Et tu, CNN?

Okay, go to CNN's results tracking site for the House elections: http://us.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/main.results/#val=H.

Now click on Minnesota.

Now marvel at the fact that Minneapolis and St. Paul seem to have switched places (and thereby congressional districts), and that Minneapolis has suddenly become the state capitol.

Losing it, Fox Style

Okay, so I seem to only be popping in to write about politics these days. There are only 7 days left until the election; deal with it.

I just watched a video that Fredrik linked me; it's a clip from Fox News of anchor Megyn Kelly losing any shred of maturity in the face of a very calm Bill Burton, Obama adviser. The topic of discussion was the claim that Obama is a "socialist" that wants to redistribute wealth, and whether or not this is a fake controversy being drummed up by Fox News. (Check it out here.) Her nonsense during this interview (in which, like so many Fox interviews, she talked and expected her interviewee to listen) included many crimes against sound statistics, but there's one in particular that I'd like to focus on.

"I get e-mails from Republicans, Democrats and independents alike who are concerned about that notion; who understand that right now in this country, the top 25% already pay 67% of the income taxes and they're worried about shifting that balance even more."

It's not kind to take advantage of the fact that most people suck at math. But in her defense, I bet she genuinely sucks at it, too.

Let's do a little experiment.

Let's say we have 4 people in America. One earns $10,000 a year, one earns $25,000 a year, one earns $50,000 a year, and the last guy earns $200,000 a year. Now let's also say that we don't even have a progressive tax system, but rather, that pipe dream of all libertarians and reactionaries everywhere: a 15% flat tax.

With a 15% flat tax, we collect a total of $42,750 in income tax from our four participants. The guy who makes $200,000 is our top 25%, and his share of the income tax is $30,000. This is over 70% of the total income tax that we have collected.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, our tax system is really really seriously and, like, totally unfair!

No, of course it's not; he pays more taxes simply by virtue of the twin facts that he makes more than 70% of the income and that this isn't feudal Europe. And this despite the fact that the example uses a flat tax, a system that very few actually advocate as the absolute most fair. Most people believe in a progressive tax system in which a higher percentage is paid by people who earn more (bloody socialist pigs, all of us).

The income distribution in my example is pretty modest compared to the extremes that exist in the U.S. An income of $10,000 is about what a person makes if they work full time at minimum wage, and an income of $200,000 is, I dare say, not an exaggerated representation of the actual average for the top 25% of income-earners.

Of course, not surprisingly, her statistic isn't correct to begin with anyway. According to the IRS, in 2006 the top-earning 25% of taxpayers earned 67.5% of the nation's income. Note -- not that they paid 67% of the income tax, but that they earned 67.5% of all the income. In light of this fact, do you suppose people would react the same way to hearing that they pay 67% of the income tax? Of course not. It would be sort of a "duh" moment (well, for most people; some people really suck at math). But what if I now tell you that the top 25% actually pay 86% of all the income tax? When tempered with the information that they also earn 67% of all the income, I still contend that many people would take a moment to reflect and decide that this isn't so bad (and some would still have the presence of mind to let out a good, loud "duh.").

And again, that's most people. The kind that actually can make a logical and consistent connection between what they believe, what they think they believe, and an actual real-life situation. Okay, so maybe that's not so many people. But that's okay; there are smart people with calculators who can help the rest of them out.

100% Genuine Fake American

Clearly I wasn't the only one who had started to wonder about her Real American (tm) status. After watching the October 20 episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (which I did this morning, as they are played one week late and in the middle of the night here), I could firmly and decisively say that I'm definitely a Fake American.

Go ahead and test yourself, so you can know once and for all: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, full episode from October 20, 2008.

But seriously folks. The "If you're not with us, you're against us" brand of dividing us into two camps and making us feel dirty for not belonging to one of them, that might have worked nauseatingly well for Mr. Uniter-not-divider, but in pushing her half-assed brand of kiddie clubhouse wars, Palin seems to have missed one thing in her calculation: for some odd reason, big cities tend to contain more people than small towns. If you go around implying that 75% of the country are fake Americans, it's going to bite you in the ass. Especially ill-advised is doing so after photo-opping your way around Ground Zero. After McCain-Palin's resounding loss, I hope she finds herself a small island somewhere and secedes from the union (I'd rather prefer that we keep Alaska; how otherwise would we keep an eye on Russia?), where I'm sure she can be empress of her very own Real America.

Main Street or Wall Street?

The ongoing presidential campaign has given me an identity crisis.

There's all this talk about Main Street and Wall Street. About Small Town America and Small Town Values. About Joe the Plumber, gosh, poor guy. So I can no longer avoid asking myself: am I Main Street or Wall Street?

I am most decidedly not from Wall Street. See, that's a street in New York, and I'm from Minnesota.

But, admittedly, I never lived on Main Street, either. I grew up on Gresham Avenue.

Those of us who come from the Twin Cities like to think of it as a booming metropolis. There are about 2 million people there, and I can promise it narrowly trumps Stockholm for crowdedness and corporations and sky-scrapers and whatnot. But then again, by American standards, the Twin Cities is not huge, and people there have a reputation for being nice and polite, don'tcha know. And since the whole state of Minnesota seems to be viewed as a rural farm-boy paradise by both natives and outsiders -- around 75% of the residents live in cities, which is pretty much the national average, but I suppose having any amount of farmland qualifies a state for Hicksville status -- I'm not sure if our buildings are tall enough and our jobs white-collar enough to show that our citizenry is adequately bereft of all moral fiber. Since I'm actually from the suburbs anyway, there's really no saying how the scales may tip for me.

I'm definitely not Joe the Plumber. I'm a computer programmer. Or at least, I'm currently a computer programmer. My career of choice is high school teacher, and I'm just taking a temporary leave from that career. Teaching is by no means a blue-collar job, but it's certainly in a league below/above computer programmer and stock broker as far as Unwashed Peasant/Salt of the Earth status goes. But it's a tough call -- a teacher works too hard performing a vital service to society for too little pay and far too little gratitude, but she's also a person who has filthied her mind for 4 or more years in halls of higher learning. It could really go both ways. And since I have switched jobs, now working a slightly better-paying desk job in the profit-driven private sector, it's very possible that my family values and my sense of What America Is were damaged in the switch.

There is, of course, one niggling little side note. In Sweden, a plumber can easily make more than a computer programmer, and ridiculously more than a teacher. If Joe is going to make over $250,000 a year, then apparently that's also the case in the states as well. Who knew? I mean, when we're all trying to figure out who we are and where we belong and how much people think we ought to pay in taxes, it's rather rude of people to go messing up the accepted hierarchy like that. But I suppose in a sense, what with both Fredrik and I possibly having lay-offs looming on the horizon, struggling to make mortgage payments (on our very modestly sized house, thank you very much) that have gone up dramatically in size because of interest hikes due to the financial crisis, and seeing the savings that we have so scrupulously put aside eaten away at by a bad global economy, it could be said that we're part of the problem, and not the solution, when it comes to inappropriately mingling outside of our so-called class. It seems kind of crazy I guess, but it makes me start to wonder if people in New York and San Francisco are also being hit hard by this financial crisis. In that case, I can understand if I'm not the only one who's confused about which of these two seemingly well-defined camps I might belong to.

One would have thought that the last two presidential elections would have given us a much easier time defining ourselves. I mean, since the universal adoption of the terms Red State and Blue State, a person could simply, when in doubt, look at a map or ask his neighbors. However, when I tried this, I just got more befuddled. Despite the fact that Minnesota hasn't voted for a Republican president for years (hello folks, who voted for Mondale? That's right, only us), they keep calling us a Swing State or a Purple State. I can't argue with CNN and MSNBC and Fox on this point, as I'm sure they know what they're talking about. But it means that, instead of helping me solve my identity crisis, I merely feel a much heavier weight of responsibility on my supposedly election-swaying shoulders. If Sarah Palin would just stop being so coy and just come out and tell us which parts of America are more pro-America than others, then it would make things a lot easier for all of us.

Wait, I just thought of something. I suppose that since the corridors of knowledge that I was tainted by were at St. Olaf College, an expensive private school, then I'm clearly in the... well, but wait, St. Olaf is located in the tiny rural community of Northfield, whose slogan is "Cows, Colleges and Contentment." And hang on, I've also attended the University of Minnesota and was a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. Oh, and of course, I got my teaching degree at Linköpings universitet. Those are all state schools! Well, but... actually, I might also be an over-educated elitist. I do really like arugula, and I've never touched a six-pack.

I suppose -- and it would be really unscrupulous of me not to mention this -- that the death-blow comes in the fact that I'm also a European. I mean, I feel American, but I'm now a Swedish citizen and I've lived here for over 6 years. I mean, it's not France or anything, but I guess I do have to admit that I'm surrounded every day by the fabled Culturally-superior-but-morally-inferior-especially-by-virtue-of-being-culturally-superior.

The verdict seems clear. I'm out of touch. I'm Wall Street. I'm, uh, Big Town and have Big Town values. No, wait, I don't have any values, that's how it probably is. I'm a snobby elitist that is supposed to, by traditional standards, make a ton of money and stomp on the Little Guy (and the fact that I don't is probably just some sort of failure on my part).

I should clearly vote for Barack Obama.

But see, that doesn't feel right. I clearly don't want to be a part of the Big Town. Being part of Small Town America sounds so nice. I want to be respectful and wholesome. I want to be hard-working and patriotic and pro-America. I would like to think that I value common sense and fishing and not locking your door at night and America being awesome. I want to be a Real Person with Real Values (tm). Even though it appears that I'm a fake person with no values, I wouldn't want people to know it.

I guess the best thing to do is to vote for McCain and Palin. I want to vote for them because I want to be a Real American because it sounds good. When it comes right down to it, the Republicans have always had the best track record of watching out for the little guy and sticking it to Wall Street.

Er, wait...

Incompetence, part what?

For a moment there, I was afraid it was over. My tension-filled tête a tête with Försäkringskassan over my sick leave after the miscarriage.

Since the last time I wrote about it, they've managed to idiot themselves at least once more. After contacting them once yet another month had gone without me hearing anything, I got the impression that they sped up my registration before answering that the registration was now finished. I went in and ordered my European medical insurance card on their website and, sure enough, this time it said "Thanks for your order, you will receive your card within 10 days" instead of saying "Who the hell are you?" But I was not to be disappointed, as I soon after received forms in the mail asking me to describe when and why I was away from work and what my symptoms were.

I was a bit confused about receiving these forms, as they asked for the exact same information that they'd already received on my doctor's notes -- and I knew they must have received the doctor's notes, because none of this process ever would have started otherwise -- so I went and had a little chat with the HR lady at my work about it. She mentioned that they had called her just the day before and wanted to confirm that they had the right dates, and had in fact even said that they still had my doctor's notes on file. So everything sounded good. I filled in the forms with the unnecessary repeat info and sent them in.

Two weeks later I received a letter saying: "We see that you have requested sick leave for the period 4 June to 7 August. In order for us to process this request, we must receive doctor's notes covering that time period."

Grr, grr, and more grr.

So I contacted Försäkringskassan, told them they didn't know their elbow from their asses, asked our HR lady to re-send my doctor's notes, and settled in for what I assumed would be another month of arguing with them or hearing that they'd lost this paper or given me the wrong address for that paper and that they'd gotten my file mixed up with a refugee from Zimbabwe.

But then, suddenly, as I looked up our bank account today, I got a shock.

There it is. My sick-leave money. Directly deposited.

But wait, there's more -- as far as I can tell, it's the right amount.

Suddenly, everything felt very empty. What will I now spend all of my free time with? I tried to console myself by remembering that in a few months I'll be hitting them up for maternity leave money and that they'll surely screw that up as well, but it just didn't fill the hole that had suddenly been created in my psyche and daily activity schedule.

But there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I discovered on Friday that my employer owes me money! After staring at my last two paychecks for god knows how long and wondering what it was that just didn't add up, I realized that they'd messed up on my sick leave as well. Despite the fact that I worked 50% for 6 weeks and then 75% for 3 weeks after that, they had charged me for being 100% sick on the weekends. So not right.

Ahhh, yes. The comforting feeling of once again knowing that I'm surrounded by people who don't know what they're doing. Back to my warm fuzzy self!