I would like to add this photo to thereifixedit, but as that site usually shows fixes that don’t actually work, I think this one might not qualify. It appears to be both fully functional and fully awesome.

…except that I just got an awesome toy/tool – the kill a watt! It’s pretty simple, just plug it into an outlet and plug something into it and it will read off pretty much any metric you want concerning electricity usage. Volts, Amps, Volt-Amps, Watts, and KWh (measured over however long you leave it there). After opening it and trying it out on a few random items, I realized I couldn’t put it down until I had measured everything in my house that attaches to an outlet. Luckily, I live in a very, very small house. I didn’t find anything too outlandish, but I’ll publish my results anyway, just for fun. An engineer’s version of fun.

Altec Lansing Subwoofer + 2 speakers – While this is sold as a 120W amplifier, I cranked some music (almost) as loud as I could, and never got it to draw more than 12 W. But, it did qualify as a candidate for unplugging when I found out that it draws, while completely off, 5 entire watts. Day and night, for the past few years, it has steadily and needlessly burned precious energy from the world’s supply. At my current electricity cost of 11.87 cents/KWh, it costs me 0.059 cents/hour. That’s $5.20 per year, or maybe $20-$30 total over the years I’ve owned it. Not terrible, I suppose, but definitely unnecessary.

Toaster – While off, this actually draws an unmeasurably low amount, which is good. While in use, it draws 721W, which is evidently the necessary amount to blacken two pieces of toast in just under 2 minutes.

Microwave – This one was a little bit intense. The microwave is rated at 1200W, but when I plugged it into the kill a watt and began nuking a glass of water, the device began beeping and screeching and blinking while reporting a draw of 1,860W. I assume it was warning of some measurement ceiling that was about to be surpassed, but it seemed to be saying something more along the lines of “situation unstable: vacate the premises while microwave is in use!”.

Fridge – While on, it draws 165W, and with the door open at the same time, 199W. While “off”, it still draws 8W, or ~$8/year. If I assume that it spends about half of its time on (cooling), it is costing me about $86/year. Considering that much of my food is courtesy of the Trader Joe’s freezer section, that seems like a pretty fair deal.

Besides a couple lamps, a phone charger, a laptop charger, and an electric heater, none of which gave particularly interesting or unexpected results when subjected to the kill a watt, that is the complete list of my pluggable appliances. I guess now I will have to leave the subwoofer unplugged for 4 years in order to recover the cost of the kill a watt, but at least now I know that my microwave is 50% more powerful, and therefore awesome, than it claims to be.

I do these things for fun. Really.

When I filed my taxes this year, some burning questions hit me. Mainly, I wanted to know two things – where did my tax money go, and how did it get there? Actually, I’m rather painfully aware of the answer to the second one with each passing paycheck, but the first one seems worth pursuing. So I did. It didn’t take that long to figure out in general how tax dollars are spent, and then apply that to my total tax payment to see how much money I personally spent on difference federal and state pursuits. And the results are in:

Federal Taxes

Social Security ($4,248) – I guess this is basic – most of that money goes to help retired people balance their budget, more or less. And, if I’m incredibly optimistic, I can hope that eventually somebody will do the same for me.

Defense ($3,772) – Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised to see that this item takes nearly 50% of the federal tax budget. I’m sure that some of those dollars are well-spent, but I’m also sure that most of those dollars are not. Or at least I don’t believe they should be spent the way they are, to be brief. That’s more money than I spent on groceries or a car last year.

Education, Employment, and Social Services ($1,058) – I’m going to have to do some research for part 2 of this post to figure out some specifics of where that money went.

California Taxes

K-12 Education ($1,046) – Seems good, and doing more seems better.

Health & Human Services ($833) – Again, I’ll have to look into this one.

Higher Education ($317) – So I’m contributing as much to California higher education (~$26/month) as I would pay to AT&T for a landline. Interesting.

Line items I’d like to do more research on include Natural Resources/Environment (US, $299), Energy (US, $248), Community & Regional Development (US, $126), and Non-agency departments (CA, $16). For “Environmental Protection” in California, I spent a whopping $2 last year. Considering that CA has some of the most stringent environmental law in the US, that must be an incredibly efficient operation. Or maybe the enforcement just isn’t what it could or should be?

I downloaded your proposal ( and the full excel file) for government spending for the next few years, and have the following comments:

I see that in 2011, you expect to bring in $2,567,000,000,000 ($2.57 T), but plan to spend $3,834,000,000,000 ($3.83 T). This means you will overspend by $1.26 T, which is 49.4% of your income, $4,114 per person, or 8.3% of the entire family farm (GDP). I realize that there is a lot going on right now in the U.S. that needs your attention, but I don’t think this is a good idea. Why wait 5 or 10 years to balance the budget and bring the deficit down to 3% of GDP? Why not do it right now? I have some ideas for how it could be done:

Net tax cuts and net spending increases have to be off the table if our goal is deficit reduction. Our only options are to spend less or collect more. So let’s start by cutting spending to make up the difference. The following categories are the biggest annual expenses:

Social Security ($730 B)
Department of Defense ($531 B)
Medicare ($491 B)
Medicaid ($297 B)
Interest on Current Debt ($251 B)
Overseas Contingency Operations ($159 B)
Unemployment Trust Fund ($102 B)
Health and Human Services ($84 B)
Transportation ($77 B)
Federal Employee Retirement ($72 B)

These “Top 10” categories account for 87% of the total spending, and we need to save $817 B to get debt down to 3% of GDP. To do that, we could apply an instant 25% cut to all of these categories. If we decide not to touch Social Security, we could cut 32% from everybody else. Or, we could eliminate entire categories, say Defense and Medicaid. Of these options, I would say that cutting 25% across the board would be the best. Of course, this would be a huge cut. People on social security or federal retirement would see an immediate 25% pay cut, medicare/medicaid copays would jump up, many jobs “created” by DoD & OCO & HHS & Transportation would be lost. We would probably enter a period of serious deflation as incomes fell, asset prices decreased, etc. The Great Recession would most certainly get much worse. So I think making instant cuts of this magnitude is probably not feasible. But it is one way to live within our means, however painfully.

So what about raising taxes? The following categories are the biggest annual sources of income:

Individual Income Taxes ($1,121 B)
Social Security Taxes ($674 B)
Corporate Income Taxes ($297 B)
Medicare Taxes ($192 B)
Federal Reserve Earnings (79 B)
Excise Taxes ($74 B)
Unemployment Insurance Taxes ($60 B)
Customs & Duties ($27 B)
Estate & Gift Taxes ($25 B)
Other Misc ($17 B)

The first thing that jumps out at me is the $297 B contribution by corporate income taxes. Here are the most recent gross annual profits of a few companies: Proctor & Gamble ($40 B), Chevron ($80 B), Apple ($17 B), Goldman Sachs ($50 B), Ford ($19 B), Toyota ($21 B), Exxon Mobil ($189 B), Berkshire Hathaway ($44 B), Burlington Northern ($10 B). You get the idea. Considering the thousands of large companies I haven’t named, don’t you think $297 B sounds a bit low? I don’t know what the average effective corporate tax rate is, but it appears to be somewhere around 18% for various reasons (loopholes, offshore monkey-business, etc). Considering that the stated corporate tax rate is 35%, immediate enforcement of this rate would boost treasury income by almost $300 B, which is close to half of the $817 B gap we are trying to close. Assuming we wanted to close the entire gap by raising taxes only, we could enforce the corporate tax rate and raise social security and medicare taxes to match their respective outflows. Consequences of increased taxes could include prolonged economic slowdown and “encouragment” of U.S. companies to invest outside of the U.S. But some benefits would include a reduction in bonuses and executive salaries, and possibly a sense of justice/equity/fairness between the individual taxpayer and the corporation.

To me, the best solution would involve both cutting spending and raising/enforcing taxes. A 10-15% spending cut across the board (with possibly a few “protected” programs), moderate tax raises, and serious tax enforcement would probably do the trick.

And the consequences of continuing to do business as usual, with massive deficit (debt) spending? I think that events of the last two years have given all of us a very clear economic picture of the eventual, indeed inescapable results of massive debt spending. I don’t believe any good-hearted person wants to see a repeat performance on a country-sized scale.

So I’m glad to hear that you support the creation of a fiscal commission to “achieve fiscal sustainability over the long term”, and I look forward to seeing their results. But in the words of my new favorite author, please “make a plan that adds up.”