Social Taxes

Given that the U.S.A. gained its independence primarily (or so I am told) on the grounds that it didn't want to pay any more taxes to its colonial power, it is no surprise that tax rates in the US are mostly lower than elsewhere in the Western world. (You could try and dig out some OECD numbers here, but I propose you simply take a look at this graph, hoping that the Wikipedians didn't mess up.)

While entire debates can be had on this topic (and on related politically inflammatory things like health care, public transport etc.), that isn't what I'm planning on today. What I am planning to talk about, is a totally different type of taxation which I would refer to as "social taxes", though it might be more generally described as "charity".


As a way of introducing the subject, have a look at this image:

You can see the trail (which I've written about before), along with a "litter control" sign. These can be found all along the trail, at an average rate of about two per mile and they are effective: the people involved with these organisations (charitable organisations such as the one on the picture above, sports groups, religious groups, scouts, etc.) do make regular rounds with large trash bags, cleaning up the place - saving the West Virginian trails from the fate so many parts of Melbourne's Yarra suffer from. (Don't get me wrong: the Yarra is awesome, beautiful and a great asset to the city, but the empty cans and bottles or the plastic bags that "decorate" the Eucalyptuses in a disturbingly pervasive manner, do take some of its beauty away.)


Another thing I'll mention are the recurring pledge drives ran by the public broadcasting services. While I've been a great fan of public radio, who has spent hours, days, months listening to the likes of the BBC, Radio Sweden, ABC, NPR and, most recently, the Deutsche Welle, I have never paid a single penny for it. While I'm sure Connex would therefore define me as a thief, I never even stopped to think about it - and I don't think anyone else has, either. With NPR this is different. Every once in a while, they run a pledge drive, which implies that for the duration of a week, they will constantly remind you that making radio shows and keeping a station on the air, costs money. And they will remind you (in a nice and friendly way, I'll admit) that if the listeners don't pay up, then we're all doomed. During these selected weeks, the reminders are so prevalent that there are mornings where I find myself wondering if I simply missed the news, or if the radio was too busy asking for money to also find some time to talk about whatever happened beyond the NPR offices.


Public radio and clean paths/nature are just two things that I consider important common goods - things which we can all benefit from and for which we, consequently, should all pay. Down here things are a bit different (I refer back to the Wikimedia graph linked above): taxes are a lot lower than in much of Europe (noticed where Belgium, Sweden and Germany are on that graph?), the U.S. military is dramatically more extensive (seeing as it is fulfilling the partly self-imposed role of policeman of the world) and they spend more on health care than most (if not all) other civilised countries. (I'm just picking out the military and health care because these are two of the three main spending posts, the third one being pensions.) The upshot of this is that there simply isn't much money left for a lot of things that can be funded elsewhere and that you, consequentially, call on people directly to try and sort this out.

At first, I figure it might sound like a good idea. After all, you get to have an immediate impact on where your money goes: do you spend it on the library-support-fund, on the public radio or on the Salvation Army? It also means that you don't have to contribute financially, but could invest time instead - go clean up the trail, for example. It does, however, also mean that essential services come under threat: if there is no one to de-ice the sidewalks, then people are litterally forced to either risk breaking their hips, or use a car. And if some catastrophy does occur one day, I'm sure we could all agree we would rather rely on information from NPR than from either the student-run college radio or Fox News.

Secondly, it means you get freeloaders: I can keep all my spare time to myself and don't spend a penny on any aid or support group or public service and no one will even know. Sure, to some degree you always get freeloaders - as I pointed out before, I never paid a cent to any radio station - but that was because I was a student, who didn't make any money and therefore didn't pay any taxes. But once you do start making money, avoiding taxes would be difficult and illegal, whereas avoiding contributing to charity merely gets you bad karma.

Religion

I've been meaning to write about this ever since I came down here, but refrained from it since I feared it might do more harm than good. However, there really are some fascinating differences so maybe I should stop ignoring the elephant in the room and just get it over with. Therefore, as a note of warning: whatever follows is nothing but my own, personal view on some rather general and sometimes abstract events and concepts and it is in no way meant as a personal offense to anyone. Not to anyone at all - especially no one I know.


Maybe I should start off with some background for the non-Europeans. The fact is I grew up in a religiously very simple and clear-cut place: everyone was Catholic, but no one went to Mass (except maybe at Christmas and if you're over 60 - old habits die hard). Those that weren't Catholic, were either clearly African immigrants or in the case of Jews they stuck to themselves and were so orthodox that there was, again, no mistaking them for anyone else. Since historically the Churches were placed in the centres of cities and towns, the church square would be used as a market place on Sundays and as a convenient parking lot during the week, though the church itself remained mostly empty.

I was therefore not too surprised when I saw the hugely prominent parking lot next to the church in Star City - given the importance of cars in WV, it was only to be expected. The thing I did not expect was that this lot would be empty at all times except during mass. That is to say: in this town, demographically the youngest town I've ever lived in, more people go to church - much more people go to church - than anywhere else I've lived. And that isn't all. The other part of the equation was something I first realised in Australia.


As I said, in Belgium things are easy: there only really is one church and one religion. Everyone who goes to church, goes to the same place (and still that place is empty). In the New World, this isn't the case by far. Every group of immigrants, be it the English, the Irish, the Italians or the Germans, they all imported their own religion or rather, since these are all Christian (to keep things "simple", I'll focus on Christianity for now) they all imported their own flavour of a religion. And so you have heaps of churches all over the place and everyone goes to his own little church - and yet somehow (I don't know about Australia, but at least in Star City/Morgantown) they manage to get decent numbers.

While I find this interesting from a mere mathematical point of view, religiously I don't understand it, either. Growing up in a homogeneous community, there was never really a point to wonder about whether your religion was the right one and whether it was best to follow the Roman Catholic church or if maybe Martin Luther had a point. Living in a place where the churches of different denominations are built side by side, I would think the question about which religion you adhere to and how sacred and indubitable the words from your holy book are, would certainly be put in perspective.


Having said that, a small word on Jews. Where I grew up, the only Jews I knew about where the ultra-orthodox ones who effectively lived in a ghetto somewhere on the rim of Antwerp. So you can imagine I was pretty surprised when it turned out some of my friends in Melbourne - who by any standards (and especially mine) look really normally Western - were, as a matter of fact, Jewish. The same thing happened here, of course. I knew someone for quite a while, but it's only around Christmas time that I discovered he celebrates Hanukkah instead of Christmas: I haven't found any other way to tell - there simply are no clear differences (for as far as I can see) between Christians and Jews. Or so I thought until (don't ask me how or why, I regret it already) the subject of Israel came up. I have not, so far, had the courage to figure out how prevalent support is in either Australia or the US, but it has been a very long time since I heard someone react with shock, horror and disbelieve (and, just maybe, a tinge of hate) after I confessed to not being a big fan of the state.


Finally, a word or two on tolerance. Last week, a proposal to legalise Gay Marriage was voted down in the New Jersey state assembly. Please do have a look at the Daily Show's clip here. It has it all - the good old orthodox Jews, the conservative nuts, both sides claiming that the Founding Fathers would be on their side of the debate - they even managed to find a conspiratorial anti-Semite. The bottom line, though, is more disturbing and recalls the debate about Sarah Palin's granddaughter and the fact that she wouldn't be aborted, because in both cases the main argument (first against abortion and now against same-sex marriage) comes down to "my God says it's evil, so no one should be allowed to do it". Maybe it's just me - and I hope wholeheartedly that a majority of the university-attending church-goers would be with me on this one - but I cannot understand how in a supposedly secular, 21^st century Western nation, the word of one person's God can be used in a legal argument to prevent another person from doing something.

And the cold remained...

Please spare a moment to glance at this interesting article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8445831.stm. Especially towards the end, a few good points are made - points which I've had in mind for the past month or so:

"In the town Roros, in central Norway, it has been -40C the last two nights. I have not heard of schools closing and the roads are for the most free [...] Why do the English have this problem every year?[...] I drive my car normally on ice and snow."

Indeed: it's an article pondering the recent cold snap across much of the Northern part of our beloved (?) Globe - and the havoc it has been wrecking on much of society - in the US as in Belgium, the Netherlands and, of course, England.


Ever since the snow started coming down in December, a regular morning feature on the radio has been the reading out of an ever-lengthening list of schools that were "delayed" or "shut". Pardon me for not understanding what a "delayed" school is, but shutting a school because there's a foot (at the very most two) of snow,... I don't get it. Surely in the land of hummers and trucks (remember, this is West Virginia, the Mountain State: your average car is not a VW Beetle), a few inches of snow wouldn't stop you.

What it does stop, of course, are bicycles: needless to say the one good bike path in the county (the one right between my home and my work) turned into an ice-based scale model of the Himalayas late last year - and of course no one has cleaned it up. Now I've ridden on plenty of slippery surfaces and my balance is outstanding - in Sweden I biked a whole winter through and while I lost balance many times, I only hit the ground twice - down here, however, that doesn't work because either the snow is so thick (because noone has ever cleared any of it away) that the drag it produces literally grinds you to a halt, or because the snow has been stamped into an icy surface with much more surface area than the geoid it is imposed upon. (i.e. it's spiky instead of flat.) Keeping your balance while slipping on a flat plane of ice - however slippery - is easy. Keeping your balance on a 30° sideways slope is practically impossible.

So my 15-minute bike ride has now become a 50-minute hike, ploughing through snow and ice and working up quite a sweat however cold the temperatures are (granted, we've hardly reached as low as -13°). On the bright side: these 50 minutes leave me plenty of time to listen to teach-yourself-German podcasts, so if winter persists, I might actually know more than "Hallo" and "Tschüß" when I do move.

In fact, come to think of it - for all the school closures and supposed havoc reported in the news, I can hardly think of any negative side to the weather - the land looks great, it is neither too hot nor too humid, the trail is blissfully deserted,... I guess the only problem is I cannot go for runs anymore, but really I have only been provided with the perfect excuse :-)

Alcohol - statistics

t turns out to be bl**dy hard to find any statistics on alcohol-related traffic deaths, but at least here's something to go by. Based on this document (and a couple of WHO sources to which I've lost the URL), about 40% of fatalities in motor vehicle crashes in the USA are alcohol-related. (Turns out it's fairly constant whether you consider 2002, 2005 or 2006, so this is a reasonably reliable statistic.) For Europe, where drinking ages are generally much lower (if they exist at all link) but where the limits on blood alcohol content while driving are lower as well(*), I found the following list of statistics on this WHO webpage:

Austria, 2001: 6.5% of fatalities; 1998: 8.5%.
Belgium, 2000: 10.2%; 1998: 8.9%.
Czech Republic, 2002: 10.5%.
Denmark, 2001: 26.6%; 1995: 20.2%.
Finland, 2005: 14.3%; 2004: 15.7%; 2002: 14.6%; 2000: 14.4%.
etc.

I could go through the entire alphabet, but I guess you see my point. (I'll admit there are exceptions to this rule: France 2002: 30 to 40%; Ireland, 2000: at least 40%; Italy, 2000: 30-50%; Spain, 1998: 41%.)


I guess my point is clear by now.

Have a great - and safe! - 2010 everyone. Happy New Year :-)


(*): ps: the link for the European statistics doesn't seem to be working. Let's see if we can remedy that. The data I show comes from this page: http://apps.who.int/globalatlas/default.asp. In the right-hand box "Related Sites", click on the bottom link ("GISAH"). Confusingly, you'll find that the URL doesn't change, but the webpage does. Anyway. Now you click on the third link from the top: Data query to search the contents of the information system, select the category "Harms and Consequences", the topic "Mortality" and sub-topic "Alcohol-related road traffic fatalities" (all the way down the bottom). Make sure to select a decent range of years, so you don't accidentally tick a year that didn't have any information.

Interestingly, last time I tried this, I only got European countries. Now it has all of them - so you can verify the American ~40% and see that Australia had 31% in 1990. (After 1990 the Aussies seem to have subtly tweaked their statistics, but I'll leave that debate for now.) UK was at 15% in 2002.

Alcohol and how to (mis)use it

As a nice little attention for the holiday season, WVU provided all its employees with a useful little brochure, reminding us the university is totally an alcohol (and drug) free place. It lists the pains and troubles you could find yourself facing when you are found to unlawfully possess, use or (insert any number of verbs right here) a controlled substance in (or near) the workplace and goes on for no less than 20 pages (A5 or whateve the equivalent name is for a folded US letter size paper) listing the fines, detentions and obliged sessions of councelling you might attract when coming anywhere close to any of these things.

Problem is, of course, that neither "unlawfully" nor "controlled substances" are clearly and univocally defined anywhere.


Anyway. The real reason for bringing this up, is that it brought to mind the fascinating and - in my mind - rediculously ambivalent relationship between the state (or, in this particular case, WVU) and alcohol. Let's, for once, start my tirade far away from home, in beautiful Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico.



Santa Fe (depicted here is the main square at nightfall, lit by some great Christmas decorations and poorly photographed by yours truly. Adam (Deller) has many more pictures that worked out much better, but I haven't managed to get them off him yet.) is a nice, seemingly authentic and very touristy town - I would almost call it the Bruges of New Mexico, but since Bruges has been around for thousands of years and Santa Fe barely for hundreds of years,... well, okay, I guess some astronomers might find them equal.

I had come to Santa Fe on a slight detour while travelling to Socorro on a visit to Adam and - more importantly? - the Very Large Array (VLA):



Since Socorro hasn't got anything more to offer than the VLA (and a bunch of scientists), Adam had the brilliant idea to show me the capital as well in a way of - you know - reminding ourselves what civilisation looked like. Truly it was a fantastic idea and I am grateful for it, even if the town didn't like us. Sparing you a rant on all that can go wrong on a two-day visit to an artsy town, I'll stick to the first night when we attempted to go out and catch up over a beer or two.

At the first pub we turned to (and as we later found out, probably the only pub that was still open at this late hour), the bouncer required a $5 entrance per person (fair enough, I guess?!) and demanded to see our ID. Given the fact that I'm 27 and that - ever since I regrew my mustache and goatee - I even look this old, I rarely carry my passport unless I'm about to board a plane. In West Virginia people have been sensible enough to accept my Belgian identity card which, even if it doesn't hold any official power abroad, does identify me and isn't easily forged (it has a chip in it!) In fact, I have successfully and without problem used this ID to both rent a car and cash a several hundred dollar check in WV. However, to get into this pub in Santa Fe; to be allowed to pay $5 to enter so that I could subsequently pay much more to drink beers while listening to music that would probably be so loud that the catching up we intended to do in the first place, would probably become impossible; to do that, my Belgian ID turned out inadequate because - as the bouncer put it - "they had had recent trouble with fake foreign IDs".

I simply didn't know what to say, how to react. There's so much I couldn't grasp, couldn't understand. Do I look like I'm 20? Do I sound like I'm American? Does my ID card (with chip!) look like it might be forged? Do I look like I would imagine I should need to go through extreme forgery attempts in order to be let in to a bar? I was flabbergasted, could not figure out what his problem was. Did not understand why the bouncer of a place would stop such a thorough forgery - if indeed it had been one, which it wasn't. Surely it wasn't his job to distinguish false documents from real documents? Surely he just had to check if the date on whatever card I showed, read less than 1989 and then let me pass? Would they really shoot themselves in the foot by disallowing entrance to two guys in their upper 20s? We ended up drinking tap water over a game of cards in our hotel room.

I'm not sure what my readers (that would be you) are thinking at this point, but the proof of age, irrespective of what you look like, is a very common thing in the US - it becomes a second nature: I show my ID card (though never my passport) without even thinking about it anymore. - But that doesn't mean it isn't hypocritical. My problem is that they're anal about checking your age but that once you turn 21, you're perfectly welcome to do whatever you please - as long as you have your ID or drivers licence (well, and as long as you're not inside university buildings). One of the most frightening things about this, is the combination of this policy with the driving culture that seems to be more common here than elsewhere. What I'm saying is that it seems to not be too uncommon to go out drinking and drive back home. After all, real men can do that, right?

I have been told - though I've forgotten my source - that there are pressure groups intent on making alcohol consumption hard and difficult in the States and that such pressure groups could - and have - send kids into bars with fake IDs, only to get the police involved as soon as the kids manage to get served alcohol, causing the place to be closed down for serving to minors (<21s). While this would explain the reluctance of our bouncer, it does not (in my view) do anything useful. Surely it would be better for everyone if we would embark on a sensible debate about the dangers and problems of alcohol consumption, instead of making 21 some sort of magical barrier past which the sky is the limit?

I guess my point is this: if, instead of threatening us with dismissals, fines and councelling when we turn up to work drunk, if they provided us with a simple, 1-page overview of the damage alcohol does to ones body, mind and brain - and showed the statistics of traffic accidents and deaths that involved alcohol, then maybe we can slowly move towards an understanding and towards a reasonable culture of care and responsibility.


One final example. Sometimes some of the graduate students at WVU go out for drinks - yet the non-drinkers never follow. One day I had the interesting idea of asking a teatotalling student to join us anyway, just for the social aspect of it - and that he could drink orange juice instead, for example. I was met with the same blank stares I gave the bouncer in Santa Fe and a discussion ensued on whether such a thing could be conceivable - if not in real life, then maybe in fantasy fiction. Sure: bars would have some orange juice to make cocktails, but chances were they wouldn't just squander that away on a full glass of orange juice - surely such a strange thing would be unheard of.

In Belgium, ever since the Bob campaign started in 1995, it is implicitly assumed that one person in each group does not drink. Or rather: drinks orange juice, water, coke, whatever non-alcoholic beverage you like. At parties, at pubs, at dancings - anywhere it has become the standard. The "Designated Driver" (aka 'Bob') has become a standard - and he isn't someone who counts his drinks and uses complex arithmetic to justify driving: he's someone who doesn't drink.


Of course, moving from a 21-and-you're-good mentality to a responsible voluntary abstaining for the greater good, isn't easy and takes a lot of campaigning along with some brainwashing. Be that as it may, harshly checking ID cards, trying to get pubs closed by tricking them into serving 20-year-olds and warning your employees about fines and prison sentences, are definitely not going to get us there. (IMHO, of course.)