Bush's health insurance tax deduction

President Bush just announced his health insurance tax deduction; $7,500 for single people or $15,000 for families. Sounds impressive. But, wait.

Looking just at how he described it in the speech (press coverage suggests that the actual proposal, which I haven't read, is even worse):

Bush said a family of four with an income of $60,000 will see a tax savings of $4,500 per year. $4,500 / 4 / 12 = $93.75 per person per month. Last time I was paying for health insurance, it was more than three times that expensive, and that was for a healthy 20-something person three years ago.

For the $7,500 single person example, we can assume that the people most desperate for it are probably in the 15% tax bracket (incomes between $7,500 and $30,650). $7,500 * .15 / 12 == $93.75 again. That seems to be the magic number. But note that, due to the $7,500 deduction, the single person's taxable income (after other deductions) needs to be at least $15,000 to get even that.

Those with even lower incomes get less.

Those with incomes above $344,060 ($336,560 + 7500) get $218 per month towards health insurance, almost covering the cost.

The Eternal Flame

Today was Martin Luther King Day. Here's something I wrote and sent to some people in July, 2005:

I just had a rather surreal experience. I got on a fairly crowded Atlanta MARTA train on which I was one of maybe three white passengers. A few stops later, I got off and started walking through a very run down neighborhood, where most of the fences had razor wire on top, some of the houses were boarded up and those that weren't looked pretty desolate. It certainly didn't feel like a safe place to be. And, as far as I could tell, I was the only white person around. From the stares I was getting I may have been a pretty rare sight. Then, showing that I wasn't as lost as it looked like I was, I came upon a razor wire fence surrounding a bunch of busses that said "Ebenezer Baptist Church."

I passed a well-maintained old church building (Martin Luther King's old church), and looked across the street at an opulent new church building also labeled as the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Suddenly, instead of urban decay, I was surrounded by a very well maintained park, the Martin Luther King National Historic Site, and the most grandiose tomb I've ever seen in the US (although the torch next to it, labeled as the "Eternal Flame" was turned off). A multi-cultural group of tourists mingled about.

On the other side of the park was the house King grew up in, beautifully maintained, as were most of the houses around it, also part of the park. But half a block beyond that a residential neighborhood started again, and again the houses appeared to be crumbling.

Then I wandered into the museum. A slew of exhibits, mostly targeted towards children, explained over and over again that segregation had been a system in which black people and white people lived in different neighborhoods, went to different schools, and shopped at different stores. They emphasized the bad condition of the black neighborhoods under segregation, and went on and on about how unimaginable this situation must be for today's children, for whom it would be a completely foreign concept.

I walked back outside, and noticed that right next door to the museum was the Martin Luther King Swimming Pool, a facility run by the City of Atlanta rather than by the National Park Service, and presumably serving the neighborhood rather than museum visitors. The roof was coming detached, and there were a few jagged basketball sized holes in the windows.

More pictures

Surpassing Al Jazeera

Back in 2001, at the beginning of the war of terror, one of the big culture shocks was that Al Jazeera showed executions. People would get kidnapped and tapes with demands would get sent to Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera would air them. Then the people would get killed and tapes of the killing would get sent to Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera would air those too. Or so we heard. Al Jazeera wasn't generally available in the US, but what we heard of it sounded totally barbaric. Airing video of executions sounded barbaric to Americans. It just wasn't done.

In fairness to Al Jazeera, it isn't really the fringe network the American media made it out to be. It's a pretty standard part of hotel TV channel lineups in much of the world, including Western Europe. While I'm sure they do air the things we as Americans are told they air, it's never looked out of the ordinary when I've watched it. It's in Arabic, so I don't know what's being said and it doesn't really hold my attention, but it's always looked like a normal news channel to me.

A lot has changed in the US media in the last few years. Maybe it's that the war is sufficiently bloody that a non-bloody news broadcast is missing something. In addition, the rise of Internet video has caused lots of footage to get out that a tasteful news editor probably would once have held back. As a result, I've spent the last few weeks avoiding watching easily available video of Saddam Hussein getting killed. I know it happened. Even though he was a horrible person, I know killing people is wrong. I know it's created even more chaos and deserved anti-Americanism in the world. I don't want to watch it, and if an American TV station were to air it, I would have expected lots of agonizing over the appropriateness, and lots of warnings to the viewers that it was coming.

Apparently, I expected wrongly. I was watching the TV news this evening on one of the San Francisco broadcast stations. With no warning at all, they started airing the Saddam hanging video as stock footage, in the background, as part of another Iraq execution story. I changed the channel, so I'm not sure how much of it they actually aired, but when I flipped back again many seconds later it was still going. I'm disgusted.

I'm not a fan of censoring or otherwise hiding the news. When people get killed by our government, especially somebody as notorious as Saddam Hussein and with such an effect on public opinion in Iraq and the Middle East, it's news. But have we gotten so desensitized that our broadcast TV stations are showing executions casually, as background, without giving any indication that they've even thought about it? The implication that Al Jazeera had done that used to shock us.