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What Goes Around Comes Around

4/25/2017

It’s baseball season again, so we offer some thoughts on the great 1984 movie The Natural.
Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a former Nebraska farm boy who’s a fantastically great natural pitcher and hitter destined to be a major league superstar.  But as he’s on his way to The Show at age 20, events take weird turns and he never gets his chance.
Until years later.  After some unlikely plot twists and strange intrigue, he’s back in the game as a 36-year-old rookie for the totally hapless New York Knights of the National League.  There are lots of sub-plots here, but let’s focus on his magical bat and the relationship it fosters between him and the team’s bat boy, Bobby Savoy.
Throughout the story, the bat seems to supply the magic that lets Roy become what he always aspired to be: the best hitter ever.  But in the end, the good deed related to the bat that he does for Bobby actually turns out to be Roy forging his own redemption.
Let’s go back to the beginning, the bat’s mystical origins.  When Roy was a mid-teenage boy, his yeoman father and baseball mentor collapsed and died under the massive tree in their front yard.  That night, as Roy watched from his bedroom window, a spectacular lightning bolt split the tree, exposing the core of its massive trunk.
The next morning, with ax and saw, Roy harvested a fine post from that core.  Using various tools skillfully, he turned that piece of wood into a perfect bat and boned its surface beautifully smooth to resist chipping and other damage.  Finally, he used his wood-burning tools to etch the name “Wonderboy” onto its barrel along with a lightning bolt.
When the phenom gets to the majors and sets the league on fire, people assume Wonderboy provides the magic.  It becomes the unifying symbol for the Knights as Roy leads them from the cellar to contending for the pennant.
Along the way, Bobby is admiring the bat one day.  Knowing that Roy made it himself when he was only somewhat older than Bobby is now, he asks Roy to teach him to make a bat.  Always having been generous with time, attention and autographs for his legions of young fans, Roy tells Bobby to go to the lumber yard and find a perfect piece of timber and they’ll work on it.
Ultimately, Roy comes to bat with two outs in the bottom of the ninth in the playoff game for the pennant.  After a couple of whiffs, he turns on a pitch and smashes it into the stands – but just barely foul.  Returning to the plate, he finds Wonderboy laying there broken.
This climactic moment completes a theme that runs throughout the film: Namely, that Roy is really King Arthur reincarnated and that Wonderboy is his sword Excalibur.  The bat was forged from the giant tree under which his father fell at his death, reminding us of Arthur’s father Uther Pendragon plunging his sword Excalibur into the stone as he dies.  Seeing the broken bat, we imagine Roy wailing as Lancelot did when he broke Arthur’s sword: “I have broken that which could not be broken!”
Is the magic gone?
Under the night-game lights, Roy tells Bobby, “Go pick me out a winner.”  They look at each other knowingly and Bobby runs to the bat rack.  He fetches a perfect replica of Wonderboy, labelled the “Savoy Special”.  The bat Bobby made with Roy’s help.
Roy contemplates the new bat for a moment and steps back into the battersbox.  With his replacement magic weapon, he smashes the next pitch into the highest light above right field, winning the game and pennant – while setting off a chain reaction that ultimately plunges the whole stadium into darkness and defeats the evil people who have plotted against him and the Knights.
More than just the usual story of what goes around comes around, in this tale when the big star generously responds to the young boy’s request, he actually ends up preparing the tool for his own redemption.
The Natural is a fairy tale – the kind we love and that teaches our children great moral lessons.

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ObamaCare: Repeal It and Then Find a Replacement

4/18/2017

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For six years, most Republicans campaigning for federal office pledged to repeal ObamaCare.  According to national polls, a majority of Americans have consistently opposed ObamaCare even when they otherwise approved of Barack Obama as president.
That’s because ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), failed to live up to the promises made by Obama and its other proponents and has made health care more expensive and inconvenient while lowering its quality.  Obama said Americans would be able to keep their doctors and insurance plans and that national spending on health care would decline.  None of those promises was realized.
The ACA mostly changed the rules for buying, selling and administering health insurance.  First, it imposed a requirement for insurance companies to issue coverage to anyone who applied, even if they already had known conditions that are costly to treat.
Real insurance is a financial contract to protect one against certain unforeseeable events, like floods or fire.  It is fair to all participants only if the price to each covered person reflects the risks insured for that person.  The ACA’s mandated coverage for pre-existing conditions is not insurance but instead socialization of costs of pre-existing conditions to other insured customers and to taxpayers.
Socializing costs to taxpayers may be acceptable, but only if it is completely transparent, not hidden or confused.  Socializing risks to other customers is never transparent and is inherently unfair – massively so under ObamaCare.  In fact, the intent of ObamaCare was precisely to socialize risks and shift costs among classes of customers so that there was no transparency.
Second, ObamaCare required insurance rates to be set on a communal basis and prohibited insurers from using risk factors like age or health status to price individual coverage to reflect each person’s risks. So, more cost shifting: Young people’s insurance premiums skyrocketed to greatly subsidize costs of care for older people.
In many cases, low-cost policies that young people previously enjoyed were cancelled altogether.  Geoff and his wife had three policies cancelled in the two years following ObamaCare’s passage.  When they finally acquired a stable policy, its monthly premium was three times higher than their original policy, the annual deductible had grown from $1,000 to $10,000, and the network of providers was smaller.
All this eroded young voters’ historical support for Democrats.  Although 73 percent of 18-29 year-olds approved of President Obama by December 2016, only 59 percent of them approved of ObamaCare.  All other age groups held even dimmer views on ObamaCare.
When Hillary Clinton took up the banner for defending ObamaCare, Democrats’ support among young people collapsed.  According to the Brookings Institution, 45 percent of 18-29 year-olds identified as Democrats in 2008, but only 43 percent in 2012 and 37 percent in 2016.
Last year’s election shows, among other things, that the public agreed with Republican opposition to ObamaCare.  But now that Republicans control the Presidency and Congress, they’ve so far been unable to agree on how to repeal it.
Some Republicans helped implement ObamaCare at the state level by agreeing to expand Medicaid to nontraditional populations, including able-bodied, working-age adults with no dependents.  This only further strained already limited provider networks for Medicaid patients, and damaged access to care for more vulnerable populations that were eligible under the old rules.
It also reduced incentives for able-bodied people to work and earn income, and it increased the size and cost of government.  But Republicans who facilitated the expansion, including many from Nevada, now tout the mushrooming Medicaid numbers as an achievement and oppose market-based reforms.  Others are afraid eliminating the cross-subsidy forced on young people to cover more costs of older people will alienate older voters that lean Republican.
Hence, the recent American Health Care Act proposed by Republicans in the House of Representatives retained many central features of ObamaCare.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would have raised premiums 20 percent and left more people uninsured than outright repeal.
So, we recommend Republicans keep their promise and pursue outright repeal and then replacement.  This would allow premiums to fall toward pre-ObamaCare rates, preserve Medicaid for the truly needy and restore the incentive work.
Plus, we’re old school and believe people should keep their promises.

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Audit the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority

4/11/2017

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The Nevada Controller is the state’s Chief Fiscal Officer, and we take very seriously the duties of the office.
Among them are the responsibilities to ensure that all public funds are spent appropriately and within the bounds of existing legislation, bond covenants, grant restrictions, federal rules and other guidelines.  We also design and monitor internal controls to prevent people from stealing or misusing taxpayer assets.
That’s why we were appalled recently when we heard of the profligate waste at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.  The LVCVA is a public agency funded primarily by room-tax dollars and gaming fees assessed in Clark County.  We believe the LVCVA, as a taxpayer-funded entity, should be subject to the same guidelines and ethical standards as every other public agency in Nevada.  But the LVCVA defiantly disagrees.
An investigation by the Las Vegas Review-Journal revealed last week that the LVCVA has reimbursed its officers for nearly $700,000 in bar tabs over the past three years and paid $85,000 to hire showgirls for agency-sponsored events.  Eight senior staffers filed expense reports in excess of a quarter-million dollars over the past three years on top of the obscene salaries paid out by the agency.  The agency’s director last year received $768,000 in salary, bonus and benefits.
After examining more than 32,000 pages of receipts, the Review-Journal investigation found that Clark County taxpayers had reimbursed outrageous extravagances, including a $6,900 steak dinner in Toronto featuring Okinawa ribeye steaks that cost $328 apiece, lobster and 11 bottles of wine for 15 people.  Employees used agency funds to purchase Tiffany bracelets for themselves.  The agency director bought himself a $3,685 ring to commemorate his own work anniversary.
LVCVA board members, who are elected officials charged with the fiduciary duty of managing the agency’s taxpayer resources, also got in on the act.  Board chairman Lawrence Weekly had the agency purchase him $1,000 in concert tickets that he openly admits had no business purpose.  He also got $33,000 in travel to places like China and South Africa, a Bluetooth speaker, a Fitbit and other goodies.
If this agency were a private corporation, those kinds of perks for board members would likely be deemed constructive dividends by the IRS and taxed as income while the SEC would investigate for fraud against investors.  But the LVCVA is a public agency and, theoretically, should be subject to even stricter controls since taxpayers have no choice about funding it.
State ethics rules expressly prohibit state dollars from being used to purchase alcohol.  They also prohibit the diversion of state dollars for personal benefit.  If any state agency submits a claim for those kinds of expenditures, we place a “Stop Payment” order on any checks associated with the expense and commence a fraud investigation.
But because the LVCVA is funded with local tax dollars instead of grants made through state accounts, we have no authority to take these actions.  That’s why this week we called on Governor Brian Sandoval and the Nevada Legislature to make immediate changes.  All local taxes in Nevada must be jointly authorized by the governor and legislature, and they also have the power to amend the charter of any local government, including the LVCVA.
So far, however, the governor and lawmakers have pretended otherwise.  Sandoval issued a statement saying, “All LVCVA governance and budgetary issues are exclusively within the jurisdiction and control of the Board and are subject to Board review, decision and comment.”  Assembly Minority Leader Paul Anderson sent a memo to lawmakers warning them not to speak about the issue and claimed, “We have no authority over this, and it’s not part of our caucus priorities.”
That’s all hogwash.
As Assemblyman Al Kramer told the press, “The Legislature has authority over everything that happens in the state.”
The truth is the LVCVA awards a no-bid contract worth nearly $30-million annually to a public relations firm that also manages and funds the political campaigns of many people saying there’s nothing to see here.  Politicians in Carson City know their bread is buttered by that contract, so they don’t want any scrutiny of the LVCVA’s corrupt practices.
However, we will continue to seek to bring all relevant facts to light.

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Tradition, Innovation and Balance

4/4/2017

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Tradition, Innovation and Balance
By Ron Knecht and Geoffrey Lawrence – 4April2017
We’ve striven all our lives to embrace positive change.
But we each do so in our own ways.  Young Geoff has always been an early adopter of new technologies.  Boomer Ron says he’s “a real Twentieth Century guy,” and prefers to see that new technologies are viable and enjoy widespread adoption before jumping on board.
Sometimes, our differing approaches can complicate matters, such as when Ron suggested Geoff should really study The Godfather trilogy more closely and offered to lend Geoff his VHS tapes.  Geoff explained it’s been nearly two decades since he owned a device that played such tapes, but said he will purchase access to those films via a digital streaming service.
On another occasion, Ron viewed the ease with which Geoff navigated airport security using a digital image of his boarding pass displayed on his smartphone.  Ron decided this approach was indeed superior to printing out a paper copy.  So he adopted the smartphone approach.
In a recent column, we detailed the great increase in productivity Ron experienced early in his career when computerized spreadsheet applications were developed to replace the old ledger paper computations Ron and his team had done manually.  Back then, Ron eagerly adopted the new technology.
All these examples highlight a constant tension in our lives: What is the balance one should strike between respect for tradition and the thirst for innovation?
On one hand, the social, political, legal, and technological traditions we inherited are what let Americans become the most prosperous large population ever to walk the earth.  On the other, all human progress is driven especially by two factors: innovation and the accumulation of capital.
There is no single right answer to this problem in all areas, of course.  Individuals embrace change at their own pace as they perceive the benefits available from innovation to exceed the costs of adoption.
We believe, however, that Western economic, political and legal traditions that have empowered individuals to act freely and produce and trade with one another over the past three centuries fostered or reinforced all other social and technological progress and human flourishing.  So these traditions we defend valiantly, even while we are avid but judicious change advocates in other areas.
One thing we watch with great interest is the balance of tradition versus innovation in sports.  Having just watched the University of North Carolina capture its sixth national championship in men’s basketball, Geoff was reminded that UNC first rose to national prominence by pioneering the defensive double-team baseline trap.  This tactic allowed UNC to shut down the traditional four-corners offense that prevailed in college basketball prior to introduction of the shot clock.
Baseball fans have witnessed an increasing reliance on relief pitchers in recent years.  The Oakland Athletics pioneered the modern bullpen in the late 1980s when they began to deploy baseball’s most feared reliever, Dennis Eckersley, for a single-inning appearance to finish a game.  The rest of the pitching staff was engineered backwards from his one-inning close with specific roles given to other relievers.  Even the use of starting pitchers was planned with the goal of getting to Eckersley for the ninth inning.
For many decades before, relief pitchers were, with some exceptions, hurlers whose performance didn’t earn them starting roles.  Oakland’s approach flipped the script and made the bullpen the focal point.  Oakland went to the World Series three consecutive years, and other teams began to follow suit.  Last year, relief pitchers logged the highest percentage of innings pitched in history.  Our team, the Los Angeles Dodgers led the way with a record 591 innings thrown by relievers.
Oakland again innovated in the early 2000s by emphasizing how often batters get on base over traditional metrics like batting average or home runs.  Oakland’s meager budget precluded them from competing for prolific free-agent sluggers, but they reasoned a walk was as good as a hit and built their offense accordingly.
This small-ball approach lowered their payroll, and many teams now mimic the innovation.  Now free-agent sluggers and pitchers face a much less lucrative market.
We embrace innovation in many areas, but we’re Old School about what’s most important:  the tradition of loving and caring for our wives, children and families.

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What Goes Around Comes Around

ObamaCare: Repeal It and Then Find a Replacement

Audit the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority

Tradition, Innovation and Balance

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