What goes on in Vegas....

The news has been full of stories about government waste lately. From the lavish Vegas bash thrown by the GSA, to the fabulous Hawaiian vacations enjoyed by GSA's director, Jeffrey Neely, to the $800,000 in travel expenses incurred by the Secretary of Defense for 27 weekend trips home...all courtesy of the taxpayer. None of these stories surprise me. None of these stories anger me. This is exactly the sort of thing I expect of a government as huge and influential as ours. This sort of unaccountable waste is as predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. It's inevitability stems from this basic fact about human beings, ie..people are much more prudent concerning their own money than they are concerning someone else's money.

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you were walking down an empty street and stumbled upon a wad of ten one hundred dollar bills. There is no one around to return the money to, no way to determine to whom it belonged, so you realize that it's your lucky day. How do you spend that money? Do you calmly deposit the $1,000 into your savings account and thank God for his rich blessings? Or do you reason that since this is an unexpected windfall, why not treat yourself to a new set of golf clubs, or a weekend at the Spa? My guess is that you would spend this largess in ways that you would never dream of spending your own hard-earned money. This is human nature. It happened to me once. Years ago, I completed my three year study program and finally earned my Chartered Financial Consultant professional designation. The company I was working for at the time gave me an unlimited gift certificate to a high end store that sold business products like fancy briefcases etc. Since the certificate had no limit, I went hog-wild. I bought a beautiful all leather Hartmann case that I still use today. It cost $400..in 1996!! If I had been spending my own money, my budget would have been 50 bucks. It's always easier spending someone else's money.

This is the intrinsic problem with government. Every nickle that government spends is someone else's money. The larger and more powerful that government is the less connection there is between the sources of the money and the spenders of the money. As budgets get more complex the less accountability there can be. Sure, every now and then something particularly egregious pops up like this GSA party and a Congressional hearing is called where the guilty spendthrifts are slapped on the wrists. But for every story that we know about there are ten that we will never discover.

There is one political party in this country that IS the party of government. The Democratic party believes in the power of government as a driver of social justice. It believes in the righteousness of the collective, in the roll of government as referee, umpire, and inspector.  Democrats are loud and enthusiastic champions of full funding for their vision of this powerful government. Unfortunately, there is no political party with anything approaching influence that champions a dismantling of and downsizing of government. The Republican party talks a better game but when they get in power, the only thing that gets downsized is the rate of growth of government, and then, only if we're lucky.When both major political parties in a country generally agree on an ever expanding roll for government, the result is never ending deficits.

If you are a Democrat, I know what you're thinking. "What, you think government is the only institution that wastes money? Big corporations waste money too!!" Yes, they do. But when a corporation goes on a wild spending spree, then what's left of the free market will punish them for it. Their stock price will suffer, market share will decline, and people will lose their jobs. Unless, of course, you're too big to fail, in which case the government, using someone else's money will bail you out, insulating you from the consequences of your bad decisions. Kinda like welfare. But in government, no matter how wasteful, ineffective, outdated or redundant your agency happens to be, your budget never actually gets cut. Maybe every now and then it's growth rate is slowed, but there's never any cuts to the perpetual motion machine that is big government. So, we better get used to $850,000 dollar parties in Vegas for government bureaucrats.

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.