Among the many problems with the Great Gun Debate these days is that the pro-gun crowd wants to make it a culture-war battle and the anti-gun crowd wants to pretend that it isn’t.
On public policy grounds, the pro-gun people have the better arguments. Firearm homicides have declined since the 1990s despite the loosening of gun laws.
Almost none of the remedies proposed in the wake of mass shootings would have actually prevented those crimes (though had so-called bump stocks been banned — as they should be — fewer would have died in the Las Vegas shooting last month).
Indeed, it’s common in the aftermath of shootings to hear pundits and politicians call for the passage of laws that already exist. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have insisted that “machine guns” be banned — they essentially already are. Others talk about banning “assault weapons” as if such a designation describes a specific kind of weapon. It doesn’t. Nor would banning assault weapons, however defined, put much of a dent in the problem. Rifles of all kinds account for just 3 percent of the murder rate.
More broadly, President Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress will not do anything significant to restrict gun rights in America. And the experience under President Obama, particularly in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, demonstrates that even some Democrats don’t want to move against their electoral self-interest.
Indeed, the main reason for inaction isn’t the “stranglehold” of the National Rifle Association — a relative piker when it comes to political spending — but the fact that millions of gun owners are likely to vote on the gun issue, while millions of gun-control supporters are not. Also, a supermajority of Americans (76 percent to 23 percent, according to Gallup) do not want a ban on private gun ownership.
These facts probably help explain why the NRA has taken a dark turn of late, releasing ads that have virtually nothing to do with gun laws and everything to do with fueling cultural resentment. It’s hard for a public-policy lobbying outfit to keep membership dues flowing when they’ve already won.
Meanwhile, anti-gun campaigners cling to the belief that they are a cadre of dedicated pragmatists who merely seek sensible gun-control laws. No doubt there are some who fit this description. But given how the most vocal advocates of gun control tend to get basic facts wrong and have a history of praising countries such as Australia, which all but banned guns outright for normal citizens, it’s easy to see why gun-rights supporters are suspicious about what their real goal is.
In 2015, the New York Times ran its first front-page editorial in 95 years to call for, in part, the confiscation of millions of guns. Last month, columnist Bret Stephens called for outright repeal of the Second Amendment.
The simple fact is that many elites in places such as New York and Los Angeles, regardless of ideology (Stephens is a conservative), just don’t like guns or the culture of people who do. One can see this in the suddenly pervasive fad — common in the pages of the New York Times and on Twitter — of mocking people who offer “thoughts and prayers” for the victims of mass shootings if they don’t also subscribe to sweeping new gun-control measures.
It’s a useful thought experiment to ask what America would look like if the gun controllers started to rack up policy victories, confiscating guns from law-abiding gun owners. Aside from the massive financial windfall for the NRA, millions of Americans would have their darkest suspicions confirmed, and the deep resentment already felt in much of “red state” America would intensify beyond anything we’ve experienced lately.
Perhaps there would be fewer mass murders and other gun deaths — though I’m skeptical. I’m sure our politics would be far uglier than they already are.
Besides the end of the War to End All Wars (which didn’t end all wars but led directly to the next war) and the day Americans remember and honor those whose service and sacrifice allow me to freely write this and you to freely read this, what else happened Nov. 11?
Today in 1954, Bill Haley got his first top 10 single, “Shake Rattle and Roll,” originally a Joe Turner song. Haley had changed the name of his band, the cowboy-motif Saddlemen, to His Comets.
Imagine what the Transportation Security Administration would have done with this: Today in 1969, the FBI arrested Jim Morrison for drunk and disorderly conduct on an airplane. Morrison and actor Tom Baker had been drinking and harassing stewardesses on a flight to Phoenix. Morrison and Baker spent a night in jail and were released on $2,500 bail.
Today in 1972, an era when pretty much everything would go in rock music, listeners got to hear the first example of what might be called “yodel rock”:
I had a great time announcing a women’s basketball game at the UW–Madison Kohl Center Wednesday.
The team I was covering lost 107–58, and we had some technical problems. I don’t care. It was still fun. Sports announcing, as I think I’ve said here before, is the most fun thing I do in my life.
I pointed out to my on-air partner how things had changed in that neighborhood over the years. Thirty years ago, when I was a UW journalism and political science student (pause to blow the dust off myself), the first story I did for my TV news class was of a proposal to finally build a replacement for the Fieldhouse and the Dane County Coliseum on the east side of campus where students lived in old houses. As part of that story I got to interview UW men’s basketball coach Steve Yoder and hockey coach Jeff Sauer, and they were nicer to students who weren’t their own players than one would figure. (Sauer was a class act who didn’t get enough credit for his coaching success.)
The Kohl Center did open in 1997, after Herb Kohl donated $25 million of the $72 million for it. A lot changed at UW over that time, beginning with cratering football, followed by football’s rebirth. Twenty years after it opened, I cannot think of a better college basketball facility, and it’s better than the soon-to-be-replaced Bradley Center in Milwaukee, since the Herb Garden has basketball sightlines patterned on the Fieldhouse and the Bradley Center did not.
Then while wasting time on Facebook (and I apologize for the redundancy) someone mentioned former UW football announcer Fred Gage. Which got me to find this:
Long off the tee and legendary around a piano bar, Fred Gage was a pillar of the local radio market and a voice of the Badgers in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. He was also a pretty good athlete. At Green Bay East High School, he competed in football, basketball and golf. At UW (1938-1940), he lettered three times in football for head coach Harry Stuhldreher. One of his earliest teammates was running back Howie Weiss, the Big Ten MVP and sixth-place finisher on the 1938 Heisman ballot.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, Gage returned to Madison and went to work in the communications business with the Capital Times and WIBA radio (the former owned the latter through 1977). In the late ’60s, Gage was instrumental in expanding the FM band, out of which “Radio Free Madison” was born. Besides sitting on the board of directors of the Cap Times and the Evjue Foundation, he was one of the top amateur golfers in the state of Wisconsin.
It has always been hard to sell Shreveport, Louisiana, as a desired postseason destination. But the Independence Bowl committee scored a major coup in 1982 by landing Don Meredith to be the guest speaker at the luncheon honoring the competing teams, Kansas State and Wisconsin.
Meredith, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback (1960-68), was then sharing ABC’s Monday Night Football booth with Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell and Fran Tarkenton.
“Everyone has asked me what Howard is really like,” Meredith crowed to the gathering. “Well, he’s a guy who changes his name from Cohen to Cosell, wears a toupee and says he’s telling it like it is. You’ve got to be kidding.”
That got yuks from the audience, which included announcers from Wisconsin’s three broadcasting teams. Prior to radio exclusivity, Madison listeners could choose from Jim Irwin and Ron Vander Kelen (WISM), Earl Gillespie and Marsh Shapiro (WTSO) or Fred Gage and John Jardine (WIBA).
Following the luncheon, Gage and Jardine, the former UW head coach, were mumbling to themselves “You’ve got to be kidding” when they learned of their broadcast position for the game. Because the stadium press box was too small to accommodate everyone, they drew the short straw.
Gage and Jardine were perched on top of the press box. They had to climb a ladder to get there. Save for a tent over their heads, they were exposed to the elements. Of course, it rained. Cats and dogs rain. Thunder and lightning. Sideways rain. Below freezing temps and 23 mph gusts.
About 50,000 tickets were sold. About 25,000 showed up.
On the air, Gage noted that the Independence Bowl committee had spent $20,000 to paint the field with a gigantic red, white and blue eagle, whose wings spread from the 20-yard-line to the 20-yard-line. But he quipped that they hadn’t spent a nickel on a tarp to protect the field.
Gage and Jardine soldiered on. As they did famously throughout their friendship. When Jardine retired from coaching, he had his choice of analyst jobs.
“My dad had a choice between taking the money (from the other competing radio stations) or hanging out with Fred on a Saturday afternoon,” Dan Jardine once recalled fondly of the negotiations. “And he went with hanging out with Fred on a Saturday afternoon.”
Friday nights were fun, too. Especially since Gage could never turn down an opportunity to belt out “Danny Boy” — his go-to Irish ballad. Former UW athletic director Pat Richter used to say, “There are certain people who are characters in every lovable sense of the word and Fred was one of them.”
Gage was the Voice of the Badgers in football for 35 years.
As previously mentioned, there were other “Voices” who shared the stage before exclusivity.
Irwin was best known as the Voice of the Packers. That was his title for 30 years — 20 of which were spent bantering with analyst Max McGee, the former Lombardi-era wide receiver. There was a folksiness to their broadcasts, not unlike Fred and John. They were Jim and Max to their loyal fans.
Irwin was ubiquitous.
In addition to his “Ironman” stretch with the Packers, 612 consecutive regular season and postseason games, he was a voice of Wisconsin football for 22 years. During that period, Irwin missed only one Badgers game, and that was when his father died in 1977.
In another role, Irwin was the Voice of Hoops in the state. He did UW basketball for five years and UW-Milwaukee games for two years during which his partner was Bob Uecker, for whom he’d sub on Brewers broadcasts. Moreover, Irwin was the voice of the Milwaukee Bucks for 16 years.
Irwin was indefatigable.
For those 16 years, he pulled off the hat trick as a voice of the Packers, Badgers and Bucks.
“I probably had, from a sportscaster’s standpoint, the three best jobs in the state and that’s very fortunate,” Irwin told the Wisconsin State Journal in 1999. “But I don’t know whether I would recommend anybody trying to do that. It was a logistics nightmare trying to get to all of those events.”
It might mean covering the Bucks on Friday, the Badgers on Saturday, the Packers on Sunday.
There was even an occasional doubleheader.
“There were a number of times when I would do a Packers game,” Irwin told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “then jump in a plane and fly home for the Bucks. Somebody else would start the (Bucks) game and I would slide into the chair at the end of the first quarter and take over.”
While Irwin was synonymous with the Packers, he had strong feelings for the Badgers.
So did Gillespie, who was the Voice of the Milwaukee Braves after the franchise moved from Boston in 1953. Gillespie’s run lasted a decade. (The Braves eventually relocated to Atlanta in 1966.)
His signature phrase with the Braves was “Holy Cow,” which he began using while broadcasting the Class AAA Milwaukee Brewers in the early ’50s. Even Harry Caray conceded Gillespie used it first. “You tried to paint a picture with your words and I painted it the way it looked to me,” Gillespie said.
When covering the Badgers, he used broad strokes.
“There are so many people in the business who look for the glass being half-empty,” Shapiro, a longtime TV sports anchor in Madison and the owner of the Nitty Gritty, once noted. “Earl always looked for the bright side and it was always half full when he talked about Wisconsin football.”
Whether listening to Gage, Irwin or Gillespie, the results were always the same even though the on-air presentations were different. So it was on Dec. 11, 1982, when the Badgers beat Kansas State, 14-3, in the Independence Bowl. It was the school’s first bowl win.
But it was not Gage’s and Jardine’s first rodeo.
They survived the wind, rain and rooftop view.
It’s a safe bet that they even toasted to it once or twice.
Jardine, who stayed at Wisconsin after he retired as football coach and did a lot for the UW, was Gage’s last on-air partner. Having done a high school football playoff game on a press box roof in similarly dire weather (no rain, but 50-mph winds), I am highly amused at the thought of having to do a Division I bowl game (known to the UW Band as the “Inconvenience Bowl,” because it was played the day before fall-semester final exams, and known by others as the “Insignifance Bowl”) outside. Somewhat amazingly, the Independence Bowl (now sponsored by something called Walk-On’s Bistro and Bar, previously sponsored by the Poulan Weed Eater) still exists today.
Gage’s UW broadcast was only on WIBA in Madison. Gillespie’s broadcast originated, believe it or don’t, in Wisconsin Rapids; his partner before Shapiro was ’60s Packers radio announcer Ted Moore. Gillespie, as you know, was the first voice of the Milwaukee Braves.
Irwin’s broadcast originated from WTMJ in Milwaukee and was on WTSO before WISM. When Gage and Jardine retired, their replacements were Paul “Shotandagoal” Braun and former UW tight end Stu Voigt, who did Vikings radio for several years. There were two other broadcasts until UW decided to consolidate broadcast rights in the late 1980s.
Irwin first worked with Gary Bender (as well on Packer games) …
… and then got the play-by-play role when Bender left for CBS, leading to …
Those three and others worked during the days when the Badgers would go entire seasons without being on TV. (Though Wisconsin Public Television carried replays the night of the game, with Braun announcing.) The only way to follow what was happening at Camp Randall if you weren’t there was by radio.
Irony that didn’t happen: Had Bender, instead of (future Bucks announcer) Howard David, had done the game (it was a syndicated broadcast), he would have been announcing his alma mater (Kansas State) against one of his former employers (Wisconsin). Irony that did happen: The Badger quarterback that year was Randy Wright, who ended up getting drafted by the Packers and replacing KSU alum Lynn Dickey as quarterback.
Since 2014, only three schools have won more games than Wisconsin: Alabama, Ohio State and Clemson. After defeating Indiana 45–17 last Saturday, the Badgers are 9–0, ranked No. 8 and have all but clinched the Big Ten’s West Division. Although they are led by freshman running back Jonathan Taylor, a Heisman candidate from Salem, N.J., and sophomore quarterback Alex Hornibrook (West Chester, Pa.), exactly half of their players grew up in-state.
That strong in-state presence dates back to 1990, when legendary coach Barry Alvarez took charge of the program. He resolved to “build a wall around this state,” and in the process created a culture that remains today in Madison, where he still serves as the Badgers’ athletic director. Successive coaches—especially Alvarez’s successor, Brett Bielema, and Chryst—have kept that barrier intact, building loyalty, cultivating walk-ons, piling up victories and indoctrinating two generations of natives in the Wisconsin Way.
[Special teams coordinator Chris] Haering is an outlier on a staff chock full of Badgers. Chryst is the son of a revered coach at D-III Wisconsin-Platteville. He went to high school in Platteville and was the Badgers’ backup quarterback from 1986 through ’88. Defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard is a native of Tony (pop. 113) who played safety under Alvarez from 2001 through ’05. And offensive coordinator Joe Rudolph, while not a Wisconsin native, was a Badgers O-lineman from 1992 through ’94. No other school that’s been ranked in the Top 25 this season has a trio of alumni as its coach and coordinators.
Rudolph started on the ’93 Badgers’ team that won its first Big Ten title in three decades in Alvarez’s third season. The coach had arrived after two seasons as Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator to find a state full of recruits wearing Michigan and Michigan State T-shirts. He told them he was the guy to turn the program around, and many began to believe. Most importantly, Alvarez mined the football talent in the state’s small towns, which was critical given Wisconsin’s geography: Of the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line, only 10 are more rural, and of those just one (Iowa) has a Power Five football program. On this year’s Wisconsin team, 47 players on the roster hail from outside of Milwaukee and Madison, in towns whose populations range from 105,000 (Green Bay) to 375 (Amherst Junction).
“You go down to Florida, and you stop, and you get 15 D-I kids [at one school],” says Leonhard, who played a decade in the NFL. “When you [recruit Wisconsin players], you might have to go 300 miles between them. It’s just kind of a [lack of] bang for your buck, as far as recruiting goes. Most people are not going to go out of their way to recruit the area.”
The Badgers’ success with walk-ons gives recruiters even greater clout: Since 1990, 19 from Wisconsin have reached the NFL. Often, these players didn’t play high-level high school football, but UW coaches spotted their talents at track meets and basketball games. “Sometimes when you turn on the high school tape, you see kids that maybe aren’t as developed in football skills yet,” Haering says. “You have to maybe see through some of those layers and project a little bit.”
Haering says the program’s commitment to walk-ons necessitates two recruiting cycles: one in which he and the rest of the staff pitch kids with multiple offers, then another, later, when they push for less developed talent. Coaches aren’t neglecting coveted players—of the 16 four- and five-star recruits raised in Wisconsin over the last decade, 13 enrolled at Madison—but it’s no surprise then that under-recruited players in the state are willing to forgo better opportunities at lesser football programs for a shot at the Badgers. When senior inside linebacker Jack Cichy of Somerset (pop. 2,635) was deciding between taking an Ivy League offer or walking on at Madison in 2013, he needed only to look at the team’s starting quarterback, Joel Stave of Greenfield (pop. 36,720), and leading receiver, Jared Abbrederis of Wautoma (pop. 2,218), neither of whom started out with a scholarship.
While schools like Texas and Florida snap up five-star in-state recruits at the top of their game, Wisconsin stocks its roster with players who seem to come out of nowhere. Consider J.J. Watt, a second-team All-America at Wisconsin in 2010 and three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, who walked on as a transfer in 2008. Or Ryan Ramczyk, the offensive tackle who was a first-round draft pick in 2017, four years after he’d been enrolled in technical school and pondered a career as a welder. Nowhere might be an understatement.
At Madison, walk-ons receive the same gear, the same sized lockers and the same opportunities—players rarely know who’s playing for a scholarship and who’s a four- or five-star guy. All have a respect for Wisconsin’s traditions. When players began complaining about the rigors of camp one recent summer, strength coach Ross Kolodziej handed out one of his training camp schedules from the 1990s under Alvarez, when practices were run three times a day. That quieted his players. “One thing we benefit from is not having a bunch of five-star guys that think they’re going to go straight to the league,” Kolodziej says. “You have guys who were under-recruited and have a chip on their shoulder.”
The road to Madison—really, any road to Madison—runs through dairyland, green in the summer, blanketed with snow in the winter. Traffic is sparse, and the tallest structures are crop irrigation machines and gas stations. Out of that landscape, a stereotype of a Wisconsin football player has arisen: the massive, cheese-fed behemoth. He’s blond, raised on a farm and he’s playing lineman in Madison. But the Badgers of 2017 say that’s not who they are. Tyler Biadasz, a native of Amherst (pop. 1,035), is 6′ 3″, weighs 315 pounds and plays center. He’s blond and bearded, but he would like you to do know that he did not grow up on a dairy farm. He grew up across the street from one.
Still, linemen on both sides of the ball this season are largely in-state guys. Eight of 12 defensive linemen are natives; so are 12 of 17 O-linemen. But to assume the Badgers simply find the biggest teenagers in the state and let the rest fall into place is simplistic. No longer does Wisconsin win by outmuscling its opponents; while Taylor has put up monster numbers, the Wisconsin offense is a balanced attack, with Hornibrook—who completes 64.4% of his passes and ranks among Power Five quarterbacks in pass efficiency—at the helm. On this year’s team, which is averaging 36.1 points a game, 29 of the 58 in-state Badgers play at skill positions or special teams.
No matter the position, most players have one thing in common: a burning loyalty to the cardinal-and-white. Cichy has had a stuffed Bucky Badger for as long as he can remember; it still sits on his dresser at his parents’ home. Kolodziej recalls crowding with a pack of family and friends around a radio at his parents’ home in rural Portage County in 1995, the middle of a stretch during which Wisconsin would make the Rose Bowl three times in seven seasons under Alvarez after going 31 years without an appearance. With no other FBS program in the state—in fact, Wisconsin lacks so much as a D-II program that might divert recruits—kids want to play for the Badgers, period.
“You grow up watching it and going to games at Camp Randall,” says former Badger T.J. Watt, JJ.’s younger brother, now a Steelers linebacker. “And once you get in the stadium, you realize you don’t want to be anywhere else.”
In the state, there’s a level of trust and familiarity among recruits. Leonhard played on the teams his players cheered as little boys. Tight end Luke Benzschawel’s father played with Chryst at Wisconsin. Defensive end Chikwe Obasih attended the same high school as Thomas, though a decade later—and Thomas’s mother was Obasih’s elementary-school nurse.
Soon after Chryst and his staff took over at Pitt, in early 2012, the coach identified a Wisconsin kid he thought they might be able to get. Chryst was still recruiting the way he’d learned to as a longtime Badgers coordinator, which is how he found Ryan Ramczyk—who before he became a first-round pick at tackle was built more like a tight end. Pitt offered to fly him out, Haering says, and Ramczyk politely declined. He wasn’t interested in getting on a plane. Eventually he made his way to Wisconsin after a stint at Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and when he went No. 32 in last spring’s NFL draft to the Saints, he was one of three UW players taken that weekend. All grew up in state. In 2016, both Badgers picked had the same distinction, and over the past six drafts, 14 of 21 Badgers were Wisconsinites. Five of them had been walk-ons.
Three rounds after Ramczyk went off the board last spring, another Badger’s name was called: Vince Biegel to the Packers. Biegel, who was raised on a cranberry marsh in Wisconsin Rapids (pop. 18,367), was living every Wisconsin kid’s dream. A former four-star recruit, he had offers from across the country and narrowed his list to two schools: Wisconsin and BYU, where his father, Rocky, had played and his grandfather had been an assistant coach. Growing up, the outside linebacker had cheered for both teams, but he felt the Badgers were on an upward trajectory. Plus, he had teachers, coaches, practically the entire population of Wisconsin Rapids giving him their two cents—which were that he’d be crazy to go anywhere else.
Rocky had been a top in-state recruit in 1988, just before Alvarez took over. Though he had an offer from the Badgers, Rocky chose BYU, but he returned to Wisconsin once his career concluded. Over the years, as his son grew into one of the state’s best football products, Rocky developed a relationship with Alvarez, who started a running joke, Biegel says. The retired coach would tell Rocky that had he recruited him, he’d have been a Badger. Rocky’s answer: “I probably would have.”
Which is how, more than two decades after his father got away, Vince found himself in Alvarez’s office in Madison in 2011, hearing the athletics director’s recruiting pitch. The younger Biegel had grown up cheering for Alvarez’s teams, and though it was Bielema who’d be coaching him, in that moment, he was swept up in the history of it all.
“Let’s make it happen,” Biegel told Alvarez, verbally committing not to his coach, but to the man who’d built the program from nothing and taken his home state to the apex of college football. “I play the game of football for a lot of different reasons,” Biegel explains. “The state of Wisconsin is a big reason why I play.”
Biegel’s path couldn’t have been any different from Ramczyk’s, but the two share that pride. Part of the reason Ramczyk quit football after high school was his lack of an offer from Wisconsin; going elsewhere just didn’t seem worth it. Haering sees recruits with that mind-set on nearly all of his trips. A three-star recruit, Biegel had offers from Northern Illinois, Illinois State and South Dakota State. Despite not wanting to travel far from home for school, he had plenty of options and was secure in his future. But on the day in 2015 when Haering showed up, Biegel had to quiet his nerves. This wasn’t just another visit. It was Wisconsin.
Taxes suck. Some taxation is necessary but in general, taxes suck. They especially suck when they are used in social and economic engineering because, like anything that becomes political, they are subject to manipulation as politicians attempt to curry favor in the class war.
I was part of a discussion on a friend’s post where a person actually thought the income tax was implemented as a tool to “equalize” incomes and that’s why a progressive tax scheme was “popular”.
No. Just no.
Income taxes were initially implemented as temporary tools used to pay off debts for wars – that was before politicians figured out taxation was a gravy train and the 16th Amendment was ratified. Then things got nuts and we got the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 which authorized withholding – allowing the government to take a percentage of your earnings before you even see them.
The fundamental premise that we should enact tax policy to “reward working people” or to “penalize the idle rich” is flawed and why there will never be agreement on tax “reform”. Of course any across the board tax cuts “benefit the rich” – the top 20% now pay 95% of all income taxes.
The idea that investment income isn’t taxed enough is just a collectivist back door to wealth taxation, as are estate taxes. What right does any entity have to confiscate a percentage of what someone has earned or built? Sure, wealth is concentrated – it always is – but as some have noted, 20% of the tax filers pay 95% of all income taxes. How is that by any definition a fair distribution, especially when each vote counts the same?
Taxes should never have become a tool of social or economic engineering. Taxes are to fund the activities of government – that is it. Cut government to its constitutionally enumerated powers, create a flat percentage so that all pay an equal share based on income and force government to live within that budget.
High tax rates on the “rich” is a feel-good fiction. If rich people are smart – and they are or they hire smart people – they will never pay a top tax rate. As Thomas Sowell pointed out in 2011, progressive tax lovers are completely unburdened by the weight of knowledge of history. We have seen this movie and it premiered in 1921 – the “rich” won’t stop working but their capital will:
>>>”Ninety years ago — in 1921 — federal income tax policies reached an absurdity that many people today seem to want to repeat. Those who believe in high taxes on “the rich” got their way. The tax rate on people in the top income bracket was 73 percent in 1921. On the other hand, the rich also got their way: They didn’t actually pay those taxes.
The number of people with taxable incomes of $300,000 a year and up — equivalent to far more than a million dollars in today’s money — declined from more than a thousand people in 1916 to less than three hundred in 1921. Were the rich all going broke?
It might look that way. More than four-fifths of the total taxable income earned by people making $300,000 a year and up vanished into thin air. So did the tax revenues that the government hoped to collect with high tax rates on the top incomes.
What happened was no mystery to Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. He pointed out that vast amounts of money that might have been invested in the economy were instead being invested in tax-exempt securities, such as municipal bonds.”<<<
Taxation should be about financing the necessary functions of government, not social engineering.
Raising taxes on millionaires only punishes successful people for being successful. Taxes “punish” whoever has to pay them. Anyone who says with a straight face that government deserves to take 40-50 cents of every dollar in income or confiscate someone’s estate after they die to fund spending without end is an idiot, an ideologue, or a liar…or more likely just economically and historically ignorant.
Earlier this week came this announcement from former Assembly and secretary of state candidate Jay Schroeder:
I am announcing my candidacy today for Wisconsin Secretary of State. One year from today will be the retirement party.
Doug Lafollette has been Secretary of State for a total of 38 years and literally ran the office in the ground. From a total of 49 employees down to 2 and a budget of $5 million down to $265,000. In fact his office is literally in the basement of the capitol.
Even democrats over the years never reinstated his office with increased staff or a budget because of his gross incompetence.
The one thing Doug Lafollette is good at is traveling the country on Wisconsin money and 5 star hotels. As he spends over $35,000 on this, it takes the money away from public education from the children of Wisconsin.
In the recent past his travels have taken him to Anchorage Alaska, Phoenix Arizona, Bismarck North Dakota, Little Rock Arkansas, Omaha Nebraska, Oklahoma City Oklahoma, Eugene Oregon, Austin Texas, Rapid City South Dakota, Long Beach California, and Kalispell Montana.
Goofy doug’s Survival Handbook which he wrote even says “that individuals should be sterilized after having two children.” It is simple and painless he says. I guess preventing births from sterilizations will give him more money to travel around the country.
My platform will be to eliminate this useless office via statewide referendum and #retireDoug in 2018.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 