Taxes

On Monday, a guest column appeared in the Opinion section of The Oregonian, titled "What the numbers tell us" and written by Ray Link, a CPA and chief financial officer of FEI Company. He begins by stating that "Unlike Joe [Biden], I have no real issue with high-income people paying more taxes, although I can't say I ever felt it was my patriotic duty." His contention is that higher taxes are not a duty for wealthy Americans, but they make financial sense for those individuals when the broader economic picture is looked at. He writes:

The key then seems to be a combination of modest tax rates coupled with modest deficits, and it's hard to have a modest deficit with really low tax rates.

As one of those "fat cat" Republicans in the maximum marginal tax rate, I'd gladly pay another 4.6 percent in tax on income above $300,000 if it resulted in higher returns on my investments and helped lower the deficit that otherwise is eroding my purchasing power.

In Link's opinion, he and other high income earners stand to gain more than they lose when their taxes are raised, particularly by such a small percentage.

Link finishes his opinion with an apology, to that other Joe, Joe the Plumber, saying, "So sorry, Joe, I'll pay more. Not because it's my patriotic duty. It's just good business."

Language and Social Interaction

Two recent articles, one in the most recent Wired, "I'll Be There 4 U" (apparently renamed to "Scott Brown on Facebook Friendonomics" in the online edition) by Scott Brown, the second appearing in the 20 October New Yorker, "Thumbspeak" by Louis Menand, deal with social networks and language, respectively. Brown's complaint is that with the advent of social networking, namely Facebook, it is increasingly harder to let old friends go by the wayside. He writes:

Third, and most grave, we've lost our right to lose touch. "A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature," Emerson wrote, not bothering to add, "and like most things natural, friendship is biodegradable." We scrawl "Friends Forever" in yearbooks, but we quietly realize, with relief, that some bonds are meant to be shed, like snakeskin or a Showtime subscription. It's nature's way of allowing you to change, adapt, evolve, or devolve as you wish—and freeing you from the exhaustion of multifront friend maintenance. Fine, you can "Remove Friend," but what kind of asshole actually does that? Deletion is scary—and, we're told, unnecessary in the Petabyte Age. That's what made good old-fashioned losing touch so wonderful—friendships, like long-forgotten photos and mixtapes, would distort and slowly whistle into oblivion, quite naturally, nothing personal. It was sweet and sad and, though you'd rarely admit it, necessary.

He ends with the statement, "I've never lost a Friend, you see, and I'm starting to worry I never will."

Menand's thesis regards text messaging, specifically, and the evolution of language more broadly. He makes a point late in the article, that "People don't like to have to perform the amount of self-presentation that is required in a personal encounter. They don't want to deal with the facial expressions, the body language, the obligation to be witty or interesting." This idea hits at the heart of Brown's problem with not losing friends. When interactions between real friends come down to 160 bytes of text, distinguising them from Facebook Friends becomes increasingly difficult. One cannot then delete a friend from Facebook, lest he or she delete a friend in real life.

On Verbiage, Verbage

James Wood wrote a short piece in this week's New Yorker, entitled "Verbage" (subtitled: "The Republican war on words."). It ends with a quote from Governor Palin:

Well, it was an unfair attack on the verbage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwords, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbage that John McCain used.

The conclusion Wood comes to is that "the coinage of 'verbage'" is the best example of "the Republican disdain for words [...], so close to garbage, so far from language."

Wood is alluding to the origin of "verbage" as a misspelling or mispronunciation of "verbiage." (See: verbage, verbiage.) However, it is also interesting to note that Palin calling McCain's words verbage is not without irony, unwittingly comparing his quote to garbage.