The View from Right Field

President Obama Beats Every Republican But He Can’t Beat “Any Republican”

In most of the polls so far, President Obama has been beating every Republican in two-person races.  But when the President runs against an unnamed or generic Republican, i.e., “Any Republican,” he often loses.  Which means, I guess, that there is some number of independent voters (which varies from candidate to candidate) who would prefer to vote for somebody other than President Obama but can’t quite convince themselves to do so when faced with certain Republicans.  Part of this, of course, is because each Republican candidate comes with his or her positions on issues.  While a voter might prefer to vote against President Obama in general, a specific Republican might make President Obama look less bad.  The hypothetical “Any Republican” doesn’t have these problems.

Another reason for this difference is that the Republican presidential field is not all that great.  We had potential candidates who might have been good (you can’t be sure until they actually get out there), but they wouldn’t run.  Very understandably, Mitch Daniels decided that the privacy rights of his family were more important than running for President, which is something that a lot of people, including many in the media and those who consider winning more important than principle and fair play, ought to be ashamed of.

Chris Christie seemed like he would have been a good candidate, but Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal had a good point:  Part of what makes Chris Christie so good is that he knows New Jersey.*  Governor Christie probably wouldn’t know certain national issues as well as he knows New Jersey, at least at the start.  (Governors, unlike private citizens – and unlike senators, have a job to do, and they can’t ignore everything else to focus on a campaign or getting ready to campaign.)  With 24-7 news, would Governor Christie been able to get ready?  He could have been ready by the time of the campaign against President Obama, but maybe not by the end of his first news conference as a presidential candidate.  If this is why he decided not to run, that is another unfortunate comment on the system.

Others, like Paul Ryan, may like the detail work of legislation and real policy choices more than the giving speeches and broad generalities of running for president.

And so, with the first votes in New Hampshire (or wherever) just a few weeks away, the candidates the Republicans have are the choices the Republicans have. 

(In this regard, it is too bad that Tim Pawlenty dropped out.  As happened to McCain in 2007-08 and as we have seen in 2011, candidates can go up and down, or down and up.  I understood, when Governor Pawlenty dropped out, after that idiot straw poll in Iowa last July, why he did so.  But it is sad that he did.  By now, after we have had a chance to get to know some of the other candidates, he might have looked pretty good.  But he wasn’t getting the contributions, and he didn’t have enough personal money to finance his own campaign.  It was too bad.)

The only thing you can say is that any plausible Republican candidate (which excludes Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and hopefully Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann) would be better than our current president.  It is just too bad that the process has, over the years, evolved in such a way that so many potentially good candidates are either excluded or exclude themselves.

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* Daniel Henninger, “Gov. Christie Rest His Case,” The Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2011.

Has American Society Become “Mobility Impaired”?

Scott Winship at National Review is very concerned about research indicating that economic mobility is down (“Mobility Impaired”).  People born at the bottom don’t seem to have the same chance to move up the ladder that they used to have.  Here are some excerpts from his article:

“If being raised in the bottom fifth were not a disadvantage and socioeconomic outcomes were random, we would expect to see 20 percent of Americans who started in the bottom fifth remain there as adults, while 20 percent would end up in each of the other fifths. Instead, about 40 percent are unable to escape the bottom fifth. This trend holds true for other measures of mobility: About 40 percent of men will end up in low-skill work if their fathers had similar jobs, and about 40 percent will end up in the bottom fifth of family wealth (as opposed to income) if that’s where their parents were.

Is 40 percent a good or a bad number? On first reflection, it may seem impressive that 60 percent of those starting out in the bottom make it out. But most of them do not make it far out. Only a third make it to the top three fifths. …

How would you feel about your child’s having only a 17 percent chance of achieving the equivalent status as an adult? That’s how many kids with parents in the bottom fifth around 1970 made it to the top two-fifths by the early 2000s. In fact, if the last generation is any guide, your child growing up in the top two-fifths today will have a 60 percent chance of being in the top two fifths as an adult. …

What is clear is that in at least one regard American mobility is exceptional: not in terms of downward mobility from the middle or from the top, and not in terms of upward mobility from the middle — rather, where we stand out is in our limited upward mobility from the bottom. And in particular, it’s American men who fare worse than their counterparts in other countries. One study compared the United States with Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom. It found that in each country, whether looking at sons or at daughters, 23 to 30 percent of children whose fathers were in the bottom fifth of earnings remained in the bottom fifth themselves as adults — except in the United States, where 42 percent of sons remained there.”

When Mr. Winship shifts over to what to do about the situation, he mentions the need for “policies that promote strong economic growth”.  He also talks about how college and divorce (more college for students and less divorce for their parents) seem to correlate with upward mobility.

Megan McArdle talks about the article and the apparent decrease in mobility in a post entitled “The Tyranny of Meritocracy”:

“The ability of one's parents to confer such enduring advantages is obviously unfair. … It is hard to get civic engagement, or respect for the law, when the bottom 40% or so feels that the game is rigged.

The new meritocracy doesn't seem to be much better, on any dimension, than the old aristocracy. It's just more persistent, in every sense of the word.”

While it is not as obvious from reading just these excerpts, when you read the articles themselves (especially Mr. Winship’s) and what Mr. Winship in particular says about possible solutions, you want to scream:  No, the solution is not getting more kids from the bottom fifth into college or reducing unplanned pregnancies or getting rid of legacy admissions to elite private colleges – or anything else like that

The solution is better schools.  The solution is improving the elementary schools and high schools that the bottom fifth attend.  The upper fifth attend really good, if not great, schools.  Most of the second fifth and even the middle attend schools that are good or at least adequate.  But the bottom of the ladder gets the worst schools.  And if we don’t do something about the schools they attend, a much bigger percentage of the bottom fifth, and the one above it, are going to continue stay there instead of moving up.

When it comes to economic mobility, it’s schools.  They’re the problem.  And more importantly, they’re the solution.

The High Cost of College Tuition – Part 2*

In Part 1 of my posts on “The High Cost of College Tuition,” I concluded that the increase in tuition at Yale Law School, which has more than tripled in “real,” i.e., inflation-adjusted, terms over the last 40 years, was ridiculous.  (Actually, there may be other terms that are more appropriate, but I did not want to use them.)  And Yale Law School is not unique or unusual, as this chart, which compares college tuition versus the Consumer Price Index from 1978 to 2011, shows.

In my mind there is no justification for this kind of increase – other than enough students (or their parents) will pay it, and colleges and universities will find a way to spend it once they get it.  One of the reasons tuition has gotten so high is that there are a lot people out there who will spend absurd amounts of money to get their children into the “best” schools.  I have often thought, somewhat facetiously (though perhaps not entirely), that the two areas where people will spend money without really looking at the price tag are medical care (you don’t negotiate in the emergency room**) and college tuition.**

More seriously, it has been suggested that one of the reasons for the large increases in both college costs and medical costs is the lack of productivity increases in medicine and education.  In much of American manufacturing, productivity has dramatically increased over the last 40 years, which has limited increases.  When people complain about the decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States, what they don’t realize is that we make the same amount of manufactured products (actually, more).  It’s just that, because of the increases in productivity, it takes fewer people to make the same amount of “stuff.”  We manufacture as much; we just don’t need as many people to do it.  Because we don’t have such productivity increases in education or medicine, the argument goes, the cost has increased. 

The problem with that argument is that, while there may not have been big per-worker productivity increases in medical care (I don’t know), medical care is much, much better than it was 40 years ago.  New drugs, new equipment, new techniques, etc., have dramatically improved the quality, and results, of medical care over the last 40 years.  But higher education?  I don’t think so.  In no way have the quality and results of higher education gone up over the last 40 years in any way comparable to the cost increases.

So what do we do?  I am going to look at that in Part 3 of these posts.

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* Part 1 is this series of posts is here.

** Especially when, for  a lot of people, somebody else is paying.

*** Obviously, some people do base their college decisions on cost, but enough of them don’t that those who do consider the cost don’t drive the market.

Joan Beck: “To Count the Lord’s Blessings”

As I did the last two years, I am reprinting another of Joan Beck’s Thanksgiving columns.  I do not know how many years she wrote them.  I have copies of those from 1985 through her last column in 1998.  In 2009 I reprinted her column from Thanksgiving 1998.  Last year I reprinted the column form 1989.  This year I am reprinting the first column I have, the one from 1985:

“As we gather together to count the Lord’s blessings, 364 years after the first Thanksgiving Day, we are grateful, O God, for summits and summers and sunshine and Sundays, for a 1464 Dow and a $3.9 billion GNP*, for the 12-0 Bears and their 307-pound rookie, for tax cuts if we get them and tax reform if it works.

Our Fathers’ God to Thee, author of liberty, we give thanks for robotics and fiber-optics and avionics, for microchips and chocolate chips and scholarships and courtship, for artificial bones and bonfires and bonuses and pro bon, for chapels and apples, for Twain and rain and fruited plains and for the love which from our birth over and around us lies.

For cars and cathedrals and ‘Cagney and Lacey.’  For teachers and preachers and all creatures, great and small, we thank Thee, dear Lord, who made them all.  And for 90th birthdays, the 90th Psalm and the 19th hole, for LiveAid, licorice and libraries, for shaloms and slaloms and Shakespeare and shamrocks, for blood donors and Doonsbury and doggerel and down.

O God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, we praise You for neighbors and horses and newborns and newspapers, for teddy bears and gummy bears, for bear hugs, and Bearnaise, for yuppies and Yosemite and yogurt and yule, for veggies and Venice and veterans and vets, for volunteers and vaccinations and Valentines and vespers.

‘I have a dream’ and ‘We shall overcome’ fill us with thankful thoughts this day, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.  So, too, do ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ and ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses yearning to breathe free’ and ‘It’s benign’ and ‘Your baby’s just perfect’ and ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’ and ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want’ and ‘You’re going to make it after all.’

O Lord our God, when we in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made, we thank you for comets and comics and comebacks and commencements, for comforters and common stock and condominiums and compacts, for homes and homers and homecomings and homemakers, for families and family planning and family doctors and family rates.

Eternal Father, strong to save, shoes arm hath bound the restless wave, we are grateful this day for the promises of genetic engineering and the hopes of Geneva, for geniuses, ‘General Hospital,’ geraniums and gender.  For modems and mammograms and amazing grace, for chess and chestnuts, cheeseburgers and checks, and for fathers and forefathers and grandfathers and founding fathers, our thanks abound.

For sons and soup and soul and soap, for daughters and day dreams and data banks and daylight savings time, for rebates and rehab and reapers and readers, for détente and detergent, dentists and democracy, we thank Thee, God of grade and God of glory.  And for whatsoever things are true, for evidence and things unseen, for a shelter from the stormy blast and for an eternal home, Ginnie Maes and gingerbread and gin rummy and jokes we list today as blessings, God of the Earth, the sky, the sea.  We are grateful, too, for books and book stores and bonds and bongos, for mushrooms and museums and munchies and music, for smokers who quit and parents who don’t give up, for Edison, Einstein, elegies and elms, for elephants and electricity and eels and eggs.

Lord of all, to Thee we raise our Thanksgiving praise for brothers and mothers and significant others, for EMTs and IRAs and HMOs and VCRs, for Keoghs and zeros and heroes, and for dawn after dark, for healing after hurt, for rest after work and life after life, and most of all that ‘neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’”

For those of you who may be interested, Joan Beck’s daughter, Melinda Beck, wrote an interesting article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Sole Survivors: Adult Orphans Preserve, Adapt Traditions”.  You can find it here, at least as long as the link works.

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* I wonder if the number here is a typo.  I don’t know.

The High Cost of College Tuition – Part 1*

Last summer, even though limits were put on government spending as part of the agreement to increase the national debt limit (and there may have even been some cuts in spending), one thing that did not get cut or limited was spending on Pell grants.**  In fact, it is my understanding that spending for Pell grants was even increased.  And recently, President Obama announced changes in federal college loan programs that are supposed to make college loans a little cheaper for some students.

All of this is in the name of making college “more affordable”.  Which got me to thinking about what I paid for tuition to Yale Law School 40 years ago (ouch, I’m old) and wondering what the tuition there is now.  I remember that, at the time, I thought the tuition was pretty high – and it was given the money we had and the value of money back then.  For the three years I went to Yale, from 1971 to 1974, the annual tuition was $2800, $3100 and $3300, respectively.  It was a total of $9200 for three years, which was a lot of money.

Then I checked to see what Yale’s tuition is now.  The tuition for the 2011-12 school year is $50,275.***  In other words, what I paid for three years would cover 37% of just one semester now.  But that’s unfair.  There has been a lot of inflation since 1971-74.  You can’t compare prices now with prices then without factoring in inflation.

So I went to the U.S. Department of Labor records to see how much inflation there has been since the early 1970s.  I used the Consumer Price Index-All Urban Consumers because the DOL has numbers for this index all the way back to 1913.  For ease of calculation I decided to compare the CPI number for January 1973 (midway through my time in law school) with the CPI number for September 2011, the start of the school year.  The January 1973 number was 42.6.  The number for September 2011 was 226.889.  Doing a quick calculation tells us that $9200 in January 1973 is equal to $49,000 in today’s money.  (See, algebra does come in handy in the real world.)

My first reaction was that $49,000 is about the same as today’s tuition of $50,275 – until I remembered that $49,000 represented three years of tuition, not just one.  In other words, while the cost of living went up 430% from January 1973 to today, Yale Law School tuition went up over 1500%.  In “real” terms, tuition more than tripled.  The tuition I paid for three years wouldn’t cover even one year of tuition today.  Which is, of course, ridiculous.

[ End of Part 1]

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* I have been wanting to write about increases in college tuition for quite a while.  I have come to the realization that I am not going to be able to do one long post, which is what I wanted to do.  So, I have decided to write several shorter posts that will hopefully tie together.  This is the first.

**  Laura Meckler, "College Grants Spared From Spending Cuts," The Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2011. Pell grants are grants (not loans) given by the federal government to college students, mostly to undergraduates, with financial need.  For the 2011-2012 school year, the maximum Pell grant is $5,550 per year.

*** For 2011-2012 there are also administrative and activities fees of an additional $2,250, but I don’t know what those were back when I was there, so I will just look at “tuition”.

Are We Good Enough for President Obama?

On June 17, 1953, workers in Communist East Germany revolted in protest of new, increased work standards that the government tried to impose.  The protests were put down by Soviet tanks.

In response, Bertold Brecht, German poet, playwright and theater director, who had actually moved to East Germany from the West in 1949, wrote this poem:

“After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”

Bertold Brecht’s poem came to mind when I read, over the weekend, that President Obama said the United States has “been a little lazy” in terms of “selling America and trying to attract new business into America.”  This was after the President said that America has “gotten a little soft” and that we “have lost our ambition, our imagination”.

Maybe Bertold Brecht was onto something.  If the American people aren’t good enough for Barack Obama, maybe he should choose himself another people to be President of.

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Update (11/15/11 11:00 am):  Corrected a typo in the last paragraph.

Thank You, Eric Holder

Thank you, Eric Holder.  Thank you for providing us a look into the mindset and thought processes of the top leaders of the Obama administration.

Many of you have read about “Fast and Furious” (the United States Department of Justice program, not the movies).  I am not sure I fully understand the program, but it apparently involved the US government sending more than 650 firearms into the illegal gun trade between criminal gangs, etc., in the United States and Mexico.  The idea was, I guess, to somehow trace these guns and prove something.  I am not exactly sure what.  It was, in any case, the kind of really dumb program that it takes a government to do.  The George W. Bush administration had the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina.  President Obama has Fast and Furious.

But the stupidity of the program is not what I wanted write about.  I’m not even that interested in the whole question of, to coin a phrase, what Attorney General Holder knew (about the program) and when he knew it.  Instead, what is interesting to me are Attorney General Holder’s comments to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Brian Terry, the Border Patrol Agent who was killed last year with one of the Fast and Furious guns and about his responsibility for the program as head of the Department of Justice.

As background, you have to know that in March of this year, a now-former U.S. Attorney told Agent Terry’s parents that none of the Fast and Furious guns were used to kill Agent Terry.   Except that was not true.  One of the Fast and Furious guns was involved.

And so, Attorney General Holder appeared before the Senate Judiciary committee this past week, and it does not appear he was happy about having to do so.  According to one article, he “chided Congress for ‘gotcha games’ and ‘political finger pointing’”.  (Remember, he was appearing before a Senate committee.  The Democrats control the Senate.)

In any case, the article continues:

“Asked if he wanted to apologize to the family [of Agent Terry], Holder declined, saying only he regretted what happened. …

Sen. John Cornyn R-Texas] … asked if Holder thought it was his responsibility to have known about Fast and Furious.

‘There are 115,000 employees in the Department,’ Holder said.  ‘I cannot be expected to know the details of every operation on a day-to-day basis.’”

Obviously, Attorney General Holder’s refusal to apologize did not last long – at least once it hit the media.  The next day (probably after a little coaching from somebody with a better feel for the public relations impact of his refusal to apologize, which would be just about anybody with half a brain), Attorney General Holder sent Agent Terry’s parents a letter saying he was sorry.

But it is not that Attorney General Holder just barely got it right – finally – that is interesting.  Rather, it is his initial response – because that shows his real mindset.  And his initial response was that he was not apologizing.  He wasn’t even saying he was sorry.

Not only that, but when asked, in effect, whether he had any responsibility for the debacle that was Fast and Furious, he said no.  There are a lot of people in the DOJ, he said.  I can’t be responsible for what they do – just because I’m head of the department.

Wow.  There is an elitism and an arrogance in those statements that is mind-boggling – and a lack of caring about the real people that were involved.  Talk about the 1% and the 99%.  Maybe we need an Occupy DOJ.

Also while President Obama is obviously smart enough to not say things like Attorney General Holder did in public, I wonder whether Attorney General Holder’s response doesn’t reflect, in at least some ways, President Obama’s mindset, too.  It certainly fits with those statements that candidate Obama made to a group of supporters in San Francisco about those Pennsylvanians who cling to their guns and religion. 

Finally, think about this:  Attorney General Holder wouldn’t apologize to the parents of a United States Border Patrol Agent who was killed with a gun that was, effectively, put in the hands of his killers by a stupid government program, but his boss, President Obama, wanted to go to Hiroshima to apologize to the Japanese people for dropping the atomic bombs that ended World War II.

The Cost of Deficits – Part 2

Ten days I wrote a post worrying about a call by French President Nicolas Sarkozy for China to support the European Financial Stability Facility.  A couple of days ago, there as an even scarier story on Reuters.  Here is an excerpt:

“Without directly referring to the euro zone's bailout fund [i.e., the European Financial Stability Fund], [Russian] Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it clear that Russia would not be willing to lend directly to it, preferring to channel any support through the IMF.

Lavrov added that this was the joint position of the so-called BRICS* caucus of emerging markets nations that have accumulated trillions of dollars in foreign reserves to insure against external shocks.

‘Our countries are ready to take part in joint efforts, including the provision of credits, under those rules and channels that exist in the International Monetary Fund,’ Lavrov told a news briefing in Moscow.”

Europe and the IMF are looking to borrow from Russia?  China might lend, at least in part, to help keep its markets in Europe from collapsing going, but Russia is run by Vladimir Putin, who called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.”  And: “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”

We need to get our budget and our deficit under control.  We need to spend less and we need to collect more taxes.  Republicans who won’t collect more taxes (by getting rid of special interest deductions and credits and corporate welfare, among other things) are wrong.  Democrats who won’t cut back on spending (to levels of just a few years ago) are wrong.  And all of them are risking our future.

Because being indebted to a Vladimir Putin-led Russia is scary.  Very scary.

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* Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa

Afghanistan: I’m Concerned.

Remember Afghanistan?  Remember the 33,000 troop surge that President Obama sent there (and set a date to bring back in the same speech).  Well, the last of the surge is getting ready to come home, and I don’t think things are going all that well.

Secretary of State Clinton went to Afghanistan and Pakistan last month and talked about a revamped approach: “Fight, Talk, Build.”  The problem with this approach is, obviously, you have to have somebody to talk to, and it’s not clear we do.

In September, Ryan Crocker, our ambassador to Afghanistan, summed up we have to do in Afghanistan (according to an article in The Wall Street Journal*):

“Peace negotiations with the Taliban are unlikely to bear results until additional military pressure is brought on the insurgents, the new American ambassador to Kabul said ….

‘The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile, Ambassador Ryan Crocker cautioned in an interview ….’”

The problem is, I don’t think we are doing this.  In a New York Times article about Secretary of State Clinton’s trip, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger wrote:

“[A]n emerging American strategy aims to attack the Haqqanis on both sides of the border.  An eight-day NATO offensive this month [i.e., October] involving 11,000 allied troops and 25,000 Afghan security forces in seven provinces in eastern Afghanistan killed or captured more than 200 Haqqani fighters and commanders, allied officials said; the pressure on the Pakistani side is being generated almost entirely by the drone strikes.”

That doesn’t sound like the kind of population security/counterinsurgency strategy that worked when we finally implemented it in Iraq.  Instead, it sounds that the old “search and destroy” strategy that failed in Vietnam and that we used in Iraq BP (i.e., “before Petraeus”).  “Body count” is not how you succeed in this kind of war.  If body counts are what we are focusing on now, or at least talking about, that is not a good sign.  Because body counts are not counterinsurgency and population security.

If we really want the other side to talk to us in Afghanistan, we need to bring steady, continued pressure on them.  We need to demonstrate our seriousness and that they can’t wait us out.  But it does not seem like we are demonstrating that seriousness and that determination.  With the surge just about gone, it’s unclear whether we have enough troops to do population security any more.  So we’re doing sweeps and talking about body counts of enemies killed instead of numbers of Afghanis protected.

Back in Washington, according to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal**, the Obama administration is yet again trying to figure out what strategy they want to follow in Afghanistan:

“The Obama administration is exploring a shift in the military’s mission in Afghanistan to an advisory role as soon as next year, senior officials said, a move that would scale back U.S. combat duties well ahead of their scheduled conclusion at the end of 2014.

Such a move would have broad implications for the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.  It could begin a phase-out of the current troop-intensive approach, which focuses on protecting the Afghan population, in favor of a greater focus on targeted counterterrorism operations, as well as training the Afghan military. …

The recent discussions reflect ambivalence within the administration over whether the counterinsurgency approach was merited.

Some administration officials privately argued that it was too costly and unrealistic, compared to a counterterrorism strategy that relies more heavily on using Special Operations forces to hunt down and kill militants.”

It almost seems like the Administration is looking for some kind of quick fix for Afghanistan like they keep trying for the economy:  Cut Social Security by two percentage points for one year and hope unemployment will do down.  Except companies won’t hire permanent employees because of a one-year tax break.  And the other side in Afghanistan isn’t going to negotiate with somebody who can’t figure out what their strategy and whose main goal seems to be getting out as opposed to getting the job done. 

That is why I am concerned about Afghanistan.

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* Yaroslav Trofimov and Maria Abi-Habib, “Taliban Need ‘Pain’ to Talk, Envoy Says,” The Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2011.

** Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. Explores Faster Afghan Handover,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2011.

The Cubs’ New Big Three* - And the One Who Got Away?

According to Paul Sullivan in today’s Chicago Tribune, Jed Hoyer, the Cubs new general manager, said this in yesterday’s press conference:

"‘It does take time,’ he said. ‘We do have to turn around our farm system to where we're churning out players every year. There is some patience with regard for that. (But) even with a smaller payroll (such as in San Diego), every single year you want to do everything you can in the offseason to put a good product on the field at the major league level. In no year are we going to ask for patience.

‘(But) where we want to be eventually — a homegrown team that people will recognize year after year — that will take patience.’"

Building from within.  “A homegrown team that people will recognize year after year.”  Those all sound good.  But we’ve heard them before.  It’s what Andy MacPhail said in 1995 (and he also had two World Series rings), and what others have said, too.  So, we’ll see.

One question, though:  If the player development function needs so much work, why did Oneri Fleita just get a four-year extension?

And one more question:  Reports are that the St. Louis Cardinals have asked for, and received, permission from the Philadelphia Phillies to talk to Ryne Sandberg about the Cardinals’ managerial opening.  If Ryno does get the job, does he have to apologize to Bruce Sutter?

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* Unfortunately, they are neither Tinker to Evers to Chance nor Williams, Santo and Banks.