I took the photos (with perhaps one or two exceptions) with the Canon EOS 7D. I did the editing with Pinnacle Studio 14 Ultimate, aided by Image Cropper – a nice shareware utility for cropping 4:3 images to 16:9 size. This was a good introduction to video editing. The number of decisions involved was nearly overwhelming, and I could easily have spent the rest of the year tweaking and improving it. But you’ve got to stop somewhere.

I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you want to visit these wonderful parks.

I’m still teaching myself how to shoot and edit video. Right now I’m working on what sounds like a fairly simple project: a slide show of photos I took on my recent vacation to Utah and Arizona. What’s complicating the project is that I want the final output to be in true HD quality. The good news is that my camera takes wonderful photos, and my video editing software can handle the HD format. The bad news is that HD format uses a 16:9 aspect ratio (1920 x 1080), and my camera takes photos in 3:2 (5184 x 3456). The 16:9 ratio is significantly wider than it is high (for landscapes), so to get my 3:2 photo in full frame I have to lose quite a bit off the top or bottom or both.

One option would be to simply crop from the center, taking out an equal amount from the top and bottom. I was planning to do that until I realized how serious the consequences of this non-decision can be. Take a look at the following photo from Zion National Park. The first is the original, in 3:2 ratio (I’ve resized it to 20% for presentation on the web).

Now take a look at the same image, cropped from the center to a 16:9 ratio.

It’s nice, but the canyon walls on the right look like they’re fighting to get out of the frame. They feel oppressed somehow.

Here’s another take, leaving in as much sky as possible at the top.

Now the mountains have room to breathe, but I’ve lost too much foreground. The sense of three-dimensionality is gone.

I can bring back the bottom of the photo, but …

Now my eye is drawn to the tree/shrub that’s front and center, with the canyon serving merely as backdrop.

I don’t know what the right answer is. I doubt there is one. Going through this exercise has taught me a lot about composition and editing. I never realized that every photograph contained so many boxes of cereal.

How would you have cropped the photo? Why? And how long would it have taken you to make a decision?

The official name is the U.S. Mens National Team, or MNT. If we were Canadians, we could easily play on that acronym and call ourselves the Mounties. But we’re not Canadians. Nevertheless, we can still use that inspiration and call ourselves …

The Purple Mountains.

I think that moniker has a lot going for it:

• It’s an obvious reference to “America, the Beautiful”
• Mountains are solid, strong, and tall – all good qualities for athletes
• Many national teams have colorful nicknames, such as the Black Stars (Ghana), the Azzuri, Les Bleus, the Oranje, and several others.
• Although there’s no purple in the American flag, we all know what you get when you mix red and blue.

How about it, U.S. Soccer?

Said Niko Horvat, of Dubrovnik,
"I’m feeling a little bit lovesick."
He went to Tatjana,
Who said "I’ll get on ya,
But first you must put on a glove, Nick!"

Which part of the federal bureaucracy would you like to see eliminated? The part that is supposed to protect mine workers from mine operators who put profit first and safety second, or the part that investigates violations of federal law, whether committed by private or public organizations? Or would both the FBI and the Mine Safety and Health Administration still be around in your ideal scenario?

Having Jay Severin call me an a-hole is like having Lady Gaga call me a hermaphrodite. (I know Lady Gaga is not a hermaphrodite, but I thought that if I used the terms “Lady Gaga” and “hermaphrodite” I might get some hits on Google.)

Consequently, I think reports of what the median-income family of four pays in taxes now compared to years past have little impact. People like stories with characters they can relate to, and how many people live next to a family that has been making the median income for the last sixty years?

So with the help of the awesome tax and spending calculator from USA Today, I’ve put together a few stories about “real” taxpayers and how they’ve fared since the Reagan era. Each of these taxpayers files individually, uses the standard deduction instead of itemizing, and has one exemption.

Paula Pooriskova. Paula has spent her entire adult life earning the federal minimum wage, working 2,080 hours a year. Paula earned $6,448 in 1980 and $15,080 in 2010. Her tax rates have gone up as well, from a total (income + payroll) tax of 8% thirty years ago to 11.5% today. She was hit hardest by the Reagan-Bush years. By 1992, her total tax rate had jumped to 12.64%, and at the end of the Clinton administration it was essentially unchanged. Since then, it’s fallen by about one percentage point, with her marginal tax rate – the tax rate on the last dollar earned — dropping from 15% to 10%. (Note: the calculator does NOT factor in the Earned Income Tax Credit, so her actual tax bill may be overstated.)

Mandy Mediate. Mandy has been doing average, which is to say better than Paula. She was making the median family-of-four income when Reagan was elected: $24,332. She’s gotten raises every year since then, but only three percent each year – less than the average rate of inflation over that time. (Her income climbed to $59,000 in 2010, but to keep pace with inflation, she would have had to reach $64,000.) Unlike Paula, Mandy has seen a slight but steady decline in her tax rates. She went from an effective rate of 24.74% in 1980, with a marginal rate of 34%, to an effective rate in 2010 of 22.26%, with a marginal rate of 25%. As a percentage of income, Mandy’s payroll tax rate has been the same as Paula’s: 6.14% in 1980, and 7.65% today. Mandy’s total tax rates went down by two percentage points under Reagan-Bush, up a hair under Clinton, and down another percentage point under Bush II.

Tim Toomedian. Tim is probably a typical Tea Party member. His income in 1980 was $48,664 – twice the median income for a family of four that year. Since 1980, his income has kept pace with inflation, so he now makes $127,908. Paul’s tax burden, however, is much lower now than it was thirty years ago. His federal taxes have gone down from over 35% to less than 28%. And the marginal rate fell from 55% to 28%. Paul’s income tax went way down, from 32% to 21%, but that cut was offset slightly by an increase in payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare, which went from 3.26% to 6.63% – which is still less in percentage terms than Paula’s and Mandy’s. (Social Security taxes apply only to the first $106,800 earned.) The decline in Paul’s tax rate has been pretty steady. During the Reagan-Bush years, his rate dropped from 35% to 29.15%. During the eight years of the Clinton administration, the rate stayed nearly constant, going up to 29.67%. They came down again under Bush II, although they actually went up by hair between 2004 and 2008.

Ricky Richardson. Ricky is living the life. He was making $100K way back in 1980, and his income has grown at a steady 10% clip ever since, far outpacing inflation. Today, Ricky makes a cool $1,744,940. While Paula, Mandy, and Tim have seen mild to moderate changes over time in their tax rates, Ricky’s rates have shifted wildly along with the political winds. When Reagan took office, Ricky was paying nearly 50% of his income in federal taxes and the marginal rate was a whopping 68%. Eight years later, Ricky’s tax rate was all the way down to 29% and the  marginal rate had been cut by forty percentage points. Under George H. W. “Read My Lips” Bush, Ricky suffered a setback and his effective and marginal rates went up to 31%. Then Clinton came along and Ricky’s marginal rate shot up to 39.6%, with his effective tax rate close behind (38%). Next came the “Bush Tax Cuts” and Ricky’s marginal and effective rates went back down to about 35%. One thing that hasn’t changed much is Ricky’s payroll tax burden. That’s because of the cap on wages that are subject to Social Security tax. Ricky paid 1.59% of income to payroll taxes in 1980, and pays 1.83% today. (Of course, few people in Ricky’s tax bracket are taking the standard deduction, so Ricky’s tax liability is likely overstated here.)

In brief: Only one of our four taxpayers has seen an increase in federal tax rates since 1980, and that’s poor Paula on minimum wage. The Clinton era helped her with her income tax rate, but since her payroll taxes are higher than her income taxes the relief was moderated. During those Clinton years, only one taxpayer saw more than a one percentage point increase in tax rates, and that was Ricky the millionaire.

In 1980, when middle-class folks were paying 35% of their income in federal taxes and the wealthiest were subject to a 68% marginal tax rate, tax revolts and cries of “socialism” might have been justified. But it’s much harder to make that same case today. The Tea Partiers might have a better case if they warned that unless we cut spending, the only way we’ll be able to service our debts is to raise tax rates all the way back to those 1980 levels. There may be some merit to that argument and I’ll take a look at spending in another post.

I said the Tea response to this is that a) it’s unfair for "working people" to be paying the lion’s share of the nation’s income taxes in order to subsidize people who "choose" low-income lifestyles, and b) earning whatever amount of money it takes to put you into one of the higher tax brackets doesn’t actually make you "rich." (In other words, the average Tea Partiers probably think their incomes are higher than average and that therefore they pay more than the average federal tax.)

The analysis I’d like to see is this: Take a two-income family of four making the median income in 1980. (For sake of argument, call it $35K.) How much would they have paid in federal taxes — including Medicare and Social Security — assuming the standard deductions? Now follow that same family, assuming their wages rise with the CPI. What would their taxes have been over the last 30 years? Now follow a second family who started in the same place in 1980 but whose incomes went up a constant 5% per year every year (ignoring CPI). How much would they have paid in taxes over time?

Any idea how I could get those numbers? Is there an on-line historical tax calculator somewhere?

As usual, I should have Googled before I asked the question. Of course there’s an on-line historical tax calculator somewhere, and here it is. This calculator, from USA Today, shows not only how much a household’s tax burden would have been, but what the money would have been spent on. It doesn’t do the analysis exactly as I proposed above, but it’s pretty close. I think I’m going to have a little fun with this tool … results in another post.

By the way … another Tea response would be that even if taxes are at historic lows, they’re still too high. If we could get rid of all that “wasteful government spending,” they’d be even lower. Rebutting that argument requires an entirely different approach.

A second by the way … I put “average federal income tax for a median-income family of four” in quotations because I don’t really understand this concept. Where does “average” come in? The graph shows what that hypothetical family would have paid each year, so it’s not averaged over time. And I can’t imagine they’ve taken a sample of median-income families in all 50 states and averaged each family’s federal tax burden. I think I’ll have to ask the CBPP about that one.

It was a beautiful morning in Boston and I had no appointments, so I decided to venture down to Boston Common to see first-hand what all this Tea Party fuss is about. I had visions of doing some Daily-Show-esque interviews … putting some of these folks on the spot to see how well they could defend their positions. So I hung a badge around my neck that said “PRESS” and I wandered through the crowd with my camera and microphone looking for people to interview. Here’s what I learned.

• Interviewing is hard. Whether you’re a journalist, documentarian, or plain old rabble rouser, it takes some chutzpah to walk up to strangers who are essentially minding their own business and start asking them questions. It’s a little easier to approach people holding signs or wearing costumes because they’re essentially advertising that they want to be heard. To the extent that these are the people getting quoted in the media, we may be getting an exaggerated or otherwise distorted view of the general sentiment among the crowd.
• Interviewing with a hidden agenda is even harder. These people have done you the favor of consenting to an interview, not to an argument or debate. I tried a few times to gently lead people into contradicting themselves, but I didn’t want to be nasty about it. You can hear for yourself (scroll down).
• Interviewing while running your own sound and video on equipment you’re still learning to use … fuggedaboudit. I ended up with interview subjects out of frame, audio levels too high and too low, once I actually forgot to hit record … it was a mess. So we have stills here instead of video. Sorry.
• If today’s crowd was a representative sample, Tea Party supporters are overwhelmingly middle class, middle aged, and white. I tried really hard to find minorities in the crowd. With one or maybe two exceptions, they all turned out to be press, tourists, or anti-Tea-Party protesters.
• Ask a bunch of Tea Party supporters about their beliefs and you will hear the same lines over and over again. Taxes are too high, government is too big, leaders in Washington are ignoring the Constitution, we’re losing our freedoms, we need to remember what this country is about, and so on. It is rare to hear any talk of specific changes that should be made other than undoing whatever the Obama administration has done (and a good bit of what the Bush administration did, too). This made the interviews challenging, because you can only ask the same follow-up question so many times without being a jerk.
• Tea Party supporters may have very simple views of the world, but they don’t seem to be stupid or insane. Kooks seemed to be the exception, not the rule. But events like the Tea Party do attract some kooks. (See “new world order, below.)
• These Tea Party organizers have been doing this road show for months and they still can’t get a sound system right. Sarah Palin could barely be heard by anyone more than 50 yards away from the podium. (Other presenters came through much more clearly.)

Here are the people I spoke to today. Click the photos for MP3 audio of the interview. Pardon the big changes in volume. Again … still learning the equipment.

When I got home, I recorded a few other thoughts about today’s experience.

Sorry about the “beard.” It’s for a movie I’m filming this weekend. Can’t wait to shave.