Category Archives: Thinking

Iowa: Let the Delegate Race Begin

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight the voters in Iowa meet to begin the process of choosing a candidate for president. The Democratic nominee is a given, and most of the news is in the Republican caucus. Starting tonight I’m planning to keep track of the delegates that each candidate wins. Four years ago I found this to be a headache as no two outlets had the same number. Nevertheless I’ll try again.

As a strong Democrat I have to confess fascination in watching the Republican race. With the exception of Mitt Romney who started moderately and has stayed there, there has been a series of what I call the Republican Vomit Comet experiences. It’s clear to me that Mitt is the Republican equivalent of 2004’s John Kerry: nobody is thrilled about him, but they need to find somebody to beat the incumbent. As Republican voters look to someone else to nominate, they find someone, shoot him (or her in the case of Michelle Bachmann) to the top of the polls, find out it’s just not going to work and drop him back to single digits.

It began with Sarah Palin who flirted with running, but elected to pass. Since then we’ve seen the same arc with Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, most recently, Newt Gingrich.

As I see it now, the Republican nominee is going to be Mitt Romney, or perhaps the dark horse, Rick Santorum.

If it turns out to be Rick, you heard it here first.

By the way, my Dad is out of the hospital! Thank you all for your prayers.

Now COPD is personal

Posted on by
Reply

As I write this my father is in Fairfax Hospital and I’m asking for prayers from everyone who reads this.

He’s been feeling badly for the last few weeks; he’s been diagnosed with COPD. This isn’t much of a surprise as he smoked a pack and half of cigarettes for about 40 years and the cough he developed earlier this month was thought to be a common cold.

Having a cough is more an irritant than anything else but he also developed swelling (edema) in his abdomen and left leg. The good news is that a doppler test (developed by my friend Lori’s father George Leopold) ruled out a blot clot.

The bad news is that he was having a hard time speaking and we didn’t know why. The hospital called at 3AM and told him to go to the Emergency Room. His sodium level was low (111) and we think it’s a bad combination of his hypertension medication Linisopril and Hydrochlorothiazide. That explained why he was so sluggish. The Lisinopril is a good idea but having Hydrochlorothiazide wasn’t. It’s a diuretic which is normally a good idea for hypertension but it lowers both potassium and sodium which messes with heartbeat. The doctors have changed the medication to stop the diuretic and we all hope it’s the beginning of good news.

I pray it is. My father is a good man, but he doesn’t enjoy being a patient; it’s hard for him to ask for help or be the center of attention. It will be good news for everyone when he gets to go home and I pray and hope he comes home soon to my mother (who he has been married to for nearly 54 years). They belong together.

I love them more than I can say.

Updating the Candidate's List

Posted on by
Reply

Every four years I put myself through the torture of following the candidates for President and if you look at the left column of this page you can see as many of the serious candidates as I can find.

Today Herman Cain announced he is “suspending” his run for the Republican nomination. It’s a technical thing and I can’t imagine he will gain the nomination. Suspending instead of ending his candidacy allows him to continue to raise money (though I can’t imagine anyone contributing) and spend money. I suspect he’s doing this so he can close his books and pay his campaign staffers. More about him later.

I also looked at the links I have for other candidates. For several I’ve updated the links when they’ve changed the URL. Others have broken links and I can’t find a campaign page and I’ve deleted them. Here is that list:

Democrat
Jeff Boss
Republican
Herman Cain
Bob Forthen
Roger Nichols
John Revelis
Green
Winona LaDuke (this was actually a mistake: there is a web page to draft her but no page where she says she wants to be President. There are several names being mentioned for the Green nomination but I haven’t found anyone who has announced).
Libertarian
Jim Duesing
Independent
Jim Duesing
James Cooper
Temperance Alesha Lance-Council (this was also a mistake. Her web page is about her candidacy in 2008)
If you are running for President and have a web page, please email me.
Now onto Herman Cain. My last post spoke of his 9-9-9 tax plan, but it’s been clear for the last several weeks that his campaign was doomed.

Charges of sexual harassment are nothing new in political campaigns and they are always bothersome: they turn on he said/she said. What troubled me about this was that the story was first broken by Politico.com in October and they gave the Cain campaign 10 days notice that they were going to publish the story. You can read the original posting here. With 10 days notice the campaign didn’t have a coherent response; at first they attacked Politico.com without denying the charges. Then they couldn’t explain why the National Restaurant Association settled with women who claimed he harassed them. As the weeks went on it just got worse; his poll numbers fell through the floor and it became clear that he was not electable. I give him credit for figuring this out.

The charges notwithstanding, he should have done a better job responding to this. Our President has to respond quickly and coherently to all sorts of things: world leaders who make stupid and provocative allegations, countries or groups that threaten violence, or just plain bad news. The fact that Herman Cain and his campaign fumbled so badly on this told us that he was nowhere near ready to lead the country. He may have had good management skills, but our President needs the type of skills he showed us he doesn’t have.

The Money Chronicles, Volume 5: Flat Tax: How Flat, How Fair, and How Feasible?

Posted on by
Reply

A few of the candidates for the Republican nomination are proposing a flat tax instead of our current progressive tax.

A progressive tax raises the tax rate as income increases; in other words a wealthy person pays a high percentage of his income in taxes than a poor person. Here are the 2011 tax rates on individuals:

Income Tax Rate
$1 to $8500 10%
$8500 to $34,500 15%
$34,500 to $83,600 25%
$83,600 to $174,400 28%
$174,400 to $379,150 33%
$379,150 and up 35%

We also tax corporations, but at different levels (I got this from Small Business, Taxes, and Management web page):

Profits Tax Rate
$0 to $50,000 15%
$50,000 to $75,000 25%
$75,000 to $100,00 34%
$100,000 to $15,000,000 35%
$15,000,000 to $18,333,333 38%
$18,333,333 and up 35%

OK, so far so good. Now here’s where it gets complicated: there are deductions to income. From the time the government taxed income in 1913, interest on your home mortgage could be deducted from your income. We can also deduct money donated to charities, and lots of other places. Every time the President says: “and I call on Congress to give a tax break to people who…” it creates another deduction. We use tax deductions all the time to change behavior. We deduct mortgage interest rates because we want to encourage people to own homes; we deduct charitable contributions because we want people to donate to places of worship, food banks, and other charities.

We also want people to save money for retirement. If you contribute money to an IRA, a 401(k) or a 403(b), that money isn’t taxed when earned but is taxed years later when withdrawn. It is generally assumed that money will be taxed at a lower rate because income is usually lower in retirement.

This means that the money you earn isn’t the money you pay taxes on. The hard work of determining your taxes isn’t figuring out how much you owe; it’s how your taxable income is determined. The hard part of doing your taxes (and the reason most of us have a professional do our taxes) is finding the difference between your gross income and your taxable income. Once that is calculated we can look on a table to see what we owe.

So here’s the rub: the candidates who propose a flat tax argue that it’s fairer than a progressive tax and will make it easier for all of us to do our taxes. I suspect most taxpayers don’t really know what percentage they pay in taxes but have a sense that it’s too much. But I do think that most people think the tax code is way too complicated and don’t like the fact that they either need to pay a professional or spend hours preparing their tax return. Do these proposals do what they promise? I propose to look at the plans of three of the current Republican candidates: Herman Cain, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry.

Herman Cain: Mr. Cain proposes what he calls his 999 Plan for Economic Renewal. It is elegant in its simplicity: Personal and corporate income are both taxed at 9%, and a 9% federal sales tax is imposed. That means that if you earn $50,000 this year, your tax would be $4,500. If your corporation makes $500,000 it pays $45,000. If you buy $100 in groceries your bill will be $109. Right?

Not exactly. According to his web page, individuals will pay 9% of their gross income minus money donated to charity. Also there will be tax breaks for people who live or work in an Empowerment Zone (though he doesn’t explain what an Empowerment Zone is or how its chosen). This begins the process of determining the difference between gross income and adjusted gross income. I have a hard time imagining that once this door is cracked open Congress won’t want to add deductions.

Shortly after he announced the 999 plan last month he came under criticism for making even the poorest pay the same rate as the richest. Even though this is the basic foundation of a flat tax, Mr. Cain tinkered with his plan. You can read about it on Fox News: he amended his plan to make anyone at or below the poverty level exempt from the 9% tax, now called 909. Here’s an interesting question: if you’re marginally above the poverty rate but donate enough money (or live in an Empowerment Zone) to adjust your income below the poverty rate, does your tax bill drop from 9% to 0%?

Perhaps the most controversial part of this is the 9% sales tax. There is currently no federal sales tax on most things (though there is an 18.4% tax on gasoline). Many states and localities do have a variety of sales taxes. Where I live there is a 7.75% sales tax on most items, but not on groceries. It’s not clear that Mr. Cain’s plan would add 9% to current local sales tax, or if it replaces those taxes, how states and localities would replace that money.

Ron Paul: This is hard to decipher, but you can look for yourself at his page on taxes. Ron suggests eliminating income taxes on individuals (and, interestingly enough, taxes on tips. I guess he figures that if you work in the restaurant or the hospitality industry, tips aren’t income). In any case, Ron is running for the Republican nomination, but he’s really a libertarian. He calls for a Constitutional Amendment that repeals the 16th Amendment and also calls for the closing of the IRS. He doesn’t worry so much about raising the money to fund the government as to shrinking the government to fit within the available funds. Government funds would be raised by a 15% flat rate on corporations.

Rick Perry proposes a hybrid plan. Essentially he gives the taxpayers a choice: pay your taxes under the current tax code, or choose his New Flat Tax System. That system uses a form called the 1040EZR. You put in your gross income, claim $12,500 for each exemption, deduct mortgage interest, charitable contributions, state/local taxes, and capital gains/dividends. This gives you a taxable income and you pay 20% of that. Governor Perry thinks this 1040EZR will be appealing enough that many taxpayers will use this form over the standard 1040 even if their taxes will go up.

So where does this leave us? The idea of a flat tax appeals to the fairness in all of us, but proponents of progressive tax argue that those who have more can bear a larger share. Right now if Bill Gates and I purchase the same car we would pay the same sales tax, but since he makes more money than I do, he would pay more in income tax.

These candidates, and others, argue a flat tax is not only fairer but also easier. The problem, at least with Cain and Perry, is they have already abandoned a pure flat tax to the extent that both allow deductions for charitable contributions. I also wonder about the pushback any candidate would get (for example) from the National Association of Realtors for trying to eliminate the deduction for mortgage interest.

Housekeeping on My Candidates List

Posted on by
2

As in 2008 I’m attempting to keep an accurate list of the men and women running for President in 2012. It’s not an easy task as I wish to go beyond the candidates who have enough money and media exposure to be household names (quick, name anyone other than President Obama running for the Democratic nomination). It’s hard sometimes to tell who is really running; many of the candidates I have listed appear to have put up a web page and don’t do anything else. From time to time I click on the pages to see if anyone has dropped out; they almost never say they do and I’m left to wonder.

Tonight I randomly clicked on the page for independent candidate Rajesh Raghavan. His page on blogspot has been removed. I looked to see if perhaps he has moved his page and I haven’t found anything. There is a page connected with the Federal Election Commission; it tracks the money to his campaign. As I write this he has raised $550 (of which $500 is from him) and has spent $347 leaving him a balance of $203. Presumably most of the $347 was the blogspot post.

From time to time a candidate googles himself and finds my page and contacts me. This has already happened with one candidate. If you are connected with Mr. Raghavan’s campaign, let me know what to do with my list. As for now I’m removing it.

Waiting in the Dark with Steve Lopez's Dad

Posted on by
Reply

Steve Lopez is a columnist with the Los Angeles Times and I often find his columns thought provoking. This past Sunday he wrote a column on his father who is in declining health. I strongly encourage you to read it.

Steve speaks in strong and stirring words about how his 83 year old father has been a man of great strength and pride, and now at 83 years old is reduced to a man who fell one night on his way to the bathroom. Neither he nor his wife were able to get him back on his feet and the result was they spent the night on the floor before they got medical help. Steve wonders if our current health care system will care for his father in a way that honors the man that he is.

I’m afraid it won’t. We have Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor) that is frankly, the socialized medicine we have been warned about. Health care in our sunset years is good at keeping our hearts beating and our lungs inflating, but not good at asking the larger questions. Questions like: “When it is enough? When it is time to recognize that nobody lives forever and we need to change the equation to recognize this.” Questions like: “When are we done keeping you alive at all costs and should instead start thinking about giving you a good death?”

In my experience we’re a long way from that. While we all know in our heads that we will die one day, many of us live as if we were going to be healthy forever and have a right to whatever health care will provide that. At the end of our lives we are the primary drivers of what we want. Assuming we have health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance), we can instruct our health care providers to do whatever we want, even to the point of keeping us alive on a respirator/ventilator. This is a machine that will keep pumping air into our lungs even when every other organ in our bodies has stopped. Most of us won’t choose this if given proper information, but if we can’t communicate and there is nobody to legally advocate for us, most health care providers will assume we want it all, and will keep us alive at any cost.

What’s wrong here? Well, several things. First, I believe that we need to stop thinking of ourselves as immortal. That means that when we are young and healthy we need to start talking with our family members about what we want at the end of our life. If we don’t want to be kept alive on a respirator, or a feeding tube, or by having a paramedic restart our heart, we need to say so and write it down. There are many ways to do this; my favorite is a POLST form. If nothing else, talking with your loved ones about what you want is a good place to start. If things go south in our lives in a hurry, our next of kin is our best ally if we can’t speak for ourselves.

Second, we need to have a national dialogue about how we allocate health care resources. Again, some scream that this will “ration” health care. Let’s face facts: we already ration health care, only we do it now by health care coverage. If you’re 95 years old on Medicare with pancreatic cancer you can get all the chemo, surgery, and radiation that’s available. On the other hand, if you’re 25 years old and work for an employer who doesn’t offer health care, and you have early onset breast cancer, you’re out of luck. It doesn’t matter that your early onset breast cancer is way more curable than pancreatic cancer. It also doesn’t matter that a 25 year old with curable cancer has a much better long term prognosis than a 95 year old with incurable cancer. It only matters on who will pay for this.

To be fair there are doctors and other heath care providers who are heroically telling elderly and terminal patients that they aren’t candidates for aggressive treatments. For their efforts they are sometimes screamed at and threatened by well meaning patients and families who accuse them of being uncaring or greedy when the opposite is true. When President Obama attempted to make this easier by reimbursing doctors for these meetings, Sarah Palin and others called these “death panels.”

As my fellow Baby Boomers are beginning to age into the Medicare problem our numbers are straining the system and at some point we will need to reform it. My prayer is that we come to an understanding of what health care can and cannot do. Providing someone with a good death, free of pain, with the people we love around us, is the last best thing our medical community can do for us.

Is There Anyone Not Running For President?

Posted on by
Reply

In my last post I talked about listing the people running for President in 2012. Running for President is fairly easy: you just need to have been born in the United States (which includes our territories) and be 35 years old. There are, currently, two major parties: the Democrats and the Republicans. It’s a virtually certainty that the winner of the 2012 election will be from one of those two parties. Furthermore, I expect I join most Democrats in believing that President Obama will be the Democratic nominee. The Republican nominee is a wide open field.

Nevertheless, I’ve chosen to add other candidates to my list. Some are challengers to major party candidates; others are members of minor parties; finally, others are people who belong to no party and run as independents. I don’t expect any of them to move into the White House on January 20, 2013, but I’m including them to show that there is no reason they can’t.

Frankly, the job of looking at their web pages has been a painful job. I find most of them delusional and think our Founding Fathers would be holding their noses too. Most of them are running on a platform of “the past years/decades/centuries have shown that our forefathers would be horrified at seeing what the government is doing. I’ve arrived just in time to save us. Vote for me.” On the whole they believe that government is too intrusive and that we would do better if nobody told us what to do.

I’m American enough to not like to be told what to do but I also believe that most of us like what the government does when we need something. I like the idea that my local government will send someone to my house of I (or someone else in my family) have a heart attack or if my house catches on fire. I like having a public library system even if I don’t use it very often. I like the idea of having a good school system even if I don’t have children who attend (because, let’s face it, the students in those schools are the people I’m counting on to contribute to social security when we’re retired).

I’m not impressed by all the people who claim to “recapture” the values of the founders of our country and have no intention of voting for them, but I’m American enough to give them a voice. I’m encouraged by the belief that our next President is chosen not by those who chose to run, but by those who choose to vote.

Choose to vote.

Updating This Page

Posted on by
Reply

A great deal has happened in the past few weeks and I haven’t had time to write much about it. Every year around the first of May I travel with Nancy to the annual Pediatric Academic Society Convention and this year it was in Denver. I’ve gone to enough of these to have become friends with several of her colleagues and I think I look forward to seeing them as much as she does. Denver is a beautiful city but I have to confess it’s not a place I would go to without a reason. Anyway, next year’s meeting is Boston and I’m already looking forward to that.

While we were in Denver we got word that Osama bin Laden was killed in a shootout with a group of Navy Seals. I have to confess that while I normally prefer slow justice over shootouts, I applauded his death that night. The hunt for bin Laden took nearly 10 years and parts of two Presidential administrations (technically it was 13 years and three administrations; President Clinton began the hunt in 1998 after the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). President Obama was rightly concerned that if bin Laden was captured alive he would become a target for Americans being kidnapped and held as hostages. Any trial for bin Laden would have taken years and have given him a platform that the world doesn’t need. As for the Seals who (once again) got the job done: they don’t do press conferences or curtain calls. We likely will never know their names, but I pray they understand the depth of the phrase “a grateful nation.”

It’s also time to update this page. I’ve taken out the casualty counter on the left column. I was hesitant to do that because I didn’t want to give the impression that anyone is forgetting that we still have young men and women fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem is that I just can’t find a casualty counter for Afghanistan and that’s where our focus is now. If I can find one, I’ll put it in. In its place I’m putting in the beginnings of stuff for the Presidential race. I recognize that the election isn’t for 17 months, but the race has already begun. For now I’m going to list the candidates; when the major parties start their primary season I hope to keep a delegate count. This was a bit of a nightmare for me in 2008, but I’ll do what I can. My process for listing someone is twofold: I find his/her name using a Google search and the candidate has an active web page. I’m guessing not everyone is happy with this process, but it’s the best I can come up with. If you have a better system, email me.

Of course, according to Family Radio it won’t matter since Judgement Day is a short 3 days away.

It's Tax Day. Do You Know Where Your Money Is Going? You Can Find Out

Posted on by
Reply

Hopefully anyone reading this has already done his taxes, but it’s an interesting point to ask where the money is going. We have a funny attitude in the country: we look at taxes as a personal assault on our checkbooks, and yet we demand that the government fix everything we perceive is wrong. I’m one of those “tax and spend” liberals who actually doesn’t mind paying taxes for the privilege of living in a free country, knowing the local fire department still makes house calls, and exercising freedoms of speech and religion.

The White House has a web page where you can calculate (in general terms) where your money goes. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but the taxes we pay are a bit of a shell game. If you look at your paycheck stub you can see that the federal government takes money out of three different categories: federal tax, social security, and medicare. In reality all three deductions go into the same pot, and this pot pays social security, medicare, medicaid, defense, national parks, foreign aid, and NPR.

It’s a pretty simple formula and I’m a little surprised that nobody thought of this sooner. The percentage of the budget is fixed and this page allows you to put in the taxes you paid into a calculator. Go ahead and try. It could be hopeful or sobering, depending on your views. As for me, I like that Nancy and I paid $879.53 for Veteran’s benefits.

Sesquicentennial of our Darkest Hour

Posted on by
1

Today marks the 150th Anniversary (Sesquicentennial) of the Civil War (or War Between the States, or War of Northern Aggression). No event in our history as a nation says more about who we are than this: the time between April 12, 1861 (the attack of Ft. Sumter) and April 9, 1965 (the surrender at Appomattox) we were a country at war with ourselves. By the time it ended 625,000 of us would be dead (more than died in World War I and II combined).

There are probably more books written about these four years than any other time in our history. Here are suggestions from books I’ve read:

Growing up in Northern Virginia (and as an adult living in the city of Manassas) I was struck by how the war continued to live in people who were born 100 years later. I was aware that the war itself was called by different names (Civil War, War Between the States, etc.) and I learned that even the battles had different names: Bull Run vs. Manassas, Chancellorsville vs. Wilderness, and others.

I also learned that the reasons for the war were not in agreement. In the north it was viewed as a war about whether or not slavery would exist, and in the south it was about whether states (who voluntarily joined the union) could leave the union. The more I read the more I’m convinced that slavery is the reality that cannot be ignored.

The roots of the Civil War can (and must be) traced back to the writing of our Constitution. The framers who drafted the Constitution in 1787 faced a dilemma when it came to slaves: how can we say all men are created equal when clearly some are the property of others. Several of framers were slave owners themselves, and while they may have found the institution of slavery distasteful, they participated in it. They also believed that the new nation would not survive if they tried to outlaw slavery. Essentially they punted, and hoped the issue would be resolved in future generations. It is interesting to note one compromise in the 1st Article of the Constitution: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years [ie, not slaves, but indentured servants], and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.” In other words, if you owned 5 slaves they were counted as 3 persons in the census.

By the time of the Civil War, some 80 years later, slavery had become an institution in the South and most Northerners either had no opinion or found it distasteful but not serious enough to end. It was also a time of Westward expansion into new territories like Missouri and Kansas. Many people in the North, including Abraham Lincoln, wanted to stop slavery where it is and not allow it to move west. Southern slave owners were outraged and believed this discriminated against them. They felt so alienated that they came to the decision that since they voluntarily joined the United States in 1789 they could just as voluntarily pull out and form their own nation. Those in the North disagreed and believed that joining together in 1789 was an irreconcilable covenant that can’t be broken. The war officially started on April 12, 1861 when Southern forces (or members of the newly formed Confederate States of America) began shelling the garrison at Ft. Sumner, South Carolina.

It’s my belief that the South never really believed the North would fight all that hard, and it is generally believed that the South expected a victory in a few weeks or months. It didn’t happen that way. President Lincoln was adamant that the Union be preserved and came only later to the belief that the post war Union would prohibit slavery. By the time the war ended the South was in shambles and the next 12 years would be called “Reconstruction.” In some ways this was as bad a time for the South as the war itself. After President Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865 he was replaced by Andrew Johnson a Southerner who remained in the Senate from Tennessee even after his state seceded. He was a weak man and Radical Republicans made life very difficult in the South. Out of this came a South that wanted to see pre-Civil War days as much better than they were. They saw it as a time when ladies and gentlemen were safe while they cared for slaves who were content with their lives. They denied that the war was about slavery or its westward expansion and that freeing slaves made them into dangerous men roaming the countryside looking for opportunities to harm or kill white people. The 1915 movie Birth of a Nation makes this point and claims the Ku Klux Klan formed as a way of protecting white people from former slaves.

Even today the Confederate Battle Flag draws controversy as some see it as a symbol of slavery while others see it as Southern heritage and tradition.