Infrastructure, useless frills or needed engineering?

We need more infrastructure is the cry resonating from media to legislatures and back.  The pols like infrastructure because it means money spend in their districts.  Motorists (most of the population are motorists) want potholes, bottlenecks, narrow and bumpy streets to be fixed, to make their drive to work faster and easier.  The clueless media cheers for infrastructure. 
   Except when the money is spent on frills.  The drive up to my place is I93, running from Boston to St Johnsbury.  I have been driving this stretch of road for 60 years to go skiing, I know it well.  New Hampshire has maintained the roadway in pretty good condition over the years,  much better than anywhere in New York state for example.  But over the years, we have wasted money on mileposts.  They put in  shiny new mile post signs every 0.2 miles.  They are so close together you can see from one to another.   We drove I93 safely for 50 years without all those expensive little signs.  Then they funded a bunch of very fancy electric signs that just stand there flashing cute slogans like "Arrive Alive" and "One for the road gets trooper for chaser".  Really necessary those are.   And then there was the great rock blasting of the 1980s.  As you can imagine a New Hampshire highway needs a lot of rock cuts to get the road thru the granite hills.  When I93 was first built, back in the 1960s, all the rock cuts were made, of a generous width (interstate standards).  And traffic flowed nicely for twenty years.  Then in the 1980's they decided to spend a lot of money and widen every single rock cut, from the original generous width, to really ridiculously wide.  Years of drilling and blasting and well paid contractors ensued.   When the work was finally done, and the last "Construction" sign taken down,  the road worked just as well as it had before.  Mega money was spent to accomplish nothing, except giving a lot of well paid work to contractors. 
    Each one of these boondoggles was a 90% Federal 10% State money deal.  If the Feds are paying for 90%  of it, who cares how much money is spent/invested/wasted?  Betcha that bunch of thrifty Yankee state legislators in Concord would never have approved these boondoggles if they had to scrape up the money for them. 
   Principle.  He who spends the money should have to raise the money.  This business of the feds pay for it and the staties spend it is just asking for waste fraud and abuse.  To straighten things out, we ought to shut down the entire federal highway fund.  The states will raise the money for truly needed infrastructure, and they won't find the money for boondoggles. 

Went to the dump today.

Got rid of an entire Buick trunk full of campaign yard signs.  All in good shape.  Used only once.  Seems a shame to chuck 'em, but who has the space to keep 'em?

Pre existing conditions and 26 year olds on their parents health insurance.

Trump was talking about "modifying"  Obamacare repeal to preserve these two Obamacare benefits.  I'm not agin the idea, but Trump ought to do it this way.
1.  Have Congress pass, and he sign,  a simple one page bill repealing Obamacare root and branch.  Just to make a point.
2.  Promise to sign a preexisting conditions law and a separate 26 year old children law, should Congress get its act together and pass them some time in the future.

If Trump allows "modification" of Obamacare, the special interests come out of the woodwork, all bets are off, all sorts of "stuff" will get packed into the "modification".  Better to kill the whole thing, and require Congress to pass new legislation from scratch to pass out any goodies to the voters.  Make sure to record the names of Congresscritters proposing and voting for such laws.

Post Mortem, which minority group tipped the election to The Donald?

The American Pundit Class has been crying in their beer since Tuesday night.  They didn't want The Donald to win, and they had predicted that he wouldn't.  Now,  they are upset to find The Donald will be President of the US in a couple of months, and they are scrabbling around for an excuse for their failed predictions.
   They talk about the Hispanic vote, the black vote, the LGBT vote, the college educated vote, the White Working Class (now sporting a new acronym, the WWC) vote, the millennium vote (was that the name of a Star Wars spaceship?), and every other minority group they can invent.  Or they are blaming the pollsters.
   Little to no talk about the women's vote.  Women are half the population, vastly larger than all the "minority groups" put together.  A couple of internet postings mention in passing that Hillary got 54% of the women's vote.  They didn't give The Donald's share of the women's vote, but let's just assume any women who didn't vote Hillary voted Trump, which would give Trump 46%.  And a difference of 8%.   From a  women voting population of 123 million, 8% is 9.84 million more women's votes for Hillary than for Trump.  Are there that many Hispanics or blacks in the whole country?  Given The Donald's crude remarks about women that came out in the campaign,  that 8% margin for Hillary is understandable.  The Donald can be very offensive when he sets his mind to it.
  The real question about the election results is how The Donald managed to squeak out his victory over that 9.84 million women's votes against him.  He did, somehow, and that's impressive.
  Next time, the Republicans need to think about doing something about that ginormous number of women who didn't/won't vote Trump.  Next time the Democrats will have stronger candidate, nearly anyone with a pulse would be a stronger candidate than Hillary was.
   I wonder why the pundits aren't talking about the women's vote?  

Trump ought to do Income Tax Reform ASAP

The income tax, both personal and corporate, is killing the economy.  Taxes are too high, highest in the world for corporations.  No wonder American corporations are leaving for overseas, the taxes are lower overseas.  And too damn complicated.  Ever since income tax was invented way back in 1913, every special interest has been adding little loopholes to the tax code to let them skate free.  Big companies and rich people who can afford enough lawyers can figure out ways to avoid taxes. Ordinary people just get soaked. 
    Carly Fiorina had the right idea.  "Close every loophole, lower every rate."   Gaping loopholes needing closure:  Mortgage interest deductions, depreciation of real estate, capital gains, loss carry forward, carried interest, electric car subsidies.  And lots more.  I only know the income tax code well enough to do my own taxes, with an assist from Excel.  The real tax dodger lawyers, and for that matter The Donald himself, know of plenty more.  Loopholes favor the big and the wealthy, finding them or making new ones gives big money to the lawyer class, and  it makes people and companies pour money into things that don't produce wealth, they just dodge taxes.  We would be better off without loopholes.   I'd trade my loopholes for a couple of percent lower tax rate any day ( or any tax year).
   We ought to have just three tax rates, one for the very wealthy, one for ordinary citizens, and one for the truly poor.  I do believe the truly poor ought to pay a little something, just so they feel some hurt every time a new handout is voted in.  The "breakpoints" between truly poor, ordinary citizen and very wealthy ought to be indexed for inflation.  Otherwise Uncle Sam gets an automatic tax hike every year as inflation pushes everyone up into the next higher tax bracket.
   Ignore the Democrats who will claim that tax cuts are "for the rich".  Right now half the population pays no income tax.  Tax cuts only help those who pay taxes.  The way Democrats say it, if you pay taxes you are a member of the evil rich.  Ignore this malarkey.

Facebook and Fake News

Facebook has been running a series of fake news articles.  Each one announces the death of a celebrity (Clint Eastwood, Angelina Joli, and the like).  In actual fact, all these "victims" as still alive and well.  Facebook really ought to shut this down. It ruins the Facebook reputation. 
   Right now, I don't believe any news posted on Facebook.  If in doubt, I go to good old reliable InstaPundit or Drudge.  If it ain't on either of those, then it didn't really happen. 

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.