Road Trip Report

We have just completed a 6,000 mile, five week, trip through seventeen states and this is a report on that journey.

First of all, this is a beautiful country!! And the fall colors were magnificent. If you send me a email address I will send you forty photographs of those remarkable colors. You can do this by leaving a comment at the end of this report.

Second, as David Zetland predicted, we met a lot of really nice people.

Third, as you watch the political TV commercials on the local TV in each state, you realize how bitter and angry people are everywhere.

Next, this trip has shown us three huge failures of the Obama administration. Reading or talking about them is one thing, seeing them first hand is quite another.

One: Obama's economic stimulus is mis-directed and wasted. There are approximately 50,000 miles in the Interstate System. We experienced about 10% of them first hand. My rough estimate is that about 15% of the Interstate System is in first class condition. Another 10% is currently being repaired. But a full 75% of the Interstate System is in simply awful condition. Try the road from Nebraska to Denver for a teeth rattling experience. In addition, the Association of Highway Engineers says there are over 10,000 bridges needing replacement or retrofitting. (Remember the bridge in Minneapolis??)

Now here is the thing. We will have to repair these roads and bridges sooner or later. And we will have to pay for it when we do. No way around it. The Interstate System moves an enormous amount of our commerce.

Spending government funds to repair these roads and bridges is a win, win, win, win decision.
Win One: It would immediately give millions of unemployed construction workers a job. (And there are millions more secondary and tertiary jobs that would be created.) This would immediately remove all those people from unemployment benefit payments.
Win Two: All of those payroll dollars would flow immediately into the economy and solve the huge problem facing our economy, i.e., a lack of consumer spending which keeps small businesses alive and hiring new employees. (One example; how many restaurants in your neighborhood have gone out of in the past year? We saw lots of them on this trip.)
Win Three: We repair our crown jewel. No other country has a system that even comes close to ours and we would be paying for it at the right time.
Win Four: We improve the distribution system for the whole country.

The Obama administration should have taken the TARP funds and made them available to individual state highway departments and to the 25,000+ mayors of U.S. cities and towns for individual projects. All of these people know exactly what needs doing in their areas. But the Obama administration wants to control everything from Washington. A big mistake!!

The Obama Administration's failure to take this no-brainer action is the first huge failure you encounter as you travel the country's highways and byways.

Two: The utter and complete failure of Obama care. Right now, 16%-18% of the entire U.S. Gross National Product is being spent on health care, and it is growing at the rate of approximately 10%-15 every year. It is on track to bankrupt the entire country in the lifetime of your children. (The amount we spend is twice the % of the GNP of any other country!!)

There is absolutely NOTHING in the Obama care bill to even slow down that growth, let alone reverse the trend. So how does that relate to a long road trip? Here is how. We saw a huge number of seriously over weight people. Fifty pounds, 100 pounds, 200 pounds, 300 pounds and more over weight! You have to see it first hand to understand it. People who can't fit into restaurant booths, people waddling along splay-footed leaning against walls to be able to walk. I know. These are not your friends. Not the people in your neighborhood, but they are real people nevertheless. O.K. here are the real numbers. 30% of U.S. adults are overweight and another 30% are clinically obese.

And here is why you should care about obesity. It leads to death, heart disease and strokes, blindness, high blood pressure, kidney disease, nervous system disease, and amputation. And here is why that is important to you. The CDC estimates that diabetes cost (the number one problem with obesity.) $174 BILLION in 2007!

Diabetes Type 2 is one of the most expensive of all diseases over the course of a person's lifetime.

And the thing that really touches your heart is all the young people who are seriously overweight. The CDC says 186,000 people under twenty already have Type 2 Diabetes and another 2 Million people under twenty have pre-diabetes. These kids are all going to have miserable lives and will cost YOU a huge amount of money.

Here are the CDC's total numbers.
Diagnosed with Diabetes now: 17.9 MILLION
Undiagnosed: 5.7 MILLION
Pre-diabetes: 57 MILLION

So why is this an Obama health care bill failure? Here why; There is not ONE SINGLE thing in the bill to address a hugely expensive problem that is right in the face of anyone who does not regularly travel in Air Force One. It is not a hidden disease like a stroke or heart attack. It is sitting right next to you in any, and every, cafe and eating place on the Interstate.

Yes, it is a good thing that insurance companies can no longer refuse pre-existing conditions and that young people can remain on their parents policies until they are twenty-six, but no how you look at it Obama care is huge piece crap!!

Now there are only two approved ways of dealing with Type 2 Diabetes, diet and exercise. It is not the job of the government to legislate what we should eat and how much we should exercise, but it is clearly the role of the government to encourage and enable better diet and more exercise. Here is some examples;
*Get sugar loaded drinks out of schools.
*Develop a set of nutritional menus for school cafeterias to use.
*Fund recess and PT programs in schools. These were the first programs cut as budget cut backs took hold.
*Create a fund to allow school principals to hire registered nutritionists to talk to students and faculty.
And for adults;
*Allow registered nutritionists to bill Medicare for diet counseling.
*Allow payments to Weight Watchers, Over Eaters Anonymous, et al.
*Fund programs similar to those that discourage smoking.
And smart people will think of more things it is reasonable for the government to do without forcing itself into anyone's life.

Three: The ETHANOL FRAUD. The very first bill that Obama signed was a spending bill whose only purpose was to distribute ear marks as widely as possible. Obama said that he hoped that would be that last one he signed. That is like an obese person eating a huge Dunkin Donut and washing it down with Diet Pepsi. Geezzzz..... But here is an example of Change We Did Not Get that you can see from the road.

As you drive through Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, you see vast, vast fields of corn. Fields that stretch to the horizon. All devoted to subsidized corn meant for ethanol. In 2009, you paid $7 BILLION to buy 4.9 Billion gallons of ethanol, which is $1.45 a gallon straight up and $2.21 for each gallon of gasoline it replaced. Studies show that ethanol is a net POLLUTER!! Your $7 BILLION reduced green house gases by 1/19 of 1%. Are you feeling screwed yet?

But wait! That was the bad news. Here is the worse news. The Obama administration just raised the amount of ethanol that must be blended to gasolene from 10% to 15% solely so that more of your money will go to about six huge agri-businesses that grow corn.

If you have been reading this rant over some time, you know that I am hugely supportive of the work that Hilary, et al, have done in foreign affairs, that Eric Shinsky, et al, have done with the VA, and Arne Duncan has done in Education.

But when you add these three huge failures that we observed on the road to the truly sell-out to Goldman Sachs financial no reform bill, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Obama we worked so hard to elect is unable? unwilling? to attempt real change.



So this is the bad news. I will save the worst news for tomorrow (or the next day). In the five weeks on the road, I read Robert G. Kaiser's book SO DAMN MUCH MONEY. If you read no other book this year read this one. (Get the most recent paperback which has updates after the 2008 election.) The lesson that I learned from this book was that I have been incredibly naive about the roles of lobbyists in Washington. More on this awful problem soon.