Is Bachmann Clever Or Sloppy?

I had been on a hiking trip for the past couple of days, so when I finally got back from hiking and checked into a hotel i updated myself on a bit of news, I noticed an article about Michelle Bachmann wishing Elvis Presley happy birthday on the anniversary of his passing. Sure everyone makes mistakes, but then you take into account her John Wayne/Gacy comment. Seems as though for a public figure she's getting all sorts of information wrong. She must be pretty dumb right? Or is she?

On my drive back home I thought about this for a little bit. What if this is a publicity stunt of sorts. As they say, any press is good press. Thinking back to my source amnesia article, what will you really remember about her incidences? That she wished Elvis Presley a happy birthday on a death anniversary? Or that she made a good hearted attempt at wishing the king a happy birthday? What if this is to show you that she is just like you. Would you have known that it was Elvis’ birthday or the anniversary of his passing (Elvis fans aside of course) if it weren't for the news? Or even the news about Bachmann and her birthday wish? Maybe she's just like the rest of us and is prone to a little screw up here and there.

Michelle Bachmann. An American like the rest of us.

Of course, you could also end up just remembering that Bachmann made many public gaffes (mistakes) throughout her campaign because Bachmann or her handlers cannot bother to put the time in to fact checking before Bachmann speaks. When it comes time to vote then, all you remember/know is that you have a negative feeling about Bachmann but you don't remember why.

Michelle Bachmann. She really is that dumb.

As I've said before, I know very little about politics so maybe my musings about political games are all wrong. Who knows?

--Elfennerji

Healthcare in America: Still totally screwed.

A man was injured while riding his motorcycle in Plumas County, California. When paramedics arrived on the scene he clearly communicated to the paramedics that he didn’t want to be treated and didn’t want transportation to a hospital. He had recently dropped his pricey medical insurance because he couldn’t afford it anymore. Despite his protestations paramedics took him to a nearby hospital and then was transported by helicopter to the nearest trauma center. Doctors then told him that he had a concussion and a broken bone around his eye. He was then discharged and later received a bill for $40,000; for services he never authorized.

There are a few things wrong with this story:

One, the man had to make the choice between health insurance or no insurance because there are no affordable plans for him to purchase.

Two, since he can’t afford insurance he had to make the decision on whether to seek medical care when he was injured.

  

Third, the paramedics took him against his will to the hospital where they gave him treatment he didn’t want for a price he can’t pay.

That third option can leads to the worst part. These crushing medical bills he will incur will likely force him to file for bankruptcy. Bankruptcy will stay on your credit report for ten years. Recent changes to hiring laws allow companies to make hiring decisions based on your credit report. Put this all together: this man can face serious problems with finding a job for ten years because he couldn’t afford health insurance.

Once all of PPACA (what Republicans call Obamacare) kicks in to effect this man will be no more likely to afford health insurance than he was before. There are many different ways to point out the absurdity of the reform of the health insurance industry. With any luck it won’t take us another 15 years to reexamine the issue and we can pass actual, meaningful, healthcare reform. Until then more and more people are going to end up like this guy.

-Kirs

The Southern Strategy

What is the Southern Strategy?
The Southern Strategy is the name given to a Republican electoral strategy. The idea is to get the racist white population of the South to vote en block for the Republican candidate. This loses the minority votes but the number of votes lost is outnumbered by the votes gained from racist whites.

Democratic incumbent Lyndon Johnson faced off against Republican nominee Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Goldwater's platform used a lot of racial dog whistle politics. Goldwater not only lost the election but failed to carry any region in the country except for the South which voted overwhelmingly for Goldwater. Republicans then realized that if they were to get the South to vote for them en mass while winning just a small handful of other states they could win the election. This was tested with Richard Nixon's campaign. Nixon's victory signaled the beginning of the Southern Strategy as an official Republican doctrine. For the strategy to remain effective, Republican strategists have to keep the racist white vote constantly agitated about racial issues so that they turn out for elections. Generally, a successful Southern Strategy does not leave a large margin for error. This is an example of a 50% +1 strategy. Lee Atwater, George Bush, Sr.'s campaign manager, once famously said of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Even though the Republican party has officially apologized for the use of the Southern Strategy, the electoral map below shows that they still employ this strategy to this day with the addition of the Mid-West to the traditional South. Note that even though McCain failed to win the election, his strongest base of support was in the South with the notable exceptions of Virgina and North Carolina.

 2008 Presidential Electoral Map per Wikipedia

Shifting demographics in the US, especially in the South, due to an increase of immigration from Latin America as well as population migration from northern states to the South may soon render this strategy obsolete. When voter turnout is higher than average, it becomes progressively harder to use the Southern Strategy effectively.

Colbert Super PAC

In the world of elections there are entities called Political Action Committees commonly referred to by their acronym PAC. PACs can spend money to influence elections though there are limits on how much money they could accept from certain donors.

After the Citizens United case ruled on by the Supreme Court a new kind of PAC was made, called a Super PAC. Super PACs can accept unlimited corporate, individual, political committee, and union contributions.

The Federal Election Commission, the FEC, regulates PACs. Recently Stephen Colbert decided he was going to make a PAC, but there was a problem with his PAC. Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, must report all contributions to PACs. According to the law, if Colbert forms his PAC and references or uses material from the PAC on his show, there is a question whether Viacom must report the time used to talk about the PAC as an in-kind contribution to the PAC.

To get around this Colbert could instead create a Super PAC and ask the FEC to give Viacom a press exemption. The press exemption is used extensively by Fox News which allows Karl Rove to be paid by Fox News while simultaneously promoting his PAC, American Crossroads. Fox News is a press entity according to the FEC and so they are considered to be reporting on the news which can include Rove’s Super PAC.

If Viacom could get a press exemption then Colbert would be able to raise unlimited levels of money and promote his PAC, and show ads produced by his Super PAC on his show, as much as he wanted. As it turns out the FEC ruled that Colbert gets a press exemption and he has started accepting donations for the last few weeks. Colbert has now raised enough money to produce his first political ad, and it keeps in line with his satirical approach to politics and current events. You can check the ad out by going to his PAC’s site: http://www.colbertsuperpac.com/episodeiv-anewhope/

-Kirs

Progressive Tax

Today, let's talk taxes. I really hated this topic when I first learned it because understanding the entirety of the tax code can be frustrating.  I am going to try to keep this post as simple and to the point as possible. So, let's see what I've learned shall we?

Taxes: Used by the government to pay for financial obligations.

Every year Congress draws up a budget. The budget determines how much funding each part of the government gets. In order for the government to be able to pay for the budget that Congress passes, they must collect taxes. There are many kinds of taxes such as income, corporate, sales, estate, capital gains, property tax, and many others. These taxes can be progressive, regressive, flat, and negative among others.

Since there is just so much information regarding taxes, I want to focus this post on just the income tax in the United States which is structured to be a progressive tax.

Progressive tax works by increasing the tax rate as the taxable base amount increases. Governments create brackets to separate your income into different ranges. Each bracket is then taxed at a certain percentage. The rate at which a bracket is taxed is called the marginal rate. The brackets and marginal rates stay the same regardless of income. Meaning people making $50,000 or $150,000 will be taxed at the same rate in the same brackets. However the brackets and marginal rates change every year.

Now, bear with me as I try to explain how this works. For the sake of simplicity, I am making up the numbers and percentages. Let's assume you make $100,000 one year in income. First, your income will be split into several different brackets. The US government has six brackets, for our example we will use just three and we will assume there are no deductions possible.

Bracket 1: $0 - $50,000 taxed at 0%
Bracket 2: $50,001 - $75,000 taxed at 10%
Bracket 3: $75,001 - $100,000 taxed at 20%

Bracket 1 has $50,000 and Brackets 2 and 3 have $25,000 each. The first Bracket will not be taxed at all. Bracket 2 will be taxed 10% which gives you $2,500 and Bracket 3 is taxed at 20% which gives $5,000. Here is an illustration for you to visualize it:

From each bracket add up the amount that will be taxed and that is what you will have to pay for your income tax. In the example stated, you will have to pay $7,500 in taxes out of your $100,000 income. This amounts to only 7.5% of your whole income even though your highest marginal rate is almost three times that amount (20%). This 7.5% is called your income tax burden. The pie chart below gives you a nice visual on just how little of your income is taxed with these rates. 

Let’s take what we have learned in the example and loosely apply it to the real world. If you are single the brackets and marginal rates for 2011 are as follows:

Bracket 1: $0 - $8,500 @ 10%
Bracket 2: $8,501 - $34,500 @ 15%
Bracket 3: $34,501 - $83,600 @ 25%
Bracket 4: $83,601 - $174,400 @ 28%
Bracket 5: $174,401 - $379,150 @ 33%
Bracket 6: $379,151+ @ 35%

This means that if you make $100,000 in payroll and take no deductions, you fall into Brackets 1-4. The amount taxed from each bracket is $850 + $3,900 + $12,275 + $4,592. The total the government will collect from you is $21,617.

If you are confused as to where the $4,592 comes from, here it is written out:
Since you made $100,000 in payroll, that is your cap. Subtract $83,600 from that and you get $16,400 which is then taxed at 28%, thus giving you $4,592 to be taxed from that bracket.

The tax burden will be 21.6% of your total income. In actuality this number will go down even more when you start adding in all the deductions applicable to you.

I hope that this explanation is simple enough and now you know the basis for our entire tax code. Deductions and credits and everything else you hear about are ways the government can adjust the totals people in certain brackets pay.

--ElfEnnerji

The Debt Ceiling

What is it?
A artificial limit that the government can accrue debt.
The word "debt" shouldn't be viewed as a negative word. The government having debt is an entirely different idea than a person having debt.

There are many government run services that exist beyond the well-known social security and medicare/medicaid. Some of the more obvious ones that you might not even think about are the interstate highways and bridges, municipal airports, and the power and water grids.
In order to run this, the government obviously needs money. For example, if the government was a person named Bob. Bob owns a store. In order to run his business he has some overhead costs such as rent, power bills, cost of getting his product, and so on. To pay for all of this Bob sells his products from his store front and uses the money generated to pay down his costs and if there is any left over, invest in making his business better. Well the government is the same way. The government needs money in order to pay for your use of certain services. In order for the government to pay for these services they have people pay taxes. If everyone paid their taxes, they are giving the government a little bit of money to be able to use and take advantage of the services the government provides.

A problem we have now is not everyone pays their taxes, but that is a story we'll get into later. When there is not enough money taken in through taxes, the government needs a "second form of income." Much like Bob would do to expand his business, the government gets a loan. The total value of these loans is the government debt. The government issues their own debt by selling bonds. These bonds work by the government saying, “you give us $5,000 now and in return we’ll give you this bond note. In 5/10/20/etc... years you can show us this bond and we’ll give you back your $5,000 plus some amount of interest. If you cash in your bond before the time is up though you don’t get as much money.” The government puts the full faith and credit of the US government up as collateral for the bond, meaning that the government would have to go bankrupt for the bonds to not pay out. Since the government sells its bonds only in US dollars the government can never go bankrupt because it can always print more dollars to pay off the bonds.

That is how it should work at least, except we still have this debt ceiling thing hanging around. The concept of the debt ceiling really is outdated and not needed today. It was created during WWI when the economy ran off of the gold standard, which is tying the value of money to the total amount of gold you have. This created a limited amount of money that the government could print. Since every dollar printed had to be backed by gold this limited how much debt the government could get into and that limit was the debt ceiling. Today, we run on a fiat system and we can print as much money as we want. This happens because the dollar’s value is set by the Federal Reserve through controlling the amount of money in circulation. The more money in circulation the less valuable each piece of currency holds the less currency the more value each piece holds. Another way of saying it is the less money in circulation the more you can buy with your dollar, the more money in circulation the less you can buy. When we moved off the gold standard we never got around to getting rid of the debt ceiling however.

So really, the debt ceiling is like having an appendix. It is no longer needed, but when something goes wrong it still needs to be dealt with. The reality is, you could live without it.


Congress has to vote to raise the debt ceiling every time we reach it and has done so as a matter of routine the last dozen plus times the vote has come up. This time however Republicans in Congress made their vote on raising the debt ceiling conditional on Democrats agreeing to spending cuts in the budget on an equal amount. So for every one dollar that the debt ceiling was raised by, the budget deficit must see one dollar decrease. The budget deficit is merely any money in the budget that must be covered by bonds instead of tax revenue.

Democrats agreed to their demands and the argument then became to what degree the budget cuts were going to come from spending cuts vs. revenue increase. The political narrative started coming out of Washington saying that these budget cuts were necessary for raising the debt ceiling. Remember though, there is no connection between the two and the only reason they are tied now is because politicians say so.


If we don’t agree to raise the debt ceiling by 02 August 2011 then the government will no longer have the ability to pay off its debts as well as pay for the programs it is supposed to fund listed in the budget. The plan that looks like will make its way through both chambers of Congress to raise the debt ceiling will end up cutting $2.1 trillion over ten years from the budget. Don’t let the big numbers trick you into anything. This amounts to about 1/10^th or so of our total current debt.

Not only does this plan create a significant change in our debt but it will further damage our already very unstable economy. Our economy suffers right now from a demand crisis, meaning that companies have plenty of goods to sell to consumers, however consumers lack the ability to buy the goods. This is because there is massive and wide spread unemployment and for those that are employed, many face crushing levels of debt that prevent them from spending freely. Many of these people are only able to stay as afloat as they currently are because of government services like unemployment benefits, welfare, foodstamps, and living assistance programs like money for heating oil. These are the very same programs that will see cuts in the plan snaking through Congress right now, further hurting demand in the economy, thus making the economy worse.

Why then does Congress and president Obama insist on pushing this deal through even though it will hurt the economy? The answer to that question is for another post.

-ElfEnnerji  

Why You Should Read The Whole Article

I have never really followed the political news, at least not in great detail I just read the headlines which are supposed to sum up what the rest of the article is about. That was probably a bad idea on my part.

So those of you reading this will probably think something along the lines of, "Reading the headlines? What's wrong with that?"
Two words: Source amnesia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_amnesia).

Almost everyone, if not all, will experience source amnesia at some point in their life. It's the thing that makes you go, "I think I've heard about that before... But I can't remember where..." The human brain isn't like a computer where it can easily save loads and loads of information; it can only recall on a limited amount. As we learn new things, previous information stored in the brain becomes, in a sense, condensed. You'll probably eventually only remember the key points, almost like a headline. How is this connected to the whole, "only reading the headline," as a bad idea. Well, repetition is one of the most effective ways to remember things.

Politicians and the media exploit this all the time. All a politician has to do is make a statement whether it is true or not. It creates an idea that there could be some kind of scandal among us. The media then picks it up and posts it as a headline "Is there a scandal among us?" If one media source picks it up, many others pick it up as well to not lose out on ratings. Pretty soon you’ll have the idea of a scandal repeated to you many times. Even if the articles you read are debunking the scandal, the fact that there was any type of scandal (true or untrue) will be the only thing you remember.

For example, the famous, "Obama is a Muslim," headline. Conservatives repeat that line over and over so many times that even up until today; many people still believe that Obama is a Muslim, despite the fact that Obama is in fact, not a Muslim.

This is also very similar to the, "Thought Stopping Technique."
This is an effective technique for those suffering from anxiety and panic disorders, among other things. When you begin to experience negative thoughts, you consciously tell your brain to stop and then replace those negative thoughts with thoughts that discourage further thinking.

Have you ever been to a game, whether it be basketball, football or even hockey? Think of the times where your team may be losing or on the verge of losing. You were probably experiencing feelings of dread and possibly even panic. But when there is a chant going on to root for you team, did you start feeling better? That is the thought stop technique. Cheering in the form of chanting for your team is a good feeling. You stopped any negative thinking about your team losing and you began focusing on happily cheering on your team.

This is heavily used in any type of political convention, where your favorite politician is up there raving on about his goals for your country. In between him shouting out each bullet point of his agenda, you're probably chanting something along the lines of "USA! USA! USA! USA!". Immediately chanting after someone speaks doesn't allow your brain to process what was just said because you are too busy cheering on.

Funnily enough, though-stop is also used in cults (http://www.cultclinic.org/qa1.html) as a form of brainwashing.

Perhaps reading the headline isn't the best source of information after all. Seeing a headline repeated over and over as if it were being chanted will only make you remember keywords whether the statement is true or not.


--ElfEnnerji