$250,000 And Poor

That headline caught my eye. This is from The Fiscal Times. The whole article is called Down and Out on $250,000 a Year.

My first response was to see how far I could read before I got the joke. But I was wrong. This is not a joke story or a satire. From the article -

By most measures, a $250,000 household income is substantial. It is six times the national average, and just 2.9 percent of couples earn that much or more. “For the average person in this country, a $250,000 household income is an unattainably high annual sum — they’ll never see it,” says Roberton Williams, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

But just how flush is a family of four with a $250,000 income? Are they really “rich”? To find the answer, The Fiscal Times asked BDO USA, a national tax accounting firm, to compute the total state, local and federal tax burden of a hypothetical two-career couple with two kids, earning $250,000. To factor in varying state and local taxes, as well as drastically different costs of living, BDO placed the couple in eight different locales around the country with top-notch public school districts, using national data on spending.

A reader begins to get the idea that we are going to explore the difficulties of getting by on this sum of money each year. So, you read further on, things like this -

Some of the expenses incurred by couples like the Joneses may seem lavish – such as $5,000 on a housecleaner, a $1,200 annual dry cleaning tab and $4,000 on kids’ activities. But when both parents are working, it is impossible for them to maintain the home, care for the kids and dress for their professional jobs without a big outlay.

And it keeps going like this. If I was from a distant part of the world with no knowledge of the United States, I might have gotten teary eyed. However, I do live here and I’m not going to cry over those suffering with a quarter of a million dollars in income.

Why don’t you read the article? If you feel sorry for them and wish them better, please let me know.

James Pilant

(The President’s New Chief of Staff) William Daley – “You can pick up the phone and call him in a way you can’t really with anyone there now.”

William Daley

Who can pick up the phone and call Mr. Daley, the President’s Chief of Staff?

That’s an interesting question.

From CBS News Political Hot Sheet -

“With Wall Street reporting record profits while middle class Americans continue to struggle in a deep recession, the announcement that William Daley, who has close ties to the Big Banks and Big Business, will now lead the White House staff is troubling and sends the wrong message to the American people,” said Justin Ruben, Executive Director of MoveOn.org.

What has liberals so upset? It’s hard to know where to start. There’s the years at JPMorgan Chase and on the board of mortgage giant Fannie Mae; the fact that Daley reportedly opposed the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was a major component of financial regulatory reform; Daley’s December 2009 argument that Democrats should “steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan”; his reported work with the Chamber of Commerce to “loosen the post-Enron regulations on the accounting and auditing professions”; his work in the Clinton administration to get the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress; and, more generally, the fact that he’s seen as a strong advocate to the Obama administration for the interests of big business.

Before the selection, Politico asked banking officials and corporate lobbyists who they wanted in the chief of staff job, and the “unequivocal” response was Daley. The subsequent story included just the sort of quote to make a liberal (as well, potentially, as a Tea Partier) cringe: “Immediately things would get better” if Daley got the job, one executive said. “You can pick up the phone and call him in a way you can’t really with anyone there now.”

Now, you know who can call Mr. Daley and “call him in a way you can’t really with anyone there now.”

James Pilant

Mind Controlled Devices?

From the Denver Post article entitled – Mind-controlled devices may be next, say experts at CES

I believe in mind control,” Xavier Lauwaert, worldwide marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard, said Thursday during a panel discussion about the future of user interfaces.

Such technology would be like voice control, only a user would simply need to think of what he wanted a device to do, rather than having to say anything.

“The next evolution of the HP PCs will be mind control,” Lauwaert predicted.

I can’t help but think this poses a whole new area of privacy concerns. I freely admit that if you use a device to turn things on and off, there is little to be concerned about but the ability to monitor how another person makes decisions (how their mind works) is not an area I want the government or private industry poking around in.

Look at it this way, if you use parts of your brain to maneuver through the internet or make financial decisions by paying your bills or investing on line, monitoring those kinds of transactions provides an intimate portrait of how one formulates thoughts and make decisions often on an unconscious level. A powerful computer can make sense of these of the minds patterns which can then be incorporated in music, videos, advertisements, scams and political campaigns.

Advertising campaigns are already designed to probe the unconscious but they have been limited by the occasional burst of rationality on the part of the public. Manipulation of thought patterns could devestate this last line of defense. They could short circuit the conscious mind bypassing it entirely.

It could be used as a limited but quite effective form of mind control depending on the power and detail of the monitoring equipment.

So, I have some concerns.

James Pilant