Another Rant!

As an able-bodied, white, American male, I am officially not a victim of discrimination. This is notwithstanding the fact that I am also short, fat, left-handed, Catholic and am a member of several other disaffected groups. As a non-victim, the only opinions I am allowed to have on the matter are 1. everyone who is not an able-bodied, white, American male is a victim of discrimination, all of the the time, 2. I'm guilty of it, all of the time, and 3. something needs to be done about it.
Lawrence Summers is the President of Harvard University. (He used to be "Larry" when he had a political job in Washington and wanted everybody to think he was a regular guy.) He got himself into a world of trouble when he suggested that the fact that women were underrepresented on the math and science faculty at Harvard might have something to do with their innate abilities. You'd have thought he shot Mother Teresa. No amount of apologizing and explaining have been able to calm the waters. The latest news is that Harvard will spend $50 million to "improve the climate for women and minorities and achieve a more diverse faculty." This move is called "a good start."
I have the privilege of being a father to both male and female children. Through them, I've had the chance to watch other children, male and female, make friends, play, study, compete, make choices and just generally grow up. Guess what? Boys and girls are different. For sure, there are differences among individuals; but boys and girls are generally interested in different things, they behave differently, they play together differently.
I don't know whether those differences affect the kind of classes they choose or their choices of careers - I suspect that they do - but apparently we're not allowed to find out. We seem to have decided that these choices are driven by discrimination, and we need to have remedies!

Heavy Stuff 1

I used to think about being a novelist, but there is that whole notebook thing. You know, carry a notebook with you wherever you go, write down what you see, what you hear, what you feel; if you wake up from a dream, write it down. While that's good advice for a writer, that's not how I want to live.
Often when we examine things, we change them. To study a flower, we cut it from the plant and take it to a lab and analyze a dead flower, or we take a photograph and look at an image rather than the real thing. Relationships are complicated, emotions are complicated, life is complicated. Instead of living in the moment, the dedicated writer has to step back and analyze and try to uncomplicate and explain.
Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living. In some sense, an examined life is not lived at all.

Taxes

Start with two premises:
1. Taxes are the price we pay for living in a society.
2. Nobody likes to pay taxes.

That being said, there are some kinds of taxes that are OK, and some that are awful.
The concept of the Income Tax is good - it falls on citizens who have the ability to pay, and those who earn more, pay more - but the execution is terrible, with the exclusions, credits and deductions, and the incomprehensible Alternative Minimum Tax.
The gasoline tax is an OK tax, especially when the revenues from the tax are earmarked for transportation.
The sales tax a good tax in that its simple and easy to collect, but its bad because it falls disproportionately on the poor - the more of your income you spend, the more tax you pay. The income you save escapes tax. Pennsylvania mitigates the regressive nature of the tax by exempting food and clothing from sales tax, but this has the effect of complicating the tax (bread and lunchmeat are not taxed, but a sandwich is.) And, of course, nobody's figured out an easy way to collect sales tax on internet transactions.
One of the worst taxes is the Social Security Tax, which is collected under the fraudulently named the "Federal Insurance Contribution Act". Its a flat tax, it applies on your first dollar of wages, without any deductions; the fact that employers pay an equal tax on the wages it pays is a drag on job creation; it disappears for high wage earners; and does not apply to any other source of income, such as interest, dividends and capital gains. (Why do we tax income from our "labor" and not income from our "capital"?) The biggest problem in trying to fix Social Security is that the program was sold as an "insurance" program. Credit the President for educating the public on the pending collapse of this Ponzi Scheme, but he has yet to explain how taking money out of the system to fund private accounts will solve the problem.
To my mind, the Estate Tax is the opposite of the Income Tax - the concept is troubling (you're going to tax somebody because he died?), but the execution is pretty good. It falls only on larger estates, if there's a liquidity problem, the tax can be paid over time, and the assets of the estate go to the heirs valued, for tax purposes, as of the date of death. That means there's no income tax on the asset's appreciation while it was held by the decedant.
The taxes I like the best are those voluntary taxes, like cigarette taxes and the lottery. For the most part, I volunteer not to pay them.