My wife is a poll worker today.
For her, election day really started last night when she and the other workers set up the polling place. Then she had to get up at 4:00 in order to be at the polls by 5:15 in order to open the polls by 6:00.
Tonight the polls close at 7:00, but anyone in line by then gets to vote. Closing the polls takes an hour or more because everyone is super tired by then. Then you have to drive the ballot box over to the registrar.
So an 18 hour day for my wife today.
This chart is a remake of a New York Times chart that is supposed to show how great Democrats are. Why is it a remake? Well, because the original chart had to lie, change scales and do other trickery so that Democrats looked better then Republicans. Because they don't.
The original chart was supposed to show that Democratic administrations are better then Republican administrations. Reworked to be honest, it shows the opposite. What this chart shows is that in general, growth has been better under Republican administrations than Democratic administrations.
The two exceptions are Nixon and Bush. But its impossible to discuss the Bush administration without talking about the three significant economic issues that happened during his administration:
Even after the financial meltdown, if you charge the Dot Com Bubble and 9/11 against Clinton, Bush would have positive growth during his 8 years.
Similarly, Nixon had the Energy Crisis to deal with. Other people have pointed out that if you include the roaring 20's, Hoover was a net wash over the previous period.
So frankly, I think you have to throw out Nixon/Bush/Hoover as outliers. So if you look at the chart, its pretty obvious that except for Clinton (who got to ride the dot com bubble), growth is significantly better under Republican administrations than Democratic administrations. 3-5% bigger.
The reason this matters is because Obama is making a big deal about how he's giving the middle class these $500 tax rebates. A $500 rebate works out to about $.25/hour. It's about 1% wage growth for a median income of $50,000. But if growth is better under Republican administrations, then that means you're passing up a raise of 3-5%/year, which works out to be $1500-$2500 the first year, and for every year after that.
Since raises and growth are cumulative but this "tax cut" is a one time bump, you're even father behind after four years, because 3-5% growth for 4 years would mean that 4th year you'd be making $6,000-$10,000 more.
So that $500 isn't looking very good to me.
Basically, Obama's "Middle Class Tax Cut" actually sucks. What he's really doing is adding about 10 more checkboxes to the 1040, most of which you probably won't be able to check off. There's an article from the WSJ which covers it. But I want to talk about this graph from that article:
We all get that Obama is raising taxes on the rich. But do you know he's raising taxes on the poor?
I guess lawyers are bad at math. Because the way he's structured his tax plan with all these checkboxes that apply or don't apply at different income levels what he's done is raise the tax rates on what economists call the marginal tax rate, and I call the overtime ass rape.
I call it that, because basically, the government doesn't tax you on the first dollar you make. It ramps up from there, until at the end of the week, your paycheck is a lot smaller than it should be. Whatever that works out to be, that's your general tax rate. But when you work overtime, you get taxed at a much higher rate. So if you work say 4 hours of overtime one week, you might expect your check to be for 6 hours more if you get an extra 50% for overtime. But it never is, because that 6 hours of pay gets taxed at the maximum rate. So instead of 6 hours of pay, you get 4 hours of pay.
The people who get reamed the most are the people making $40,000/year. Their marginal tax rate is 40%. Which means that even before state income taxes, if they work 4 hours of overtime, they get paid for 3.6 hours.
So with Obama's plan to hand out this $500 tax rebate, someone making 20/hour would make an extra $.25/hour, or $40/month. Whoopdedo. But if they worked 4 hours of overtime, instead of making an extra $120 they only make $72. So they just paid $48 in taxes. That $40 they got this month suddenly doesn't look so good, and if they worked 4 hours of overtime each week, they paid $192 more in taxes.
This is not the way to rebuild the economy, and it illustrates the fundamental problem with the wealth transfer philosophy at the core of Obama's Tax Plan. It completely undermines people's incentive to work just a little bit harder. Why work overtime? The government will just take it all, and what they don't take will be eaten up by more child care.
Forget about Joe the Plumber who wants to make $250,000. What about Joe the Factory Worker who just put in 4 hours this week of overtime but had to pay more in child care? He's now behind because the government will take more in taxes than he earned.
Hundreds of Economists Sign Letter Opposing Obama's Tax Plan
Meanwhile, the Democrats are going to throw wood on the Bonfire
Good Comparison of the Two Health Care Plans. I learned that basically, McCain's plan will make Health Savings Accounts pretty much universally available. Which is pretty interesting. I still favor my all-of-the-above plan:
To me, education is one of the single biggest issues this election.
We can't have real political discussions in this country about the economy because most people barely get percentages. So any talk about how wages are flat but total compensation has grown over the last 8 years because health care premiums have sucked away all the growth just makes peoples eyes roll up in their head.
We can't fix problems, because any national problem is complicated, and people aren't educated enough to understand the ins and outs. So we have to fix education first.
While fixing education would take 10 minutes for either Presidential candidate, it will take you more then 10 minutes to read the background of why my 10 minute plan will work.
My mom was the shop steward for her union, and she always said that there were two problems with education in America:
That union she was the shop steward for? The teachers union. The problem is that the bureaucracy and the teachers union feed off each other. Its not the bad teachers who get written up, its the good teachers that get written up for rocking the boat. So the rhetoric about getting rid of bad teachers from both sides misses the point: Many of the bad teachers have burned out from fighting the bureaucracy.
It shouldn't be a great mystery why private and charter schools do better then regular public schools. Private/charter schools put more funds and responsibility in the hands of the teachers and principals. Why that works is obvious when you consider the following:
People with the most influence on whether a child learns to read, in order:
The Child. The fact is that motivated children can learn even in bad schools or even with bad teachers, and there are plenty of historical cases of people who learned with no schools.
The Parent. Parents have an enormous influence over the child. Parents don't have the skills a teacher has, but they can motivate the child, which leads us back to #1.
The Teacher. Teachers have both the skills, knowledge, and connection to the child. But they're not the parent.
Those first 3 people have enormous influence over the child. I would say 99% of the responsibility of whether the child learns rests with those 3 people. 4th is perhaps the principal, but only in their capacity to motivate and support the parents and teachers.
Now lets consider how we run our schools.
In our schools, the more influence you have on a child's learning, the less money or resources you control. It's upside down.
Here's my 3 part strategy for fixing education in this country:
Fire 90% of the people at the district office, and put the money into the teachers and principals hands instead of people so far removed from the classroom that they have no clue. Most people in the bureaucracy have never actually taught children.
I'm not kidding about this. Look at the nonsense that has happened because the bureaucracy controls the funds:
Whole Language Starting in 1970, school districts and State Education Boards switched wholesale from Phonics to something called Whole Language reading instruction. The problem? Whole Language doesn't work for most students.
Textbooks Schools typically pay up to $200 for textbooks most of which are awful. You can buy a copy of Harry Potter for $13, and the children will actually want to read it. You could actually let them keep the book! My mother had one child who was having trouble learning to read, but he liked porcupines. So she bought him a book on porcupines, and let him keep it. He learned to read. Another child was having problems, but liked sports. So she signed up for a subscription to Sports Illustrated.
Bilingual Education This is only an issue because the teachers don't control the funds. Have a student who only speaks spanish? You buy a bilingual book. Have a student who only speaks vietnamese, you buy a different book.
Pick any controversy in education, and you'll find the teachers are unanimous, but the bureaucracy is confused, because they've never actually taught children.
Picture if you will, amazon.com. Now picture everything on amazon that takes money stripped away along. Instead, teachers can go to teachers.amazon.com and see their budget for the year. Child need more help in school? Parents can go to the supermarket, buy a gift card, and hand it to the teacher and know the money will only go to educational materials. Rotary International can donate money to different schools, and know it will go directly to the teachers. The same with IBM, Apple, Disney, Microsoft or any other corporation you can think of.
If you're child is behind in school, $50 in materials placed directly in the hands of any teacher is all they need to come back.
No Child Left Behind didn't invent standardized testing. There were 50 states that did testing before NCLB, and there are 50 states now that do standardized testing. All NCLB really did is make the school districts disclose the results of the test for the schools.
But it didn't go far enough. After each standardized test, every parent in America should do the following.
Ask for your child's test scores. Don't just assume your child is doing ok, because chances are, if you're in a neighborhood with a good school, your child still has a 20% chance of being behind. In a bad school? 50% chance. But the system will never tell you if your child is behind, because if you tell a parent their child is behind the other kids, the parent gets mad at the school. But most kids are behind in something. It's better to find out now, then when they're 18 and can't get a job at McDonalds because they can't read the menu.
If your child is behind, insist on more work, not a special class If your child is behind, the school district will offer to put your child in a special class. Do not let them do this. If you let them put your child in a special class, you might as well just plan on them having a career where they say "Would you like fries with that?". If you're running a race, you can't catch up by running special, you have to catch up by running harder. That means more homework for your child, staying after school, and tutoring.
Special classes don't work for various reasons. First off, the special teachers who teach those special classes are paid per student. It is not in their interest for your child to progress back to their normal class. So its a life sentence for your child. Additionally, either these special classes have a fair number of students in them (15-30) so really your child isn't really getting any more instruction than they would in their regular class. Or, the special class has just a few students (5), but its only for part of the day, so the student has to leave their regular classroom and travel to the special class (10 minutes lost). Then they get some special time, but then they have to go back to their regular classroom. So your child starts 20 minutes behind. Whatever attention they get has to be awfully special to make up for that. Generally, they just fall farther behind. It's also typical to give those classes to the rookie teachers, so the child is getting worse instruction. What your child needs is a tutor.
The argument against tutoring is that it stigmatizes the child. You know what is stigmatizing? Spending the rest of your life saying Would you like Fries with that?. Besides, who are they fooling? Being is a special class isn't any less stigmatizing then tutoring. The real reason they don't want to offer tutoring is because its inconvenient. Fuck 'em, insist on the child staying in a regular classroom, but work with the teacher to get extra work for them, and tips on how you can help.
If your child is behind, give the Teacher a $50 gift card to Amazon
In most supermarkets, you can just take your change jar to the Coinstar counter and do this directly and the Coinstar people won't charge you their usual fee. Collect Aluminum Cans if you have to. Stand up during church and beg for the money. Seriously, it will be the best $50 you've ever spent.
Those 3 things are all we need to do to fix education in this country. Thank you for listening. Now if I could just get one of the Presidential Candidates to shout this from the rooftops.
As the commenter over there says:
The tax code is has been made so complex that the Governor of a US state in conjunction with the best professional experience of H&R Block, are unable to file an accurate return.
It's bad enough that you have to endure media scrutiny when you run for President, now your tax returns get scrutinized and you end up having to fork out thousands of dollars?
If there's one thing I hate more than Democratic Tax-the-Rich economic policies, its our tax code. (Which is why I hate the Democratic Tax-the-Rich economic policies.)
I got to watch it in 50” HD at my parents house.
It definitely would have been much more entertaining if each candidate had been placed in a giant hamster ball and had them go at it ala American Gladiator.
And really, it would have been just as informative.
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