On Valentine’s Day, this song, tied to no anniversary or birthday I’m aware of, nonetheless seems appropriate:
The number one British single today in 1968 was written by Bob Dylan:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “Motown Chartbusters Volume 3”:
Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to cut middle-income taxes by raising taxes on Wisconsin’s vital manufacturing sector is making some employers nervous.
And that’s not what the doctor ordered for a resurgent sector that not that long ago seemed to be on life support.
“I have an advanced manufacturer in my district in the process of trying to expand their business. Now they are are concerned, with the rhetoric coming out of the East Wing, they’re not sure if it’s the right to expand their business,” state Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point) told MacIver News Service last week on the Vicki McKenna Show on NewsTalk 1130 WISN.
The markets may hate uncertainty, and business deplores it.
“This is not the time we should send out mixed messages within the state of Wisconsin that’s going to put any new development or growth on ice,” Testin said. “We should continue to pursue policies that are going to grow our economy.”
Evers campaigned on a pledge to cut taxes 10 percent on middle-income earners, amounting to about $225 in tax relief for the average filer. The Democrat’s plan, yet to be fully defined, would be paid for in large part by hiking taxes on manufacturers that make more than $300,000 annually. Those who do exceed the income limit would no longer receive the state’s manufacturing and agricultural tax credit. Evers says the cap would generate about $518 million to pay for his proposal, leaving nearly $375 million at present unpaid for.
An Assembly Republican tax relief packagewould also target middle-income earners, delivering a $300-plus income tax cut for the median income family, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Republicans fund their proposal using about $340 million annually from the projected $2.4 billion in additional tax revenue over the next couple of years.
The bill, which passed last week in the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on a party-line vote, is slated for floor debate this week in the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Evers’ plan appears to be a nonstarter for Republicans.
“We are not going to raise taxes — period,” said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester). “We are not going to raise taxes, especially on our job creators, when we have a huge budget surplus.”
Capping the tax credit, critics say, could be disastrous for a rapidly expanding manufacturing sector that has helped the Badger State keep its unemployment rate at 3 percent or lower for nearly a year.
The state added 9,100 private-sector jobs in December, according to the latest preliminary data from the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.Wisconsin’s unemployment rate remained at 3 percent.
Wisconsin added 44,900 private-sector jobs from December 2017 to December 2018, with weekly wages rising a robust 4.5 percent in year-over-year comparisons. Wisconsin’s private-sector wages grew on average by 5.7 percent in the first five months of 2018, according to Census Bureau data. That compared to 2.7 percent for the entire U.S.
Manufacturing has had a lot to do with the strong economy. …
A big reason for manufacturing’s resurgence in Wisconsin is tax policy change over the last eight years, particularly the manufacturing and agriculture tax credit that was among Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s top first-term initiatives. A 2017 University of Wisconsin-Madison analysis of the tax credit found it had accounted for the addition of more than 20,000 manufacturing jobs and more than 42,000 total jobs over a three-year period.
Capping the tax credit would have real-world implications on businesses that have helped build Wisconsin’s economic turnaround.
The vast majority of Wisconsin businesses in the U.S. — and Wisconsin — are pass-throughs, such as S-corporations and sole proprietorships. The tax structure passes income through to the businesses owners to be taxed under the individual income tax, not at the corporate rate. It reduces the effects of double taxation faced by traditional C-corporations.
In December’s extraordinary session, the Legislature passed a bill allowing pass-throughs the ability to choose between filing under the individual tax code or the higher 7.9 percent corporate rate. In that case, the businesses aren’t capped by the $10,000 limit on individual income tax deductions.
Most pass-throughs are small businesses with $10 million or less — much less in many cases – in sales or receipts. Evers’ tax increase on small manufacturers with taxable income of more than $300,000 would more than likely stymie job creation and production expansion in Wisconsin, Testin said.
That’s why it’s critical, Testin said, that the Legislature hold the line on any attempt to raise taxes.
“That’s the wrong approach right now. We don’t need to,” the senator said. “The (Legislative) Fiscal Bureau numbers show we are in sound fiscal ground right now. To upend the apple cart and send a chilling message to the business community in the state that we have an administration that wants to be tax happy, it’s the wrong call.”
Ask Bill Smith what he thinks about the legislative battle over tax cuts and he’ll tell you lawmakers should instead focus on repealing one of the state’s most inequitable taxes: The personal property tax.
“We urge the governor and the Legislature to get rid of the personal property tax and give Main Street some real relief,” Smith, state director of NFIB Wisconsin told MacIver News Service.
Wisconsin law has long taxed businesses on their personal property. The business community got a partial victory in the last session, when the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a $75 million repeal, exempting machinery, tools and patterns from the personal property tax code.
True fairness, Smith said, will come when the entire tax is wiped out.
“Doing so would impact every business on Main Street equally, without picking winners and losers,” he said.
The number two single, believe it or don’t, today in 1961:
In an unrelated development that day, Frank Sinatra began Reprise Records, which included artists beside Sinatra:
On Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced what many news outlets described as “legislation” for the Green New Deal, a wildly ambitious plan to eliminate the American fossil fuel industry within a decade or so. It’s worth noting that it’s not legislation as people normally understand the term. It’s a resolution titled “Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” In other words, even if it passed — a considerable if — nothing would really happen.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t taking it too seriously. She didn’t put Ocasio-Cortez on the new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and when asked about the resolution, she was dismissive.
“It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi said. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
I bring this up for the simple reason that a lot of people on the left and right have every incentive to make this thing a much bigger deal than it is.
Still, given that almost everyone running for the Democratic presidential nomination feels obliged to say they’re for it, it’s worth taking somewhat seriously.
This raises the first of several problems: It’s not a very serious proposal. The goal is to eliminate the fossil fuel industry over a decade and, perversely, phase out nuclear power over a slightly longer period. All of the jobs dependent on these industries would be replaced by government-guaranteed jobs.
“We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years,” the backers explain in an outline, “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.”
Well, at least the plan isn’t too ambitious. Retrofitting “every building in America” can be done in 10 years, but eliminating all the gassy cows will take a bit longer. Maybe we’ll move them all to Hawaii, which with the near-abolition of airplanes will be effectively cut off from America anyway.
Even if you take these goals seriously, as a practical matter it’s a fantasy masquerading as green virtue-signaling.
But it’s a fantasy based on a worldview that should be treated seriously because it’s so dangerous. NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Ocasio-Cortez whether she was comfortable with the “massive government intervention” critics say is required by such an undertaking.
The number one R&B single today in 1961 was Motown Records’ first million-selling single:
The number one single today in 1972:
Birthdays begin with that well known recording star Lorne Greene:
No, the headline is not an accident for this piece from David Harsanyi:
A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls — including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and Beto O’Rourke, for starters — have already endorsed or expressed support for the “Green New Deal” (GND). [Thursday], Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.
It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that’s ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal costs are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing are but trifling projects compared to a plan overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND.
Today in 1964 — one year to the day after recording their first album — the Beatles made their first U.S. concert appearance at the Washington Coliseum in D.C.:
The number one album today in 1969, “More of the Monkees,” jumped 121 positions in one week:
Today in 1972, Pink Floyd appeared at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, during their Dark Side of the Moon tour.
The concert lasted 25 minutes until the power went out, leaving the hall as bright as the dark side of the moon.
The first gold record — which was only a record spray-painted gold because the criteria for a gold record hadn’t been devised yet — was “awarded” today in 1942:
The number one British album today in 1968 was the Four Tops’ “Greatest Hits”:
The number one single today in 1963:
Today in 1964, three years to the day from their first appearance as the Beatles, the Beatles made their first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew:
The number one single today in 1974 could be found for years on ABC-TV golf tournaments:
The number one single today in 1991:
Readers know that I have covered, either in print or on the air, high school sports since I first got into journalism for pay (such as it is).
Frederick M. Hess and Amy Cummings:
In the long shadow of this week’s Super Bowl, high-school football drew some unflattering attention, including headlines such as “As the Super Bowl Approaches, Is High School Football Dying a Slow Death?” (the Guardian) and “Rams’ Run to 2019 Super Bowl Reveals Cracks in Football from High School to the NFL” (Forbes).
Such stories are hardly surprising. In recent years, high-school sports have had a tough go of it. Football’s concussion problem has spawned headlines such as CBS’s “Young Athletes Abandon Football as Concussions Rock High School Teams.” But it’s not just football. The indefensible actions of some pro athletes, especially with regards to domestic violence and sexual misconduct, have colored views of sporting culture more generally. Meanwhile, for many progressives, sports are seen as celebrating problematic notions of competition, toxic masculinity, and gender segregation.
Indeed, school sports have served as a convenient punching bag for advocates and academics who tend to regard athletics as a cultural backwater. Amanda Ripley, a senior fellow at the “social change” organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, has made “The Case against High-School Sports” in The Atlantic, blaming sports for mediocre U.S. performance on international tests. And Brookings Institution education scholar Mike Hansen has lamented that sports are “distracting us from our schools’ main goals.”
The manifold benefits of school sports can too readily get lost, especially the crucial role that athletics can play in supporting academic success and building character. Given all the negative attention, it might surprise you to learn that participation in high-school sports has actually risen steadily over the past four decades. The National Federation of State High School Associations reports that participation in high school athletics has risen from 40 percent of high schoolers in 1980 to 52 percent in 2015.
Given the pervasive gloom and hand-wringing, the question arises: Why is participation in sports growing? Well, for one thing, a look at some of the most widely cited scholarly studies on high school sports tells a story very different from the popular narrative of violence and misbehavior.
Despite assertions that sports distract from academics, there’s evidence that they can just as readily complement the scholastic mission of schools. A widely cited 2003 study by Oxford University’s Herbert Marsh and the University of Sydney’s Sabina Kleitman in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology reported, using nationally representative longitudinal data, that participating in high-school sports had a positive effect on academics in high school and college. Students who played high-school sports got better grades, selected more challenging courses, had higher educational and occupational aspirations, were more likely to enroll in college, and had higher levels of educational attainment. What’s more, these results held up across socioeconomic status, gender, race, and ability.
A decade ago, in the Economics of Education Review, Mathematica’s Stephen Lipscomb used a fixed-effects strategy to test whether participating in high-school sports affected academic performance. He found that sports participation associated with a 2 percent increase in math and science test scores and a 5 percent increase in bachelor’s-degree attainment expectations. Other scholarship has reported that participating in high-school sports significantly reduces a student’s likelihood of dropping out of high school and, for young women, that it is associated with higher odds of college completion.
None of this is remotely new. Three decades ago, Alyce Holland and Thomas Andre published an influential review of the research on high-school extracurricular participation in the American Educational Research Journal, reporting that participation in sports was associated with higher self-esteem and feelings of control over one’s life. In a finding that won’t surprise many who’ve participated in sports, they found that athletics participation was also correlated with improved race relations and heightened young-adult involvement in political and social activities. Educators and reformers who are seeking ways to promote values such as self-control, responsibility, and good citizenship should keep in mind that schools already house programs with a track record of doing just that.
Sports also provide the opportunity for young athletes to interact with an adult role model in a shared endeavor outside of the home. Especially given that more than a third of school-age children live in single-parent households, sports afford athletes a chance to forge relationships that they might otherwise lack. This can be especially pivotal for young men who don’t have a father or other male authority figure in the home.
The point is not to make outsize claims about the restorative powers of school sports. These studies all have methodological limitations, and we should not treat the results as gospel. Meanwhile, there are real physical risks in some sports, some of the benefits are due to self-selection, some poorly run sports programs do breed destructive behavior, and there are times and places when school sports can clash with education’s academic mission.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 