The Deal on Taxes

The centerpiece of the deal on taxes that Obama and the GOP leaders in Congress reached yesterday is an extension of the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for all filers, which means that the dreaded "rich" -- people who make more than $250,000 -- will not have their taxes increased as of January 2011.   That, of course, is a good thing in itself and, at the rates that still apply (35%, which would have gone up to 39.6%), I suspect will actually generate more revenue for the Treasury, not less.   (That is, I think we have been on the right side of the Laffer curve, where higher rates at the margins mean less revenue, not more, because they disincentivize efforts by individuals to increase their marginal income.)   So far so good.  

I also like the modicum of restraint that's going to be put on the onerous "death tax" on estates over $5 million for individuals or $10 million for couples.  Look, I probably won't get there, but some of my friends will, and it seems to me grossly unfair that someone can work their whole life, make a lot of money (by doing services for customers, i.e., the community), save and invest assiduously, likely defer a good deal of gratification in the hope of passing something on to their kids, and then the government will essentially vilify them and confiscate 55% of what they made.   It's organized thievery, and the only reason it's legal is because it's done by the government.   Otherwise, it's just a shakedown.   The moral tax rate on estates is 0%, and Republicans who have the wisdom and courage to say so will get my vote. 

I also don't have a big problem with reducing the payroll tax by 2% for 2011.   I don't think this will have much of a stimulative effect, but it will have some.   But it's also marginally hurting Social Security solvency at a time when we ought to be trying to solve that monster.   On the other hand, since current workers are likely going to get screwed when that solution comes, it's a bit of a nice gesture (albeit unspoken) to give them a little back now.  

I do have a big problem with the extension of unemployment benefits for another 13 months, which will provide up to 99 weeks of federal unemployment benefits to workers -- I use the term loosely -- who have exhausted their 26 weeks of state unemployment benefits.  Thus, a "worker" can have not worked for 125 weeks, nearly 2.5 years, and still be getting paid.   Wow!   Does anyone really believe that doesn't have an effect on incentives to seek work?  To take jobs offered at wages that might not be ideal?  To move to look for work?  Does anyone really believe that there aren't hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of "workers" who are gaming the system?  Who are working "off the books" on the side while getting federal benefits?  Who are using this time to go on vacations?  To start side businesses?  To remodel their houses?  To be a paid "stay at home" Mom? 

But, on the whole, this isn't a bad deal for now.   In 2012 we need to elect a Republican Senate and a Republican President who will have the real "audacity of hope" to vote for changing the whole corrupt system of federal taxes to a lower, flatter, fairer, simpler system.

UPDATE:

On NRO:  

Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) tells NRO he likes the tax deal. “All things considered, I think it’s the best deal we were going to get,” he says. “It’s clearly not a good as we would’ve wanted, but far better than the alternative route.”

He stressed the importance of not decoupling the tax rates for upper-income earners, and thus rejecting the “class-warfare economic doctrine” that is harmful to economic growth.

He says the two-year extension was expected, and while he would much rather have seen a permanent arrangement, it’s still a good start. Ryan says he is ready to lead a debate over taxes starting in 2012. “I see this as a great way to set the stage for fundamental tax reform in 2013,” he says.

Good enough for Paul Ryan, good enough for me. 

Why Have the Last Three Recessions Been Relatively Longer?

Here is an exceptionally interesting chart via Hot Air:

If I am reading this right, the three recessions that appear to be of the longest duration are the last three:  the recession of 1990-1991 that arguably led to George Herbert Walker Bush being a one-term President (even though it had ended by the time of the election); the recession of 2000-2002 (including the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000 and 9/11/01); and the current recession, which began in late 2007 and accelerated with the crashing of the mortgage finance market in the fall of 2008.   Why?  

I would offer two potential theories, neither of which I am entirely comfortable with, but both of which I think have at least some plausibility.

First, our economy has increasingly moved from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based economy (or, less charitably, from an economy that makes things to an economy that pushes paper).   But, as anyone who has worked in a large, "knowledge-based" company could tell you, there are a lot of "knowledge workers" who don't work very hard, who don't produce very much, and who are, therefore expendable.   When a recession comes, then, it's easy to justify laying people off from knowledge-based companies, because everyone knows they are expendable anyway, and it becomes harder to justify hiring them back, because you don't need them to actually make anything.  

Second, I would hazard the guess that unemployment benefits have been extended far longer in the past twenty years than in prior recessions.   Thus, people who are out of work don't have to look for new jobs (or take jobs in a different field or with less benefits or at less pay), because they don't have to.   Ironically, then, the government's remedy for unemployment actually creates more unemployment, or at least lengthens the period of unemployment for those it tries to help.  

A third theory occurs to me:  it may very well be that the length of recessions is contingent on the degree to which the government has distorted the marketplace.   If relatively low (as in the 1950s), recessions will be relatively short, because the market will rebound.   If government distortion (intervention) is relatively high (as it is now), recessions will be relatively longer, because the market will react slowly because of uncertainty about what the government might do next. 

Alarming

A new study of science, math and reading aptitude comparing 15 year-old students from different countries should be alarming to American educators.    Here's the money graph:

Birthdays Today

The great Reds catcher, Johnny Bench, was born today in 1947.   Bench was the catcher on the Cincinnati Reds championship teams in the 1970s, and is generally thought of as the greatest catcher in baseball history, both defensively (he had a great arm) and offensively (he hit for power with a lot of RBIs).    His lifetime totals of 1091 runs scored, 2048 hits, 389 HRs, 1376 RBIs, a .267 average and an .817 OPS, are very very good for a catcher.  

However, a pet peeve of mine:  they aren't that much better than the Cardinals' catcher in the same era, Ted Simmons.  Simmons finished his career with 1074 runs scored, 2472 hits, 248 HRs, 1389 RBIs, a lifetime .285 average, and a lifetime .785 OPS.   So, slightly fewer runs scored (he played on much poorer teams with much poorer hitters around him), fewer HRs (he played in a bad hitter's park -- Busch Stadium in the 1970s was 414 to center, 386 in the gaps).   Simmons' career numbers are also better than Gary Carter of the Mets, who everyone later labeled as the best catcher of the next era in baseball, but Carter and Bench were easy Hall-of-Famers and Simmons didn't get a whiff.   Perception versus reality.  

Today is also the birthday of Larry Bird.   If I were making an all-time team in the NBA (my son and I do this all the time), I would have Wilt Chamberlain at center, Tim Duncan at power forward, Bird at small forward, Michael Jordan at shooting guard, and Magic Johnson at point guard.  

My second team:  Bill Russell, Karl Malone, Elgin Baylor,Kobe Bryant and Bob Cousy.  

Girl Tuesday - Veronica Hamel

The first of many cop shoes I have loved over the years was Hill Street Blues -- it's a direct line from there to NYPD Blue, The Shield, and The Wire (which is the best of them all).    Veronica Hamel played the Assistant DA/love interest of the Police Captain on Hill Street Blues, and she was easily the best looking gal on the show:

Smile of the Day

President George W. Bush's approval rating according to Gallup is now at 47%, one point higher than... you guessed it, President Barack Obama.   Well, well, well.  

Birthdays Today

Ira Gershwin, the great lyricist brother of George Gershwin, was born today in 1896.   Gershwin wrote the lyrics for some of the most memorable tunes in American music, including "I Got Rhythm," "The Man I Love," "They Can't Take That Away From Me," "'S Wonderful," and one of my all-time favorites, a song I used to sing to my little girls at bedtime, "Someone to Watch Over Me."   Here's Linda Rondstadt singing it:



Also born today in 1962 was the actress Janine Turner, who starred in the romantic TV comedy Northern Exposure  with Rob Morrow.   Turner played a tough-talking Alaskan girl pilot, with Morrow as a young Jewish doctor from New York who is required to serve as the town doctor in a remote Alaskan village to pay off his student loans.   My wife and I used to watch it all the time when we were first dating.   Here's a funny scene witih Turner and Morrow:

Girl Monday - Diane Keaton

Not really a great actress and not classically beautiful, Diane Keaton was in a remarkable series of movies in the 1970s -- the Godfather movies on the one hand, and all of the great Woody Allen comedies on the other.   She won the Academy Award for Annie Hall, and that's the role I remember her best in:

Smile of the Day - Cardinal Version

The Cardinals signed Lance Berkman to a one-year deal at $8 million.   It's a decent deal, but not a no-brainer:  Berkman is on the downside of his career, and won't be a good left-fielder; and, if the Cards move Holliday to right, they'll lose fielding there too.   Coupled with the Theriot signing (replacing Brendan Ryan), we are giving up a lot of defense for marginally better offense.   Also, we are giving up young (Allen Craig) for old (Berkman).   Not sure this makes sense unless you assume that the Cards aren't hopeful about signing Pujols after 2011, and are looking to make one last push for a World Series this year.   If Berkman rebounds to his career norm (say, 28 HRs and 105 RBIs), they might just make it.

PlameGate Redux

I have always thought the controversy over who "outed" Valerie Plame as a "spy" was a strange exercise, because it was based on strange premises.   The overarching premise was tied to the general thesis of the Left during the Iraq War that George W. Bush had "lied" to get us into the war by saying that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, chemical, biological -- and that the invasion had proved that he didn't.   This premise was obviously false factually  -- of course, Saddam Hussein had WMDs, we know that he did, because he had already used them, both against his own people and against Iran in the earlier Iran-Iraq War.   And, of course, the invasion proved that he had at least some WMDs as late as 2003, because they found at least some of them and are still finding them.  

But, even if it were false, it shouldn't have mattered, because we couldn't prove it false until we invaded, and we can't have a rogue state, terror sponsor, fascist dictator like Saddam blackmailing the West with the threat that he might have WMDs.   This is no different than the current argument about Iran:   as we now find from the Wikileaks cache, even Arab countries want us to preemptively strike Iranian nuclear facilities -- because we have to be safe rather than sorry when it comes to WMDs in Islamofascist hands. 

The underlying premise was also false, because Valerie Plame was not a "spy."  She was a bureaucrat, working in a large bureaucracy that just happened to be called the CIA.  She was not in the field, and had not been in the field in any covert position for many years.   It was all a sham, as shown by this testimony by Victoria Toensing, the lawyer who helped draft the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which is the only statutory basis for concluding that Plame had been illegally "outed."  

I recall this issue, because Hollywood, in its typical fashion, has created a "fact-based" movie "inspired" by the Plame affair, called "Fair Game," that gets practically everything wrong.   In their view, Plame was an active agent involved in covert operations in Iraq who was outed by the White House as an act of political vengeance because her husband had debunked a story about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium "yellowcake" powder from Niger.   The truth:  Plame was not involved in covert operations; she was "outed" by Richard Armitage at the State Department without any political motiviation; and her husband's trip to Niger had supported the conclusoin that Saddam had been seeking to purchase yellowcake. 

Don't believe me?   How about the Washington Post?   Here's their editorial for today:

"Fair Game," based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions - not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post's Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification.

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson's reporting did not affect the intelligence community's view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush's statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

"Fair Game" also resells the couple's story that Ms. Plame's exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy - but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative.

Fair Game also has the detriment of starring communist-sympathizer Sean Penn, who has to be one of the greatest actors and one of the most execrable (at least politically) individuals ever.

Don't pay a dime to see this propaganda.

Birthdays Today

George Armstrong Custer was born today in 1839.   Everyone recalls Custer's Last Stand, of course, and there have been good books written about it, including the recent book by Nathaniel Philbrick, one of my favorite authors of non-fiction.   (Philbrick is also the author of a really great book about an exploration of discovery and science in the first half of the 19th century, Sea of Glory, and another really good book about an ill-fated whaleship, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.)

But not that many people recall that Custer was an extraordinarily successful young cavalry commander in the Civil War, attaining the rank of Major General by war's end, although only 25.   He fought in the first major engagemen of the wart, the First Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas, if you're a Southerner), and he was on hand when Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox.


















Today is also the birthday of Walt Disney, born in 1901.   Hard to overestimate the impact of Disney's vision on our culture.  It's ubiqitous, in mostly good ways,

although sometimes not.

Eeek!

Finally, Otto Preminger was also born today, in 1905.   Preminger directed two of my favorite movies, In Harm's Way, which is probably the best John Wayne movies that doesn't involve a horse, and Anatomy of a Murder.   Here's the trailer from Anatomy of a Murder:

Girl(s) Sunday - Isla Fisher and Amy Adams

Is it my imagination or are these two actresses identical twins:

Smile(s) of the Day

Since it's Walt Disney's birthday:

Birthdays Today

These will seem like obscure birthdays, but they are both artists that I have loved in the past.

First, in 1866, Vassily Kandinsky was born today.   Kandinsky's abstract paintings in the early 20th Century are among my favorites; I remember having a Kandinsky poster in one of my first apartments.

Also born today, in 1875, was the great Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.   I loved the "Duino Elegies" when I was in college.   Here's a snippet about the strangeness of life and death:

It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth,

to no longer practice customs barely acquired,

not to give a meaning of human futurity

to roses, and other expressly promising things:

no longer to be what one was in endlessly anxious hands,

and to set aside even one’s own

proper name like a broken plaything.

Strange: not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange

to see all that was once in place, floating

so loosely in space.

Smile of the Day - Go Cornhuskers!

My wife is from Omaha, so I root for the Nebraska Cornhuskers.   Tonight they play the hated Oklahoma Sooners for the Big 12 Championship.  It would be great for the Huskers to win the Big 12 in their last year before moving to the Big 10 (which will then have 12 teams, but still be called the Big 10, while the Big 12 will have 10 teams but still be called the Big 12.... go figure).  

Girl Saturday - Katherine Ross

I posted about a month ago a picture of Katherine Ross with Paul Newman, but she's worth her own post.   My parents had the good policy to let me see relatively adult movies before I was really old enough to see them; nowadays kids are so locked into kid culture (and society produces so much more kid culture), that there is a complete disconnect between what adults watch and read and listen to and what kids watch and read and listen to.   Anyway, back in the late 1960s I saw Katherine Ross in The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (as well as in a John Wayne movie called Hellfighters) and she was pretty much my idea of what a really great girl looked like.   Perhaps not incidentally, twenty years or so later I married a tall slender girl with long dark hair.

This Graph Must Be Shown To Every Voter!

This is a graph that I've seen a number of times on the great Ace of Spades blog, but here it is updated to reflect the November jobs report.   The upshot is that President Obama said that, without his stimulus plan, unemployment would go above 8%, but with it, well, you know, utopia would commence and birds would sing and the oceans would recede and the planet would begin to cool.   Or something like that.

Anyway, here's the graph that brings us back to reality:

Obama and the Democrats and the liberal media all like to deride their opposition by saying that they are the "reality-based" party, they are the parties of "facts" and "logic" and "evidence" and "science."   But, at some point, you know, a person who was really concerned with "facts" and "evidence" would conclude based on this data that Obama and his Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, just didn't know what they were doing back in the winter of 2009 when they pushed through the stimulus package.  

Time to try a different approach. 

It's George Bush's Fault

According to a new Commerce Department report, orders for manufactured goods in October decreased $3.6 billion or 0.9 percent to $420.1 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today.  Also, new orders for manufactured durable goods in October decreased $6.9 billion or 3.4 percent to $195.7 billion.

Nearly four years after Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took over Congress, nearly two years since Barack Obama was inaugurated and his stimulus plan was enacted, we have manufacturing slipping and unemployment increasing.   If unemployment gets to 10%, there should be rumblings about a primary challenge to Obama from a more moderate, pro-business Democrat (if there are any of those anymore).  

And, of course, it's all George Bush's fault.   Still.

Birthdays Today

 Birthdays are in a minor key today.  

Born in 1755, Gilbert Stuart was the portrait painter whose work you see every day:

I am just beginning Ron Chernow's new biography of Washington.   Chernow is one of the best biographers going, the author of Alexander Hamilton, Titan (about John D. Rockefeller), and The House of Morgan (about J.P. Morgan and the investment bank he founded).  
















It is also idiot rocker Ozzy Osbourne's birthday,born in 1948, but I have my standards.

Good grief.   What would Gibbon have to say about this sort of thing as evidence of Decline and Fall?

Girl Friday - Myrna Loy

I named my littlest girl after Myrna Loy's greatest character, Nora Charles, from the Thin Man movies with William Powell.

Smile of the Day

President LeBron apparently got a fat lip playing basketball.  If this was Clinton, we'd question the story.   Since this is Obama, my only question is... why so much basketball, so much golf, why so few jobs?   (Oh, by the way, the latest unemployment figures for November are out today (the Bureau of Labor of Statistics always issues them the first Friday of the following month), and they aren't good.... 9.8%.)

By the way, they've pulled the stories now that the actual jobs report is out, but the major web-based media like CNN were working overtime to carry water for Obama this morning on the jobs front, talking about the improving outlook.   Which just goes to show you, once again, that you can't trust the MSM. 

UPDATE:

I actually found the CNN story I remembered, which had been moved off their front page once the BLS report was released at 8:30 eastern time.   Here's what it looked like at 7:45:

Shameless.   

Why We Fight

I attended a Federalist Society luncheon today -- with the pleasant side benefit of sitting next to Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Diane Sykes, who has often been touted as a future Supreme Court nominee.   Judge Sykes is very charming, judicious, and intelligent.  

Anyway, the topic of the lecture was the barriers to entrepreneurship created by Milwaukee's byzantine City government and City code.   The young man giving the talk -- a very young (too young) lawyer with the free-market public-interest law firm, Institute for Justice, out of Arlington, VA -- gave a number of examples, but this one stuck out to me as the epitome of what we are fighting about when we say we want smaller government: 

If vendors want to set up a stand on the sidewalk, or be stationary on the street for longer than one hour, they may as well not bother. The barriers are almost insurmountable. First, prospective vendors must get a state seller's permit (anyone who sells anything in Wisconsin has to get one of these so the state can collect its share of taxes). Then, they must apply for a direct seller's license, which carries a $129 annual fee.  A prospective vendor will also want to check to make sure the product she is selling does not require a separate city license (e.g., gem dealer, secondhand dealer, etc).

Street vendors who wish to remain stationary must also file an application for a "special privilege" to do so from the Milwaukee Common Council. It requires another $250 application fee, filing a surety bond in an amount ranging from $1,000 to $10,000, and a public liability insurance policy with a significant amount of coverage.  It also requires a plan or sketch of the proposed vending station, the exact location when the vendor wishes to set up shop, and a description of what is to be sold. According to one city official who handles these requests, the process will suck months of one's life away. When asked about what it takes to become a prospective vendor, she discouraged this writer from even bothering to file, but was very helpful explaining how the process worked, and forwarded along the special-privilege permit application.

Once the special-privilege petition is filed with the Common Council, it is introduced into its Public Improvements Committee. It then gets referred to the Department of Public works ("DPW"). DPW then reviews the application, while getting input from DNS (which tends not to favor these because street vending is typically inconsistent with the zoning ordinances). It then submits its recommendation to either grant or deny the special privilege back to the Public Improvements Committee.  The committee then considers the request, votes on it, and then submits its recommendation to the full Common Council for a vote. Along the way, vendors will have to tussle with their alderman and gain his or her support, as well as be in the good graces of the adjacent property owner, either of whom can effectively kill a vendor's application.

Even if the special privilege were granted, vendors would be limited to a three-foot-by-seven-foot stand, and saddled with an annual sliding-scale fee based on the value of the adjacent property. That fee can range from as small as $10 per square foot of space, to $250 per square foot. It is no wonder that there are only two active special privileges: one to a sunglass vendor, and another to a flower stand.

This is an Orwellian nightmare.   We apparently have in Milwaukee a city bureaucracy dedicated to dissuading people from opening small businesses.   Insanity.

I have often commented to people that the legal-government-regulatory morasse is particularly sad, and should be galling for liberals, because it tends to create barriers to entry to the lowest-rung of the economic ladder.   If you were an immigrant, struggling with English, or you were a relatively less-educated American, looking to start a non-technical, service-oriented business like a food stand, the amount of paperwork -- which by definition is hard for you, or else you'd be doing something else -- is going to be daunting.  If, by contrast, you are an educated white suburbanite, well, you'll just hire lawyers to navigate the regulatory jungle for you.

Is it any wonder that the poor in the inner-city despair?  

Stuxnet and the XM-25

The Stuxnet computer worm that has apparently crippled the Iranian nuclear program is a story that makes me want to kiss an engineer.   There are some real geniuses out there who may have anonymously saved millions of lives.   Here is the story from Fox News' webpage, and it's fascinating reading.  

Couple that with the recent story about the Army's new XM-25 rifle, that shoots exploding shells (grenades) up to 2300 meters, and can program them to explode either just in front of or just behind a target.   What this means is that the concept of "taking cover" just became a lose-lose situation for the Taliban in a firefight:

Lt. Col. Christopher Lehner, project manager for the semi-automatic, shoulder-fired weapon system for the U.S. Army's Program Executive Office Soldier, said that the XM25's capability alone is such a "game-changer" that it'll lead to new ways of fighting on the battlefield, beginning this month in Afghanistan.

"With this weapon system, we take away cover from [enemy targets] forever," Lehner told FoxNews.com on Wednesday. "Tactics are going to have to be rewritten. The only thing we can see [enemies] being able to do is run away."

Engineers... making the world safe for democracy.   Wouldn't my dear departed old Dad be proud?  

Birthdays Today

Born today in 1859 was Georges Seurat, one of my favorite painters, whose style of "pointillism" is so cool that it almost is unusable by anyone else: 

Also born today, on 1923, was the great soprano, Maria Callas.   Here she is doing the famous aria from Bizet's Carmen: 

From the sublime to the ridiculous, today is also the birthday of maybe the worst public figure in American politics, Nevada Senator (and, luckily, former Majority Leader) Harry Reid.   Ugh!

Girl Wednesday - Honor Blackman

Better known by her "nom de cine" in the best of the Bond movies, Goldfinger, "Pussy Galore":

Best name in movie history.  

Smile of the Day

Okay, so we like dogs in our house.   Especially fluffy Goldens.  

Paul Ryan on the Debt Commission

The smartest and best Republican in Congress right now, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, on the Debt Commission's report:

Ryan is exactly right:  we can't balance our budget and put our fiscal house in order until we fix health care, and specifically Medicare.   Here's a chart that tells the tale:

As this shows, projected Medicare spending drives the deficit in the years after 2025 or so, which in turn drives the exploding interest payments.  (It's also worth noting that many of these projections rely on interest rates on US sovereign debt remaining relatively low... they won't.)

Birthdays Today

Marty Marion, the Cardinals shortstop for their 1940s World Series championships, was born today in 1917.   Marion was the prototypical good-field, no-hit shortstop, but when I think of the Cardinals of that era, he generally comes to mind second, just after (although a long way after) Stan Musial.

Also born today, in 1929, was the comic actor Dick Shawn, perhaps best known for his turn as the crazy hippy Lorenzo St. Dubois ("LSD") who plays Hitler in the bogus musical, Springtime for Hitler, that is the centerpiece of Mel Brooks' best movie, The Producers.   Here is LSD's hilarious audition:

Girl Wednesday - Farrah Fawcett

Inevitable for someone who was a teenager in the 1970s:

Smile(s) of the Day

Troy Tulowitzki, the Colorado Rockies' shortstop, inked a 7-year extension for $134 million, or $19 million per during the extension.   Weirdly, this may be a good deal for the Rockies -- an All-Star shortstop who gives you 20+ HRs and 90+ RBIs a year through age 26 might be a bit better in his prime, and won't fade too much hopefully by age 36, when this contract expires.  

For Cardinals fans, however, it begs the question -- if Tulowitzki gets $19 million per, what on earth is Albert worth?  I'd say the number is going to have to be $30 million at least.  Or, as suggested by the direction Albert is looking, maybe even higher.