Month: May 2013

A Massachusetts state representative, Cory Atkins, recently proposed adding a sales tax on aircraft in Massachusetts. Neighboring states either don’t have sales tax at all (New Hampshire) or mostly exempt aircraft (e.g., Connecticut). It isn’t surprising that a politician would dream of taxing a $60 million Gulfstream at 6.25 percent and spending the resultant $3.75 million on worthy projects supervised by wise bureaucrats (cf. the Big Dig, which could have been fully funded with sales tax revenues from just 3,893 Gulfstream G-650s (8 built so far says Wikipedia)).

What is surprising about this proposed new tax is that it is put forward by a representative from a town, Concord, partly occupied by an airport, Hanscom Field. Arguably the town would be better off if the airport were shut down and the land converted to McMansions paying property tax, but a shut down is not possible due to the fact that the airport is used by the adjacent Hanscom Air Force Base and the airport is owned by Massport, which would not cede its authority and revenue source to Concord. The airport generates a lot of jobs for people involved in hangaring airplanes, piloting them, fixing them, and fueling them. A tax on airplanes would result in hangar, repair, pilot, and fuel jobs moving to Nashua, New Hampshire, a 10-minute flight away. Why would a politician want this for the town that she represents?

One obvious argument would be to minimize noise from those Gulfstreams. But if the Gulfstream lives in Nashua, along with its pilots, flight attendants, fuelers, mechanics, and hangar crew, it will need to perform twice as many operations at Hanscom Field to get a passenger off to Teterboro, Dulles, or Palm Beach. Instead of landing and taxiing to its hangar, the plane will taxi, unload, and then noisily depart for its New Hampshire home.

I’m not surprised that a politician would propose a new tax but wouldn’t one expect it to come from a politician whose district did not include airport-related businesses and employees? Even the most peace-loving Congressmen nearly always support more military spending in their own district. Could it be the one-party nature of Massachusetts politics that accounts for Ms. Atkins’s war on Hanscom Field?

Folks:

I’m planning a party to celebrate an immigrant’s recent acquisition of U.S. citizenship. Unlike the red carpet that our government rolled out for the Tsarnaev family, this Boston-area immigrant had to pay for an MBA from an Ivy League university and hand over roughly 50 percent of her income in federal, state, and local taxes over the 11 years since graduation before getting the citizenship that came so easily to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (a failing student in debt to the taxpayer-subsidized University of Massachusetts, who had previously cost Cambridge taxpayers approximately $26,000 per year as a K-12 student (given that the older Tsarnaev brother was collecting various welfare benefits in Massachusetts and was also a Cambridge Public School student, my immigrant friend was also paying for our hospitality to the Tsarnaevs)).

By accepting U.S. citizenship, my immigrant friend says goodbye to the possibility of returning to her native Russia and paying income tax at a 13 percent rate. She also says goodbye to the possibility of living tax-free in a country such as Monaco and to the possibility of living for a smallish annual fee in a country such as Switzerland. She is therefore adopting a share of our debt. I’ve got a baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie theme already planned for the core of the party but am stumped as to what to get to indicate her shouldering of our debt burden.

I thought briefly about getting a huge quantity of jelly beans, one for every dollar that she will have to pay back. But then I got stuck on the question of how many jelly beans to buy. http://www.usdebtclock.org/ says that debt per American (citizen or resident?) is $53,281. The JellyBelly FAQ says that there are 400 jelly beans in a pound, so that would be 133 lbs. of jelly beans. But not every resident pays taxes to service the debt. Some are too young, some are too old, some are unemployed, some are disabled, etc. The debt clock tries to adjust for that by showing “debt per taxpayer” (maybe misleading because people who don’t pay income tax still pay a lot of other taxes, e.g., property tax, sales tax, gas tax) of $148,136. What about the fact that my friend has an Ivy League MBA? Her income is higher than average and likely to remain that way. Furthermore, the Obama Administration and Congress are constantly coming up with new ways to “tax the rich”. My immigrant friend is likely to bump up against the $250,000 “you are now a rich person” threshold in a lot of future years. Should her share then be considered closer to $1 million?

We also have to consider her age, 37. She’s in her prime earning years yet by the time she turns 65 it seems unlikely that Medicare and Social Security will exist in their current forms (maybe they will be “means-tested” so that people who had higher incomes during their working lives won’t get any benefits). Does the fact that she is unlikely ever to receive these valuable government handouts mean that her share of the debt is higher? Since none of her tax payments will ever turn into checks and health care payments in her old age, unlike a lot of American taxpayers

Finally…. since the debt is growing, not shrinking, perhaps her share of the debt is actually $0. If it is never going to be paid back then nobody needs to shoulder the burden of repayment.

So… comments from readers would be appreciated. Question 1: What is the proper way to calculate the share of our national debt being taken on by a new citizen, age 37 and with a high income? Question 2: What is a fun but not crazy expensive or bulky way to symbolize this quantity at a party?

One of my pet theories, supported primarily by the fact that housing prices in Cambridge, Boston, and Brookline remained high while the farther-out suburbs of Boston have never recovered from their 2005-6 peaks, is that as the transportation system in the U.S. collapses due to congestion, people who value their time at more than $5 per hour will abandon the suburbs. Anecdotally this is supported by reports from my friends who are regular commuters: “The reverse commute is now just as bad as the standard commute”; “What took 35 minutes in 2010 now takes 1:15”; “I used to have to get to the Weston tolls by 6:55 to avoid Mass Pike traffic but now I have to be there by 6:40.”

Today’s New York Times carries a story about how suburban poverty in the New York City metro area is growing while the central cities are “prospering.”

The typical house in a Boston suburb was built between 1950 and 1975, when the highways were new and the commute time was a predictable 20-30 minutes. During peak traffic periods, which now may include weekends, what had been a 20-30 minute trip is now a 45-150 minute trip and there is no way to predict which end of the 45-150-minute spectrum will prevail on any given day. Travel times get longer every year as car ownership and use increases. What’s the value of a house from which it might take hours to get anywhere?

What do readers think? Are the suburbs finished because we’ve melted down our transportation system? Or will Google’s computer-augmented cars save the suburbs by making much more efficient use of existing roads? (And if we haven’t mustered the political will to establish congestion pricing or to tax older high pollution cars so that people have an incentive to buy cleaner new cars, how will we ever muster the political will to mandate semi-automatic cars that can cluster efficiently on highways?)

A friend has a new Private pilot certificate. He is planning a 4-hour round-trip helicopter journey, in one day, to pick up his daughter from college. With him and his daughter on board there will be two empty seats in the machine on the way back. I encouraged him to take a junior flight instructor, who would be anxious to add hours to his or her logbook, along for the ride. Here’s a slightly edited version of my follow-up email explaining the advice (from a 4000-hour pilot with an ATP certificate):

Though I was not concerned about your ability to do the trip safely, I personally try to offer a two-pilot crew to any passenger if I am able to do so. That is really the cornerstone of airline safety. Let’s assume that a pilot makes a serious mistake once every 100 hours. Sufficient numbers of these mistakes are unrecoverable that we have the accident rate in R44s that we have (http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/11nall.pdf says it is between 6 and 7 per 100,000 hours for both non-commercial helicopters and airplanes). If you have two pilots and the mistakes are not correlated, the probably of both pilots making a mistake during the same hour is very low (1 in 10,000 hours). So in theory the chance of an accident should be 100X lower. In practice http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safetystudies/SS0101.html makes it seem that the risk of an accident is about 24X lower in FAR 121 operations [scheduled airline; always two pilots] than for GA [generation aviation]. So there are some things that apparently aren’t uncorrelated or due to the pilots. But still I can think of a lot of times when a copilot has helped me and/or pointed out a mistake.

Canon today finally announced the availability of a long-awaited telephoto lens. It is a standard 200-400mm f/4 lens with a new wrinkle: built-in 1.4X teleconverter. Demonstrating the value of packaging, a 1.4X teleconverter from Canon costs $450, a likely-very-comparable Nikon 200-400/4 lens costs $6750, and the combination of the two… $11,800 (product page). The lens weighs 8 lbs., enabling the parent to do some strength training while the child is building aerobic capacity. Similar Canon lenses typically come in their own suitcase. For this one Canon shows an accessory suitcase for the reasonable price of $910 (the B&H web site indicates that the suitcase is included; the Canon site is ambiguous).

If you were willing to monkey with bayonetting a teleconverter on and off the lens every now and then, the price of this Canon lens would instead buy you a Nikon D800 with superior image quality to any Canon body, a Nikon 200-400/4, a Nikon teleconverter, and a full complement of professional Nikon lenses at focal lengths shorter than 200mm. But it would be crazy to let rational thought interfere with the purchase of a new photography tool!

More: buy the lens at Amazon.

[Note: to my Canon-owning friends who ask me about a more reasonably priced lens for kids’ sports photography I generally recommend the Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6L, though I myself do not own one (I have a 70-200/2.8 and a 300/4, among other lenses that overlap this range).]

A friend sent me the New York Times’s “buy versus rent” calculation page. The analysis shows that you can save a bit of money buying rather than renting if you are sure that you will stay in the house for five years. The potential savings are $1743 per year in a $172,000 house held for six years. I think the calculator is flawed, though, in that it doesn’t factor in the time that homeowners spend on trips to Home Depot, reading Consumer Reports, tweaking things in the house with hand tools, etc. It seems reasonable to me to budget at least 24 days per year (2 days per month) of effort that homeowners put in compared to renters, either because they are doing something that a landlord and his/her maintenance crew would do or because they are doing something that simply doesn’t get done in a rental. A person who owns a $172,000 house might have the potential to earn $20 per hour after taxes. Figuring an 8-hour day that’s $3840 in personal labor that the homeowner puts in. Now the house has to be held for 14 years to break even with the rental.

The selling costs of the house don’t include the potential for it to be vacant for six months, with the former owner paying about $7000 in rent somewhere else. That means the house has to be held for 15 years to break even.

Then consider the reduced flexibility of the homeowner. He or she may be spending more time commuting because it was too expensive/burdensome to move after taking a new job within the same general area (see “The American Dream or the American Delusion”, a working paper from University of Pennsylvania where the author found that “female homeowners spend less time on enjoyable activities, such as active leisure). He or she may turn down a better job in another city. If homeowners are commuting 20 additional minutes per day, that’s about 83 additional hours per year, $1666 at $20 per hour. Now the house has to be held for 19 years. If the homeowner waffles for five years before moving to a state with better economic opportunity (think Michigan to Texas), giving up $5000 per year in income, the $25,000 takes another three years to recover. Now the house has to be held for 22 years.

Homeowners in states with big unfunded pension liabilities (report), which is to say nearly all states unless investment returns end up being 8 percent/year for the next 50 years, could find themselves with dramatically higher property taxes over the required 20-year holding period. Renters will feel the property tax pain too, albeit indirectly, but will have the flexibility to escape. I’m not sure how to factor in state/local insolvency and accompanying property tax risk.

Obviously if you love being a homeowner, enjoy trips to Home Depot more than playing soccer or going to movies with your kids and friends, and are very picky about wall colors and appliances, it might make sense to buy. But I don’t see how it can be justified on rational economic grounds, contrary to the rosy “just hold it for six years” picture painted by the New York Times.

[Disclaimer: I am a homeowner, but I don’t think that it has saved me money or made me happier. I did it mostly because of a dog (who ended up making me happier and making me a lot of money too since he spurred me to start my own company).]

An immigrant friend of mine was surprised to learn that my mother, holder of two degrees from Harvard University, was a stay-at-home mother and that, moreover, we had a full-time housekeeper. “How could you afford it on just your father’s salary?” she asked, not having experienced American life in the 1960s and early 1970s. My father worked as an economist for the federal government (not nearly as lucrative back then as it is now). Neither of my parents had any family money. So how did we do it?

I pointed out that there wasn’t much to buy back then. We couldn’t buy cable TV. We couldn’t buy mobile phones or personal computers. We had just one car, like most other American families. My dad took the bus to work. We took the bus to school. In any case, even if one wanted to splurge on a car, the most expensive cars available (e.g., Cadillac) were not more than twice as expensive as the average car (compare to today when most cities have dealers selling cars that cost 5-10X the average car’s price). Ordinary families did not aspire to live in 5000 square foot houses.

How about the housekeeper? “Her husband didn’t work, so she really had no choice but to work,” I replied. “Though her blood pressure was high and she developed some health problems later.” In thinking about it I realized that she would not have been a member of 2013’s American workforce. Both she and her husband would have qualified for disability benefits. So a big part of the answer for why our middle class household could afford a housekeeper was that we did not have to compete with the federal government for our housekeeper’s labor.

I attended an interesting talk yesterday at MIT. Markus Klute talked about finding the Higgs boson and establishing its mass using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Klute mentioned that the Higgs boson would have been found during the Clinton Administration if not for the 1993 cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, whose Texas-sized dimensions would have enabled much higher energies than anything foreseeable in the LHC. A big challenge in making better accelerators, aside from physical size, remains the fabrication of the superconducting cables. Now that the Standard Model has been filled in, what’s the point of an experiment bigger and higher energy than the existing LHC? Professor Klute says that maybe we will be able to figure out Dark Matter/Energy.

[Pressed by an audience member to explain how funding these huge particle physics experiments is beneficial to an economy, Professor Klute was forced to resort to arguing that drawing really smart people (i.e., physicists) to a country would help that country when they quit to do other stuff (e.g., run the hedge funds and trading departments within investment banks that periodically melt down and require torrents of taxpayer cash). Certainly there does not seem to be an immediate market for Dark Energy. Comments from readers would be welcome if anyone can think of something that you can buy today that depends on understanding anything smaller than protons, neutrons, and electrons. Certain kinds of scanners for medical imaging? For finding radioactive material inside shipping containers? What?]

Hardly anybody knows anything about why some workers succeed more than others. This US News article describes research that found that, among college graduates, left-handed men earned 20 percent more than right-handed men (and as noted below (Ioannidis), this result is itself probably false). Despite this confusion Sheryl Sandberg and Nell Scovell, with Lean In, attempt to tell a large and diverse group of workers, i.e., women, how to get further ahead. In giving this advice Sandberg draws heavily from her personal experience. However, based on my interviews with members of the Harvard economics faculty, who were scientifically sampled based on dog ownership and membership in an elite 10:30 pm dog play group, Sandberg is an atypical individual. Out of the Class of 1991 she is fondly remembered more than 20 years later for her unique talents, work ethic, and personal charm. Few of us would expect to enter the NBA on the basis of learning from Michael Jordan’s personal stories.

In most of the book Sandberg is an exponent of Silicon Valley Socialism. On page 23 she decries the fact that “Of all the industrialized nations in the world, the United States is the only one without a paid maternity leave policy.” (There is no consideration of whether or not the federal government can constitutionally impose such a regulation on businesses that operate within a single state.) When government cannot impose right-thinking via new regulations it must be imposed by our social and intellectual superiors bullying us: “Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders” (p50).

On page 24, however, Sandberg takes up the traditional conservative position of blaming Hollywood: “We need more portrayals of women as competent professionals and happy mothers. The current negative images [of working mothers] may make us laugh, but they also make women unnecessarily fearful by presenting life’s challenges as insurmountable.”

At least one chapter is based on some confusion regarding government protocol (p27). Treasury Secretary Geithner shows up to a meeting at Facebook and his four staffers, all women, don’t want to sit at the table with their boss. Sandberg assumes that they are sitting on the sidelines not because they are staffers (who don’t typically sit at the same table as cabinet secretaries) but because they are women. Sandberg and Scovell title a whole chapter “Sit at the Table.” The rest of the chapter contains heavily footnoted observations about how men and women supposedly behave in general. Men overestimate their capabilities, qualifications, and performance. Women may underestimate these things. Women don’t take criticism well. Presumably some psychologists did reach these conclusions at some level of statistical significance, but as John Ioannidis notes, “Most Published Research Findings are False.” Sandberg and Scovell heavily footnote their book, but without ever acknowledging that a semester’s effort by a tenure-hungry psychologist or sociologist may not be as reliable as results from a team at CERN (and even some of those have been wrong).

Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David, a neurosurgeon whom Sandberg admires because currently “he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty”, was also a Harvard undergrad. He takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success is attributed to the general confidence of men. Sandberg does not consider how likely it is that her brother’s confidence would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

Sandberg and Scovell cite a significant-sounding CMU study in which 57 percent of male master’s graduates tried to negotiate for a higher starting salary while only 7 percent of female graduates did (p45; Sandberg does not discuss “Negotiation for Starting Salary: Antecedents and Outcomes Among Recent College Graduates” by O’Shea and Bush, 2002, which found that “Women [among graduates with a business degree] were no less likely to engage in negotiation than men, and experienced similar success as a result of their efforts.” (“success” being a $1500 pay raise, an amount that Sandberg earns every 13 seconds that she is at work)). Sandberg points out a useful strategy for a woman who is being hired for a job that involves negotiation: tell the potential boss that he or she should expect to see some good negotiation skills right there and then (p46).

Mark Zuckerberg, smart enough to drop out of Harvard, gives Sandberg some useful-sounding advice: “When you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress.” (p51)

We get some good advice on how to apply for an important job from Lori Goler. She went to Sandberg at Facebook and asked “What is your biggest problem and how can I solve it?” (p52)

Sandberg’s history of Facebook seems to have been informed by “The Social Network” movie. On page 54 she refers to Mark Zuckerberg as having “famously crashed” the Harvard computer network with his little site full of still photos. In my review of the movie back in 2010, I noted that this was not likely given that the Harvard network at the time was used for physics data sets and streaming video.

Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO at the time, gives Sandberg some interesting career advice: “Only one criterion mattered when picking a job–fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them.” (p58)

Sandberg did a bit of her own psychology research, tracking the number of men versus women who were interested in leaving the security of Google to follow her to Facebook. It turned out that the women were more risk-averse and waited until Facebook was larger before seeking Sandberg out. (p61) Sandberg says that it is bad to be risk-averse but she has not analyzed the risk-adjusted return to the different career choices of men and women. With the benefit of hindsight it sure seems dumb that these women did not quit their safe jobs at Google to join the sure-to-grow Facebook, but at the time Groupon probably looked just as good as Facebook. If taking big risks and using the benefit of hindsight is so sensible, everyone invested in the S&P 500 is stupid. It would have been so easy for them to have put all of their money into the IPOs of Microsoft, Apple, and Google and earned 80 percent ROI instead of 3-8 percent (source).

Sandberg identifies the same tendencies for underlings in a bureaucracy to hold their tongues that Max Weber noticed 100+ years ago (p85; no reference to Weber). She offers some practical advice for dealing with the problem of the boss not getting frank feedback on page 86: ostentatiously reward people who breach etiquette by speaking uncomfortable truths to higher-ups.

Sandberg advises women to take a very challenging exciting demanding job just before getting pregnant (p95). That way, when the baby arrives, the temptation to quit work altogether won’t be so tempting. [Sandberg says that this advice is for those women who find that “pregnancy does not slow them down at all, but rather serves to focus them and provides a firm deadline to work toward.” She herself finds pregnancy “very difficult” and had to turn down a demanding new job that would have coincided with her second pregnancy.] Sandberg encourages (p102) women to work even if their after-tax salary (and the book was written before the recent round of tax increases!) is not much larger than the cost of child care (and the book was written before the latest round of day care/nanny inflation). Sandberg’s argument is that for executive-track women the cost of being out of the workforce for a few years is devastating so they should stay at work, despite the minimal net after-tax compensation (and keep kids parked in day care), so that their future salaries will be higher.

I covered Sandberg’s simple formula for marital happiness in an earlier blog post. Sandberg recounts that she herself had a first marriage that ended in divorce and left her traumatized for several years, unwilling to take an important government job because she would have had to live in Washington, D.C. where her ex-husband was wandering about. [The divorce seems to have happened when Sandberg and her husband were both in their 20s, with minimal assets and no children, so the trauma was due to disappointment rather than to litigation over child custody and the millions of dollars of tax-free cash that a plaintiff parent who wins custody can enjoy when the defendant parent has money; just imagine how incensed Sandberg would be if she had to turn over half of her $845 million/year salary as alimony!]. Her second marriage has worked out a lot better but it is unclear that her current husband does anything special with or for the kids: “Dave pays bills, handles our finances, provides tech support. I schedule the kids’ activities, make sure there is food in the fridge, plan the birthday parties.” (It seems that neither parent cleans the house, cooks the food, or is involuntarily hands-on with the kids.)

Sandberg devotes a chapter, “The Myth of Doing It All”, to telling women that they don’t need to work so many hours and they don’t need to care for their children so many hours. On page 136 she cites a study finding that children are just as well off being cared for by someone other than the mother. (I.e., according to the PhD psychologists Sandberg’s kids are learning just as much from a $12/hour day care center employee as they could have from their Harvard-educated parents. Sandberg does not discuss the research (a sampling) that finds that children with involved fathers do better on a wide variety of measures, including intelligence tests, before suggesting that children will be unharmed from less involvement by both parents.) It would be difficult to apply the chapter in practice, though. Sandberg says to cut back on working hours and on taking care of kids, but not exactly how to do it. Insist on shorter meetings with the distribution of a pre-meeting agenda? Delegate more to recent college grads and make them do the 80-hour weeks? Park the children in front of 500 channels of TV? Buy an Xbox 720 and PS4 for the kids? Sandberg doesn’t say.

The book becomes hard to understand as Sandberg moves from descriptive to prescriptive. On page 168 she talks about how one of the first women U.S. Navy submarine officers was welcomed by the men on the fancy boats but resented by Navy wives. On page 169, however, she talks about how the world will be a better place for women when more of their sisters are in power. Sandberg’s personal experience, however, contradicts this. She says that she has never worked for a woman. All of the mentors and sponsors she describes are men. When she was 27 years old, a man hired her to be Chief of Staff for the United States Secretary of the Treasury. Would a woman have been willing to hire her for the same job at age 17?

That completes my chapter-by-chapter review of the book. Time for some overall comments….

Short list of people you need to meet to be in Sandberg’s league: Larry Summers (the former United States Secretary of the Treasury was Sandberg’s thesis advisor at Harvard and is her “longtime mentor”, page 17 (Sandberg was Summers’s chief of staff in Washington, p56)); Tim Geithner (United States Secretary of the Treasury at the time that he visited Sandberg at Facebook, page 27); Meg Whitman (eBay CEO, p57); the Google founders and CEO (p57-58); Robert Rubin (genius who got Congress and Bill Clinton to repeal Glass-Steagall, then left government to collect $126 million from Citigroup, the primary beneficiary of the repeal, page 81); Howard Schultz (Starbucks founder/CEO, fellow board member of Starbucks with Sandberg, p91); Gloria Steinem

The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks identifies “Second System Syndrome” as a problem that can doom projects to multi-year delays and huge cost overruns (though not enough to sink a near-monopoly like IBM was in the 1960s). Software companies that have a successful “first system” out on the market write down a comprehensive list of everything that could be improved, then promise to fix all of those identified problems with a “second system”.

Terrafugia, the MIT spinoff company that has been struggling to get a flying car (a.k.a. “roadable aircraft” a.k.a. “do you want to get a door ding at Walmart in your $280,000 airplane”?) into the market has now announced the TF-X, which will solve all known problems with light airplanes, four-seat automobiles, and light helicopters. So the “second system” has been announced some years before the “first system” is likely to get into the hands of customers.

[I’m a little bit skeptical of the value of a flying car versus legacy airplanes. I flew a Cirrus SR20 to Indiana, Pennsylvania last weekend. At 150 knots the trip seemed endless, nearly three hours of flight time on the way back due to a 15-knot headwind. The purpose of the trip was to visit my cousin Olivia, who was performing (fantastically I might add!) in an Indiana University of Pennsylvania production of Lysistrata. Olivia is just a freshman and does not have a car. But guess what her best friend has… a car! So they picked me up at the airport, a five-minute drive from campus. Later in the afternoon Olivia’s mom, my cousin Lynn, showed up in… a car. So I now had two chauffeur-driven cars in which to ride. Lynn happily drove me to the airport the next morning. My ground experience would have been worse if I’d had to drive the Cirrus, alone, to the university and then the Comfort Inn. And the experience of going back to Boston at 75 knots of ground speed in a Terrafugia would have been horrific. The 2005 Cirrus that I flew, with its Avidyne glass panel and slightly crummy autopilot, is worth about $120,000, less than half the cost of a new Terrafugia and therefore insurable at a much lower annual rate.]