Punishing the Victims II -- The High Price of Being Poor

I yearn for the good old days when I didn't get a headache trying to follow the arguments of our political leaders and when I had the feeling that even though they disagreed they were willing to compromise to keep the government running.

Before the recent budget deadlock that nearly brought the country to a standstill, I voiced my disagreement with the Republican/Tea Party strategy for balancing the books because it seemed to put more of the burden on those least able to afford it, Americans of modest means who have suffered most from a recession caused by the investment decisions of Wall Street bankers.

As a central feature of their strategy, the Republicans/Tea Partiers (RTP) adamantly refused to increase revenue by allowing the Bush-era tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy to expire, and even proposed lowering their tax rates while simultaneously cutting spending for social programs that benefit ordinary people. Another idea was to reduce the amount companies have to pay workers, the logic being that this will stimulate growth by increasing profits. For example, one RTP proposal was to repeal an act that requires companies receiving federal contacts to pay workers at least at the level of prevailing local salaries and benefits.  In short, the conservative economic strategy is to increase the income of corporations and the wealthy but cut the income and benefits of middle and lower class workers.

And now the latest development, which is perhaps the most difficult for me to follow, is that the RTP may push for allowing the temporary payroll tax break enacted as part of the Tax Relief Act of 2010 to expire next year, according to a recent AP report.   Payroll taxes are levied only on payroll income, not income derived from capital gains, dividends, or other investment sources, and only on salaries up to $106,000.  In other words, these taxes apply primarily to people in the middle and lower income brackets. Allowing the tax reduction to expire would increase revenue and help balance the budget, but it is exactly the kind of revenue increase the RTP fought so fiercely against during the debt deadlock when the expiration was for temporary income tax breaks for the wealthy.

The Regressive logic of this seeming contradiction is expressed by Texas Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling's comment, "...not all tax relief is created equal for the purposes of helping to get the economy moving again."  That is, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy are good because they may lead to investment and expansion, but tax cuts for workers aren't so good because they only allow families to buy groceries and pay their mortgage.  Bottom line: to get the economy moving again, lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy and raise them on middle and low income workers.

The latest wrinkle in this drama is in President Obama's just-announced Jobs Package, in which he proposes temporarily continuing and increasing the reduction in Payroll Tax for workers (which the RTP should be against) and also reducing the employer contribution as well (which the RTP should support).  The upcoming gymnastics of Regressive logic will be "interesting" to watch.

Time to buy more aspirin......

_________________________________________
Related Blogs:
Punishing the Victims (Part Un)
Misperceiving Wealth in America

Reflecting on 9/11 Ten Years Later: Unity & Civility No More

It is hard to believe it has been 10 years since the World Trade Center attacks.  So much has happened in the world and in my personal life since that moment that it seems much more distant.

I suppose every generation has a few world events that are so personally significant they stand out it photographic detail in peoples' memories -- you can picture where you were and what you were doing at the time with great clarity.  For me there have been three such instances in my lifetime so far:  the assassination of JFK, the moon landing, and the 9/11 attacks.   I note that two of these three are negative events -- a ratio I wish was reversed.

9/11 occurred just a couple of months after my wife and I had moved here to Hawai'i to enjoy our retirement.  Given the time difference between Hawai'i and the East Coast, the attacks had occurred in the early morning hours while we were sleeping.  I had gotten up around 6:30 and as part of my usual routine I was enjoying a cup of coffee while checking email and reading some online news.  It was then that I saw the incredible headlines that the Trade Center had been attacked and had fallen.  At first I thought it was a hoax -- somebody must have hacked into the news website and planted a false story, so I checked many other online news sources, and then turned on the television to find that the story was not only true but even more horrific than I had imagined.  I woke my wife and tried to explain what had happened -- I can still picture the confusion and disbelief on her face.

In the days and weeks that followed there was a heart-warming outpouring of compassion, sympathy and support from people not just in the U.S. but from all parts of the world.  Within the U.S. there was a feeling of unity and national identity that was greater than any other time I can remember, though I suspect older Americans might point to similar reactions connected with WWII.  Political and social differences were secondary to collective concerns of security, mourning, and recovery.

Sadly, the unity and civility of that time seems to have evaporated.  Instead we now have a social climate that is characterized by the divisiveness and intransigence we witness daily among political leaders, many of whom seem to regard compassion as a budget line item to be chopped and programs for the public good as extravagances to be dismantled.

9/11 showed the positive spirit of people in the face of  tremendous adversity.  The spontaneous acts of selflessness and compassion that were commonplace showed that we have the potential to overcome our differences and work for the common good.  I hope it doesn't take another 9/11 to make that potential manifest itself again.

Why Is That Geezer Smiling?

[*** Warning***  This is another in my series of Geezerhood blogs. Instead of reading this you may want to do something more fun, like checking your investment portfolio.  Related blogs to avoid are given at the end.]

There are a lot of negative stereotypes about aging.  One of them is that most older people suffer from a variety of negative emotions, like depression, remorse, and despair as they confront the problems and challenges of aging. Old people are just not happy campers.

Like many stereotypes, this one sounds reasonable. For example, depression and sadness seem like a natural reaction to the loss of friends and family, declining physical and mental abilities, and to the contemplation of one's unfulfilled goals and dreams.  The stereotype of the sad geezer is especially strong among young people, but even older people seem to share this pessimistic view (Hummert, et. al,1994).  In fact, just reading this is making me a bit depressed.

However, there is ample empirical evidence that even though it sounds reasonable, the stereotype is wrong, and that older people report generally higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction than do younger people (Mroczek, & Kolarz, 1998; Myers & Diener, 1995;  Charles et al., 2001).  According to Laura Carstensen, a renowned researcher on aging at Stanford University, the fact that emotional well-being is actually maintained and in some ways even improves across adulthood "...is among the most surprising findings about human aging to emerge in recent years" (Carstensen et. al., 2011, p. 21).

A cynic (probably someone young) might argue that this is just another symptom of the cognitive decline of Geezerhood -- no longer in touch with reality, the oldsters are in denial and just assess everything as positive. However, Carstensen's research indicates that older people in fact exhibit both positive and negative emotions to situations, often in a more complex way than younger people do:  "...investments in meaningful activities under time-limited conditions elicit richly complex emotional experiences, such as gratitude accompanied by a sense of fragility and happiness tinged with sadness" (Carstensen et. al, 2011).

One explanation of these changes in emotional well-being across the life span is given by Carstensen's "Socioemotional Selectivity" theory of aging, which proposes that we structure our life goals partly on the basis of how relevant they are to the time we have left:

The central change in adulthood is a shift in the salience of social goals. Younger adults, having much to learn and relatively long futures for which to prepare, are motivated by the pursuit of knowledge—even when this requires that emotional well-being be suppressed. For older adults, the reverse trend appears. Facing relatively shorter futures and having already accrued considerable knowledge about others, older adults prioritize emotional goals because they are realized in the moment of contact rather than banked for some nebulous future time.
       The theory stresses that age does not entail the relentless pursuit of happiness but rather the satisfaction of emotionally meaningful goals, which entails far more than simply feeling good. Finding meaning in existing relationships, even conflictual ones, emerges as a central task in later life. (Carstensen et. al., 2000, p. 645)

So, the picture that emerges is that older people are happier overall, but also experience negative emotions in meaningful ways. I would add to Carstensen's example of relational goals a more general openness to experiencing all life events in an emotionally meaningful way, including those we probably dismissed as insignificant when we were younger.

Our young cynic, clutching at straws now, might point out that the research showing that geezers are happier than young people is "cross-sectional" in design and that so it really hasn't demonstrated that people's emotional well-being improves as they age.  It could be that the current crop of old people have always been happy, perhaps because they grew up in simpler, more supportive times.

A recent longitudinal study by Carstensen (Carstensen et al., 2011) has eliminated this possible alternative explanation by following the same group of people over a 15-year period.  The results showed that as participants in the study aged their emotional well-being improved, thus supporting the earlier cross-sectional conclusion .

So, why is that Geezer smiling?  You'll find out when you're older.

________________________________________
Related Blogs and References:

Jogging the Memory of a Geezer
Embracing Your Inner Geezer
How to Compress Your Morbidity
The Power of Negative Thinking
Thoughts for a New Year
So, What Do You Do All Day?

Carstensen, L. L., Pasupathi, M., Mayr, U., & Nesselroade, J. R. (2000). Emotional experience in everyday life across the adult life span. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 644–655.

Carstensen, L. L., Turan, B., Scheibe, S., Ram, N., Ersner-Hershfield, H., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., Brooks, K. P., & Nesselroade, J. R. (2011). Emotional Experience Improves With Age: Evidence Based on  Over 10 Years of Experience Sampling. Psychology and Aging, 26, 21–33
 
Charles, S. T., Reynolds, C. A., & Gatz, M. (2001). Age-related differences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 years. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 136–151.

Mroczek, D. K., & Kolarz, C. M. (1998). The effect of age on positive and negative affect: A developmental perspective on happiness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1333–1349.

Myers, D. G., & Diener, E. (1995). Who is happy? Psychological Science, 6, 10–19.

Whack-A-Mole Maintenance

 My neighbor and I stood looking at the side of my house, beers in hand, admiring my latest home maintenance project.  "Looks great," he said taking a swig. But I could tell there was a lack of earnestness in his voice that meant he really wasn't sure what I had done.  Being a fellow home owner, though, he wanted to show support.

That's the way a lot of home maintenance is -- it makes problems disappear but you can only appreciate the effort if you had noticed the problem in the first place.  And preventative maintenance that heads off bigger repairs later on is even less noticeable.  It looks the same only more so.

The joys of home ownership include maintaining and fixing things constantly.  You can put this off, but you'll pay the price later in terms of expensive repairs, lots of remedial work, or a lower resale value.  So most of us either learn to use tools or we line up a stable of professionals to do the work for us.  The trouble with the second approach is that (a) pro's can be expensive and (b) they usually don't like small jobs and (c) good ones can be hard to find.

Home maintenance is a game of whack-a-mole, only in this version you pay a lot more to play and the game never ends.  Whack one problem -- say a rotted stair railing -- and another pops up, like the stair tread your foot went through while you were fixing the railing.

Then there's the "one-thing-leads-to another" phenomenon where fixing one small thing becomes a marathon of additional projects that become necessary before the small thing can be fixed -- that small repair becomes a super-sized pain in the ass.  We recently decided to have our living room carpet replaced.  Other than moving some furniture and writing a big check, this required very little on our part.  But of course we realized that before the new carpet went in, we really should re-paint the room.  And before we repaint, we really should put in a new outlet box for the tv and stereo connections.  And before we do that, we really should run a new cable through the wall for connecting the tv to the dvr.  And before we do that, we really need to install another cable splitter in the crawl space.  Etc., etc., etc.

Whack, whack, whack. whack.

A particularly irritating, vexing, and usually expensive aspect of maintenance is the "what the heck is that?" phenomenon when one repair reveals previously unknown problems of even bigger magnitude than the original.  We were once going to put it new flooring in a bathroom, a fairly simple and inexpensive project.  Removing the old flooring exposed serious rot in the wood underneath, requiring ripping out major chunks of the whole underneath structure and rebuilding it.  Hmmm.

It follows that any repair or maintenance project is bound to take way, way longer than you think.  Changing a light bulb?  Plan on several hours.  Doing some rewiring or plumbing work?  Count on days or weeks.  When I call my handy man to schedule help with a project I give an estimate of how long it will take, like "should be quick, just a couple of hours" -- the response is barely suppressed laughter.

It is easy to become despondent, frustrated and overwhelmed by Whack-a-Mole-Maintenance.  However, whenever I begin to feel this way, I remind myself that these days I should be thankful to still have a house to maintain.

Benefits of Dangerous Travel, Revisited

In a previous blog I described a recent trip to three countries in the Middle East, including Syria.  I titled the blog "Dangerous Travel" to highlight the demonstrations that were occurring in Syria at the time and the brutal crackdowns by the government.  Despite the depictions of these events in the media as widespread chaos throughout the country, my wife and I felt quite safe and were very glad we continued the trip.  At that time (April and early May of this year) the violence was in very specific areas at very specific times, posing little threat to tourists.  And most important, the target of these demonstrations was the current regime, not the governments of other countries.

Since then the internal situation in Syria has gotten steadily worse.  Larger and larger demonstrations have occurred, and they have taken place in some cities that were previously thought to be strongholds of support for the Assad regime, like Aleppo. Since we stayed in Aleppo for a few days, this caught our attention.  When we were there things were very calm, and as usual the people welcomed us warmly as they had elsewhere in Syria.  We were struck by the modern sophistication of the city and the charm of its old town area, a noteworthy feature of which was a huge Orthodox Christian cathedral next to an equally huge mosque, and a neighborhood where Burkas and knee-length dresses were evenly mixed on the streets.  The city had prospered over the years from the Assad regime's strong-arm enforcement of stability and had been rewarded for its support of the government's policies.  For demonstrations to occur here was a striking sign of the erosion of Assad's power. 

A second place we visited that is currently in the news is the smaller city of Hama, a picturesque place known for its ancient waterwheels throughout town that are used to draw water from the town river.  We enjoyed it very much, and again we are startled by the contrast between the quiet, seemingly calm place we saw and the images of it as the center of demonstrations by 100,000 anti-government protestors and violent reprisals by Assad's armed forces.  This is the town where Assad's father killed an estimated 10,000 or more in earlier uprisings about 30 years ago.  As detailed in an informative article by Al Jazeera, the recent events began to take place just days after we were there.

Finally, there are the demonstrations in Damascus and the storming of the French and American Embassies there.  These events are chillingly different because they seem to have been sponsored or at least encouraged by the government in response to the visit to Hama by the French and American Ambassadors.  The claim -- without foundation from everything we saw -- is that the anti-Assad demonstrations that have been going on for months now have been instigated by these foreign governments.  Our interpretation is that this is a very desperate attempt by Assad to legitimize his brutal crackdowns in the eyes of his dwindling supporters.

Is it now too dangerous to travel to Syria?

Prior to our trip my answer to this question would have been a quick "Yes."  After traveling there, meeting the people who are the targets of their government's brutal retaliation, and seeing firsthand the disconnect between filtered media versions of events and the reality we experienced, I'm not so sure.  But I think what would now keep me from going is the change in the government's attitude toward foreigners from being objects of  economic exploitation to scapegoats for justifying brutality.  If a government is willing to use tanks and machine guns to quell peaceful demonstrations and kill thousands in the process, it might not care about a protecting a few tourists.

Misperceiving Wealth in America

How is wealth in America distributed?  We're a capitalist country so a certain degree of inequality is justified and appropriate. After all, a major motivational advantage of the wealth-generating power of capitalism is that it allows some people to amass a greater portion of a country's wealth than others.   But just how unequal is the distribution in America today? How accurately do people perceive the inequality? How close is the current distribution to what we might consider ideal?

Harvard Business School Professor Michael Norton and Duke Psychology Professor Dan Ariely have recently published a study that examines these questions (Norton & Ariely, 2011).  The results are timely, given the recent debates over our budgetary crisis and economic policies, and are likely to be very relevant for evaluating the election rhetoric that is already beginning to heat up.  Although our political leaders clearly disagree on the question of ideal wealth distribution,  it isn't at all clear what ordinary people think nor how much agreement there is among them.  Nor is it clear how accurately ordinary Americans perceive the current wealth distribution in America.

Norton & Ariely surveyed 5,522 Americans who were representative of the population in terms of income, voting record, gender, and state of residence.  The careful nature of their sampling technique allows confident generalization to the larger population.

The study revealed that people are generally pretty inaccurate in their perceptions of the actual distribution of wealth in America, tending to believe that wealth inequality is less than it really is.  For example, the richest 20% of Americans actually own 84% of the wealth, but people estimated they own just 59%.  For the middle 60%, where most of us fall, the actual amount owned is only 15%, but people think it is much higher, about 37%.  Estimates regarding the poorest 20% of Americans were most accurate -- they actually own less than 1% of the wealth, but people think they own 5%.  Although there were slight differences in the estimates among demographic groups based on personal wealth, party affiliation, and gender the level of consensus was very high -- inaccuracy was not much greater in one group than another.

In terms of their ideal distributions of wealth, there was a clear tendency to accept a certain degree of inequality, but to prefer a level that is much less than currently exists.  For example, in people's ideal distribution the wealthiest 20% would own 32% of the nation's wealth, a rather lower figure than the 84% they actually own, and the poorest would own about 11%, not the .1% they actually do.  For the middle 60% the ideal was 57%,  a dramatically higher figure than the 15% actually owned by this group.  Again, income level, party affiliation, and gender were associated with only small differences in ideal figures.  Compared to their estimates of current inequality,

All groups—even the wealthiest respondents—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than what they estimated the current United States level to be, and all groups also desired some inequality—even the poorest respondents. In addition, all groups agreed that such redistribution should take the form of moving wealth from the top [20%] to the bottom [60%]. In short, although Americans tend to be relatively more favorable toward economic inequality than members of other countries (Osberg & Smeeding, 2006), Americans’ consensus about the ideal distribution of wealth within the United States appears to dwarf their disagreements across gender, political orientation, and income. (Norton & Ariely, 2011)

In contrast to the conservative view voiced by congressional politicians who want us to believe that the historical trend in America has been for greater and greater advantage being given to those in lower economic brackets, resulting in overpaid workers, bloated welfare programs and an entitlement society, the reality is that inequality favoring the most wealthy has been steadily increasing, particularly since 1970.  Evidence for this is powerfully presented in a very informative interactive graphic recently published online by The Washington Post.  I urge you to look at these data yourself, but in the meantime I'll offer the Post's summary regarding income distribution in the US:  "Inequality in the U.S. has grown steadily since the 1970s, following a flat period after World War II.  In 2008, the wealthiest 10 percent earned almost the same amount of income as the rest of the country combined (my italics)."  These wealthiest 10 percent are those whom the Republican/Tea Party leaders are willing to defend to the point refusing to consider any budget that would lead to higher taxes on the rich, and in fact have proposed lowering taxes on corporations and on people in the highest income brackets, despite the fact that their tax rate is lower than it has been for most of the past 100 years.

This does not seem like a strategy that might get us closer to most people's ideal distribution of wealth in America. 
___________________________________
Related Blogs:

Punishing the Victims
Terminate Me, Please
Does Size Really Matter?
Tax Tips for Tea Time
The Real Lesson from This Election
These Will Be "The Bad Old Days"

"Lei"zy Horses and Hot Malasadas

There are a number of annual events that make living in Hawai'i very enjoyable.  One I have already written about is the awe-inspiring Ironman Triathlon.  Several others are more celebrations of local culture and history that primarily involve residents, though visitors lucky enough to be here when they occur will also find them to be a unique treat.

One is the yearly parade in honor of King Kamehameha I, the Hawaiian monarch who unified the islands into one kingdom in the late 1700's and ushered in a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity.  Kamehameha was born on our island, and so there is a special local connection to this celebration, which is held state-wide each June. 

Pa'u Riders

The parade route is along part of Ali'i Drive, a waterfront street that passes through the quaint business area of Kailua-Kona.  The backdrop is the crystal clear blue Pacific 50-100 feet away and lining the route are palms, banyan trees, colorful bougainvillea, plumeria, orchids, and other assorted varieties of tropical greenery.  In the golden morning sunlight the scene is eye-poppingly beautiful.

Princess and Two Escorts

The special feature of the parade are eight groups of Pa'u horseback riders, each representing one of the main Hawaiian islands.  Each group consists of a princess and her attendants, plus several male outriders or escorts, all of them (including the horses) wearing the colors and flowers of the island they represent. The word Pa'u means "skirt" and refers back to the tradition started in the 1800's for women riders to wear long flowing skirts to protect their fancy clothing when they were riding to a party or celebration.  The flowers are incorporated into leis and hatbands and are appropriate to the island -- for our Hawai'i Island the riders wear red and the flowers are lehua blossoms woven into leis of maile and other ferns.  The horses wear leis, too, and usually bands of flowers in their harnesses.

Horses have been in Hawaii only for about 200 years.  They were introduced in 1803, when a mare and foal were brought by Richard Cleveland as a gift to King Kamehameha I.  Hawaiians had of course never seen such an animal -- the only mammals in the islands until humans arrived were the monk seal and an indigenous species of  bat.  The Hawaiians introduced dogs and pigs from Polynesia  (and maybe accidentally the palm rat), and in 1793 Captain George Vancouver presented King Kamehameha I with 5 black longhorn cattle. The cattle multiplied wildly, and in 1832 John Palmer Parker worked with King Kamehameha III to bring Mexican vaqueros with riding and roping skills to help with his booming cattle ranching business.  The vaqueros adapted well to Hawaii, where they were called paniolos (a Hawaiian interpretation of "espanol"), and introduced the cowboy culture here even before it was developed on the mainland U.S.  Of course here the cowboys do the hula instead of the two-step.  In the early 1900's Portuguese immigrants were recruited as ranch workers and they added their own cultural flavor to the mix, including the invention of the ukelele.

Poop Patrol

A parade with nearly a hundred horses is going to generate considerable fertilizer.  One of the cutest parts of the parade are the teams of pooper-scoopers that follow each of the Pa'u units.  They pull small wagons often decorated as colorfully as the Pa'u groups, and the scoopers do their job with a humorous flourish.  For example, this year the team following the riders representing Koho'olawe, a small island off the coast of Maui that was used for many years by the U.S. military as a bombing range, called themselves "The Bomb Squad,"  a double nod to the historic military reference and to the still-steaming missiles on the street. One of my favorites a few years back was a group whose highly decorated poop wagon had a large sign saying "Hot Malasadas!"  We residents in the crowd had to explain to visitors that malasadas are Portuguese doughnuts, a delicious favorite pastry found in bakeries all over the island.

For me the parade captures the character of Hawai'i very well:  A mix of Hawaiian, European, Asian, and Polynesian cultures displaying the complexity and diversity of influences on our history,  all in a physical setting that is hard to match.