Chris Dodd Comes Out Against Oil Spills, Genocide, Mosquito Bites, Traffic Jams

It's good to know that the soon-to-retire Connecticut Senator is upset by the ongoing ecological disaster currently unfolding in the Gulf. I'd certainly be more likely to vote for a candidate who shares his view than for a member of the pro-baby-birds-drowning-in-crude-oil movement. Blaming George W. Bush for the disaster is a bit much, though. Bush's Presidency was a train wreck on multiple levels, and had this spill occurred on his watch I don't doubt that some scandal involving incompetence or lax enforcement at whatever bureaucratic arm of the Department of the Interior regulates offshore drilling would have emerged. The thing is, Bush isn't the President any more, and hasn't been for a year and a half. He's just a retired old man living on a ranch in Texas. Obama has had more than enough time to overhaul the executive branch to his liking, and screwups therein are on his watch and have been for awhile.

Of course, when your party controls both branches of the legislature, and its approval ratings look like this, I suppose it makes sense to deflect attention from yourself as much as is possible. Someone how I doubt "Ooga Booga Wall Street George Bush Party of No" is going to be an effective slogan for the fall campaigns however.

Le Affaire Rand Paul

We libertarians don't have much of a voice in national politics, so it was refreshing to see Rand Paul win the Kentucky Republican primary (and, in a right-leaning state in what's shaping up to be a Republican year, almost assuredly a position in the Senate). I'm not under any illusions that a new libertarian golden age is on the horizon, but to at least have someone with a high-profile position from which to explain libertarian principles and advance libertarian arguments is a step forward for the movement.

As happy a development as that was, the reaction to Paul's now-infamous exchange with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC has been equally depressing. Paul's attempt to explain his philosophical and constitutional objections to the heavy-handed exercise of government power in legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was quickly spun into unqualified opposition to the law itself, which was then in turn spun into opposition to the goals of the law. Liberals have been tripping over themselves to declare Paul at worst a closet racist nutjob, and at best a hopelessly naive ideologue who doesn't grasp the "adult" truth that free market principles don't work in the real world. The White House has piled on with a self-serving statement that Paul's critique of government interference in individual rights "has no place" in today's political dialogue. Paul has begun to dig himself out of the whole with a clarifying statement, and I don't think this kerfluffle will hurt him in November, but the fact that the primary response from the left has consisted primarily of name-calling, a furious onslaught against libertarian strawmen, or both, does not speak well to the state of political discourse in the country right now.

While I see where he's coming from, I disagree with Paul that market forces and the choices of free citizens would have quickly dispensed with the Jim Crow regime, without the need for Federal intervention. Racism in that era, in that region, was simply too virulent and socially entrenched for a simple change in the laws outlawing de jure discrimination against blacks to have made much of a difference. As in my opinion any intellectually honest person should be, I'm willing to concede the point that in some instances my preferred political philosophy may not have the right answer. But it's at least an argument worth having, and Paul should not be laughed out of the room for making his side of it. His contention that citizens freely choosing not to patronize openly racist establishments would have brought about change in the social norms might not be correct in this instance, but one cannot on those grounds dismiss his entire philosophy as naive or unrealistic any more than one can dismiss liberalism because some liberals don't understand that government services aren't free. Nor can one dismiss the indisputable point he makes that, as noble as its goals were, the Civil Rights Act did involve a real intrusion on the rights of free assembly and private property on the part of the government. When we weigh our response to the pressing issues of today - terrorism, the drug war, immigration, health care, and all the rest - the impact that government policy has on individual rights ought to be a major consideration in the debate. Conservative and progressive ideology both have a tendency to trample on these rights in different ways in pursuit of their respective visions of an ideal society, and as the driving forces behind the two major political parties in our country, they are in a position to do so. The libertarian impulse is a necessary philosophical check on the excesses of both.

Though the test case in question is flawed, Paul makes a reasonable argument that society can deem the behavior of certain individuals highly objectionable without thinking that it is therefore prima facie legitimate to forcefully alter it by government fiat, and the related and important point that more government may not always be the best solution when there is a social problem. That he is the victim of (excuse the expression) a virtual lynch mob for doing so doesn't say much for the discernment or intellectual capability of his critics.

Specter Goes Down!

Every Pennsylvanian's favorite RINO-turned-DINO has lost the Democratic primary to U.S. representative Joe Sestak. This isn't a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention, and was pretty much an inevitability, if not now then in November. After his after his near death experience in the 2004 Republican primary, in which he narrowly defeated Pat Toomey, Specter saw the writing on the wall and realized that a squishy Rockefeller Republican like him wasn't likely to survive long in the furnace of right-wing activism that has become the Republican primary process, and duly switched his affiliation to Democrat, but his late career defection transparently smacked of opportunism and desperation and won him little-to-no trust or goodwill in his new party while alienating whatever support he might have had left among similarly centrist members of his old one. His critical votes in favor of the polarizing stimulus and the health care reform bills weren't enough to save him when the state's Democrats thought they had a chance to elect a more reliable liberal like Sestak to his position.

Unfortunately for them (but happily for me, desperate as I am to see divided government at least put some kind of a check on Obama's spendthrift ways), I think there's a pretty good chance that Toomey, who's back at a more opportune time, is going to defeat Sestak just as he likely would have beaten Specter. An arch fiscal conservative who's a ferocious deficit hawk has the right message at a time when voters are extremely put off by how much money the Federal government is spending. And while Sestak made hay in the Democratic primary by tying Specter to George W. Bush, that kind of tactic will be less successful this year, not only because Bush is gone and the marginally popular President now in the White House is of his own party (as is the extremely unpopular Speaker of the House in the Speaker's chair), but because Toomey has been out of office for five years and is clearly the candidate best positioned to brand himself as an "outsider" in this election, contra Sestak whose fingerprints are all over the Obama agenda, including the most unpopular parts of it.

Every political career comes to an end sooner or later, even one as long and tenacious as Specter's. It's hard to believe the arc of the guy's career - from principle architect of the magic bullet theory during the Warren Commission hearings in the 1960s, to failed mayoral and gubernatorial candidate in the 1970s, to a five-term Senate stint culminating in a role as chairman of the judiciary committee during Bush's second term - and I don't know that we'll see many of its like happen again in today's political environment. Whatever you thought of Specter (I voted for him in 2004 but certainly had my disagreements with him), there's no denying that he was a smart, tough, and hard-working politician, if not the most principled one. Here's hoping Pennsylvania's next Senator can equal him in the former qualities, if not the latter one.

Oh, Democracy...

Memo to everyone involved in the healthcare reform debate: it's rather hard to take anything from polls that show that "a majority of Americans favor a public option" when it appears that barely 50% have even a vague idea what a public option is.

Perhaps we ought to focus on educating the public about its government first?

Am I Missing Something?

Not to be the turd in the punchbowl or anything, but what, exactly, has Barack Obama done to merit a Nobel Peace Prize, other than be beloved of the international demographic of cosmopolitan liberals that decides the award? The Prizes awarded to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore may have been (alright - were) dubious, but at least those two were devoting a good deal of their time to something that could be construed as conducive to world peace. Obama has not done so. He has not figured out how to pacify intransigent regimes in Iran or North Korea, nor made any headway in getting the Israelis and the Palestinians to stop blowing each other up, nor resolved the Mexican standoffs over Kashmir, Taiwan, etc., nor really accomplished much of anything on the peace front. That's not to fault him - these problems have persisted for decades or centuries despite the best efforts of lots of smart, dedicated people for the reason that they're incredibly difficult to solve - but I hardly see how one even begins to justify giving him a Nobel Peace Prize. The award is especially hard to fathom when one considers that with few substantive differences from George W. Bush, Obama has continued to prosecute the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in some cases more aggressively than his predecessor did. Bush was pilloried as a war criminal and the biggest threat to peace since Hitler by the very same liberal European elites who have now deemed Obama the person who has done the most for the cause of peace this year. What gives?

It all makes sense as soon as one acknowledges that in the court of international opinion the criminality of an action is determined not by whether it actually violates law or morality but by whether the party responsible has the right political allegiances. See also Polanski, Roman. I love the smell of rank liberal hypocrisy.

With Friends Like These...

Hot on the heels of Jimmy Carter blathering about motivation to the Obama Presidency being motivated largely by racism, Bill Clinton has decided to join the chorus of Democrats saying asinine things. Clinton has declared that his erstwhile bête noire, the fearsome "vast right wing conspiracy" that framed him for draft dodging, forged a bunch of fake documents implicating him in shady real estate dealings, bribed Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey to accuse him of sexual harassment, and programmed the Manchurian Bimbo, Monica Lewinsky, to seduce him before planting his semen on her dress, is now out to get Obama. Their sinister agenda? "Wanting him to fail". Horror of horrors! It's not as if we live in a democracy - you know, that quaint form of government in which, if someone whose policy goals you vigorously oppose is elected, you're allowed to declare your opposition to them and attempt to prevent them from being realized. Obviously conservatives who don't agree with Obama's agenda didn't get the memo that states that failure to approve of the Dear Leader's plans with sufficient enthusiasm has now been deemed Thoughtcrime. Perhaps a mix-up at the post office prevented timely delivery of their magical unity ponies. Whatever the problem, there's no need to worry - Bubba's on the case.

Obama's one of the few partisan politicians I genuinely like. I voted for him and haven't yet regretted that decision, despite the fact that I disagree with him on many issues and he has enacted policies of which I disapprove. Nevertheless, I want him to fail at many of the things he is keen on trying, not because I am part of a conspiracy, but because I think that they are bad ideas and I am opposed to them. This is the way democracy works. Only a malignantly narcissistic egomaniac like Bill Clinton would see members of an opposition party wanting a President to fail as some kind of sinister force. Well, unless the opposition party in question is the Democrats and the President is George W. Bush. In that case wanting the President to fail is a patriotic duty.

For once, it appears we don't have such a malignantly narcissistic egomaniac in the White House. Obama has at times responded to his opponents forcefully, but he has not imputed base motives to their opposition or implied that it is tantamount to disloyalty. Unfortunately for him, with high-profile loose cannons like Carter and Clinton rattling around the Democratic ship, he doesn't have to for the tone of political debate to continue to sink ever lower.

Question of the Day

Should Palinite Republicans oppose President Obama's plan to increase instruction hours in U.S. schools? After all, it gives his minions in the teacher's union more time to brainwash them.

Someone get Jimmy Carter a muzzle

Is Jimmy Carter a courageous advocate of racial equality, or a senile old man? The fact that Carter repeated his claim that opponents of President Obama are motivated by racism after Obama himself rather pointedly downplayed the role of race in opposition to his policies begs the question. The instances of hateful speech Carter cites - of people likening Obama to Hitler, or claiming he should be buried alive with Kennedy - are indeed beyond the pale, and have no place in civilized political discourse. They are not, however, substantively different from similar things said about George W. Bush by irate liberals. For Carter to suggest that these sorts of comments, unhinged though they may be, are motivated by racial animus, without any proof thereof, is inflammatory and irresponsible. It is also deeply unfair. Congressman Joe Wilson behaved in a boorish and uncivil manner when he heckled Obama during the healthcare speech, and was rightly rebuked for it; given that he has never exhibited any sort of racist behavior in the past, and that he has since apologized for his outburst, it is tantamount to slander for Carter to accuse him of being a bigot.

It is certainly true that there are still racists in America - but I think the country has gotten to the point where the racist vote is such a small portion of the electorate that any mainstream politician who exhibits racial prejudice is likely to lose more non-racist votes than they are to gain racist ones. This seems to be true even in the south - after all, many people attributed George Allen's stunning defeat in the Virginia Senate race in 2006 to his "macaca" moment. While race is undoubtedly a factor for at least some people who oppose Obama's agenda, it should not be assumed that if one despises the policies of the first black President one therefore despises black people. If it is, we have not come as far as I'd like to think we have. I find it reprehensible that people like Rush Limbaugh are willing to resort to open race-baiting in the name of ratings - it inflames prejudice and poisons the political discourse. I don't think it's any less inflammatory or toxic for Jimmy Carter to intimate that people who are a tad too strident in their rhetorical opposition to government-run healthcare belong under the same white tent as the local Klan wizard.

Those Crazy Jerseyites

Pollsters have gathered some interesting data on attitudes toward Barack Obama in New Jersey. Apparently, 8% of residents in the Garden State are convinced that Obama is the Anti-Christ, and another 13% aren't sure. Those numbers are even higher among registered Republicans (14% and 15%, respectively). 21% of those polled, including 33% of Republicans, are "birthers", believing that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. On the other end of the whacko spectrum, 19% of respondents, including 32% of Democrats, believe that George W. Bush had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. "Birthers" and "truthers" combined make up 37% of the electorate polled.

In my view, this is probably a reflection of the limits of polling as an apparatus for gauging public opinion - as has been well documented by people who study human communication, the same option can elicit vastly different responses depending on how it is presented. Furthermore, one cannot discount the "wiseass factor" - people are notoriously prone to lying to pollsters, and quite a few of my friends I suspect would tell a pollster they believed the President was the Anti-Christ just so they could laugh about it afterwards.

Assuming, however, that the results are somewhat reflective of real opinion, it's scary, because it means that we are attempting to operate a democracy in which 37% of the electorate (perhaps more - New Jersey had the lowest percentage of "birthers" of any state polled, though probably a higher percentage of "truthers") believe things that are, not to put to fine a point on it, absolutely batshit fucking insane. JFK-was-assasinated-by-the-Illuminati-the-Mob-and-Cuban-Agents-plotting-in-Area-51, tinfoil hat wearing insane. This is not because the beliefs that Obama is actually foreign-born or that Bush wished to let 9/11 happen so he could invade Iraq at the behest of the neocons are inherently as implausible, but because we have scads of contrary evidence that renders both notions implausible upon rational scrutiny. Believing something for which there is no evidence is one thing. Continuing to believe it when investigation has revealed nothing but masses of evidence to the contrary is another thing entirely. It's not a commitment to finding the truth. It's delusional psychosis. No democracy in which a third of the body politics consists of delusional psychotics can possibly stay healthy for long.

Ergo, I really, really hope that the data in this poll are correctly explained by my initial theory.

God's Cosmic Joke

Gotta love yet another "family values" blowhard Republican getting busted (or, in this case, busting himself) for cheating on his wife in a decidedly unwholesome fashion. While some foreigners may question Americans' preoccupation with our politicians' sex lives, I've got to say I love it, and hope it continues, because it's fantastic entertainment. There's no better farce than the spectacle of a cheating pol getting caught with, so to speak, his hand in the cookie jar, and the Kabuki ritual that inevitably follows. Vehement denials, uttered in mock outrage, followed by weasel-worded spin doctoring, followed finally by ritual confession and serial apology, in an attempt to gain absolution and a return to the voters' good graces, all of it unfolding in a narrative arc with the predictability of a Hollywood genre film. In this case, you can throw in a nice dash of graft and cronyism for seasoning. The shit practically writes itself. Tom Wolfe once referred to sex as "God's cosmic joke". I'd say that's a pretty good assessment. Nothing punctures the myth of the rational animal quite like a man with wealth, power, and connections (or, in the case of Bill Clinton, the fate of the world literally in his hands) setting it all on fire for the sake of smearing himself in another primate's smelly body fluids for fifteen minutes.

If there are any socially conservative politicians out there who don't multitask preaching self-righteous horseshit with having deviant extramarital sex with women of low virtue, would they please come forward?

Why I'm not a Republican

This blog post by disaffected former GOP bigwig Bruce Bartlett has me thinking about my own reasons for shunning the party. As someone with an instinctual aversion to statism and an inclination to believe that the free market is generally the best mechanism for creating positive social, economic, and technological innovations, I've never been comfortable with the sort of blunt-instrument big government interventionism favored by old school liberals, and certain elements of the Democratic coalition (teachers' unions, urban political machines, radical pro-choice militants, etc.) I find distasteful, if not actively loathsome. I'm the type of voter who ought to be right in the GOP wheelhouse. And yet, since I've come of voting age I've held my nose and voted for Democrats more often than Republicans. Why?

Many of my reasons are the same as Bartlett's. The contemporary GOP's naked partisanship and complete lack of ideological principle are part of it - for the party to declare reforming Medicare outside debate while simultaneously arguing that Obama's health care proposals will bankrupt the nation is disgraceful, and a first-order insult to the intelligence of conservative-leaning voters. The widespread pandering to the delusional paranoia of lunatics like the birthers, with their unseemly, racially tinged xenophobia, is also an issue. Both are primarily problems created by the pressures of electoral politics, however, problems that the Democratic party also has in spades.

The biggest reason I am not a Republican is that the modern Republican party is intellectually bankrupt. On domestic and foreign policy alike, they have failed to present anything like a coherent set of ideas for tackling the problems of contemporary America, instead choosing to robotically repeat Reagan-era slogans as if they were magic mantras. The problem is that while Reagan was an effective conservative leader for his time, 2009 is not Reagan's time. Domestically, the U.S. does not face the same problems it did when Reagan was elected. Taxes are low. Business is relatively unregulated. Cutting taxes and de-regulating, therefore, are not the winning ideas they once were. While the economy might be just as bad as it was in the late 1970's and early 80's, the causes and nature of the downturn are entirely different. We're now living, working, and doing business in a global, information-based economy. The government must be willing to provide a business climate and infrastructure which enable American companies to compete and thrive in that environment, and in some cases that may mean that more government spending is necessary. Government spending is not in-and-of-itself a bad thing - the idea that government spending in areas other than defense, law enforcement, and bare bones infrastructure must always and everywhere be opposed to tooth-and-nail is irrational, and increasingly obviously incorrect, dogma. The international situation is entirely different as well. Certainly the U.S. still faces threats, but none are as powerful, well-organized, or ideologically unified as Soviet-era communism was, and Reagan's admirably clear rhetoric denouncing the abuses perpetuated by the USSR and its satellites is out of place in the murky, multi-polar world in which we now live. Responding to the threat of militant Islam by announcing a "crusade" against terrorism and invading a Middle Eastern country was, and continues to be, a batshit insane idea. Promoting the idea of bombing a country like Iran, in which a domestically unpopular regime only hangs on to power by appealing to nationalistic sentiment and demonizing the West, is equally wrongheaded. The list goes on. The Democrats' ideas are often wrong and even more often compromised by venal politicking, but at least they have ideas.

I have a sneaking feeling that the Republican party will need to absorb a few more sound electoral beatings before the fact that they are no longer connecting with a majority of American voters begins to sink in. As someone who readily self-identifies as a conservative and considers a great many of the ascendant left's initiatives deeply problematic, I find this distressing. American politics needs a sane, sober, reflective, and intellectually sound conservatism. What it has is the contemporary Republican party. The gulf between the two has never been wider.

And How

NPR has a story up about how fear is trumping logic and reason in the current debate about reforming the healthcare system, and it's completely on point. Following the debate is tremendously frustrating precisely because so many of the players involved seem intent on avoiding rational discussion of the issue in favor of fear-mongering to score political points, and the voters are too misinformed to know better. Anyone who has studied the health care problem seriously, or taken an in-depth look at the various approaches to providing health services deployed by governments in other industrialized countries, will realize that the American system is by most objective measures among the worst in the developed world. That is not an ideological statement - it's true irrespective of whether one favors bigger government or freer markets. Lefty complaints about the U.S. healthcare system are at this point well-documented, but (and this is an underplayed angle in the media's coverage of the debate) even from the perspective of a libertarian-leaning free market enthusiast like me, it's a complete mess. The American healthcare apparatus is not an open marketplace - it's a sclerotic tangle of overlapping and sometimes redundant government bureaucracy, inefficiently allocated private resources, and expensive, unnecessary red tape which costs twice as much as any other system out there and doesn't deliver anything more. It's not by any stretch of the imagination a free, open marketplace - thanks to differing state laws it's more like 50 different marketplaces, each with its own norms, rules, and price points, and because of the administrative costs that entails, no one but the largest and most well-entrenched companies are able to compete effectively on a nationwide basis. In wide swaths of the country the health care market has essentially been cornered by one or two players, and as anyone who paid a bit of attention in economics 101 can tell you, that's a recipe for higher prices and lower quality services. Furthermore tying healthcare to employment creates massive distortions in the labor market, restricting the ability of workers to change jobs, discouraging entrepeneurship, and hamstringing startup and small businesses. It's just as possible to envision a better system coming from the right as it is from the left - and indeed, some of the better systems out there are something closer to a true competitive marketplace. But who needs to acknowledge reality when you can trot out the bogeyman of government bureaucrats pulling the plug on grandma to score a few points in the polls in time for the next election?

Thank Your Lucky Stars, Democrats...

..that Obama came along, because otherwise John Edwards might well have been your candidate. Edwards' entire political persona, that of the hardworking, honest family man who had worked his way up in the world by doing the right thing and sticking up for the little guy, was a monumental edifice of pure bullshit, one I'm glad to see is finally crumbling. I distrusted him the first time I heard him open his mouth - he struck me as a sniveling, overambitious, glad-handing huckster right off the bat - and that distrust grew into a sort of intuitive loathing the more I heard him, but lots of my liberal friends at one time viewed him as their best hope. How lucky they were that events unfolded as they did.

I do, of course, feel terrible for his wife Elizabeth, for whom this news is undoubtedly another blow - to be put through such emotional trauma while already battling cancer is a truly awful fate. But the fact is, it was her husband's selfishness and mendacity that brought this fate upon her, which only heightens the contempt I feel for him. It's likely he will never again achieve prominence or political power, and I couldn't be happier about that.

Update: I just came across an interesting piece speculating on possible ways recent history might have played out had Edwards been the nominee.

No free lunches, except for me

Despite the fact that I'm overseas, I've continued to follow politics at home, and the ongoing healthcare debate has convinced me moreso than ever before that a large number of Americans have a thoroughly infantile view of their government. They want comprehensive, high-quality services, but don't want to have to pay for them. They do seem dimly aware that someone has to pay, as widespread concern with the federal deficit shows - they just don't want it to be them. Ideally it would be some other segment of the tax-paying population (the rich, corporations, etc.), but if that's not an option, future generations of Americans or Chinese bankers will do. All the while, the government grows and grows, waste and inefficiency continues to proliferate, and the country's fiscal future grows ever dimmer.

Healthcare policy is an extremely complicated subject, and the various proposals being debated right now all have their plusses and minuses. What is undoubtedly true, however, is that any meaningful reform to the current system is going to entail either A.)higher taxes, B.)curtailed services, or C.)some combination of the two. It's elementary economics. An ever-growing population of sickly and elderly people demanding an ever-growing variety of ever-more-expensive cutting edge medical treatment means costs will inevitably continue to go up. A relatively stagnant working-age population, an economy in recession, and increasing federal deficits means that revenues will not rise fast enough to pay them. The system as currently constituted is a fiscal train wreck in the making, and whatever solutions may be available to avert that, they are going to entail pain all around. I know that most people are happy with their current healthcare, and are worried they might lose options as to doctors or treatments under the reform proposals being considered. That's not an excuse. One way or another, people are going to lose options eventually anyway, because if we keep spending on healthcare the way we are now, rather soon there won't be enough money available to pay for those options. That means either significantly higher taxes, or a healthcare regimen that doesn't outlay extravagant amounts of money on marginally effective but expensive treatments. Sarah Palin's hyperventilating about "death panels" aside, I don't have a problem with the latter.

A major part of the problem, I think, is America's childish fear of death and dying. I've lived in Japan and Korea, both countries with national healthcare systems. In both countries, doctors and hospitals provide a standard of care comparable to what's available in the U.S. to patients, at significantly lower costs. What they won't do is spend absurd amounts of money to briefly prolong the life of a moribund patient. The grandfather of a Japanese friend of mine is currently dying of terminal cancer. The hospital took good care of him for months, but when it was determined that his case was hopeless, he was sent home to receive palliative care and live out his last days in relative comfort. My friend's family has no problem with this. They are doing everything they can to make the most of the time they have left with him. There is no whining or complaining about how the doctors aren't doing enough to save him - he's old, he's lived a long life, and his time to go is coming, and people accept that. This seems to me an infinitely more sane and humane approach to the final days of life than spending enormous amounts of money on painful, difficult, and ultimately futile treatments intended to give a person a few more days or weeks of poor quality life. The fact that it saves hundreds of thousands of dollars that can be used to provide cheaper and more effective healthcare to other people, younger and healthier people, people with a lot of good life yet to live - that's almost besides the point. People grow old and die. American culture, perhaps as a result of its relative youth and obsession therewith, does not accept this fact gracefully or with dignity, but it should.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that that's not how it's going to be, though - Americans are determined to keep reaching into the piggy bank for handfuls of change, irrespective of the fact that it's not being refilled fast enough to replace what they take out, and it's going to be the young who are stuck trying to fix things when there's no money left to pay for repairs.