The Big Con

In their apparently successful effort to continue tax cuts for upper income taxpayers the GOP managed to pull of a con job Bernie Madoff would be proud of. It seems they've convinced a majority of Americans that all these folks with incomes over $250,000 per year (and that's after exemptions and deductions) are "job creators." and if their marginal tax rates return to the levels of the 1990s they'll be unable or unwilling to create enogh jobs to get America back on its feet.

Of course they offer no evidence that a slightly higher marginal rate will have this effect, nor do they see a problem with the millions of folks in these tax brackets who will never create jobs under any circumstances - think Wall Street traders with their multi-million dollar bonuses, or corporate executives who earn enormous salaries while exporting jobs overseas. But they too will continue to enjoy the lowest tax rates in over 50 years because we must protect those "job creators."

My question is this: why can't we reward "job creators" when they live up to their name? Why not provide a tax credit for documented job creation? That way real "job creators" are rewarded, while folks who merely make a lot of money pay taxes at the same rate they did in the "good old days" of the 1990s.

Letter to the Editor

I sent a "letter to the editor" of the Columbus Dispatch today concerning an editorial published today; the letter probably will never see print, but here it is for my vast blog audience:

Editor:

I applaud state's retirement systems' managements for refusing to provide the group of eight newspapers with "records of salaries, benefits, ages, years of service and contributions to the systems for each of the 400,000 people receiving benefits." (Dispatch editorial August 11)

While the Dispatch asserts in the editorial that "Statistical detail on salaries, payouts, age of retirement and the like isn't personal when no names are attached," in many cases it would be quite easy to determine an individual retiree's name from that information and public information available from employers. To cite an obvious example, consider former Columbus Police Chief James Jackson, who retired March 16, 2009 with 51 years of service. Armed with this information, how difficult would it be to determine "personal" information on Chief Jackson's retirement benefit?

Other items requested by the newspapers include each benefit recipient's age and last place of employment. Since in many smaller entities only one or two employees retire each year, identifying such individuals would also be quite simple.

Have there been "abrupt changes in pay that could signal manipulations of pay that could signal manipulations to boost benefits?" Of course there have been! But such changes could also signal a promotion to a higher-paying position. And there's no way the Dispatch could investigate further without determining the individual's identity! In any case it's the employer who increased the employee's pay, not the retirement system. And the retirement systems have already proposed changes to how final average salary is calculated to address "spiking."

The news media and the public are right to be concerned about the operations of Ohio's retirement systems. However, I suspect the detailed information requested appears more likely to be used for still more sensationalized articles concerning individuals receiving "exorbitant" pension benefits rather than an honest evaluation of the systems.


Tom Severns
Westerville

Addendum: Surprise - the Dispatch published the letter on Aug. 16.

Peru

I recently returned from Peru, and have posted 800+ photos from the trip online.

Select item #2 at under "Favorite Links" at right to access all my online photos at Picasa.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, Serial Liar

Last week in the space of 10 minutes, GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell repeated the same lie concerning the Democrats' financial reform legislation three times:

• It is "a permanent taxpayer bailout of Wall Street banks."

• It is "an endless taxpayer bailout of Wall Street banks."

• It is "a perpetual taxpayer bailout of Wall Street banks."

He claimed the legislation "perpetuates the one thing the American people have said they don't want to happen again, which is to have their tax money used to prop up the a large failed institution."

I looked forward to hearing McConnell explain his assertions when he was interviewed on CNN Sunday, but when asked by Candy Crowley of CNN to respond to President Obama's statement that the bill contained no provision for "taxpayer funded bailouts," observe McConnell's obfuscation:

MCCONNELL: Well, Candy, he ought to talk to his own treasury secretary, who agrees with me, as well as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, that there is a bailout fund in the bill that was reported out of the Banking Committee, the partisan bill that came out of committee on a party-line vote.

CROWLEY: But that still does not--

MCCONNELL: I don't think that's in dispute.

CROWLEY: But that bailout is funded by the banks themselves, is it not? It is not a taxpayer bailout?

MCCONNELL: Well, Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton's secretary of labor, says it is a bailout fund. I mean, regardless of how the money is produced, it is a bailout fund that sort of guarantees in perpetuity that we will be intervening once again to bail out these big firms.

Note how McConnell never did address Ms. Crowley's questions regarding who would actually be funding the bailout fund. Instead he simply calls it a "bailout" and ignores the key word "taxpayer."

Of course close followers of the news know that "taxpayer bailout" is a GOP "talking point" recommended by Republican strategist Frank Luntz to defeat any attempts at financial reform legislation. And the fact that taxpayers aren't involved at all funding the process is apparently irrelevant to the GOP, which continues to mislabel the "bailout fund" even though it would be totally funded by the banks themselves. And the $50 billion fund would be used by the government "to liquidate failing financial companies that pose a significant risk to the financial stability of the United States in a manner that mitigates such risk and minimizes moral hazard," not to rescue them. A failing bank would be broken up, sold off, and its executive management fired. That's sure some "taxpayer bailout of Wall Street" Senator!

Canadian Health Care: Fact vs. Fiction

I recently saw an interesting report comparing US and Canadian health care. It's a couple of years old, the figures are for 2005, but it clearly illustrates one of the fallacies perpetuated by opponents of single-payer health care for the US.

We regularly hear stories of Canadians coming to the US for medical treatment because of alleged long waits for treatment in Canada - or even stories of someone dying while on a Canadian wait list. And of course the blame is always placed on the Canadian government's involvement in the process.

Consider these numbers though: in 2005 annual per capita expenditures for health care in the US were $6,401, vs. $3,359 in Canada!* Isn't it likely the shortage of services in Canada is due more to underfunding than to the fact that it's a single-payer system? Wouldn't raising per capita spending by say 50% likely eliminate most of the problem? And at $5,000 that would still be far far less than what we spend in the US.

* http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20071205/

Costa Rica Photos

I posted all (~600) of my Costa Rica photos, some good, some bad, mostly just so-so, on Picasa Web: http://picasaweb.google.com/tom.severns/CostaRica#

More Anti-Obama Trash

So today I receive another unsolicited email bashing Obama - this time for putting his feet up on the desk in the Oval Office. Here are a few choice remarks from the email:

"We should inundate the White House with emails demanding he keep his feet off of our furniture. This arrogant, immature, and self-centered man has no sense of honor, or of simple decency."

"He thinks of himself as a king -- and not as a servant of the people, humbly occupying our White House for his term in office."

Now you can probably guess what I did next: quickly Google "Bush feet on desk," and in a flash I found a photo of Dubya in exactly the same position as Obama. And there was also a nice photo of Jerry Ford doing the same thing. The difference? Well, Obama is a Democrat, and he's an African-American, and I guess that's enough for these right-wing nuts!

A Perfect Day in Pasadena