It's not just Phil Mickelson — plenty of high-income athletes want out of California taxes.

Mickelson was just the one who was PR-deaf enough to let us know how he feels.

Why do you think Tiger Woods lives in Florida?

In November, voters in California approved a ballot measure raising the top rate on income over $1 million to 13.3% (the increase applies retroactively to last year). ... Mr. Woods grossed $56.4 million in 2012. As a Floridian, he will keep about $7.5 million that he otherwise would have owed to the state of California. His net tax savings over his 16-year career come to about $100 million. Mr. Mickelson last year earned $60.7 million. Paying the 13.3% California rate, he will owe the state $8 million.

That takes Mickelson down to $52.7 million, putting him behind Woods, when he was ahead of him on the money list. Aggravating! (I know, I'm failing to take account of the way state taxes are a deduction on your federal income taxes and everything else that affects after-tax income.)

The benefit of living in a state without an income tax can be diminished by the "jock tax" that states impose on money earned by athletes when they're playing or training in the state. (Luckily for baseball players, spring training is in no-tax Florida or low-tax Arizona.) But in sports like tennis and golf where athletes can train anywhere in the world, a preponderance happen to migrate to states without an income tax.

These celebs — with their endorsements — need good PR, as the Mickelson slip proved. State tax proponents could get proactive and actively shame the sports stars who live in Florida without an adequate cover story. 

For instance, Serena and Venus Williams grew up in Compton, Calif., but moved with their father to Florida in the early 1990s.

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Krugman sees a "major rhetorical shift" from Romney's campaign to Bobby Jindal's recent speech.

Krugman's column is titled "Makers, Taker, Fakers." Here's one thing that seemed off to me:

Mr. Jindal posed the problem in a way that would, I believe, have been unthinkable for a leading Republican even a year ago. “We must not,” he declared, “be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys. We have to be the party that shows all Americans how they can thrive.” After a campaign in which Mitt Romney denounced any attempt to talk about class divisions as an “attack on success,” this represents a major rhetorical shift.

There are 2 propositions: A. Those who are successful should be able to keep the fruits of their efforts, and B. All Americans should have the opportunity to work toward their own success.

Krugman comes close to saying Romney only said A and Jindal only says B.

But Romney continually said both things. His opponents worked constantly — and successfully — to make people feel that he was only saying A.  And Jindal is also saying both things. That's the function of the word "simply."

Jindal — in the quoted sentence — isn't saying Romney only said A. He's talking about the way people think about the Republican Party, which is in A terms, because that's the way Democrats have successfully framed them. Jindal is saying the B frame is better political rhetoric.

Krugman goes on to explain why B rhetoric doesn't properly apply to what Jindal and the rest of the GOP are really doing. That is, he's continuing the process that was used so successfully in the campaign to defeat Romney — pushing A, obscuring B.

There is no major rhetorical shift. Not from Jindal and not from Krugman. Everyone is doing, rhetorically, what they've been doing all along.

There are 2 propositions — A and B — that relate to GOP policy. GOP proponents portray them as 2 sides of the same thing: The reason why A makes sense is that it's part of how B works. Opponents of the GOP de-link A and B and portray B as a trick to get people to vote for the party that's only about A.

2 questions for the GOP: 1. How can you truly be about B, with A as a subordinate proposition? and 2. Can you get people to believe that's what you are?

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Bill Clinton says: Do not look down on the bitter clingers.

"Do not patronize the passionate supporters of your opponents by looking down your nose at them..."

"A lot of these people live in a world very different from the world lived in by the people proposing these things... I know because I come from this world."...

"A lot of these people … all they’ve got is their hunting and their fishing... Or they’re living in a place where they don’t have much police presence. Or they’ve been listening to this stuff for so long that they believe it all."

He feels their pain...



He feels their pain, which includes feeling that they are getting looked down on, so don't let them notice, he's saying, even as he lets the big Democratic donors see that he knows just as well as they do that the bitter clingers are a bunch of losers.

Don't look down you nose at them. Whenever you eyes are trained on the bitter clingers, project feel-your-pain empathy. Save your condescension for the off-camera, off-mike back rooms.

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"I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

It means something that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "pig" instead of "pork." I think about how George Harrison sang about piggies, the bigger piggies, "in their starched white shirts... stirring up the dirt" as well as "the little piggies... crawling in the dirt." (He stirred up Charles Manson to deliver "a damned good whacking.")

Life was "getting worse" for the little piggies, while, by contrast, the bigger piggies "always had clean shirts." Now, I'm not going to veer off into the topic of The Great — big pig — Gatsby's shirts. You know if you've read "The Great Gatsby" or seen the movie that a huge to-do is made at one point about how many beautiful shirts Gatsby had.

But here in this Gatsby project, we look at one sentence in isolation. That way, everyone's on the same footing. You don't have the little readers and the bigger readers. Life isn't getting worse for some of us and just fine for others. We gather here, in the daily post, to consume one sentence, so let's lunch.

Let's know each other by first names. Here we are equals. We have all read the sentence, and we can all very well speak out about it. Here, we actively exclude extrinsic evidence. About the book, I mean. We're free to drag in anything else, such as The Beatles, as betamax3000 did so well in yesterday's Gatsby thread, the one about warm human magic.

So pig, then. Pig, not pork. Which makes us think that the clerks and bond-salesmen are little piggies. The men eating humble food — all the humbler for saying pig, not pork — in a dark, crowded place. A pigsty? Our narrator is crammed in close quarters with them as he chows down. He's on familiar terms with them: He calls them by their first names. He's a member of the herd of little piggies.

Did you notice the words are right there one after the other: little pig? As a competent and tolerant reader, you can tell it's the sausages and not the pigs that are supposed to be little, and as a picky reader, you might say it's bad writing to permit that ambiguity to survive the final draft. But maybe the writer wanted you to see little pig. And the bigger question is why insert the pig at all? We'd presume that sausages were pork. Obviously, Fitzgerald wants us to think about pigs and think about the men as pigs. He wasn't as blunt as Mr. Harrison, but he was calling these guys pigs.

Another reason to throw pig in there, permitting the ambiguity, is to call the sausages little without being too aggressively Freudian about saying little sausages and making us think too quickly — before we'd noticed all these other things — of pricks.

ADDED: Meade, helping me proofread, questioned "herd" as the proper collective term for pigs. I know there are some other options, but I like it because it evokes Jesus:

Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.” He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region.

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