By CHARLIE SAVAGE，紐約時報，Published: April 15, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Obama and his wife released their 2008 federal tax return on Wednesday, showing that they paid $855,323 in federal income taxes on a combined household income of $2,656,902.Mr. Obama and Michelle Obama also reported giving $172,050 — nearly 6.5 percent of their earnings — to 37 charities, including $25,000 contributions to CARE, a global antipoverty group, and to the United Negro College Fund.
For the fourth year in a row, most of the Obamas’ income came from royalties from his two books: “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.”
Proceeds from book sales totaled more than $2.4 million in 2008, dwarfing the roughly $200,000 the couple made from Mr. Obama’s salary as a United States senator and Mrs. Obama’s at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Mrs. Obama went on leave from her job during the presidential campaign last year and formally resigned at the beginning of this year.
Earlier on Wednesday, the deadline for Americans to file their income tax returns, Mr. Obama made a sales pitch for his tax proposals, saying a tax cut in the stimulus bill would benefit “95 percent of American workers,” and praised other changes that he said would help small-business owners, parents of college students and first-time homebuyers. And he called for a sweeping overhaul of the tax code.
Mr. Obama made his remarks as conservative activists held a series of “Tea Party” protests around the country calling for lower taxes and less government spending.
The president has proposed to raise taxes on more affluent workers, and would himself be likely to pay higher taxes should his proposals go through. He has called for putting a cap on the value of itemized deductions, like charitable contributions.
Moreover, he advocates allowing Bush-era tax cuts to expire as scheduled at the end of 2010, restoring the marginal tax rate on couples’ earnings above $250,000 to 39 percent, as it was during the 1990s. That rate is currently 35 percent.
The White House on Wednesday also released the tax return for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his wife, Jill. They reported an adjusted gross income of $269,256 and paid $46,952 in federal income taxes.
The Bidens also reported donating $1,885 to charity, less than 1 percent of their earnings. In a press release, the White House said the Bidens have made additional donations to charity not listed on the returns.
“The charitable donations claimed by the Bidens on their tax returns are not the sum of their annual contributions to charity,” it said. “They donate to their church, and they contribute to their favorite causes with their time as well as their checkbooks.”
The Obamas first opened a window onto their rapidly escalating personal wealth in March 2008, when they released seven years of their tax returns amid Mr. Obama’s effort to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.
Those forms showed that the couple’s income had spiked sharply in 2005, largely because of book sales after Mr. Obama became famous with a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when he was running for the Senate.
From 2000 to 2004, the Obamas had earned an average of about $250,000 a year. But their taxable income surged to $1.6 million in 2005 and $983,826 in 2006.
In 2007, as book sales rose to a new high during the first year of his presidential campaign, they earned $4.2 million. Since then, Mr. Obama’s book sales have slowed somewhat but remain lucrative, the new tax filings show.
Mr. Obama signed a book deal in January, just before taking office. The deal, revealed in a routine Senate filing last month, will pay him $250,000 for an adaptation of his memoir for younger readers. The Senate filing also first disclosed his 2008 book royalty income.
The White House also released the Obamas’ and the Bidens’ state tax returns. The Obamas reported paying $77,883 in state income taxes to Illinois, and the Bidens reported paying $11,164 in state income taxes to Delaware.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington, and Liz Robbins from New York.
2、Does Bo Know He’s Top Dog?
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA，紐約時報，Published: April 15, 2009
SOONER or later, someone is going to ask Bo, the 6-month-old Portuguese water dog who moved into the White House this week, if he knows the answer to a simple question: Who’s a good boy?
The question will of course be rhetorical, since Bo, whose raison d’être is to be furry and sweet, has significantly fewer performance expectations than his master. But it will by no means be idle, at least not to the psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers and kissy-face dog owners who for centuries have pondered the mysteries of canine consciousness. What, they ask, does a creature that lives to chew shoes and chase tennis balls really know about himself and his surroundings?
These questions are intriguing enough when applied to household pets — do they know why they’re not allowed on the couch? That we are coming home again? That the houseguests do not like to be sniffed and jumped on? — but downright trippy when it comes to dogs like Bo. All of a sudden, photographers shoulder one another aside to snap his picture, and the president of the United States scampers behind him.
Does Bo wonder, in whatever way he might be capable, what all the fuss is about? Does he know he’s the most famous dog in the world?
Yes — or he soon will, said Cecelia Ruggles, a Connecticut dog breeder who owns Stump, the Sussex spaniel who won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club show this year. She is also an owner of J. R., a bichon frisé who won Westminster in 2001, and several other champions.
“Oh, they know they’re famous, and they definitely get an attitude,” she said.
Like many people in the dog business, Ms. Ruggles takes a fairly anthropomorphic view of her animals’ cognitive abilities. “What distinguishes show dogs from other dogs is that they realize what’s going on, they know what they’re doing,” she said. “That’s what makes them who they are.”
J. R., for instance, knows how to make an impressive entrance at a press conference. “He waves his paws — it’s his signature,” Ms. Ruggles said. “It’s not something we taught him to do, it’s just something he does.”
But many dog owners are quick to tell stories about the precocity of their pets (often, long after the interest of the listener has waned), and skeptics chalk these tricks up to personality rather than brains. Even people who have studied the intelligence of dogs are doubtful that Bo has any clue he is an international media star.
“No,” declared Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the co-author of “What Do Dogs Know?” “Dogs don’t know fame.”
What dogs do know, said Professor Coren, is their position within their social group, whether they are at the top or the bottom of their pack.
“They know about comfort, and they know how much they can demand and get away with,” he said. So with the first family treating him like royalty for the time being, “that might be equivalent to fame. He might think he has groupies.”
By that standard, Bo’s perception of his surroundings won’t be all that different from any other well-pampered family dog, he said.
“I’m certain there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of dogs who are owned by blue-collar workers who really feel that they are extremely special,” Professor Coren said.
Based on the behavior of previous four-legged White House occupants, it is hard to draw too many conclusions. During the George W. Bush presidency, Barney the Scottish terrier had his own Web page on whitehouse.gov (which he shared with the Bushes’ other dog, Miss Beazley), and showed his gratitude by biting a Reuters reporter during the administration’s waning days. Socks and Buddy, the Clintons’ cat and dog, drew enough mail that Hillary Rodham Clinton assembled a book of letters, though Socks’s nastiness to Buddy got him gifted to Betty Currie when the Clintons left the White House.
Perhaps a better role model for Bo was Millie the springer spaniel, who not only “dictated” a book to her owner, Barbara Bush, but also gave birth to a camera-ready litter of puppies.
The idea that a dog could tell a red carpet from a housebreaking pad may sound far-fetched. For centuries, however, the mysteries of animal awareness have occupied some of mankind’s most respected thinkers.
Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Catholic philosopher, believed that animals possessed just enough consciousness that people should spare them outright abuse, if not the frying pan. René Descartes, who divided the world into two distinct substances, mind and matter, said that animals were purely mechanical beings that lacked an inner life (a classification that rings hollow to anyone who has heard the noise a beagle makes when you step on its tail). Darwin, Aristotle and Immanuel Kant also tried, unconvincingly, to wrap their heads around animal minds.
But canine cognition has become a serious science in the past few decades. More or less.
Starting in the late 1990s, Marc Bekoff, then a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, used his dog, Jethro, to conduct a landmark study he called “The Yellow Snow Project.”
“For five winters I collected piles of yellow snow on the path where I walk my dog in the mountains outside of Boulder,” he said. “Then I would move them along the bike path and watch what Jethro did.”
“He basically spent a longer time sniffing the other dogs’ urine than his own,” Mr. Bekoff said.
Professor Coren, who has studied Mr. Bekoff’s work (animal psychology is a tight-knit field), said that the yellow snow experiment offered proof that dogs have a sense of themselves versus other dogs. “It’s the first level of consciousness, knowing that you are there and a separate entity from everyone else,” Professor Coren said.
His own claim to fame is a series of tests conducted in the early 1990s that measured how many sounds, signals and gestures dogs could comprehend. He concluded that the average dog had roughly the same cognitive abilities as a 2-year-old human, a finding that is now commonly cited among pet owners.
“It’s helpful because when dealing with a dog, you can ask yourself, ‘What would I expect of a 2-year-old kid?’ ” he said.
Still, no matter how many pointy-headed tests are dreamed up, there will always be pet owners who believe their dogs possess the magical ability to apprehend their larger place in the world.
“People love to humanize their dogs,” said Mathilde DeCagny, the Hollywood trainer who worked on “Marley & Me.” “But Bo is not walking in the White House right now thinking, ‘I scored!’ ”
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Some animal rights advocates have criticized the Obamas for adopting a dog from a private breeder rather than from a shelter. But the choice somehow seems less cruel once you remove the suggestion of Oliver Twist-like emotional despair. “I have gotten so many e-mails today from people saying it’s too bad they didn’t get a mutt from the pound who would know that he is special,” Mr. Bekoff said.
“But come on,” he laughed. “Bo doesn’t know that, and neither would a pound dog.”
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