Supposedly the military air shows come back in 2014. I’m not sure that I understand the sequestration process that well. Is there suddenly going to be a lot more money in 2014? And it is selfish to hope that our government stop giving suitcases of cash to foreign dictators in favor of local pomp and circumstance?

I’d like to host a helicopter, airplane, and Internet discussion in Copenhagen the morning of June 8 (10:30 am?). We can talk about anything that I’ve posted about in this blog. I’m especially eager to meet with pilots to talk about how flight training (for helicopters and airplanes) and private aviation works in Denmark. Maybe a Danish reader will email me to suggest a place near Kongens Nytorv or at the University of Copenhagen.

Please email  philg at mit.edu if interested in joining.

What is surprising about this proposed new tax is that it is put forward by a representative from a town, Concord, partly occupied by an airport, Hanscom Field. Arguably the town would be better off if the airport were shut down and the land converted to McMansions paying property tax, but a shut down is not possible due to the fact that the airport is used by the adjacent Hanscom Air Force Base and the airport is owned by Massport, which would not cede its authority and revenue source to Concord. The airport generates a lot of jobs for people involved in hangaring airplanes, piloting them, fixing them, and fueling them. A tax on airplanes would result in hangar, repair, pilot, and fuel jobs moving to Nashua, New Hampshire, a 10-minute flight away. Why would a politician want this for the town that she represents?

One obvious argument would be to minimize noise from those Gulfstreams. But if the Gulfstream lives in Nashua, along with its pilots, flight attendants, fuelers, mechanics, and hangar crew, it will need to perform twice as many operations at Hanscom Field to get a passenger off to Teterboro, Dulles, or Palm Beach. Instead of landing and taxiing to its hangar, the plane will taxi, unload, and then noisily depart for its New Hampshire home.

I’m not surprised that a politician would propose a new tax but wouldn’t one expect it to come from a politician whose district did not include airport-related businesses and employees? Even the most peace-loving Congressmen nearly always support more military spending in their own district. Could it be the one-party nature of Massachusetts politics that accounts for Ms. Atkins’s war on Hanscom Field?

I’m planning a party to celebrate an immigrant’s recent acquisition of U.S. citizenship. Unlike the red carpet that our government rolled out for the Tsarnaev family, this Boston-area immigrant had to pay for an MBA from an Ivy League university and hand over roughly 50 percent of her income in federal, state, and local taxes over the 11 years since graduation before getting the citizenship that came so easily to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (a failing student in debt to the taxpayer-subsidized University of Massachusetts, who had previously cost Cambridge taxpayers approximately $26,000 per year as a K-12 student (given that the older Tsarnaev brother was collecting various welfare benefits in Massachusetts and was also a Cambridge Public School student, my immigrant friend was also paying for our hospitality to the Tsarnaevs)).

By accepting U.S. citizenship, my immigrant friend says goodbye to the possibility of returning to her native Russia and paying income tax at a 13 percent rate. She also says goodbye to the possibility of living tax-free in a country such as Monaco and to the possibility of living for a smallish annual fee in a country such as Switzerland. She is therefore adopting a share of our debt. I’ve got a baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie theme already planned for the core of the party but am stumped as to what to get to indicate her shouldering of our debt burden.

I thought briefly about getting a huge quantity of jelly beans, one for every dollar that she will have to pay back. But then I got stuck on the question of how many jelly beans to buy. http://www.usdebtclock.org/ says that debt per American (citizen or resident?) is $53,281. The JellyBelly FAQ says that there are 400 jelly beans in a pound, so that would be 133 lbs. of jelly beans. But not every resident pays taxes to service the debt. Some are too young, some are too old, some are unemployed, some are disabled, etc. The debt clock tries to adjust for that by showing “debt per taxpayer” (maybe misleading because people who don’t pay income tax still pay a lot of other taxes, e.g., property tax, sales tax, gas tax) of $148,136. What about the fact that my friend has an Ivy League MBA? Her income is higher than average and likely to remain that way. Furthermore, the Obama Administration and Congress are constantly coming up with new ways to “tax the rich”. My immigrant friend is likely to bump up against the $250,000 “you are now a rich person” threshold in a lot of future years. Should her share then be considered closer to $1 million?

We also have to consider her age, 37. She’s in her prime earning years yet by the time she turns 65 it seems unlikely that Medicare and Social Security will exist in their current forms (maybe they will be “means-tested” so that people who had higher incomes during their working lives won’t get any benefits). Does the fact that she is unlikely ever to receive these valuable government handouts mean that her share of the debt is higher? Since none of her tax payments will ever turn into checks and health care payments in her old age, unlike a lot of American taxpayers

Finally…. since the debt is growing, not shrinking, perhaps her share of the debt is actually $0. If it is never going to be paid back then nobody needs to shoulder the burden of repayment.

So… comments from readers would be appreciated. Question 1: What is the proper way to calculate the share of our national debt being taken on by a new citizen, age 37 and with a high income? Question 2: What is a fun but not crazy expensive or bulky way to symbolize this quantity at a party?

Today’s New York Times carries a story about how suburban poverty in the New York City metro area is growing while the central cities are “prospering.”

The typical house in a Boston suburb was built between 1950 and 1975, when the highways were new and the commute time was a predictable 20-30 minutes. During peak traffic periods, which now may include weekends, what had been a 20-30 minute trip is now a 45-150 minute trip and there is no way to predict which end of the 45-150-minute spectrum will prevail on any given day. Travel times get longer every year as car ownership and use increases. What’s the value of a house from which it might take hours to get anywhere?

What do readers think? Are the suburbs finished because we’ve melted down our transportation system? Or will Google’s computer-augmented cars save the suburbs by making much more efficient use of existing roads? (And if we haven’t mustered the political will to establish congestion pricing or to tax older high pollution cars so that people have an incentive to buy cleaner new cars, how will we ever muster the political will to mandate semi-automatic cars that can cluster efficiently on highways?)

Though I was not concerned about your ability to do the trip safely, I personally try to offer a two-pilot crew to any passenger if I am able to do so. That is really the cornerstone of airline safety. Let’s assume that a pilot makes a serious mistake once every 100 hours. Sufficient numbers of these mistakes are unrecoverable that we have the accident rate in R44s that we have (http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/11nall.pdf says it is between 6 and 7 per 100,000 hours for both non-commercial helicopters and airplanes). If you have two pilots and the mistakes are not correlated, the probably of both pilots making a mistake during the same hour is very low (1 in 10,000 hours). So in theory the chance of an accident should be 100X lower. In practice http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safetystudies/SS0101.html makes it seem that the risk of an accident is about 24X lower in FAR 121 operations [scheduled airline; always two pilots] than for GA [generation aviation]. So there are some things that apparently aren’t uncorrelated or due to the pilots. But still I can think of a lot of times when a copilot has helped me and/or pointed out a mistake.

If you were willing to monkey with bayonetting a teleconverter on and off the lens every now and then, the price of this Canon lens would instead buy you a Nikon D800 with superior image quality to any Canon body, a Nikon 200-400/4, a Nikon teleconverter, and a full complement of professional Nikon lenses at focal lengths shorter than 200mm. But it would be crazy to let rational thought interfere with the purchase of a new photography tool!

[Note: to my Canon-owning friends who ask me about a more reasonably priced lens for kids' sports photography I generally recommend the Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6L, though I myself do not own one (I have a 70-200/2.8 and a 300/4, among other lenses that overlap this range).]

The selling costs of the house don’t include the potential for it to be vacant for six months, with the former owner paying about $7000 in rent somewhere else.  That means the house has to be held for 15 years to break even.

Then consider the reduced flexibility of the homeowner. He or she may be spending more time commuting because it was too expensive/burdensome to move after taking a new job within the same general area (see “The American Dream or the American Delusion”, a working paper from University of Pennsylvania where the author found that “female homeowners spend less time on enjoyable activities, such as active leisure). He or she may turn down a better job in another city. If homeowners are commuting 20 additional minutes per day, that’s about 83 additional hours per year, $1666 at $20 per hour. Now the house has to be held for 19 years. If the homeowner waffles for five years before moving to a state with better economic opportunity (think Michigan to Texas), giving up $5000 per year in income, the $25,000 takes another three years to recover. Now the house has to be held for 22 years.

Homeowners in states with big unfunded pension liabilities (report), which is to say nearly all states unless investment returns end up being 8 percent/year for the next 50 years, could find themselves with dramatically higher property taxes over the required 20-year holding period. Renters will feel the property tax pain too, albeit indirectly, but will have the flexibility to escape. I’m not sure how to factor in state/local insolvency and accompanying property tax risk.

Obviously if you love being a homeowner, enjoy trips to Home Depot more than playing soccer or going to movies with your kids and friends, and are very picky about wall colors and appliances, it might make sense to buy. But I don’t see how it can be justified on rational economic grounds, contrary to the rosy “just hold it for six years” picture painted by the New York Times.

[Disclaimer: I am a homeowner, but I don't think that it has saved me money or made me happier. I did it mostly because of a dog (who ended up making me happier and making me a lot of money too since he spurred me to start my own company).]

I pointed out that there wasn’t much to buy back then. We couldn’t buy cable TV. We couldn’t buy mobile phones or personal computers. We had just one car, like most other American families. My dad took the bus to work. We took the bus to school. In any case, even if one wanted to splurge on a car, the most expensive cars available (e.g., Cadillac) were not more than twice as expensive as the average car (compare to today when most cities have dealers selling cars that cost 5-10X the average car’s price). Ordinary families did not aspire to live in 5000 square foot houses.

How about the housekeeper? “Her husband didn’t work, so she really had no choice but to work,” I replied. “Though her blood pressure was high and she developed some health problems later.” In thinking about it I realized that she would not have been a member of 2013′s American workforce. Both she and her husband would have qualified for disability benefits. So a big part of the answer for why our middle class household could afford a housekeeper was that we did not have to compete with the federal government for our housekeeper’s labor.

[Pressed by an audience member to explain how funding these huge particle physics experiments is beneficial to an economy, Professor Klute was forced to resort to arguing that drawing really smart people (i.e., physicists) to a country would help that country when they quit to do other stuff (e.g., run the hedge funds and trading departments within investment banks that periodically melt down and require torrents of taxpayer cash). Certainly there does not seem to be an immediate market for Dark Energy. Comments from readers would be welcome if anyone can think of something that you can buy today that depends on understanding anything smaller than protons, neutrons, and electrons.  Certain kinds of scanners for medical imaging? For finding radioactive material inside shipping containers? What?]