End the Echo weblog

You may recall, that new catch phrase that was run during the 2000 election - compassionate conservative, this was to describe the new face of conservatism brought to you about George W Bush.

Sadly, he was high on conservatism, and very lacking in compassion.  As a perfect example, which you were probably ignorant of thanks to corporate media and their crush on candidate Bush.

As Christopher Brauchli reported in Common Dreams last fall,

In 1997 Texas was allotted $561 million that it was required to spend in full by 2000. According to the Dallas Morning News, mid-way through 2000 Texas had only spent $112 million leaving $449 million unspent. By June 2000, 123,000 Texas families had applied for assistance but only 27,000 children had been enrolled. According to the Children’s Defense Fund Report, Texas ranked 45th among the states enrolling children in CHIP. Texas was one of only 8 states where the number of children with any form of health insurance declined from 1997 to 1999.

Failure to implement CHIP was not Mr. Bush’s only success in protecting Texans from the greedy needy. His other successes were described by U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice. On August 14, 2000 Judge Justice entered a ruling on a case that had been filed against Texas for its failure to live up to a 1996 consent decree involving other health care programs. The judge gave Mr. Bush a report card that looked a lot like ones he probably got in grade school. It had lots of “needs improvement” on it. He said Mr. Bush had failed to improve children’s access to Medicaid, checkups under the program’s managed care arm were inadequate and fewer than 10 percent of children were receiving immunizations. He said the state had failed to inform indigent families about the availability of health services. He said managed care plans to which some indigent Texans had been assigned were not providing the required services and 1 million eligible individuals had received no dental care. In response to the judge’s findings Mr. Bush said: “[W]e’ve got a good record in signing up children for Medicaid and we’re going to continue to do so.” He must have been thinking of something the judge had overlooked.

So his record as Governor Bush was pretty dismal in helping the poor-more conservative than compassionate in my book.

Now the reason this is important is because Bush has done a couple of things to limit access to SCHIP from the top down, as the magical unitary executive that he is.  One is that he has vetoed increased funding for SCHIP to expand the number of children that are covered.

At issue is a program that provides health insurance for children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private health insurance. The vetoed measure would expand the $5 billion-a-year program by an average of $7 billion a year over the next five years. Supporters say that would be enough to boost enrollment to 10 million, up from 6.6 million, and dramatically reduce the number of uninsured children in the country, currently about 9 million.

The other method he used was to have the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issue a letter explaining the statutory and regulatory reason to limit SCHIP to families whose income is below 250% of the federal poverty level (FPL).  Ironically, this letter has this sentence:

In addition, section 2102(c) of the Act requires that State child health plans include procedures for outreach and coordination with other public and private health insurance programs.

It sure would have been nice if that spotlight had been directed to Governor Bush’s record.

Back to this letter, I have a huge problem with the FPL because it is a one size fits all for the whole contiguous 48 states, and do we really think that $13,690 for a family of 2 can be stretched the same in Manhattan as in Topeka, Kansas?  That is why some of the states with a higher cost of living are expanding coverage past 250% of FPL.

The bigger issue for conservatives, who rely heavily on corporate campaign contributions, is that SCHIP could cause children with current private coverage to switch to public health insurance under SCHIP, this is called “crowd out.”  Of course, this is about private insurance not wanting to compete with public insurance, guess there some doubts in the church of free market!

The good news is that the Government Accounting Office has informed Congress that the letter constitutes a rule, and as such must be submitted to Congress and the Comptroller General before taking effect.

The August 17 letter from CMS to state health officials is a statement of general applicability and future effect designed to implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy with regard to SCHIP. Accordingly, it is a rule under the Congressional Review Act. Therefore, before it can take effect, it must be submitted to Congress and the Comptroller General.

Hopefully this ruling by the GAO will lead the CMS to withdraw the letter.

-Josh

I was out of town on vacation in Toronto, so I am doing a little catch up on stuff from the past few weeks.  I have already posted on two concerts I saw just before leaving.  Now I will switch gear and get to some policy and political stuff that happened just before or while I was out of town.

-Josh

This weekend the SPCO had a very nice concert.  So nice, that at least one of my friends that saw it three times.

The concert opened with Rameau’s Suite from Zoroastre, very much a baroque piece.  I am not sure that I have heard any music by Rameau before, but it doesn’t matter because I really liked it.  A few times it seemed like I heard some elements of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in it.  It was interesting that the violins were reduced to four musicians (from six) for each of the first and second violin sections, the violas were their usual four, the cellos were halved to two, and bass also halved to one.  For cello and bass, the principals did not play.

Second up was the very familiar by now (saw it on February 9th and April 6th), Tartini’s Devil’s Trill, arranged for violin solo, piano, and string orchestra.  I have seen this piece earlier this season with Joshua Bell and Dale Baltrop in recital, but without the string orchestra.  As before, this is a great piece and Dale Barltrop once again played it beautifully.  It was hard for me to hear the piano where I was sitting, but the strings were a really nice complement to the solo violin.  As expected (and same as Thursday at Temple Israel as reported by my friends) Dale got a very quick standing ovation from the audience which was well deserved.

After intermission we heard Dvorak’s Serenade in D Minor for Winds, Op. 44.  This was a fun piece that featured winds (no flutes) plus solo cello and solo bass played by the principals.  At the start of the third movement I really enjoyed the parts by Timothy Paradise on clarinet and Kathryn Greenback on oboe.  It was also nice to see Sarah Lewis, Sabina Thatcher, and Michael Christie (Michael was sitting one row in front of me on the aisle) sitting in the audience for it.  Steven Copes lurked in a doorway for about 2 movements.

The final piece of the night was Ligeti’s Concert Romanesc (Romanian Concerto) which took a while to start.  After the stagehands rearranged the seating and stands, the musicians came out and sat, we waited a little while for Michael Christie to take the stage and conduct this final piece.  He left his seat after the Wind Serenade pretty early in the applause, so I am not sure what happened.

The good news is that the wait was well worth it.  This was a fun, lively piece that was fun to hear.  I had heard from my friend who attended the night before that it was good, and my guest that joined me said it was her favorite piece that night.  I hope we hear it again.

-Josh

On April 24th (and 26th) Dawn Upshaw sang in her final concert of the season as an Artistic Partner with the SPCO. This was the first concert I attended with a Club 2030 purchased seat, which placed me in seat 213 and row S. The view from this location was very nice, I could see the wind section for a change.

The concert started with Stravinsky’s Suite from Pulcinella which is a beautiful piece, especially the second movement-Serenata. This piece had the principal strings (excluding bass), Steven Copes-1st violin, Dale Barltrop-2nd violin, Sabina Thatcher-viola, and Ronald Thomas-cello, sitting in string quartet formation and the rest of their sections sitting behind them.

It was a bit odd to start the concert program with such a long piece (23 minutes) as often they start with a shorter piece to make it easier to seat late people between pieces, rather than between movements. However, that was probably a nod to Dawn Upshaw’s performance in the later two pieces before intermission.

As I mentioned, the Serenata is particularly nice, it features a nice opening oboe solo which was wonderfully played by Kathryn Greenbank. This movement is one of my favorite all time and I was happy to hear it live again. I have this recording of it and I recommend it highly.

After the Suite was finished, I was a bit surprised that conductor Douglas Boyd, an oboist himself, shook hands with the string quartet members after the piece, but didn’t acknowledge Kathryn Greenbank until after he returned to the stage.

The next two pieces were songs by Stravinsky-Two Poems of Constantin Bal’mont and Three Japanese Lyrics with Dawn Upshaw singing soprano. Both were short, 3 minutes, I didn’t enjoy them all that much, not awful, just not my cup of tea.  In an interesting change of pace, the SPCO used supertitles and two TVs on the side of the stage (for those sitting close) to provide translations of the text.  They had done supertitles for years, then at one point switched to paper inserts to the program book.

This was the first concert I have heard for the give, not sure if they started a week earlier with the neighborhood series, but happy they didn’t do it at the April 5th concert (which in past years they would have).  This year’s theme is about people coming to the SPCO and that they want to support the organization.  As in the past they have a match from the Bush Foundation for new and increased giving.  The increased giving might be why they are giving a book on the SPCO for $150, higher than last year’s DVD (with TPT) about their tour to Europe which went to those who gave $100.

After intermission, we heard a world premiere of Schubert songs (She Was Here) arranged by Golijov. I am not really familiar with these songs, not sure I have heard them before. I really liked them, the music was very nice and we were able to see Golijov take a bow for his work as he was in attendance. In fact he was sitting 2 rows in front of me.

Last year the SPCO played a piece by Golijov, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind for Klezmer Clarinet and String Quartet (arranged for klezmer clarinet and string orchestra) which has a very different sound (Klezmer), but also very enjoyable. I recommend this recording which I own. Hopefully we will hear more from this composer in the future.

The concert ended with Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, London. As usual, this was another great performance. If you like Haydn, you should look at subscribing to the SPCO, you will see his symphonies played with them much more often than with the Minnesota Orchestra.

For those of you who are less familiar with classical music, where I used to be until I started going all the time. Haydn really did have 104 symphonies, much more than the 9 symphonies of Beethoven, and rightfully so is called the father of symphonies.

-Josh

On April 23rd, bass-baritone Bryn Terfel performed at the Ordway.  This was the only vocal recital I saw this year at the Schubert Club and it was quite enjoyable.

Early on it became clear that Terfel is a good performer, not just his great singing, but also his comfort with the audience, his stage presence.  I have seen singers with orchestras that just stand and sing, but have no real stage personality, Terfel is not one of those singers.  Probably the best example was a few years ago when the Baldwin sisters (Christina Baldwin and Jennifer Baldwin Peden) were on stage with the Minnesota Orchestra with two male singers for the Mozart Opera concert of the Casual Classics series.  The two guys just stood in their tuxes and sang, while the Baldwin sisters demonstrated great stage craft, the best was looking through the open frame like they were looking through a mirror.

Reading the text of the songs, especially of English language songs, it seemed that a few times either Terfel or the text was a bit off since they didn’t quite match a couple of times.

During the last set of songs, Songs of the Celtic Isles, Terfel solicited some audience participation for the last two songs.  For Ar Hyd y Nos (All Through the Night) he had the audience humming with the music.  For the last song, Molly Malone, he had the audience singing with the chorus part.  At first we were pathetic and he stopped and had us stand to sing better.  The audience clearly enjoyed it, I think it is a sneaky (but fun) way to ensure a standing ovation, which he would have receive anyway.  The other strange thing with the Celtic Isles is that he skipped Cariad Cyntaf (First Love).

For an encore, he sang a nice song, can’t remember the name.  I don’t know if this was a true mistake, or part of the fun that we were lead to with the audience participation, but pianist Malcolm Martineau had the wrong music when Terfel announced the piece from the stage.  I am guessing it was planned, as Terfel went up to the piano while Martineau was off stage getting the right music and played a few notes of the music he had brought out originally and nodding it was the wrong music.  During the encore, Terfel hopped off stage and sung to women in the audience, holding hands, kissing hands, and playing footsie.  Once again showing his skills as a performer, and with his ability to get back on stage his skills at moving quickly.

It was a great performance and a nice end to the Schubert Club’s International Artist Series for the season.

-Josh

What happens when you take a tax evader and sprinkle in a good dose of religious nuttery?  You get, Robert Beale.

Apparently tax evader (not simple protester), Robert Beale is charged,

In a new complaint unsealed Monday, the former North Oaks executive was charged with conspiracy to prevent U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery from overseeing his trial.

“Once I take down Ann Montgomery, no judge in the whole court will have anything to do with me,” Beale said in a tape-recorded phone call from jail.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of white collar crime, like tax evasion, I don’t think of more violent actions like attempts to knock off the judge.  But it gets more bizarre, because it is based on some faith,

Beale is a “member/leader” of what’s known among certain groups as an extra-judicial “Common Law Court” in Ramsey County. The lengthy title of this specific “court” indicates a religious undercurrent, including a reference to “a superior court for the People, original jurisdiction under Almighty Yahweh exclusive jurisdiction in and for confederation-government United States of America.”

I wonder exactly where in the judicial system that falls?  Between District Court and Court of Appeals?  Maybe we should get Alberto Gonzalez involved, I hear he is looking for work.  But see, it isn’t just this secret court that Beale believes in, God also has some specific plans for the judge,

Snell said that Beale told his common-law wife, Mun Suk Kim, in an April 3 conversation that God wants him to “destroy the judge. That judge is evil. He wants me to get rid of her.”

Wow, that must be some God, if Beale was polytheistic, maybe the God against the tax oppression?  Now apparently Beale’s God has conveyed some special powers.

Beale also told Pelton that “God needs us to be like Gideon against the Mennonites– 300 vs. 120,000 men. We rise up and God will take care of us.”

But if his God will take care of him,

His trial was initially scheduled for August 2006. But he fled Minnesota before his trial could be held and was arrested Nov. 1 in Orlando, Fla., after spending 14 months as a fugitive.

why did he need to flee, and why was he caught?  Sounds like Beale’s God is not taking care of him.

This is a man accused of evading over $1.6 million in taxes, and uses some bizarre form of religion to justify this.  He is not making a strong case to us non-believers.

“I thought everybody should be doing what I was doing,” he said. “I wasn’t hiding anything. I wanted to be a hero. But a lot of people who try to do that end up in jail, just like me.”

Hero or criminal on the tax issue, that could be a point of debate for some people.  But when it extends to killing a judge in the name of God, well it sure will be hard make that hero claim.

-Josh

So I was watching Chris Wallace grill Dick Durbin (Obama’s proxy) on Fox News Sunday this morning. This is really about framing an issue in such a way as to achieve your objective by presenting the language in a favorable, or more generally acceptable way.

The frame:

• An increase in capital gains taxes, which Obama is proposing to increase from 15% to 28%, will impact the middle class, considering that almost 50% of the tax returns that list capital gains taxes make less than $50,000.

I am going to pick on a piece by Larry Kudlow at the National Review Online on this issue, because that way I can quote what he is writing, plus I am certain this is part of the right wing echo machine that I have said I am fighting, the echo ends here!

The Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore points out that in 2005, almost half of all tax returns reporting capital gains came from households with incomes under $50,000, while more than three-quarters came from households earning less than $100,000.

The first hint that an attempt is being made to confuse us is that we talk about the number of returns, not the percentage of capital gains tax paid. See, I did my taxes earlier this week. I make less than $50,000 and I paid capital gains taxes on my dividends from one stock, that one stock gained me a total of $4.52 in dividends, so at 15% I paid 68 cents and at 28% I would pay $1.27, or a tax increase of 59 cents. So yes, I would be one of these masses that would face a tax increase, but I would be okay with it.

But my point still stands, so I went looking for information on percentages by income of the capital gains tax paid, not just number of returns. I found this from Citizens for Tax Justice (pdf),

Looks like under $46,000 paid 0.4% of all of the capital gains taxes paid, and under $110,00 paid 5.7%. Once again, this an example of conservatives, co-opting the “looking out for the middle class” to protect a reduced tax rate that primarily benefits those at the top of the income scale. You will not see this similar behavior, this concern for middle and low income voters when we talk about preserving (when cuts are proposed) or expanding social programs, just on the revenue end of things.

Now Kudlow has some questionable arguments against other aspects of Obama’s proposed tax policy.

Obama also proposed uncapping the payroll tax, another blunder that will hit people up and down the income ladder. While Obama pledges tax hikes only for folks earning more that $200,000 a year, his tax hike on payrolls would actually slam middle-income earners. The cap on wages subject to the payroll tax is presently $102,000. By eliminating that cap Obama will be soaking veteran firemen, cops, teachers, and health-service workers, along with a variety of other occupations.

In fact, in America’s largest cities, a firefighter married to a school teacher can earn close to $200,000 filing jointly. So not only will each spouse separately pay more for Social Security and health care under Obama’s plan, together they’ll also be slammed by Obama’s cap-gains tax increase.

This is a lot of confusion being thrown about to make Obama look bad.

Who down the ladder will this impact, if you make under $102,000 a year, no tax increase. It is that simple and begins to unravel the lie.

What is middle class, maybe in the Boston to Washington DC supercity, $200,000 is considered middle class in that subset of the US population. But if you look at the raw number in the chart above, $200,000 is clearly in the top 5 percent for the whole US. This increase only effects those that are in the top 20% nationally and mostly those in the top 10%.

Now lets say we breakdown his example of a firefighter married to a school worker making $200,000 a year. Lets say the firefighter makes $130,000 and the school teacher makes $70,000. A big omission, is that the cap is per person, not per family. So the school teacher who makes less than $102,000 will not see any increase to their payroll taxes. So the fire fighter would for the $28,000 income that currently is not subject to the social security pay roll tax. That tax is 6.2% off of the pay check and then another 6.2% from the employer. So $28,000 times 6.2% is an increase of $1,762. That is a real increase, but Kudlow is trying to confuse, because in a scenario where both wage earners earn $100,000, then they would face no increase to the payroll tax. But he wants you to think that the total increase would be $98,000 times 6.2% or $6,076.

That is how it would effect his middle class in his example. But what about a person that earns $1 million. Well that additional $898,000 of their income that would be subjected to the 6.2% social security tax would increase their tax by $55,676. That is a big amount, clearly more than I make in a year, but why should only lower income, those of us under $102,000 in income pay 6.2% on ALL of our income. Currently anyone that makes $102,000 or more pays at total of $6,324 in payroll taxes for social security. So for that person making a cool million, they are paying an effective tax rate to social security of 0.63% or one tenth the tax rate we middle and lower class people are making.

Now after this, if you are confused, you may now question the thinking that Larry Kudlow is looking out of the middle class, and this reinforces that doubt. He has been a staunch defender of preserving the capital gains rate of 15% for the hedge funder managers,

The latest assault comes courtesy of House Democrat Sander Levin. Late last week, he introduced a bill that essentially would abolish the 15 percent capital-gains tax preference for risk investing, and raise it by 20 percentage points to the 35 percent corporate and personal rate. This goes beyond an earlier tax attack on a public offering by the Blackstone Group, and would slam into all private partnerships, including buyout funds, hedge funds, venture-capital firms, real estate partnerships, and oil-and-gas deals.

Taxing income at 35% versus the 15%, what does that mean to tax revenue for the country? Well for one manager in 2007,

One manager — John Paulson of Paulson & Co. — earned $3.7 billion last year, which management consultant Peter Cohan pointed out means Paulson in 2007 made 30 times in one hour what the median family made all year.

So what would John Paulson pay in taxes on that $3.7 billion.

• 15% equals $555 million
• 28% equals $1.036 billion
• 35% equals $1.295 billion

Even at 35% he would have $2.4 billion in take home income, I know that must be a hardship, after all he could (and probably did) taken home $3.1 billion.

Ironically, that June 27, 2007 post where he argues against raising the tax rate for hedge fund managers, he mentions this,

But plain ol’ income this is not. The recent crack up of two Bear Stearns sub-prime-mortgage hedge funds shows just how risky these ventures can be.

Well they aren’t THAT risky if the government is going to bail you out, and what was his take on that bailout for Bear Stearns?

But speaking for himself, Kudlow, a contributor to Buckley’s National Review who worked for Bear Stearns for eight years, defended the bailout. He said that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke “have done exactly the right thing.” But it wasn’t the conservative thing to do. It wasn’t consistent with the conservative and free market principles in the Sharon Statement.

Well I have gotten a bit off topic here, so I will summarize.

• Conservative pundits are trying to co-opt the progressive message of protecting middle class from tax increases. They do this by using numbers of people who file capital gains in their returns, not the amount of the capital gains they claim as a percentage of all capital gains claimed to inflate the impact on the middle class.
• Conservatives worry about the lifting the cap on income subjected to the payroll tax for social security, while clearly this only would impact those in the top 20% nationally.
• When talking about the capital gains taxes and how they must be kept low, they have defended the right for people like John Paulson to only pay 15% on his $3.7 billion income in 2007, not a higher 28% (proposed increase to capital gains tax rate) or 35% rate (top income tax rate).
• Larry Kudlow justified this lower rate because of the associated risk that hedge fund managers have, but did not have an issue when the government bailed out Bear Stearns, in other words government taking on the risk that hedge managers were apparently being rewarded for taking with a lower tax rate.

So when the right wing pundits carry the water for the investor class to punch holes in Obama’s plan for more equitable taxation, they are only crying crocodile’s tears for the middle class.

-Josh

Watching ABC’s This Week, John McCain was being grilled by George Stephanopoulos on tax increases or cuts.  Finally McCain fell back on the tired mantra we are so familiar with in Minnesota, the problem is not government revenue (reason not to raise taxes) but a spending problem.  We have been hearing this from Minnesota Republicans for a couple of years now.  Maybe McCain spent too much time hanging out with Tim Pawlenty.

On medical care, McCain spewed the typically right wing talking points, attacking Canada’s system.  He talked about health care decisions should be made by people, not government, but as usual, what about private insurance companies.  They make a majority of the decisions for Americans these days, just a bit of an omission.

-Josh

This week the Minnesota Opera has been performing Rusalka by Dvorak.  The plot is adapted from the Little Mermaid, although not with a Disney ending.

The overall story is a little light, and a bit bizarre, but the music is outstanding.

Coming from my worldview of an atheist, I found it interesting that in the opening act, that Rusalka wants to be human, become mortal so her soul can go to heaven when she dies.  Not sure if that is the original translation or just the translation that we saw, but it strikes of trying to convert people to Christianity from a pagan belief system.

We also have the prince falling for the mute (just to humans) Rusalka in less than a week, and then falling for the more passionate foreign princess.  Rusalka’s dress in this second act was well designed to convey the image of being a fish, but the red color, which looked very nice, didn’t match the words or concept of her being cold and that being the reason the prince left her for this foreign princess.

At the very end, the prince commits suicide, basically sacrificing himself for the curse that befell Rusalka when he rejected her.  I wonder how that balances out theologically and ethically, I mean he isn’t really sacrificing himself as much to help Rusalka as to get over his guilt.

The set was really nice, it worked well, especially with the projected images.  Other than the red dress for Rusalka in the second act, I really thought the costumes fit well with the theme of the opera and the set.  The chorus was pretty minimal, but the use of dancers was really nice and enhanced the production.

I really enjoyed the signing and I thought all the roles were well sung.

I brought my friend Egil, who really enjoyed it.  He thought there was a lot of Wagner in this opera.  He also shouted out a lot of bravos and bravas, and got thumbs up from some of  the cast as they walked on stage, so clearly they appreciated his enthusiasm.  I know that staff at the Minnesota Opera know of him as bravo guy, and last year I talked to one that wondered what had happened to him as he hasn’t been able to go for the past few years, they will know that he is back now.

There are two performances left, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.  I would highly recommend them if you are free.

-Josh

As I have previously mentioned, Club 2030 with the SPCO is a great deal. SPCO is not the only good deal in town and I will list a few more.

• Dakota Jazz Club
• Guthrie Theater
• Landmark Theater (Uptown, Lagoon, Edina 4)
• Minnesota Opera
• Minnesota Orchestra
• Riverview Theater
• Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (for all ages)

If you know of other good ones, post them in the comment section.

Last night I had a 2 for 1 offer from Dakota to see the Somi who isn’t well known. They are trying to fill the house.

Tuesday, Landmark Theater had a free preview offer for Young @ Heart for Wednesday.

I saw the Dale Barltrop recital as part of the Club 2030 program and have had offer for 2 for 1, not often, through the general e-mail program for SPCO.

Guthrie will often give you discounts for mid week shows.

Riverview Theater doesn’t really have deals, unless you count it a deal every time you go like I do. But if you like the theater, which I do a lot, then it is great way to get information about upcoming schedule. They also use it to ask for advice on things like showing Tour de France and World Cup, or to let you buy their old seats (last December) as they replaced them (new ones are nice).

So if you like good deals, get on these lists. I am on all of them so I speak from experience.

-Josh