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To get us into the mood of looking at this, and as a set-up for starting the analysis, ask yourself this question: Am I in the top 1% of income earners?
Unless your Adusted Gross Income (AGI) for 2009 was $343,927 or more, you’re not. Here’s a table I put together from the latest IRS data that shows the breakdown from 2001-2009.
And here’s a graph that shows the same information.
This graph, however, gets so distorted by the incredibly high incomes of the 0.1% that it makes the rest of the data hard to read. Taking out the 0.1% numbers compresses the Y axis and makes the remaining 99.9% much easier to see.
One thing that jumps out in both charts is that most of the downturn in income in 2007-2009 came at the very top ends of income. At the top 50%, 25%, and even 10% levels, 2009 incomes were essentially the same as in 2007. At the top 5% and above, however, we see a downturn, with the downturn increasing as the incomes rise. Without data to refer to it is impossible to be certain, but this would seem to correlate very strongly to a loss in capital gains income as the stock market crashed. If that were true, as a result we would see a corresponding rise in the average tax rate paid by the top tiers in 2008-2009 (Capital gains tax rates are, on average, lower than the rates paid in normal income tax.).
The table here is also from the same IRS dataset. It confirms this relationship.
The rates for the top 3% bracket and above are all higher, the rates for the 4% and 5% bracket are basically flat, and the rates for the 10%, 25%, 50%, and bottom 50% brackets are all lower. These lower tax rates are as a result of stimulus measures and would have had a similar, but smaller effect on the upper brackets as well had they not had such a high portion of their income coming from capital gains (and potentially tax-free municipal bonds or similar instruments). Here’s the same data in graph form.
An important point here is that the losses in the stock market, unlike losses in other income due to a cutback in hours or a lowering of one’s salary, can be deducted in following years. This means that during a year with a loss, no capital gains income is recorded and other forms of income become a higher portion of AGI, which raises the average tax rate. When stock markets recover, the losses from the previous years can be offset, which brings the cash back into the investor’s hands, but again is not recorded as taxable income. This keeps the AGI at the higher level on the remaining income, but vastly reduces it when compared to cash flow, or actual income.
So it’s clear that the very wealthy – the top 1% — are paying a higher tax rate than everyone else, but they also get some advantages from the tax code that allow them to write off losses that would not be available to a person not able to invest heavily in the stock market. I’m not here to argue whether this portion of the tax code is correct or not, but is important to understand that much of the income fluctuation in the top brackets is not coming from lost wages, but from lost investments, and that our tax code allows those losses to be recovered in future years.
We often hear the claim that the top 1% pay a greater share of the tax burden than the bottom 90% combined. That’s only correct when talking about income taxes, however, and the payments made for Social Security and Medicare are often ignored because they make the statement much less strong. We can do some easy calculations against this IRS data to see what the impact would be, so let’s take a look at the results.
In 2009, the Social Security tax rate was 6.2% on the first $106,800 of income. No Social Security tax is paid on income above this level. Medicare is taxed at 1.45% for all wages. In order to do this analysis, some assumptions need to be made about what portion of income at the top tiers comes from non-wage sources. I tried to find data on this and was unsuccessful, so I selected high numbers – numbers that would tilt the analysis in the direction of showing the upper tiers paying more taxes – in my analysis. The table here shows what I did.
Notes:
[1] This analysis estimates Social Security income by using data from the CBO here and looking at the 50% employee contribution. Because the purpose here is to show how the addition of Social Security and Medicare payments greatly shifts the tax burden to the lower income brackets, I am not overly concerned about absolute accuracy. It is important to note that Social Security is capped, which means that you never have to pay for it for incomes over a certain level ($106,300 in 2009). The result is that for 2009, everyone in the 10% and higher income bracket paid only up to that amount. It also means that any shortfalls for this simulation must therefore come from the brackets below 10% and would shift the tax burden in that direction.
As a graph it looks like this – Note the comparison to straight federal income tax payment shares. It shows very clearly that the additional of FICA to the analysis makes a huge difference and absolutely should not be ignored when discussing overall tax burdens. With FICA included, the top 1% doesn’t even cover as big of a share as their neighbors in the 1.1-2.0% bracket, although this bracket’s share shrinks as well. Once into the lower 98% of earners, adding FICA greatly increased their share of overall taxation and changes the graph dramatically.
It is obvious that taxpayers in the higher income brackets pay more taxes, and even pay a higher percentage of their gross income in taxes, when compared to lower tax brackets. What is absent in the discussion is a reasonable look at what percentage of disposable gross income is paid in taxes. Without this calculation, it is not possible to evaluate and discuss the impact different taxes have on different income brackets.
Disposable gross income could be calculated in many different ways. A simple, straightforward, and reasonable baseline to begin the discussion would be at the poverty level. US Census Bureau poverty levels for 2009 and other years can be found here. Poverty levels are calculated for size and age of households, but because of the limitations in the data from the IRS, we will have to select one dollar amount to use for the analysis. The average household size in the USA right now is around 3 people. It was smaller in the past, but economic constraints are leading to larger households. Because of this, for this analysis I will use a three-person household with one child as the poverty baseline. That leads us to $17,268 as our poverty threshold.
The way I calculated the tax burden as a proportion of disposable income is as follows: Federal Taxes Paid (With and without FICA)/(Adjusted Gross Income – Federal Taxes Paid – Poverty Threshold. I found the average (As opposed to split levels) incomes for each bracket by taking the total taxes paid and dividing it by the total number of filers in each bracket. For those of you who were happy that you squeaked into the 1% bracket by crossing the $343,000 level, take a deep breath: The average income for members of the 1% bracket is $960,000. Here is the table.
And as a graph.
Note that the bottom 50% of Americans are showing a tax burden now that actually exceeds their disposable income. In reality, most of these people are somewhere between doing OK and scraping by, but just as the ultra-rich at the 1% and higher end of the spectrum have their peaks skewed due to people like Warren Buffet, the lower brackets will tend to balloon outward as well. This is why we have tax credits, welfare or food stamp programs, and other systems to support these people. My belief is that if we analyzed the lower brackets we would see a more steady and less abrupt progression, with people in the lowest quartile banging up against the 100% tax burden calculation in this analysis. Similarly, a more detailed analysis of the very rich, for example at 0.1% increments after 1%, would show a much more even distribution with taxes rising from 1.0% to 0.5% on a slope more similar to what is seen from 5% through 1.1%, and then falling as it approached the 0.1% level.
Please also note that the peak in this calculated tax burden is right at the bottom of the top quartile, or just as one moves out of the middle class and into the upper middle class. Much of this is a function of two things: The cap on Social Security taxes, and the assumptions I made about proportions for wages to income.
The instinct here may be to point to the peak at 1% and use it to argue that the rich are paying their fair share or even more than they should be, but when considering for how much disposable income remains after payment it is clear that there is no financial duress at those levels.
I’m very open to comments and criticism on this. If anyone wants the Excel files for the data, leave a comment and I’ll e-mail it to you.
 I’ve been thinking about this whole “media bias” question recently. You know, the one typically brought up by the hard right in a statement such as “Of course the liberal lamestream media is going to use a photo of Michelle Bachmann that makes her look like she just sat on a citrus juicer! They’re biased!”
I understand where they are coming from. Honestly, I do. Besides pointing out that Michelle Bachmann makes the crazy-eyed lady who played the Mom in “Malcom in the Middle” look like Betty Davis, the mass media says all sorts of things that don’t jive with how the far right sees the world. Things like…
- Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to invade Iraq.
- Dinosaurs were on earth long before humans were. (Oh, and “Eve” was a black australopithecus hominid who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.)
- If you don’t have enough money, you can reduce spending *or* raise more of it through taxes.
- Global warming is real.
- Stories of gays in love, and, crazily enough, in marriage!
- President Obama is, indeed, an American.
- etc.
If you don’t share these sentiments, statements like this sound incendiary, or even downright treacherous treasonous. They become clear evidence of a bias in the media against your worldview and in favor of people with whom you don’t agree. It’s hard to fault this logic – The media is indeed biased and hard right conservative viewpoints don’t get nearly the airtime or space that more liberal viewpoints do. The question shouldn’t be whether it is biased or not, but to what it is biased and why. I’ve asked this question before of some of my conservative friends, and never been able to get a coherent answer. The question goes like this:
Given a free press with minimal oversight and regulation, such as we have in the United States, and given very minimal media financing from the government, such as we have in the United States, and given a free market with minimal oversight and regulation, such as we have in the publishing industry in the United States, why would the media bias itself in any particular direction?
Since I’ve never been able to get an answer, I’ve attempted to answer it myself, and the answer lies firmly in capitalism.
The mass media is indeed biased, but it is biased toward making money. Jon Stewart, in his recent appearance on Fox News with Chris Wallace, put it a bit more cynically by claiming that if anything the media was biased toward sensationalism, but the idea remains the same whether sensationalism is the lowest common denominator or not. The media is owned by organizations that exist to make money, nothing more and nothing less. As such, they look at the market and provide a product that is designed to get them the highest rate of return possible on their investment. What this means is that when Rupert Murdoch saw an underserved market and created a product to serve it, birthing Fox News, he didn’t do it for politics any more than Ten Turner did when he created CNN, or when General Electric created MSNBC with Microsoft. These media outlets were created for the same reason that the automobile industry creates models as varied as the Prius, the Taurus, and the Hummer: Different people want a different product. The designers or managers of these products may indeed have been successful because they were predisposed to think in ways that made these different models successful, but the purpose was not to get the world to believe what they did. It was to make money.
Let’s think about this for a bit. We all can likely agree that different people want different types of vehicles. They want these different vehicles because of many different reasons, some of which are based on hard requirements and others which are based on perception and personal preference. A consumer may buy a Ford F250 because they have to haul a massive trailer for work, or because they pull a boat up to the lake every weekend. That’s a hard requirement. Another person, however, may use an F250 only to commute, but they perceive the F250 to be safer than an alternate vehicle. Or they may simply have, for whatever reason, a preference for it over, say, a Ford Fiesta. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these choices, and in a free market we are all allowed to make them as we see fit, with companies competing to capture our business by providing products that match our requirements, perceptions, and preferences as closely as possible. We expect this competition, and it would never cross our minds to complain about a ‘bias’ in the marketplace simply because there are more large trucks sold every year rather than small compact cars. We might complain that the market doesn’t offer us enough choices for the particular type of vehicle we want to purchase, but we all understand that this is not political bias, but a function of economic demand.
Why don’t conservatives recognize this in the media market as well? There is a ‘bias’ in the media, but it is a bias stemming from Adam Smith’s invisible hand, not from any liberal elitist conspiracy. The bias exists because more people want a centrist approach to how news is reported than want a conservative perspective. The bias also exists because Rupert Murdoch capitalized on a changing market quickly and very effectively, capturing it in the same way that Apple has captured the market for iPads: Other companies may indeed want to come in, but Fox has created a very high barrier to entry. The remaining old-line media outlets stay clustered to their original centrist positions, and if you prefer Fox News, they all feel liberal. They feel liberal, however, not because they are pushing a liberal agenda, but because everything looks liberal when you stand as far right as Fox does.
The bias exists because the market segment demanding a conservative take on the news is a fringe segment of the overall news market. Put another way, if you enter a crowded room and go over and stand against the far right wall, everyone is to the left of you. They are not, however, to the left of you because someone made the room incorrectly. They are to the left of you because of a choice you made. That is not bias by the room, it is bias by you. It is also instructive to consider that the left wing anchor outlet for mass media is MSNBC, which has a much smaller audience than Fox News does on the right wing. If Fox viewers can logically complain about a liberal media bias, then MSNBC viewers should be able to complain even louder of a conservative bias. Of course, they’d both be correct, because they inhabit the two tails of a marketing bell curve where just as in any market or population there is a large group of people in the center surrounded by a thinner and thinner circle of fringe participants as you move towards the edges.
Undoubtedly the market for news is different than the market for most other products. Primarily, I would argue, this is because the hard requirements when selecting your news source are typically few and far between. We select our news sources based on timeliness and convenience, but other than those requirements our choice comes down mainly to perception and preference. In the cases where there are additional hard requirements, as with business media like The Wall Street Journal or a business outlet such as CNBC, the real bias stays in the editorials and away from the fact-based reporting that makes up the bulk of the product. Just as with that F250, you don’t want to push away the consumer whose hard requirements you have met by adding something that they don’t like, such as lace seat covers or hot pink trim.
For reporting on social issues, politics, and other topics with more room for opinion, when we see a media outlet saying something that doesn’t match our sensibilities, the only thing we have to fall back on is perception and preference. We cannot, in the absence of other information, hypothesize that the reason a particular choice was made was because of a hard requirement. This is why you end up with headlines proclaiming “The Queen of Rage” and get the response that occurred. In this case we have a very politicized (She is a politician after all…) topic that would raise hackles somewhere no matter how it was handled. Newsweek, I am sure, knew this and tried to capitalize on it by making a sensationalist story that very effectively garnered them a large amount of free publicity and, I am equally sure, a jump in their weekly circulation. Is that bias or just capitalism in full swing? I don’t think that you can effectively argue anything other than it is simply our markets working the way our core capitalist ideology says they should. It allows all ideas to be heard in relative proportion to the people who adhere to those ideas, and by accurately reflecting our society through the unfiltered lens of the free market, it gives us a better understanding about who we are as a country and what we believe. It is not bias. It is a reflection of our society.
There is one area, however, where blatantly spinning an article to suit your audience is neither beneficial to your consumer nor to society as a whole. This is when ideology overrides reality. It used to be that the mass media was very concerned with getting the facts right, but as both heavily liberal and heavily conservative media outlets have expanded there has been a growth in inaccurate and indefensibly partisan reporting. Whether it is MSNBC with its smaller footprint or Fox with its much larger one, the amount of spin, selective editing, and outright falsehoods that appear in these media outlets today has greatly increased. Neither side is innocent of this, but I would be dishonest myself if I didn’t say that I think that Fox is by far the biggest committer of this type of bastardized ‘reporting’. That, I believe, goes back to Mr. Murdoch and his undying commitment to winning in the market as opposed to behaving in an ethically sound manner, so it has nothing to do with politics – just the person at the top of the heap of that particular pile – Remember, this is also the guy who gave the go-ahead to The Simpsons and many other “liberal” programs.
In any case, falsehoods and misunderstandings are what a healthy news organization should be designed to rid society of, not burden society with, and to have major players in our media ecosystem foster ill will and misguided decisions while nurturing incorrect understanding about our world should not be tolerated by anyone, whether or not they agree with the message being sent. I’ve said before and will continue to say it until the day I die: Facts matter. In this case, the fact is that there is no “liberal” bias or any other bias other than a market bias. Someone needs to explain this to the folks over at Fox right away — at least this falsehood can be corrected rather quickly.
Everybody is angry over the current state of affairs in Washington. In two days our country may effectively go bankrupt, unable to borrow more money and pay for the goods and services we have already bought, despite the world wanting exactly the opposite and being willing to loan us money at interest rates approaching zero. The media shows us clips of this or that politician making statements about how the other side isn’t listening, isn’t playing ball, or is unwilling to compromise. Americans see this, rightfully feel angry and frustrated, and start thinking about throwing all the bums out next election cycle.
Fair enough. But have both sides really been equally idiotic? I get the feeling that the mainstream media, often maligned as having a liberal bias, has, in this case, bent over backwards to try to portray both sides as equally culpable. But the media is dead wrong. That’s not just my opinion, but the opinion of the media in Japan, Europe, and China right now, with the Chinese going as far as to call the Republican party irresponsible. Even The Economist magazine, a notably fiscally conservative magazine with impeccable economic credentials, called the Republicans “economically ignorant and disgracefully cynical.”
Look at the facts: The White House has moved significantly in the direction of the Republican Party’s position in terms of spending and where the cuts should take place. While we may reasonably disagree on whether the current position of either party is acceptable or not, the fact is that the Democrats have compromised by reducing tax revenue demands and accepting certain cuts to key Democratic Party pillars such as Medicaid and Social Security. Has the Republican Party done the same? No. True, Speaker Boehner has tried, but the Tea Party faction has held him and the American economy hostage to that “economically ignorant and disgracefully cynical” path The Economist dislikes so much. The key demands of no new taxes, a stop-gap raise to the debt ceiling that would require this circus to run again in 6 months, and a full Constitutional amendment prior to authorization are still in place. Speaker Boehner understands this, but he cannot reign in his unruly party, and he cannot proceed with co-brokering a centrist solution among adults in both the Democrat and Republican parties without losing his position as Speaker to Eric Cantor.
So, are both sides equally at fault here? No, there are a lot more idiots on the right side of the aisle this time — mostly concentrated in the Tea Party-backed 87 freshman House Republicans that care more about some fairy-tale view of politics and governance than they do in the actual business of getting our country back up on its feet and stable again. Think of it in terms of what the liberal left would have to be demanding in order to put them at the same liberal extreme as what the right has staked out at the conservative end of the spectrum: a 50% income tax rate on the very rich, a 30% reduction in military spending, and a Constitutional amendment to enshrine the sanctity of gay marriage. The cynicism of right wing media and the current Republican leadership is that they portray their position as center-right and scream in outrage at the “socialist” demands of a White House that has done nothing but try to uphold the American tradition of political compromise.
The media does us no favors when they abdicate the facts in the name of appearing “fair and balanced”. What we need is objective, informed journalism. Unfortunately, you tend to find that more outside the United States now than inside it. The nice thing about this, however, is that you can be relatively sure that there is only a limited effect of US political influence on the content of the news. That makes it believable.
There is no doubt in my mind that the US needs to reign in some spending. I am equally sure, however, that this must also involve some tax increases, some closing of loopholes, some elimination of subsidies, and a re-evaluation of where our priorities as a country lie. In this, my opinion lies squarely with The Economist, as does my evaluation of the Republican Party right now. The Big Tent party has turned into a garrison, with the only entrance being a heavily guarded gate at the far right side.
Unfortunately, we’re stuck with the current situation, and this is unlikely to change until the Tea Party gets out of its childhood and its members start acting like rational adults instead of hormone-addled teenagers with a strong sense of superiority. My guess is that the adults will prevail, but not until the children have burned part of the house down. How the American people decide to punish these children will have to wait until the next election to be seen. The parents may also deserve some punishment as well, but anyone who argues that the scolding neighbors and others in the community are equally culpable is simply refusing to take responsibility for what they helped allow to happen.
It’s 3pm and my back hurts. It doesn’t ache, it hurts. I’m coated with dust, my gloves are caked with black sludge, my body is soaked with sweat, my neck is sunburned, and I’ve just pulled out a rusty and twisted nail that sank half-an-inch into my boot. For most of the day I’ve been bent over picking up rubble and debris by hand, either carrying it armful by armful to one of the monster piles placed around what used to be the town of Minami Sanriku, or scooping it into wheelbarrows for someone else to haul. There are 30 people on our team, all of us volunteers, coming from across Japan and as far away as Malaysia to lend a hand and try to make a difference. We don’t talk much as we work, but we work together smoothly and nobody stops for more than a few minutes to get some water or catch their breath. There’s a lot of work to do.
I look down the 75 yards of drainage ditch that we’ve been clearing since noon. Downstream from me, where foul-smelling black water has slowly begun to trickle out as our efforts clear a path, was where the big pieces were. A tree trunk, two feet in diameter at its base, 25 feet long, and with a 4-foot diameter root ball, lays pushed up against the main rubble pile from where we used pry bars and our backs to get the water-soaked log out of the 3-foot deep ditch and across the roadway. Beside it lay steel beams that took 10 people to even roll, and on top and around all of it lay the remains of a town.
That’s really the only way I can describe it; the remains of a town. There are shattered windows and mounds of rotting carpets or futons mixed with roof tiles. Broken shards of glass and pottery are everywhere, scattered from the kitchens and dining rooms of homes that no longer exist. A bag of potato chips, somehow untorn, lies in the mud with the chips still intact inside. Picking it up, I wipe away enough to see that the expiration date is November 13, 2011. Nearby is a bright orange squirt gun. A bit further away lays a Playstation, broken in half. I find adult’s clothes, children’s clothes, photo albums, a microwave, a calendar from 2009, even a DVD of “Jackass, the Movie.” Car wreckage is at every turn, the car bodies almost comically jelly-bean shaped as every sharp corner has been rounded off from being tumbled in the tsunami like normal waves tumble pebbles on a beach. I find an old purse that had been used to store letters. It is full of them, somehow protected from the water. They are written in the thin wavering lines of an older woman and are all addressed to “Chisako”. The group leader says to just put it with the rest of the rubble. There are thousands of these, he says, and nobody to claim them.
It’s all here, but the houses and the people are not.
I’m overwhelmed by Minami Sanriku. I grew up in a town the size of this place, both geographically and in terms of population. When I try to think of the entire valley of my town destroyed and 10,000 people killed in the space of an hour, my mind goes blank and refuses. I can’t wrap my head around it, either intellectually or emotionally, so my brain just stops and it doesn’t start again until I think of something else. In the meantime, I just stand there and look at these piles of rubble the size of football fields, taking short, shallow breaths, almost hypnotized by the devastation of this place. There are no dead bodies around, but you know that many people died here simply because there is no way that many people could not have died.
In the morning our job had been to clear debris from a roadway higher up the mountains, just where the tsunami stopped. From there you could look down toward the ocean almost two miles away and more than 150 feet below.
An older local man with whom I spoke as we broke for lunch described how the first wave came in and he and his friends ran up a small steep embankment to escape. The wave stopped just short of where his car was parked, so as the water stopped rising he ran down and got in his car to drive it to higher ground. Before he could start the engine, however, he saw his friends yelling for him to get back up the incline. He left his car with the keys in the ignition and ran back to safety. Thirty seconds later the second wave hit, and at almost two miles of distance and 150 feet above sea level, but only ten feet below where he stood, he watched his car get swept away. Looking down towards the harbor, he said that all he could see was black, oily ocean where the town used to be. All of it was under water.
I look back at the ditch. Until today, nobody had touched it since the earthquake, and it is filled with the kind of putrid, black, sucking muck that only gets created by water, heat, and human garbage. When we first arrived at this site, we all started at the far end before working our way to where most of us are now.
Initially you couldn’t see the water – just a floating mass of debris and garbage. Using shovels, pitchforks, pry bars, and our hands, we had pulled an amazing amount of material out of the ditch, exposing a dark black water with scattered islands of yellow-gray foam. Compared to the morning, it was harder, hotter, dirtier work. One lady cut her lower leg on some aluminum siding that pushed up her boots, taking her pantleg with it until it got to skin. Another volunteer had glass go through their glove, cutting their hand. Another got stuck in the arm by some rusty wire poking out of what was probably the interior plaster wall of a house. People came close to heatstroke. People were made ill by the fumes coming out of the mud. But they cleaned up, cooled down, walked it off, and kept working.
I had noticed some older people in our group when we all boarded the bus in Tokyo the previous night and had wondered how they would do. I shouldn’t have. I worked for several hours with two of the older ladies and found them to be tireless and amazingly strong. When we were moving the heaviest things, they were always there to help. Just now, after a full day of hard work and in 90-degree heat, I had been struggling to pull a large carpet from the mud and up out of the ditch. One of these ladies came over, and without saying a word helped me pull this heavy, sodden, stinking mess over to the main pile. When we finished, before I could even catch my breath, she said “Thank you” to me and walked back to get another load. I asked her later, and this was her third time volunteering.
Another 30 minutes on, our leader calls it a day. We load up the tools into the wheelbarrows and walk the half mile back up the mountain to where they are stored and where our bus waits. On the way, I talk with him about the work. One of the questions I ask is about the number of cars missing wheels that I’ve seen. He stops, points out an SUV nearby, and says “Look, they left the spare bolted to the rear door. Do you know why? They didn’t have a key for the lock. Most of these wheels are gone from theft. Saltwater doesn’t hurt the expensive alloy wheels, so they were the first to go. Now we see it on more cars. Not everyone here is good, but some of them probably just need the money.” He turns a little bit away and looks out over the harbor. “Most of us are good, but not all of us.”
It takes us about an hour to get everything – and ourselves – cleaned up enough to put away and board the bus for the three hours it will take to get to a hotel with electricity and running water. Ten minutes later we are bouncing over the cracks and waves of what used to be a flat and modern highway. Ten minutes after that, the only sound on the bus is snoring. Tomorrow we’ll go back and get assigned another job. There’s a lot of work to do.
The question today is whether the Palins deserve the attention they get in American media. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they get in the news. Why?
There’s one very big reason why Sarah Palin, and to a lesser extent other members of the Palin family, have become such political lightning rods: They’re a farce. If SNL or Bill Maher wanted to think up a skit to poke fun at the conservatives in the USA, they couldn’t have done better. It’s like the Alaska-Washington DC version of “The Beverly Hillbillies“, except instead of striking oil some old guy who had already sold out his beliefs in order to get reelected to the Senate finds himself in the race for the US Presidency and realizes that he has absolutely no chance of winning it except for the political equivalent of the Hail Mary pass. He throws this giant political football up to Wasila and hits an ex beauty queen in the head with it. After talking for 15 minutes they decide that their maverick team is exactly what America needs to reinvigorate the political DNA of the conservative party, re-instill those core American beliefs that made us such a great nation, and capture the spirit and imagination of people who have been wronged, lied to, and cheated by big government lefties.
Only it doesn’t quite work out. After Mama Hillbilly moves in next door, the rich old white guy soon realizes that she could become a huge liability. She’s not very smart – although she does show some media savvy – and she brings with her Papa Hillbilly, Daughters Hillbilly, Baby Hillbilly, and even Boyfriend Hillbilly. The old jalopy is rocking the American Dream and BOOM!, now there’s Still Unwed Pregnant Teen Daughter Hillbilly about to pop out GrandBaby Hillbilly, and Mama Hillbilly has to get Boyfriend Hillbilly to become Son-in-Law Hillbilly until at least the elections are over. Which The Mavericks lose, but in the meantime new wardrobes are purchased, the allure of the camera lens and spotlight becomes even more appreciated, and a grand time is had by all (Cue laugh track, a post-election divorce between Postpartum Daughter Hillbilly and Son-in-Law Hillbilly, and a subsequent Ex-Son-in-Law Hillbilly feature in Playgirl.).
That’s the funny part. What’s not funny is the pure gusto with which Sarah Palin and her family have abused the trust of the very constituents that they claim to support and represent. Sarah Palin left office early in Alaska and embarked on a lucrative career as political personality/commentator/pundit/gadfly. She was certainly having a rough time of it as Governor of Alaska, but she could have stuck that out. Instead, though, she struck while the fire was hot and could make money for herself while still claiming to be for all the people who supported her as a politician. Other Palins got odd jobs as a professional snowmobile racer, being themselves in a reality TV show, performing as a celebrity on a TV dancing show, or as the richly-paid face of a particularly non-active charity.
They all have the right to do this, of course – I think that most people would agree with me on that. What is irksome is the sanctimonious drivel that gets spouted in the name of making a buck. It is patently obvious by now that the Palins are not in this to make America a better place. They are in it for money. If Sarah Palin really was concerned about righting the wrongs of the political system, she would have stayed in it and fought the good fight. If Bristol’s main focus was really to help stop teen pregnancy, she would have volunteered her time and maybe even donated her Dancing with the Stars fees.
But none of this prevents many conservatives from revering Sarah Palin as the embodiment of all that is good, right, and proper about conservative political views. To ignore the political force that is Sarah Palin is not only to ignore the person, but also to ignore where this comes from and why the people who like Sarah Palin can ignore the self-serving money-hungry personality that she has become.
It’s important to note that we’re used to our politicians doing this once they leave office, and Sarah Palin has certainly left office. What is different is that when famous politicians leave office in the USA, they usually leave the political limelight. Ms. Palin hasn’t done this. What she has done is redefine what a politician is, and in this new definition you don’t need to hold actual office to be able to help form and direct political opinion. That’s at least one reason why she is a force as well as the farce described above.
Even the leaders of her own party don’t quite seem to know what to do with her. They vacillate between praise at her ability to bring attention and focus on the Republican Party, and dressing her down (Usually more quietly, this one…) for damaging the image of the party and impairing its chances in the 2012 Presidential Election. Within the Tea Party faction of the GOP, however, Ms. Palin is still seen as a prime contender to lead the party in 2012. The Republican leadership can’t ignore this block and hope to win, so for now they keep up the vacillation and try to work out a solution.
A very telling exchange between Rick Santorum and Ms. Palin in mid-February shows the way that Republicans are tippy-toeing around the issue as well as how sensitive Sarah Palin is to how her image is perceived, even when that perception is is coming from within her own party. In response to a question about Ms. Palin’s decision to not attend CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Santorum said “I have a feeling that she has some demands on her time, and a lot of them have financial benefit attached to them.” He also went on to comment on the demands on her time from being a mother with children. The response was swift and typically Palin in the passive-aggressive way it was made. The most succinct quote from her response? “I will not call him the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. I’ll let his wife call him that instead.”
Of course, this made me think of the Anais Nin quote “We don’t see thing as they are, we see them as we are.”
All joking aside, Anais Nin’s insight is applicable to the Palin farce or force question. Strongly liberal voters tend to see the Palins as a farce. They discount her long-term impact on the American political scene and focus instead on the disingenuousness of Sarah Palin’s supposed beliefs in conservative political values even as she rakes in money because she left her political career behind. Tea Party voters see her in exactly the opposite light, as someone who was pushed out of office by underhanded political attacks and who is staying a public personality only out of a desire to remain a public servant. The GOP, stuck between a rock and a hard place, is waffling between its desire to hold on to those conservative Tea Party voters while also viewing Sarah Palin as a threat to the unity and integrity of the conservative voting block in the United States.
In between are many, such as myself, who look at the whole thing as a passing, but dangerous phase in American politics, where Sarah Palin and her family are at the same time entertaining and frightening. What I believe is critical to understand is that the Tea Party country conservatives who back Ms. Palin so strongly are doing so because the current political parties have somehow alienated them. Whether this alienation is due to class, economic, education, or religious differences, I’ll leave for another time — mainly because I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that movements like this do not spring fully-formed, but develop and mature over time. They also do not occur randomly and for no reason. Sarah Palin’s supporters are angry about something and they want a change. Whether they get that change from Sarah Palin or not remains to be seen, but even if they don’t, the anger will remain until it is addressed. That makes Sarah Palin a force as well as a farce, and while I will continue to enjoy her entertainment value, I won’t treat the angry voters behind her with such a light heart. They scare the GOP, and if they scare the GOP they should scare everyone further to the center and left as well.
This post came about as the result of a Facebook exchange. You can see the original exchange here.
Message to Ito Group, March 25, 2011
On March 11, 2011 at 2:41pm a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck Japan off of the coast of Miyagi prefecture, 373 kilometers northeast of Tokyo. Tokyo was shaken quite hard, and in our headquarters we had computer monitors tip over, books tumble out of cabinets, and boxes fall off tables and shelves. The only damage that we have found, however, is a small leak in one window that we didn’t even notice until it rained 10 days later. Our warehouse nearby has some cracks in the walls, but they are small and we do not believe that they are a problem. To be safe, we have scheduled a structural engineer to come evaluate the warehouse.
At our Mito office, further north and closer to the quake, the shaking was stronger. Our building and people were again fine, but there was much more damage in the surrounding areas and water service was not restored until March 22. Further away from the quake at our Shonan and Nagoya offices there was little shaking and no damage at all.
In the end, Ito Group was very lucky, but the people in northeastern Japan and the Fukushima area have suffered huge losses to both life and property. The combined total for dead or missing people is now getting close to 30,000, and almost everyone is Japan knows someone dead or missing, or is friends with someone who has lost a family member or friend. It is a time for sorrow, and it is a time for remembering who and what is important to us.
The hundreds of thousands of people in evacuation centers across northeastern Japan need everyone’s support, and Ito Corporation will be making a donation on behalf of Ito Group when we have decided on what we can afford and where that money can best be used. In the meantime, we encourage each of our employees to find some way of contributing, whether it is through money, food, or simply continuing to work hard and with pride to help Ito Group be able to donate an even larger sum.
Moving forward, Japan and Ito Corporation still have many challenges. One immediate challenge is the current situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. At this time the levels of radiation are not harmful to any of us working in Mito and Tokyo, the two closest areas, but we are tracking the levels and making sure that our employees have the right information to make decisions regarding what is appropriate for them and their families. Unlike in some other parts of the world, the mass media here has largely been even-handed in its reporting of the Fukushima situation, but for our overseas employees who may be concerned about levels of radiation in Tokyo or Mito, I would like to provide a few pieces of information and some links to places that can provide more.
First, there is no danger from airborne radioactive contamination in either Mito or Tokyo right now. The levels are elevated from where they were before the quake, but they are still very low. For example, according to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the average yearly radiation exposure in the USA from naturally occurring background radiation is 3100 microsieverts (uSv)[1]. Tokyo is currently experiencing about double the level of radiation it had before the quake. However, because the naturally occurring background radiation in Tokyo is very low when compared to most of the world, at the levels being measured today (March 24, 2011, 0.11uSv/hr), our yearly dose is only about 1000uSv, or less than one-third of what is normal in America. In other words, if you live in America and want to reduce your radiation exposure, one way to do it would be to move to Tokyo as soon as possible.. I have not referenced data here for other parts of the world, but they are similar to the USA. Lastly, while Mito is experiencing radiation levels about 10% higher than Tokyo, the radiation level is still much lower than in many parts of the world and is not dangerous right now.
Longer term there are additional issues regarding radioactive contamination of the food and water supplies, but unlike air we can control how and when we come into contact with food or water. Food is particularly easy to control, and as we do not yet know how much radioactive material has gotten into the soil or ocean yet, I will not comment on it. Water is something I would like to address.
Levels of Iodine-131 in parts of the Tokyo water supply have already risen substantially and are now above the recommended level (100 becquerals) for use with infants, but they are still below the recommended threshold for adult consumption (300 becquerals). It is important, however, to understand how low these levels of contamination actually are. If you were to drink a normal amount of water every day at these levels, the additional radiation you would receive is 400uSv, bringing the total in Tokyo for a year up to 1400uSv, or still less than one-half of the average does in America[2]. Obviously we do not want to go out of our way to drink the tap water now, but at these levels it is absolutely not a threat. It is something, however, that we will continue to watch.
The true long-term impact on Tokyo and the greater Kanto Region, however, is likely to not be radiation, but something much more common. That impact will be energy.
During the quake, 6 oil refineries covering 31% of Japan’s production capacity were shut down, and two of them burnt to the ground – One burning for 11 days until March 22. Several of the plants that were shut down have re-opened, but Japan’s refining capacity right now is only 80% of what was being processed in the week before the quake[3]. This has meant long lines at gasoline stations, rationing of gasoline when you get there, and much higher prices. The large refining companies are now working to open up more capacity to fill the gap, but for now there is a shortage, and that shortage will likely continue for at least several more months.
The much larger impact, however, is in electrical power production. In addition to Fukushima Daiichi, Japan lost a number of other power plants and is currently running a power deficit in the Tokyo region of right around 10 gigawatts of power. As a result, the areas around the center of Tokyo have been divided into 5 groups, and each group is cycling through a 3-4 hour-long planned blackout every day. These start in the morning around 6:30am and finish as late as 10:00pm at night.[4] A great effort by companies and people to reduce power requirements has meant that in practice it is rare that every area gets a blackout every day, and some days we have actually been able to make it through without any blackouts. This is important, because although Ito Corporation’s headquarters and our Shonan office are not in an area subject to planned blackouts, the Mito office is.
The government has reduced electrical consumption not only by planned blackouts, but by reducing subway and train frequency, lowering the brightness of street lights, and other less obvious measures. At Ito Corporation, people are coping by riding bikes to work, making sure than unused appliances at home are not only turned off, but unplugged from the wall, and not heating or only partially heating their homes. At the Tokyo, Mito, and Shonan offices we are all trying to do our best to conserve power and have not been using heat or our normal level of lighting. At headquarters we have installed power switches at each desk so that power to monitors, notebook computers, mobile phone chargers, printers, and other small parasitic energy drains can be completely shut off at night. It will be interesting to see what our power consumption is when we get the bill, but I am hoping that we can get a 25% reduction in power consumption at the headquarters office.
TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, announced yesterday that these rolling planned blackouts will continue for at least a year and may continue until the end of summer, 2012. That may seem like a very long time, but power plants normally take years to build and that process can only be shortened so much. Summer is when power consumption is highest, because people rely on air conditioners to escape Tokyo’s hot, humid weather. The last two summers, TEPCO warned that it was dangerously close to not having enough power even when all of its plants were running. My belief is that the biggest effect on Tokyo from the earthquake will be felt starting in June. There is a good possibility that we will shift our working hours to try to spend more time at the office when it is cooler. If that happens we will of course let everyone at all offices know.
This note became much longer than I had planned, but I hope that you found it useful. We must remain rational in our decision-making, reasonable in determining how we will work through the difficulties ahead, and resolute in our belief that Japan has the strength of country and character to survive this ordeal and emerge even stronger. If you have questions about any of this, address them to IGS and we will get you an answer. Our business is strong and our people are working hard. We have no reasons to fear right now and a lot of reasons to buckle down and show our true strength.
Ganbare Nippon!
P
The US budget is being debated now, with misrepresentation, disingenuous semi-truths, and bald-faced lies being told all around. I’m a stickler for facts and data, and the best place I have found (Other than booting up Excel and hitting the data yourself from here (2012) and here (previous years) for facts on the budget is www.factcheck.org. These guys cut it right down the middle, and if there is any gray area, they leave it gray and ask the reader to make a decision. The anti-Bozo in me loves this, and their review of Bozoness from both sides of the aisle here is a great place to start digging through the crap to find out where our dollars are really being spent.
But do we really need to look at that level of detail? The Obama 2012 budget has a clear 19.27% of total spending dedicated to our Defense budget. That’s just shy of Social Security total spending at 20.04%, but add in Veterans’ Benefits and you end up with 22.53% of total US Government spending being dedicated solely to defense and the support of people who worked in our defense. Is the world really such a scary place that we, the most powerful, richest, technologically-advanced country in the world, need to spend almost a quarter of our budget on feeling safe? Is that last marginal dollar being spent on our security really the providing the best return on investment that we can get?
To understand, it helps to look at US military spending compared to military spending around the world — After all, maybe we just spend more because we’re bigger. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has been compiling data on global military spending for many years. And before you run off thinking that this is a liberal Scandinavian snow machine, think about this: SIPRI is funded largely by the Swedish government. Sweden is a major arms exporter, so knowing who has the biggest military budgets is just good marketing research. For reference, about 1% of Sweden’s GDP is arms exports, which is approximately double the percentage for the USA.
So, how does the USA stand in terms of how much of our GDP we spend on defense? We actually come in 9th in the world for 2008, which was the last year for which I could find data. Here’s the list for the top 20 countries.
 Percentage of GDP Spent on Defense 2008, Source SIPRI Looking at that list, you see a lot of unstable places — Iraq, Georgia, Chad, Lebanon — so the initial reaction might be that we need to be spending at least as much as these guys — After all, they could become a problem. But we’re talking about percentages here, and these countries have itsy-bitsy economies. Not one of these countries has an economy as big as New York City — In truth, not one of them has an economy half as big as New York City’s. What this means is that one percent of our GDP is HUGE compared to one percent of theirs. The same chart above, but changing the percentage into dollars, looks like this.
 USD (millions) of GDP Spent on Defense, 2008 (2009) Source: SIPRI, Google We dwarf the other countries, most to the point of insignificance. The largest other country on the list is Saudi Arabia, who gets most of the weaponry and training from us.
But what about China? They must be huge, right? They just announced a stealth fighter (And only 30 years after we did!) so perhaps they’re the big threat we need to pour billions into defending against?
Well, it turns out that China is number two to the USA in terms of money spent on their military. On the face of it, that makes sense because China is the world’s second largest economy. Here are the actual numbers.
 US-China Defense Spending Comparison. Source: SIPRI
US-China Defense Spending Comparison, Source SIPRI, World Bank
So we outspend China almost 7-to-1 in defense in real dollars, and almost 3:1 in terms of percentage of GDP. And don’t forget, China is #2 in the world in defense spending. And we outspend them almost 7:1. To put it in perspective, if the USA did not increase its defense budget, but simply kept it at the current level, and the Chinese increased their defense budget by 10% a year for the next 20 years, they’d finally be at the same spending level we are at right now. Somehow I think that over 20 years we would notice the buildup and could develop an appropriate response with plenty of time to spare.
Here’s the full list from SIPRI on global defense spending at almost all countries. North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Myanmar are the only significant countries not included, simply because of lack of data.
 Global Defense Spending, 2009. Source: SIPRI If you do the math, the USA comes out with 43% of global defense spending according to SIPRI, and while it is certainly true that every country hides some of its military spending, the black boxes that are US intelligence budgets dwarf anything else out there. The SIPRI numbers also do not include Veterans’ benefits or foreign aid that gets used for military purposes, so it is not a stretch to see the USA coming very close to the 50% mark in a more holistic view of defense spending.
There is one place, however, where the Chinese absolutely did outspend us, at least in terms of percentage of GDP. When the economy turned sour in late 2008, the Chinese initiated a stimulus package that totaled USD$586 billion. Smaller than the US stimulus package in dollar terms for sure, but in terms of GDP it was enormous — a full 13% of GDP. For the US to have done the same would have required a stimulus package of around $1.8 trillion, and we came nowhere close. To put it another way, the Chinese stimulus package was almost 6 times bigger than its defense budget. For the US to have done that would have required more than $3 trillion.
What it comes down to is something we’ve been told countless times over the past twenty years: The Chinese are better at math than we are. It also seems that they’re better capitalists. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who sees irony in the fact that a dictatorship spends more on its economy and less on its military than the supposed leader of the free world. Or maybe I am. Either way, we need some cosmic Suze Orman to shout “Denied! Have you lost your mind?” to this defense budget increase and to any that come for, say, the next 20 years.
We can afford Social Security. We can afford Medicare. We can afford health care. What we cannot afford is our defense budget. You want to drop $40-$100 billion from the US budget next year, that’s the place to hit hardest and first. We’re stretched thin as a country right now and because of that we also need to stretch our dollars. That last marginal dollar is more important now than it has ever been, and it is extremely hard to argue that defense is where it should be spent. President Obama made a great speech (Referenced here by me before in a post.) during his campaign that talked about defense in terms of police, firefighters, teachers, health professionals, and other parts of our society that provide for defense against problems that come up from within our country, not from without. Seems to me that he was on the right track. Spend the money at home and on our people, not overseas and on our defense industry. That’s where that last marginal dollar will make the most sense.
It’s just after 7pm and I’m debating whether to open the window of my taxi to allow in some fresh air. The sour old-sweat smell of the beat-up Suzuki Maruti hatchback is a bit nauseating, but that is the smell of taxis in India. You hire a car and a driver and then the driver waits for you in the car once you get to your destination. And he sweats. Do that every day and you end up with a funk that just won’t stop. After seven years of visiting India I still can’t say that I’m used to it.
I look outside and decide not to open the window. My taxi is scuttling through the margins of some construction site that has pushed itself out into the roadway, stirring up giant clouds of dust. The construction site, like so many others in India, has a big sign touting the arrival of yet another IT center, and it shows an artist’s rendition of a gleaming block of glass and steel set against an improbable background of trees. Near the sign, a slowly revolving line of Indian women goes between a giant — but shrinking! – pile of sand on one edge of the site and, pails of sand balanced firmly on their heads, another steadily growing pile on the far side where they dump off the pail and trudge back through the dust for another load. I can’t figure out exactly what the purpose is — the way the site is arranged, the original pile of sand could just have easily been dumped where they are now manually transferring it one small pail at a time.
Suddenly the taxi skids to a halt and the driver curses something in Tamil. I look at him and he smiles back through the rear-view mirror. With an Indian head-bobble he gestures to the front right of the car, and as I peer out the window I see a baby goat still wet from its birth. It is all wobbly-kneed and trying to move toward its mother, who bleats at it from nearby. A dapper young man in a dark suit that seems straight from Seville Row sees me looking out the window and laughs before lunging at the two goats, causing the mother to scramble away while the newborn kid shakes with fear so hard it almost falls down. He then turns his back, deep into the conversation with whomever sits on the other side of his Blackberry. I notice that his shoes and lower pant-legs are filthy with construction dust while his head is shiny with pomade. A diamond stud glints from one ear.
As we continue on toward the hotel, the Sangeetha restaurant I ate at last night (All Veg! 29 Establishments Around the World!) has an Audi A8 pulled up in front of it. It’s a nice car, and it looks startlingly expensive next to the bullock cart piled high with rope that slowly moves between it and me as we wait in traffic. The cart is being pulled by a barefoot man who looks like he is 60 years old. He’s probably younger than I am.
I lean back into the seat and think about going home tomorrow. India is the one place that I go to that tires me out as much mentally as it does physically. It’s a sea of barely contained chaos that seemingly threatens to explode at any given time while never quite making it there. It makes me tense in a way that no other place does, but at the same time I always come away impressed at what is being done and thinking about what could be done. As my local friends point out, truly anything’s possible here, unlike China, because India is the world’s largest democracy and everyone has the freedom to become whatever it is they desire.
That’s a lie, of course, just like it is anywhere in the world where poverty, lack of infrastructure, and social inequality are present. The man pulling the bullock cart was almost predestined to do that work from the day he was born. His caste and community foretold a limited education with a life of backbreaking labor. The beauty of India right now is, however, that this man’s children have a genuine chance of breaking this cycle and moving from the ant-lines shifting sand to a desk in an air-conditioned office where they will shift bits of information instead.
The little Maruti’s engine revs and strains as we pull up a short slope to my hotel entrance. It is all granite, marble, and chrome under bright lights, staffed by a giant Sikh in full doorman regalia who lets me out of my battered car and leads me through the metal detector so that I can quickly get into the cool and spacious lobby. My driver eases the car around the corner out of sight and I breathe in the fresh air I have been craving.
The lobby is full of businesspeople, both international and local, and could be anywhere in the world. But it isn’t. It’s in India, and when I arrive in my hotel room and go to close the curtains I look out and see where the taxis go. They are huddled in a typically Indian way, unorganized and haphazard, ready to go back out again when called. The drivers are squatting in the dust.
As I take off my jacket, I notice that it has picked up a bit of the taxi funk and that I will need to air it out. Almost simultaneously I see my driver below by the taxis. He has just seen something as well and I follow his eyes to a small boy of perhaps seven or eight running across the open space. He’s dressed in a school uniform of bright white shirt, dark pants, and black shoes. His father sweeps him up in his arms as he gets close and I now notice a woman walking toward the two of them. She looks poor and tired, the same as my driver, but even from four stories up I can see the pride and hope in how they interact with their child. I watch for a while as they stand there and then my driver walks over to a car and flips on the headlights. The boy sits in the door of a nearby taxi, opens his bag, takes out a book, and begins reading. His mother and father squat in the dust nearby.
Sigh. I fly a lot. Too much, but such is life. Every month I get updates on my frequent flier status from United, Delta, and, as you will see, American. United and Delta are set to send me updates in English, but American defaulted to sending them to me in Japanese when I changed my address to Tokyo. So be it — There’s probably a way to change it back to English, but either way is actually fine with me.
Here’s the first few lines of the American monthly update.
こちらのメールをご覧いただけない場合は、こちらhttp://link.aa.com/r/9PM23E/KN0JO/CJ864D/UHBTJN/WZXB4/7M/t?a=9PM23E&b=04MEI&c=EXM85X1&d=LT7M9F&e=1&f=7b0b25646801738e8c3からご覧ください。
mailto:americanairlines@aadvantage.email.aa.comをアドレスブックに加えてください。
この E メールを英語でご覧になる場合は、次のリンク先にアクセスしてください： http://link.aa.com/r/9PM23E/KN0JO/CJ864D/UHBTJN/TV5LM/7M/t?a=app.aa.com&b=9PM23E&c=04MEI&d=QO87X&e=EXM85X1&f=LTM9F
“Okay,” you’re thinking, “So you can read Japanese. Lah-dee-dah.” And you would be right, I can. Lah-dee-dee. However, there are a *lot* of non-Japanese who move here and must have the same thing happen to them. Most of them cannot read Japanese. American obviously understands this as well, which is why they so kindly provide the final link above to see this e-mail in English just in case you cannot understand it in Japanese. Too bad they explain this in Japanese only…
(It’s the last sentence and link, btw, and I’ve altered the links because with them American also allows you to see my account details without having to log in. They seriously don’t get this whole digital world thing.)
Uff da.
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