The number one single in Britain …
… and over here on my parents’ wedding day in 1961:
The number one single today in 1977:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Jan. 7
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The Wall Street Journal:
As the FBI seeks to end the citizen takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, it’s worth reflecting on what is behind the rising civil disobedience in the American West. The armed occupation of federal buildings is inexcusable, but so are federal land-management abuses and prosecutorial overreach.
Activists on Saturday broke into an unoccupied building on the 187,000-acre federal refuge in eastern Oregon to protest the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers. The group’s spokesman is Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevadan who in 2014 came to national attention over his standoff with the Bureau of Land Management. The younger Bundy is a political grandstander, and many in Oregon oppose his illegal siege.
The drama is bringing attention to legitimate grievances, especially the appalling federal treatment of the Hammond family. The Hammonds’ problems trace to 1908, whenTheodore Roosevelt set aside 89,000 acres around Malheur Lake as a bird refuge. The government has since been on a voracious land-and-water grab, coercing the area’s once-thriving ranchers to sell.
The feds have revoked dozens of grazing permits and raised the price of the few it issues. It has mismanaged the area’s water, allowing ranchlands to flood. It has harassed landowners with regulatory actions that raise the cost of ranching, then has bought out private landowners to more than double the refuge’s size.
The Hammonds are one of the last private owners in the Harney Basin, and they have endured federal harassment over their water rights, the revocation of their grazing permits, restricted access to their property, and prosecutorial abuse.
In 2001 the family told authorities it planned to set a managed fire on its land to fight invasive species. The fire accidently spread over 139 acres of public land before the Hammonds extinguished it. In 2006 the family tried to save its winter feed from a lightning fire by setting “back fires” on its property (a common practice), which burnt an acre of public land.
Years later, in 2011, the feds charged Dwight Hammond and his son Steven with nine counts under the elastic Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. A federal jury found them guilty only of setting the two fires they had admitted to starting, and federal Judge Michael Hogan sentenced the father to three months and the son to a year in prison. He said the federal minimum of five years would not meet “any idea I have of justice, proportionality” and would “shock the conscience.” The feds appealed the sentence and another judge ordered both Hammonds to serve the full five years. They also owe $400,000 in supposed fire-related costs.
Many in rural Oregon view this as a government vendetta. Rusty Inglis, who worked for the Forest Service for 34 years and now runs a local Oregon farm bureau, recently told a trade magazine that it’s “obvious” that “the BLM and the wildlife refuge want that ranch.” The Oregon Farm Bureau called the sentences “gross government overreach.” The ideology of “national” land has become the club to punish private landowners who are the best source of economic stability and conservation.
The Bundy occupation of federal land can’t be tolerated, but the growing Western opposition to government harassment of private landowners ought to be a source of political concern. Ted Cruz and others are right to caution the occupiers against their sit-in, but the federal bureaucracy also needs to be reined in.
This is not the first time the BLM has grotesquely exceeded its legitimiate authority. The first time I read about the BLM was in the late 1970s in, of all places, a motorcycle magazine that wrote about the BLM’s shutting off motorcross motorcycle riders’ access to federal lands without any authority to do so. The magazine cited a radio commentator who pointed this out. The commentator’s name was Ronald Reagan.
This is also not the first time government employees who work in the environmental arm of government have reached near-totalitarian levels of bureaucratic overreach. Ask any business owner who has to deal with the Environmental Protection Agency. This state’s Department of Natural Resources has been known for decades as “Damn Near Russia.” And too many Wisconsinites continue to believe it’s a good idea for state government to use taxpayer dollars to gobble up state land under the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund so that the unapproved cannot use land their taxes paid to buy. (That is: hunters, fishermen, ATV owners, snowmobile owners, etc.)
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Jim Geraghty has some inconvenient truths for supporters of Donald Trump, though it applies to all Republicans:
The American Right is divided between those who think our country has serious problems and those who think it is teetering on the edge of collapse. Donald Trump’s rise has been fueled by the latter group, which sees itself as Cassandra, accurately surveying and desperately trying to revive a “crippled America,” as Trump titled his book.
The edge-of-extinction crowd hasn’t just failed to persuade the rest of the Right; they’ve failed to persuade the mass of voters. Americans tell pollsters the country is headed in the wrong direction, but they’re not apocalyptic about it. To everyone else, the Doomsayers come across as paranoid, race-obsessed hysterics.
Conservative columnist Diana West, arguing that it’s time for “American Patriots” to rally around Trump, offers a concise summary of the apocalyptic vision that has taken hold among quite a few self-identified conservatives:
If, say, a President Cruz were to ensure that Planned Parenthood was defunded, Obamacare ended, government trimmed, and amnesty once again staved off for another election cycle — we would all rejoice. However, the Constitution, the Republic, would be no more secure. On the contrary, they would still teeter on the edge of extinction, lost in a demographic, political, and cultural transformation that our fathers, founding and otherwise, would find inconceivable — and particularly if they ever found out that the crisis took hold when We the People lost our nerve even to talk about immigration and Islam.
There’s a lot to unpack here. West’s first point on the path to extinction is a “demographic transformation.” The United States is 77 percent white, 13 percent African American, about 17 percent Latino, and 5 percent Asian. Those numbers will change in a generation; staid demographers and rhetorical firebrands alike refer to it as the “browning of America.” West and others assert that a majority-minority United States will be a lesser country — less free, less prosperous, less safe. At heart, they believe that what gives America its unique strengths is a population that is predominantly European in heritage.
But if you think a strong national defense, strong family values, free-market economics, and respect for the rule of law only benefit white America, and can only be preserved by them, you’re out of your mind. Try telling the 233,000 African-American members of the military that they’re incapable of keeping Americans safe. Tell the 42 percent of Asian-Americans who profess faith in Christ that their lives don’t preserve and promote Judeo-Christian values. Tell the 55,000 Hispanic police officers that they’re culturally incapable of upholding the rule of law. Tell the immigrants starting 520 new businesses per month that they can’t strengthen American capitalism. According to apocalyptic conservatism, Clarence Thomas, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Thomas Sowell are part of the problem, not the solution.
The Doomsday Conservatives contend we’re living in a genuine dark age of oppression of speech, at a time when Alex Jones is on 160 stations, Glenn Beck has his own television network, and Mark Levin’s books repeatedly top the New York Times bestseller lists. West concludes that the crisis she sees took hold when the American People “lost our nerve to even talk about immigration or Islam.” Look around you. Do you see a country that is afraid to discuss immigration or Islam?
It’s a bit like when Leftists insist “it’s time for a real national dialogue on race” or “it’s time for a serious national conversation on guns,” when in reality these dialogues have been ongoing for decades, in the halls of Congress and on cable-news shows and at dinner tables across the country. Trump-aligned anti-immigration zealots insist the conversation is nonexistent or suppressed so as to avoid the truth: They aren’t winning the argument.
The country is evenly split on whether to allow Syrian refugees to resettle in the United States. But only 27 percent of registered voters support banning Muslims from entering the country; 66 percent oppose the idea. A slim majority supports the status quo on “birthright citizenship” — giving American citizenship to anyone born on American soil, regardless of their parents’ legal status. Support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants consistently sits between 50 and 60 percent.
Those who feel that stopping illegal immigration should be the nation’s top priority rarely have any idea of how few of their countrymen agree with them. Gallup recently asked voters what they see as the most important problem facing the country today. Just 5 percent said “immigration/illegal aliens.” 16 percent said “terrorism” and 9 percent said the “economy in general.”
Yet to West, the problem that’s so low on most people’s lists is even worse than anyone is willing to admit:
We don’t even have a border. We have “border surges,” and “unaccompanied alien minors.” We have “sanctuary cities,” and a continuous government raid on our own pocketbooks to pay for what amounts to our own invasion. That’s not even counting the attendant pathologies, burdens, and immeasurable cultural dislocation that comes about when “no one speaks English anymore.”
It is no doubt frustrating that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement service capable of removing 409,000 illegal immigrants just a few years ago only removed 235,419 in the last fiscal year. But U.S. immigration enforcement has not ceased, as West and her ilk might suggest.
In 2005, 9,891 border-patrol agents worked on the Southwest border with Mexico; by 2014, there were 18,127 agents. Under Operation Secure Texas, the state government will devote $800 million in new resources to securing the border, which is already patrolled by Texas National Guard troops. We have a border, and a lot is being done to secure it. But the Doomsday Conservatives can’t take “yes” for an answer. They’re too emotionally and psychologically invested in the idea of perpetual crisis to acknowledge that real progress has been made on immigration.
Despite its gloom, their narrative preserves their self-image: A nation of sheep tunes out the severity of its problems, obliviously careening toward the precipice while an impassioned, brave band of outsiders recognizes the menace arriving from abroad. While even seemingly conservative lawmakers such as Ted Cruz are mesmerized by, as West puts it, a “rosier vision of Islam and immigration screening,” the faithful unite around a billionaire who’s willing to speak the truths that political correctness has so thoroughly silenced. Anyone who doesn’t see it the way they do is a loser, a low-energy clown, or something more sinister.
The best part of this narrative is that if Trump fails to win the nomination or the presidency, the outsiders have a ready-made explanation: the party and/or the country chose to be ostriches, heads buried in the sand as the country fell apart. It just couldn’t be that Trump and his supporters tainted legitimate concerns about border security and assimilation of immigrants with a whiff of lunatic white-nationalism.
Go back to those numbers:
5%: Americans who believe “immigration/illegal aliens” is the biggest issue facing the U.S.
27%: Americans who believe Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S.
50–60%: Americans who believe illegal immigrants should get a path to citizenship.
60%: Americans who oppose banning Muslims from entering the U.S.If you’re taking one or both of those first two positions … well, Donald Trump calls people on the wrong end losers. The First Amendment gives us the right to be wrong and unpopular, but taking positions most people do not agree with doesn’t get you elected.
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To put it mildly, James Taranto is not impressed with what Barack the Weeper announced yesterday:
“This is it, really?” Jennifer Baker, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association’s lobbying arm (no pun intended) asks the New York Times rhetorically. “This is what they’ve been hyping for how long now? This is the proposal they’ve spent seven years putting together? They’re not really doing anything.”
She refers, of course, to what the White House calls President Obama’s “commonsense steps … to keep guns out of the wrong hands.” As we write, the White House homepage carries the prominent headline “Watch President Obama Take Action to Reduce Gun Violence.” That’s accompanied by an 84-minute video that is literally all talk and no action.
We take it back. It’s not all talk. The first 35 minutes are a “beginning shortly” screen, followed by a minute-plus of an empty lectern and a six-minute introduction.
As for the “action,” as per a White House fact sheet, it consists mostly of an effort to “keep guns out of the wrong hands through background checks”:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is making clear that it doesn’t matter where you conduct your business—from a store, at gun shows, or over the Internet: If you’re in the business of selling firearms, you must get a license and conduct background checks.
The key phrase here is “in the business of selling.” Not everyone who sells firearms is “in the business.” The law exempts hobbyists and collectors who sell firearms from the requirement that they run background checks on buyers. Only Congress can change the law, and Obama’s gun control agenda couldn’t get past even the Democratic Senate in 2013. So the administration is adopting a broader definition of “in the business of selling firearms” in the hope of expanding background checks (or deterring sellers).
What is the new definition? That’s unclear, and deliberately so. From that Times report:
Under [the president’s] plan, the White House said, officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will begin contacting gun sellers to let them know of new standards to “clarify” who would be considered a regulated dealer—taking into account factors such as whether someone has a business card, uses a website or sells guns in their original packaging.
But there will be no set number for defining how many guns sold would make someone a “dealer”—a standard that some groups had pushed as essential to giving the changes more teeth. White House officials said someone could sell as few as one or two guns yet still be considered a dealer whose sales are subject to background checks.
From the White House’s standpoint, the lack of a clear standard would appear to be a feature rather than a flaw. It means that nobody is safe: Anyone who sells so much as one gun will have reason to fear prosecution. Some will no doubt be deterred, while others will obtain licenses and do the background checks—though as the Violence Policy Center noted in a 2007 report, licensed dealers are exempt from other regulations that apply to private sales. Of those who continue to sell without licenses, a few will be prosecuted. Some, even if acquitted, will have their lives ruined over a malum prohibitum offense.
Meanwhile, malum in se firearms offenses will go on unabated, which is to say the effort is unlikely to save any lives. There will remain numerous channels, both legal and illegal, by which would-be killers can obtain guns.
That VPC report points out that what liberals refer to (imprecisely at best) as the “gun show loophole” was an unintended consequence of earlier gun-control efforts:
From 1968 to 1993, almost anyone who was not prohibited from owning firearms and had a location from which they [sic] intended to conduct business—including their own home or office—could obtain an FFL. For $30 an applicant could receive the three-year license, allowing the license holder to ship, transport, and receive firearms in interstate commerce and engage in retail sales. . . .
In 1986, Congress passed the National Rifle Association-backed Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which further eased regulation of licensees and placed restrictions on ATF’s ability to weed out illegitimate gun dealers. . . .
As a result of the lax requirements for becoming a firearms dealer, the number of Type 1 FFLs ballooned from 146,429 in 1975 to 245,000 in 1992. The vast majority of these license holders were what is known as “kitchen-table” dealers—individuals who conduct business out of their homes and offices and do not operate actual gun or sporting goods stores. And while many “kitchen-table” dealers obtained the license merely to enjoy lower prices and evade the perceived “red tape” associated with gun purchase laws, others recognized it as a dramatic loophole in federal law that could easily be exploited to facilitate high-volume criminal gun trafficking.
In response to the widespread abuse of FFLs and at the urging of the Violence Policy Center, the Clinton administration began strictly enforcing the requirement that license holders be “engaged in the business” of selling firearms as required by the statute.
That’s right, the Clinton administration used the “in the business of selling firearms” requirement as a reason to deny licenses—exactly the opposite of Obama’s approach now.
In addition, Clinton-era legislative changes increased the license fee and imposed new regulatory burdens on licensees. The result was predictable: “The number of Type 1 FFLs in the United States has dropped 79 percent—from 245,628 in 1994 to 50,630 in 2007.”
It’s a safe bet that the Obama measures will have unintended consequences as well. One provision, as Politico notes, weakens medical privacy: It “ enables health care providers to report the names of mentally ill patients to an FBI firearms background check system.” That doesn’t seem unreasonable on its face, but it may deter some patients from seeking treatment.
National Review’s Charles Cooke notes another near-certain consequence:
Ceteris paribus, the United States will play host to at least another 20 million guns by the end of December 2016—many of them so-called “assault weapons.” In addition, the country will welcome another million or so concealed carriers, and another half-million or so NRA members. Every time the president talks about gun control, these numbers increase, and, in consequence, the president’s opponents are strengthened.
One caveat: There’s an element of guesswork in any enumeration of gun sales. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, “the best approximation we can get of the number of firearms sold each year comes from the FBI’s data on gun background checks.”
But that’s convenient for an administration that claims to be expanding background checks. Obama and his men will be able to spin increased demand for guns as a success: “Look at all the checks we’re conducting!”
So a policy loop is created: Gun control is stiffened, which doesn’t actually result in reducing gun violence; thus there are more calls for gun control. Maybe Obama can see an ObamaCare doctor for his tear duct problem before his next gun control speech.
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First: The song of the day:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”:
The number one single today in 1973 included a person rumored to be the subject of the song on backing vocals:
The number one British single today in 1979 was this group’s only number one:
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Robby Soave writes about the conflict in Oregon between ranchers and the hated federal Bureau of Land Management:
Various Republican candidates are calling for a peaceful resolution to the armed occupation of a remote federal outpost in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Sen. Rand Paul had this to say, according to The Washington Post:
“I’m sympathetic to the idea that the large collection of federal lands ought to be turned back to the states and the people, but I think the best way to bring about change is through politics,” Paul told the Washington Post in an interview. “That’s why I entered the electoral arena. I don’t support any violence or suggestion of violence toward changing policy.”
Sen. Ted Cruz called on the protesters to “stand down peaceably.” Sen. Marco Rubio urged them to “follow the law.”
The White House maintains the standoff is a matter for local authorities, and has urged caution. Given that no one’s life is currently threatened by the antics of the Bundy family, this restrained approach seems especially wise.
It’s a shame, then, that so many left-leaning commentators—having branded the ranchers as a bunch of terrorists intent on committing imminent violence—seem dismissive, or at least dissatisfied, with this wait-and-see approach. The Daily Beast’s Sally Kohn has accused the federal government of encouraging right-wing militias by failing to crackdown on them with extreme prejudice. Kohn claims that authorities should have thrown the book at Cliven Bundy and his supporters after the previous standoff. “Talk about being ‘soft on terrorism’,” she writes:
What’s even more disturbing, perhaps, is that nothing has changed in terms of the federal government’s hyper-passive response to such flagrant acts of menacing and threats of domestic terrorism.
The Department of Justice did, wisely, revive the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee—recognizing the need to defend against and prevent the very real and comparable threat posed, for instance, by mostly white anti-government zealots and not just Muslim radicals. Yet the FBI said it was seeking a “peaceful” end to the standoff, and there are reportedly no signs of law enforcement being anywhere near the building. So maybe it’s not even a “standoff” if the federal government is standing down.
Of course there’s a strategic case to be made for a cautious approach on the part of the federal government that doesn’t escalate violence nor feed a cult of martyrdom within the anti-government extremist movement as happened after Ruby Ridge and Waco. That would seem jarring enough juxtaposed with the violent over-policing of black Americans and conservative calls for blanket scrutiny against all Muslims. But in the face of the very direct connection between the Bundy conflict and the Oregon standoff, and the SPLC’s evidence that the government’s non-response simply gave anti-government extremists more power, the government now seems naïve about right-wing extremism at best and encouraging at worst.
It’s important to note that this is the same kind of paranoia about “the other” that animates Donald Trump and his supporters. The calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. and the calls to crack down on right-wing militias aren’t so different from one another, even though they come from distinct ideological groups with almost no overlap. I would say to both groups that there is just as much danger—if not more danger—in counselling the government to overreact to perceived threats. Advocates of saner government have little to gain, and a lot to lose, by distorting the definition of the word terrorist to include the likes of the Bundys and Hammonds.
Soave adds:
Meanwhile, a whole bunch of left-leaning people on Twitter are accusing the militia of engaging in domestic terrorism. The hashtags for the story are #OregonUnderAttack and #YallQaeda—as if the Bundy family’s activities thus far have something in common with a terrorist attack perpetrated by Islamic radicals. …
Domestic terrorists? Really? And here I was thinking liberals were just as skeptical as libertarians about the prudence of labelling everything and everyone a terrorist. Don’t they remember that every time someone brands someone else a terrorist, the Patriot Act gets a dozen pages longer? Government power relies upon such unfounded suspicions. …
Keep in mind that the ranchers haven’t taken hostages, damaged property, or hurt anyone. The previous standoff between federal authorities and the Bundy family was resolved peacefully. It’s possible the situation at the wildlife headquarters escalates into something horrifically violent, but it seems wildly premature and speculative to assert that it will. …
A more responsible left-leaning commentator, the historian of student activism Angus Johnston, expressed some misgivings on Twitter about such broad use of the term terrorists, but nonetheless maintained that the ranchers’ “threats of political violence against state agents strike me as unambiguously terroristic.”
They strike me as unambiguously foolish and crazy. But keep in mind that the origins of the current standoff can be traced to the government’s treatment of the Hammonds, who were re-sentenced to a mandatory minimum of five years in prison under federal anti-terrorism laws—even though the initial judge in the case said such a lengthy sentence for two counts of arson would “shock his conscience.”
In any case, everyone who opposes government-sanctioned violence should remember that unfounded concerns about terrorism are the health of the state. Lowering the bar for what counts as terrorism is not a winning move for critics of authoritarianism and unconstitutional exercises of police power.
Liberals should ask themselves what would stop, say, abortion rights advocates, who advocate what they call a medical procedure that to their opponents is murder, from being labeled as domestic terrorists by a future Republican attorney general. (That was basically how anti-Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists were viewed by the federal government in the 1960s and early 1970s. Someone once wrote something about what happens when you don’t learn from history.)
The Washington Post provides valuable context through maps:
There’s a historic link between population and federal land ownership. In 2012, the Congressional Research Service looked at the history of tensions between the government and the population out West — particularly ranchers and farmers who, like the Hammonds and Bundys, use federal land for grazing and other purposes.
Early in the history of the country, the government took over land that was then distributed to citizens for farming and economic growth. As the United States expanded westward, the land was increasingly inhospitable, including the Rockies and the deserts of Nevada and Utah. By the end of the 19th century, a new focus was placed on conserving the land, with Yellowstone becoming the first national park in 1872. …
Over the course of the 20th century, the government’s emphasis shifted away from releasing the land to private citizens and toward managing it itself. The passage of 1976’s Federal Land Policy and Management Act made that policy concrete, keeping the land as the property of the government. After the federal government’s shift, there was a push from some in the West, including governors and members of Congress, to shift control from the federal to the state or local government. The Sagebrush Rebellion, as it was known, tapered off during the relative friendly administration of Ronald Reagan. …
What’s new is the way in which the broader political moment has cross-pollinated with longstanding objections to how the government manages land out West. The takeover in Oregon has its roots in the Sagebrush Rebellion. They way it’s being manifested, though, is as modern as it gets. -
Today’s first song is posted in honor of the first FM signal heard by the Federal Communications Commission today in 1940:
Today in 1968, Jimi Hendrix was jailed for one day in Stockholm, Sweden, for destroying the contents of his hotel room.
The culprit? Not marijuana or some other controlled substance. Alcohol.
Today in 1973, Bruce Springsteen released his first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” It sold all of 25,000 copies in its first year.
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This column is not about Comrade Bernie Sanders and how he demonstrates his vacuum of knowledge about economics every time he opens his mouth.
No, this is worse. Mark J. Perry writes:
When a random sample of American adults were asked the question “Just a rough guess, what percent profit on each dollar of sales do you think the average company makes after taxes?” for the Reason-Rupe poll in May 2013, the average response was 36%! That response was very close to historical results from the polling organization ORC’s polls for a slightly different, but related question: What percent profit on each dollar of sales do you think the average manufacturer makes after taxes? Responses to that question in 9 different polls between 1971 and 1987 ranged from 28% to 37% and averaged 31.6%.
How do the public’s estimates of corporate profit margins compare to reality? Not surprisingly they are off by a huge margin. According to this Yahoo!Finance database for 212 different industries, the average profit margin for the most recent quarter was 7.5% and the median profit margin was 6.5% (see chart above). Interestingly, there wasn’t a single industry out of 212 that had a profit margin as high as 36% in the most recent quarter. The industry “REIT-Diversified” had the highest profit margin at 33.5% followed by just one other industry – Wireless Communications at 30.9% – with a profit margin higher than 30%.
“Big Oil” companies (Major Integrated Oil and Gas) make a lot of profits, right? Well, that industry had a below-average profit margin of 5.1% in the most recent quarter. And evil Walmart only made a 3.1% profit margin in the most recent quarter (as I reported recently), which is less than half of the almost 7% average government take on retails sales in the form of state and local sales taxes. Think about it – for every $100 in sales for Walmart, the state/local governments get an average of $6.88 in sales taxes (and as much $9.44 in Tennessee and $9.16 in Arizona, see data here), while Walmart gets only $3.10 in profits!
Bottom Line: The public’s complete overestimation of how much companies earn in profits as a share of sales explains a lot. If $36 of every $100 in sales at a company like Walmart, McDonald’s, Home Depot, Ford Motor Company or a local dry cleaner or restaurant really did turn into profits, then of course those companies could afford to pay unrealistic living wages of $15 per hour, accept unreasonable demands from labor unions, provide all sorts of generous fringe benefits including weeks of paid holidays, long paid maternity leaves, and gold-plated pension programs, etc. The public that believes in the fantasy-world of sky-high 36% profit margins would naturally think companies are just being greedy and stingy when they don’t pay higher “living wages” and have to be forced to do so through minimum wage, or living wage, legislation.
If the average person could realize that a 36% profit margin isn’t even close to reality, and that the typical, median firm has a profit margin of only 6.5%, or almost 30 percentage points below what the public thinksis a normal profit margin, then hopefully the average person would become a little more realistic about how the business world operates. Companies aren’t being stingy when they pay competitive wages, they’re just trying to survive on what are sometimes razor-thin profit margins, in a competitive environment where there’s not a large margin of error. If they’re not operating efficiently and watching costs very carefully, it’s pretty easy for a business to go from a 6.5% profit margin to a 0% break-even situation, and then to losses and bankruptcy — just look at the more than half a million businesses that fail every year.
My educated guess is that the Main Street businesses near you make even smaller profit margins. Owning a business is pretty much the only way for most people to make money, but that doesn’t mean most business owners are rich.
This also should explain why despite having the highest corporate tax rates in the world, neither the federal government nor the states that assess corporate income taxes get much take from corporate income taxes.
Perry doesn’t go into other aspects of public ignorance about business. What people think of as “corporations” such as the aforementioned Ford, Home Depot, McDonald’s and Walmart are actually publicly traded companies (that is, the public can buy stock in the company), which by the broadest definition totals all of 0.1 percent of American businesses. (And yet companies you’ve heard of probably make your 401(k) portfolio, which means you really should pay attention to such business news as corporate earnings.) Nor does Perry say that most businesses are organized in some sort of form of corporation — for instance, businesses with more than one owner, or businesses whose owner(s) want to be legally protected from liability against the company, the latter of which should mean all business owners.
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The number one single today in 1959:
Today in 1970, the Who’s Keith Moon was trying to escape from a gang of skinheads when he accidentally hit and killed chauffeur Neil Boland.
The problem was Moon’s attempt at escape. He had never passed his driver’s license test.
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The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1957:
Today in 1964, NBC-TV’s Tonight show showed the first U.S. video of the Beatles:
Today in 1967, Beach Boy Carl Wilson got his draft notice, and declared he was a conscientious objector.
Today in 1969, Jimi Hendrix appeared on BBC’s Lulu show, and demonstrated the perils of live TV:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 