The Tangled Webs

One of the things we'd like to do before the Little It pops out is get married, mostly so that Karel doesn't have to go to the Hague to declare himself the dad (I'm not actually sure he has to do that, but it wouldn't surprise me) and so that the baby can have dual citizenship. So a few weeks ago, we made an appointment for a consultation with the gemeente, to make sure that all of our ducks were in a row, and to start the necessary process of getting the paperwork.

Two things immediately became clear: I might need to pay (yet another) visit to the US Embassy in Amsterdam, to get a "I was never married" paper signed and stamped. I can't remember if I'd sent the original to the IND, but in any case, that's not too difficult to do and that can be readily arranged.

Item the second is that I need my original birth certificate. And this is a bit of a pickle, because, well...I haven't got one.

In Taiwan, recordkeeping is somewhat...looser than it is in, say, the anal-retentive Netherlands. I was able to get around this problem the first time I needed proof of having been born (beyond existing) by providing a document that one of my aunts had to dredge up: a paper saying that I lived with my mom and dad. As far as an actual document saying that "Jules was born on Day/Month/Year at Hour:Minute", though? I get the feeling, after speaking with my mother, that such things were optional. But in any event, the paper stating that I was a resident of such-and-such an address was enough for them, although I get the feeling that they would've accepted any document with a smattering of Chinese on it.

What kind of irritated me about this appointment, though, was that the woman kept referring to China's system of public record keeping. China is not Taiwan--well, it is for official purposes (i.e., my passport says that I was born in China), but Taiwan has it's own (lax) government and different rules and such. While technically not wrong, it's sort of like suggesting that Maastricht is Dutch.

Taxes: You're Doing Them Wrong

Now that I've officially begun as a freelancer (photography is but a subset of what I do--the main bread-and-butter operation is copyediting), I enter the world of Dutch tax forms and all their insane, crazy, and confusing glory.

Oh. Sorry. My apologies to the Netherlands. I meant US tax forms.

Something that I never did truly appreciate up until now was how simple Dutch tax forms are to fill out. At the end of the year, most people receive a jaaropgaaf from their place of employment, which contains just four numbers. When you do your taxes in the Netherlands, you basically match up the four numbers on the forms with the four names on the online form, and (assuming you haven't made any significant investments or bought a house or had a baby) click through the entire form in about 10 minutes. If you have made significant investments/bought a house/had a baby, clicking on the box next to the scenario leads to a drop-down menu, in which you can enter in relevant data. What you do need is a working DigiD account to complete the form (it's sort of like the electronic PIN you get when you take out money for your student loans), but even that's relatively simple to arrange.

As a small business owner, though, perhaps the nicest part of doing taxes is that the Belastingdienst has made every effort to simplify the tax forms I need to fill out, to the point where, even though I don't know what half of the words mean, I can still enter in the right numbers (mostly--adding and subtracting have always been a bit iffy). And furthermore, rather than putting any onus on me to look up the right form to fill out, the Belastingdienst sent me the form, with directions, and a self-addressed envelope. It was mind-bogglingly-simple, so much so that I felt sure that in my mess of papers (looking up receipts and all makes everything a bit messy) some monster tax form was about to rear its ugly head.

Contrast this with the US: when you go on the IRS website, the section on internationals gives you a screen filled with small type, most of it highly legal-esque. Do I qualify for this exemption? Do I have to fill out that form? Clicking on the forms leads to a PDF rather than an explanation. The PDF, granted, does have an explanation: "Fill this form out if you meet conditions A, B, C, D, but not if you meet conditions E, F, G, H." It's positively Vogon-ish, compared to the simplicity of the Dutch system.

And then there's the fact that if you don't have a W2 ( = jaaropgaaf, but with more blocks and inked in bright red), you can't use the relatively simple online software to zip through your taxes. The Dutch government gets around this by (sensibly) not requiring citizens living abroad to contribute to its coffers. The US government is the only industrialized nation that requires its citizens to keep paying income taxes even though there really is no way to do it properly once you leave the land of the "free" (used ironically, as I am a woman and the uses of my uterus can be legislated by creepy white guys). Up until now, when I had been a regular working stiff, things were relatively simple, but now that I'm a small business owner (even if it goes belly-up) it gets infinitely more complicated. I'm sort-of-jokingly-considering renouncing my US citizenship, just so I won't have to deal with the IRS. Several millionaire expats have done just that, actually, since their tax burden has gotten too onerous to bear. Happily, my income falls well short of that bracket, but there's still the question of whether I can do my own taxes correctly.

Is it the government's responsibility to make things easy? I don't know, and given the vitriolic tone of recent US politics, I don't particularly care to venture an opinion. But what I will say is this: if you make it look easier, people are certainly more willing to try, and more likely to succeed. I think the Dutch government got it right: you shouldn't need an accounting degree to do your taxes properly, which is something that seems to have escaped the IRS.

"Nobody move! I dropped me brain."

24 Oranges first picked up the story, which one of my FB friends linked to: Rick Santorum, now a "serious contender" for the presidency (and I swear, I wish I could say that that was a typo), says that the Dutch practice euthanasia on the elderly.

Which is ridiculous, and Reddit has already done a thorough refutation of everything that Santorum said about the Dutch. Starting with "wearing special bracelets". Dude--the Holocaust is still within living memory, and Karel's parents still remember the Dutch famine of '44-45. We are so not going there.

There are a whole host of other things about Santorum's quote that rubs me the wrong way. "Elderly people in the Netherlands don't go the hospital, they go to another country", for starters. I live closer to the Germany than I do to Amsterdam. If I do need urgent medical care, it is actually pretty reasonable for me to seek it in Germany. Happily, we live in a city serviced by a major medical center, so I don't need to learn another language.

Now, to be fair, it is easy to point to the Netherlands, with all of the hash and hookers, and say, "What a degenerate country!" But if you look beyond that, to see how people who actually live here actually live, it's quite the opposite. You can point to the ridiculously long wait times for elective procedures (one month to get a wisdom tooth extracted, for instance) as evidence that socialized medical systems suck, but honestly--it's an elective procedure. It's not like it's going to kill me if I wait another month. It's like tossing out a Maserati because a bird crapped on the hood.

Right now, the US is embroiled in another "controversy" over mandatory birth control coverage for women who want it. Detractors have framed it as a question of religious freedom, which sort of begs the question: if a Catholic woman wants birth control, are they then suggesting that she can no longer be Catholic? Or to put it another way: what better way to celebrate religious freedom, than to let people decide how they want to practice it?

All of which gets lost on morons like the ones that are (God knows why, I've long given up trying to understand the Republican psyche) running for the highest office of one of the most powerful nations on the earth. Perhaps I didn't actually drop me brain. Probably it fled rather than confront the idiocy.

Care Bears

In the US, when you're about to lose your job, you panic for a bit, and then, when you stop panicking, you arrange for unemployment, and find another job.

In the Netherlands, apparently, the correct response is to arrange for uitkering benefits.

Uitkering is welfare, plain and simple. It's a bit of money you get from the government so that you can still buy food, and, depending on the circumstances through which you are unemployed, pay your mortgage, provide child care, and gives you a vacation "bonus" (in quotes because, being American, bonuses are something you need to earn). The exact amount you get depends, I would imagine, upon the probability of your finding a job and whether you have any disabilities. There are, of course, rules that you must follow in order to receiver your benefits (such as not having a successful business), and frankly, I'm not even sure I'd qualify, seeing as I am healthy and sound of body and mind. But the gist here is that it seems that applying for benefits is the first thing I should have done upon receiving notice of contract expiration. No less than three people this week have asked me whether I will be applying for it. It's starting to make me wonder if I should...

But I won't, because, as I learned today, applying for uitkering could complicate starting a business considerably, and it would limit my ability to work as much as I want to, to say nothing of finding another job. Of course, I am sure there are some sneaky Dutch people who flip the bird at the rules and do whatever they want and collect uitkering money, but the government can't deport them.

Transit

This fascinating article in Slate disucsses two factors of public transit: "system", defined as the physical and operational infrastructure; and "empathy", meaning cultural "texture", although I tend to think of it as anything about public transit that doesn't refer to the infrastructure. It's safe to say that Dutch public transit is a high system and high empathy system (yes, I know I used "system" twice in one sentence): you have a thorough public transit system servicing a great range of neighborhoods, relatively frequent services, and the trains/buses/trams/subways are, for the most part, not terribly uncomfortable, and clean. Dutch readers of OLI who wish to take me to task for the last should go visit Philadelphia's public transit system. Our litter boxes after three days are pristine compared to some of the...ah, stuff, that you can see on the subways.

Why is public transit so wonderful in Europe and yet so...well, shoddy in the States? Even the best public transit systems that I've seen (the Metro systems in DC and New York) are bare-bones compared to the worst of the Dutch NS (the older cars they run between Utrecht and Weesp). The easy answer is that public transit is an afterthought in the minds of most people--they have cars. But most people in the Netherlands have cars, as well--in this respect, Karel and I are in the minority 10% of family units who do not own at least one car. The parking lot of the nearby Albert Heijn is consistently filled to the brim on Saturdays, falsifying the statement "All Dutch people ride bikes".

But the buses are simultaneously crowded on Saturdays, and the trains are packed with travelers at all hours of the day. This is, in part, because the files (traffic jams) can be long enough to make a short delay by the NS worthwhile, and parking can be a pain. Briefly, while the door-do-door time of a trip by train versus a trip by car is theoretically the same according to Google, it must be countered by the possibility of a long traffic jam and the cost of parking. Which is also not cheap, and can be quite a walk from where you need to get to.

European cities, in other words, have gamed the system to work against drivers. Timing traffic lights so that cars have to stop at every other block, eliminating streets available for parking, and marginalizing parking structures all serve one thing: to keep cars out of key areas of pedestrian traffic. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Dutch don't have cars, if you looked at Nijmegen's city center on a Saturday. Or Utrecht. Or Amsterdam's tourist hot spots. I don't know if the Dutch have gone out of their way to time traffic lights, but I am fairly certain that the buses that service Nijmegen communicate with some of the traffic lights, so that they don't have to be like all of the other chumps cars and wait their turn.

But more importantly, the public transportation system in Europe tends to make more sense than it does in the US. Trains go to where people are--where there are fewer people, there is less service. This bit of intuition seems to have escaped the powers-that-be at SEPTA, who have plunked train stations at places as odd as Rosslyn, which is literally in the middle of nowhere. The scheduling systems are quick to load and easy to follow--why anybody should even bother loading a timetable to their website these days baffles me (SEPTA)--and all of the information, fares, times, stops, are available at one glance. The Dutch are not exceptional at public transit, although after having suffered SEPTA for three years, it certainly feels that way. They've just done a better job of adapting to how people actually use transit, rather than expecting people to adapt to them.

People in the US, on the other hand, don't use transit. It startled me to learn, for instance, that for the majority of Disneyworld visitors, their encounter with Disney's trams and buses were their first with "public" transit. A public that doesn't use public transportation can't provide information for how to make service better; a service that can't make service better can't attract the public to use it. The public, not having seen any benefits for having a good public transit system in place, therefore refuses to pay taxes to ensure its survival. And things only get worse.

Koningin Conundrum

Life in the Netherlands is, usually for the better, pretty damn quiet. I say this because on Monday, Queen Beatrix went to Abu Dhabi and got photographed wearing a headscarf...and the flak hasn't stopped since. Immediately after the pictures were posted, Geert Wilders (yes, that Geert, Dutch-directness-become-@$$hole-ishness-personified) begain ripping on Her Majesty for "endorsing a symbol of inequality and oppression." (Approximate translation)

It is times like this that I find myself wishing for a bit of "real" news--y'know, like heads of state conspiring to teach Intelligent Design as science. Something good and proper to get riled up about, rather than this nonsense. The queen rightfully dismissed Wilders's "criticism" as "echte onzin" (nonsense), but strangely enough he has his supporters. Mostly from people who just don't get why their queen would want to visit a mosque. (Because it's a beautiful building with gorgeous artwork and historical books, maybe?)

I also find it amusing that the same people who are getting their panties up in a bunch about the queen adhering to local customs are the same ones who insist that foreigners should become completely integrated, or GTFO: They don't want the queen to adopt to local customs for a visit, but they insist that buitenlanders learn Dutch and jump for joy over Zwarte Piet. It's the kind of hypocrisy that would make for blood-boiling anger-fueled rants, if the Netherlands were just a little bigger.

Flat World, Flat Country

A perfect confluence of events:

A Facebook friend of mine pointed out an article that kind of bludgeons the US over the head with a poleax: the reason why Finnish schools are so great and American schools less great (on average) is simply that Finland believes that every child should have the same opportunity to learn the same things. If they fail to pass the test at the age of 18, then it's trade school, or straight to work, but at least they all had the same chances. It's a wonderfully egalitarian system that really brings out the truth in that favorite-of-favorite catchphrases, "All men are created equal".

Undoubtedly the reality is more complicated than the glossy Atlantic article would have it, and indeed, the article touches on a few more points that I won't get into, here. But there is an ugly truth behind it: the gulf in the types of opportunities that the children of the super-rich have, versus those of the middling-to-lower classes, can't possibly be bigger: children who go to schools armed with iPads and filled with breakfasts designed by nutritionists to maximize mental activity, and then children who count themselves lucky to have school that day because they can get the free lunch. There is something seriously wrong when people can see these two scenarios and say, "Yes, that is capitalism at work--things are as they should be." It's one thing for an adult to screw things up--take to drink, do drugs, etc. But it's another to disadvantage a child from birth, and then expect him to pull himself up by his bootstraps the moment he turns 18. I'm not suggesting that every child gets state-of-the-art technology. But it just seems to be common sense that textbooks should not be written by corporations (as Eric Schlosser points out in Fast Food Nation) and that science should not be infused with God, and in a world where there is so much information to be had, it's a crying shame that more people can't make better use of it.

The educational system in Finland is similar to that of the Netherlands, although the process to weed out the educational misfits begins at the tender age of 12, rather than 18. But in any case, the Netherlands still do bettter than the US in the three metrics of reading, math, and science. You can play with the data at the PISA site: it's quite fascinating (although a bit of a pain to use). Or you can just cheat and look at the Wiki page (2009 data).

I am pointing this out because a comment that someone left on my post "Phat" has been niggling at me for quite a while. In the Netherlands, being a much smaller economy, I have fewer choices (the choices that the commenter suggested were bikes or cars). There are 6 brands of peanut butter on the supermarket shelf, rather than 30. There are 4 brands of milk, rather than 10. And there are certainly not 31 flavors of ice cream. The limitation of choices could be construed as a limitation of the freedoms I have (golly, if I want Skippy peanut butter, I should be able to get it!). Or it could be that I am able to be happier. Barry Schwartz explains it much better than I could:



Dr. Schwartz explains it in matters of consumer goods, mostly, but the same could apply to school choices, as well. In the US, the school district you live in can easily raise housing prices by $10,000 or more (at least that's the figure Elizabeth Warren gave in her speech--personally, I think it's more). But the impact of schools is much bigger than mere dissatisfaction with your choice: social and environmental policies are more often driven by pleasant-sounding ideologies than hard science, and we can't vote smart politicians into office unless we are also capable of making smart choices.

Sure, biology plays an important part, too--half of the people have got to be below average, after all. But Finland, I think, proves that good social policy can at least mitigate the effects of an avearge population.