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Think Tanks, Lobbying Groups, and Leftists – Oh My!
On a recent visit to Georgetown, my wife and I had dinner with an old friend of hers. I’ll call her “Susan.” They studied together in France during a semester abroad in college, back in the ’80s. Susan grew up in California near Malibu. Her family had a second home in Park City, Utah, and most weekends she and her family would fly to Utah to go skiing. She didn’t get into Berkeley and ended up going to the University of Utah, where she says she basically skied and partied for four years.
While in France, she met a Frenchman who owned a winery. They got married and had two kids. She sent her kids to boarding school at 11 years old and she traveled the world unencumbered. Her husband was unfaithful, and they divorced after 19 years of marriage. Now she’s back in the states, working at a health care think tank in Washington, DC. Which seems sort of funny, because after a very pleasant evening of conversation, my primary impression of her was that thinking was not her strong suit. That sounds mean. But she consistently and clearly struck me as not terribly intelligent. Which is fine. I’m not terribly artistic like Susan seems to be. We all can’t be great at everything.
Anyway, my wife hadn’t seen her in 30 years, and they had a great time catching up. Susan mostly ignored me (which was perfectly fine with me), until my wife mentioned that I was a doctor. Then she turned to me and said, “Oh, you’re a doctor? I help run a health care think tank!”
Me: “That’s nice!”
Susan: “The CDC gave us a huge grant to figure out why people aren’t getting their COVID vaccines. We’ve been researching the problem for over six months. We’ve got the most brilliant minds in the world working on it.”
Me: “That’s swell!”
Susan is a blind follower of the far left, as you’d expect of someone who grew up extremely wealthy, has been sheltered from reality for most of her life, and lacks an active mind. My wife warned me ahead of time, and I assured her that I would just sit there, and not say a dang thing, no matter what Susan said. So I was keeping my answers brief, and keeping an eye on my wife, who was watching me intently, to be sure I didn’t slip up and say something. Anything, really. I couldn’t blame her.
Susan: “This is a real problem with America. People don’t think. I miss Europe so much…”
Me: “I’m sure they miss you too.”
Wife: * stares at me even more intently *
Susan: “We’ve spent millions of dollars on our research so far. But this is so ridiculous. Can you imagine why anyone wouldn’t get their vaccine?”
Me: “Well, some blacks won’t get it because they suspect it’s a government plot to sterilize black people.”
Susan: * genuinely surprised * “Why on earth would they think such a thing?!?”
Me: “They’ve been trained that you hate them, along with every other white person. You can’t really blame them for actually believing it, I suppose.”
Wife: * dirty look *
Susan: “That’s incredible!”
Me: “And some Democrats won’t get them because Biden and Harris spent a year saying that they would never trust a ‘Trump vaccine.’”
Susan: “You’re kidding!!!”
Me: “And some Republicans won’t get it because they don’t trust the CDC or other government agencies.”
Susan: * clearly shocked * “Oh my gosh! That’s unbelievable!!!”
Me: “So in six months of millions of dollars worth of research, did any of your ‘most brilliant minds in the world’ go out and, you know, ask people why they didn’t get the vaccine?”
Wife: “Say, who was that cute guy in France that worked at the pub we always went to?”
Susan: “Well, of course, we’ve been really busy with data collection and analysis. We’ve been talking to some of the smartest people in the country about it. I mean, if you won’t even get a simple vaccine, that kind of means that you’re not exactly a genius, right? So why would we talk to people like that?”
Me: “Um, because you want to know why they’re making a certain decision. One way to figure that out would be to, you know, ask them. I understand your desire to avoid the undesirables. But it’s hard to study fish without getting wet once in a while, right?”
Wife: “Remember that cheap wine we used to drink for like 50 cents a glass? Woo!!!”
Susan: “For Europeans like me, it can be really hard to understand why Americans do things.”
Me: “Especially if you don’t ask them.”
Wife: “How ‘bout we get another bottle of wine?”
Me: “Sounds great!”
Susan: “All we can do is report our findings. We’re not a lobbying group (she spat those words out as if they were distasteful to her). We’re a think tank. We just provide our findings to the government.”
Me: “Let me guess. Your findings are that the vaccination rates are lower than desired because of inadequately funded government programs.”
Wife: * really dirty look *
Susan: “Actually, you’re exactly right. We’re proposing federal and state initiatives to improve vaccination rates. Funding for these programs will be easy because both parties want to fix this. That’s why they should listen to think tanks instead of lobbying groups. We provide them with unbiased information. So we keep them honest, and they keep hiring us for whatever problem comes along.”
Me: “There’s a simple way to test your hypothesis.”
Susan: “What do you mean?”
Me: “Just once, submit your findings to the government on some problem, and suggest that the best way to fix their problem would be to spend less money on something. Anything, really. See if you get any future grants. That way, you’d know that they really want honest information rather than confirmation of their own biases, and you could – OW!!!!”
Wife: * really dirty look after she kicked me in the shin *
Susan: “I don’t understand…”
Me: “Ah! Here’s our next bottle of wine! Why don’t you ladies refill your glasses? If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go the little boys’ room…”
* Limps away from table at 35mph *
I’d never really thought about the difference between think tanks and lobbying groups in Washington. After hearing Susan point out how different they are, I suspect that they may have a lot in common. They’re all just trying to earn money by promoting the growth of the government that pays them money. It’s not a parasitic relationship – it’s symbiotic. Which is much worse.
This sort of relationship makes sense, I suppose. Presuming you’re either a leftist or a sociopath. Which, in DC, seems to be a pretty safe assumption for much of the population.
Our government is broken in so many little ways. And it’s infested, at every level, with people like Susan. Which means it’s very unlikely to get better. They can’t fix problems that don’t even strike them as problems. To them, everything is ok.
The three of us drank three bottles of really yummy wine, ate some really good food, and blew nearly $300. I woke up with a hangover, a sore shin, and a grumpy wife: “I can’t take you anywhere!”
Why did my kid have to decide to play at Georgetown? Nebraska has a great volleyball team. Those visits would have been pleasant, at least…
Published in General
Not “we.” THEY.
Did she actually use the word “help run”? This is something that a person who runs the copying machine would think.
There you go.
Emphasis added.
So working backwards, assuming this was a recent conversation, Susan’s think tank was given millions of dollars in the beginning of March for this study. The Biden administration would have taken at least a few weeks to award the contract for something that had somehow already been determined to be of enough necessity to investigate, only a few weeks into their administration, for vaccines that had only been made available to the general public two months earlier.
And some people say that government works slowly.
They only do USEFUL/EFFECTIVE things slowly, if at all.
Yup. True on all counts.
One thing I would love to see is the government, and all other big organizations like nonprofits, universities, churches, and state and local government departments and agencies as well, create a closed Ricochet-like website through which legislators could communicate with experts, especially those among their constituents, easily.
The three things I would borrow from Ricochet are (a) the airy graphic design. It’s really inviting for reading, writing, and editing. (b) I’d incorporate some elements from our CoC and enforce it strictly. And (c) I’d create a barrier to entry–not a fee but some qualification. I know some groups use Facebook, but it will never offer what Ricochet offers. It’s very ugly and hard to read and work with.
Imagine being able to tap into the kind of expertise that exists on our Ricochet website. When I was involved in a political action issue on Cape Cod years ago, we held many public hearings, through which we discovered a goldmine of expertise here among the retirees. We were working on a water system issue, and one guy who spoke up had been one of the engineers who had actually worked on an updating of the Suez Canal in the late 1970s. :-)
A website that was “open” all night and all day would give people access to their favorite organizations and government agencies and legislators all the time. This type of website would make it very easy and pleasant for people who had otherwise busy lives or who had mobility issues to check in with committees and others and to weigh in on important legislation.
And it would also give the legislators feedback from members of their voting constituency even on the on the day-to-day stuff.
Has this women created life with a human male?
So, she really can take you some places! Thanks for satisfying my curiosity.
Do you have reason to suspect her husband was a genetically-compatible extraterrestrial, Henry?
You beat me to it. Not all lobbyists are looking for government money. Some are representing industries that just want to be left alone. There’s a big difference between lobbying for a subsidy and lobbying against raising the minimum wage to $15.
Many on the left would argue that not having a $15 (or higher) minimum wage IS a subsidy.
In fact they DO argue that for places like Walmart, if they don’t pay enough for workers to have health care etc, so their workers get subsidized health care, maybe food stamps…
The government and the Fed have made such a total hash of everything it’s unbelievable.
Everybody knows how GDP is 2/3 consumption. Right now 1/3 of that is transfer payments. Social Security, Medicare, welfare, and all of the pandemic stuff. What’s going to happen when you stop the pandemic stuff? It’s going to collapse for a few months. They won’t do it. Medicare and Social Security are running out of money. If they calculated shelter inflation as rent going up instead of the bogus owners equivalent rent, inflation would be running at 11% right now, and my peeps say that shelter rate is going to stick. Real genius system we have.
We’ve always been pretty hard savers, and through a series of fortuitous events, we have a pretty good chunk of change in the bank. But at 11% inflation, it’ll be worthless in a few years.
How do you have a civilization if you can’t get one percent over inflation in an ordinary savings account? This is how you manage the risks of life and other more aggressive investments.
All of this was artificially created by government force. Bad policy and people ripping each other off with government.
Listen to this analysis of our GDP. It’s one minute. Start at 1:09:20. If inflation is so understated and what this guy says is halfway true, the GDP is really negative. Doesn’t it show up in government borrowing and transfer payments propping everything up? Doesn’t that prove it?
There is actually good evidence that many of those people who move from the blue states lean red.
It’s a good thing, or we’d be overwhelmed.
Bringing this over from another post/thread:
I don’t understand his analysis. If GDP is mostly consumption, what does that mean exactly? Isn’t GDP measurement of wealth created yearly? Consumption is just buying stuff, and buying stuff means transferring wealth, not creating it.
Am I wrong about something there?
This is the problem. There is no such thing as an accurate measure of GDP. There are different ways to do it that are just as logical as any other way. I don’t think it’s ever described as creation of wealth, it’s just a measurement of output. More like revenue compared to profit, which you could consider to be actual wealth, mostly.
He’s saying that to the extent it’s coming from China the wealth creation is in China because that’s where the production is. Capital goods and labor (wealth) producing output (increasing that wealth) is over there, not here.
One more comment on #111.
If you get your goods cheaper from China, the money savings is wealth creation. I’m not sure it works out because we have so much inflation and we have always had too much inflation for that to net out. Everything should be going down in price. If you don’t do it that way that is literally the hollowing out of the middle class. jmo
I can certainly see why TPTB would want to count consumption rather than production as GDP.
Except that’s the actual definition given sometimes: the value of the wealth created in an economy in one year.
But insofar as the point is that there’s no good way to measure that and that consumption spending is used to measure it, I can’t object or even quibble.
Naturally, when you Google alternatives to GDP measurement, it comes up with all this hippie commie stuff, like happiness and social measurements. There are discussions that leave it at math and statistics but I can’t find them.
The other important thing to remember is inflation is just a terrible measurement of what is happening. It’s totally understated. The only people that don’t think it is understated are academics. This means GDP is overstated. It also means they are taxing the crap out of you with inflation. It’s just a racket for the government class and the financial class.
Right. I think they actually do do that, especially over decades. It just shows how circumspect you should be of all of this stuff.
I definitely do not think we are better off if the government has a bogus measure of inflation, which it is.
They use the inflation measurement for Federal Reserve central planning. When they push the economy around it’s central planning. It’s as stupid as anything the Soviets did. I just thought of this, but if they are going to do that, they should also be publishing what the real interest rate (inflation adjusted return) is on savings accounts and what interest rate is going to break the government. That would make it easier for the masses to understand how bad they are screwing everything up.
Oh, I know. Elizabeth Warren talks about how we subsidize big business by building them roads so they can ship their products to market. As if commercial trucks don’t pay road taxes and as if the roads are used exclusively by big business and not every single person in the country. Socialists can find a way to interpret every facet of life as greedy capitalists cheating the poor.
They can get so illogical and be so uninformed about this stuff, it’s unbelievable. You tell them the same things over and over, too. The worst one is anti-gouging laws under emergency situations. All of these things are going to get rationed with government force or by price, and the latter is what will get you more supply faster. They just don’t care. They would rather do it the way Stalin would do it. lol
The thing about price gouging is, as long as somebody didn’t create an artificial shortage there is no reason to worry about the price.
Those bastards.
They killed Kenny!