Burrowowl

Listening to the radio earlier today, somebody was ridiculing Mitt Romney for claiming in a Univision interview that he had given back nearly 50% back to the community, and that his last two years of taxes indicated this. There were a few points made by the radio host that break down as follows:

• He didn’t really release two years of his taxes because he hasn’t filed for 2011 yet and only released an estimate for that tax year.
• His net personal tax rate for 2010 was 13.9%.
• His charitable contributions were “over 15%.”
• At one point in the interview he said he gave back about 40% back to the community, based on 13.9% plus 15%. That’s only 29.9% total.
• His claim that the corporate tax rate of 35% is the reason capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes is spurious.
• Counting the corporate tax rate of 35% he figures he gave back about 50% of his profits on average for the past two years.

Well, each of those points has some degree of merit and certain degree of bullshit. Clearly the point about giving back about 40% was him confusing some numbers. Romney would have to have been taking something else into account to get to that number. As for the 50% business, let’s take a look at two fairly naive theoretical situations:

In one case, Romney is a sole proprietor of a business, in the other Romney is a shareholder in a corporation. In one case all his profits are income, in the other case his profits are capital gains. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that the corporation really pays 35% in taxes:

That’s a naive breakdown, as it doesn’t take into account several thousand pages of tax code, personal exemptions and deductions aside from a 10% tithe to the Church of Latter Day Saints. Personal income tax is at a lower rate than corporate income tax. Social security tax (which you have to double-up on if self-employed because normally your employer has to what you see on your pay stub) is lower than the capital gains tax, but capital gains is taxed on dividends and such, which are after taxes so it’s 15% of the 65% post-tax corporate income.

At the $100,000 scale, corporate taxes don’t look quite so drastically unfair, do they? The same dollar value of goods or services were sold, and the liability-limiting corporate setup ostensibly pays more in taxes. And yeah, it works out to about 50%. That’s what I think of as the theoretical tax rate that Romney’s accountant starts with, and that guy’s job is to game it down in his client’s favor.

Ramp that scale up to, say, $20,000,000 instead and it’s a bit different. At the personal level social security tops off a little over the $100,000 mark, whereas the capital gains and corporate tax rates have no cap. Several thousand pages of tax codes and subsidies and other shenanigans render hypothetical situations like this moot anyway.

“How much did you give back?” is a loaded question that cam take into account a lot of things. Does the questioner mean just Federal Income Tax? All federal taxes? Does that count park fees? Taxes on airfare? On your phone bill? Does it count state taxes? If so, is it just state income tax, or do property and parcel taxes count? Or minimum usage fees from municipal utilities? There are dozens of variations built into that seemingly-simple question. Playing “gotcha” about the specific number Romney cites about how much of his money he kicks back to society-at-large (as opposed to simply spending on himself, his friends, and his family) serves little purpose in illuminating the public about important political decisions in the next few months.

This past week I had the pleasure of spending two days at the lovely Northstar at Tahoe ski resort. This is a place I have fond memories of, and given recent family events a nostalgic run or two down Logger’s Loop seemed appropriate. Skiing is best done for the intrinsic pleasures of the activity; the beauty of the environment, the bite of the wind on your cheeks, the roll of the hill under your feet, the chats with strangers on a lift. It’s all good. Expensive, but good.

Normally when you go to the mountain, you purchase a lift ticket in the form of a sticker or cardboard print-out that you hang from your jacket or pants. The lift operators know you paid and let you right on by. This year, the first time I’ve been to Northstar in a while, they handed me a RFID card with my name and a numeric code printed on it. “Just put it in your pocket and we’ll scan it for you,” I was assured. Indeed, there were dedicated staff posted at the gondola with scanner guns of some sort, ready to process the guests like we were in some winter wonderland of the Cyberpunk dark future. OK, fine, that makes sense. Then there were more at the first proper lifts at mid-mountain. OK, just making sure I wasn’t sneaking a ski day when all I might have paid for was a Gondola ride. Then there were more scanners at the Comstock lift (up the hill from the mid-mountain lodge), and again at both of the backside lifts. What the heck?

When I got back home, I checked out the website referenced on the RFID card and discovered that lo, I was participating in an alpine Foursquare of sorts. Each time I rode a lift, my card was scanned and they knew how many vertical feet I’d ski by the time I hit another lift and was scanned again. They even had pins, just like XBox Live and Steam achievements. I was surprised to learn that in one morning I’d traveled the equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge in vertical feet, that midway through my second day I’d traveled over five miles in vertical feet, and midway through my last run I had descended the equivalent of the full height of Mt. Everest. I’d also earned a Festivus pin and a “brown bagging” pin for having skiied on December 23rd and during lunch hour respectively. What an odd way to encourage people to do things they already wanted to do.

This system is available at several resorts scattered about, some of them in Tahoe, others elsewhere, and allows folks to share all their little victories via outside social networks and set up ladder competitions. I suppose in an age where people habitually post hog many miles they jog each day, this was inevitable.

Recently a lot of fuss has been made about the behavior of the police in various areas in response to protesters, particularly an incident at UC Davis. The focus in these discussions is almost always some contrast between the legality and appropriateness of the protesters’ behavior and that of the police officers. I’d like to instead take a look at the people standing by with their cameras. The onlookers. The enablers.

To quote from StopBullying.gov:

What to Do When Someone is Being Bullied

• Take a stand and do not join in. Make it clear that you do not support what is going on.
• Do not watch someone being bullied. If you feel safe, tell the person to stop. If you do not feel safe saying something, walk away and get others to do the same. If you walk away and do not join in, you have taken their audience and power away.
• Support the person being bullied. Tell them that you are there to help. Offer to either go with them to report the bullying or report it for them.
• Talk to an adult you trust. Talking to someone could help you figure out the best ways to deal with the problem. Reach out to a parent, teacher or another adult that you trust to discuss the problem, especially if you feel like the person may be at risk of serious harm to themselves or others.

This is advice meant for teenagers witnessing other teenagers being horrible to each other, but I think it applies here as well. In the above photograph of Lt. Pike dousing students with pepper spray, there are no less than a dozen bystanders with cameras, not counting the photographer who took the picture itself. They represent for the police officer a dozen votes of confidence that his behavior is not outrageous, not outside the norms of society, not aberrant, that what he’s doing is OK.

Don’t be an enabler. Behave like you’d hope a teenager might.

There was a push by local credit unions to get a bunch of folks to switch over from big national and multi-national banks over to more Sonoma County-minded establishments *. Kudos to them. It apparently went quite well. I’ve never used a big bank, so I kinda missed the boat there. Rather than switching my deposits to a local bank, I’ve been sending my beer money to local brewers. A couple of notables:

• Bear Republic in Healdsburg makes one of my personal favorites, Racer 5. My local supermarket can barely keep this stuff stocked.
• Lagunitas, straight out of Petaluma. Their IPA is available at just about every store in Santa Rosa.
• Lost Coast Brewery is up in Eureka. That stretched “local” pretty badly, but their Downtown Brown is worth a shot.
• Mendocino Brewing Company in Ukiah makes Red Tail Ale. I make a habit of picking up a six-pack whenever they’re on sale.
• Moonlight Brewing Company in Santa Rosa makes a variety of somewhat severe brews. A mainstay at my work’s company events, but tread with caution.
• Russian River Brewing Company is renown for its limited-run Pliny the Younger, though Pliny the Elder will set you up just fine. Located in Santa Rosa.
• Sierra Nevada is way up in Chico, but is very much treated as a local beer down here in Santa Rosa. I was pleasantly surprised to find it available at restaurants in Washington, D.C. a couple years back. I abstain from their Celebration Ale for purely nostalgic reasons.

The specific brews mentioned above are just representative of what comes immediately to mind when thinking of these folks; there’s a lot of variety to be found from wheat beers to ales to stouts and reds and what-have-you. I’ve found the Lagunitas and Sierra Nevada beers to be a mixed bag, having partaken of them since my ne’er-do-well high school days. It’s good to know that your beer-buying money is heading right back into the local economy, where it’s brewed by the very people you honk at in traffic and silently judge while they take too long at the ATM.

Don’t confuse this with a call to political action. I’m just suggesting you put down your Guinness for a moment and give Death & Taxes a try.

* Move your Money Project

Today I caught word of an old steadfast friend’s demise. Well, an old friend metaphorically speaking, not a person I actually know. No, not that guy; the Sonic.net Usenet server. My boss fired of a note today announcing that news.sonic.net, long quietly understood to be terminally ill and in need of a number of costly, intricate, and risky transplants and upgrades, is being shifted over to palliative care. The deluge of warez and donkey porn and flamewars and spam have just been too much to justify as a value-added no-charge service. Dane explains:

Our Usenet infrastructure is dying. Due to this, I would like to encourage you join our new web-based discussion forums at http://forums.sonic.net/

Five years ago we spent a huge amount to build a massive cluster. Since then Usenet volume has grown at least four-fold. The systems are old, drives are failing, and the infrastructure cannot keep up with the total volume. As a result, we’re missing some percentage of headers, so while downloading of messages by message ID (for example by using an NZB index) generally works, relying on our headers results in many “missing posts”.

As less than 1% of our customers use the Usenet, we have no plans to reinvest in Usenet at this stage, and it’s only a matter of time before these old systems reach such a state that they can no longer be patched up. At that time, we plan to stop proving NNTP to customers, and will encourage folks to subscribe to one of the many services such as Giganews, EasyNews, Astraweb, etc.

The local discussions in the sonic.* groups have been a great opportunity for customers to interact with each other and with Sonic.net staff. Today there is a very similar growing community in the forums, so please check them out!

Sincerely,

Dane Jasper

I’ve long thought of Usenet as the last vestige of the old untamed frontier that the Internet used to represent. It is very informally organized, with each server administrator bearing sovereign authority for peering configuration, message retention, and propagation policies. Once something gets out on Usenet, there’s no telling how far it will reach, and no way of taking it back once it’s out. I’m not quite nostalgic enough to pay money out-of-pocket for access, but it will be sad to see this window to inter-networked anarchy finally put down.