Taxation without Representation? Politicians "Not Responsive at All" to Lower Income Constituents Study Says

Salon has an interesting article on "why it is so hard for politicians to raise taxes on the rich." You can read the whole thing by following the link above. Here is an excerpt:

A study by Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels provides some insight. Bartels found that senators are "very responsive" to the views of the wealthiest third of their constituents, "somewhat responsive" to the middle third, and not responsive at all to the third with the lowest incomes (to the extent that the opinions of the wealthiest constituents can outweigh senators' party affiliations in determining their voting records). It's true that Republicans are nearly twice as attentive as Democrats to the preferences of the wealthy, but both parties are equally indifferent to the opinions of their lower-income constituents.

Of course, it's not exactly news that the rich are politically powerful, but even so, the estimates of just how much power they hold can be staggering. Northwestern University political scientists Jeffrey Winter and Benjamin Page estimate, in a paper titled "Oligarchy in the United States?," that "the top 10 percent of the population has about as much material-based political power as the entire bottom 90 percent." And one important effect of this power has been a gradual shift of mainstream fiscal policy discourse toward policies favoring -- surprise -- the rich.

To see how far the debate has shifted, you just need to look at what's on the table in the current showdown: Progressives are asking to increase the top two tax brackets from 33 and 35 percent to 36 and 39.6 percent, while Paul Ryan's "Pathway to Prosperity" proposes cutting taxes in the highest bracket to 25 percent. That is, Democrats are merely asking that taxes on the rich be returned to what they were at the beginning of the Bush administration, which is still just slightly more than half of what they were at the beginning of the Reagan administration, while Republicans are pushing for rates lower than they've been since immediately before the Great Depression.

On the Value of Education: Another Argument Against the Marketization of Everything

There are certain types of value that money measures quite well and certain values that should be measured in other ways. In our political climate and our culture we have become accustomed to discussing everything in terms of its financial value at the expense of values that are harder to quantify.

If you look through the archives, you will find stories about measuring the success of books with a "best seller list" rather than some list based on quality, arguing for arts in terms of tourism dollars or the creation of non-arts jobs, and for arts education with the tortured logic that music makes you good at math, which has some marketplace value.

Robin Cangie today responds to Peter Thiel's much discussed article on what he calls the higher education bubble. Cangie argues on her blog that we devalue education-- and miss the whole point-- when we treat higher learning as nothing more than an overpriced stepping stone to a higher salary, and entry into the middle class.

The very real problems that Thiel identifies aren’t symptoms of a bubble but of an institutional crisis of education; they only look like a bubble because we’ve learned to treat education as a market-driven commodity rather than a social good.

...Students pay top dollar, not for quality, but for a name brand education. For-profit universities treat students as cash cows, making unrealistic promises and even outright lies to increase enrollment.... Meanwhile, rising tuition and student debt are justified on the increasingly faith-based grounds that it all will pay off in the long run.

By commoditizing higher education, we have not only given it away to the highest bidder, or borrower, as the case may be; we have impoverished the notion of becoming educated itself, at great social and economic harm.

...I’m not disagreeing with the problems in higher education that Thiel has pointed out. But to treat all of this as a bubble, on par with housing or high technology, is to not only misunderstand the problem but also to contribute to an impoverished, commoditized view of education that values a monetary return-on-investment over intellectual cultivation, that treats education as a resource, not unlike wood or oil, to be exploited and profited from, rather than a vital ingredient of a healthy society.

And so we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to be educated? If education means churning out obedient, unthinking, indebted consumers, then we’ve done very well. But if it means anything – anything at all – more than that, we have failed massively.

Read the whole article by following the link above.

Poor People Are Tax Payers Too

If you've ever found yourself thinking that you were so broke, and paid so little in income tax, that you couldn't make a political argument as a "taxpayer," here is something you should read from an article in the Wilamette Week:

Poor Americans do pay taxes.

Gretchen Carlson, the Fox News host, said last year “47 percent of Americans don’t pay any taxes.” John McCain and Sarah Palin both said similar things during the 2008 campaign about the bottom half of Americans.

Ari Fleischer, the former Bush White House spokesman, once said “50 percent of the country gets benefits without paying for them.”

Actually, they pay lots of taxes—just not lots of federal income taxes.

Data from the Tax Foundation show that in 2008, the average income for the bottom half of taxpayers was $15,300.

This year the first $9,350 of income is exempt from taxes for singles and $18,700 for married couples, just slightly more than in 2008. That means millions of the poor do not make enough to owe income taxes.

But they still pay plenty of other taxes, including federal payroll taxes. Between gas taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes and other taxes, no one lives tax-free in America.

When it comes to state and local taxes, the poor bear a heavier burden than the rich in every state except Vermont, (emphasis mine) the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated from official data. In Alabama, for example, the burden on the poor is more than twice that of the top 1 percent. The one-fifth of Alabama families making less than $13,000 pay almost 11 percent of their income in state and local taxes, compared with less than 4 percent for those who make $229,000 or more.

Remember broke folks-- you are tax payers too-- and you have a voice.

The Dumpster Project

Built A Home for Less Than $3,500

Let's Talk About Tax Baby

Here is what I learned today by reading the San Francisco Chronicle:

For the well-off, this could be the best tax day since the early 1930s: Top tax rates on ordinary income, dividends, estates and gifts will remain at or near historically low levels for at least the next two years. That's thanks in part to legislation passed in December 2010 by the 111th Congress and signed by President Obama...

For the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income, the effective federal income tax rate - what they actually pay - fell from almost 30 percent in 1995 to just under 17 percent in 2007, according to the IRS.

And for the approximately 1.4 million people who make up the top 1 percent of taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent in 2008. It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so...

Much of the top 400's income is from dividends and capital gains, generated by everything from appreciated real estate to stocks and the sale of family businesses. As Warren Buffett likes to point out, because most of his income is from dividends, his tax rate is less than that of the people who clean his office.

Read the rest by following the link above.

The Antidote to Apathy

Thought provoking talk on barriers that prevent people from being engaged in the political process.

The Age of the Broken Man

AThe age of the self-made man was also the age of the broken man... This >American sense= looked upon failure as a >moral sieve= that trapped the loafer and passed the true man through.  Such ideologies fixed blame squarely on individual faults, not extenuating circumstances.@-Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers

The Poverty of Riches

At Big Questions Online, David Sloan Wilson asks Can riches be a form of poverty?

My colleagues and I have created an extensive database on the neighborhoods of Binghamton, including measures of neighborhood quality and median income. Dan O’Brien, my most recently minted PhD student, has also played experimental games with high school students in their classrooms. Experimental games are wonderful tools for studying the propensity to cooperate in social interactions. The results showed that students from the highest quality neighborhoods were most likely to cooperate in an experimental game, but that median income had a negative effect. The most cooperative kids came from high quality low income neighborhoods.

Once I recovered from the shock of realizing that “poverty” and “pathology” cannot be treated as synonyms, these results began to make sense. Sociologists such as Robert Putnam and Robert Sampson have long talked about “social capital” and “financial capital” as commodities that can substitute for each other. Why bother cooperating with others when you can pay for what you need with a credit card?

Longing and Error

"I left Symons's company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love.  It isn't that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so.  And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses.  In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are."-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Wow, You Have Two Million

“When their (British) Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? finally had a million-pound winner, newspapers looked through the society registers and then pounced: the winner was already wealthy, they announced. How dare she win another million pounds? And here is their difference from us. First, no American would bother to find out the assets of a quiz show or lottery winner. And while there is class resentment in America, the poor do not take it to a personal level: they vent at the mayor, at the police, at local businesses, at other poor people, at everyone but the rich themselves - because they want to be rich too, and would do the same. If you have a million and win another million, Americans will not spit at you. They will say, 'Wow. Now you have two million.'"-Paul Collins, Sixpence House

Imagine a World that Rewards Creation Instead of Greed

Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in. -Yoko Ono

Imagine a world in which social status was achieved by creating the most value.  By value I do not mean financial wealth-- that is a measure of how much you can take.  It is easy to measure profits in digits and so it is easy to celebrate the bank or corporation that has the largest profits.  

What if we were as consistent in measuring what an organization created?  We like to believe that the business that does the best work in the world receives the greatest rewards, and yet the work in the world is not what we measure.  What kind of "taking-stock exchange" would we create to tally the most creative corporations and banks?  ("Creative" meaning those that create the most, not the most innovative in finding ways to accumulate profits.)

What if the bank that helped fund the most innovative companies-- that enabled the most great ideas to thrive-- what if this bank was viewed as the most successful?  What if its CEOs and Presidents were the most admired and most emulated?  What would it take for us to change our definition of success to value creating over taking?  

Imagine if the individual with the greatest social status was not the one who could buy the most stuff, but the one who had done the best job bringing things into the world-- funding or making art, teaching the most scientists or funding the research with the most breakthroughs, funding the companies that had the most revolutionary impact on society.  What if we held the creator in the highest esteem and saw a big house and a car as simply things-- neither good or bad in themselves?  What if we thought of power not in terms of political sway or the ability to hire people-- but in terms of the ability to effect positive change in the world?  If we operated under these assumptions, what would the world be like?  Who would be our heroes?  How would business and the economy change?  Can you imagine this world?  How vividly can you imagine it? 

 

Quote of the Day: Money is Like Fire

"Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put."- Lewis H. Lapham,  Money and Class in America

Oh Yeah, and People Might Starve Too

Why is it that in our culture the only legitimate argument for anything seems to be its effect on making money?  I have brought this up before when it comes to arts funding.  We always try to argue that we should fund arts because of the economic impact artists have on an area.  We argue for arts education funding with the claim that music makes you good at math with which you can, presumably, make actual money.

Do we not place any value on doing things because they are good for the community and society, because doing them makes our nation a more pleasant place to live, because they are morally right?  It seems that we do not consider such arguments to be serious enough.

Take this example.  In The Shamanic Economist, the author says he is going on a one day, symbolic hunger strike to protest extreme austerity measures.  The arguments against cuts to food programs all come down to our ability to boost productivity and bring in money.

The point I personally hope to make is that it is the height of folly, even in an austerity budget, to axe the very things that are necessary for people to work and live. To a limited extent, the government must support such things as food, housing, safety, and transportation.

Let me start with transportation as an example. Broad cuts in transportation leave significant numbers of people at home, unable to get to work. When people don’t work, they don’t pay taxes. And when people don’t pay taxes, that makes the budget situation worse, not better.

It is the same with food. When people can’t eat, the quality of their work suffers almost immediately. If they are looking for work, the quality of their job search declines in the same way, and the tendency for employers to take them seriously or view them favorably all but vanishes. In the United States today, it is basically impossible for a person who looks like they are suffering from hunger to find a job. But again, as long as they aren’t working, they aren’t paying taxes. Thus, withholding food from people does not improve the budget either.

I am not suggesting that by focusing on the economic impact or making an argument based on taxes and revenue that this is the only thing on the writer's mind.  I don't believe this author is concerned about people going hungry only because it affects the quality of their work.  But it does point to a framework for discussion, in which the only thing were are able to consider-- the only "valid" argument we can make-- is a financial one rooted in the concept of economic prosperity measured in terms of GDP.  Is that truly the only thing worth considering when making policy?

There is No Progress

"On the surface, where the historical battles rage, where everything is interpreted in terms of money and power, there may be crowding, but life only begins when one drops below the surface, when one gives up the struggle, sinks and disappears from sight... There is no progress: there is perpetual movement, displacement, which is circular, spiral, endless. Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it lead him."-Henry Miller

How Should We Spend Ourselves?

Every once in a while I find myself in need of a Quaker perspective on maps and I turn to mapHead the blog of Nat Case.  (He's a Quaker and head of production for Hedberg Maps and writes about both mapping and his faith.) One of the fundamental tenants of Quakerism is the importance of simple living.  On March 7, Nat posted a thoughtful article questioning our assumptions about the economy and what we value:

...something that's been bugging me for a while now, a sense that our fundamental terms of discussion on economic issues are missing the point, over and over.

First, the use of "jobs" to mean "earned income." We're used to wage employment being the primary source of sustenance for most American families, but this is pretty new, globally speaking. The move by more and more friends and acquaintances to grow at least some of their own food is striking, and I think points to a broadening sense that wage labor is not the only way to go in terms of providing for oneself. When we say "we want everyone to have a job" what we ought to be saying is "we want everyone to work such that they can sustain themselves and have time and energy for the pleasures and joy of life"

Second, the sense that money is the fundamental unit of economic measure. It is certainly the most easily quantifiable measure—maybe the only easily quantifiable measure. But in the end, it is a measure, not the thing itself. A dollar is a unit of exchange. As has been pointed out countless times, you can't eat gold. The focus on money also means we ignore non-monetized parts of the economy...

 The core economic question is not "how much money do we get for our work?" but "how should we spend ourselves?" because whatever we earn in cash, when we work we are spending time out of our lives. The product, whether it is fungible or not, is what we should pay attention to. Not everything needs to be exchangeable on the open market.

You can read the full article here.

Quote of the Day: Paper Trail of a New Life

"Under the page headed, 'Rywalt, Dawn' was a truly mind blowing page: the one headed, 'Rywalt, Baby'. This was a sudden and sharp reminder that we were not just sitting in a plush room filling out form after form; we were starting the paper trail of a new life who would one day have forms of their own to fill out. In a strange way, I found that seeing the tentacles of the relentless bureaucracy of America reach out for our baby was more stunningly solid proof of what we were getting into than feeling the baby move. It was almost as if this baby wouldn't be a person until the government said they were, and here we were filling out the forms to ensure that recognition in the form of the baby's birth certificate. And now I recognized the baby's personhood, too." Christopher Rywalt, It's Just Another Baby

How Architects Design Space to Encourage Buying

What is the Context?

I have been reading Theodore Zeldin's an Intimate History of Humanity. In it, I found a quote that summed up well what I was trying to do when I wrote Broke is Beautiful: to provide different options for looking at a life of limited means.

"Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable."

Video of the Day: Measuring What Matters

Quote of the Day

"We are captivated by the feminine shadow of the self we might have been; in my case by that counterpart of the romantic writer who should have had the courage to reject society and to accept poverty for the sake of the development of his personality. Now when I see such beings I hope that I can somehow be freed from my shortcomings by union with them. Hence the recurrent longing to forsake external reality for a dream and to plunge into a ritual flight...I am attracted by those who mysteriously hold out a promise of the integrity which I have lost."-Cyril Connolly

Alain De Botton Breaks Down Status Worries at TED

Highly recommended viewing to put your job worries in perspective:

Poem of the Day

When your spirit is wealthy
you take gold lightly.
Ink dries when too thick;
a light wash is often deeper.

Leftover mist by the water
where red apricots flower in the forest.
By my ornamented house, the bright moon
and a painted bridge in greed shade.

Gold goblets are brimful of wine
as I play the zither to entertain my guests.
I feel so happy, fulfilled.
My heart is exhausted with joy.
-Sikong Tu

Video of the Day: An Economy in Accordance with Our Hopes

Tim Jackson on prosperity without growth.

Threatened by Beauty?

I have posted an article on my sister blog "One Writer's Thoughts."
I make the argument that not only does a consumer relationship to beauty make us insecure, it also robs us of the ability to enjoy the simple aesthetic pleasure of physical beauty.

Our deeply held assumption is that we are not only meant to look, we are meant to look like the beauties we see in media. Who said that? Who told you that someone else’s beauty is something you should strive to “attain?” My guess is that they were trying to sell you something.

The problem is not that models are beautiful. It is not even that they are impossibly beautiful—extraordinarily young, skinny and photoshopped. It is only our relationship to the images that is unhealthy and dangerous. The danger is in our unshakable belief that our beauty ideal is aspirational, that perfection is something we should always strive towards.

What marketing does that museums do not is to transform our natural appreciation of a beautiful form into a push to buy a product. A model is presented with a call to action—buy my make up, buy my jeans. Advertisers create the implicit promise that not only can this beauty be contemplated, it can be imitated. And it is easy to do so, just buy the jacket, the perfume, the deodorant, the car. If it is so easy to become beautiful, if all you have to do is buy a shampoo, then it really is a personal failing if you don’t make the effort.

The real problem is not that the physical form of the model is “unobtainable” by most of us, but that we think of beauty as a product, as something we should “obtain.” We tyrannize ourselves with the belief that we should possess anything we see that pleases us. "I see physical beauty, it pleases me, I should have it."

That is a shame, not only because of the way it makes us feel about ourselves, but also because it robs us of the joy of simple aesthetic appreciation of rare physical beauty. We should celebrate the capricious twist of genetic fate that creates a Heidi Klum, and be grateful that it occasionally happens.

You can read the entire original article by following the link above.

Did You Go to College So You Wouldn't Have Regrets?

That may not have been the best plan. The journal Social Psychological and Personality Science has published the results of its study on regret. (No, I don't read psychological journals in my spare time. I read about it on Mind Hacks.)

Among their findings was this: "Americans with high levels of education had the most career-related regrets. Apparently, the more education obtained, the more acute may be the sensitivity to aspiration and fulfillment."

Want to know what else people regret? Follow the link above.

Quote of the Day

"I really am in this game seriously for something besides money and... I'd rather live on less and preserve the one duty of a sincere writer-- to set down life as he sees it as gracefully as he knows how."-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sister Blog Launched

I have launched a sister blog Musing on Muses in anticipation of the release of my novel in the Fall. The link above will take you to my welcome message and an explanation of what the difference will be between that blog and this.

I will keep up with Broke is Beautiful whenever I come across a story or something in a book that I think will be of interest to people who want to think about money and consumerism and measuring values in units besides dollars and cents.

The new blog will be a repository for my more general thoughts. I'll be talking about the process of writing, and the writing life and delving into the creative force, the muse and spirituality from time to time.

Wealthy Poets: The Riches of the Artistic Life

Over at The Life Poetic, a fellow writer, Sage Cohen, puts the "broke and beautiful" life in poetic terms arguing that "starving poets" should stop buying into the notion that artists are supposed to struggle and that less money equals less wealth. (Remember the origin of the world "wealth" is simply "well being" and you don't need money to have it.)

If we don’t question the popular paradigm that aligns “wealth” with money and we make the pursuit of cash a primary goal, we may find that we have little time left over for poetry. And on the flip side, if we neglect our material needs in pursuit of a life poetic, we are likely to end up in real, uninspiring distress.

But if we agree that a prosperous life is one with time to literally and figuratively smell the roses, and then luxuriate in the time to write about it, then we are establishing a root system for a new “poetry of prosperity” — one which we feed and water with our attention and our words. By recognizing, welcoming and prioritizing both our material and creative needs, we have a far better chance of striking a balance that feels like true wealth and can sustain us over the long term.

While you're at it, you can visit Cohen's blog at Writing the Life Poetic.

Are You Typical?

Are Marriage and Consumer Culture Incompatible?

This is the thesis of the book Why Love Will Always be a Bad Investment by Kurt Armstrong. The book has been featured in Sojourners. Reviewer Brittany Shoot writes:

Through a series of vignettes from his life, he posits that covenantal love is at direct odds with modern consumer culture, which sells the idea that life is competitive, sex is a commodity, and love is scarce. Most of all, consumerist ideology is rooted in the notion that we must abandon what we have the moment something better comes along. As our larger narrative about everyday life becomes inextricably intertwined with the consumerist mentality, romantic comedies, diamond jewelry commercials, and sex selling products as diverse as deodorant and fast food can force the most happily wedded couple to reconsider what constitutes happiness, what it means to live in marital bliss.

Broke is the New Rich Says HuffPo

Fitness coach Penny Hoff has come out of the closet as a broke person in the pages (I'm old enough to remember when magazines had pages) of the Huffington Post.

Today, we are a statistic; we are one in every six families in the country. We are no longer the upper middle class. As a matter of fact I saw a frightening chart the other day that put our family of five under the poverty line. We are poor. Shocking to me, but nothing new in 2011.

But something unprecedented happened since last Wednesday.

In the words of author Gene O'Kelly, not only have I let go of something precious but I've also gained something precious, and that is the palpable sense of being carried by my community when I couldn't walk through this letting go process by myself...

This week, I have been given the gift of community and friendship that almost (almost) eclipses the loss that I will feel leaving this street and this house.

I should also mention that releasing the bondage of all my "stuff' is very similar to the experience of shedding unwanted pounds. We start to feel what it feels like to be free of unnecessary weight that we didn't know was weighing us down until it was gone. Finally, we can breathe.

So if this is the way it feels to be Broke, then I am the Richest Broke Girl in all of history. Bring it on.