One day, the ship-wide newscasts show you something odd. A small, but vocal portion of the alphas are protesting about income inequality. You watch the story, figuring they will talk about the big divide between the alphas and the betas, but they don’t. Instead, they are complaining that 1% of the other alphas control too large a portion of the collected wealth of the alphas. In other words, there are 1,000 “alpha primes” that have really pissed off the alphas.

Now, given that you are a beta, how much do you care about the plight of the alphas?

Translated to our own world (via the Global Rich List), if you make at least $25,140, you’d be an alpha.

…the key thing for any fiscal adjustment plan to say on the cut side isn’t really how much money you’re cutting, it’s what things do you want the government to stop doing. Once you name the things, you can total up the savings. Then you can either say you’ve cut enough, or else you can go back and name more things.

So with that in mind, here is what I’d like my government to stop doing, in no particular order. I want the government to stop…

• …embargoing Cuba.
• …printing official signs and government paperwork in languages that are not English.
• …subsidizing industrial farming.
• …ignoring post-industrial farming.
• …unconditionally supporting Israel. (Support Israel, yes, but don’t give them checks without strings, and call them on their shenanigans.)
• …buying people drugs.
• …tracking, arresting, trying and incarcerating people for buying plants.
• …ignoring the cost-benefit of long term education as a weapon in the “War on Terror”.
• …declaring war on abstract concepts.
• …fighting in previously declared wars on abstract concepts and, instead, switch such efforts into “campaigns” with reasonably well-defined victory conditions.
• …pouring money into overpriced, questionable defense systems.
• …maintaining the Department of Education, which can boast almost no tangible successes over the last 30 years.
• …supporting horrible market incentives, like the Community Reinvestment Act.
• …funding any part of the Federal Communications Commission that does something other than mediate spectrum usage collisions.

The Cato Institute has very detailed thoughts about what they want the government to stop. The New York Times also offers and interactive method for playing with what stopping certain things will save. What do you want the government to stop doing?

(Hat tip to MN for pointing me to the original article.)

Instead, raise a glass to Hickenlooper for starting his campaign with a pledge to avoid negative attack ads, and actually sticking to it. And also because the ads he did run were a cut above your average political shilling.

So, here’s to you, Governor Hickenlooper. (Now, if only this glass was filled with some Rail Yard.)

Before bill: Health care degrading by the day due to unneeded, unwanted interference from corporations lining their own pockets. Hospitals closing because of it. Doctors no longer able to afford to practice. Government racking up debts for reasons mostly unrelated to health care.

After bill: Health care degrading by the day due to unneeded, unwanted interference from corporations lining their own pockets. Hospitals closing because of it. Doctors no longer able to afford to practice. Government racking up debts for reasons slightly more related to health care.

The Obama administration said Monday it will crack down on mortgage companies that are failing to do enough to help U.S. borrowers at risk of foreclosure, as part of a broad effort to ramp up participation in its mortgage assistance program. The Treasury Department said it will withhold payments from mortgage companies that aren’t doing enough to make the changes permanent.

I mention this just in case it wasn’t clear that the “Obama administration” has forgotten every economics class it ever took from people who know better.

Remember six months ago? The “Obama administration” doesn’t seem to. Remember when it seemed like all the banks were failing and screwed? Remember how that wasn’t actually true? How some banks were doing just fine, because they didn’t make stupid loans? Remember how those banks were given crappy ratings by the government due their fiscal responsibility? Oh… you don’t?

Well, consider Massachusetts bank East Bridgewater Savings. Back in March, when all the banks were going to hell, East Bridgewater Savings was doing fine:

Bad or delinquent loans?

Zero.

Foreclosures?

None.

Money set aside in 2008 for anticipated loan losses?

Nothing.

“We’re paranoid about credit quality,” Petrucelli said. The 62-year-old chief executive has run the bank since 1992.

East Bridgewater Savings ended 2008 with $135 million in assets and deposits of $84 million.

The bank even squeaked out a profit of $87,000. And its Tier 1 risk-based capital ratio was 31.6 percent, or more than three times higher than many community banks in Massachusetts.

In other words, rather than do the “predatory lending” and “sub-prime” shenanigans that the government and media would lead us to believe caused all this trouble, this particular bank only made reasonable loans, and avoided the problems entirely. But, for its trouble, the FDIC “slapped East Bridgewater Savings with a rare ‘needs to improve’ rating after evaluating the bank under the Community Reinvestment Act.”

The CRA is a set of laws that have been revised over the past 30 years to “encourage” banks to lend to local, low- and moderate-income borrowers. Because East Bridgewater Savings judged that giving loans for large houses to low-income families was not worth the risk, the FDIC essentially published a statement saying they were a bad bank.

Now, it is unlikely that the banks pushing subprime loans did so to avoid this FDIC ranking; they probably would have done it anyway. But it certainly is not particularly useful that, should you want to manage risk correctly, the government will tell the world you are an idiot for doing so. It is a totally misdirected incentive.

This current push from the Obama administration works in a similar way, offering incentives to force exactly the wrong kind of behavior.