Is Obama a radical? or is he the Great Compromiser?

We progressives consider that Obama was a centrist democrat because

1. He used a model for health care that was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Liberals in the party wanted a single-payer universal health care, like those in England, France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. But the Democrats in Congress were blocked by a few conservatives in their party who refused to cooperate. Of course, none of the Republicans agreed to cooperate. The major problems with the ACA are caused by the refusal of Republican Governors and Health Care Corporations to cooperate with the program, which Obama considered a compromise that would be acceptable to all. But since the Heritage Foundation had made its proposal, the Republican Party had moved to the right so they were unwilling to accept any universal health care proposal.
2. He refused to institute a carbon tax that would require carbon polluters to pay for the damage their actions were doing and would continue to do into the distant future. Republicans, who once had agreed that global warming was a problem of epic proportions, one that all mankind had to cooperate to ameliorate, had again moved to the right by denying that global warming existed or that the US should do anything at all to prevent its damage. In this opinion, the Republicans rejected the testimony of nearly all climate scientists. Again, there was no possibility for compromise with the Republican dead-enders. Your statement that Obama was the one who refused to cooperate beggars belief. It takes two parties to compromise, and the Republicans refused to compromise on this issue.
3. Obama ended the credit crisis caused by Wall Street brokers during the Bush administration, but he did it by bailing out the banks who had caused the problem. None of the people responsible for the nearly catastrophic melt-down of our financial system lost their jobs or went to jail for what they did, the effects of which are still being felt today. Obama compromised plenty by putting Wall Street insiders in charge of the Treasury department. This compromise has led to a rollback of safeguards against another crash like the two that happened during the Bush regime. Notice that there were no crashes during the Obama administration, at least partly due to the moderate reforms he pursued. As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, there will be another serious crash during the Trump administration because his advisors are the very people who profited from the last two and these greedy con artists would dearly like another shot at the big apple.
4. Obama refused to institute marijuana reforms. The marijuana laws are laughable, since they state that marijuana, like heroin and cocaine, is addictive and has no legitimate medical value, regardless of the fact that millions of people world-wide are currently using marijuana to treat a number of chronic conditions. Since marijuana is known not be be physically addictive, the perpetrators of these laws had to make a new definition of addiction, one which would apply equally to coffee, aspirin, and numerous over-the-counter drugs that are actually more harmful to the population than marijuana.
5. Obama said nothing about Americans’ addiction to sugar, even though research indicates that the dietary guidelines for sugar were written by the same man who falsified results to make it appear that cholesterol, not sugar, was responsible for increased risk of heart attacks, as well as the current epidemic of obesity.
6. Obama made no plans for converting to a society without petroleum despite scientific agreement that oil will soon run out and that society is unprepared for a petroleum-free environment. While practically every other country in the world has reduced its petroleum use through taxation and regulation, the US policy under Obama was to continue allowing exploration and development of coal and oil while also providing moderate subsidies for clean energy. Once again, his position is a compromise between those who profit from the sale of oil and the environmental and health organizations that campaign against its use. Yet you say that Obama never compromises. I say that Obama compromises way too much, especially with those who actively seek to undermine sensible environmental policies.
7. Obama did not move to reduce defense spending and wasteful spending on unnecessary weapons systems. Here again, no compromise position was ever offered by the right, despite the claims of tea party politicians that they opposed all government waste.
8. Obama did not campaign strenuously against the disastrous Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United, that has led to unlimited spending by polluters, lobbyists, and financiers to buy a President and a congress who would not oppose them in any way. This was the single most disastrous “moderate” position that Obama took because it has led to exactly what people feared: enormous campaign spending by corporations and the wealthy, who now have bought control of both houses of congress and the Presidency.
9. Obama also failed to campaign against gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed many practices beloved by Republicans.

There are many other examples I could give where Obama was slow to propose progressive policies. It is meaningless to claim that he was more liberal than other presidents because times change and issues that are pressing today, like climate change and unlimited spending on elections, were not known to earlier presidents. I will note that Republican President Nixon proposed a guaranteed annual income and Bill Clinton proposed a universal health care act, so Obama was not more liberal on those issues.

But comparisons of this sort are meaningless because we need dynamic leadership to protect our workers from foreign competition and climate change. We certainly won’t get that from Trump, a dynamic leaders who doesn’t understand the foreign policy initiatives of the past 50 years and who appoints extreme right-wingers and fringe politicians to his cabinet. Obama, lest you forget, appointed a republican as his Defense Secretary. But I guess you don’t count that action as a sign that the man could have been called, The Great Compromiser.

Why healthcare.org doesn't work

No one should be surprised that the federal government can't do database interfaces very well. Their computers are obsolete, of course, as are the development platforms they use. They require their programmers to use obscure programming languages that they are not allowed to fix. But the worst barrier between you and the database of your choice is the rigid hierarchy that infects the halls of power.

We know how to develop good technology. Silicon Valley has numerous companies that do it quite well. Google and Facebook come to mind. But the federal government pays absolutely no attention to the rules of program development, among which are the following:

1. Hire the best engineers you can find. Forget about Ivy League credentials and teacher recommendations. My company once hired a high school student who had been helping them with user testing. They waited until he got out of high school, though.

2. Give your developers their head. These developers are like spirited racehorses. If you tell them they must wear a suit and tie and be in the office at 9 am, they will bolt for the nearest exit, where they will find project managers eager to hire them. 

3. Make sure your engineers are creative and flaky. Encourage them to stay at the office by giving them whatever they need. Google gives them espresso and food. There are also game rooms (see below).

4. Let them goof off. My favorite software company developed video games. Anyone in the company could play video games at any time. That was part of the culture. In other companies, the department snitch spies on you and tells the manager you are goofing off. The Roman philosopher Seneca explained it this way: Reading and writing are opposites. You must do both, like breathing in and breathing out. Programming and playing are opposites. You can't have one without the other. One company I worked at had a big red nerf bat. The project manager came to your cube and hit you with it if you were late with your code. The same company had super-soakers (squirt guns). Members of the development team would sneak up on someone and spray him with water.

5. Pay them time-activated bonuses. These usually take the form of stock options that don't vest until a person works for the company for several years. This keeps them working for the company and gives them an incentive to keep producing.

These are just a few of the effective practices used in the computer industry to produce  high-quality software. Here, by way of contrast, are some of the practices of the federal government:

1. Always hire graduates of top Universities. Federalistas believe that they should hire people with good grades who are skilled at pleasing their professors. These people should fit in well in a federal system that prizes pleasing your boss above all other virtues.

2. Always give preferential treatment to veterans. Unfortunately, this hiring practice works against finding good programmers. Veterans learn how to follow orders. Good programmers learn to disregard orders whenever necessary. Their attitude is different. They know that managers can't code, so they don't pay attention when managers tell them how to do something. Good managers, on the other hand, don't give explicit orders to programmers, because they know programmers like to figure things out on their own.

3. Hire stable workers who will stay on the job for many years. This works well when you are looking for people who need to fit in to a hierarchy to be happy. Such people make terrible programmers. Good programmers find problems in other people's code and tell them about it. Good programmers abandon a structured design when it isn't working. Good programmers find new and innovative ways to solve problems.

Health care lies that trap us all in an inferior system of medical care

I recently saw a post on Quora that encapsulated nearly all of the myths, lies, and misconceptions that surround the US medical care system. The Affordable Care Act may put an end to this nonsense. We shall see.

I have analyzed these myths below. In each case my answer follows a brief summary of the original point.

1. Multiculturalism: No one else is close in the ethnic variability of the US. It affects our decisions to work together in ways not even fathomable elsewhere. 

I live in a neighborhood where practically everyone is an immigrant. They're all different ethnicities, from all over the world, but they have one thing in common: They're all poor. So you're saying that our country is great because people come here from all over the world to clean hotel rooms and serve hamburgers.

2. Social mobility: you still can go from outhouse to penthouse. 

The US does not offer its people the best chance of becoming well-off. Many other countries give their poor people a better chance to get rich. ln the US, only 6% of people born into the lowest economic group (bottom one fifth) make it into the top economic group (top one fifth).  see Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations for details. Countries with a better chance for improving your status are Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada. see Page on brookings.edu for details.

I love the part where you say that immigrants take advantage of educational and entrepreneurial opportunities. The educational system is rigged so that very few people get elite educations, and most of those come from privileged families. The cost of a higher education has become so high that many poor families can only afford to send one child to college. 

The US has some laws that favor entrepreneurs but many others that do the exact opposite. For example, becoming a doctor is a way to get rich, but states control the number of students who enter medical school and the number of doctors who can practice medicine. They have strict laws forbidding non-doctors from practicing medicine. Once again, these laws harm the very poor, who cannot afford a real doctor and instead use faith healers and patent medicines.

Every entrepreneur knows that what you earn depends on how much you have to invest, and poor folk got nada.

3. No cost lawsuits: Other countries haver loser pays for court costs.

It used to be easier to sue a doctor in the United States, but Health Insurance companies and vulnerable corporations--like those that sell tobacco and asbestos--have made it much more difficult to sue anyone. An individual rarely can afford to do so. Many states have passed "tort reform" laws that limit the amount you can receive and also prevent class action suits from being filed. A recent $5 billion class action judgment against big tobacco companies was rejected by an appeals court that said class actions can't be joined by people in other states. So every person injured by tobacco-related diseases must join in a lawsuit with others from their own state. Since these cases last for years, it may not be possible for people in small states to recover their losses at all. 

Tobacco companies and Asbestos companies have learned how to game the system so they pay only pennies on the dollar for actual costs of deaths due to their life-threatening products. Asbestos companies did this by declaring bankruptcy, then allotting a small amount for future damage claims. Afterwards, they can start up business again without worrying about the consequences of their former actions. That outcome results from the lenient bankruptcy laws of the US.

Besides, if everyone has health insurance, the costs of health care are much lower and there is no necessity to sue. The US has the highest health care costs in the world but its high costs do not make their people healthier. 

4. Americans view of the value of life: We put those over 70 on dialysis, ventilators and other extraordinary measures.

The belief that Americans place a higher value on life than elsewhere is a myth. Americans have an average life expectancy of 79.8, while Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Italy all have higher life expectancies. These are all socialist countries that have national health systems. If they placed a lower value on life, they would let their people die. But they keep them alive longer than the US does.

5. A fundamental difference in how we are constructed: It is ACCESS TO not the NATURE OF our health care system that drops the US in all the rankings.

I don't understand how you can separate the nature of the health care system from how many people it refuses to care for. You're saying that our health care statistics are worse because we don't provide health care to the poor. You just complained because other countries ration health care by age (which isn't true), but you're saying the US system only looks bad because it rations health care by wealth.

Yes, the US looks bad because poor people can't afford necessary health care. Many lose their lives needlessly because of this system of rationing. This results in a health care that looks bad and is bad, unless you judge a health care system by the way it treats the rich. If those statistics where the US looks bad only considered the health of the rich, the health system would look better. But then you couldn't compare it to the other countries of the world, which do provide health care to the poor.

I suppose you're actually claiming that the US can't afford to give health care to the poor because there are so many poor people here. But the median income in the US is among the highest in the world. See Household income for details. So what you're saying just isn't true. The median family in the US has more money to spend on health care than nearly every other country in the world. The reason we don't provide health care to our citizens isn't because we can't afford it. It's because people like you believe that it is acceptable morally or philosophically to deny health care to people "from the third world country" inside the US.

6. Paying for everyone else's research: Our drugs are DRAMATICALLY more expensive. 

Public Citizen has published an extensive report on the claim that drug companies need higher prices to conduct essential research. The report concludes, "But this R&D scare card is built on myths, falsehoods and misunderstandings, all of which are made possible by the drug industry’s staunch refusal to open its R&D records to congressional investigators or other independent auditors."

Every other country in the world pays less for the same drugs than the US, despite the fact that publicly funded scientists provide much of the research for these drugs. The drug companies have managed to convince our Congress that every other country in the world is wrong to pay less for drugs. They have done this by spending large sums of money on lobbying and public relations. The US is the only country in the world that falls for this stuff. I guess that is a form of "American exceptionalism", but I think it is something we would all be better off without.

Obama's All-in Compromise Strategy: Does it work?

We all thought we knew how to compromise. You make an offer. Your opponent makes an offer. Your first offer never reveals everything you are prepared to yield. You save that for your final offer.

This style of compromise is based on the idea that there is a middle ground somewhere that will satisfy both parties. This style works well when both sides are evenly matched and the compromise will not harm either party too much. This is the piecemeal style of compromise.

The piecemeal style does not work well at all when one side is much stronger than the other, as when a prosecutor is negotiating with a defendant in a criminal trial. The prosecutor has little to lose in this negotiation. True, a series of lost judgments can harm a prosecutor's career, but he or she must be willing to take that risk because a series of non-decisions can be just as harmful. Besides, a single case ordinarily will not make or break a career.

A defendant in a criminal case frequently has his whole life on the line. Criminal sentences are cruelly harsh these days. Even a first offense can lead to years spent in prison. A second or third conviction can lead to a life behind bars. In one recent case, a defendant was involved in a robbery with two accomplices. The two accomplices pleaded guilty but the defendant, a young man who believed that his two older friends had influenced him to commit a crime, decided to plead not guilty and go to trial. This defendant lost his gamble and the judge sentence him to spend much of his life in prison. Admittedly the judge was extreme in his sentencing, but what's the point of being a judge if you can't throw the book at scofflaws? 

So a criminal defendant is likely to seize at any offer of compromise to avoid a dire outcome. Any offer is likely to be better than what he can expect from a skeptical jury and a mean judge. So our prisons fill up with petty criminals. 

 

The piecemeal style of negotiation is not the only style, however. As an American, I became annoyed with the Turkish bazaar in Istanbul, where the salesman typically starts out with a price three or four times the value of a piece. Once when a tradesman used this approach on me, I simply turned and walked away. He followed me, cutting his price in half several times in succession. But I didn't want to deal with someone like that and I kept on walking.

It turned out that someone else was watching the incident, one of the seller's competitors, or even--who knows?--his boss. This man came an offered to show me better merchandise at his factory, located outside the bazaar. I went with him and bought two items. No bargaining involved, I simply accepted the price offered. I later discovered from my Turkish friend that the price I had gotten was a good one. Maybe not the best possible price, but still a good one.

I would call this the "all-in" style of negotiation. The name comes from tournament poker, where a player cannot wait for a good hand while his pile of chips dwindles. At some point, he will not have enough money to compete with the other bettors. He therefore pushes all his chips into the pot and calls "all in".

Until Barack Obama became president, all negotiations between presidents and the congress were piecemeal negotiations. One party made an offer to compromise, then the other made one, and so on. The result of this style of negotiation was not satisfactory for Obama, however. Frequently, one party may delay a bill by offering one compromise after another in a piecemeal fashion. In the end, the party withdraws its support and the session ends with no action on the bill that seemed so popular at the outset.

Obama saw that the piecemeal style had one big flaw--bills could not be continued on to the next session of Congress. So he tried the all-in strategy. In the health care bill, he offered the same bill that the Republicans had offered the last time the issue had been brought before the congress. He may have believed that the Republicans would simply cave in and accept their own proposal. But he probably realized that the Republicans never intended to pass that proposal and merely used it as a delaying tactic in their piecemeal strategy.

Obama's all-in strategy worked. The Republicans tried to make counteroffers, but they really had nothing else to give. Obama and his congressional allies passed the bill by buying off the few votes he needed to get the bill through the Senate. The all-in strategy essentially stops the clock ticking, preventing delaying tactics, especially if, as on the debt-limit bill, the all-in player refuses to offer any further compromise.

After the 2010 elections, Obama faced an obdurate congress that refused to be intimidated by the all-in strategy. Obama continued this tactic, however, and gained a political advantage by making his Republican opponents appear petty, self-interested, and even stupid. The Republicans countered by passing one meaningless bill after another, hoping the electorate would blame the president for the failure of these bills. After numerous meaningless bills failed to pass the Senate, however, even disinterested voters began to get the idea that the Republicans were not serious about solving problems and governing. 

It remains to be seen whether the all-in style wins in the long run.