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A passionate Hillary Clinton supporter posted “Female Trump Supporters Don’t Really Care About His Sexism” to his Facebook status with some re-posted additions from a like-minded friend. Here was some of the stuff that his friend had added and with which my friend was apparently agreeing:

Sandy: They are Evangelical Christians who do not believe that they are worth anything more than what a man tells them they are. Religion is why there are so many women who follow and not lead in church. They are indoctrinated into believing that a woman is never to lead a man.

Patsy: Speaking as someone raised in the South-They are used to a loud mouth bigot alpha male to run their families and thought process for them and so they respond very well to Trump….he is Tennessee Williams “Big Daddy” for many of the Trumpettes.

Denise: Until he walks the gauntlet next to them and personally deconstructs their looks….You’re too fat, You look too old, You’re not tall enough, You’re too flat-chested……then watch them change their minds when it becomes personal. For the dumb ones…that’s what it takes.

I questioned whether he, a persistently vocal male feminist, hadn’t just posted an article “asserting, essentially, that millions of American women are too stupid to perceive their self-interest.” The ensuing exchange:

Him: Not quite the way I would word it. I’d say that too many women are raised in a misogynistic culture that undermines their egos and their potential, and knowing nothing else, never have the opportunity to appreciate or grow into their best selves. I am absolutely NOT insulting their intelligence or their choices.

Me: Perhaps they need a man like yourself to guide them then? Show them how to think and vote?

His friend:I think you’re twisting the logic – [He] said it best – not growing up in an environment that allows them to achieve their full potential as people/citizens/workers. It’s blatantly obvious in countries with strict religious doctrines that subordinate women – just not as severe with evangelicals here.

Background on this Trump-hating Clinton supporter: he works for the federal government in a job that requires U.S. citizenship and a tech PhD, so his job is safe from both immigrants (no citizenship) and children of the next batch of immigrants (will not reach PhD age before he retires).

Related:

• the Feminism section within the Rationale chapter of Real World Divorce, with university professors explaining how a woman withdrawing from the labor market and living off child support profits is a recognizably “feminist” goal

 

 

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Americans still spend a lot of time fighting each other regarding aircraft (mostly airplane) noise near airports (e.g., see China building 66 airports in the next five years; Californians work to close a busy airport). I’m wondering if it will turn out that technology was making the fight irrelevant. The buzzing family airplanes and trainers could soon be replaced with quiet all-electric planes (see the Airbus E-Fan, for example, or the Pipistrel Alpha Electro). Larger jet-powered airplanes may become considerably quieter with technologies such as geared turbofans. (Economist). As the U.S. population grows (due to immigration and children of immigrants) perhaps there will be a combination of more air travel and more houses and apartments crammed close to airports. However, it seems as though this trend toward a larger population is more gradual than the trend toward electric light planes and quieter jets.

Readers: What do you think? Are these airport noise fights a bit like a circa 1900 fight about horse-drawn carriages?

Related:

• analysis of the extent to which noise complaints are made by a handful of neighbors (one household in northwest D.C. accounted for 78 percent of the noise complaints regarding KDCA (Reagan National))

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Donald Trump has what he calls a “child care plan” (in reality it is merely an “idea” since Trump is not a member of Congress and it is Congress that writes the tax laws). The crux of it seems to be that a family with N children can deduct N*(average cost of day care) each year from income.

At first glance this looks sort of reasonable. Businesses pay tax on their profits, not on their revenues. If you consider a parent’s W-2 job as revenue then the cost to park children in day care is a business expense and the appropriate thing to tax is the difference (profit).

But on the other hand, where does this stop? A person who decides not to work won’t have a daily commute and can get rid of the car. So shouldn’t the cost of one car per working adult in a household be deductible? A person who decides not to work will have time to cook meals from scratch using inexpensive ingredients such as lentils and potatoes. So shouldn’t the cost of 10 restaurant meals per week be deductible (5 individual lunches plus 5 family dinners that the working parent wouldn’t have had time to cook)?

Currently there are a lot of Americans who are in a greater-than-100-percent tax bracket due to (a) various programs, such as public housing, that are means-tested, and (b) the fact that many expenses associated with working are not deductible. (See Book Review: The Redistribution Recession for more on this subject.) The declining labor force participation rate suggests that quite a few Americans have figured out that it is not economically rational to work (check Singapore’s stats going back to 1990, especially for prime-age males, to see what happens under a system in which it does make sense for the average person to work).

Perhaps Trump’s idea actually makes some sense (this sentence alone would be enough to get me defriended on Facebook!).

When we dig deeper, though, it gets stranger. The web site says “Mr. Trump’s plan will ensure stay-at-home parents will receive the same tax deduction as working parents, offering compensation for the job they’re already doing, and allowing them to choose the child care scenario that’s in their best interest.” Thus this begins to look like a straight-up “pay people to have kids” plan. (See When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?) It is no longer about taxing people on net income rather than gross income.

As befits a person of, um, rather advanced years, Trump’s plan seems to reflect an obsolete view of American society. Pew says that only a minority of today’s American children live “in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage.” How does Trump’s plan interface with the American divorce, custody, and child support industry? Consider the Massachusetts resident who has obtained custody of three children with three different co-parents, each of whom earns $250,000 per year. The revenue yield from the three kids is a minimum of $40,000 per year under the child support guidelines plus payment of any actual kid-related expenses, such as day care. Congress enacts the new Trump idea. If consistent with current child-related federal tax deductions, the person who gets hold of the child can take the deductions even if all of the money is coming from someone else and the child is a cashflow-positive asset. Day care in Massachusetts is kind of expensive compared to the national average so perhaps the parent here gets $12,000 per year per child as a deduction? So in addition to the $120,000 per year in tax-free child support and any reimbursements for actual expenses, the successful child support plaintiff in Massachusetts now has an extra $36,000 per year in tax deductions. So this person can now earn perhaps $50,000 per year tax-free (total tax-free income now of $170,000 per year, equivalent to $350,000 per year in pre-tax income for a childless American under likely future tax rates)? If we add this to the existing American family law system under which it is more lucrative to have a one-night sexual encounter with a high-income person than a long-term marriage to a medium-income person, will this accelerate the trend away from two-parent households for children?

A final question is why this makes sense for older children. Consider a 17-year-old who is in a public high school and working an after-school job sufficient to pay for clothing, entertainment, etc. The “child” is not costing the parent or parents any money yet is generating a tax deduction the same as a 4-year-old who needs to be in day care? Trump doesn’t say anything about reducing the deduction when children enter public school and are cared for 7 hours per day at taxpayer expense.

Readers: What do you think? Does this plan make any economic sense or it is just a way to pander to voters with children?

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I wrote a “nice but not $100,000+ nice” review of the Tesla X. Back in 2003 I wondered why cars weren’t smart enough to prevent the death of a child or dog locked in on a hot day:

In an age where we spend infinite money and effort on high-tech cures that save a few lives it is a shame to see kids dying for want of a few lines of software and a $50 802.11 base station.

It seems that, 13 years later, Tesla has written the software. “Tesla cars have a new feature that could save your dog’s life” says

With it’s just-released 8.0 software update, Tesla has brought an innovation to the auto industry that enables just that. It’s called “Cabin Overheat Protection.” … “In an industry-first safety measure, we’re also introducing Cabin Overheat Protect, focused on child (and pet) safety,” Tesla said in a statement. “This feature keeps the car at a safe temperature for hours, even when the car is off. This feature is only made possible by an electric vehicle with Tesla’s uniquely large battery packs.”

I guess it is easy to be “industry-first” when your peers can’t or won’t write the most obvious computer programs. So maybe by the time the rest of the automakers pile into the all-electric market it will in fact be too late.

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“Inside corporate America’s stand against transgender discrimination” (Guardian) says that the one thing nearly all American companies can agree on, aside from wishing that they’d chosen Ireland, Estonia, or Singapore as a corporate home, is that it makes sense to take a break from manufacturing widgets to talk about bathroom and locker room choice in North Carolina.

Politically incorrect commenters (a.k.a. “haters”) sometimes complain that, given the small percentage of the population that is transgender, too much attention is devoted to this topic. I’m wondering if they’ve got this exactly backwards. Perhaps the vogue for transgender rights advocacy can be directly attributed to the small percentage of transgender individuals.

Suppose that a company loudly advocates for the rights of black Americans to earn, on average, the same pay as white Americans. Now all of a sudden people can ask “well, what percentage of your own employees are black and how much do they earn?” (or write articles such as “Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate“) People can go to Wikipedia and learn that roughly 13 percent of Americans are identified as black by the U.S. Census Bureau. Conveniently “the United States Census Bureau and other keepers of official records do not ask about gender identity” (nytimes). So a company can’t be attacked for not having a representative population of employees with respect to transgenderism.

This may be true for individuals. A Massachusetts resident who claims to love and advocate for black Americans could be asked “Census data show that 8.4 percent of your neighbors are black; are 8.4 percent of your friends black?” (Aviation community member response: “Some of my best friends are extremely rich black people.”) Yet a person who signals virtue by claiming to care about the transgendered need not try to find a specific number of transgender friends.

Readers: What do you think? Will it be simpler, especially for a company, to advocate for the rights of a group for which no data exist?

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One thing that investors could agree on back in the 1990s was that grocery shopping would be mostly online by now. Who would want to go to the effort of driving to the store and lugging bags into the house if it could all be done in a browser? (And that was before they charged you 5 or 10 cents for each bag!)

Except for perhaps Donald Trump’s hypothetical 400 lb. computer expert, online grocery shopping turned out not to be a lifestyle-changer (two percent U.S. market share in 2016). I’m wondering if this is because it is actually easier to browse amongst the shelves of a physical store than to choose via menus. If you don’t know exactly what you want for dinner it turns out to be easier to go to the store.

Could practical virtual reality systems change this? Run through the aisles virtually. Grab virtual stuff off the shelves effortlessly. Have the physical counterparts show up a few hours later.

Readers: What do you think?

[Separately, a shift to online grocery shopping would add some challenge to what lawyers told us was a standard procedure used by child support plaintiffs in Massachusetts. To bolster an argument for above-guidelines child support profits, a plaintiff will get either a gift card (to be stockpiled for post-trial use) or cashback during every visit to a physical grocery store. The bank statements then show an extra $100 or $200 per week in spending. This can be helpful when trying to obtain more than $40,000 per year (the post-tax guideline amount corresponding to a pre-tax income of $250,000) and/or when trying to get a judge to use discretion to award a larger-than-guideline fraction of a defendant’s income.]

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My friends on Facebook are pointing to Warren Buffett’s release of his tax returns (nytimes) as (1) proof that Donald Trump was lying when he said that Buffett avoids taxes, and (2) proof that Buffett, a Hillary Clinton supporter, is doing his fair share to keep the government’s cash bonfire going. Buffett reported an income of $11.6 million and taxes paid of $1.85 million. None of my friends, in celebrating this data release, questioned how the world’s third-richest person had the same income as a successful dermatologist (e.g., one who owns a laser hair removal clinic).

Let’s put this tax payment into context. Forbes says Buffett has $65 billion. Thus $1.85 million is 1/35135th of his total wealth. That’s equivalent to a millionaire paying $28 in tax, e.g., a portion of the sales tax on a new iPhone, as her entire tax for the year.

Perhaps you are thinking that Berkshire Hathaway pays corporate taxes on its income and therefore that Buffett pays additional federal taxes indirectly? Barron’s says no:

HOW MUCH TAX is Warren Buffett able to avoid by fixing Berkshire’s dividend at zero? The dividend yield of the Standard & Poor’s 500 is about 2%. The price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is about 18. Thus, for the S&P 500, approximately 30% of earnings are paid out to shareholders. These dividends are taxable at a current maximum rate of 23.8%.

If Berkshire followed the average of the S&P 500, it would have paid out about $6 billion in dividends in 2014, and Buffett’s share would have been about $1.2 billion.

FOR 2014, BERKSHIRE ITSELF recorded a provision for $7.9 billion in taxes, most of which was “deferred.” In fact Berkshire, like many other companies, is able to defer much of its taxes, in its case $61 billion. This is money it acknowledges it owes the government but has yet to pay.

Deferred tax liabilities are the difference between taxes that will come due in the future and what the company owes today. Accounting rules require this difference to be recognized as a liability, but it ultimately acts as a sort of “float” that the government allows companies in the midst of an acquisition—which Berkshire almost always is.

In 2012, the year before it was acquired for $28 billion by Berkshire (and a Brazilian partner), H.J. Heinz paid more than $600 million in dividends. Those dividends were taxed and provided revenue to the U.S. Treasury. After the acquisition, the dividends stopped. Tax revenue from those dividends stopped.

In 2010, the year before it was acquired by Berkshire for $9 billion, Lubrizol paid $90 million in dividends. After the acquisition, the dividends stopped, as did tax revenue on the dividends.

In 2009, the year before it was acquired by Berkshire for $44 billion, Burlington Northern Santa Fe paid $546 million in dividends. After the acquisition, the dividends stopped, as did tax revenue on the dividends.

LAST YEAR, Berkshire entered into what became known as a “cash-rich split-off” that, according to the New York Times, might have allowed it to avoid $1 billion in taxes. Berkshire traded its stock in Procter & Gamble, which carried a low cost basis of $336 million, for P&G’s Duracell unit plus $1.7 billion in cash, a total value of $4.7 billion. The point was to reduce capital-gains taxes that would have been due on a sale of Berkshire’s P&G stock.

It seems that Buffett and his businesses are serial deprivers of tax revenue to the U.S. Treasury. Yet that does not deter him from loudly advocating higher income tax rates for others.

Could Buffett be required to pay more?

Now consider Section 531 of the Internal Revenue Code, which imposes a 20% tax on the accumulated but undistributed income of a corporation. And Section 532 of the Code states that the tax shall apply to “every corporation…availed of for the purpose of avoiding of the income tax with respect to its shareholders…by permitting earnings and profits to accumulate instead of being divided or distributed.”

The Buffett Loophole and the Berkshire Model provide clear examples of the purpose of Sections 531 and 532. Buffett and Berkshire are accomplishing precisely what the code is trying to prevent: shareholders getting away without paying taxes.

Enforcement of these two sections has been sporadic, subject to the judgment of the Internal Revenue Service. An official commentary on the code, Federal Tax Coordinator 2d, D-3003, states that, for enforcement of the accumulated-earnings tax, “Congress did not want the taxing authorities second-guessing the responsible managers of corporations as to whether and to what extent profits should be distributed or retained, unless the taxing authorities were in a position to prove their position was correct.”

CAN THE IRS CONTEND that Berkshire’s purchase of Duracell was not essential for its Heinz holding, for its Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, or for its core insurance businesses? Of course.

Can the IRS see that by looking the other way it has unreasonably feathered Buffett’s nest, allowing him to avoid paying reasonable taxes? Of course it can. It chooses not to see anything.

Apparently he could, but not if he has good friends in Washington, D.C.

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From our anonymous insider…

Two weeks before exams and the small library is packed in the evening. We have to review every topic since August while simultaneously being introduced to the complex biochemistry of the urea cycle, the process our body uses to eliminate ammonia freed from normal recycling and breakdown of protein and DNA. Free ammonia is normally turned into urea by the liver for excretion in urine.

Our patient this week was a 20-year-old woman suffering from a Urea Cycle Disorder (UCD) since birth. She had the cognitive function of a toddler. A few of my classmates were left speechless after seeing the patient and hearing from the mother about her round-the-clock caregiver role. She described struggling against the adult strength of her daughter during basic tasks such as bathing and feeding. UCDs are typically caused by a genetic mutation to an enzyme that catalyzes an intermediate product in the conversion from ammonia to urea. If not detected early, excess blood ammonia (hyperammonemia) can alter blood pH enough to cause irreversible effect on the nervous system or death. Most states’ newborn screening programs now test for several UCDs. Treatment typically is a combination of strict dietary restrictions and nitrogen scavenger drugs.

We heard from a hospital Institutional Review Board (IRB) administrator in charge of approving clinical trial requests and access to patient data. The IRB does not evaluate the value of the proposed research; instead, the IRB evaluates if the project can be conducted in a reasonable manner to benefit and to protect the research participants. This process is historically a huge pain for physicians who want to conduct research. The board can take months to review a simple clinical trial proposal or data analysis project of patient data. She did not deny that the IRB process is cumbersome, but used the 1999 example of Jesse Gelsinger to explain why these protocols are followed. Gelsinger was a functioning teenager with a UCD that was so mild he should not have qualified for the trial to begin with. Scientists attempted to use adenovirus (influenza) modified with a functioning form of the mutated urea cycle enzyme to cure the patient. Potential dangers of the trial were not disclosed to the patient and his family. A principal investigator for this NIH trial had relationships with the pharmaceutical company providing the adenovirus vector. Gelsinger died from a massive immune response and liver failure. This tragedy triggered review of clinical trial procedures and halted many ongoing and future gene therapy trials.

After the 1.5-hour IRB presentation, an Emergency Room Physician talked about his experience with the IRB for a pain medication clinical trial. He clearly was frustrated with the IRB, but diplomatically limited his criticisms to “there is plenty of room for improvement.”

Anatomy lab continued with the previous week’s dissection of the shoulder joint from the anterior side. We saw the actions of the four rotator cuff muscles and observed the massive vessels and nerves near the clavicle. Between the clavicle and the joint capsule lies a fascinating mesh of nerve fibers called the brachial plexus, by far the most complex nervous feature we’ve seen so far. We learned how upper extremity range of motion is a function of three joints: sternoclavicular (SC), acromioclavicular (AC) and glenohumeral (shoulder blade-humerus). I never realized we have movement in the SC, the single point of contact between our upper extremity and our axial skeleton, when we raise or rotate an arm. When orthopedic surgeons came in to demonstrate shoulder exam techniques, nearly 20 percent of our young class had bad enough shoulders to line up for a free exam.

Statistics for the week… Study: 16 hours; Sleep: 6 hours/night; Fun: 2 nights out. Example Fun: Friday after-class soccer tradition followed by bowling night, in which we learned that one of our classmates is a former competitive bowler.

The Whole Book: http://tinyurl.com/MedicalSchool2020

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I would have thought that scanning a basic gel pen drawing would be something that any modern device could handle. Yet look at the difference in color here.

• from a fast document scanner (Canon DR-C240)
• from a slow graphic arts scanner (Epson 11000XL)

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From “Columbus Day now Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Cambridge” (Boston Globe):

The Cambridge City Council has voted unanimously to change Christopher Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Councilor Nadeem Mazen, who proposed the idea, said it is important to reclaim the day for Native Americans, thousands of whom were killed under Columbus’s leadership when he came to the New World.

…

At the end of the discussion and vote Monday night, Mayor E. Denise Simmons had a simple message for the council: “This is a very important day in Cambridge.”

The official city notice says

In June 2016, the Cambridge City Council adopted Policy Order #164 noting that the Council go on the record to state that the second Monday of October henceforth be commemorated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Cambridge, in recognition of the indigenous people of America’s position as native to these lands, and the suffering they faced following European conquest of their land.

It doesn’t seem that anyone proposed building houses or apartments in Cambridge in which Native Americans might live. Census Data show that, as of 2010, there were at most 0.2 percent “American Indians” among the city’s population (the Census Bureau is apparently lagging in the political correctness department).

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