Across the Great Divide

Big Business McCain and His Small Business Friends.

One of John McCain's gambits over the past several weeks has been to announce the formation of small business advisory groups in potential swing states, including Virginia, California and other states. Tiny New Hampshire has quite a robust list, while Minnesota, home to one of his campaign's co-chairs, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, has a pretty meager showing.

Given the relatively minor name recognition and political clout most of these "small business leaders" have, they are useful to McCain mostly so he can stand in front of them and proclaim himself in favor of business growth while spinning bald-faced lies about the effect his opponent's policies will have on these exemplars of the American Dream.

Backed by a handful of marketing consultants, cleaning service contractors, insurance agents and filling station owners, McCain makes as if he is supported by about 8 percent of the U.S. population — all those beleaguered small business owners.

FactCheck.org goes into the detail of how McCain first inflates the number of small businesses, ignores that most of them do not actually employ workers, and then conflates them with the relatively small proportion of business owners potentially affected by a tax increase on top earners.

Of the 26.8 million that SBA counts as "small businesses," fewer than 6 million are actually "employer firms" with any payroll.

From this, we must conclude that to arrive at his 23 million figure, McCain is counting mostly "business owners" with no workers, including those who simply report small amounts of income from sideline or freelance work. McCain is arguing that Obama's tax increase would "destroy jobs," but he's counting mostly firms that don't produce any.

[...]

Based on the number of taxpayers who now report any sort of business income on their returns, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center projects that 663,608 taxpayers with business income, or business losses, will fall into the top two tax brackets in 2009, when any Obama tax changes would first take effect. Not all of those can properly be called "small-business owners," however. Some are farmers. Many are lawyers, accountants or other professionals who get some of their income in the form of partnership distributions. Others may be passive investors in real-estate partnerships or similar investment arrangements and not really persons who own and manage a business.

         

It is also not clear how many who report business income actually employ any workers.

 

         

Of the small businesses that do employ workers, Boston Review points out that many benefit as "state social supports—from education and training to health care—supplement workers’ wages and benefits, and help small businesses recruit and retain their workers."

Nor should we believe that small businesses are some monolithic political force with identical interests. Our service economy includes both businesses employing low-skilled, low wage workers and high-skilled, higher-paid knowledge workers that may value different ways the "welfare state" helps support their stability and success.

The Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, underwrites incomes for low-wage workers while increasing the labor supply in low-wage service industries. Food stamps, child care subsidies, and public health programs such as Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program increase productivity and reduce turnover among low-wage workers, to say nothing of improving their quality of life, at virtually no cost to their employers.

[...]

High-skilled firms have needs different from low-skilled ones, but public policies are just as important for them. These firms tend to employ highly educated and potentially mobile workers who are attracted to communities with good schools and universities, well-maintained recreational facilities, and effective environmental policies. Moreover, when workers lose their jobs, unemployment insurance gives them the economic security to defer work in order to train for new skills. Here, too, there are bases for supporting a more active government as a way to ensure the supply of skills on which small businesses will build in the future.

    

By siding with mom & pop stores and plucky, job-creating entrepreneurs, McCain can still advance  the interests of big business — oil, pharmas, financial services, defense contractors, airlines, big box retailers... — without being associated with their down sides, which are plenty in this economy.

Voting and Cognitive Dissonance: Just Looking for a Good Salesperson?

Do voters behave like consumers? When they respond to surveys, do they answer based on how they see the candidates — or how they see themselves?

Chuck McKay is writing about how cognitive dissonance can skew marketing surveys, but his column certainly has political dimensions.

He starts by noting that the concept of cognitive dissonance — the discomfort of trying to hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time — was originated by studying a Minnesota cult preparing for the end of the world that obviously didn't come.

And according to Festinger, when learning the new information forces people to compromise their self-image, they will not learn from their mistakes. Instead of admitting their own fallibility, they'll continue making the same bad choices. (This denial of the evidence also contributes to confirmation bias, in which an individual picks and chooses among the “facts” he'll accept as true.)

Bush supporters, I feel your pain.

McKay walks through some of the reasons respondents don't give the researchers straight answers. (Not in depth, though. He's an ad guy.)  And that even reasonably accurate responses only reflect a moment in time that may not still be true when it's really time to make a decision.

A recent study of automobile shoppers indicates that 58 percent of those who bought, drove off in a car other than the one they came looking for. And when questioned, a full 42 percent arrived at the lot without having made a clear choice between a new vehicle and a used one. Maybe what they were “just looking” for was a good salesperson.

Here's How to Fix the Congressional Housing Crisis.

I'm not a fan of gotcha political stories, regardless of who's being got. The story on Norm Coleman's Washington DC crash pad is one of those. Dinging him for accepting landlord leniency just invites counterattacks and ends up lowering the public's respect for all elected officials even further. (See the latest revelations about Rep. Charles Rangel's rent deals.)

Coleman is paying below-market rent to a friend who does work for his campaign, which doesn't look great, but it's hardly a Capitol crime compared to, say, taking big favors from big pharma.  Beyond appearances, the issue really is who's giving the break and what they expect in return.

Coleman is already giving his landlord his campaign direct mail business, it appears. Yes, it's a benefit not available to the general public, but it's hard to see how shaving a few bucks off his rent would make a difference.

I'm more bothered by this one detail in the Strib's showcase tour of Coleman's crib:

Turn the corner and the senator is within leaping distance to his tall full-sized bed, covered with a mound of pillows.

"Full-sized" is a pretty imprecise description of a furnishing that has well-known size designations, and a "mound of pillows" is a very curious feature in an otherwise spartan batch pad that barely has room to turn around.

To reporter Emily Kaiser, this decorator's touch may have seemed normal. But I would ask my male readers to tell us whether they have ever remotely — without female intervention — considered voluntarily piling any bed they occupied with pillows, which must be removed each night, put somewhere, and then replaced again in the morning.

Not. Gonna. Happen. This could be a realty house stager trick, the act of a woman with a shopping habit, or a basement display of metrosexuality, but it is not what regular guys do.

We had a discussion about this in our household, and my domestic partner came up with the idea that each state could provide optional housing for its Congressional delegation — a sort of DC apartment version of the governor's mansion concept.

In my big government extension of her states rights version, the federal government buys or builds housing near the Capitol available to any elected official required to maintain a residence in their home district. One complex would consist of apartment units for members who decide to move their families to Washington; the other would be designed for single members who are simply looking for convenient, affordable quarters while they are in town.

Rents would be priced at the same level as the income-based reimbursement available through Section 8 housing vouchers. Members would be free to accept the subsidized, below-market rate, or to find their own accommodations. Unrented units would be offered to public renters who qualify for Section 8 subsidies.

Just a thought.

Next-to-Final Message from Command on Planet Von Mises.

If we had come in peace, you would not have taken us seriously.

So I hope you can see now why it was necessary to incinerate Iran and surgically depopulate Sweden. (It's best, we've found, to demonstrate more than one WMD technology, as you call it, and to make it very clear we are not choosing sides.)

If you fail to follow through with our mandate, there will be no flowers of supplication left on Earth to strew in our path when we return five years from now. Just so there is no misunderstanding...

But peace is what we bring. Peace and the liberation of mankind through the free market.

We do not like to intervene. It goes against our philosophy. But have tried voluntary compliance with other planets, and frankly, it did not work out.  Freedom is not such an easy thing to bear after many generations of living under the yokes of oligarchies, social democracies, republics, dictatorships, democracies, communes, guilds, unions, tribes and religious cults. To expect human societies to cast off government restraint and embrace the free market as their sole protector was simply too much to ask.

We know that now.

We had great hopes when we secretly installed Ronald, and Grover has been an effective change agent on a smaller scale, but the others have been a disappointment. We thought with Rudy, Mitt and Ron all in position, America at least, would be able to stumble forward with one of them. Cindy was a mere afterthought, a back up, and Jesse and Arnold, entertaining as they are, represented a little R&D project that is hereby discontinued.

As for George, let's just say he's coming with us.

And so we will grant you five years to correct your trading systems, remake your schools, manage your infrastructure, keep your air, water and land clean, move yourselves efficiently and safely, and decide how to handle crime, birth, illness, insanity and death. As for wars, I hope you understand those will be pointless, and defense is out of the question.

As a visual aid, Tehran will continue to smoke for five years, and any living thing passing between Kiruna and Malmo will succumb to the residual toxins. We are sorry about Copenhagen, but as you may appreciate, your arbitrary borders are unintelligible from space.

Fail to implement a total free market system, and our return will not be a demonstration project. We have no interest in hundred-year occupations.

We trust you will greet us as liberators next time. Of course, there is no other option.

Looking Up Delegate Information is Tough When GOP Delegate Michael Brodkorb's Party Website Hides the Information.

A certain blogger, who happens to be a delegate from Minnesota to the Republican National Convention, was in a tizzy the other day because part of the Minnesota Secretary of State's web site was down for a short time.

In his book, when a site goes down, that's a sign of a leader's incompetence.

But what does it mean when a party doesn't even put basic information on its national convention site?

I went to look up some delegate information at the official GOP convention site. There's a Delegates section with a State Delegations sidebar, but if you click on a state name, all you get is some boilerplate text and a chance to become a "Digital Delegate." There's no search function on the site to help you dig out the information in case it was placed in some non-intuitive corner.

So I decided to see if this delegate secrecy was the same for the Democrats.  Their site has the same list of states, but when you click, you get actual information about who's representing a state.

Also significantly, you can reach the lists from a number of different locations on the site.

Three for the Fourth.

To celebrate the Fourth, I thought I'd go shopping for a flag lapel pin. I don't have lapels, but for less than two bucks, how could I justify not expressing my patriotism  — even if the pin was made in a Chinese sweatshop?

Turns out, I'm not the only lapel-limited citizen who can celebrate independence with a flag pin symbol. There's a whole province of them in Canada. But it's hard to imagine there's much of a market in Nunavut, where less than $15,000 could outfit the entire population.

*****

After seven years of looking, researchers have finally uncovered the foundations of George Washington's childhood home. Though Washington was raised in relatively prosperous circumstances, the exact location of the house was lost. 

Humankind's record of keeping track of itself is pretty spotty. If we can lose the birthplace of the father of our country in fewer than 250 years, what hope has Paris Hilton for immortality? Not to mention Yucca Mountain.

*****

Jesse Helms, who died today, epitomized the shift in the Republican power base created when white southern Democrats fled their party during the Civil Rights era. Only dying on Martin Luther King Day — or perhaps the day Obama is inaugurated — would provide a more ironic conclusion to Helms' exit from this world.

A comment on the Strib's story about Helms captures the man's hateful politics pretty well:

Soon after the Senate vote on the Confederate flag insignia, Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) ran into Mosely-Braun in a Capitol elevator. Helms turned to his friend, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah), and said, "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." He then proceeded to sing the song about the good life during slavery to Mosely-Braun (Gannett News Service, 9/2/93; Time, 8/16/93).

I'm proud of my country, but being really proud means forgetting we put people like Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.

Why Does This Sound Familar?

Newsweek reports John and Cindy McCain forgot to pay property taxes on a beach front condo they owned through a trust. Tax notices for the La Jolla, CA, place had been unanswered for four years until the matter was raised with the McCains this week.

County records show the bills, which were mailed to a Phoenix address associated with Mrs. McCain's trust, were returned by the post office. According to a McCain campaign aide, who requested anonymity when discussing a private matter, an elderly aunt of Mrs. McCain's lives in the condo, and the bank that manages the trust has not been receiving tax bills on the property.

Hey, the sort of thing can happen. At least no one at the trust office signed for the mail.

Mock Ads: McCain Swift Boated.

The Worst Political Ads in America Awards are coming Wednesday, May 21st. Sen. John McCain helps out with this weekend's reminder, appearing in a pair of ad parodies, plus an attack ad from the Ron Paul campaign.

And a special bonus clip...

Anonymous Left-Leaning Blogger Almost Breaks Story!

Ollie at A Bluestem Prairie already posted about the Strib story on the accounting woes of the State  GOP, and she fills in the blank, naming the anonymous blogger mentioned here:

Last month, GOP party chairman Ron Carey said, “Why do Hollywood celebrities think there is one set of rules for them and one set of rules for everyone else when it comes to paying taxes?”

A left-leaning blogger tried to ask Carey about the party’s FEC reports at a news conference the GOP called last week to highlight Franken’s problems. Carey dismissed him, saying the press briefing “is something for our credentialed media here.”

If it had been a certain right-leaning blogger, of course, Carey wouldn't have called on him either, but that's because the blogger would have already received and leaked the substance of the GOP story prior to the press conference. And the Strib would've had no problem identifying said blogger, even without seeing his Real ID media credential.

Here, we're taking no position on the state party's filing troubles, having already gone on record as defending the right of Democrats to make paperwork mistakes. However, let's note this isn't the only level at which the Party of Business has had accounting troubles. And the left-leaning blogger isn't the only one getting stiffed by Carey on this story.

Carey did not respond this week to Star Tribune requests for an interview about the FEC filings.

Eye of Newt, Toe of Tim.

Chris Steller at Minnesota Monitor speculates that Gov. Tim Pawlenty's commentary on electronic medical records — written with Newt Gingrich and, let's be honest, some anonymous help — was timed to burnish Pawlenty's conservative sheen in advance of the McCain VP selection.

I see a few problems with this.

The uncontroversial electronic medical record (EMR) is strange pick for conservative credential burnishing, since it's one of the most bipartisan areas of agreement on the planet. Expanding its use has been part of candidate health care platforms from Brownback and Huckabee to Kucinich and Obama.

Is a co-byline  with Gingrich going to set conservative hearts racing? He's so rehabilitated that Hillary Clinton is even willing to say she's working with Newt on the EMR, despite his torpedoing the Clinton health plan as part of his strategy to gain Republican control of Congress in 1994.

And how does any commentary piece in Minnesota, where Pawlenty's image is pretty much set, shape his image nationally, where it needs the help? With Gingrich's national profile, he could certainly get his op/ed placed elsewhere. For example, in Baltimore, where he was addressing a national health care symposium at the same time the piece appeared in the Star Tribune. So far, the commentary hasn't been picked up by any other media nationally.

That symposium, by the way, was sponsored by Siemens, which is a major player in the EMR business and one of the funders of Gingrich's Center for Health Transformation.

I may have more to say about the content of the piece in a later post.