The number one song in the U.S. today in 1961:
Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded “Love Me Do,” taking 17 takes to do it right:
Three years later, the Beatles had the number one single …
… which referred to something The Who could have used, because on the same day the Who’s van was vandalized and $10,000 in musical equipment was stolen from them while they were buying … a guard dog:
James Pethokoukis starts with a swerve …
“It ain’t right,” says President Barack Obama.
Yes, it ain’t right that Obama is president. Blame the 2012 voter, who among other flaws appears to think it’s OK to have a president who can’t speak proper English.
Now to Pethokoukis’ main point:
American companies who dodge the taxman by merging with overseas rivals are “renouncing their U.S. citizenship” and should be branded “corporate deserters,” he says. And in name of “economic patriotism,” Obama wants Congress to quickly close the corporate “inversion” loophole so these Benedict Arnold multinationals keep paying their fair share to Uncle Sam.
But patriotism, at least of the superficial sort, and business don’t mix. For example, after the 9/11 terror attacks, investors wondered if there would be a “patriots rally” once the New York Stock Exchange reopened. Well, there wasn’t. Instead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 7 percent on Sept. 18, 2001, one of largest one-day declines in Wall Street history. With fear of new attacks running high, there was little incentive for investors to stay in the market — even though it would have been the “patriotic” thing to do.
Corporations are not required to have America’s best interests at heart. This is business. And for many U.S. multinationals, there is little incentive to stay officially based in America and remain subject to a complex, confiscatory tax code. It’s not just that the U.S. has the highest statutory corporate tax rate — it’s 40 percent including federal and state levies —among advanced economies. Even once myriad tax breaks are factored in, the effective U.S. corporate tax rate is still tops. There’s no mystery as to why companies are going through all this trouble to escape the Treasury Department. It has nothing to do with a lack of patriotism, or the evasion of some sort of national duty, and everything to do with reducing costs and maximizing profits. That’s what businesses do — at least the ones that want to stay in business.
And let’s remember who benefits when businesses reduce their tax burden — perfectly legally! — by moving overseas. Mitt Romney was bang on when he said “corporations are people.” Workers bear 70 percent of the corporate tax burden, according to the Congressional Budget Office. American Enterprise Institute economists Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur have found higher corporate taxes lead to lower wages, with a 1 percent increase in corporate tax rates associated with a 0.5 percent drop in wage rates. No wonder the OECD found corporate taxes to be “the most harmful for growth” of all taxes.
Indeed, the corporate income tax is so harmful that we should just get rid of it. That would really help America’s struggling middle class. Economic modeling conducted by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff finds “a very strong, worker-based case” for swinging the ax. Fully eliminating the corporate income tax, he writes, would cause “rapid and dramatic increases” in U.S. investment, output, and real wages. More investment means more jobs, higher productivity, and higher wages. Real wages of unskilled workers would rise 12 percent over the long term, and those of skilled workers would increase 13 percent.
Any place corporations send money — more dividends for shareholders (which comprise more than half of U.S. households, including everyone with retirement accounts that include stock), more pay for employees, more investment back into the company — is a better use of their money than sending it to the tax man. That includes the tax man in Madison, by the way.
It’s not as if I didn’t have a lot to do before school resumed, but now it seems my to-do list runneth over.
I am announcing volleyball Thursday and the following Thursday here. (The latter I knew about; the former I found out about yesterday.) I am then announcing football the next seven (at least) Fridays here as well, Friday from Potosi, the following Friday from Black River Falls.
So when Wisconsin Public Radio asked if I wanted to appear on Joy Cardin’s show to not discuss The Week in Review, but another subject, being a media ho, of course I agreed. The subject will be media coverage of politics generally and Gov. Scott Walker specifically.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
I am looking for a Presteblog coffee sponsor, by the way.
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1955 was written 102 years earlier:
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1966:
Today in 1970, Arthur Brown demonstrated what The Crazy World of Arthur Brown was like by getting arrested at the Palermo Pop ’70 Festival in Italy for stripping naked and setting fire to his helmet during …
The infamous speed traps of Rosendale (m0tto on T-shirts available at convenience stores: “Rosendale: That’s the Ticket”) or the Town of Ripon (not the city) appear to have a sister city in a n0w-infamous community in Missouri, according to Governing magazine:
Much has been made of the apparently poor police-community relations in Ferguson, Mo., where a confrontation with the police two weeks ago left 18-year old Michael Brown dead and sparked weeks of community unrest. But there are other less visible yet no less serious indicators of simmering conflict in Ferguson, say experts, including one buried in the city’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR).
Ferguson’s budget relies heavily on public safety and court fines that have skyrocketed in recent years. A review of Ferguson’s financial statements indicates that court fine collections now account for one-fifth of total operating revenue. The St. Louis suburb of about 21,000 residents took in more than $2.5 million in municipal court revenue last fiscal year, representing an 80 percent increase from only two years prior, when fines netted about $1.4 million.
While the media has focused largely on the police department’s testy relationship with the majority black community and the city’s shifting demographics, longstanding frustration with the municipal court system may have also contributed to the civil unrest, say some.
Brendan Roediger, an assistant professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law who supervises a local civil advocacy clinic, said practices of the local court system are a major driver of Ferguson residents’ distrust of government and law enforcement. Roediger described a court system in Ferguson and select areas of St. Louis that function primarily as a revenue generator. “They don’t want to actually incarcerate people because it costs money, so they fine them,” he said. “It appears to be a blatant money grab.”
From his time representing clients in Ferguson, Roediger estimates the court — which holds three sessions each month — heard 200 to 300 cases per hour some days.
The city’s most recent annual budget report attributed the sharp increase in fines to a “more concentrated focus on traffic enforcement” from both manned enforcement and the installation of traffic cameras. Red light cameras posted in three locations resulted in 5,318 tickets in fiscal year 2013, according to city records.
Ferguson’s financial documents depict a city increasingly reliant on fines to fund government operations. In all, fines and forfeitures accounted for 20 percent of the city’s $12.7 million operating revenue in fiscal year 2013, up from about 13 percent in 2011. …
In general, traffic fines tend to account for a larger share of revenue in smaller communities. State law, however, prohibits Missouri municipalities from collecting more than 35 percent of operating revenues from traffic fines and court costs, requiring excess money be turned over to the state Department of Revenue for schools.
If cities decide to ramp up traffic enforcement, they shouldn’t do so primarily to raise revenue, said Christine Cole, executive director of Harvard Kennedy School’s criminal justice policy and management program. “It can put police in a difficult place because you then become reliant on that revenue,” she said.
Rather, any increase in enforcement must be clearly tied to public safety gains. It’s also equally crucial that city officials and law enforcement communicate such safety benefits to residents, Cole said.
It’s difficult to gauge the extent to which the increased enforcement and hefty fines added to Ferguson residents’ discontent in the years leading up to shooting death of Michael Brown. Legal advocates, though, argue that it helped foster negative perceptions of law enforcement and government in general.
ArchCity Defenders, a local legal and social advocacy firm, recently issued a scathing white paper that identified the Ferguson Municipal Court as one of the region’s most “chronic offenders.” …
The report alleged that the Ferguson Municipal Court routinely began hearing cases 30 minutes before the scheduled start time, then locked the doors to the building five minutes after the official start. As a result, those who arrived late faced an additional charge for failing to appear. The Ferguson court also limited access to hearings to only defendants and lawyers. Earlier this summer, the presiding judge of the St. Louis County Circuit Court sent a letter urging municipal judges and cities to open their courts to the public.
The Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases in 2013, or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household, according to the report.
The animus of Ferguson residents toward their police is not necessarily primarily the fault of the police. (Although it certainly seems from this distance that Ferguson’s police may not be the ideal model of a suburban police department.) Oppressive law enforcement isn’t necessarily something dreamed up by police chiefs. Ferguson’s mayor and council pass ordinances (including speed limits) and give the police chief direction. That also applies to such Wisconsin speed traps as Rosendale and the Town of Ripon.
For another example, let’s head to Waldo, Fla, according to the Gainesville Sun:
Five members of the Waldo Police Department told the City Council Tuesday night they were under a quota to write traffic tickets, which is a violation of Florida law.
The officers outlined a long line of grievances they had against police department command staff and city administration.
Before a packed room, Officer Brandon Roberts told commissioners they were required by Chief Mike Szabo to write 12 speeding citations per 12-hour shift or face punishment. Roberts explained his claims with the help of an electronic presentation and printed emails as evidence.
“We’re doing this with a heavy heart,” Roberts said. “We would never want to go against our fellow officers but we have no faith in our chain of command.”
Waldo has long been notorious as a speed trap. In 2012, the Alachua County town of roughly 1,000 residents was rated the third worst speed trap in the country, according to a poll conducted by the National Motorists Association.
Documents provided by Waldo state that roughly half of the city’s $1 million budget comes from an item listed as “police revenue.”
The Waldo police problems with Szabo apparently don’t end with the speed traps …
On Aug. 12, Szabo was placed on administrative leave after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement launched an investigation against him on an allegation of violating police procedures. Neither Worley nor FDLE officials have been willing to provide details in the case, citing an active investigation. The five officers who brought allegations Tuesday night against Szabo, Worley and Waldo Police Cpl. Kenneth Smith said they did not know the details of the FDLE investigation.
Roberts alleged in his presentation that Szabo regularly lied on his timesheet and would disable a GPS device on his city-owned vehicle – violating department policy – to cloak his location.
Roberts also claimed Szabo used a cooler in his office to store drug evidence and not a secure room commonly used by other departments. This placed the evidence within reach of civilian employees. …
The cooler of bongs disappeared after Szabo was suspended, Roberts said.
Motorists who recently received a ticket from Waldo Police Cpl. Kenneth Smith may be in luck.
Smith, the interim chief of Waldo’s small municipal police department, was suspended on Thursday morning due to a new state investigation, and he subsequently failed to show up for traffic court.
Early Thursday morning, Waldo City Manager Kim Worley issued a release:
“Corporal Smith has been placed on administrative leave until further notice. I have requested a commander from the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office to manage the Waldo Police Department while these issues are being resolved.”
As of Thursday night, Alachua Sheriff Sadie Darnell and Waldo city officials were putting finishing touches on a memorandum of understanding that is expected to be completed by this morning. In the meantime, Waldo’s police officers spent the day without a leader.
Smith’s suspension came down less than 24 hours after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement launched a preliminary review of several allegations made by five of Waldo’s seven police officers.
Subsequent reporting makes one wonder why Szabo was hired in the first place:
A copy of Szabo’s personnel file provided through a public records request showed he applied to become an officer with Waldo Police in 2000. His application showed he was an Air Force veteran who was hired with the Walterboro, South Carolina, police department in 1996 and was then hired by the Clay County Sheriff’s Office in 1997. He was fired from his Clay County job 10 months into his routine probation because he did not get along with his supervisor, records show. He also worked for the Lake Mary Police Department for six months in 1999 and disclosed that he was untruthful with a supervisor about damage to his patrol car, records show. When asked on the application why he left Lake Mary, Szabo replied, “We talked about it.”
This shows that police officers are not always the right people to blame for police problems. Sometimes it’s their bosses, police chiefs. (Big-city police chiefs, such as Milwaukee’s Ed Flynn, are usually liberals similar to the people who hire them.) And sometimes it’s the chiefs’ bosses, municipal leadership, who, among other duties, set municipal speed limits and tell their police chiefs what to prioritize.
(This blog is brought to you by the Wisconsin State Patrol, whose anniversary was yesterday, and who should not celebrate another anniversary.)
Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post:
In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova.
Even if it starts out as an unrecognized rump state — Abkhazia and South Ossetia, “states” that Russia carved out of Georgia, are the models here — Novorossiya can grow larger over time.
Russian soldiers will have to create this state — how many of them depends upon how hard Ukraine fights, and who helps them — but eventually Russia will need more than soldiers to hold this territory. Novorossiya will not be stable as long as it is inhabited by Ukrainians who want it to stay Ukrainian. There is a familiar solution to this, too. A few days ago,Alexander Dugin, an extreme nationalist whose views have helped shapethose of the Russian president, issued an extraordinary statement. “Ukraine must be cleansed of idiots,” he wrote — and then called for the “genocide” of the “race of bastards.”
But Novorossiya will also be hard to sustain if it has opponents in the West. Possible solutions to that problem are also under discussion. Not long ago,Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the Russian member of parliament and court jester who sometimes says things that those in power cannot — argued on television that Russia should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries — “dwarf states,” he called them — and show the West who really holds power in Europe: “Nothing threatens America, it’s far away. But Eastern European countries will place themselves under the threat of total annihilation,” he declared. Vladimir Putin indulges these comments: Zhirinovsky’s statements are not official policy, the Russian president says, but he always “gets the party going.”
A far more serious person, the dissident Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, has recently published an article arguing, along lines that echo Zhirinovsky’s threats, that Putin really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear strikes — perhaps against one of the Baltic capitals, perhaps a Polish city — to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe. Indeed, in military exercises in 2009 and 2013, the Russian army openly “practiced” a nuclear attack on Warsaw.
Is all of this nothing more than the raving of lunatics? Maybe. And maybe Putin is too weak to do any of this, and maybe it’s just scare tactics, and maybe his oligarchs will stop him. But “Mein Kampf” also seemed hysterical to Western and German audiences in 1933. Stalin’s orders to “liquidate” whole classes and social groups within the Soviet Union would have seemed equally insane to us at the time, if we had been able to hear them.
But Stalin kept to his word and carried out the threats, not because he was crazy but because he followed his own logic to its ultimate conclusions with such intense dedication — and because nobody stopped him. Right now, nobody is able to stop Putin, either. So is it hysterical to prepare for total war? Or is it naive not to do so?
Britain’s number one single today in 1972:
On the same day, the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival was held on Bull Island in the Wabash River between Illinois and Indiana. The festival attracted four times the projected number of fans, three fans drowned in the Wabash River, and the remaining crowd ended the festival by burning down the stage:
First: If you work for a weekly newspaper that prints on Tuesday, or has Labor Day events in its circulation area, then you are working today. In fact, you work on every Monday “holiday,” including the ones that other people have as vacation. So the labor unions can take their we-brought-you-the-weekend self-congratulatory crap and stick it someplace really dark.
(And today should be Capital Day, not Labor Day, anyway.)
People who will be working today include police, including Milwaukee police, because Barack Obama is coming to Milwaukee in support of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke. (Though apparently they won’t be in the same place in public, which is strange.) Which brings up irony number two: Neither Obama nor Burke have ever employed union labor. Trek Bicycle is nonunion, and Obama has never had a real job in his entire life.
Obama and Burke are campaigning against Gov. Scott Walker, as if Obama has nothing better to do given the numerous crises about which he is doing nothing. (More on that momentarily.) No one at Goonfest — I mean, Labor Day in Milwaukee — will also acknowledge the blame Wisconsin unions have for the state’s less-than-desired economic performance. For a solid year viewers, including business owners, of TV news watched various union types screaming about their sacred rights to free health care and pensions to which they don’t have to contribute during the Act 10 debate and Recallarama. And if you were a business owner outside Wisconsin and watched that, the logical conclusion you’d reach is that Wisconsin workers are concerned only about their benefits and not about actually performing their jobs. So why would you come to Wisconsin if that’s your first impression of the Wisconsin workforce? Hell no, you won’t go.
The Pittsburgh Post–Gazette reports about workers:
Rutgers researchers found more than a third of workers report their finances have been permanently injured by the recession, with 16 percent of Americans, or 38 million people, reporting they were financially devastated and expect that damage to be permanent.
“The typical American worker lives a precarious and doleful existence — unhappy, poorly paid and fearful about losing his or her job, according to the opinions of fellow Americans who responded to this survey,” the team at Rutgers found.
Seventy percent of respondents described typical American workers as not secure in their jobs and 68 percent said workers were highly stressed. …
Carl Van Horn, one of the authors of the Rutgers study, said the two independently produced reports reinforce each other. “One is the economic reality as portrayed by wages and the other is how people feel,” he said.
While most Americans are satisfied with their own jobs, they are also afraid of what is coming down the pike.
“They’re really afraid they are going to be the next person with a pink slip,” he said.
The reality is “there were lots of problems before the Great Recession and the Great Recession made everything worse,“ Mr. Van Horn said. “The recovery has been slow and uneven, and it has not brought about anything close to prosperity so it did not allay any of the fears people had.”
Well, we already knew the stimulus was a giant steaming pile of failure, the perfect symbol, if you think about it, of the Obama administration, for which a majority of voters voted twice. So has been every economic policy that has followed (allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, for instance), not to mention the ones they’d like to foist on us (i.e. increase unemployment by paying employees more than they’re worth, through increasing the minimum wage). How many times do people have to be told that government does not create jobs?
Either Obama or one of his paid idiots, or one of the union goons that get six-figure salaries, will claim that American companies are making record profits. Their economic illiteracy is demonstrated by such claims, given that, as readers of this blog know, publicly traded companies, about which that claim is made (since publicly traded companies have to report their finances), represent all of 0.1 percent of American businesses. Ask a business owner you know if he or she is making record profits. The answer will be no.
The unionistas won’t tell you this, but part of the problem with the American economy may well be the American worker. Following Mike Rowe, host of cable TV’s “Dirty Jobs,” on Facebook may make you think, from comments to his thoughts, that too many Americans are not interested in hard work anymore, and are certainly not interested in hard work that by their definition is unpleasant or beneath them. (That is probably the natural consequence of taking the bad vocational advice of doing what you (think you) love, instead of doing what you’re good at.) The American workplace has too many clock-watchers and not enough people who work hard and well because we should work hard and well irrespective of how we’re paid or otherwise rewarded. (The craptacular level of service at most fast-food restaurants today should make you choke on your French fries at the thought that those people deserve a pay raise.)
It should be apparent anyway that the only way to make money isn’t to work for someone else, it’s to go into business. That doesn’t mean you will make money going into business, but you will not make money working for someone else. That also means, of course, giving up nights, weekends (like this weekend) and holidays (like today), along with the security, such as it is, of getting paid on a regular basis.
Obama will probably mention climate change sometime today, to change the subject from his failures that are too numerous to count, both domestically and in foreign policy. U.S. Sen. John Barrasso (R–Wyoming) lists seven different things that are more important:
• Iraq is a greater challenge than climate change. While the president now likes to pretend that he didn’t force a total withdrawal of U.S. troops, Americans remember his 2008 campaign promise to do exactly that. When the U.S. leaves a vacuum, others will fill it. The barbaric Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, is trying to build a base of operations in Iraq and Syria from which to attack the U.S. and its allies. The recent beheading of American journalist James Foley showed how serious ISIS is about “drowning” our nation in blood, as the group said in the video of the murder posted on YouTube.
• Afghanistan. The administration says it still intends to pull out the remaining 30,000 troops by the end of 2016. If it does, the country will quickly become a terrorist haven once again. As with Iraq, the timetable seems to be mostly about the political calendar. The Obama administration seems to have lost the will to win. The terrorists have not.
• Russia. President Obama was so intent on “resetting” U.S. relations with the Kremlin that he telegraphed a lack of resolve. President Vladimir Putin has only become more aggressive. That’s led to Russian troops in Ukraine and Russian-supplied weapons shooting a passenger plane out of the sky.
• An Iranian nuclear weapon. America’s enemies have shown they are content to stall for time, while President Obama gets distracted. That’s what’s happening as the president continues to negotiate indefinitely on Iran’s illicit nuclear program. An Obama administration desperate to strike a deal is likely to strike a bad one. It could leave in place an enrichment program that would be a pathway to a nuclear-armed Iran.
• Syria. It has been more than three years since President Obama said the time had come for President Bashar Assad to step aside. The administration drew a “red line” on the use of chemical weapons, then did nothing when Assad crossed that line last summer. ISIS already has strongholds in Syria, while the Free Syrian Army desperately needs more U.S. assistance.
• North Korea. The North Koreans continue to test nuclear weapons. They have held multiple tests of missile technology designed to reach the continental U.S. President Obama has done nothing at all about this.
The White House has said its foreign policy rule is “don’t do stupid stuff,” but putting climate change ahead of global threats fails that simple test. The United Nations will hold yet another conference on climate change next month, while the world burns.
The greatest threat to Americans “right now” is not climate change. The greatest threat is people with the intent and capacity to do us harm—and the president’s failure to lead the fight against them. [Secretary of State John] Kerry’s fixation on climate change is one reason America’s friends no longer trust us and our enemies no longer fear us. The world is growing more dangerous as a result.
Today in 1957, 15-year-old James Marshall Hendrix went to Sicks Stadium in Seattle to watch Elvis Presley.
Seeing Presley inspired Hendrix to learn to play, one note at a time on a junked ukelele with one string, “Hound Dog.”
One year later, Hendrix purchased his first acoustic guitar, for $5, and taught himself to play the theme from the TV series “Peter Gunn.”
(Sicks Stadium, by the way, was the home of the Seattle Pilots, which after going backrupt during their first season became the Milwaukee Brewers.)
The number one song today in 1962:
The number one song today in 1984 announced quite a comeback:
Today in 1955, a London judge fined a man for “creating an abominable noise” — playing this song loud enough to make the neighborhood shake, rattle and roll for 2½ hours:
Today in 1968, Private Eye magazine reported that the album to be released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono would save money by providing no wardrobe for Lennon or Ono:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 