Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Who’s Behind the Medicare Drug Plan?

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Since the NY Times made their op-eds pay-to-read Ed Cone as been doing a review of them called Dark Times.  In this post he looks at a column by Krugman re. the Medicare drug plan.  The main points:

Huh.

Has Hell Frozen Over? or The Journal Has a Blogger!

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Move over Greensboro News & Record, it looks like the Winston-Salem Journal is finally entering the fray with an in-house blog that is set to launch next week.

The Journal’s managing editor Ken Otterbourg is going to be the paper’s guinea pig, and I’m glad to see it.  I hope he does as well as his counterpart in Greensboro has done and I’m looking forward to his efforts.  I really hope that the blog has comments and an RSS feed, because if it doesn’t the whole exercise will be a glorious waste of time.  In the Q&A with Ken (since it’s online I feel comfortable using his first name although we’ve never met) he says that readers will be able to ask questions, but that could be done by email so I’m not assuming anything.  I’m sure, though, that if Joe has anything to say about it they will have comments and feeds aplenty.

In the Q&A Ken also mentions that the paper will be launching more blogs in the near future.  Maybe hell is freezing as we speak.

Welcome to the sphere Ken and good work Joe.

Flying, Flu and Cheerleaders: The Longest Day

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On Tuesday I had to fly to Orlando for a meeting and then fly home in the evening.  Here’s how it went:

  • Up at 4:00 a.m to catch a 6:00 a.m. flight from Greensboro to Dulles, connect to Orlando.
  • Meet up with client, go to Disney’s Coronado Springs, do the tour thing and have lunch, meetings.
  • Back to airport, catch stomach bug that seems to have gone around.
  • Flight
    to Atlanta delayed about 2 1/2 hours so I’m stuck (with stomach bug) in
    airport lounge with bitter travelers and the Moorehead State University
    cheerleading team.  Chipper and bitter/sick just don’t mix.
  • Thankfully, Orlando’s airport has relatively clean bathrooms (I’ll spare you the details).
  • Get to Atlanta, my connecting flight is four terminals away.  Long walk to train between terminals, surrounded by chipper cheerleaders talking incessantly about how much sex they’re going to have at their destination.  Know I’m sick when I use the words "incessantly" and "sex" in the same sentence.
  • Connecting flight is delayed an hour, which they didn’t bother to post on the status board so I wouldn’t have to run.  Thanks Delta.
  • Sit
    on puddle-jumper waiting for takeoff for 1/2 hour while they try and
    figure out how to get a wheelchair bound passenger on the
    plane.  Seriously wondering if it would be better to be dead,
    or at least comatose.
  • Miraculously don’t lose my lunch in the puddle-jumper as we do as near a proximation to dive bombing as I’d like to get.
  • Land, again miraculously, and drive home like a bat out of hell.
  • In bed at 2:00 and next thing I know it’s 10:30 and I’m still alive, although not by much.

This now makes two terrible trips I’ve had since Independence Air went out of business.  I think they’ve put a curse on all their old routes. Note that I’m not blaming the airlines since for the most part it’s just bad luck, but that’s what a curse amounts to, right?

New Business, Blog in Winston-Salem

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There’s an independent publisher that recently opened its doors in Winston-Salem and also launched a blog.  Press53’s website can be found here, and their blog can be found there.

Looks like they’re having a launch party on January 27, 7 p.m. at the Borders on Stratford Road in Winston-Salem.  Hopefully Celeste and I will have the chance to get out there and say hi, especially since that Borders is such a frequent date location when we need to get out of the house.  On top of that I’d love to see a little cottage publishing industry get going in this little city.  There’s a surprising number of artists in this town and I’d love to see them supported by local companies, and maybe even bring a little balance to the ready-to-explode local biotech industry.

Don’t Trust English Majors. or Departments, with Money

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A university in Florida (of course) has fired two administrators in its English Language Institute for failing to deposit checks worth about $275,000 (story here).  Checks were found under books, in desk drawers and other niches within the office.  Some checks were almost a decade old, and checks worth about $133,000 were too old to cash or deposit.

As an entrepreneurial English major (oxymoron?) I can tell you it is neither safe, nor wise to put money in an English major’s hands.  While we may be energetic and creative we are at a loss for how to manage the green stuff.  Celeste, my patient and brilliant wife, has learned that lesson the hard way and has taken our finances into her capable hands.  Amazing how much better we’re doing since that happened.

Along the same tangent, Celeste’s first job after college was running the Professional Center at George Mason University. Her greatest achievement was figuring out that the center was owed about $200,000, primarily from the IRS and the Air Force for training space they had rented over the years (this is in the early 90s).  They hadn’t paid because the invoices were not prepared properly so Celeste figured out what information was needed, re-submitted the invoices and collected all of the money that was owed.

That’s why she does the books for the Lowder family enterprises.

One Reason There Will Never Be a Flat Tax

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There’s a new study from the Tax Foundation that says that for every dollar in taxes that are collected Americans will spend 22 cents in compliance costs.  From the TaxProf Blog:

The study estimates that complying with the federal income tax code
during 2005 cost U.S. taxpayers $265.1 billion (up from $134.2 billion
in 1995 (in inflation-adjusted dollars)), or 22 cents per dollar of tax
revenues collected (up from 15 cents per dollar of tax revenues
collected in 1995). By 2015, compliance costs are projected to grow to
$482.7 billion.

Compliance
costs are highly regressive, taking a larger toll on low-income
taxpayers as a percentage of income than high-income taxpayers. On the
low end, taxpayers with AG) under $20,000 incur a compliance cost equal
to 5.9% of income while the compliance cost incurred by taxpayers with
AGI over $200,000 amounts to just 0.5% percent of income.

That’s serious money and it’s money going to accountants, lawyers and tax preparation services.  Do you think they’re lobbying for tax reform or simplified taxes?  Hah!  I would LOVE to see a study done on what the economic impact of implementing a flat tax would be.  $265 billion could buy a lot of something besides time with accountants, lawyers and tax preparers but then where would all the lawyers, accountants and tax preparers (and the dollars they spend on their toys) go?

And what about businesses?  What would happen to the capital they would save if all the exemptions went away AND all the costs of accounting went away as well?  Would it be a positive for the economy?

My gut tells me that a simplified or flat tax would be a net positive for the economy, but I can’t see the scumbags, er, leaders of our country letting it happen.

Oh, and as for that argument against a flat tax, you know the one that says it’s unfair to the lower end of the income scale, what does the regressive nature of the compliance costs do to that argument?

You can find the Tax Foundation’s report here.

Introducing Stinking Scumbag Number One

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Well, I’ve finally had all I can take from the stinking scumbags we call leaders in today’s society so I’ve created a category just for them.  As I come across stories of greed, avarice and unethical behavior involving our leaders in politics, government, business and popular culture I’ll post them under the "Stinking Scumbags" category/tag.  It should contain the most posts on this blog in very short order.

Our first "Stinking Scumbag" is actually two people, Tom Delay and his wife Christine.  She was paid $115,000 over three years by a firm tied to the Abramoff scandal.  Here’s a description of the hard work she did for that money:

An attorney for
U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay on Monday said that $115,000 was a reasonable price
to pay the congressman’s wife to determine favorite congressional
charities and compile information on each one…

“She was paid
by Alexander to work on a project and the project enabled her to do it
from Houston,” Richard Cullen, one of Tom DeLay’s attorneys, said
Monday. “She would contact the … members of Congress to determine which
charity in the congressman’s district was the congressman’s … that he
thought was the best-run or was his favorite charity in that district.

Christine DeLay then tracked down those charities in each
of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. She learned such facts
about them as what their tax status was, what geographic districts they
operated in and what projects they were working on, Cullen said.

Cullen said he didn’t know how many hours it took for Christine DeLay
to complete the project, nor did he know what Alexander Strategy Group
did with the information.

Cullen said Christine DeLay was not the sort of person to do the job haphazardly.

"She’s not a superficial person,” he said. “She’s going to do it right.”

Now that’s what I call soft money.  Read the whole story here.

 

Seems That Raleigh Has More Than Corrupt Politicos to Worry About

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There’s a creek in north Raleigh that has a "sticky white substance" floating in it.  You can read about it here (with pictures!).

I thought about working in a reference to NC House Speaker James Black, currently embroiled in a few scandals here in the Tar Heel State, and saying something snide about "sticky Black substances" being common in Raleigh, but that seemed a little too sophomoric for me.  Or not.