Things we don't understand - the Afghan war, part 5

Stories I get from Afghan war are mostly discouraging. The latest relates back to Afghan war post 3. Not only do taxpayers not understand Afghanistan and its culture, we have no clue about how our military operates.

The context

Back in Afghanistan post 3, the story was about how the USAF (U.S. Air Force) runs things at Baghram airbase near Kabul. USAF arrogance and incompetence was center stage. By comparison, this makes the USAF look good. The loons running the USAF aren't just arrogant and disconnected from reality. They are a disgrace.

The new story

After the rocket attack incident at Baghram described in Afghanistan post 3, USAF medical facilities administrators decided to have a meeting that included even lowly military medical officers from other U.S. medical branches (not Air Force). No one knows what prompted that incongruity. At that meeting, USAF administrators deigned to discuss the situation around rocket attacks on Baghram and the USAF's refusal to send out USAF doctors to help wounded American personnel until after the "all clear" sounded. By then, most seriously wounded American soldiers would have died.

The Air Force side of the story: At the meeting, which included medical personnel from other U.S. military branches and contractors, USAF medical administrators proudly made the following two points (self-evident and irrefutable, in their opinion):

1. After the weekly rocket attack on Baghram, Air Force medical people would continue to not move from their air-conditioned, bomb-proof medical bunker with big flat screen TVs and cappuchino machines until after the all clear sounded. It didn't matter if U.S. military people on the base died before then or not.
2. Air Force medical personnel were too valuable to go out to rescue injured U.S. military personnel until it was safe. USAF medical lives ranked above normal soldiers, especially one in other military branches (Army or Marines).

In response to that lunacy, an doctor from another military branch piped up and said that he/she would be willing to go out immediately after an attack and try to help wounded U.S. soldiers before the all clear sounded, even if that meant the he/she was going in harms way. Then the U.S. military medical person said that he/she would bring the wounded back to the USAF's nice, safe, bomb-proof hospital before wounded U.S soldiers died.

A civilian contractor (ex-U.S. military) at the meeting piped up and said that he/she would do exactly the same.

The USAF administrators (administrators, not doctors) responded this way (paraphrasing): "Contractor, you cannot do that (save wounded U.S. military personnel) because that isn't in the scope of your contract."

The contractor responded (paraphrasing): "I don't care if trying to save them is in the scope of my contract or not. I am going to do everything I can to save wounded U.S. soldiers and I don't care if the all clear has sounded or or if it is safe or not. I will do that because it is the right thing to do and just try to stop me."

The contractor was pissed off - and rightly so.

The doctor from another branch (not USAF) said, "fine USAF medics, not USAF doctors, can go and help wounded U.S personnel. That way USAF doctors will not be in jeopardy."

The USAF administrators (doctors and nurses who had not treated patients in years) said, "Huh, we have medics!! What are you talking about???" Even if we do have medics, they are too valuable to jeopardize. Implying: "As if we are in a war or something like that, you stupid numb nuts".

Then the USAF administrators said, you (non-USAF doctor) could go out and try to save wounded soldiers, implying: "You are not as valuable as USAF doctors. We don't care if you die or not."

The non-USAF doctor said that he/she would bring the wounded back to the USAF hospital and then let USAF doctors save our wounded. In response to that, the USAF administrators said: "You can't do that without a printout of the patient's medical records."

The non-USAF doctor had no response to that idiocy. He/she lives in a B hut. B huts have plywood walls, intermittent electricity, usually no printers, not much heat and not much air-conditioning. B hits are primitive. Doctors in B huts can't print out the patient's records most (or all) of the time.

By contrast, the USAF hospital has electricity, heat and air-conditioning all of the time and the exact same records that the USAF was demanding from the non-USAF doctor for admission of dying U.S. soldiers into the USAF's hospital.

The non-USAF doctor then said, fine, I may or may not be able to get the patient's records. I don't care. I will just bring them here in a USAF ambulance to the USAF hospital and your doctors will do the right thing, i.e., try to save them. They don't have to leave the safety of the secure hospital bunker.

The meeting ended.

A couple of days after that meeting the USAF released a memo to medical personnel at Baghram. It said that after a rocket or other attack on Baghram, the USAF would park a big truck front of the hospital admissions area until after the all clear had sounded. If anyone wounded showed up before it was safe, they would not be admitted into the hospital . . . . . 

End of story.

Hm. Is anything wrong with this? Something amiss?

Why do we tolerate this?

This isn't just about the apparent hopelessness of the Afghan war and our profound ignorance of that country and its people. That isn't the only issue. What in the hell are us taxpayers funding in terms of how our military operates? Is this kind of incompetence and arrogance acceptable? 

Where is the press?

I do not expect to hear things like this from our politicians or the military. I get that. But, where is the American press? Why do I hear stories like this from close confidants and not the press? Why? Where is the press? AWOL, that's where. They kiss themselves and marvel in their useless Ivy League brilliance. For the most part, the U.S. press is worthless. If this is what U.S. journalism gets us, to heck with them. What we get is the Faux News propaganda hour with no pretense of "journalism". With few exceptions, the press is a failed institution.

Who is on your side?

How much do we average citizens really know about how our military operates? Not much, despite the tens of billions we rain down on them every year, freedom of speech, the freedom of information act and the idiot press. Who is on the average citizen's side? Nobody, that's who. Not the USAF. And certainly not the Democratic or Republican parties. This sad story is just another grain of sand - a rock actually - on the scale that tips in favor of the conclusion that American two-party politics is a failure.

Defending the American Standard of Living, part 2

An earlier post on defending our standard of living gave some context for concern about the issue. This post goes a bit deeper.

Some things are not easy to understand because they involve things that are not tangible. One intangible is intellectual property. It's called that because it includes intangibles like methods to make products, methods do things, new drugs (patented), the Coca Cola recipe (a trade secret), music (copyrighted), company logos like the Mercedes Benz logo (a trademark)
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Tangible property includes things like your house, jewelry, a bar of soap, a bar of gold, your car, your clothes and so on.

The questions that come to mind are simple: So what? Who cares? Why should anyone care about intellectual property? Real property (house, car, jewelry) is the real deal, right? Well, yes and no - probably mostly no.

A recent study by Ocean Tomo rated the intellectual property value of intangible assets in some U.S. companies. Its an eye opener. According to that study, the value of S&P 500 companies in 1975 was 83% tangible (physical and financial) assets and 17% intangibles, mostly patents. By 2005, that had flipped to 20% tangible assets and 80% intangibles, which is where it still was as of 2010.

If the estimates are basically accurate, it is fair to conclude that a significant portion of the U.S. has transitioned from an economy grounded mostly in physical property and financial assets to an innovation-based economy. Again, one can ask: So what? Who cares?

To maintain our standard of living, there has got to be a means to create wealth to at least keep up with population growth. That opinion is based on common sense and the observation that we do not distribute our wealth very evenly. That may be just a natural aspect of human nature. Regardless, new wealth has to come from somewhere and some of it needs to reach the middle and lower income classes. If that doesn't happen, our standard of living will drop.

Everyone should care

If intellectual property is as important a source of wealth as the study suggests, then it is reasonable to conclude that most everyone should care about related U.S. law and policy. If nothing else, much wealth more resides in intellectual property now than before. It could therefore be a source of new wealth creation.

The current job situation suggests we are facing an erosion of the American standard of living. Despite the constant thunder from the political right about the horror of the national debt, we seem to be in an era of high unemployment and shrinking incomes. Although incomes increased by about 1.9% last year, consumer inflation was about 3.2% in the year ending in April. If that trend continues, what will happen to the middle and lower classes in the U.S. is obvious.

If intellectual property, particularly patents, generates wealth by protecting U.S. innovation, then patent policy and law should be focused on reasonably maximizing its potential to do that.

What to do, if anything? - Fix patent law

I believe in not fixing things that aren't broken. Unfortunately, the U.S. patent system isn't just broken. Patents are under attack by the federal courts and some sectors of society, e.g., special interests who don't like paying for access to inventions and people who see patents as evil monopolies that hurt people for no socially redeeming purpose. That's a bunch of rot, but it is reality.

Congress can't help. They aren't up to the job. They don't understand patents and cannot distinguish good ideas from bad. Arguments from special interests who are expert at obfuscation in service of their own interests leaves congress confused, uncertain and largely paralyzed. In the meantime, the courts continue to undermine patent law.

There are fixes: To a large extent, it would be an improvement to go back to patent law as it was before the Supreme Court, the U.S. patent office and people unhappy with patents became active about 4-5 years ago and went on the attack. The rationale for the attack on patents is only partly comprehensible - most of it is nonsense. To the extent that changing patents or patent law makes sense, there are simple, focused and efficient solutions.

Instead of getting reasonable, efficient solutions, we get a nuclear attack on patents and their economic value. In short, American political institutions and parts of society are actively undermining one of its most effective means to crate wealth, strong patents. We needlessly slit out own throats, but that's politics as usual from inept Democrats and clueless Republicans in congress.

There are good and defensible reasons for losing faith in our political institutions and both political parties. One is that they have failed and another is that they continue to fail with no evidence of meaningful change in sight.

I have said it before and repeat it again, Democrats and Republicans govern without my consent.

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A later post will explain how patents are being gutted by our political institutions and some parts of society. I cannot explain why, other than to attribute it to incompetence, public ignorance, political self-interest, special interest corruption and/or the politicization of the courts by inept ideologue politicians, i.e., political business as usual.

Explanations are too much in a single post here. It takes some explaining and context to be fair to the topic. Some federal court decisions that clearly illustrate my opinions are (1)  Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd., v. EliLilly & Co., 625 F.3d 719, 96 U.S.P.Q.2d 1830 (Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, 2010) (the U.S. supreme court denied certiorari this week, so that awful federal appeal court decision is the law of the land as of now) and (2) KSR Int'l. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 98,  (U.S. Supreme Court, 2007). 

Briefly, the 2010 Sun Pharmaceuticals case came out of the blue, directly contradicted what was clear precedent and established law. It will have the effect of killing hundreds or thousands of patents with on warning to patent owners that it was coming. All for no reason - the rationale in Sun is grounded in old law that is now completely changed (a 20 year limit on patent term). The Sun decision is an attack on the patent system, pure and simple.

The 2007 KSR case is just as bad as Sun and was just as unexpected. Although the KSR opinion itself says otherwise, the KSR decision allows the use of hindsight to render patents invalid, which is a big patent killer. And, it directly contradicts a law that Congress passed years ago at 35 USC 103(a) which says that it doesn't matter how an inventor invents something. The KSR case blows that away and yet congress does nothing, absolutely nothing, to reverse the catastrophic KSR decision. Thanks to KSR, we are now back in the very bad old days when an invention had to come from a divinely inspired a flash of genius accompanied by crisp blue thunderbolts and lots of smoke spewing from an inventor's ears. That is something that rarely occurs. It ignores the real world way in which inventions come about - slow, hard work, usually accompanied by a lot of pain and research expense. When it comes to patent law, the U.S. supreme court is simply clueless and inept.

Tax policy reform, part 2

There are good reasons to consider rethinking our tax laws and policy. Part 1 discusses some context and a major flaw, intentionally lax enforcement of tax law with loss of hundreds of billions in tax revenue each year. This post describes a couple more major flaws in U.S. tax law and policy.

The perception of unfairness

Perceived unfairness in the tax code fosters cynicism and non-compliance by average taxpayers. Actually, this isn't just a perception. It is reality. Workers who are classified as employees have essentially no opportunity to under report their income because it is subject to tax withholding. Those employees report about 99 percent of their earned income (U.S. Tax Advocate, 2010 annual report, page 7).

By contrast, compliance rates drop dramatically for workers not subject to tax withholding. Non-farm sole proprietors report only 43 percent of their business income and unincorporated farming businesses report only 28 percent (U.S. Tax Advocate, 2010 annual report, page 7). Tax noncompliance cheats honest taxpayers, who must pay more to make up the difference. According to the IRS’s most recent comprehensive estimate, the net tax gap stood at $290 billion in 2001 (IRS Updates Tax Gap Estimates, IR-2006-28, Feb. 14, 2006; U.S. Tax Advocate, 2010 annual report, page 7). This meant that each taxpayer in 2006 was paying a “surtax” of about $2,200 to subsidize noncompliance or tax evasion by others.

Is that fair or not? When average Americans see gross unfairness in this magnitude of tax cheating, is that cynicism or just seeing reality?

Wasteful compliance burden

The tax code is blindingly complex. Complying with tax law imposes a large but unnecessary burden on the economy. One estimate is that is requires about $125 billion annually for businesses and individuals to comply with tax law. Another estimate is about $163 billion, which is about 11% of receipts (U.S. Tax Advocate, 2010 annual report, page 4). The annual tax code compliance burden requires more 3 million full time workers or about 6.1 billion hours per year (U.S. Tax Advocate, 2010 annual report, page 3).

For the most part, that effort is a nonproductive burden our economy must carry while struggling to compete with low cost economic competitors, e.g., China, Indonesia and India. Obviously, the cost of compliance cannot be reduced to zero. But, it would be reasonable to expect a reduction of at least 50%-60% in compliance cost. That would yield a saving of about $60-$95 billion annually.

One has to ask, can we afford to continue this or not? Does our economy need help in the form of reducing unnecessary burdens like this? Or, do we just keep on with business as usual? One thing is certain, if this is left to the Democratic and/or Republican parties we will have business as usual.

Malignant incentives to cheat

The tax code is opaque and subject to manipulation by wealthy individuals and corporations (U.S. Tax Advocate, 2010 annual report, page 5). Those individuals and corporations take full advantage of their opportunities to avoid and evade taxes. Expoliting those advantages, of course, makes sense and would be expected. Current tax rates are such that the incentive to evade taxes is too powerful to resist for many individuals and entities.

That economic incentive coupled with the staggering complexity of the tax code leads to what one would expect - massive tax evasion. One recent study estimated tax evasion amounts to about $450-$500 billion with about $2 trillion in income going unreported. Other estimates are lower, e.g., the GAO estimates about $330 billion per year. Although the amount of evaded taxes is staggering, there is nothing remarkable about it. The situation simply reflects Adam Smith's invisible hand responding to economic opportunity in free markets. Our current tax code is too complicated and riddled with massive flaws to ignore. Tax law and policy provides the market and the opportunity to make very large amounts of money with little or no risk. That's hard for anyone to resist.

Assuming the estimates of tax evasion are accurate, it would be reasonable to expect hundreds of billions of increased revenues from a reformed tax code that (1) incentivizes compliance by reducing tax rates, (2) deincentivizes tax evasion by vigorous (real) enforcement of tax law in all economic sectors, (3) minimized opportunities for tax avoidance by simplifying tax law and (4) broadening the tax base to create a sense of common community and reduce public distrust of our current corrupt system.

Although that is easy to say, it will be difficult to implement. Neither of the two political parties want to make major changes. That is understandable because the system benefits them. Most of the people behind much of America's wealth feel the same way for the same reason. Again, no surprise. Things are the way they are for good reasons - there are powerful interests who want it this way. They will fight against meaningful change. Real reform will have to come from outside the two party system.