The Buffett Rule...Stupidity on Steroids

The White House freely admits that even their most optimistic projections of the next ten years shows staggering, out of control deficits. 2012's deficit alone is 1.5 trillion dollars. This is an unsustainable national tragedy that demands serious reform to correct. So, what is the President's plan? The Buffett Rule.

Yes, the Sage of Omaha, the third richest man on the planet is famously annoyed by the fact that he pays taxes at a lower "rate" than his secretary. Our President, never content to let a perfectly good annoyance go to waste, immediately seized on his comments and decided to make the "Buffett Rule" the centerpiece of his strategy to rein in the fiscal insanity facing the country. Yes, passing a law demanding that anyone making one million dollars a year be required to pay a minimum of 30% in taxes is President Obama's solution to the trouble we face. Yes, the financial train wreck we find ourselves in stems from the horrible fact that the rich earn much of their income from appreciating assets and thus pay only 15% tax on that income. Guys like Buffett and Romney are awash in capital gains income. The Buffett Rule, we are told by the President,"will help us close our deficit. This is not politics, its math."

I will not here debate the wisdom of whether or not capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate. I will not debate the charge that millionaires don't pay their fair share of taxes. I will not even debate the politics of such a tax proposal during an election year. I prefer to examine exactly what kind of "math" the President could possibly be talking about?!

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that full implementation of the "Buffett Rule" would raise 5 billion dollars in revenue to the Treasury. Other analysis estimate the number to be closer to 3 billion, but for argument's sake, I'll take the CBO at it's word. 5 billion dollars....or enough money to close our current 2012 deficit in roughly 500 years. 5 billion dollars....or the amount of money our government borrows every 24 hours. We are facing a tsunami of deficits and debt as far as the eye can see and the President's plan is...the Buffet Rule. Wouldn't it be better if the government just confiscated all 44 billion dollars of Warren Buffett's net worth instead of settling for 30% of his yearly income? Better yet, why don't we confiscate every dime from everyone who showed up in the Forbes 400 richest Americans list this year? In exchange for all of their money, the government would agree to provide them reasonable housing, food and medical care. Desperate times call for desperate measures. When the American people see the patriotic sacrifices being made by the super rich, our collective sense of fairness would be satisfied, and with all that money we could, we could...close the 1.5 trillion dollar deficit for 2012. Yep, we would only fix the problem for one year. Then in 2013, there wouldn't be another 1.5 trillion to confiscate. But, for one glorious year there wouldn't be any fat cats not paying their fair share, and certainly that would be worth it...right?

When Republicans talk about illuminating "waste, fraud and abuse" from the federal budget as a way to balance the budget I get angry because the amounts of money involved are like treating a knife wound with a band-aid. When Democrats call for millionaire tax hikes as a way to close the deficits I also get angry. Both approaches amount to score settling appeals to political interests, and do nothing the address the big problems driving our nation to the edge of a fiscal abyss. Those big problems are out of control spending, and a tax system that has successfully managed to remove half of our citizens from the tax rolls. Any real and enduring fix will HAVE to include dramatic reductions in federal spending AND tax increases..on EVERYONE, not just the Warren Buffetts of this world.

Graduate School Journal...Part 2

Yesterday Pam and I got to spend much of the day doing the tourist thing around Princeton while Patrick was in meetings. We bought some books, walked through some shops in Palmer Square and then spent some time on the Princeton campus. Absolutely gorgeous. Patrick's meetings went well, although I think the financial realities of life here were brought home to him in his meeting with the financial aid people.

It has been a great trip. I can see Patrick living and thriving here. The school exceeded expectations. Last night we drove into the town of Windsor to see "The Artist". This is the Oscar-winning silent film by mostly French actors, directors etc.. It was amazing. The score, the glorious lighting of black and white, the phenomenal acting required when words are absent, all made for a terrific movie. Of course, the first thing Patrick said afterwards was how amazing the music was. Nothing has changed in that regard since he was five.

So, now we head back to Richmond. This time four months from now I'll have two kids in graduate school. That thought seems outrageous to me. I barely survived the University of Richmond. It was everything I could do to sit still long enough to endure an hour long lecture. Now, thirty years later I have two kids who can't wait for the next class.

Graduate School Journal...Part 1

I'm in Princeton, New Jersey with Patrick visiting what will be his home for the next two years, Westminster Choir College. We have toured the campus and walked through this most charming of what the people up here refer to as "townships". Everywhere you look you see stately old buildings covered with ivy. Coffee shops outnumber Walmarts about 28 to zero. There are chocolate shops seemingly on every corner, quaint bookstores and upscale boutique shops of every description line the streets. There are beautiful, ornate churches everywhere. I've seen Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, Catholic and even an Assembly of God, but no Southern Baptist! If ever there were a place perfectly designed for a kid like Patrick to thrive, this is it. As a student at this school, he will get to sing in choirs that perform in Philadelphia and New York, even a performance at Carnegie Hall in the fall. There's a train station within walking distance that goes straight to Grand Central Station in New York that I'm sure Patrick will wear out. What an awesome place for my son to be. So blessed.

Easter Tradition At The Dunnevants

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. Kaitlin will be driving up from Winston late this afternoon. Patrick flies in late tonight. We will all be together, just the four of us for the first time since the new furniture arrived. Patrick's room is now where the movie room used to be and vice-versa. Hope he's fine with the new arrangement. Our new kitchen table's inaugural meal with all four of us will be the much anticipated Easter morning breakfast. This meal is famous in Dunnevant family lore because of Pam's "empty tomb rolls". She flattens out a tube of canned biscuits, then inserts a marshmallow and wraps the flattened dough around it to form a ball. This dough ball then gets dipped in butter and rolled through a bowl of some sort of heavenly ambrosia containing sugar and cinnamon. Everything gets loaded into muffin tins and thrown in the oven. Then these babies are served up on a plate with bacon, scrambled eggs and fresh fruit. When you dig in to the rolls, the inside is hollow since the marshmallow has melted, adding its thousand calories to the mix. The empty tomb rolls make us think of our Saviors' resurrection from the dead. It's all quite wonderful.

This year will be like all Easters in my family. There will be an egg hunt...with a twist. My two kids have always been insanely competitive with each other. Everything had better come out "equal" in the end or both of them will claim that the other is guilty of a "big braggy show". So, twenty years ago it became evident that just hiding a random number of eggs around the house and letting them go at it was problematic. This always resulted in one of them having more eggs than the other, an intolerable outcome for my strangely communistic children who always insisted, like Stalin and Mao before them, in equality of results!! To insure peace, Pam came up with the brilliant idea of buying an identical number of color-coded plastic eggs, giving each of them an identically sized bucket and letting them get after it, knowing that as long as neither of them were color-blind, they would end up with the same number of eggs, and we could go to church on speaking terms. This plan worked so well, we've done it the same way ever since, even though my "children" are both in their early twenties, college graduates, and surely beyond such pettiness. Somewhere down the line I came up with the idea of saving my pocket change all year, and instead of filling the eggs with teeth-rotting candy, filling them with quarters, nickels and dimes. This proved to be a raging success as well, although making sure that the money came out equal in the end was and is a labor-intensive process.

The question now has become, at what point do we retire the Easter egg hunt? Last year Jon was with us and I thought perhaps that would have been a good time to bring the festivities to a close. But, Pam, being the creative party-planner, people pleaser that she is, came up with the idea of buying a bag of plastic baseballs to hide for Jon so he wouldn't feel left out. I was fine with it, but drew the line at filling his baseballs with my change. Seriously though, one of my kids is in graduate school, and the other will be this fall, and we're still hiding twenty year old plastic eggs around the house for them to find? Yes, we do. Knowing their Mother as I do, we will be hiding those eggs for them every year until it comes to the point where our grandchildren start getting annoyed at having to share my change with their parents.

The Mystery Of Kim Kardashian

This morning I was getting dressed for work in the usual way, only this morning it happened to be at the exact moment when Ann Curry of the Today show was interviewing Kim Kardashian. So, essentially, this blog writes itself.

Before I proceed, I should confess up front to never having watched an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. The sum total of my knowledge of this woman comes from what I am able to glean from the covers of Us, People, and the National Inquirer as I'm standing in line at Martins. With those fine publications serving as my data-base, I can confidently assert that Ms.K has very large breasts, wears spectacular clothes, seems to be quite fond of large athletic black men, and wears copious amounts of makeup.

What I have never understood is why she is famous. Does she have musical talent, does she act, is she a model? I mean, what exactly does she do, and how did she get her own television show? I watch the television screen for clues to her success. She is sitting there in a fabulous blue dress into which her bountiful assets have been poured. Just for arguments' sake, I will assume that her physical beauty has not been genetically manipulated or surgically enhanced, that what we see is, in fact, real. Well done, Mr. and Mrs. Kardashian, well done.

But as she begins to speak, I am astonished by the perfectly pedestrian drivel that comes out of her voluptuous mouth. This girl is virtually identical to practically every super-beautiful girl in the history of the world. There is nothing unique or captivating about her. She has the intelligence of your average late night dime-store clerk. Not one word that she speaks is in the slightest way interesting. When challenged by Ms. Curry as to whether her ill-fated marriage to Kris Humphries might have been some sort of publicity stunt, she seemed genuinely shocked that anyone on earth could possibly have come to such a conclusion. Rarely have I seen a public figure with less self-awareness...and I'm American, so that's saying something!!

So the mystery of Ms. Kardashian remains. Absent any obvious talents, I am forced to assume that she is famous, for being famous. Like Paris Hilton before her, we will watch her with shameful fascination. We've already watched one marriage collapse. There will be more. Then there will be some sort of substance abuse which will require stints in a series of celebrity rehab centers. Perhaps that will be the genesis of yet another reality show, following Kim throughout the despair of the 12 step recovery program.( Step one...lay down the curling iron and slowly step away from the vanity table!).
Then we will watch as her narsicism ratchets her down ever lower until finally, she ends up hawking her tanning beds on Craig's List. But, about the time we think she's disappeared forever, there will be a religious conversion, and a shocking tell-all auto-biography, in which we learn that Kim was sexually abused by her creepy step-dad Bruce Jenner. Tears will flow as Oprah tenderly squeezes out all the salacious details during a prime-time interview that will be the highest rated television show of all time. The headline in the National Inquirer the next day will scream.." Kim's Painful Ordeal Takes Toll On Figure."

Birthday Checklist

Today is my birthday. As has been my custom since turning 50 I try to perform some feat involving physicality, not to prove my relative fitness, but more to document the progress of my inexorable decline. Today it was a 5K run, a distance of 3.1 miles. I ran it outside on a rather hilly tract I have measured out in my neighborhood. My time was 27:50.7. Two years ago my records indicate that I ran 4 miles on a treadmill in a time of 31:48. Three years ago I ran 3 miles on a treadmill in 23:39. At this pace I will soon manage to break the 30 minute barrier for one mile!

Since it's my birthday, there's a paragraph that I need to get out of my system...

Yesterday I tried to help my daughter fill out her first 1040 form. I haven't done my own taxes in over 20 years since my return is practically an inch thick, costs me $500, and I don't understand a word of it. So, I probably am not the best person to ask for help filling out even the most benign IRS form which I assumed something called the "EZ" 1040 form would be. Nope. Even at this entry level introduction to the labyrinth that is the IRS, I was hopelessly over matched. "If line 24d is greater but not equal to the total on line 17, proceed to tax table on schedule ADJ" was one of the more straightforward instructions found on this two page EZ1040 form for tax-paying beginners. After 10 minutes of this I was muttering under my breath about the "pencil-necked, soul-crushing, blood-sucking, parasitic bureaucrats who work at the most evil construct ever spawned by the United States government."

There. I feel better already. However, having just read the part about blood-sucking parasites it occurs to me that there is an agency of our government that was the ACTUAL spawn of the IRS and the CIA. That would be the department of Homeland Security, and it wouldn't surprise me if there isn't some pencil-necked employee sitting in a cubical doing nothing else but monitoring blogs for combinations of words that might be deemed "dangerous". Perhaps they use some sort of algorithm that screams  an alarm whenever the words "blood-sucking" and "bureaucrats" appear in the same sentence. On the off chance that this is the case, let me just say that I was not referring to any specific actual employees of either the IRS,CIA or Homeland Security, all of which are part of the grand mosaic that make up the engine of our self-government. I was merely voicing the minor frustration that many of us feel when trying to comply with the law of the land. So, no need to push the "audit this guy" button. haha...

Birthday checklist:

1. Take freshly baked molasses cookies made by Pam to the office.  CHECK.

2. Get taken to lunch by my office mates. Take full advantage of their rare display of generosity. CHECK.

3. Read scores of birthday wishes posted on my facebook page and say a prayer of thanks for each one. CHECK.

4. Enjoy steak dinner at Firebirds with great friends. CHECK.

5. Ponder the inevitable and relentless physical and mental decline that awaits you in the years to come. CHECK.

April Fools and the Week Of My Birthday

Anyone who knows me knows that I love April Fools Day. Its the only day of the year where my predominant personality trait is celebrated, the one day where what I really love to do isn't "frowned upon in this establishment!!" Those lucky enough to work with me in my office have learned to fear this day. They enter the office gingerly, vigilant eyes scanning the ceiling, doors and walls, determined not to be victimized. They perform even the most menial tasks with extreme caution, never knowing when a remote controlled rat might dart out from underneath their desks, or when a large bucket of ping pong balls might suddenly pour down from the heavens. Even the most benign surface might by covered with some odious gooey substance of unknown origin. Strange odors waft from the most unsuspecting places. I'm telling you, it's a thing of beauty. But not today. Once every seven years my big day falls on a Sunday. It's like the Governor's pardon, or the year of Jubilee for everyone else, but for me it's the mother of all letdowns.

Today is also the beginning of the week of my birthday, a seven day celebration of the day, 54 years ago, when I was born. That's the way we do it in the Dunnevant family. One day just isn't enough. Birthdays have lost much of their cache with me in recent years. When I was a kid I couldn't wait to be older, I counted the days until I turned 13 as if I was going to win the lottery. 18 was cool. It meant I could drink beer legally, and vote. Oddly enough I found that drinking beer legally, in a bar wasn't nearly as fun as sneaking around. Then 21 came and went. It wasn't as big a deal in 1979 to turn 21 as it is today. 30 was weird. I was a father by then and it didn't seem possible that I was 30. I had always been told never to trust anyone over 30. Could I now not trust myself? 40 was a blur, 50 even blurrier. Birthdays have become more like reminder posts than occasions of celebration. They are like those signs you see on the interstate..."last rest stop for 100 miles"..reminders that something unsettling is in your future. I'm not exactly sure when it started, but it used to be when I would accomplish something athletically like a personal best time in the mile, or hitting a wind-aided 300 yard drive I would brag about my superior skill. But somewhere awhile back I started saying..."not bad for a       year old." How did that happen?

So, I will grin and bare the week of my birthday, and be thankful that I have not assumed room temperature, which, after all, is the only other available option. Perhaps I will go out and do something physically demanding to prove to myself that I've still got it, whatever "it" is. Then after I return from Patient First in a sling with a prescription for pain killers I'll feel much better!