Hello, my name is Sam . . .

And I have 2 older brothers. My mom used to worry about violence. Now, she's just trying to keep her head above water. In other words, I get to play with whatever I want!

The Big Seven

7 month Sam . . .

Has one adorable little TOOTH that will soon brighten his smile (not really showing yet, unfortunately).

Can cross a room in 30 seconds by ROLLING and turning his body.

Clearly shows his parent preference by babbling his new FIRST WORD constantly.

Finds lots of things funny and is LAUGHING nearly all the time!

The Presidents Party!

Finally - the post you've all been waiting for: Ellis' Presidents Birthday Party!

The rain ruined our plans for a nice backyard dinner, but we still had a lot of fun crammed in our house with a bunch of Ellis' favorite people!  He chose the guest list himself, mostly people who share his affinity for the U.S. Presidents.  So we had everyone from Mary (the former U.S. History teacher) to Caroline's daddy (history and trivia buff) to the McQuivey family (members of the Ellis fan club who all seem to know most of the presidents' names) to Hank (who knows little about presidents but can totally pull off the Abe Lincoln look).  It's always more fun to be around people who understand what makes you tick -- right?

I had a little too much fun with the food table.  Ben, Henry and I brainstormed a few ideas for presidential food . . . and then we got carried away!

Main course: President Roast-a-melts (roast beef & cheese sandwiches)

Jell-o Ford was a stretch (I really wanted to make the layered Jell-o!)

Barack-oli Obama and Benjamin Carrot-son

Don't forget the Ulysses S. Ranch (with a friendly reminder from Dubya)!

Array of chips and snacks

Lincoln Logs (Tootsie Rolls) or Harry Tru-mints

Wash it down with some Calvin Kool-Aid (Millard says, "Fill-more!")

Birthday cake time!

The moment Ellis had waited for all year (he LOVES singing Happy Birthday almost any day!)

Help from Mom with the trick sparkler candles (not the smartest idea for a 3 year old!)

This flag cake is what started the whole idea for the Presidents Party.

I'm kind of proud of it!

Marian, Caroline, Ellie, and Hank enjoy the goodies (I had red, white, and blue smeared all over my floors throughout the house!  Worth it for these guys.)

Deidre, Isaac, Becky, and Megan in their red, white, and blue

Best costume award goes to the McQuiveys: J.B., Logan, Soren, and Janessa!  Aren't they patriotic?

And Hank's Abe Lincoln costume was awesome too (wish I had a better picture!)

Quiz time!  We had two quizzes: a name-the-presidents quiz and another with presidential trivia.  Ellis took the questions very seriously.

Ben took it seriously as well!  He made sure no one cheated as they graded their trivia quiz.  The winners of this one?  Mary and Henry (Ellis was close)!

It's no question that Ellis was the winner of the name-the-presidents quiz!  He proudly called out the answers for everyone to hear.  This was his big moment!  We had some bonus questions about the General Authorities, which threw off the history buffs.  Ellis was not deterred.

Here's a little video clip of Ellis announcing the presidents to everyone.  He has come to recognize how AWESOME he is for knowing all the presidents, and he's pretty proud of himself when he shows off his presidents skills now.  And apparently he has some pretty decent nose-picking skills too (which I didn't notice until after I loaded this movie onto our computer!).

The casual observer might see this stash and think Ellis got overloaded with U.S. Presidents gifts.  If that observer could have a little peek into our home over the past two weeks since the party, they would see hundreds of "regular kid" toys going untouched on the shelves, and this stash of "president kid" toys being played with, lined up, scattered, and read over and over again.  He just can't get enough!

Thank you to everyone who made this 3 year old's birthday great!

The Ramble: A balanced approach to balancing the budget (Part 2)

This is the second of a 2-part post about how I think we should balance the federal budget.  Part 1 dealt with cutting federal spending, and you can find it here.  This post looks at raising taxes.


Taxes.  What a terrible word.  I instantly think of endless and incoherent forms, mixed with the feeling that someone is taking my money from me.  It's a terrible cocktail of frustration and anger.  Because we are so easily riled up, I think we tend to hear a lot of sound bites about taxes, rather than serious discussions.  Let's start this out with a couple of tax sound bites that I seem to keep hearing recently:

1. About half of all Americans pay no income tax at all.
2. Warren Buffett pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary.

Of course, republicans are fond of trotting out #1, while democrats are quick to promote #2.  But when they are both put up there right next to each other, how are we to make sense of them?  #1 seems to be saying that the richer half of the population is completely supporting the poorer half.  But, #2 points out that the rich (or, at least the super rich) are not being taxed nearly enough.  The problem is, both factoids are so misleading that they do not help us understand the real issue at all.

Here is what these two points are both missing: they only focus on income tax.  And why not?  That's what we all care about, because we see the withholding from our paychecks and, come April, we have to fill out the 1040s and settle with Uncle Sam.  Since income tax feels so much like the government stealing our hard-earned money, it's easy to get us all up-in-arms about it.  I'm angry just thinking about it!

So, take a deep breath.  Relax.  Let those awful emotions leave your body, and let's have a calm discussion about what to do about taxes.  Ready?

The truth is that even the poorest Americans are paying taxes, they just might not be income taxes.  And, Warren Buffett might not end up paying a huge portion of his income in taxes (because most of his income is capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate), but because he is a business owner, all of those business profits are being taxed by the government before they even get to him, at which point they are taxed again.  It's pretty likely that Buffett is paying over 30% of his income in taxes overall, it's just not all coming in the form of income tax.

We do ourselves a disservice when we ignore all other taxes and only talk about income tax.  What about corporate tax, sales tax, property tax, estate tax, payroll tax, etc. etc. etc.?  The thing with many of these taxes is that we don't feel them quite as sharply as income tax.  Take the corporate tax, for instance.  Corporations pay that, right?  Well, yeah, but corporations are really people (Mitt is spot on on this point), meaning that any tax we levy on a corporation ultimately results in either (a) lower dividends for the owners (shareholders) of the company, (b) lower wages for the employees of the company, or (c) higher prices charged by the company.  Thus, we all bear the burden of corporate tax, really, and so leaving it out of the equation gives us a really distorted view of the total tax burden we all pay.  So it is with the other taxes I listed.

Luckily for us, the Tax Policy Center does a great job of compiling the numbers for us:

Ah-ha!  Now we can clearly see that individuals in the highest tax bracket (the Warren Buffett crowd) pay about 30.4% of their income in total taxes, not 17% like Buffett claimed.  Individuals at the median pay less than half that: 14.1%.  And those in the lowest bracket only pay about 1.6% of their income in taxes. (Source: Tax Policy Center).

So, that's how things currently stand.  Before we can make much progress in determining what we need to change, we have to understand the impact that taxes really have on the economy.  Let me walk you through how I think about it.

First, we need to understand that there are really two decisions that go on with tax policy.  First, we need to decide how much tax revenue the government needs to raise in order to perform all of the things we want it to do.  I'm pretty much working under the assumption that we need to raise taxes from where they are now.  Looking at the current budget deficit, I think that it's clear that's the case, because we can't cut enough spending to balance the budget.  So, that means we need to raise taxes.  The second question is, then, what is the best way to do it?  In order to answer that, let's look at the problems that taxes cause and the problems that they can potentially solve.

In a perfect market, taxes cause all sorts of problems.  If you tax people based on their income, they choose to work less, and the economy struggles.  If you tax goods purchases, they purchase less, and the economy struggles.  Economists call this a deadweight loss--taxes don't just transfer wealth (from you to the government), they destroy it completely.  This is why true capitalists hate taxes.

Of course, in the real world markets aren't perfect.  We lack full information, there are externalities, and the market just isn't fair to everyone either.  Taxes can potentially solve these problems.  In particular, we can use taxes to punish negative externalities, and we can tax the rich more in order to help out the poor who were unlucky.  Taxes will still cause some deadweight losses, but that is kind of a wash if they solve some other problems along the way.

So, the takeaway from this is that we should try very hard not to tax behavior that we want, and we should instead charge taxes for behavior that is harmful.  Seems straightforward, right?  In practice, though, I don't think we have a great track record of following this simple rule of thumb.  My recommendations for raising taxes focus mostly on fixing areas where I think we've gone awry in skewing incentives the wrong way.

Alright, that's enough groundwork,  I think.  How should we raise taxes?  Here are a few ideas that I like, in order of how much I like them:

1. Institute a consumption tax.  Why do we tax income so much more than spending?  Which do we want to encourage, and which do we want to discourage?  In my opinion, if anything American consumers have a problem with over-spending, not over-earning.  So, I would like to see a consumption tax, such as a VAT.  A VAT isn't perfect, but it's the lesser of two evils if we're choosing between taxing income and consumption.
2. Get rid of the mortgage interest tax deduction.  A long time ago, we decided in the U.S. that having a lot of homeowners was good.  It's the American Dream.  As part of that decision, the government did many things to try to encourage homeownership, one of which was deduct all payments of mortgage interest from taxable income.  Unfortunately, there's no strong evidence that homeownership is actually a good (or bad) thing.  If anything, I think we currently have too many homeowners in the U.S., not too few!  So, we should get rid of the mortgage interest tax deduction--it would raise tax revenue, and discourage overindebtedness, all at the same time.
3. End the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy.  The richest individuals in the U.S. have enjoyed relatively low marginal tax rates for the past 25 years.  Today, their marginal tax rate is 35%.  In 1945 (the peak) it was 94% (Source: Wikipedia!):
   
   (IMPORTANT ASIDE: It's always the marginal tax rates that matter.  Buffett was quoting his overall tax rate, but that's irrelevant.  The reason?  Suppose you were deciding whether to work one more hour for $15 or not.  If you are being taxed at 3% on average, but this $15 is going to be taxed at 90%, which rate matters to you?  The marginal rate of 90%, since it means you would only get to keep $1.50 for your efforts.)  Given that the rich truly are paying relatively low marginal tax rates, it probably makes sense to raise their rates a bit.  Sorry, rich friends!  I still love you, and hope to be one of you someday.  ;)
4. Simplify the tax code.  The tax code is incredibly complex, as we all know.  This makes it so that sophisticated taxpayers, who are typically better-off, are able to find loopholes while unsophisticated individuals don't find them.  That seems kind of unfair to me.  I would be all for simplifying things, which makes it much easier to detect tax fraud and much harder to find loopholes.
5. Broaden the tax base.  This should not be done right now, but once the economy does start to recover, we can probably charge a small of amount of tax to some of those households who currently pay no income tax.  Having half of the population paying no income tax seems a little extreme to me.  The good news is that by doing the other things I've listed, it won't need to be much.

Obviously, these steps would all need to be taken slowly and carefully.  Quickly implementing any of them would likely cause people to get blindsided by the changes.  The good news is that Congress never does anything quickly.  Regardless, in the long run these are the types of reforms that need to happen to balance the budget.

Congratulations!  You've just completed Ben's two-part course on balancing federal budgets!  You deserve a break from all of this boring old public economic mumbo jumbo.  I'll try to lighten things up in the next Ramble.  In the meantime, ponder this question:  Imagine that Mr. Average who lives in Normalville found $1 on the sidewalk.  What would make Mr. Average better off: paying that $1 to the government, or keeping it?  If you answered, "keep it, Mr. Average!" you believe that taxes are too high right now, not too low.  If you answered, "give it to the government," what if it was you who found the dollar instead of Mr. Average?  Would your answer change?  This is why raising taxes is so dang hard!

As always, let me know what you think in the comments!

Oh my goodness . . . Peach Dumplings

There is something with me and peaches.

I think it's something about the fleeting quality of peaches.  They are only here for a couple of precious months and then . . . gone.  I have to get my fill while I can still get them!  These cases of PERFECT peaches at Trader Joe's for $5.99/12 were just too much for me to resist.

And that's where it all started.  I found the perfect peaches, and then I started having visions of these peach dumplings Christina taught me about last year.  Allow me to explain . . .

1. First, you make a recipe for a double pie crust (here is my favorite).  You cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit while you prepare the peaches.

2. Then, you get a pot of boiling water.  Place each peach carefully in the pot (I do 3 at a time) and submerge them for 30-60 seconds. Then immediately remove them and place them in a sink or bowl full of cold water.  

3. Peel the peaches with your fingers.  The skins will come right off!  [The day I discovered this trick was a happy, happy day.]

4. Halve and pit the peaches.  Don't forget which halves go together!

5. Top one half of each peach with a firmly packed 1/2 Tablespoon of brown sugar.  Sprinkle with cinnamon!

6. Press the two peach halves back together with the sugar and cinnamon inside.

7. On a well-floured surface, roll out your double pie crust into one large rectangle.  Cut into six equal squares, (approximately 5-inch squares).

8. Place a peach on each square.  Pull corners up to wrap peach in the pastry.  

Perhaps you will be better at making them look pretty than me.  I just wanted to wrap 'em tight!

9. Place dumplings in 9x13 pan.

10. Make the sauce: 2 cups water, 1 1/4 cups sugar, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon.  Boil; simmer 5 minutes.  Add 1/4 cup butter and stir until melted.  Pour over and around dumplings.

11. Bake at 350 degrees for 50-60 minutes.  Some of them will break open, but they'll still be beautiful and delicious.  Serve with vanilla ice cream, and spoon extra sauce over the top!

Dan-o popped in tonight for a visit (he is at a training for work in the area).  He said he would travel 2,000 miles any day, just for these dumplings!  Luckily, I gave him some for the road so he doesn't have to pay $13 for his continental breakfast tomorrow!  Perhaps not the most nutritious breakfast ever, but healthier than a couple of doughnuts and juice (and a hundred times yummier)!

Take a one-question survey for Ben!

Hey everyone, want to help me out?  I need you to take a one-question survey that requires no expertise and only a little thinking.  All I'm asking is how you would allocate a hypothetical $100,000 dollars between two investment options.  You don't need to do anything sophisticated, just tell me how much you would put in each option.  It should take you less than two minutes.

Here's the tricky part: I have two surveys, and I want you to take only ONE of them (they differ slightly).  To decide which survey you should take, just do this: Look at the clock on your computer.  If the last digit is between 0-4, take Survey 1.  If it is between 5-9, take Survey 2.  So, if it is 1:43, say, I would take Survey 1, but if it is 1:46 I would take Survey 2.  Got it?  Please only answer your survey (not both), and do not look at the other survey until you have answered yours.

Many thanks!  Here are the links:

Survey 1 (last digit is between 0-4)

Survey 2 (last digit is between 5-9)

The Mission Box

A few weeks ago, I was preparing a Sharing Time lesson about missionaries, and I was collecting items from different countries to use as visuals. I asked Ben if he had anything from his mission in Guatemala.

Lo, and behold, out came the secret "Ben's Mission" box! This box has been a part of our family since the day we got married -- almost 8 years ago. It has followed us from Provo to Layton to New Jersey to Boston. In each of our homes, we found a special place where this box could be stored -- away from the elements -- where none of Ben's precious mission mementos could get damaged. In the back of my mind, I imagined future Family Home Evening lessons about Ben's mission, where he would remove the box from safekeeping, open the lid, and reveal all sorts of treasures for our kids to marvel at: some Guatemalan clothing, toys, dolls . . . perhaps some items related to Guatemalan culture that would help our children to appreciate these people whom Dad grew to love so dearly over his two years serving them. I imagined lots of oohs and ahhs for sure.

Well, you can imagine my excitement when Ben opened the lid of this box for the first time in 8 years.

Ta da! Here are the relics of Ben's mission: a bunch of expired pills, an extra toothbrush and roll of floss, some highlighters, lots of band-aids, an old sweaty Velcro watch, and a can of Wal-Mart toenail fungus spray!

And nothing says "Guatemala" like a cigarette and match in an "Emergency" glass case! I'm actually hoping Ben will bump up the Family Home Evening I was hoping for and try to tie this into a lesson next week! I really can't wait to see how he'll pull it off (and I can't wait to hear the oohs and ahhs -- at least, I'm pretty sure there will be "ew"s).

And finally, buried amid the flotsam, Ben unearthed . . . count 'em -- THREE actual mission keepsakes: his nametag, his little white Bible, and a small wad of Guatemalan money! Really, besides that, there wasn't much. He did save a handful of letters and pictures that other people had sent him, which were all pretty random (Kami Knowlton's wedding announcement, anyone?). And the other really great thing that he saved from his mission were a few items he used for magic tricks when he was entertaining the little niños. The "disappearing scarf" trick has actually kept Henry and Ellis completely spellbound for the last week! Trust me, it's way cooler than any Guatemalan cultural appreciation night could ever be! :)

Confessions of a Cry Baby

This 5 year old boy has made me cry more than a few times over the past month.

Wouldn't you cry too if you were losing your buddy of 5 years to a full-day factory that steals your babies and turns them into educated individuals with minds, thoughts, and ideas of their own?

1. This was the first episode.  We were having a lovely backyard picnic, and I was snapping a picture when I noticed Henry and Ellis, completely unprompted, with their arms around each other on the trampoline.

They were having a great imaginative moment together - one that represents how well they've gotten along this summer (that's not to say they didn't fight several times every day as well - but they really have been best friends lately).  

I snuck around them and took these pictures . . .

 . . . completely unposed -- I swear!  They were just having a happy day playing together.  I took the pictures and then ran inside and bawled.  Not only was I going to miss Henry when he started Kindergarten, but I knew that Ellis was going to miss him too!  What will Ellis do without him?  What will I do without the two of them having each other?  Why can't they just stay in this moment, looking up into the clouds and dreaming together, forever?  

Why can't I just freeze my little boys just the way they are?  

Who invented public school, and who do they think they are?

2. And come to think of it, what will Sam do without Henry?  Henry has been Sam's best little buddy this summer as well.  He has played with him, loved him, kissed him, entertained him, protected him, made him laugh, and has just absolutely adored him.  Will Sam feel less loved when Henry is gone all day?  Will I survive without having my star helper taking care of Sam for me?  The tears spouted on.

Here's Henry in front of our house, looking super happy/excited/confident for his first day.  I held back the tears and worked on getting him to school on time.

It was a rainy day for drop-off.  The Kindergarteners lined up inside, so we got this picture outside and I continued to hold back the tears.

3. As soon as we walked in the doors and saw the teachers rushing about to line everyone up, I got a lump in my throat.  At that moment, it wasn't the thought of missing him, but the excitement of the teachers, the students, the hustle and thrill of the first day of school.  It was a familiar feeling to me, and for the first time, I felt excited for him.  He's off to do REAL things, make real memories.  He might even remember this day when he's my age!  He's going to remember his teacher and the kids in his class, and he's going to start the process of really deciding what kind of person he wants to be.  He no longer has to tag along with Mom on boring errands all day; he gets to start a new adventure where his life really starts to take shape.

As I kissed him good-bye and walked out of the school, the tears started to flow.  I was crying because my little boy is not mine anymore.  The boy who used to be my 6-month-old smiling baby, the boy who used to drive cars around the house all day, the boy who used to ask what was going to be the "Craft of the Day" every single day, is now his own.  And he's going to have a big adventure.  And he's going to love it.  And I'm so proud of him.

4. And of course, I'm sobbing while writing this blog post.  Lots of tears for a very important boy.