Sustainable Middle Class

Upside down and backwards with it!

As I write this, I have in front of me next to the keyboard a 15-ounce can of Spartan brand yellow cling peach halves. They are the “lite” variety packed in pear juice from concentrate. On the back label is a comparison to the other variety they sell, which is packed in “heavy syrup.” It says:

Calorie comparison (per 1/2 cup serving)
Peach halves in heavy syrup…90
Peach halves in pear juice……50

Assuming the company is on the up and up, that’s a 45% reduction in calories using the pear juice sweetener. The “lite” peaches are plenty sweet without the corn based “heavy syrup” found in the other, more common variety.

After seeing some success eliminating trans fat from some foods, I think an outright boycott of High Fructose Corn Syrup is in order.

From Dr. Mirkin’s High Fructose Corn Syrup and Obesity (references at end of quote):

Several recent studies have shown that fructose is processed differently in the body than the far more common sugar, glucose (3,4). Glucose causes the pancreas to release insulin which drives sugar from the bloodstream into cells. Glucose causes fat cells to release leptin that makes you feel full so you eat less. Glucose prevents the stomach from releasing ghrelin that makes you hungry. On the other hand, fructose does not cause fat cells to release leptin and does not suppress ghrelin. This means that fructose increases hunger to make you eat more. Furthermore, the liver converts fructose far more readily to a body fat called triglyceride, than it does with glucose. High triglyceride levels raise blood levels of the bad LDL cholesterol and lower blood levels of the good HDL cholesterol, which increases heart attack risk.

1) Lancet 2001;357:505-08.
2) European Journal of Cancer Prevention, 1999, Vol 8, Iss 4, pp 289-295.
3) American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 76, No. 5, 911-922, November 2002.
4) Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology & Diabetes 2002 Thema: Poster Diabetes, Metabolism and Gastrointestinal Hormones. p184.
5) American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, November, 2002.

The corn syrup lobby claims that corn syrup is not significantly different than cane sugar, pointing out that some of the damning studies on corn syrup were conducted on animals, not humans. Even if their claims hold merit, they can not deny the ubiquitous use of this product as an additive in processed foods where it is often hidden and unexpected. Recently, I was surprised to see it listed in the little package of soda crackers that came with a small chili from Wendy’s.

Perhaps the most significant negative dietary development since about 1980 is the increase in total sweeteners used (sugar + corn syrup) in our overall diet. This fact is illustrated by the graph in this post.

We Americans are now consuming about 62 pounds of corn syrup a year, over a pound per week of empty calories to support a $4.5 billion industry. We’re fat. Our kids are getting fat.
We don’t need this crap. Grow something nutritious and send it Haiti, dammit!

Eric Armstrong has an idea for a successful boycott. When shopping at the grocery, he suggests, when you find a product containing corn syrup, turn the package upside down and backwards and replace it on the shelf.

It’s a start.

Many of those who land on this website do so as a result of searching on the question, “what is middle class?”. In a recent televised debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and moderated by ABC’s George Stephanopolous and Charles Gibson, “middle class” came up in a discussion of the capital gains tax. Gibson and Clinton were throwing income figures of $100,000 to $250,000 supposedly earned by the middle class. Barack Obama correctly said that only 6-7 percent of Americans earned that much. In my view, that ain’t the middle, nor is it the focus of concern on this website. The American middle class is stressed and the Gibson-Clinton characterization of it is false and misleading. Like television, their comments project a distorted idea of America around the world, with Americans much better off than they really are. I’d like see Charles Gibson try to live a year on $40,000. It would make a good story for ABC.

A New York Times study, Class Matters, published in 2005 examines components of “class” and U.S. Census data to estimate class status. The Class Matters study focuses on four components of class: Occupation, Education, Income, and Wealth. An interactive chart is available at this New York Times page. Once there, click on the tab “Components of Class” to get to the chart that looks like this.

Each of the four components are ranked in percentiles, 1 to 99. Here are some examples within each major component:

Occupation - Percentile Rank
Physicians - 99
Credit Analyst - 48
Retail Sales - 25

Education - Percentile Rank
Doctorate - 99
Bachelor’s Degree - 91
High School Diploma - 48
12th Grade no diploma - 19

Income - Percentile Rank
$100,000 - 93
$40,000 - 56
$20,000 - 18

Wealth - Percentile Rank
$1 to $5 Million - 98
$50,000 to $100,000 - 55
$0 to $5,000 - 25

After choosing a specific category or dollar value, Components of Class calculates an average percentile. Perhaps one of the weaknesses of the calculator is it does not offer a choice for negative wealth. It may be that the New York Times doesn’t think that massive debt should detract from class status. Nor is it clear how they calculate “wealth.” Is it based on the fair market value of our “stuff” or replacement cost?

Despite need for some clarification, the Class Matters Components of Class calculator is a reasonably fair method for characterizing the “ladder” of American social and economic status. It also makes pretty clear that Americans in the bottom 2 quintiles (40% of workers) are in tough shape due to lack of education and low wages.

“Give me a half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you the next ice age.” - John Martin, Oceanographer

For over a decade, fertilizing the oceans with iron, an important plant nutrient, to create algal blooms has been proposed and demonstrated as a way to capture atmospheric carbon and mitigate global warming. The carbon-rich algae, or phytoplankton, grow, die, and sink to the ocean bottom where the carbon is stored, or “sequestered.” At least nine ocean-going iron enrichment experiments have been done thus far and the process works.

A NASA satellite image of an algal bloom about 100-miles (150km) created by one iron enrichment experiment is shown here.

Photo source: NASA and CSA

But it turns out the phytoplankton have still another strong environmental effect: the production of cloud-seeding aerosols.

Evidence shows as the wind sweeps these materials up from ocean waves rich in phytoplankton, the effect is enhanced cloud formation and increased albedo, which reflects solar radiation back out to space.

Does this offer at least a partial fix for global warming? Iron’s cheap and relatively abundant. It could be spread around the ocean on a large scale. The thought of manipulating ocean ecosystems undoubtdedly makes some people nervous, including me. Common sense would go against the notion of fixing one problem by creating another. Then again, we seem to have no problem drastically altering the earth’s land surface through deforestation, agriculture, and urbanization.

But, given that the ocean is 71% of the earth’s surface and probably the primary regulator of earth’s climate, we better be careful with it.

Originally posted at Terra Central

What a week! He lost Pennsylvania by 9.2 percent and 10 delegates. Jeremiah Wright is talking to the media! The bowling score won’t go away. If he can’t bowl 200, how’s he gonna run the country? Can the Obama campaign take any more bad news? Good grief!

In the words of a famous Arkansan, we all might need to just “chill out.” Here are some very good favorability data for Barack Obama compiled by RasmussenReports.com:

Monday April 28, 2008
Candidate: Percent Favorable/Unfavorable (Spread)
Barack Obama: 51/46 (+5)
John McCain 51/46 (+5)
Hillary Clinton 45/53 (-8)

Very Favorable:
Barack Obama 28%
Hillary Clinton 19%
John McCain 16%

Obama’s advantage in the Very Favorable category reflects the enthusiasm for his candidacy. That 28% is where the energy is, likely where a strong “get out the vote” (GOTV) effort would come from this fall. I suspect that Democratic Party leaders are paying attention to these numbers, which don’t bode well for Clinton or McCain.

Updated 4/29/2008.

During the primary campaign it seems that little has been said about Barack Obama’s 12 years as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. I guess it’s boring stuff from a media standpoint, not nearly as sensational as Obama’s minister Jeremiah Wright, a former Marine/Navy corpman turned charismatic minister who sometimes made wreckless remarks.

From a University of Chicago Law School press release:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track….Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.

The full press release is here.

Could this happen to anybody?

You volunteer to coach youth soccer for your town’s recreation department. You get a list of names of the kids on your team. The list also has their parents’ names and phone numbers. One kid’s dad bowls on a church league where some members have past associations with the “Christian Patriot Movement.” One of the members has a daughter working in Christian ministry in East Africa - she calls home once a week.

You have another kid on the team whose dad works at a farm and fleet supply company. Your sister, who you are close to, is married to a guy who delivers fuel oil.

You call all the soccer parents up to introduce yourself and let them know when they’ll have practice. A couple days later it rains and you call them all again to let them know practice is cancelled. You call later to re-schedule. You call again a couple days later to let them know about team pictures. This goes on for six weeks.

Now the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring international calls and hones in on the ones to and from the daughter in East Africa. They begin to analyze a “spider web” of related phone calls.

You really don’t know anything about the families who trust you well enough to be their kids’ coach, accept their son or daughter likes to play soccer. You talk to your sister once a week or more. The DHS has no idea you are a volunteer soccer coach supporting a community activity, but the pattern of your calls maybe looks suspicious to the professionals who get paid to be suspicious.

Some months later, you book a flight for a vacation to the Bahamas. As you slowly shuffle through the security line toward the metal detector and the plastic tubs, having selected a better pair of socks to wear to the airport that morning, you’re pulled aside by a TSA officer. You’re told you’ve been identified for additional screening. You go to an office where there are more TSA officers who ask you some questions then tell you you’re on a “no fly” list. The vacation to the Bahamas is cancelled. No sense complaining, we are at war after all.

Things aren’t so bad, you could still drive to the casino. Good luck.

House GOP and White House Deliver a Blow to Verifiable Elections

Congress recently failed to pass “The Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008″ (HR 5036). The bill received 239 Yeas and 179 Neas but fell short of the required two-thirds majority. The vote was strongly partisan with the Democrats voting yes and Republicans voting no. President Bush threatened to veto the bill if it had passed. The roll call vote is available here.

The non-profit group Verified Voting.org is running a campaign to have “voter verified paper record (VVPR) required in all states. They have an interactive map showing progress made thus far. One of the states without state-mandated VVRP is Pennsylvania. Another is Indiana. The others are southern states.

How real is the risk of voter fraud with unverified electronic voting machines? According to this New York Times article, the hacking was all too simple and the hackers easily “covered their tracks.”

The fix was in, and it was devilishly hard to detect. Software within electronic voting machines had been corrupted with malicious code squirreled away in images on the touch screen. When activated with a specific series of voting choices, the rogue program would tip the results of a precinct toward a certain candidate. Then the program would disappear without a trace.

The whole article is here.

Michigan’s Seventh District U.S. Representative Tim Walberg makes no mention of his “no” vote on his website. He’s up for re-election this year.

Small Town Scribbles has this fine article on the coming of spring in a small English industrial town.

On March 4, 2008 the Clinton campaign needed two big wins in Texas and Ohio. She got one, if even that. As reported in this table at Real Clear Politics, Clinton won the popular vote in Ohio by a wide margin but had a net gain of only 7 delegates. In Texas, Obama came out with a net gain of 5 delegates. Instead of two big wins, Clinton came away with a net gain of 2 delegates from those two contests.

As the Clinton apparatchiks and artful dodgers try to “sneak the rule book out of the archives” and litigate the nomination, it’s appropriate to keep in mind that Rush Limbaugh encouraged Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in the March 4 primary. About 1 in 10 Texas voters identified themselves as Republicans in exit polls.

Considering Limbaugh’s “edict,” isn’t it reasonable to argue that Hillary’s popular vote is contaminated with “Dittoheads?”

The “Texas Two-step” primary-caucus was, at the time, often derided as a bizaar method. After voting in the primary, few of the Dittoheads hung around for the evening caucus. What with the influence of crossover mischief -makers, I think Texas may actually have a very good system, one they should keep, one that could be a model for the whole country.

Don’t mess with Texas!

Q1. Why can’t Barack Obama “close the deal?”
A1. Closing date for the primary season is June 3 with final votes in Montana and South Dakota. The Democratic primary is a contest to win delegates. The candidate who wins at least 2024 delegates wins the nomination. Obama has a lead of about 131 delegates but remains a few hundred short of the goal. Neither candidate can win, probably, until the superdelegates make up their minds. Many of them won’t do that until June 3, when the primaries are finished. If they don’t, Howard Dean better be all over them.

Q2. Are there issue differences between Clinton and Obama?
A2. Perhaps the biggest difference between them is their contrasting views of participatory democracy. Hillary Clinton’s motto is “ready to lead on day one.” This strongly suggests a top-down management style, much like the current Bush Administration. The phrase on the Obama website masthead says “ I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington, I’m asking you to believe in yours.” This is a call for citizens to stand up and actively participate in the life of the nation. It’s more respectful, less paternalistic, in my opinion, than Hillary’s motto, which, by contrast, sounds a bit like “leave the driving to me and Bill.” I think this is reflected in Clinton’s polling higher with older voters. They, particularly “blue collar” older voters may be more used to top-down organizations and management.

Q3. Hillary Clinton says she is a better candidate because she can win big swing states. Does evidence back her up?
A3. No. According to a study done by Pew research and an April 17 article by Andrew Kohut, Clinton has no advantage over Obama in swing states, as is shown in this table.

Q4. Is it better to win one big state with 30 electoral votes than to win two smaller states with each having 15 electoral votes?
A4. The Clinton campaign seems to think so.

Q5. Do Democrats think they can win “Red states” in the south and west?
A5. In the last two elections, the Democrats have essentially worked an 18-state strategy. DNC Chair Howard Dean has said the Democrats need a 50-state strategy. Obama has taken the lead in the nomination, in large part, by organizing in the other, smaller states, making inroads into places Democrats usually “write off.”

Q6. Do large media organizations like ABC have reason to favor Clinton?
A6. Yes, her husband signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that allowed for consolidation of media companies, which created more pricing power and made it much more difficult for small media companies to stay in business.

Q7. Did Clinton win Pennsylvania by the psychologically significant “double digits?”
A7. No. The final margin was 9.34 percent.

The March data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that inflation rose faster than wages for non-managerial workers in the private sector, who make up about 80% of the American workforce. The key data:

Consumer Price Index (CPI) +0.3%
Average Hourly Earnings (AHE) +$0.05 or +0.28%
Average Hourly Wage $17.86/hour

Calculating March increase in earnings adjusted for inflation:
AHE - CPI = 0.28-0.30 = -0.02.
March Simplified Stagflation Index = -0.02 X 100 = -2.

There’s more about the Stagflation Index here.

Photo

Hillary Clinton, according to this news report, doesn’t think Barack Obama is tough enough to be president. Not sure what she bases that on other than Bill Clinton running his mouth.

Riding a career-long roller-coaster of scandal, controversy, and redemption, the Clintons do seem impervious to the kind of humility most people possess. After two terms in the White house, they want more. They expect more. Their appetite for power, celebrity and wealth is insatiable.

Prediction:
The Clintons take their campaign all the way to the August Convention where they ultimately lose. Bill and Hillary concede tearfully, graciously. The show isn’t about the nomination of Barack Obama, but the “canonization” of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Once again, as always, it’s all about them.

Update April 19, 2008:
Later this summer, after the Democrats have a nominiee for president, a major topic of debate between the Republicans and Democrats will certainly be the estate tax. The estate tax, or, as wordsmith and Republican operative Frank Luntz prefers to call it, the “death tax,” passed along with other Bush Tax cuts shortly after he took office, has been gradually scaled down each and is eliminated in 2010. The tax is scheduled to reset in 2011. Radical conservative Republicans want to end it permanently.

The phase out and return of the estate tax are described as follows (sourse: Wikipedia)

Year, Excluded, Top rate paid on amount above that excluded
2001 $675,000 55%
2002 $1 million 50%
2003 $1 million 49%
2004 $1.5 million 48%
2005 $1.5 million 47%
2006 $2 million 46%
2007 $2 million 45%
2008 $2 million 45%
2009 $3.5 million 45%
2010 repealed 0%
2011 $1 million 55%

According to this report by Citizens for Tax Justice, less than one-percent of American estates are taxed. The report covers 2005-2006 and is broken down by state. Alaska, Mississipi, and Louisiana had the lowest percentage of estates being taxed, less that 0.5-percent. California had the highest percentage of estates taxed, less than two-percent. Congressional Democrats have proposed revising the estate tax after 2010 to levels similar to those of 2005-2006.

It’s pretty clear from the CTJ study that the estate tax under 2005-2006 rates is paid by only the richest Americans.

From another post I wrote last year:

Benjamin Franklin is said to have claimed that only two things in life were certain - death and taxes. So, if there were such a thing as a “death tax,” most people would probably think it was a tax they couldn’t avoid. The association of death, taxes and certainty is that strong. The government intruding into a private matter of family grief to snatch away what modest savings the deceased worked decades to pass along to his or her surviving loved ones is a powerful and repulsive image. It’s also a charade.

Read the rest of post.

The use of the term “death tax” and its (falsely) implied universality is an example of what David Hapgood, NYU professor and author of The Screwing of the Average Man, calls a “youtooism.” Youtooisms are part of what he calls the “Vocabulary of Screwing.” Youtooisms are deceptions that greedy wealth and their politicians use to convince the rest of us that what is good for them is is also good for us, and vice-versa. David Hapgood’s short list, Vocabulary of Screwing is available here.

Update April 21, 2008
Related post: Do Media Conglomerates (like ABC) Owe the Clintons Another Favor?

Update April 18, 2008
An open letter condemning last Wednesday’s ABC ambush “debate” is endorsed by several notable signatories and posted by Mark Thoma at Economists View. Pretty interesting.

“What’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial” - Barack Obama from his book The Audacity of Hope. (Quoted by Michael Grunwald today at Time Online.

At the so-called debate last night that was more like a couple of tabloid shlock journalists (Gibson and Stephanopolous) “fishing” for sensational news, Barack Obama was serious and steady, but who could blame him if he was a little annoyed?

As Steve Kornacki at the New York Obsever wrote:

ABC News devoted the first 30 minutes or so of the roughly two-hour Democratic debate on April 17 to trivial and petty gotcha questions, which pretty much set the tone for the evening.

“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” George Stephanopoulos actually asked Barack Obama—twice.

Near the end of the evening during a segment on taxes, Charlie Gibson suggested over 100 million Americans pay capital gains tax. That many may own stock, but relatively few receive their income from investments and don’t pay that tax. Those who do are mostly middle class retirees, who have modest tax burdens, and the wealthy Invester Class,- but more about that later. Obama had a good reply describing billionaire hedge fund managers who only pay 15-percent on capital gains income, a lower percentage than their secretaries would pay in income tax.

Definitely a lousy night for ABC’s “finest.” If that’s the way the pros run a debate, then bring on the League of Women Voters.

Listen to Michael Greenberger on NPR’s Fresh Air

Michael Greenberger was recently interviewed by Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. The topic was “The Shadow Financial System.” The audio feed for the interview is linked above. Everyone at all curious about the world of money, investment, and finance should listen to what Greenberger has to say - it’s that good. Educators might want to use it in their classes.

According to Greenberger, who used to serve on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission but is now a professor at the University of Maryland, an irresponsible piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000(CFMA) was presented to Congress by its sponsor Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) in December 2000. It was not written by members of Congress. It was written by lawyers and lobbyists. With no rigorous hearings or debate on the bill, it was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton just before Christmas recess.

According to Greenberger, the CFMA was a particularly damaging piece of legislation that made possible a type of murky, unregulated investment known as structured investment vehicles. These are the “mystery meats” on the global financial “menu.”

Furthermore, according to the Wiki article on Gramm, the bill created the “Enron exemption” that deregulated energy markets. Gramm’s wife, Wendy, wrote that part of the bill and Gramm pushed it through the legislative “grinder” to final passage. Wendy was later appointed to a directorship at Enron. This legislation led, in part, to the Enron debacle and thousands of Enron employees losing their jobs and pensions. Phil Gramm is now advising John McCain and has been suggested as a potential running mate (ibid).

The explanation by Greenberger in the audio link is better than my crude summary, but in short, nobody knows the extent of problem because these SIV’s are so mysterious in composition and so poorly collateralized that they amount to nothing more than “making bets.”

Summing up, Greenberger says:

Should we have an economy that’s based on whether people make good or bad bets? Or should we have an economy where people build companies, create manufacturing, do inventions, advance the American society, make it more productive? This economy is based on people sitting at their computers and making bets all day long. They call it credit default swaps, OTC derivatives, asset backed securities, etc. etc, - makes it all very complicated, but we are rewarding people for sitting at their computers and punching in bets. That’s not the way our economy is going to be built, and India and China, with their focus on science and industry and building real businesses, are going to eat our lunch, unless the American public wakes up and puts an end to an economy that praises and makes heroes out of speculators.

Those “retrospective voters” who long for a return to the good old days of the “Clinton economy” of the 1990’s should realize that those were days of relatively cheap oil, the tech boom (followed by the Nasdaq bubble), and the Baby Boomer generation working in its peak earning years. The economy Clinton inherited from George H.W. Bush was in much better shape than the one our next president will see.

Update April 18, 2007:
The arcane terms structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, OTC derivatives, and asset backed securities are examples of what NYU professor and author David Hapgood calls “wordnoise.” Hapgood defines wordnoise as “verbal fakery designed to mask reality.” Wordnoise is part of the “Vocabulary of Screwing,” which is described here.

Related Article: Merril Lynch Posts First Quarter Loss