Carey Krause's Open Salon Blog

Federal Budgeting for Dummies

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 20:02:33 -0500

President Obama sent his budget for fiscal 2011 (starting next October) to Congress today. As you’ve probably heard, his budget proposes to spend about $1.3 trillion more than will be collected in taxes, and this less than a week after his State of the Union pledge to freeze spending and do more belt tightening throughout the government. It takes a true believer indeed to keep from losing faith when confronted with that apparent inconsistency. The Tea Party must be collecting converts tonight as fast as they can sign them up.

Just for grins, I thought I would dig a little deeper into the proposed federal budget, and make a stab at balancing it myself. My only rule is that the budget must actually be balanced; that is, expenditures cannot exceed tax collections.

First, what kind of money do I have to work with? The Office of Management and Budget (the source of all my figures) estimates total tax collections of $2.57 trillion for FY ’11. By the rules of the game, I can’t spend more than that.

Now for expenses. Medicare and Medicaid are by far the biggest expense, and are traditionally “untouchable.” They will cost $1.43 trillion. I’ve got $1.14 trillion left. (This isn’t going to take long, it seems.)

Social Security payments are expected to be $730 billion. $410 billion left. I have to pay the interest on the national debt, lest the government default. That’s going to cost $251 billion.

I now have $159 billion for everything else. I think I’ll just throw it in a hat and let the Defense Dept. and Homeland Security fight it out. Either way, I don’t look soft on defense.

Done.

On the other hand, I note that even left wing, bleeding heart Obama wanted to spend $744 billion on defense. So perhaps I’d better do a little jiggling.

For starters, I’m going to throw out Medicaid. After all, people need to stand on their own two feet. I pay taxes; why can’t they? That gets me back a whopping $570 billion dollars! And it’s time to reinstate those higher income taxes on the rich – push the maximum tax bracket back to 39%. That gets me another $90 billion. Add back in the $159 billion surplus and I now have $819 billion to work with. I can pay for the defense budget and still have $75 billion left over to fund the rest of the government.

What is the rest of the government, by the way? What are those discretionary programs which we don’t really need but the liberals love to tax us for, anyway?

The biggest four buckets in the remainder of the federal budget belong to education, Veterans affairs, transportation, and the Justice department. Ordinarily those four programs collectively would consume 12% of the federal budget, or about $460 billion for FY ‘11. In my budget, they are going to have to make do with $75 billion.

So what did I cut? Let’s see, no more international affairs (1%; so long, Hillary!), no more technology or science (1%; happy trails, space station), no more energy department (you couldn’t see their pie slice with a magnifying glass before, so who will know?), no more natural resources or environment (1.5%; see ya, tree huggers), no more housing or regional development (1%; get a job, losers), no more agriculture subsidies (1%; please don’t tell the farmers where I live), and no more federal government bureaucracy (1%; welcome back to the real world, guys). That’s pretty much it; the remnants will be cleaned up by the accountants: that’s why we hire them.

With a little reflection, I see that I’ve probably cost at least a third of all healthcare workers their jobs, and have basically fired any federal employees not working for the defense department. So I just increased the number of unemployed by 6 million. That's going to ripple, as they say. I’m gonna have to call the accountants back in to figure out what to do with that lost tax revenue. And those people aren’t likely to be buying a whole lot (‘cause they’re sure not getting unemployment), so we’ll have to adjust down for lower corporate taxes, but eventually it will all stop wobbling about the center and we’ll have our number.

That was easy.

Of course, it’s going to make Dickens’ London look like a paradise.

Going Bogue: The Start of the 2012 Campaign

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:11:32 -0500

I am declaring the unofficial start of the 2012 presidential campaign right here in li'l ol' Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sarah Palin kicked things off yesterday by starting her book tour here. The book, of course, is her critical dissection of the 2008 campaign, "Going Rogue," in which she explains how the McCain camp could've probably maybe won the election if they had just followed her advice, like not subjecting her to interviews with national television news anchors.

Why Michigan, you ask, which went for Obama in a big way? Because this isn't just Michigan, this is Grand Rapids. This is a town that still debates the moral outrages of homo-sexuality and evolutionary biology in the "Public Pulse" section of the local paper. This is a town where people were willing to stand in line for at least 20 hours for a 10 second conversation with Ms. Palin, because she is so - well, she is just so what this country needs. (Not everybody who stood in line got to meet her. After all, the campaign bus - I mean the book tour bus had to be on its way to Fort Wayne, Indiana, for a grocery store appearance this morning. But that's okay. They got pre-signed stickers they can glue inside copies of the book, which is almost as good.)

Meanwhile, across the street at the home improvement center, a liberal salient in this conservative town ( it's sign is blue, anyway), the mood was almost as festive. Liberal shoppers were comparing a potential match-up between Palin and Obama in 2012 to the disastrous 1998 Michigan governor's campaign, where incumbent John Engler was assured of a victory against challenger Geoffrey Feiger as long as he kept his composure during the debates and didn't laugh in Feiger's face.

Well, to be honest, some of the festiveness was not due to the upcoming campaign, but seemed to be centered around the latest generation of snow-blowers, which come equipped with joysticks. Winter is a serious business in Michigan.

What I Learned Self Publishing a Novel

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:08:21 -0400

In the past, once you had completed your first novel, you had three options. You could rely on your well-known name to get a deal, you could submit your book to dozens of agents and editors and hope for lightning to strike, or you could put the manuscript in your desk drawer and get started on your second novel. Nowadays, you have four options: rely on your name, hope for lightning to strike, put it away, or publish it yourself. I recently went with the latter option. This post shares some of my thoughts and experiences, both cautionary and good.

The only way to sell books is to market them. Perhaps this seems obvious, but it’s worth stating. About 175,000 new books are published in the U.S. each year (UNESCO keeps some unusual statistics). There is no way anyone is going to stumble upon your book without substantial marketing. And marketing is, quite simply, what a mainstream publisher does, compared to a self publisher. They have the contacts to get your book into the major chain bookstores, and to get it in front of the eyes of influential people, whether that person is a reviewer for the NYT Review of Books or one of Oprah’s producers. Ask yourself: is Stephanie Meyer really a better writer than you? I didn’t think so. But she’s got a heck of a marketing machine. Self-publishers will be happy to tell you about (and often sell you) options for promotion. But unless you are a genius at self promotion, you will spend hours and hours trying to promote yourself in front of audiences that number in the dozens. If you are a genius at self promotion, you’ve probably already figured out how to get your manuscript in front of the right people in the first place. But if you’re like me, a semi-introvert who spends much of your free time reading or writing, eventually you will realize that the return on investment for your marketing time is not worth the effort, and you will get back to work.
You will lose money. I suspect most aspiring novelists don’t expect to make a living off of their first book, although we all dream of that lightning strike. When self publishing, however, you pay the publisher to get your book ready for publication, which means you start out in the hole. I’ve seen options that cost anything from a few hundred to over ten thousand dollars. At that higher price point, you do get an actual hardbound book, as well as some marketing help. So far I’ve spent a relatively modest $1500, including some non-publisher costs (website, manuscript costs, etc.). So, considering my share of the selling price (which I didn’t get to set, by the way), I’ll be in the black after I sell my 500^th book. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Self published books are not printed until they are sold. As a result, the publisher does not carry a stock on hand, and they do not accept returns. On the other hand, a brick and mortar bookstore will simply not carry a book on the shelf if they cannot return it. That may be the biggest reason you are not going to get your self-published book into every Barnes and Noble. Local bookstores may be willing to stock your book, but you will have to buy the books ahead of time and be willing to take back whatever they don’t sell. On the other hand, if you’re planning on giving your closest hundred friends a copy of your book for Christmas, you may have little to lose.
It looks really cool to see your book in print. This is no small thing. I can look over and there it is on a shelf, ISBN number and everything. It feels finished. I don’t feel like a pretender when somebody asks “you wrote a book?” and I say yes. In fact, it was quite a bit of fun to swap some cover and design ideas around with the creative staff, and I think the end result looks as good as any trade paperback in the bookstores. By the way, a trade paperback is what you will end up with, what the industry calls a “perfect bound” book, a book somewhat larger than a mass market paperback, printed on better paper.
Hire a professional proofreader. After I felt like the re-writes were good, I went back through my manuscript several times looking for simple errors. Then, after I submitted the file for formatting, I had one last chance to review it. I found 80 more errors. Since publication, I’ve been keeping a file for additional errors, as when readers say “great book, but I found three places where the punctuation is missing.” After you’ve read it a hundred times, you’re no longer actually reading it, and the mistakes just slip past you.
Get some kind of professional review. Let’s face it; your friends and family are going to tell you it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever read. (If they don’t say that, you either have some mean-spirited friends, or you wrote a piece of crap.) Despite the praise of those who love you, you will find yourself wondering if you really do have any talent. And let’s face it, spending another few thousand hours writing your second book is not a good use of your time if you can’t write. I submitted my manuscript to Kirkus Discoveries, a division of the Kirkus company which reviews works destined for self publication. Yes, you have to pay for the privilege, and yes, they are going to try to be positive if they can, since they are in the business of selling reviews. But it won’t be a whitewash, and you may get some valuable criticism out of it.
Don’t spend too much time reading “writer’s market” books and magazines. After a while, it’s just depressing. Everybody will give you pretty much the same information on how to write a query letter, for example. And I may regret saying this, but you agents: lighten up! You’d think, from reading your magazine interviews and your websites, that the last thing you wanted was for someone to actually send you a query letter or a synopsis. Talk about a self-important group of people. If you’re the type of agent who blows a gasket because someone forgot to format in Times New Roman, then you probably don’t work well with others to begin with.

And now it’s time for my shameless self-promotion paragraph. My novel, The Sword of God, is a political thriller set in the here and now. The hero is a regular guy, an anonymous government employee, without extraordinary equipment or abilities, who must nonetheless rise to the challenge of events which threaten the stability of the world. Admittedly, I haven’t single handedly re-created the genre. But it’s pretty good, nonetheless. The aforementioned Kirkus Discoveries called it “a compelling page turner,” and said “The Sword of God reads like the work of an accomplished spy novelist.” As with most self-published works, it is widely available only online, at Amazon, Alibris, etc. More info is available at my website: www.swordofgodbook.com By the way, I have no idea what the diwani calligraphy on the cover says, but a friend of mine who speaks Arabic assured me that it’s benign and not offensive.

I think I’ll send out another round of query / synopsis packets, and then be ready to move on. I’ve decided that the traditional routes to publication are the traditional routes for a good reason. So I’m going to submit more stuff to magazines and literary journals, and start building a publication record. Frankly, I think about the only thing agents or editors look at is a track record, anyway.

So, back to work.

Near Misses with the Rich and Famous

Wed, 5 Aug 2009 20:08:28 -0400

We live in a sufficiently small world, with sufficiently liberal prerequisites for fame, that most of us have had a brush with a famous person at least once in our lives. I have had at least three near misses myself. Only recently I discovered my name was in a book of letters to Christopher Reeve published about 10 years ago by his wife Dana. A friend of mine had written a letter of support after his accident, and had mentioned my name. And I performed ragtime music for Nadia Comaneci and the Romanian gymnastic team while in Romania many years ago, but perhaps that’s another post. My most thrilling brush with greatness occurred a couple of years ago, however, when I almost met an actual hero from my childhood.

I was booked to fly from San Antonio to Chicago, when I succumbed to the $150 upgrade option for first class. If you get the chance to fly first class every once in a while, you should take it. It’s like being taken across the country while sitting in your living room arm chair. And you encounter some seriously interesting people. In fact, on this trip I sat next to a guy who was on his way to meet with the emir of Dubai, because he was THE GUY everyone in the world consulted about oil exploration. Perhaps this post ought to be about him, as he more likely has a greater influence on the world than anyone else I’ve ever met (and he was a delight to talk with). But it’s not. Because sitting in the seat in front of me was a genuine Apollo astronaut: Captain James Lovell, along with his wife Marilyn.

Lovell, of course, was the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. I was a child when the actual mission flew, but I recall thinking that they were never in any real danger; it was just the over-protectiveness of NASA which made them return without getting to walk on the moon. It took reading Lovell’s book, Lost Moon, and (like everyone else in the world) watching Ron Howard’s movie for me to realize what actual peril Lovell and his crew had endured.

At any rate, I wasn’t really aware that I was sitting directly behind an actual astronaut until the flight attendant gave it away while passing out hot towels. (Hot towels are another neat thing about first class, by the way.) “Hot towel? Hot towel? Hot towel?” he asked, as he moved through the cabin, flipping hot towels with a pair of tongs, until he got to the seat in front of me. “Hot towel, Mrs. Lovell? Hot towel, Mr. James Lovell Jr.? Captain James Lovell?Astronaut!?” The suddenly obsequious behavior of the flight attendant got my attention. I was in the presence of a bona-fide American hero, quietly reading in the seat in front of me.

I had to know, after a while, what it was that American hero astronauts read while flying first class. Technical manuals, perhaps? Maybe he was relaxing with the latest edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology. So when the opportunity came to get up and stretch my legs, I glanced over the seat. He was reading Sky Mall.

I did not find an excuse to speak to Mr. Lovell on this trip. I have always thought that if I met an actual famous person, I would want to treat them as a normal person, which would mean not getting in their face, asking for autographs, or generally making a fool of myself. As I could think of no reason that he would want to know who I was (and believe me, I tried), I did not introduce myself. And so this would have been just another uneventful near miss, were it not for what happened when we landed in Chicago.

We were early, if you can believe it. Early enough, it turns out, that the previous occupants of our intended gate had not yet left, so there was no place for our plane to go. O’Hare ground control has prepared for this possibility; they have a couple of large empty spaces they call “penalty boxes,” and any flight impertinent enough to arrive early can be banished to one of them to wait its turn to park. Our pilots taxied over and shut down the engines, and we sat there in eerie silence.

And then I overheard Marilyn Lovell say quietly, “I need something from my purse.” Mr. Lovell did not respond. After a moment, she unbuckled her seat belt and stood up to open the overhead bin.

Suddenly James Lovell came to life. “You can’t do that!” he said.

“I just need something from my purse,” she replied.

“But you can’t do that! The light is on!” And he pointed to the fasten seat belts sign, which had indeed remained lit even though we were stopped and shut down.

Mrs. Lovell made some sort of face, continued searching through the overhead bin until she found her purse, and then sat back down.

“You can’t do that,” Mr. Lovell repeated one more time, for good measure.

And I thought, what a perfect moment. With that tiny exchange, I witnessed the essential nature of these two famous individuals: the astronaut who is alive today because of an innate trust in and adherence to the rules, and his wife, whose mere presence after more than fifty years of marriage, forty of which have been spent in a media spotlight, suggested she had learned to discount the rules when necessary, to make her own decisions, live her own life.

Suddenly I was happy that I hadn’t pushed myself onto this charming couple. As we de-planed, I watched him graciously sign the pilots’ manifest, which only reinforced my sense that these were genuinely nice people. Off they went, likely to their son’s restaurant in Lake Forest. And off I went to catch my connection, with a story better than any autograph.

O God, Deliver Me from the Supermarket

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:07:36 -0400

The cupboard is in its proverbially bare state. (There are always a few dried spices and the remnants of a box of Wheat Chex from the last time someone made party mix, but you know what I mean.) I can think of no excuse to get me out of heading to the supermarket after work.

I hate the supermarket.

Specifically, I hate checking out at the supermarket. Specific to that, I hate checking out in one of those self-serve lanes. I loathe it. They are, I’m sure, the invention of a sadist; probably some guy who used to teach middle school gym until he finished his night school business classes and got a job at green grocer corporate. Seriously, I will travel out of my way to go to a supermarket where I know they still mostly employ live checkout people, just to avoid the scolding voice and inevitable humiliation of the self-serve checkout lane.

Finishing work for the day, I found myself next to a store I haven’t been inside in years. My favorite store was all the way across town, so I decided to risk it. I hurried in, grabbed a cart and headed for the produce section. And, of course, I got a cart that thought it was an indy race car: it only wanted to turn left. When I forced it to go straight it protested with the dreaded caster wheel chatter. Nobody looks at you when you have caster wheel chatter; they are thinking “poor bastard, glad it wasn’t me this time.” I am caught between the desire to race through the store to try to get out of there as soon as possible, and the knowledge that the faster I go, the louder my cart protests. Needless to say, if I forget something in my quick zig-zag aisle run, I’m not going back. Produce meats canned frozens dairy and I’m ready for checkout. And, oh god, there they are.

Six self-serve checkouts and two human checkouts. The human checkouts have huge lines. There is no express lane; that’s gone the way of the passenger pigeon. In front of me there is an empty self-serve lane. Do I trudge over to the back of the human line, or do I succumb to the thought that this time, somehow, I will manage to get through the self-serve lane unscathed? I succumb.

I have learned not to rush the self-serve lane’s pedantic school-marm voice. Like a good boy, I push all of the buttons I’m supposed to push, and scan my first item. And it works. Put it on the belt like I’m told. Scan the next one. Put it on the belt. Maybe this will be okay. The next thing, though, is a package of chicken breasts which have been marked down. Taking a deep breath, I pull aside the plastic bag like the checkout pro’s do, and try to scan the chicken. Nothing. Try it another direction. Nothing. Upside down, angled, reverse direction, slower, faster, and nope, it won’t scan, and now the school-marm keeps telling me “If you’ve scanned your last item, push the finished button.” I start to fear that she’s going to make me start over, or make me go stand in a corner of the store. I set the chicken aside and quickly scan my last easy-to-scan item, but now it’s only the chicken and the watermelons, and so I raise my hand in shame and call over the scanner manager.

Instead of six checkout people, they now have this one scanner manager, who spends his time fixing the screw-ups of us dim-witted scanning masses. He, naturally, unsuccessfully tries to scan the chicken himself (which gives me just a moment’s pleasure) before flashing his ID card at the machine and typing in a bunch of chicken-related codes, and then walks off silently, leaving me with the watermelons still to do. “Yep, this is sure a time saver for all of us,” I say to his back as he walks off, but he doesn’t turn around.

Now the watermelons, and what’s this? They have bar code stickers on them! There must be some genius working in the produce section. I scan the first melon – beep! – and the school marm says “item not found,” even though it seems to be right in my hands. “What are you talking about?” I want to reply. “The item was never lost.” But I will look like even more of a fool if I start talking to the checkout scanner, so instead I make my big mistake of the day, and I try to fix the problem. I try typing in the 4 digit code, “4032” (red seedless). Unfortunately, the screen turns an ominous yellow color, and – swear to god – the belt reverses and the chicken starts coming back toward me again! Rather in a panic, I raise my hand and flap it to get the scanner manager’s attention. I knew I’d regret my earlier smart-ass remark.

Out comes the ID card and tickety-tack go the fingers. The scanner seems to accept his direction, and I notice the price on the screen says “.99”. Though I’m not the most careful shopper, I know watermelons cost more than ninety nine cents, but the veneer of civility is thin in the best of us, and mine has been severely scratched, and I’m ready to get away with this secret victory until the school marm gives it away by drawling “ninety-nine cents,” which catches the scanner manager’s attention. “That can’t be right,” he says.

So he calls over a genuine expert, a check-out lady from one of the human lines. “Is this them watermelons that are on sale?” he asks her. She, in turn, flashes out her badge and scornfully types in some new numbers. (I don’t know how she conveyed it, but the scorn was clearly there.) The watermelons ring up at $3.49 apiece and she walks away silently, the pecking order revealed. “Them bambino melons are on sale, right?” he calls out after her. When you’re caught in the pecking order, proper grammar is the first thing to go.

Fortunately, the melons are my last item. Pacing myself once again, I tap the right places on the screen and swipe my bank card. I unwind the overcoiled electronic pen and start to sign my name on the screen, and then the idea hits me. I sign in small cursive, and then in the remaining space print as clearly as I can “THIS STORE SUCKS.”

And so, it is with a smile on my face that I grab my stuff and wobble my cart out to my car. You may have won the battle, self-serve checkout lane, but the war is still on, and there’s fight within me yet.