If the government were a family, how would its budget look?

For their final exam, I assigned my Persuasive Writing students to hold a model Congress in which they'll solve our nation's budget woes. Because giant numbers are hard to keep track of, I decided to pretend to revalue the dollar such that the government's annual revenue was not a mind-boggling $2.2 trillion dollars, but rather $45,000, which happens to be the current median American income.

On this scale:

1) The federal government would be spending about $76,000/year. Oops.

2) Its debt would be $300,000.

There's something fitting about that: it's like the government is trying to buy a full professor's house on an adjunct's salary. I can relate: except that unlike the government, I live in a basement apartment.

Should we relegate the government to a basement? Should we help it find a better job? I don't know, but here are some more figures that might make the debate in D.C. over these various issues a little clearer:

3) Our government is about $2,600 family-scale dollars from a balanced budget...per month. Note to those spending $76,000/year: please let us know if you can cut $2,600/month in "waste" or by "improving efficiencies." I'm a vegetarian so I wouldn't know, but could any of you save $2,600 a month just by cutting pork?

4) Letting the Bush tax cuts expire would generate around a scale $500/month in income. This is more than twice what the average panhandler makes in a month or what a just-below-average lawyer charges for two hours. Not enough to solve the problem, but maybe worth considering.

5) Cutting the Department of Education's budget in half would save a scale $66/month: the same as not eating out twice--if you're kinda cheap and leave lousy tips. And assuming you eat out at twice a month.

6) The Iraq war would have cost about as much as getting two new cars: a Camero for him and a Mustang for her (that's a scale $61,000 or so, depending who's counting).

7) That said, liberals who focus entirely on military spending are in some serious denial. Even eliminating the entire Department of Defense (which would be insane) wouldn't solve the problem: it would only save our federal "family" $1,300/month. Deep military cuts (say, 20%) would save a scale $260/month, so you're going to have to find something other than the military to complain about.

8) Speaking of entire programs: Medicaid weighs in at a scale $600/month. That means if we refused poor and disabled people all medical treatment, we could be 23% of the way to a balanced budget!

9) Since Americans buy 10.2 billion cases of soda per year, a soda tax of 25 cents a can would generate a scale $105/month: almost enough to fund the entire Department of Education.

10) Eliminating the Social Security Wage Base (which is a rule that you don't have to pay any social security taxes on income over $106,800/yr) would raise a scale $200/month: as much as a 15% cut in military spending.

So: assuming most of my math is right, you know have a clearer idea of the situation the federal government is in. I'm sorry if it depresses you: depending on your perspective, you can blame FDR for making a big government, Ronald Reagan for his failed experiment in raising revenue by lowering taxes, or George W. Bush for turning a projected budget surplus into an epically blown opportunity.

And then, when you're done being depressed, you can pat yourself on the back for being more financially responsible for the government. Although, to be fair, you aren't helping record numbers of people afford college, bailing out screwed-up private financial institutions, dealing regularly with maniacal tyrants overseas, and making sure people with bad credit ratings don't have to bleed to death on the streets if they get hurt.

So while it is important to help the government fix some things financially, maybe we should cut those "worthless" politicians and bureaucrats a little slack.


Pictured above: the author of this post doesn't let the budget
get him down. Republicans and Democrats come and go:
forget about them all and dance!

Query Letter

I recently finished the first draft of my book and am ready to start the hard part: the Query Letter. A Query Letter is a mythical beast with four wings on either side of its face and cattails coming out of its back, but if you don't have one, you're allowed to substitute words.

As an illustration of the above point, I have included (below) my first Query Letter draft.

Dear Sir/Madam to Whom It Concerns:

Once upon a time, there was a blender. And an author, who put things in that blender. The blender was a metaphor. It wasn’t actually real. But the author put many things in it anyway, because that’s what the great authors have been doing since great authors first existed (about the 6th century BC). The things the author put in the blender were the Bible and a lot of blood that came out of someone’s eyes. That someone was named Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalin. Also Faiz Ahmed Faiz. And some other Urdu-speaking guys.
When the blender finished writing, it was beautiful. The author started bleeding out of his own eyes, because he was in love. But not with a woman. With his work, like Ghalib was. And that love was like lightning that incinerated his soul.
He smeared the ash of his soul on the outside glass of the blender (which was no longer a metaphor) and I copied it into my book. My book is 74,765 words. They were much smaller on the blender, so I’m not sure I copied them all right. But that’s what editors are for.
If you find me an editor, I will give you a share of the money. Which I WILL earn. I swear! Because it’s so (heart-breakingly) beautiful, people who read it will weep and hand their credit cards to whoever asks for them because that’s how lost they’ll be in the madness of love.

Sincerely,

[name withheld for privacy reasons]

The Caged Bird Tweets

I had planned to post the highlights of my experiment with Twitteration. Unfortunately, there are no highlights yet. Maybe these can hold you over until when:

12 Feb
Baby reaches toward me like Adam in Michelangelo's painting--only it's my eyeball, not my finger, that he's almost got...

14 Feb
Nicole says Valentine's Day was designed for six-year-old girls: lots of pink, cute little notes, and free candy. Also, no angst.

15 Feb
Just folded a sheet that's had the spit-up washed out twice today. Ponce de Leon, we have found the fabled fountain of youth.

18 Feb
Someday, my young friend, you too may tell your wife, "You always look so sexy when the kids are asleep."

19 Feb
I am so religious: every day, I listen to my infant son recite the entire book of Lamentations. Still wish he would just sleep, though.

22 Feb
The internet puts the whole world at the same distance. The only things we have to fear are horseshoes and hand grenades.

Becoming a Twit

I am currently working on a book so poetic that I am only averaging a little over five hundred words per day even though I am almost always working whenever my baby isn't crying so loudly I can no longer think.

You would think that I would put out more than 515 words on average in that three-hour work window, but don't be fooled: dredging great writing out of my soul is fairly time-consuming, because my soul is pretty far away.

All of which is to say: I didn't blog in January, and may not blog again "for realsies" until April.

Honestly, I thought that would be good enough, but having watched the news out of Tunisia and Egypt (not to mention Algeria), I'm getting a bit nervous that if I don't keep active in some way, I may be ousted from my own blog by popular protests.

That's why I decided yesterday to become a real Twit.



I joined Twitter in June of 2009 so I could win free tickets to a play, but almost immediately forgot my password and didn't tweet again until yesterday, when I suddenly remembered that my Twitter password was "Twitter." Armed with that password, I have since tweeted twice, hoping that a tweet a day keeps the protests at bay.

You can follow me on Twitter if you know how to do such things (no help here--I'm still only following the people in charge of that long-ago contest...) OR you can check this blog every week or so and I'll update a post with selected tweets.

Why No One Publishes My Fiction

My daughter recently asked to email her uncle Matt, who is serving an LDS mission in India. She only wrote the subject line and two sentences, but that was enough to get us past the starting--which is the hardest part of most writing. Nicole went on to tell Matt about our lives (wake up, get spit up on, do laundry, repeat) and said that I would finish by telling more interesting stories. Here is what I wrote:

Dear Elder Mattathias Singh Goldberg Westwood,

Nicole said I would tell you some stories, so here are some stories. Once there as a frog. The frog lived in the bottom of a well, unless it rained really hard, in which case the frog could go and see the big wide very wet world. One day the frog wandered so far into the big wide wet world that the well waters dropped back so far he wouldn't have been able to get back in without a very dangerous jump. But it didn't really matter, because on his way back to the well after the storm, the frog got run over by a rickshaw.

Here is another story: once there was a bird. The bird had three eyes and a magical shadow. From high in its perch in the mountains, the bird would look down on the earth and think "my, it is rainy down there." When it became sunny again, the bird would look with its third eye on the world and see all kinds of things. For examples: a village where every dog had lost one of its legs but all were happy in any case because that is the nature of most dogs, an old man who'd had two fingers frozen off at high elevation during the mostly pointless 1962 war with China who could slip playing cards in and out of his sleeve covertly in the gap between his remaining fingers and made good money doing so, a village of squatters who had erected makeshift homes and even several shrines in the thirtieth through fiftieth floors of an office building which had been abandoned during a past financial crisis, and a dead frog. The bird flew a thousand feet over the frog, which was instantly revived and could thereafter lure sufficient flies into its well to feed its family simply by croaking a hypnotically melodic croak with which it had been gifted.

A thousand year later there was a lost wanderer in a great desert. He looked this way, he looked that way, and he saw only rocks and sand as far as his nearly sand-blind eyes could see. He walked in no particular direction at all and collapsed--afraid that he would weep in despair and that the tears would waste his body's last ounces of liquid and he would die. In the night, the wanderer dreamed of good things to eat: sweet doughy balls, and cakes with the taste of honey and cumin seed, and tiny fritters shaped like the tracks lizards leave as they skattle their way across the barren wasteland. In his dream, he kept feeling as if something was missing, something he desperately needed, and that's when he heard it: a hypnotically melodic croak. The dreaming wanderer left the sweets and walked through the freezing winds of the midnight desert toward the sound. He removed five rocks from their places and then a sixth. As he lifted the sixth rock, off slid three pebbles plink, plink, plink into the waters of the well and the dreamer woke up and fell on his face and drank desperate thirsty gulps of it until he felt human again.

Those are my stories for today. If you were going to kill me, I would tell you nine-hundred and ninety-eight more, but you are not going to kill me, so there's really no need to tell you of the girl the wanderer saw through the well, who could weave her old castaway clothes back into sheep, goats, camels, alpacas, and once--inexplicably--into a wooly mammoth. Nor is there need to tell you about the man who prayed to find his fortune and chanced upon a magical goat and who became very rich selling goat cheese until he learned that the goat had the power of speech and knew the way to a secret kingdom where no one casts the evil eye. And of course I won't tell you about the boy who grew up in a land of happiness but invented another world and walked into it by trying to imagine sorrow.

I hope you are having a good time and learning not to tie your shoes too slowly or disappear into the library of your own mind for too long.

-James

Should Top Earners Pay Higher Income Taxes?

Dear People in the Top Tax Bracket,

When many liberals look at your incomes, the answer is clear. State and federal governments need money. You have a lot more money than you need to live. Therefore, they should take a higher percentage of money from you, right?

From a practical perspective, that's not bad--an extra percent or two in the top bracket generates a lot more money than a percent or two at the bottom--but it understandably makes many of you top 2% of earners feel a bit like the government has noticed your nice jacket, chased you into a dark alley, and shaken you down at knife point while explaining that they have a bit of a spending addiction and need your help.

From your perspective, it may seem like the United States is built on a clear division of labor: private industry earns the money; the government spends it. You work hard or smart (or else have the foresight to be born with the last name "Walton") and then politicians who are probably too busy text-flirting with teen-aged Congressional pages to do much math blow $3 trillion a year and then announce that they need more of your money. But does anyone ask what you stand to gain from higher taxes?

My friends: fear not. Today, I will try to answer that question. For the first time in the history of the world, I will bother to explain how higher taxes for you top-bracket earners actually benefit you.

But first: let's get to know each other. Let's start with a very personal question: how did you make your money? Maybe you are Bill Gates and before you spent all your time checking this blog for updates, you made a billion dollars by ruling the world of computers (up until Al Gore ruined your near-monopoly by inventing the internet). Or maybe you're way at the bottom end of the top 2% and earn your just over $200 grand a year as a highly successful lawyer or stockbroker or as the owner of a car sales franchise. The again, maybe you're not even in the top 2% yet but you've started your own company making the next big thing and you're pretty sure it will go viral and by next year you'll be crazy rich and so you're worried about top-bracket taxes in advance.

Whatever service you give or product you produce, you are probably very good at it. If you weren't, you probably wouldn't be earning like you are. That makes it easy to think that your special skill--whether it's hard work, intelligence, strong people skills, or having a successful father--is the sole reason for your success. But don't fall into that trap. You don't make money just by being you. You make money if and only if there's a useable outside world to work from.

That is to say: it's hard to sell cars if the government doesn't build roads. It's hard to sell Microsoft Word to every household in countries without public education where the majority of people are illiterate. And it's hard to successfully start your own company in relatively government-free places like Somalia, where everyone's been too busy surviving to develop skills that make them worth hiring, where shoplifters carry automatic weapons, and where it's really not worth it for the average person to venture out of their house to buy your goods anyway.

Successful businesspeople make better products, but they rely on the larger society for quality markets. Take a few moments to estimate the:
a) cost of educating your own laborers from childhood: $______
b) cost of providing the only security for your business operations: $______
c) lost profits from customers without access to your product because of gov't roads, or because a lack of public education makes it useless to them, or who don't buy your product because they or their parents couldn't pay for a medical emergency years ago and they died: $_____
Total: $_____

Now write down the amount you pay in federal and state taxes: $______
Next, multiply the federal part of that number by .13 and add it to the line above. This is your tax amount if the Bush tax cuts expire: $____

It may seem obvious to you based on these two lists that you earn a lot more by operating under a decent government than without a government. So obvious, in fact, that you might think people in your bracket would want to give money to the government whether they were taxed or not. But my dear high-earning friend: do not be fooled. Other high earners, the ones who don't read this blog, are not as philanthropic as you. All businesses have a vested interest in making the market more educated, safer, and healthier, but since the market is so big, most of them won't do it unless everyone solemnly swears to work on the problem together. Many top earners would rather claim that their jet ski purchases stimulate the economy than actually do more to pay for the military, infrastructure, and educated populace they actually depend on.

Let's talk about this in the context of now. If we let the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% of earners expire, each of you goes from paying 35% of your income to paying 39.6% and the government gets an extra $70 billion or so per year. How much is $70 billion? More than enough to pay for the entire Marine Corps ($29 billion per year). More than we spend, even in this age of tracking terrorists, on military intelligence (about $50 billion per year). It's also more than twice the current estimated net cost of TARP ($30 billion), and just over the usual budget of the entire U.S. Department of Education (about $60 billion a year not counting recent stimulus money). Yes: even by government standards, $70 billion a year is real money.

Now, let's imagine that because of the $700 billion less in revenue the government will get thanks to eight-now-turning-into-ten-years of the Bush tax cuts in your bracket, one of these services ultimately gets cut. Have these tax cuts for your bracket really been worth 24 years' worth of Marine Corps funding? Or 14 years' worth of military intelligence? Have they been worth more than 23 bailouts? Go ask the Tea Party about that last one--I'm curious to hear what they think.

Of course, most Tea Partiers would probably say that the real problem with federal spending isn't the Marines and that bailouts are Satanic but rare. They would say instead that the $700 billion the Bush tax cuts for you top earners cost should come out of entitlement programs that only serve to turn losers into whiners. I will not use the same line of argument with you, however, because unlike Tea Partiers, you know that this is silly--thanks to the Social Security Wage Base, everyone in your bracket pays the same $6,621.60 maximum social security tab as someone with a $100,000 a year income, meaning that your social security tax rate is far lower than your cleaning lady's is. (You also know that Medicare is funded by a flat tax, but let's not talk about that too loudly.)

In the end, then, you can't blame the entitlements. And you profit way too much from government-funded services like security, infrastructure, and increased consumer and workforce access to education and health care to be bothered, if you're honest with yourself, by the relatively low prospective 39.6% tax rate that makes a country where people earn what you do possible.

The real question, I suppose, is whether you want people in the future to be able to earn as much as you do. If you think the country should stay safe, strong, and developed enough for the best businesses to have a chance at the success you've seen, you should beg for the $70 billion annually in tax cuts your demographic is getting to end. If you've been aching to see the end of collective American prosperity and supremacy, you should call up your local Republican Senator and offer him a ride on your new jet skis.

And who knows? Maybe you can become the first American multi-millionaire to jet ski all the way to Somalia, and you can start a business while you're there...

Guessing Game

After spending three hours trying to figure out which districts I am part of (it's something like 4, 57, 26, 4, IV, and apparently none of 8, 9, 10, 12, 14 and whatever else was up for state school board), I finally managed to get sent home from the polling station to come back with proof of address (my driver's license still lists my old address, twenty minutes away). Don't worry, though. I did come back and vote, which has given me my annual buzz of civic engagement--sort of like going to church on Easter gives select people a year's worth of religion.

In more amusing news, Kira decided we should play a guessing game on the way home. I was a little burned out on guessing after all that voting, but Nicole and I played along anyway. Kira's game worked like this: she'd give us three clues, and then we'd guess what she was talking about. This worked pretty well when she'd tell us things like:
-she's an aunt
-she has red hair
-she's awesome
but got more difficult when the clues changed to
-it's a noun
-it's fast
-it's cool

For those of you playing at home, the answer to the first set of clues is "Kirstin." My answer to the second was "I don't know, Kira, and I don't want to guess" but the real answer was "Beavers. No, actually cats. Cats look like beavers. Haha! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers! Hahahaha! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers!"

She danced her way into the house and down the hall to this refrain and was still laughing about the line as she put on her pajamas.

Sometimes I wish I had her energy, but times like this remind me it's probably safer that I don't.