Big words, Trump's a 4th grader, and the Presidential Speechalist

K.I.S.S
I have been trying to tell my students this for years, but we finally have evidence: using big words does not make you look smart. In fact, the opposite is true.

In one experiment, the researchers — including Daniel M. Oppenheimer, of the UCLA Anderson School of Management — took real college admission essays and replaced some of the simpler words used in them with more complicated ones. They then gave these to their study participants, to read and rate the competency and confidence level of the authors. As it turned out, the authors of the essays with complicated language were rated lower than the authors of the essays with simpler language. 

Read more about it here

The reading level of the speech of presidential candidates
While we are on the subject of simple language, check out the grade level of the language of presidential hopefuls 

Based on the above data, we REALLY need to worry about Trump. Read the accompanying article here.

The Presidential Speechalist
All this talk of presidential speeches reminds me of a classic video

Can American education replicate Finland's success?

I was reading an article about why Finland's school system is the envy of the world when I came across a telling paragraph. First, a little background.

Apparently (I haven't seen the movie yet), Waiting for Superman, the documentary about the "failure" of the American education system, holds Finland up as the model for effective education. The statistics tell the story. According to the article, "In 2000, ...a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science." The country's results pay off later too: "Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States."

These numbers are so impressive that Smithsonian Magazine attempted to find out what made the system so great. See if you can figure out why America will never replicate Finland's success:

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

That's right. We'll never replicate their success because Finland practices Socialism, and every red-blooded American knows that Socialism doesn't work!

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html#ixzz1W3gWC9T2

The Debt Crisis

I'm a liberal in almost every way, but I don't really follow politics. In my opinion, it's just a bunch of posturing from people who are more concerned with making money to get reelected than they are with passing good laws. So I haven't followed the debt ceiling "crisis." Yes, it's important, but I just get pissed every time I read about it.

Now, as the post-mortems get written about the "compromise," I have been reading all my liberal media like Slate and the New York Times, and I get angry. "This compromise has ruined the economy. We're doomed," they all seem to say. When I read this, I get pissed again, this time at the Republicans.

But when I really think about it, what do I know about macroeconomics? I don't know enough to make a judgment about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I have FEELINGS about how I think this will turn out, yes, and I have SUSPICIONS that it won't turn out well, but I don't know a damn thing about this really, nor does anyone else.

If you say you do, you're full of it. Unless you have studied economics, then read the same amount of propaganda from EACH SIDE of the aisle, you don't know enough to make a sound judgment. This assertion is not a challenge to people that I love who feel passionately about this issue (and I do love people on BOTH sides of this issue). Rather, this is a call for calm.

The sky is not falling. Or it is. Nobody knows for sure.

Winner Take All

In a review of the book Winner-Take-All Politics, Ezra Klein notes that the gap between rich and poor has grown not because of economic changes, but because of political ones:

Perhaps the most shocking study the authors cite comes from Martin Gilens, a political scientist at Princeton University. Gilens has been collecting the results of nearly 2,000 survey questions reaching back to the 1980s, looking for evidence that when opinions change, so too does policy. And he found it—but only for the rich. “Most policy changes with majority support didn’t become law,” Hacker and Pierson write. The exception was “when they were supported by those at the top. When the opinions of the poor diverged from those of the well-off, the opinions of the poor ceased to have any apparent influence: If 90 percent of poor Americans supported a policy change, it was no more likely to happen than if 10 percent did. By contrast, when more of the well-off supported a change, it was substantially more likely to happen.”


In part, this is because politicians began to need money more than they had before, as the costs of campaigns started skyrocketing. The predictable outcome? Both parties have been relying more on wealthy donors and less on labor unions. Where unions had substantial support among the Republican Party in the middle of the twentieth century—then-Senator Ted Stevens, we learn, ended up backing the labor law reforms that the business community eventually killed—today the Club for Growth primaries anyone in the GOP who forgets to refer to union presidents as “bosses.” Meanwhile, the Democrats have had to embrace the business community to remain financially competitive. As Hacker and Pierson show, Democrats were at a massive funding disadvantage in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1981, the Democratic National Committee was still paying down debt incurred during the 1968 election. There was only one place to turn to close the gap: corporate America, and the (mostly) men who ran it, or lobbied for it. And so they turned there, which meant turning away from the middle class, at least somewhat. As Hacker and Pierson say, today’s Republican and Democratic parties are not black and white. They’re “black and gray.”

It seems we are moving toward a winner-take-all society? Is this what we want? The answer seems to be no:

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely and psychologist Michael Norton recently asked people to estimate wealth inequality in this country. As it happens, most Americans think wealth is distributed vastly more equally than it actually is, and yet they would like something more equal still: When given a choice between various options, they chose the one most closely resembling Sweden, followed by the world in which every quintile has exactly 20 percent of the wealth. Only 10 percent chose our world. But the problem, as Hacker and Pierson point out, is that the political system isn’t listening. It’s time it did.

Read the entire article here.

The Travels of the Constitution

In this time of the Tea Party's overheated reverence for the Constitution, the tale of the document's travels from the Pennsylvania State House to its modern home in the National Archives might provide some perspective.

"...the secretary of the convention carried the original to New York to present it to Congress, which met, at the time, at City Hall. Without either endorsing or opposing it, Congress agreed to forward the Constitution to the states, for ratification. The original Constitution was simply filed away and, later, shuffled from one place to another. When City Hall underwent renovations, the Constitution was transferred to the Department of State. The following year, it moved with Congress to Philadelphia and, in 1800, to Washington, where it was stored at the Treasury Department until it was shifted to the War Office. In 1814, three clerks stuffed it into a linen sack and carried it to a gristmill in Virginia, which was fortunate, because the British burned Washington down. In the eighteen-twenties, when someone asked James Madison where it was, he had no idea.

In 1875, the Constitution found a home in a tin box in the bottom of a closet in a new building that housed the Departments of State, War, and Navy. In 1894, it was sealed between glass plates and locked in a safe in the basement. In 1921, Herbert Putnam, a librarian, drove it across town in his Model T. In 1924, it was put on display in the Library of Congress, for the first time ever. Before then, no one had thought of that. It spent the Second World War at Fort Knox. In 1952, it was driven in an armored tank under military guard to the National Archives, where it remains, in a shrine in the rotunda, alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights."

Read the entire article here.

Local Author Writing About Politics for the NYT

"If I were one of the big corporate donors who bankrolled the Republican tide that carried into office more than 50 new Republicans in the House, I would be wary of what you just bought.

For no matter your view of President Obama, he effectively saved capitalism. And for that, he paid a terrible political price."

This was written by Spokane-grown Timothy Egan, winner of the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl and most recently the author of The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.

He writes a blog for the New York Times, and the above is from an excerpt from his post titled "How Obama Saved Capitalism and Lost the Midterms" I recommend it.

How social scientists make people vote

"Before the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial primary, three political scientists isolated a group of voters and mailed them copies of their voting histories, listing the elections in which they participated and those they missed. Included were their neighbors’ voting histories, too, along with a warning: after the polls closed, everyone would get an updated set. After the primary, the academics examined the voter rolls and were startled by the potency of peer pressure as a motivational tool. The mailer was 10 times better at turning nonvoters into voters than the typical piece of pre-election mail whose effectiveness has ever been measured."

...

"Yale political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green conducted a study testing the relative effectiveness of basic political tools. As the 1998 elections approached, Gerber and Green partnered with the League of Women Voters to split 30,000 New Haven voters into four groups. Some received an oversize postcard encouraging them to vote, others the same message via a phone call or in-person visit. One control group received no contact whatsoever. After the election, Gerber and Green examined Connecticut records to see who actually voted. The in-person canvass yielded turnout 9.8 percent higher than for voters who were not contacted. Each piece of mail led to a turnout increase of only 0.6 percent. Telephone calls, Gerber and Green concluded, had no effect at all."

Read about "How Behavioral Science is Remaking Politics" in the NYT.

Here we go again

In response to Obama's talk of stimulus packages, Fox News's new hobbyhorse is the assertion that Roosevelt's deficit spending prolonged the Great Depression.

Not true.

As Newsweek's Daniel Gross reports, "One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression."

Find the article here.

The Slippery Slope of an Obama Presidency

“Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” released October 22 by Focus on the Family Action, an activist group affiliated with James Dobson’s conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family. This letter was discovered and published in the January 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine.

October 22, 2012

Dear friends,

The 2008 election was closer than anybody expected, but Barack Obama won. Many Christians voted for him, as they didn’t think he would really follow through on the far-left policies that had marked his career. They were wrong.

In his first week in office, Obama fired all ninety-three U.S. attorneys, replacing them with his own appointments, recruiting the most active members of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Justice Department soon began to file criminal and civil charges against nearly every Bush Administration official who had any involvement with the Iraq War. Dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are in jail, and most of them also have been bankrupted by legal costs.

[....]

Finally, the far left had the highest prize: complete control of the Supreme Court. And they quickly set about to enact their entire agenda. The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that laws barring same-sex “marriage” violated the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

[....]

The Boy Scouts chose to disband rather than be forced to obey a Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual Scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys. President Obama invited homosexual-rights leaders from around the United States to join him at the White House as he signed an executive order directing all branches of the military to abandon their “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and start actively recruiting homosexuals. As a result, homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting.

The Supreme Court nullified all Federal Communications Commission restrictions on obscene radio and television broadcasts. As a result, television programs at all hours of the day contain explicit portrayals of sex acts.

The Supreme Court declared that home schooling was a violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents agreed not to teach their children that homosexual conduct is wrong or that Jesus is the only way to God, since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment. Thousands of homeschooling parents, seeing no alternative in the United States, have begun to emigrate to other countries, particularly Australia and New Zealand.

[...]

This goes on.

If this letter were written by some small far-right wacko group, it would be unfair to assume mainstream Christians tolerate this garbage. As an analogy, even though I am very pro-conservation, I would hate to have my beliefs equated to those of the Earth Liberation Front, a violent eco-group.

But what makes this letter so disturbing is that it was not written by a small splinter group. Focus on the Family Action is the lobbying arm of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, a powerful mainstream Christian organization.

One aspect of the letter I find odd is that abortion is not mentioned. The letter's hysteria would be somewhat understandable if the writer thought lives were at stake. Instead, it's old-fashioned fear-mongering propaganda based on wedge issues like homosexual marriage and home schooling.

If you can bear to do so, read the entire letter here.

She would be a hearbeat away from the nuclear (or should I say nucular) button

At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates.

McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.

Read the article here.

These People...

I try to stay out of politics. I think it's mostly theater--complete bullshit akin to two medieval monks arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

But imagine my surprise when Barack Obama took issue with what I considered the scariest statement a Republican has made in WEEKS: "Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America -- he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?" said Palin.

I was shocked. I turned to my wife and mimicked--"These liberal pansies actually want to ensure your constitutional rights!!" I couldn't believe an American could cheer for Palin's sentiment. And, apparently, neither could Obama.

September 08, 2008
FARMINGTON HILLS, Michigan
ABC.com

A fired-up Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., took on his opponents -- "these people," he said incredulously, in a familiar refrain -- for shamelessness and dishonesty.

"I have said repeatedly that there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution," Obama said. "During the Republican convention, you remember during the Republican convention, one of them... said, ‘Well, ya know, Sen. Obama is less interested in protecting you from terrorists than ... reading them their rights.’"

"Now, let me say this," Obama continued, "first of all, you don’t even get to read them their rights until you catch them. So, I don’t know what, they should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later. Hah! I mean, seriously! These folks.

"Catch ‘em first!"

Obama said his position on this "has always been clear. If you’ve got a terrorist, take ‘em out. Take ‘em out. Anybody who was involved in 9/11 –- take ‘em out."

But, the former constitutional law professor argued, "What I have also said is this: that when you suspend habeas corpus -- which has been a principle, dating before even our country, it’s the foundation of Anglo-American law -- which says, very simply, if the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' and say, 'Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.'

"The reason you have that safeguard," he said, "is because we don't always have the right person. We don’t always catch the right person. We may think this is Mohammed the terrorist, it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.

"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism, it’s because that’s who we are," Obama said as the crowd rose to its feet, applauding. "That’s what we’re protecting. Don’t mock the Constitution! Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up! It’s worked pretty well for over 200 years!

"These people!" Obama said.

A Nation at Risk?

I am reading a book right now about the under-30 generation, and the book often mentions an NAEP test that seniors take every year. Educational illuminati use students' declining scores on this test as evidence of the fall of western civilization. I was curious as to what kinds of questions were on this test, so I did a little digging and I found some released questions on the web.

I was taking the economics quiz when I came across this question:

Question 4: Which of the following has been most important in reducing poverty over time?
A. Taxes
B. Economic growth
C. International trade
D. Government regulations

I was struck by how the answer might depend upon party affiliation. Democrats might say high marginal tax rates that redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor have done much to level citizens' wealth, so they might answer "A". They might also say that reigning in corporations and creating federal programs have had an impact on poverty, so a Democrat may also answer "D".

Republicans, on the other hand, might believe that free trade has reduced the cost of goods and has opened up economic opportunity across the globe, so they may answer "C". Republicans may also argue that a white-hot economy benefits everyone ("A rising tide raises all boats") so they could also answer "B".

Before you read on, lock in YOUR answer. I'll wait.............

I have a few qualms with the question. First, I'll bet you could poll economists and they might not agree on the answer. Second, the question itself is vague. Reducing poverty where? Worldwide or in America?

Third, I have qualms with the "correct" answer, "B". Growth in the economy does not necessarily equal a reduction in poverty. Often, as it has lately, growth means more jobs at Walmart, with the true economic gains, the ones reported in the newspapers, accruing mostly to the wealthy.

I guessed the correct answer by default, really. The question basically says "Why are people not poor any more?" with the answer being, "Because they make more money." Still, the question certainly seems to be politically slanted much more so than, say, this question:

Question 5: What happens to most of the money deposited in checking accounts at a commercial bank?
A. It is used to pay the bank’s expenses.
B. It is loaned to other bank customers.
C. It is kept in the bank’s vault until depositors withdraw the funds.
D. It is paid to owners of the bank as return on their investment.

You can test yourself, and find out the answer to question 5, at this site.

Everything I Needed to Know About Foreign Policy, I Learned from "The Godfather"

IT IS ONE of the most well-known scenes in cinematic history. Don Vito Corleone, head of the most powerful of New York’s organized-crime families, walks alone across the street from his office to buy some oranges from the fruit stand. He mumbles pleasantly to the Chinese owner, then turns his attention to the task at hand. However, his peaceful idyll is shattered by the sounds of running feet and multiple gunshots—and he is left bleeding to death in the street, as his son Fredo cradles his body.

By a miracle, he is not dead, only gravely wounded. His two other sons, Santino (Sonny) and Michael, as well as his consigliere, Tom Hagen, an adopted son himself, gather in an atmosphere of shock and panic to try to decide what to do next—and how to respond to the attempted assassination of the don by Virgil “the Turk” Sollozzo. This, of course, is the hinge of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, one of the greatest movies ever produced by American cinema. However, given the present changes in the world’s power structure, the movie also becomes a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems of our times.

The aging Vito Corleone, emblematic of cold-war American power, is struck down suddenly and violently by forces he did not expect and does not understand, much as America was on September 11. Even more intriguingly, each of his three “heirs” embraces a very different vision of how the family should move forward following this wrenching moment. Tom Hagen, Sonny and Michael approximate the three American foreign-policy schools of thought—liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism—vying for control in today’s disarranged world order.

Read here how following Michael Corleone's example can lead America back to world prominence (if not dominance).

Dino Rossi, True Republican and True Hypocrite (no, they are not necessarily redundant)

I was driving north on Division street today, and I saw a billboard advertising Republican Dino Rossi's current gubernatorial campaign. In huge letters, it said (of course) DINO ROSSI. What it said underneath made me roll my eyes: "Don't let Seattle steal this election."

First of all, this billboard represents the triumph of Karl Rovian innuendo--implying that Seattle stole the last election when current governor Christine Gregoire narrowly defeated Rossi. (On an aside, how a city can steal an election is beyond me. For instance, Florida did not steal the 2000 election--the Supreme Court stole it.) This billboard also plays to the class-based politics Republicans are known for, because, as every redneck Spokanite knows, Seattle is the bastion of the wine-and-cheese set, a place where they do NOT cling to religion and guns...rather, they cling to spirituality and tofu. We patriotic, gun-toting evangelicals in the inland northwest cannot let those effete west-siders boss us around.

Second of all, I had a feeling Rossi was being a little disingenous about his choice of villain. I knew he was not from the east side, but I didn't know where he WAS from. So, I checked his website and found that Rossi:

was born in Seattle
went to high school in Seattle
went to Seattle University (where he is still on the Dean's Advisory Board for the business school)
has worked and lived in or near Seattle his entire life
currently lives 15 miles east of Seattle

So, in sum, Rossi is a Seattle-ite through and through. That means that we should understand his billboard message for what it is: a hypocritical and cynical attempt to exploit east-siders fear of the elite...in other words, Rossi is a true Republican.

Shameless

My friend Rob and I were talking recently about how many newscasters have included on the news stations' sites links to their personal blogs and MySpace pages. So, in one click, we can go from today's headlines to finding out that "meteoroligist" Kris Crocker likes System of a Down.

This led us to a discussion of how the younger generation is becoming inexplicable to us. What makes them confusing is their predilection for exposure. Sure, I have a blog, as does Rob, but our discussions tend not to be of the personal type--in other words, our entries are about externalities like art and politics...they are not the stuff of psychoanalysts' couches.

Young peoples' lives, ergo their blogs, seem not only to be an open book, but a book they beg us to read. Further, these are not books of accomplishments like a memoir or an autobiography, they are compendia of every innermost thought and desire, of trial personae, of pinup photos...things that our generation is accustomed to keeping to ourselves.

I thought of this as I read a short piece on France's president Nicolas Sarkozy, who, at the time of the writing, had yet to wed his new sweetheart, Carla Bruni. Sarkozy had, right after being elected, divorced his wife and began cavorting with Bruni. What makes Sarkozy's decision so odd is not that a French president has a mistress. Mitterand's mistress was an open secret, and she even attended his funeral, standing next to his wife. However, his emphasis was on "secret." Sarkozy has decided to emphasize the "open" part of the phrase "open secret."

What makes Sarkozy so thoroughly modern, so exquisitely MySpace, is how extrovertedly public he is about his sexcapades. As Adam Gopnick of the New Yorker wrote:

What distinguishes the ballad of Carla and Nicolas from similar tales is that this time the media is not trying to pry into the private life of a public man; this time, a public man is trying desperately to parade his private life in front of the media. Sarkozy not only performed for the press, welcoming photographers along as he and Bruni holidayed in Egypt and walked on the beach in what used to be called bathing costumes; he insists, to everyone’s embarrassment, on talking about their bonheur and their approaching marriage at press conferences. This is not tacit complicity, of the Princess Di-and-the-tabloids kind; it is Presidential leadership. Sarkozy wants people to think about his sex life, in the way that Bill Clinton didn’t want people thinking about his. The Sarkozy moment is more like Tom Cruise pounding Oprah’s sofa; the gentleman is so vehement about his love that something seems weird about it.

I don't think his vehement love is weird. I think it is a harbinger of the times, and we must begin getting used to these unseemly parades of information that used to be kept private. This type of exposure started years ago. Heck, we even know what kind of underwear Bill Clinton wears. (Wouldn't it be interesting if a wag decided to ask Hillary the same question?)

I could lament the fact that, as Rob's friend Derek proclaimed, "there's no shame any more," but I fear that I have finally settled on the adult side of the generational divide, so my complaints just sound like the typical grumblings of an old man.

Read the Gopnick article here.

State of the Union by the Numbers

Time Magazine put together a look at what President Bush said in his final State of the Union Address delivered Monday night. They listed the most common words from his speech. Each word is scaled in proportion to the number of times it was used. I was kind of surprised. Before you click, try to guess the top three and post them in the comments section.

Presidential character

An interesting Obama anecdote from Governor Bill Richardson.

The NYT Shows Its Cojones

The New York Times has added a new columnist--a conservative. No, this is not a weak token member of the opposition like Alan Colmes. Instead, the new columnist is heavyweight William Kristol, one of the leading lights of the conservative movement. Kristol is editor and co-founder of The Weekly Standard, an influential conservative political magazine, and appears regularly on Fox News Sunday and the Fox News Channel.



The New York Times is a liberal paper. But it is now also home to two of the most well-respected conservative writers alive: Kristol and David Brooks. This is great news, especially if it is a harbinger of future decisions by other news organizations.



The only hope we have for restoring a spirit of bipartisanship and unity in the U.S. is to learn again to listen to the opposing side. However, we live in a time when many people get all their news from virtual echo chambers, be they Air America or Fox News. Many of us can go months without hearing one opposing view--we can have all of our media tailored to our preformed ideas.



This is why I heartily applaud the Times' decision to include another conservative columnists in its liberal pages. Liberal readers will now be exposed more often to opposing views, and I hope this exposure will lead to a renewed dialogue in American politics.



Not long ago, we had such a thing as a Reagan Democrat. Today, I can't imagine such a beast. Polarization in politics has led to ossified, visceral opinions on each side--opinions that won't change, that can't change, because the holders of those opinions never hear the other side.



I hope this decision begins a procession of intermingling of right and left, of conservative and liberal, which can lead (imagine) to the two sides actually listening to each other.



And maybe now Fox News will start respectfully giving air time to liberals like Paul Krugman or E. J. Dionne. I eagerly await the imminent announcement.

Humanity Hanging From a Cross of Iron

Gen. Eisenhower speaks with soldiers of the 101st Airborne on the eve of D-Day


Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?


–Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

Warren Buffet's Remarks to the Senate

Following are Warren Buffett's remarks to Congress last week. He may be one of the richest men in the world, but he hasn't let that fact cloud his judgment. I hope people in Washington are listening.

*********************

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, Senators, I appreciate the opportunity to express a few views on the estate tax.

I will limit my remarks to three points.

The first relates to the intellectual dishonesty employed by those who use the phrase 'death tax.' This term is clever, it is Orwellian, and it is, if you'll pardon the expression, dead wrong.

More than 2.4 million Americans will die this year. About 12,000 of them will leave an estate that will be taxed when the exemption goes to $3 million, as Senator Grassley mentioned. It will be 9600 estimated and it's been 19,000 when the exemption was lower.

That means that 99-and-a-half percent of estates will be tax-free. You would have to attend 200 funerals to be at one at which the decedent's estate owed a tax. Indeed, far more people who die receive a large tax benefit. I don't think that's generally understood. Namely, a stepped up basis on appreciated assets.


If people insist on renaming the estate tax, it would be more appropriately labeled the 'death present.'

The second point I would like to make is that in a country that prides itself on equality of opportunity, it is becoming anything but that, as the gap between the super rich and the middle class widens in dramatic fashion.

Here are a few figures on the Forbes 400. Other people save their Playboy magazines, I save the Forbes 400 magazine.

Twenty years ago, 1987, it took $220 million dollars to make the list. Now it takes $1.3 billion, about a six-for-one increase. The total wealth of the list in 1987 was then $220 billion. Now it's $1.54 trillion, exactly a seven-for-one increase.

Tax law changes have benefited this group, including me, in a huge way. During that same period, the average American went exactly nowhere on the economic front. His income went from a median $26,061 to $48,201, almost exactly the increase of the CPI during the 20 years.

He's been on a treadmill while the super rich have been on a spaceship.

Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise. Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward a plutocracy.

Finally, I have a suggestion. Estate taxes now raise about $24 billion. It's one of the lowest percentages, incidentally, of total taxes in the history of the tax system.

As mentioned, that $24 billion will come from about 12,000 estates. Indeed, half of that sum will come from only about 1500 estates. The beneficiaries of each of those estates will receive millions, in many cases tens of millions or more. One point you never hear from proponents of estate tax elimination is whom they would get the $24 billion from if they didn't get it from the 12,000 large estates.

They just say, 'Free us.' They don't say who to further shackle.

Here's a suggestion: Keep the estate tax and its $24 billion, reshape it if you will, but keep the estate tax and its $24 billion. Then take a look at the bottom fifth of America. There are 23 million households in the United States with $20,000 or less of income. Many are paying payroll taxes that now total 15.3 percent. That 15.3 percent alone is more than the rate on dividends or capital gains and more than the rate on carried interest.

Let's give those 23 million households a $1000 annual credit. Every dollar of such a credit would affect real change in the lives of the 50-million-plus people residing in the 23 million households. Yet the cost of this would be less than getting rid of the tax on the 12,000 estates.

50-million people would be helped in a material way. The beneficiaries of the 12,000 estates would still receive what looks like a fortune to almost all Americans.

Leona Helmsley's dog, Trouble, reportedly is inheriting $12 million. If Mrs. Helmsley's estate is in the 45% tax bracket, Trouble could instead receive $22 million if the estate tax is removed.

Alternatively, just from Trouble's share of the Helmsley estate tax, 10,000 families making less than $20,000 annually could receive $1000 each to make their lives a bit better. Even though Trouble probably heard Leona say, quote, 'Only the little people pay taxes,' end-quote, I don't think he would mind the estate paying $10 million in order for him to get his $12 million.

We need to raise about 20 percent of GDP to fund the programs the American people want from the national government. Further shifting of this requirement away from the super rich is not the way to go.

This transcript is from this link at cnbc.om.