Daniel Drezner offers an excellent analysis, replete with useful links. His bottom line: it is poorly designed and a fiscal catastrophe. He reproduces a Heritage graph with the rather tragic heading: “A Drug Benefit Will Add $2 Trillion to Medicare’s $5 Trillion Shortfall by 2030,” see the link for the visual. Drezner, who describes himself as a “pragmatic libertarian,” is, like myself, depressed at the current political climate and the willingness of the Republicans to abandon principle and fiscal discipline.

This is one debate I simply have not had time to follow. Brad DeLong, however, offers two posts, the first notes that the prescription drug benefit has no funding source. The second, drawing on Henry Aaron, notes that the insurance component of the bill is far from ideal, here is one excerpt, Brad quoting Henry Aaron:

The design of the bill’s drug insurance makes little sense. Any plan that covers the three-hundredth dollar a person spends on drugs in a year, but provides no coverage for that person’s three thousandth dollar of spending has to be regarded as a bit wacky. Yet that is what this bill would do. It would end federal support for Medicaid drug benefits if patients are also eligible for Medicare, even where the new Medicare coverage would be narrower than existing Medicaid coverage. At the same time, it does nothing to remedy Medicare’s other major failings. It does not cap out-of-pocket costs, even though almost all policies covering the nonelderly provide this essential “stop-loss” protection. It provides no additional help to pay crippling nursing home costs, which are poorly covered under the current program. And it does nothing to help the half of the poor elderly and disabled who now receive no help with premiums and cost sharing they can ill afford.

Even worse, the conference committee bill could single out Medicare for unfair benefit cuts or payroll tax increases in the future. Currently, Medicare hospital benefits (part A) are covered by a dedicated payroll tax. Revenues from this tax now exceed costs and, together with the excess collections from past years (which are deposited in the Hospital Insurance trust fund), are sufficient to cover benefits through 2026. Under current law, three-fourths of the cost of Medicare’s Supplemental Medical Insurance (SMI or part B), which covers doctors bills, durable medical equipment, and certain other expenses, are paid from general revenues and the balance by beneficiary premiums.

I’m still a bit baffled by the whole issue, but it appears we have to write down yet another case (e.g., profligate domestic spending increases, various protectionist measures, the stalled energy bill, etc.) of bad economic policy from the people downtown.

Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant make the front pages for their possible misdeeds. The tabloids are full of news about Reese Witherspoon’s baby boy. Why do we care? Here is one account:

On the surface, the celebrity rags seem to be about sex. But their real subject is reproduction and the future of the human tribe. On the savannah, we needed to monitor how our clan was faring, and given our small populations we could do the job by ourselves, gossiping about how Gronk had left Zumba and that last night she slipped into Uggah’s cave to make a baby, and what our chance might be to steal one of them as a mate. But in a country of 290 million people, where even our next-door neighbors are strangers, we still need to flex those savannah needs for gossip and information in order to measure our species’ prospect. What better proxy than the young, wealthy, handsome, and visible alpha-male and -female breeding stock that Hollywood employs?

So writes Jack Shafer on Slate.com, see his full analysis. I agree, though I would be reluctant to write with such a reductionist tone myself. Furthermore I think we use celebrities for more prosaic reasons as well. We are fascinated by what produces relative status, something we all seek. We also use celebrities as a topic of social conversation, a means of showing that we are in touch, a way of signaling our views on various issues, and as a vicarious outlet for our hopes and fears. For more, see my What Price Fame?, also shown on the right bar on this blog.

You might try bsr-inc.com, they offer a two-day anti-terrorist driving school, which includes surveillance and 180-degree spins. You can even give your loved ones a gift certificate for the camp.

Why stop at driving? A three-day anti-terrorist camp in Arizona also teaches espionage and combat pistol techniques, for only $3800, try incredible-adventures.com. They offer a special course on Russian martial arts, promising “If you do spend time in a hotel, it won’t be a five-star.” You learn the “Systema” method of self-defense, enabling you to strike from virtually any position, dating from the Russian cossacks. Oddly, the course promises only two hours a day, I suppose you spend the rest of the time sunning yourself at the hotel pool. Their driving adventures include a course in Southern truck racing.

Many Hollywood movies, by the way, suggest that you overtake a car in pursuit by bumping it in the rear. Anti-terrorist driving instructors assure us this is the wrong way to go. Bump them from the back side, cause their car to spin around, and then pin them against a wall. Warning: do not try this on your own.

From this month’s issue of Popular Science. Oh, yes, if any of those anti-terrorist courses are beyond your means, consider a simple computer game for $50 or less, or perhaps the new John Woo movie, due out Christmas day, for $8.50 or so. That will be my pick of the lot.