Steve Kass

Factcheck.org is wrong when they say Obama “mischaracterized” an aspect of McCain’s health care plan.

In last night’s debate, Obama said that under McCain’s proposal, “Your employer now has to pay taxes on the health care that you’re getting from your employer.”Factcheck says Obama got it wrong, and Factcheck says that employers would not “be taxed on the value of health benefits provided to workers.

“Factcheck is forgetting about FICA, a 15%+ payroll tax split between employers and their employees. The employer tax rate on wages and taxable benefits is around 7%. Absent a new loophole for employers in McCain’s plan, if health benefits become taxable, well, they become taxable, and they will be taxed.

Under McCain’s plan, employers that provide health care benefits will have these three choices, none of which is likely to help fix the health care problem:

1. Increase their health care budget by 7% to pay the new McCain tax (which is separate from any inflationary rise in health care costs)
2. Reduce health care benefits to employees by 7% in order to stay even
3. Stop providing health care benefits to employees, since those costs will rise even more rapidly than earlier predicted

Personally, I think payroll taxes are a good thing, but they should apply to benefits only when those benefits are surrogate wages (company cars, houses, stock, golf memberships, and so on). Until we have government health care, employer-provided health care benefits should remain untaxed, for both the employer and the employee.

If Obama got something wrong here, it wasn’t a fact. Obama missed the opportunity to point out that under the McCain proposal, both workers and employers will be taxed on the value of employer-provided health care benefits.

In a tour de force of apologetic paragraphs, New York Times columnist David Brooks denounces as “baloney” the idea that “the McCain on the campaign trail is the real McCain.” Believe the last “half-century of evidence,” not what you see today.

It’s all perfectly in character for the longtime McCain supporter until out of the blue, WHAM!, he delivers the knockout punch line. “[I]t seemed worth stepping back to recall the fundamentals — about McCain.”

McCain: his fundamentals are strong. I can’t believe Brooks missed the irony, and I hope in the days to come he decides not to be subtle.

From the Wall Street Journal’s “Washington Wire” today (notes added):

The two presidential campaigns have issued competing timelines of events today leading up to McCain’s call to cancel the debates. Here is Obama’s version:

“At 8:30 this morning, Senator Obama called Senator McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, Senator McCain returned Senator Obama’s call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement. The two campaigns are currently working together on the details.”

Shortly after, the McCain campaign released their version:

“Senator Obama phoned Senator McCain at 8:30 am this morning but did not reach him. The topic of Senator Obama’s call to Senator McCain was never discussed [1]. Senator McCain was meeting with economic advisers and talking to leaders in Congress throughout the day prior to calling [2] Senator Obama. At 2:30 pm, Senator McCain phoned Senator Obama and expressed deep concern that the plan on the table would not pass as it currently stands. He asked Senator Obama to join him in returning to Washington to lead a bipartisan effort [4] to solve this problem.”

Translator’s notes:

[1]: “Never discussed”: If Obama did not reach McCain, nothing was discussed. Note that the following is equally true, though understandably the McCain camp chose not to include it in their press release: “A McCain plan to withdraw from the race and apologize for his repeated lies was not discussed.”
[2]: “prior to calling”: Before 2:30, but in all likelihood, not at 8:30, when Obama phoned with the joint statement idea, or the McCain statement would have been specific. Had the McCain camp been cleverer, they wouldn’t have mentioned the exact time of the call at all, because the single mention draws attention to the later non-mention.
[3]: “lead a bipartisan effort”: Here is the McCain camp’s best use of rhetoric in the release. (”Best”, of course, is relative, and does not imply lack of sleaze.) They have rhetorically taken Obama’s good idea (”issuing a joint statement”), kept the concept (”<verb> joint <good thing>”), and concocted a replacement readers might believe is theirs (”lead a bipartisan effort”). The indefinite article “a” emphasizes that there was no earlier mention of a bipartisan effort, and it may be true there wasn’t. But McCain surely knew at this point that Obama had suggested a joint statement, and I bet they talked about it. 

So this is the likely sequence of events:

• Obama called McCain at 8:30 am.
• McCain hears the phone ring, sees it’s Obama, and lets the call go to voice mail. There’s no conversation.
• McCain listens to the voice mail and knows that Obama came up with a good idea before him (McCain).
• Later on, McCain has a few meetings and phone calls.
• At 2:30pm, McCain called Obama, who answered.
• McCain and Obama discuss doing something together.
• Obama’s camp issues a press release about all this.
• McCain’s camp reads the Obama press release. They immediately realize how damaging it would be to ignore, since it hits them hard: Obama had a good idea, and first; McCain didn’t answer an 8:30 call, so where was he?; and regarding any bipartisanship between the candidates, Obama is in control and decisive.
• The McCain team scrambles its writers, and “shortly” afterwards, they issue their own press release crafted to address the strong points of the Obama release as fast as they can. They choose not to lie outright. (You can get in trouble when you make up lies in a hurry.)

The Journal, which is no way “in the tank” for Obama, is appropriately cynical.

At www.wordcount.org, you can browse and search a list of the 86,800 most frequently used English words (ordered by how frequently they appear in the British National Corpus). Brilliantly, the creators of WordCount kept track of the words people search WordCount for, and they added “QueryCount”, where you can browse and search a list of the 71,632 most frequently searched-for-at-WordCount English words (ordered by how frequently their frequency ranking was sought). I’m sure they’re keeping track of searches at QueryCount and have thought of creating QueryQueryCount, a list of English words in order of how frequently the frequency ranking of their frequency-ranking’s-being-sought ranking was sought, and make that list searchable, and so on. How would the limit of (Query^n)Count behave?

In the news today: Governor Palin’s Yahoo! account was hacked. But could it be a hoax? Or could it be Act I of a staged stunt by Palin supporters? I won’t hazard a guess, but I will point out something strange: One of the eye-catching phrases in the message headers posted on wikileaks.org is “CONFIDENTIAL Ethics Matter.” That phrase is sure to get some attention, but for now (i.e., 15 minutes before this post) Google returns only five hits. Three were from today’s news, and the other two were from the .doc and .pdf versions of Alaska’s “Executive Branch Code of Ethics.” Crafty, or just plain weird?[Added at 19:42: The header data from one of the Palin family pictures on wikileaks.org says the photo was taken with a Blackberry Curve 8310. Blackberry...Blackberry... wasn't that in the news yesterday, too?]

Do not make things easy for yourself by speaking or thinking of data as if they were different from what they are; and do not go off from facing data as they are, to amuse your imagination by wishing they were different from what they are. Such wishing is pure waste of nerve force, weakens your intellectual power, and gets you into habits of mental confusion.

Mary Everest Boole, in “Philosophy and Fun of Algebra” (1909)
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13447

With Software, Till Tampering Is Hard to Find
By Roy Furchgott
August 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/technology/30zapper.html

As hard as zapper software is to detect, it is easy to make, said Jeff Moss, organizer of the annual hacker convention Def Con. “If it runs on a Windows system and you are a competent Windows administrator, you can do it,” he said.

According to analysts at the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, 85 percent of all point-of-sale systems, as cash registers are called, run on the Windows operating system, although other systems are also vulnerable.

Don’t blame the operating system; blame the hardware. Modern technology has replaced paper and indelible pen (a twentieth-century write-once, read-only data collection and storage system with physical properties that make forgery difficult; see http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/616793140/) with the technological equivalent of a Magic Slate (a 1970’s toy; see http://www.landofthelost.com/slate.htm), which is child’s play to alter.

Do electronic systems that record transactions on write-once storage even exist? The technology exists, and it’s dirt cheap. Why can’t businesses be required to keep permanent, inalterable transaction records? Ultimately it may be impossible to prevent a crooked business owner from embezzling from his or her own business or committing tax fraud. But why make life easy for them by allowing Magic Slates for accountability?

I guess it’s easier to write “the Stieltjesness of f” than “the fact that f has the Stieltjes property.” The jury seems to be out about whether to capitalize the word. Of the five instances Google finds, one is at the beginning of a sentence, and two are uncapitalized. Here’s to not resolving the issue.

A lot of people must wonder about the name of this place, and the school’s FAQs page answers the question “What does “Isothermal” mean?”:

In meteorological terms, the word “isotherm” refers to a line drawn on a weather map showing identical or even temperatures.  If something is isothermal, it is of equal or constant temperature with respect to either time or space. Research has shown that it is not uncommon for an isotherm to curve through the area of Rutherford and Polk Counties where Isothermal Community College is located.

When choosing a name for the college, the original Board of Trustees drew from this regional characteristic to create a name that described the area and represented the college in an inventive manner.  So now when someone breaks the ice by asking you about the name Isothermal, you’ll be able to pass on part of the school’s unique history!

Isotherms probably pass through most places most of the time. The isothermally distinctive places are places like Bullhead City, that frequently don’t lie on an isotherm.

DNSstuff.com follows a time-honored sleazy marketing model. They’ll run a free test of your domain and tell you you’ve got problems, but they won’t give you the details unless you sign up for a free trial of their $79/year tools. Their free test even reports critical errors on their own site. What’s the old line about cheating your own mother?