Last week, Web suggested that our government does not have a spending problem but rather a revenue problem. He goes on to point out the vast concentration of wealth among the wealthiest small-percent:

Liberals are often obsessed with keeping taxes highly progressive, but let’s face it – the top 1% control more than 42% of the wealth in the US. If you go to the top 5%, then they collectively control 67% of the wealth in the US. Go to the top 10%, and they control 93% of the country’s wealth.

I don’t disagree with Web that this is problematic. But as Dave later points out, there is a difference between wealth and income. Our federal government taxes the latter. And there are limits to the degree that you can rectify this (in the long, anyway) through tax policy. And it’s even more limited that you can use this in order to bridge our current deficit because any year’s income is only a part of that huge mass of wealth, and the primary form of wealth taxation we have – the estate tax – raises some money, but not huge amounts*. In preparation for a different post, I created a spreadsheet that looks at overall tax burdens of the top earners using numbers from Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ).

For the sake of this post, I am going to make a rather key assumption or two that are probably not true but that a lot of people assume is: you can tax income more-or-less directly. You can prevent the wealthy from wiggling out of it with a good tax attorney. By raising overall tax rates, you will not see an increase of people looking for deductions or else you can account for it with heavier tax rates. And these heavier tax rates will not result in people doing less work (and thereby paying less in taxes).

The CTJ numbers are looking at effective tax rates (for households) and not marginal or accumulated tax rates from which many can whittle down their burden through deductions and the like. To the right are the numbers. TAE represents Total Annual Earnings, OFTB represents Overall Federal Tax Burden. ELTR represents effective local and state tax rates. ETR represents Effective Federal Tax Rate. All are represented as percents. On subsequent charts, you will see EFMR, which is the Effective Federal Marginal Rate, and TETB, which is the Total Effective Tax Burden.

As Web points out, our tax system is not particular progressive once you get to the top 20%. Especially when you factor in state and local taxes, which are regressive. But right now we’re looking at federal. So if we’re concerned about income inequality, and we’re concerned about balancing the budget, why not just add more progressiveness to the tax code and take care of both!

The answer is that the deficit is simply too large. If you were to double the tax rates on the top 1%, you would increase the tax-base by 25%. Now, that’s not too bad… but it’s a first step. It also means that you’re taking over 60 cents on each dollar in the top pseudobracket** if you account for local/state taxes as well. You can extend this downward, but then it starts getting really problematic for people earning money in between the low, existing tax rates, and the higher, new ones. For instance, you can close the entire deficit (almost) by doubling taxes on the top 10% and raising taxes on the next ten percent by 10% by 50%, but now you would be taking over fifty cents on every dollar made over $66,000 (if we include state and local taxes) and almost seventy-five cents of every dollar between $100,000 and $141,000 (after which, marginal rates go down again).

Of course, an odd thing about looking at it this way is that under the previous scenario, marginal rates go down again once you pass $141,000. So let’s say we fiddle with ETRs and make it more directly like a graduated income tax. This means tinkering with the bottom 80%, too, because you run into the same bump for the middle quintile, which pays more marginally than either the second or fourth, but I left their overall burden roughly the same. So if we try to restructure it so that nobody pays more per new dollar earned than those in the previous bracket, you can actually come across something that’s a little more fair in the broader sense. However, you would still have various governments coming after people for more than fifty cents on the dollar for everything they made over $100,000***. The end result of this is a smoother, very progressive system in which the average dollar over $250,000 has almost seventy-five cents taken from it;. And if you’re inclined to cut those between $250k and $1.3m (the average income in the top 1%), you’re going to have to take that much more from the top. That may be satisfying on one level, but exactly how much do we want to take from those that earn good money? Under this plan, the top would lose over 2/3 of their (admittedly, very high) income.****

I support a progressive tax code (one more progressive than the code we have now). And as I mentioned on Web’s post (and will mention again in a future post), I think that the Truman family’s taxes are going to have to go up even if the folks in Washington manage to cut government. Perhaps it’s merely a product of suddenly being closer to the income where people start thinking that we have too much money and if we’re not turning it into Washington we’re essentially hoarding it, but it’s seeming unreasonable to take three out of four dollars off the top (if you include the state’s cut). The “off the top” does matter, I should add, because I can guarantee you that should something like the above come to pass and the tax burden off of new dollars made reach two-thirds of our income (as it would in the last table), then Clancy and I do start making decisions involving her working less and my not working at all even if more permanent employment does make itself available. And the further down the income line you start the hikes, the higher the marginal rates have to be to make up the difference.

The alternative, here, is to tax wealth itself. Local and state governments do this with the property tax. The federal government does it with the estate tax. I would have to think more about this, though my main concern would be that if it’s too high, you run into a situation where people build companies that they can no longer afford because it’s an asset being taxed. So they’re having to dig into their own pockets just to keep what they’ve built. So while you could do it (and to an extent, it is already done), I don’t know how much revenue you can actually raise from it. Raising the estate tax is another possibility. However, as mentioned in * below, the estate tax doesn’t raise all that much revenue. Too few rich people and they don’t die with sufficient frequency.

This isn’t an argument against raising the taxes on the wealthy (or closing loopholes or whatever). I support the graduated income tax and, as much as we can, targeting taxes to those that can most afford it. But it’s not going to end there. My above assumptions, that we can accurately target these taxes, loopholes will not be created and exploited, and that significant numbers of high-earners will simply trade the thirty-five cents on the dollar that they would otherwise get in favor of more leisure time. Ultimately, unless our economy rebounds in spectacular fashion, the tax punch is going to have to go further than the top 10% or even top 20% of earners, spending is going to have to be cut, or we have to start confiscating wealth/assets.

Which is the main problem with looking at how much the top earners are and thinking that we could close the gap just by taxing them more. The problem is that the top 1% only qualifies as 1% of the population. The top 5% as 5. Meanwhile, the middle quintiles constitute 20% of the population a piece. It’s hard to look at the deficit without also looking at that third of the national income. And at spending. The current deficit, if it continues*****, is not a problem with a simple solution. Nor is it a problem that will be accomplished without pain, as though we can somehow cut huge amounts of spending that nobody will miss or we will simply be able to tax the other guy. (more…)

Britain is looking at eradicating labeling from cigarettes:

“The government accepts that packaging and tobacco displays influence young people, so there is no time to waste. It may take years to pass a new law on plain packs but the law on tobacco displays is already on the statute books and comes into force next year.”

Dr Alan Maryon-Davis, professor of public health at Kings College London, said: “It’s a very welcome statement from the health secretary and a good example of how the government can help people choose a healthier way of life by ‘nudging’ rather than nagging.”

But Simon Clark, director of Forest, a lobbying group that opposes smoking bans, described the move as a “cheap publicity stunt”.

He said: “There is no evidence that plain packaging will have any influence whatsoever on smoking rates. Also, the policy is designed to discriminate against smoking and stigmatise the consumer, which is totally wrong.”

Good.is does a mock-up. Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind that one bit. In fact, I consider it far preferable to the Australian method of putting graphic imagery on packs. I’ve thought to myself if the government ever does the latter, I will probably throw out the box upon purchase and put the cigarettes in something else. That probably means that it’s effective on some level. The Good.is mockups, though, wouldn’t phase me a bit.

More effective than that (though less effective than gangrene) would be to make them less rather than more plain. I don’t want to carry around a box that’s hot orange. Of course, part of the idea is for young people and they might be more likely to respond favorably to wild coloring. Of course, the boys will probably respond positively to gangrene as well. I was vociferously anti-smoking when I was 12, but I might have fished empty boxes out of the trashcan to see how many of the disease-boxes I could collect. Boys are like that.

Does packaging lure smokers? Well, there’s two questions. The first question is whether it entices people to smoke. That I’m not sure about, though it probably does have an effect on the margins. I’m not sure it has enough of an effect to justify the time it takes to enact this law, but maybe so. The second question is whether it entices people to choose a particular brand. It does. There are a lot of brands out there and two of the main brands I smoke, Maverick and USA Gold, got my attention with their box. Mavericks had, at the time, a really sleek black and gold box that was hard to miss. USA Gold had an interesting logo. However, while the packaging got me in the door, it was the taste that kept me there. With other off-brands, I never made it through the pack.

I am sure that the tobacco companies have some research on this. I wonder what it says. Given how opposed they are to the idea, maybe I am deeply underestimating the effects of packaging to youngsters. You might think that they’d be looking at this as a way out of paying marketers money without losing marketshare to the ones paying the marketers. But they don’t, either because it is effective or because they think their marketers are better than the other guys’.

Following up on Web’s rant yesterday, a couple of interesting articles.

First, from the Washington Post:

President Obama granted him the full state-dinner treatment that President George W. Bush denied him five years ago – but in return, Hu had to put up with a news conference, which he had refused to do when Obama visited China. For a repressive ruler, facing a free press is about as pleasant a prospect as attending the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.

After the leaders’ standard opening statements full of the blah-blah about bilateral cooperation, the Associated Press’s Ben Feller rose and asked a gutsy, forceful question.

“Can you explain to the American people how the United States can be so allied with a country that is known for treating its people so poorly, for using censorship and force to repress its people?” he asked Obama. And to Hu: “I’d like to give you a chance to respond to this issue of human rights. How do you justify China’s record, and do you think that’s any of the business of the American people?”
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Obama answered. The translator translated. All eyes turned to Hu – who said nothing.

Instead, he looked to a woman from China Central Television – the state-run network that answers to the Communist Party’s propaganda department – who tossed him a softball about “friendship and mutual understanding.”

Perhaps the most humorous take of the visit in 25 words or less: The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner holds a State Dinner for a man who has the 2010 winner under House Arrest

I value Daniel Drezner’s perspective on all manner of issues, and his take on the limits of China’s rise and Hu Jintao’s power in particular are no different:

Hu Jintao, the President of the illegitimate Chinese mainland “government”, is visiting the US today.

At these meetings, US corporations are supposed to be talking with Jintao about “access problems” of getting their products into the Chinese markets. Meanwhile, nothing is going to be mentioned of China’s human rights abuses, spying, and constant theft of just about anything they can get their hands on.

I’m pretty sure there will also be no mention of the myriad crappily made, dangerous, poisonous (also here and here products that constantly flood into the US, as well as the various knock-offs and product fakes that flood our shores every year.

In an era when the US still had some trade barriers to work with, we lauded the “opening” of Chinese trade paved by on Richard Milhouse Nixon. Since then, however, the rush of “global free trade” has shown what a mockery “free trade” really is; completely unfair trade in which dangerous products regularly are sent around, in which products can be made in factories where workers are driven to suicide with shocking regularity, paid slave wages, have no safety, no protections, and no environmental protection whatsoever.

By all rights, we should be sticking up tariffs on Chinese goods until they learn to behave themselves like civilized people as far as worker protections and environmental protections go. This is doubly so when considering they are a communist nation which pays lip service to the “worker” constantly. Instead, for the past couple decades our government have been committing the error of handing a despotic communist dictatorship economic trade incentives in exchange for their turning around and dropping trou at us in UN security council meetings, and this week they’re going to compount the mistake by kissing the ass of a despotic criminal named Hu Jintao. Yeah, I’m a little sickened.

Jerry Gomez works as an IT person at a corporate law firm, Weicker & Schmidt. A woman named Beth Toomey is murdered and Jerry quickly emerges as a suspect when some emails are found where Toomey and Gomez were supposed to meet (somewhere around the time she was murdered) about something that Gomez was very upset about. When the police confront Gomez, he has a lawyer on speed-dial and refuses to say a word (refusing to even answer the question of how he knows Toomey). This only increases suspicion.

After the police do a search of his office at W&S, his boss and a corporate VP call Gomez into a meeting. Gomez assures the firm that he did not commit any crime and says that he is perfectly willing to take a polygraph to that effect provided that is the only question asked (the concern being that the police could subpoena the results and find out more than he wants to tell them). Likewise, beyond assuring them of his innocence, he will not explain any of the circumstances surrounding his relationship with Toomey for fear that they will be subpoenaed. The firm finds this unacceptable and they issue Gomez an ultimatum: fully cooperate with the authorities or you’re fired. Gomez refuses to cooperate and is fired.

Gomez is ultimately cleared of the crime (before charges are ever filed). Gomez sues the employer for wrongful termination on the basis that they should not be able to fire him on the basis of his exerting his constitutional rights. He loses the case because he lives in an Employment-At-Will state with no bad faith exemptions. That means that the firm can fire him for whatever reason they deem fit as long as it is not one of the exceptions carved out in the law (attempting unionization, whistleblowing, race/gender/etc.) and no such exception is made.

Gomez’s lawyers go to federal court on the basis that the Constitution is irreparably harmed if people are required to forego their rights in order to keep their jobs. Especially when, as in this case, no hardship is being brought to the company beyond the initial search of his office. In fact, until this lawsuit his employer was never mentioned in any of the newspapers. If Weicker & Schmidt are allowed to fire Gomez on the basis of his exerting his 5th Amendment rights, they could similarly act on other rights. For instance, they could be “good corporate citizens” and require employees to allow the police to search their car on traffic stops. If these sorts of things catch on, the protections in the Constitution become meaningless for all but the self-employed. They employer responds that the law is the law and having freedoms granted to you in the constitution does not grant you freedom from the repercussions of utilizing those freedoms. Gomez can assert his rights or not, but W&S simply doesn’t have to employ him. High-profile people are fired or punished for utilizing their First Amendment rights all the time: Whoopi Goldberg, Don Imus, John Rocker, etc.).

So the question is… do you think that Gomez has a constitutional argument? Or, in the event that precedent suggests that he does not, that he should have one? If you think that W&S is in the right here on the basis that there is no right to continued employment simply because the Constitution does not allow the government to punish you, would you also support them if they wanted to institute the “good corporate citizen” policy of forcing employees to forego their Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure? If not, how do you draw the line? If you agree with Gomez, do you also believe that someone who publicly makes offensive (anti-American, racist, anti-Semitic, etc.) comments should also be allowed to keep their job? If not, how do you draw the line?

Note: I know that a number of you oppose Employment-at-Will doctrine on principle, but in this scenario it is the law of the land whether you agree with it or not. This question is more of how you think the constitution should be read rather than legislative preferences. So, feel free to rip on EAW, but only if you also comment on the main thrust of the post with the stipulation that the law in Gomez’s state is what it is.

Note II: If any lawyers know how the courts have responded to challenges like this, feel free to chime in. I suspect I know, but I also wanted to know what people’s thoughts on how the courts should rule are.

An interesting story from the Boston Globe:

Geneva Fielding, a single mother since age 16, has struggled to raise her three energetic boys in the housing projects of Roxbury. Nothing has come easily, least of all money.

Even so, she resisted some years back when neighbors told her about a federal program called SSI that could pay her thousands of dollars a year. The benefit was a lot like welfare, better in many ways, but it came with a catch: To qualify, a child had to be disabled. And if the disability was mental or behavioral — something like ADHD — the child pretty much had to be taking psychotropic drugs.

Fielding never liked the sound of that. She had long believed too many children take such medications, and she avoided them, even as clinicians were putting names to her boys’ troubles: oppositional defiant disorder, depression, ADHD. But then, as bills mounted, friends nudged her about SSI: “Go try.’’

Eventually she did, putting in applications for her two older sons. Neither was on medications; both were rejected. Then last year, school officials persuaded her to let her 10-year-old try a drug for his impulsiveness. Within weeks, his SSI application was approved.

“To get the check,’’ Fielding, 34, has concluded with regret, “you’ve got to medicate the child.’’

There is nothing illegal about what Fielding did — and a lot that is perhaps understandable for a mother in her plight. But her worries and her experience capture, in one case, how this little-scrutinized $10 billion federal disability program has gone seriously astray, becoming an alternative welfare system with troubling built-in incentives that risk harm to children.

I suppose it’s only a sense of ethics that would prevent Fielding from simply throwing the drugs away (and the law from selling them). It’s an interesting dilemma. I don’t have any problem helping out parents with kids that have disabilities. My ex-sorta Delsie ended up marrying a man with a disabled (like, seriously disabled) daughter and even though she’s very positive and upbeat it sounds like a real handful. And really expensive.

Of course, when you implement these programs you always have to be on the lookout for perverse incentives. Whether Fielding is genuinely doing wrong or not is unsure. That’s part of the problem when it comes to issues like ADHD, depression, and other things. With Down Syndrome, it’s an up-or-down thing. A kid with serious autism pretty obviously has something abnormal about them. But a lot of psychological issues are difficult to nail down. There’s no good blood-test and brainscans and the like are expensive and as much a product of learning about disorder (through subjective diagnosis) than objective diagnosis. This has (unfortunately) lead some to believe that the entire disorder (ADHD in this case) is really a “disorder” or simply a product of or metaphor for our times. Or that it’s simply a matter of laziness.

Daniel Carlat is a doctor frustrated with parents coming to him for the reasons cited in the Globe article:

As a psychiatrist besieged by patients asking me to diagnose them with ADHD so that they can get a prescription for Ritalin, I both agree and disagree with Dr. Klass. Yes, there are clearly some patients at the extreme end of the severity spectrum whose brains simply won’t allow them to focus. These are the patients who end up being enrolled in all the “convincing” neurobiology studies outlined by Klass — the studies that suggest that ADHD might involve frontal lobe problems and dopamine deficiencies. But for every child or adult with obvious ADHD, I suspect there are several who have a “soft” or even, yes, a “mythical” version of the disorder.

The prototypical mythical case is the parent of an ADHD child who comes into my office saying that he or she tried their child’s Ritalin and found that suddenly they were incredibly productive at work. “I think I must have ADHD, doc.”

I then have to explain that Ritalin is a version of that old college term-paper completion engine — speed — and that studies show that just about anybody who takes an ADHD drug thinks more quickly and focuses more acutely. That doesn’t mean you have ADHD.

But what does? The inability to really answer that question is as much the problem as SSI, video games, medication nation, and a host of other things. That doesn’t, as Carlat notes, make it entirely mythical. But the ambiguity of it all is pretty problematic. It can be an attractive excuse for failure for some. If your kid having ADHD or not having ADHD is the difference between a few hundred dollars a month and better medical care, it’s not difficult for even honest and well-intentioned parent to determine that their kids probably have it. The ambiguity around diagnosis may make it hard for a psychiatrist to argue otherwise (and they can always find another psychiatrist if they do). It’s really not surprising that people would respond to these incentives. Some are dishonest, some are conflicted like Fielding, but a lot will simply believe what it is advantageous to believe.

In the past, I have expressed a degree of discomfort with drunk driving laws. Primarily because the limit is (in my opinion) set too low, no distinctions are made between buzzed drivers and blasted drivers, and the enforcement of these laws represent some civil liberty problems. But I can’t quite get on board with this:

People do react to alcohol differently. For many people one drink may well be too many, while experienced drinkers can function relatively normally with a BAC at or above the legal threshold for presuming intoxication. A person’s impairment may also depend on variables such as the medications he is taking and the amount of sleep he got the night before. Acevedo et al.’s objections to the legal definition of intoxication highlight the absurdity of drawing an arbitrary, breathalyzer-based line between sobriety and criminal intoxication.

The right solution, however, is not to push the artificial line back farther. Instead we should get rid of it entirely by repealing drunk driving laws.

Despite all of the fears about the latest and greatest dangers of driving, the roads have never been safer. Accidents are down. Injuries are down. Fatalities are down. And not just on a per capita basis, but an absolute basis as well. I suspect that the transition of drunk driving from something everyone nods and winks at to a BIG DEAL is one of the reasons for this. It’s really hard to think of something that used to be so commonplace to become so universally scorned. Yes, people do continue to drive drunk, but by virtue of its social unacceptability, it’s something that people do much more judiciously in the past and avoid when they can.

Driving drunk (as in drunk-drunk) is hazardous in the same way that driving 100mph is hazardous. Other than environmental concerns, driving 100mph is not inherently dangerous, but most people can’t do it safely and it’s difficult to interact with traffic going 70mph when you’re going 100mph. The correct and true libertarian response to this could be that we should let people drive as fast as they want and only penalize them when they get into an accident. On some roads this may actually make sense, but the majority of the time it’s an eventuality that something bad is going to occur. The laws are put in place to (ahem, among other things) prevent that from happening. It’s not often I go around and defend speed limits given that this site is a hub for scorn towards speed traps, but the basis for having speed limits is sound.

Ditto for drunk driving. Yes, you outlaw drunk driving because of the impairment it causes. But that’s the same rationale for speed limits. If something is inherently unsafe for most drivers under a sufficient number of circumstances, it is worth our while to ban it. Not to set up checkpoints for it. Not to declare war on it. But to keep it illegal and take reasonable measures to enforce it.

As with so many other things, though, the reasonable basis for a law pushes it towards being something much more problematic. On this Balko makes a number of good points. We lowered the legal intoxication level from .1 to .08 in our War Against Drunk Driving when the main issue is with people that have a BAC of twice that level. Billboards say “Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving!” when no, actually, the two are quite different. But the law doesn’t see it that way. And when you keep lowering the limit, you can actually make things worse. When you make it so that people equate the two, you’re not just telling people that are buzzed that they’re as bad as someone that is drunk (even if they aren’t, which is why we have two different words to describe the two different conditions), you’re also telling buzzed people “Go ahead. Have another beer. You’re already ‘drunk.'”

This also becomes problematic because it increases the rationale for encroachment on other personal behavior. You know those studies that show that people on a cell phone are the equivalent to being drunk drivers? Well, they’re equivalent to being at the legal intoxication limit, which is not the same. And so The Worst Cabinet Secretary In Recent Memory (that would be Ray LaHood) puts out the idea that maybe we should prevent cell phones from even working in cars. Yeah, it might be inconvenient for passengers in the car calling to get directions and the like, but who cares? WE’RE TALKING ABOUT DRUNK DRIVERS!!!(or the equivalent thereof)!!!! And truth be told, there are all sorts of behaviors that are likely to be more distracting than having a minimal (but legally impermissible) amount of alcohol in your system. Do you listen to sports on the radio? DRUNK DRIVER! Bring the limit down to .05, as some propose, and you’re probably in the “eating a sandwich while on the road” territory and banning drive-thrus.

I’ve never seen the science to back it up, but I’ve heard that smoking a cigarette behind the wheel is the “equivalent of drunk driving.” I don’t think this is true, but lower the limit much more and it might be. And before you start thinking “Screw the smokers!” I can tell you first-hand that smoking behind the wheel is far less distracting than eating a sandwich.

It would be great if we had only well-rested, completely sober drivers behind the wheel doing absolutely nothing but driving. Or rather, it would be great if everyone else on the road was well-rested, completely sober, and doing nothing but driving. But for me? That would be hell. I’ve got the sober thing down, of course, but music and audiobooks keep me sane. Eating on the road makes trips last shorter. Getting a hotel room any and every time I get tired would get mighty expensive (and would bring medical residency programs across the country to a screeching halt, though that might be in the “plus” column).

First, a disclaimer. I have no idea if the textual depiction of events is accurate. It could be completely made up to make the TSA look bad. With the current anti-TSA fervor, a lot of people are inclined to believe the worst. Including me, but I freely admit that I could be wrong. With two parallel tracks on my mind, one in which the depiction is accurate and another in which it is not, the first is pretty outraged. The second doesn’t know what to think because it doesn’t know what happened.

What I find baffling, however, is how some people can even grant the events as described (or most of them), and yet still think that we should be more understanding of the TSA officers in question. I’ve heard excuse-making like “why did she insist on not having her breastmilk ex-rayed?” and “By challenging them, she was baiting them.”

The track in my mind that is upset about this isn’t upset that they wouldn’t let her board the plane with breast milk. It’s that there were rules, which the woman was familiar with, which they simply didn’t care about. If the rules stated that all liquids must be x-rayed, then we can debate the virtues of that rule along with the other recent… err… innovations in airport security. But if we have a right to do something, and that right is ignored, then we don’t have the right to do something. It sounds pretty simple in essence. But it gets worse because if the rights we have are ignored, then we essentially have no rights. Because trying to take advantage of rights puts us in an antagonistic place with authority and then we “have it coming” when they respond with hostility. So, in effect, we have to do whatever they tell us to. Full stop.

It’s not unlike something I wrote about a couple years ago:

There is a story in Colosse about a man going around and impersonating a police officer. He hasn’t done anything awful yet, but whatever his motives are they are assumed not to be good. The police are “reminding” everybody that any time you’re pulled over if you have doubts over the authenticity of the officer to find a well-lit and/or well-populated place to pull over. It’s considered a rule that as long as a person doesn’t make an attempt to flee, they should be given latitude as to where or when to pull over.

The problem with this is that when you’re being pulled over, you don’t know if the officer in the car behind you knows and understands this rule. Further, you don’t know that even if the rules should cut in your favor, whether you are doing yourself considerable harm by invoking them. It’s sort of like how you legally can’t be asked various questions on job interviews such as what your wife does but if you ever invoke this it’ll hurt you all the same (I had a post a while back on how my employers keep asking me what my wife does and they’re not supposed to do that, but I can’t find the post).

Chances are, I wouldn’t even like the woman in the video if I knew her. In my experience, the type of women to freak out over stuff like this are the type that believe that formula is child-abuse and vaccinations will give your kid autism. And, generally speaking, I tend to view people that make a fuss over things that I would just sigh and move on about skeptically (because my threshold for “important” is the only one that matters!). But I also find myself deeply resentful of the notion that these people have this sort of arbitrary authority. Since on Track One (where the depiction of events is accurate) we’re talking completely arbitrary because the rules state different, though I would respond the same way if it was written in the book “All rules are subject to TSA Officer discretion” because then I would quite simply have no idea what, if anything, I could bring on the plane, ever.

I had TSA Officers ignore the rules on a couple of occasions. For a while after the Burning Shoe incident, matches and lighters were not allowed on board. Then they changed their mind. At least twice afterward, though, I was told that I had to throw away my lighter. Since I don’t smoke on planes and even in between flights because of Clancy and because a lot of connecting airports will make you walk through security again if you want to go smoke outside, I had no problem throwing out the lighter. I could buy another one for a buck upon arrival. But I was thinking that I had a choice. I could either throw the lighter out or I could make a fuss and make them look up the rules and piss off everyone behind me. It turns out, my choice may have been (on Track One and if the TSA agents were like these) either throw the lighter out or stand like a freak in a clearbox cell while I missed my flight.

I’m hoping on Track Two.

A while back on a liberal website, there was a discussion about fracking and how the natural gas reserves in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania could make them the New Texas and revitalize their economies. I thought to myself “Wouldn’t that be interesting!” Of course, This website being what it is, they figured it would be a great comeuppance to those (generally red) states that make a killing off of mineral wealth in their vast expanse and voting in a way that these people would prefer they not vote.

Of course, those states also do something. For instance, they don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Even in Louisiana, even after the BP spill, Obama’s decision to kill offshore drilling proved to be remarkably unpopular.

Some people, like, you know, need money and jobs.

Reminds me of a conversation I had several years back with my old college roommate and friend Hubert. I was working on a project that involved making equipment for a controversial drilling project, which he was against. Among the other reasons he was against it was “What about the people of {the state involved}? Shouldn’t they have a say?”

“Well yes, they should. They want this to happen. It’s the people on the other side of the country that don’t.”

“Well, they’re kind of biased, don’t you think?”

Anyway, along those lines, I suppose that this is New York’s decision to make. If they’re really that worried about the environmental repercussions, I guess it hurts them a lot more than it hurts the rest of us.

A while back, President Obama signed a law intended, among other things, to limit the ability of banks to collect overdraft fees. It limited the number of fees applied to three per billing cycle and forced opt-in to consumers that wanted overdraft protection. In addition to prohibiting billing practices that can lead to interest even when you make payments on time. But what got most people interested was the strike against overdraft protection. People on both sides of the discussion felt really passionate about this issue. I was on the “pro” side. The “con”argument went as follows:

1. This is yet another example of the government penalizing the responsible for the sake of the irresponsible.
2. People need overdraft protection. They should be allowed to get it.
3. The government should not protect people from themselves. People need to learn personal responsibility.
4. If the banks can’t get their money this way, they’re going to get it another way. No more free checking. You just wait and see.

Point #1 represents a misunderstanding of the current state of affairs prior to passage. This isn’t about the responsible subsidizing the irresponsible. Rather, this is reversing a system in which the irresponsible subsidized the responsible. Because of these fees they were collecting against the irresponsible, the hard-up, and the disorganized, they have been able to offer people like me free checking. It’s a good deal for you and me, but a pretty bad deal for them. We can argue the virtues and failings of taking from the responsible and giving from the irresponsible, but penalizing the irresponsible to subsidize the responsible strikes me as much more problematic. It’s the same reason that I am against state-run lotteries. If you have trouble with overdrafting, you’re either poor or irresponsible or both. Life’s going to be hard on you as it is. We shouldn’t take advantage.

Point #2 represented a misunderstanding of the law. Nobody was taking away the right of people to get overdraft protection. It was merely taking away mandatory or automatic enrollment. In other words, you can’t be signed up without your knowledge. It’s possible that the fee limitations would make fewer banks offer the service, but charging $35 six times because someone made a purchase six times throughout the day is ridiculous. If this law went too far, it’s because the banks were taking advantage.

On Point #3, I agree. Forcing people to consider whether they want overdraft protection (and, in the larger bill, making statements easier to understand) will help them learn personal responsibility. As it stands now, people are enrolled without realizing it until it’s too late. Or they can’t unenroll. Avoiding bad consequences means, among other things, being given the tools to know when you are inviting them. Until this came up, I hadn’t even realized that I had overdraft protection. I simply assumed that if I ever overdrew, payment would be denied.

Point #4 I found particularly agitating. Especially when, after the law was passed and banks announced that they might be doing away with or otherwise limiting free checking, they all got so smug saying “I told you so…”

I find #4 agitating because it is absolutely true. The thing is, at least some of us already knew that. Granted, there are those that think that there is a revenue-reduction fairie that casts a spell over bank managers and other corporations that push them to accept lost profits and net losses gracefully, but I don’t. And neither do a lot of people on my side. As far as I am concerned, if free checking rests on taking advantage of those that have difficulty keeping things straight, it’s not something worth having. I feel the same way about speed traps. Getting rid of them will only result in increased taxes, but so what? That’s far preferable than artificially low speed limits and cops hiding behind rocks.

The whole thing is not about the banks making too much money, nor is it about giving money back to the consumer. It’s about transparency. It’s about getting rid of the illusion of free. Things that people think are free but only because they exist based off fees that the consumer doesn’t think he or she will ever have to pay. Checking accounts and credit cards cost money to maintain. If they want me to pay my share, then I will make a decision based on how much that service is worth to me. However, signing on customers who think they will be paying nothing (or a low amount) and end up paying a large amount, you may not be a liar (that’s what small print is for), but you’re lacking in the good faith department.

You may agree with that perspective or disagree with it, but it’s a matter of values and opinion and not a matter of people like me “not knowing what we do” (they say with a smug sigh). And we’re no more guilty of pie-in-the-sky thinking we could get something for nothing than they are for thinking that “free checking” was ever really free.

Anyhow, a funny thing happened on the way to the conclusions that they lamented and I accepted: it hasn’t happened. Free checking accounts come with more strings attached (no paper billing, no tellers), but they have not gone away. And on the other side, most people with overdraft protection have apparently decided that they want it*.

The “con” side is busy saying “I told you so” except that they didn’t. We were both arguing under the premise that this would make a serious dent. And maybe it will, over time. I suspect (well, hope, really) that as more people get dinged they will realize that it’s better for a payment to be declined than getting stuck with $100 in fees. Or maybe they won’t, because $100 is a lot less than it used to be, and that’s good, too.

But whatever the case, one area where I really did agree with the “con” side is that you can’t make better decisions for poor decision-makers. Well, you can, but it’s difficult and impedes on the rights of those that can make decisions with more sound mind. If they want to dig themselves into a hole, I’m actually cool with that. At least then, when they say “Man, I just got hit with these ridiculous fees” I can say “Well, you shouldn’t have gotten that overdraft protection.”

In some ways, all along this has been about the right wag my finger at the irresponsible. Before, decisions were being made without their input. I could put myself in their shoes because I didn’t realize you could automatically get overdraft protection. I could condemn the banks because they were relying on people to not fully appreciate the consequences of their actions. Now, the banks merely say “Well, they signed up for it” and that’s good enough for me.

And in the meantime, 25% of people are no longer enrolled in overdraft protection they didn’t want. That alone is progress.

* – Apparently the banks pushed the customers on this hard. I guess my bank knew better than to even pitch the idea to me except for a little box on my statement. I guess I don’t really like the high-pressure sale, but once again, there is only so much I want the government to do to protect people from making stupid decisions. The bill meets that threshold, as far as I am concerned.