Scott Adams: Tax the Comfortable
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MikeStansky (http://dilbert.com/users/MikeStansky)
Dec 27, 2010
I saw an amusing analogy on taxation:
Suppose that every evening, 10 men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do. The 10 men drank in the bar every evening and were quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner said "Since you are all such good customers, I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20". Drinks for the 10 men would now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men? The paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share? They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.
So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by a higher percentage the poorer he was, to follow the principle of the tax system they had been using, and he proceeded to work out the amounts he suggested that each should now pay.
Therefore, the fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing.
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% saving).
The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% saving).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% saving).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% saving).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% saving).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free.
But, once outside the bar, the men began to compare their savings. "I only got a dollar out of the $20 saving," declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, "But he got $10!" "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a buck too. It's unfair -he got 10 times more benefit than me!" "That's true!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back, when I got only $2? The wealthy always win!" "Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison, "we didn't get anything at all. This new tax system exploits the poor!" The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had their beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, is how the tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes will naturally get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas, where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
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The comment id is 75340, if anyone knows how to hack the URLs.
Seriously, there are forms of wealth which don't add value to societies, and if those people aren't willing to get into markets because it hurts their bottom line too much, so be it. "The Rich" are not a universally good group that adds value to all the economies where they do business; they too have their part in fucking up a huge number of locations around the world.
Just as an example, Germany is one of the most prosperous nations in the world, and their economy is as socialist as it gets (in the European, modern use of the world, not the classical Marxist usage). Their labor force is highly skilled and sheltered, and its manufacturing base is strong. I don't see the same thing happening in the dirt-poor Caribbean tax havens.
She's done almost nothing but move the country further away from socialism and unemployment now stands at 6.7%. So I don't see your example as being very accurate.
Also, apparently the lower German employment is due to a socialist program in which the government gets companies to lower your working hours and makes up the salary difference.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/business/global/04dmark.ht...
> Part of the answer is that, in Germany, Trumpf could take advantage of government incentives to reduce worker hours rather than lay off people, a system known as short work. In the program, the government gives workers partial compensation for the lost wages.
Edit: Just to quote facts...
Welfare Cuts: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20050104/business/...
(Though Germany's made further cuts since)
Short-Work Program: http://www.german-info.com/press_shownews.php?pid=1638
how does one measure "socialism" exactly?
First of all, Germany is social democracy, not "socialist". On the other hand US is liberal capitalist country - even slightest hints at turning it more towards European-style social democracy are instantly attacked as "communism" there.
Secondly, even if Germany is more of a social democracy than US, it's "a little more", not "significantly more".
And a lot of that has been initiated during the time when Schröder was in power – then head of the Socialist Democratic Party.
So it's really not that easy to ascribe it to certain political leaders or certain political ideologies. Unless you count pragmatism…
Considering the fact that many countries have paid a much, much heftier price on their social welfare than Germany and have not improved substantially means that the balance need not shift as much as many people claim.
I would prefer it if people in this thread could avoid lazy labels like "capitalist" or "socialist" and instead speak specifically about what policies you think help or hinder German competitiveness.
I have trouble imagining that anyone would look at Germany and see it as a model of what an economy can do when the government does nothing - rather, in Germany, the government is everywhere. The state plays a leading role in all aspects of civil society. This does not mean that private sector players have no influence, however, the role of the state is large.
I'm uncertain what the original author may have meant by this:
"Germany is a socialist as a nation comes and they're one of the most prosperous countries in the world"
However, if you recall the debates that happened in Britain and the USA during the 1970s, Germany raises many interesting questions. Both Thatcher and Reagan came to power in a political environment where the labor unions were blamed for the competitive decline of Britain and the USA, respectively. Given the very strong unions in Germany, and Germany's competitiveness, some revision of the 1970s debate in the English speaking countries seems warranted. Apparently it is possible to have very strong labor unions and yet remain competitive.
In almost all 50 states, the overall tax code is regressive - the middle classes are taxed more heavily than the rich. The regressive nature of the state taxes is offset by the progressive nature of the Federal taxes.
Imagine re-doing the above scenario of 10 men in a bar, but doing it in an accurate way, where there is sales tax on those beers - then the story comes out rather differently.
This is far from the whole story, and NH isn't perfect, but the model of these four taxes seems to hurt the poor much less.
relevant msn article: http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/YourRealTa...
full paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.148...
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But, once outside the bar, the men began to compare their savings. "I only saved 16% out of the 20% reduction," declared the tenth man. He pointed to the sixth man, "But he saved 100%" "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the ninth man. "I only saved 22%. It's unfair -he got much more benefit than me!" "That's true!" shouted the eighth man. "Why should he get 100% back, when I got only 25%? The poor always win!" The eighth, ninth, and tenth men got together and talked to the bartender, who (because their money was keeping him in business) agreed to no longer serve the group unless they adopted a less progressive schedule.
And that, boys and girls, is how the tax system works. The people who pay the highest tax rate will naturally get the least benefit from a tax reduction, but they have the most power to explicitly direct a reduction to themselves.
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Note that however it may seem, I don't mean to argue a particular position by this. I'm only pointing out how changing a little piece at the end completely changes the message of the parable. It's a complete hypothetical either way. I've been calling this the "Fallacy of the Parable": using a parable in place of a reasoned argument.
Obviously, a parable is only as good and the truth it illustrates. If the parable is implausible (like your revised version), it obviously carries no weight.
Parables are good for teaching children lessons, but not as evidence for a particular viewpoint.
(Also, you may not hear people say things like "The poor always win." That's because that side prefers to a different sort of emotional appeal; I hear things that express the same sentiment all the time. Nobody discusses economics in good faith, which is part of the problem.)
Ok - the tenth worker has an obligation to pay for this stuff. But about 60% of the government budget is just wealth transfers, and has nothing to do with the public goods you mentioned. Why does the tenth worker have an obligation to pay for that?
(I'll ignore the fact that education is a private good. I'll also ignore the many wealth transfers hidden inside the public goods you describe, e.g. inflated teacher comp packages, unnecessary military spending which funnels money to various congressional districts.).
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html (All #s taken from official sources. I use this link because it is t he only source I've found which combines both state and federal numbers into one chart.)
It is for the reasons I've stated that Social Security is not part of the discretionary budget. The discretionary budget is dwarfed by defense related spending. And this is just the 'on the books' spending in defense related activities. When one factors in the supplemental spending on defense activities then the share of defense spending is even greater.
Highways, national defense, and education are a large majority of the discretionary budget.
Edit: I'm only talking about federal spending as that is what the topic of discussion appears to be.
Same thing for medicare, medicaid, welfare, and even big portions of defense and education. See the numbers I linked to - most government spending is redistribution, not public goods.
You may count it as a government expenditure and count payouts from this pension system as a government expenditure but this is contrary to how this is normally considered.
The major reason that US car companies struggled so much over the last decade is that they are saddled with pensions that foreign car manufacturers are not (e.g. Toyota). They sold as many cars, but their profit per car was less because of pension obligations to workers no longer producing for the company.
I do agree that it's not analogus, because it's not zero-sum, and it's not decided by chance to the same degree. If anything making the scenario more unfair.
I actually think insurance can be quite a good model of the tax system. I'm insuring my assets against a total societal breakdown and confistcation, a la the Bolshevik revolution. I pay more than some because I have a higher asset base to lose but less than others who have more than I.
Why can't they use real people and real numbers?
"Why can't they use real people and real numbers?"
I would suggest that simple models can help clarify things, in a way real situations do not. People use simple models in math, physics, medicine, sociology, statistics, economics, finance, chemistry, ecology, climatology, astronomy, etc. In almost every field of inquiry, people attempt to build simple models to try to get at the underlying truth of some situation. Real events are full of complex interactions, which often involve more variables than can be easily understood. The human brain is not set up to understand real events in which 200 variables all have some influence.
Issac Newton was offering a simple model when he said all matter attracts matter, proportional to its mass and inversely proportional the square of the distance - his model does not explain everything in the Solar system, it especially failed to describe the orbit of Mercury, but it did offer wonderful insight all the same.
Lister and Pasteur were both offering a simplified model when they advanced the germ theory of illness, and yet their model offers wonderful insights into disease.
Gauss offered simple models for more things than I could possibly list here - some have argued that he was the most important mathematician of all time. He contributed something to group theory, geometry, analysis and he largely invented statistics. And what is statistics, but a set of methods for quantifying simple models or sorting relevant data from the irrelevant?
With only slight exaggeration, I could make the argument that the progress of science is the progress of simplifying models.
That is the argument for not using "real people and real numbers".
People are largely in charge of their own destiny in America (as well as many other countries). No one is made a CEO by birthright.
The real data is usually not as convincing as toy examples, analogies, or assertions that your political opponents are pure evil.
So technically that's an analogy, rather than a hypothetical. My bad. It's still a far cry from using real people and real numbers to argue for inflationary monetary policy.
(Incidentally, one very common liberal hypothetical is that "tax cuts for the poor have a higher velocity than those for the rich, since the poor live hand to mouth and must spend everything they get." It turns out this is false - the poor pay down their debts with tax cuts, while the upper middle class spend it. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shapiro/TaxRebates.pdf http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16246 )
which other monetary policies you know of? inflation is the underpinning of monetarism - very little to do with Krugman or liberals.
The difference would be that under a stable policy you would only print money to keep the currency stable as inflation occurs, rather than printing money to fund government initiatives.
The fact is, even if all the money printed would be given away to non-governmental entities (that is, central bank would not be engaging in Quantitative Easing), it will still be funding the government (e.g. some of it will be collected back as taxes).
/groan
Laws could be passed to keep wealth from moving overseas without being taxed first.
It's very simple. All it takes is political will.
As for using terms such as "rob" and accusations of not being "American" enough, let's save the ideology and inflammatory rhetoric, shall we?
"Before you break out the tiny violins for my hypothetical doctor, allow yourself to imagine that he's got a mountain of college loans, his mortgage is underwater, and he's supporting three grandparents (one on his wife's side) who all need some form of senior care, and the doctor's parents, and his wife's parents, have no spare cash. The doctor's parents might also need help in a few years. Oh, and the doctor has two kids of his own, one of whom needs some sort of special care. That's what the real world looks like for the so-called Sandwich Generation. For this imaginary doctor, any extra tax burden takes money from four generations of his family who needs it and distributes the cash to strangers."
Imagine that instead of a doctor, we are talking about a hard working carpenter who makes about $40,000 a year, and of whom we could say "his mortgage is underwater, and he's supporting three grandparents (one on his wife's side) who all need some form of senior care, and the carpenter's parents, and his wife's parents, have no spare cash. The carpenter's parents might also need help in a few years. Oh, and the carpenter has two kids of his own, one of whom needs some sort of special care."
Why do the woes of the hard-working doctor demand more sympathy than the woes of the hard working carpenter?
If that's what you drew from the article; you've missed the point entirely. The point Adams is making is that a doctor making $250,000 per year has a lot more in common with the $40,000 per year carpenter than he does with the truly rich.
This isn't about having sympathy for the doctor OR the carpenter; it's about understanding that both of them will be significantly hurt by higher taxes. Since no one is talking about increasing taxes on the carpenter, it's fair to question whether we've set the bar of "rich" far too low--or if two categories even make sense.
The answer is to punish the doctor? This is precisely my problem with the general tact of liberalism: the answer is always to bring the upper-middle class down to the level of the lower-middle class while predominantly leaving the true wealthy untouched. Why shouldn't people be able to get somewhat ahead? Why is the mentality that we all have to be exactly equal so long as we can lump your income with this mythical middle class?
As it was, pretty much all of the Bush era tax cuts were extended.
As to this:
"This is precisely my problem with the general tact of liberalism: the answer is always to bring the upper-middle class down to the level of the lower-middle class while predominantly leaving the true wealthy untouched."
According to Wikipedia, only the wealthiest 1.5% make in excess of $250,000:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
The poorest 98.5% of the USA makes less than $250,000 a year. Are you trying to define a portion of that wealthiest 1.5% as part of the upper middle class? If so, which part? Would you go into the top 1% and define that, too, as part of the upper middle class? Definitions matter, and it would be good if you could be precise.
I would add, my politically active friends are pushing for much higher taxes on the rich. Their focus is not on the poorest 99% of Americans, but the wealthiest 1%. And so, they focus on those making in excess of $350,000. I am curious if you regard that as within the range of the middle class?
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of those outflows are avoidable only to the extent that they are picked up by taxpayers, like taking care of his parents or college grants. We don't win if we grab $10,000 more from that guy, he goes bankrupt, and we incur $30,000 more in liabilities picking up what he now can't carry. (And yeah, I think those numbers do work, as the government frequently picks things up inefficiently.)
As if that matters. It's not like they are taxed before they pay salaries. Small business people pay taxes on the amount of money they have left over after all business expenses are deducted, i.e. profit, not revenue, so what point exactly are you trying to make here?
> Just taxing everybody with a high income is not necessarily a good idea
Small business people, if near broke after paying all outflows, wouldn't qualify as people with high incomes even if their business was pulling a billion dollars a year in revenue, and wouldn't be paying any additional taxes on the rich because they wouldn't qualify as rich.
The whole small businesses would be hurt by taxes on the rich is a red herring, it's simply not true, and is just rhetoric from the right meant to distract from the real issues. It takes advantage of the fact that most people don't know how taxes work and don't separate gross income from net income. Businesses don't pay taxes on all they money they make, they for the most part, pay taxes on profit, which is by definition, extra money above and beyond operating expenses.
Bob the business owner needs a new gizmo for his lawn care operation. It costs $500k. Normally he would need to depreciate this gizmo over some period of time (it depends on what you are buying) spreading the expense out over those years. If he has a net-profit over $250k then whatever he makes over that rate will be taxed at that higher rate reducing his ability to afford the gizmo.
Essentially the issue is that under normal accounting rules he would pay the higher tax rate today, but it would take 5 years for him to fully realize that expense from a tax perspective. That could, at least in theory, make small business owners a bit gun-shy about making large capital purchases as their take-home pay would take a hit even though they bought something for the business instead.
Thankfully the legislation, as crafted by Obama, contains provisions allowing the cap on capital purchase deductions to be raised significantly (I think it would have put it over $1M). Thus you could take the entire expense in the year you bought the thing and avoid this particular tax issue.
A family with an income of $200,000 per year is certainly more well-off than a family with an income of $50,000 per year; but there's absolutely no parallel to a family with income of $5,000,000 per year. I'd contend that the family with the $200k income has far more in common with the $50k income than the $5m family.
And then we look at the $5m per year family and the $500m per year family. There's still no comparison.
I don't think this is a case of Adams trying to push himself into the "middle class," I think what he's getting at is that the "middle class" is really a myth.
1. No, my point wasn't that there's something wrong with using the word "suckers" to describe people on $200k/year, but that I strongly suspect that he's substantially better off than a lot of the people he's labelling as "suckers".
2. Oh ho ho ho. Yes, indeed he said that. But the fact that someone says "I'm doing X to demonstrate the power of language" doesn't mean that's really why he's doing X. It may merely mean that he's hoping to deflect criticism of the sleazy rhetorical move he's pulling. Which, by an astonishing coincidence, moves in the same direction as the sleazy rhetorical move of saying "allow yourself to imagine" followed by this huge pile of problems our hypothetical doctor might have, each of them plausible enough but distinctly unlikely in the aggregate, and then "That's what the real world looks like for the so-called Sandwich Generation". No, it's what the real world looks like for a small fraction of the apparently-affluent, of any generation.
Oh. And "gang-raped by the Rich and the Majority while they high-five each other and call it fairness"? I suppose that would be another example of a loaded word to demonstrate the power of language. The most that anyone's proposed is that his taxes should be returned to the level they were at before the so-called Bush tax cuts, which would put them at about the same level as they were under that egalitarian communitarian socialist, Ronald Reagan. And even that has just been put on hold for two years.
Imagine the government found some way to fund itself without any tax revenue at all. Say, a giant reserve of natural resources were found on federal land, and now tax revenue isn't needed to fund the government. As a libertarian-leaning conservative I personally would be delighted to see all federal income tax go to zero. After all, we've always been told that taxes are needed to fund the government. But somehow I think some people would not be happy that even "rich" people wouldn't have to pay taxes anymore.
And here I think is where the real difference lies: libertarian and conservative type people see taxes as a necessary evil. If the government wouldn't need the money, the ideal situation would be zero taxation. But I think liberals tend to see things in the opposite way: Taxes are a way to acheive fairness, and funding the government is a convenient means to that end, in the absense of which they would find a different means.
Conservatives want to set the level of taxation to match their preferred level of spending (at least in theory), and liberals want to set the level of spending to match their preferred level of taxation. The difference is whether taxation is the means or the end.
Any truth to this technically? It feels right to me but I'm neither an economist or much of a politician.
There's a whole other world of hurt when you look at that "at least in theory" part. Recent history has shown conservatives being very good at lowering taxes but totally inept at the corresponding reduction in spending. Liberals tend to be better at staying true to their higher taxes, higher spending line.
I'm a liberal but I can understand the basic conservative, libertarian economic argument (I have issues with libertarian theory but thats another flamewar) and can even see it as, perhaps, a viable model. But if they can't decrease spending while cutting taxes then their model fails completely.
The gist is that President Obama really cut a fantastic deal for liberals yet many were still livid because it also contained an extension of the tax cuts. Hence they want to punish the rich above or equal to achieving their own goals.
Personally I think the left is a sliding scale that goes from Moderate to Marx. Marx's famous quote "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is in line with the comment you quoted and I think people on the far left believe just that. I think the further you get away from the far left on the sliding scale the less that becomes true.
(Please note I'm not even on the conservative side here. I think the tax cuts should have expired. But I can see both sides of the argument)
And when you do, you'll discover various activists with an agenda pushing speculation and prediction backed by gigantic statistical formulae. And this is even taking the neo-Keynesian picture of the economy as a proven truth (as opposed to a wildly oversimplified model based on assumptions known to be false).
(Note: not trying to imply that any other macroeconomic prediction models are much better.)
That anger isn't about reducing the already ballooning deficit. There's something more there (whether that "more" is to punish the rich is debatable)
"The extremely wealthy are receiving tax cuts which will barely affect their personal quality of life, yet cost 'the rest of us' billions of dollars. That money would have a far higher quality of life impact if spent on welfare or tax cuts for middle/lower income Americans. Our quality of life is being held down for the sake of theirs, when theirs is already far higher."
Both want to cut government waste and will employ as many civil servants as it takes to do this
If we look at conservative libertarianism vs liberalism, the comment is pretty spot on; especially in its conclusion as to how both sides view the purpose of taxation.
I've never met a single human being who thinks this way. I'm not denying that such people exist but it seems to be an absurdly broad brush.
Edit: thinko.
IMO the danger of a government that doesn't get its funds from the people is that it doesn't really need the people. The leadership only need to maintain their lock on the golden goose, and that can often be done more cheaply with guns than butter. They people become at best a nuisance to be placated, and at worst a rabble to control with fear.
It's a good thing normal people never end up in that situation! If he wasn't rich, he couldn't afford it. Wait... I think they do!
He has a good point, but his analogy completely obliterates it. Unfortunately, he acts like we've never heard of the middle class and that he's delivering us news that they exist. They have been part of every tax discussion I've heard in the last few years. It's not news.
Exactly.
In my opinion an income (or wealth-based) tax systems is not really that optimal in a globalized world. Instead I propose a kind of resource-based tax systems: Instead of taxing income tax the amount of scarce resources used. For example, the amount of land owned, the amount of oil used, or even the amount of CO2 emitted.
I think that such a system would have several nice implications:
* Businesses would automatically look for ways to save taxes, and thereby help the environment.
* It better reflects the true cost of a business or person to the society: If someone earns a lot of money this does not reduce my standard of living. However, if someone destroys the environment it does.
* As a country you can avoid loosing many of the Internet businesses to tax havens, as there is a lesser advantage of moving away.
Unfortunately, in many countries it's exactly the other way around. For example, many South American countries endorse usage of scarce resources by subsidize oil. While this works in the short-term, the consequences in the long-term will be fatal.
My family was left penniless just paying the healthcare bill for our first daughter, and even then I would never compare a broken system to gang rape. I'm not saying we should discount the woes of middle-class America, but I think it's irresponsible to act as though the poor don't have it worse — and even more irresponsible to imply that the poor and the rich are somehow in collusion to "rape" the middle class.
His initial point is a good one, but it strays really far.
The problem with a consumption tax is getting the Government to agree to a system that doesn't guarantee them a certain income and getting the people to accept huge price spikes (which are emotionally jarring even if your income tax has been eliminated).
The poorer you are, the larger the proportion of your income that gets used for consumption.
Folks making minimum wage currently pay little or no taxes, so they'd see a significant tax increase with consumption-based taxation - an increase they can't afford.
Maybe they would see what it's like to be taxed..and not vote to get everyone else gouged while their income isn't affected.
Should people from well-off families be made to see what it's like to live off a minimum wage income so they can not vote to make life harder for the poor?
If no, why one direction and not the other?
seeing as how the the poor vastly out-number the rich, no. I also don't see how the rich are making it difficult for the poor.
They pay more than their fair share of taxes (which in turn pays for many social programs that they don't even use). They also aren't lobbying to take anything away from the poor, except less of their own money.
Warren Buffet disagrees.
> They also aren't lobbying to take anything away from the poor, except less of their own money.
So no one's lobbying for benefits cuts to the poor? Are you posting from an alternate universe?
Similarly, very few people pay attention to the "use tax" where that's in effect, and buy small, high price items like computers online where tax < shipping.
Also, consumption taxes would disproportionately kill the poor since they tend to spend 100% of their income if not more.
Deleted comment
I'd love to hear a workable solution to this...
I would imagine all but a handful of doctors make less than 2 million dollars (40 times the median household's income), and those that do I'd be fine calling rich. If you create a new tax bracket for the rich at that point, you're losing only 2% of the increased tax income on the 100 millionaires, but not harming the struggling, debt-ridden doctors of the world.
Of course, we'd need to create a big exemption for the poor (most of whom choose not to work).
[edit: citation for my assertion that the poor choose not to work: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf ]
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/14/national/main45225...
> The number of jobs with pay below the poverty threshold increased to 29.4 million, or 22 percent of all jobs, in 2006 from 24.7 million, or 19 percent of all jobs, in 2002.
If you bothered to read your link as far as the third paragraph, you would realize they redefine poverty to be $41k/year. By that definition, more than half of France lives in poverty, oh noes!
Considering I quoted the fourth paragraph...
$41k is a pretty small sum for a family of four. My family of four's health insurance premiums would eat up 1/4 of that. Our copays would eat up another 1/4. Not much money left for rent, insurance, food, transport to work, education, etc., let alone longer term stuff like college and retirement savings.
My mistake.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/24/magazines/fortune/tully_henr...