May 2018 – Live an Untethered Life

The facts, they are a changin

May 22, 2018 by live an untethered life, posted in Uncategorized

It was a dark and stormy night. Or rather, the night darkness concealed the source of the intense storms. That seems much better. My wife and I waited for the storm to pass that evening before setting off to walk the dogs. The reflection of the street lights glistened off the wet streets.

All down the street, I could see small ridges. Upon closer examination, I could see that there were literally hundreds of night crawlers stretched out perpendicular to the road. The road friction made them stretch out to a tortured length of about a foot and a half. Normally plump, this condition thinned them out considerably. Night crawlers are earth worms on steroids.

Feeling some form of compassion for this Lumbricus terrestris, I started to scoop them up and toss them back on to the grass. Some worms can survive being cut in half but being half squashed flat by a truck did not seem very survivable to me.

Now, under normal conditions worms produce a fair bit of mucus. Adding torrential rains to that seems to add to mucus production as the worm exodus continued. I started to regret my misplaced compassion and tried to distance myself from my emotions. My wife just simply distanced herself.

I assumed the common knowledge that during intense rain storms worms attempt to escape drowning in their burrows. However, they breathe through their skin which needs moisture. So there may be a number of other reasons why they engage in such risky behavior of stretching themselves out on a busy road.

One good reason would be migration. Lots of rain would allow them to move great distances. However, half of them moved from the south to the north, while the other half moved from north to south. But, hey, they’re worms. The grass always seem more organic filled on the other side of the street it is said.

An interesting phenomena occurs when you experience a situation and learn some new facts about it later. I learned that another good reason worms travel is that they want sex. My recollection of the event now includes an added ‘ewww’ quality to it. And what better time to find a mate than when everyone else is stretched out in the same area. We have a beach here that seems to serve the same purpose for humans.

Although worms are hermaphrodite, male and females together, they cannot reproduce solely by themselves. They need a mate. I must have cast aside, and severely disappointed, several dozen night crawlers. Destined now to remain virgins they’re probably bitter. Unless that was going to be their choice anyway, and so that is perfectly ok.

This sex migration behavior can bring down planes. After a rain, worms like to stretch out wherever they can, including airport runways. Worms do not get sucked into turbines, but the birds coming to eat the worms can be. Particularly the flocking birds like gulls which tend to ignore whatever happens around them when they fight over food. So airport authorities tend to use fungicides to reduce worm populations.

Night crawlers contribute to the US current account deficit! Some politician should complain about this. If nothing more than the neat optics it provides. “Congress needs night crawler NAFTA negotiations!” Apparently $20 million of night crawlers are exported to the US each year with little or no USA content. A few years ago, the price leapt from $35 per thousand worms to $80 per thousand. Economics 101. Supply was tight, and owing to inelasticity of demand, prices skyrocketed. Worm futures may not have the panache of Tesla stock, but you would have made a fortune otherwise.

Fact

Federal tax reform debates suffer from the Rashomon effect

May 13, 2018June 29, 2018 by live an untethered life, posted in Untethered Mind

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The film Rashomon won an Academy Honorary Award in 1952 and is considered now one of the greatest films ever made. The film uses a plot device that involves various characters providing subjective, alternative, self-serving and contradictory versions of the same incident.

One can see the theoretical application of this plot device to the multi-varied perception of the liberal government’s changes to the taxation of Canadian controlled private corporations. Let’s just deal with the one plot device — the sprinkling of income.

The government takes the position that these tax advantages are in place to help Canadian businesses reinvest and grow, find new customers, buy new equipment and hire more people. Not surprisingly, people evidently use these corporate structures to reduce taxes by paying dividends to those family members at a lower tax bracket and not involved in the business. Mea culpa. The government perceives that these people are avoiding paying their fair share of taxes as opposed to investing in their business and maintaining their competitive advantage.

Of course, sprinkling income provides dividends to family members who may not have much to do with the corporation in the first place. The tax policy intended to spread income more among those involved with the corporation.

The government states that when the rules are used for personal benefit, they are not contributing to growing the economy. Rather, such practices undermine confidence in the economy by selectively giving away tax advantages and producing an unfair result.

The Canadian Bar Association takes umbrage to the government’s use of the term “loophole.” Loopholes are inherently legal, but they circumvent the policy intent of the legislation when corporations legally use tax advantages to make professionals more whole as compared to salaried employees. So let’s just call these advantages “loopwholes” instead.

We can use the Rashomon approach to examine taxes paid in Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s CCPC comparison discussion paper. Susan, an employee, earns employment income of $220,000 and pays her fair share of taxes totalling $79,000. We compare this to our business owner Bob earning a professional income of $220,000 and, through the sprinkling of tax loopwhole-ness, pays only $44,000 in taxes. Susan pays about 36 per cent of her income in taxes while Bob only pays 20 per cent, a $35,000 difference. One could easily think that there is only a 16-per-cent difference, but through the magic of Rashomon, we can see that Susan pays about 44 per cent more in taxes (35/79). If the loopwhole is lost, Bob becomes even more upset as his tax bill would increase 80 per cent (35/44).

The CBA, to the consternation of some members and now some former members, takes a political position against the removal of the tax loopwhole. The main argument appears to be that the loopwhole allows the corporate professional to earn the same amount as an employed individual since a corporate professional does not have paid vacation or an employer pension. The pension argument has an iceberg quality to it since fewer companies are providing pensions in any event, down to around 37 per cent of employees.

In comparing total compensation, HR professionals use a rough guideline that benefits can total 20 per cent of income once you include vacation, health and pensions. If we get back to fun with ratios, we can see that Bob’s tax savings of $35,000 comes close to this 20-per-cent premium ($44,000 normally).

A major argument for allowing professional corporations a tax break is the risk premium. A business owner has no guaranteed income, job security, paid vacation, sick days or retirement program. In addition, the owner must personally guarantee debt obligations and pay the entire cost of the Canada Pension Plan. Therefore, an owner should be entitled to a risk premium. As an example, the risk premium for stocks is arguably about five per cent, but this does not appear high enough for Bob considering the risk.

So, in a straight comparison, Bob should pay less tax in order to have close to the same total compensation as Susan, a salaried employee. Unfortunately, we drifted away from the actual question, dreamed about a logical fallacy and refuted an argument that was never made. The question is not how the tax system should make Susan and Bob have the same total compensation but rather how to limit the tax exemption for what it was intended, mainly using dividends to compensate those involved in the business and to help businesses reinvest and grow.

If we use sprinkling dividends as a loopwhole in order to make Bob’s total compensation the same as salaried employee Susan, we have passed the risk premium over to be paid by Susan by way of tax revenue foregone by exempting Bob. The risk premium should belong to Bob to be mitigated by higher revenue paid by Bob’s clientele or by reduced expenses, not lower taxes at the expense of Susan.

If a tax break is truly yours, then let it go. If it returns, then it belongs to you. If it doesn’t, then it never was.

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

From a previous Canadian Lawyer Article.

The Open Office and the Hawthorne Effect

May 6, 2018May 6, 2018 by live an untethered life, posted in Untethered Mind

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Private and public organizations appear to be drifting towards the open office concept. They intend to decrease costs and increase interaction amongst staff.

We can see the slow evolution from the closed office, to the head high cubicle walls to now the chest high walls. All in the name of integration. We may get back to the day of no walls and simply desks arranged in neat rows and columns. Whenever they show this type of arrangement it always seems somewhat Kafka like; the bleak dystopian future that we are always trying to avoid but seems to be coming for us anyway.

A new study from CTF, Service Research Centre in Karlstad University, Sweden suggests that the more co-workers share a workspace the less satisfied they are and the more difficult it is to have a good dialogue with other staff.

This may have depended on where the studied employees started of course. Anyone with a private office suddenly cast into the open workplace community would be dissatisfied it would appear. Anyone coming right out of school, with no previous experience working in a private office, could well be ecstatic just getting their own private desk instead of one of the communal desks.

Perhaps a staff engagement and satisfaction management technique would be to recall the Hawthorne experiments conducted in the late 20s and early 30s. Here Western Electric in its factories outside of Chicago in the suburb of Hawthorne conducted various experiments regarding productivity. Hawthorne placed the individual in a social context and suggested that performance is influenced not only by a person’s innate abilities but also by their surrounding environment and colleagues.

The experiment attempted to show how the surrounding environment increased productivity. In one factory they improved the overall lighting and kept another factory as a control group. Productivity increased in the first group. As time went by, they added additional improvements to working hours and health breaks. Productivity increased again. Productivity continued to increase even when they returned the lighting to where it was originally.

The experimenters concluded that it was not so much the change in conditions that mattered, but rather the fact that someone cared about the workplace environment and gave them an opportunity to discuss the changes beforehand.

Staff engagement and an opportunity to have an impact on the workplace remains key in job satisfaction.

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