DI: Okay, you emailed me this, but I’ll let you introduce it however you want. So go nuts.
B: Some people have called me a deficit hawk, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think my business experience has taught me that the books need to be balanced, but I’m also schooled enough in economics to know that governments don’t operate the way a business does, they actually operate more like an individual. What I mean by that is that most people go through phases in their spending, where they’ll spend more than they make and go into debt, or make more than they spend and squirrel some of it away. The only real difference is that when our government takes in more than it spends there’s this odd urge to give the money back to the taxpayers. If we had already paid down the debt, and it looked like we could safely reduce revenues to a lower level commensurate with spending, that makes sense, but giving back money when we still have this large debt would be like Visa handing you back your monthly payment and saying, “no, you spend it on something else- we’ll just keep charging the interest.”
But the whole reason I even mention any of this is I got a chance to balance the budget. No, the Obama administration wasn’t offering me a job; the New York Times put together a little game that illustrates the deficit. You have to make budget decisions, and it explains to you the impacts of the cuts you’re making. And it’s really kind of agonizing, some of the decisions you end up making, because there are all kinds of things that in a perfect world we wouldn’t be looking at cutting, but that in the context of trying to balance the budget may be necessary. I’m probably underselling how amazing this actually is, but I would entreat everyone to give it a try:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?hp
Though I should emphasize that tightening our belts, right this second, is probably a bad idea. Our economy is actually recovering right now, but the impact of government cuts that have already taken place have made it almost a zero sum game. Further cuts may very well cripple an economy that’s still hobbling.
DI: Very nice. And it is enlightening- and a little depressing, too. But I have journalistic things. And I really do hate to ask- because I hate to give Glenn Beck’s existence any acknowledgement whatsoever- but just a few weeks ago you distanced yourself from George Soros, and Beck seems to have taken an eager swipe at the man.
B: Yeah. Chills my blood to be even in the same neighborhood as Beck, but I’ll try and explain myself. Geoge, and I think I’ve known him long enough to call him George, is a great guy. He’s a fighter, going back decades. He’s spent billions of dollars funding anti-Communist efforts in the Soviet bloc, in large part because his family survived first the Nazis and then the Russians. He has a visceral dislike of authoritarian governments, and unlike some he really puts his money where his passion is. And I have a lot of respect for George, I really do. But he’s been associated with liberal causes for a long time and for that he gets written off, as if he does these things without deep and contemplative thought. He doesn’t- and I was saying I don’t want to be written off as a knee-jerk liberal, either.
I believe in a strong government that does certain things well for its citizens, and that if we’re going to have that government we’ll have to pay for it through taxes. Some people want a weaker government, or smaller, if you prefer that terminology- and that’s a possibility, too. The size and mission of the government is something we have to compromise on, because we can’t all get what we want, obviously. I think I’m realistic in that, not ideological. And I don’t want people to write me off because I know we need to have those conversations, in order to forge those compromises; otherwise we all suffer.
DI: I particularly liked the New Yorker takedown of Beck’s comments- the New Yorker being appropriate, since it was quotes from an old New Yorker piece that Beck repeatedly misrepresented- not that I regularly read the New Yorker, as I’m no effete East Coast liberal.
B: Careful- I am an effete East Coast liberal.
DI: Who would have given Bruce Lee a run for his money in his day.
B: No- not even close. Lady Shiva might have, on one of her better days. But what people forget about Bruce Lee is the man spent hours every day training. I’m in excellent shape, but I spent as much or more of my time on studies, on running my companies, on so many other things. Bruce Lee would have beat the holy hell out of me- though I think Kareem Abdul-Jabbar might be in my wheelhouse.
DI: So you’ve fought freakishly tall and long-limbed martial artists?
B: On occasion. I’d cheat, mind you. A fair fight with someone like that is just asking to get a size 16 foot in the eye.
DI: Oh my God- I’m going to Google that later, but did you just pull the man’s shoe size out of thin air?
B: I have a mind for details- not quite a photographic memory, but about 93% recall.
DI: Hmm. Damnit. I meant to steer the conversation away from politics; I know that’s a lot of where your mind is, these days- I think because you’ve had to step back from the chief way you tried to impact the world, and now you’re groping for new ways to be useful.
But I’m as much if not more interested in you and your past exploits. I think it’s a balancing act, there- and so far I’ve been failing. Next week, though, we’ll be back and hopefully better at it.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Fear
DI: Okay, it’s Halloween, or it was, at this point. What did you go as?
B: Rainbow Batman.
DI: Little on the nose, don’t you think?
B: Only if I was being serious.
DI: Fair enough. But given the season, I wanted to know, given a life of doing dangerous, reckless and occasionally heroic things involving lunatics, what was your scariest moment?
B: Hmm. There’s been a lot of them, like you say. Crazy and horrifying well describe my world for the last thirty years.
And for the same reason that people say that most shrinks got into the field to understand themselves or the crazy people in their lives, I think crazy people, really truly violent psychotics I mean, have an obsession with abnormal psychology, too.
Examples litter my career, like the Joker trying to prove to Commissioner Gordon that the world wasn’t sane by driving him clinically insane. And I’ve been trapped, by various means, in dream worlds where everything was how I thought I wanted it, only to have it fall apart.
But the one that got the deepest under my skin I think was largely accidental. Jonathan Crane, who you may know better under the alias of the Scarecrow, was a psychologist. He specialized in phobias, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t trained in all aspects of the clinical practice.
And he became obsessively convinced that Batman and by extension the man beneath the cowl had to be crazy. I don’t know entirely if I’d argue the point- particularly not at the time.
But he put together an old failing of mine. A girl was kidnapped, and the ransom paid, but as often happens with kidnappings, they had no intention of letting the girl go. I tracked her into the sewers, where she was trapped. The water in the tunnel was rising. There was a boulder preventing me from freeing her, at least 300 pounds of dead weight. And I couldn’t move it; I couldn’t even budge it. I had to watch as this girl, five years old, drown.
I didn’t take that… failure, lightly. I embarked on a pretty brutal training regimen- but I still couldn’t build enough bulk. Faced with the possibility- really probability- that something like that would happen again, I started taking a performance enhancing drug called Venom-
DI: The same stuff that makes Bane into the meat mountain he is [ed. note: “meat mountain” does indeed sound like a porno- it isn’t just you].
B: Right, only this was years before Bane showed up. Anyway, like steroids, there were consequences to taking the drug, including rages. I’ve got anger issues on my best day, but I became truly frightening- and eventually I realized I was terrified of what I might do- that there was very real potential that on Venom I would be capable of doing far worse than what I might fail to do without the drug- and quit. Crane pieced together that situation, or at least enough of it, and used it.
He set a trap for me, captured me. I woke up in the old meatpacking plant, in one of the freezers. He told me he’d captured both me and Robin; this was also after the death of my second Robin- after I nearly beat the Joker to death for it. So I was keenly aware of their potential mortality.
I was drugged, hypnotized; later analysis showed the cocktail he used included hallucinogens, Venom, and a mix of drugs designed to make a patient more pliant. Crane told me there was a woman on the floor with me, and that if I didn’t kill her, he had henchmen in a second room watching via teleconference who would shoot Robin.
For hours he beat me, and taunted me, and threatened; every five minutes he’d start a timer and tell me at the end that if I hadn’t killed her that he’d give the order for them to shoot Robin, and just as the timer was about to go off he’d wind it back. The drugs probably kept me from recognizing his bluff, and every single time I thought it was going to happen- several times I watched it all unfold in slow motion, the gun firing, and I’d flash back to my parents and I was that same scared kid, and I’d watch the bullet fly through the air and tear through Robin’s face and skull- only to realize I was hallucinating. I wanted more than anything to murder the girl, then Crane, and then his stooges if they’d hurt Robin- and maybe even if they hadn’t- and anyone else I needed to protect people I cared about. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Eventually I passed out.
When I woke up I managed to head butt Crane as he was trying to put me back into a hypnotic state. I crawled over the floor to where the woman was. The hallucinogens had worn off enough that I could see her for what she really was: a bloodhound in an evening gown and a wig.
A gunshot rang out, and I ran out of the freezer and fumbled my way through the Scarecrow’s henchmen- they were rent-a-thugs, or I might have been in serious trouble. They’d been in a freezer next to me the entire time, and it’s door was open. “Robin” was a Raggedy Andy in a bad Halloween costume; the colors weren’t even right.
I stalked back into the other freezer, sobering with every step, and I realized I’d overcome what had terrified me before: the idea that I was so crippled by a fear of failure that there was no limit on what I might be capable of. I picked Crane up off the floor by his collar. “You’re going to hit me, aren’t you?” he asked sullenly.
But I hugged him. It was such a relief, of such a great burden. I couldn’t even express how wonderful it was not to have it hanging over my head anymore. Then I punched him for a while. Some of that might have been the drugs.
DI: Just so we’re clear, here, you were celebrating your ability to ignore the violent murder of a teenager. That might be the scariest thing about that story.
B: You know you have an uncanny ability to cut through whatever emotions have built up by being a dick. I think you’re beginning to grow on me.
DI: I want you to know, if you’re making an erection joke I’ll have to bleep it out.
B: Rainbow Batman.
DI: Little on the nose, don’t you think?
B: Only if I was being serious.
DI: Fair enough. But given the season, I wanted to know, given a life of doing dangerous, reckless and occasionally heroic things involving lunatics, what was your scariest moment?
B: Hmm. There’s been a lot of them, like you say. Crazy and horrifying well describe my world for the last thirty years.
And for the same reason that people say that most shrinks got into the field to understand themselves or the crazy people in their lives, I think crazy people, really truly violent psychotics I mean, have an obsession with abnormal psychology, too.
Examples litter my career, like the Joker trying to prove to Commissioner Gordon that the world wasn’t sane by driving him clinically insane. And I’ve been trapped, by various means, in dream worlds where everything was how I thought I wanted it, only to have it fall apart.
But the one that got the deepest under my skin I think was largely accidental. Jonathan Crane, who you may know better under the alias of the Scarecrow, was a psychologist. He specialized in phobias, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t trained in all aspects of the clinical practice.
And he became obsessively convinced that Batman and by extension the man beneath the cowl had to be crazy. I don’t know entirely if I’d argue the point- particularly not at the time.
But he put together an old failing of mine. A girl was kidnapped, and the ransom paid, but as often happens with kidnappings, they had no intention of letting the girl go. I tracked her into the sewers, where she was trapped. The water in the tunnel was rising. There was a boulder preventing me from freeing her, at least 300 pounds of dead weight. And I couldn’t move it; I couldn’t even budge it. I had to watch as this girl, five years old, drown.
I didn’t take that… failure, lightly. I embarked on a pretty brutal training regimen- but I still couldn’t build enough bulk. Faced with the possibility- really probability- that something like that would happen again, I started taking a performance enhancing drug called Venom-
DI: The same stuff that makes Bane into the meat mountain he is [ed. note: “meat mountain” does indeed sound like a porno- it isn’t just you].
B: Right, only this was years before Bane showed up. Anyway, like steroids, there were consequences to taking the drug, including rages. I’ve got anger issues on my best day, but I became truly frightening- and eventually I realized I was terrified of what I might do- that there was very real potential that on Venom I would be capable of doing far worse than what I might fail to do without the drug- and quit. Crane pieced together that situation, or at least enough of it, and used it.
He set a trap for me, captured me. I woke up in the old meatpacking plant, in one of the freezers. He told me he’d captured both me and Robin; this was also after the death of my second Robin- after I nearly beat the Joker to death for it. So I was keenly aware of their potential mortality.
I was drugged, hypnotized; later analysis showed the cocktail he used included hallucinogens, Venom, and a mix of drugs designed to make a patient more pliant. Crane told me there was a woman on the floor with me, and that if I didn’t kill her, he had henchmen in a second room watching via teleconference who would shoot Robin.
For hours he beat me, and taunted me, and threatened; every five minutes he’d start a timer and tell me at the end that if I hadn’t killed her that he’d give the order for them to shoot Robin, and just as the timer was about to go off he’d wind it back. The drugs probably kept me from recognizing his bluff, and every single time I thought it was going to happen- several times I watched it all unfold in slow motion, the gun firing, and I’d flash back to my parents and I was that same scared kid, and I’d watch the bullet fly through the air and tear through Robin’s face and skull- only to realize I was hallucinating. I wanted more than anything to murder the girl, then Crane, and then his stooges if they’d hurt Robin- and maybe even if they hadn’t- and anyone else I needed to protect people I cared about. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Eventually I passed out.
When I woke up I managed to head butt Crane as he was trying to put me back into a hypnotic state. I crawled over the floor to where the woman was. The hallucinogens had worn off enough that I could see her for what she really was: a bloodhound in an evening gown and a wig.
A gunshot rang out, and I ran out of the freezer and fumbled my way through the Scarecrow’s henchmen- they were rent-a-thugs, or I might have been in serious trouble. They’d been in a freezer next to me the entire time, and it’s door was open. “Robin” was a Raggedy Andy in a bad Halloween costume; the colors weren’t even right.
I stalked back into the other freezer, sobering with every step, and I realized I’d overcome what had terrified me before: the idea that I was so crippled by a fear of failure that there was no limit on what I might be capable of. I picked Crane up off the floor by his collar. “You’re going to hit me, aren’t you?” he asked sullenly.
But I hugged him. It was such a relief, of such a great burden. I couldn’t even express how wonderful it was not to have it hanging over my head anymore. Then I punched him for a while. Some of that might have been the drugs.
DI: Just so we’re clear, here, you were celebrating your ability to ignore the violent murder of a teenager. That might be the scariest thing about that story.
B: You know you have an uncanny ability to cut through whatever emotions have built up by being a dick. I think you’re beginning to grow on me.
DI: I want you to know, if you’re making an erection joke I’ll have to bleep it out.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Losers
Losers
DI: You lost.
B: The Democrats lost. I’m a liberal, and it’s certainly a blow to hopes for any kind of a liberal agenda, but honestly the liberal agenda in this country’s been a little haphazard.
I see a potential for hope- or maybe it’s just a silver lining I’m picking out of a cloudy sky. But the country needs two things; there are a lot of things we want and that we’d like, but for the country to continue to exist and thrive, it needs two things. In the short term, we need a stronger economy; in the long term, we need fiscal solvency.
Being a Keynesian, I think spending is the answer.
What’s strange about that is that cutting taxes without trimming spending is actually another form of government spending- it’s in fact raising future taxes. We can argue over the best ways to spend, but I think economic modeling pretty effectively shows where this kind of spending is most effective.
Lower income people are largely more likely to spend new money, because their immediate needs are likely more salient. If the government cuts me a check for a quarter of a million dollars, it goes right into my piggy bank, because I’ve already bought basically everything I want or need, and you can generalize this, statistically. The top 10% of earners take home 50% of the money, but account for only 20% of consumption.
I think a payroll tax holiday is the best of all possible solutions. And because of our trickle up economy, the wealthy will gain too, because their companies will sell more products, their stocks will do better; even property values will rebound somewhat.
I think now is the best possible time for it. Congress could pass the holiday in time for the holiday splurges; the fact that it’s passing out of a Democratically controlled Congress would marginally benefit them, but the recovery would largely happen with a divided government- and Republicans being the superior salespeople, I have no doubt they’d get at least their fair share of the kudos.
But that’s why I think it has the best chance of getting passed, and that’s only one factor. I also think that it has the best chance of having long-term benefits, too.
As an alternative, I think Jon Stewart had an excellent idea. Basically, if people are overly concerned with the proportion of their debt, the federal government can bail out the American people. Basically, figure out the average debt per person, and cut everybody a check. If you’ve overspent, you can regain peace of mind which would help the economy by both injecting further capital into the banks and rejoining the consuming portion of the economy. If you don’t have any debts, then you get a big wad of cash for a down payment on a car or a home or to throw into the stock market. The only two caveats, really, are that you’d want to prohibit people from squirreling away more than 10% of it in savings, and that it’s complicated enough as to be virtually unfeasible. But it’s still an interesting idea.
DI: But we’d be federalizing debt, and basically borrowing from ourselves in the future.
B: But that’s what debt always does. Except this time we’d all benefit, and in this particular case, it’s important to include in your calculus the fact that our economy is depressed. A depressed economy is less productive- so we’re losing out on all the productivity that our economy is not making use of. So even though such a measure would certainly cost money, as long as the effects on the economy were positive enough that our economy recovered faster, there’s a good chance we’d make up whatever it cost for those stimulating funds in the first place. Last year tax revenue was a full $600 billion dollars short of what it would have been without the recession. If another stimulus cost us say $1.8 trillion, but we got back to booming three years earlier, then the net cost of the stimulus would be zero. And right now our recession resembles the Japanese recession, which lasted a full decade, so the odds of us coming out ahead on such a transaction are pretty good.
And even if our government ended up losing a little money in the long run, isn’t it worth it to get unemployment down? Obviously the degree is important. $1 trillion for a .1% decline in unemployment isn’t acceptable, but there’s a sweet spot where the cost of intervention is justified.
DI: We’ve talked about Paul Krugman a bit, off the record, but there was an item in his blog I wanted to ask about. Republicans have stated their intention to put global warming science, and particularly the recent “scandals” through the testimonial ringer. Thoughts?
B: I imagine they won’t. Because what most climate deniers, at least in the professional arena, know but don’t want their constituents to know is that they’re full of crap. The science is about as tight as any other science right now. The supposed scandals involve, at best, professional secrecy, and the reasoning for it is pretty understandable. You know how people say that statistics can mean almost anything? It doesn’t mean that truth is fungible, or that there aren’t any abstract, measurable facts, but that through statistics you can obscure the truth. The scientists involved were reticent to disclose all of their raw data because raw data can be misused by people with an economic or philosophical agenda. That’s it. Nothing sinister about it.
DI: And we would be remiss if we didn’t at least mention the Deficit Commission.
B: God. I can’t imagine why the commission was staffed the way it is. Its co-chairs are a small-government Republican and a Wall Street executive; predictably the commission’s suggestions consist almost exclusively of tax cuts for wealthy and corporate interests, and spending cuts for everyone else, including cuts in Social Security, Medicare and even defense. Deficit reduction is absolutely an important and serious issue, but if we’re going to pay back our debt, we all have to share the burden. It might mean the rich pay more in taxes, it might mean that some people see a reduction in benefits, but we can’t, as responsible citizens, expect somebody else to bear the brunt.
My taxes should increase. As a multibillionaire, I have a lower effective tax rate than anyone in my entire company; even the custodial staff pay a higher proportional tax rate than I do. That’s because everyone pays about a 15% tax rate for Social Security and Medicare only on the first $100,000. I pay 37% in federal income taxes from my salary, which is modest for a CEO, and only 15% from capital gains, which is where most of my income comes from. Even if the capital gains tax goes back to 28%, I’d still have an effective tax rate equal to someone earning $80,000 a year. And that’s stupid. I can afford higher tax rates because of my affluence. Someone earning that much is certainly better off than someone earning $25,000 or even $50,000, and their tax bracket should reflect that, but when I bring home degrees of magnitude more money annually it doesn’t make sense that I would be paying a lower tax rate.
DI: What do you think about the proposed increase in the retirement age?
B: Apparently, since the 70s, life expectancy for most workers has increased by a year, and if everyone is living a year longer, then delaying Social Security benefits by a year makes a certain degree of sense- especially if it helps stave off benefit cuts. It’s all a delicate balancing act. To create a responsible budget, it’s highly likely that we’ll have to endure some pain, but hopefully when we get to the light at the end of the tunnel we can do better; sharing our triumphs as well as our torments is what makes us a society- it’s what keeps us human.
DI: You lost.
B: The Democrats lost. I’m a liberal, and it’s certainly a blow to hopes for any kind of a liberal agenda, but honestly the liberal agenda in this country’s been a little haphazard.
I see a potential for hope- or maybe it’s just a silver lining I’m picking out of a cloudy sky. But the country needs two things; there are a lot of things we want and that we’d like, but for the country to continue to exist and thrive, it needs two things. In the short term, we need a stronger economy; in the long term, we need fiscal solvency.
Being a Keynesian, I think spending is the answer.
What’s strange about that is that cutting taxes without trimming spending is actually another form of government spending- it’s in fact raising future taxes. We can argue over the best ways to spend, but I think economic modeling pretty effectively shows where this kind of spending is most effective.
Lower income people are largely more likely to spend new money, because their immediate needs are likely more salient. If the government cuts me a check for a quarter of a million dollars, it goes right into my piggy bank, because I’ve already bought basically everything I want or need, and you can generalize this, statistically. The top 10% of earners take home 50% of the money, but account for only 20% of consumption.
I think a payroll tax holiday is the best of all possible solutions. And because of our trickle up economy, the wealthy will gain too, because their companies will sell more products, their stocks will do better; even property values will rebound somewhat.
I think now is the best possible time for it. Congress could pass the holiday in time for the holiday splurges; the fact that it’s passing out of a Democratically controlled Congress would marginally benefit them, but the recovery would largely happen with a divided government- and Republicans being the superior salespeople, I have no doubt they’d get at least their fair share of the kudos.
But that’s why I think it has the best chance of getting passed, and that’s only one factor. I also think that it has the best chance of having long-term benefits, too.
As an alternative, I think Jon Stewart had an excellent idea. Basically, if people are overly concerned with the proportion of their debt, the federal government can bail out the American people. Basically, figure out the average debt per person, and cut everybody a check. If you’ve overspent, you can regain peace of mind which would help the economy by both injecting further capital into the banks and rejoining the consuming portion of the economy. If you don’t have any debts, then you get a big wad of cash for a down payment on a car or a home or to throw into the stock market. The only two caveats, really, are that you’d want to prohibit people from squirreling away more than 10% of it in savings, and that it’s complicated enough as to be virtually unfeasible. But it’s still an interesting idea.
DI: But we’d be federalizing debt, and basically borrowing from ourselves in the future.
B: But that’s what debt always does. Except this time we’d all benefit, and in this particular case, it’s important to include in your calculus the fact that our economy is depressed. A depressed economy is less productive- so we’re losing out on all the productivity that our economy is not making use of. So even though such a measure would certainly cost money, as long as the effects on the economy were positive enough that our economy recovered faster, there’s a good chance we’d make up whatever it cost for those stimulating funds in the first place. Last year tax revenue was a full $600 billion dollars short of what it would have been without the recession. If another stimulus cost us say $1.8 trillion, but we got back to booming three years earlier, then the net cost of the stimulus would be zero. And right now our recession resembles the Japanese recession, which lasted a full decade, so the odds of us coming out ahead on such a transaction are pretty good.
And even if our government ended up losing a little money in the long run, isn’t it worth it to get unemployment down? Obviously the degree is important. $1 trillion for a .1% decline in unemployment isn’t acceptable, but there’s a sweet spot where the cost of intervention is justified.
DI: We’ve talked about Paul Krugman a bit, off the record, but there was an item in his blog I wanted to ask about. Republicans have stated their intention to put global warming science, and particularly the recent “scandals” through the testimonial ringer. Thoughts?
B: I imagine they won’t. Because what most climate deniers, at least in the professional arena, know but don’t want their constituents to know is that they’re full of crap. The science is about as tight as any other science right now. The supposed scandals involve, at best, professional secrecy, and the reasoning for it is pretty understandable. You know how people say that statistics can mean almost anything? It doesn’t mean that truth is fungible, or that there aren’t any abstract, measurable facts, but that through statistics you can obscure the truth. The scientists involved were reticent to disclose all of their raw data because raw data can be misused by people with an economic or philosophical agenda. That’s it. Nothing sinister about it.
DI: And we would be remiss if we didn’t at least mention the Deficit Commission.
B: God. I can’t imagine why the commission was staffed the way it is. Its co-chairs are a small-government Republican and a Wall Street executive; predictably the commission’s suggestions consist almost exclusively of tax cuts for wealthy and corporate interests, and spending cuts for everyone else, including cuts in Social Security, Medicare and even defense. Deficit reduction is absolutely an important and serious issue, but if we’re going to pay back our debt, we all have to share the burden. It might mean the rich pay more in taxes, it might mean that some people see a reduction in benefits, but we can’t, as responsible citizens, expect somebody else to bear the brunt.
My taxes should increase. As a multibillionaire, I have a lower effective tax rate than anyone in my entire company; even the custodial staff pay a higher proportional tax rate than I do. That’s because everyone pays about a 15% tax rate for Social Security and Medicare only on the first $100,000. I pay 37% in federal income taxes from my salary, which is modest for a CEO, and only 15% from capital gains, which is where most of my income comes from. Even if the capital gains tax goes back to 28%, I’d still have an effective tax rate equal to someone earning $80,000 a year. And that’s stupid. I can afford higher tax rates because of my affluence. Someone earning that much is certainly better off than someone earning $25,000 or even $50,000, and their tax bracket should reflect that, but when I bring home degrees of magnitude more money annually it doesn’t make sense that I would be paying a lower tax rate.
DI: What do you think about the proposed increase in the retirement age?
B: Apparently, since the 70s, life expectancy for most workers has increased by a year, and if everyone is living a year longer, then delaying Social Security benefits by a year makes a certain degree of sense- especially if it helps stave off benefit cuts. It’s all a delicate balancing act. To create a responsible budget, it’s highly likely that we’ll have to endure some pain, but hopefully when we get to the light at the end of the tunnel we can do better; sharing our triumphs as well as our torments is what makes us a society- it’s what keeps us human.
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