I was reading about the 47% this morning. This is the proportion of Americans (individuals, families, taxpayers, earners?–they never tell us what the base for the statistic is, but if you read my post about the 1%ers, you’ll see that it makes a difference) that don’t pay federal income taxes. (Of course, they probably don’t then pay state income taxes either, but they pay sales taxes, excise taxes, maybe property taxes and other government fees.) Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney linked those who don’t pay taxes to those who are dependent on government welfare and support. (They are irresponsible and careless, too.)  They are the “takers” as opposed to the 53% who are “makers.” The solution? Cut government expenditure programs to encourage them to join the ranks of the makers, and start paying federal income taxes.

But who is earning so little that they don’t pay federal income taxes, and qualify for food stamps, out of choice? There’s the–not so hidden–charge that people are choosing to be unemployed, or take on menial low-wage jobs because it’s better than the alternatives. When the unemployment rate is over 8%, there really aren’t too many better options for the 43%ers. (Don’t mind the logical problem caused by the fact the majority of Americans who receive support from the government are retired, disabled, or going to college, and aren’t really looking for full time, tax-paying work.)

Those 43%ers who are unemployed, or earning such low wages that they don’t pay federal income taxes at the end of the year, are victims (or at least have a victim mentality.) But who or what are they victims of? How about “makers” who are forced to cut costs to remain competitive, who cut salaries or lay workers off to maintain profits, or cut losses in a depressed economy? And these aren’t the 1%ers, like Romney. These are middle class business owners, many of them employing less than 50 people, even less than 10 people, who are paying taxes (to the federal, state and local governments) and scraping by month to month. They have family members, and former employees who are now part of the 43%.

Romney may not be able to convince 47% of the voters to support him in November, but his bigger problem is convincing enough of the other 53% to find his brand of Darwinian individualism palatable. We’ll see…

As an expert witness, I know what it’s like to sound smart, even if sometimes you’re holding on to the rail… But one of the areas in which I certainly don’t sound smart is when describing how wine tastes. I have practiced a lot, and I’m willing to do more, but you’d think after all these years I’d be able to describe a tannin, or differentiate a cherry from a blackcurrant. I don’t know if I’ll ever taste “horse leather” or some of those other crazy, pretentious descriptors people use, but the simple ones seem doable.

I recently found a great article on the Business Insider website. It makes sense and might help you, like it did for me, to better understand what we’re drinking–and then talk about it.

If you haven’t found “Wind Map” yet, then read this nice article from the Economist about the visualization of wind speed and direction across the United States, updated hourly and animated. You can zoom in and see what the wind is like where you are. I found this a few months ago, and have repeatedly returned to the website, either to see how tough my bike ride is going to be, or simply to watch the beautiful patterns of an otherwise invisible force.

While presenting a lecture on the Life-cycle model of personal finance (my term) I talked about the end-point of the model: death. I made the point that in a world that is essentially uncertain (especially as we experience it sequentially,) there is only one thing that is truly certain—the death of an individual human. How ironic that true certainty is reserved for the one thing that the vast majority of people find difficult to consider and discuss. Everything else is uncertain, admittedly to vary degrees (between 0 and 1, in fact.) Death is also the only thing in life that is common to everyone. Not everyone gets to ride a horse, or go to school, but everyone dies.

Of course, if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably said to yourself, I know why people don’t talk about death: it’s so morbid! And who wants to hang out with someone who keeps talking about dying? But I’d like to argue that because death is so certain, it’s actually not very interesting. What’s actually interesting are the related questions of how and when? Thinking about how just satisfies our curiosity hoping we don’t die a horrible, or painful, death. Thinking about when has real implications for what we do now, and tomorrow in all the personal, social, and economic dimensions of our lives. I spend quite a lot of time thinking about these aspects of death. For good reason.

While researching for a paper I am writing about socioeconomic resilience (yes, it is a buzzword) I spotted an interesting article in Slate online magazine (there are many.) The author states that uncertainty is the biggest security challenge facing the US since (or because of) the 9/11 attacks. Which got me to thinking—has randomness, the phenomenon underlying uncertainty, increased recently? I’m pretty certain (!) the answer is no, so in what sense has uncertainty increased? (By the way, for me, semantically, risk is simply the downside of uncertainty: all those bad things that happen, rather than the good things, when we think about what could happen.) Uncertainty could have increased due to an increase in the number of people, and events, happening in the world, or the complexity of the interactions between those people and events. We did just recently break the 7 billion people barrier (see blog entry below,) so that’s a lot of people, and events! And increased complexity means that we know less about more things, or a lot about fewer things, so more things fall into the category of “I don’t know about that,” or “there’s not enough information about that for me to decide.” So I’ll concede that uncertainty may have increased without any change in the underlying randomness of events, which makes me feel somewhat better. Because unlike randomness, which is surely beyond the influence of humans, greater uncertainty can be reduced by more information, more thought, and more understanding.

A Google search will reveal a lot about WHO the 1%ers are, but it requires a little math to answer the simpler (in my opinion) question: how many 1%ers are there? I am also interested in a related, yet personal, question: how much more do I have to earn to be part of that much-maligned group?

This Washington Post article from 2011 claims that the top 1% of households earn more than $516,000 (in 2010.) To put that in perspective, earning less than $59,154 that same year puts you in the company of 60% of US households.  The Census Bureau estimates there were 118.6million households in the US in 2011, with an average of 2.6 people per household, so there were about 3.1 million people in the top 1% last year. Note that the official population of the US in 2011 was 311million, which means these back of the envelope calculations are reasonable.

What’s the threshold to be in the 1%? The Washington Post article says $516,000. Occupy Wall Street defines the top 1% as those taxpayers (individuals or households depending on filing status) earning more than $400,000 annually. They alternately define the 1% as having net wealth of more than $1.5million.

According to another website, in 2009 the top 1% of taxpayers earned more than $344,000.

And just how wealthy are the 1%ers? From the Washington Post article, the average income of the top 1% of households was $1.5m in 2011 and they had an average wealth of $14m (in 2009.)

Thankfully, money doesn’t buy happiness*…

*btw, this is true the world over.

I don’t mean “in person,” I mean to watch. In this case, on television. I have always argued the televised coverage of golf–with its switching between holes and players, tees and greens, great hits and great misses, is unsurpassed in its ability to compress space and time for the more complete enjoyment of the viewer–is about as good a spectator experience as is imaginable. And far better than being there in person. This article captures my sentiment very well.

Probably not, especially as we have (arguably) no evidence of what it’s like to be dead, especially over the long term.  And the only people asking this question appear to be alive, so I’d conclude we are all better off alive. However, earlier this year when the official count of heads on the planet reached 7 billion, the question was asked:compared to the 7 billion alive, how many people are dead?  Many articles gave an answer, and the modal answer (available in this article) was 107 billion came before us. That means there’s a ratio of about 15:1 of dead to living people at present.  And that’s apparently a pretty good estimate.

The following weirdness just happened while traveling with my daughters to meet their mother in New York a few weekends ago.  Unwilling to carry on our bags, we paid $75 to check three bags with American Airlines.  Having passed through the TSA checkpoint, while waiting in the boarding area, the agent announced that anyone willing to check their carry on baggage at the door of the jetway could do so–free of charge.  Well, the agent didn’t actually say free of charge, but no one taking advantage of this option (to reduce overcrowding of the overhead bins on a full flight) was charged to check their luggage.  The flight was full, as usual, and people were trying to stuff large refrigerator-sized bags in the overhead bins–god forbid they would place them under the seat in front of them–while the flight attendant pleaded for all to be seated so that the door could be closed and the flight begin. (By the way, I hypothesize that the official record of when the flight took off is when the door is closed, and being sensitive to these widely published performance measures, airlines are quick to close the doors, even if the plane does not actually leave the ground until some unreasonable time later.)

Back to the checked luggage fee. I could never figure out why the airlines charged for checked bags which simply fill the empty spaces in the belly of the plane (read: marginal cost of carrying an extra checked bag, zero) but let people carry on steamer trunks for free! It seemed to me that the reverse would make more sense: let people check as many bags as they want for free, but charge them a stiff fee for stuffing those overhead bins (care must be taken when removing your items as they may have shifted in transit.) Passengers would all be seated much quicker, those sitting in the isle seats would be a little less bruised, and more departures would be on time. But further investigation has revealed a possible explanation for what I deemed folly.

I discovered that while airlines are charged a 7.5% excise tax on all flight related sales (tickets, change fees, etc.) they do not pay the tax on extra services such as checked baggage or early boarding. Also, about five years ago, in response to pressure from Congress, airlines agreed not to charge for carry on luggage. The incentives are clear: airlines want to avoid paying taxes (like the rest of us,) so they don’t just hike ticket prices. They increase revenue by charging for things people really can’t avoid when traveling (luggage.) They don’t care about the discomfort imposed by people carrying on tonnes of baggage while upholding the promise not to charge for carry-ons.

But there is a possible work around!  Don’t check your bags at the counter, take them to the gate and accept the agent’s offer to check them there,  for free!