TightWind

The CRFB says the Obama administration’s 2011 budget is hiding stimulus bill provisions so they don’t have to pay for them:

The Administration is taking two tax provisions from the 2009 stimulus bill — expansions of the child tax credit and the EITC — and claiming them as part of the “current policy” Bush tax cuts. And they are doing something similar for Pell grants: assuming that they will receive sufficient funding to pay out the maximum grant level set in the stimulus bill.
The Administration didn’t inherit these policies, they created them. And worse, still, they created them as explicitly temporary, under a stimulus bill which they claimed was meant only to help bring us out of this recession.
Yet the White House wants to continue these policies, and they don’t want to pay for them. So what do they do? They hide these policies in their baseline, in the hopes that they won’t have to.

Transparent and honest, clearly.

The Obama administration has invited Congressional Republicans to the White House to discuss health care reform. Ezra Klein describes the terms:

In conversations today, the White House was quick to emphasize a couple of points. First, they’re not starting over. Legislation has already passed the House of Representatives and the United States Senate. That’s not to be taken lightly, and the White House isn’t taking it lightly. “The President has made it clear that he’s adamant about passing comprehensive reform similar to the bills passed by the House and the Senate,” one official said.

So in other words, he’s going to “listen” to their ideas, maybe incorporate a few small ones, and call it bipartisan.

But there is no real discussion if the core of the bill — the mandate and additional entitlements — are off the table for debate. Once government has affirmed its right to require individuals to pay for health care, and has begun paying for health care costs of an even larger percentage of the population, then there is no logical barrier for government to provide health care. They can say, “the government already pays for a majority of the population’s health care costs. Your bad choices are costing us money. So we’re going to do two things: we’re going to limit how much unhealthy food you can eat, like soda, junk food and fast food; and we’re going to take control of health care to make it more efficient and effective for you.” This is perfectly logical when the government (1) can require everyone to purchase health care, and (2) pays for or subsidizes a large part of the population’s health costs.

Once that step is made — the individual mandate and increased entitlements — government-controlled health care is inevitable. And the Democrats know it.

This means that the administration’s conference is pure political theatre, meant to cast the bill as bipartisan. The Republicans shouldn’t enable this.

The Economist describes China’s financial system:

Big credit decisions in China are not advanced by any one bank, nor any one banker. Credit is infused and withdrawn by central diktat. That process has extraordinary appeal to state planners but is horribly inefficient for individual institutions. In recent weeks, for example, as the screws on lending have tightened, favoured industrial companies have been getting urgent calls from their bankers demanding that they immediately scoop up their credit needs for months to come, or be subject to a freeze of uncertain duration. Firms that manage to load up on credit still suffer because they bear interest costs long before the money is actually needed.

“The Chinese banks are pure utilities,” says one banker. “The State Council [the government’s chief administrative arm] tells them to lend, and they lend.” Overt controls increase in line with the amount of credit. Loans above $500m are said to be directly vetted by the State Council.

China’s economy is by no means a free market. While individual firms are allowed some semblance of freedom, the government manipulates the economy towards its ends. Economic success is had through the government, not through the market.

The U.S. economy is stepping in this direction. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are perfect examples of this model: their primary intent is not to make a profit, but to expand credit in the housing market to fulfill the government’s policy goal of increased homeownership. They are given special privileges to do so, and they played a large role in inflating the housing bubble by allowing too much liquidity in the market. Government distortion of the market has consequences.

Rather than recognize this, however, the Obama administration has tried to adopt its own version of China’s government-dictated banking sector:

President Barack Obama challenged top bankers Monday to explore “every responsible way” to increase lending, saying they were obliged to help after being rescued by taxpayers. He asked them to “take a third and fourth look” at their small-business lending.
…
Obama, in a statement after more than an hourlong meeting with the executives, said he reminded them that much of the financial crisis that took the U.S. banking system to the brink of collapse had been “of their own making.” He also exhorted the executives — both in private and in public — to drop their opposition to an overhaul of the nation’s financial industry.

Besides being completely un-presidential — attempting to shame private businesses in to supporting government policy — it is wholly antithetical to a free market, and exactly what led to the financial crisis: government policy encouraging dumb loans and investments. Yet here we are, and the administration is now pressuring banks to do precisely that. When they say lend, they lend. Or at least that’s what the administration is seeking.

Panelfly has released some mockups of their iPad application.

I’m not a comic book fan really, but this looks beautiful.

Fraser Speirs put together a set of screenshots the iPad’s new UI conventions and elements.

Fascinating to look at. I love how the calendar application looks and functions like a real calendar book.

Keith Hennessy on Obama’s proclivity toward reminding us what he inherited:

I agree with the President that he inherited a tough situation, although I disagree with his explanation of the causes. Our fiscal car is driving toward a cliff. To avoid the cliff, the President might want to turn the wheel left, and I might want to turn right.  At the same time, President Obama has the wheel. Complaining about the previous driver won’t prevent us from driving off the cliff. I hope the President will soon stop focusing on the last decade, and instead propose solutions for the next one.

Exactly.

Admiral Mike Mullen said that the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy should be lifted.

Democratic Sen. Mark Udall said his Colorado constituents pride themselves on allowing others to live and let live.

“You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight,” said Udall, quoting libertarian Barry Goldwater.

About time. This is one of the most discriminatory policies we have. The military is supposed to build upstanding leaders, but officially requires all homosexuals to lie about their sexual orientation. It’s not that hard to see the conflict there.

It’s incredibly dumb to kick out, and discourage from even joining, perfectly-qualified people just because they’re homosexual, when we need every man and woman we can get to serve in our military.

One more note: Republicans that support the policy should be ashamed of themselves. Not allowing homosexuals to serve their nation, or to serve openly, is not supporting our military or country. It’s discriminating against individuals who serve with just as much honor as others, and it is hurting our country by keeping capable men and women out of the military.

TidBITS has some great insight into the iPad up, including a few little UI touches that we haven’t seen before.

They also had this to say about handwriting:

At no point did we wish we could write on the iPad with a stylus and have it recognize our handwriting. Although handwriting recognition has improved significantly since the days of the original Newton, it’s just not a good computing input mechanism. Just because you’re holding something that roughly resembles the shape of a notepad doesn’t mean it needs to be treated like one.

Handwriting, though, would be useful for a number of people — anyone who’s moving around and needs to take down quick notes while they’re standing and holding the device in one hand. Typing with the keyboard just doesn’t work very well in these cases.

Omni Group is bringing five of their applications to the iPad, including OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. They’re excited about the iPad because:

Remember how Macintosh was intended to be the computer “for the rest of us”? That’s what we feel Apple’s iPad is: the best computing device for most of the things people use computers for.

Great news. I can’t wait to see how they bring OmniGraffle to the iPad.

Joshua Blankenship thinks the iPad is mostly just for consumption:

At its core, the iPad is a consuming machine, not a creating machine (at least in its currently presented iteration.) Yes, I understand there are quite a few of those 140,000 apps in the App Store that allow people to create and share, but only under very specific constraints. And not nearly on the level that I can with my laptop.

But the iPad is not designed to fill my desire to create, it’s mainly designed for me to consume the creations of others. It will change the landscape of personal computing and find its way into the hands of a ridiculous amount of people who are very happy to simply consume. My hands just won’t be among them anytime soon. I have too much creating to do.

Blankenship’s basic argument is that the iPad is, even though you can create on it using iWork or third-party applications, primarily for consumption because of its constraints. You can’t type on it as well. The hardware is limited. The UI possibilities are limited.

The first isn’t really a limitation — you can use a keyboard. The third will change in time (a 2 GHz iPad would be perfectly capable of doing all kinds of work). The third is the only real limitation of note.

But I think this misses the point.

Blankenship is defining “creative” work very narrowly, and inaccurately. A touch UI may limit certain kinds of work — for example, no matter what, a Photoshop-like application with the same depth of features may never work — but he’s limiting creative work to kinds that seem dependent on a windows-based and mouse-driven UI: Photoshop design, photography, video editing, application and web development, et cetera.

These aren’t the only kinds of creative work.¹ Drawing and painting are ideally-suited to a touch tablet. There’s no reason you can’t write just as effectively on a tablet than on a regular computer (and with Hockenberry’s point, there’s good reason to think you’ll write better). Architects would certainly benefit from being able to create new building designs anywhere they get inspiration, or even edit the design on site while it’s being constructed. Teachers and students would benefit immeasurably from textbooks, the web, and iWork all on one device. Doctors could finally get rid of the rooms full of paperwork and their clipboards. Campaign workers can carry it with them, house to house, to show people their campaign materials, sign them up for the campaign, and log their response. And…

You get the idea. The iPad might be limited for the types of creation that we in the creative professional community are used to, but this isn’t the only kind of creative work people do. There’s all kinds, kinds that you and I might not be able to conceive right now but someone else can, a kind that a computer that weighs 1.5 pounds and can be carried around anywhere a magazine can will enable.

That’s what the iPad is all about. This isn’t about consumption. This is about opening up the future.

1. And, really, some of these may work even better in a touch-based UI. Video editing, photography, and application/web development all seem on first blush to either work fine in a touch UI, or in an improved manner. ↩