Fitful Murmurs

Daphne Eviatar, who writes for The Washington Independent, agrees, as I do, that the government should cap the salary and bonuses of executives whose banks receieve bailout money.  But then she takes it a step too far:

But why stop there?  The shrinking economy has led to mass layoffs across the country in virtually all sectors, at such venerable companies as Caterpillar, Home Depot, Sprint, Microsoft, Nextel, Texas Instruments and Starbucks. There’s hardly a company or industry that isn’t embarking on large-scale layoffs these days.

So what about looking at what the executives in those companies make? How many of them are earning more than $400,000?

I’m a little uncomfortable writing this post because I am very much a layman in the field of economics.  But it seems obvious even to me that there are a couple of things wrong with this.

First of all, it smacks of punishing people simply because they are rich, and not because they actually did anything wrong.  Caterpillar makes construction equipment.  This year, the number of new construction projects has plummeted.  It makes sense, then, that Caterpillar no longer needs as many people to make construction equipment as they did before.  But they do still need a CEO.  Cutting his salary isn’t going to magically remove the need to lay off those workers.

But more to the point, rich people pay a lot of taxes.  In the article, Eviatar cites the case of a Sprint CEO who made $21,000,000 in 2007.  That puts him comfortably in the 35% income tax bracket, which means that he paid over seven million dollars in taxes right off the top, not counting the taxes on any bonuses he made or things he bought.  In a big-picture way, this seems like exactly the wrong time to be slackening the government’s income stream by arbitrarily limiting a bunch of people’s salaries to $400,000.

Mickey Kaus should really just stick to politics.  In a recent blog post, he asks:

Why did Honda design its new hybrid to look exactly like the Toyota Prius? I like the Prius’ appearance, but a lot of people don’t. This seems like a missed opportunity to create a new trademark design. Timid.

First of all, the Insight is not a “new” hybrid.  Honda has been selling the Insight in the United States for about ten years – about the same length of time that the Prius has been on sale.  And the new design isn’t really all that different from the old design, although given how silly the old one looked, the changes were wise ones.

But more importantly, hybrids use their gasoline engines at higher speeds, so the Prius is efficient on the highway not because of its interior but because of its exterior.  The aesthetics of the whole banana thing are debatable, but the shape of the Prius is extremely aerodynamic.  Given that, it’s unfair to slight Honda for using a similar design for the Insight – especially since most cars look similar anyway.  Is there really much difference in the shapes of the Altima, the Accord, and the Corolla?

A New York Times review of a recent Metallica show included this line: “…while Mr. Trujillo, who wields his bass as if showing off a prizewinning fish, played meaty figures that neatly supported Mr. Ulrich’s propulsion.”

Now, I like a neat turn-of-phrase as much as anyone.  And it’s true that I was not at this show.  But I still have no earthly idea what that kind of bass playing could possibly look like.

Update (1/31/2009, 2:30pm): After twenty minutes or so of extremely lazy Photoshopping, I have decided that it would look like this:

It’s a Saturday afternoon – what do you want from me.

So my friend Madelyn, who blogs over at A Dinosaur in Brooklyn, shared a playlist the other day of songs that made her happy.  It’s a good list, too, and I would really reccomend clicking through.  (The Noah and the Whale song is excellent, and “Walking to Do” is a top-notch Ted Leo song.)  I liked the idea, so I decided to do the same, but after I made my playlist I realized that some of the songs on my list aren’t happy songs at all.  A few (particularly the last two) are downright grim. So this is more just a playlist of songs I’m currently listening to and obsessing over, some of which make me happy and others of which I just love.

There’s a bit of overlap with the “2008, For Me, in Music” post I wrote a week or two ago, but not, really, all that much.  And this time I figured out how to embed a handy little lala playlist, so you can listen to the songs right here in the browser, and you don’t have to click around YouTube for everything you want to hear.

» Read the rest of this entry «

John Aravosis, who blogs at Americablog, is angry that Congress is getting their annual 2.8% wage increase – which comes out to about $4,700 a person this year.

Giving yourself a pay raise in this economic climate is perhaps not the best PR move, but I’m finding it tough to get too upset about this – especially since there’s a good case to be made for paying lawmakers competitive salaries.  A lot of these people are coming from jobs (especially as lawyers) in the private sector that pay comfortably over half a million (or a million) dollars a year.  I’m not saying that we should be trying to pay them salaries competitive with those rates – and, indeed, we aren’t.  Nor am I suggesting that we want the compensation to be a draw for people looking to make more money.  But the last thing we want to do is pay people so little that they are actually disinclined to run for office, and I think their current salary ($174,000) falls right about where it needs to.  And since this pay raise is automatically approved unless Congress actively works to block it, I’d just as soon have them concentrate on more pressing matters for the moment.

Via the New Republic’s Environment and Energy blog, I was linked to this Chicago Tribune article about creative energy-saving solutions.  This paragraph in particular I liked:

Early attempts to notify people of their energy use with e-mails and text messages did no good. What worked was to give people something called an Ambient Orb, a little ball that glows red when people are using lots of energy, but green when their use is modest. In a period of weeks, users of the orb reduced their energy consumption during peak times by 40 percent!

First, I think this is a really cool idea.  But second, I think this really highlights the challenges of trying to get people to seriously change their energy-usage habits.  Everyone is pretty much aware of the need to save energy.  We know both the financial and ecological costs behind the energy we use.  In this case, the employees were even notified via text message when they were using too much energy.  But none of that worked – and what did work was giving them a small, glowing orb!  And they didn’t just cut their usage by a little bit – they cut it by almost half!

Someday we may have to stop pretending that we’re purely rational beings.

Old news, I know, but the stimulus passed through the House of Representatives yesterday 244-188.  No Republicans voted for the stimulus, although eleven Democrats broke ranks and voted against it.

It remains to be seen how effective the stimulus will be; that greatly depends on the speed and form with which it makes it through the Senate.  (The popular thinking seems to be that more spending will be added to the bill there, which cheers me a bit.)  But I think that the political impact of this particular vote cannot be overstated.  (On most of the following, I’m agreeing with Hilzoy’s post at the Washington Monthly, and I’d reccomend that you all click through and read her analysis, too.)

There was a genuine bipartisan reachout by Obama on this issue, not just in style (going to the Hill) but in substance, too: when House Republicans objected to specific things in the bill, Obama took some of them out.  And the tax cuts were a concession to the Republicans from the beginning.  Obama genuinely seemed to want this bill to pass with bipartisanship support.

In their vote, the House Republicans burned him badly.  There are a number of moderate Republicans who had been making noise about possibly voting for the bill, and it’s tough to imagine that at least some of their constituents wouldn’t have supported them – the stimulus bill has enormous public support.  But they didn’t, and in not doing so, they made themselves look not only petty but irrelevant, too.  Despite their uniform rejection of the stimulus bill, it passed anyway, by a huge margin.  What’s more, they were instructed – by House Minority Leader John Boehner, who I’ve been disgusted with for a number of reasons recently – to vote against the bill even before Obama came to discuss their objections.  So what incentive do Obama and the House Democrats have to work with the Republicans next time?

The answer is: none.  And I hope that what this means is that they will simply pass the bills they want to pass, and stop worrying about bipartisan support.  It’ll speed the process up considerably.

See also: Nate Silver’s excellent commentary on this issue here, and another post of his on the broader political implications for the Republican party here.

My review of Lotus’s Hammerstrike went up today.

Yesterday brought us the news that House Republicans were (on the advice of Matt Drudge, who I thought everyone had forgotten about) attacking provisions in the stimulus bill that provided easier access for low-income women to birth control.  Today brings us the news that apparently they also have trouble with the stimulus bill providing money to prevent sexually transmitted diseases:

Now, he’s eyeing another part of the legislation that provides for healthcare funding, specifically $335 million for STD education and prevention programs.

In his “flash” on the subject, Drudge writes, “In the past, the CDC has used STD education funding for programs that many Members of Congress find objectionable and arguably unrelated to a mission of economic stimulus.”

As Harold Pollack (writing for Ezra Klein) pointed out, it’s actually pretty easy to make the argument that cheaper, easier access to contraceptives is good for the economy.  People on Medicaid who have access to contraceptives are (duh!) much less likely to get pregnant, and thus much less likely to require expensive prenatal and birth care.  People who don’t unexpectedly get pregnant are also much more likely to, you know, stay at work.  And for those on Medicaid whose contraception isn’t currently covered, that contraception can be a rather large expense of income that might otherwise be spent elsewhere.

But it is even easier to make the argument that better funding for STD prevention and education will help the economy.  For one thing, a greater number of STD clinics means greater numbers of doctors, nurses, lab technicians, janitors, and office assistants employed at each of those clinics.  But even more importantly, STDs are somewhat unique among medical conditions in that they are extremely cheap to prevent and extremely expensive to treat.  Reducing the number of people who contract an STD directly and measurably reduces the amount spent by the government to treat STDs through programs like Medicare.  Or, as the Salon article linked above puts it:

As for that $335 million for STD prevention, that number sort of pales when you consider the direct medical cost of STDs every year, which one 2000 study found was $6.5 billion.

But even beyond all that: who the fuck is against fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer sexually-transmitted infections?

As reported today by The Telegraph:

But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.

Rubina was paid £500 [$710] for a year’s work while Azharuddin received £1,700 [$2440] , according to the children’s parents.

Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: his family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father, who suffers from tuberculosis.

On one hand, it’s not exactly the responsibility of the Slumdog production team to personally rescue young children from poverty, and considering that the Indian per capita income is estimated to be about $1000, the rates those children were paid are, if not fair, then at least in tune with what a normal Indian worker makes.

On the other hand, shooting films in third-world countries is usually a win-win situation for everyone involved – the production company gets to keeps costs down, while the shooting location gets an influx of money and employement opportunities.  Given that the costs of shooting in India are a fraction of what they are elsewhere, it is somewhat the moral obligation of the producers to ensure that they are paying their workers – and actors – a fair wage relative to their contribution to the film.  It’s pretty tough, then, to imagine that the $14,000,000 budget of Slumdog held no more than $710 for Rubina, and more likely that it was a deliberate move by one of the producers to cut costs.  And that is pretty reprehensible.