Archive for October, 2008

Hard as it may be to believe, Alan Greenspan was once a young radical of sorts — a radical for capitalism. In his New York youth, he fell in with novelist Ayn Rand and her salon. She used to make fun of him for a flubbed first impression, in which he tied himself in a philosophical knot and appeared to be unsure whether or not he, personally, existed.

But Rand came to like young Greenspan. He was smart, eloquent, and committed to the free market. The Objectivist Society gave him a platform in a 1966 book containing his (and Rand’s) essays called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Given the man’s sad performance in his Congressional testimony recently, in which he tied himself into worse knots than he did in Rand’s salon, I wanted to quote from some of the far better arguments he advanced as a young man — about how government regulation causes precisely the kinds of breakdowns we’ve seen recently.

“It is precisely the ‘greed’ of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer,” Greenspan wrote in an essay called The Assault on Integrity. “What collectivists refuse to recognize is that it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product…

“Government regulation is not an alternative means of protecting the consumer. It does not build quality into goods, or accuracy into information. Its sole ‘contribution’ is to substitute force and fear for incentive as the ‘protector’ of the consumer. The euphemisms of government press releases to the contrary notwithstanding, the basis of regulation is armed force. At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun. What are the results?

“To paraphrase Gresham’s Law: bad ‘protection’ drives out good. The attempt to protect the consumer by force undercuts the protection he gets from incentive. First, it undercuts the value of reputation by placing the reputable company on the same basis as the unknown, the newcomer, or the fly-by-nighter…. Second, it grants an automatic (though, in fact, unachievable) guarantee of safety to the products of any company that complies with its arbitrarily set minimum standards. The value of a reputation rested on the fact that it was necessary for the consumers to exercise judgment in the choice of the goods and services they purchased. The government’s ‘guarantee’ undermines this necessity; it declares to the consumers, in effect, that no choice or judgment is required — and that a company’s record, its years of achievement, is irrelevant…”

The explosion of small shops selling subprime mortgages would seem to lend credence to this idea. Why not take out a mortgage from someone whose method of advertising is yellow signs on telephone poles? After all, the government regulates mortgages, right? So how risky can it be? And unfortunately, as the explosion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac show (though Greenspan wasn’t writing about them at the time) “Government regulations do not eliminate potentially dishonest individuals, but merely make their activities harder to detect or easier to hush up” — especially when Fannie and Freddie are doing their best to buy off Congress.

The young Greenspan had a clarity in his vision. But in his testimony before Congress last week, Greenspan allowed the current market finger-pointing psychology to get the best of him. He spoke of being in a state of “shocked disbelief.” He called for more regulation, and under questioning from Rep. Henry Waxman, said he found a “flaw” in his belief that markets were self-correcting. It’s unclear what that flaw is — anyone who bought stock a few weeks ago is up a lot, there are some great deals on housing to be had at the moment, and Greenspan himself noted that the recent panic is going to make all of us more conservative than any government regulation could.

But even if he made his point more nuanced than the headlines shouted, it is unfortunate that Greenspan chose to give any ground to statists such as Waxman and his cheerleaders in the mainstream media who were quick to seize on the idea that Greenspan was denouncing laissez-faire. Because the truth is, despite the recent Economist cover about “Capitalism at Bay”, capitalism remains as much an unknown ideal as it was in 1966 when Rand and Greenspan published their book.

I pay a marginal tax rate of greater than 60%. Is that capitalism? Is it capitalism that the government forces me to pay 12.4% of my income for retirement income insurance (i.e. Social Security) when I am perfectly capable of saving by myself? Sarbanes-Oxley has created jobs for thousands of accountants who might otherwise be doing more productive things — is that capitalism? Medicare and Medicaid eat up an increasingly large percentage of the health care economy — is that capitalism? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac socialized risk and privatized gain, causing much riches for their excutives and their Democratic allies in Congress — is that capitalism? Desperately ill patients have to fight, fight, fight to try experimental drugs that haven’t yet run the multi-year FDA gauntlet — is that capitalism? Our government is about to loan billions of dollars — seized from productive people — to the unproductive auto companies. Is that capitalism? American corporate farms feast on an array of subsidies, our government is subsidizing the burning of food (corn) to make fuel, and our Supreme Court (in Kelo) gave the OK to the seizing of private property for any government purpose whatsoever. Is that capitalism?

Unfortunately, this election doesn’t give us a good choice on this matter. President Bush has presided over the nationalizing of banks and insurance companies, and over a massive expansion of federal spending. Sen. John McCain is talking about buying up mortgages. It’s small comfort that Sen. Barack Obama would be worse.

Unfortunately, we seem to have lost sight of any idea of the consumer responsibility that Greenspan talked about. People are happy to make money when the housing market and stock market go up. They do not ask questions about exactly why your mortgage payment would be so much lower if you refinance. This election is very likely to result in half of Americans being taken off the income tax rolls entirely, thus giving us a majority of people who are looking more for what the government can give them rather than being concerned about a proper stewardship of resources. We’ve lost our self-efficacy, our self-reliance. I realized this the other day when I read a result of a Freelancers Union survey that found that 79% of independent workers would like to buy into their state unemployment insurance schemes. Yes, most of us would rather pay a tax than do what we could on our own (save the maximum of $10,400 that 26 weeks of $400 unemployment benefits checks comes out to).

I do not know how this election will turn out. But I do know that, as Kimberley Strassel wrote in her Wall Street Journal column this morning, the GOP is doomed unless it stops being Democrats-lite, and makes a coherent argument for “lower taxes, more opportunity,” and embracing anyone who “doesn’t like anyone telling them what to do.” Personally, I think those of us who care about the free market need to invest time and resources in making a coherent argument for real capitalism and sharing it with as many people as possible. It’s an unknown ideal, but when parts of it are tried, more wealth is created (which then winds up being spread as entrepreneurs hire people) then under any other system we’ve tried.

But unfortunately, I think we are about to see yet another massive expansion of government. That’s too bad, because as Greenspan wrote, “the possibility of individual dishonesty applies to government employees fully as much as to any other group of men. There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat — and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.”

(Author’s note: This piece was originally written in 2003)

Forty feet below the waves off Caye Caulker, Belize, a cloud of jacks changes direction, as though dozen silver coins could simply flip, head-to-tails, as one. Nearby, a spiny lobster scurries beneath the coral reef. He is wary of the enthralled divers, with reason: they feasted on his brethren, caught in fishermen’s traps and roasted in lemon butter, in Caye Caulker’s restaurants the previous night.

Little but a dark shadow from the surface, for the curious diver, the reef world becomes a carnival of parrot fish, angelfish, turtles and rays, decked in more colorful costumes than the tourists on the beach. But even more astonishing than these creatures is what isn’t there. “Groupers, snappers, barracuda and sharks are a normal part of everyday reef life,” says oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who dove in Belize’s waters in December, 2003. “They’re gone. You might see a few little ones. It’s rare to see a big one.” During her 50-year diving career spanning 6,000 hours underwater, this former Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates the sea has lost 90% of its big fish — the tuna, cod, marlins and snapper that delight divers and diners alike.

For while seafood consumption has soared in the developed world, fishing has lingered as an industrial version of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle Caye Caulker’s lobstermen live. As previous generations hunted buffalo, so today’s captains prowl the seas with their trawl boats and longlines. As rising demand cleared the prairies of their beasts, so fishing has thinned the seas. While the decline of many species has slowed, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 75 percent of the world’s sea stocks are fished at or above sustainable levels.

Fly from Caye Caulker to Belize City, though, and the plane passes over 100 ponds just north of the Philip Goldson International Airport. This NOVA Ladyville shrimp farm, owned by the Bluecadia Aquaculture Group of Fairfax, VA, can churn out 100,000 pounds of crustaceans a day. Worldwide, aquaculture enterprises produced an estimated 37.5 million metric tons of seafood in 2001, about 30% of the world’s total seafood. Just as man first planted seeds and domesticated cows thousands of years ago, these farms are leading the planet from a hunted seafood supply to a harvested one.

Fish farms, combined with carefully managed wild fisheries, offer the best hope for keeping the sea full of fish — and seafood lovers happy. Whether large-scale fish farming can be healthy and environmentally sustainable, though, remains as much a mystery as the ocean deep.

*

Information on fish populations is tough to gather. NOAA reports that of 932 federally managed fish stocks, status is not known for 695. Of those known, 86 are designated “overfished,” including the Cape Cod yellowtail flounder and the Pacific whiting. Worldwide, fish such as bluefin tuna, orange roughy, and red snapper are down to fractions of their World War II-era levels. Their decline has led Earle and other oceanographers to believe the world is flirting with an ecosystem collapse.

Even many fishermen agree that past practices have damaged the seas.

Nelson Beideman began catching swordfish and other species at age 7 in his father’s boat off the New Jersey coast. Now the executive director of the Bluewater Fisherman’s Association, he reports that declining stocks alarm the fishing community. “We’re totally dependent on the health of the resource,” he says. After the swordfish population plummeted in the 1980s, cuts in the quota allotted to each fisherman brought the species back. But now he worries about bluefin tuna and the white marlin, which he estimates has fallen to 15 percent of its optimal biomass.

Depletion has two main causes — what flows into the sea, and how the sea’s bounty is reaped. Chemical run-off from paved coastal regions and farms poisons fish. Garbage ebbs and flows with the tides. Earle reports that once, twelve miles off the California coast and 1,000 meters deep, she swam toward a marvelous red and silver creature — only to discover it was an RC Cola can.

On the fishing side, conservationists rate trawl boats — immense vessels with nets up to a quarter-mile wide — as the worst offenders. Trawls clear-cut the sea floor for a few fish, then dump the rest — “like bulldozing an orchard for a bushel of apples,” says Earle. Industrial longlines with thousands of baited hooks also land “bycatch” (unwanted fish) that are usually thrown back dead. Everyone knows about the celebrity bycatch victims — dophins and turtles — but while special nets and laws have limited their suffering, experts still estimate that bycatch accounts for 25 percent of all seafood that’s caught.

Even when fishermen hook the right fish, they can grab too much. Sixty percent of the world’s oceans lie outside national jurisdictions. While many countries manage their fisheries well, migratory species pay no attention to borders. As new fish gain culinary fame, countries compete for market share in open waters. This has led to shortages of cod in the north Atlantic, Chilean sea bass in the Antarctic and tuna worldwide.

Economists call this the tragedy of the commons. When no one owns a resource, everyone has an incentive to take all they can get. Of course, there are some checks on the market — “People in the fishing business are smart enough not to fish themselves out of business,” says Linda Candler of the National Fisheries Institute, an industry group. Fishermen notice declining catches before land-based environmentalists. Fishermen must weigh current and future returns, but, says Candler, “many of them want to hand their businesses down to their kids.” In the U.S., at least, fishing remains an old-fashioned family enterprise. Until recently, many Manhattan chefs purchased seafood at the 170-year-old Fulton Fish Market — stalls of ice and flesh near the East River with names like “Third Generation Seafood” or “M. Slavin & Sons.” Even on a frigid January morning before the sun peeks over the Brooklyn Bridge, these burly men were out hawking frozen catfish and live lobster.

But the city has been in the process of moving the market to a modern facility in the Bronx, and the industry is changing too. Americans are eating ever more seafood — up nearly a pound to 15.6 lbs per person in 2002. “We’re more adventurous diners than we used to be,” says Candler. Savvy dieters know the health benefits of salmon’s omega-3 fatty acids. Popular fish-based Asian and Latin dishes are starting to shove meat and potatoes off America’s plates. While the Fulton Fish Market moved millions of pounds of seafood each year during its existence, when mall food courts serve sushi, family fishermen simply can’t meet the demand.

*

Enter aquaculture — the relief valve. Done right — just as acres of wheat freed our ancestors from constant hunting, and let the human population grow — fish farming could spare wild stocks and create steady deliveries of enough fish to feed our soaring appetites.

“Farmed fish are the only source of increasing supply,” says George Chamberlain, president of the Global Aquaculture Alliance and owner of a fish farm. Wild fisheries are at their limits and “we’re not going to discover any more.”

Aquaculture is growing by nearly 10 percent a year, the UN reports, but fish farming has its opponents. Critics say farmed fish is loaded with antibiotics and that carnivorous species such as salmon and shrimp still require wild fish for food. In a recent issue of Science, U.S. researchers reported that farmed salmon contained more toxic chemicals than wild salmon.

But technology is changing this. The farm Chamberlain owns in Malaysia uses no antibiotics; probiotic and disinfection technologies keep the shrimp disease-free. While many fish farms do use fish meal (generally anchovies or sardines) for food, overall fishmeal catches have not risen — fish farmers simply outbid poultry and pig farmers, who’ve switched to other feeds. Researchers are investigating meatless protein sources. Fish farmers are searching for species that can be domesticated and are using selective breeding to produce hardier strains of tilapia and salmon that can survive farming better. Governments and industry can both support research to make fish farms environmentally sound. The easiest source of funds? The subsidies now bestowed on wild fisheries — an estimated $15 billion per year worldwide. Since the U.S. does not subsidize its fisheries as heavily as Japan and other nations, America has an incentive to lead international talks on cutting payments that keep overfishing profitable — and subsidize the destruction of the seas.

Minus subsidies, and with few possibilities for expansion, “some fishermen are going to have to exit the business,” Chamberlain says. “But there will always be a market for the wild product,” just as some consumers buy organic or free range meat. Wild fish will become a niche market. Wisely managed through strict international quaotas and incentives to reduce bycatch, wild fisheries can be sustained. NOAA and fishermen have already developed a new circle-shaped hook which reduces accidental turtle catches by 90 percent on test boats.

Consumers can push such changes — nationally through their governments, and internationally through market pressure. Tuna fishermen developed dolphin-safe nets when people demanded them; fishermen will use more gentle methods than their trawls if consumers speak up. Fish afficionados can also choose their meals wisely. Sylvia Earle loves seafood, but now she eats only farmed tilapia and catfish, species she believes are responsibly managed. In general, herbivorous fish are better than carnivores and (with exceptions) farmed fish are more sustainable than those caught at sea.

The problem, says Earle, is getting people to see fish as wildlife, no less than toucans, tigers or apes. “The worst thing we’re doing to the oceans is ignorance,” she says. Few people have seen the world beneath the water, like Caye Caulker’s jacks and rays. Clear-cut rainforests scream of waste and loss. But from the surface, reefs of fish and reefs of ghosts alike are just dark shadows beneath the blue.

(Author’s note: This column ran in USA Today in 2005 during the John Roberts nomination battle. It was quoted in the Economist and elsewhere. I reprint it as a reminder of the problems of voting — one way or the other — solely on the basis of Supreme Court nominees. As was pointed out to me after this column ran, some OBs do terminations disguised as D&Cs, and these docs aren’t counted in the official “abortion provider” statistics. But there’s no reason to think that many doctors do this in states where abortion is frowned upon, so I don’t think it changes the number much. Plus, as, say, a college student without a regular private OB, you wouldn’t be able to go to them for these services anyway).

So far, most senators are withholding judgment in the battle to confirm Judge John Roberts, nominated by President Bush to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, but that hasn’t stopped everyone else from trying desparately to discern the nominee’s views.

Pundits are making a mini-scandal over whether Roberts was ever a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. Ralph Neas, president of the liberal People for the American Way, is fretting over Roberts’ “sparse public record.” James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, told supporters, “We need to be in prayer that Judge Roberts’ true colors will become apparent before a final confirmation decision is reached.”

The real issue at hand

On both sides, people talk broadly about wanting to know Roberts’ views because the next judge will shape the “direction” of the country, but let’s not mince words. Most of this angst is about one issue: abortion. Liberal groups are terrified that Roberts will bring the court one vote closer to overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that overturned state laws banning abortion. Pro-life groups hope, fervently, that he will.

I don’t know whether the Supreme Court, with Roberts, will overturn Roe. I do know it won’t matter much if it does.

You see, for all the rights rhetoric, abortion is not an abstract concept. It’s a medical procedure requiring a doctor willing to perform it. In states where abortion is frowned upon — the states likely to ban abortion if Roe is overturned — abortion providers are already more rare than purple Volkswagen Beetles. Most abortion providers, understandably, prefer to practice in states where people support them, i.e., states where abortion won’t be banned.

This reality means that however much energy is spent on Supreme Court nominee battles, a Roe reversal wouldn’t change the country’s total number of abortion providers much. In fact, a year after Roe is overturned, it would be the rare woman who would notice any difference in her life at all.

In the past year, as passionate people on both sides have dug their Supreme Court battle trenches, a few pro-choice organizations have attempted to rally supporters with reports on which states would ban abortion if Roe fell. Shortly before the 2004 election, for instance, the Center for Reproductive Rights announced that 21 states were highly likely to ban abortion, and nine somewhat likely.

The problem with these calculations is that they tend to include pre-Roe abortion bans still on the books. Roe superseded these laws in practice. In theory, some bans would immediately become law if Roe were overturned. But this theory implies that legislators and voters in these states wouldn’t be able to debate and pass laws saying otherwise.

Given the split in U.S. politics, many would do just that. Of the 21 states the Center for Reproductive Rights claims are most likely to ban abortion after Roe, seven have Democratic governors. These governors would not be able to preside over new post-Roe abortion bans without risking a party revolt. Of the other 14 states, one (Rhode Island) votes consistently Democratic in presidential races. Though not all Democrats support abortion, it’s unlikely that the 60% of Rhode Island voters who chose Sen. John Kerry last fall would be inspired to support a ban.

Another state, Ohio, is too much of a political tossup to count in the ban camp. Colorado might vote “red,” but the state’s recent election of a Democratic senator and new Democratic majorities in its statehouse implies that the politics are pretty split.

That leaves us with 11 states. According to data from The Alan Guttmacher Institute, these states had 122 abortion providers in 2000. That’s less than 7% of the 1,819 abortion providers — a fluid number, to be sure — in the USA. Most of those 122 providers (65) are in Texas. If pro-choice forces can hold on to Texas (not unlikely, given the feisty Democratic minority’s tendency to flee to Oklahoma to deny the Legislature a quorum when its members are miffed) we’re down to 57 providers.

Spread across a handful of vast states, that’s a low enough number to be useless to the average woman seeking an abortion.

In Mississippi, Kentucky and the Dakotas, 98% of counties have no abortion providers; in Missouri and Nebraska, 97% lack them. In these Roe-unfriendly states, women already have to travel hours to obtain abortions; in a post-Roe world of crossing state lines, that story wouldn’t change. Even if all three of the only “somewhat” likely states with Republican governors, legislatures and voting tendencies (Indiana, Idaho and Georgia) banned abortion, that would affect just 48 providers. In a “worst-case scenario” (for pro-choice types) that included a Texas ban, overturning Roe would affect a maximum of 170 providers, less than 10% of the U.S. total.

What are they fighting for?

In their zeal to fight over the Supreme Court, though, neither side of the abortion debate has absorbed these numbers. Few pro-life groups realize they’ve fought a 30-year battle to put just a handful of doctors out of business. Pro-choice forces haven’t grapsed that the millions they’ll spend lobbying to block Bush’s nominees could tip a lot of legislative races in places such as Kentucky and Texas. Or, for that matter, build a lot of clinics near the borders of states likely to enact or keep abortion bans.

Instead, over the next few years, the two sides will fight the political equivalent of World War I trench warfare– bloody contests over 6 inches of turf. Millions will be spent. Nominees will suffer the same “Borking” fate as Judge Robert Bork did in the 1980s. The filibuster might melt with the “nuclear option.” Yet in the end, a post-Roe world will look a lot like a Roe world — except we’ll like each other a lot less, thanks to the battles.

Are you better off now that you were eight years ago? I am! I freely admit this has absolutely nothing to do with the presidency of George W. Bush. But since it’s become a campaign mantra, repeated to the point of seeming true, that the past eight years have been an economic failure, I’d like to point something out.

According to this table from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, US GDP was $9.817 trillion in 2000. In 2007, it was $13.808 trillion. That’s growth of approximately 41%, or an additional $3.991 trillion added to the economy during Bush’s “failed” presidency. During the alleged glory years of President Clinton’s term, 1992-2000, US GDP grew by $3.479 trillion (from $6.338 trillion to $9.817 trillion). Granted, this is higher in percentage terms — 54% vs. 41%. But we’re not talking, say, orders of magnitude different.

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story today called “Sarah Palin’s College Years Left No Lasting Impression.” She moved around between schools, did a variety of jobs (waitressing, fishing) to earn money, and even tried her hand at pageants to pay the bills. She majored in journalism and shone on camera (as anyone who saw her convention speech and recent Saturday Night Live performance can attest) but her professors don’t remember much about her. “Looking at this dynamic personality now, it mystifies me that I wouldn’t remember her,” Jim Fisher, Palin’s journalism instructor at the University of Idaho, told the LA Times.

I’m not sure if it’s mystifying — the University of Idaho is large, and Hillary Clinton may be the only candidate who actually made national news in college among the major candidates this election cycle. What’s interesting is that LA Times reporter Robin Abcarian chose to start her feature by comparing Palin’s mystifying college years with the other three major players in this presidential race. “Sen. Barack Obama, who attended Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School, is remembered as a daunting scholar and calming influence,” she noted.

This may be true from his better recorded Harvard Law School days, but most of what we know from his Occidental/Columbia days and the few years before law school is based on his memoir, Dreams From My Father. In it, he weaves a certain narrative of the lost soul encountering the rough city. An idealist, he wants to be a community organizer right after he graduates, but no one hires him, so he takes a conventional job at a “consulting” company with a suit, a secretary and money in the bank. He is tempted by this vision of an alternate life — not unlike, oh, say, Jesus being tempted by Satan with all the kingdoms of the world — but The One decides to stay the course of community organizing.

Back in October 2007, before Obama became the Democratic nominee, the New York Times poked some major holes in this narrative with an article called “Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say.” Dan Armstrong, who worked with Obama at that “consulting” job at Business International Corporation, told the New York Times that the story had required a lot of “exaggeration” to fit the Temptation of Christ narrative. And according to the Times’ interviews with multiple co-workers, Business International Corporation “was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets… Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it ‘high school with ashtrays.’ Many workers dressed down. Only the vice president in charge of Mr. Obama’s division got a secretary, they said. Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report. ‘It was not working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,’ said Louis Celi, a vice president at the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. ‘And it was not a consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination.’”

Obviously, taking literary license in memoirs is nothing new (see my piece about James Frey in USA Today), but it takes a certain calculation of fitting one’s life to a narrative to turn a business casual newsletter-writing gig into working for the corporate dark side. It makes one wonder if Obama’s arrival-in-New York scene, in which he can’t get into his apartment, sleeps in an alley, and winds up bathing with a homeless man in a fire hydrant is perhaps a wee bit exaggerated too.

In fact, one wonders if the major problem many of the intelligentsia have with Sarah Palin is that she failed to retell her life to fit an appropriate narrative of political alienation, temptation and liberal ideals. She was a local girl who went home and married her high school sweetheart, raised lots of kids and ran for office. There was, apparently, no feminist consciousness-raising at college, no realization that small towns were stifling and she had to bring revolution (or organizing) to the masses. John McCain fell into his narrative when his plane was shot down, and it has been played up when appropriate, but since he didn’t go to seminary to work out his conflicted feelings about Vietnam afterwards (as Al Gore did), or throw his medals away (as John Kerry did) it also doesn’t have the appropriate ending.

The truth is, we don’t know much about Obama’s early years, including his Columbia years, just as we don’t know much about Palin’s early years. But because Obama is liberal, he is assumed to have been a “daunting” scholar during all of them. With Palin, on the other hand, someone chose to fake her SAT scores recently to show how dumb she must be. The problem is when we believe our narratives so seriously that we don’t remember that truth often fails to fit a neat story line.

So I’ve been hearing from Sen. Barack Obama that it’s “patriotic” to pay taxes. He also informed Joe the Plumber that it’s best to “spread the wealth.” The implication is that we’re not already doing that these days. It makes me curious what tax rate the man who might be our next president thinks would be most just.

I’m asking because governments of all levels already take the majority of my income. Indeed, even though I earn about six figures a year, the only reason I can afford to work is that my husband earns more than I do.

How is this possible? Here’s the breakdown for this New York City independent contractor. My federal income tax rate is 35% — calculated from the first dollar since as part of a married couple, I get taxed at my husband’s rate. My Social Security and Medicare taxes come out to 15.3% since, as a self-employed individual, I pay both the employer and the employee part. Already, this puts me up past 50%. Then you have to add in New York State and city income taxes (including a little gem called the “unincorporated business tax” which taxes self-employed income twice in NYC).

The result is that governments take over 60% of every dollar I earn. But the Obama-Biden ticket thinks this is not nearly patriotic enough.  They want to add in at least another 4.6 percentage points to bring my federal income tax rate to 39.6%. This pushes me up to roughly a 65% tax bracket.

Now I can see the objection: if I’m lucky enough to be married to a man making over $350,000 per year (roughly the line for the current 35% tax bracket), what do I have to complain about? But marginal tax rates are all about incentives. Why should I work if I only get to keep 35 cents on every dollar I make? At some point, it stops making sense for me to even try to earn money. In essence, the tax code Obama envisions as just will try to do a little more to push me out of the workforce.

This has been an election of oddities. I used to think Republicans were out to get working moms, until the entire conservative wing of the party developed a crush on Gov. Sarah Palin. I thought Democrats were the champions of the working mom — but their tax plan will make it even more pointless for me to try to earn a living once you factor in the cost of daycare. Of course, if I don’t work, that’s $60,000 less in wealth that governments will have to spread around. But hey, why let that pesky little detail get in the way of our zeal to have everyone pay their “fair share?”

(Author’s note: Another “I would like to find a home for this research” article/essay idea that could work for a parenting publication)

My husband and I both work full-time, and he travels frequently for business. Consequently, we exchange a lot of “bye-byes” with our 17-month-old son. The experience can be drastically different day to day. Sometimes he races off — shrieking with joy — to play on his daycare’s playground. Other days, he cries and clings to our legs. He’s too young to say what he’s thinking. But of course, we wonder. Does he feel differently when we leave for a day of work, or when we leave for a multi-day trip? Does he feel differently when one parent disappears than if both do? How does this change over time?

New research, much of it done at the University of Miami’s daycare centers, is showing fascinating things.

Babies perceive different people — and notice your absence — much earlier than generally thought. Infants are “very sophisticated creatures,” says Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Department of Pediatrics. “They don’t have a whole repertoire to show you except crying, cooing and closing their eyes, but they do notice these things.” Within four hours of birth, baby’s heart rate responds differently to her mother than it does to anyone else. The University of Miami’s daycare center accepts infants as young as one month; researchers there observed that children acted more distressed when their mothers dropped them off than when their fathers did. When a mother left for a few days to go to a conference, her baby would become aware of her extended absence, and start exhibiting symptoms of depression. That said…

Baby’s reaction to your leaving is driven by your reaction. One of the big reasons infants didn’t complain when their fathers dropped them off, says Field, is that mothers and fathers left differently. “Mothers lingered around and were very reassuring — redundant with their reassuring,” she says. “Fathers very cavalierly left, saying ‘I’ll see you at 5 o’clock.’” Infants rose to the assumption that they’d do fine on their own. Also, moms make extended absences more traumatic by their own actions. “A baby would know whether her mother was going off for a few hours or going off to a conference by the way the mother acted,” Field says. If you cry, baby responds in kind.

interesting finding: If you’re traveling for several days, you may be better off leaving baby with your parents than your husband. If one parent leaves, the remaining parent often acts anxious. It’s stressful parenting solo! Baby picks up on that. Grandparents, on the other hand, are often more excited and happy to be taking care of the child when a parent is gone, which baby also notices.

Regardless of what you do, though, remember that…

Children are extremely resilient. The first time a mother goes away overnight, baby may show signs of depression, and even reject her mother when she returns — briefly. But “it’s not something that’s a chronic wound,” Field says.  “Kids get used to it.” Just like adults, babies notice separations. They don’t like them — just as we don’t like being apart from our loved ones. But, over time, they, and we, learn to cope.

(Author’s note: A version of this piece was scheduled to run in USA Today but was taken off the page at the last minute. I have not been able to find another home for it, but I would love to explore the issue more. So many stories of “the new frugality” these days! So little consideration that time is money — and spending 5 hours a week gardening to save $15 is a really bad pay off).

With the Dow in flux, and gas and food prices still high, Americans are feeling pretty pinched this fall. So pinching our pennies has become a national obsession in return. A recent BusinessWeek cover story profiles a “lean green family” (featuring Leah Ingram, a colleague of mine from the American Society of Journalists and Authors). Parade magazine did a covery story on America’s thriftiest families, one of whom then scored an appearance on an Oprah show which also featured a “Coupon Mom” and her $30 grocery bills. Lenka Keston, product manager at CouponWinner.com, notes that the site has seen huge increases in people printing coupons since the economy started slowing. In June, the Wall Street Journal claimed that more Americans were spending their summers planting victory gardens a la World War II — vegetable plots in their backyards — to minimize produce bills. More recently, the Journal claimed that office workers are skipping the deli in favor of the brown bag lunch.

There’s a simple reason for this new frugality. When times are tough, people have two options. They can cut costs, or they can increase their incomes. The latter sounds harder, particularly in a sour economy. That’s why most people try the former first, even though some of the penny-pinching tips batted around sound ridiculous (shave with soap instead of shaving cream for a year! You’ll save…$6).

But as the economic doldrums sink in this winter, I’ve started to wonder if this idea is due for a rethink. That’s because — even since the last downturn — we’ve shifted into what I call “The Craig’s List Economy.” The rise of online job sites, where people can easily advertise part-time jobs, gigs, or their own skills, means that for many Americans, spare time can be turned into money far more smoothly than in the past. This changes the calculation — from one of hunkering down with the coupons so — thanks to our keyboards and a flexible labor market — a more optimistic approach to dealing with tough times.

A new mindset

This idea of surviving a recession by boosting income seems counterintuitive. If you fear layoffs, you can’t ask for a raise. The trick is to nix the mindset that the only way to earn more is to ask the boss for a salary bump. This is tough. “People know how to cut back,” says Emma Johnson, a personal finance columnist for MSN Money. Being entrepreneurial in seeking out new gigs is “a very scary proposition for many people. If you cut a Netflix subscription, there’s no risk except that you’ll be bored.”

Certainly during the 1991 recession, trying to moonlight or freelance was tougher than nixing Blockbuster trips, or whatever the equivalent of cutting Netflix was back then. There were few good ways for people who had projects, and people with spare capacity, to meet up. Full-time jobs could justify lines in the newspaper classifieds. But if you want to pay $20 an hour for five hours weekly, it makes no sense to pay hundreds of dollars for enough print real estate to describe the gig. Nor does it make sense for a part-time job seeker to take out an ad listing her skills. Instead, you get signs in windows and pink flyers on telephone poles — inefficient means of finding talent in either case.

Then, in 1995, San Francisco programmer Craig Newmark founded his eponymous list. Since Craig’s List lets people advertise jobs, gigs, and their own skills for nothing or next to it, this site increasingly dominates the industry, with job posts rising 10-fold in the past three years to 2 million-plus per month, though of course it’s far from the only online job board (I look for gigs on some freelance writer sites and my college alumni networking lists). Plenty of jobs advertised online are normal full-time positions, but a growing number are part-time, contract, freelance. That’s because the cost to advertise a job (or job sought) online is so low that it results “in more jobs being listed than would be otherwise,” Craig’s List CEO Jim Buckmaster tells me. Because there are more jobs listed, there’s more variety, and “when you have a wider variety of different kinds of employment opportunities, it stands to reason that you’re going to fit more people into more different kinds of situations beyond the traditional ‘I’m looking for a 40 hour a week job in an office complex somewhere in a cubicle.’ There’s a lot bigger variety to be found on Craig’s List.”

Journal articles to parking

That’s putting it mildly. Nina Gilbert, who now teaches full-time, found an in-between jobs gig on Craig’s List editing journal articles written by scholars whose first language was not English (”I particularly enjoyed learning about the history of Armenian dovecotes,” she says). Andrew Robinton, who now works in publishing, found tutoring jobs, catering jobs, and valet parking jobs on Craig’s List — “obviously not what I wanted to do in the long run,” he says, “but it was a fine way to make ends meet in the short term.” Some gigs pay insultingly little. Some are scams. But not all are. And more importantly, you can always post your own ideal gig on an online job board, your pay requirements, and see who contacts you.

In the Craig’s List Economy, the barriers to finding new projects to bring in more cash are low. Granted, it’s not for everyone. About 15 million Americans already hold multiple jobs — with probably little more capacity to moonlight. Many of the rest of us feel pressed for time anyway, though somehow the average American manages to watch over 30 hours of television each week. Earning just $8 an hour freelancing for half of that would bring in an extra $120 a week — more, even after taxes, than most people can save with coupons, a victory garden, or bringing their lunch to work. In fact, you could sew your own clothes, get rid of your car, and still eventually face the same problem as, say, Chrysler idling plants to cope with a 22% decline in sales through June. There’s a limit to how much you can cut. Better to find new sources of revenue because, in theory, there is no limit to how much you can earn.

In practice, of course, there is. But in the Craig’s List Economy, that number is far higher than most of us have ever tried to find out.