Frequent Traveller Nightmare Part 1: Why I don’t travel (that much)

I used to love to take a trip on an airplane. And my airline of choice was United. I flew on them because their planes were clean, they got me to where I wanted to go most of the time without a plane change (particularly when I lived in San Francisco), and I could follow all of the air traffic fun on my headset, giving me something the remote possibility of learning something, while mindlessly staring out the window.

Almost a decade ago my love affair with flying ended, sometime after the love affair with my (now) wife began. We were often separated by hours of overnight flights and thousands of miles. It was also a time when United went bankrupt while their planes were over capacity. Since then, the Towers fell on 9/11 (I was in the UK at the time), and we’ve become so paranoid about our personal safety thanks to the Bush Era approach of leading from a position of fear that air travel has become a flying prison experience. And so I have largely stopped.

My own personal travel has dropped from a peek of 120,000 miles per year down to roughly 30,000. Yes, I still travel, but considerably less, and not often to America. There are more than a few reasons for this:

Flying is expensive, especially for families. I now have one.
Fuel surcharges that can be over 200% of the cost of the ticket (something that Continental misleads customers to believe it is entirely beyond their control).
Distance- this cuts both ways: I don’t need a plane (or even clothing) to see my wife and daughter, while my parents and American friends are much farther away, making the trip both more expensive and difficult.
Convenience- who wants to deal with the TSA? To be fair, here in Switzerland they really do make it as painless as possible. I have only ever once missed a flight here in Switzerland, when a train broke down, and the SBB actually rebooked me on the next flight before I arrived at the airport!
A long flight is hard on a child– any child. Parents need to think long and hard before putting their children– and other passengers– through that. We made that mistake by bringing our daughter on a long haul at the age of 4 months. When she was sick. Big mistake. Even though the doctor told us it was okay for her to fly (he was wrong) in order to get to Florida.
But beyond that, anyone in the back of a long haul has a miserable experience ahead of them from the moment they board. You can be assured that drinks on American airlines won’t be free, the movies will be lousy, and the food will be, if anything, worse than you remember.
Families have very few options to upgrade. When I’ve done so, it hasn’t been worth it. After all, what’s a comfortable chair if you can’t sleep because you need to attend to a child?

All of this boils down to the fact that the average flight to the U.S. costs us around $3,100. It’s about 1/3 that to elsewhere within Europe. Compare that with the $388 it used to cost me to go from San Francisco to the East Coast.

This leaves business travel. I have reduced that as well. A lot. Some people aren’t in a position to do so, I am, and I have. It has helped that my company now discourages travel where four years ago people would just as soon hop an airplane than pick up a phone. Now we have TelePresence, WebEx, and all sorts of other collaboration tools at our disposal. I applaud the change.

But even when I do travel, within Europe I prefer the train when it is feasible. I recently chose the train over the plane to get from Zürich to Maastricht. That turned out to take only about an hour longer without a plane than it would have taken with. But it cost quite a bit more. Within Switzerland I always use the train to Geneva. No reservations required, and it just works.

Like or Dislike: Foyles War

To blow off steam after what can be a very long day, Christine and I will occasionally watch TV, like most of the rest of the world. Most of what we watch is on DVD, and my current favorite is a show called Foyle’s War, created by Anthony Horowitz. It’s a combination of murder mystery and historical fiction, at the outset of World War II. Played by veteran Michael Kitchen, Chief Detective Inspector Foyle covers the beat of Hastings, an English coastal town. Kitchen depicts our hero as a stiff-upper-lipped classic English gentleman, with a stick so far up his posterior, you wonder how he walks.

What I like about the show is that it really gives you a feel for the sorts of hardships the British endured during the war, and how they endured them. Families were torn apart, there was very limited food to eat, there were prisoners of war, bombings, land confiscations by the government, the invasion of the American troops. And mixed into all of this, a murder or two.

While there’s occasional blood and guts, there are no DNA labs, no fancy police cars, or for that matter, fancy getaway cars. Just a game of wit to get you through.

Rate Foyle’s War in the OfCourseImRight Poll:

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Tyler Clementi: The real crime

I grew up in the township of Piscataway, New Jersey. It was a town of contradictions in the 1970s, where there was a large immigrant population, a large black population, a small Jewish population, and a well outspoken bigot and homophobe population. To be fair, this was not that uncommon in America for the 1970s- we were all learning how to get along with each other, still trying to learn the lessons that Dr. Martin Luther King gave his life teaching the world. Indeed a nearby Piscataway school was named after him, just like many were in the U.S. Piscataway, in fact, had a birds-eye view of what happens when people are oppressed just because they are somehow different: its neighboring town of Plainfield was the site of race riots in the 1960s.

Growing up, my family and our neighbors got to know a fellow neighbor by the name of David. David was a wonderful sensitive boy who couldn’t hurt a fly. He took part in school activities, and he enjoyed flash. While I didn’t understand it at the ripe old age of 7, when David expressed interest in Elton John and Bette Midler, it later became clear that he was gay. I do not know all the dynamics within our neighbor’s family, but they were Roman Catholics, and David had a very difficult time in the house. Outside the house, he had an even more difficult time in high school, as he tried to find ways to express his personality. The bigots would “kick his ass”. Between his homelife and his school life, David’s self esteem was battered, and he later chose self-destructive behaviors. He ended up as one of the many victims of AIDS, his behavior – not really his sexual orientation – being a contributing factor.

That was a long time ago. I miss my friend to this day, of course, but one thing I hope is that we will have learned from the tragedies of the past, in the same way they say that the regulations of submariners are written in blood.

The Washington Post story of a Rutgers Student in Piscataway killing himself last week because he was filmed having sex with another man reminds me that sometimes, when “boys will be boys” (in this case I think one of the offenders is a woman), the results are tragic. I’m sure the two people who committed this gross invasion of privacy could not have predicted the consequences. That’s in part because of their immaturity and in part because of their upbringing; because their parents didn’t impress on them the need to respect not only someone’s privacy, but to consider what it would be like if they were gay.

I hope we remember the name Tyler Clementi. What a sad loss, and for what? Why did he think what being gay and acting on those feelings was somehow wrong? Why? Why was it wrong? Who did it hurt?

The worst thing about this sad situation is that there are many people today who won’t see this as a loss because they are so blinded by ideology, prejudice, shame, and ignorance. That to me is the real crime.

Healthcare: 51 million people in U.S. now without health insurance!

NPR’s Morning Edition reports today that the numbers are the worst since the Census Bureau started keeping statistics in 1987. Take the poll: how are you insured?

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On States Suing over a National Healthcare Plan

I had a guest here this weekend who told me of one theory of why states might sue the federal government over portions of the Obama Healthcare Plan that requires individuals to buy insurance. The theory goes that the federal government is not authorized by any clause in the Constitution to force individuals to pay for healthcare. A plain and superficial reading of the Constitution would seem to support that. This leads to three questions:

Is ObamaCare constitutional?
If not, can it be made constitutional?
Who is doing the suing and why?

First, a caveat: I am not a lawyer. All lawyers: please chime in.

Is ObamaCare Constitutional?

Next, some Constitutional basics. The way our form of government works, each and every law that Congress passes must find some authorizing basis from within the Constitution, because the 10th Amendment of the Constitution clearly states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In other words, Congress has to find a basis for the law from within the Constitution. For the better part of three centuries, however, Congress has largely been able to get around this restriction through what has become known as the Interstate Commerce Clause (Article I, §8 Cl. 3):

[The Congress shall have power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;

“Commerce among the several states” has been interpreted to mean, for instance, the ability of someone in New York to charge for access to its waterways. That was what Gibbons v. Ogden (22 US 1) in 1824. It’s largely the basis of how drug laws are authorized today by the federal government. Some people might say that this is a stretch of the clause, and that in fact requiring expenditures from individuals on health insurance would be even more of a stretch.

So what’s the logic in favor of the law? That has its basis in the theory of insurance. Here I will say that I am not an insurance expert, by the way. This much I know: a risk pool requires that everyone not make a claim at the same time, and the lower the likely percentage of claims over some period of time, the need for less money by the insurance companies to satisfy claims.

In the context of health care, if only old and sick people buy insurance, because they make up for the bulk of claims, the money required to pay out claims would require very high premiums, thus reducing any benefit to having insurance. On the other hand, if only healthy people bought into the system, since there would be very few claims, there would be no need for high premiums. Indeed, healthy people might not buy insurance at all, or very limited policies. In short, insurers can only sell health insurance to sick and old people if they have a group of otherwise healthy and young to reduce costs.

Does the decision of someone to not buy insurance in one state impact consumers in and companies in other states? If there exist risk pools that cross state boundaries, then the answer would appear to be yes. Otherwise it would seem the answer is no.

If ObamaCare is not constitutional, can it be made so?

Supposing the Supreme Court found mandatory premiums unconstitutional, what could the Congress and administration do to get around it? The tax system offers us one possibility. The 16th Amendment authorized Congress to tax us:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

One way the Congress could get around this would be to impose a tax that is the amount of a minimum premium, and then allow for a credit based on the costs expended on that premium. Loophole? Perhaps. But not the first.

Coming back to the Commerce Clause, the Congress probably could not have imposed a national speed limit without relying on highway funding. They probably could not themselves have prosecuted individuals for traveling over 55 or 65 mph. Instead they required the states to pass laws or face losing highway funding.

Who is doing the suing and why?

Ultimately if we look at the states that have filed suit, I’m sure we’ll see a distinctly Republican red tinge to them. For one thing, the strategy of Republicans has been to obstruct any Democrat initiative, no matter the harm that obstruction causes to individuals. Here, what possible benefit could individuals who are uninsured gain from not having health insurance? Today 45 million Americans don’t have a choice because they cannot take part in a well balanced risk pool, and hence cannot afford any coverage. Tomorrow even if they don’t have a choice on insurance, at least they’ll have some coverage.

Summary

In short, while considering the constitutional elements is interesting at an academic level, the officials doing the suing are harming the very people they are supposed to be serving. Perhaps voters should remember that.