State refund & random question

As indicated in a previous post, I filed my taxes electronically on Monday night. Wisconsin state refund was electronically deposited to my account Friday. That's a new speed record, in my experience.

I have a completely unrelated question that I've been wondering about for a few months. Why is it that the blogger user stats just suddenly stopped updating about three months ago? Just stopped cold, they did. So my profile page is looking a little ridiculous, with the "Recent Posts" dated 03 November. Ditto for Joseph and Salvius. Frozen in time.

Is this the blogger service dropping the ball, or did they change something and we just missed it?

Math moment

Yesterday, I noticed another thing that my wife in I have in common. And by that I mean, "have had in common since before we met." After all, it's not particularly remarkable to develop a number of things in common once you're married. But this new discovery adds to an already long list which includes (but is not limited to):

Both of us are firstborn.
Both born on a Sunday.
Have same number of letters in our first names.
Have (and had) same number of letters in our surnames.
Both have one sibling, a younger sister with 'Nicole' in her name.
Both fathers have 'Ray' in their names.
Our mothers' first names are Sheryl and Sharon.
Both have a Grandma Dorothy.
Both fathers were engineers, graduates of the same college.
Both mothers were nurses.

Hard to say how remarkable such stuff is. It is in our nature to take note of patterns and coincidences. So here's the new one I just noticed: Both my wife and I have social security numbers whose prime factorizations are three and one other number. Put another way, my SSN divided by three is a prime number, and so is my wife's SSN.

But this leads to the question: Is this really rare? Maybe lots of SSNs are this way. How are we to know, aside from undertaking a brute force operation sampling a great many numbers between our two SSNs? Interestingly, prime number theory tells us that there are shortcuts to these answers.

I'm going to have to dance around a little here to avoid publicly giving out too many hints about my SSN. Suffice it to say, the numbers for my wife and I start with the digits '39', and then differ. So let's re-state the question: "What is the spacing of numbers in the vicinity of 390 million where the numbers factor into two primes, one of which is three?" Well, this of course relates directly to the spacing of primes in the vicinity of 130 million. For example, the number 130,000,001 is prime. The next higher prime is 130,000,007. If we multiply both these numbers by three, we get two neighboring SSNs in the vicinity of 390 million that factor into two primes, one of which is three. In this case, the spacing between the SSNs is 18 (the difference between 390-00-0003 and 390-00-0021), or three times the difference between the two original primes. But is 18 a typical spacing?

Well, mathematicians in the 19th century figured out that the average spacing of primes in the neighborhood of a number N is very close to the natural logarithm of N, written ln(N). Furthermore, this formulation becomes more and more accurate the larger N is. This is a consequence, or perhaps an alternate way of stating, the Prime Number Theorem. Since I'm not a mathematician I'm probably not stating it well, but there it is. So using the Prime Number Theorem we can characterize the average spacing of primes in the vicinity of 130 million, and by extension the spacing of 3-times-prime numbers around 390 million.

From there, the answer falls out rather easily. The natural logarithm of 130 million is about 18.7. Multiply by 3 and you get 56. So on average, one out of every 56 SSNs starting with '39' factorize into three and a prime.

I'm going to stick to telling my wife she's one-in-a-million. One in 56 just isn't quite as flattering.

e-file bargains 2004

I got a valuable tip last week from a USA Today article. It noted that competition between tax preparers participating in the IRS' Free File partnership had finally driven Intuit (makers of Turbo Tax) to offer free federal e-filing to all filers.

This is an interesting development. I'm not certain as to why the government sponsors a Free File program. The article claims that the original mission was to help low-income taxpayers. Help them avoid tax preparation fees? Help them get refunds faster? Perhaps, but I suspect that the initiative mainly helps the government cut down on their manpower costs, since workers will have millions fewer paper returns to key in to computers. As "low-income" returns are often very simple returns to file on paper, the surest way to get those people to go electronic is to make it so there's no fees associated with switching over.

So how is it that I am able to file for free? Well, small outfits and newcomers to the tax preparation business saw the Free File program as a way to get their foot in the door and introduce their products to a wider audience. In the drive to get the greatest exposure, these companies "exceeded the mandate" and opened up free filing to more and more people. Eventually a couple small companies opened it up to everybody, regardless of tax status. This was intolerable to the giant Intuit, who along with H&R Block dominate the personal tax-software market. So Intuit followed suit, probably to protect their market share. Since I have been switching back and forth between Turbo Tax and Tax Cut the last few years, it seemed time for me to seize the opportunity to save a little money filing.

By the time I sat down to consider using Free File, H&R Block had jumped in with both feet as well. Since I used Tax Cut last year (and it worked reasonably well), I followed their link. Note that you must follow the link from the IRS website's Free File page in order to get the no-cost preparation and e-filing. You won't see this deal if you go to Intuit or H&R Block directly.

There are a couple downsides to this kind of filing, and they're mainly associated with the fact that you're running browser applets instead of a regular resident software application. For one thing, I only recommend doing your filing this way if you're confident in the reliability of your internet connection. I did both my federal and state returns over the course of three-plus hours, a stretch that few dialup connections would maintain straight-through in my experience. Another downside, at least with the online Tax Cut filing, is that in the end you do not wind up with a dot-T04 file like you would if you had the resident software package. Since I don't have that file, it means that if I want the convenience of being able to import 2004 information into next year's return, I'll have no choice but to use H&R Block's online filing. (You do get a full printable PDF of your returns though, for your records.) Lastly, probably owing to the fact I filed so early, I noticed a number of typos in H&R Block's web scripts, plus a few places where their error messages were misleading or confusing.

On the up side, all the federal and state preparation and e-filing that last year cost me $45 net (and additional hours of fiddling with rebate forms) cost me only twenty dollars (and less time) this year. There also was none of the usual software patching, where the release CD you would buy from the store has to be corrected with updates when you sit down to actually use it. And for the first time ever, a preparation software correctly queried for and handled my own peculiar combination of W-2s, capital gains, and Schedule C / Self-Employment information on the first walk-through. In years past, regardless of whether I used Intuit or Block, I always had to go back multiple times or even fiddle with the internal forms manually to get the return to come out correctly. So that's real progress from my perspective.

From H&R Block's perspective, they still have me as part of their market share, and they received twenty dollars of my money (state filing) without having to get one or more boxed software packages to me. No CDs, no booklets, no sharing revenues with Best Buy for retailing it all. Seems like a decent arrangement all around.

"Industry average"

We had the annual benefits meeting at my workplace this month, where the HR guru from corporate dropped in to explain the latest changes to the insurance arrangements. The news was less bad this year than in previous memorable meetings, but a lot of the same obtuse catchphrases reappeared, including the dreadful "industry average."

Some background: Once upon a time, I was hired. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. Well, it wasn't that long ago, but we did get point-of-service (POS) type health insurance coverage for employee premiums of zero. It was one of the factors that brought me to the company, offsetting the rock-bottom salary offer. This benefit, like several others since, eroded considerably. First step was to make only HMO-type coverage premium-free; if you still wanted POS, you had to scare up some out-of-pocket. The next year, everyone had to pay some portion of premiums. Over the following years, the portion of the premium that the employees had to come up with was steadily enlarged.

So you see what the net effect is. The underlying premiums are increasing, sometimes at double-digit rates. But at the same time the company is making you pay an even larger fraction of that premium. So year to year, the premium being deducted from the paycheck was increasing twenty or thirty percent! So you'd get a raise in the summer quarter, hopefully. Come winter quarter you'd get the un-raise, where the company would take back a chunk of what they'd given you earlier. A darkly comedic money dance.

But it's the HR blather that really gets my goat. "We are targeting a twenty-eighty employee contribution, which is in line with the industry average." "Office co-pays are increasing fifty percent, putting them closer to the industry average." To put it bluntly, if I had known I was joining an "industry average" obsessed company, perhaps I should have restrained myself over the years and put forth a more "industry average" effort. When the CEO comes to rally us, I don't recall him asking for and expecting average performance. For heaven's sake, the word "leading" is right under our company logo on the website. Wonder whether HR ever noticed that.

Now, being both employees and stockholders, most of my coworkers can understand fiscal necessity. We can understand restraining spending and curtailing benefits to present a picture of responsibility to the institutional investors and other important ownership blocs. But "approaching the industry average" is a direction, not a justification, and the highly-educated (and correspondingly irritable) engineering pool knows that. The HR panjandrums should learn the difference, otherwise in a not-too-distant meeting one shall receive such a magnificent verbal wedgie that the HR flack will go gimping back to corporate with the world's first and only Fruit-of-the-Loom brand do-rag.

Penguin News

Fran Biggs of the Penguin News (Stanley, Falkland Islands) announced today that she thinks a full electronic edition of the newspaper may be available in February, and that the annual rate for access should be fifty pounds sterling or less. This is great news for overseas subscribers, who in the past have only had two comparatively unattractive options for reading the paper. One option was to receive the paper "by post," which involves a large markup to cover postage (driving the annual rate to 82 pounds) and delays that meant your news was usually two to four weeks old upon receipt. The other option was to download back-issue PDFs from the Penguin archive for free, but of course back-issues don't appear until they're a good five or six weeks old. So either way the news was considerably dated.

I am further informed that it will be possible to pay for this new service by credit card -- again an improvement from paying by international wire transfers, which have proven for me to be both inconvenient and expensive. This fervent kelperphile eagerly awaits futher information.

Greetings, leeches!

Is your household pulling its own weight, federally speaking? The 2004 tax season is just about upon us, so it's a convenient time to find out. For Federal figures, I'm going to rely on Treasury projections for the full fiscal year, found here. What we'll do is look at overall receipts from income tax and payroll taxes, divide by the U.S. population, and compare the per-capita receipts to your per-capita household payments. Are you pulling your own weight, or are you a tax slacker?

On the government side of the ledger, we're looking at $913.1 billion in individual income taxes. Add $577.7 billion in "employment and general retirement (off-budget)." I take this to mean the Social Security portion of payroll taxes, which are neither considered "income" taxes nor considered a federal budget item. Then there's "employment and general retirement (on-budget)," which must be Medicare tax receipts, at $169.0 billion. The ratios look correct: the Medicare rate is 1.45% and Social Security is 6.2%, but the Soc contributions are capped while Medicare's are not. This is the bulk of what individuals pay into the system. We're not going to delve into the smaller line items, like estate taxes, since (1) they're small, and (2) as you're reading this, you're probably alive. So total projected federal receipts from individuals: $1.6598 trillion. Divide this by 294 million people in the United States.

I get $5646 per capita. I'd peek at your answer, but you're really, really far away at the moment, and the teacher is watching.

Consult your pay stubs for 2004. Add up your Social Security and Medicare contributions, then double that figure. Since we included all Soc and Med receipts as part of individual taxes above, we must consider the "employer portion" to be your tax on this side of the ledger as well. Add your federal income tax paid. If there's more than one of you at home, repeat for each person and take the sum. Divide by the number of individuals. Is the final figure above 5646? Yes? Then right now you are a net contributor to the work of the federal government. Congratulations, I guess. If not, then I will gently point out that the government is getting its work done in spite of you, using someone else's earnings. (Please do better next year!)

It's a considerable amount of money you have to earn to just break even with federal average collections. My spreadsheet here says that if you're a married couple with two kids in Wisconsin with a $120k mortgage on a $180k house and contributing 10% toward your retirement, your household gross has to exceed $106k for your four-person family to be pulling its weight. By comparison, the dual-income no-kids couple (somewhat smaller house, no freeloading offspring) is in the black after $54k.

Another eye-opener is how much the typical taxpayer is paying in his payroll taxes. And again, when I talk about payroll taxes, I include the "employer portion" as part of what you are paying. The fact that half the tax never appears on your pay stub is immaterial. It's still all money that you earn from your employer and goes into the U.S. Treasury. The above breakeven two-earner couple with two kids pays only $8,160 in federal income tax because of four exemptions, $16k in itemized deductions and the child tax credits. But their payroll tax contributions are a whopping $14,600.

Conservative radio talk show hosts make lots of hay in talking about how the top ten percent of earners pay such-and-such a percent of income taxes, and those statistics are true as far as they go. But it rather overstates the case by focusing solely on income tax, and ignoring the enormous flow of payroll tax money that the low-income earner is contributing to. Even so, when a household of four has to gross $106k to be average taxpayers, it does again demonstrate the extent to which the high earners carry the rest of the populace.

And that, I suppose, is the flip-side to "tax cuts for the rich" rhetoric: "Tax cuts for the leech," instead?

Urchin Report

I was driving to work Monday from very far away. That's because I was driving to work from a body shop that had finally granted me a loaner car, fifteen days after I was hit by a vehicle that came shooting out from a parking lot. December 26th that was, and since that day my life has been a muddle of inconvenience, phone tag, and more than a few miles of walking.

But that is, as they say, a whole 'nother story.

Nay, the rant this morning comes from the Greater Milwaukee Area; Greenfield Avenue to be specific, 7:50 a.m.. For it was there that the school bus stopped right on the Avenue, bringing to a halt all traffic in both directions, for it is law in Wisconsin that when the bus' red lights flash and it swings out its cute little octagonal stop sign that no motorist may pass the bus from any direction for fear of smooshing an incautious child. Fair enough.

Only as I came to a stop and started looking around, there were no children. There was a house on the right. There was a house on the left. Where were the children? Five seconds pass. Ten seconds. Surely the school bus stopped to pick up children, yes?

After a protracted interval, a small boy emerged from one of the house garages, jogging the length of his driveway toward the school bus. By this time ten cars were piled up both east and westbound, waiting. And as the child slowly lumbered toward the bus, he glanced backward. And I thought, "aw jeez..." For the backward glance could only mean that, yes, the even younger (and slower) sibling was now emerging from the garage. Criminy. From the time that bus stopped to when traffic was permitted to move again was no less than forty five seconds, and was probably closer to a minute when you consider that I didn't start timekeeping right away.

So what is to be my cantankerous, heartless, geezer-like "point" here? Mainly that, things sure as heck weren't like this when I was a lad! Nobody's at the bus stop when the school bus comes through? The bus keeps right on going! Lumping it two miles to school a few times teaches you something about punctuality. Furthermore, that bus this morning was pulled right up to the end of these kids' driveway. Door-to-door service! In our day, we got to mill about on some arbitrary road shoulder (nope, no sidewalks). Those kids this morning have the day to day convenience of only having to make it to the end of their driveway to patiently wait for the bus, but even that was too much to ask. Instead, two dozen commuters had to wait for them. Fifteen man-minutes of time lost unnnecessarily. Fifteen extra automobile-minutes of idling, for what? So two pre-teen children don't have to spend five minutes of their time waiting for the bus. Does this seem like an intelligent tradeoff to you?

And is it really the kids' fault at that age? Of course not. It's the coddling parents and bus driver who won't impose a higher standard. And the kids pay for it later when they find out they're soft.

Is there a hypertext markup key for "end of rant?" Bracket-slash-'eor'-bracket.