rich and poor

Paul Krugman, in a recent editorial, makes the statement that "this election really is -- in substantive, policy terms -- about the rich versus the rest."   Mitt Romney, for his part, refuses to apologize that he is successful in his private economic life, and Obama, for his part, refuses to apologize for making his record at Bain Capital and what we know of his tax history a matter of campaign rhetoric.  Some of the current rhetoric surrounds the Bush era tax cuts, where predictably the conservatives want to maintain all the tax cuts, while the progressives want to maintain those for those at the middle and bottom of the income spectrum and raise them for the rest.  While neither solves the deficit problem, at least in terms of direct revenues, the progressive plan puts more money in the coffers while the conservative plan, as Krugman notes, makes a promise to close tax loop holes.  There is, really, little reason to believe that the conservatives will do much in the way of closing tax loop holes -- in part because most of the so-called loop holes are either incentives to behavior that we ostensibly value (e.g. deductions for mortgage interest because we value the social effects of home ownership) or benefit the very constituency that form the contributing position of the conservative base (e.g. the differential tax rate for capital gains).  The closure of each loop hole, I'm certain, would simply provide new fodder for political contention and gridlock.

The tax code is, of course, far too complex to comprehend, with intentional and unintentional effects scattered throughout, and that is why the notion of a "flat tax" has some appeal, principally among libertarians and conservatives.  Just for the sake of argument, and to highlight the issues involved, let's assume that we have a flat tax of 10% on income.  As a matter of calculation, this is absolutely equitable, and that is part of its common appeal, and anyone who has divided snacks among eight year olds knows the appeal of absolute equity.  When one considers the effects, however, the equity tends to disappear.  The effect of a 10% cut on an income of $30K, leaving $27K, is much greater than the effect on an income of $100K, leaving $90K.  The cost of most goods and services are the same -- a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk will set both back equally -- which means that, after necessities, the person with $27K will have far less to spend than the person with $90K.  One could expect the latter to spend on "upgrades," a better dwelling or car, and on luxury items like an iPhone.  Altogether, this seems straight forward, and seems to provide no disincentives to increase one's incomes.

There are a couple of tipping points, however, one obvious, one not so obvious.  At the low end of the scale, there is a point where the confiscation of the tax would tip a person into real poverty, a point at which the 10% means the difference between affording and not affording the basic necessities of life.  One could define this with some precision, but again for the sake of argument, let us say that it requires an income of $20K to provide just the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter, transportation to and from work, and the like.  If we confiscate the $2K in taxes from someone making $20K, leaving $18K, they can no longer provide for themselves.  Assuming, of course, that we do not want to reduce people to abject poverty, there seems to be a couple of options.  On the one hand, we could say that, for incomes below $22K we would not confiscate the tax.  Or, on the other hand, we could go ahead and confiscate the $2k, and return it to them in the form of entitlements -- say, food stamps.  The first, of course, opens the door to a progressive tax rate, and at certain income levels provides a direct disincentive to increase one's income.  For example, if one is making $21K, with no tax, one would be wise to decline a raise to $22K, with a tax leaving $20K.  The second just pushes the same issue off on the value of the entitlement.  On the assumption that the entitlement disappears at some income level, one would be equally wise to decline a raise that wiped out the entitlement.

At the high end of the scale, the tipping point is not so obvious in part because it relies on an individual standard.  We could ask, for example, "at what point does an increase in income make no appreciable difference in those things that one might reasonably value?"  At an income level $100K, the 10% tax leaving $90K may well make an appreciable difference, say, in one's ability to afford a better home in a better neighborhood with better schools.  At an income level of $1000K, the 10% tax leaving $900K would make no appreciable difference in one's ability to afford a better home, or much of anything for that matter.  At even higher income levels, it makes even less appreciable difference.  We might never reach the point where it makes no appreciable difference at all to specific individuals -- after all, someone might highly value the third $20 million home, particularly if their neighbor has three --  but we could ask the initial question a bit differently.  At the low end of the scale, there are more or less obvious reasons to provide incentives to earn more.  At the high end of the scale, however, at what point do we say, enough is enough?  Steve Jobs died a very very wealthy man, not because he created money out of nothing, fortuna ex nihilo, but because people like you and me made contributions to that fortune in the way of iPhone purchases, among other things.  At what point do we say, "you win.  You have taken enough."

I might be accused of class envy, but in truth I really don't envy Mitt Romney the good fortune of his parentage, or the fortune he was able to leverage.  Except perhaps envy for the overwhelming sense of security a fortune of his scope must provide, I have given it very little thought really.  I might also be accused of fomenting class warfare, and that comes closer to the truth, but I would not advocate the violence that warfare tends to imply.  At the moment, I am simply a voice in the wilderness, advocating for the sorts of redistributive justice that would make us not only a society of moral individuals -- and it is important, of course, that we be moral individuals -- but more generally, and collectively, a moral society.  There are any number of fraught notions within the previous sentence, not least "redistributive justice" and "moral society," and those notions are fraught because we have not yet achieved a consistent set of values that could garner universal consent.  Michaiel Walzer in his Spheres of Justice comes close to articulating the space I want to occupy when he writes that the aim of "redistributive justice" and of "political egalitarianism is a society free from domination."  He recognizes that to free a society from anything requires some level of coercive force, and to free a society  from domination gets stuck at the universal level in sophomoric paradox that we must exercise coercive force over domination.  We must, as it were,  dominate domination, and we must do so within an advanced democracy, if by no other means, through the coercive force of the "will of the people" as it emerges within the deliberative process of our electoral politics.  As some have noted, if the extremes of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements have a common core, it is this egalitarian impulse to be "free from domination."  The question that is hotly to be debated, is this:  "domination by what?"

The extreme right, of course, fears domination by the government, particularly the federal government.  They seem to have less compunction about seizing control of local government and using its coercive power to legislate a particular vision of the moral society.  They nevertheless have a point, and their fear of central governments is not entirely misplaced.  I needn't reiterate Hayek's arguments here to suggest that the 20th century experiments to coerce communal egalitarianism from a central government were neither communal nor egalitarian, but were bathed in the blood of millions.  No one I think wants to resurrect those experiments, but the reflexive fear of government domination, captured in the word "socialism," still prevails.

The extreme left, of course, fears domination by the plutocracy within oligarchy.  They too have a point, and their fear of corporate dominance is not entirely misplaced, and seems altogether more imminent than government dominance, which brings me round again to Krugman's point that this election is about the rich and the poor.  Anyone who doubts that money is power hasn't yet stumbled far enough through life.  The ability to give or withhold a loan, for example, is a direct exercise of power with considerable influence on the quality of most Americans' lives.  The ability to set the terms of that loan deepens the power and the influence, and the use of force, even violent force, to coerce obedience to those terms completes the picture.  One need only conjure the picture of a mobbed up loan shark to understand why "usury" is morally challenging.  The difference, and really the only difference between the mobbed up loan shark and Bank of America are scale and government.  Under the regulatory sway of the federal government, they are not entirely free to set the terms of the loan, nor are they free to deploy their own enforcers.  They must use the courts.  Government, in short, stands between the vast majority of Americans and dominance by the Plutocracy within an Oligarchy.

I have some empathy for both sets of fears, though in this day and age I know of no one who credibly advocates for anything that might actually resemble a socialist government.  There are those, of course, who believe that government may well be the solution to pressing social problems, and not the problem itself, and President Obama would be within this camp, but they tend to advocate for government solutions proposed within and made legitimate by democratic institutions.  This hardly counts as "socialism," unless any government solution to any social problem is by definition socialism, and there are those, of course, who believe just that.  The reflexive cries of "socialism" are not intended to engage discourse around the nature and type of government, not even discourse around the nature of a specific government policy, but rather emerge from a broad distrust of government itself, in all its dimensions -- or, and this is more to the point, self-interest.  On the one hand, we are familiar enough with the conspiracy theorists, the one's who form militias in northern Michigan, but anyone who has held a position of leadership within a large complex organization knows how difficult it is to keep the ducks marching in the same general direction, much less mount a true conspiracy.  On the other had, we are familiar enough too with the government bashers, those who assume that any government operation is inefficient and ineffectual, but here again anyone who recognizes a grain of truth in the Dilbert strip would need to admit that the inefficiency and ineffectuality are characteristics not simply of government organizations, but of human organizations, the too-big-to-fail banks with their billion dollar losses being no exception to the rule.  Whether one's belief tends toward the hyper-efficient conspiracists or the bumbling ineffectuality of the bashers, there is plenty of reason to distrust government, per se, and it was perhaps the peculiar circumstance and genius of the framers to build this distrust into the constitution itself, but they also recognized that government, though problematic, was also necessary.

I am not concerned with those that distrust government in and of itself, and even feel they serve a broadly socratic role as gadflies, but I am concerned with those who capitalize on that distrust out of self-interest.  It's a good rule in life to follow the money, and that pertains especially in politics.  If we believe that government is necessary -- if we believe, along with Hamilton, that "the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes" to fulfill the ends imposed upon it -- then we should concern ourselves with the question of ends -- what is our tax money actually being used for? -- and with the question of equity -- do we have a fair and equitable system of taxation to accomplish those ends?  I suffer under no illusions that current tax policy tends to benefit the very wealthy more than the merely wealthy, and the merely wealthy more than the rest of us.  According to Roberton Williams from the Tax Policy Center, for example, "the very rich may be 'different from you and me,’ as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, but they are also different from the ordinary rich, as new IRS data on the 400 tax filers with the highest adjusted gross incomes show. Not only do the top 400 taxpayers have much more income than others with [adjusted gross incomes] exceeding $1 million — nearly 75 times as much on average in 2009 — but they get far more of their income from investments and thus pay lower effective individual income tax rates."  


I probably don't need to point out that Mitt Romney is among those that pay lower effective individual income tax rates.  While across the board tax cuts of the Bush era do put more money in the pockets of most Americans, they also put a disproportionate share back in the pockets of the very wealthy and the merely wealthy.  Whether those tax cuts and Mr. Romney's tax rate have had a salutary effect on job creation has yet to be conclusively demonstrated, but they have effectively increased the deficit.  It is also accepted, more or less as common wisdom, that reductions in the deficit will come at the expense of social programs.  As C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute points out, however,  "the nation’s real tax system includes not just the direct statutory rates explicit in such taxes as the income tax and the Social Security tax, but the implicit taxes that derive from phasing out of various benefits in both expenditure and tax programs. What I have labeled 'expenditure taxes' are like tax expenditures in the sense that both tend to hide the full impact of government and are seldom dealt with on a consistent basis."  He also points out that "although low- and moderate-income households are especially affected, middle income households face these expenditure taxes, too, as in the phase out of Pell grants and child credits."  In short, reductions within and access to social programs, like Pell grants and food stamps and medicare, increase household expenditures on education and food, and it's not difficult to see how that would have a disproportionate effect on those who can least afford it.


So, yes, this election really is about the rich and, if not the poor, then rich and the rest of us.  It will not likely play out that way however.  While American voters tend to vote the state of the economy, the votes comes more a "throw the bums out" reflex than a consideration of one's real economic interests, and there are plenty of other divisions to distract us -- evangelical social conservatism being perhaps the biggest of the big distractions.  Those who are for Jesus, against socialism (and gays, and illegal immigration, and abortionists, and government handouts in general) will line up at the polls and vote against their own economic interests while saying, "it's the economy stupid."    
  
       
        





  

fund raising

USA today has reported that "Obama releases his list of fundraisers every three months, but Romney has refused to do so."  As they go on to point out, "Romney is not required to name his bundlers, with the exception of those who work as federal lobbyists.  Presidential nominees, however, have voluntarily disclosed the names of their top fundraisers for a dozen years, starting with Republican George W. Bush."  Many have noted that Romney has been secretive about many things, to include his tax returns, among other things, and one wonders why such secrecy is necessary.

It could be, of course, that he feels as my wife feels about such things in our private life -- that it's nobody's business but his own -- but then too, once when I suggested running for public office with some seriousness, she ... well, let us say, she was not receptive to the idea.  That by way of saying, there is a diminished expectation of privacy when one holds public office, and the expectation diminishes the further up the food chain one climbs.  Romney, as a presidential candidate, should know that there is virtually no expectation of privacy, so even on that score his secrecy is troubling.

It could be, of course, that he feels disclosure would be more politically damaging than his secrecy, but then one needs to wonder about his own wisdom.  Secrets have a way of coming out, and one doesn't need a secret on the order of Sandusky's for it to have significant implications, and a certain part of Romney's secret has emerged through the sleuthing of USA TODAY, which reports that "more than 300 people" or about 25% of the total 1,200 fundraisers "come from the world of finance, more than any other sector," and more than a dozen come from Goldman Sachs.  Of course, there's not much that's surprising in this, insofar as Romney toes the Republican line and has "pledged to dismantle financial-industry regulations enacted during the Obama administration."

In fairness, President Obama has his financial sector fundraisers as well (77 of  532 to be exact) but one suspects that Obama will not have the success in the sector that his rival, and the real success will not be within the boundaries of campaign finance.  As the article also points out, "Romney's most prolific supporters also have performed double duty -- writing large checks to Restore our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC that can raise unlimited amounts to aid his White House bid as long as it operates independently of his campaign."  The question -- how independent is independent -- has not received an adequate answer, but it may be moot regardless.  Ninety of Romney's fundraisers have "donated nearly $18.4 million to the group, which has spent more than $53 million to promote Romney and attack his rivals."

Altogether, this comes to the point of my previous entry.  The chicken egg question of whether the financial industry has bought Romney's support, or whether Romney's position has garnered the financial industry's support, is irrelevant so long as the alignment is clear, unmistakable, and mutually reinforcing.  There is nothing new in this, except that the supreme court decision around Citizens United, by allowing unlimited contributions to super PACS, have significantly magnified the influence of corporate interests, like Goldman Sachs.

Individual citizens can still make up their own minds, and vote accordingly, but if we honest with ourselves, really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that advertising works, and a good deal of the money spent by either political camp does little to promote dialogue around the best solutions for the problems facing America today, certainly not the continuing problem that the financial sector poses for the vast majority of Americans, and does a whole lot more to reinforce existing attitudes, not all of them pretty.  Romney spoke before the NAACP, for example, not because he expected a warm welcome, or to convert the black community to his vision, but to demonstrate and reinforce the worst racial attitudes and stereotypes.  The ploy is so transparent as to be laughable, except that, I suspect, it will work with those voters who turn out to his rallies.

The money, in short, not only magnifies the influence of certain sectors who want a receptive face in the oval office, and their methods for putting him there are perhaps rhetorically effective, picking the scabs of the deepest wounds in the American psyche, but most are a diversion from what is actually at stake.  We have, in effect, almost fully commodified our electoral process within a largely unregulated market.  To a greater and greater extent, those who own America are running American, if not directly, then by proxy, and it is not surprising that fewer and fewer people are owning more and more of America.  The real danger to American democracy is not socialism, certainly not communism -- those are the bogey men of the past.  The real danger is oligarchy, and perhaps that is the secret Romney wants most to keep.  He is emergent type of the emergent oligarchy.

Orin Hatch

Of late, I have become interested (obsessed I hope is too strong a word) with American conservatism, in part because I simply can't believe that rational human beings could believe what they believe with such sincerity.  The Salt Lake Tribune recently published (June 29) an editorial by Senator Orin Hatch marking the Supreme Court decisions upholding the constitutionality of the so-called Obamacare.  It can be found at http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/54397092-82/health-law-president-care.html.csp) so I won't repeat it entirely here, but it is representative of a style of argumentation that I find, well, distressing.  It piles assertion on top of assertion with nothing to warrant or evidence to support the arguments.

The opening paragraph is indicative.  It begins, "over two years again, I stood on the floor of the Senate and warned the president that he'd regret jamming his massive $2.6 trillion health spending bill through Congress on a party-line vote.  He'd regret his signature policy achievement that undermines personal liberty and the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government."  There are so many implications here that one doesn't know where to begin unpacking them, but let me say first, OK, it presents a number of arguable assertions, one for which evidence could be found and should be found. One assertion is that the President would regret "jamming" the bill through congress on a "party line vote."  Jammed, of course, is a loaded verb, but we'll look the other way on that, but the implication, of course, is that there's something terribly wrong with "party-line votes," and that they are an object of regret as opposed to what?  More consensual votes across party lines.  It's convenient for Hatch to accuse the President of "party-line votes," in part because the Republican party has become famous for strict ideological alignment and refusing to compromise unless its a crises and the 11th hour -- famous enough that two moderate, but right leaning scholars felt it necessary to write a book about the ideological extremism of the Republican party and their insistence on "party line votes" .  Mann and Ornstein's title, It's Even Worse than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, says it all.  Because they make the argument there, I won't make it here, and suffice it to point out the irony of Hatch's assertion later in the editorial that the President behaved "arrogantly -- ignoring or attacking th legitimate concerns of those who disagree with him."  At the very least, it seems, that ball bounces between two courts.

Another assertion is that the President would regret "his signature policy that undermines personal liberty and the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government."  I think the President would agree that the health care law is his signature policy, but one implication of Hatch's statement, of course, is that the President considers it his signature policy, not because it extends health care to hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans, but specifically because it "undermines personal liberty" and "limits on the powers of the federal government."  I suspect that the President's intention was more the former, and that he gave not one nano-second of thought to how he could "undermine personal liberty."  In fairness, Hatch is not making that claim, but rather a factual or descriptive claim -- that the health care law, regardless of its motivating intent, has the effect of "undermining personal liberty" and "the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government."  Let me take each in turn.

On the first, it probably wouldn't surprise my one reader that I find the whole question of personal liberty fraught with difficulty, as did the founders and everyone since.  Short of no government, any government is an infringement on my personal liberty.  The restrictions on my "personal liberty" range from the ridiculous to the sublime, and there are altogether too many to list.  A big one, of course, is the governments imposition on my income, in the form of taxes, and the government has imposed a positive obligation, a positive responsibility on me.  Hatch does not say how the law is an infringement on my personal liberty, but I suspect he is referring to the individual mandate.  To suggest that the individual mandate is an infringement on my liberty is true, but trivial.  Of course it is.  So is the requirement that I drive on the right side of the road, that I throw my trash in the trash receptacle, that I pay my sales tax, that I refrain from smoking at the mall, shoplifting, killing my neighbors dog, or raping his wife.  The  question before us is not whether the individual mandate or other provisions of the law are an infringement on our liberty, but whether the infringement on our liberty, the mutual obligations it creates as a tax, is ethically and morally responsible.  A good deal of ingenuity goes into avoiding precisely those questions because we would have to decide, as human beings, what our obligations are to others in a civil and moral society, and as Americans we want to believe we have few if any obligations to provide others with anything, and certainly not something as expensive as health care.  As one wag famously yelled, referencing the uninsured, "let them die."

On the second, I am not a constitutional scholar, and so would not really want to comment in depth on the "constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government."  The Supreme Court, by definition, are constitutional scholars, so I am confused.  The editorial was occasioned, or so it would seem, by the Supreme Court decision.  A majority of the court decided that the law was constitutional, so again, by definition, it did not undermine the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government.  That Scalia side-stepped the presented arguments, declaring the individual mandate a tax, strikes me as interesting, in part because I believe it to be a tax (and would have appreciated a more cogent argument from Scalia in that regard) and in part because I thought the "not-a-tax" argument on the part of the democrats was in some measure a misguided appeasement of conservative anit-tax sentiment.   It is misguided because the Republicans are not to be appeased.  That the Republican pundits were so outraged by his decision, that he had not voted with his appointed purpose along ideological (or rather party) lines and struck down the law, is deeply ironic.  The individual mandate itself was an appeasement of private insurance providers, which originated in a Republican health care proposal, and now that it is a "tax," of course, it is open to attack as a tax.  Hatch writes that "families earning under $250,000 a year will bear most of the burden of this tax," and factually he may well be correct, but what he doesn't say, and won't say, is that families earning under $250,000 already bear the greatest burden of taxation in this nation, and that every Republican tax proposal will exacerbate the disproportionate share of that burden while decreasing the services and security of middle America.          

Having said all that, the fundamental difficulty with Hatch's position, such as it is, comes in the last paragraph.  He writes, "before we can even undertake these much-needed reforms, we have to scrap ObamaCare and start over.  Then we can move forward with real, step-by-step reforms to give the American people the health care they deserve from the doctor they want at a price they can afford."  Even if I were to concede every point made by Hatch, and it would be difficult because there are few points to concede, my response to the last paragraph would need to be something along the order of "yes, and what would those step by step reforms be exactly?"  It is also deeply ironic that the Republican contender for the White House must repudiate his own step by step approach, the one he implemented as Governor, to appease his party base.  When Hatch tells us that "when Mitt Romney becomes president, he'll scrap it is in its entirety and move forward with common-sense health reforms the American people deserve," I suspect Mitt Romney will learn the lesson that Obama (and probably every occupant of the White House) has learned.  It is one thing to run for president, quite another thing to be president.

The occupant of the White House must make  positive proposals of the "do this" variety.  Any positive action is open to a wide-ranging critique, in part because any positive action will have greater consequences for some, lesser consequences for others, but it is unlikely any change within a domain as complex and as fraught with competing interests as health care will have positive consequences across the board -- not for any one individual, and certainly not for the larger society.  Anyone undertaking a change will encounter those who, to quote Hamilton in the first of the federalist papers, will "resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the officers they hold" -- or in the current vernacular, those who will be negatively impacted by the change.  Mitt Romney, and those like Hatch who are his campaign minions, have it easy.  There is much in the health care proposal that can be critiqued, that has been critiqued, but to say that, "over two years later, this law is as unpopular as it was then," is to say virtually nothing unless one is willing to specify, unpopular with whom?  and why?  -- to say that what people "want is a different approach that addresses their number one concern: skyrocketing health care costs that are eating away at every family's pocketbook," is again to say virtually nothing unless one is willing to specify just what that different approach might entail and how it might be implemented.  

If Mitt becomes the occupant of the White House, and God forbid that he should, the one positive proposal is the repeal of the existing health care reforms.  That action too will be subject to a wide-ranging critique.  I am not entirely convinced that the number one concern among the American people are the "skyrocketing health care costs."  I would agree, however, that it might well be a signature concern among employers and employees who find themselves in a double bind.  As the costs of health care escalate, along with the costs of health care coverage, they must either diminish the amount of coverage for their employees or defer the escalating cost of that coverage to the employees or as is more often the case some combination of decreased coverage and increased cost to the employee.  There is, of course, another option.  The employer can continue coverage at the same level and accept diminished profits, but I would concede that, given the rapidly escalating costs, for many small to medium sized employers, to do so would mean no profit and ultimately no business.  So, for that faction, the "skyrocketing health care costs" are of concern, but even so that does not address the needs of those who are unemployed, those who are under-employed in contingent or part time positions, those who are of age and attending school full time -- the millions of Americans who are uninsured.  I suspect their number one concern is not the cost of health care, but their access to health care.  On the questionable assumption that we are a moral society, when the crises comes, we will not turn them away, and they will access the health care systems, but they do so in ways that are guaranteed to have  the greatest impact on the escalating health care costs.  It is, in every respect, a vicious cycle.

If the Obama health care reforms should be critiqued, and they should if we are to improve upon them, I would suggest that they are not enough Democratic health care reforms -- that they are too much step-by-step reforms of the sort advocated by Hatch -- that they are too much the RomneyCare compromises that attempt to rescue the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between private insurers and private employers and private providers.  The expansion of medicaid is a teeny-weeny step in the right direction, but on that point Hatch might be right, if altogether too hyperbolic, in that it is a "gun to the head of the states."  It simply substitutes the state for the employer and maintains the same employer-employee imbroglio, which is, I believe, at the core of the problem.  Hatch tells us that "before we can even under-take these much needed [entitlement] reforms, we have to scrap ObamaCare and start over."  Mitt Romney, as president, might well scrap his resurrected Massachusetts legacy of health care reform, but I doubt seriously that he will "start over."  Health care reform is fraught with difficulty, not least the money.  A good deal of money flows around and through health care, and I strongly suspect that those who benefit most from the status quo are those who are most likely to make the right kind of contribution to the Republican war chest. I don't want to pander to the same sorts of ad hominem arguments that rife within political rhetoric, so just saying, if one wants to know where the real resistance to health care reform originates, "follow the money."