Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

Your reader stated:

Someone earning $156,800 would have a tax increase of $6,200 under this proposal.  If that person supports a family of four in the DC metro area on that salary, are they rich?  Certainly not.

Your inbox is probably already full with dissents to this idiotic statement.  It always amazes me just how clueless some of my wealthier fellow citizens are about how the rest of the country lives.  Even in D.C., $156,800 for a family of four would be firmly in the upper class of incomes – maybe not "rich" like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates but certainly far better off than 85% of the country AND the District.  Households making over 150k are in the top 7% for the country and the top 15% for D.C.  It's these type of loony assertions about lack of wealth that make me (and probably many many others) far less sympathetic to arguments against raising any taxes on the rich.

Another writes:

I find your reader's anger at the suggestion that we raise the limit on social security taxes laughable.  A family of four making $156,800 already gets plenty of breaks from the government:

a credit for being married; for having kids; for mortgage interest; for their 401k contributions; for charitable donations; for employer-provided health insurance; for child care and even for using public transportation.  If they're long-time homeowners, they get a subsidy on their property taxes in many states.  They likely have capital gain and dividend income, which is taxed at lower rates than regular income.  They'll likely avoid the estate tax.  Every year, the AMT gets fixed so that it doesn't hit them.  Their marginal tax rates are lower than they were during the Reagan Administration.  And on top of all that, they want a regressive Social Security tax and benefit cuts for people who don't get quite so many gifts from the tax code?

Another:

Your dissenting reader objects to your characterizing the ceiling on income that can be taxed for Social Security as a "loophole", and calls it instead an "across-the-board marginal rate increase" of 12.4%.  Well, "Wow" back!  This argument could only be made by someone misled by the privilege of wealth.  I make over $106K per year, and every year in around late September I get an un-asked-for, automatic, and highly appreciated "raise" when that Social Secuirty tax deduction drops off my pay stub.  People who earn less than $106K do not get that raise.  I get a raise because I earn more than them.  How is that not perverse?  Why should the very part of my income that puts me in the top 15% (more or less) of wage earners not be subject to Social Security withholding?  Why should I get a bonus for being wealthier than people who make less than $106K? 

Believe me, I love getting that raise each fall, but I'm smart enough and honest enough to know that it is poor policy and definitely a loophole for high wage earners. It should be eliminated.

Another:

The reader's dissent is well taken, but there is a serious factual error.  The Social Security tax is shared between the employer and the employee.  The impact on the hypothetical DC couple would be 6.2%, not 12.4%.  This equates to around $258.00 a month.  It is hard to imagine that an additional $258.00 a month could have "serious detrimental consequences for labor supply and … economic growth".  

There are no free solutions to addressing Social Security.  Raising the retirement age, changing the basis for inflation indexing, means testing benefits – each of these will have an impact on some constituency and the same $258 argument will be made.  If it was easy and popular to fix, it would have been fixed already.  

The irony is that, under means testing, the hypothetical DC householder is likely to lose more than $258 a month (and at a time when that income is more significant).

Because it's Friday of a Holiday weekend:

Marcy Wheeler finds that the NYT's defense doesn't hold up:

Three years passed before the NYT started balancing those defending waterboarding with quotations calling it torture in less than half of their articles discussing the practice.

So what explains the delay?…It’s possible the formal admission of waterboarding to Congress by Michael Hayden on February 5, 2008 changed things. It’s also possible that John McCain’s presidential campaign–heating up in 2007–offered a reason to consider calling waterboarding torture okay. Or, it’s possible that the NYT didn’t want to call torture torture until the Iraq war made Bush so unpopular that it became okay to let torture critics have a voice in the paper.

Whatever it is, the NYT’s own narrative about how they balanced their capitulation to the Administration with quotes from torture critics is anachronistic.

My lengthy response to unfounded charges of hypocrisy in my criticism of offering $100,000 to get emails written under the assumption of privacy got quickly buried by a fast blogging day yesterday. If you’re still interested, here it is. Andrew has invited me to debate this with him in public. I hope we can do that soon.

Deborah Newell Tornello points to a double standard she finds "exceedingly sexist and unfair":

A man who says he has fought in combat–an act that is fraught with life-and-death decisions and details that would spin the heads of the more squeamish among his audience; that affects a person, both emotionally and physically, for the rest of his life; and the retelling of which narrative treads through extremely sensitive grounds–does so knowing he'll incur the admiration and support of a large, electorally significant group of voters.

A woman who says she has carried and given birth to a special-needs infant (after first satisfying her speech-giving obligations as governor, then, incredibly, flown across a continent while in labor)–an act that is, by any stretch of the imagination, fraught with life-and-death decisions and details that would spin the heads of the more squeamish among her audience; that affects a person, both emotionally and physically, for the rest of her life; and the retelling of which narrative treads through extremely sensitive grounds–does so knowing she'll incur the admiration and support of a large, electorally significant group of voters.

With the former candidate, any inconsistencies and lies in his narrative are dug up and military records–personal and sensitive as they may be–are called for and examined.

Reporters might talk to those who served with him (if indeed he served); newspapers and televised news programs discuss the serious problem with his story. … Yet with the latter candidate–who in this case is embodied by one Sarah Palin, former half-term governor of Alaska, vice-presidential running mate and likely, if not certain, presidential candidate in 2012–the vast sea of inconsistencies and outright lies in her narratives is simply accepted, or else acknowledged in private by those with functioning ears and eyes but never questioned fully and responsibly by our national media, and, to a great extent, by bloggers of any political persuasion.

Daniel Indiviglio:

We'll probably have to wait until we get rid of all the Census and seasonality noise to fully understand the way the labor market is evolving. But the narrative essentially sounds something like: job growth wasn't quite as strong as we thought it was during the spring, and probably won't be as resilient as we hoped it would be during the summer. With private sector jobs continuing to grow, though at a crawl, at least we're on the right path. It's just going to be a slow recovery for employment.

Felix Salmon:

Unemployment dropped sharply, to 9.5%. But why?…If people are just giving up and removing themselves from the workforce, then a falling unemployment rate only serves to hide the bad news. What’s more, the only important statistical decline in the unemployment rate was among white women, who already have lower unemployment than just about anybody else. The rest of the country — including, crucially, men overall — was pretty much unchanged.

Leonhardt:

The overall picture isn’t so much of a double-dip recession as it is of a badly wounded economy recovering at a slow pace.

Calculated Risk digs into the details.

(Image via Ezra Klein)

The Economist has a video interview with photographer Bruno Stevens:

Robert Wright turns his attention to Afghanistan:

If you ask people — right, left or center — why we can’t withdraw from Afghanistan, they start talking about the catastrophe that would ensue: The Taliban would take over, provide bases for al Qaeda, and suddenly it’s 9/11 again. Now, the consequences of withdrawal would certainly be messy and in some ways bad — and this subject is way too complicated to deal with in my remaining few paragraphs. But enough holes have been poked in standard catastrophe scenarios (by, for example, Paul Pillar, former deputy chief of the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center) without much reducing the grip these scenarios have on people’s minds that you have to wonder whether our fears are grounded in something other than pure reason. You have to wonder whether we’re…taking a genuinely pretty scary bunch of enemies and making them much scarier — attributing so much unity and relentlessness and cunning to them that it’s hard to imagine beating them without military victory.