On the other hand…
My little girl’s dad, who by the way tried to solve the damn thing, says it is probably not the guy who draws XKCD. Says he thinks that guy is in Massachusetts. But wouldn’t it be hilarious…?
The problem with culture war discussions about taxing the rich
I would hazard a guess it’s not difficult to figure out the politics of AllFinancialMatters when the author posts an article about how Bush’s tax cuts for the rich supposedly favor the poor. It’s not the first time the Bushies have played the “I know you are, but what am I” game, and it probably won’t be the last; he’ll be bleating Newspeak on his way out the back door next January 20th.
Be that as it may, I have several issues with the blog article and the underlying premises.
First of all, let’s be very clear about what we’re discussing here, because AFM wasn’t. AFM wants us to believe that a tax credit is the same as a tax rate, and it isn’t. When politicians speak of tax cuts, they aren’t talking about tax credits, they’re talking about tax rates. So, claiming that the poor get more tax cuts just because they have tax credits is misleading and probably also dishonest, because as a personal finance blogger, AFM surely knows the difference between the two.
Secondly, I find it astounding that so many PF bloggers are such experts on the supposed “fact” that taxing the rich hurts the economy and how cruel it is to punish people for succeeding–more points taken verbatim from the neoconservative Republican playbook!–when they are conflating another couple of important concepts, thereby fleecing the public. I’ll explain:
- Any PF blogger worth his salt knows you get wealthy by spending less than you earn.
- Any PF blogger worth his salt knows that your income does not determine your wealth. You could be earning $500,000 a year and be poor as a church mouse once you factor in your debt load. See point 1.
- Any PF blogger worth his salt also knows that your average wealthy person is likely to be so not because he is earning a high income but because he has leveraged his assets to earn money for him without earning wages. The concept is a familiar one, referred to as “passive income” by most PF bloggers and spoken of in tones of utmost longing–this is the Holy Grail of personal finance philosophy for many of these writers, to be able to make money in their sleep!
With these factors in mind it is just inexcusable that so many personal finance bloggers let themselves be dragged (deliberately?) into the culture wars argument that rich people are rich because they make really high wages, therefore high tax rates for higher wage brackets punish the rich for being successful. Anyone who’s read The Millionaire Next Door knows better than to make this argument. Anyone who understands the concept of net worth and who has applied it fruitfully in his own life doesn’t need to read The Millionaire Next Door to begin with.
But the point is that someone who is truly, honestly wealthy is that way because they have a high net worth, regardless of income. And if you have a high net worth and a modest or low income, you’re a rich person who is not paying high income taxes! This doesn’t even delve into all the nifty little tax shelters, exceptions, loopholes and escape clauses the rich have invented for themselves and inserted into the U.S. tax code. Ask an accountant sometime if you’re curious.
And there’s another factor in play here which makes the discussion particularly irksome. How many times have you seen PF bloggers and other people who discuss personal finance going on and on about how they can’t make ends meet because their taxes are too high? First thing you know, they’re blaming the government because they’re falling behind on their mortgage.
The amusing part is that sometimes in the same breath they will turn around and call welfare recipients lazy or shiftless or whatever because poor people may seem to expect the government to do something about the fact they’re poor. But of course it’s perfectly OK to expect the government to help higher-income people pay a mortgage they took on voluntarily in the first place–which it would be doing if it cut the highest marginal tax rates just because a bunch of higher-income people whined to their Congressmen about high mortgage payments.
And this brouhaha obscures an important consideration: That if these people were half so knowledgeable about money as they’d like everyone else to think they are, it shouldn’t make a difference how much the government is taxing them. The marginal tax rates are published on the IRS website for the whole world to see, you can also find the formula for calculating Social Security tax online, and with a little more digging you can find out how much of your income pie your home state will take from you. Mortgage calculators abound. Regular calculators exist to be used to help you figure out a household budget. Tell me again why it’s the government’s fault you can’t make ends meet.
If you really aren’t making a high income and would therefore be hurt by income taxes then that’s why the government introduced tax credits for low-wage earners. So you shouldn’t be complaining about the high marginal rates anyway, because they don’t apply to you.
So, the two faulty premises: One, that the government is “punishing the rich”–just because someone makes high wages doesn’t make them rich. Two, that the government’s taxation prevents people being able to afford necessities–if you couldn’t afford necessities, it’s likely you owe little to no tax to the government to begin with.
I don’t see this so much as the government punishing the rich. I see this as people who are wasteful with their money, blaming everyone else but themselves for their problems. If it’s not all right for someone on minimum wage to do this in the comments on personal finance blogs, I don’t see how it’s right for higher-wage earners to do this in PF blog posts.
But that’s just me, and your mileage may vary.
Money-tracking
I’m having trouble with GnuCash and money-tracking. To wit, I can’t figure out the transaction split function. I’ve read the Help file and I’ve followed the instructions the best I could but they are not very clear and the results make no sense to me. I won a copy of the most basic version of Quicken from a blog several weeks ago and it way outshines GnuCash in this regard; I had almost no trouble with it and managed to make it do what I wanted to do.
Now I can’t figure out what I did with tracking my checking account in GC. I’m off by thirty bucks and I have no idea how. This is only true in GC, as my paper checkbook register jives with the balance on Kemba’s website. I have no idea what’s going on and every time I remember to look into it, I’m too tired for my brain to track numbers very well. Also, I’ve tried printing off the register from GC and got this weird bug where the printout is backwards and possibly upside-down. I don’t remember; I took one look at it, got disgusted and threw it away. (I don’t keep account numbers in GC so there wasn’t any risk.)
The one area in which I think GC is more useful to me than Quicken is that it maintains liability accounts for me which makes it easier to track debt reduction. But I can just as easily keep those written down somewhere and consult my written records when it’s time to update NetWorthIQ.
So I’m thinking I should probably take a few minutes tomorrow, count up my cash and make sure that number’s current, uninstall GC and re-install Quicken and just be done with it. That’s assuming I find a few minutes, as I’ll be tired and Thea has her speech therapy, but we’ll see, won’t we?
I’m on page 2!
Every now and again I go to Google and plug in the search term getting a life. In the past when I’ve done this I could not find my blog at all; if it was in the results, it was buried way back on page 5000 or something.
Well, now it’s the second result on page two of Google’s search results. Go me!
And this just goes to prove the person right that I was reading today elsewhere who was talking about some of the myths of search engine optimization (SEO). Basically, if some so-called SEO “expert” tells you that you have to purchase their services in order to land on page one Google search results, find another expert. You also don’t have to submit your URL anywhere. The way search engines work now, they find you automatically. For example, I am the only person on Earth with this first and last name combination, as far as I know. Because I have a homepage and use my real name, and I have also participated in several other sites on the Web, if you plug my name into Google I have first-page Google results. For another example, I opened a CafePress shop a few years ago that was based around a T-shirt design I did with a phrase that is fairly widely used in a certain subculture of which I was once a member. Long story short, for some reason my store was popular enough that not only was I on the first page, my store was the first result. I put forth almost no effort to get it found, either; all I did was take my design and plaster it on a bunch of schwag and direct some of my friends to it. That was a really cool experience, and I doubt I’ll replicate it any time soon (although it wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all if I did!).
We’ll see if I can make it onto page one with this site. I feel pretty optimistic about it; I need an excuse to write here more often anyway.
Body to-do list
I have been ruminating for several days about specific steps I need to take to make progress in a few areas of my life, and right now I seem to be obsessing most about health, fitness, and appearance. There are reasons for that I won’t go into here except to say that I am also doing this for myself, ha ha (no, seriously, I am, and you could say that my own outlook is the biggest reason for this), but I’m feeling more driven than usual to address these areas of my life.
I’m still low-carbing, although I am not following strict Atkins. Some things I have been reading about how human beings might have originally eaten and about the health and ecological costs of grain agriculture lead me to believe it doesn’t really matter how much carbohydrate I re-introduce into my life, anyway, and I’m not convinced that staying in ketosis would be a bad thing in the long run–nor keeping my intake below 40g net carbs most days, for that matter. As revolutionary as Dr. Atkins was for his time, I think he still subscribed overly much to mainstream attitudes about diet and health. I won’t go any farther than that, but that’s where I’m at where he and the diet are concerned. In any case, I think I’ve finally driven the point home for myself that I should not ever eat a high-carb diet again.
I need exercise. Desperately. I’m realizing that my body is crying out to move but I’m not precisely sure how to go about that other than walking; I still have a residual attitude problem about having to work hard physically at seemingly pointless activities. Specifically, I still hate push-ups. I learned recently that the much-vaunted bodyweight exercises promoted by some bodybuilders are nothing more than exercises like push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and similar which those of us who did phys ed in grade school or went into the military have done and are familiar with. I hated them then and I hate them now, but unless I can get around to affording a gym or even my own set of free weights and a bench, they’re what I have. So now I get to talk myself into them.
I do, however, want to acquire the new Callanetics videos. One of them has cardio elements to it and there is some debate in hardcore exercise circles about whether cardio really is good for you, but I think it would help me with cardio endurance even if it served no other good purpose, so I’m going to get it anyway. I have a couple of dance videos in the meantime and we’ll see how that goes or if I keep avoiding them because I feel like a huge klutz when I’m following them. In any case they won’t sculpt things for me like the Callanetics exercises will, and that’s what I’m mostly after.
And clothes. Man. I hate seeing photos of myself because I used to dress sort of nicely some of the time, and I never do anymore, and I always wear these huge t-shirts that look like tents on me, and the pants aren’t much better. I need a few bras; I haven’t worn one in years and I don’t have the silhouette, as it were, to be going around without it. I also need shoes; I’ve got one pair that isn’t worn the heck out and I would like another pair of sneakers as well as a couple pairs of dressier shoes (but not heels, please!) and perhaps a pair of boots. And the clothes. Dear God. I did mention the clothes, yes? Good. From now on I am imposing a moratorium on myself against any more t-shirts for a while. When I get done losing this weight I’ll reconsider, and then only if it’s something novelty like some weird thing I find on CafePress or Zazzle, or maybe Northern Sun. I’ve been looking at plus-size catalogs and have decided I like tunics best, which is like a fancy t-shirt, but there’s more shape to it and they come in prettier colors. I also suddenly like A-line dresses, which I thought I could get a few shorter ones and wear them over leggings, perhaps with lace edging. And I’ll figure out other stuff. And I need to figure out how to do all this and not go broke. I already know where to find cheaper bras that will suffice until I have to get a different size; when I’m done losing weight I’ll get some really good ones that will last me several years.
I’m way behind on grooming, too. I’m lucky if I wash my face and brush my hair most days. That’s got to change. My skin is trashed because I don’t bathe every day; if I got in the shower every day and used the loofah, my pores wouldn’t get so clogged by keratin. My hair gets greasy and then it’s hide it under stupid hats. I haven’t shaved in years, and part of me doesn’t quite care, but I might start again just for a change of habit. Anyway it helps me feel a bit less freakish. And oh God, do I ever need a haircut. I want something about shoulder-length or slightly longer that’s more flattering to my face and that I don’t have to wear off my neck all the time because it’s too hot. I’ve looked good in layers in the past and as I think they’re currently in style, I may do that again.
If I were going to establish some sort of order in which to do these things it might look something like this:
1. Weight loss: ongoing
2. Exercise: Will be ongoing
3. Bathe more often & shave: Will be ongoing, I hope
4. Bras
5. Haircut
6. Shoes
7. New wardrobe
Although I could at least start getting some basic items for #7 all along if I can get the money together to do so.
Oh, and I also need to deal with health concerns, and I’m not sure how I will go about doing that yet. I intend to apply for Medicaid again soon because there is a Healthy Families program here in Ohio for which I think I qualify but it would be a stopgap in case I got hurt or seriously sick, so I don’t wind up bankrupt over medical bills. I don’t think it would work very well for maintenance healthcare. I’ll see what else I can manage, and at least I might have someone now who can periodically watch my child during the day so I can get these things done.
It might be interesting to label this a Body Project and see how far I can get with it, complete with photos. I need to do some kind of series project to keep people reading, anyway.
Good thing I wasn’t counting on the money…
A while back I noticed I had no copy of a tax return for the tax year 2004. Since I would have had to file in early 2005 and since that was a fairly drama-riddled time for me, I guessed I had forgotten to file because of all the stress. Accordingly, I sent in a paper return. I wasn’t sure I would get any money back because of issues with my defaulted student loan, but I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I got a notice back from the IRS today. As it turns out I had already filed for 2004. Oops! They were actually pretty gracious about it, if a bit absent-minded; they included tax return material for tax year 2007, in which I had not actually earned anything taxable. It’s probably something they throw in with all their written correspondence to taxpayers.
Ah well. There is no point getting hysterical about it, I suppose. The money would have been nice but I was already living without it, know what I mean? Still… It would have been nice to have had some way to catch up.
Weekly weigh-in
237 | 225.0 | 140
Two-pound gain from last week but some of it is bound to be hormones. I had a sashimi bowl last night for supper, but on the heels of not having had much to eat all day and I am still in ketosis this morning, so I don’t think I derailed anything. It was the third successive day of dealing with my daughter having moderate to severe behavioral issues and as I think I’ve mentioned here a time or two, I can be an emotional eater. Not that I sit around eating gallons of ice cream when I’m upset–it isn’t that bad–but I will tend to rationalize a lot more when I’m upset, and in the case of food it involves saying something to myself like, “I need a bowl of sticky rice. I’m stressed out.” It isn’t even properly a food craving. More like acting from a place of defiance.
And I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to be defying, but anyway, I’m fine today so there’s no point beating myself up about it. Said bowl of sticky rice also contained raw salmon and shredded lettuce, carrots, and daikon, so overall the dinner was rather good for me, and I skipped the sweet potato tempura I usually get from that place.
So, not too bad. I’m about due for Aunt Flo to visit anyway, which probably means it’ll happen in another week and a half *sigh* …but when it does I’ll probably drop about five pounds or so in a week. It’s happened before.
Fun with BzzAgent
I recently joined BzzAgent for some reason I don’t recall, and it looks like fun. Right now I am not rated very highly yet, but I have access to their FrogPond feature where they ask you to visit websites and give your opinion of them.
Well, I ran across this nutrition website. Seeing a link for new diabetics, I investigated. I was not very impressed. My summary of the site back at FrogPond:
Honestly, I would rather use the USDA nutritional database than this site; the only way they could improve it is if they would make it more user-friendly. This site buys into the same old stuff about fat being bad for you, weight loss being about calories in versus calories out (generally untrue–depending on my diet composition, as a 226-pound, 5′6″ tall woman, I can eat as much as 2900 calories a day and lose weight, without exercising), and calories being more important than carbohydrates for diabetes control. The latter is particularly egregious since there is scads of good research out there indicating that cutting grains, starchy vegetables, and sugars to the bare minimum in a diabetic diet and upping fat intake is key to good blood sugar control without drugs, particularly in early diabetes. These folks have access to even more research studies than I do, and there is no excuse.
It’s a pretty site, but I need substance as well–good, honest substance that doesn’t buy into hype. People’s lives literally depend on it, with this particular subject matter.
I mean, why do experts do that? When they have access to good information and they completely ignore it even though that means people will die badly, how do you justify that?
So this has been my evening…
First there was this…
I miss sushi rolls like crazy, even though I have found I can eat some rice through the day and not knock myself out of ketosis–why risk it? So sashimi is an acceptable substitute, and how! I got this while I was picking up shirataki noodles at the Japanese grocery, which is what my little girl and her dad and I all went there to get in the first place. When I read about these noodles Friday night on Sugar-Free Sheila’s website, I knew I had to try them. We haven’t opened them yet, as we’re all kind of moping around because my little girl has caught a cold or something, but we probably will later on today. Too bad; they probably would have gone well with the squishy fish. Oh, and my daughter loves sashimi now, which is hilarious, because she wouldn’t touch the fish in the center of my sushi rolls in the past.
Anyway, then I went on to this:
Disregard the toys in the background. I only just rearranged this section of my living room yesterday and already it is disappearing under a three-year-old’s clutter.
However, the computer screen in the background is of interest. That’s GnuCash running on my computer; you can see the lines in the “ledger” onscreen.
I just got done doing a massive catch-up of my financial tracking for the month of May; I’d seriously fallen behind on everything, and in particular my cash. Probably explains how I shot through most of $400 without actually paying any of my regular household bills. I am feeling really stupid right now. And this just points up the necessity of tracking your spending DAILY before you overshoot and wind up broke with people threatening to shut things off. Not that that is happening yet, but I need to get my butt moving on catching up.
At least the single biggest category was groceries and not, say, pig snout futures. I also have to give myself kudos about my cash balance because I knew I’d be off and it turned out I was only fifty-two cents short. However, I have no idea what the heck I did in inputting my checking account stuff into GnuCash because it’s seriously misbalanced, and I know I have the correct balance in my register (rather than drive myself nuts, I finally just adjusted up for that eight cents so it matches the balance on my credit union’s website now). But my brains are just about run out of my ears, so I’ll figure that one out later. It doesn’t help that GnuCash’s one major flaw seems to be the difficulty involved in entering split transactions. Grumble.
Oh, and one more thing: I got mentioned at Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb! AAAAGH! I feel like some famous person just came over to my apartment and it’s… well… it looks like it does now. Um… hi? *waves*
I love being proven right.
In the process of reading about low-carb dieting, I recalled some of what I learned in high school honors biology about glucose metabolism. It helped me put together what else I was reading in the same vein about prediabetes/Syndrome X, diabetes, and obesity. Along with this I remembered what I’d been told all my life, that bodyfat is just a way of storing excess energy in case of famine.
All these factors came together in my mind and the lightbulb came on. I thought, Why is obesity being blamed for disease? Fat is just energy storage. Why would it make us sick when it’s there to save our lives?
I decided that the reason obesity has been statistically correlated with things like heart disease and cancer must be that it is sometimes a symptom of health conditions that themselves lead to heart disease and cancer. I felt my position was bolstered, too, by the strong connection between diabetes and heart disease and also diabetes and obesity, and by the fact that cancer cells need more glucose than normal cells do. (This has been a long-understood fact, although researchers did not understand why–do a search for cancer cells and glucose on Google and all sorts of stuff pops up.) Well, it’s like having a severe allergic reaction. Itching in itself doesn’t kill you, but might be a sign of something else that will. Think along those lines.
So anyway, it turns out that two years ago, research emerged that proved me right: diabetes, not obesity, causes death. Score another one for allopathic Western medical practice and its longstanding tradition of treating symptoms instead of disease!
Now, before any Fat Acceptance folks come along and start crowing (if you haven’t seen this already), this doesn’t exactly let you off the hook, because you’ve been telling fat people for years that nobody ever needs to change their dietary habits if they’re fat. Fat people should be able to eat whatever they want no matter what, you proclaim. *bzzt* Wrong! Their obesity still isn’t the central problem, but someone who is overweight NEEDS to get a health workup to discover the cause(s) of their obesity. It’s not as simple as “get up off the couch and get some exercise”–something is going on. If their obesity is related to insulin resistance, which is what leads to type 2 diabetes, they need to change their eating habits permanently. That’s not saying fat people are bad, it’s saying diabetes is bad and should be prevented where necessary. You aren’t the one who’s going to need the dialysis, the seeing-eye dog and the foot amputations, so go preach to your bathroom mirror.
Now here’s one more area in which the medical community needs to get a clue: they’ve discovered that some cancer cells immediately die when deprived of glucose. Now they’re saying they need to develop drugs to take advantage of this, but that the drugs can’t cross the blood-brain barrier, because “the central nervous system… needs glucose to function properly.” Oh, really? This ranks right up there with the medical community’s efforts to come up with a satiety drug when all you have to do to feel full is eat enough fat and cut back your sugars and starches. Now they want to drug a cancer to starve it when low-carb eating is a possible alternative. Can we stop re-inventing the wheel now, please? Because it’s rolling over entirely too many people.
