Vic Socotra

25 February 2009

Cost of a Dime

(Roosevelt Dime)

It has been good having the Visiting Dog here this week. He goes back home from Camp Socotra on Friday, and this morning found us out in the dark. It is still cold but the knife-edged wind has finally died down. Still had to wear gloves.

I will both miss him and be relieved. He is looking at me right now a bit pensively, wondering if I will get up from the computer for coffee, or hopefully something more interesting.

I would prefer to have a fenced yard where I could let him out, or install a Dog Door, since that seems to be what God ordained. Dogs and high-rise buildings create a bit more drama to the most mundane functions of life, and he did not want to sit still for the duration of the President's address last night. It was not exactly a State of the Union speech, since this is his first outing with the joint session of Congress, and the Supremes, the Cabinet and the Joint Chiefs.

President Obama was confident, cerebral, cool and vague. That both heartens and dismays me a bit. Make no mistake: I want this man and his administration to succeed. There is no alternative to that, and we are all in this together. My questions are about what we are going to shed on our journey into the unknown.

I satisfied both my need as a citizen and the dog’s impatience to go outside by putting on my jacket with great show and kicking the ball around the apartment to keep him interested until “God Bless America!” rang out on the television and we were able to go to the elevator and plod around the building in the cold.

Apparently there was a long celebratory interlude after the speech, since we returned just in time to watch the bizarre response to the Presidential address from the Republican-Indian-American-Governor of the state of Louisiana. That is more hyphens than I am used to, and am contemplating not using them anymore.

Not that Bobby Jindal is bizarre- actually the dog and I found him quite appealing. What is bizarre is how the American political landscape has changed so rapidly.

Maybe it was eight years of Mr. Bush's Excellent Tex-Preppie Adventure that concealed a tectonic change of the political continent. Last time I thought about Louisiana's statehouse, it was occupied by a woman with a Cajun heritage- Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.

But maybe that was extraordinary, too.

Listening to him with fascination meant staying up later than usual, and clinging to the bed this morning. The Visiting Dog has a thoroughly endearing trait of nosing under the sheets and tunneling down along the length of my body to snuggle deep in the heat behind my legs.

I managed to retreat deep into one of those dreams where everything worked out and everyone was fine.

Wish real life was like that.

There will be more information on what the President really meant last night coming out in the next couple days, and a lot of it has already been said. What I took away from it was he is prepared to do anything to get through this rough patch, since failure now means failure for all the things he would like to do at this great moment when all things are possible, including doom.

The two things that clunked were the "not one more dime" of taxes for people who make less than $250,000 dollars, or effectively that he is going to put the arm on the "top two percent" of wage earners to pay their fair share.
The statement was separated far enough in time during the long but riveting speech so as not to directly put that class of people next to the bankers, to whom he gave a limited amnesty, for now.

I assume he meant we could string them up later, after the crisis is past. The implication is still a bit troubling, since I don't know what he means.

I assume that means married couples making more than $125,000 dollars per year each, which is common enough in this expensive town and others, and makes me wonder about the "top two percent" remark. Are we that out of touch, or is the clear "Not one dime" thing just another bogus sound byte "read my lips" that means nothing?

Nothing to worry about, I’m sure. It will all be clear enough shortly.

In the aggregate, I am close enough to the limit all by myself to be a little alarmed, being nakedly single. Thankfully, I give a lot of it away, either by order of the court or to the mortgage people at the credit union.

If what he means is literally true, which experience tells me it is not, and he actually meant adjusted gross income, everything is fine and we can go after the rich, those bastards.

The uneasy feeling is that I don't know if I am one of them or not.

If the Bush tax cuts expire as scheduled, my marginal tax rate will jump about six percent to 39.4% on the Federal side, and that means a 50% total tax liability when you figure in the state and locals. Back of the envelop calculation suggests that is another $10 grand or so I will have to cough up, and that I might have spent on stimulating the economy.

If you think of that as a stack of dimes, it is a rather large stack of metal.

That does not address the social security wage cap, which is one of those stealth taxes. When I hit the maximum contribution late in the summer, gives me a chance to have free vodka for the rest of the year.

That means tax year 09 is the best it is ever going to be for me, highest income and lowest taxes, and no amount of raises or incentives I can foresee are going to make up for what happens in 2010.

So, I imagine it is time to put the house in order and batten down the hatches, which is not what the President’s speech urged us to do.

The other thing that troubled me, aside from the implications of passing along one-time money to the states for entitlements that last longer than aircraft carriers without accounting for the liability of the out-year tail, was the comment that those who "serve the community" should have the same benefits and access to health care that others who serve their nation do.

That was curious, since it amounts to a pension and GI Bill for community workers. I can't imagine that is true, but the President started as a Community Organizer, after all. He may view that as being as much of value as carrying a rifle someplace. Who am I to judge that?

It was a curious aside, none-the-less.

Anyway, I hope he can pull it all off and we can get back to loaning each other money at a fevered pitch.

The big savings obviously are going to come out DoD and Agriculture, which he explicitly cited as targets in the line-by-line review that is supposed to save two trillion dollars.

I would think that the Navy shipbuilding program, the Army Combat System, the F-22 Raptor and the Joint Strike Fighter are all going to be on the block, along with all the people who build them, wouldn’t you?

Although the Intelligence Community is not exactly a weapons system, per se, I still have to think that the marketplace where people like me ply our trade is not looking like a growth industry.

I’ll hope for the best, but the tea-leaves from the speech suggest that at least in Tunnel Eight on the fourth floor of Big Pink, the zenith of the American Century is 2009, and it is downhill from here.

I can’t work much harder, and it would appear, based on the diminishing stack of dimes, that I will never get the fenced-in yard to make life easier for the Visiting Dog.

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