Feedjit Proves Atheism's Contagion

This search recently came in and I viewed it on the traffic feed:

Foggia, Puglia arrived from google.it on "Not A Potted Plant: June 2007" by searching for If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses. traduzione.

"Traduzione," of course, is italian for "translation." So someone in Foggia wanted to know what that particular phrase meant.

Kiss Me, I'm Half Norwegian On My Father's Side

Huh. Turns out that yesterday was St. Patrick's Day. I literally did not notice. Wasn't an issue at all. Now, if people want to wear green and drink a lot of booze that's cool, but the point, I thought, was to celebrate Irish people and Irish culture. A fine people, those Irish. But if you're not Irish, it can get a little bit annoying to be continually exposed to people pining for the green fields of Kilkenny or the great food at so-and-so's pub in County Cork or insisting that Guinness tastes better when it travels less, so you've really got to go drink it in Dublin. And it gets particularly more annoying when the person telling you this has never traveled to Ireland in the fire place, so you can't be sure just how much of what you're being told is a load of blarney.

As it turns out, I am not Irish. I am, however, almost eligible to join this fine legal organization. But you don't see a whole lot of Norwegians trying to impose their food and sartorial choices on the rest of society like those damn Irish. Now, that could be because homespun gray isn't as interesting as kelly green as a color choice for clothing, and because lutefisk and aquavit are just plain nasty. I would much rather have corned beef and cabbage and a shot of Irish whiskey. So if it's a question of old-world cultures to celebrate, I suppose you could do worse than the Irish.

Well, I'm part Italian, too, and I don't suppose I could find any examples of Italians trying to impose their culture on the rest of the world, either. Or of Americans getting all misty-eyed and romantic celebrating the traditions of a country their ancestors came from but they've never been to by doing things like re-screening The Godfather and listening to Frank Sinatra music while eating a big plate of noodles and gravy. So this sort of silliness is hardly limited to Irish-Americans; they've just managed to market St. Patrick's Day a lot better than Italian-Americans have managed to market San Gennaro.

So "Erin go braless!" or whatever that phrase is, belatedly, to all my Irish-American friends.

If You Want To Never Feel Like Having Sex Ever Again...

...then listen to Bill O'Reilly read the sex scenes from his already-creepy book out loud.

[author whimpers, shudders]

Bonus Coverage

Um, someone explain to me why everyone is so outraged over bonuses being paid to AIG executives? It's not like this was some kind of a secret that this is how they were going to be paid, and that they would be paid handsomely to boot. This has been a standard practice in the insurance industry for a long time, both for salespeople as well as those in other segments of the industry -- in particular, in asset management, and in this day and age of blurry lines between industries, that subspecialty of the insurance industry that sells things like annuities, money markets, stocks, bonds, and a whole host of other things you used to have to hire a stockbroker for.

After all, asset management is where the money is. In between collecting the premiums, paying its people, and paying out claims, the insurance company is sitting on top of a lot of money. It doesn't put that money in a passbook savings account -- it uses it, out on the market. It buys stocks, bonds, and commodities futures. A big insurance company has the same kind of market clout on Wall Street as a small mutual fund, and behaves in a fashion similar to a mutual fund.

You might say that this segment of an insurance company's operation seems to have little to nothing to do with the business of insurance, and you'd be right. But the people who buy and sell stuff on the market generate much more revenue for the insurance company than the salespeople do -- and their compensation packages reflect this. No one so much as squeaked about this back when profits were fat and the solution to high premiums was to buy stock in the company.

AIG got into financial trouble not by selling personal lines like auto, life, and homeowners' policies. Those sorts of policies were and continue to be perfectly ordinary and predictable sorts of things as part of their regular operations. Any insurance company can predict with an astonishingly high degree of accuracy how many of its insured policyholders are going to die over the course of any given twelve-month period, and therefore how much money it will have to pay out in life insurance benefits. (This is in the aggregate, of course; if you ask about an individual policyholder, they won't even try to make a prediction.) So in terms of personal lines, underwriting, and claims, the various AIG companies (there are over 200 corporations operating under the AIG umbrella) are perfectly healthy.

The issue is that the managed assets are also the working capital of the company, from which claims and operations are paid out while they are being managed. Normally, this is simply a requirement that a certain portion of the insurer's assets remain liquid, or at least readily-liquidatable, for use in keeping the doors open, and being able to pay out claims. But when the market takes a sudden dive, well, things start to look pretty grim pretty fast as the working capital gets reduced to a fraction of its former value. And it's those same asset managers, the ones who allegedly mismanaged AIG's assets and resulted in the entire corporate structure becoming endangered, who are getting these bonuses.

Here's a few things for Chuck Grassley to consider, then, before he encourages these people to step out of skyscraper windows if they take their bonuses. These people had contracts. So we're looking at $165 million in bonuses being paid to people who entered into contracts back when they could have been working for hedge funds and in the boom-boom years, earned ten to twenty times as much as they agreed to take from AIG -- in exchange for the security of certainty of payment. AIG has to follow through on those promises.

Now, perhaps the contracts were not well-considered, given that they were "retention" contracts for people who still leave the company at what a snapshot picture suggests is something like 11% a year, and they seem to be largely fungible. But regardless, they were promised this money and if they don't get it, they'll sue and win. So it's better to pay them and be done with it.

Reason enough to pay the bonuses, although perhaps there may be good reasons to change the way they are compensated in the future. And this is not Chris Dodd's fault. Or Tim Geithner's. It's how things were done and we have to deal with cleaning that mess up. That's not to say that the government shouldn't demand management shake-ups. The outrage is not that AIG is honoring its contracts, or even that legislators or Treasury Department officials didn't try harder to get those contracts re-written, or that any particular legislator or regulator made any particular proposal.

And we're talking about less than .1% of the total AIG bailout here. AIG did manage to make over $750 million in business activities like luxurious conventions and sales incentives go away. But the government, first at President Bush's urging and then again at President Obama's urging, has now sunk over $180 billion into AIG to keep it afloat -- thereby acquiring an 80% ownership stake in the umbrella organization. And people are choosing to get pissed off over $165 million?

The issue should be that the government doesn't know dick about running an insurance company and has now taken an 80% interest in the world's largest insurer. So, not knowing dick about running this company, they kept on board all of the same yahoos who got the company in trouble in the first place. Doing so suggests that these people weren't really at fault for the company's distress.

If that is the case, paying them bonuses ought to be non-controversial. This would be credible and reasonable if we want to say that the collapse of the financial markets last year was something unpredictable, something that the best and brightest could not have seen coming, then we have no reason to think these people are incompetent and undeserving of executive-level compensation. Pay them, let them get the company back up on its feet enough to pay the government back itsmoney (with a reasonable rate of return for its use).

But if we're going to say that the management and/or asset managers of AIG did make significant mistakes and bear some measure of blame for failing to prevent the collapse fo the market as a whole and AIG as a market participant in particular, fine. Maybe they should have seen it coming. Then pay off their contracts and get them out the door. If they did do something wrong, then they can be relied upon to repeat whatever mistakes they made again, especially given that now they've learned that the government will bail them out if they do screw up.

The outrage is that this isn't happening. An 80% interest is a controlling one under any set of laws anywhere. The government has bought so much AIG stock that it can, almost at will, convene stockholder meetings and fire the board of directors of AIG en masse and replace them with hand-picked pros from Dover. It ought not to be too hard to get new people in who can buy and sell stocks, structure annuities, and predict with reasonable accuracy how much money pork bellies are going to sell for in September, if the incumbent set of managers are incapable of that.

The fact of the matter is, the government doesn't know dick about running an insurance company, which is why I objected to the form of the AIG bailout in the first place. No one saw the crash coming, with only a few exceptions, and we've no reason to think that AIG's management team are any more incompetent than any reasonable replacement slate of executives.

Now, the President, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Senator Dodd do look unseemly rushing to point fingers of blame at AIG for distributing bonuses because back when the bailout was structured, they didn't do or say a thing about them -- so it sure looks like their outrage today is a response to political pressure rather than something they actually care about. But while I certainly take note of their hypocrisy on this issue, it's really kind of beside the point.

The point is the government is now doing something it should never have started doing in the first place, and no one should be surprised that it's doing it badly.

When The Desert Blooms

For about a week every year, California's high desert blooms. This is usually about a month after the rains stop. The grass is green and growing all throughout the desert. Poppies start to emerge. The mountains have a golden-green sheen to them and the yucca plants flower. The weather is short-sleeve pleasant during the day and homeowners contemplate when they'll need to start mowing their lawns.

This is that week. We don't have anything like the glorious crop of poppies we had last year, but when the desert is green it's still quite pretty up here. I can believe it when we come across old documents from when this area was first settled which describe open flowing streams and ponds that lasted all year long, and realize that it made sense back in the day for the first people here to make their living by farming despite the absence of aqueduct.

Next week, of course, all the grass will be dead again, and the blooming yucca trees will be replaced by dead tumbleweeds. But I'm enjoying it all right now.

Taxing Zima

In a bid to increase revenues, the State Board of Equalization took a look at ultra-sweet "malt liquor beverages" like Mike's Hard Lemonade, Smirnoff Ice, and any remaining bottles of the clear, oddly-sweet-yet-undelicious alcholoic soda known amongst my law school buddies as "That Zima Crap." The SBE determined to reclassify these alco-sodas as "liquors" instead of "beer." This would have resulted in, they hoped, an additional $38 million in revenues from the increased taxes resulting from the reclassification as college freshmen, looking to use these things as liquid panty-removers, presumably were buying them by the pallet.

As you might have guessed by now, it didn't work out that way. So far, about $9,000 in additional revenues have been generated. The manufacturers say that they've begun to derive more of the alcohol content from yeast fermentation less of it from distilling grain alcohol (otherwise known as "adding vodka to soda pop"). The stuff looks and tastes exactly like it did before, but we're told they're making it in a new way, and since they all add so much high fructose corn syrup to the drink in the first place, it seems that not even spectral analysis of the product will reveal any difference from the old ingredient list of "carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, grain spirits, artificial flavors, FD&C Yellow #4 with BHT added as a preservative."

As the Fish Wrapper dryly notes, "Some officials and activists suspect fraud." Really? Well, good luck with that, fellas.

See, what's going on is the manufacturers have never, ever disclosed to anyone what the recipes for these bottled girl-drinks really are. Nor do they have to, and we should expect them to resist doing so because the Uniform Trade Secrets Act provides them with a powerful legal incentive to resist public disclosure of how they make these instruments of adolescent seduction. Now, they do have to provide the recipes to a Federal agency, but the Federal agency is bound by law to hold those formulae secret. Because ethyl alcohol is ethyl alcohol regardless of how it's made, the State Board of Equalization is kind of ass-out unless they can find other evidence that the product on the shelves isn't alcoholic from fermenting a liquid grain mash with yeast as opposed to distilling the grain mash into vodka.

So we'll just pretty much never know. Well, so much for that "easy money." Relying on smoke and mirrors just turns an otherwise-honest merchant into a liar -- and generates lots of work for lawyers. Or, if you really were trying to increase revenues, you might do it the old-fashioned way: go to the Legislature and get them to raise the tax on beer. That would probably have been easier, and certainly it would have been more lucrative.


Hat Tip to Outside the Beltway, which led to Kevin Drum's column on Mother Jones, and then, of all places, back to the Fish Wrapper.

"Kiss My Fat Ass," Or "Let's Make A Deal"?

Remember when I said "Hooray for Meghan McCain?" And then when I pointed out that Laura Inghram mocking her for being "plus-sized" didn't really respond very well to the very legitimate point that Ms. McCain was making about the state of the Republican party? Well, I've got another reason to say hooray to this new light -- or at least a flash in the pan -- in the great Republican Reboot, as Meghan McCain responded directly to Laura Inghram in the most appropriate fashion that I can imagine -- going on national television and saying:

"Kiss my fat ass." Here's the video.*

She's a chip off the ol' block. Does anyone have the remotest bit of trouble imagining that exact reaction coming from her old man under similar circumstances? Actually, the only problem I have is that Meghan McCain is a little bit less aggressive than her father the Senator would have been. And a glance at the video illustrates that indeed, Ms. McCain is well within the limits of attractiveness for a young lady; she would have no trouble attracting a lot of attention from most of the gentlemen in any singles bar in America even if she weren't as well-known and wealthy as she is. Frankly, I find her more attractive than Laura Inghram.

So I'm kind of happy to see that she's returning the insult in kind. It's now reached the point that all the amusement value has evaporated from this little spat. So it's time to say, "Enough, ladies, let's get back to the main point here."

That main point is that the Republican party suffers from an image problem, that it has been branded as a part of extreme social conservatives and become the catspaw of the religious right. As Republicans, we will continue to lose elections as badly was we did in 2006 and 2008 -- and indeed, we will see it get worse and worse over time -- unless we start emphasizing something other than the James Dobson Agenda. We need to set some priorities, craft a new set of political policies to match them, and identify young and articulate people to expound them. What used to work in the past isn't going to work again in the future.

Whether that point is made by an attractive woman, or an unattractive woman, or an attractive man, or an unattractive man, the point is either valid or it is not.

So if we can get past the hissing and spitting, the fundamental message that hard-core social conservatism has lost its appeal and must be at least augmented, if not replaced, with a different flavor of Republican politics. It's a point that I've been arguing for on these pages for some time. It's one that a lot of people have been arguing for. And it's looking like if the only response from the people who disagree with it is to call the reformers a bunch of names. Doing that will have several possible reactions:

1. The reformers will find the GOP an unwelcome place to sell their message of fiscal responsibility, limited government, strong defense, and/or restrained foreign policy. Therefore, they will seek out another viable platform from which their policies can be expounded -- the Jim Webb wing of the Democratic party.
2. The GOP will suffer a schism between these wings, and both of the resulting parties will be utterly crushed in all but a handful of local and regional elections, reducing both to semi-irrelevancy.
3. The two sides will have a showdown at various party gatherings like state party conventions, with the losing side from each bitter and unwilling to accept any of a variety of implications of loss of control of the party machinery, culminating in another prolonged and bitter Presidential primary between one of Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee on the one hand and one of Mark Sanford or Charlie Crist on the other in 2012, with the loser fading into obscurity and the winner taking the reins of a deeply weakened and divided party and being utterly destroyed in the general election by President Obama, leaving the Republican Party to contemplate the fate of the Whigs and the Federalists.

How many of those sound like good outcomes for the Republicans? I don't know what kind of accomodation can be made between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. I don't know what kind of a bone the social conservatives are willing to throw over to my side of the discussion or whether only total and complete dominance of the party is acceptable to them. No one on that side of the debate has done so much as to even hint that a reconciliation is possible, which leaves only the three scenarios described above. A reconciliation makes possible a Republican victory in 2012. It does not guarantee victory, but without it, Republicans can certainly look forward to four more years of minority status in Congress and Democrats in the Oval Office.


* You can stop watching it after about three minutes, when the astonishingly annoying Whoopi Goldberg starts to concern-troll for Republicans. Yes, we're in bad political shape, Ms. Goldberg, but that doesn't mean we've been reduced so low that we have to take advice from the likes of you.

For The Wife: A Recipe

Use a cocktail tumbler, sometimes called an old-fashioned glass. Do not use a pint glass such as one might use for drinking water or beer.

First, fill the glass loosely with ice cubes, maybe two-thirds full.

Then, pour in about one-half of the glass with non-flavored vodka. After that, add in a little bit less than half of that amount of Kahlúa. Stir ice, vodka, and Kahlúa together until well-mixed.

To finish, fill up the rest of the glass with cream or milk, poured in slowly to float on top of the mixture. Do not stir again; instead allow the cream to gradually mingle with the liquor on its own terms. Abide.

End Of The Competition

Tonight was the last round of the mock trial competition. If I were any prouder of the kids on the team I coached, I'd literally burst. They did great. I wish we'd have had more time to practice than we did; I'm quite confident that with more time, they'd have made it to the championship round again. Even as it was, they looked so much better, so much smarter, so much more confident tonight than they did when we started, it was like seeing a whole new set of teenagers.

Sometimes Ignoring A Comments Thread Is The Wiser Choice Of Action

I thought to comment on an American plane shooting down an Iranian drone over Iraq. But then I read the comments thread on the article. After about twelve comments, I felt a whole lot dumber than I felt when I started. As is so often the case with such web-based phenomena, XKCD got there first:
I'm glad that when someone chooses to comment here, they generally have something intelligent to say. I'd much rather have fewer, but better, comments than a lot of comments that are as totally brainless as this article in Wired got.

"Yeah But You're Fat" Is Not A Valid Rhetorical Technique

Meghan McCain: "I think that the strategy of constantly expounding upon the most extreme possible social conservative positions imaginable is starting to backfire on Republicans. It's really turning off younger voters."

Laura Inghram: "Shut up, Meghan McCain. You're fat."

Does anyone else see a disconnect between the argument and the rebuttal here? I'm gonna have to say that McCain won this exchange. Besides, Meghan McCain doesn't look particularly fat to me.

...And My Wife

An Effective Tactic Indeed

The British government is worried about economic deflation. Deflation, as in money becoming too valuable as compared to the goods and services for which it is exchanged. And damn, did they find an effective way to fight that.

The Bank of England, the UK equivalent of the Federal Reserve, is going to simply print £2 billion and buy back some government debt at auction. (FYI, the British Pound is trading for a smidge over USD 1.39, so this works out to $2.79 billion.) Pure currency devaluation. Not a lot of it from a macroeconomic perspective, but still, there you go.

Word is, if the British do not see any ill effects from this, the U.S. Federal Reserve will follow suit. Economic historians, I ask of you -- when in human history can you point to an example of currency devaluation working out well? I don't think you'll come up with a single example. But maybe you'll surprise me.

The Purpose Of Prosecutorial Discretion

I heard this story last night on NPR. It started out with a couple of cheerleaders at this high school in suburban Denver. They were goofing off and one thing leads to another and they decided to take a shower together, and used their cell phones to take pictures of themselves naked together in the shower. They didn't have sex, just being goofy teenagers. One girl says she deleted the picture and the other denies sending it to anyone, but it wound up on one of their boyfriends' phones, and he denies sending it to anyone but apparently it didn't take long before it was on the phone of pretty much every kid in the school. At some point it comes to the attention of a school administrator, who got in touch with the girls' parents. The police got involved.

That's where I started departing from the story. There were scary statistics about how one in five teenagers takes naked pictures of themselves and sends the pictures to other teens (that can't possibly be right, by the way) and the parents fretting about how this is going to follow their daughter around for the rest of her life. They didn't apologize for it but seemed to put the incident in context -- teenagers doing stupid stuff because, well, that's what teenagers do. Nevertheless, I'm going to go ahead and say that even regardless of the law (which I'll take on in the balance of the post), taking naked pictures of yourself and sending them to teenagers is a Really Bad Idea.

But I was thinking about something else by the time the reporter mentioned that the police became involved in investigating the case. I don't see a whole lot of other ways of the law dealing with a situation like this other than the rubric of child pornography. In this case, the girls who took the pictures of themselves are both the victims and the pornographers -- they created an apparently sexualized image of two underage girls. Then, everyone who got the photo and kept it on their phone is guilty of possessing that child pornography, and everyone who passed it along to their friends is guilty of distributing child pornography. Which, of course, is not only a serious set of felonies, but ones that follow people around forever because someone convicted of this crime must register as a sex offender.

So you wind up with hundreds of teenagers who are looking at multiple charges of possessing and distributing child pornography, can't get a room in the dorms when they go on to college, and are felons. It would be within the discretion of the prosecutor to charge some of the kids as adults, too -- and some of the kids will be eighteen and automatically adults. I put myself in the shoes of a prosecutor sitting down to talk with the investigating police officer -- realizing that with this information, there is a huge amount of power and responsibility to go with it. What would I do?

Well, "not prosecute a thousand teenagers for child porno" would be pretty high on my list. This doesn't seem to me to be the sort of behavior kiddie-porn laws are aimed at. Everyone knows teenagers are going to 1) fool around sexually and 2) do stupid stuff generally. What they need to be is scared, exposed to the fact that there are potential consequences for doing stupid stuff, so that hopefully they start to think about this sort of thing as they mature and don't go on to do really stupid things. But how to most effectively scare a thousand teenagers without running them through the legal system and incurring potential consequences for them and their families that are far greater than are warranted under the circumstances?

By the way, I don't know what the lesser-included charges for child pornography are. But I'd hope that if a prosecution did happen, the authorities in a case like this would opt for a more mild charge than the full kiddie-pandering that isn't really what's going on here. Obscenity, maybe? Creating a public disturbance doesn't seem to fit. There's got to be something, but I don't know what it is. Without knowing what other weapons the prosecutor has in the arsenal, it's difficult for me to think of what the right strategy might be.

You could send the detective out to arrest some of them in front of their peers -- this would scare the whole school and after they get the rumor mill working in your favor. Effective if you get it done right and then you could let the kids go later without charges. But it's too easy for a bunch of kids to misinterpret that and to fight false rumors. And then which ones do you arrest? The girls who took the pictures of themselves? Which of the thousands of kids who passed the picture on to their friends do you pick out? Do you have the kids gathered for a pep rally and arrest the whole school?

Do you just let the whole thing go? Not take any action at all? That seems like it's the wrong thing to do, too -- clearly, these kids don't have an understanding that it's not okay to do this sort of thing; they think it's fun. I suppose if I wanted to be all progressive and libertarian and stuff, I might launch into a discourse of questioning why this sort of thing is considered 'not OK' for any reason other than Puritanical uptightness about sex. And if we were talking about adults, I might just find such a discourse profitable. But we're not talking about adults, we're talking about kids, who are presumed to be not capable of understanding the full consequences of actions like these and with quite a lot of justification, given that they lack enough life experience to really appreciate what it means to have naked pictures of yourself floating around out there in the digital aether.

So do you could have the school set up an assembly and do an educational program. But how many of the kids are going to really get the message in a format like that? Not all, and probably not most. But some will. A lot will be scared and the girls will be utterly humiliated. (Well, that's not really your doing, it's theirs.) Then if you find out the picture has been passed along by a kid who was at the assembly (or should have been at the assembly), maybe you actually prosecute them.

So this is why prosecutors have discretion. At minimum, someone not directly involved in the sitaution is the one who has to decide how the legal system reacts to it. Nailing a thousand kids to the wall for the most serious possible offenses -- possession and distribution of child pornography -- would be the robotic response here. But of the many not-good responses, this is possibly the worst one to do. Which is why human beings make these kinds of decisions, not computers. Same thing with the judge handling the case -- another human being, who may have a different perspective on the matter than the prosecutor, as kind of a backstop for finding the ethical and effective response. And ultimately, it's why there are juries and all of the other procedural safeguards built in to our legal system.

Washington Moves In The Right Direction

As I've previously argued, given that it seems that voters even here in very-liberal California are not yet quite ready to accept the idea of same-sex marriage, those same-sex couples who want to be married and those of us who think they should have that right, will need to settle for the next-best thing for the time being.

That next-best thing is domestic partnerships or civil unions which provide all of the same legal benefits as marriage. My theory, as dedicated Readers will recall, is that voters will realize that their lives have not been impacted one iota by virtue of same-sex couples having these institutions and come to realize, over time, that letting people of the same sex get married is truly harmless. A period of reality and marriage-in-fact-if-not-in-name will, I think, help to reduce the impact of the hysteria exploited by the movement to restrict marriage rights.

California has come pretty close for some time, as have a few other states. Now, it appears that the state of Washington is going to take it all the way. I commend the legislators of Washington for taking this step. Also, I'll give praise where it's due -- the evangelical Christian and "pro-family" political groups are arguing, consistently with their arguments in the Prop. 8 fight here in California, that domestic partnerships are acceptable so long as they aren't called "marriage." It's nice to see them sticking to the same stance they used in California and saying, "Sure, gay people are entitled to equal rights, and since they aren't trying to use a word that has a particular social meaning, we can get behind this." I'm pleased to see the mature, calm leaders of the Christian political movement committing to a reasonable compromise between their deeply-held moral beliefs and the civil rights of other people.

No, no, no. I'm just kidding. In reality, they're throwing a panicked hissy-fit and acting as if Western civilization is about to collapse into a soul-crushing wave of sodomy:

"This is the last incremental step before they ... try to attach the name 'marriage' to what is now called domestic partnership," said Gary Randall, head of the Faith and Freedom Network, which opposes the measure. ... Randall and Larry Stickney, president of Washington Values Alliance, said if the measure passes, they plan to ask voters to reverse it. "We're fighting with a great sense of urgency," Stickney said. "In light of the California Supreme Court decision, it inspired us that if we didn't fight, it's lost. We feel backed into a corner."

Right. To date, a total 5,111 couples have registered as domestic partners in Washington. So we're talking about upwards of ten thousand people, a figure approaching .16% of the total population of the Evergreen State!

This, of course, reveals the basic truth about opposition to same-sex marriage, or in this case, anything that resembles it: social conservatives do not want any kind of gay relationship to be afforded any kind of legitimacy whatsoever; anything from a casual flirtation to a lifelong relationship must be condemned, because otherwise, the culture warrior's irrational prejudice against homosexuals cannot be justified. Intellectual or ideological consistency is unimportant. What's important is putting those homosexuals back in the closet where they belong and making damn sure that their kind of love dare not speak its name ever again.

Here, then, are a group of political activists who know how to prioritize.

Troubling Tax Trope

I wrote a few days ago about tax policy. One of the things I wrote was:

I cannot believe that 600,000 people paid 40% of the Federal government's $2.15 trillion in tax revenues in 2005; that would work out to an average tax bill of $3.6 million for each of these allegedly ultra-rich taxpayers. Any rich person who intended to remain so would look at the prospect of paying $3.6 million in taxes with something akin to the look a prom queen would have at a fresh turd floating in the punchbowl -- and hire a small army of accountants and lawyers to reduce that tax obligation in any way possible.

I still can't believe it. But I hear a harmonizing note today sounded at Donkelphant, where the normally-insightful Justin Gardner writes to advocate raising the capital gains tax rate as opposed to income taxes, and pessimistically hints that a new economic plan to be offered by Senator John McCain will do the opposite. Gardner quotes from the Gray Lady, dialing his Wayback Machine all the way to 2003:

The 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in the year 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. But their tax burden plummeted over the period. [¶] The data, in a report that the I.R.S. released last night, shows that the average income of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers was almost $174 million in 2000.

Now, this is a more subtle form of the trope -- 400 taxpayers had an average income of $174 million in 2000. But it still gets at the idea that very well-off pay a hugely disproportionate share of the money that funds our government.

Here's my value-added: the Gray Lady and Gardner refer to "income." Wealth is not income. Wealth is capital that has already been accumulated. Income is cash flow. My employer pays me X dollars a year in exchange for my labor; that is income. From there, I do various things with that money, motivated in no small part by the incentives and disincentives built in to the Internal Revenue Code, so as to reduce my taxable income to some fraction of X.

But Bill Gates does not get a W-2 form. We are discussing income tax, not a wealth tax. Wealth is untaxed in this country. Even the capital gains tax does not tax wealth -- it taxes the growth of wealth. He's made his money already and now, as a philanthropist, he is spending the rest of his life giving it away. Consequently, it would be hardly surprising if Bill Gates, the richest man in America, paid effectively no income tax at all. In all likelihood, my middle-class income was higher than his last year.

Gardner's point, and it is similar to mine, is that a "capital gain" is not the same thing as "income" and therefore this is where we should be looking if we are going to increase governmental revenues. Okay, I understand the point and it's not a point that goes to income at all since by law, we've defined this sort of money as something other than "income."

My point, though, is that there are simply not enough of these very-wealthy taxpayers out there, and they are very sophisticated, from whom meaningful numbers can be extracted. Those 400 highest income-earners in 2000 were not the Bill Gateses of the world. They were hedge fund managers, CEOs of blue-chip and tech companies, and other people who were gaining their wealth in that period of time. They may have gained their wealth in the form of capital gains rather than incomes, and let's not forget what economic times looked like back then -- tech was still hot, recovering after a late-90's "correction" and a monkey could throw a dart at a copy of the Wall Street Journal that had been tacked on to the wall of his cubicle and pick a winner. It was in this environment that the Gray Lady reported:

While the sharp growth in incomes over that period coincided with the stock market bubble, other factors appear to account for much of the increase. A cut in capital gains tax rates in 1997 to 20 percent from 28 percent encouraged long-term holders of assets, like privately owned businesses, to sell them, and big increases in executive compensation thrust corporate chiefs into the ranks of the nation's aristocracy.

Again, this is not taxing wealth, it is taxing income -- or, as the Gray Lady grouses, taxing the growth of previously-accumulated wealth at a lower rate than had been done in previous years.

Now, let's consider the theory that the top 400 taxpayers are a very small fraction of the already-elite top 1% of taxpayers. 600,000 people are .2% of all Americans, and we're told to believe that they provide 40% of the revenues for the government. If true, their average tax would be $3.6 million.

Add to that the theory that 400 individual people, .00013% of all Americans, pay 1% of the total revenues for the government. We are further told that, their average tax bill in 2000 was $174 million apiece, which would be $213.35 million apiece in today's dollars.

But the government's total revenues are on the order of about two trillion dollars a year. If 400 people are paying $213.35 million apiece, that would generate $85.3 billion. That's 4%, not 1%, of total revenues. Those numbers underestimate the impact of these very high-income taxpayers by a factor of four. So the Gray Lady's numbers indicate that these taxpayers are paying only a quarter of the taxes that they "should" be paying. "Should" is in quotation marks in that last sentence, because that word begs the question we've been dancing around.

Specifically, how ought Americans be taxed so as to make them pay their "fair" share of the burden? In answering that question, it is possible, as Gardner and the President and many others have been doing, to quietly agitate in a populist direction, towards the idea that the rich should pay a lot more than everyone else.

It is also possible to be realistic about the question. Taxing the ultra-rich is an exercise in diminishing returns. As I saw in my study of historical tax rates, one way the government got around that in the past was to impose very high marginal tax rates for high levels of income. But 90% marginal tax rates for anyone is simply not going to fly in today's political environment.

The idea that we can solve our economic problems by "soaking the rich" is simply not accurate. By definition, 1% of all income earners are going to be in the top 1% of all income earners. Those top 1%, as I hope I've demonstrated above, do what I and nearly every middle-class taxpayer across the country already do, only on a much larger and more effective scale -- they use their money in such a fashion as to define their taxable income down, and avoid paying huge percentages of the taxes that they potentially could be paying. I bought a house, and I got a huge mortgage interest deduction on my taxes. I gave some of my money to charity, I put some of my money away in an IRA. I didn't even need a lawyer or an accountant to tell me to do those things. (Alright, yes, I am already a lawyer myself, but I'm not a tax lawyer.)

How much more of this can a really rich person do? Lots, as it turns out. As a little bit of math shows above, they can do enough to reduce their tax obligations by a factor of 75% at even the very highest levels of income and capital gains. The very rich can afford to hire lawyers and accountants and do things with their money so as to defer or avoid paying the taxes altogether. Trying to soak these people with income-based or even capital gains-based taxation schemes is going to be an exercise in futility.

That is true if the goal of these tax schemes is to extract money from the very wealthy. It is not, of course; that's just the political rhetoric circulated around it.

Income taxes and even capital gains taxes are aimed at the middle class, not at the wealthy.

The real goal of these tax schemes is to extract money from the middle class. Which makes sense from a number of perspectives. The middle class can afford to pay; there's a pinch felt, but most middle-class taxpayers can certainly do it. They are made to pay as they go in the form of withholding from income, effectively converting every employer in America into a tax collector, ensuring that middle-class tax revenues do indeed flow into the government. (Notice how the wealthy do not have to withhold and can self-report their income; they do not have employers with reporting and withholding obligations.) Middle-class taxpayers lack large masses of accumulated wealth, but they earn reasonable streams of income in return for their labor, income which is not readily-concealable from government inspection. There are a lot more of them than there are rich people. They are, in short, ideally-positioned under the current scheme of revenue generation to pay taxes.

Bear that in mind as discussion of tax increases is underway. And bear in mind, as we've discussed before, that the real action in taxes is not found in the tax rates. It is found in the process of defining what is taxable in the first place. The rich are always going to be better than the middle class at gaming that aspect of the system. And the poor? They have no income to tax in the first place, or at least very little of it. They simply aren't worth the time it takes to do more than review withholdings.

When discussion of tax policy is underway, it is always taxes on the middle class that are really at issue because no significant revenues come from the extreme ends of the curve. It is always much more in the definition of taxable income than the tax rates that matter. Both parties, people from both ends of the political spectrum and from all points in between, act in harmony with this fashion no matter what kind of rhetoric they use, because they have no other realistic options.

Accurate? No. Amusing? Yes.

Shamelessly hotlinked from Instapundit.

Good Writing

When the weather starts to turn nice, sitting outside and writing is a very pleasant way to spend a late afternoon. Writers have done this for a long time, but only in the most recent generation have they done so using readily-portable laptop computers. Before that, they had to have written things out longhand.

That must have sucked.

Bad Facts Make Bad Law (Updated)

There are times I admire groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, or American Atheists. The ACLU often does principled work to protect individual freedoms and absorbs the blowback of unpopularity aimed its way by people who cannot see past the ACLU's odious clients or allow themselves to understand the principles that the organization is really fighting for.*

But then I come across something like this. American Atheists is challenging the practice of the Utah Highway Patrol Association planting roadside crosses next to places where officers have been slain. UHPA is a private organization, funded privately by its members, as a mutual support organization for highway patrol officers in Utah; it is not an organ of the UHP or otherwise a governmental entity. The objection to the crosses takes two forms -- the cross, as illustrated to the left, uses an insignia that looks a lot like a UHP badge, and the state allows the crosses to be planted on public land or a public right-of-way.

Come on, guys, do you think you could maybe find some defendants who have done something that ordinary people might actually object to? You're going to sink tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of attorney hours into telling police in Utah that they can't put up a memorial to mourn their brother and sister officers? Okay, it's public land being used here, so yeah, there's a colorable claim of a Constitutional violation, but come on! Prioritize!

Well, they didn't prioritize. Amazingly, of all of the mixing-up of the LDS church with the way things actually run in Utah, apparently the lawyers there couldn't find any more egregious an Establishment than telling the families of slain police officers that they can't mourn their loved ones. Well, bad facts make for bad law, and this is what American Atheists got for their troubles out of the District Court:

Just as the Christmas tree evolved into a secular symbol of celebration, the cross has evolved into a symbol capable of communicating a secular message of death and burial. While the cross retains its religious meaning when placed in religious contexts, it has transformed into a representation of death and burial when placed in pop culture settings and when used as a memorial. Like the Christmas tree, which took on secular symbolism as Americans used the tree without subscribing to a particular religious belief, the cross has attained a secular status as Americans have used it to honor the place where fallen soldiers and citizens lay buried, or had fatal accidents, regardless of their religious belief. And the progression of the cross from a religious to a secular symbol continues as crosses are increasingly used to symbolize death in advertising campaigns, films, television, and seasonal holiday decorations--frequently having nothing to do with religion or a particular religious belief. Consequently, the court finds a reasonable observer, aware of the history and context of the community would not view the memorial crosses as a government endorsement of religion.

There you go -- a ruling that the cross is now a secular symbol of death and mourning. Which means that not only can it go up on roadside memorials, it can go up on the walls of courtrooms, city halls, and the Utah Legislature because it can be called a "memorial" to fallen soldiers, 9/11 victims, or anyone else that no one with the remotest bit of political sense would dare attack. Good job protecting the wall of separation of church and state there, American Atheists!

See, this is the problem with zealots. They are so convinced of the rightness of their own position that they lose the ability to see how their point of view fits in to the larger world. Yes, separation of church and state is an important principle, a principle enshrined in the First Amendment.** Yes, there are excellent reasons for it and yes, the courts are probably the best way to go about enforcing that part of the Constitution. But telling people they can't mourn fallen police officers with inexpensive wooden crosses and maybe some flowers and candles is just plain mean. So AA should not be surprised when the Courts go out of their way to produce bad law to fit these facts.

And this is one of the reasons I've not joined AA, FfRF, AU, ACLU, or any of those other organizations -- they sometimes do really good work and they sometimes do really dumb things like this, and none of them have impressed me with the ability to distinguish between the two. That, and I'm already on enough mailing lists of people who send me letters begging for money which I generally throw away unopened.

But mainly, it's because of stunts like this. It's as if someone in the Utah chapter of AA said something like this in a meeting: "Hmm. We're already the most despised minority in the United States. So what can we do to prove to the rest of the world that we really are a bunch of assholes, you know, really drop our approval ratings into the low single digits? Oooh! I know, let's go after people mourning their dead loved ones. Yeah! That way we can look just like Fred Phelps!" Okay, no one really said anything like that, but if they did, do you think the result would be any different than this?

If the cross had been paid for with public money, I might feel differently. But tolerating a temporary, privately-funded memorial to a slain police office on public land is not so severe an Establishment of religion as to raise my hackles. Let the privately-funded cross go up and stay for a reasonable length of time. Eventually it has to come down, yes, but let the family and colleagues of an officer killed in the line of duty mourn in the way that they think is right.

Hat tip to Prof. Howard Friedman, the author of the remarkable Religion Clause blog.

UPDATE: To clarify, I do hope that AA wins the case and given that they've done what they've done, I wish them the best. Calling a cross a "secular symbol" is nothing short of ridiculous and that holding ought to be overturned. (Christians ought to hope for the same thing; when they worship at the symbol of the cross, that ought to mean something special to them. I can't imagine a Christian liking the idea that the cross is somehow equivalent to the knife-and-fork ideogram that tells you there is a restaurant at the next freeway exit.) My fear is that the high sympathy factor for the defense here will get in the way of that, and my opinion is that discretion is the better part of valor, and AA would have been better-off looking elsewhere for its target litigation. But if they win, that would be the right result.


* Another reason I don't join the ACLU is too many of its members seem to render the organization's odious clients into bizarre kinds of heroes because they stand up to the government. They're not the ones doing the real standing up; their lawyers are, and the clients are generally not particularly noble individuals. That doesn't mean their rights are unimportant, but it does mean I have no illusions that it's necessarily David versus Goliath when the ACLU takes on an unpopular client.

** I know perfectly well that the words "separation of church and state" are not in the Constitution. But you'd have to deliberately blind yourself to original intent to say that the concept is irrelevant to understanding both the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. And if there's one thing I abide even less happily than target litigation crafted with a tin political ear, it's deliberate ignorance.

Visa Calamity

One of the things that makes the United States of America truly exceptional in the world is the our truly amazing system of higher education. Think about the very top universities in the world. How many of them are in the USA? Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, Duke, Columbia, Princeton, Cal Tech, MIT -- these are world-class schools. How many cognates of them can you think of outside the United States? Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne -- and after that, you're gonna start to have to really think. Heidelburg?

The London Guardian, no bastion of Americophiles, lists this as the top ten, and all of them are in either the US or the UK:

1. Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass., USA)
2. Yale University (New Haven, Conn., USA)
3. University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK)
4. University of Oxford (Oxford, UK)
5. Caltech (Pasadena, Cal., USA)
6. Imperial College (London, UK)
7. University College (London, UK)
8. University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill., USA)
9. MIT (Boston, Mass., USA)
10. Columbia University (New York City, NY, USA)

Going to the Guardian's source material, you've got to go to #16 to get a non-US/UK university, which winds up being the Australian National University in Canberra, and to get into a non-English speaking university, you head further down the list to #19, the University of Tokyo. (My own alma mater ranks #98 globally, which is not so bad. In your face, Purdue!)

On the list, thirty-seven out of the top 100 universities are in the United States of America, a nation of 300 million people. Take a nation of 1.3 billion, the People's Republic of China. It boasts two universities on the top 100. Or a nation of 1.15 billion, India. It has zero. (India has two in the top 200, though.)

Now, I take it as a given that people are no more inherently smart in the United States than they are anywhere else. But innate intellectual ability is hardly the end of the story. Intelligence requires education in order to be useful. Even a significant figure of genius -- an Einstein or a Newton -- needed university education in order to make significant progress in their disciplines. So having the best schools in the world gives the United States a huge advantage.

This creates a system in which the F-1 visa, which is issued to college or graduate students from abroad who wish to study in U.S. universities, are in high global demand. Accordingly, the process of getting a sponsorship from a U.S. university is competitive. And as is little known to most U.S. citizens but probably well-known to those who have known people from abroad who have come to study here, a prospective F-1 visa recipient must also provide proof of a fairly substantial amount of money saved up in the bank, so as to prove the ability to pay for the cost of two years' worth of expenses while here in the United States.

What this means is that the United States attracts the brightest, most ambitious, and richest students from around the world. They come here to study and learn. Along the way, they get the experience of living in the United States. They develop friends here. They develop an appreciation for our open society. Since these are elites, they will gravitate towards other elites, or at least other comfortable people, and discover a relatively crime-free and affluent society, one which for the most part is interested in them and what they have to learn and say and one in which they can clearly see opportunities for themselves.

A lot of them decide that they want to stay and take advantage of those opportunities. I propose here that we do everything in our power to let them do exactly that. By attracting these people to our shores, we are able to keep ourselves the smartest, most technologically-advanced, and most productive society on the planet -- in part because we are sending our own bright young people to these universities, but also because the bright people from around the world are coming here and staying on to work afterwards, using the skills and knowledge they have gained to contribute to our economy.

Apocryphal evidence from acquaintances suggests that many of them stay on for a few years after graduating from their U.S. university, and then go home. And of those, a substantial number that they prefer the U.S. to their own homelands, and prefer to immigrate to the U.S. permanently and maybe even naturalize. And when that happens, we have a highly-skilled, well-educated, affluent person who wants to come here and be a part of our economy, a part of our society. A person with contacts and family from the higher levels of society back in their home country. It's good for us diplomatically and it's good for us economically.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, restrictions on the number of student visas, particularly from middle eastern nations, were imposed in the original USA-PATRIOT Act and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002. Those restrictions should be loosened and we should invite more students in. I do not see anything wrong with a more elaborate screening process than what this young man had to go through to get a visa to the University of Florida (he seems to think this was a long interview; in fact I think it was rather short) but the presumption should be that this is a bureaucratic hoop for a foreign student to jump through which anyone who is reasonably bright and of a generally legitimate background should be able to do.

What is more, and probably more important even than having plentiful numbers of foreign students coming here, is to make work opportunities available to these people when they graduate. For this, the primary ticket is the H1-B visa. A foreign national generally needs a college degree and an employer who will sponsor the foreign worker.

This is, in my opinion, not enough to fulfill the real purpose of the F-1 and H1-B visa programs. Because we are turning away talented, smart people, people who can make important contributions if given the chance to do so, these people are going home and since we're making it clear to them that they're not welcome in the U.S., they go to do the things that they would have done here back in their native lands. In particular, they are going back home to create industries, build roads, start companies, and employ people. In 2006, corporations founded by immigrants in the United States employed 450,000 workers, generated $52 billion in tax revenues, and were responsible for more than one-quarter of all patents issued by the USPTO.

These people are going home and doing those things there instead. They are doing it because, astonishingly, they see better opportunities at home than they do here. They feel more welcome there. They believe they can have a higher quality of life in places like India or China than they can in the United States. These are young, talented people who could be contributing here if only we allow them to. And I'm thinking in particular of India, and in particular of the field of high-tech here, because about 70% of all H1-Bs are issued to nationals of India whose field of expertise is in technology.

Lest you think I'm railing against Republican moatdiggers, I'm not. I'm taking dead aim at the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress, which included in its wasteful stimulus package a provision that none of the stimulus money could go to any company that sponsored an H1-B visa. The value of these people is significant; the contributions they make to our economy as work-generators is not insignificant. But Candidate Obama was cool to the idea of expanding the number of H1-B visas, and we can expect President Obama to leave in place or restrict the current number of these visas for highly-skilled, educated foreign workers.

Is there a shortage of U.S. high tech workers? Well, apparently there is. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many H1-B applicants in this particular field. Our own industries and businesses are now heavily dependent on high technology to stay competitive. We can't compete with cheap foreign labor; workers in other nations work just as hard as us and they are industrializing to compete better. Therefore, if we are to stay on top economically we need to be smarter and more advanced than everyone else. And if we could keep up with the need for the kinds of workers that enable us to do that, no doubt we would be doing it already.

What's more, these are people we want, or at least, people we should want, here in our country, doing tech jobs, making friends and putting down roots while putting in a good word for us with the elites in their circle of friends and family back home in the world's fastest-growing economy and soon to be the world's most populous nation. We could and should interweave our economic and diplomatic interests with India precisely because it is a large, industrialized, and increasingly wealthy nation. India, even more than China, is the marketplace of choice for the world's goods and services in the future -- and if America is well-poised to take advantage of this, we too will profit in the long run, right along with our Indian trading partners.

But that will only come true if we have the foresight to look beyond the protectionist impulses that seem to be guiding our new President and the fear inherent in the immigration policies he inherited from the previous administration. We cannot and should not be afraid of the world, either economically or socially. If the Democrats are going to retreat into protectionism, then this is an opportunity for Republicans to embrace the international economy -- because eventually, the power and opportunity of the international economy will overwhelm those who would use the law to stand in its way.

And strategically, having 1.4 billion friends living south of the Himalayas rooting for our college football teams is way, way better than having those same 1.4 billion people looking crosswise at us because most of them know someone who wanted to study here and got turned away. Maybe we ought to learn a thing or two about cricket, while we're at it.