Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

On sheRiffs and District attorneys

July 17, 2014

Wisconsin politics
Fighting Bob’s favorite nominal Republican, Bill Kraus, raises a point that should be made more often:

In the current four-person race for Attorney General of Wisconsin there have been some disturbing suggestions that candidates for that office may opt in or out of cases based on what they consider the virtue of the laws on which the cases are based.

And the ongoing tainted John Doe controversy is partisan infected at the very least.

This isn’t the kind of partisanism and ideological bias that dominates the first and second estates, but it seems to me to be headed in that direction.

Contests in judicial elections elsewhere have been influenced, even decided, by something that looks like prejudging based on something other than the facts or the interpretation of legislation which are supposed to be the main or even the only criteria in play in these quarters.

A partial remedy or at least a treatment for these deleterious trends has been suggested for those members of the third estate who gain office through elections.

Their elections can, and I think should, be moved from the partisan fall to the non-partisan spring.

Judicial elections are already there in Wisconsin.

The rest of the offices whose reason for being is law enforcement should be as well.

Sheriffs, district attorneys, and even attorneys general are not in the policy business. They enforce laws others write, keep the peace, and punish the miscreants among us.

Politics is not a part of their jobs. Political affiliation is irrelevant to their job performance.

Moving them to the non-partisan election spring date would make that distinction more evident to the voters.

That would mean, of course, that county offices — sheriffs, district attorneys, clerks, treasurers, registers of deeds and coroners — be nonpartisan offices. The only reason for county offices to be partisan offices is because they’ve always been partisan offices since statehood. That doesn’t mean there has ever been a valid rationale for them to be partisan offices.

Some would argue those offices shouldn’t be elective offices. At a minimum, the services those county offices provide should not change based on whether the office-holder has a D or an R after his or her name. (See Milwaukee County District Attorney, John Doe investigation.) Democrats or Republicans are so entrenched in many counties of this state that there is no competition for those positions, since one way to get out of favor with the local party in power is to run against its incumbents. The accountability of elections diminishes greatly in such a situation except when the incumbent retires. (Including retirement by death, which sometimes happens.)

There is a long tradition in this nation of having elected county positions, particularly sheriffs, because the sheriffs of England were not elected and thus not accountable to the citizens. Sheriffs in this state are the top law enforcement authority of their county, over even the State Patrol or other state law enforcement. If, the argument goes, we elect people to create our laws, we should also elect people to enforce those laws, or at least those who manage those who enforce those laws, because those who are dissatisfied with their work can vote for a different sheriff next election.

The flip side is that sheriffs are politicians, and politicians do whatever they have to to keep their offices. (For that matter, while district attorneys are required to be attorneys, sheriffs are not required to have any law enforcement experience. Older readers may recall William Ferris, Dane County’s sheriff from 1972 to 1980, elected at 32 with no previous law enforcement experience, though he had six years of Dane County Board experience. Ferris, who was just 41 when he died of cancer in 1980, claimed to be an administrator, not a cop. Indeed, sheriffs may have been police officers or deputy sheriffs, but sheriffs don’t run radar or even investigate crimes, contrary to what you watch on A&E’s “Longmire.”)

You may think the answer is shorter terms or term limits. Wisconsin sheriffs used to have two-year terms until 2003, and they used to be limited to two terms until the 1960s. Proving that sheriffs are indeed politicians, sheriffs got around those laws (as politicians always find ways to get around laws designed to curb their power) by getting their wives (who often served as the county jail cook) or sons elected sheriff, and then having the new sheriff appoint the old sheriff as undersheriff, which was a non-civil service position. (That, however, resulted in at least one election pitting father against son for sheriff.)

I’m not a fan of the April elections. For consistency, the spring elections should be moved to November in odd-numbered years, to distinguish from the November even-numbered-year elections for president, governor, Congress and the Legislature, such as the one coming up in four months. On the other hand, April elections are closer to Tax Day; in fact, I’d like to see property and income taxes due to be paid on election days, to make clear the connection between your taxes and your vote.
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Presty the DJ for July 17

July 17, 2014

Music
Two Beatles anniversaries of note today: The movie “Yellow Submarine” premiered in London …

… six years before John Lennon was ordered to leave the U.S. within 60 days. (He didn’t.)

Birthdays today start with pianist Vince Guaraldi. Who? The creator of the Charlie Brown theme (correct name: “Linus and Lucy”):

(more…)
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U need 2 B learned good

July 16, 2014

Culture, media
Journalists are, or certainly should be, keepers of proper use of the English language — even if the rest of the world around them barely qualifies as “English-speaking.”

Weird Al Yankovic is on our side:

(Apparently Weird Al based this on a Robin Thicke sign, “Blurred Lines.” I’m happy I didn’t know that. Most music today is a #soundcrime.)

Another thing the print world gets to deal with is people’s inability, or refusal, to punctuate properly, as reported by Farhad Manjoo:

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.* You’d expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you’d be wrong; every third email I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for “Dear Farhad,” my occasional tech-advice column, I’ve removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I’ve received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two-spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy). …

The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually. James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing. Hundreds of years ago, some typesetters would end sentences with a double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling, punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to adopt best practices. Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after.

Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men’s shirt buttons on the right and women’s on the left. Every major style guide—including theModern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)
The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

Truth be told, though, fixing double spaces is relatively easy for someone who has Microsoft Word, or any other word processing software, or even just a Find and Change function on software. Type two spaces into “Find,” type one space into “Replace,” and your problem should be fixed … except for those who, instead of using tabs or indenting, type several spaces to move type over from the left margin on a page.

Fixing bad grammar and spelling takes much more time. You can do that in print, but it’s difficult to tell someone that the plural of “you” is not “yous,” and if you want to find out something you don’t “ax” someone. It’s particularly annoying to fix the writing or someone who thinks he or she is a good writer, but isn’t. The PlainLanguage.gov website (yes, it exists) has examples of how to write good:

Avoid Alliteration. Always.

Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

Avoid cliches like the plague. (Theyre old hat.)

Employ the vernacular.

Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

Contractions arent necessary.

Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

One should never generalize.

Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

Dont be redundant; dont use more words than necessary; its highly superfluous.

Profanity sucks.

Be more or less specific.

Understatement is always best.

Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

One word sentences? Eliminate.

Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

The passive voice is to be avoided.

Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

Who needs rhetorical questions?

Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.

It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.

Avoid archaeic spellings too.

Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.

Don’t use commas, that, are not, necessary.

Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.

Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice.

Subject and verb always has to agree.

Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.

Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispeling and to catch typograhpical errers.

Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.

Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.

Don’t never use no double negatives.

Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.

Eschew obfuscation.

No sentence fragments.

Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.

A writer must not shift your point of view.

Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.

Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.

Always pick on the correct idiom.

The adverb always follows the verb.

Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.

If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.

And always be sure to finish what
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That’s not funny, and you’re a racist

July 16, 2014

media, US politics
Charles C.W. Cooke proves that liberals are humorless:

Nineteen terrifying words from the Omaha World-Herald:

The U.S. Department of Justice has joined the discussions over a controversial float in the Norfolk Independence Day parade.

Thus did the federal government dispatch an emissary to investigate a minor instance of Midwestern dissent.

A quick recap for the happily uninitiated: The “controversial float” in question was one of many included in this year’s Independence Day parade in Norfolk, Neb. The entry, which featured a zombie standing on an outhouse marked “Obama Presidential Library,” was created by a veteran named Dale Remmich, and was designed, Remmich claims, to express the “political disgust” that he feels at the Obama administration’s mismanagement of the Department of Veteran Affairs. As is the habit now, pictures of the float were quickly pushed around the Internet, attracting the attention and disapprobation of such august institutions as the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, and the Huffington Post — and, it seems, the interest of the United States Department of Justice. This week, the World-Herald reports, the DOJ “sent a member of its Community Relations Service team, which gets involved in discrimination disputes, to a Thursday meeting about the issue.” Present at the summit were the NAACP, the mayor of the Nebraska town in which the float was displayed, and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, which sponsored the event.

Now for the obvious question: Why? What, exactly, was the problem here? Nobody was killed. Nobody was maimed. Nobody had their material or spiritual interests injured, nor were they stripped of their livelihoods. No federal or state laws were broken. Indeed, not even private rules were broken. More to the point, there was no “discrimination dispute” of the sort with which the DOJ likes to concern itself. Instead, a few free people were vexed because a politician that they like was depicted in an unflattering light. One might well ask, “So what?” Once, Americans tackled the Oregon Trail. Are they now in need of their political “discussions” being arbitrated by glorified social workers sent by Uncle Sam?

In a typically risible statement, Nebraska’s state Democratic party described the incident as one of the “worst shows of racism and disrespect for the office of the presidency that Nebraska has ever seen.” That this is almost certainly true demonstrates just how much progress the United States has made in the last 50 years — and, in consequence, how extraordinarily difficult the professionally aggrieved are finding it to fill their quotas. If a fairly standard old saw is among the worst things to have happened to the Cornhusker State in recent memory, the country is in rather good shape, n’est-ce pas?

Exactly what it was about the float that rendered it “racist” was, of course, never explained. Instead, the assertion was merely thrown into the ether, ready to be accepted uncritically by the legions of righteously indignant keyboard warriors that lurk around social media as piranhas around a fresh carcass. But, for future reference at least, it would be nice to have the details of the offense unpacked. Are outhouses racist now? Are zombies? Or was it perhaps the overalls in which the zombie was dressed? Moreover, if any of these are now redolent of something sinister, at what point was this association held to be operative? A popular cartoon from 2006 depicted a latrine standing in the middle of the desert, on its outer wall the words “Bush Presidential Library.” Was this “racist,” or is this one of those timeless truths that were only discovered in 2009? …

Frankly, as superficially appealing as they might sound, appeals to “the dignity of the office” are invariably prissy, serving more often than not as a means by which humorless partisans might grumble about their team’s being dinged without appearing hypersensitive. Indeed, far from damaging the national fabric, astringent mockery of the powerful is a healthy and necessary thing — a source of valuable catharsis that serves also as a canary in the proverbial coal mine. When I see the most powerful man in the country being not only mocked, but hanged and burned in effigy too, my first thought is less “gosh, how awful” than “wow, is this a free country or what?” A historical rule of thumb: If a ragtag group of political dissenters can simulate the violent execution of the head of the executive branch and not be so much as scratched as a result, the country is a free one. Who cares if a few of our more delicate sorts reach for the smelling salts?

It is always tempting to believe one’s own time to be particularly interesting or fractious, but there is little in politics that is genuinely new. Sharp and violent denunciations of the executive branch have been a feature of American life since the republic’s first days. Before the Revolution, the colonists routinely hanged likenesses of unpopular royal representatives, including King George III; Andrew Oliver, the Massachusetts Distributor of Stamps; and the loyalist Supreme Court justice, Thomas Hutchinson. Afterward, having dispensed with the old guard, Americans took to lambasting the new, among them George Washington, who had effected the king’s defeat; Thomas Jefferson, who had authored the charter of separation; and James Madison, who had drafted the lion’s share of the new Constitution. Chief Justice John Jay’s 1795 treaty with the British was so wildly unpopular among the Jeffersonians that Jay reported being able to travel from Boston to Philadelphia by the light of his burning effigies. Later, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was subjected to the treatment. In one form or another, most presidents have been.

Of course, anyone who makes fun of Hillary Clinton has been called sexist for some time. For that matter, you can even create a film depicting the assassination of a current president and win awards, as long as that president is a Republican. Try that now, and you’ll go into the Secret Service gulag, never to be seen or heard from again.
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Presty the DJ for July 16

July 16, 2014

Music
This is a slow day in rock music, save for one particular birthday and one death.

It’s not Tony Jackson of the Searchers …

… or Tom Boggs, drummer for the Box Tops …

(more…)
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Over-the-top spin masquerading as analysis

July 15, 2014

media, Sports
For today’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game (weather permitting, as it only grudgingly did for last night’s Home Run Derby), one wonders how much retiring MLB commissioner Bud Selig paid the Washington Post’s Dave Sheinin to write this:

Bud Selig leaves a complex legacy

He finds himself thinking about history a lot these days, not so much the ancient minutiae he can famously recite from memory — the 1953 Milwaukee Braves starting lineup, for example, or the name of that one obscure pitcher who did that one amazing thing in that one game so many years ago — but History, writ large. His own history. Baseball history. American history. By this point, they’re all intertwined.

This is what happens when you’re about to turn 80, as Bud Selig will at the end of the month, and each week seems to bring the death of another good friend or colleague. It’s what happens when you are preparing to step down from the job you have held for 22 years, as Selig will Jan. 24, a job you have cherished and in many ways transformed. It’s what happens when you have held a lifelong obsession with history and now are confronted with it at every turn as the weeks tick down.

I learned about this because I got an email from Mueller Communications of Milwaukee, which intoned:

The attached piece by Dave Sheinin of the Washington Post not only describes the achievements that Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. “Bud” Selig has made, but delves into those qualities of leadership made him successful. I believe you will find it interesting reading.

This is why I have a, shall we say from the Post’s headline, “complex” relationship with the public relations world. PR professionals provide a valuable service for the news media by bringing to their attention their clients’ work when their clients’ work dovetails with the media’s needs.

This, however, is over the top. I am trained by experience, not education, in PR, but said experience teaches me that if a PR professional feels the need to hype his or her client — “achievements” and “qualities of leadership” that “made him successful” — I should become immediately suspicious. At least Mueller didn’t use the terms “buzz” or “hot,” which I loathe.

How about that complex legacy?

“If you look at this season, it’s almost a personification of his vision, with so many teams within striking distance,” says Bob Costas, a commentator for NBC and the MLB Network and the author of Fair Ball: A Fan’s Case for Baseball. “His mantra for 20 years has been ‘hope and faith for all.’ He’s come pretty close to accomplishing that.” …

His legacy is something Selig cares deeply about. Though he tosses off questions about it with a wave of the hand (“That’s up to the historians to decide,” he says), a man who gets a daily package of newspaper clips faxed from New York each morning — and who has been known to call the writers of negative stories to set them straight — doesn’t all of a sudden stop caring about the way in which history will view him, just as he is ready to depart.

Costas, interestingly, wrote in Fair Ball that he hated the wild-card. So instead of one wild card team, which is one too many, per league, now we have two. It’s not really an accomplishment to say that more teams are in the playoff chase when there are more playoff spots to chase.

Selig has only taken baby steps to actual competitive balance. The so-called luxury tax has not prevented the big-market franchises — the Dodgers ($235 million), Yankees ($203.8 million), Phillies ($180 million) and Red Sox ($162.8 million) — from outspending small-market franchises by an order of magnitude. If salaries were everything, the Yankees would win every World Series, so obviously they’re not, but consider who’s on first in each division and their payroll rankings:
- National League Central: Milwaukee (until the second-half begins and their losing streak resumes), 16th.
- NL East: Washington, ninth, and Atlanta, 14th.
- NL West: Dodgers, number one.
- NL wild card as of today (the other would be the NL East loser): San Francisco, seventh.
- American League East: Baltimore, 15th.
- AL Central: Detroit, fifth.
- AL West: Oakland, 25th.
- AL wild cards as of today: L.A. Angels, sixth, and Seattle, 18th.
At least baseball fans can chortle at the plight of the Dead Sox (fourth overall in payroll, last in the AL East), Rangers (eighth in payroll, last in the AL West) and Phillies (third in payroll, last in the NL East). Cubs fans are inexplicably going to Wrigley Field to watch a team with the 23rd highest payroll and the second-worst record in the NL (though their history shows they should be used to that). Imagine, however, being a fan of the Astros (lowest payroll, and dead last in the AL Central) or Diamondbacks (second lowest payroll, and in the basement by one-half game in the NL West), whose ownership appears to be not trying to win.

Comparing baseball and the National Football League is tricky, except that they are competing for your entertainment dollar. The NFL has never canceled its playoffs due to labor unrest; baseball did, in 1994. The numerous past examples of teams going from watching the playoffs to playing in the Super Bowl the next year shows that even fans of, say, the Cleveland Browns have some hope when the season begins. And yet, fans in some baseball markets know full well at the start of the season that their team will be out of the race by Memorial Day.

Sheinin reports that baseball shares $400 million in revenue now. That, however, is a pittance compared with what the NFL shares. If baseball was serious about revenue sharing, teams with huge broadcast contracts — all the big-market franchises — would be required to share all of those revenues with the smaller markets, because it takes two teams to play a baseball game.

This may be why Mueller Communications pushed this story:

He has been called a master politician himself, skilled both at whipping votes when there is the possibility of consensus and at applying the dark arts of politics when there is not. In Milwaukee, the city’s power brokers still speak in awe at how Selig pushed through the construction of Miller Park, mostly through public money, when both the mayor and (eventually) the governor were against it.

“He comes up, and he goes, ‘Goddamn it, governor, I’m sick and tired of all this horseshit!’ ” says Carl Mueller, a prominent Milwaukee public relations man and longtime Selig confidante who was involved in the effort to get Miller Park built, recalling a meeting in Gov. Tommy Thompson’s office. “ ‘I’m going down there, and we’re going to pass this bill. And I got one question: Are you with me or not?’ ”

The bill passed. “I wouldn’t want to cross him,” Mueller says of Selig. “Having him in your corner is worth a lot, and I think the owners understand that. I’ve never witnessed what happened to people who crossed him, but I don’t think you do it twice.”

Had that story gotten out during the Miller Park debate (and Thompson been a Democrat and Selig a Republican, instead of the other way around, this story would have gotten out), the Brewers would be the Charlotte Distillers or something else. It says more about Thompson than it does about Selig that Thompson didn’t tell Selig to go east on Interstate 94 and keep going until the water went over the top of his car. (Indeed, Thompson then pushed for the stadium bill by telling those outside Milwaukee to “stick it to Milwaukee.” And to be honest, the Miller Park roof remains probably the best $100 million portion of a building project in the history of this state, as I rediscovered upon a trip to Miller Park when it was 49 degrees in the parking lot.)

Sheinin concludes …

Baseball still has its problems. Oakland and Tampa Bay are stuck in bad stadiums. Washington and Baltimore are fighting over their cuts of a shared television network. Most vexing of all, the games themselves are too long, and thanks to the rise in strikeouts and the work-the-count approach of hitters, the ball is in play less than ever — not a great prescription for a sport struggling to keep the attention of the next generation of fans.

The Pete Rose issue still looms, too — the banished Hit King, 73 years old himself, withering on the vine, hoping for a reinstatement from his 1989 ban for gambling on baseball. If Selig is considering reinstating Rose on his way out — his own version of a presidential pardon — he isn’t saying, having stayed almost completely silent on the Rose matter.

… without one single word about the enormous problem of the game’s arrogant umpires, too many of whom think fans pay good money to see them instead of, you know, the players. Selig does deserve credit for bringing the umpires out of control of the individual leagues, but too many umpires who do not deserve to get major league paychecks are getting major league paychecks. Indeed, baseball arguably still has the worst officials of any of the professional sports.

I don’t believe in praising people for adequately performing their work when they are much, much more than adequately compensated for that work. The National Hockey League has grown tremendously under commissioner Gary Bettmann, and the National Basketball Association grew considerably under former commissioner David Stern. Former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was the greatest commissioner in the history of professional sports, and the NFL grew from there under former commissioner Paul Tagliabue and current commissioner Roger Goodell. Compared to them, Selig did OK, and only OK.
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Presty the DJ for July 15

July 15, 2014

Music
Today in 1963, Paul McCartney was fined 17 pounds for speeding. I’d suggest that that may have been the inspiration for his Wings song “Hell on Wheels,” except that the correct title is actually “Helen Wheels,” supposedly a song about his Land Rover:

Imagine having tickets to this concert at the Anaheim Civic Center today in 1967:

Today in 1984, John Lennon released “I’m Stepping Out.” The fact that Lennon stepped out of planet Earth at the hands of assassin Mark David Chapman 3½ years before this song was released was immaterial.

(more…)
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Reich and wrong

July 14, 2014

US business, US politics
Remember Robert Reich, the most leftist of Bill Clinton’s Cabinet appointees?

For those who forgot Reich’s leftist twaddle, James Taranto brings it to us to smash it flat:

Robert Reich, the leftist former labor secretary, has a very confused–or perhaps deliberately confusing–post up at Salon in which he denounces American corporations that move their headquarters overseas for tax reasons. The news peg is Chicago-based Walgreen Co.’s planned merger with Alliance Boots GmbH, a multinational pharmacy chain.

The new company would be headquartered in Switzerland, as Alliance is now.

“Walgreen’s morph into a Swiss corporation will cost you and me and every other American taxpayer about $4 billion over five years,” Reich complains, citing a report by Americans for Tax Fairness, a nonprofit corporation that advocates for higher taxes on corporations and high-income individuals.

“We’ve been hearing for years from CEOs that American corporations are suffering under a larger tax burden than their foreign competitors,” Reich writes:

This is mostly rubbish.

It’s true that the official corporate tax rate of 39.1 percent, including state and local taxes, is the highest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But the effective rate–what corporations actually pay after all deductions, tax credits, and other maneuvers–is far lower.

Last year, the Government Accountability Office, examined corporate tax returns in detail and found that in 2010, profitable corporations headquartered in the United States paid an effective federal tax rate of 13 percent on their worldwide income, 17 percent including state and local taxes. Some pay no taxes at all.

Which raises an obvious question: If it’s “mostly rubbish” that the tax burden is higher on U.S.-based companies than on those headquartered elsewhere, how is it that Walgreen stands to save all those billions by moving to Switzerland? Why are companies moving at all? Surely their accountants know the difference between the statutory and effective tax rates.

There’s an obvious problem with Reich’s argument, which is that he compares the average effective U.S. corporate tax rates only with the statutory rate, not with other countries’ effective rates. That’s a limitation of the GAO study, but the summary notes that U.S. effective tax rates “are high relative to other countries.” The summary also notes–but Reich doesn’t–that the U.S.’s average effective rate is considerably higher, 22.7%, when unprofitable companies are included in the calculation. Reich fails to mention as well that Walgreen’s effective rate is considerably higher than average–31% between 2008 and 2012, according to that Americans for Tax Fairness report.

There’s a less obvious problem, too. What Reich either doesn’t know or chooses not to tell his readers is that the U.S. corporate tax burden is unusually heavy not just because the rate is the highest in the developed world, but also because the U.S. subjects companies to double taxation. MIT’s Michelle Hanlon explained it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month: “The U.S. has a world-wide tax system under which profits earned abroad face U.S. taxation when brought back to America. The other G-7 countries, however, all have some form of a territorial tax system that imposes little or no tax on repatriated earnings.”

Even worse than Reich’s deceptive analysis of the problem is his idea about how to solve it. The obvious answer would be to reform America’s corporate tax system to make it competitive with other countries’ and do away with the perverse incentives to move to another country. To say Reich rejects this idea out of hand would be giving him too much credit. He doesn’t even mention it.

Reich wants revenge, not rational policy. To his very slight credit, he rejects one awful idea for retaliation: “By treaty, the U.S. government can’t (and shouldn’t) discriminate against foreign corporations offering as good if not better deals than American companies offer.” Thus a Medicare and Medicaid boycott of Walgreen’s pharmacies is off the table.

But here’s what he does want to do:

Even if there’s no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there’s no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship. . . .

Walgreen should no longer have any say about how the U.S. government does anything. . . .

The Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision may have opened the floodgates to American corporate money in U.S. politics, but not to foreign corporate money in U.S. politics.

The Court didn’t turn foreign corporations into American citizens, entitled to seek to influence U.S. law and regulations.

On one point, Reich is partially correct: The Citizens United decision does not necessarily extend the same protections to foreign-based companies as to U.S.-based ones. The decision, by Justice Anthony Kennedy, left open the possibility “that the Government has a compelling interest in limiting foreign influence over our political process”–which is to say that it did not decide the question either way.

Reich does not make the case that such an interest is compelling. To our mind his argument fails even the considerably less stringent “rational basis” test. As Justice Kennedy observed in Romer v. Evans (1996), a law that is “inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects . . . lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.” Reich’s conclusion is an expression of pure nativist animus: “[Walgreen] may still be the Main Street druggist, but if it’s no longer American it shouldn’t be considered a citizen on Main Street.”

Further, while it’s true that one sometimes refers colloquially to a corporation as being a “good citizen” or a “bad” one, as a legal matter the concept of American citizenship doesn’t apply. Corporations don’t vote or carry passports, in America or anywhere else. A corporation is a legal person, with legal rights and obligations, but only an individual human being–a “natural person,” in the parlance of the law–can be a citizen (or, for that matter, an alien).

As Citizens United critics typically do, Reich misstates the court’s holding in the case. It did not “open the floodgates” for “corporate money.” Corporations, regardless of where they are headquartered, are still prohibited from donating money to candidates for federal office. (So are noncitizens, except for legal resident aliens.)

What Citizens United affirmed was that corporations have the right to free expression under the First Amendment. Liberals claim to disagree with that principle, but in fact it is uncontroversial in other contexts. We’ve never heard anyone suggest that New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the landmark defamation decision, should have gone the other way because the defendant was a corporation (or, for that matter, because the expression in question was a political advertisement).

Reich is wrong to imply that free expression is among “the privileges of U.S. citizenship.” It is, instead, a right that belongs to all persons regardless of citizenship. (Perhaps Reich agrees with Justice Clarence Thomas, who has argued for a revival of the 14th Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause–but we very much doubt it.)

If you sue a foreign national, or a foreign publication, for libel in a U.S. court, the defendant will have the full protection of the First Amendment. American government censorship of a foreigner’s book–say, Frenchman Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which Reich himself has praised–would violate the Constitution as surely as if the author were Mark Twain.

As for foreigners influencing American politics, where has Reich been for the past few elections? If the marketplace of ideas ever observed national boundaries, it no longer does. Commentary from all over the world is widely available on the Internet, and especially in 2004 and 2008, members of Reich’s party frequently cited foreign opinion as a reason to support their presidential nominee.

Many voters rejected the argument, especially in 2004, but we don’t recall anyone suggesting that the U.S. government should prevent the dissemination of viewpoints from outside America’s borders. Even authoritarian regimes find such suppression a challenge; in a free country it would be as futile as it is un-American.

The other thing, of course, is that accepting the first part of Reich’s argument requires you to believe that every cent of a business’ profit belongs to the government, to take away as much of it — or maybe all of it — as the government pleases. To believe that, you also have to believe that the government has a similar right to your money, including, potentially, all of it. Reich probably does believe that. No one with brains and morals believes that.
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Presty the DJ for July 14

July 14, 2014

Music
This being Bastille Day, I should probably post some French rock acts, even though you probably have never heard of any French rock act.

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Presty the DJ for July 13

July 13, 2014

Music
We start with the first recorded instance of Buddy Holly in Wisconsin: Today in 1958, Holly nearly drowned while swimming across a lake near Rhinelander while on tour.

Holly’s swimming problems may have occurred because he didn’t realize how cold Wisconsin (specifically our bodies of water) can get. He got another lesson in that seven months later.

Today in 1960, Elvis Presley released a song based on the Italian “O Sole Mio”:

Today in 1970, Anne Murray released her first song during an inappropriate time of year:

The number one single today in 1974:

Today in 1999, the New Radicals (which were really just one, uh, Radical) split up after one album, from which came one single:

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