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.

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:

• The Dot Com Bubble Bursting
• 9/11
• The Financial Meltdown (which he tried to head off, but I digress)

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.

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.

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:

• Let the Government Try to Compete with the Insurance Companies (Obama)
• Shift from Employer-Controlled to Employee-Controlled Health Care (McCain)
• Make a reasonable $150/month Health Care plan available in all 50 dates (Florida)

Things are Much Better in Iraq

Cool Map from the WSJ showing the Global Economy

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:

1. The bureaucracy
2. The Teachers Union

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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:

Give Teachers and Principals control of the funds.

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.

teachers.amazon.com

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.

Ask for your child's Test Scores

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

That's all Folks

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.)

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.

Actually, Sarah Palin is still for a bridge.

I'm sure you're confused now. Let me back up a bit with some history.

First off, they don't call it the bridge to nowhere in Alaska, they call it the bridge to the airport.

40 years ago, people in that area of Alaska were looking for a place to build an airport. Airports require land that is well, flat. The only land around that was flat was Gravina Island. So they build the airport there, and the federal government promised that someday, they would build a bridge to the airport. In the meantime, the Alaskans setup a ferry system.

40 years later, the airport is getting more and more use. So the Alaskans bug their Senator, Ted Stevens. The problem is, the waterway between the island and the mainland is deep, deep enough for ocean going vessels. So bridging it would be equivalent to building a copy of the Golden Gate Bridge. It wasn't Ted Stevens money though, so he slipped it into the bill. $363 million dollars worth of bridge.

Some people (McCain) was outraged by this, and started calling it the bridge to nowhere. Which wasn't entirely fair, but $363 million dollars was definitely too much to pay. So, long before Sarah Palin became governor, the earmark became a regular highway funds allocation instead of an earmark.

When Sarah Palin was running for governor, and she was asked about it, and she said, yes, they need a bridge to the airport. So she "supported it".

When she became governor though, and she had the entire transportation budget for Alaska (including some of that $363 million), she decided there were a lot better things to spend money on than the bridge. Mostly, roads. It seems that Alaska has this long history of its congressmen getting earmarks for this project and that project. So they had a lot of bridges with shitty roads connecting them, because after the congressmen were done earmarking transportation funds for this bridge or that bridge, they ended up with no money for the roads. Alaskans are overall, generally happy about this, because coming up with a list of transportation projects and prioritizing the important ones is what governors are supposed to do.

Meanwhile, she still believes that they need a bridge to the airport, but not $363 million worth. So she directed the state transportation people to either come up with a cheaper plan, or float it as a bond issue so the state residents could decide correctly.

So:

1. Yes she said she was for it during the campaign. But it wasn't a big issue in Alaska.
2. She could have built the bridge, but she didn't. To me, this underscores the evils of earmarks, because it seems to me that governors should be able to decide how to spend money in their state, not have it done for them by their congressional delegation.
3. She's still for it, just not at $363 million. I suspect that unless someone figures out how to make bridges out of carbon nanotubes in the next couple of years, the people in that area will have to take the ferry to the airport.
4. Yes, she's oversimplifying in her speeches. But Alaska has greatly cut the number of earmarks they request since she took office, so its not that terrible.
5. Yes, Alaska gets more earmarks per capita then other states. They also get less per acre then other states. Its hard to tell if that's fair or not, as Alaska has lots and lots of Federal land. CA/NY really rake in the earmarks, and since NM elected Pete Richardson and he started being seen as the key to Hispanic votes, NM gets some of the most per capita.
6. Yes, Sarah got earmarks as mayor of Wasilla. No, she didn't get 27 million, more like 7 million, there was 20 million in earmarks she had little to do with they were just in the same area.

I'm looking over the web page for the organization Sarah Palin belongs to, Feminists for Life and I found the following in their FAQ.

FFL has never advocated prosecuting women seeking abortion

FFL has what they call a "pro-woman" stance, which they state as:

No woman should be forced to choose between sacrificing her education and career plans and sacrificing her child

Also, Sarah Palin has specifically stated that she doesn't believe in picking judges that will advocate her religious views. She hasn't done so. But she has increased funding for unwed mothers by 354% in Alaska which is consistent with FFL doctrine.

So I'm wondering if Sarah Palin is a "plague on both your houses" Mercutio on the abortion issue. That's my term for people who feel like I do that both sides of the abortion debate are correct; it may be murder but making it illegal won't solve the issue, presenting better choices will solve the issue. So neither Pro-Life or Pro-Choice.

Given that we've been screaming at each other over this issue for 30 years, I'm starting to think that solutions like Feminists for Life make the most sense. As the Democrats used to say, safe, legal, rare. Seems like Sarah is working on the rare part.

But Bill Whittle has, and he sums up a lot of my feelings about this election.

read the whole thing

I thought she did pretty well, especially for a vice-presidential speech. She's not as good a speaker as Obama, but she seems more real then Obama who always seems like an actor playing a politician to me.

In fact, when she was up there on stage with her family, I was struck by how real they seemed. Most political families look like aliens have abducted them and replaced them with people who aren't quite human. Sarah's family look like actual people still.

I think the speech will be a huge hit with what the elite like to call flyover country. As someone who grew up in LA and moved to Flagstaff, I've gone from the suburbs to the country and at this point city people annoy me.

They're rude, they litter, they're always spinning their wheels so hard they never get anywhere. Flagstaff is a bit of a tourist getaway for Phoenix, and several times either me or my wife has upbraided someone from Phoenix with "Cut that out, we don't do that here. In fact, that's why you like coming here, because everyone is friendly and our town isn't covered in trash." The city people are always startled a bit, but usually go "you're right."

There's been this undercurrent in the criticism of Sarah of city people looking down their noses at country people. I really have no idea who would win the experience race between Obama and Sarah. But dismissing her experience as mayor, as a business owner, and as a governor seems foolish. Personally, I prefer ex-governors to ex-legislators. In general, governors are closer to the center then legislators, because they have to actually get things done. This is true for both parties. But when I looked at Sarah Palin months ago as a possible running mate for McCain, I wasn't sure if 20 months was enough experience.

But having worked her way up from city council member to mayor, to oil/gas commissioner, to governor, Sarah has paid her dues. Less so with Obama, he talks pretty but he's never really delivered. As others have pointed out, I'm comparing the bottom of the ticket with the top of the ticket though.