DEFEAT FASCISM

 A single mother in my town whose husband left her with two kids and won't pay child support because "Bambi" is high rent pays the same sales tax on a quart of milk as the trust fund baby who became a multi-millionaire when he exited his mother's womb. That's why scholars call it a regressive tax.

At the same time, it has always been one of the easier taxes to impose as its collection is done in small increments and may go relatively unnoticed unlike income tax which is proclaimed clearly and loudly each April.

It's been a popular tax to pass traditionally, the sales tax has. In my state, the highway department has even chosen to fund its work with the sales tax in lieu of charging the folks directly who use the highways. That way, the single mother mentioned above, who walks to her job cleaning houses, pays for the out-of-state truckers to use our roads.

It has always been a more popular tax than one actually based on income, say one with which the trust fund baby mentioned above pays tax on wealth. Incidentally, a powerful cabal that includes a high percentage of those trust fund babies mentioned above has recently ordered national legislators to reduce the income tax on high-wealth individuals and families. They much prefer the sales tax so a billionaire who inherited vast wealth won't have to pay more than you or I for our next Tesla. They enjoy what you and I might call "The Lucky Sperm" privilege that removes the income tax and relies on the sales tax.

Yep, it's been popular.

Until now.

Folks are beginning to notice. On-line retailers are even noting it on their sales. So legislators are squirming and looking for ways to reduce the impact. Our state, our counties, and our cities all depend upon the sales tax revenue for operation. It is now becoming a target.

One wonders which entity is in the most danger.

Introduction to logic

Fortunate I was as a child growing up in south Arkansas. I had a world-class philosopher as a father. No, he wasn’t highly educated. An eighth-grade education at a one-room school near Kedron, Arkansas sufficed for him. Oh, he believed strongly in continued education. Thus, he extended his knowledge-base each morning with a careful perusal of the Arkansas Gazette. Also, he was the only person I ever knew who read the center portion of Red Ryder and other action comics. This was the short, printed, two-page section that no one else, I am sure, ever bothered to read.

Yep, only a true seeker of knowledge would bother to read narrative in a comic book. But that was my daddy.

He would be a delight if he were around to comment on such ideas as the one posed by our national Energy Secretary when he approved the sale of our nuclear technology to the country that furnished all but one of the 9-11 bombers of the World Trade Center. Oh yes, it was the same country whose leader recently commanded the execution of an American journalist.

I imagine my father looking him straight in the eyes as did me when I would advance, at the supper table, one of my hair-brained plans to make money without working. Using a principle as old as Socrates, he would say, “That don’t make no sense.” I can still hear, through the musty corridors of history, Aristotle chortling.

His expertise floated into economics as well. I’ll never forget the time I suggested a way to increase profits in the store. “Simple,” I said. “Just start giving away free cokes.”

“Free what?’

“Cokolas.”

“Do what?”

“Give customers free soft drinks. You won’t get revenue from them, but more folks will spend more money and profits will go sky-high.”

“We’ll make more money by taking in less money?”

“It’s as simple as that. What do you think?”

“I think,” he said, again piercing me with his eyes, “that they have a special ward in the state hospital over in Little Rock for people who believe such things.”

Yes, that sound you just heard was Descartes giving Kant a “high-five.”

My most memorable moment came years later, when I had reached full height and gotten married. We were sitting in the backyard of the family homesite waiting on ribs to cook. He was talking about hard times back during The Depression, about how growing their own food kept his family from starving.

I saw the opportunity for a “learning moment.” I told him how some high-income urban dwellers were giving it all up and “returning to the land” to live with nature and grow their own food like his family had done.

“Back to farming like we did?”

“Pretty much so.” I said, thinking though, of the pitiful scene from Easy Rider, where a demented group of misfit hippies were planting seeds in the barest desert land you ever saw. “I don’t think some of them know a lot about farming.”

But they are going back to living like we had to when I was a kid?

“Yep.”

“And they are leaving good jobs for it?”

“Yep.”

That man, who had once dug fence post holes for, as he put it, “four bits a day,” who had sharecropped, chopping cotton alongside his new wife in the blistering Arkansas sun, and who had butchered hogs while his wife “watched the store” and ended the day with bloody hands and soiled clothes, turned his head. He looked at me with those pale blue eyes that had won the heart of a local beauty as used to hard work as he was, and shook his head in a manner that would have pleased Plato.

“Why?” was all he said.

Early economic training.

Sunrise With Schubert: February 2, 2018

The “Hate-Bite” machines, in ‘”1984” fashion after the recent speech, are pumping out prepared responses with wild fury now. I don’t understand. Is partisan enthusiasm now the measure by which we measure our love of America”

I hope not, for I worry about other things.

From where I sit this morning, I could, within an hour, drive through a dozen communities, once vibrant home-towns for thousands upon thousands of hard-working Americans. Now those communities are near-empty or, at best, half-empty shells, devastated by the economic turns of the last 60 years or so.

Perhaps most of the decline resulted from the inevitable economic changes that swept through an area based on an agricultural economy. As hard as it might be to face, race also figures into the history of the decline. White flight has been the most prevalent response to economic decline so far.

At any rate, it seems to be that most of the remaining citizens of these communities are those waiting to move, or those waiting to die. The vacant buildings and cracked concrete slabs bear mute testimony to this. Should one even attempt to run a business in one of these towns, the only activity they would see would be the delivery trucks bearing  products purchased on the Internet, or friends waving as they drive by heading 30 miles or so to the nearest Walmart.

Oh, we do studies and hire experts to tell us how to “revitalize” such places. They draw pictures of pedestrian trails with kids waving from their bicycles, and write reports from, to quote Alistair Cook,  “warm places and on full stomachs.” Their proposals scatter terms like “empowerment,” “sense of place,” “branding,” and other such silly crap.

As their findings are being published, another family leaves town with its life’s belongings stacked “Joad-like” in an ancient vehicle.

We even sometimes send squads of college students down to tell these folks how to obliterate decades of economic deprivation, something we can feel quite confident that those kids know a lot about. (Sarcasm alert for the Ivy-League educated).

Although issues facing other geographic areas lie well outside my meager and modest area of expertise, I’m sure I could drive farther, to the north and east, and find once prosperous industrial cities in similar states of despair.

For those unfamiliar with the areas of which I speak, the folks there don’t give a flying fig about who stood and how many times they applauded the president during his speech, nor do I. They don’t carry a lot of voting power, so the corporations don’t spend much money courting them.

We've left seeds of potential disaster, though. There are socio-economic “chickens” in such towns, just waiting for the chance to seek a new place to roost. I believe this represent a real problem to be addressed. If a stable and unified society doesn’t address them, the gangs, drug dealers, and firearms industry will. They are awfully good at it.

“How does this affect me?” one might ask, from behind the walls of a gated community in a homogeneous and wealthy enclave. Good question.

On answer might include this. What could result from what I call the “Willie Sutton” effect?” In other words, what if young, angry, impoverished, and hopeless folks should realize that you live “where the money is?”

Yes, I know that Willie denied ever having made the infamous statement, but, as our president teaches us so well, amidst all the hoopla, let’s not let reality ruin a good story, nor compassion spoil an applause line.

Tell them Willie sent you.

Growing Up Southern: January 9, 2018

Was thinking about how much fun a teenager like me used to have on fifty cents. Four bits. Two quarters. Half a dollar. Fiddy cents. Half a Shekel. Oh marvelous coin! To some, still a symbol of America’s greatness.

It brings to mind the great day of my youth when the latest Elvis Presley single would come to the music store in our town. Sainted Mother and I would have been saving for weeks. The news would spread that He had just issued a ditty called Don’t Be Cruel, and we would head to town. For the one coin you could get a 45-rpm version, the kind with the big hole in the middle. We would be in “tall cotton” for a week or more.

You could take a girl to the best movie in town for two quarters. Of course, that didn’t include Cokes, popcorn, or Bon-Bons if she had a sweet tooth. A boy needed two more “halvers” for that.

Later, fifty cents would buy you two gallons of gas, or a whole evening of “dragging Main,” or hanging out at the “Wagon Wheel.”

For the wicked, the same amount or so would buy you three or four packages of cigarettes so you could look cool in front of the other kids. Oh, and the coins were great for flipping. (Quarters just never measured up). And you could even clasp one in your eye and pretend to be a German prince.

Some kids would spend months banging on the edges of a coin with a spoon, They said you could make a ring of one if you did it long enough. I never saw a completed one, though. Attention spans had already started to wither. These days, they give kids expensive drugs to help them concentrate. A fifty-cent piece and a spoon would work just fine, every bit as well as molasses and a feather.

They quit making them—fifty-cent pieces— somewhere along the line. Why? I don’t know. I always found them useful and it felt reassuring to carry one in your pocket. Their disappearance, as I remember it, coincided with the decision to quit making quarters out of silver. As far as I was concerned, both decisions amounted to “currency-debasement” and ushered in a whole era of instability in our lives.

Now, the only memory of this most wondrous coin resides in the name of a music rapper who calls himself “50 Cent.”

I still keep a couple around though, to remind me of those days that we use as an example of when America was great. I like the coin better than the symbol. If you think about it:

Fifty cents was less than a woman earned for filling a man’s dollar-an-hour job back then.

If you weren’t white, fifty cents only bought you a balcony seat at the movies, assuming the theater had a balcony.

Some families ate on little more than fifty cents a week.

There were kids my age who had never held a fifty-cent piece in their hand.

Oh, but if you found a buddy who also had a fifty-cent piece, you could buy (or get someone to buy for you) a six-pack of beer.

Hey, let’s do make America great again.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 13, 2017

 Last evening, we watched Rebecca, one of my wife’s favorite films. It has one of the best performances by an off-screen character in movie history.

Life is like that. So many of the people who shape our lives and the future of our country we have never seen, or at least we no longer see them. On the other hand, we see far too much of the people who are currently shaping our futures. We would prefer most of them as off-screen characters, preferably in cartoons.

Back to shaping our future, there is an old economic theory we used to apply to urban economics. We called it ‘location quotient analysis.” In economic terms, location quotient is a way of quantifying how concentrated a particular industry, cluster, occupation, or demographic group is in a region as compared to the nation. It can reveal what makes a particular region “unique” in comparison to the national average. Some used it to estimate potential as well.

What I think about when I drive through the Arkansas Delta is how some thinkers used to apply the location quotient principles to sociological factors, i.e. estimating human potential. It posited how likely a given area was to produce an Abraham Lincoln, an Albert Einstein, a Jonas Salk, a Mozart, or a Robert Johnson.

Of course, the probability of success for any given area depended on a myriad of complex and related characters. It always makes me think, though, as I drive through areas of our country that the modern world continues to neglect. I can’t help but wonder how many people like Harriet Tubman, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., Clara Barton, Fredrick Douglass, or Jonas Salk we may squander through our neglect.

Oh well. Let's just build another aircraft carrier.

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have

freed a thousand more if only they knew
they were slaves. - Harriet Tubman

Sailing Into Oblivion: June 7, 2017

Grandchildren would be nice, but I’d hate like the dickens to try and explain to one what is going on in America now.

I confess. I haven’t a clue. Nothing in the study of American history could prepare one for an understanding of what our current national mood is.

In the past week, the President of the United States of America has insulted three of our staunchest post-World War Two allies—all internationally respected nations. In addition, he took sides in a squabble between two Middle Eastern countries, the disparaged one just happening to be a country in which the United States has a strategic naval base, the chosen one happening to be the one that furnished 15 of the 19  hijackers on 9-11. Oh, and nobody asked him to take sides. He just did.

Taking sides in a Middle-Eastern squabble reminds one of the apprehension that police officers talk about when responding to domestic disturbances. If one party doesn’t get you, they both will.

What I might have the most difficulty in explaining is the economic policy being espoused. It goes something like this.

- Although both corporate profits and corporatetax-avoidance skills are at all-time highs, corporations need tax cuts in order to survive and grow the economy.

- Although reduced revenue and increased expenditures create massive deficits and massive borrowing, the repayment of which starves economic growth, such deficits don’t matter somehow.

- Job sectors facing dwindling demand must be protected through federal largess. Thus, we can expect country grocery stores, such as the one my family, owned to again proliferate. Oh, and for those folks who once built guitar tuners that were made obsolete by a free phone app, help is on the way.

- It is vital to cut taxes on corporations although historically they have been as likely to use the additional money to reward shareholders, increase dividends, or purchase and plunder other corporations for their assets or over funded pension plans as they are to expand and grow the economy.

- Corporate profits, despite both the laws of gravity and mathematics, can expand at fixed percentages forever and ever.

Yes, and those summer afternoon thunderheads soaring into the sky don’t ever topple over from their weight. We just need to have trust.

One would certainly need a grandchild who believed in magic to understand all this.

Gravity will always win.