My favorite holiday has always been Yom HaAtzmaut, independence day. I think that the reasons for this are rooted in my childhood. For one thing, when I was little, my family used to meet with other families of my parents for a Kumsits. As a child, staying up until late, eating barbecue food and being with the "grownups" used to be something I liked. Back then, when the national public television was the only channel, there was no TV on weekends and holidays, and independence day used to be the only day with TV. I used to enjoy the Israeli movies that were aired, though they were "burekas" movies.
The day before independence day is Israeli memorial day. The proximity of the two dates has always puzzled me: how can you be mournful one moment and joyful the next? Israelis are indoctrinated as children that the "fallen" have bestowed upon us our lives in Israel. Their sacrifice is the reason for us being there. I also remember that as a child, with - luckily for me - no known relative who had been killed in service, but with many family members, who had perished in the holocaust, I used to think that the holocaust remembrance day should be more significant than the IDF memorial day. Of course, as a grown up I understand that both are equally important: mourning cannot be measured in quantitative values. There is no "my pain is bigger than yours".
So, why this long introduction? It is my first independence day abroad, and I was wondering how I would feel, whether it will feel like a holiday or not, whether I will feel some mourning on IDF memorial day or holocaust memorial day. It turns out that I do feel and in some absurd way it feels that being abroad makes me feel even more. It is as if being abroad has caused me to feel it from the inside, rather than something that comes from the outside, from the public symbols of these days. Today the movie Beaufort was screened at the University's cinema. I felt that I had to go to the movie, although I saw it some years ago. It is not an easy movie, and seeing it the second time doesn't make it easier to watch. It is as sad as it was the first time, even worse, as one already knows how the plot develops. The screening was organized by the Jewish students organization and "Bearcats for Israel", which is the pro-Israeli organization here. I was expecting people to come, and was surprised to see that I was the only audience when the lights were turned off and the movie began. Afterwards several people came in, one of them I think I even recognized. The strangest thing is that I tried to think how these people interpret the movie.
There are several reasons why non-Israelis will have a problem understanding the movie. Firstly, the movie was screened with Hebrew soundtrack and English subtitles, and so many of the innuendos of Hebrew (and specifically the IDF jargon) just get lost. Secondly, they lack context. When I came out of the movie I saw only 4 other people, all of them looked Indian. There was no introduction to the movie, and I guess that no one leaving outside Israel or Lebanon can even try and understand the situation and all the feelings surrounding it in the year 2000. Furthermore, there are several strong scenes in the movie, in which the leading character - a young officer who is the commander of Beaufort stronghold - is tested. I think that this thing is simply lost to anyone who hasn't had military training, which is obviously anyone who watched the movie today. I couldn't help wondering how they feel when they see it. Some (may be most) of them left at some point or the other, and I wonder if it was because they couldn't understand the movie, or because they had other better things to do. Perhaps I am mistaken, because it seems that most of the comments left by people in IMDB are very positive.
In conclusion, I think that if anything, the fact that I am here causes me to identify even more with the Israeli memorial days/independence day. It's such a shame that I don't have anyone to tell (except D here and the brave readers of this blog).
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Some updates
Spring quarter has begun and we're about 25% in it. Spring itself, however, seems to be a crazy season here. The weather has been oscillating from warm shiny days to damp, rainy and even snowy days. The period of the oscillation can be measured quite accurately to 3-4 days. When the weather is warm everything looks very nice and indeed spring is beautiful here. D has posted some photos in her Flickr album.
Last weekend we also had our first ever guest here in Cincinnati! We had a friend of mine from New York over for the weekend. She had to rid herself from Passover sticky Seders (there are two here in the US, because diaspora Jews apparently celebrate each holiday twice) and fled to our sanctuary. She spent three days with us, which allowed her to experience the entire cycle of weather. On gloomy Friday (originally, Good Friday) we went to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which surprisingly was more impressive than what I had expected. The museum showed an exhibition compiled by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on Surrealism and Dada works. This type of art is usually not my cup of tea, and indeed I could (and did) summarize some of the works as: hey, I can paint better than these blotches of paint on canvas. I did like the classic Alpha Romeo they put on exhibit in the museum: now this is art!
It cleared on Saturday and we went for a great walk in Ault Park, which is a lovely park minutes of walk from our house. Most of the photos in D's album were taken there (although a week earlier).
When it comes to observing the Passover tradition I'm glad to say that we didn't observe any of it. We didn't go to any Seder. We didn't eat any unleavened bread, on the contrary: we ate pizza. I think the only relation to the holiday's tradition was drinking wine on Seder. By the way, pizza and wine are our traditional way of celebrating this holiday, as we have done that in four of the last five years. Naturally, we also worked, studied and taught during the Passover week. So basically, we didn't feel any holidays spirit.
Today we made our first significant step into mutual recognition between us and the matrix, aka the State of Ohio: both of us took our driving test and passed. So now both of us hold a valid driver's license issued by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles of the grid. As stated in a previous post, we were required to pass all the driving tests administered, as if we haven't been driving for the past 17 years or so. At least now we hold a license that will - hopefully - enable us to be free of the passports we were carrying all the time: it is, after all, a valid ID. The driving test here is very short: about 15 minutes in total. The test has two parts: maneuverability test and actual driving. In the former one needs to drive from an original position through a rectangular area defined by 4 cones and then proceed either to the left or to the right of a fifth cone (called point), bringing the car to a stop with its rear at the line of the point, and parallel to the general direction of the area. Then, from this position one must reverse the car to its starting position (description of the test can be seen in this animation). The rules are that the motion forward and in reverse should be done without stopping and that the cones must not be driven over. Then, if one passes that part of the test, the second part of the test is a very short drive outside the testing center's parking lot. This proved to be very short and very easy. The funny thing, of course, that if we had failed the test, we would have simply get into our car, driving with our international license. Anyway, this is past us now, and thus, we have finally completed the work plan defined about a year ago for our relocation.
Last weekend we also had our first ever guest here in Cincinnati! We had a friend of mine from New York over for the weekend. She had to rid herself from Passover sticky Seders (there are two here in the US, because diaspora Jews apparently celebrate each holiday twice) and fled to our sanctuary. She spent three days with us, which allowed her to experience the entire cycle of weather. On gloomy Friday (originally, Good Friday) we went to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which surprisingly was more impressive than what I had expected. The museum showed an exhibition compiled by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on Surrealism and Dada works. This type of art is usually not my cup of tea, and indeed I could (and did) summarize some of the works as: hey, I can paint better than these blotches of paint on canvas. I did like the classic Alpha Romeo they put on exhibit in the museum: now this is art!
It cleared on Saturday and we went for a great walk in Ault Park, which is a lovely park minutes of walk from our house. Most of the photos in D's album were taken there (although a week earlier).
When it comes to observing the Passover tradition I'm glad to say that we didn't observe any of it. We didn't go to any Seder. We didn't eat any unleavened bread, on the contrary: we ate pizza. I think the only relation to the holiday's tradition was drinking wine on Seder. By the way, pizza and wine are our traditional way of celebrating this holiday, as we have done that in four of the last five years. Naturally, we also worked, studied and taught during the Passover week. So basically, we didn't feel any holidays spirit.
Today we made our first significant step into mutual recognition between us and the matrix, aka the State of Ohio: both of us took our driving test and passed. So now both of us hold a valid driver's license issued by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles of the grid. As stated in a previous post, we were required to pass all the driving tests administered, as if we haven't been driving for the past 17 years or so. At least now we hold a license that will - hopefully - enable us to be free of the passports we were carrying all the time: it is, after all, a valid ID. The driving test here is very short: about 15 minutes in total. The test has two parts: maneuverability test and actual driving. In the former one needs to drive from an original position through a rectangular area defined by 4 cones and then proceed either to the left or to the right of a fifth cone (called point), bringing the car to a stop with its rear at the line of the point, and parallel to the general direction of the area. Then, from this position one must reverse the car to its starting position (description of the test can be seen in this animation). The rules are that the motion forward and in reverse should be done without stopping and that the cones must not be driven over. Then, if one passes that part of the test, the second part of the test is a very short drive outside the testing center's parking lot. This proved to be very short and very easy. The funny thing, of course, that if we had failed the test, we would have simply get into our car, driving with our international license. Anyway, this is past us now, and thus, we have finally completed the work plan defined about a year ago for our relocation.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Spring Time
I have never lived in a country that has actual winter until we came here. Here was the first time that I saw snow and experienced real cold temperatures (though not as cold as the Northern areas experience). Here is also the first time that I see and understand the meaning of a real spring. Back home, the winter is a sort of autumn, autumn and spring are mild versions of summer, and summer is unbearable version of it. What I see here now explains why so many holidays are related to the spring, and why spring is a symbol of life. During the winter, all the trees were without leaves. It took the first days of precipitation in a liquid form (i.e. rain) instead of snow to convince them that the worst is over and that they should get back to life. All of a sudden the world, that used to be colored by shades of gray and brown has been recolored with all sorts of colors: green for grass and shrubs, white, pink, red, and purple for the flowers on the trees and on the ground. On a nice day, like the one we had on Saturday, everything looks so beautiful, and then the true meaning of the word spring emerges: the world springs to life.
Naturally, not everything in life can be perfect. Thus, the American taxes season is upon us, and all the tax return forms are due April 15. Taxes here are much different than the ones we had in Israel. Firstly, there is an income tax at any level: federal, state, and local (city). Each one of them requires a different set of forms to be filled. Not only that, there are several variations for each form, and it is almost impossible to know which form to fill. For example, on the federal level the same form has the following types: for citizens, for resident aliens, and for non-resident aliens. To make it even more confusing, the residency of an alien is defined differently by the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the INS). It turns out that you can be a non-resident in the eyes of the INS while still being deemed a resident alien by the IRS (I think that the other way around is impossible, but not sure of that). Furthermore, since there is a huge variety of non-resident visas, and the IRS considers each one differently for residency purposes, it is even more confusing. And if that is not enough, there are other forms that need to be filled out if you didn't have any income or if you changed status during the year.
On the state level it is approximately the same thing, only that here you have an even more complicated task: if you moved from state to another you are considered part-time resident. Since we came here in September we are part-time residents. However, we arrived from out of the country, and this is a completely different story, which I don't know how the local officials treat.
Then you have the locality tax. In Israel the locality gets its money from the tax on your property (Arnona). Here it's another form of income tax (perhaps there is a tax on your property too, I don't know).
I have had my taxes withheld during the year. It means that I receive a salary after some of the money is put aside by the university as part of the taxes I owe to the federal government, state and city. Apparently, this is not like in Israel where the payments are accurate and usually you don't need to do anything at the end of the year. Here they take a "rough" amount and in the end of the year you fill out the tax return and learn how much you still owe the government, or how much the government owes you. It turns out that the government owes me quite a large amount of money, almost half my withheld taxes. Strange.
Thinking about all the forms and paperwork sent by April 15 to the federal and state services just makes me shiver. Let's assume that there are about 200 million tax payers in America, and each one prepares a single federal tax return, a single state tax return and a single locality tax return. That's already 600 million forms, each with multiple pages. There goes some forests...
Then, someone has to read these forms and make sure that no one tried to pay too little or get too much money back. Assuming that it takes 10 minutes per form per person, 6 forms are processed each hour, making it 100 million work hours. The checks from the government(s) usually come back within 5-7 weeks, according to their site. This means that between 15-20 million hours are done each week, or 3-4 million hours a day, or between 300-400 thousand people are paid to do it. That's not including hierarchy and supporting personnel (IT, HR, administration). It is a safe idea to believe that for every official that checks a form there is at least one that is either above in the hierarchy or support this person's work. Thus, 600-800 thousand people, not including the 10% of hidden unemployment, redundancies and undesired bureaucracy.
These people are paid, their offices have electricity, heating and cooling, plumbing, and other necessary working conditions. The offices themselves are in buildings, taking up place and real estate value, usually within the downtown of some major city. I guess that the costs of these services are about $100K per person (at the very least, probably as much as twice that amount). So, it must cost about 50-100 billion dollars just to collect, process and return all the tax forms.
Perhaps collecting taxes as it is done in Israel would be much more efficient. Everything is collected upfront. There is little need for additional tax returns at the end of the year, and those who venture it usually are turned away with nothing, which deters people from actually trying to do it. This could save dozens of billions of dollars to the American tax payer. Come to think of it: this could save money to me!
Naturally, not everything in life can be perfect. Thus, the American taxes season is upon us, and all the tax return forms are due April 15. Taxes here are much different than the ones we had in Israel. Firstly, there is an income tax at any level: federal, state, and local (city). Each one of them requires a different set of forms to be filled. Not only that, there are several variations for each form, and it is almost impossible to know which form to fill. For example, on the federal level the same form has the following types: for citizens, for resident aliens, and for non-resident aliens. To make it even more confusing, the residency of an alien is defined differently by the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the INS). It turns out that you can be a non-resident in the eyes of the INS while still being deemed a resident alien by the IRS (I think that the other way around is impossible, but not sure of that). Furthermore, since there is a huge variety of non-resident visas, and the IRS considers each one differently for residency purposes, it is even more confusing. And if that is not enough, there are other forms that need to be filled out if you didn't have any income or if you changed status during the year.
On the state level it is approximately the same thing, only that here you have an even more complicated task: if you moved from state to another you are considered part-time resident. Since we came here in September we are part-time residents. However, we arrived from out of the country, and this is a completely different story, which I don't know how the local officials treat.
Then you have the locality tax. In Israel the locality gets its money from the tax on your property (Arnona). Here it's another form of income tax (perhaps there is a tax on your property too, I don't know).
I have had my taxes withheld during the year. It means that I receive a salary after some of the money is put aside by the university as part of the taxes I owe to the federal government, state and city. Apparently, this is not like in Israel where the payments are accurate and usually you don't need to do anything at the end of the year. Here they take a "rough" amount and in the end of the year you fill out the tax return and learn how much you still owe the government, or how much the government owes you. It turns out that the government owes me quite a large amount of money, almost half my withheld taxes. Strange.
Thinking about all the forms and paperwork sent by April 15 to the federal and state services just makes me shiver. Let's assume that there are about 200 million tax payers in America, and each one prepares a single federal tax return, a single state tax return and a single locality tax return. That's already 600 million forms, each with multiple pages. There goes some forests...
Then, someone has to read these forms and make sure that no one tried to pay too little or get too much money back. Assuming that it takes 10 minutes per form per person, 6 forms are processed each hour, making it 100 million work hours. The checks from the government(s) usually come back within 5-7 weeks, according to their site. This means that between 15-20 million hours are done each week, or 3-4 million hours a day, or between 300-400 thousand people are paid to do it. That's not including hierarchy and supporting personnel (IT, HR, administration). It is a safe idea to believe that for every official that checks a form there is at least one that is either above in the hierarchy or support this person's work. Thus, 600-800 thousand people, not including the 10% of hidden unemployment, redundancies and undesired bureaucracy.
These people are paid, their offices have electricity, heating and cooling, plumbing, and other necessary working conditions. The offices themselves are in buildings, taking up place and real estate value, usually within the downtown of some major city. I guess that the costs of these services are about $100K per person (at the very least, probably as much as twice that amount). So, it must cost about 50-100 billion dollars just to collect, process and return all the tax forms.
Perhaps collecting taxes as it is done in Israel would be much more efficient. Everything is collected upfront. There is little need for additional tax returns at the end of the year, and those who venture it usually are turned away with nothing, which deters people from actually trying to do it. This could save dozens of billions of dollars to the American tax payer. Come to think of it: this could save money to me!
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