A Better Solution than Budget Cutting

President Obama's proposed that we cut roughly one trillion dollars of spending each year from the federal budget. That's going to cause an enormous amount of pain for honest people just barely making ends meet, as well as exacerbate our already painfully slow economic recovery. There is a much better solution to our problems and it amazes me that our leaders are unable to see it.

The black market or underground economy is estimated to be larger than a trillion dollars; possibly as much as double that much (eight to ten percent of our gross domestic product--and even larger in most other nations). Now suppose we could heavily tax that activity. Then we wouldn't have to reduce spending as much, and could make crime a lot less profitable as well. It has all sorts of nice side effects too, like creating a huge disincentive to illegal immigration, all forms of vice, and even theft. Right now, a dollar stolen will buy more goods than a dollar earned honestly. That's a terrible state of affairs. Why don't we reverse that and make sure that a dollar earned buys more than one that is stolen?

It's relatively easy to do because there is nothing you can do with money (no matter how you get it) except to eventually spend it. Even putting it into the bank, or stock market, is a form of spending it. And if you don't spend it, it will evaporate slowly anyhow--we call that process inflation.

One way to accomplish this is to create a new kind of tax that only applies to money earned via the black market. There are a lot of different ways to do that. The easiest is probably a very high national sales tax, like 100%. It's easy because we already have the infrastructure at almost every point of sale to calculate it. Suppose that for every dollar of income that you reported, the government gave you a dollar's worth of national sales tax credit. Then no one who could report their income would ever have to pay that sales tax because having the dollar to spend also meant they'd have a dollar of credit too. But people working here illegally, or acquiring their income in ways that cannot be reported would not have the credit. Thus criminals would effectively be taxed at the rate of 50%--higher than anyone earning their money legally.

There are even better ways too, but they're not as easy to implement. The best way I can imagine wouldn't just solve the problem of taxing the black market, but would also protect us from exploitation by the people we do business with, help our doctors maintain our health, protect us from identity theft, and give us all a whole new source of revenue by allowing us to sell our consumption data (rather than allow banks and credit card companies to sell it without our consent and keep the proceeds themselves.) Effectively it's a universal transactor which is an entity that stands between us and the people we do business with. Only the universal transactor would actually know who we are. We pay it, then it pays our creditors ensuring that they cannot lose or sell information about us.

Putting some soul into health care

My previous three posts have all been about health care. I'ld like to briefly summarize them here and then finish. In the first one I define a governmental agency, like the National Institute of Health, that would act as a transactor for every payment that can be considered a health care expense or a purchase of health care insurance and why I think it is such a wise approach to health care reform. In the second one I outline how that change would affect the basic components of our present health care system and better motivate them to focus on on their specific role, and not just any old way they might increase profits. (And assumed that the present practice of allowing employers to pay the health care expenses of their employees with pre-tax dollars was on its way out.)

In the third one, the previous post, I brought your attention to a particular node or place in cyberspace that would hold all of your medical information and suggested it should exist inside the transactor's databases because that is the most private information about us and that should be very important to our government to protect. The goal is to create an environment where that node actually becomes a personal life advocate for us. A sort of virtual personal assistant that remembers everything about us, has a nearly perfect knowledge of our health history, diet, habits, and myriads of other information that it can use to detect the sorts of things that correlate with opportunities for preventative medicine and make us aware of those choices.

Building a soul for ourselves in cyberspace

Health isn't just being physically fit. It's being educated enough to at least make informed health choices. It's having the infrastructure a person needs to function. Those things are just forms of preventative medicine. The real medicine we'd need by neglecting them is more expensive than the non-medical preventative medicine we need to treat them. If citizens are so important to their governments, how is it no government has even thought to create a computer program that looks for the people it can easily find, would benefit from help, and that it can easily afford to help? That's what this is. Nothing more than a task running on some server in cyberspace with no more to do than be there for you. It's job is to keep you as happy and healthy as you, and it, can figure out how to do.

Think of it as a crude attempt to create a soul for humanity designed to help us be us. We create this computer program that knows a lot about everyone, and uses that information to help us make wiser decisions. If, for example, your behavior changed in some way that correlated well with people who later had a medical problem, this little advocate will make you aware of it. Have a pain you don't understand? It might save you a visit to the doctor or direct the ambulance to where you're lying. If you wanted to change something about yourself, it could be of help since it could look for what worked for others like you that wanted the same thing and got there. If you wanted to learn something, same deal. It will be capable of whatever we are clever enough to teach it. As computers grow in power and software in sophistication I wouldn't be surprised if it renders the field of psychology utterly obsolete in just a few years by doing a much better job of helping us see ourselves clearly and make the changes we want.

The idea is to create a focal point, like the iPhone did, where everyone is invited to deploy their solution to help us be better people (or get more out of the device). Does this imply that I consider people devices? Yes, I suppose it does. Why is that a problem? Doesn't an actor want to get the most out of their instrument? I'm not suggesting we look for ways for others to get more out of you. Just how we can enable you to get the most out of you. No one is going to use an iPhone application that they find annoying. It's the same thing here. If the sort of software that emerges from a system like this was a nuisance, who would use it? Okay, I suppose masochists would love it. But they can almost certainly find devices already that are better suited to amuse them.

Creating the incentive to empower us

Like the iPhone, I'm advocating a standardized forum where anyone can deploy software they believe would be useful helping people become better. We will be the ones to decide how we interact with the data made available this way, and the developers of the software we choose to use will be paid a tiny amount per user by the transactor. The first applications will most likely be electronic patient advocates that help people avoid treatment mistakes (like taking a drug while you are using a different drug that is incompatible,) follow progress, and be sources of information, encouragement, and a connection to supporters. But I would expect lots of stuff to emerge, from software that helps kids do well in school or learn an instrument, to ones that teach adults how to eat more wisely or cope with tragedy.

I see these things as going a long way to lowering the level of overall uncertainty and stress in our lives. I think collectively they'd lead to substantially lower health care costs and healthier longer lives for most people. I also think they would push many other boundaries that limit the opportunities that appear to us and thereby increase the growth rate of our economy.

But most importantly, I see this as a solution we can adopt very quickly and without undue immediate impact (other than starting to phase out employer paid health care.) We can even delay the flow of insurance premiums through the provider to give that industry time to come up with standardized contracts, computer procedures and the other infrastructure needed for a smooth transition. The providers should be routed that way as quickly as possible because there is simply no reason not to. The limiting factor there is to standardize the format of medical information and design and deploy equipment well suited for error-proof collection and delivery of it. All of that should happen regardless of what we do because we need that information for so many things--from better evaluating the efficacy of treatments to the competency of practitioners.

I should also note that I've pretty much avoided any discussion of funding mainly because this suggestion is actually independent of how health care costs are ultimately reckoned with. This is just about how we might get the most out of whatever we do decide to spend.

Resistance is meaninglessness

The most useful things I know of are all actually just tokens for metaphysical entities. Like words, formulas, money, contracts, and yeah, I suppose, even people. And although every bit of their utility never leaves the metaphysical realm, they don't become very usable until they have a functioning physical form.

A meme isn't even knowable by it's holder until we have a word or phrase that can adequately contain it. A fact about the structure of our world isn't all that much more tangible even after we've outfitted it with a perfectly tailored formula. It can take a great deal of training just to see a blurred image of it. And cash seems more real to us that the real things we trade it for that seem mostly fake! This should amaze us.

Contracts can actually be too real. And people aren't just real, their physical manifestation can even be nice, naughty, or if you're really lucky, both. My only point in all of this is to illustrate what wonderful things can happen when something metaphysical somehow gets inside a body that suits it. Because I think that trick might just lead us to a great deal more than cheaper health care.

So I've long wondered what metaphysical concept, property, or idea could be embodied into a tangible entity whose presence in our environment would just naturally lead to our becoming deeply enfranchised. (Whenever I ask my wife something like this she looks at me or responds like I've been caught preparing to torture her. It's not easy to discuss this stuff.)

I stumbled onto what I think might be a solution when I was looking at what a mess my room had become and wishing I had a copy of me to do all the things I didn't feel like doing but knew I should do. I know I could tell the clone what it ought to be doing and that it would agree because it could see I had much more important things to do. But by that point I didn't want my clone to do any work because I wanted his complete attention while I explained what seemed like a clever way to solve the problem I mentioned above. Besides, if my room wasn't such a mess I wouldn't have stumbled in the first place.

Competing with your virtual clone

I realized that if we are all better at telling ourselves what to do than we are at doing it ourselves, then maybe, if we could make a virtual copy of ourselves more tangible, we could use it to improve ourselves. It could be a very natural, private, and compelling process--if the only way to endow my avatar with a property was to achieve it in real life then I might be onto something. And I started to look for ways that might work.

Then I noticed that my soul is already in cyberspace (well, bits of it), why not just make it official as a tangible presence for ourselves by pulling those bits together? We can do that to some extent already at sites like facebook and youtube, but I'm picturing a node, or URI, that's connected in various ways to a great deal more. The safest node in cyberspace is the one that represents us in the universal health care transactor I described earlier.

You can't secure liberties without robustly engineering them into the fabric of society. You already have lots of nodes that represent you in cyberspace. I'm not too happy about that. In fact, you might say I'm sort of ticked off that our government is so careless about defending our privacy and the integrity of our identity. Just because it's more intangible than I am doesn't mean it's not rather important to me. And just because the bits of your soul are presently scattered about cyberspace doesn't mean that a clever piece of software can't box them together faster than you can say 'unholy packet.'

Giving our souls an address in cyberspace is the best way to ensure our government puts protecting them above even us. We just have to ensure that if they fail there is no longer a way for them to collect our taxes. It's the ultimate identity protector because it need never share anything the identifier doesn't have a need to know. If the software running the database is open source, and can be proven by anyone to be correct, and the mechanisms is uses to protect us from even the most sophisticated attempts of our own government to get at it are verifiably robust, I believe we will be a lot better off than if we leave things to our leadership to work out. This is a technology that needs to emerge from academia fully tested and ready for governments to deploy or be left out of a new economic reality.

I guess I never got to what I promised in the prior post--a mechanism whereby we encourage ourselves to make wiser health care choices. Whoops. Maybe I'll make it there with the next one. Right now I'd like to bite something resembling food.