The Most Stunning Ironic Political Development In My Lifetime

Scott Brown's election has to be the most stunning and ironic political development that I've ever seen. Jesse Ventura becoming governor of Minnesota was stunning. Sonny Bono becoming a serious politician was stunning. Sarah Palin for VP was stunning. But none carry the irony of this election. Congress is consumed in passing a health care bill, the dream of the late senator Ted Kennedy. All the talk since passage of the Senate bill on Christmas Eve was whether the Democratic controlled Congress could reach an agreement (somehow it probably would because failure was not an option given the Obama administration's prioritization). Nowhere on the radar was the possibility that the Senate Democrats might lose their fillbuster proof 60 member majority. Ten days ago I never heard of Scott Brown. Now he has taken the former Ted Kennedy Massachusetts seat in the U.S. Senate. This leaves three alternatives for health care reform. The House can approve the Senate bill intact (with its Cadillac health care excise tax intended to hit at wealthy individuals but which more greatly affects union members) exactly as is, avoiding further Senate votes. They can try to pass a new bill in two weeks or less before Brown is certified. Or they can start all over again. The first two alternatives sound too much like dirty pool and I'd be surprised if they went down that road. So is that the end of health care reform for now?

Manhattan Chinese Food

Since I'm spending most of the week in New York City I thought I'd write on the state of Chinese food in Manhattan and how it compares to the stuff back home in L. A. I've eaten at over 200 restaurants in New York Chinatown (which I estimate covers perhaps two-thirds of all the restaurants there), choosing the best ones first. I've also eaten at all the Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles Chinatown and 95 percent of the Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley.

I can categorically say that by comparison, New York Chinese food is grossly inferior to that of Los Angeles, or for that matter, San Francisco. I don't make this statement as a matter of regional pride, but rather because it is the logical conclusion based on demographics. Historically NYC Chinatown had been Cantonese in origin, but the last two decades have seen a wave of immigration from Fujian province. These recent immigrants are the poorest of the poor. NYC Chinatown serves the Fujian community, the historic Cantonese community, and the tourist community. As such the Chinese food there is mired in the 20th Century, certainly not being bad, but not reflecting the latest evolutions in Chinese in cuisine, both as to other regional cuisines as well as improvements in Cantonese/Hong Kong style cuisine, and not particularly geared towards an affluent customer base. Indeed, the best Chinese restaurant in Manhattan is Chinatown Brasserie, which is not even in Chinatown, and most of whose clientele is not Chinese (because it is so ridiculously expensive).

Meanwhile, Los Angeles has likewise seen an influx of immigration from Asia, much more broadly based than that seen in New York, both in terms of geographic origins as well as socioeconomic background. Nobody loves their food more than the Chinese, and well heeled immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China expect the most appetizing food that money can buy. As a result, the Los Angeles area is a gold mine for lovers of Chinese food, with more diverse (in terms of regional cuisines and breadth of selection) better (and, interestingly, cheaper) Chinese food than anywhere else in the United States, though the Bay Area is a close runner up. It is particularly the much smaller community of Hong Kong Chinese in New York that probably explains the lack of evolution of Chinese food in Manhattan compared to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto.

There is California quality Chinese food in Flushing, and indeed there are regional varieties in Flushing, such as Xian, Wenzhou, Henan and Guizhou that you won't find in California. However, Flushing does not measure up to the San Gabriel Valley.

Happy New Year

In honor of New Year's, here's a seldom seen view of the Times Square Waterford Crystal Ball.

It's Football Bowl Season

College bowl season is here and purists who would rather see a playoff system decry the ever increasing number of "meaningless" bowl games. But does anybody stop and ask why we have 34 bowl games now, with two more being added next year? Perusing the bowl schedule we see that of all the pre-January 1 bowl games, only two are not televised by ESPN or ESPN2, and indeed only one game is slated for ESPN 2. What that means is that almost all of the early bowl games have an exclusive time slot on ESPN. Obviously this means that the ratings for each game will be maximized. Indeed, ESPN has become the gorilla in the room when it comes to the bowl system. While a lot of college football fans make fun of all of the minor bowl games, the fact is that these bowl games have ratings that far exceed any comparable programming that ESPN could put up in the time slot. The New Mexico Bowl, as minor as the bowls get, draws something like 3 million viewers. That's almost double the highest rating one can expect for a showcase regular season basketball game.

The power of ESPN can be demonstrated by UCLA's appearance in the Eagle Bank Bowl in Washington DC. Traditionally PAC 10 teams do not play in bowl games east of the Mississippi River, except for BCS appearance, because none of the PAC 10 teams travel well enough to warrant an invitation. Even relatively high profile non-BCS bowls such as the Gator Bowl or the former Peach Bowl (whatever it's called now) would never consider inviting a west coast team.

Everything else being equal, one would expect UCLA to be playing in the Humanitarian Bowl in Boise against Idaho. So how did UCLA end up in a regional east coast bowl game instead? Two reasons, both ESPN related. First of all putting UCLA in the Eagle Bank Bowl would give the game TV ratings far higher than any other opponent, as it would capture the lucrative Los Angeles TV market. Secondly, if UCLA played in the Humanitarian Bowl, it would mean that one of ESPN's other bowls would be stuck with two also ran teams out of the mid-American conference. While it is true that most any game with a bowl label will draw a significant TV audience, that is because people like watching bowl games to see matchups that they otherwise wouldn't see during the regular season. A game between two second tier teams from the same mid-major conference probably wouldn't draw a viewership beyond the players' families.

Note that this "made for TV" bowl schedule now extends to college basketball, with all of these preseason tournaments with top teams from all over the country that are played in empty arenas. These tournaments are supported entirely by TV dollars, with live gate not even being necessary.

Tiger Woods Deserves His Privacy -- Not!

Putting the aside of what size club Mrs. Woods used to pummel the Tiger or how many more girlfriends he has to pay off to keep quiet, another major issue relates to Tiger Woods' request for privacy and whether he's entitled to it. Some people think his private life is his private life and he should be left alone. However, the fact is that Woods owes his fame and fortune to being in the public limelite, and to then ask for privacy is an unreasonable request. A person who is a celebrity, and who has gotten rich off that celebrity cannot have it both ways. Indeed this is seen in the legal system where the standards for proving libel or slander are considerably more difficult when the claimant is a public figure. On top of everything, given Woods' notorious reputation for controlling his public image, his plea for privacy just doesn't fly.

Downloading You Tube Videos

I had always been a casual collector of music videos, particularly from the pre-MTV era. However the onset of You Tube rapidly accelerated my interest, as clips from Bandstand, Ed Sullivan, Shindig, Hullabaloo, Shivaree and other shows were posted. In the early days of You Tube this was a true bonanza as collectors posted thousands of these clips. But if you look at You Tube today you find very few of these any more because of copyright infringement claims. One poster complained that Dick Clark Productions made him take down a clip (The Skyliners' "Since I Don't Have You") even though the alleged copyright holder apparently didn't even have a copy of its own. Fortunately, I learned very early that You Tube videos are not merely streamed, but are actually downloaded onto your computer. So if you can access your browser's cache, you can save a copy of the video for yourself. It's easy in Internet Explorer--just go to tools, Internet Options, settings and view files, then copy and paste. The earlier versions of Firefox had readily identifiable cache folders, but I haven't been able to find them in the recent versions. Fortunately there's a Firefox plug in called Cache Viewer which does a decent, though not complete, job of capturing files in the cache.

All We Want Is A Fair and Simple Income Tax Law

You hear it all the time. Politicians talking about the goal of having a tax law that is fair and simple. Well, excuse me, but the concept of a tax law being simple and being fair are entirely contradictory. A simple tax law is not fair, and a fair tax law is not simple. Simple means one size fits all, and one size fits all is not fair.

One of the most naive and theoretical income tax proposals I ever heard of was made by a government economist, who proposed that federal income tax rates be indexed for regional differences in the cost of living. Actually, this is a eminently fair proposal. Why should somebody who earns $70,000 and lives in Manhattan and barely scrapes by due to the high cost of living be taxed the same as somebody making the same income, who lives like a king in some rural enclave in the South? But can you imagine how terribly complicated such a system would be? Obviously, the person who made the suggestion didn't.

Or how about the section of the tax law which taxes amounts received as punitive damages, but excludes punitive damages awarded in Alabama for wrongful death? Why do we need to clutter up a simple rule concerning the taxation of punitive damages and create a loophole for those silly Alabamans? Because only in Alabama are wrongful death damages categorized as punitive damages whereas such damages are not punitive damages in any of the other 50 states. The simple rule would be a blanket rule taxing punitive damages, but the fair rule is to exempt Alabama punitive damages that are not punitive damages in any other state in the USA.

So why do politicans keep holding out this goal for tax laws that are conjunctively simple and fair. Clearly that's what their constituents want to hear, with the contradiction between the two attributes not readily apparent to the general public. That raises the question of whether the politicians themselves are aware of the conflict, or are they as clueless as the general public. I can't imagine any politicians with any expertise in the tax law not recognizing the conflict, but for the run-of-the-mill non-tax specialist politician, I suspect they too may be clueless.

Of course the opposite corollary is not necessarily true--tax laws might be both unfair and not that simple. And indeed this can occur in the search for fairness. One of the current health care proposals is an excise tax on employer paid health insurance plans that exceed a certain value. The bill recognizes that a $8,000 plan in New York city is not the equivalent of a $8,000 plan in some low cost part of the country, so it provides for an adjustment of the threshold dollar amount for 17 high cost cities. Well that gums things up from a simplicity point of view. But is it fair? How about the people who live in the 18th most expensive city? How about the person who lives a mile outside the city boundary. And what exactly is the boundary? (SMSA defined, I presume.)

So despite what the politicans promise, you can have a tax system that is fair, you can have a system that is simple, but you just cannot have both.