Third Party Rising

Excellent op-ed in this weekend's NYT by Thomas Friedman:

A friend in the U.S. military sent me an e-mail last week with a quote from the historian Lewis Mumford’s book, “The Condition of Man,” about the development of civilization. Mumford was describing Rome’s decline: “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”

It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine — way, way too close for comfort.

...

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.

...

Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a huge majority. Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. We need to stop waiting for Superman and start building a superconsensus to do the superhard stuff we must do now. Pretty good is not even close to good enough today.

Entire op-ed is here.

Eating my words

I was delighted to post back in January that I had sat through my last first day of school. I thought to myself that day, "surely if I can only get through the 19th Grade unscathed, I will finally be smart enough to be unleashed on the world!" Now, only 9 short months later, I regret to inform you that I am at it again. Like eating boiled crow, indeed.

I had my first day of work at Elon University today, bolstering the already talented Advancement Office's bench strength by filling the post of Assistant Director of Gift Planning. Just so youse know, any of youse out there want to be giving away money, you come and talk to me first. So long as you are giving to Elon!

Not only that, but I am blogging right now because I am halfway through my assigned reading for my first class at NYU Law's famed Tax LL.M. program, which I am pleased to be taking via teh internets. Ah technology. Actually, it may not be too different from actually attending class - half of that felt like I was just watching a videotape of the professor, anyhow.

Seriously, this is exciting to be doing, even if tonight's reading is all about cash and accrual accounting methods and how they are treated under the Internal Revenue Code.

Oh well. Wish me luck.

"Eye-dentical!"

I love that movie, but law school was continually marred by professor's use of My Cousin Vinnie as a substantive reference of how to be a lawyer. C'mon, Profs. It's a movie. We are paying you money to show us how to do it for real. Come up with some new examples, for chrissake!

Now on to business: Doc and I have been repeatedly struck over the last few days by the striking (well, duh) similarity between our two kids, particularly at the coupla-weeks-old newborn stage. If I had to pick who Caroline resembles of the two of us, I'd say "neither" - but she is a spitting image of young Jack. Q.E.D.:

Can you see the resemblance? It is really uncanny. I need to try to take some similar pictures for comparison, before she gets too chubby. Speaking of which, little Caroline gained over a pound in her first five days since she left the hospital, and I wouldn't be surprised if she breaks 9# when she goes in for her checkup after Labor Day. She is eating like a champ. Next goal: sleeping!

Brushes with Fame

Top Ten Ways to Celebrate Law School Graduation

1. Nice long run by the lake with my dog (to include "bath" of said dog)
2. Wrap birthday present for my hot-as-tamale wife
3. Check in on the new "office"
4. Try to sell my academic regalia on Craigslist 
5. Not study for the bar exam
6. Find 6GB of music from college (hey, that was a lot back then..)
7. Watch everyone else's facebook status change to FirstName LastName, JD (or Esq. )
8. Mail some thank you notes
9. Plan the next big graduation in the family (hello, Nassau St!)
10. Enjoy having such a great family

Juris Doctor

The older I get and the more children I have, the less I can remember things, especially dates. So now I sequence my life based on events and today was one such occasion that will forever be a mile marker on my life path. My beautiful husband graduated law school.

Three years of legal pads and law books and late night clackety-clacking on his laptop into the late hours of the night have surprisingly gone by in the blink of an eye. Today, with our families in tow, we proudly watched him walk the stage Magna Cum Laude and become Stephen Shaw, JD. Even Jack seemed to feel the importance of his entrance to Pomp and Circumstance which will always give me goosebumps for the instant recognition of the work needed to get to march to that beautiful song.

I just couldn't be more proud of my husband, not only for his accomplishments (which I could list for pages only to get edited off this blog once he saw them posted) but also for the way he's managed to take care of us, his little nuclear family, while he himself was under the strain of pencils, books, essays, and exams.

Perhaps the very best part of this weekend was watching Stephen's father beam with the pride only a father can know whilst Jackson sat atop his shoulders with the carefree glee only a son riding high on his father's strength can feel. It was a generational portrait of the way men are supposed to be raised. Excellence and respect by example. And our son could not be any luckier than to have these men to be his guide.

I also couldn't help but think, as I watched our young little family mingling in the park reception, that it will be way too soon when I am sitting in a living room not yet laid out, with a photo album in my lap, thinking of how much has happened since today and how we had no idea how much fuller and richer our lives were going to get.

Today is one of my milestone days that I will pivot my memory around and I can't thank you enough for it, Matilda. Congratulations and I love you.


[Editor's note: Amazingly, I have refrained from removing anything from this post; more pictures located at http://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.forest.shaw/Graduation02# /Matilda]

Tax Rate Madness

I blogged earlier about a personal record for our low effective tax rate this year - turns out USAToday is now reporting a similar story for America at large:

Tax bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950 - USATODAY.com:

"Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman's presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found."

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

Unfortunately, USAToday left a big chunk of math out of their story by omitting the cumulative effect of payroll and consumption taxes. Also, I think it is clear that our world-beating corporate tax rates combined with techniques such as the AMT undermine this sort of celebratory (but cursory) analysis. What we've got is fundamentally a tax policy problem - a cumulative rate (>60% marginal) that is too high, combined with a tax base that is far too narrow. This is a similar problem with NC's tax structure - a policy one of my professors advocates reforming in a recent law review article.

Other articles have previously pointed out that 47% of US households did not pay any income tax this year. Do you realize what is alarming about that - once we get past 51%, its very unlikely that our democracy will vote to change things back to the way they once were.

Textbook Russian Ingenuity

You really have to appreciate the Russians' pragmatic approach to problem solving. For years, a patchwork of dated law, jurisdictional conflicts and human rights concerns has plagued modern suppression of piracy (and terrorism). Too often, military forces cannot or do not detain pirates because of the unlikelihood of a successful domestic criminal prosecution, the chance that unscrupulous fellows may seek asylum in the host nation, or the risk that turning them over to their own county will result in human rights violations (read: execution) for which the detaining county is potentially liable. Leave it to the Russian Navy to handily dismiss all of those concerns.

BBC News - Freed Somali pirates 'probably died' - Russian source:

Ten suspected Somali pirates captured by the Russian navy last week may have perished after their release, a defence source in Moscow has told reporters. Marines seized them during a dramatic operation to free a hijacked Russian oil tanker far from shore, killing an 11th suspect in the gun battle. They were released in an inflatable boat without navigational equipment.

Within an hour, contact was lost with the boat's radio beacon, the defence source said.
'It seems that they all died,' the unnamed source was quoted as saying by Russia's Interfax news agency."

Apparently the Russian plan can be summed up as something like this:

1. Day 1: "We have captured some insidious pyrates and will try them in a Moscow court of law"
2. Day 2: "The law in this area is confusing - we will release the pyrates."
3. Day 3: "Unfortunately, it appears the released pyrates have died." (after being released in a small craft in the middle of the IO, hundreds of miles from shore, without communication or navigation equipement)
4. Day 4: "What is the big deal? They are pyrates!"

Good job, Russkies.

School's Out For Summer!

Done, sir, done. No more pencils, no more books. No more teachers' dirty looks..

Alice Cooper has said he was inspired to write the song when answering the question, "What's the greatest three minutes of your life?". Cooper said: "There's two times during the year. One is Christmas morning, when you're just getting ready to open the presents. The greed factor is right there. The next one is the last three minutes of the last day of school when you're sitting there and it's like a slow fuse burning. I said, 'If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it's going to be so big.'"

School's out for summer / School's out for ever ...

Now I just have the bar exam to worry about. No big deal, yo.

The Miranda Two Step

Finally, some 5th Amendment criminal procedure that I can get behind..

From The Volokh Conspiracy:

The New York Times reports about the interrogation of Faisal Shahzad, who was arrested for trying to explode a bomb in Times Square:

"The suspect, Faisal Shahzad, was interrogated without initially being read his Miranda rights under a public safety exception, and provided what the F.B.I. called “valuable intelligence and evidence.

After investigators determined there was no imminent threat to be headed off, Mr. Shahzad was later read his rights to remain silent, but he waived them and continued talking, the F.B.I. said. Authorities charged him as a civilian on Tuesday, but postponed plans to bring him to court."

Based on what we know, it sounds like the FBI made a good judgment call here. Shahzad is a U.S. citizen who has been living in the United States and was caught in the United States for a crime committed in the United States: Surely this is a case for federal court

Right on, Feds - that was quick thinking. There will be no "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree" doctrine here.

As they say on TV: "Book 'em, Dan-o."

3.13%

I am proud to report that this year's effective tax rate for our small Married Filing Jointly family was a rock-bottom PR of 3.13% We are damn close to being one of the 47% of American households that don't pay any income tax at all. (Don't forget, however, that those poor* people are still subject to the regressive spectre of sales tax - unless they use Amazon - not to mention state and FICA taxes of approximately 8% each.)

* used in this sense, "poor" refers to the pitiable nature of these folks, not their station relative to the poverty line.

As a commentary on all the time we waste arguing about taxes and making the tax code and all of the deductions and credits more complex, I offer the graphs and passage below (artfully excerpted from Wikipedia). Enjoy.

This graph shows the effective tax rate per $ of income. For tax year 2009, it is reported that President Obama recognized income (AGI) of $5.5MM and paid taxes of $1.7MM. That puts him at an effective tax rate of just under 31%. For reference, that is ten times more than me. I win.

This next graph shows the change in top marginal income tax rates over history (currently around 35%). Despite the wide variance you see in the graph, Hauser's Law accurately theorizes that regardless of the top marginal rates, tax revenues will remain unchanged.

Hauser's Law is a theory that states that in the United States, federal tax revenues will always be equal to approximately 19.5% of GDP, regardless of what the top marginal tax rate is. The theory was first suggested in 1993 by Kurt Hauser, a San Francisco investment economist, who wrote at the time, "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP." In a May 20, 2008 editorial in the Wall St. Journal, David Ranson published a graph showing that even though the top marginal tax rate of federal income tax had varied between a low of 28% to a high of 91% between 1950 and 2007, federal tax revenues had indeed constantly remained at about 19.5% of GDP. Critics of Hauser's Law, such as Zubin Jelveh in a Wall St. Journal editorial, point out that tax revenues have fallen as top income rates declined if you don't include Social Security revenues. Similarly, other changes in tax rates and the income threshold for paying those rates are expected to impact tax revenues and should be considered when analyzing the relationship between tax-rates and tax revenues.

All Dad had to say when I told him of my accomplishments? "Enjoy it while you can." True enough.

Last First Day of School

I got started off this morning with an introduction to the Law of Remedies, or more precisely “The means by which a legal right is enforced, or the manner by which a violation of a legal right is prevented, redressed, vindicated or compensated.” Fun stuff.

As I sat there, it occurred to me (mainly by noticing everyone else's Facebook and Twitter posts) that this is my last First Day of School. Kind of a milestone, and while no one knows what fate and happenstance may bring, I expect I will not find myself sitting in a classroom again as a student for quite some time. I have to say, both the intellectual pursuits and the pace of life these last three years have been a treat and I have tried hard to enjoy this phase of my life.

Bar prep starts Tuesday and late July will begin looming over the horizon. But for now -particularly after a wonderfully tasty gyro at Jack's Corner Grille with Doc - this has been a pretty good day.

Blogging While Studying

I heard that an addendum to NC's new Texting While Driving Law (more blog posts about this ridiculous thing later) is a general prohibition against Blogging While Studying. Needless to say, I am up to my eyelids in Secured Transactions, Environmental Law, Estate and Gift Taxation, and Family Law (all coming up within the next week). Yay.

Fortunately for my morale, my lovely wife and the ever-beautiful Aunt Rachel dropped by the library and dropped off Jack so they could go giggle together. Not wanting to have anything to do with "girl talk," my boy immediately plunged into the stacks and started researching caselaw to help out his daddy.

Jack: "You can just call me 836 F. Supp. 1342"

Good boy!

Good People

I knew there was a reason I liked this company:

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

Thy Name Shall Be Called Thunderpants

My son just pooped so loudly that it woke the dog. No kidding - this was an amazing feat. I thought he was going to blow the diaper clean off.

In other news, I am just about done drafting my first complaint for damages, and this baby is bullet proof! Those tortiously negligent Shrackle Brothers are going down, and they are going to pay handsomely for the way they ran over my client. (Alas, if only this was a real lawsuit, and not just a class simulation...)