We joined the madding crowd last weekend and went to see Harry Potter 7a.
As with all of the other movies in this series it was well done and entertaining, though for the budget that they had you’d think they could have sprung for a few more lights. Yes, I get it – it’s dark and brooding and the atmosphere is supposed to reflect that, but after a while you start wishing that you could see what was going on.
I spend enough of my life bumbling around in the dark. I don’t need to go out of my way to experience that vicariously.
We took the girls with us this time, as they are now plenty old enough to enjoy the films in a way that they weren’t when this whole series started. It’s astonishing to realize that the Potter films have been going on for the better part of a decade now, and the books for nearly two. We even made it something of a festival weekend, watching Potter 5 and 6 at home before heading out to the theater for 7a. I don’t even try to remember the titles anymore.
I’ve enjoyed them all, though – Rowling is a better story-teller than she is a writer, and she managed to create a fairly textured world that became a character in its own right in her stories and peopled that world with characters that you could care about. The movies have done a good job of capturing that.
My favorite characters are actually minor ones, the ones that flesh out the world that the main characters take for granted. They seem more real to me, and more interesting. Or maybe it’s just because I know I’m not the sort who’d become one of the heroes – if I ended up as a character in a movie like this, my credit line would probably read “third good guy from the left, classroom scene” or something like that.
Yet my favorite scene in this film was one that involved just main characters.
And no, at this point I’m not worried about spoilers. The book was a major best seller three years ago and has entered the culture as a point of reference, and the movie follows as closely as time and space will allow. If you don’t know the story by now that’s your issue, not mine. Read on at your peril.
For much of the movie Harry and Hermione are running from the bad guys, just the two of them, camping out in one of those marvelous tents that they have in their world, the ones that are so much bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. They’re cut off, even from their respective significant others, and it starts to weigh on them. They’re teenagers in the film, after all, and young love cuts deeply.
And at one point, with a song playing on the radio, Harry gets Hermione to dance with him.
This scene could have been such a disaster. And yet it worked out so well.
Several people have asked me if I thought the director was trying to imply that there was something romantic between the two characters, and that’s precisely the way the scene could have been fouled up. And you know that if this were not based on a best-seller with legions of fans who would picket any studio dumb enough to make serious alterations to the basic storyline, or if this were an American film, with our customary mandatory need to see happily-ever-after romance in a world that usually does not support such claims, that’s what would have happened. But that’s not how they handled it, and for that I was glad.
They dance for a bit – two sad and lonely people who care about each other and are trying to cheer each other up, and for a brief space it works. And then it stops working. There is pain you just have to experience until it stops, and Hermione turns away. It’s a very bittersweet moment, the kind you rarely find in films of any description anymore, let alone films aimed at young adults and kids.
I really liked how they let Hermione turn away into her own pain, and how they let Harry understand that, accept it, and still be there for her.
It was a heartbreakingly lovely moment, and it was the one I took with me as I left.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Baking The Night Away
There’s a whole lotta bakin’ going on.
It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and we’re in charge of desserts this year. This means apple-cranberry pie (with cornmeal crust), apple crisp, and a mound of peanut butter cookies big enough to land aircraft on. Somehow we need to get all this up to Kim’s parents’ house for the holiday dinner without eating them all in transit, which is harder than you’d think because those are some really good desserts and the car is not so big that we can't reach them wherever we stash them on the ride. So if we get halfway there and turn around, you'll know why.
Tabitha is making the cookies, all on her own.
She’s decided that she likes baking, which is fine by us. This means more cookies, and there is no way that can go wrong.
Although when you add in all the Girl Scout cookies that are still cluttering up my office, this might - might, mind you - amount to overkill. We got rid of most of the cookies last week, and then on Monday night the second wave crested and broke all over my desk, leaving delicious, delicious destruction in its wake. And now that we’ve finally located the sheets that tell us who ordered what so that we can possibly get these things distributed, life is good.
So we’ve got a lot of baked goods around here and are expecting more.
I’ve always liked Thanksgiving as a holiday. It is full of good food and good company, and there is always the possibility of a decent football game breaking out, although not likely. There’s a bit of suspense, you see – otherwise it would all be too predictable.
I am thankful for many things.
Happy Thanksgiving.
It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and we’re in charge of desserts this year. This means apple-cranberry pie (with cornmeal crust), apple crisp, and a mound of peanut butter cookies big enough to land aircraft on. Somehow we need to get all this up to Kim’s parents’ house for the holiday dinner without eating them all in transit, which is harder than you’d think because those are some really good desserts and the car is not so big that we can't reach them wherever we stash them on the ride. So if we get halfway there and turn around, you'll know why.
Tabitha is making the cookies, all on her own.
She’s decided that she likes baking, which is fine by us. This means more cookies, and there is no way that can go wrong.
Although when you add in all the Girl Scout cookies that are still cluttering up my office, this might - might, mind you - amount to overkill. We got rid of most of the cookies last week, and then on Monday night the second wave crested and broke all over my desk, leaving delicious, delicious destruction in its wake. And now that we’ve finally located the sheets that tell us who ordered what so that we can possibly get these things distributed, life is good.
So we’ve got a lot of baked goods around here and are expecting more.
I’ve always liked Thanksgiving as a holiday. It is full of good food and good company, and there is always the possibility of a decent football game breaking out, although not likely. There’s a bit of suspense, you see – otherwise it would all be too predictable.
I am thankful for many things.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Friday, November 19, 2010
And the Hat Came Back
The hat has made a comeback.
Every year at Christmas we play The Game – a gift-swapping game that is a fun and entertaining substitute for the usual slog of presents among the older generations of our family on both sides, since at this point we can just get what we want ourselves and save the real gift-buying for stuff for the kids. I’ve described this game before so I’m not going to go into detail here except to note that The Game requires each participant to contribute one nice gift and one goofy one.
Five years ago, one of the goofy ones was, for lack of a better description, a pimp hat – a poofy cap made of pink velour and covered with reflective silver sequins.
This ended up in the possession of either my cousin Paula or her husband Randall, who both looked quite smart in it.
Even so, they were happy to donate it to the girls when Tabitha expressed her interest, because they are generous people that way. Plus, they live in the South, where it is usually too warm to be sporting a stylin' lid like that and you can't let something so right go to waste.
And so we returned to Baja Canada hat in hand.
The hat kicked around for a few years as an occasional piece before being relegated to the Dress-up Box down in the cellar. The Dress-up Box is where you put things that are too old, too weird, too fantastical or too clunky to wear to school, and as such is a lot like my normal wardrobe except with a lot more pink and definitely a lot more flashing LEDs.
But this year the hat made it back upstairs into the big leagues when Kim gathered up anything that could even vaguely be described as “winter gear” and deposited it into two big fabric boxes in the mudroom. And that’s where Lauren discovered it.
She rocks that hat.
Although I always have to fight the urge to buy a newspaper off of her when she’s wearing it.
Every year at Christmas we play The Game – a gift-swapping game that is a fun and entertaining substitute for the usual slog of presents among the older generations of our family on both sides, since at this point we can just get what we want ourselves and save the real gift-buying for stuff for the kids. I’ve described this game before so I’m not going to go into detail here except to note that The Game requires each participant to contribute one nice gift and one goofy one.
Five years ago, one of the goofy ones was, for lack of a better description, a pimp hat – a poofy cap made of pink velour and covered with reflective silver sequins.
This ended up in the possession of either my cousin Paula or her husband Randall, who both looked quite smart in it.
Even so, they were happy to donate it to the girls when Tabitha expressed her interest, because they are generous people that way. Plus, they live in the South, where it is usually too warm to be sporting a stylin' lid like that and you can't let something so right go to waste.
And so we returned to Baja Canada hat in hand.
The hat kicked around for a few years as an occasional piece before being relegated to the Dress-up Box down in the cellar. The Dress-up Box is where you put things that are too old, too weird, too fantastical or too clunky to wear to school, and as such is a lot like my normal wardrobe except with a lot more pink and definitely a lot more flashing LEDs.
But this year the hat made it back upstairs into the big leagues when Kim gathered up anything that could even vaguely be described as “winter gear” and deposited it into two big fabric boxes in the mudroom. And that’s where Lauren discovered it.
She rocks that hat.
Although I always have to fight the urge to buy a newspaper off of her when she’s wearing it.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
A Modest Proposal
One of the reasons my dissertation took so long was that the newspapers of the 1790s had not invented the headline yet, so I had to read them pretty much straight through to find what I was looking for. And this meant I ended up reading a lot of fascinating things that I very much wanted to work into my dissertation but which my advisor found expendable.
This story, based on a long 1799 article in the Aurora and General Advertiser, one of the two main newspapers of the day, made it through several drafts before I finally conceded and deleted it.
But I still think it was funny.
---
The 1790s were plague years in Philadelphia.
In 1793, three decades after its last previous appearance, yellow fever returned to Philadelphia and the city essentially collapsed. Both the national and state governments fled into the countryside, taking with them almost half of the city's population and leaving an undermanned municipal government (at times consisting of only Mayor Samuel Clarkson and a volunteer Committee of Assistants) to deal with the crisis as best it could. Mail delivery ground to a halt, meetings of every description were postponed or cancelled, and every newspaper but one in the city stilled its presses. People died in the streets and were buried without ceremonies, coffins or mourners.
By the time the epidemic abated in the fall 4,044 people had been identified and reported as having died from the disease, with the actual total probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,500. With a population of about 55,000 at the time, Philadelphia was quite literally decimated by the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.
Yellow fever would return repeatedly throughout the decade and into the next, with smaller outbreaks in 1794, 1796, 1797, 1799 and 1803, as well as a major outbreak in 1798 that took the lives of the editors of both the Aurora and the Gazette of the United States and once again brought the city to a standstill.
What made the yellow fever epidemics so unsettling to Philadelphians was not only the staggering mortality and ghastly appearance of the disease but also the fact that nobody really understood what caused it.
Theories abounded, however.
Some said it was caused by miasma from the swamps, or from the stench of the markets and the canal. Others blamed the recent flood of immigrants from war-torn San Domingue [Haiti], or the faltering morality of the nation's capital. Still others came tantalizingly close to the realization that mosquitoes, more common than usual in 1793, were to blame. As the disease returned again and again throughout the 1790s, Philadelphians struggled to understand yellow fever so that they might be able to do something about it.
Even without a real understanding of the details of the connection between the two actions, Philadelphians in the late 1790s moved toward preventing yellow fever by beginning to construct the first major public water works in the country.
A 1797 petition to the Select and Common Councils stated the case bluntly, arguing that the city government had the duty to build such a system, no matter the cost, as a way to prevent the yellow fever from returning. The Councils agreed and by 1801, in the intersection of Broad and High Streets where City Hall now stands, the first of several attempts at a public water system would be up and running. By 1822 the whole operation had been moved to the banks of the Schuylkill River, on the western edge of town, where it was a resounding success.
Decades before most Americans, Philadelphians were enjoying the benefits of clean, reliable water, and yellow fever slowly faded into memory.
The connection between the water works and the prevention of yellow fever was not universally accepted at the time, however, and there were those in Philadelphia who did not consider the water works to be money well spent.
One critic of the proposed system wrote to the Aurora in 1799 with what he presented as a better plan. "TIMOTHY DEEP," philosopher and insistent purveyor of social utopian "schemes," declared that the problem with the water works was that it sought to provide the citizens of Philadelphia with water.
This was unimaginative and not a good return on the investment, as far as he was concerned.
"[Y]ou must know," he wrote, “that I have lately formed a plan for improving the water works at present carrying on in this city, by converting them to the purpose of supplying the citizens with BEER; which I am sure will be more acceptable, and prevent those rising clamours among the people on account of the water Tax, already assessed, and shortly to be levied to a most enormous amount, at least so say the canal speculators. I believe few people would think hard of paying a much heavier tax than the one proposed, if they could be daily accommodated with a certain quantity of that wholesome beverage or of good gin twist, instead of the muddy water of the Schuylkill[.]”
Well aware that some might see this plan as impractical, Timothy reassured his readers that he could "prove by an algebraical involution, that the thing is not only practicable, but very easy."
Most people who have consumed the muddy water of the Schuylkill would probably consider this a good trade, but even with his algebraical involution supported by a host of Latin phrases Timothy reported great difficulties in getting his latest scheme approved by the people who might help him enact it.
A maltster, who "did not understand Algebra," balked at the twenty acres of malt houses Timothy's plan would require.
A brewer ridiculed Timothy's formulas, saying that they "looked more like a charm to cure a tooth ache, than anything else he could compare it to" and causing Timothy to storm out in a huff.
A local politician beat him about the head and shoulders and threw him out into the street when he tried to explain his plan.
What could "a poor philosopher" do in the face of such willful ignorance?
Exhausted and dispirited, Timothy set out for home and before long was hopelessly lost, both in thought and in the streets of Philadelphia. Eventually he was taken in by his old friend Dick Kindly, who fed him and sent him straight home as one would do with any wayward child.
Philadelphians would just have to settle for water.
This story, based on a long 1799 article in the Aurora and General Advertiser, one of the two main newspapers of the day, made it through several drafts before I finally conceded and deleted it.
But I still think it was funny.
---
The 1790s were plague years in Philadelphia.
In 1793, three decades after its last previous appearance, yellow fever returned to Philadelphia and the city essentially collapsed. Both the national and state governments fled into the countryside, taking with them almost half of the city's population and leaving an undermanned municipal government (at times consisting of only Mayor Samuel Clarkson and a volunteer Committee of Assistants) to deal with the crisis as best it could. Mail delivery ground to a halt, meetings of every description were postponed or cancelled, and every newspaper but one in the city stilled its presses. People died in the streets and were buried without ceremonies, coffins or mourners.
By the time the epidemic abated in the fall 4,044 people had been identified and reported as having died from the disease, with the actual total probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,500. With a population of about 55,000 at the time, Philadelphia was quite literally decimated by the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.
Yellow fever would return repeatedly throughout the decade and into the next, with smaller outbreaks in 1794, 1796, 1797, 1799 and 1803, as well as a major outbreak in 1798 that took the lives of the editors of both the Aurora and the Gazette of the United States and once again brought the city to a standstill.
What made the yellow fever epidemics so unsettling to Philadelphians was not only the staggering mortality and ghastly appearance of the disease but also the fact that nobody really understood what caused it.
Theories abounded, however.
Some said it was caused by miasma from the swamps, or from the stench of the markets and the canal. Others blamed the recent flood of immigrants from war-torn San Domingue [Haiti], or the faltering morality of the nation's capital. Still others came tantalizingly close to the realization that mosquitoes, more common than usual in 1793, were to blame. As the disease returned again and again throughout the 1790s, Philadelphians struggled to understand yellow fever so that they might be able to do something about it.
Even without a real understanding of the details of the connection between the two actions, Philadelphians in the late 1790s moved toward preventing yellow fever by beginning to construct the first major public water works in the country.
A 1797 petition to the Select and Common Councils stated the case bluntly, arguing that the city government had the duty to build such a system, no matter the cost, as a way to prevent the yellow fever from returning. The Councils agreed and by 1801, in the intersection of Broad and High Streets where City Hall now stands, the first of several attempts at a public water system would be up and running. By 1822 the whole operation had been moved to the banks of the Schuylkill River, on the western edge of town, where it was a resounding success.
Decades before most Americans, Philadelphians were enjoying the benefits of clean, reliable water, and yellow fever slowly faded into memory.
The connection between the water works and the prevention of yellow fever was not universally accepted at the time, however, and there were those in Philadelphia who did not consider the water works to be money well spent.
One critic of the proposed system wrote to the Aurora in 1799 with what he presented as a better plan. "TIMOTHY DEEP," philosopher and insistent purveyor of social utopian "schemes," declared that the problem with the water works was that it sought to provide the citizens of Philadelphia with water.
This was unimaginative and not a good return on the investment, as far as he was concerned.
"[Y]ou must know," he wrote, “that I have lately formed a plan for improving the water works at present carrying on in this city, by converting them to the purpose of supplying the citizens with BEER; which I am sure will be more acceptable, and prevent those rising clamours among the people on account of the water Tax, already assessed, and shortly to be levied to a most enormous amount, at least so say the canal speculators. I believe few people would think hard of paying a much heavier tax than the one proposed, if they could be daily accommodated with a certain quantity of that wholesome beverage or of good gin twist, instead of the muddy water of the Schuylkill[.]”
Well aware that some might see this plan as impractical, Timothy reassured his readers that he could "prove by an algebraical involution, that the thing is not only practicable, but very easy."
Most people who have consumed the muddy water of the Schuylkill would probably consider this a good trade, but even with his algebraical involution supported by a host of Latin phrases Timothy reported great difficulties in getting his latest scheme approved by the people who might help him enact it.
A maltster, who "did not understand Algebra," balked at the twenty acres of malt houses Timothy's plan would require.
A brewer ridiculed Timothy's formulas, saying that they "looked more like a charm to cure a tooth ache, than anything else he could compare it to" and causing Timothy to storm out in a huff.
A local politician beat him about the head and shoulders and threw him out into the street when he tried to explain his plan.
What could "a poor philosopher" do in the face of such willful ignorance?
Exhausted and dispirited, Timothy set out for home and before long was hopelessly lost, both in thought and in the streets of Philadelphia. Eventually he was taken in by his old friend Dick Kindly, who fed him and sent him straight home as one would do with any wayward child.
Philadelphians would just have to settle for water.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Feline Physics
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
Elections come and go. Promises are made, kept, broken and forgotten. Administrations bluster into existence, collide with cold reality, disintegrate into competing memoirs, and get relegated to footnotes in survey-level textbooks. Empires rise and fall.
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
Spring leaves bud out on the trees as the green grass emerges from under its blanket of snow. Temperatures climb and then first the grass and then the leaves turn brown, and then white under the frost once more.
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
Children are born. They stay up all night. They sleep through the night. They sleep through the morning and stay up all night again. They meet lovers and have children of their own.
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
Doors open and doors shut. Windows tilt in, slide up, slide down. Openings are left for just a split second, for a forgotten morning, for days.
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
There is no force on earth as constant as a cat on the wrong side of the door.
The cat comes in.
Elections come and go. Promises are made, kept, broken and forgotten. Administrations bluster into existence, collide with cold reality, disintegrate into competing memoirs, and get relegated to footnotes in survey-level textbooks. Empires rise and fall.
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
Spring leaves bud out on the trees as the green grass emerges from under its blanket of snow. Temperatures climb and then first the grass and then the leaves turn brown, and then white under the frost once more.
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
Children are born. They stay up all night. They sleep through the night. They sleep through the morning and stay up all night again. They meet lovers and have children of their own.
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
Doors open and doors shut. Windows tilt in, slide up, slide down. Openings are left for just a split second, for a forgotten morning, for days.
The cat goes out.
The cat comes in.
There is no force on earth as constant as a cat on the wrong side of the door.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Get Thee Behind Me, Girl Scouts
I am awash in Girl Scout Cookies.
They are everywhere. Boxes of them, all neatly crated up and calling out to me with their siren sugary voices, urging me to forget about the people who actually ordered them, forget about dividing them up into bags so they can be delivered, and go ahead and eat them now. For breakfast.
Must. Resist. Temptation.
You would think I'd be better at this. It happens every year, after all. The girls go out and about the neighborhood with me in the background, hitting up the neighbors for some fundraising. Kim drops off the order forms in strategic locations around Home Campus for people to sign up. Orders roll in. And my office turns into a place that could induce diabetes at a distance of a hundred paces.
To make that even better, sometime later this week there will be more orders coming in – the “second chance” order that I turned in last night when the girls and I went down to pick up the first chance order.
Cruelty, thy name is Girl Scouts.
I will be good. I will not rip open a box of Thin Mints and eat an entire sleeve of cookies in one breath, as they were clearly meant by Nature and Nature's God to be eaten. I will not snarf up a box of Peanut Butter Patties despite their uncanny resemblance to the Tastykakes of my youth. I will not open up a package of that new kind – the one with the chocolate, the one that comes in a tube rather than a box – just to see what it is like.
Okay, maybe just one.
They are everywhere. Boxes of them, all neatly crated up and calling out to me with their siren sugary voices, urging me to forget about the people who actually ordered them, forget about dividing them up into bags so they can be delivered, and go ahead and eat them now. For breakfast.
Must. Resist. Temptation.
You would think I'd be better at this. It happens every year, after all. The girls go out and about the neighborhood with me in the background, hitting up the neighbors for some fundraising. Kim drops off the order forms in strategic locations around Home Campus for people to sign up. Orders roll in. And my office turns into a place that could induce diabetes at a distance of a hundred paces.
To make that even better, sometime later this week there will be more orders coming in – the “second chance” order that I turned in last night when the girls and I went down to pick up the first chance order.
Cruelty, thy name is Girl Scouts.
I will be good. I will not rip open a box of Thin Mints and eat an entire sleeve of cookies in one breath, as they were clearly meant by Nature and Nature's God to be eaten. I will not snarf up a box of Peanut Butter Patties despite their uncanny resemblance to the Tastykakes of my youth. I will not open up a package of that new kind – the one with the chocolate, the one that comes in a tube rather than a box – just to see what it is like.
Okay, maybe just one.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Election Fallout - Part the Second
I have solved the deficit problem.
Today’s New York Times online has a nice little interactive feature on its website that allows you – yes, you personally – to solve the financial problems facing the federal government these days. Because for all the talk about such problems that got floated around in the recent unpleasantness billed as an election, there were precious few actual solutions proposed. There’s an awful lot of rhetoric in politics these days, but not much substance.
Not that this is new, really – I quite literally earned a PhD studying the political rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, whose passions often took them somewhat wider around the curve than the reality track could contain – but it does get discouraging to see how little has changed other than a steady decrease in the literacy of such rhetoric. Eighteenth-century invective was just so much more elegant than the semi-human gibberish that passes for hard-hitting these days. If Glenn Beck were to find himself magically transported back to the 1790s to try out his schtick, I doubt the Revolutionary Generation would have been able to stop laughing at him long enough to eat him alive, which for him at least would be to the good.
Be that as it may, the Times has given us a chance to put our money where our mouth is. And how could I pass this up?
It turns out that solving the deficit is remarkably easy to do. Who knew? And why isn’t it getting done in Washington?
All it takes is a clear sense of priorities, a general willingness to make sacrifices for the public good, and a recognition that taxes are not evil and spending is not sacred.
See how I answered my own question there? That’s called rhetorical strategy. Benjamin Franklin Bache and William Cobbett taught me that.
The goal of this exercise is to resolve the projected federal shortfalls for 2015 ($418,000,000,000.00) and 2030 ($1,355,000,000,000.00), on the theory that if you can stick those points the rest will fall into place. You get a series of options to check, and each time you do the site automatically calculates how much you’ve done for both years.
Please note how I used all of the zeros in those dollar amounts. Words don’t convey just how big those numbers really are, otherwise.
My solution required 45% of its actions come in the form of tax increases, and 55% - the majority, for those of you bad at math – in the form of spending cuts. So I’m not sure where this places me on the current spectrum of American politics, other than possibly outside of it. This is not a point of pride.
On the spending cut side, I cut 250,000 federal contractors from the payroll, on the theory that we’ve already got enough of those and frankly if the federal government wants something done it should just hire someone and train them properly. Contractors haven’t worked to well in Iraq, for example, and they’re just sucking up space and money here.
I also reduced the size of the military in some ways, though not in others.
I think we can get along fine with a mere 1050 nuclear warheads, for example – there isn’t a country on earth we couldn’t vaporize with that and still have enough left over for whomever’s next – and I’m not convinced that having as many troops as we have in Europe, Iraq or Afghanistan is materially contributing to our security. It’s not 1946 – Europeans are well able to take care of themselves. Neither is it 1980, and the Soviet Union is gone. And to be blunt, for all the everyday heroism of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan I remain unconvinced that the larger mission is worthy of their sacrifices.
On the other hand, reducing military pay and benefits strikes me as short-sighted at best and ungrateful at worst, and I tend to support the Navy’s mission of force projection.
I also think that Medicare and Social Security can wait until I’m 68 – the original logic behind picking 65 as the starting point was that not many people lived that long, and therefore the system could remain solvent. I also think that if I should somehow strike it rich by the time I’m 68, my benefits would probably do more good going to someone who hadn’t done so.
Much of the tax side of this equation follows along from that last point. The wealthy don’t need tax breaks. Supply-side economics doesn’t work in a demand-side economy – that was the lesson of the Great Depression, and no matter how often claims are made to the contrary it is still true today. If we ever switch from the modern consumer economy and return to a producer economy like we had in the 1880s, maybe we’ll talk. Otherwise, no.
So estate taxes on millionaires? Capital gains taxes on the wealthy? Eliminating tax cuts for the top 2% of household incomes? It all sounds good to me.
On the other hand, the tax system we have now is bizarrely complex and if you could eliminate most of the loopholes, you could probably reduce overall tax rates, even on the wealthy, and still increase income. I’m for that. I’m sure that’s a lot harder than the Times made it sound, but it does serve as a useful goal.
And a carbon tax. We should have one of those. This would likely be self-reducing, as businesses sought technological improvements to cut down their emissions and thus their taxes. And if both go to zero, well, then everyone wins.
When you add all this up, I’ve saved $532,000,000,000.00 for 2015 and $1,700,000,000,000.00 for 2030, giving us a tidy little surplus that we might be able to put toward paying off all the debts accumulated by less forward-thinking leaders.
Now, on to a well-deserved vacation.
Today’s New York Times online has a nice little interactive feature on its website that allows you – yes, you personally – to solve the financial problems facing the federal government these days. Because for all the talk about such problems that got floated around in the recent unpleasantness billed as an election, there were precious few actual solutions proposed. There’s an awful lot of rhetoric in politics these days, but not much substance.
Not that this is new, really – I quite literally earned a PhD studying the political rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, whose passions often took them somewhat wider around the curve than the reality track could contain – but it does get discouraging to see how little has changed other than a steady decrease in the literacy of such rhetoric. Eighteenth-century invective was just so much more elegant than the semi-human gibberish that passes for hard-hitting these days. If Glenn Beck were to find himself magically transported back to the 1790s to try out his schtick, I doubt the Revolutionary Generation would have been able to stop laughing at him long enough to eat him alive, which for him at least would be to the good.
Be that as it may, the Times has given us a chance to put our money where our mouth is. And how could I pass this up?
It turns out that solving the deficit is remarkably easy to do. Who knew? And why isn’t it getting done in Washington?
All it takes is a clear sense of priorities, a general willingness to make sacrifices for the public good, and a recognition that taxes are not evil and spending is not sacred.
See how I answered my own question there? That’s called rhetorical strategy. Benjamin Franklin Bache and William Cobbett taught me that.
The goal of this exercise is to resolve the projected federal shortfalls for 2015 ($418,000,000,000.00) and 2030 ($1,355,000,000,000.00), on the theory that if you can stick those points the rest will fall into place. You get a series of options to check, and each time you do the site automatically calculates how much you’ve done for both years.
Please note how I used all of the zeros in those dollar amounts. Words don’t convey just how big those numbers really are, otherwise.
My solution required 45% of its actions come in the form of tax increases, and 55% - the majority, for those of you bad at math – in the form of spending cuts. So I’m not sure where this places me on the current spectrum of American politics, other than possibly outside of it. This is not a point of pride.
On the spending cut side, I cut 250,000 federal contractors from the payroll, on the theory that we’ve already got enough of those and frankly if the federal government wants something done it should just hire someone and train them properly. Contractors haven’t worked to well in Iraq, for example, and they’re just sucking up space and money here.
I also reduced the size of the military in some ways, though not in others.
I think we can get along fine with a mere 1050 nuclear warheads, for example – there isn’t a country on earth we couldn’t vaporize with that and still have enough left over for whomever’s next – and I’m not convinced that having as many troops as we have in Europe, Iraq or Afghanistan is materially contributing to our security. It’s not 1946 – Europeans are well able to take care of themselves. Neither is it 1980, and the Soviet Union is gone. And to be blunt, for all the everyday heroism of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan I remain unconvinced that the larger mission is worthy of their sacrifices.
On the other hand, reducing military pay and benefits strikes me as short-sighted at best and ungrateful at worst, and I tend to support the Navy’s mission of force projection.
I also think that Medicare and Social Security can wait until I’m 68 – the original logic behind picking 65 as the starting point was that not many people lived that long, and therefore the system could remain solvent. I also think that if I should somehow strike it rich by the time I’m 68, my benefits would probably do more good going to someone who hadn’t done so.
Much of the tax side of this equation follows along from that last point. The wealthy don’t need tax breaks. Supply-side economics doesn’t work in a demand-side economy – that was the lesson of the Great Depression, and no matter how often claims are made to the contrary it is still true today. If we ever switch from the modern consumer economy and return to a producer economy like we had in the 1880s, maybe we’ll talk. Otherwise, no.
So estate taxes on millionaires? Capital gains taxes on the wealthy? Eliminating tax cuts for the top 2% of household incomes? It all sounds good to me.
On the other hand, the tax system we have now is bizarrely complex and if you could eliminate most of the loopholes, you could probably reduce overall tax rates, even on the wealthy, and still increase income. I’m for that. I’m sure that’s a lot harder than the Times made it sound, but it does serve as a useful goal.
And a carbon tax. We should have one of those. This would likely be self-reducing, as businesses sought technological improvements to cut down their emissions and thus their taxes. And if both go to zero, well, then everyone wins.
When you add all this up, I’ve saved $532,000,000,000.00 for 2015 and $1,700,000,000,000.00 for 2030, giving us a tidy little surplus that we might be able to put toward paying off all the debts accumulated by less forward-thinking leaders.
Now, on to a well-deserved vacation.
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