Elect Chris Booth to U.S. Senate

According to one of this past years Nobel Prize recipients in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, there are eight rules that must be followed:

Groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8. For CPRs [Common-pool resources] that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

From "Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action", published in 1990

I see this as a blueprint in designing a new health care system for the United States.

It is said that economics is the only field that two people can not only win, but share, the Nobel Prize, in the same year, for saying exactly the opposite thing.

Everyone has an opinion on the economy, and it is often said that there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. The chart showing the rise in health care costs could have been rearranged to make it look like the more than ten fold increase in per capita cost was only a slight increase.

What we really need is fiscal responsibility in the Congress. We spend money we do not have on things we do not need and ignore problems that are easily fixed. Who does the Congress work for? Lobbyists or the people? What has happened is that banking regulations that made banking boring, predictable, and low paying, have been removed, allowing banking to be exciting, unpredictable, and high paying, but who has paid the price? We have. We went from local banks having to back up risky loans and thus not making them, to mortgages being bundled up into securities with false AAA ratings. We went from loans that required a 20% cash down payment to loans with no down payment, and no chance of being repaid, the so called "liar loans".

This graph shows that the rate of foreclosures started to increase in June of 2007. Did any alarm bells go off that month, when delinquencies went from 0.40% to 0.42%? It is a little late to get excited when delinquencies are at 3.72% - in November 2009, and still climbing.

The problems in the economy started much earlier. New Hampshire used to have woolen mills, using the power of the Merrimack River. But due to lower labor costs in North Carolina, all the mills closed and the jobs went to the south. The same pattern was repeated when jobs began to be sent offshore.

Eventually people in Thailand and China will demand higher wages and the world wide economy will stabilize again, but right now we have a situation where some factories are paying less than a dollar a day for labor, and others over six hundred.

And it is not just manufacturing jobs that we have lost. MacDonalds announced that they would no longer be processing drive up orders locally but instead would feed the audio to someone for example in India who would take your order and enter it into a computer where it would show up back at the local store.

Many companies have switched to offshore customer service respondents. I always ask where are you located. Sometimes they will say, sometimes not, but they could be almost anywhere in the world today.

My position is that the only solution is to institute a world wide minimum wage, and a tariff on imports from any country without at least that minimum wage. That is easier to implement at the dock than it is for a phone call that goes over the Internet at the speed of light, but if India chooses to have a minimum wage so that they can economically export manufactured goods, that same minimum wage will help keep phone calls here in the states.

Almost all of the energy available to the earth comes either directly or indirectly from the sun.

During the next one or two decades it is likely that the United States will finally transition away from dependence on foreign resources for almost 80% of our energy.

The first source of energy people learned to use was fire, in the form of burning wood, which, since it is a renewable resource is still used today, mostly in the form of pellet stoves, woodstoves, and fireplaces.

The next two energy sources developed were wind and water. Some of the early Dutch windmills are still in use, and across the United States farms used windmills to pump water. The first mills were powered either from wind or water.

Next came coal power, and later the development of electricity transmission, powered mostly from hydroelectric dams or coal.

In 1956 M. King Hubbert published a paper called Nuclear energy and the Fossil Fuels, wherein he predicted that any limited resource such as oil would follow a bell shaped production curve, where production would peak and then decrease when half of the supply was left. We are now at or even beyond peak production, meaning that all of the cheap oil is gone, and meaning that demand exceeds supply, inevitably driving prices higher and higher, unless a replacement is developed. In the paper he anticipated the replacement to be nuclear, and outlined how to make the transition from oil to nuclear.

During the 1970's, the United States had a choice of either pursuing nuclear or solar and wind. In the end we chose nothing, resulting in increased dependence on foreign oil - other than a minor diversion into Alaskan oil - creating a huge environmental disaster. The environmental movement favored solar and wind, and fought to prevent the construction of nuclear plants. Seabrook was delayed, and the second reactor canceled. The end of nuclear power in the United States came with the Three Mile Accident, and worldwide the end came with the Chernobyl Accident. Using the type of nuclear power used in Seabrook, the world gets about 5% of its energy from nuclear and has about a 70 year supply, at current rates of consumption, along with 35 years for oil, 85 years for natural gas, and 145 years for coal.

Yet we can, if we choose, live on the planet for the next billion years.

There are two other types of nuclear power which could be used, each of which could last that long. The first is using breeder reactors to make plutonium, and instead of burning U235, use U238. There are four insurmountable problems with the world taking that approach. Waste, Radiation, Proliferation, and Accidents. It is said that the final blow to the nuclear industry will come not if there is another major accident, but when the next major accident occurs.

Why wait? We now have wind and solar technology available to provide many times our current energy consumption. Modern wind turbines are over 300 feet tall, and can supply over ten times our current energy consumption. Solar panels are a little like biofuel - they convert sunlight into energy, except they are much more efficient, and thus require much less land. Most homes can generate all of their electricity needs simply by installing rooftop solar panels. There is enough solar energy to supply over 1,000 times current energy consumption. In 5 years, by 2015, we can get 10% of our energy from wind and 10% from solar, and 5 years later obtain 90% from a combination of wind and solar, with the rest from geothermal and hydroelectricity.

The United States has large resources of natural gas and coal, and many cars will be converted to use natural gas instead of gasoline as a cost saving measure, but electric cars are even cheaper, and the equivalent of buying gasoline for about 60 cents/gallon. While we do have coal, it is the dirtiest form of energy, and is best left in the ground.

In 1950 in the United States, we essentially had universal health care - doctors made house calls, and office visits were affordable to everyone - about $5 for a half hour consultation. Hospital stays were about $20/day. The average cost per person per year was $100, or $500 in today's dollars.

Contrast that with today. Costs have doubled or tripled every ten years to $6,000 per person, and an expected $8,800/person in 2010. All explosions are exponential and all exponentials are unsustainable. When will it stop? How about now? What is most interesting to me is that the unsustainability of health care costs was recognized in 1977.

The benefit has been increased life expectancy, but a large portion of the cost is due to obesity, alcohol, and smoking.

Fortunately the number of smokers is quickly disappearing. I often ask someone who is buying a pack of cigarettes how much it costs to smoke a cigarette. They universally do a quick calculation, let's see $4 divided by 20 cigarettes, and come up with 20 cents. I then say, no, that is how much it costs to buy a cigarette. I did not ask that, I asked how much it costs to smoke a cigarette. If you threw it away now, you would only be out 20 cents, but if you smoke it, it is going to cost you another $3.80, for a total of $4, or $80/pack, in health care costs, lost time from work costs, cleaning costs, etc.

The same costs are true of alcohol and obesity. According to the book Traffic, the average cost of each DUI ticket to us is $8,000. Driving impairment, though, does not start at 0.08% BAC, the legal limit - it starts at 0.01 or 0.02% - and 0.00% is the only safe level.

Today only one third of the population has a normal body weight, with the rest being overweight or obese. In 1998 the health care cost of obesity was estimated at $78.5 billion. Ten years later, in 2008, the rate of obesity had increased by over a third, and costs jumped to $147 billion. Folks, this is an avoidable cost! No one wants to be obese! One interesting fact is that one of the factors is that few school children walk to school today, yet children are much safer walking to school than they are being driven to school.

Today I am announcing my candidacy for the office of U.S. Senator from New Hampshire, as an independent.