Category Archives: Politics

A “New” Way to Get Around

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As an employee of a major airline, I probably shouldn’t like this idea. However, as an environmentalist, opponent of traffic jams and the hassles (sorry, boss!) of airline travel, I see some benefit in high-speed rail.

My experience with trains involves not high-speed rail but slower commuter rail in major cities – London, Paris, Washington, Dallas, New York, and Chicago. I was always impressed by how many people these subway and light rail systems could move around. Jenny and I have taken the Trinity Railway Express to downtown Fort Worth and the American Airlines Center many times to avoid traffic and parking hassles.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about high-speed rail. I know they are popular and very successful in Europe and Japan. In terms of carrying a person or pound of cargo a given distance, they use less fuel and produce fewer emissions than a car, truck, or plane. Sure, even a high-speed train is much slower than a jet. However, if you account for the chance of flight delays and the extra time and trouble you spend at the airport prior to the flight, the difference in overall travel time drops.

Leaders in Texas have discussed a high-speed train network to link Dallas, Houston, and Austin at various times. It appears to finally have a chance of success thanks to significant private investment. Southwest campaigned strongly against the idea in the early 1990s for obvious reasons. You won’t see me campaigning against my employer, but I think the idea is at least worth considering.

Check out this article in Time for details about high-speed rail possibilities in the U.S., particularly in Florida.

How Much Do I Really Pay in Taxes?

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It seems that many people love to complain about taxes, both how much we pay in taxes and how the government uses our tax dollars. I’ll save the government’s handling of tax revenue for another day.

I’ve been thinking lately about tax rates. What is the fairest system for collecting taxes? On one hand, the simplicity of a flat income tax or a flat consumption tax appeals to me. On the other hand, I also see value in a system like ours in which the wealthier you are, the greater your tax rate is, at least in principle.

This recent article in the Dallas Morning News confirmed a few suspicions I’ve had. I invite you to read it and then come back.

If you don’t feel like reading it, the article discusses the huge amount of tax revenue that the government loses every year through common tax breaks such as mortgage interest. Most of these tax breaks go to middle- and upper-class people who can afford to own a home, invest money, and contribute large amounts to charity. In general, the more money you make, the more you can claim in deductions on your more expensive house and other items. Eliminating all of these breaks would make a huge dent in the budget deficit.

Intrigued, I ran some numbers on our family’s finances. We’re just regular, middle-class people with two living tax credits kids and a reasonably-priced home. We’re in the 25 percent tax bracket. However, we take many legitimate deductions every year, including mortgage interest, property taxes, student loan interest, and a variety of charitable donations. For 2009, we also claimed some capital losses (bad stock picks – oops) and a home energy improvement credit. These deductions and credits saved us thousands of dollars last year. How much?

Our effective income tax rate was only 11.3 percent. That sounds a whole lot better than 25 percent, doesn’t it?

But does it? Sure, it’s great to keep the difference in my pocket. And yes, some would argue that even 11.3 percent is too high. However, I understand and appreciate the government’s contributions to my life and the life of every American, and I think it’s only fair that we pay for them. All my deductions contribute to the massive budget deficit.

I don’t have a comprehensive plan for tax reform, nor do I have any intention of reducing my deductions to help solve the budget crisis. I just wanted to point out that our actual tax burden might not be quite as heavy as we might think.

The Three-Hour Rule

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The airline industry is abuzz regarding the upcoming “three-hour rule”, which forces U.S. airlines to allow passengers to deplane after no more than three hours of waiting on the tarmac. Congress passed this law in response to several high-profile incidents in which passengers were stranded for many hours due to bad weather and ATC delays in New York, Minnesota, Austin, and other areas.

In my opinion, this law is a classic example of politicians who are more interested in making their constituents happy than in actually understanding the problem and finding a good solution. At first glance, the three-hour rule might sound like a great idea. After all, who wants to sit on an airplane going nowhere for 12 hours with limited food and overflowing toilets? However, this new law severely limits our ability to operate in bad weather, will ultimately cause more passenger inconvenience, and will lead to a significant increase in flight cancellations.

Multi-hour taxi delays generally occur for one of two reasons: 1) Thunderstorms that prevent traffic from efficiently flowing to and from an airport, and 2) Frozen precipitation that causes lengthly deicing delays, makes the runways extremely slick, and sometimes prevents flights from departing or arriving altogether. Sometimes there’s no easy way to know how long a flight will take to go from the gate to the air.

For example, I once worked flights to and from several cities in the Northeast when a line of strong thunderstorms moved through, blocking many of the available “highways in the sky”. Due to the large number of flights and limited paths, the air traffic controllers were hardly allowing anyone to move, gridlocking much of the region. In several cases, all we could do was to add lots of fuel and send the flights out to get in line to depart. They had to wait in line until the storms moved off some of the departure paths. If a flight burned up too much fuel in line and needed to get more, or needed to return to the gate for “passenger convenience”, ATC put that flight in the back of the line once it came back out, resulting in an even longer delay.

As another example, the FAA has declared it illegal to depart in certain combinations of frozen precipitation, such as ice pellets (sleet), snow, and rain mixed together. WIth any frozen precip falling, the aircraft must be deiced prior to departure, which can take a long time. Once deiced, if one of the forbidden combinations of frozen precip falls on the aircraft, the pilots must 1) wait until that combination stops falling, 2) get deiced AGAIN, and 3) hope that the combination doesn’t reappear and force them to repeat the whole process. This is similar to what happened to jetBlue at JFK during their Valentine’s Day meltdown a few years ago. The flight needs to be ready to get deiced and launch when able, but since no one can know for sure what the weather will bring, sometimes the crew needs to get the plane out there and wait.

By forcing us to return to the gate after three hours for “passenger convenience”, we will lose valuable opportunities to launch flights during the sometimes limited windows that become available. Even more importantly, keeping passengers onboard beyond the three-hour mark can result in a fine of $27,500 per passenger. On our 737s, that would be over $3.7 million for a full flight. Rather than risk a heartstopping fine like that, the airlines will preemptively cancel many flights that could face multi-hour delays. So instead of potentially being stuck on a plane for a few hours before reaching their destination, some passengers will have their flights cancelled and won’t reach their destinations at all until a day or more later.

The law goes into effect in April, during thunderstorm season. I’m curious to see how big the impact will be. For more information, check out the following articles:

Three-Hour Rule Ready to Become Reality

Airlines Threaten to Cancel Flights

Health Care Reform – Issues and Impact

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I’m growing tired of the health care debate. Perhaps you are, too. I’m tired of it for two main reasons:

  1. As with so many issues, many people fear and oppose the current reform bill without understanding it, often based on false information. Some say it allows the government to take over our health care system, which is not the case. Some oppose it simply because they are Republicans and blindly oppose anything supported by the Democrats, which is a cop-out. If you actually understand the bill and have specific, grounded objections to it, I can respect your position. You might be right. But lemminglike rejection or acceptance of any proposal based on party affiliation or unfounded assumptions does not serve anyone well.
  2. They still haven’t reformed health care. A bill might pass sometime soon, but it hasn’t happened yet, and the problems with our health care system go on.

The Dallas Morning News wrote a nice summary of Obama’s latest proposal. It’s toward the bottom of the page.

In my view, although it doesn’t solve every problem and is extremely expensive, I like Obama’s plan because it helps address some of the biggest problems with our current system:

  • When you start a new policy due to a job change or other reason, insurance companies can deny you coverage for a preexisting condition, such as cancer or even pregnancy. That should be criminal.
  • At least 30 million people are uninsured, including millions of children, due largely to the high cost of coverage. We have friends who don’t have insurance and have to pay out-of-pocket for any health expenses. We hope they never get into a car wreck, get sick, or get pregnant unexpectedly because it might destroy them financially.
  • There are limited ways to get decent insurance coverage: work for a large company or organization, serve in the military, live long enough to get Medicare, pay ridiculous amounts of money for it, or serve in Congress. Jenny and I are blessed with great insurance through Southwest. My parents, on the other hand, are self-employed. Their premiums and deductible are huge, but their coverage is lousy. People who choose to work for themselves or for small businesses should have access to good coverage at an affordable price. People shouldn’t be afraid to go to the doctor when they are sick or injured.

I believe everyone deserves quality health care.

If you trust them (don’t laugh, it’s worth a look), the White House put together a webpage that tries to explain the Obama proposal’s impact on you based on your situation. The bill will have little impact on me and Jenny, but I believe it will help some of you.

If the Republicans can work up a plan that will fix health care, I’d love to hear it. I hate all political parties and have no particular affiliation with the Democrats, despite my support for Obama. But I haven’t seen a comprehensive counter-proposal from the Republicans, mainly lots of objections instead. I do like their goal of limiting medical malpractice liability as a way to cut health-care costs. Let’s put the best ideas together from all sides and get this thing done.

Liberty and Responsibility

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The Obama administration is proposing some new rules for certain federal and other employees to prohibiting texting while driving. Some states already have some restrictions in place regarding the use of cell phones while driving, both for talking and texting. The Dallas Morning News posted a good article on the proposal.

A couple of people I know from work strongly oppose such a law, claiming it’s yet another example of big government interfering with personal liberty. Presumably, in their view, people should have the right to make bad decisions even if those decisions hurt other people. Although I can see their point, I strongly disagree with them.

The primary purpose of law is to force people to behave responsibly when they refuse to do so voluntarily.

People make decisions based on a variety of motivations, such as love, hate, duty, fear, peer pressure, and greed, to name a few. In the case of texting while driving, just like drinking while driving and any number of other choices, positive motivations such as love and duty have failed miserably. Human beings in general just don’t care enough about strangers to stop doing many activities that put others at risk. If our goal as a society is to eliminate the damage caused by people’s stupid choices, legislation and punishment seems to be the only viable solution. Like it or not, the fear of punishment is often the only reason that sinful people like us will do the right thing.

What do you think?

September Rants and Raves

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I’m in a good mood, so you get more raves than rants today. Here we go…

RAVE – USOpen.org

The official tournament site, USOpen.org, is excellent. On top of the usual information on scheduling, draws, and players, it also offers streaming broadcasts of the top matches. This feature came in very handy on Saturday night when The Tennis Channel held exclusive broadcast rights. Since AT&T doesn’t offer The Tennis Channel, we would have been out of luck. The site’s broadcast offers surprisingly high quality for an internet broadcast. I also heard a rumor that it can sneak through some workplace firewalls, but I don’t know anything about that from personal experience. Ahem…

RAVE – High School Football at Cowboys Stadium

On Labor Day, the new Cowboys Stadium is hosting a four-pack of high school football games. I always loved the way Texas Stadium’s officials opened their doors for high school playoff games. MacArthur, my alma mater, got to play there a few times back in the day. Mocking me with the mother of all conflicts, one of the Labor Day games at the new stadium features MacArthur versus Colleyville Heritage, probably Brenden and Newbie’s future high school. We won’t be there, but I’m thrilled for the players, coaches, and fans who get to experience these games in a world-class facility.

RANT – Obama-hating parents whining about Tuesday’s address

I like Obama. I don’t agree with him on every issue, but I like him overall. I also respect your right to dislike him if you so choose. But I am sick of hearing about parents who are whining about Obama’s Tuesday address to the nation’s children and young adults. The leader of the free world cares enough about your students to want to personally tell you about the importance of hard work and education. To encourage them to stay in school and do their best. To prove to them that a black man from a single-parent home can rise to the highest office in the land. From what I understand, his message is NOT political. Yet some parents, particularly down here, are complaining to the school administration and even threatening to keep their kids home on Tuesday. Bush delivered a similar message to students several years ago. Let’s use some common sense here, folks.

RAVE – Fall

Fall is possibly my favorite time of year. The temperature cools off enough to make outdoor activities pleasant, which will be VERY helpful with a toddler. Football and hockey return. At work, the weather is best overall, making my job easier. My grass quits growing. Leaves transform into all sorts of gorgeous colors. I can grill without having to sweat from the radiant heat. Several people in my family, including myself, celebrate birthdays. The electric bill drops significantly. SWA celebrates Halloween with the annual skit contest (anybody have a Dr. Evil/Mini-Me costume set?). I’ve had enough of the heat. Although I’m shocked at how quickly this year is passing, I’m very glad September has arrived and fall is drawing near.