ALTERNATIVE ARGUMENTA

By Richard E Walrath

So far, you’d think the subprime mortgage crisis affects only houses in the cheap rent districts.  Not so, the next wave is going to hit homes that look like these.

FDR declared a Bank Holiday until a way could be figured out to keep the banks from going under.  We need a a Home Holiday on mortgage increases for 90 days.

One of the funniest things the media is putting out now is the idea that Willard Romney will benefit from the economic crisis we’re having because he has such extensive business experience. 

Does he have an MBA, too?  Just like Bush?

That will be such a help! 

Why do I refer to him as Willard Romney?  That’s because it’s his first name. 

By Patricia L Johnson

Beep, beep, beep…

Beep, beep, beep…

Beep, beep, beep…

Over and over again the electronic ballot box rejected Mike’s ballot.  After the 5th rejection the election judge provided him with a new ballot to complete and upon completion we once again heard:

Beep, beep, beep…

Beep, beep, beep…

Beep, beep, beep…

As a former election judge I accompanied Mike to the early polling place this afternoon just to take a look see at what procedures were in place and see how much action our newly implemented early voting was getting.

When the second ballot was rejected I advised the person working with Mike that the screen on the optical scanner should provide him with information on why the ballot wasn’t accepted.  Since the election worker wasn’t familiar with the information indicated on the screen he telephoned the election office to be advised that the machine was telling him the ballot was being placed in the wrong ballot bin.

During an election ballots are coded for each precinct.  The early voting polling location covers several precincts so there were many optical scanning ballot boxes in place.  Even though the election judge told Mike to place his ballot in the second machine, after the machine scanned the ballot it knew it was in the wrong bin and rejected it.

Score - Machine 1 - Human 0

Upon arriving home I was bombarded with newspaper headlines reading “NH Recount Finds Irregularities” - “NH Recount Finds Vote Count Errors” as well as a blog headline that I won’t repeat because that would encourage the nonsense.  As you might guess the blog article is extremely popular and had a count of 179 on Digg. 

What is unfortunate about the blog article is the fact they are claiming huge errors were made by Diebold in counting the votes.

All ballots cast in New Hampshire are paper ballots, with some counted by Diebold Optical Scanning devices.  This is the basically the same technology that is used to scan your ATM card when you go to the bank, scan bar codes on purchases of merchandise in department stores, and the same technology that was used to let the election worker at the precinct know that the ballot was being placed in the wrong bin.

The recount is being done by hand and minor discrepancies found were due to human error.  Some voters didn’t follow instructions properly resulting in improperly marked ballots that could not be read by the scanning devices.  Not much room for error when it comes to optical scanning.

The exception to the minor errors found were in the Manchester Ward 5 where larger errors were found.  Clinton’s total dropped from 683 to 619 and Obama’s total went from 404 to 365.  Other candidates totals dropped as well.  However,  once again, the error was made by a human, not an electronic counting device.

New Hampshire voters may vote for a Vice-Presidential candidate on their ballot and some voters wrote their choice for president in the Vice-Presidential space.  The clerk posting the totals erroneously added in the Vice-Presidential votes to the totals for the Presidential candidates resulting in overcounts.

Humans make errors on a regular basis, machines seldom do.

Score - Machine 2 - Human 0

What is incredible about this whole mess is we have 291 more days until the actual election.

Voting irregularities have made all of us more conscious of what is going on at our polling place, which is good for the country as a whole, but all of us must remember that humans are far more error prone than machines.

According to the New Hampshire WMUR article “Human Error, Not Machine, Found During Recount” hundreds of people have e-mailed New Hampshire Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, calling him a “liar”, calling the election process a “sham” or threatening to have him arrested for “rigging the election”.

Most of the irregularities found in voting tabulations over the past several years have been due to human error of some sort, but you generally don’t hear that because it doesn’t sell newspapers.  What sells newspapers and what gets peoples attention on the Internet are the articles that claim there is a conspiracy going on to steal your vote, or there is some sort of fraud.

This country needs a voting system that is standard from one county to the next, one state to the next, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  We need election officials that are well trained in procedures and can concentrate their efforts on helping the voter get in and out of the polling place as quickly as possible.

And the one thing we need more than anything else is electronic voting machines that allow the blind, the disabled and the non-English speaking public to vote without assistance.

The reason HAVA passed was due to the extraordinary number of votes that were lost in prior elections. 

Standard voting procedures, standard voting machines and trained personnel limit the number of lost votes. 

By Patricia L Johnson

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is the organization responsible for calling a recession, “a recession”.  They determine when a recession begins based on their definition: 

“A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real [inflation adjusted] GDP [gross domestic product], real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.”

The last time NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee called a recessionary period was in 2001, for the 8-month period beginning March 2001 and ending November 2001.

The November 2001 trough was announced July 17, 2003.
The March 2001 peak was announced November 26, 2001.

The CBO, in their January 2008 report Options for Responding to Short-Term Economic Weakness indicate five economists, “Richard Berner (Morgan Stanley), Martin Feldstein (HarvardUniversity), William Gross (PIMCO), Robert Shiller (Yale University) and Lawrence Summers (Harvard University) have all stated that the probability of a recession this year is greater than 50 percent.”

All too often the media is full of reports about how this or that economist missed the boat on a forecast, but we’ll give these guys the benefit of the doubt and agree that we’ll probably have a recession this year.

Although a recession won’t be called until ‘after the fact’ our economy is now operating in slow motion, so now what?

The Federal Reserve has been taking bold actions to keep the economy running on an even keel, but even the Big Bank may not be able to stop the tsunami caused by the subprime mortgage mess.  There are still 1.7 million subprime ARMs that will reset in 2008 and 2009.

Many of the 2008 presidential hopefuls have put together various stimulus packages.  Whether or not a stimulus package is needed to jump-start the economy has pretty much been answered, while the remaining question becomes what type of stimulus package will best serve our failing economy.

Three questions must be answered when looking at the various proposals.

1. Are they cost effective? 
2. Are they timely - do they provide a quick fix to the economy?
3. How sure are we of the end result?

The CBO has listed nine possibilities and prepared a chart (page 20) indicating the pros and cons of each.

• Lump-Sum Rebate
• Temporary Tax Reduction
  • Withholding Holiday for the Employee Payroll Tax
  • Across-the-Board Tax Rate Cut
• Deferring or Eliminating Scheduled Tax Increases
  • Extending the AMT Patch
  • Deferring or Eliminating Tax Rate Increase under EGTRRA or JGTRRA
• Cut in Corporate Tax Rates
• Incentives for New Investment
• Extending Operating Loss and Carryback Provision
• Direct Transfer Payments to Households
  • Extending or Expanding Unemployment Benefits
  • Temporarily Increasing Food Stamp Benefits
• Providing General Aid to State and Local Governments
• Investing in Public Works Project

Deciding what to do shouldn’t be complicated if you look at the prior stimulus packages put into place during the Bush administration - they didn’t work, so obviously a different approach is needed.   Providing tax cuts to the rich and tax and investment incentives to big business, just didn’t provide the goals sought - unless the goal was to bankrupt the rest of us.

A review of the Consumer Price Index, CPI, report issued January 16, 2008 could provide an excellent case for directing the brunt of a new stimulus package to those needing it most, the poor and middle class.  The increases in basic necessities over the past year; food, energy and medical costs has impacted all of us, but has been especially detrimental to the poor and middle class. 

Nearly all the indicators have gone up considerably in the 12-months ended December 2007 v. the 12-months ended December 2006, with Energy commodities having the biggest increase at 29.4%, followed by Energy at 17.4%, Transportation 8.3%, Medical Care 5.2%, Food and Beverages 4.8%, Energy Services 3.4%, Other Goods and Services, 3.0%, Housing and Education at 3.0% each, Recreation at .8% and Apparel at -.3%.

The percentages indicated above are a sum of all items within a particular index.  Some increases in the food and beverage group over the past year are milk up 19.3%, cheese up 13.0%, cereal up 5.4%, bread up 10.5%, fruits and vegetables up 5.9%, and meats, poultry, fish and eggs up 5.4%.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that eating, staying warm and being able to afford medical care when necessary shouldn’t be a luxury in this country, but that appears to be the direction we’re heading.

By Richard E Walrath

People are way over their heads in debt, and have no way out except bankruptcy which the Republicans have made more difficult and more costly to protect their business interests, but bankruptcies are on the rise.

People on the bottom half just can’t make it any more on their incomes.  The median household income is below $50,000.  Food, housing, health care and energy are consuming more and more of their incomes.

Add a debt burden that has been steadily growing to this picture, and you see the Big ‘R’ fast approaching.

What the bottom half needs is an increase in income–not just a short-time, one-time stimulus. 

Wages have been suppressed and depressed for years.  The minimum wage stayed at $5.15 an hour for almost ten years! 

Meanwhile, debt in the bottom half has soared.  Add to this grim picture growing unemployment and the financial crisis due to the subprime mortgage mess, and you can understand the situation we are in. 

By Richard E Walrath

The big ‘R” is fast closing in on us, so now we hear about plans for doing something about heading it off. 

Hillary Clinton is proposing a $70 Billion stimulus plan for those with lower incomes–that’s called trickle up.

What I don’t understand is why does it take seven years and $700 billion of trickle down to get us where we are? 

Why not just skip the trickle down idea since we know it doesn’t work?

If we can head off the big ‘R’ with only $70 Billion, just think of what we could do with $700 Billion!

By Richard E Walrath

It looks like another Perfect Storm to me.

I’m talking about the NH Primary results which left egg all over the pollsters and the political pundits and the media. 

Ever since the book and the movie, by the same name, came out, things that go wrong are called a perfect storm.

For opera lovers, it was the Una Furtiva Lagrima that escaped from Hillary Clinton as she bravely faced the cameras and voters on the fateful final day before the election.  That’s what swayed the election, say they.

Not so, says Andrew Kohut, President Pew Research Center, who brings you the Pew Polls.  It was the po’ white folks, the poor women voters, to be exact, who turned out in record numbers to vote for Senator Clinton. 

Kohut, in his NYT Op-Ed piece today, probably has summed up the results best. 

Pollsters, pundits and the media saw what they wanted to see, not what was really there.

Now they will have to face the possibility that their dwindling number of readers and viewers will continue to dwindle and diminish.  But I would suggest that being wrong isn’t something that the pollsters, the political pundits and the media should find so hard to explain. 

After all, they’ve had lots of practice.

It reminds me of one of Clint Eastwood’s movies, Pink Cadillac.  Somebody named Roy is supposed to be acting as a look-out, but a gang goes right around him unnoticed by Roy.  How could they get by Roy, says one character in the  movie. People have been getting by Roy for years is Eastwood’s answer.

Lots of stuff–people and things–have been getting by the pollsters, political pundits and the media for years–seven going on eight years, at least.

Richard E Walrath is a former budget analyst and co-owner of the Articles and Answers News and Information sites:  Articles and Answers  Articles and Answers 2007 and the Alternative Augumenta blog.