It's Time to Limit Exemptions to Childhood Vaccinations

The recent case of a student of a Plano ISD elementary school getting infected by measles should be an eye-opener to parents, teachers, health care professionals, and most importantly, the state officials of Texas. The Collin County Health Care Services sent a letter on January 12, 2016 to parents of the Schell Elementary School in Richardson, notifying them of the measles case. According to the letter as reported by the media, including The Dallas Morning News, a student, who had traveled to a foreign country, returned to the school on January 5, 2016, the first day of the new year, and might have infected other students and staff with measles. The student was not vaccinated, and might have gotten measles as he was traveling in a foreign country. The student showed the symptom of measles on January 6, 2016. This case illustrates the risk that is posed by the scale of so-called conscientious exemptions in the recent years.

In 2003, Texas legislature passed a law that paved the way for unwilling parents to skip mandatory vaccinations for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A and B, varicella and meningococcal diseases on religious and conscientious ground. Prior to that, the exemptions were granted only to students who had underlying health problems. The unintended, but largely expected, consequence of the 2003 Texas law was multiplication of exemptions sought. As a result, measles, a preventable disease, that was largely eliminated from the U.S. in 2000 after a decades-long, sustained vaccination campaign reared its ugly head in recent years, partly because of the so-called junk science that had tied vaccination to autism. Although negligible compared to 894,134 reported cases of measles in 1941, 667 cases of measles, considered significantly high in today's standard, were reported in 2014. This is absolutely unacceptable, and we all have responsibility to reverse this suicidal course of action. In the last legislative session (2015), the Dallas area Republican Rep. Jason Villalba filed a measure to limit the number of non-medical exemptions. Unfortunately his measure didn't get even a chance for hearing as many of the lawmakers from his party were opposed to this measure because of their so-called small government philosophy. However, this has nothing to do with small government, but to do solely with health care policy. What these Tea Party-backed lawmakers have failed to grasp that their highly partisan political stand has created a perfect storm for a health care disaster of alarming proportion with consequences that will demand significantly larger intervention by government agencies. These so-called pro-small government, anti-establishment, Tea Party-backed lawmakers should go through some political introspection to see what's at stake: children's health. Their foolhardy action today will lead to explosion in cases of preventable diseases tomorrow, and that will likely trigger a potential public demand for government agencies to take a more pro-active stand to cut down exemptions to childhood vaccination. To avoid that political embarrassment, these lawmakers should come around and stand behind the Villalba measure as their first legislative action item in the next session (2017). Better late than never.

Culture of Victimhood Proves Me Wrong on Culture of Complaint

Back in 1993, a book written by an art critic, Robert Hughes, was published that drew sharp criticism from various corners. I truly thought that Culture of Complaint was nothing but a heaping monologue of an author who was devoid of any insight into American way of life and focused on the mere negatives of societal degradation. Fast forward twenty-three years to an era of explosion of information, with world at the fingertips of an overwhelming number of people, and for many, world confined to their smartphones and tablets. I find myself to be wrong on how I have evaluated the Culture of Complaint. Actually in many ways, the book proves not only right in reflecting the popular and prevailing mood of the people, but also provides a window of opportunity for readers to assess and analyze the likely cause of frustration and complaint of people in the current time.

It's important to remember that there is a fine, often a gray, line that separates advocating for victims from the state of victimhood. Over the centuries of human history, inspirational leaders took stand to advocate for victims. Their overarching goals were always to provide dignity, honor and rights of people who had been subjugated to the dominance of others based on race, religion, color, or any other pretext. These leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela stood out to be aspirational, and always strived toward fighting against discrimination and levelling the field for all the people to have a society based on fairness, dignity and opportunity for all. Advocating for victims espouses a line of thought leadership that goes beyond just fighting against the culture  discrimination of one segment of population by another, it also transcends into a vision that  promotes hope, confidence and optimism among all the people. This takes guts and grits to move people forward as a whole, not defending one group of people against the rest. In the contrary, the state and culture of victimhood often emerges from thinking narrow and defensive. People who feel victim are the ones who are often afraid of changes that may be thrust upon them by circumstances, or other people such as immigrants, or political process. These people fear of losing their space to impending real, or imaginary, changes, and want to protect their way of life by adopting a protectionist line of defense. The state and culture of victimhood gives rise to extreme viewpoints to both left and right of political spectrum, leading to calls for building walls on the southern border, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, imposing blanket ban on Muslim immigrants, putting up defense barrier against "micro-aggression" and creating so-called "safe space". The culture of victimhood over the time erodes the value and virtue of free society and, in an unintended consequence, gives rise to a political climate of fear and defeat.

Fiscal Postmortem Shows a Robust U.S. Economy in 2015

As the new year is flush with many prognostications on the health of the nation's economy for 2016, it's prudent to look back and assess how we as a nation have performed economically in 2015. The past year was notable for collapsing oil prices, slowdown in Chinese economy and subpar domestic stock market performance. However, the overall U.S. economy was on the strong footing in the past year. Five key economic metrics--Jobless Rate, Wage Growth, Retail Sales, Consumer Confidence and Inflation--seemed to have captured the broader economic health of our nation. An unbiased analytical dissection may provide insight into underlying strength/weakness of the U.S. economy last year (2015).

* Jobless Rate: Heading into 2016, there is ample proof that U.S. economy is headed, barring an unanticipated shock, into near-full employment as can be evidenced by a significant drop in unemployment rate by six basis points from 5.6 percent in December 2014 to 5 percent in December 2015. During this time, the U.S. economy has added 2.65 million jobs, averaging little over 200,000 jobs per month, definitely a feat by its own standard. Although many who oppose Obama administration on one pretext or other would like to overlook these hard facts and focus on the low employee participation rate in the economy, they couldn't link this phenomenon to poor performance of our economy as nobody knows if this is an outcome of expanded healthcare coverage due to Obamacare, thus obviating the need for some to continue to work for uninterrupted healthcare coverage, or renewed vigor of millions to pursue entrepreneurial zeal, or something else.

* Wage Growth: This is the real weak spot in the U.S. economy as the income of American families has remained more or less stagnant since the country has emerged from the shadow of the worst recession in generations in March 2009. The average hourly wage in December 2015 stood at $25.24 compared to $24.62 a year ago, thus making a meager gain of 2.52 percent in income gain in the past year. However, as a natural outcome of the U.S. economy heading toward the near-full employment in 2016, the nation is expected to see a brighter future this year in terms of income rise.

* Retail Sales: Since consumer activity drives almost two-third of our economy, retail sales is an important indicator for the overall health of our economy. Preliminary data show that retail sales over the past year jumped by 2.2 percent, not a jaw-dropping increase, but nonetheless robust. At the end of last year, the December retail sales stood at $448 billion compared to a little over $438 billion a year ago. Part of the stunted growth was due to falling oil prices and the subsequent dips at the pumps.

* Consumer Confidence: American consumers seemed more optimistic about the economy than most of the politicians, especially Republican presidential candidates. The consumer confidence, a barometer of consumers' outlook about nation's economy, as reported by the private Conference Board, for all of the last year, moved in a healthy range of readings over 90, hitting the highest level of 103.8 in January, then dipping to the lowest level in July (91), and eventually ending the year with a reading of 96.5.

* Inflation: American consumers for the most part of the last year enjoyed low gasoline prices, putting some extra cash for spending at retail stores or restaurants. However, these savings didn't always get infused into the economy as consumers remained cautious and made smart buying decisions, a behavioral change that had transformed the American shoppers' buying habit during 2008-09 Great Recession. The core-inflation, measured as change in CPI minus that of food and fuel, rose about 2 percent last year, thus allaying any fear of rising inflation that many economists had thought would be triggered by Federal Reserve's long-pursued low interest rate regime. At the December 2015 Open Market Committee meeting, Fed policymakers at last announced a modest rate hike after keeping the overnight federal funds rate to record zero percent for the past nine years.

Looking back in the rearview mirror, last year (2015) seems to be a robust year in terms of nation's economic health with America's economic engine firing on several, not all, cylinders. Hope that this year (2016) will be a transformative year for American economy that will eventually begin to fire our growth engine on all cylinders.