I'm kinda sorta getting used to this whole lack of sleep thing. I've been getting about six hours a night. I'm on night-shift with the little man, so officially I take him from 9:00pm - 1:00am, but it's often 1:30am - 2:00am, especially on the weekends. I'm lucky that I have a job with a very flexible daily schedule -- as long as I put in 8-ish hours a day sometime between, say, 7:00am and 7:00pm, I'm good. Plus I work from home two days a week. A lot of people can complain about their job situations right now, but not me.
The housing situation is also good. I'm finding our basement is a godsend. When you're down there you can't hear what's going on upstairs, so I'll take the little man down there at night so that S can sleep (she can't sleep through baby crying even if it's a small peep and I'm on it immediately, it's that Mamma Bear instinct), and I'll go down there during the day so that I can work distraction-free. The nights before I have to go into the office I'll sleep down there as well, so pretty much I'm always down there now.
The baby is doing alright, he's been really cranky the past few days, though. He was so good up until then; when he cried it meant either "change me", "feed me", or "rock me" (like a Hurricane). Now he has a new cry that's impervious to all these remedies. We think it's a gas-pain cry, because when he farts (sharts, really, it ain't just gas coming out), he seems to calm down, but who knows? I'm finding there's a lot of armchair doctoring as a parent -- "put him on his back, and pull his knees up", "massage his tummy", "give him a half teaspoon of gripe water", "warm up his milk a little before you give it to him", "my friend whose wife knows a pediatrician says we should try to keep him upright and awake for 20 minutes after each feeding" -- you try all this stuff and none of works, or it does, but you don't know if it was actually that thing or if he just stopped crying because at some point he has to stop.
The whole 47% kerfuffle got me thinking about taxes, and I think we screwed ourselves as a country a long time ago by framing income taxes as if they come out of one's paycheck. This puts people in the mindset that it's their money and the government is taking it. A better way to look at it, in my opinion, is that it's the government's money, the price of doing business in America (yes, I believe you should pay for this privilege), and you're just holding it until April 15. The way I think it goes (or how it should go) is all monetary transactions are subject to a tax, proportional to the amount of the transaction. Who "pays" it is in some sense irrelevant. You can say either party pays it or both do, but somebody (by default the payee) is responsible for transferring it to the government. They aren't "paying" it, because it was never really theirs in the first place. Now, you can still argue over what the tax rate should be (even 0 is a legitimate option, but it's one that would probably cause the country to crumble), but that's the basic idea.
Things get really complicated when you start introducing tax brackets and write-offs and credits and capital gains taxes, which is why if I were in charge, I'd just eliminate all that stuff. All the loopholes would be gone, even the popular ones, like home-owner and child deductions. All transactions (including those from employer to employee, i.e., income) are taxed at x%, end of story. If x = 20 and you're making $10,000,000 / year, then $2,000,000 must be collected; if you're making $10,000, then $2,000 must be collected, that's it. Maybe I would have a provision that if you're making less then some preset amount then your employer has to cover some of your taxes, or maybe I would tax the super rich's transactions a tiny bit more to subsidize those of the super poor ("Tyranny!", the rich would cry), but nothing too extreme.
One thing I like about this plan is that it easily takes down the "Adam Carolla Argument". On his podcast, Adam frequently implies that rich people are doing the rest of us a favor by paying so much in total taxes even if they pay a lower rate than everybody else (like Mitt Romney paying $2 million in 2011, just 14% of his income). But under the plan I described above a lower rate would never be beneficial to society even on very high incomes, because presumably, the money being transferred to somebody would be transferred to somebody (or somebodies) else if the first somebody didn't exist.
For example, let's say the tax rate is 20% and Adam Carolla gets $100 from a sponsor, so the government takes $20. If Carolla stops doing his podcast that sponsor probably isn't going to stop advertizing, they're going to give, say, Mark Maron $50 ($10 tax), Penn Jillette $30 ($6 tax), and Greg Fitzsimmons $20 ($4 tax). Each individual gets less because they don't have as many listeners as Carolla did, but the total spent (and taxed) is the same, so Carolla's high taxes don't actually add anything to the overall pie (and in fact a lower rate would be a net loss to society), and he shouldn't be complaining that he's paying so much (unless he's complaining about the rate which is legitimate), because it necessarily means he's making so much. It's like Nelson Muntz once said to Lisa Simpson when she was crowing about putting together the yearbook, "If you didn't do it some other loser would have, so quit milking it."
Now, I'm not an expert on tax policy, and I've taken exactly two formal economics courses*, I'm sure somebody who knows something would tell this is how taxes are already supposed to work, or they could tell my why this is all wrong, and why it would never work in practice, but until then I'm sticking by it.
And that's all for this week. Until next time...
*I took Honors Micro and Macro as an undergrad. I think I missed five total points on exams over both semesters. The first exam I took in Micro, I scored 99%, and the professor showed it to the class as an example of how to answer questions correctly and parsimoniously (I remember he used that exact word). Once I went to see the prof during his office hours and this girl I knew, and had a crush on, was coincidentally working as his student assistant. Later I saw her at a party, and she told me that after I left, he went on and on about how well I was doing in his class. She seemed genuinely impressed. So I kissed her, and then later that night we made love under the bleachers of the football field. OK, everything happened but that last sentence. Really, I cracked a few jokes, she laughed, and then I tried to muster up the courage to ask her out, but couldn't. We left the party separately, and I basically never talked to her again. That pretty much sums up my game as a 20-year old.
The housing situation is also good. I'm finding our basement is a godsend. When you're down there you can't hear what's going on upstairs, so I'll take the little man down there at night so that S can sleep (she can't sleep through baby crying even if it's a small peep and I'm on it immediately, it's that Mamma Bear instinct), and I'll go down there during the day so that I can work distraction-free. The nights before I have to go into the office I'll sleep down there as well, so pretty much I'm always down there now.
The baby is doing alright, he's been really cranky the past few days, though. He was so good up until then; when he cried it meant either "change me", "feed me", or "rock me" (like a Hurricane). Now he has a new cry that's impervious to all these remedies. We think it's a gas-pain cry, because when he farts (sharts, really, it ain't just gas coming out), he seems to calm down, but who knows? I'm finding there's a lot of armchair doctoring as a parent -- "put him on his back, and pull his knees up", "massage his tummy", "give him a half teaspoon of gripe water", "warm up his milk a little before you give it to him", "my friend whose wife knows a pediatrician says we should try to keep him upright and awake for 20 minutes after each feeding" -- you try all this stuff and none of works, or it does, but you don't know if it was actually that thing or if he just stopped crying because at some point he has to stop.
[For pure rocking out purposes, does it get any better than The Scorpions? Yes, it does, but they're pretty good. This is what I sing to Lil' S while I'm rocking him. Pretty sweet video.]
OK, enough about baby stuff. Let's turn toward everybody's favorite topic this time of the year, presidential politics. Nate Silver currently has Obama as 77% favorite, which seems about right to me. Too many people don't like Mitt Romney, for good reason. The dude's a jackass. His 47% comments turned off a lot of people, but the thing is, he's been giving that same basic message since Day 1 of his presidential campaign. He's wrong of course, it's simply not the case that nearly half the country is mooching off the other half (nor are all the moochers for Obama, if that were the case he'd win the South by a landslide), but as far as I can tell, that's always been the Republican message. It's been funny and weird to see Republicans have to backtrack for saying things they actually believe. (Something similar happened with Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comments. My reaction after he apologized was, for what? If that's what you think then there's nothing to be sorry for. You're a complete fucking idiot, but you don't have to apologize.) Although with Etch-a-Sketch Mitt, you never know what he believes. I believe he's very driven to be "successful" (i.e., rich and powerful), everything else is pretty much fungible. With respect to whether or not Mitt's most recent "gaffe" will ultimately hurt him, I don't know. He was behind before and he's still behind. I'll echo Silver's sentiment on the matter.
My favorite part about this statement is the last paragraph. You know how I'm always bitching about people not reasoning objectively and not basing their opinions on fact-based analyses? Nate Silver gets it. (And by the way, things have down-ticked for Romney since this was written a few days ago.)I have my own instincts about Mr. Romney’s remarks, which are roughly as follows: even if his outlook is a bit less negative than it seemed a week ago, he is nevertheless the underdog in the race, and not in a position where he can afford to alienate any voters who might allow him to climb to 50 percent of the vote. His coalition may already be drawn too narrowly, and this won’t help him with that.
But I’d place rather little value on my instincts, and rather more on the polls. We should know more about the state of the campaign a week from now than we do today.
[Another song I've had stuck in my head a bunch these days.]
The whole 47% kerfuffle got me thinking about taxes, and I think we screwed ourselves as a country a long time ago by framing income taxes as if they come out of one's paycheck. This puts people in the mindset that it's their money and the government is taking it. A better way to look at it, in my opinion, is that it's the government's money, the price of doing business in America (yes, I believe you should pay for this privilege), and you're just holding it until April 15. The way I think it goes (or how it should go) is all monetary transactions are subject to a tax, proportional to the amount of the transaction. Who "pays" it is in some sense irrelevant. You can say either party pays it or both do, but somebody (by default the payee) is responsible for transferring it to the government. They aren't "paying" it, because it was never really theirs in the first place. Now, you can still argue over what the tax rate should be (even 0 is a legitimate option, but it's one that would probably cause the country to crumble), but that's the basic idea.
Things get really complicated when you start introducing tax brackets and write-offs and credits and capital gains taxes, which is why if I were in charge, I'd just eliminate all that stuff. All the loopholes would be gone, even the popular ones, like home-owner and child deductions. All transactions (including those from employer to employee, i.e., income) are taxed at x%, end of story. If x = 20 and you're making $10,000,000 / year, then $2,000,000 must be collected; if you're making $10,000, then $2,000 must be collected, that's it. Maybe I would have a provision that if you're making less then some preset amount then your employer has to cover some of your taxes, or maybe I would tax the super rich's transactions a tiny bit more to subsidize those of the super poor ("Tyranny!", the rich would cry), but nothing too extreme.
One thing I like about this plan is that it easily takes down the "Adam Carolla Argument". On his podcast, Adam frequently implies that rich people are doing the rest of us a favor by paying so much in total taxes even if they pay a lower rate than everybody else (like Mitt Romney paying $2 million in 2011, just 14% of his income). But under the plan I described above a lower rate would never be beneficial to society even on very high incomes, because presumably, the money being transferred to somebody would be transferred to somebody (or somebodies) else if the first somebody didn't exist.
For example, let's say the tax rate is 20% and Adam Carolla gets $100 from a sponsor, so the government takes $20. If Carolla stops doing his podcast that sponsor probably isn't going to stop advertizing, they're going to give, say, Mark Maron $50 ($10 tax), Penn Jillette $30 ($6 tax), and Greg Fitzsimmons $20 ($4 tax). Each individual gets less because they don't have as many listeners as Carolla did, but the total spent (and taxed) is the same, so Carolla's high taxes don't actually add anything to the overall pie (and in fact a lower rate would be a net loss to society), and he shouldn't be complaining that he's paying so much (unless he's complaining about the rate which is legitimate), because it necessarily means he's making so much. It's like Nelson Muntz once said to Lisa Simpson when she was crowing about putting together the yearbook, "If you didn't do it some other loser would have, so quit milking it."
[If you didn't pay all those taxes some other millionaire would have, so quit milking it.]
Now, I'm not an expert on tax policy, and I've taken exactly two formal economics courses*, I'm sure somebody who knows something would tell this is how taxes are already supposed to work, or they could tell my why this is all wrong, and why it would never work in practice, but until then I'm sticking by it.
And that's all for this week. Until next time...
*I took Honors Micro and Macro as an undergrad. I think I missed five total points on exams over both semesters. The first exam I took in Micro, I scored 99%, and the professor showed it to the class as an example of how to answer questions correctly and parsimoniously (I remember he used that exact word). Once I went to see the prof during his office hours and this girl I knew, and had a crush on, was coincidentally working as his student assistant. Later I saw her at a party, and she told me that after I left, he went on and on about how well I was doing in his class. She seemed genuinely impressed. So I kissed her, and then later that night we made love under the bleachers of the football field. OK, everything happened but that last sentence. Really, I cracked a few jokes, she laughed, and then I tried to muster up the courage to ask her out, but couldn't. We left the party separately, and I basically never talked to her again. That pretty much sums up my game as a 20-year old.
Sounds like you are officially out of the babymoon phase. We had the same experience with B, really mellow the first 6 weeks and then he got super hard to console sometimes. Baffling. I don't really have any words of wisdom, just empathy. And counting down the days until I can cuddle him!!
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