Bring on the clowns...

 I am an admirer of America and Americans, but...........

I am now convinced that American politics is populated by loonies.

Newt and Perry are trying to undermine Mitt for being a – er – conservative! And it’s a cardinal sin in their eyes to speak French.

I have read Perry’s comments about Turkey that prove he is a moron. Turkey to be kicked out of NATO, indeed. There would be nothing left but the  Yanks, the Brits and the Frogs, never mind the US advance missile defences there.

Looks as if Mitt is a least in with a chance. What I have seen and heard suggests that he is good CEO material – a successful businessman; an experienced politician; one who knows what a balance sheet is; understands that you can’t borrow your way out of debt; no baggage; and boring.

Does the American electorate not want to hear about the candidates’ views on foreign policy, the world economy, the public debt, healthcare, education, defence, unemployment, climate change, China, and other trivia? Are they content with lurid accounts of the candidates’ sex-lives, tax dodging, pocket-lining, lovely children, devoted wives, sporting prowess 40 years ago, devotion to creationism, and other information essential to being able to judge whether or not they are electing a POTUS who will declare war on Iran, screw the fiscus, pack the Supreme Court with mates, and appoint his mistresses to key public posts?

What have the candidates had to say about the fact that 75% of people between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible to join the military through poor education, criminal record or unfitness?  Or about an education system that is so dysfunctional that 47% of the population of Detroit is illiterate – 200,000 people who will never get a job in the motor plants because they can’t even read the safety warnings?

Or an immigration system that is so screwy that it allows entry to West African unskilled hotel staff and Yemenis taxi drivers but takes 10 years to process an application from an Indian PhD because of the quota system that allocates visas according to nationality, not value to America?

Beating Obama does not feature on the agenda at this time.

I am beginning to feel that America is evolving into two parallel societies – the political system and the people. US politics depends on compromise, since there is no UK-style whipping to make the buggers behave, and there is now uber-partisanship that prevents anything being decided. The outcome must be that the American people will rise from their troubles despite their politicians, not because of them.

And since Medicare features so large in US politics, I thought I should try to understand it.

Now I do, and it’s nuts.

If I’ve got it right it has the following characteristics.

It is unbudgeted. Nobody really knows what goes in and what comes out of the exchequer.

It is unfunded. The Treasury just pays the bills.

It is uncontrolled and uncosted. The medical fraternity charges what it likes and the Treasury stumps up. There appear to be no checks and no vetting. In the NHS, these do not apply to Doctors because, of course, health care is free at the point of delivery, but certain treatments will be banned if they don’t represent value-for-money. An outfit called NICE determines whether certain treatments should be disallowed on VFM grounds and this quite frequently applies to drugs if it is considered that the cost outweighs the benefits or the NHS is being ripped-off by the big pharma. However, for some bizarre reason it allows treatments of dubious or no medical benefit – cosmetic surgery; IVF even though sterility is not a disease; hip-replacements for 90-year-olds, etc.

It has no priorities. 30% of the money is spent on patients in the last year of their lives.

And another thing.

When I was digging around for stuff about the real state of the nation, I discovered that the Fed debt ain’t half of it. It seems that many of the States are totally boracic, skint, broke, in Queer Street, bankrupt and generally in deep merde.

For 30 years the unions and state officials have been bleeding the revenues until they are as dry as the Kalahari. They have been giving themselves eye-watering salaries, pension benefits that are almost beyond belief and generally living high on their neighbour’s hog. And since the revenues don’t support all this it has been funded with someone else’s money. They are drowning in debt. The excessively generous pensions (taken in full at 50 and then on to another public service job) are largely unfunded. They are unaffordable. I have seen a figure of $3 trillion in zero-collateral debt.

The Golden State is not only broke, but ungovernable to boot on account of its crazy political system, but it pays its fire-truck drivers $144,000 a year against an average national wage of $52,000.

The upshot is that public services are collapsing.

Of course, we have seen this all before.

In Third World countries.