Does the Pentagon Need an Acquisition Chief??

Title of an article in Aviation Week.  They have one now.  The incumbent, Frank Kendall, claims that cost overruns were 51% before his time and he has reduced them to 5%.  His job is on the line, latest Senate defense authorization bill would remove it and replace it with two lower ranking slots, one for R&D and one for "management and support"  what ever that might be.  Pure paperwork perhaps?
  Acquisition is a serious problem at the Pentagon.  Look at the F35 program, a decade late and zillions over budget.  There was a new Marine One helicopter program that got so far out of line that Obama had it canceled.  The KC-46 tanker is years late and under attack by nit pickers.  I don't follow the new programs as closely as I used to back when I was a serving Air Force officer.  So there has got to be more grief out there.
   Success or failure (cost overruns and delays) rest with program management.  Take F-35 for example.  It's problems can be laid at the feet of F35 program management.  Extra layers of Pentagon paper pushers have nothing to do with it.  
   Every military officer in program management needs to know that his Officer Efficiency Report (his future promotion chances)  rest upon program success.  Bring the program in on time and under budget and you get ranked at the top.  If the program is late or overbudget, you get ranked at the bottom.
   Program management needs to have input to the specification writing.  Many program disasters result from ridiculous specifications, spec that called for unobtainium, or faster than light, or other things impossible to actually make.  Or, gold plating the project with nice-to-have but not really necessary expensive gadgets.  I'm thinking of the Tactical Situation Display in the old F106.  It never worked, and the plane flew and fought successfully without it. Or the C-5 program which sank under the weight of impossible to make requirements.  Or the F35 burdened with an airborne digital networking system, and Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) systems neither of which are needed in a fighter.  Fighter planes are expensive and should concentrate on air superiority, shooting down enemy aircraft and attacking enemy ground troops.  We have recon aircraft, drones, and satellites for ISR.
   Then program management has to iron out the myriad boggles and whoopsies that come up during the program. Specifications almost but not quite met.  Subsystems that just don't work.  Program management must be prepared to accept small shortcomings when the cost of fixing them is high.  And be prepared to just dump subsystems that aren't working.  And accept cost reduction suggestions from the contractor. 
    Trump needs a good, intelligent defense secretary to sort this stuff out.  The current secdef, Ash Carter isn't bad.  John McCain would be good, he at least knows the issues and knows which end is up. 

Trump ought to cancel Obamacare ASAP

Obamacare is going broke, insurers are bailing out, and it is a terrific drag on the economy, plus most of the voters don't like it.  First we need to get a simple one page bill  thru Congress that completely puts away the present 5000 page law.  Democrats in the Senate will try to block it, but we ought to be able to stir up public opinion to undermine them.
   After the present law is scrapped pass a few things to help out.  Most (75%) Americans get very decent health insurance thru their jobs.  Obamacare only effected the self employed, and the unemployed.  The big companies have lawyers and experts and they drive a hard bargain with the insurance companies.  Any insurance company will bend over backward for a customer like GM or Walmart.  This makes the company insurance policies the best and cheapest it is possible to write.  All that is necessary is to pass a law requiring insurance companies to sell their best policy to the general public at the same price their big company customers pay for it.  This will let the self employed get insurance at a reasonable rate. 
   Then a little competition is good for pricing.  Pass a law that allows any American insurance company to sell insurance in all fifty states of the Union.   Right now, to sell insurance in a state, the insurance company has to go to the various state insurance commissions, do a thousand pounds of paperwork, kneel on the floor and bang there heads against the bureaucrat's desk.  This is such a drag, that for small or thinly populated states, they just don't bother.  And so, the citizen's of such states (like New Hampshire!) only have one insurance company to buy from.  And ripped off they get.  We could fix that easily.  The insurance companies won't like it, but they don't vote.
   Then we could cut drug prices with a law that allows duty free import of medicine to the US from reasonable first world countries (Canada, Britain, Japan and so forth).  Whether or not said medicine has FDA approval.  If the authorities in reasonable first world countries have OKed the drug for their citizens, then it's good enough for American citizens.  The drug companies and the FDA will hate this idea, but again, they don't vote.

Stock Futures? Investment or Gambling?

First I have heard that we even had a stock futures market.  During the long election night Fox mentioned that US stock futures had taken a serious dive, hundreds of points, as Trump's election victory became clearer and clearer as the night wore on.  But, in the morning when the real stock market opened, everything was hunky dory, the Dow went up a couple a hundred points over the day.
   Why do we have a futures market in stocks.   Futures markets were invented for agricultural commodities, crops, which are in oversupply right after harvest, and become scarcer and scarcer as the once a year harvest gets used up.  Used to be, if you were a farmer, you could get much better prices for your crop if you waited til well after harvest to sell it.  Which takes money for the farmer to do.  He has bills that have to be paid, and he needs the money from selling the crop.  If said farmer has some cash in his checking account, he can wait, but few farmets have that much money in their checking accounts. 
  So, they invented futures markets.  The producer makes a contract with the consumer to deliver a big load of crop, sometime in the future, at an agreed on price.  And these contracts can be traded or sold, along with the crops.  This smooths out crop prices over the year, which is a good thing for the producers.  And as crop prices move up and down, futures contracts offer a way to bet on price movements.  In fact the gambling angle proved so popular that futures markets in things that are not seasonal, like gasoline and jet fuel,  were created.  Southwest airlines was very good at playing the futures market in jet fuel and saved themselves a ton of money. 
   And, so, we now have a futures market in stocks. They are not seasonal, and the real stock market is open five days a week  every week.  Far as I can see, stock futures are just pure gambling.  We ought to tax the hell out it. 

Healing the wounds of the election. Let Hillary off.

I'm gonna offer advice to the incoming Trump Administration, while it is still incoming.  My first advice is to drop prosecution of Hillary Clinton over the emails or any other matter.  She lost the election.  She doesn't hold public office, she will be too old to run again in 2020.  She's harmless now.  Let her go.  You could probably gin up your Justice Dept to prosecute and even win a court case against her.  Don't.  She cannot do you any harm now.  And prosecuting her will really piss off  all her friends and supporters.  Of which there are a lot. People you want to win over to your side, not  kick in the head.  Don't be divisive when you don't need to be.

So what happened election night?

The pollsters had Hillary ahead by a little.  But Trump won.  What happened?
   The short of it is, we voters were given two unpalatable candidates.  One candidate promised to get the country back on the right track.  The other insisted that we were on the right track all along.    But we weren't, we still aren't, and everybody except newsies know it.
   Basically Wall St speculators crashed the world economy back in 2008.  And it has stayed crashed.  US GNP growth has been a measly 1% per year for the eight years of Obama.  It should be 3%.  Obamacare, the war on coal, 80,000 pages of new federal regulation, crazy federal tax policies and general federal meddling has combined to flatten US economic growth.  And people feel it, they cannot find jobs, their children cannot find jobs, they don't get raises, they loose their houses to foreclosure, and everything costs more.  The country is on the wrong track and everyone knows it.
   So, faced with two unpalatable candidates, voters went for the unpalatable candidate that promised to fix the economy, rather than the unpalatable candidate that claimed things were just peachy.
   The profession of economics did not help the situation.  Economist say a depression is over when things stop getting worse.  Great Depression 2.0 flattened out way back in 2008 but it hasn't gone away, the economy is still not growing.  Voters, workers, and citizens don't think a depression is over until things climb back up to where they used to be (ought to be).  So we had all the economists (a lefty lot) claiming Great Depression 2.0 was over back i9n 2009.  The Obama administration liked this myth, and spread it around, and the newsies (another lefty lot) picked it up and pushed it.
   But truth is stronger than fiction, and the voters knew things were bad and voted for a guy who said he would fix them, despite  that guy's big mouth. 

Let's just charge him with nine counts of murder

Dylan Roof is headed to FEDERAL court first.  The Feds want to charge him with 50 counts of this and that.  This is malarkey.  Roof committed premeditated murder of nine completely innocent strangers.  In front of witnesses no less.  Murder is a state crime in the US.  There doesn't appear to be any controversy over the facts of the case.  Roof ought to be in state court facing nine counts of murder.  The law on murder is clear, and hasn't changed much since Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mt. Sinai.  And murder has always been a death penalty offense. 
   The feds are charging "thought crimes" (hate crimes) and weapons charges and welfare for lawyers.  This ain't justice.
   Justice is an atrocious criminal brought to trial and convicted of straight forward well understood crimes.  And executed for murder. 

Lamenting ( or cheering for) the death of democracy. NHPR

NHPR was on this depressing theme all day Saturday.  The were talking about "economical man" the theoretical man of the economics text books who does every thing for money.  The claimed that such a man would never bother to vote, because there is no money in it, and because his one vote won't count for much in the myriad of other votes.  They ragged on about this for a half an hour.  Depressing talk.
   Of course the entire concept is malarkey.  People don't vote 'cause there is money in it, they vote cause they believe in the cause.  It doesn't cost money to vote, and the trivial amount of time it takes is of little account.  I managed to vote for fifty years stopping at the polls on my way to work or on my way home from work.  Not a significant burden. People vote for either a candidate they like, for an ideology they like, or against a candidate or ideology they despise.  Except in the simple case of vote buying by party bosses, money is not the question.  Which means voting is not properly a subject of economics, or concepts like "economical man"
   And, American democracy has a good track record of selecting decent leadership.  For the great crises of American history, Revolution, Civil War, the two world wars,  our democracy  put forth good strong effective leaders, Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt. 
   We did better than Europe.  European leadership was monarchies, and the governments, even France and Britain, were staffed by the aristocracy.  They weren't very good at their jobs.  In the supreme crisis of 1914 they allowed events to drift into a terrible war, a war that wrecked all of Europe for good.  US democratically elected leadership knew enough to stay out of it, and once it became clear that we had to step in to prevent the bad guys from winning US leadership brought the united backing of a large industrialized country into battle, and in both world wars,  created the moral high ground, Wilson's 14 points, FDR's four freedoms.  "In war the moral is to the physical as three is to one," said Napoleon once upon a time.  US democratically elected leadership understood this where as European aristocratic leadership did not. 
   Churchill once said "Democracy is the worse form of government, except for all the others."   I like that.