An interesting anniversary considering what tomorrow is: Today in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling punishing WBAI radio in New York City for broadcasting George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. (If you click on the link, remember, you’ve been warned.)
Birthdays begin with Fontella Bass:
Damon Harris of the Temptations:
The late Laura Brannigan:
Stephen Pearcy of Ratt:
Taylor Dayne:
Two notable deaths happened today: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who contributed, according to Wikipedia, “guitars, sitar, keyboards, accordion, marimba, harmonica, dulcimer, autoharp, percussion, recorder, cello, mandolin, saxophone, [and] backing vocals,” drowned in his swimming pool …
… two years before Jim Morrison of The Doors died in Paris of a heart attack.
This being Independence Day weekend, which is one of the major vacation/trip weekends, it seems appropriate to bring up a former American automaker with deep Wisconsin roots.
Hot Rod magazine committed one of the great April Fool’s jokes in the history of magazine publishing when it breathlessly reported in its April 2008 issue that a group of private investors were working to bring back the late American Motors Corp. (The disclaimer at the beginning of the Web page didn’t appear until the last paragraph of the printed version.)
As with any successful practical joke, this one worked because of the appearance of plausibility. Given that the 2008 Ford Mustang looked like the 1967–68 Mustang, and given that Chrysler resurrected the Dodge Challenger and General Motors Corp. brought back the Chevrolet Camaro, is it possible that someone might want to resurrect the AMC Pacer …
… or, even better, the Javelin?
First, some history: AMC, the child of the marriage of the Nash and Hudson brands, was the smallest member of the Big Four automakers, until Chrysler purchased it in 1987 to get the Jeep brand into the Chrysler fold. AMC’s corporate headquarters were in the Detroit area, but its cars were built in Kenosha and Milwaukee (a Nash plant built in 1901).
AMC first had a reputation for building compact cars, such as the Rambler, in an era in which compact cars were only sporadically popular. One of AMC’s presidents was Gerald Romney, a later governor of Michigan and Republican presidential candidate, and father of presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Having much less capital than its bigger three competitors, AMC nonetheless built some cars that were ahead of their time, thanks in large part to the work of chief stylist Richard Teague. The company first took its sporty Javelin, chopped off the rear end …
… and created the two-seat AMX, a cult car among collectors today.
A couple years later, AMC took its compact Hornet, similarly sliced off the rear end …
Whoever thought of adding four-wheel-drive to the compact Concord (born as the aforementioned Hornet 10 years earlier) created the Eagle, America’s first crossover sport utility (car with four-wheel-drive-truck-like capabilities), predating the Subaru Outback and other all-wheel-drive-equipped cars by 15 years.
Then, in 1983, came the downsized Jeep Cherokee, the first sport utility not based on a full-size pickup truck. An AMC subsidiary, AM General, began work in the late 1970s on something the U.S. Army called the “High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle” — which, two owners and a marketing agreement with General Motors later, the world came to know as the Hummer.
Other AMC cars were not great cars, but at least they stood out on the street, such as the Marlin …
… which arguably looked better as the Tarpon show car, based on a smaller model than the Marlin ended up being …
… the aforementioned Gremlin and …
… the final two-door and four-door versions of the Matador. Like the Pacer, the Matador coupe was in a class of one, while the last four-door Matador was referred to as “coffin-nose.” AMC seemed to have two kinds of styling: staid and really out there.
Of course, AMC had long history with, shall we say, interesting-looking large cars. The Hudson Hornet, which detractors said looked like an upside-down bathtub with wheels …
… was, in the not-intended-as-a-compliment words of car magazine editor David E. Davis Jr., resurrected as the early 1990s Chevrolet Caprice:
On the other hand, the aforementioned Hornet (which you’ve seen if you’ve seen the movie “Cars”) was also an example of AMC’s ability to do more with less. Despite having just a six-cylinder engine, the Hornet was one of the dominant cars of the early years of NASCAR, thanks to its lower center of gravity from said upside-down-bathtub design, and the heavily-breathed-upon six.
The car I wish AMC had brought out would have been the replacement for the AMX when it was merged into the Javelin line (which meant the AMX wouldn’t have just two seats anymore) was …
… the AMX/3, a mid-engine/rear-drive halo car designed in Italy but with an AMC 390 V-8. I have a 1970 issue of Popular Mechanics that includes the AMX/3 as one of AMC’s 1971 offerings. The AMX/3 was unveiled one day after Lincoln–Mercury unveiled its De Tomaso Pantera, and that supposedly scared off AMC. (The Pantera didn’t last long either, which is too bad; while I should favor Ford since, unlike GM and Chrysler, it received no government aid, Ford also doesn’t have anything like the Corvette either.)
AMC and its predecessors also had a history of some unusual design and engineering decisions. Early 1960s Ramblers had push-button shifting for its automatic transmissions. On the other hand, AMC for some reason thought it would be innovative to remove the zeros from speedometers, making them read from 0 to 12 instead of 0 to 120 mph. To get the most out of one steering wheel design, the steering wheel was mounted upside down on the Gremlin and Hornet models. The last Javelin’s air conditioning controls required the owner to read the owner’s manual more than once — one slide controlled the fan, one controlled the heat, one controlled the outlets from which the air blew, and the last was for the air-conditioned air, including a “Desert Only” setting, prolonged use of which, owners were warned, could lead to loss of cool air due to coolant freezing.
One unusual AMC niche was in police cars. Anyone who watched “Adam-12,” “The Rockford Files” or “The Dukes of Hazzard” (I plead guilty to all three — any series with cool cars got my attention) might remember that those series all featured Matador police cars. Many law enforcement agencies used Matadors because they probably were less expensive than their Big Three competition. (I once saw a sign in a National Guard armory that reminded everyone that all of their equipment was produced by the lowest bidder.) I don’t remember seeing Matador police cars in Wisconsin, but for several years in the early ’70s the Wisconsin State Patrol used Ambassador squad cars. So did a few sheriff’s departments, including Dane County, at least until a well-publicized spat between either AMC or the Madison AMC dealer and the sheriff over sheriff’s deputies’ habit of crashing said Ambassadors. (The dealership, from which we purchased a 1973 Javelin (read further), is still in business today, though it sells used cars now.) The Alabama Highway Patrol and the Muskego police used Javelins for a while.
The Nash+Hudson=AMC merger came right after Studebaker and Packard merged, which lasted only until 1966, when Studebaker–Packard closed its Hamilton, Ont., plant, two years after it closed its South Bend, Ind., plant. Studebaker and AMC apparently were talking about merging before AMC president George Mason, well, died in 1954. That put Romney in charge of AMC, and Romney was opposed to using Studebaker parts, and that ended the merger idea. Which seems too bad, given that StudePackAMC might have had enough brands to compete with every Big Three brand, from Nash at the Chevrolet/Ford/Plymouth level to Packard at the Cadillac/Lincoln/Chrysler level. (As owners of Plymouths, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Mercurys — Mercuries? — and Saturns know, that wouldn’t have been sustainable long-term, but one crisis at a time.)
There are conflicting schools of thought as to why AMC finally folded with its purchase by Chrysler. Patrick Foster, author of American Motors: The Last Independent, argues that AMC did fairly well in the 1960s, offering economical (for the day), sturdily built, stolid cars (similar to Mercedes-Benz in the day), until AMC management decided it needed to offer what the other members of the Big Four were offering — sporty cars (although the Javelin was quite successful in the Trans Am series) and big cars, products where AMC lacked the ability to compete with GM, Ford and Chrysler.
I maintain that the reason AMC doesn’t exist today as an independent manufacturer has to do with a decision the company made during the early 1970s to discontinue building its Javelin “pony car.” Chevrolet built many more Camaros and Ford built many more Mustangs than AMC built Javelins, but the Javelin and its AMX two-seat cousin developed a reputation as race cars whose performance exceeded their reputation. The last year of the Javelin was 1974, just before the pony car market exploded and General Motors sold as many Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds as they could build.
This (minus the vinyl roof, and the horses, and my parents didn’t look like that) was our 1973 Javelin, our first new second car. It was also the first car I drove on public roads. It had a 304 V-8, automatic transmission with floor shifter (first I’d ever seen in a car), bucket seats and console, power steering (but not brakes), and AM radio. It was a cool-looking car from the front seats forward, with a back seat suitable only for dolls, and a trunk large enough for the spare tire and a golf bag, and that’s it.
The Javelin was an example of AMC’s less-than-sterling quality reputation, although to be fair many ’70s cars were similarly lacking. The gold tape stripe on the side started cracking seconds after the 12-month 12,000-mile warranty expired. The car started rusting shortly thereafter, although rust on a brown car is easier to not notice. Even at age 8 I could tell that things didn’t seem to fit together that well. Most of the interior screws were dislodged after a Boy Scout camping trip in which the camping spot was at the end of a rough gravel road.
The Javelin was killed after the 1974 model year. Instead of the Javelin (and the luxury Ambassador, killed at the same time), AMC built …
… the Pacer, a car that was small in length, but wider and thus roomier (or so AMC wanted the consumer to believe) than the average small car. It was, however, heavy for its length due to big windows and slow yet fuel-inefficient even for that time, and, as the New York Times put it, it “looked like nothing else on the road,” a plus perhaps only in the minds of Wayne and Garth.
With AMC lacking money, 25 percent of AMC was sold to Renault (leading to the AMC Alliance and Fuego) before Chrysler purchased all of AMC in 1987. Chrysler closed the Milwaukee manufacturing plant in 1988, and closed the Kenosha plant (which was being used to build Chrysler engines) in 2008, just before GM closed its Janesville plant. (My family must be a curse upon carmakers, since our family’s garage simultaneously housed a Kenosha-built Javelin and a Janesville-built Chevrolet Caprice. My parents also owned two of the last Oldsmobiles, and my father owned a Studebaker Hawk many years ago. Someone should warn Cadillac, Subaru and Honda of this.)
Given how things for the remaining Big Three automakers today — as in GM owned by the taxpayers and Chrysler owned by Fiat — it’s hard to imagine how AMC could have made it to today had the sale to Chrysler not occurred. It is fun to contemplate, though, what could have happened had the“group of like-minded venture capitalists pooling billions of dollars to create the ultimate U.S. car company, and without the hindrance that comes with being a public company” been more than the figment of a creative writer’s imagination. That, however, would give the lie to the old saw that the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
Today in 1963, the Beatles recorded “She Loves You,” yeah, yeah, yeah:
Four years later, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” reached number one, and stayed there for 15 weeks:
Birthdays begin with Robert Byrd (no, not the older-than-dirt Ku Klux Klan member who became the senator from West Virginia), whom you may know better as Bobby Day:
Delaney Bramlett, of Delaney and Bonnie and Friends:
I have tried to avoid commenting on whatever happened between two members of the state Supreme Court June 13 until I could get an original take beyond:
Justice Prosser should resign.
Justice Bradley should resign.
Chief Justice Abrahamson should resign.
All of the above.
Before I begin: Proving that either it’s a small world or I’ve been around a long time, I have met most of the principals in this rasslin’ match. I have heard Shirley Abrahamson talk about what the Supreme Court does on a couple occasions, and although I don’t particularly care for her politics, I found her very personable, and she deserves credit for trying to show taxpayers what the Supreme Court does. (I also took a UW genetics class taught by her husband. For six weeks, until I concluded either I needed to drop the class, or I would fail the class.) I was at David Prosser’s victory party when he lost to Democrat Jay Johnson in the 1996 Eighth Congressional District election. (Victory parties by losing candidates are not much fun.) I have jousted with Bill Lueders, who broke the story Saturday, on Wisconsin Public Radio. I haven’t met Ann Walsh Bradley, but I have met her husband, Mark, who heads one of the state’s biggest law firms (as Marketplace Magazine readers know).
First point: The lack of criminal charges having been filed immediately after the incident means whatever happened did not rise to the level of criminal activity (i.e. assault or misdemeanor or felony battery charges). Neither Prosser nor Bradley will get awards for good workplace conduct or self-control, but ordinary police or sheriff’s departments are able to recommend charges to district attorneys sooner than two weeks after incidents take place. (Which makes one wonder why we have a Capitol Police Department.)
That brings to mind a second question: Who cares if Justice A cannot get along with Justice B? Regular readers know that I dabble in and have a broader interest in sports broadcasting. Over time, I have read rumors about how some nationally known sports broadcasters have a reputation for being difficult to work with. (Examples can be read in Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN. Or follow the career arc of Keith Olbermann of CNN, ESPN, Fox, MSNBC and, for now, Current TV.) And every such rumor makes me yawn, because I can think of no media consumer who cares whether the two news anchors get along, or if the editor and reporter don’t speak to each other, or if the radio show host and news person swear at each other off-microphone, or whatever — they care about what they are watching or listening to or reading, not the personalities on the other side of the fourth wall. Put it this way: I didn’t vote for Justice Prosser April 5 because of whether he got along with his coworkers.
Speaking of the media: It is not uncommon for the initial story (Prosser’s chokehold on Bradley) to be at odds with subsequent versions (Bradley lunged at Prosser first) of that same story. The former summarizes the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s first report, published online by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier Saturday; the second summarizes the story the Journal Sentinel’s own reporters did Saturday. Without the Internet, TV and radio (that is, those radio stations that actually have bodies in their newsrooms on weekends), the electronic media would have reported version one, and the newspapers would have reported version two Sunday.
Everyone must be a discerning media consumer, which is why it is important to point out that Lueders, who broke the story (or was given the story by Supreme Court sources), appears to have sources on only one side of the political spectrum willing to talk to him, based on his initial reporting. For its reputation as a liberal newspaper, the Journal Sentinel appears to have sources on both sides of the political spectrum willing to talk to them. Regardless of whether a reporter expresses his or her own opinions on the stories he or she covers, it is important to have enough credibility to be able to get information on all sides, not just the side that supports your own agenda.
To me, this is the state judicial recipe variation of the toxic cocktail that is politics at an increasing number of levels, and particularly in Wisconsin. (Even local, and if you don’t believe me, you should have been in Ripon around the last mayoral election. Or observe politics in Waukesha.) Background reporting about Prosser v. Bradley has demonstrated that the mid-June outburst was only the latest symptom of the festering feud between the liberal and conservative wings of the state Supreme Court.
Political observers have this gauzy idealism that the Supreme Court impartially judges the burning constitutional issues of the day. Not to call that view naïve, but if that was ever the case, it hasn’t been the case for decades. That is the fault of the judicial system as a whole, because over the past century or so the judicial system has increasingly legislated from the bench (for instance, Roe v. Wade, a bad decision regardless of how you feel about abortion rights) and taken on issues properly decided by the legislative branch. (However you feel about same-sex marriage, at least it was legalized by the legislative process in six states, not their courts.)
Everyone knows who are the conservatives (Prosser, Roggensack, Ziegler and Gableman), who are the liberals (Abrahamson and Bradley, who was marketed as a moderate when she was first named to the Supreme Court), and who is the turncoat (Crooks, who claimed to be a conservative when he lost to Bradley in 1995 and beat Court of Appeals Judge Ralph Adam Fine in 1996). And like everything else in politics, it is the result, only the result and nothing but the result that counts.
Regarding my multiple-choice question at the start of this blog: When a Supreme Court justice resigns before his or her term ends, the governor appoints a replacement (something to keep in mind for those espousing choice 1), but that replacement serves only until the next scheduled judicial election when no other justice is standing for election. If a justice were to resign today, the appointed replacement by Gov. Scott Walker would serve only until April 2012. And regarding choice 3, this irony: The Chief Justice in Wisconsin is the longest serving justice. Should Abrahamson resign, the next longest serving justice is … Bradley, elected in 1995. (Followed by Crooks; the three liberals are also the three longest serving justices.)
All of this is also another symptom of government’s increasing its tentacles into all aspects of our lives, which has increased the stakes in elections and the political process, which has increased political spending and nastiness of political campaigns and politics generally. Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus had two beliefs that seem contradictory today, but are not. On the one hand, he believed the federal government’s role was “defending our shores, delivering our mail and staying the hell out of our lives.” On the other hand, he also believed that “there are some questions the government has no business asking.” Unfortunately, neither side of the political aisle is following Dreyfus’ advice.
Here’s an odd anniversary: Four days after Cher divorced Sonny Bono, she married Gregg Allman. Come back to this blog in nine days to find out what happened next.
Birthdays start with Florence Ballard of the Supremes …
… born one year before Glenn Shorrock of the Little River Band:
Billy Brown, of Ray Goodman Brown:
Andrew Sweet, who is “Andy” in this famed ’70s song:
WRPN radio in Ripon (the AM station, not the Ripon College-owned FM station — yes, it occasionally gets confusing) performed a valuable public service earlier this month.
WRPN interviewed Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the statewide teacher union and the number one obstacle to improving education in a cost-effective manner in Wisconsin.
(Before we go on: Does this headline mean that I believe that Wisconsin teachers and non-teachers are on opposite sides? Certainly not. But given that teacher unions believe they speak for all their members, the phrase “guilt by association” comes to mind. Perhaps they’d prefer another acronym for WEAC I found on Facebook: “We Extort And Coerce.” And I am not comparing WEAC to the Mafia. One of WEAC’s members already did.)
Bell’s interview is interesting in that it provides insight into the mindset of teacher unions, the scourge of taxpayers, students and teachers who are actual professionals. Teacher unions, of course, treat their members, who have earned bachelor’s, master’s and even doctoral degrees, as the public-school equivalent of $10-an-hour laborers. (Here’s a tip: If a teacher is known more in a community for leading the teacher union and working in politics than for his teaching, he’s really not a teacher.)
Bell certainly didn’t back into the interview by beginning with niceties or local references. To an opening question about “how do we make schools a priority” (as if they’re not), Bell fired:
We want to make them a priority in terms of the positives and the things we know Wisconsin citizens have traditionally valued about their schools. You don’t do it by cutting budgets by nearly a billion dollars, but that’s what the Legislature has just done and the governor is about to sign. But you do it by saying these are the things that our communities want and need for their schools, these are the resources that are necessary, and we make that argument community by community, to the Legislature and the governor, that the direction they’re heading is not the direction that Wisconsin wants for its public schools.
It is absurd to assert that schools are not “a priority” when schools and public safety comprise more than half of the spending in the 2011–13 state budget. Note also the order in which Bell orders things: “these are the things that our communities want and need for their schools [and] these are the resources that are necessary,” instead of starting with what our state’s overtaxed taxpayers can afford. (“Affordability” appears to be as alien a concept to WEAC specifically and public employee unions generally as the word “conservative.”)
Note also Bell’s comment about making “that argument community by community.” One can infer from that that WEAC doesn’t want any state-mandated spending controls, which will force — the horror! — school districts to reduce property taxes in the next two fiscal years.
That “community by community” argument, which was the state approach until the state established two-thirds funding for schools in the 1990s, resulted in, for instance, three school districts in one county having the highest (more than $31 per $1,000 assessed valuation), eighth highest and 11 highest property tax mil rates in the entire state. (I was there.) Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus was fond of quoting his favorite iteration of the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Accept more state money, accept the rules that go along with it.
Bell talked about how WEAC has worked with the superintendent of public instruction (now there’s a real taxpayer watchdog) and “a number of other organizations” on …
… other ways to adequately fund our public schools, to focus the money where it’s needed, and to say that there are some places that are simply going to need more funding than others, some students for whom resources are not adequate, where in other cases they might be. We need to do that in a discussion community by community about how these things are done. And we need to make sure that everyone is paying their fair share. We’ve heard a lot in the last few months about shared sacrifice. But the actions that the Legislature has taken have really focused that sacrifice on a given group of people and said that corporations are going to get more tax breaks than they did before, and not just Wisconsin companies but multinational companies that really don’t provide a framework for our state’s economy.
The term “fair share,” of course, really means “more.” (Perhaps WEAC actually stands for “We Expect All Cash.”) It is interesting to note that even Gov. James Doyle and the previous Democrat-controlled Legislature did not endorse such proposals as increasing sales taxes for education as education groups wanted, nor has anyone with actual political power signed off on the three-decade-old proposal to take school taxes off the property tax.
Bell’s quote about “corporations are going to get more tax breaks than they did before” exposes (not that that’s a surprise) the anti-free enterprise nature of WEAC and public employee unions. The aforementioned “multinational companies that really don’t provide a framework for our state’s economy” presumably include Kraft Foods (5,000 employees in Wisconsin), Rockwell Automation (5,000), Mercury Marine (3,000), Georgia–Pacific (2,500) and Johnson Controls (2,500), among the largest private-sector employers in this state. The aforementioned “Wisconsin companies” include Menards Inc. (10,000), Marshfield Clinic (5,000), ThedaCare (5,000), Affinity Health (4,300), and Lands’ End (4,000). And yet Bell believes sticking it to business will mean more money for schools. You’d think teacher unions would want to be nice to the companies whose donations of money and employee time augment schools, but you’d apparently be wrong.
Bell also said this about teacher evaluation proposals: “Just as we don’t think that any child is described by a test score, we don’t believe that any educator is described by the kind of test scores that students get.” (Which will come as a surprise to students whose grades are indeed “described by a test score,” as many test scores as a student takes in a particular class.) Bell said student learning was “one part of what educators are to do. It’s very important, but there are lots of other factors that go into the learning in the classrooms.”
(For those who think it’s unfair to judge teachers by their students’ test scores, one potential way to fairly do that was devised in, of all places, my seventh-grade math class in the late 1970s. At the beginning of each unit, we students took a pretest, and at the end of each unit, we took a test. Our grades were determined by a combination of the final test score and by the improvement in our score from the beginning to the end of the unit. That’s how a higher test score could lead to a lower grade if there was little improvement between pretest and the last test.)
Working in higher education taught me a major difference between education and most other lines of work. Most people who work in business (and, for that matter, those who work in educational advancement or admissions) are based on results. Educators judge their work on process, which is why such terms as “pedagogy” and “rubrics,” terms not found in normal conversation, enter the atmosphere. The fact that non-teachers may not grasp that difference does not make educators superior to non-educators, particularly taxpayers and parents.
The purpose of employee evaluations is to determine an employee’s contribution to the organization and that employee’s appropriate compensation, which includes the number “zero,” as in the employee needs to work somewhere else. Any teacher evaluation process that does not weed out bad teachers is worthless to those whose taxes pay teacher salaries and benefits. If you listen to that segment, you will conclude that teacher unions want to come up with their own evaluation criteria and have no input at all from, you know, taxpayers, or even parents. (Perhaps WEAC actually stands for “We Eschew All Critiques.”)
The irony here is that teachers and taxpayers do have common ground. My example comes from southeast of Wisconsin — a 2010 Weekly Standard story about Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels:
We were having lunch one day … when a reporter from the local radio station appeared. She pressed him on the education budget cuts too. She told him the local school board had just laid off nine teachers and an administrator.
“What would you say to those people?” she asked.
He visibly flinched …
“I’d say it should have been nine administrators and one teacher. There are 20 things that school board could do before it had to lay off one teacher.”
One would think taxpayers and teacher unions could agree that every administrator in a school district that does not have the title “superintendent” (without the words “assistant” or “deputy” in front) or “principal” is a position the school district needs to rethink. School districts that in times of fiscal strain keep such administrators and lay off, or don’t hire, teachers are committing administrative and educational malpractice. (Administrator salaries are always higher than teacher salaries, so every administrator position costs the equivalent of 1.5 to 2 teacher Full Time Equivalents. On the other hand, administrators are always former teachers, so perhaps teacher unions’ looking the other way on administrator employment is another example of looking out for their own at everyone else’s expense.) Such spending scrutiny should also be applied on those school districts that maintain their own school bus fleets instead of hiring a company to provide school bus services, or other spending that is not central to a school district’s educational mission.
Bell’s interview is, to be blunt, worthy of an F grade in public relations, but I’m betting WEAC doesn’t grasp how bad this interview was for Bell or for WEAC. (Which wouldn’t be a first: A teacher I know, who is not a union activist, was genuinely shocked to find out that at least some people in his school district favored public employees’ paying more for their benefits because they had paid more for their own benefits for years.) She began by insulting those who didn’t vote for WEAC-supported candidates Nov. 2 (that is, most voters) and those who support the attempts by Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature to put reasonable controls on the billions of dollars the state sends to school districts every year. She then veered off into claiming that only education professionals can judge their own work, a rhetorical middle finger to those whose taxes pay for education professionals’ work. By the time she veered back into complaining about inadequate (by her definition) educational funding, as in Ferris Bueller’s economics class, most listeners probably had mentally checked out.
Today in 1968, Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe thru the Tulips” reached number 17:
Today in 1971, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were sentenced on drug charges. And, of course, you could replace “1971” with any year and Jagger’ and Richards’ names with practically any rock musician’s name of those days.
Or other people: Today in 2000, Eminem’s mother sued her son for defamation from the line “My mother smokes more dope than I do” from his “My Name Is.”
Birthdays start with LeRoy Anderson, whose first work was the theme music for many afternoon movies, but who is best known for his second work (with which I point out that Christmas is less than six months away):
Anderson was born two years before Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite composer, Bernard Herrmann:
Who was Eva Boyd? Older readers would remember Little Eva:
Ian Paice, drummer for Deep Purple …
… was born the same day as Bill Kirchen, who led Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen:
Colin Hay, who was born in Scotland but moved to Australia to join Men at Work …
… was born the same day as Don Dokken, who headed his eponymous group:
The latest consequence of the previous governor’s and Legislature’s tax-happiness comes from Kiplinger’s Retiree Tax Heavens (and Hells).
Even had you not seen this on the news, given Kiplinger’s headline, you probably could choose one and have nearly a 100 percent chance of being right.
Wisconsin is one of the 10 worst states for retirees, according to Kiplinger. The other nine are California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon and Vermont. (Which gives the lie, at least in those states, to the claims of the outsize political influence of senior citizens.)
The list of 10 best states for retirees actually does not include many states where one would think elderly people are moving in huge gray waves for retirement — Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wyoming. (Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Texas are not on the list.)
Wisconsin’s approach to taxing retirement income is similar to the federal government’s, according to Kiplinger. While Social Security and Railroad Retirement income is not taxable, and “all retirement payments from the U.S. military employee retirement system, the Coast Guard, the commissioned corps of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Public Health Service” are exempt from taxes, most other retirement income is taxable at up to 7.75 percent.
(An intriguing half-sentence on this page: “Certain Wisconsin state- and local-government retirees qualify for a tax exemption …” One wonders how those who paid the salaries of state and local government retirees who do not get that tax exemption feel about that.)
Wisconsin probably ranks closer to 41st than 50th given that the state did not make the lists of the five states with the top income tax brackets, highest sales taxes or highest median real estate taxes, or the six least pension-friendly states, or the 23 states with estate or inheritance taxes. On the other hand, Wisconsin also did not make any of the opposite lists, and Wisconsin’s lack of estate and inheritance taxes is the case only until the end of 2012.
If your goal is merely to maximize revenue from taxpayers, being on Kiplinger’s bottom 10 list makes sense. Despite what you read from demagogic Democrats about failure to tax enough resulting in senior citizens’ living on the street and eating cat food, the fact is that the retirement generation as a generation is the richest in this country. They’ve had their entire working lives to invest income and accumulate wealth, they’ve paid off most of the big bills (their homes, children’s college, etc.), and the past three years of stock market doldrums took money from a vastly larger base of investments thanks to the economy of the 1980s and 1990s.
What is particularly unfair about high retirement taxes is that many retired people feel unable to leave Wisconsin because Wisconsin is where their family is. (Particularly in the case of retired people with grandchildren, and particularly where their children are single parents.) The nature of retirement is much different from the days of retirees’ parents; retirees from the full-time grind can usually expect enough years of good post-retirement health to make such contributions as starting a business or getting heavily involved in volunteer work. Encouraging retirees to leave, which our tax structure clearly does, means those contributions go to another state too.
As is always the case, when you want less of something, you tax it.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
