only allowed to raise to a certain level. We are near that level. There are various tricks and gimmicks that can be used to keep things going once the limit is reached. But this trickery will only work for a short period of time, a few months. The best current estimate is that the debt ceiling needs to be raised by February 2013. There was a big fight the last time the debt ceiling needed to be raised. There is no reason to think that this time around will be any different. Many people have suggested that a debt ceiling increase be rolled into the same legislative package that would address the fiscal cliff.
So how did we get here? It actually goes back to the early part of the Bush '43 Administration. They wanted to do a big tax cut. But whenever a tax cut is under serious consideration the CBO does an analysis of the impact over a 20 year time horizon. Had the CBO done this the number would have been truly scary and it would have been harder for the bill to pass. So the Bush tax cut was made "temporary". It would expire in 2010. Since taxes and, therefore, revenues would revert to the old amounts, the cost of the tax cut was way less scary and the bill was passed and was signed into law. This worked so well that the Bush Administration pulled the same trick with s second tax cut they put through a couple of years later. They also made it expire in 2010. Now notice that 2010 is after the end of a two term Bush Administration. It becomes someone else's problem. And the cynical calculation was that the tax cut would never actually get repealed so the Administration got to have their cake and eat it too. So far the prediction is working out. A deal was done in the 2010 "lame duck" session to extend all provisions of both tax cuts for two more years. So now they expire at the end of 2012.
When the Obama Administration came in they were faced with an economy that was truly a disaster. Their first response was to pass a "stimulus" bill. One of the provisions of this bill was a "temporary" reduction in Social Security withholding. Normally 6.2% of an employee's salary is withheld for Social Security. This is matched by the employer, except that self employed people have to pay the "employer" part too. The "stim" reduced the employee amount to 4.2%. This saved an individual making $50,000 per year $1,000. As part of the deal that was made in the 2010 lame duck this provision was extended for 2 years so it expires in 2012 now too.
As a result of a political deal made a couple of years ago a "super committee" consisting of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans and equal numbers of Senators and Representatives was formed. To encourage them to come to a bipartisan deficit reduction deal a provision in the enabling legislation was included that said if they failed then starting in 2013 "draconian" (that was the design objective) cuts would be automatically mandated. To spur on Republicans one of the cuts was $55 billion per year to the Defense budget. To spur on Democrats the other cut was $55 Billion per year to "non-defense discretionary" programs. What is in and out of this latter category is spelled out but it is complicated. It's things like the NASA, Education, etc. Social Security and Medicare were specifically exempted. Needless to say, the super committee failed so the cuts are scheduled to go into effect if something is not done right away.
I have left out a lot of detail and I'm sure I have put most of you to sleep anyhow. So let's just move on to what should be done. We are now living in a political world at the federal level where everything is pushed to the limit so what should be minor or routine actions are blocked or delayed to the last minute and beyond. If we had a functioning political system many of the components of the fiscal cliff would have long since been taken care of. I lay almost 100% of the blame for this brinkmanship on the doorstep of the Republicans.
As a simple example, they forced a confrontation the last time the debt ceiling need to be raised. This has historically been a routine activity. There is usually some posturing but neither side does anything to stop the ceiling from being raised in a timely and predictable manner. The last time around the Republicans brought the entire country to within hours of a total default of the government. And that was after the Treasury pulled every trick and gimmick that anyone could think of to stave off what would normally have been the default date. I could cite several other examples of Republican brinkmanship. But if you don't want to agree with my characterization of the "debt debacle" then you aren't going to buy my analysis of the other events. And, if you agree with my "debt debacle" analysis, then you can take my word for it that the other events are there and happened too.
So it is important to recognize that we have not only a "fiscal cliff" problem but we also have a Republican intransigence problem. If we don't do something about both of them we don't make any real progress. So what should be done?
Option 1 is to do what the Republicans say they want. That would be to continue all the tax cuts (the Bush tax cuts, the Obama tax cuts, and the other tax provisions I haven't gone into). They would also repeal and replace the "sequester". They would make no cuts to the Defense budget. Instead they would make very large cuts to "non-defense discretionary" and additional cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That is what they would do as best I can make it out. They have not been very specific.
Option 2 is to do what President Obama wants to do. He too has been pretty vague. He would increase taxes on people making more than $250,000 per year. He would preserve all the tax cuts for people making less. As far as I can tell, he would leave the sequester in place. This is good as far as it goes. I am all in favor of the increase in taxes on rich people. The problem is that it does not raise enough money. I think we should raise taxes on the wealthy anyhow on fairness grounds.
Option 3 is to go off the cliff. Let everything expire or go into effect.
Before continuing, let me state the obvious. All of these pure positions are seriously flawed. It is a bad idea to do any of them in their purest simplest form. But they give us a starting point for discussion. So let's discuss.
Option 1 is the most ridiculous. The oratorical way the Republicans square the circle on this proposal is they offer to close loopholes in the tax code. I am all in favor of this as a general principle but the devil is in the details. And so far the Republicans have provided no details. Well that's not completely true. One Republican or another has taken pretty much all the big loopholes off the table. My idea of "low hanging fruit" is various loopholes that favor the Oil industry. Democrats have put together bills that close one or more of these loopholes. None of these efforts has garnered a single Republican vote. Two big loopholes that affect individuals are deductions for education expenses and mortgage expenses. Various Republicans have taken both of these off the table. There is the "carried interest" loophole. This allows Hedge Fund managers to treat their multimillion dollar bonuses as Capital Gaines taxed at 15% rather than as ordinary income taxed at 35%. Republicans have shot down the idea of closing the carried interest loophole.
In fact, you can find various Republicans taking all the big loopholes, corporate and individual, off the table at one time or other. And no Republican has publicly supported eliminating a single specific loophole. I am absolutely convinced that had Mitt Romney won the election and succeeded in getting his tax and budget programs enacted into law then no loopholes would have been closed, defense spending would have gone up, tax rates might have been cut, discretionary spending and entitlements would have been cut, and the deficit would have grown enormously. That's what history says Republicans do when they get into the White House.
Option 2 is better but not by a lot. The President has been short on detail in public. As I have indicated above, raising rates on high income people is a good idea but it only solves a small part of the problem. Apparently the President tentatively agreed to a package that included entitlement cuts (styled as "reforms") and cuts to discretionary programs. But we don't know the details. If the Republicans actually came up with some loopholes to close, and they were reasonable loopholes, I'm sure the President would go along with them. Besides the ones listed above, there is another loophole I would like to see closed. I would like for mortgage interest to be only deductible on a singe primary residence, as in you would have to live in the house for it to be deductible. This would not bring in a lot of money but I still think its a good idea.
Now lets talk about options 3. Actually, I want to talk about two variants. Option 3a is the "limited" version. We let everything go into effect. That defines a new base case. Then, after the new congress goes into session in early January, we enact legislation reversing or modifying the components we don't like. This is the version advocated by Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC, for instance. Why would we want to do this? In a word (actually two) Grover Norquist. Norquist put together a "no tax increases, ever" pledge and got almost all Republicans to sign it. Increasing the tax rate on rich people counts as a violation of the pledge and would result in bad things happening to the Republican in question, if the past is any guide. Enacting tax increases on rich people (i.e. the Obama plan) violates the pledge if it is done before January 1. But after January 1 all those higher rates have already gone into effect. So leaving the rate high on rich people is not a violation of the pledge. And cutting the rates on non-rich people is fine and dandy. Finally, if the new laws are passed and put into effect in the first month or two of 2013 the damage to the economy is tiny. And many provisions can be made retroactive to January 1, causing even less harm to the economy.
The other version, option 3b, is to let the various provisions expire or go into effect and then do nothing. This is supposed to be very bad for the economy. But it might not be. I cite the example of the first couple of years of the Reagan Administration. Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers in a labor dispute. The Fed drove up interest rates. These, combined with some other actions, drove the economy into recession. But it was a short sharp recession. The economic problem at the time was a wage/price spiral that resulted in high inflation. The recession cured the inflation and within two years the economy started growing robustly.
The Republican view is that the economy is doing poorly for two reasons. First, the deficit is too high. Second, there is a lot of economic uncertainty. Option 3b attacks both of these issues. It would cut the deficit by more than in half in the short run and put us on track toward a balanced budget in the long run. That's what the Republicans say they want. Since this plan requires no new legislation is it definitely feasible in this "gridlock" political environment. So uncertainty is removed. People may be unhappy with the higher taxes but they know what the future looks like and can plan accordingly.
Large U.S. corporations are literally sitting on more than a Trillion dollars of cash. If, due to the certainty of the budget and tax situation, they start spending this pile of cash then the economy could take off and quickly. The CBO analysis of this option assumes there will be no change in corporate behavior and that individuals will cut back on their spending because they will have less disposable income. But if the economy picks up due to higher corporate investment then this will put money directly into the pockets of people hired by these corporations. Their income will go up so their spending will go up. If the economy picks up in general then the income of the employees that are not directly involved in this increased corporate spending may well see their income go up more than enough to compensate for their higher tax load. So we could easily see spending rise rather than dip and the economy growing rather than shrinking.
So option 3b may not be as bad as the CBO estimates. But let's say the CBO is right. Everyone will adjust. So I predict a short mild recession. After we exit from the recession we have a federal government that is on a sound and sustainable course. So growth should be robust and sustained. So even the bad version of options 3b is not so bad.
I find it very unlikely that either options 1 or 2 will happen. It is possible that some blend of options 1 and 2 will come out of a genuine effort by the Republicans to compromise. But it is very hard to imagine such a deal coming together quickly enough to be implemented before the end of the year. So I see option 3 as what we will see. And I don't see it as all that scary an option. So what will we actually see, option 3a or option 3b? I actually favor some version that is much closer to 3b than 3a. I have skipped over a bunch of details when outlining the situation. And, while I am comfortable about all of the major provisions that I outlined above, there are several minor provisions that I think need addressing.
One is the AMT, Alternative Minimum Tax. This was a good idea when it was first enacted. It was designed to close some loopholes used only by the rich. But the provisions were not indexed. As inflation has worked its magic more and more middle class people, people not intended as targets of the AMT provisions are effected. Congress had dealt with this by enacting a series of annual AMT "patch" laws. But the AMT needs to be fixed or repealed. The problem is a political one. A permanent AMT fix is scored by the CBO as a big tax cut as the CBO is forced every year to assume AMT is part of the baseline and, since it hits a lot of people, it theoretically raises a lot of revenue. So the political problem is getting beat up about the high theoretical cost of fixing it.
Another problem is the "doc fix" to Medicare. A few years ago it became obvious that doctors wouldn't take Medicare patients because the compensation rate was too low. So the rate was raised, again temporarily, by 27%. It needs to be permanently raised. Again, on one has wanted to take the political hit for "blowing up the medicare budget" that a permanent fix would entail.
I have mentioned the debt limit above. It needs to be raised.
The implementation of the "sequester" is a robotic "cut everything by the same amount". I think it would be healthy to cut the Defense budget by $55 Billion a year. But I would like a more intelligent approach to how the money is cut. Barney Frank has suggested we can scale back our overseas commitments, especially troops in Europe and Japan, by a lot safely. I agree. This also cuts the money shipped over seas, where it doesn't help our domestic economy much. There are weapons systems (e.g. tanks) that can be cut and bases that can be closed. The money is there.
I am less happy about the "non-defense discretionary" cuts. But if they are the price for the rest of the package I can live with them. But again the "cut everything by the same amount" rule needs to be replaced with cuts that total to the same amount but are applied more intelligently. Personally, I would like to take a big whack out of farm subsidies. Almost all of the money goes to large corporate farms. And, at the other end, I see no reason to subsidize small hobby farms. Most farms that are small enough to look like a traditional family farm are actually hobby farms. The group in the middle, relatively small farms that do support the rural lifestyle, are too hard a target to hit. And a lot of them are already in some commodity that is not part of the farm subsidy program. The only parts of the system that look like they might be a good investment to me are the extension service and research programs at "ag" colleges. I don't know where the Department of Homeland Security fits in all this. But I think there is more "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" in this department than in the Department of Defense, normally the "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" poster child. I think a big whack can be taken out of the Homeland Security budget and, if done intelligently, would result in an increase in the security of the homeland.
There are numerous fixes that should be made to other items affected by the fiscal cliff. But you have to ask yourself: Are these fixes more or less likely to happen if we avoid going off the cliff? I find it extremely hard to believe that they will be approached in an intelligent way if some grand bargain is made and going off the cliff is avoided.
So let's all go off the cliff. It should be a hell of a ride.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
FCC Robocall Challenge
The FCC is running a contest called "FCC Robocall Challenge". Details can be found at the following location: http://robocall.challenge.gov/. I have blogged about robocalls before. See: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/02/rachel-from-cardholder-services.html for details. So this subject is near and dear to my heart. I think the FCC is slightly misguided. They think the winner should come up with a solution, presumably a gadget, that "should block robocalls". I think a proper solution consists of a number of components. Some of these components would be hardware. But other components would be processes or procedures. Here's my solution:
Telco component
All telcos (anyone providing dial tone and access to the international telephone network) must provide the following service, implemented by a code, to their customers. Someone on the contest web site suggested using “*111”. I will leave it to the experts to decide what actual code would be used. But when a customer receives an inappropriate call (e.g. a robocall) the customer will enter the code on his telephone keypad while the call is in progress. This will cause the telco to record and retain certain information about the call. Entering the code will also cause the call to be flagged as a “logged” call. The customer will also be able to enter the code up to five minutes after the call ends in normal circumstances. The window will expire immediately if the customer has not logged the call before making an outgoing call. Also, if a new call comes in within less than five minutes, the window will expire immediately if the customer does not enter the code to flag the old call as a "logged" call before connecting to receive the new call.
Telcos will maintain the information on logged calls for a minimum of a week (7 days). Then, if the customer “registers” the call within the one week period, the information will be retained for whatever period is appropriate. Once the information is transferred to e.g. an FCC database it can be deleted from the telco system.
The telco will collect and retain the following information when the call is logged:
- Nominal caller ID of the source.
- True source of the call.
- Nominal caller ID of the destination (customer).
- True destination of the call.
- Call start date/time.
- Call end date/time or call duration (Experts can decide which).
Note: A telephone call is a two way process. To work both the true source and the true destination must be known to the telephone system. This is the information that will be collected as the “true source” and “true destination”.
Note: Crime TV shows make reference to “LUDs”. If “LUDs” are a standard part of telephone infrastructure and the information in a LUD is equivalent to the information listed above then collecting a LUD for the call meets my requirements and no new special record type will be needed.
Customer component
This component is optional. But, if provided, it must operate as described.
First let’s consider a standard “land line”. For the moment let’s also assume that the line has a customer provided answering machine. The new component can be thought of as an “enhanced” answering machine that would replace the standard answering machine. The enhanced answering machine would require an Internet connection (e.g. Ethernet or WiFi connection with an IP address assigned to the device).
The enhanced answering machine would process calls that “go over to the answering machine” in the usual manner. But the enhanced answering machine would also speculatively record the first five minutes of all “live” incoming calls too. The telephone system started going digital in the 1960s. At that time a standard was established that converted the audio component of a conversation to a digital format. The digital data consisted of 56,000 bits of data per second of conversation. This is equivalent to 7,000 bytes of data. The enhanced answering machine will record the data in a standard format specified by experts that has a fidelity equivalent to the old 56,000 bits per second standard. Assuming no compression, a five minute recording would consume 2.1 million bytes of storage. This is well within the capability of inexpensive computer technology available today. Multi-Gigabyte thumb drives are readily available for about $10. If the standard included compression or other techniques, or the call lasted less than five minutes, the file could end up being much smaller. And the file should be encrypted using standard techniques for privacy reasons.
So the enhanced answering machine would speculatively record all incoming calls. If the call was not logged (see the above rules) then the recording would be silently discarded. Logged calls would be retained and a standard technique would be specified by the experts for transferring the recording to an Internet capable device (e.g. a computer). Vendors would be required to provide a minimum capability to record and retain one logged call at a time. The recording could be silently discarded after a week at the discretion of the device maker. The device maker could optionally provide the capability to retain more than one recording or retain it for longer than a week. The device maker would just have to spell out the actual capabilities over and above the minimum in the documentation for the device.
What is important here is the capability, not the specific hardware implementation. An enhanced answering machine is certainly an easy way to understand the required capability and feasible way to implement the capability in the case of a standard land line. But a lot of people now use smart phones. All the required capability can be implemented in a high end smart phone using software without requiring an external box or other supplemental hardware. Many people have an “answering machine” service provided by their telco using equipment not located on the customer premises. The telco could enhance their ”answering machine” service offering to provide equivalent capabilities. Or they could choose to not provide the additional capability. The only thing I require is that they be clear with their customers as to whether their “answering machine” service provides the described enhanced capability or not. If their offering did not provide the enhanced capability then customers would be free to decide whether they wanted to continue the telco provided service knowing that message recording would not be available to them or to instead go ahead and acquire an enhanced answering machine device to replace the telco offered service.
The registration process
We now have much more information available than before. We will now always have the logged information for all flagged calls. Where the additional capability exists (e.g. the customer has installed an enhanced answering machine) we also have a recording of the first five minutes of the incoming call.
A change would be made to the current process for registering a complaint with the FCC. Currently this is done through the FCC web site. The new process would be done through a telco web site or through a free down loadable app for smart phones or free app provided by telcos to their customers that would run on an Internet attached customer PC.
The telco would validate the identity of the customer e.g. by a log in process to their web site. In the case of a smart phone app, validation is automatic because the app runs on the customer smart phone and would only use data available on that smart phone. The registration/validation process should be simple in the case of a web site. And customers could log complaints to the FCC about their telco’s process if they did not like it.
Using the telco web site, smart phone app, etc. the customer would be able to see his recent logged calls. He would then be able to select one or more to “register” as a complaint with the FCC. The complaint information would be passed through to the FCC from the telco web site, app, etc. The detailed specifications I leave to experts. But I envision an implementation where the telco web site "front ends" for the FCC web site. The telco web site would be responsible for a "pass through" capability to pass the logged data and, if present, recording file, along to the FCC web site. The FCC would incorporate the logged data and, where it exists, the recording into the complaint. This is why the smart answering machine would need Internet access. The "Internet access" for this device could be restricted to the customer’s local LAN. The PC could pull the file from the smart answering machine and upload it into the complaint package. In the case of a smart phone or telco provided enhanced answering machine service the appropriate procedure would be used to include the recording in the complaint package. Timestamps would be used to match the correct recording to a logged call record.
FCC process
The FCC would now have much more information and much more reliable information for evaluating complaints. The FCC project is designed only to address inappropriate robocalls. So let me proceed along that path for a while. It is probably impossible to automatically identify robocalls. My recommendation is to not try to do it automatically. Use volunteers instead. The same registration process for the telco web site would be use to register volunteers with the FCC. The volunteers would listen to the recordings and evaluate manually whether the complaint was valid. They would not know the identity of any of the parties involved. All they would know was the type(s) of complaint alleged by the customer. Multiple volunteers would evaluate each recording and a super majority would be required to validate the complaint. The FCC would act accordingly in the case of a validated complaint.
Certainly this is a good process for dealing with robocalls but it is easily extended to handle other cases. This is done by giving the customer some options for characterizing the problem when a complaint is registered. One would be “robocall”. But another big problem is with live operators making illegal marketing calls (i.e. violating the “do not call” list).
I suggest that a rule be implemented that required all robocalls to include the name and a "contact" phone number for the organization making the robocall. The information must come in the first minute of the call. Customers could complain that the caller was not doing this or that he was providing bogus information. (It should be a serious crime to omit the information or provide bogus information). The same information would be required for “live operator” calls if the customer requests it. This permits a number of complaint categories:
- Company name omitted or bogus
- Contact phone number omitted or bogus.
- Contact number does not work (not answered or calls are not returned).
- Inappropriate contact (i.e. call not permitted by “do not call” exceptions).
- Illegal Robocall (marketing call rather than a e.g. "snow closure" informational call).
- Etc.
If the call contains misleading or bogus information the caller would first be gone after on this basis. If the contact name and phone number is correct then complaints would be aggregated by who is making them and the “use many separate numbers to originate the call from” trick would no longer work. This system would also catch spoofed “caller ID” numbers, which should be illegal, if it is not already.
Beyond the FCC
The FCC process for dealing with robocalls has been a failure from a customer perspective. It is possible that the FCC, even with this new capability, would not do an adequate job. So I recommend that individuals (or a class of individuals in a class action suit) be allowed to file a lawsuit in the situation where the FCC declines to prosecute. I believe that robocallers do not want to find themselves in a court room where they will be judged by a jury of citizens. This implied threat should allow the FCC to be much more effective than they currently are. Violators know that they are pretty toothless now.
This system can also be expanded to cover situations beyond robocall and “do not call” problems. An obvious example is harassing phone calls. Here the information would not go to the FCC but to law enforcement or the court system. In the worst case, the basic call information would be available. In the best case, a recording of the first five minutes of the call would also be available.
Basic threats e.g. “husband threatening to beat wife” situations could be dealt with directly. But other problems (e.g. “heavy breathing with caller not identified”) could also be addressed. The same third party validation system would be employed. This would filter out reverse harassment situations where the recipient is alleging harassment when none is actually present, at least not in the first five minutes of the call.
Analysis
Every indication is that the vast majority of robocalls originate from a small number of abusers. The above system seems slow and cumbersome but it will yield results that will actually solve the problem. It will take some time for the telcos to implement the logging process. It will be some time before customers have enhanced answering machine capability in large numbers. But it will get us to where we want to be in the end.
If the FCC contest yields what they say they are looking for (e.g. an inexpensive robocall filter device) it will be some time (years) before most customers have one. Likely the device will cost more than the enhanced answering machine device that is part of my proposal. So the aggregate cost of the FCC approach will be the same as or higher than the cost of my proposal and will probably take the same amount of time or longer to implement.
I see only one long term problem to my proposal. If my proposal is successful then robocalls and other similar telephone related problems will plummet. At that point the number of volunteer listeners will probably also plummet. But the need for listeners will plummet too. At that point it may be necessary to pay listeners to attract and maintain a sufficient number of them. If we get to this point perhaps some fine or fee will be needed to provide the money to pay the volunteers.
Finally, there are some areas I have not addressed. For instance:
- How is the volunteer pool managed (e.g. weeding out bad performers)?
- A lot can be done with just the registered complaints data, e.g. statistical analysis.
- Should the complaint database be published? (Of course!) How?
- How to deal with legitimate but unpopular callers (e.g. ethical collection agencies).
Telco component
All telcos (anyone providing dial tone and access to the international telephone network) must provide the following service, implemented by a code, to their customers. Someone on the contest web site suggested using “*111”. I will leave it to the experts to decide what actual code would be used. But when a customer receives an inappropriate call (e.g. a robocall) the customer will enter the code on his telephone keypad while the call is in progress. This will cause the telco to record and retain certain information about the call. Entering the code will also cause the call to be flagged as a “logged” call. The customer will also be able to enter the code up to five minutes after the call ends in normal circumstances. The window will expire immediately if the customer has not logged the call before making an outgoing call. Also, if a new call comes in within less than five minutes, the window will expire immediately if the customer does not enter the code to flag the old call as a "logged" call before connecting to receive the new call.
Telcos will maintain the information on logged calls for a minimum of a week (7 days). Then, if the customer “registers” the call within the one week period, the information will be retained for whatever period is appropriate. Once the information is transferred to e.g. an FCC database it can be deleted from the telco system.
The telco will collect and retain the following information when the call is logged:
- Nominal caller ID of the source.
- True source of the call.
- Nominal caller ID of the destination (customer).
- True destination of the call.
- Call start date/time.
- Call end date/time or call duration (Experts can decide which).
Note: A telephone call is a two way process. To work both the true source and the true destination must be known to the telephone system. This is the information that will be collected as the “true source” and “true destination”.
Note: Crime TV shows make reference to “LUDs”. If “LUDs” are a standard part of telephone infrastructure and the information in a LUD is equivalent to the information listed above then collecting a LUD for the call meets my requirements and no new special record type will be needed.
Customer component
This component is optional. But, if provided, it must operate as described.
First let’s consider a standard “land line”. For the moment let’s also assume that the line has a customer provided answering machine. The new component can be thought of as an “enhanced” answering machine that would replace the standard answering machine. The enhanced answering machine would require an Internet connection (e.g. Ethernet or WiFi connection with an IP address assigned to the device).
The enhanced answering machine would process calls that “go over to the answering machine” in the usual manner. But the enhanced answering machine would also speculatively record the first five minutes of all “live” incoming calls too. The telephone system started going digital in the 1960s. At that time a standard was established that converted the audio component of a conversation to a digital format. The digital data consisted of 56,000 bits of data per second of conversation. This is equivalent to 7,000 bytes of data. The enhanced answering machine will record the data in a standard format specified by experts that has a fidelity equivalent to the old 56,000 bits per second standard. Assuming no compression, a five minute recording would consume 2.1 million bytes of storage. This is well within the capability of inexpensive computer technology available today. Multi-Gigabyte thumb drives are readily available for about $10. If the standard included compression or other techniques, or the call lasted less than five minutes, the file could end up being much smaller. And the file should be encrypted using standard techniques for privacy reasons.
So the enhanced answering machine would speculatively record all incoming calls. If the call was not logged (see the above rules) then the recording would be silently discarded. Logged calls would be retained and a standard technique would be specified by the experts for transferring the recording to an Internet capable device (e.g. a computer). Vendors would be required to provide a minimum capability to record and retain one logged call at a time. The recording could be silently discarded after a week at the discretion of the device maker. The device maker could optionally provide the capability to retain more than one recording or retain it for longer than a week. The device maker would just have to spell out the actual capabilities over and above the minimum in the documentation for the device.
What is important here is the capability, not the specific hardware implementation. An enhanced answering machine is certainly an easy way to understand the required capability and feasible way to implement the capability in the case of a standard land line. But a lot of people now use smart phones. All the required capability can be implemented in a high end smart phone using software without requiring an external box or other supplemental hardware. Many people have an “answering machine” service provided by their telco using equipment not located on the customer premises. The telco could enhance their ”answering machine” service offering to provide equivalent capabilities. Or they could choose to not provide the additional capability. The only thing I require is that they be clear with their customers as to whether their “answering machine” service provides the described enhanced capability or not. If their offering did not provide the enhanced capability then customers would be free to decide whether they wanted to continue the telco provided service knowing that message recording would not be available to them or to instead go ahead and acquire an enhanced answering machine device to replace the telco offered service.
The registration process
We now have much more information available than before. We will now always have the logged information for all flagged calls. Where the additional capability exists (e.g. the customer has installed an enhanced answering machine) we also have a recording of the first five minutes of the incoming call.
A change would be made to the current process for registering a complaint with the FCC. Currently this is done through the FCC web site. The new process would be done through a telco web site or through a free down loadable app for smart phones or free app provided by telcos to their customers that would run on an Internet attached customer PC.
The telco would validate the identity of the customer e.g. by a log in process to their web site. In the case of a smart phone app, validation is automatic because the app runs on the customer smart phone and would only use data available on that smart phone. The registration/validation process should be simple in the case of a web site. And customers could log complaints to the FCC about their telco’s process if they did not like it.
Using the telco web site, smart phone app, etc. the customer would be able to see his recent logged calls. He would then be able to select one or more to “register” as a complaint with the FCC. The complaint information would be passed through to the FCC from the telco web site, app, etc. The detailed specifications I leave to experts. But I envision an implementation where the telco web site "front ends" for the FCC web site. The telco web site would be responsible for a "pass through" capability to pass the logged data and, if present, recording file, along to the FCC web site. The FCC would incorporate the logged data and, where it exists, the recording into the complaint. This is why the smart answering machine would need Internet access. The "Internet access" for this device could be restricted to the customer’s local LAN. The PC could pull the file from the smart answering machine and upload it into the complaint package. In the case of a smart phone or telco provided enhanced answering machine service the appropriate procedure would be used to include the recording in the complaint package. Timestamps would be used to match the correct recording to a logged call record.
FCC process
The FCC would now have much more information and much more reliable information for evaluating complaints. The FCC project is designed only to address inappropriate robocalls. So let me proceed along that path for a while. It is probably impossible to automatically identify robocalls. My recommendation is to not try to do it automatically. Use volunteers instead. The same registration process for the telco web site would be use to register volunteers with the FCC. The volunteers would listen to the recordings and evaluate manually whether the complaint was valid. They would not know the identity of any of the parties involved. All they would know was the type(s) of complaint alleged by the customer. Multiple volunteers would evaluate each recording and a super majority would be required to validate the complaint. The FCC would act accordingly in the case of a validated complaint.
Certainly this is a good process for dealing with robocalls but it is easily extended to handle other cases. This is done by giving the customer some options for characterizing the problem when a complaint is registered. One would be “robocall”. But another big problem is with live operators making illegal marketing calls (i.e. violating the “do not call” list).
I suggest that a rule be implemented that required all robocalls to include the name and a "contact" phone number for the organization making the robocall. The information must come in the first minute of the call. Customers could complain that the caller was not doing this or that he was providing bogus information. (It should be a serious crime to omit the information or provide bogus information). The same information would be required for “live operator” calls if the customer requests it. This permits a number of complaint categories:
- Company name omitted or bogus
- Contact phone number omitted or bogus.
- Contact number does not work (not answered or calls are not returned).
- Inappropriate contact (i.e. call not permitted by “do not call” exceptions).
- Illegal Robocall (marketing call rather than a e.g. "snow closure" informational call).
- Etc.
If the call contains misleading or bogus information the caller would first be gone after on this basis. If the contact name and phone number is correct then complaints would be aggregated by who is making them and the “use many separate numbers to originate the call from” trick would no longer work. This system would also catch spoofed “caller ID” numbers, which should be illegal, if it is not already.
Beyond the FCC
The FCC process for dealing with robocalls has been a failure from a customer perspective. It is possible that the FCC, even with this new capability, would not do an adequate job. So I recommend that individuals (or a class of individuals in a class action suit) be allowed to file a lawsuit in the situation where the FCC declines to prosecute. I believe that robocallers do not want to find themselves in a court room where they will be judged by a jury of citizens. This implied threat should allow the FCC to be much more effective than they currently are. Violators know that they are pretty toothless now.
This system can also be expanded to cover situations beyond robocall and “do not call” problems. An obvious example is harassing phone calls. Here the information would not go to the FCC but to law enforcement or the court system. In the worst case, the basic call information would be available. In the best case, a recording of the first five minutes of the call would also be available.
Basic threats e.g. “husband threatening to beat wife” situations could be dealt with directly. But other problems (e.g. “heavy breathing with caller not identified”) could also be addressed. The same third party validation system would be employed. This would filter out reverse harassment situations where the recipient is alleging harassment when none is actually present, at least not in the first five minutes of the call.
Analysis
Every indication is that the vast majority of robocalls originate from a small number of abusers. The above system seems slow and cumbersome but it will yield results that will actually solve the problem. It will take some time for the telcos to implement the logging process. It will be some time before customers have enhanced answering machine capability in large numbers. But it will get us to where we want to be in the end.
If the FCC contest yields what they say they are looking for (e.g. an inexpensive robocall filter device) it will be some time (years) before most customers have one. Likely the device will cost more than the enhanced answering machine device that is part of my proposal. So the aggregate cost of the FCC approach will be the same as or higher than the cost of my proposal and will probably take the same amount of time or longer to implement.
I see only one long term problem to my proposal. If my proposal is successful then robocalls and other similar telephone related problems will plummet. At that point the number of volunteer listeners will probably also plummet. But the need for listeners will plummet too. At that point it may be necessary to pay listeners to attract and maintain a sufficient number of them. If we get to this point perhaps some fine or fee will be needed to provide the money to pay the volunteers.
Finally, there are some areas I have not addressed. For instance:
- How is the volunteer pool managed (e.g. weeding out bad performers)?
- A lot can be done with just the registered complaints data, e.g. statistical analysis.
- Should the complaint database be published? (Of course!) How?
- How to deal with legitimate but unpopular callers (e.g. ethical collection agencies).
Friday, October 19, 2012
Written Communication
I'm an old fart. When I was a kid the standard and pretty much only form of written communication was a hand written letter. Typewriters existed. But most of them were manual (hit a key and a series of levers would cause a letter to thwap into the paper). Electric typewriters existed. Here it was like power brakes on a car. You hit the key and electricity assisted the levers to thwap on the paper so you didn't have to hit the key so hard for the typewriter to work. But typewriters were for the office. Few homes had them. My home didn't have one.
So people like me were expected to occasionally hand write a letter to grandma or whoever. I was really bad at this for two reasons. The first one was practical. My handwriting was and still is horrible. I was taught "Palmer" penmanship in school but it didn't take. At some point I switched to printing rather than writing. But my printing, while better, was also pretty unreadable. The second problem was I was always stumped as to what to write. I now know that banal is just fine. Just natter on and everyone would be happy. But I was not a good natterer and I just never even figured out that that was what you did. So I was a bad boy. I can't remember writing even one letter as a kid. And just to give you an idea of how different that time was, a first class postage stamp was three cents.
In high school my mother insisted that I take typing. This was an improvement in that at least what I wrote would be legible. But I was also a terrible typist. A typical person can learn to type 30 - 80 words per minute. My top speed was about 15. And I was very inaccurate. If I tried to type even 15 words per minute I would make lots of mistakes. I remember that in one speed test lasting 15 seconds I made 12 mistakes. In spite of this my mother sent me off to college with a small typewriter, which was a good idea.
In terms of coming up with what to say, things got a little better. I had to take a series of English classes as a Freshman. After a couple of failed attempts to do something sensible I found that what worked for me was procrastination. If I waited until I barely had time to finish the composition then batted out whatever came to mind, I could complete the assignment. Surprisingly I got fairly good grades for these efforts.
Computers and I first met in college. And I found that I finally was in an environment that worked for me. I found I could quickly compose computer programs. And the "keypunch" machines of the time were like typewriters. Except there were tricks that allowed you to correct mistakes. And 15 words per minute was no impediment. While I was relatively quick, I wasn't quick enough to compose computer programs faster than I could type them in. So I was in hog heaven.
For many years I assumed that my compositional efforts would be restricted to computer software and I was OK with that. But technology marched on. First the CRT came along. CRT stands for Cathode Ray Tube. It is actually just the picture tube part of an old fashioned TV. But it came to be the nickname for a device consisting of a keyboard, CRT, and associated electronics. You typed on the keyboard and characters appeared on the screen. But now all you had to do was hit the "backspace" key to go back and correct errors. This was an improvement but initially it was only practical for using with computer software. So it became much easier for me to compose and update computer software but it was still impractical to apply these techniques to regular letters to regular people.
But an interesting thing happened as technology continued marching. I could pretend to write a program but then instead of putting it into the computer I could just print it out. Using this trick I could compose something like a letter. And I did so. I composed and printed a number of letters about some practice or project having to do with work and passed them along to the computer center manager. He told me he liked them and found the information in them useful. He encouraged me to write more of them. This was the first time it occurred to me that I might have something to say.
Technology marched on and E-Mail evolved. This was clearly a potential substitute for the hand written letter. Initially it as only a little better than the "write a computer program that is really a letter and then print it out" system I had been using. And E-Mail systems only allowed you to send a letter to someone who had a CRT that was hooked up to the same computer as your CRT. So it was only good for sending E-Mail to other people who worked in the same building or perhaps the same company. But eventually E-Mail systems started connecting to each other and finally through the Internet to anyone who had a computer. And by this time lots of people had a computer.
I had finally arrived. I could communicate via E-Mail. I could type rather than write. So the result was legible. I had decided by this time that I had something to say. Mostly it was about work or technical stuff but that beat having nothing to say at all. I am still not that good at nattering but I am better than I used to be. And E-Mail systems came with spell check. I have always been a bad speller. Being a bad speller then adding a lot of typing mistakes on top makes for a pretty bad situation. But it was as good as it was going to get for me.
But technology continued to march on. E-Mail is now "so last year" or "last decade" or whatever. (See, there is an entirely legitimate use for the much maligned "whatever"). The currently popular methods of communication are Facebook and Twitter. I have neither a Facebook account nor a Twitter account. To be a proper Facebook user you are supposed to post pictures and do all kinds of other stuff I am bad at. Twitter is all about the famous "140 character limit". A lot of people have found a lot of very good things to say in 140 characters. And Twitter allows you to link to something like a picture, a blog post, or something else that doesn't fit into 140 characters. But I am a long form kind of guy. Most of the time I want to say something that will take a lot more than 140 characters to say. Facebook is a great picture sharing service. And Twitter is a great way to broadcast headlines. But I am not very good at either of those things. So I have been passed by.
But wait, it's worse. Most people still have one or more E-Mail accounts. So I can pretty much communicate to anyone I want by sending an E-Mail. But I have noticed something. A lot of people manage their E-Mail accounts using a smart phone. Smart phones have sucky keyboards. So people keep their responses short. And I find that sometimes they don't scroll down or whatever (because it's hard to do on that small screen) and they miss part of what's in my message. So I find that E-Mail is becoming more and more Twitterized. It is becoming just another home for "headline" messages.
"What a world. What a world."
BTW, that's what The Wicked Witch of the West said while she was melting in the 1939 MGM version of "The Wizard of Oz".
So people like me were expected to occasionally hand write a letter to grandma or whoever. I was really bad at this for two reasons. The first one was practical. My handwriting was and still is horrible. I was taught "Palmer" penmanship in school but it didn't take. At some point I switched to printing rather than writing. But my printing, while better, was also pretty unreadable. The second problem was I was always stumped as to what to write. I now know that banal is just fine. Just natter on and everyone would be happy. But I was not a good natterer and I just never even figured out that that was what you did. So I was a bad boy. I can't remember writing even one letter as a kid. And just to give you an idea of how different that time was, a first class postage stamp was three cents.
In high school my mother insisted that I take typing. This was an improvement in that at least what I wrote would be legible. But I was also a terrible typist. A typical person can learn to type 30 - 80 words per minute. My top speed was about 15. And I was very inaccurate. If I tried to type even 15 words per minute I would make lots of mistakes. I remember that in one speed test lasting 15 seconds I made 12 mistakes. In spite of this my mother sent me off to college with a small typewriter, which was a good idea.
In terms of coming up with what to say, things got a little better. I had to take a series of English classes as a Freshman. After a couple of failed attempts to do something sensible I found that what worked for me was procrastination. If I waited until I barely had time to finish the composition then batted out whatever came to mind, I could complete the assignment. Surprisingly I got fairly good grades for these efforts.
Computers and I first met in college. And I found that I finally was in an environment that worked for me. I found I could quickly compose computer programs. And the "keypunch" machines of the time were like typewriters. Except there were tricks that allowed you to correct mistakes. And 15 words per minute was no impediment. While I was relatively quick, I wasn't quick enough to compose computer programs faster than I could type them in. So I was in hog heaven.
For many years I assumed that my compositional efforts would be restricted to computer software and I was OK with that. But technology marched on. First the CRT came along. CRT stands for Cathode Ray Tube. It is actually just the picture tube part of an old fashioned TV. But it came to be the nickname for a device consisting of a keyboard, CRT, and associated electronics. You typed on the keyboard and characters appeared on the screen. But now all you had to do was hit the "backspace" key to go back and correct errors. This was an improvement but initially it was only practical for using with computer software. So it became much easier for me to compose and update computer software but it was still impractical to apply these techniques to regular letters to regular people.
But an interesting thing happened as technology continued marching. I could pretend to write a program but then instead of putting it into the computer I could just print it out. Using this trick I could compose something like a letter. And I did so. I composed and printed a number of letters about some practice or project having to do with work and passed them along to the computer center manager. He told me he liked them and found the information in them useful. He encouraged me to write more of them. This was the first time it occurred to me that I might have something to say.
Technology marched on and E-Mail evolved. This was clearly a potential substitute for the hand written letter. Initially it as only a little better than the "write a computer program that is really a letter and then print it out" system I had been using. And E-Mail systems only allowed you to send a letter to someone who had a CRT that was hooked up to the same computer as your CRT. So it was only good for sending E-Mail to other people who worked in the same building or perhaps the same company. But eventually E-Mail systems started connecting to each other and finally through the Internet to anyone who had a computer. And by this time lots of people had a computer.
I had finally arrived. I could communicate via E-Mail. I could type rather than write. So the result was legible. I had decided by this time that I had something to say. Mostly it was about work or technical stuff but that beat having nothing to say at all. I am still not that good at nattering but I am better than I used to be. And E-Mail systems came with spell check. I have always been a bad speller. Being a bad speller then adding a lot of typing mistakes on top makes for a pretty bad situation. But it was as good as it was going to get for me.
But technology continued to march on. E-Mail is now "so last year" or "last decade" or whatever. (See, there is an entirely legitimate use for the much maligned "whatever"). The currently popular methods of communication are Facebook and Twitter. I have neither a Facebook account nor a Twitter account. To be a proper Facebook user you are supposed to post pictures and do all kinds of other stuff I am bad at. Twitter is all about the famous "140 character limit". A lot of people have found a lot of very good things to say in 140 characters. And Twitter allows you to link to something like a picture, a blog post, or something else that doesn't fit into 140 characters. But I am a long form kind of guy. Most of the time I want to say something that will take a lot more than 140 characters to say. Facebook is a great picture sharing service. And Twitter is a great way to broadcast headlines. But I am not very good at either of those things. So I have been passed by.
But wait, it's worse. Most people still have one or more E-Mail accounts. So I can pretty much communicate to anyone I want by sending an E-Mail. But I have noticed something. A lot of people manage their E-Mail accounts using a smart phone. Smart phones have sucky keyboards. So people keep their responses short. And I find that sometimes they don't scroll down or whatever (because it's hard to do on that small screen) and they miss part of what's in my message. So I find that E-Mail is becoming more and more Twitterized. It is becoming just another home for "headline" messages.
"What a world. What a world."
BTW, that's what The Wicked Witch of the West said while she was melting in the 1939 MGM version of "The Wizard of Oz".
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