Did You Catch the Grinch?

People are frustrated they and their children aren’t doing as well as their parents. There’s a grinch out there mucking things up. Did you catch it? It’s time to lock it up!

How come our parents’ did well? Education and immigration! !! Think mines and factories were staffed and roads and railroads built by the sons and daughters of the American Revolution? We got immigrants to do the dirty jobs – Chinese, Irish, Poles, all kinds of immigrants plus immigrants lured under false pretenses and then treated like slaves. America burst into an industrial powerhouse beginning with the Civil War when unlimited immigrants came. We bought, ate, rode and drove on what they made. They still want to do all that for the rest of us but we no longer let them. The jobs are different now – including agricultural and essential work – but the needs are still there.

And we used to make sure to educate them. Without education and immigration we’d be subsistence farmers with little to show for our efforts. Before the land grant colleges, authorized during the Civil War and financed with federal investment, our methods of agriculture were medieval. Without both education and immigration there’d be no infrastructure, no industry, no hospitals, no health systems.

The Republican response is cut, block and deport. Block and deport immigrants so there aren’t enough workers and nothing gets done except for complaining about inflation. Send back those who grew up here and let them take their educations somewhere else. They must imagine we’d be healthy if we could keep out all those who want to be our nurses, aides and doctors – you think we graduate enough doctors by ourselves? Silly.

Cut, block and deport. Cut their rich friends’ taxes. Cut every program, starting with Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act that benefits anyone else, and let most of us, including essential workers, squirm. Cut jobs and education because there’s no money. And there’s no money because Republican penny pinchers cut taxes for themselves and their rich friends!

The tax system has been continuously distorted by the wealthiest Americans and their corporations since 1980. The marginal tax rate for average Americans has been about a fifth of their income from 1970 to the present. In 1970, however, the top tax rate for the wealthy, paid only on their top dollars, was 70%. But the maximum tax rate, regardless of earnings, declined to 37% or about 3/8s of however much income they declare, and the wealthy actually pay much less because they have access to tax deductions and loopholes that most of us don’t. Remember Warren Buffet who was outraged to discover that his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did.  No wonder we “can’t afford” anything – can’t afford to repair roads, water systems, or keep schools functioning at the same high level we benefitted from when we and our parents went to school. The grinches are making out like bandits.

Frankly, the wealthy ought to pay more than average Americans. They don’t need those high dollars as much as ordinary Americans need every penny of what they make. And they get a lot more benefits from government. Just ask their lobbyists!

So, did you find the Grinch? Lock it up and ship it out on the big plane Woody Guthrie labeled “Deportees.”

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on January 3, 2023.

Nuts, Liars, Suckers and the Rube Goldberg Disease

I just heard that Jeff Bezos is worth $100 billion. What is he doing with that net worth? Is he putting it all to work? If not, why not? Ya think if we just gave Jeff another billion he’d put that money right to work putting Americans to work? Why can’t he do that with the $100 billion he already has?

Republicans keep telling us that if they give tax breaks to the wealthy they’ll put it to work, like another billion for Bezos. They have to be either nuts or liars. If you like nuts or liars, that’s your business. But the question is whether we are suckers.

Republicans want us to give the money to people who don’t need it in the hope that now, with even more money they don’t need, they might decide to go to the trouble of running another business and the other business would be somewhere in America and would use people and equipment made in America, or they might find others, like venture capitalists who might use the money in, by and for Americans.

Rube Goldberg, a giant of comedy who died in 1970, certainly would have gone that route in his satirical cartoons. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines Rube Goldberg as “a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation.”

The Rube Goldberg website describes “A Rube Goldberg contraption” as “an elaborate set of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups and rods, put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles and live animals – [which] takes a simple task and makes it extraordinarily complicated. He had solutions for How To Get The Cotton Out Of An Aspirin Bottle, imagined a Self-Operating Napkin, and created a Simple Alarm Clock – to name just a few of his hilariously depicted drawings.”

Sound familiar? We could give large tax breaks to people and companies that don’t need it on the prayer that they would use it in helpful, constructive ways, and provide decent, useful jobs to Americans.

Or to get the economy going, nationally or locally, we could just do whatever was needed. Instead of praying someone else would do it with unseemly incentives, we could build roads, bridges, updated electrical grids, schools, universities and water systems, all of which would employ lots of people and provide the resources people and businesses need to function. We might even organize cultural attractions that make places more fun and attractive. Just last week the Times had a front and multipage article on the ways the New York City subways have been starved of maintenance dollars. We’re always postponing maintenance but what do we get for that – paying the rich more for the privilege of being their patrons?

People who tell you that we have to give tax breaks to people who have money lying around that they already don’t know what to do with are either Rube Goldberg creations, nuts or liars. If you like nuts, OK. If you like liars, that’s your business. But the question is whether we are suckers.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, November 28, 2017.

Government and Our Trip South

Many people in this country believe that the Founding Fathers established our Constitution to get government off of people’s backs. My wife and I just traveled to North Carolina where that idea is big. They expect people to take care of themselves without the help of the nanny state. We are all expected to earn and pay our own way.

We were on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in Nags Head, and traveled to Ocracoke Island by ferry. It is a lengthy ferry ride, about ten miles as it winds around shoals that would stop and probably destroy the boat. I chatted with one of the crew, an employee of the State of North Carolina, and told him that I hadn’t yet been told how much the trip would cost me. Nothing, he replied. It’s free. We were certainly prepared to pay our way. That’s quite a gift from the State of North Carolina.

Still the good people of North Carolina, and certainly their elected representatives, know that government is nothing but a problem in the way of the people. So imagine our surprise when we stopped at the Ocracoke lighthouse to discover that the feds, those doggoned feds, built the light house in the eighteenth century, before the ink on the Constitution had much time to dry, and rebuilt a sturdier one in 1825 that is still working today to keep ships off the rocks and shoals.

Then we mailed a couple of cards to our granddaughters. You guessed it – we relied on the Postal Service that the feds set up and ran since Ben Franklin, that old self-reliant founding patriot, ran the thing even before the Constitution was written. The old Founders, they certainly knew how to use the government to benefit the people. Guess no one told them they weren’t supposed to.

Daily we checked NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that includes the weather service. Perhaps you didn’t realize it, but all those private meterologists on every television and radio station are basing their forecasts on weather data collected, analyzed and distributed by the federal weather service. Lawyers by the way, contact the weather service for information about the weather at the time of events being litigated – there’s no need to replicate Lincoln and his famous use of an almanac to get an acquittal for his client. Weather service data are recognized and relied on as authoritative virtually universally.

We drove back on U.S. highways, both in North Carolina and between there and Albany. Yes roads the government built. In good shape too. In fact some of the first roads in the United States were postal roads, built by Uncle Sam.

We had some great dinners. But I sure hope the health department was checking up on those places – it’s pretty darn hard for a traveler to know much about what’s going on in the kitchen. And we have sometimes had some pretty bad experiences despite our best efforts.

I expect MORE from our government, not less.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 11, 2015.