Are You Rich?

David Kocieniewski explains that most folks compare themselves to people who have higher incomes than themselves when defining wealth. In other words, "I'm not rich because the guy down the street (on the other side of town, wherever) has more money than me. That's what rich is." It seems we never compare ourselves with those who actually have less than us until we reach the Bill Gates level of wealth.

Speaking of rich people, have you seen Ken Burns' latest baseball film on PBS? The film points out that in the 1970s when the medium income for American households was $15,000 the average salary for a major league baseball player was in the neighborhood of $45,000. Today, when the average American family's household income is $50,000, the average baseball salary is $2,400,000.


Just in case you're waiting for Superman …

Gail Collins points out some of the issues raised by the new documentary film that has grade school teachers everywhere in tears. Spoiler alert: This film is about how highly we value lotteries and sentimentalism over hard work and persistence. By the way, the evidence demonstrates that charter schools overall provide no better education than do public schools and about one-third of them are worse.

Will the next car that you buy be made in China?

Tom Friedman reports on economic growth in China and compares its plans for the future with what's happening in a U.S. preoccupied with fear of its own shadow in today's New York Times.

China is investing heavily in electric cars and the batteries needed to operate them, in high speed trains to connect cities, and in stem cell research. Americans, in the meantime, don't have enough sense to know that energy efficient homes can be built and think that stem cell research is being used to create mice with human brains.

"When they say 'we,' they mean 'you'."

Paul Krugman explains how the "angry rich" are different from the rest of us in today's New York Times.

The rich, as anybody with eyes open wide knows, owns the Tea Party, the Republican party, and, for that matter, the Democratic party, and they are upset that anyone, especially the president, would expect them to pay their fair share of taxes.

America Is Not No. 2 — It's No. 11:

Newsweek's list of the best 100 countries in the world places the U.S. at number 11, not even in the top ten. Ooopsie! Check out the story.

Finland and Sweden rank one and two. How about Canada, our frozen neighbor to the north with that terrible socialized medicine thing going on? It's number five. In fact, universal health care goes a long way in making a country a good place to live in. Evidently it's better to live in a country where your neighbors help you get good health care rather than in one where your neighbors are so hateful that they hope you die of a curable disease. Go figure!

Buying Votes:

Just how corrupt is the U.S. Government? Eric Lipton at The New York Times reports on the scam many congressmen use to sell their influence: they set up charities that seek donations from businesses and others seeking to influence their votes, then they vote to grant themselves special dispensations to allow exceptions in congressional ethics rules. Is it any wonder that Republicans preach low taxes, stating that charities will do the jobs we expect government to do?


The School Reform Boondoggle:

Robert Samuelson addresses the failure of school reform in today's Washington Post. Samuelson points out that although much has been tried since 1971, nothing has proven effective, regardless of which political party's proposals have been tried. He points out the fallacy of placing a great teacher in every classroom. As my high school senior English teacher pointed out to me many years ago, there are no great teachers, just great students.

Numbers Don't Lie:

In 1933, when Social Security was instituted, the average life expectancy was just 63, while today it is around 78, if you're a white male. This is the primary argument that all parties fall back on when they point out that Social Security needs to be fixed or done away with as some on the far right argue.

But in this case the numbers are highly misleading. In 1933, infant mortality was much higher than it is today. If you lived to be 60 years of age in those days, you could actually expect to live to be 75 years of age, only three or four years less than today. The real truth is that the problem with Social Security is an expected short fall equivalent almost precisely to—you guessed it: the Bush tax cuts.

To read more about the situation, see Sunday's Washington Post.

The Lessons of War: "The United States leaves Iraq having learned nothing."

Thus concludes Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a graduate of West Point, at the end of his recent New Republic article:

So the Americans are bowing out, having achieved few of the ambitious goals articulated in the heady aftermath of Baghdad’s fall. The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation, and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget. (Emphasis mine.)

Frank Rich points out some of the cost of the war in his op-ed column today:

For this sad record, more than 4,400 Americans and some 100,000 Iraqis (a conservative estimate) paid with their lives. Some 32,000 Americans were wounded, and at least two million Iraqis, representing much of the nation’s most valuable human capital, went into exile. The war’s official cost to U.S. taxpayers is now at $750 billion.