Rae Sterling @ Sidewalk Cafe

Rae Sterling is a singer-songwriter with a big, soul-style voice and catchy tunes. She writes clever lyrics that can be a little bit funny and a little bit sad... You might already know her as the alto from the Bluestockings or as the charming chanteuse who joined The Elements of Style onstage at our last show for "Brown-Eyed Girl"! But Rae is even more radically excellent as a solo artist who writes, plays guitar and sings her own originals! Go see her at New York's legendary anti-folk stomping ground!

Tuesday, February 8th, 10:00pm

Sidewalk Cafe
94 Avenue A
New York, NY

For a sampling of Rae's groovy sound, check out some videos from her prolific YouTube channel:

"Got it Bad"

"Paper Cranes"

Will Nan Hayworth Vote as a Rockefeller Republican or a Tea Party Extremist?

Now that the 112th Congress has been sworn in, New York’s 19th Congressional District is represented by Mount Kisco ophthalmologist and a freshman Republican Nan Hayworth. Rep. Hayworth’s voting record should be up for exacting scrutiny – perhaps even more so than the rest of the New York delegation on Capitol Hill – because her constituency in northern Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess and Orange counties has been one of the most fickle swing districts in the United States over the past few election cycles.

Belying New York’s solidly Democratic trends in recent statewide and presidential elections, the GOP has always found a receptive bastion in the New York City suburbs, exurbs and small towns Upstate. NY-19 spans all of those demographic zones. This swing district in the disproportionately upper-income exurbs and working class white towns has historically churned out from the moderate wing of the Republican Party who have demonstrated independence from the partisan leadership in Washington and supported liberal positions on civil rights and the environment. From 1969 through 1994 the 19th district was represented by Hamilton Fish IV – a leader of the liberal Rockefeller Republican wing who voted for two out of three Articles of Impeachment against President Nixon. In 1994 Fish was succeeded by the Katonah denizen Sue Kelly – who positioned herself squarely in the Republican Main Street Partnership, Republicans for Choice and Republicans for Environmental Protection.

Though the 19th Congressional District certainly trends red, it has proved to be not so solidly Republican that GOP Representatives elected here can get away with simply catering to the party’s base and ignoring swing voters. The decidedly independent exurbanites of the 19th District soured on Sue Kelly as she voted for the most divisive excesses of the Republican leadership; a Federal Marriage Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in all states, draconian spending cuts on Medicaid and student loans, and particularly as she doggedly supported what was increasingly perceived as a failing course in Iraq. Moreover, in a year when the House GOP leadership was tarnished by scandal, Representative Kelly came under fire as the Chair of the House Page Board which administered the program amidst the Mark Foley fiasco. In 2006 independent voters bolted.

New York’s 19th Congressional District has been represented so consistently by Republicans for so many decades that the DCCC rarely assembled more than token opposition. Though in 2006, the Republican incumbent was turned out of office by the dark horse Democratic candidate John Hall – a professional rock musician most famous for his guitar and vocals with the band Orleans. Unlike most other 2006 Democratic freshmen, John Hall ran on an unabashedly progressive platform of clean energy, environmental protection, expanding health care coverage and ending the war in Iraq – according to the strategems of the Clintonite New Democrats, he should have lost. But Hall managed to eke out a surprise 51% to 49% victory because he put together the most serious, well-funded Democratic campaign this district had seen in years. John Hall also benefited from a nationwide Democratic wave which proved devastating for most Northeastern Republicans, nowhere more than this quintessential blue state where in 2006 the ballots were headed by the enormously popular Hillary Clinton and Eliot Spitzer. In 2008, an even stronger blue election cycle when Democratic candidates nationwide rode on the long coattails of Barack Obama, Hall won re-election with 59% of the vote.

Though the Democratic candidates performed exceptionally well in 2006 and 2008, even their gains in the Northeast turned out not to be the “national realignment” that some politicos took them for. In the 2010 round of midterm elections, the four-year tenure of John Hall was cut short by GOP challenger Nan Hayworth. Compared to 2006, in 2010 both the DCCC and RCCC regarded NY-19 as a competitive race from the get-go; the latter named Hayworth as one of their “Young Guns”. Even in a in a year when unemployment hovered above 9% and discontented voters were eager to oust incumbents, a red tsunami of a midterm cycle which decimated the ranks of 63 Democratic House members including 5 more from the New York City suburbs and Upstate, Nan Hayworth only won with a modest 52.7% of the vote over Hall’s 47.3%. In other words, even in this election cycle when Republican challengers nationwide had every external factor going in their favor, this was still a very close election. If there is any lesson to be taken home, it is that both parties should now consider NY-19 less like the bastion of moderate Northeastern Republicanism it once was and more like the model swing district that it now is.

Given the competitive nature of the 19th District and the historically persuasion of Hamilton Fish , Sue Kelly and the kind of Republicans which this constituency normally supports, one might expect our new Congresswoman Nan Hayworth to vote well within the moderate faction of the GOP. However, all signs thusfar portend that Hayworth – who enthusiastically received the endorsement of Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, the National Rifle Association and the Tri-State Sons of Liberty – hails not from the Northeastern moderates once known as “Rockefeller Republicans” but as a firebrand from the right wing of the Republican Party. A proponent of Big Tent-ism she is not; Putnam County activist Jay Michaelson labels the election of Hayworth as “The End of Rockefeller Republicanism”; Bush speechwriter David Frum has described the Princeton- and Cornell-educated Hayworth as “New York's Ivy League Tea Partier”.

Nan Hayworth might not exude the cultural pseudo-populism of her fellow class of 2010 Republican freshmen; unlike the heartland districts where the GOP made most of its electoral gains in 2010, it is not very socially acceptable to espouse openly xenophobic positions in Hayworth’s native Mount Kisco – a multiethnic community with large Black, Latino and Jewish populations. Though what makes Hayworth so appealing to the Tea Party groups which backed her campaign is her dogmatic free market ideology. In his post-election piece in the New York Times, Peter Applebome explains the formation of Hayworth’s views on economics:

To hear her tell it, her life changed in high school, when, at her father’s urging, she read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, a popular explication of laissez-faire economics, whose listing on Amazon.com features endorsements by Ayn Rand and Ron Paul.

Often Ms. Hayworth sounds as if she is quoting from it: “Private enterprise must thrive. It must flourish. And it must do so without the federal government putting a finger on the scale.”

As for the abuses of business, her attitude seems mostly to blame the government (the mortgage market, for example, was warped by government interference) or to figure that stuff happens.

The best way to predict how Hayworth might vote over the course of the next two years might be to analyze who contributed to her campaign; in her own words in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, “Funding finds its way to a cause”. And not surprisingly, the bulk of the funding for Nan Hayworth’s campaign came from banks, insurance companies, HMOs and the local health care industry which have plenty of chits to cash in from their clientele in Congress (compared to Sue Kelly –who fundraised from a greater variety of business interests – it is interesting to note that Hayworth’s campaign contributions came so disproportionately from the financial and health care sectors). Already Hayworth has voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – the number one item on the health care industry’s agenda. Over the next few months she can be expected to vote to dismantle the Dodd-Frank legislation on financial regulations, to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the highest tax brackets, to abolish the Estate Tax, and other measures meant to protect the profits of her financial patrons.

In addition to the boilerplate economic issues that all Republican candidates campaigned upon in 2010, it will be telling to watch how Congresswoman Hayworth is going to vote on any proposed changes to our national gun control and mental health laws in response to the Tucson shootings. So far, it seems that the most pivotal legislation will be that introduced by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D NY-4) that would ban high-capacity magazines like the 33-round clip used in Arizona. According to The Poughkeepsie Journal, the 19th District’s new U.S. Representative is opposed to even the most modest measures of reforming national gun laws.

Freshman Republican Rep. Nan Hayworth of Mount Kisco, Westchester County, said that even if McCarthy's proposal became law, it would be circumvented. "There would be an extensive secondary market," she said. "So these clips would still be available."

Amazingly enough, Hayworth contends that she will respond to this deadly commerce in extended ammo clips with no legitimate civilian use by voting for the United States government to sit on their hands, parroting the press releases of the National Rifle Association - her campaign’s 9th-largest contributor. Even on the matter of mental health policy – which national Republicans are now hoisting as a cudgel with which to address the Tucson massacre and sidestep gun control altogether – Hayworth promulgates the archaic doctrine of federal impotency.

"The relevant law has been established," she said. "It is incumbent on the state of Arizona to determine how better to enforce it. I don't feel this is a matter for the Congress to pursue at this time."

If Nan Hayworth’s response to the first national crisis of the 112th Congress is going to be emblematic of her voting record for the remainder of her term, it might portend that she will vote to maintain the deregulation of business and public sector minimalism to the most absurd limits of Henry Hazlitt’s laissez faire ideology.

From the narrow standpoint of politics, Hayworth’s posturing on the Second Amendment may or may not translate into electoral dividends come November 2012. Granted, New York’s 19th Congressional District includes the small towns of Putnam, Dutchess and Orange County where the endorsement of the NRA carries a lot of weight amongst the large gun-owning electorate. But they also include Rockland and Westchester County which are home to more suburbanites who sit on the other end of the cultural divide and are more likely to hold a politician’s reflexive obedience to the NRA as a fault against them. Even in 2010 Hall won these counties – including Hayworth’s native Mount Kisco. If common sense gun control legislation like Rep. McCarthy’s high-capacity magazine bill is brought to a vote and Hayworth obediently tows the line of her campaign financiers, then suburban independents might very well jump ship come 2012.

The 19th District is certainly more conservative than New York State as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that Republican office-holders here can speak and act like Republicans from Texas or Alabama and coast to re-election (there is a reason Hayworth’s campaign literature almost ignored social issues altogether and focused incessantly on health care and taxes). So the working class whites of Brewster and Carmel are upset by the influx of Mexican immigrants and the swift cultural transitions happening in their communities – but if Nan Hayworth votes for any Arizona-style immigration laws then the rapidly-growing Hispanic electorate in these counties is going to vote en masse for her opponent in 2012. If John Boehner schedules a vote on a bill meant to scuttle the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or if he resurrects the Federal Marriage Amendment as an election year wedge and Hayworth votes reflexively with her party, the Journal News and the Poughkeepsie Journal will almost certainly cast Hayworth as a bigot – and rightly so. New York is simply too cosmopolitan an environment to be conducive to the Kulturkampf which passes for politics elsewhere in the heartland.

Nan Hayworth’s Tea Party posturing might have been largely ignored in an outlier election cycle all-but-defined by a sluggish economy, rampant unemployment and a climate preternaturally hostile to incumbents, but she should be wary of voting as though there were no tomorrow when the Democratic Party is going to put up a spirited opposition in every future election in this swing district. In November 2012 when New York is expected to vote heavily for Obama and Gillibrand’s re-election and straight-line voting should help all Democratic candidates lower on the ballot without any countervailing Republican wind, NY-19 is surely going to serve as a prime pickup opportunity for the DCCC. So if Nan Hayworth wants to serve another term in Congress after this one, she should emulate the example set by moderate Northeastern Republican Senators Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Scott Brown and consider breaking with her party to vote for the occasional Democratic-sponsored bill every now and then. If Hayworth does not demonstrate independence from the national Republican Party, and especially if she votes consistently with the Tea Party Caucus, then she is only going to hand this seat to her Democratic challenger in 2012.

Drinking Bottled or Filtered Water Could Increase the Risk of Tooth Decay

In today's edition of the Washington Post Juliet Eilperin writes that limiting the consumption of tap water could - by cutting yourself off from what is the primary source of fluoride for the vast majority of Americans - result in a greater risk of tooth decay and cavities.

The Shortcomings of Microcredit

Don’t get me wrong; I think that microcredit can be a wonderful tool to foster gainful employment and reduce poverty amongst the most financially-marginalized segments of the population. One of the primary financial barriers to poverty-reducing economic development in Second and Third World countries is that credit is only readily available to established business interests and entrenched elites; in countries like Bangladesh where Dr. Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank, microcredit banks have indeed opened up entrepreneurial opportunities to rural peasants, the urban poor and women. And microcredit has not only served as a boon for the poor in Dhaka and Calcutta; microcredit programs have helped financially-marginalized groups to capitalize upon their innate entrepreneurial potential in places as varied as Harlem to rural Arkansas.

However, I’m glad to see that the New York Times is finally reporting that microcredit is something less than the miracle cure for poverty that it’s all too often cracked up to be. Critics of microcredit have long abounded on the ideological antipodes – diehard leftists oppose Dr. Yunus’ movement because it threatens the promise of State Socialism, and paradoxically enough free market purists object to the Grameen Bank’s dependency upon government subsidies. But when such a pillar of mainstream liberalism as The Grey Lady is reporting on the shortfalls of microcredit, now even the material objectivist must acknowledge that - like any other money manager – even some of the most well-meaning bankers to the poor have been been practicing reckless lending policies.

Nevertheless, especially since the popularization of the term microcredit from development circles to lay audiences, most lending institutions throughout the world are keen to at least rhetorically jump on the microcredit bandwagon – and the vast majority of self-described "microcreditors" have significantly less scrupulous lending and management practices than the Grameen Bank.

When most people hear the term microcredit they think of a financial scheme which extends loans to the poor at low, easily-repayable interest rates. However, all that a bank needs to do to call itself a “microcredit institution” in most developing countries is to conduct any banking activity under the broad premise of lending very small amounts of money with the stated intent of reducing poverty. What should separate microcredit from common loan-sharking is that the former species of loans to the poor should be issued at low interest rates. However, what constitutes "low interest rates" is relative. In countries where borrowers tend to pay grossly usurious rates along the lines of 60 percent annual interest, it is not so terribly dishonest for a bank to issue small loans to the poor at only mildly less usurious interest rates – say, 40 percent – and call themselves "microcreditors".

Microcredit can be empowering if a bank extends a loan of $20 to an unemployed Bolivian woman who wants to set up an empanada stand. But microcredit can just as easily refer to a situation in which a bank lends $20 to that same unemployed Bolivian woman to buy a pair of Jimmy Choo knock-offs. Predatory loans come in small sizes too. Particularly in economies where banks do not offer adequate financial products for individuals to save their money for regular consumption, it is fairly common practice for individuals to take out micro-loans for items that have little to no potential to be described as “business investments”.

In Mali, people often take out small loans from the local Kafo Jiginew franchise as Americans pay for our large expenditures on credit cards. One common big-ticket item that rural, property-less farmers will take out loans for is a motorcycle; one would argue that a new gasoline-powered motorbike is necessary to improve the efficiency of his business – he could travel to markets in nearby cities to sell their goats and chickens more quickly. Under such fairly valid-sounding proposals, the loan officer would lend them $600 to $700 for the cheapest bike on the market. But the economic reality is that the real value of a motorcycle in a proto-commercial agricultural economy is not derived from any profit that could be measured in dollars and cents. The total benefit of this microcredit-financed endeavor is more or less the sum of the value of time saved and the sheer prestige of driving around the village in a motorcycle – neither of which is going to help him sell any more chickens. Now, the farmer’s financial standing is even more precarious as he has to pay for gasoline for his bike and interest on his loan with more free time but no additional monetary income to show for it. From capital’s self-interested perspective this loan might have been a pretty shoddy investment decision – yet a bank like Kafo Jiginew has every right to classify such reckless lending as “microcredit”.

Compared to other endeavors for which banks issue micro-loans, a motorcycle is sadly a relatively sound investment. It’s somewhat less common for microfinance institutions to give small loans of a few hundred dollars to people who wish to buy cell phones and computers for their business operations which are used more often for listening to mp3s and downloading porn than they are for any profit-increasing business communications. Other times men would take out small loans of $10 or $20 to bet on the horses in France – consider it micro-leverage for investment on the commodities market. It is even more common for people in countries with underdeveloped financial institutions to take out exorbitant loans for things as frivolous as televisions, alcohol and cigarettes. If you think that subprime lending is a phenomenon exclusive to the U.S. real estate market, then you are sorely mistaken.

Economies predicated upon agriculture are particularly sensitive to predatory lending practices because the brief period after the harvest is typically the only time that peasant farmers ever stand to receive any monetary income. In the least-developed, poorest of the poor agricultural economies like parched Niger and Mauritania, the single millet harvests only come after the year’s brief, single rainy season; in significantly more prosperous and developed agricultural economies like Ghana and Tanzania, there might be enough rainfall for two long growing seasons so farmers’ revenues come in twice a year. When an economy based on rain-irrigated agriculture faces a drought, every single farmer might need to take out a loan in order to feed his family. However, loans taken out to finance pure consumption are not likely to ever be repaid – especially in a subsistence agricultural economy in which food is rarely sold on the market in exchange for currency. With so much demand for credit, interest rates rightfully go way up. The politically incorrect truth is that there is a rational reason why interest rates in these credit markets are generally so high: in developing, stagnant and regressing agrarian economies alike, the rural poor are not very creditworthy.

But the world’s poor still need to be able to obtain capital without resorting to debt slavery if they are ever to improve their lot. The advent of Grameen-style microcredit is without a doubt a step in the right direction as it popularizes and democratizes lending, but it is also no panacea to the ills of the various financial sectors of the developing world. So what then should the doe-eyed idealists of Davos, Wall Street and Cambridge do if they sincerely wish to rid the world of poverty?

The harsh reality is that aside from conducting checkbook activism on Kiva, there are not a whole lot of options available for private good-doers to extend affordable credit to small entrepreneurs in the Hindu Kush. The opportunities to improve the lending practices of the Global South lie for the most part at the feet of the banking and government elite who reside in the gated communities of these countries’ capitols – in so many words, the very individuals who have the most vested interest in the status quo and not a whole lot of desire to expand credit to the masses who live in shantytowns and mud huts. Western development agents and business consultants might have a role to play in reforming the financial sectors of foreign nation, but only insomuch as we can educate and persuade these elites to implement change in their respective institutions.

Bankers in countries like Guinea and the Ivory Coast tend to practice such egregious usury partly because they make a disproportionate amount of loans to their friends and family-members. In many African cultures it is considered the social obligation of anyone with money to share it with anyone and everyone who might ask for a handout; not only for the haves to lend money to the have-nots, but for the haves to simply give it away – people who keep all of their money to themselves are often shunned and isolated from the rest of the village. Judging by the rate at which credit applicants actually get denied, it would be fair to say that such communitarian social mores are expressed in the decisions of loan officers who simply can’t say no to their blood relatives no matter what sort of lavish status symbols they plan on buying on credit. Not surprisingly, a sizeable portion of these terrible loans never get amortized, so banks do have to charge high interest rates on all of their loans – large and small – simply in order to stay in business. In order to stem the worst of the worst lending decisions and make credit more accessible, banks need to crack down on crony capitalism by introducing stricter standards of professional ethics, increasing transparency in their lending practices and holding loan officers accountable when they issue such egregious loans.

Another one of the reasons why interest rates remain so daunting to would-be entrepreneurs in the Global South is that so many of the microloans issued by banks go to finance not just business investments but also consumption goods that cannot lead to direct financial returns. According to free market ideals people should be able to spend and consume as they want to without having to go into debt, but banks have to start offering modern financial products in order for that ideal to become a reality. Microcredit is only part of the equation; what the world’s poor need even more desperately is some form of microsavings. In many of the countries where microcredit is needed there simply are no financial products which reward small account holders for saving; in these markets, people have to pay the bank exorbitant fees simply in order to keep an account open and thus saving money in a bank account is a losing endeavor for all but the super-rich. If the yeoman farmers and proletarians of the world could stow their money away in bank accounts which reward savers with interest instead of vice versa, they would be able to pay for things like emergency health care without having to resort to the crushing debt which crowds out the market and stifles entrepreneurship. Microsavings is even more necessary for the rural peasants and urban poor of the world to accumulate their own capital to start a small business independent of the whims of any bank – a phenomenon which could foster the strengthening of bourgeoisies and middle classes in societies dangerously stratified between the tiny financial elites and the sprawling, starving masses.

In order to obviate the absolute most predatory sort of micro-lending, quasi-modern banks also need to take a step backward in order to go forward by creating new financial services which cater to those borrowers whose means of production remains defined by pre-capitalist subsistence agriculture. In particular, banks which issue microcredit and microsavings accounts to the poor need to establish cereal banking divisions which allow small farmers to deposit their surplus in years of good harvests and to withdraw a few sacks of millet, rice or corn to feed their families in years of drought and blight. Chauvinists of Western capitalism might be inclined to pooh-pooh cereal banking as a philanthropic sideshow, but those who think that the archaic proto-commercial economy has nothing to do with the shortage of affordable credit in the relatively modern money market are profoundly mistaken. When there is a drought which threatens the subsistence farming population with starvation, everybody wants to take out loans from the bank to pay for basic foodstuffs – loans which most likely will never be repaid by people who have no source of monetary income – and so interest rates skyrocket for everyone. The expansion and development of cereal banking can serve to reduce the risk of all participants in the money market and should drive down interest rates for all borrowers – including those who wish to take out a loan to start a new cash business.

The impoverished masses of the underdeveloped world are also shut out from affordable credit largely because in most of these countries where they live the law does not recognize any titles or deeds to the one thing they have: the land they live on. As a result, peasant farmers and urban slum-dwellers have no de jure property they can use as collateral to help them receive a favorable loan. Developing countries should heed the advice of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto and overhaul their property laws to codify the de facto land property of the credit-needy poor so that they can collateralize what little they do have. Champions of traditionalism and leftists opposed to private property in general howl at what they perceive as the injustice of such unabashed Neoliberalism and Western imperialism – but I dare de Soto’s detractors to come up with a better way of addressing the basic causality between land that cannot be collateralized and the paucity of affordable credit. If the humanitarians of the world are so genuinely concerned about predatory lending, they should applaud the efforts of the World Bank, USAID and the like when they push such property-livening legal reforms which could serve to reduce the incentive for banks to charge such usurious interest rates in the first place.

Microcredit has warts just like any other financial product, but the shortcomings of this strategy to foster economic growth and poverty reduction do not mean that it must be discarded to the ash heap of history. Indeed, much of the Global South’s economic ills could be abated if their respective banks were to simply begin genuine microfinance programs which emulate the Grameen Bank’s commitment to issuing loans at low, affordable interest rates strictly for the purpose of business development. Yet the expansion of real microcredit is only a partial reform of economic systems which fail the bottom billion of the world's poor; if these countries are ever going to fix their credit markets in a way that systematically reduces let alone eliminates poverty, their bankers, borrowers and legislators are going to have to comprehensively reform their financial practices.

The Elements of Style @ Fat Baby

Put on your drinking boots, because The Elements of Style are gonna rock the Lower East Side!

Pants optional.

Saturday, January 8 at 10:00pm - January 9 at 12:00am

Fat Baby
112 Rivington Street
New York, NY

Fat Baby has 3 levels - we'll be in the lower level, at the dance floor.
$7 cover - not our call, we asked to have it as low as possible.
Transportation - take the F to Delancy St OR the J/M/Z to Essex St.

VIDEO UPDATE!!!

Thanks to Rae Sterling, Hap Shashy and Spencer Robins, we have 2 new videos on YouTube!!!

"Brown-Eyed Girl"


"Evil Woman"

Some Food for Thought

Over this holiday season I’ve been traveling around Tanzania with my sister who has been volunteering here as a health educator. Though she has been primarily working on HIV/AIDS issues, I of course have been more interested in how this particular African country has been dealing with waterborne diseases. And the fact of the matter is that – just as Tanzania’s economy is experiencing relatively solid growth while Mali is left watching on the sidelines - Tanzania is steadily improving its indicators of water and sanitation while my beloved Mali remains mired in stagnation and disease.

Statistics vary according to the respective methodologies of the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, UNICEF, etc.; and public health statistics are notoriously difficult to measure in the hardly-functional states of sub-Saharan Africa. But the broad picture is clear; though health indicators in Tanzania remain generally abysmal, they are considerably less abysmal in Tanzania than in Mali. Here in Tanzania there is a significantly lower prevalence of diarrhea, giardia, dysentery and cholera; Tanzania has a lower prevalence of death by diarrheal disease, a lower infant mortality rate, a lower child mortality rate, and a slightly greater life expectancy overall.

And in many of the same reports, you will find that only 24 percent of Tanzanians have “access to adequate sanitation facilities” i.e. toilets or latrines. This statistic too is prone to wild estimation and subjectivity, but I think that it may be the most telling. A Westerner might look at this figure and read it to mean Tanzanian sanitation infrastructure is atrocious – I think that would be a fair statement – but they don’t know the meaning of atrocious until they read that only 1/6 of that fraction, a mere 4 percent of Malians have “access to adequate sanitation”. The blunt truth is that beyond the likes of Niger, Mauritania, Haiti, Afghanistan and the very nadir of the most-underdeveloped countries of the world, it is difficult to exceed the sheer disarray of sanitation in the Republic of Mali.

Confined to the realm of pure statistical analysis, one might be inclined to assume that that is the whole story; Tanzanians have more latrines and soak pits than Malians, latrines and soak pits reduce the chance of fecal contamination of the drinking water, therefore Tanzanians have less prevalence of giardia and dysentery and greater life expectancies than Malians. Q.E.D.

But there’s more to it than that. In addition to the existence of water and sanitation infrastructure of the lack thereof, the prevalence of diseases transmitted via the fecal-oral cycle is tied to sanitation practices. Loyal readers of this blog are probably familiar with the fact that Mali’s appalling prevalence of gastrointestinal disease is largely caused by the country’s traditions which entail that the people of that country clean their respective anuses with their respective left hands, they “wash” their hands before eating by mushing their left and right hands together in a tin can of water used by every member of the eating party, and then they eat from a communal food bowl with their respective right hands. Popular Tanzanian anal-cleansing and eating practices are not much better; they generally eat their corn ugali with their hands, very few ever adequately wash their hands with soap, and even fewer use toilet paper or a bidet.

However, there are a few subtle differences. Most notably, when Maasai herders “wash” their hands without soap, they don’t dip their hands into a container of increasingly-filthy water. Instead, the eating rituals of the Maasai culture involve the youngest boy bringing a pitcher of hot water to his elders and pouring it over their hands. Even if they’re not doing a very thorough job of washing their hands, at least they’re not making them even dirtier as the Miniankas are wont to do.

And even though the Maasai maintain the uncouth tradition of eating with their hands, they do not eat with their hands from a communal food bowl. You see, in addition to drinking tea and eating fried potato “chips”, Tanzanians adopted from their former British colonial overlords the practice of eating from individual plates. This – I believe – makes a world of a difference. Even if someone is going to eat ugali with fecal matter-tainted hands and unwittingly practice coprophagy, there is relatively little risk of contracting giardia, dysentery or cholera by ingesting one’s own fecal matter – if there are amoebas in your stools, then you already have amoebic dysentery. The only way to contract fecal-oral cycle-transmitted disease is to ingest someone else’s poo particles – a risk significantly downgraded by a culture that shifts from eating from one shared bowl of food to multiple, individualized bowls of food.

I can only assume that the hygienically-superior eating habits of Tanzanians and their hand-washing practices which at least are not counterproductive probably provide a partial explanation of why this society is significantly less mired in disease than the people of Mali. Of course, this hypothesis would be quite daunting to prove as 1) there is no control group; and 2) if compilations of data on disease prevalence are shaky and “access to adequate sanitation facilities” is much too subjective to ever be analyzed scientifically, any statistic like “the prevalence of adequate hygiene practices” is 100-percent subjective and therefore epidemiologically-useless.

Nevertheless, I suppose that the conclusions are quite clear: cultures that are receptive to amending their cultural practices at least stand a chance of improving their public health and their general standard of living. Conversely, cultures which exhibit little genuine interest in learning how to swim are more liable to sink. If the people of Mali want to sully their hands in each other’s filth and eat with their hands from the same food bowl, then they are going to remain forever mired in gastrointestinal disease.

Zac Mason in the News!

Two generations of Masons - one a doctor and the other an actual mason - are quoted in the New Canaan Patch on how this recession is taking a toll on the hopes and dreams of 20-somethings.

Though I want to clarify that I vehemently live in Vista, New York and not New Canaan, Connecticut as this article erroneously implies - my only tie to the place is that my dad works there.

And if any other foot soldiers in the reserve army of the unemployed are looking for career opportunities, the Peace Corps is always hiring!

Long Live the Existing Homes Tax Credit!

I will concede to my Republican friends that there are tax cuts which serve as such a strong incentive to potential consumers that they do stimulate economic activity. I will agree that Congress ought to extend these tax cuts in order to help small businesses weather this deep recession, to create jobs and to reduce the federal deficit – and that it is imperative that they extend these tax cuts as soon as possible so that they don’t expire with the coming new year. In fact, I think that these tax cuts ought to be made permanent.

I’m not talking about the Bush tax cuts, of course. Across-the-board reductions of the income tax rate for the very richest households are amongst the most ineffective job creation policies imaginable because they are absolutely unconditional to any sort of consumer spending, business investment or other job-creating activity. Moreover, these sorts of tax cuts are even more ineffective when they are showered upon those millionaires and billionaires who respond to incentives the least and are more likely to save their tax windfall than to spend or invest it. This is why few economists unaffiliated with the Heritage Foundation or Regent University will tell you that extending the Bush tax cuts to the year 2021 actually amounts to a cost-effective policy to promote economic growth – the CBO estimates that every $1 of the Bush tax cuts has generated only a piddling 40 cents of additional economic activity.

To find such solid growth-oriented and fiscally responsible tax incentives that are targeted towards the most incentive-responsive sectors of the economy, you would have to look at the understated Obama tax cuts embedded in the 2009 stimulus package. Among the most cost-effective growth-oriented policies conducted in recent years have been the extension of the Existing Homes Tax Credit tucked into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This unarguably pragmatic plank of the stimulus package combined Keynesian spending in the form of $5 billion of grants to low-income homeowners and it increased from 10% to 30% for the cost of energy-efficient insulation, windows, roofing, heating, ventilation and cooling systems and with a maximum tax deduction of $1,500. Because these particular tax incentives were tax credits completely conditional on very specific species of investments, the Existing Homes Tax Credit was specifically-targeted to stimulate economic activity.

The Existing Home Tax Credit was a primary reason why my family decided to splurge $13,120 renovating our house with a new set of windows. In all honesty the Obama tax credit wasn’t the only reason why we made this large investment – also, I was really, really cold. You see, our home and all of its original windows were built in 1972 – a year when the Vietnam War was a-raging, Don McLean’s “American Pie” was at the top of the Billboard charts, Richard Nixon obliterated George McGovern in his re-election campaign and five Cuban men were arrested in an elaborate plot to bug the office of the Democratic National Committee. 1972 was also mere months before the OPEC embargo on the United States, the mother of all oil crises and the classical era of energy conservation.


38 years later the seals on our windows had broken, the wood frames had warped and in many places the entire panel had fallen off its tracks. In my room the windows had degraded so badly that I literally could not close them. My room had always been drafty through high school and college; in the summer this was never really so bad, but it was always a bit uncomfortable when the outside temperature had fallen below 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Now that my body is still struggling to adjust from the sweltering Malian Sahel, I felt that I could now submit to my father a quite-valid request to crank up the thermostat.

“For such an admirer of Jimmy Carter, you of all people should put on a sweater…”

“I am wearing a sweater – and a polar fleece and a jacket and a scarf and a hat. And when I sit in my room I can see my own breath. With all due respect to President Carter, our house in Vista is situated in a different climatic zone than his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia…”

And we agreed that maybe there exist even more effective, cost-efficient methods of heat retention than polar fleece. My dad and I gave an ample examination of each and every one of our house’s 25 windows and came to the conclusion that they were all past their expiration date. Every window in our house was broken beyond repair; the seals were broken, the cavities between the panes were full of condensation. The worst culprits were the bay windows along the wall of our dining room. Our heat vents were blowing 30 percent of our hot air right out the window! And likewise, since heating and cooling constitutes roughly half of our home energy consumption, at least $50 of the $341 we spend a month on our electric bill was being completely and unnecessarily wasted – we were throwing at least $600 out the window every year!



The root of the problem was in the fact that the original windows built in this house were made with wood frames. Wood can be fine for flooring, paneling, trim and furniture, but it is in many ways an archaic building material for window frames because wood warps, it cracks, it eventually decays and rots no matter how much protective varnish you paint it with. Even in a climate spared of termites, wooden windows are not meant to last much longer than a single generation in America (33 years in my family). If people want to live in homes made of wood that’s fine, but so long as the United States’ official housing policy is to promote home ownership, then we Americans have to grasp that home ownership entails the responsibility of conducting necessary maintenance, repairs, and gradual modernization – and if we are going to own houses made out of organic materials like wood then we have to continue more regular upkeep than we would if our houses were made solely out of concrete, brick, plastic and steel.

And just as it makes only perfect sense for our every next car be a hybrid or an electric, it’s time to make sure that we not let this crisis go to waste either. If we have to replace our windows, we are going to replace them with the most effective, the most durable, the highest quality windows on the market to cut down on the amount of energy we consume for heating and cooling. Maybe our Ben Affleck-aged, 2,400-square-foot house is too outdated to ever be LEED-certified, but we can at least remodel and renovate it into something that is significantly more energy-efficient, something that requires less consumption of fossil fuels and reduces our overall carbon footprint.

My dad decided to go with the recommendation of one of his friends and hired Thermo-Tite Windows – a small business of a few dozen employees based out of Port Chester, New York which sells the highest-graded window available on the market to private homeowners. Apparently, we learned that when we are buying new windows every 38 years or so we should ensure the quality of the products we purchase by checking the window performance rating issued by the National Fenestration Rating Council.

Every window worth its weight in sand should be affixed with an NFRC rating label detailing the following:

• U-factor - which measures how much energy material conducts.
• solar heat gain coefficient - which measures how well a product blocks heat cause by the sunlight.
• visible transmittance - which measures how much visible light comes through the glass.
• condensation resistance –which measures the window’s ability to resist condensation on the interior surface.

The problem with our 38-year-old double-paned windows was that all that sat between those panes was gas composed of the natural ratio between nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, carbon dioxide and argon found in Earth’s atmosphere.


“What is argon?” you might ask. Argon is a noble gas, element number 18. People usually do not give it much notice unless they are either engaged in the business of poultry asphyxiation, graphite production, titanium processing, filling up fluorescent light bulbs or windows. But people should give this noble gas the credit that it is due. Coming in third after only nitrogen (78.09%) and oxygen (20.95%), argon gas constitutes approximately 0.93% of the volume of Earth’s atmosphere; coming in fourth is the most prevalent greenhouse gas – carbon dioxide – which constitutes a mere 0.039%. Argon gas exhibits certain properties which allow us humans to utilize it in our manufacturing of windows in a way that reduces the prevalence of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we pump into our atmosphere.

In vintage Genesis-with-Peter Gabriel-Era windows like the ones we had in our house, naturally-occurring argon gas usually constitutes only 0.93% of the insulation. That’s a terrible waste of that fraction of that millimeter of space between the two panes of glass that could be easily filled with a plurality of argon gas – which conducts heat less efficiently than nitrogen or oxygen. When the Mason family’s climate-controlled home interior is set to 68 degrees and the portion of the atmosphere directly adjacent to the windows is 34 degrees, the basic laws of thermodynamics entail that heat will gradually transfer from the portion of the atmosphere inside our house to the atmosphere outside of our house. Hence despite the fact that we were setting our thermostat and consuming enough energy to heat the house to 68 degrees it felt closer to 58 or even 48 right next to the windows.

Now in the 2010s the Thermo-Tite Window Company is mass-marketing double-paned windows with enhanced argon content of the slight cavity between the two panes. Gaseous argon allows for significantly less heat conduction than gaseous nitrogen or oxygen – so the greater the ratios of argon to nitrogen and argon to oxygen in a given gaseous mixture, the slower it will conduct heat. Compared to windows filled with naturally-composed dry air, this argon-enhanced double-pane window reduces heat conductivity by roughly 30 percent.



In a temperate climate like New York, most families consume approximately 864 kilowatt/hours of energy and spend $95 month air-conditioning their home from May through August. Since heat can also be conducted from the hot summer air outside through your windows to the air-conditioned interior, windows like my old Thermopanes with a high U-factor are wasting about 30 percent of that energy or $29 of their monthly electric bills on air-conditioning which also effectively is lost through the windows. And those are only the economic windfalls of the windows’ reduced heat conductivity!

Argon-filled Thermo-Tite Windows also receive such high performance ratings from the National Fenestration Rating Council because of their solar heat gain coefficient, their visible transmittance, and the windows’ condensation resistance. These factors are also beneficial to my household’s bottom line, because homes are also inadvertently heated by the sunlight which passes through the double-paned windows – so windows marked by higher solar heat gain coefficients and lower visible transmittance are heated by unwanted solar radiation during the months when families are cranking the AC. A New York household that uses a central air conditioner 8 hours a day could reduce the amount of heat coming into their house via solar radiation and reduce the amount of energy that their air conditioning system needs to bring the house to their designated temperature.

In layman’s terms, Thermo-Tite’s windows are framed with special insulating fiberglass which reduces the chance of condensation forming on the inside of the two panes. Thermo-Tite’s silver oxide-coated windows reduce the amount of solar radiation that passes through the glass panes and argon cavity – and this reduces the amount of energy consumed on cooling houses in the summer, which is much less than that lost by conduction but a considerable amount of energy nonetheless. With such slight technological improvements in manufacturing these windows from making the frames out of durable steel, plastic and fiberglass instead of wood, coating the glass with silver dioxide and filling the space between the two panes with concentrated argon gas, we can prevent so much wasted energy consumption on cooling by about 30 to 35 percent. In New York we consume a much greater percentage of our annual energy bill on heating than cooling in comparison to a household in Texas or Arizona, but over the months and years the costs add up nonetheless.

Altogether, New Yorkers typically spend 50 percent of their overall utility bills - roughly $4,000 - on heating and air-conditioning. So if there is any way that we can reduce the amount of energy we consume on heating and air-conditioning our homes – even by just a fraction, it can eventually adds up to hundreds if not thousands of dollars in savings every year. That means that if the average family in New York were to replace their outdated air-filled double-paned windows with energy-efficient argon-filled double-panes, they could save an average $600 each year on their electric bills. So by investing in more energy-efficient windows and reducing their consumption of fossil-fuel-generated electricity, that average family in New York would save themselves the equivalent of their much-heralded rebate from the 2001 Bush tax cuts every single year from now until they move out of their current home.

More money saved on utility bills is more money the pockets of consumers – in terms of economic behavior, savings on utility bills has supply-side effects on consumer spending no less than a check in the mail from the U.S. Treasury. If anything, it is more effective than the ostentatiously-marketed supply-side stimulus of the Bush tax cuts because people are less likely to notice the money saved and put it in the bank and more likely to go out and spend it on better-quality food at the supermarket, a new jacket at the department store, dinner and a movie with their girlfriend or a round of beers for all of their friends at the bar. Instead of spending money on oil imported from the Middle East, people who improve the energy-efficiency of their homes are now freed to spend that money on goods and services produced here in the United States.

A free market purist would argue that every consumer in America should simply be educated about the economics of energy consumption and the science of argon-filled windows and they should be able to decide upon such a clearly money-saving investment by their own reason and free will. Maybe my parents would have replaced the drafty windows in my room simply because it was so cold that I could see my breath at night. But what really prodded them to make this decision was the Obama administration’s $1,500 home weatherization tax credit.

After my dad and I inspected all of our broken, leaking 38-year-old windows, we did the math and calculated that to hire Thermo-Tite to replace every one of them would cost $13,120. But thanks to the tax credit, it would really only cost us $11,620 – still a significant sum, but a much more manageable one. Though we live in a relatively large 2,400-square-foot house, so we consume more energy on climatisation. by investing in more energy-efficient windows alone we should save approximately $50 month on our electric bills

Thanks to the Obama administration’s tax credit, we decided to pay Thermo-Tite Windows for $13,120 worth of argon-filled double-pane windows, insulated frames and installation. Our $13,120 went towards the windows themselves – which were manufactured in New Jersey, the Thermo-Tite company headquartered in Port Chester, New York, and the subcontracted carpenters who live throughout the Hudson Valley. And when the work was done we gave each one of the carpenters a $20 tip. The home weatherization tax credit spurred us to take $13,220 that would have otherwise laid fallow in the bank and to spend it on goods and services right here at home.

…And those window manufacturers in New Jersey and the management in Port Chester and the carpenters from Wappinger’s Falls are going to take the money they earned from us and spend it at the supermarket, at the movie theater, on Christmas gifts for their wives and their children. And that money in the pockets of working class households who need it the most is going to create more demand for more goods and more services and more jobs as it continues circulating and multiplying throughout the economy. From personal observation, I can tell you that the Existing Homes Tax Credit was the deciding factor in my family’s decision to put $13,220 into the economy – and all of this additional spending cost the U.S. Treasury only $1,500 in tax deductions. And the window-makers, carpenters and management are going to pay more income taxes, that extra money circulating and multiplying is going to generate sales taxes, thus the federal and state governments are going to reduce their deficits with more tax revenue.



The grant and tax incentive policies have received criticism over the past year as they have grossly underperformed the Obama administration benchmark of weatherizing 600,000 homes by March 2010. Vice President Biden came to in Manchester, New Hampshire to celebrate the weatherization of the 200,000th home on August 27th. At the current trajectory, the Energy Department will probably announce the 600,000th home improvement paid for with the Weatherization Assistance Program sometime in the sequel Recovery Summer 2011.



A March 2010 article by Garance Burke in the Boston Globe panned the weatherization measures of the Obama stimulus, noting that a year after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed by President Obama “the stimulus program has retrofitted 30,250 homes – about 5 percent of the overall goal – and fallen well short of the 87,000 jobs that the department planned.” Burke emphasized individual instances of inactivity as poster-children for the WAP grants’ ineffectuality;

“In Indiana, state-trained workers flubbed insulation jobs. In Alaska, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, the program has yet to produce a single job or retrofit one home. And in California, a state with nearly 37 million residents, the program at last count had created 84 jobs.”

Burke and other critics are correct to point out the inconvenient truth that this one of the Obama administration’s signature job creation policies has lagged in meeting its expectations on time. However, they are misguided in asserting that this lag in job creation has been due to any inherent fault in the structure of the Weatherization Assistance Program or the extension of the Existing Homes Tax Credit. One of the primary reasons why the home weatherization policies have yet to live up to the Obama administration’s projected job creation numbers has been because the Recovery Act was designed so that most of the stimulus funds would be spent by the individual states – and for one reason or another, the individual states have not administered the home weatherization programs that these grants are meant to fund.

The weatherization program has underperformed nationally because it has underperformed disproportionately in states like Alaska, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina where the rock-ribbed Republican state governments are ideologically opposed to implementing President Obama’s stimulus policy. "We can't accept the bait," said Sarah Palin - then-Governor of Alaska. "It's a bribe - it's 'here, take these dollars - but you gotta grow your government.'" In addition to federal grants to pay for home weatherization, Governor Palin rejected energy efficiency grants, immunizations, air quality grants, emergency food assistance, homeless grants, senior meals, child care development grants, nutrition programs, homeless grants, arts, unemployment services, air quality, justice assistance grants and other programs allocated to Alaska. Surely if we are to caste blame for the disappointing track record of the home weatherization grants and tax credits in states like Alaska, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina, we should be pointing our fingers at GOP Governors like Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford who have sacrificed the weatherization grants which would greatly benefit their constituents on the altars of national ticket ambitions.

Other states like California have fared so badly implementing their share of the Recovery Act’s stimulus funds because not because their Governors were more interested in political grandstanding but because their hands have been tied by sheer political gridlock. Though Governor Schwarzenegger had been an outspoken proponent of the Obama administration’s home weatherization policies in his state, California has been largely unable to implement stimulus projects because the state government is undergoing such a budget crisis has slashed public employees to such austere extremes – Governor Schwarzenegger has asked state employees to take voluntary “Furlough Fridays” – that the state can hardly cash their Weatherization Assistance Program grants let alone establish and conduct a brand new state housing program.

However, the opposite is true in Massachusetts – which is perfectly on schedule with spending its $122 million in WAP grants by the U.S. Energy Department’s March 2012 deadline. As of May, the Commonwealth had insulated 2,845 units of private housing, employing 42 new contractors and 220 new installers. The Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development has also awarded more than $10 million to 20 local housing authorities to weatherize the state’s 50,000 public housing units and replace their outdated, inefficient heating systems – with material procurement and installation happening as you read this blog. The primary reason why the Obama administration’s weatherization grants have been so consequential in Massachusetts while they have been faltering elsewhere is that under Governor Deval Patrick Massachusetts already had a established a functioning home weatherization program of its own albeit with a much smaller budget. When the Recovery Act’s WAP grants were allocated to the respective state governments, Massachusetts did not have to waste time with HR issues and was able to hit the ground running.

The Weatherization Assistance Program has yet to meet its job creation in the immediate short run perhaps because state-administered home weatherization programs are not as “shovel-ready” as federal highway spending or aid to the states to retain public school teachers, police officers. Nevertheless, as of Joe Biden’s August commemoration of the 200,000th weatherization of a private home with federal stimulus dollars, despite the delays and setbacks experienced in some of the largest states, this program had created approximately 13,000 jobs for plumbers, carpenters, electricians, welders and other assorted craftsmen. As states are picking up the pace, tens of thousands more jobs are projected to be generated by the modest $5 billion Weatherization Assistance Program.

An unfortunate matter for the Obama administration and other cheerleaders of Keynesian spending is that there exists hardly an iota of data available on the Existing Home Tax Credit for economists and public policy experts to parse. Homeowners were only able to begin making tax deductions on money they invested in energy-efficient retrofitting beginning as of Tax Day 2010 – so it would be fair to say that with the notable exception of professional policy analysts the vast majority of taxpayers did not feel this incentive until this year. Until we have conclusive numbers from the Departments of Treasury on how many people actually took this tax deduction, we can’t really know how much it costs because its expenditure is perfectly conditional on the degree to which people respond to this incentive, until we have employment statistics through December we can’t know how many jobs it created, and until we have statistics from the Department of Energy we can’t project how much they are going to reduce U.S. energy consumption and emission of greenhouse gases.

This whole matter of home weatherization is anything but a campaign of feel-good activism – it is a serious policy to spur economic growth and recovery. As far as tax cuts go, the Existing Homes Tax Credit is remarkably cost-efficient because there are no public monies being wasted on just throwing tax cuts at everyone with the hope that some of it might stick. The carrot of the tax credit is perfectly contingent on actual spending, so if you weatherize your house and actually put money into the economy you receive a tax credit, if you don’t you get nothing and the deficit is no worse as a result. No public monies are frittered on idle speculation, stagnant saving or wasteful consumption– the cost to the Treasury of this particular tax credit is directly offset by consumer investment which stimulates demand for domestically-produced goods and services and spurs employment for working class and middle class Americans. Since home heating and cooling costs are disproportionate strains on the pocketbooks of those working class and middle class families who can afford them the least, this tax credit is remarkably progressive – while at the same it remains egalitarian as higher-income families like my own can benefit from saving on energy bills all the same.

If my parents were to live in this house indefinitely then their investment in energy efficiency would pay for itself with savings on home heating and cooling bills after approximately 19 years; assuming that my parents still live in this house into their 70s then sometime around the year 2029 they would have an additional $4,800 every year to splurge on vacation, invest on the stock market, tuck away in their savings account, or do whatever their hearts desire with the windfall of real energy savings. Though by that time they Dan and Sue Mason will more likely have sold their present house and retired to Vermont or the Berkshires; they will nevertheless benefit because they will be able to sell this property for a higher price – not because of idle speculation on the real estate market but because they have invested in the real value of their home. Whichever way you look at it, the home weatherization tax credit will in the long run foster greater savings, investment and spending on goods and services produced in America, it could help revive the real value of property on the real estate market and should be a boon to the financial interests of homeowners, landlords and renters alike.

However, like the Bush tax cuts the extension of the Existing Homes Tax Credit is set to expire on December 31st of this year. Rich Neale, a sales representative for Thermo-Tite Windows says “We’ll still have jobs here and there, but a good portion of our business comes from customers are deciding to weatherize their windows solely because of the tax incentive. We’re afraid that at the end of the year our business is going to dry up.”

As Congress deliberates on which tax cuts to extend and which to let expire, the Existing Homes Tax Credit must not be overlooked. This directly targeted tax incentive stimulates economic activity and fosters job creation more cost-effectively than blanket reductions of the income tax, capital gains and dividends tax, and especially the inheritance tax. Moreover, these tax credits estimated to be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars and their $5 billion public spending counterparts are relatively modest and affordable. Not all tax cuts serve as incentives for private sector growth the same way, some tax cuts are simply better fiscal policies than others, and there is no compelling economic argument that the gargantuan, ineffective, regressive boondoggles of the Bush tax cuts should be renewed but the modest, cost-effective, job-creating Existing Homes Tax Credit should be allowed to expire.

From my perspective, this is a no-brainer.

The Future is Here

Now that the clunker of a Jeep Wrangler has been traded for a hyper-efficient Toyota Prius, I’ve been in awe of modern Japanese technology. Being eternally vigilant of keeping my smug emissions to a minimum, I can only heap praise upon the ultra-light, aerodynamic, hybrid-electric which stands as the most fuel-efficient gasoline-consuming automobile ever mass-produced thusfar in the history of human civilization.


It is a pleasure to drive, the built-in GPS and rear-monitor make driving and parking incredibly easier, and with an average of 48 miles per gallon on highways and 51 miles per gallon in cities I hardly ever have to fill up for gas. When I drove the Wrangler I could hardly drive from Vista to Vermont without having to fill the tank, but on a recent road trip I was able to drive the Prius from Amherst, Massachusetts to Alexandria, Virginia – a total of 8.5 hours and 401 miles – without having to stop for gas! And if that weren’t good enough, it only cost me $29 because the Prius gas tank is so small to begin with! Forget about carbon emissions; the expense of this car will eventually pay for itself in savings on gasoline consumption!

Though it is the most fuel-efficient car on the market, the Prius isn’t necessarily the superlative most cost-efficient when it comes to fuel consumption. Though the Prius II gets 48/51 miles per gallon it costs a whopping $22,800 – whereas the Honda Civic gets a mere 40/43 mpg it also costs only $15,800. Of course, if private consumers as well as policymakers in business and government are trying to figure out ways of minimizing CO2 emissions, they should focus more on those models that can reduce fuel consumption the most cost-efficiently. Hybrid vehicles are only going to be practical solutions to the macroeconomic issues of air pollution and climate change when they are sold at a price that not just the sons of doctors and real estate brokers but also middle-class and working-class consumers can afford such an unwieldy investment.

So the other day I was driving around doing errands when I stopped in a parking garage and saw something which put my puny Prius to shame: a Tesla Roadster.

I was just dumbstruck standing there for what must’ve been five minutes admiring this beautiful, sleek and unarguably sexy car as though it were Lea Michele posing there in the parking garage in lingerie and stilettos… (drool)…

And this Jamaican delivery guy parks next to me, sees me and laughs a good hearty belly laugh, “Ho ho ho! Dis electreec ca! De man paks his electreec ca hea every day! It ees de Futah!”

“Yeah… I know…”

“You know how much money I spen’ on gas? Hundreds and hundreds o’ dollas every week! If I had an electreec ca I could deeliver my packages and not spend no money! I’d just plug eet in and feell eet with electreecity!”

And for the rest of the day, I couldn’t help but think of that Jamaican dude in the parking garage. In all probability this guy making $15,000-$20,000 a year can’t afford to go out and buy a Tesla Roadster. And he’s probably not in line to buy one of the first Chevy Volts for $32,780 or one of the Nissan Leafs for $25,280. But what if one day five, ten, twenty years from now the Volt or the Leaf or one of their progeny is produced on such a scale that he can afford to buy one?

These electric cars are being marketed as being able to run on $1.50 worth of electricity per day. If you can charge your car up at home or at the office then the cost would just be added to your overall utility bill – but a great deal of commuters who need to drive long distances every day would need to be able to recharge at private recharging stations en route. A small business owner like a package deliverer, a carpenter, a cable repairman or Joe the Plumber who drives from house to house for business might have to recharge multiple times every work day! And of course, no country has ever had a full-scale economy of electric-charging stations and we can only speculate as to how this hypothetical market is going to function.

But could the recharging of electric cars really cost only $1.50 per day – even for someone like the Jamaican delivery guy whose job consists of driving around town all day long? And wouldn’t charging a commuter fleet only be adding to the burden of our already-strained electric grids? Maybe in a market along the swaths of California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas desert that will soon be electrified exclusively with solar and wind energy a fleet of electric cars could have a miniscule carbon footprint - but here in New York where so much of our electricity is derived from oil, coal and gas of course electric cars would only have a marginal effect on reducing our greenhouse emissions for staving off the most disastrous global climate change. Electric cars could have only modest improvements on our environmental degradation in a cloudy region like New York without a massive reinvention of our energy grid - which for now remains untold generations away, so they can really only be rationally superior products in this market if they offer genuine economic benefits in terms of saving on transportation costs.

I must concede my own ignorance on the matter – and beseech you all in the peanut gallery for some answers. At the moment I’m only tangentially interested in electric cars in terms of air pollution or carbon emissions – I'm much more interested in the potential for electric cars to improve the traditional indicators in our economy. If a typical commuter who drives from, say, the suburbs of Westchester County to Madison Avenue five days a week were to drive a Tesla Roadster, a Chevy Volt or a Nissan Leaf, how much money would he be saving on gas? In the case of the Jamaican delivery guy who is driving not just as a commuter but as an operating cost of his business, how lucrative would his investment in a Volt be over the course of 10 years? Is this fuel-saving technology something that could help small businesses stay afloat in this perilous economy – and if so, to what degree? Could it help small and large firms save so much money on gas that they could actually afford to invest and expand their production and start making new hires? And considering that many of these cars are going to be manufactured here in the United States and they will be using less Middle Eastern oil, how will the growth of electric cars effect our trade deficits? Can the gradual conversion from a fleet of gasoline-fueled cars and trucks to vehicles powered by electric batteries contribute to the overall solvency of the United States economy?

If any of you can find any good data on the economic benefits of electric cars – or even just personal anecdotes or musings on your own household budget, I would much appreciate it. Here’s to making Zacstravaganza more of a two-way conversation in the new year!

$20 and a Goat

(With my apologies to those who already know it ends, I have recently rewritten what remains perhaps the greatest story that has ever happened in the history of Zachary Asher Mason. The Assassination of James Brown is now my case for why I want to go to law school to study property, torts and international law. At the very least, I'd like to hope that it makes my application a memorable read.)

While I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the African nation of Mali, I found that “property” and “property rights” were very nebulous concepts. Every man in the Minianka tribe with whom I lived had his own plot of land over which he had exclusive claim to farm – but the fields were demarcated only by the whims of the village chief. Every man was the undisputable owner of the millet he harvested – but the Miniankas believe that it is every man’s obligation to share his food with his fellow clansmen. Property rights did exist in Minianka culture, but if one man had it and another man believed that he deserved it then who had the right to use that property was up for debate.

My interest in the law was piqued when a twist of fate required that I argue a case of property rights before the Minianka tribal elders. I came to the elder council believing that the facts of my case were very straightforward; I owned a cat upon which I bestowed the name James, and this cat was my sovereign property. One night my cat ventured beyond the realm of my chain-link fence and scaled the wall of the clinic across the street. At this clinic stood a night watchman armed with a shotgun to deter the theft of the village’s valuable stores of medicine, and he had a history of abusing his position by shooting neighborhood cats and feeding them to his deeply-impoverished, malnourished family. This one night the watchman decided to shoot my cat James, chop its head off, skin it and feed it to his family for dinner.

Upon discovering this act the next morning, I considered myself a victim of great wrongdoing and demanded restitution. In Minianka society it was considered a greater affront than the crime itself for one to press charges with the formal law enforcement agencies, for after 80 years of Colonialism and 32 years of dictatorship this culture has nurtured a deep-seated distrust of the state. Instead, the Miniankas resolve all of their conflicts within the informal system of the chief of the village and the traditional elder council. And so I petitioned the chief of the village for a redress of my grievances. My argument came in two parts.

As for the charge of livestock theft, I based my claim on the facts that my cat was an article of livestock property and that I had paid 10,000 francs for this cat and its vaccinations. I argued that since the night watchman killed the cat and ate it, he was thereby unable to return my cat in its original form and thus he had violated my sovereign property rights. Therefore, I contended, the night watchman should pay me 10,000 francs so that I could buy and vaccinate a new cat to replace the one he had destroyed.

Moreover, I contended that the night watchman had committed reckless endangerment by discharging a Colonial-era musket mere meters from the garden where I was then sleeping in my tent. I was concerned that if he had missed my cat he might have hit me with a bullet from his highly inaccurate musket. I made the case that I would not be content with a mere financial settlement equivalent to the property that I had lost, for I was concerned that on a later date the night watchman might be perfectly content to shoot at another cat and simply pay me after the fact. Since I did not press formal criminal charges before the Commandant, I demanded that the night watchman also pay me a goat in civil damages.

In the traditional Minianka legal system the defendant is entitled to make his argument too, and in this case the defendant asserted a novel defense. The night watchman conceded that he did in fact kill my cat, but he argued that he had no choice. “Evil sorcerers cast black magic spells to curse people with sickness, and evil sorcerers can take the form of animals”, he reasoned, “and so when I saw this cat approach the clinic wall, I had no means of knowing whether or not it was an evil sorcerer disguised as a cat. Therefore, as I was afraid for my own life, I determined that I had no choice but to shoot this cat as an act of self-defense.”

The village chief found in my favor for my claim for restitution for my property, but he acquitted the night watchman under the charge of reckless endangerment; “The night watchman raises a good point; what if your cat had been an evil sorcerer?” I erred in the way that I formed my case because I articulated an entirely Western sense of justice, and I did not consider that the village chief himself was a product of a society that is sincerely afraid of witchcraft.

Despite the fact that my first experience arguing a case resulted in such a disappointing verdict, I came away more determined than ever to pursue a career in law. Knowing what it means to suffer a loss, I want to be able to defend people’s property rights in a modern court of law. Now that I know the true meaning of injustice, I want to be able to right these kinds of wrongs and make such an airtight case that not even the most partial judge could reject it.

In particular, I intend to study international law so that I can represent American citizens and firms conducting business overseas. When Americans are in foreign countries to do work, at some point they are going to have to write contracts and obtain licenses from the pertinent regulatory agencies. As I have learned from personal experience, when disputes arise with host country nationals American firms are going to need legal representation to make their case before foreign tribunals within the framework of the local laws, customs and beliefs. That is why I would like to study the principles of justice as they are codified in the laws of the United States and be able to compare them to the laws of the State of Qatar, the Kingdom of Morocco and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan – as well as the customs of societies like the Miniankas who resolve their conflicts through informal institutions.

I want to pursue a career in law because I hope to be able to use my legal education in countries like Mali not just to protect American expatriates’ property in their beloved cats but to also protect Bambara farmers’ property in goats and Fulani pastoralists’ savings in cattle. The law must protect property rights in order to facilitate business growth and development in countries like Mali not just so that Americans can profit – but also so that people like the night watchman might be able to afford to buy more food, medicine and clothing for their families. I hope that I can use the power of the law to advance the cause of justice, because the sound practice of law should protect the rights of all property owners and foster an economy that thrives to such an extent that no family goes malnourished.