Toby Must Die

So my buddy (I'll call him Andrew Miller to protect his identity) loaned us the first season of the "West Wing" and said "I'll bet you love this because you're a politico." Okay, so I misquoted him, but what does that matter. It sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat. Then one day Christina fell asleep at 8:00 and I wandered into the front room and put in the first disc.

Well friends and neighbors, we're now on season three in the midst of the whole "Bartlet's running for re-election and people are still freaking out about the whole MS issue." Yeah, both Christina and I have been sucked into the show despite the bleeding liberal positions of the senior staff and President Bartlet. I wouldn't have cared about this show prior to my sudden conversion to a political wonk as of two years ago. But now, I love it. I love the politics and I especially love the policy talk. I think Christina just loves watching that dreamy Sam Seborn.

Anyway, I can't wait for something to drop on Toby, the Communications Director. I can't stand him. I can't think of anyone good named Toby. Let's see, we have Toby the dog on the Great Mouse Detective who did jack the whole movie, Toby Keith, and Toby the Communications Director. Our third-born shall not be named Toby. He has this annoying tendency to be a soft talker giving way to loud screaming rants.

I got giddy that they talked about the poverty line in a recent episode but it was utter rubbish what OMD proposed. Somehow, they were going to increase the poverty line by adjusting for housing prices and by including work expenses i.e. child care, medical out-of-pocket expenses, and transportation. Supposedly this would increase the number of people in poverty by four million. Leave it to liberals to adjust the poverty line in such a way as to increase the number of the "official" poor. Practically anything you do to affect the way that poverty is currently measured will reduce the poverty rate. You know, stuff like including the EITC (average of $1800 a family), the value of means-tested noncash benefits (food stamps, WIC, public housing), and using an inflation adjustor (CPI-I-RS) that corrects for the mistakes in inflation in the current inflation adjustor (CPI-U). That's not even taking into account that we could use an inflation adjustor that looks at a variable basket of goods (assuming that as the price of something increases, poor people will adjust by purchasing a substitute i.e. price of beef goes up, people switch to chicken) or that we could include the value of Medicaid and Medicare or include adjustments for income underreporting. The point I'm making is that the current way of measuring poverty does not include a number of indicators of a family's income that would pull them out of poverty if added. Now, some people might say "Yeah, people might get 4,000 added to their official income, but they still are making around 20,000. It's the actual poverty line that's messed up." And they'd be right. 20,000 is jack, especially in urban areas with high costs of living. What you need to do is attack the way the poverty line is determined which is three time the cost of the economical food plan as determined by the USDA. If someone would like to propose a better plan, I'd like to hear it. Really, I would.