RW Reader: A Supplement to Rashan's World

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

How did $250,000 become the magic number?

In the debate over how to close the budget deficit, President Obama talks often about raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires,” but his policy prescription is a bit different. He says that federal income taxes should be increased on families making more than $250,000. That seems to be the threshold. Under $250,000, you’re middle class; over it and you’re wealthy.

Where did this number come from? Is it based on a statistical metric of wealth in America — a true dividing line?

Empirically, these households are surely not middle income. Only 2 percent of households in the nation make more than $250,000, according to the Internal Revenue Service. But some economists and tax reform advocates are questioning whether those households are rich enough to be worthy of the same tax bracket as millionaires.

“The very round nature of it suggests that it’s arbitrary,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center and the deputy assistant director for tax analysis at the Congressional Budget Office from 1998 to 2006. “There’s nothing magical about $250,000 per year. It has no economic basis.”

It does have a political basis.

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By DONNA SHUTE PROVENCHER

Mark Twain once famously quipped that he could live two months on a good compliment. Most of us, if we’re being honest, find this observation relatable on some level or another. Whether we acknowledge it or not — often women will but men won’t, because to acknowledge it is to admit weakness, vulnerability, and need, traditionally seen as feminine frailties — we all need praise from time to time. It is a basic human desire to be affirmed. Buried within the most secure psyche is a jumble of half-articulated insecurities and a sprawling welter of human needs. That’s why single people (or people in bad relationships) find themselves so often feeling lonely: “people are meant to go through life two by two,” notes Thornton Wilder in Our Town. ”‘Tain’t natural to be lonesome.” To be fair, most of us don’t do kind, good, or noteworthy things in our lives for the recognition; we do them for their own sake, for the sake of those around us, for the sake of our character development. We do them to enact a positive change in our own little corner of the universe — but a little recognition can bolster and buoy our determination to do more kind, good, or noteworthy things in the future.

Think back on your childhood. Were you more likely to finish your chores and homework if you were threatened with grounding, or if you knew you would get a gold star on your achievement chart posted with pride on the fridge? Didn’t you perform better in athletics or the arts when your parents showed up and were cheering in the front row of the bleachers or the auditorium? If you’re of a certain age, you probably participated in the Book-It program and you probably vigilantly read x number of books each summer because that God-awful little $2.99 personal pan pepperoni pizza ($2.99 in 1992, anyway) was ever before your eyes as a tangible reminder of what you were striving for. We are hard-wired to respond to systems of reward and praise because we all, on a fundamental human level, long to feel special, unique, talented, lovable, irreplaceable, unrepeatable. “Secure people don’t need praise” is a bullsh*t outlook on life. We all need praise, from the six-year-old at the karate awards ceremony to the 22-year-old landing the first real job out of undergrad to the 44-year-old for the epic work promotion. Perhaps at times this need is a manifestation of our own neuroses, but more often than not it is simply that we want to be seen, known, loved, and appreciated for our finer qualities and achievements. As Tolstoy once observed, “In the best, the friendliest, and simplest relations … praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.”

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Garance Franke-Ruta

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the Koch brothers — yes, those Koch brothers, of dumping mad cash into elections fame — are considering buying the Tribune network of newspapers in a bid to establish a pro-business conservative media chain.

I say, good luck with that.

There are several reasons regional newspapers are an awkward fit for anyone looking to counter-program what they see as liberal bias in the news media.

The main reason is that all major U.S. newspapers are based in cities. Cities in America are in the main run by Democrats, because they are populated, by and large, with Democrats, and very often also surrounded by Democratic suburbs. And because cities are run by Democrats, and populated by not only by Democrats but, very often, by liberal, minority, and immigrant Democrats, they tend to have laws on the books that at least formally signal a desire to serve the interests of these voting groups — their residents, let’s call them.

Newspapers, which are businesses, are subject to the employment and other laws of the cities in which they are based. Because they are based in cities, and because cities are often at the forefront of progressive legislating, newspapers tend to work under employment laws and answer to regional communities that have distinctive views about what a just society looks like. Conservatives are right to call these views liberal, but it’s just as important to recognize them as the product of representative democracy within defined urban spaces (see Richard Florida for more on what it is that causes cities to vote Democratic). Newspapers, like other businesses, have to follow the local laws — such as those protecting out gay employees — or risk getting sued. And, historically, they had to appeal to urban or urbanizing local residents if they wanted any subscribers.

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by Dan McQuade

We’ve been noticed! Over the weekend, the New York Times’ 36 Hours column directed its searchlight to Philadelphia, joining such places as New Haven, Queens and Ljubljana, Slovenia as recent column subjects. Another 36 Hours city, back on May 7, 2009? Philadelphia! I think the New York Times kind of has a crush on us. At the very least we can win its affections over, say, Baltimore.

While TV producers appear to insist on b-roll consisting entirely of cheesesteaks, Rocky and the Liberty Bell, the Times directed tourists to hipper places like Federal Donuts, Monk’s Cafe, Johnny Brenda’s and Han Dynasty. Frankford Hall made the Times’ list, too, though it was saddled with the “more family-friendly” descriptor.

A lot of people—and, by “a lot of people,” I mean “people in the overeducated, underpaid class that tweets nonsense all day to distract ourselves from the emptiness of life”—noticed this article, and some took it as another example of Philadelphia’s inferiority complex. I don’t think so. To many, many people (the same people) the Times is the Most Important Publication in the World. It’s Johnny Football inviting us to the dance. It’s stupid, sure, but it’s as natural as stargazing when a movie films here. The only thing that would be more exciting: The New Yorker!

Still, the piece might make out-of-towners think a Philadelphian’s life is all trips to the Barnes and Philadelphia History Museums and an endless supply of donuts and fried chicken, shoveled into our mouths as quickly as possible. (Okay, that second part is kind of true.) The Times’ 36 Hours in Philadelphia is adequate. But here’s a (slightly fictionalized and compressed) 36 Hours in Real Philadelphia, another helpful public service from your ol’ friend Dan McQuade. Don’t worry, I am lame and mainstream enough that most of the places on this list could end up in the Times the next time it profiles Philadelphia in 2016.

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by Megan McArdle

Too many college kids are living in Mom’s basement, or working at Starbucks. Like most personal finance columnists, I get the letters from them: what do I do? How do I fix this? For many, the answer is grad school. But I get the letters from grad students too. A while back, I found myself talking to a professor whose school has a number of impressive-sounding graduate programs that were originally conceived as add-ons for a professional degree in law or medicine or business. They are now attracting a number of students who just go for the standalone degree. He didn’t understand what the career path was for these kids, and he wasn’t sure that they did either.

“It sounds good, so they can persuade their parents to pay for it,” he said, a touch guiltily.

A new paper from Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand argues that these worried kids—and their worried parents—are not just imagining things. The phenomenon is all too real. Skilled workers with higher degrees are increasingly ending up in lower-skilled jobs that don’t really require a degree—and in the process, they’re pushing unskilled workers out of the labor force altogether.

The graph above shows the average cognitive load of the work that college students are doing. As you can see, in the 1990-2000 period it spiked, as the IT revolution created new opportunities for “thought work”. Then it started to fall. A brief recovery around 2006 was pretty much squashed by the financial crisis. Meanwhile, the amount of routine work that they’re doing has risen.

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by Derek Thompson

Like Western democracy, Socratic philosophy, written histories, epic poetry, and every other foundational pillar of high culture, spring break began in ancient Greece.

Called “Anthestreria” by the local teens, and their parents, it was a festival dedicated to Dionysus, the god of wine and whoopee and just about every excuse to party. For three days, people would dance, singers would perform, women would deck themselves with flowers, and Greek men would compete to see who could be the fastest to drain a cup of red wine.

Two thousand years later, practically nothing has changed except our taste in chugging alcohol. While Anthestreria is immortalized in terracotta wine vessels in world-class museums (below), you might think today’s spring break rituals are as easily forgotten by history as they are by memory-blighted college students. But for the American cities that host students, the impact is not so brief, as John Laurie explained in his fascinating economic study Spring Break: The Economic, Socio-Cultural and Public Governance Impacts of College Students on Spring Break Host Locations.

The paper begins, as spring break did, in Greece, before the rise of Christianity put an end to kylix head-stands and other childish things for two thousand years. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that modern spring break emerged. In 1934, Sam Ingram, a Colgate College swim coach, was looking for a warm place to keep his swimmers in shape. He chose the small, quiet town of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. More swimming instructors followed. During World War II, rich Ivy League students, who occasionally visited Bermuda during their spring breaks, were suddenly spooked by rumors of German U-Boats roaming the Caribbean. The best intracontinental alternative was to meet up with the swimmer co-eds in Florida. And so, Ft. Lauderdale became the first official home of the American Anthestreria tradition.

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by Joel Kotkin

Among the most pervasive, and arguably pernicious, notions of the past decade has been that the “creative class” of the skilled, educated and hip would remake and revive American cities. The idea, packaged and peddled by consultant Richard Florida, had been that unlike spending public money to court Wall Street fat cats, corporate executives or other traditional elites, paying to appeal to the creative would truly trickle down, generating a widespread urban revival.

Urbanists, journalists, and academics—not to mention big-city developers— were easily persuaded that shelling out to court “the hip and cool” would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group’s impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.

Well, oops.

Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, he notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”

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by Team Random

Tom Penny is known by most skateboarders to be the greatest street skater on earth. However, his hermit lifestyle and the secret mythos that surrounds him has given him a living legend status…

Normally when you’re doing any sort of research on a successful sporting hero via the internet, Google does all it can to throw as much information, relevant or not, down your throat. In the case of Tom Penny, British skateboarding legend, quite the opposite is true. Apart from the numerous videos of him skating, the internet shies away from showing any grounded information on his actual life and instead tries to make you question whether there really is all that much of a story behind this highly acclaimed, Dorset-born skater.

Penny started skating in Oxford at a young age with no external skating influences other than the friends he skated with. Skating itself had not yet become what it is today, there simply weren’t that many skaters around him and so the culture was of an esoteric nature, especially in Oxford. It wasn’t until he gained the sponsorship from ex-pro Sean Goff and moved to the US that he started to gain real coverage from UK skate magazines such as Skate and Rad. He was added to the Deathbox skateboards team (now rebranded Flip) and at the age of just 15, featured in Flip’s opening Video ‘The Long Overdue.’ By 1996, Penny had placed both 3rd and 1st in the UK Championships at Radlands, received acclaim from the likes of Tony Hawk and been on the front cover of Transworld. He was just 19 years old.

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by Aurora Snow

Portrait of me in the middle of a typical porn scene: Sweat drips down my face, my overworked legs are wobbly, my jaw might ache from being open too long while my neck burns from being twisted into an awkward angle.

Being an adult performer is not easy money, as the preachers like to say. It’s a little like being a high-risk professional athlete—stamina is required. While everyone is entitled to love or hate “skin flicks,” I think most people harbor misconceptions about the work. Remember that pornography is shot with the viewer in mind. In the summer there is no air-conditioning on the set (too noisy) and it’s not always, or even often, glamorous.

Like many other adult actresses, my first few scenes, which were shot in May of 2000, were the stereotypical easy-money kind: some regular vaginal sex where I played the wide-eyed innocent guided by the seasoned male. Fresh meat sells well—the roughing-up came later.

Over time the “new girl” scenes no longer appealed to consumers, who want to see diversification from steadily working performers, and scenes that progressively up the ante. Over the last decade this process has gained momentum—girls that enter porn in 2013 have to be ready for extreme acts earlier on in their careers. Because of this acceleration, there is about to be a generation of porn performers who have spent the majority of their years in porn doing extreme sex acts. I am one of them. I’ve smiled through gonzo scenes, but afterward often went home sick, curled up in a ball and physically nauseated. There is always a price to pay; the kind of damage we’ve inflicted on our bodies won’t catch up with us for years. Hopefully it won’t be lasting, but we’ll be the first generation of adult actresses to know.

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