Sambal

John Kerry is quoted, on the subject of the tax cut passed last week, saying:

“George Bush promised to leave no child behind, and with the stroke of his pen yesterday, he left 12 million children behind,” Kerry said. “The president’s tax bill spends billions on the wealthiest Americans, and yet it is America’s children who had to make the sacrifice.”

I’m awed by this twisted reasoning: he’s talking about a tax cut as if it were a government expenditure. It’s unfair to “spend” money on wealthy people, in Kerry’s world. Somehow, this money should be refunded to people who have paid no income tax.

This is the genius of the left: the ability to straight-facedly describe tax cuts as an entitlement program.

Via Andrea at spleenville, via Markunas, I read this editorial at The Angry Liberal: The Bush Tax Cut, Part II: The Free Ride for Stockholders.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted to suspend collecting taxes from the idle rich for three years. That’s right. While you and I continue paying taxes on our income, those who live exclusively off of the labor of their fellow Americans will dodge the tax man completely from 2004-2006, if the Senate republicans have their way.[emphasis added]

Right. Because there’s no difference between slavery and return on capital.

About two weeks ago, a leak developed around the valve that draws hot water into our humidifier system. I was able to manage it with a 5-gallon beer bucket raised up on blocks, with a hose running down into the drain, but that obviously wasn’t a pretty or permanent solution. I tried draining the system and applying some heavy-duty plumbing epoxy, but the leak continued. So we decided to call a plumber.

And while we were having the plumber in anyway, we had him pull our old hot water heater and install a tankless heater. Our old hot water heater was original equipment — 40 years old — and was not providing a whole bathtubful of hot water even when turned up to the “scald” setting. We got a Bosch Aquastar 125B, mainly because that’s the kind of tankless water heater you can get at Home Depot in Canada. Here’s a picture:

I’m not sure I would do it again, knowing what I know now. The conversion cost — replumbing the corner of the basement where the hot water heater sits –was pretty high. The plumbers had to run new cold water, hot water, and gas pipes to accomodate the fittings on the new heater.

Also, with the input water temperature being around 45-50 F and the maximum heat rise on this unit being about 110 F, we wind up with a hot water temperature of 150 F. That’s nice but not hot. I find I get the perfect shower temperature when I turn the hot tap on full and the cold tap on just a tiny trickle.

In order to get the maximum heat rise, the heater throttles the amount of water it delivers to the hot water system. The maximum flow rate at maximum heat rise is only 2.5 gallons per minute. That’s enough to have a decent shower, even with our high-flow shower head, but it means that filling the washing machine, dishwasher, or bathtub takes longer than before. Maybe about twice as long.

Also, the initial wait for hot water can be long. Not only is the system full of cold water — as usual with a tank system — but the hot water heater has to detect the flow through the hot water system and ignite before the water starts to be heated. And then it takes a minute or two before the heat-exchanger is fully hot and the water reaches peak temperature. In a network I would call this “high-latency”.

Of course, the trade-off is that we now have an infinite constant flow of hot water, instead of running out after 30 gallons.

The electrical analogy is handy (this is the first time I’ve thought of plumbing in electrical terms — usually it’s the other way around). With a hot water tank, you have a constant voltage source; with a tankless heater, you have a constant current source. With a tank, opening several hot water taps at once doesn’t visibly affect the flow, because the total hot-water system pressure is always larger than any one tap can deliver in flow. With a tankless heater, if I open three taps, each one gets approximately 1/3 of the total flow passed through the heater.

For the first week, we were consciously adjusting to it, but now it’s normal. When I go into the bathroom to take a shower, I turn the hot water on full and then go get a towel from the linen closet. When I come back it’s fully hot.

I was able to start a load of whites (hot/warm) and then go load and run the dishwahser with no problem. The two appliances were not drawing hot water at the same time, and even if they were, it would just take a little longer to fill them up. With our old tank heater, after running those two, I would need to wait an hour to have a supply of hot water again. With the new heater I had as much hot water as I might have wanted.

Overall, it seems OK so far. We’ll see whether it brings down our gas bill enough to justify the capital and conversion costs.

There’s a new person on one of the bulletin boards my wife reads. She has four images in her signature. They’re hosted on msnusers.com. You can’t get content from msnusers.com without having a Microsoft .NET Passport account.

So every time my wife reads one of this woman’s posts, she has to dismiss this dialog four times:

My wife doesn’t want to get a Passport account, and I don’t blame her. The supremely annoying thing for me is that this looks like a “real” dialog, not a web page. So something in Microsoft’s msnusers.com service is using some ActiveX control or some part of the Internet Explorer browser to toss up this image. Which means, of course, that just about anyone could figure out how to access that control if they spent a few seconds at it. Thanks a pile, Microsoft! You’ve installed a means for people to throw up login dialogs on my machine!

Of course, my wife could make IE prompt her for scripting and ActiveX controls. That would mean that she’d spend all of her time dismissing dialogs like this:

This is the situation I have come to, but it’s not acceptable to her.

So I modified our proxy server’s configuration to totally ban requests directed at msnusers.com. I found the instructions for how to set up a porn site block list, and I’m using them to ban msnusers.com.

That seems appropriate.

So yesterday I claimed that it’s wrong to call people who want their taxes lowered “greedy”. You can only be greedy, I claimed, when you are trying to get more than a fair share of some shared resource.

So far I’ve tried it out on my wife, who was too nice to comment; and on a liberal of my acquaintance, who disagrees with it. So the focus groups are pretty negative.

Webster’s defines greed as “excessive or reprehensible acquisitiveness”. This does not have the restriction I placed on the word (”of a shared resource”). But it does require “acquisitiveness”, and I don’t see how you can really be acquisitive of your own property.

So I think I understand it now. These people who want their taxes lowered are in fact showing their meanness, cheapness, stinginess, what have you, when they ask for their taxes to be lowered. But they’re not being greedy then. No: they proved they were greedy by getting all that money in the first place.

So in this worldview they are, in fact, greedy rich people who don’t give a damn for anyone but themselves. They’re greedy just because they’re rich. If they weren’t greedy, they wouldn’t have gotten rich. And wanting lower taxes is like not wanting to share — mean.

So the answer to John Cole’s question

At what level of taxation will Democrats agree the rich are no longer greedy?

is:
The fact that rich people are greedy is independent of the tax level.

I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

The deeper problem with the millionaire’s taxes discussion is in the comments on Drum’s post (there were 209 as I write this).

The word “greedy” was introduced by the first commentor, and it’s an unfortunate word that colored the whole subsequent discussion.

It’s not greedy to want to pay less in taxes. It might be stingy, mean, or cheap, but it’s not greedy.

Greed is trying to get more than a fair share of some shared resource. You’re greedy if you have a second helping of cake before some people have had their first. But this assumes a social context where all participants are equally entitled to a piece of cake: the cake is a shared resource.

As it happens, there is a political philosophy that advocates treating personal income or wealth as a shared resource, subject to state division. So don’t call low-tax-proponents greedy, guys — it shows your true colors!

CalPundit (Kevin Drum) wrote, on the subject of rich folks opposition to social programs, that a millionaire would only pay 30% of his income to the federal government, and a total of only 9% of their income would be used to pay for social programs. This 9% figure comes from adding the Social Security and Medicare taxes withheld to “$70,000 toward the social welfare programs that make up approximately a quarter of the rest of the federal budget.”

John Cole is all over this, and Free Speech has another good point. But I have a different problem with this post.

I don’t see where Drum is getting these numbers. I did a little work on this and for a single person with $1,000,000 in gross salary income I get $380,648.30 total federal tax of which $20,263.80 is Social Security and Medicare taxes. That yields more than $110,000 spent on social programs, or 11%.

What’s more, we’ve left out state taxes. Our millionaire friend will pay $94,823.45 in state taxes if he lives in California (as I did and I assume Mr. Drum does). Of that, $416.14 is for state disability insurance and the rest is income tax.

Let’s assume the same 25% of the state budget is spent on social programs. It’s probably more, since the state doesn’t spend anything on defense. Ah hell, I’ll look it up. Here’s the Governor’s budget document. It’s about 4 MB. The state of California spends 24.1% of its General Fund on Health and Human Services so 25% is about right. More fun facts: California spends 57.2% of its general fund on education (43.6% K-12 and 13.6% higher) and receives 5/6 of its general fund revenue from individuals via personal income tax (48%) and sales tax (33%).

Okay, so we wind up with a total tax of $475,471.75 on $1,000,000 of earned income. Continuing to use the 25% number for the fraction of income tax spent on social programs, we wind up with a total of $134,378.50 spent on social programs: $113,697.75 via income tax and $20,680.74 via payroll taxes. That’s a total of 13.4% of the millionaire’s gross pay.

Nearly 1.5 times Mr. Drum’s number.

Of course, this does not address the other point (how can these rich guys be complaining about this?!), which I hope to get to later.

There’s a long discussion at The Corner at National Review Online about neo-conservatives. Jonah Goldberg even wrote a two-part article (1 2) about neocons, who they are, what they want, etc.

The only useful thing I’ve managed to pick up is that neo-conservatives are ex-liberals, and that the term “neo-conservative” itself was coined by liberals to disparage their former comrades.

And there are a lot of ex-liberals in the conservative camp. There are those who milk it, like David Horowits, and those who don’t make a big deal out of it, like nearly everybody else. But there certainly are a lot of people who indentify themselves as former liberals turned conservative. (Bill Williams for one and James Lileks for another.)

I don’t think that this really describes me. I wasn’t even a liberal in high school, and by the time I was in college I was pretty well set as a conservative.

I bring this up because I’m wondering where the ex-conservatives are. Are they in the liberal camp? I don’t recall hearing about them, except for that guy with the book expose about the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. So there are some, but they’re not as common as ex-liberals.

Does this mean that adherents of conservatism stay longer? Or have all the dissenters been killed off? Or is it merely observer bias?

I was standing on a bus platform talking to an ex-girlfriend and her brother? new flame? something like that. As sometimes happens in dreams, I was outside myself (above and behind) listening to myself talk. We were catching up, talking about what’s happened in the last few years.

Then she got on a bus and went home, or at least to her parent’s house. I offered to escort her because it seemed wrong for her to go by herself. For some reason none of the other four people in the conversation wanted to go her way. So I went home too.

Nothing as exciting as my wife’s pregnancy dreams which typically contain vivid images, heightened sexuality, the whole hormone package. (Last night she dreamed about being chased by zombie Alzheimers’ patients.)

I need to brew some more beer. What’s left of the Improv Stout is in 12-oz bottles and I’m nearly certain that it was bacterially contaminated.

Just when you thought Alberta’s economy might be starting to recover, this happens:

U.S. bans Canadian beef imports because of mad cow

OTTAWA (Reuters)