Month: March 2009

House update

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The Ditch Witch machine makes a ditch, and a mess.

I’m sure I’ve complained before that the part of the building process that bothers me most is the excavation and the muddy mess it leaves. I plant grass, and it gets trampled, or dug up. On Tuesday the plumbing crew laid the underground pipe and wire to connect the pump house to the house. The house now has water. (The plumbing fixtures aren’t installed yet, just the pipes.) They also connected the house to the septic tank. The good thing is that two important inputs and outputs for the house — water and septic — are now working. The bad thing is that I have a scar from a ditch upon which I need to plant grass and throw straw before the rain starts.

There was major progress today on the inspections front. The county’s chief inspector came out today, and I now have those beautiful green stickers for four required inspections: plumbing rough-in, heating and air conditioning rough-in, electrical rough-in, and final framing. That means I’m clear to start the insulation job. The insulation contractor will start Tuesday. Putting in the insulation may take only one day. Then I’ll move on to drywall, which will take about a week.

I installed a lot of audio wiring today to connect the organ console, which will be on the first floor, to the speakers and amplifiers, which will be on the second floor. The organ’s wiring will be neatly inside the walls. For audio nerds, I installed three types of wire — speaker wire (10 channels, including 2 channels to the stairwell for the choir organ), unbalanced preamplifier audio wire (coax, 4 channels), and balanced preamplifier audio wire (shielded parallel pair, Belden 1800F, 4 channels). Some work remains to install wiring for telephone, television, and the security cameras. The inspector didn’t seem too concerned about that, since that type of wiring doesn’t present safety issues.

If there are no hitches, I’ll be able to move into the house next month!

When you're craving something fried…

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Sometimes the craving for something fried is irresistible. It can get bad enough to tempt me to start up the Jeep in the pouring rain and go out and eat something I shouldn’t. Sometimes hot homemade bread and butter will extinguish the fried-food craving, but I’m always looking for alternatives.

I’d rate a pasta and vegetable stir-fry about B- for curing a fried-food craving. But it works.

Start by browning lots of onion. Then throw in the cooked pasta and brown that too. The pasta in the photo, by the way, is whole wheat pasta — it’s not that brown from being fried. Pasta likes to be lightly browned. It gives it a nice chewy texture. Tonight I added some walnuts and let them get nice and hot with the onion and pasta. I used “broccoflower,” which is cheap and good here in the wintertime. To cook the vegetables, I threw in a little white wine and covered the pan until the broccoflower was good and hot. Then remove the lid and make sure all the wine has boiled away.

Browned onions are a great seasoning. It’s easy to forget just how sweet onions are until you’re reminded how nicely they caramelize.

Tax rates

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There was quite an outburst at the prospect of raising taxes for incomes over $250,000 a year. That’s radical, many said. “We’re running out of rich people,” said Michele Bachmann. “How Obama Will Bleed the Rich Dry” is the headline on Michael Gerson’s column this morning in the Washington Post.

The key point of fact is this: the Obama budget raises the tax rate on income over $250,000 a year from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.

Historically, that’s hardly radical. The top rate was over 90 percent during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and 70 percent during the 1970s. We never ran out of rich people.

Historically, what’s radical was Reagan’s reducing the top tax rate to 28 percent in 1986. Though there were tax cuts on high incomes, wage earners actually paid higher taxes under Reagan. Part of this project of lower taxes for the rich and higher taxes for wage earners was to teach wage earners to hate government by convincing people that higher taxes always hurt the little guy. That is just not true.

Denmark

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Wikipedia

Those who say that the United States is on a course toward European-type socialist democracies could be right. Let’s take a look at Denmark…

In the past eight years I’ve made two business trips to Denmark and spent four weeks there. I helped install a Danish publishing system at the San Francisco Chronicle, so I worked closely with a Danish company, and lots of Danes, for several years. This publishing system, by the way, is the system that’s also used at the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Danes are fantastic engineers and smart, honest businesspeople.

Most of these factoids about the Danish economy come from the Wikipedia article on Denmark:

— Denmark has a free market economy.

— Denmark has a large welfare state.

— Denmark has one of the world’s highest levels of income equality.

— Danes are very productive, and Denmark’s GDP per capita is 15 to 20 percent higher than the United States.

— Denmark holds the world record for income tax rates.

— All college education in Denmark is free.

— 80% of employees belong to unions.

— Denmark spends about 1.3 percent of GDP on defense, compared with about 4 percent in the United States.

— The national health service is financed by an 8 percent tax. This is a local tax on income and property.

— According to Statistics Denmark, the unemployment rate in Denmark in January 2009 was 2.3 percent.

— In some surveys, Denmark is ranked the happiest place on earth.

— Denmark was ranked the least corrupt country in the world in the Corruption Perception Index.

— According to the World Economic Forum, Denmark has one of the most competitive economies in the world.

I realize that Denmark’s model probably would not scale up in a workable way for the United States. Still, in my opinion, we should be studying some of the European models and not let ourselves be scared by them. They work.