Walmart shoppers on Black Friday. (CC 2.0.)

For the past few days, one of the most popular stories on the New York Times website has been Graham Hill’s op-ed “Living With Less. A Lot Less.” In a majestic display of guileless narcissism, Hill, an Internet multimillionaire, congratulates himself for downsizing his life and getting rid of all the stuff—the homes and cars and gadgets and sectional sofas and $300 sunglasses—he accumulated over the past decade. Now he lives in a 420-square-foot studio and has only six dress shirts and “10 shallow bowls” that he uses “for salads and main dishes.” Imagine that. Eating off the same plate. Twice. In one meal.

If the success of a speech is measured by its capacity to provoke a set of raging, contradictory reactions, then Jodie Foster has a hit on her hands. Hollywood players and gay organizations are fawning over her remarks at Sunday’s Golden Globes, while gay critics like Andrew Sullivan have slammed her for her cowardice. The dispute hinges on whether or not Foster came out of the closet. If you think she did, however awkwardly, you’re likely to approve, or at least to sympathize. If you think she played peek-a-boo while sniping about the invasion of her privacy on national TV, you’re likely to revile her.

I find this whole contention very odd. Whatever it is that Jodie Foster did or did not do at the Golden Globes has very little relation to the act of “coming out,” at least as it is performed by 99.99 percent of the gay population. When you or I come out, it is to a circumscribed world of intimate social relations. First we tell our friends or family members. Then the orbit spirals out to co-workers, acquaintances, the communities in which we travel: a neighborhood, a church, a profession, the “friends” in your Google+ circles. The impact of these disclosures is almost always a function of proximity; coming out changes the way someone we know thinks about gay people. And in aggregate, this can be quite powerful; repeated millions of times by millions of people, coming out has been the signal act around which the gay movement was organized. But let’s have the self-awareness to admit that however many pride rings we wore in the ’90s, in the grand scheme of the cosmos the measurable effect of any one of our individual acts of coming out is rather infinitesimal. It’s only within the smallness of communities and alongside a social movement that our disclosures matter.

In her very young career, Lena Dunham has distinguished herself as her generation’s pre-eminent observer of female social and sexual mores. From her first film, Tiny Furniture, to her oft-acclaimed and sometimes-reviled HBO series, Girls, Dunham creates works of video pointillism. Her narratives and characters don’t make a whole lot of sense in the medium view (really, there are no black people in Brooklyn?), but from afar they’re unmistakably recognizable. From up close, inside a particular scene or bit of dialogue, she can be achingly brilliant and pure.

It should come as no surprise then that her impish video imploring young women to vote for Barack Obama—because on the first time “you wanna to do it with a great guy”—works in the same mode and has elicited similarly polarizing reactions. In just twenty-four hours, her ad has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube and an almost equal numbers of likes and dislikes.

In his letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rejecting the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, Texas Governor Rick Perry tells a whopper. Expanding Medicaid, he writes, would “threaten even Texas with financial ruin.”

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the country (25 percent), and it stands to enroll some 1.8 million new Medicaid recipients through the expansion. These are some of the poorest people in America, making less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level (just $31,000 a year for a family of four). In the first six years of the expansion, from 2014 to 2019, the total cost of insuring these Texans would be about $55 billion—not an inconsiderable sum. But the federal government would pay more than 95 percent of that amount; Texas’s share would be just $2.6 billion. That’s not chump change—but threaten Texas with financial ruin? Not by a long shot. 

What does threaten Texas with financial ruin is the fact that it has some of the most regressive, insane tax policies in the nation. According to Matt Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), Texas is one of nine states without any broad-based state income tax. Back in 2008, the Center for Public Policy Priorities calculated that Texas could raise $7 billion a year through a modest personal income tax comparable to what its neighbor Kansas had at the time (6.45 percent for individuals making more than $30,000 a year). If Texas collected that amount annually through a personal income tax during the first six years of the expansion, it would raise $42 billion. That would pay for its share of the Medicaid expansion more than sixteen times over. (I suspect the state’s teachers, social workers, firefighters, police and other public employees would have some ideas on how to spend the surplus.)