Isaac Laquedem

The Federal income tax (second in a series) and the Laquedem Cosmic Federal Budget Workweek

I enjoy reading the descriptions of natural history that condense the life of the universe into the scale of a single year, sometimes called the Cosmic Calendar, so that if the Big Bang happened on January 1, the solar system formed on September 2, life on Earth started on September 21, fish appeared on December 17, the ice age ended on December 31 at 11:59:33 p.m, and so on.  I also appreciate the similar scaling of the federal income tax and the concept of Tax Freedom Day, the day of the year on which the nation has earned total income equal to its federal and state income tax burden.  It's in late April.

Something I read inspired me to condense income taxes and the federal budget into a single workweek -- the Laquedem Cosmic Federal Budget Workweek.  Imagine that your annual work and income are condensed into a single workweek of five 8-hour days, each running from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (For this exercise, skip lunch and breaks.)  The tax freedom moment is Tuesday at 1:29 p.m., including state taxes.  Your federal income tax freedom moment is Tuesday morning at 9:20 a.m.

But let's take this scale one step farther.  If your income tax is allocated ratably among the $2.854 trillion (net of certain offsetting revenues including Social Security and Medicare taxes) that our federal government spends, for how much of the LCFBW are you working for which program? 

The answer is that from 9:00 to 10:52:19 Monday you're working for the Defense Department, from 10:52:20 to 12:37:26 you're funding other discretionary spending, from 12:37:27 to 1:19:39 you're funding the interest on the national debt, from 1:19:40 to 2:24:08 you're funding Medicaid, and from 2:24:09 to 3:51:23 you're funding the gap between Social Security and Medicare tax revenues and expenses.  For the rest of the Monday (remember, no breaks!) and 20 minutes Tuesday morning you're supporting everything else the government does that has some mandatory element, including SNAP (food stamps), federal and military retirement benefits, the earned income credit, some veterans' programs, and unemployment benefits, net of all offsetting revenue.  

Mr. Trump proposes to cut funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  How much of your workweek goes to support those three programs?  Last year the federal government funded public broadcasting with $445 million and sent about $150 million each to NEH and NEA.  On the Laquedem Cosmic Federal Budget Workweek scale, one minute equals $5.708 billion and one second equals $95 million.  The answer, then, is that the $745 million for those three programs together correspond to about eight seconds of your workweek.  If you read at a respectable 300 words per minute, in the time it took you to read this post you funded your share of the three programs twelve times over.  Now get back to work.

Federal Income Tax Policy (first in a series)

In January, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) proposed eliminating the corporate income tax.  As president-elect, Donald Trump wanted to lower the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 15%.

They may wish to review the history of how the nation's tax burden has shifted from corporations to individuals.  In the early years of the federal income tax, the burden lay about evenly on individuals and corporations.   In eight of the first ten years, the government actually collected more from corporations than from individual taxpayers.  That tenth year -- 1943 -- was the last year in which the United States government collected more income tax from corporations than from individuals ($9.56 billion from corporations and $6.51 billion from individuals).

The last year in which corporations paid as much as two-thirds as individuals was 1954 ($21.1 billion from corporations and $29.5 billion from individuals).

The last year in which corporations paid as much as half as individuals was 1967 ($34 billion from corporations and $61.5 billion from individuals).

The last year in which corporations paid as much as one-third as individuals was 2006 ($353.9 billion from corporations and $1,044 billion from individuals), and before that was 1977 ($54.9 billion from corporations and $157.6 billion from individuals).

The tax cut that the Republicans champion has already happened.

Portland's parting gift to a generous citizen

 

On this day in 1919, when Tom Moyer was born in an upstairs bedroom of this unassuming building in Sellwood, his father, who had boxed as "Silk Hat" Harry Moyer, might have imagined that Tom would himself become a boxer some day, and so Tom did, being for a while the second-best amateur boxer in the United States.  Harry Moyer might not have envisioned, however, that his son would go on to success in the business world as the founder of the Luxury Theatres chain, which grew to 190 screens before being acquired by Norman Lear's company Act III in 1988.  (It's now part of the Regal Cinemas chain.)  Nor would Harry Moyer have pictured his son becoming a Portland real estate tycoon, and then a quiet philanthropist who gave millions of dollars back to the city in which he lived and prospered, and donated the land and part of the construction cost for Director Park.

Late in Mr. Moyer's life, the city recognized his civic contributions, and some awards followed -- not many, for he disliked talking in public, even in the form of the words of gratitude that audiences expect honorees to utter from the stage.  "Thank you very much" was one of his longer speeches.

In 2014, on the gray November morning on which he died in his downtown apartment, the city had one final farewell gift for Mr. Moyer: it ticketed his hearse.

How well does Portland's Office of Equity do its job? Its leading proponent is spending $40,000 on an alternative provider

I was not the first, or the second, or even the six hundredth person to be surprised by Amanda Fritz's decision to close her City Hall office and travel to Arizona with six of her senior staff to attend a three-day residential training session on diversity in the workplace, at a cost to the city of $4,750 per person plus travel costs, for a total cost to the city of about $40,000.  Many of the raised eyebrows, including mine, arched skyward because White Men As Full Diversity Partners, the organization that will provide the diversity training, is headquartered in Portland a mere two miles from City Hall.  (To be fair, the organization offers the residential training only in Arizona and Illinois, but not in Oregon.)

In 2011 the city created an agency, named the "Office of Equity and Human Rights," to educate city elected officials and their staff on issues of access, opportunity, race, and disability.  Commissioner Fritz was the Council's strongest voice to support its creation.  The Office has a staff of ten and provides mandatory training to all city employees.   That Commissioner Fritz believes it valuable to take her staff out of town for three days or more to obtain diversity training that is readily available in Portland, from the same organization that's providing the training in Arizona, suggests that she believes that the Office of Equity and Human Rights is failing at its job.  Else why would the additional training be necessary?

Sometimes I think that the Portland City Council does not understand that a dollar spent on Project A is a dollar that is not available to spend on Project B.  This is one of those times.