Hometown discounts don't come about often in pro sports

Based on his many conversations with Matt Kemp, agent Dave Stewart said he has a clear idea of what his client is looking for in a long-term deal.

"Winning is important," Stewart said. "Team chemistry is important."

And something else: "It's also important for him to be seen by his peers as one of the best."

So, what does this mean for the Dodgers, who will attempt to sign their star center fielder to a contract extension this winter?

"This isn't Matt saying this, this is me saying this," Stewart said. "But, unfortunately, the way these things are seen is often based on how you're paid."

In other words, if the Dodgers intend to retain Kemp beyond the 2012 season when he can become a free agent, they shouldn't count on a significant hometown discount.

Hometown discounts, in which players remain with their longtime teams or sign with their hometown clubs at less than their market value, are becoming increasingly rare in baseball and other professional sports.

"I think it's walked step by step with the increase in salaries," said Dodgers General Manager Ned Colletti, who has spent more than three decades in baseball.

Whereas a hometown discount in the past often meant leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table, doing so today could cost a player millions.

But it does happen.

By agreeing to a five-year, $85-million contract extension with the Angels in August, pitcher Jered Weaver passed on the opportunity to sign a nine-figure deal as a free agent after the 2012 season.

"There's no better fit than to stay here," Weaver said at the time.

Weaver grew up in Simi Valley, pitched at Long Beach State, was drafted by the Angels in 2004 and has spent his entire professional career in the organization.

Six-time Pro Bowl safety Troy Polamalu said he felt similarly toward the Pittsburgh Steelers. In a league filled with mercenaries who switch teams with great frequency, Polamalu has spent his entire nine-year career with the same franchise.

A season away from free agency, Polamalu signed a four-year extension with the Steelers last month. He is under contract through 2014.

"There's a lot of loyalty here," Polamalu said. "With that, you have consistency. You have a deep understanding of the system and you don't have so many ego problems. It's not like the adopted brother that comes in when everybody's in high school and the family is set in its ways."

Still, the Steelers had to pay him top dollar. Polamalu is one of the league's highest-paid defensive backs.

A player might take less to stay with the same team, Colletti said, but not that much less.

"It's got to be relatively close," Colletti said.
Until its collective-bargaining agreement expired, the NBA had a mechanism in place to limit the movement of its top players. "The Larry Bird exception," named after the Boston Celtics' Hall of Fame forward, allowed teams to exceed the salary cap to re-sign their own free agents.

In the NFL, a team can retain a would-be free agent by designating him with a "franchise tag." The tag binds the player to the team for the upcoming season. In exchange, the player is guaranteed to earn 120% of his salary from the previous season or the average salary of the top five earners at his position in the league.
But top-tier NFL players rarely reach free agency in the primes of their careers. Many sign multi-year deals before then because players fear potential injuries and teams fear losing their top talent in the open market.

Many Major League Baseball teams and players are employing the same tactics.

Entering his second big league season, in 2008, Ryan Braun tied himself to the Milwaukee Brewers through 2015. The extension, which bought out Braun's first two years of free agency, was worth $45 million. Braun signed another extension in March, this one for an additional $105 million that bound him to the Brewers through at least 2020.

Chad Billingsley also exchanged the potential upside of free agency for guaranteed money. Shortly before opening day this year, the right-hander anchored himself to the Dodgers through at least the 2014 season. The deal includes a team option for 2015, meaning Billingsley could have signed away his first three years of free agency.

Like Kemp, Billingsley is represented by Stewart, a former major league All-Star pitcher.

But that doesn't mean Stewart is pushing Kemp to sign a below-market deal for the sake of security.

"The timing is what makes this different," Stewart said.

The Dodgers had Billingsley under club control for two more seasons when they signed him to his extension. Kemp will be a free agent after only more season.

"Matt is arguably the best player in the game at this age," Stewart said. "He's a special hitter. He hits with power. He plays a special position. His potential is upward. He plays every day. There's no reason to think anything negative is going to happen."

Kal Penn: From 'White Castle' to White House and back

When Kal Penn worked in the White House, he sometimes briefed President Obama before meetings.

Yeah, the guy who plays the marijuana-craving Kumar in silly road movies was giving the commander in chief the scoop on matters of public policy. If need be, he could also have told the president how to deal with problematic raccoons and stoned cheetahs — among the bizarre plot points of "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle."

"When you're working there, you always think, 'What is the best time to tell the president that you played a stoner who escaped from Guantanamo Bay?'" Penn said with a smile over a late lunch in Studio City this month, a Detroit Tigers baseball cap pulled down brim-forward on his head. "Is it before his national security meeting? Is it after the education meeting?"

The 34-year-old UCLA grad is back plying his craft in Los Angeles after a two-year sojourn as a mid-level staffer in the White House, complete with a security clearance and a $41,000-a-year salary. On the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," Penn has a guest role this fall as a shrink who falls for Robin (Cobie Smulders). He's developing a workplace comedy set at the United Nations for NBC, where he has a deal. And next month comes the release of the third installment of the movie series that gave him his claim to fame: "A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas," which Penn filmed last year during a hurried sabbatical from his White House duties.

"I think there's always a risk that goes with taking time off," Penn said. But "no actor in their right mind moves to either L.A. or New York … because you think you're going to have job or financial security. That's just stupid. This amazing opportunity came along, and what are you going to say — 'No'?"

Maybe so, but it's still striking when a rising young actor goes to Washington to scratch a public-service itch, toils quietly in the bowels of the Eisenhower building and then reemerges a couple of years later with no apparent damage to his performing career. This is not something today's image-obsessed young thespians tend to do, whatever lip service they might pay to campaigns against allegedly harmful vaccines, school bullying or restaurants that make you wait too long for a table.

Penn's is an intriguing tale, one involving not weed-smoking cheetahs but rather labor unrest, a fictional suicide and one dissatisfied talent manager.

Carter Bays, the show runner on "How I Met Your Mother," said he'd always wanted to work with Penn after seeing the "Harold & Kumar" movies (which also feature "Mother" star Neil Patrick Harris). Penn played Kumar Patel, the lazy, wisecracking Indian American college grad resisting his father's attempts to pack him off to medical school. "But Kal was always unavailable for various reasons, whether it was starring on 'House' or working at the White House," Bays said. "This was just this great, serendipitous moment" for the guest spot this fall.

Penn comes by his political conscience honestly; family lore holds that his grandparents marched with Gandhi during the road to Indian independence in the 1940s. His parents emigrated to the U.S., and Penn — his birth name is Kalpen Modi — grew up in suburban New Jersey. At UCLA he mixed sociology with a film and theater major. In his spare time — have we made the point that his serious-mindedness is a rarity in Hollywood? — he has been pursuing a grad certificate in international security from Stanford.

He's also a self-described independent with a professed distaste for the extremism that dominates much of the political debate these days. So Penn was receptive to the speech at the Democratic convention that vaulted Obama onto the national stage in 2004 — ironically, the same year the first "Harold & Kumar" movie came out. The rising politico from Chicago, Penn believed, was changing the status quo.

"The thing that drew me to his campaign was that he wasn't taking lobbyist money; he actually opposed the Iraq war early on; he had a plan for a lot of things that a lot of other folks just seemed resigned to doing," he said. Needless to say, Penn in person is a lot more serious-minded than the movie character who made him famous.

His pro-Obama sentiments might have remained admiration from afar had it not been for the fall 2007 writer's strike, which paralyzed much of Hollywood. Penn — who'd just gotten a plum job on the cast of Fox's hit medical drama "House" — figured he wasn't working anyway, so he packed off to Des Moines to help the Obama camp get ready for the Iowa caucus in January. At the time, Obama looked like a long shot, at best, behind Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Penn's arrival at campaign headquarters made a bit of a stir. Not just a celebrity was in their midst, but one who'd made his name off something more glamorous than, say, a piece of innovative tax legislation.

"Everybody knew 'Harold & Kumar' — absolutely!" said Paul Tewes, with a chuckle. Tewes was Penn's boss in Iowa and now runs a Washington consulting firm.

But the actor quickly won co-workers' respect. "There was a selflessness about it," Tewes said. "He was there for the right reasons. He believed in the candidate, he believed in the cause. He was approachable, he didn't put on any airs. And he loved to work hard.… We'd take him to five, six college campuses a day, and he'd never complain.… You could have asked him to do anything — go lick some stamps, he would've done that."

Unfortunately, this career turn was driving someone back in Los Angeles nuts. His manager, Dan Spilo, would call Penn and remind him that he could still work in films that were written before the strike. "What are you doing?" Spilo would ask, referring to the Obama work, according to Penn. "The guy is down 30 points in the polls. It's not cute anymore!" (In an email, Spilo said he merely asked Penn to make sure he really wanted to take a complete hiatus from acting and added that he later met Obama himself and "was completely sold.")

Once the strike was over, Penn did return to his job on "House," playing enthusiastic young doctor Lawrence Kutner. But not for long. He still traveled all over the country to help the campaign on weekends or at other times when he wasn't shooting. And after Obama's victory in November 2008, Penn asked Spilo and his agent whether they thought the show's producers would give him a break for a year or two to go work in the White House. They said no.

"I've always wondered," he said wryly, "did they ever actually ask?" (Spilo said he had a "number of conversations" with the producers on the subject.)

Penn approached the show's executive producer, David Shore, and explained his plan. According to Penn, Shore was supportive of the move — although he and the writing staff then decided for story purposes to have Kutner commit suicide.

"I'm like, 'Oh, man, there goes the 'If you ever wanna come back' conversation," Penn said.

He was hired to work for Valerie Jarrett, a top Obama adviser, doing outreach to arts and minority organizations. The money was hardly great, but savings from "House" had enabled him to keep paying the bills. Government worked in ways that took some getting used to, however.

"I got calls from friends of mine in L.A. saying, 'Dude, so the FBI just called me; do I need to be worried?'" Penn said, adding that such contacts were merely routine background interviews for his security clearance.

At work he would run into the president "on occasion," but their contact sounds fairly succinct and professional. Even so, the glow from Obama's candidacy never faded for him. "It made me more inspired," he said of his service.

However, his manager can rest easy. He said he may volunteer for Obama's reelection campaign but otherwise Penn seems to have worked public service out of his system. He may be a little adventurous, but he's not stoned-cheetah crazy.

"There's no big plan to run for office," Penn said. "To be honest, I don't have any desire to really get involved with politics."

Cain’s 9-9-9 plan doesn’t add upAt

 the Bloomberg-Washington Post debate, Cain argued that economic growth spurred by the reduced rates would more than make up for any lost revenue. “We have had an outside firm, independent firm, dynamically score it,” he said. “And so our numbers will make it revenue-neutral.”
Beware when you hear the phrase “dynamic scoring.” It translates to: “This tax cut might bust the budget, but let’s cross our fingers and hope for growth.”

And it turns out — at least according to his chief economic adviser — that Cain didn’t mean to be relying on dynamic scoring at all.

Cain adviser Richard Lowrie said the candidate mistakenly invoked dynamic scoring. But even under a more traditional analysis, Lowrie said, the plan would be revenue-neutral, meaning it would not lose money.

“On occasion he might transpose the terms,” Lowrie told me. “When asked if it is revenue-neutral, he might say it’s dynamically scored. He might misspeak.”

This is not reassuring. Sure, anyone can jumble up terminology, especially in the unaccustomed glare of a presidential debate. But a few days earlier, Cain said the same thing.

“The people who are saying it will not be revenue-neutral? They are absolutely wrong because they did a static analysis,” Cain told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “We had this done with the dynamic analysis with an outside independent firm, so they are making an erroneous assumption.”

The 9-9-9 plan is the main plank — the only plank — of Cain’s campaign platform. As it turns out, according to new calculations by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, his plan would probably raise more revenue in 2013 than would the current tax code. But his muffed explanation is pretty unsettling.

Cain is even more muddled on the undeniably regressive impact of his plan. “Some people will pay more, but most people would pay less,” Cain told NBC’s David Gregory.

The Tax Policy Center analysis shows that Cain has it exactly backward. Compared with current tax rates, 84 percent of taxpayers would pay more under 9-9-9 if it were fully implemented in 2013. Just 14 percent — the wealthiest — would see their tax bills drop.

By a lot. The top 1 percent, earning $600,000 and up, would pay almost 20 percent less, for an average tax break of $238,000. The middle 20 percent, those with incomes between $37,000 and $65,000, would see their taxes rise 10 percent — an average increase of $4,330.

Why? As University of Southern California law professor Edward Kleinbard, former chief of staff to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, has shown, the 9 percent business tax, 9 percent retail sales tax and 9 percent wage tax is effectively a 27 percent tax on wages.

Cain’s business tax is not like the existing corporate income tax, which applies to profits. Instead, it’s basically a value-added tax in which businesses do not deduct the cost of wages. That means, in effect, another 9 percent tax on income — just as standard economic theory now treats the employer’s share of payroll taxes as reducing workers’ wages.

Cain ignores any impact of the business tax on wages. Meanwhile, he asserts that the 9 percent retail sales tax would not raise the final cost of goods; rather, it would replace existing taxes “embedded” in the current price. If anything, he asserts, prices will drop.

Simultaneously, however, Cain claims the tax isn’t a problem for lower-income people because they can simply buy used goods, on which the tax would not apply. Slight problem: There’s no such thing as used milk.

Assume Cain is right. Prices won’t go up. Wages won’t fall. Cain simplistically argues that the existing payroll tax adds up to 15 percent and asserts that people will be six percentage points better off under his 9 percent plan.

This is wrong, as explained above. But consider the impact of only the personal income tax on two taxpayers earning $25,000 and $250,000, both married with two children. According to the Tax Foundation’s nifty calculator, the $25,000 earner owes $1,413 in payroll taxes. Thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, his income tax liability is negative. He receives a $5,002 check. Under the Cain plan, he owes $2,250.

Assuming a standard deduction, the $250,000 earner owes combined income and payroll taxes of $60,765. His Cain tax is $22,500. Explain again, Mr. Cain, who wins under your plan?