Month: August 2012

Paul Ryan has advocated ending them, but Chye-Ching Huang sees little reason to cut capital gains taxes further:

Proponents claim that lower capital gains and dividends rates help boost the economy, but the evidence doesn’t show it. In 2003, President Bush and Congress cut the tax rate on capital gains and dividends to 15 percent (ceasing to tax dividends at the same rate as salary and wage income). If the proponents were right, we would have expected U.S. stocks to then perform much better relative to European stocks, whose owners didn’t get such a tax cut. But research found that they didn’t.

 The Polygot Vegetarian puts the truffle trade under the microscope:

These days, restaurants and frozen entrees offer dishes like mac-n-cheese that are truffled, that is, made with truffle oil. The LA food critic Jonathan Gold called truffle oil, "the ketchup of the middle class" and a judge on a recent Chopped proposed that it should be incinerated. In 2003, Jeffrey Steingarten wrote a piece for Vogue provocatively titled, "Does truffle oil have anything to do with truffles at all?" … He methodically samples various truffle-derived or -named products. The best he can be say is that some are worse than others. Mostly, truffle oil is vegetable oil with 2,4 dithiapentane (or, if you prefer, bis(methylthio)methane) added. And since natural or naturale is not a controlled designation, saying that does not mean anything about how the oil was made.

Earlier this year, "60 Minutes" did an expose on the black market arising from the high demand.

It may be annoying, but it works:

For one, infants like baby talk. Pretty much from the get-go they’ll listen to it longer than they’ll listen to speech directed toward adults. Baby talk is also a particularly efficient conduit of speakers’ emotions and intentions. All speech transmits this information to some degree; a non-English speaker can nonetheless listen to an English speaker’s words and do a decent job of deciding whether they’re listening to chastisement, approval, comfort-giving, or attention-seeking. But present that non-English speaker with English baby talk and she’ll do an even better job. Baby talk, with its theatrical sing-songedness, wears its heart on its sleeve.

As exciting as Excel ever gets:

After seeing the upcoming film Arbitrage, McArdle explores why we so consistently fall for Ponzi schemes and other forms of fraud:

When money without effort seems within our reach, we don’t require much of a rationale to believe. And we aren’t necessarily too picky about the rationale, either. In 1996 a Ponzi-scheme craze swept the nation of Albania so thoroughly that within a year two thirds of the country had invested in one pyramid scheme or another. The inevitable collapse was horrific. According to the International Monetary Fund, "there was uncontained rioting, the government fell, and the country descended into anarchy and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed."

Shortly after the collapse, writer P.J. O’Rourke went to Albania and interviewed people who had participated. How had they been taken in? Similar pyramids had, after all, already come and gone in Russia. A local newspaper editor explained it to him. "People did not believe these were real pyramid schemes," the editor said. "They knew so much money could not be made honestly. They thought there was smuggling and money laundering involved to make these great profits." Just like those Albanians, some of Madoff’s investors seem to have understood that his purported strategy couldn’t generate the returns he was claiming. So why did they invest? Perhaps because, as O’Rourke notes of the Albanians, they didn’t believe they were the victims of a scam; they thought they were the perpetrators.

And she says all of us are susceptible, a fact that can be seen in the American public's routine investment behavior.

Riffing on Leanne Shapton's new book, Swimming Studies, Carolyn Kormann points to the longstanding, if sometimes tragic, connection between swimming and sexuality:

"I believed, for a while, in the aphrodisiacal qualities of my swimming," Shapton writes. Sex and swimming go way back. The first swimmer in Western literature was Leander. He swam a mile across the Hellespont each night to see his lover, Hero. She guided him into port with a torch. Then, one night, storm winds blew out the torch and Leander drowned. Hero, devastated, flung herself into the sea. Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, in 1810, and found it tough going, "so much so, that I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise." (Shapton’s belief did not survive her experience, either. After watching one of her swim meets, her husband was "like a man who has just sat through an interesting lecture and is now peckish.")

(Photo of a Shanghai Holiday Inn pool 24 stories in the air, via Gawker)

Blake Zeff thinks not: 

For better or worse, Obama is a professional politician, and always has been. This means he plays by similar rules and playbooks as other people in his line of business. Which means that his use of these same standard tools this time around is neither a new part of his arsenal, nor does it represent a threat to his brand, which managed to survive a heated 2008 campaign which has only been cemented further during the subsequent four years.

Josh Green defends the nastiness:

It may not be pretty, but the fact is that pummeling the opposing party into chastened submission has become the only way to settle significant policy disagreements. Romney’s choice of Ryan will nationalize the election around the most significant ones of all—not just taxes and entitlement reform, but the whole nature of the relationship between government and its citizens. The campaign was always going to be brutal and nasty. Now it will be brutal, nasty, and meaningful.

In his cover-story, first fisked here, Niall writes:

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

Krugman wants a correction:

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.

Niall responds:

I very deliberately said “the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,” not “the ACA.” There is a big difference.

Oh please. If you only include the costs – but not the revenues – in any law, of course it will add to the deficit. But since the point is whether the ACA adds a net trillion to the deficit, the only possible inference is that Niall deliberately distorted its plain meaning, while subsequently hiding behind a Clintonian parsing. Niall:

Krugman suggests that I haven't read the CBO's March 2010 report. Sorry, I have, and here is what it says:

“The provisions related to health insurance coverage—which affect both outlays and revenues—were projected to have a net cost of $1,042 billion over the 2012–2021 period; that amount represents a gross cost to the federal government of $1,390 billion, offset in part by $349 billion in receipts and savings (primarily revenues from penalties and other sources).”

What Niall doesn't do is include the rest of the paragraph. It continues, as Joe Weisenthal notes, thus:

"The other provisions related to health care and revenues will reduce budget deficits by an estimated $1,252 billion over that 10-year period— including $520 billion in revenues, mostly from new taxes and fees, and $732 billion in outlay savings for Medicare and other federal health care programs (see Figure 1). Those outlay savings reflect the net effect of some provisions that will reduce direct spending—such as lower payment rates in Medicare—and others that will increase direct spending, such as the expansion of Part D benefits and mandatory funding for a number of grant, research, and other programs."

This is not a matter of opinion. Krugman is right and Niall's response is embarrassing not because he didn't read the CBO report, but precisely because he did.

After last week's shooting at the Family Research Council (FRC), where, thankfully, no one died, the FRC blamed the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which labels the FRC a "hate group." Josh Barro defends the SPLC:

Opposition to gay marriage is anti-gay, but it does not have to be rooted in hate. But FRC is not simply an anti-gay marriage group.  As the Law Center has documented, FRC has a broad and inflammatory anti-gay agenda. FRC contends that gays are dangerous, which its scholars argue justifies criminalizing homosexual behavior and barring gays from various professions, like teaching. For example, see this 1999 paper co-authored by Robert Knight, who at the time served as FRC's Director of Cultural Affairs. In it, he alleges the existence of a gay conspiracy to promote pedophilia. 

Adam Serwer is on the same page:

The SPLC's decision to categorize the Family Research Council as a hate group, while subjective, nevertheless relies on FRC's record of purveying stereotypes, prejudice, and junk science as a justification for public policy that would deny gays and lesbians equal rights and criminalize their conduct. Accusing someone of purveying "hate" does not contain a justification for violence, explicit or implicit. It's a free country, and hating is one of the rights Americans have under the First Amendment. But if an organization were putting forth papers arguing that blacks, Latinos, or Jews were inherently prone to committing certain crimes and recommended laws specifically tailored to restricting their behavior, would we call them a hate group? At the very least, the SPLC has evidence for its decision beyond simply disliking FRC's politics.

I just wish we could do away with the word "hate" in these debates. It's far too crude a designation. When opposition to minority rights is rooted in the kinds of lies and conspiracy theories and smears that FRC trafficks in, best to call it bigotry. When it is rooted in genuine secular concerns about the social consequences of, say, marriage equality, it is completely legitimate. Along the same lines, in response to Gwynn's post from last week on on the topic, a reader writes:

Guilford cites Dreher and Milbank's essays that insist that the FRC is not in the same category as, for instance, the KKK.  Guilford might have wanted to note that Perkins, the head of the FRC, actually has long standing ties with the KKK and the White Power movement.  In 1996, for instance, the Federal Election Commission fined Perkins for attempting to hide a payment to David Duke for the KKK's mailing list, a list he used in the Senate campaign for Woody Jenkins.  Moreover, in 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Concerned Citizens and this organization fights against not only homosexuality but also the intermixing of the races, i.e. it is an overtly racist organization.  Perkins has since claimed that he had no idea about their ideological positions, but such efforts at deflection, even if true, raise suspicions about Perkins' sense of responsibility (who speaks before a group without knowing what they stand for). So, in my opinion, Dreher and Milbank are missing some tangible connections between Perkins and organized racist organizations, including the KKK, connections that the SPLC notes in their report on the FRC.

Besides that, the FRC participates in constructing 'homosexuals' as threats by spreading libels, i.e. homosexuals are after 'your' children, which is analogous to the blood libel against Jews, for example, which presumably most people would classify as 'hate speech.'  Oddly, whenever LGBT folks face such unsubstantiated accusations, they are simply ideological differences, small policy (!) differences that should not inhibit dialogue.  I am not sure how I can have a productive dialogue with an organization that imagines I am a predator.

Me neither. But just engaging in dialogue can dispel some of the myths the bigots hold in their hearts and minds. Look how far we've come through dialogue about the core issues, like marriage or military service. There are times when the "hate debate" actually prevents this from happening.

A reader writes:

I've been biting my tongue during the whole "Purring Murderer" debate, but as the owner of two rescue cats and a die-hard bird-lover, I feel it's my duty to say something after seeing those preposterous bibs and other "tricks." Here's how you keep your cat from killing birds, contracting feline HIV, or getting run over by a car: Keep them inside, permanently.

Our cats are happy living indoors. Sure, they would probably love to go outside and chase (and kill) birds, etc., but since they've never done it, they don't miss it. It's why we would never do "supervised" outdoor time. Our dogs would love to chew on shoes and furniture all day (and probably would have eaten the cats, happily), but we've trained them not to do it. The difference with cats is that you can't train them like you can train dogs. Keep them indoors, always. The occasional moth, mouse or laser pointer for them to chase is just fine. They can sit in windows. They're cats – feed them, love them, play with them, and they're happy.

I have one friend who is insistent that her cats are happier because they're outdoors. But she also buries a cat every other year from cars or fights with unknown animals – and those cats are also killing an untold number of birds in their shortened lives (but supposedly "happier") lives.

You hear this same argument about people. There are some folks who think that life was better for hunter gatherers because they didn't have to ride a bus to work or answer idiotic emails from dumb co-workers or clients. No – prehistoric people lived shorter, nastier lives, dying from what are now treatable diseases or in childbirth at alarming rates. Sure, they weren't cooped up in the house, but I think they would swap places with us, who have to worry about very little in comparison, in a heartbeat. They might not understand why the house cat is wearing a bib, though.

Another writes:

Growing up, my family had cats that were allowed outdoors. Not only did they kill, but they every so often got fleas or ticks, and even more so ended up the victim of being the inferior cat at the hands (er – paws!) of the neighborhood bully cat. Also, there's risk to several cat diseases if there's a run-in with another cat who is infected (namely FIV, Feline Leukemia, and of course, rabies from any animal – especially infected kill!).

So, what is the benefit to letting a cat out of doors? There is none, really. Or at least the risks WAY outweigh any benefits. My current kitty Gretel and my last one who passed away last year never saw the out of doors. And actually, the shelter I adopted them from had it in in their contract: indoors only.

Another sends the above photo:

"Bitty" is a now 9-year-old DSH whom I found on the road as a kitten, suffering from maladies that would make her almost completely blind. Only a few days ago, I took this photo of Bitty near-comatose in the sunshine as a feral bunny grazed itself across our back lawn.  Can't we all just get along?