Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comment that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent on the government” and “believe they are victims” isn’t the only reason he lost the presidential campaign. But the candidate himself acknowledged after the election that the comments were “very harmful.”
He added, “What I said is not what I believe.”
But many Republicans still believe it, and the “makers vs. takers” theme has a deep hold on the party. In private conversations, many in the GOP are whispering that Romney was right and that his only mistake was saying it out loud.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say something like, “Well, the half who favor government programs is the half who don’t pay any taxes.”
This is ridiculous — on many levels.
First, the overwhelming majority of those who don’t pay federal income taxes pay a whole variety of other taxes, including state and local taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, sin taxes and more. They don’t feel excluded from sharing the tax burden just because they don’t pay one particular tax.
It’s also worth noting that these aren’t the people pushing for higher taxes. At Rasmussen Reports, our most recent polling shows that people who make $100,000 or more each year are more supportive of higher taxes than those who make less.
Second, the 47 percent who don’t pay federal income taxes include large chunks of the Republican base. Many senior citizens fall into this category because their primary income is from Social Security. They don’t consider themselves “takers.” They paid money into a Social Security system throughout their working lives and now simply expect the government to honor the promises it made.
Third, low-income Americans aren’t looking for a handout. Among those who are living in poverty, 81 percent agree that work is the best solution to poverty. Most would rather replace welfare programs with a guaranteed minimum-wage job. Sharing the mainstream view, 69 percent of the poor believe that too many Americans are dependent upon the government. …
If they want to seriously compete for middle-class votes, Republicans need to get over the makers vs. takers mentality. We live in a time when just 35 percent believe the economy is fair to the middle class. Only 41 percent believe it is fair to those who are willing to work hard. Those problems are not created by the poor.
GOP candidates would be well advised to shift their focus from attacking the poor to going after those who are really dependent upon government — the Political Class, the crony capitalists, the megabanks and other recipients of corporate welfare.
Now that the second of the two Boston Marathon bombers has been captured …
… it’s time to evaluate.
That begins with law enforcement and intelligence, from Steve Spingola:
As far as the lock down, call it 20/20 hindsight, but the tactic itself may have actually helped the suspect elude capture, as thousands of eyes remained inside. Ironically, once the “stay sheltered” ban was lifted, a set of eyes observed something suspicious. Plus, this tactic sends a message to other wannabe Jihadists that they can shutter an entire metro area with a few pressure cookers.
Certainly, the boots to the ground teams on the street did an outstanding job. However, I think this case merits a thorough, top-to-bottom policy review. Once again, all the intelligence fusion centers, NSA electronic listening, etc. failed to provide the intelligence needed to prevent the attack. The shoe bomber hopped aboard an airliner undetected; the underwear bomber successfully took a commercial flight, even though he was on the no-fly list (due to his name being misspelled by one letter); while a bombing in Time Square was prevented by a faulty detention device and a vender who had spotted a suspicious SUV. In each of these instances, surveillance—as a method to prevent terror attacks—failed miserably.
So much for sacrificing liberty for security—a doctrine Benjamin Franklin warned against.
Sure, after the fact, video surveillance has proved valuable; although it appears private video footage broke the Boston case open. Moreover, during this investigation Americans learned that suspect #1 traveled overseas for six months, posted strange things on social media, and was red flagged by a foreign government (probably Russia), which asked the FBI to check into his activities. One would have thought suspect #1 would have been one of a hundred individuals fusion center operatives would have kept close tabs on.
So, the question needs to be asked: was the $500 billion our nation has spent since 9/11 to employ over 800,000 people and create a vast electronic intelligence apparatus worth the expense? …
What can the government do to prevent terrorism? Discontinue the surveillance of large swaths of the American populace, 99.999 percent of whom will never commit an act of terror, and, instead, focus our resources on those with a motive. Think about it: how do the surveillance cameras mounted atop traffic control signals on 124th and Burleigh prevent acts of terrorism? Wasting taxpayer dollars to conduct surveillance of Americans diverts resources from the real problem: extremist groups and foreign nationals overstaying student visas that pose a real threat to this nation’s security.
As far as the media, they continue to report that this was the first terror attack since 9/11, which is simply Obama administration propaganda. Ft. Hood was a terrorist attack. As was the case in Boston, Hassan was radicalized from within and took his orders from afar. Classifying Ft. Hood as “work place violence” is akin to claiming that Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy is an immaculate conception.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza evaluates the media:
The events in Boston over the last four days have riveted the nation — and put journalism, the profession that I love, under the microscope. I’ve been thinking about what lessons I can learn as a political reporter from everything that has happened over these last 96 hours. …
1. Better safe than sorry. For all of the things that reporters got right this week, the after-action report will focus on what we got wrong. The reporting that a suspect had been taken into custody on Wednesday became a story of its own, a development that no serious journalist wants to see.
The reality of a news environment driven by Twitter (more on that below), cable television and constantly updating news on the web is that the desire to be first has become all-encompassing. Everyone, of course, still wants to get it right but in the race to be first judgment about being right can get skewed. …
2. Twitter is a reporter’s best friend…until it’s not. I am a big believer in the power of Twitter. I use it daily. I think it has revolutionized journalism (and news consumption generally) in ways we are just now beginning to grapple with and understand. And, as expected, Twitter was the de facto news source for many people — including most journalists not in Boston — this week.
That was a good thing — at times. Twitter helped me understand where the bombs had gone off, sent me to reporters on the ground in Watertown Thursday night and provided images of an empty Boston and the SWAT teams searching for the suspects.
It was a bad thing too. The immediacy of Twitter means that one moment of bad judgment by someone with lots of followers (or even someone without lots of followers) can distort coverage for minutes or hours. …
So, trust but verify.
3. Primary sources matter…: Because of the general dearth of experts on any subject — the Boston bombings included — it’s important to identify the people who really are authoritative sources and give them priority.
So, what the FBI and the Boston police department say (or don’t) matters more than what some random person on Twitter — even one affiliated with a news organization — says or what an anonymous source might tell a reporter on TV. …
Pete stood out by reporting only what he KNEW to be true and making clear that there was plenty he didn’t know. Ditto the Post’s Sari Horwitz and Doug Frantz. (One of the bad tendencies of journalists is an unwillingness to acknowledge what we don’t know. The truth is NO ONE expects us to know everything about every topic.)
Good reporters are the ones who take in all of the incoming — from Twitter, from their own sources, from colleagues — and filter out what doesn’t matter or can’t be proven. “The essence of journalism is the process of selection,” Williams noted in a National Journal profile. He couldn’t be more right. Judgment — knowing what is and isn’t news — is the single most important trait distinguishing good reporters from the rest of the pack.
By the way: Never love your job, because your job does not love you.
Speaking of the media, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ biggest waste of space not named Paul Krugman, should learn that sometimes he should stop at his column’s first half-sentence …
Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation …
… instead of proving his own point with several hundred words of irrelevancies, illogic (a carbon tax has exactly what to do with Chechen terrorists?) and plain stupid ideas (see “carbon tax”).
Jonah Goldberg makes infinitely more sense:
… we now live in a climate where there’s a ghoulish appetite to transform every act of terror and murder into a useful plot point in a political narrative. This is a bipartisan phenomenon, and while I think you could make the case that the Left is worse (in fact, I will in just a minute), it’s silly to deny that we don’t do the same thing.
Moreover, given where we are as a country, it is unavoidable. This sort of thing is too seductive. The Left desperately wants every terrorist attack to be conducted by Rush Limbaugh’s biggest fan, so it’s impossible not to cheer when the Left is disappointed. And given the outrageous double standards that the Left — and the elite “responsible” media — use to demonize the Right, the urge to throw it back their face is irresistible. …
The Left likes to claim that conservatives want these terrorist incidents to turn out to be al-Qaeda attacks in order to justify an often-bigoted “war on terror” narrative, which in turn fuels the military-industrial complex, imperialism, and meat-eating, or something like that. And at the margins there is some of that on the right. Some folks are eager, for one reason or another, to see the Muslim world as a monolithic threat, more powerful and sophisticated than it is.
But here’s the thing. Al-Qaeda exists. The Muslim Brotherhood exists. Islamist terrorism exists. We know this because these people keep trying to kill us — often successfully. Moreover, they clarify things by admitting it. They say things like, “Hey, you guys! We the Islamist terrorists are trying to kill you! We will remind you about this every 15 minutes until you are dead, converts, or slaves.”
I’m paraphrasing, but you get the point. These are not literary interpretations or academic exaggerations of the sort that cause people to think that football is a crypto-fascist metaphor of nuclear war. …
Islamic terrorism is not some subtext, discernible with the sort of magic decoder ring that they give out in English departments. It’s the text, found in weekly, if not daily, headlines. So sure, sometimes people on the right might exaggerate the threat from Islamist terrorism, but it is a wholly understandable exaggeration. You can only exaggerate the truth, you cannot exaggerate a lie. An exaggerated lie is simply an even bigger lie. …
The reason why most Muslim or developing-world terrorists are treated as representative of something larger is that, wait for it, they are representative of something larger. And to the extent white non-Muslim terrorists are usually cast as lone wolves, the reason is: That is what they are.
And, as far as I can tell, those white guys that are part of larger conspiracies, ideologies, and religions are pretty much always associated with them. In fact, there’s far more evidence that lone wolves who don’t have such associations are routinely cast by the media — and certainly by people like [Slate’s David] Sirota — as if they do. Jared Loughner was a deranged isolated individual. That didn’t stop the Left from immediately associating him with the tea parties, Sarah Palin, etc. (By the way, have they found Sarah Palin’s Facebook map of Chechnya yet?) Timothy McVeigh is still treated as a leader of the militia movement, even though he didn’t belong to any militia movement. And President Clinton was perfectly happy to associate mainstream conservatives with McVeigh.
This is an old and truly disgusting game for Democrats. FDR played it relentlessly. Going so far as to claim — in a State of the Union message! — that anyone who wanted to restore the “normalcy” — i.e. peace, prosperity, and liberty — of the 1920s under Republicans was in fact seeking to install the very fascism we were fighting abroad. Lyndon Johnson and the mainstream media did everything but declare Barry Goldwater a Nazi on national television. Oh wait, they pretty much did that too.
In many ways this is a replay of the smug anti-American asininity of the Left during the Cold War. The idea that the Soviet Union was a threat was often treated as a paranoid delusion, while the “real” threat from the domestic American right was a grave danger. Hitler was dead. Germany and Japan were U.S. allies. But Communism, which was killing and enslaving hundreds of millions before our eyes, just wasn’t something to get worked up about — at least not compared with the super-scary John Birch Society.
Proving the maxim about stopped clocks being right once (digital) or twice (analog) a day, the Daily Caller reports:
On HBO’s “Real Time” on Friday night, host Bill Maher entertained CSU-San Bernardino professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism, who maintained that despite the events in recent days, religious extremism isn’t only a product of Islam.
But Maher took issue with that claim, calling it “liberal bullshit” and said there was no comparison.
“You know what, yeah, yeah,” Maher said. “You know what — that’s liberal bullshit right there … they’re not as dangerous. I mean there’s only one faith, for example, that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a bad cartoon of the prophet. There’s only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith. An ex-Muslim is a very dangerous thing. Talk to Salman Rushdie after the show about Christian versus Islam. So you know, I’m just saying let’s keep it real.” …
“I am not an Islamophobe,” Maher replied. “I am a truth lover. All religious are not alike. As many people have pointed out — ‘The Book of Mormon,’ did you see the show? … OK, can you imagine if they did ‘The Book of Islam?’ Could they do that? There’s only one religion that threatens violence and carries it out for things like that. Could they do “The Book of Islam” on Broadway? …
“Now, obviously, most Muslim people are not terrorists. But ask most Muslim people in the world, if you insult the prophet, do you have what’s coming to you? It’s more than just a fringe element.”
Then, shortly after 11:30 this morning, Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the two suspects, stepped out of his house in Maryland and delivered an extraordinary message about character, shame, and collective responsibility. …
Tsarni said he was coming out to express condolences to the families of the victims in Boston. He spoke with anguish and specificity about each of the dead. He had nothing to do with the bombings, yet he felt an awful connection to them. He couldn’t imagine, he said, that “the children of my brother would be associated with them.”
Association is a hard thing. The suspects are Tsarni’s nephews. He’s related to them, but he’s also separate from them. “We have not been in touch with that family for a number of years,” he said. …
A reporter asked what might have provoked the violence. “Being losers,” Tsarni shot back. “Hatred to those who were able to settle themselves” in this country. Then Tsarni raised his voice to make a point: “Anything else to do with religion, with Islam—it’s a fraud. It’s a fake.” He went on: “We are Muslims. We are Chechens.” But that didn’t explain his nephews’ violence, he said. “Somebody radicalized them.”
Tsarni tried to explain that his birth family had drifted apart. Speaking of his brother, the father of the two suspects, Tsarni said, “My family has nothing to do with that family.” In fact, he continued, “This family [has] had nothing to do with them for a long, long time.” When a reporter asked why, he refused to say more than, “I just wanted my family [to] be away from them.”
The press wouldn’t let go. “Are you ashamed by what has unfolded?” a reporter asked. “Of course we are ashamed!” Tsarni exclaimed. “They are [the] children of my brother.” But even his brother, he cautioned, “has little influence” on the two young men.
A reporter asked Tsarni how he felt about the United States. Tsarni, his voice rising, declared it the “ideal” country, a microcosm of the “entire world.” He went on: “I respect this country. I love this country—this country which gives a chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being.”
A reporter asked whether the young men had ever been caught up in the fighting in Chechnya. Tsarni spat back, “No! They’ve never been in Chechnya. This has nothing to do with Chechnya. Chechens are different. Chechens are peaceful people.” The young men weren’t even born there, he said. One was born in Dagestan, the other in Kyrgyzstan.
Muslims, Chechens, immigrants, the family, even the parents—it wasn’t fair to hold any of these people responsible. And yet Tsarni couldn’t escape the feeling of collective disgrace. “He put a shame on our family,” he told the reporters. “He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity.”
In the end, Tsarni raised his hands and asked to say one more thing: “Those who suffered, we’re sharing with them, with their grief—and ready just to meet with them, and ready just to bend in front of them, to kneel in front of them, seeking their forgiveness. … In the name of the family, that’s what I say.”
Finally, Iowahawk sums up the week by channeling his inner Billy Joel.
Back in my business magazine days, at the behest of higher management I created a section of the magazine I called “Green Business.”
As you can imagine from the title it had to do with environment-related businesses or green-related business issues. I insisted, however, that the section be about more than jumping on the green fad, that it show how businesses could make more money (as in higher revenues or lower expenses) through “green” things.
Perhaps “green” isn’t a fad, except that the environmental movement keeps damaging its own credibility with hysterical end-of-the-world predictions, such as those chronicled by FreedomWorks around the first Earth Day in 1970:
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Timeseditorial
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
“In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
“[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt
Making a profit is the first responsibility of a business, after all, and maximizing profits for the owners is the fiduciary responsibility of a business’ management. If a business can make more money by, for instance, energy efficiency or figuring out how to use less water during a product’s manufacturing process, that’s sustainability.
Extrapolate global average GDP per capita into the future and it shows a rapid rise to the end of this century, when the average person on the planet would have an income at least twice as high as the typical American has today. If this were to happen, an economist would likely say that it’s a good thing, while an ecologist would likely say that it’s a bad thing because growth means using more resources. Therein lies a gap to be bridged between the two disciplines.
The environmental movement has always based its message on pessimism. Population growth was unstoppable; oil was running out; pesticides were causing a cancer epidemic; deserts were expanding; rainforests were shrinking; acid rain was killing trees; sperm counts were falling; and species extinction was rampant. For the green movement, generally, good news is no news. Many environmentalists are embarrassed even to admit that some trends are going in the right direction.
Why? The underlying assumption is that pessimism is what drives change. But great innovators from Archimedes to Steve Jobs generally lived in the richest parts of the world in their day. Driven by ambition, not desperation, they changed the world for optimistic reasons.
Pessimism should no longer be a prerequisite for being an environmentalist. It can be counterproductive because it is a counsel of despair. People do not respond well to being told disaster is unavoidable. Instead, the environmental movement should try optimism.
There is a wonderful chance that the current century is going to be a golden age for nature. Not everything is going to go right, but it is possible that by the end of the century we will have more forests, more wildlife, and cleaner air. …
The “forest transition”—the point at which a country stops losing forest and starts regaining it—is happening all over the world: Forest cover is increasing in Bangladesh, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, France, Gambia, Hungary, Ireland, Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Rwanda, Scotland, South Korea, Switzerland, the United States, and Vietnam. …
Why are environmental trends mainly positive? In short, the gains are due to “land sparing,” in which technological innovation allows humans to produce more from less land, leaving more land for forests and wildlife. The list of land sparing technologies is long: Tractors, unlike mules and horses, do not need to feed on hay. Advances in fertilizers and irrigation, as well as better storage, transport, and pest control, help boost yields. New genetic varieties of crops and livestock allow people to get more from less. Chickens now grow three times as fast in they did in the 1950s. The yield boosts from genetically modified crops is now saving from the plow an area equivalent to 24 percent of Brazil’s arable land.
What is really making a positive dent in the environmental arena is the unintended effects of technology rather than nature reserves or exhortations to love nature. Policy analyst Indur Goklany calculated that if we tried to support today’s population using the methods of the 1950s, we would need to farm 82 percent of all land, instead of the 38 percent we do now. The economist Julian Simon once pointed out that with cheap light, an urban, multi-story hydroponic warehouse the size of Delaware could feed the world, leaving the rest for wilderness.
It is not just food. In fiber and fuel too, we replace natural sources with synthetic, reducing the ecological footprint. Construction uses less and lighter materials. Even CO2 emissions enrich crop yields. …
Catastrophic climate change might undo us. Yet moderate climate change will only help with land sparing. Moreover, the empirical data increasingly support the probability that climate change will be mild and slow for many decades. One should be more concerned about the effects of climate change policies, which are horribly land-hungry and harsh toward nature. This includes biofuels, wind power, hydroelectric power, and the refusal to back fossil fuels for the rural poor, which results in the continued exploitation of forests for fuel. In other words, when it comes to climate change, the cure might be worse than the disease.
Organic farming is another example of ecologically good intentions that would pave the road to environmental hell. Organic farming is nice enough as a local fad, but if it were pursued on a global scale it would require a doubling of the amount of land devoted to agriculture, because organic yields are necessarily much lower than those using synthetic fertilizer. In effect, organic farmers have to grow their own fertilizer as “green manure” or dung from livestock, which takes up far more land than making fertilizer in a factory. If the world were to go organic, it would require a renewed and massive assault on forests, wetlands, and nature reserves to feed the global population.
Paradoxically, economics has done more for nature than ecology has. Yet, as discussed at PERC’s recent forum, there is still much that both fields can learn from the other. Economics could learn something from Charles Darwin and ecology could evolve from revisiting Adam Smith. Indeed, Charles Darwin read Smith, so there is an ancestral connection between the two fields: they both stress the emergence of phenomena rather than their direction from above. And, there is much activity in evolutionary biology and ecology that is parallel to what is occurring in economics and vice versa.
On April 22, in cities across America, some environmental activists will celebrate Earth Day, claiming only increased government control can protect the environment. Those celebrations will expose a couple ironies.
First, many activists will arrive in a Toyota Prius, which has become the symbol of environmental consciousness. Ironically, however, the Prius is not a triumph of political planning but of the free market. In the 1990s, while California was requiring “zero-emission” vehicles, leaders at Toyota and Honda saw an opportunity to sell cars to people who want to spend less on gasoline, drive a car that emits less carbon dioxide, or both. Thus was born the hybrid vehicle. Even though it did not meet California’s regulation, it sold well, causing Golden State politicians to change the law.
Jumping on the bandwagon, politicians began to give preferences to hybrids. Politicians did not lead, but followed the innovation of the free market. Most Prius drivers, however, don’t know that history and some will spend Earth Day opposing the free-market policies that created the car they are so proud of. …
Across the country, the parts of the nation that most consistently support free-market candidates are those surrounded by stunning natural beauty. The most vocal environmental activists — who are quick to lecture others about caring for nature — tend to live in cities, where nature has been thoroughly controlled, constrained and paved. …
Environmentalism has become trendy and a way to show you are a good person, rather than actually helping the environment. Environmental activists and politicians choose government-mandated approaches not because they help the environment, but because the policies make them feel good about themselves and make them look good to others. …
In fact, a strong concern for the environment is part of believing in personal responsibility and the free market. Conservatives believe people have freedom, but must take responsibility for the impact they cause. If you commit a crime, you don’t get to blame society. A reason conservatives live near nature is that we love to hike, hunt, fish and marvel at the awe-inspiring natural beauty with which our nation is so blessed.
Finally, the free market is the greatest system for allocating scarce resources and doing more with less, both of which are at the heart of a true environmental ethic.
Rather than forcing behavior change, conservatives promote technological solutions that respect the freedom of individuals while reducing environmental impact. Rather than falling for the latest trendy environmental policy, conservatives demand that the government measure success or failure.
Today in 1964, the president of Britain’s National Federation of Hairdressers offered free haircuts to members of the next number one act in the British charts, adding, “The Rolling Stones are the worst; one of them looks as if he’s got a feather duster on his head.”
One assumes he was referring to Keith Richards, who is still working (and, to some surprise, still alive) 49 years later.
The number one British single today in 1965:
The number one British album today in 1972 was Deep Purple’s “Machine Head”:
As you know, the Tax Foundation’s Tax Freedom Day is the day when we taxpayers are done paying our federal, state and local taxes for the year, and everything from here until Dec. 31 goes to such frills as housing, food and clothing.
As you know, Wisconsin has the fifth highest state and local taxes in the country.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that today, Tax Freedom Day in Wisconsin, is the 11th latest Tax Freedom Day in the nation.
I bring this up not just because Tax Freedom Day is today, but because of a snarky comment The Capital Times made about a blog of earlier this week:
Wisconsin right-wing bogger Steve Prestegard, convinced that Wisconsin under Scott Walker is doing just fine, quotes another right-wing blogger, Christian Schneider, to explain why Wisconsin is lagging so far behind other states in job creation and economic growth. The conclusions are, well, interesting.
At the risk of appearing to not appreciate the attention for my “bog,” whoever wrote this clearly didn’t read what I wrote, which was that things under Walker are not just fine, but they have been not just fine well before Walker took office. My proof is in this appalling comparison of taxes to personal income dating back to the days of Gov. Patrick Lucey:
This graphic (from this page) shows this state’s percentage of income in taxes, and (in the third column) its national ranking. (We are apparently supposed to believe that ranking fifth is better than first or second.) The last column is national average per capita income, and two columns to the left is Wisconsin’s average per capita income for that same year.
Since 1977, when Jimmy Carter was president and Martin Schreiber (who took over as governor after Carter named Lucey ambassador to Mexico), and I was in middle school, Wisconsin’s per capita average income was higher than the nation’s in only three years, 1978 through 1980. Every year since then, Wisconsin’s per capita average income has been less than the national average. (And the gap was particularly bad between 2005 and 2009, when James Doyle was governor. Contrary to Christian Schneider‘s assertion that Wisconsin fared relatively well in the late 2000s recession, state per capita average income was $6,700 less than the national average between 2008 and 2010.)
Think you could have used another $1,600 of income (the 2010 difference between Wisconsin average income and national average income)? Well, thanks to the state government and the 3,120 local governments, you can’t have it. (Imagine what the state’s economy might be like if every Wisconsinite had $1,600 more in his or her wallet every year. Well, you can’t have that either.)
Politicians who oppose radical state and local tax reform would claim the link between high state and local taxes and below-average personal income is correlation, not causation. That link has been the case every year since 1980. That’s not an accident, and that’s not a coincidence. Remember the economic rule that if you want less of something, tax it? Apparently Wisconsin voters are fine with less income; they’ve been voting that way for decades.
So, for the illiterates at The Capital Times: No, Wisconsin is not “just doing fine.” Wisconsin hasn’t been “doing just fine” for a long, long time. Wisconsin will not do “just fine” until Wisconsin takes the radical step of substantially lower taxes (how about ranking 25th in state and local taxes instead of fifth?) and a much smaller government to match. That means cutting taxes a hell of a lot more than 27 cents per day and making it impossible to raise them without taxpayer approval (remember the Taxpayer Bill of Rights?).
That’s how Summerall, almost a decade ago, said he would craft the first sentences of his obituary — short and to the point.
The legendary sports broadcaster died in his hospital room at Zale Lipshy University Hospital, where he was recovering from surgery for a broken hip, a family friend said.
Summerall’s comment about his obituary was made at his Southlake home after a 2004 liver transplant that saved his life. He was serious.
Typical … succinct … vintage Summerall.
His minimalist staccato style coupled with a deep, authoritative voice was his trademark as the pre-eminent NFL voice for a generation of television viewers.
Summerall worked 16 Super Bowls in a network career that began at CBS in 1962 and ended at Fox in 2002.
In the 21 seasons in which play-by-play voice Summerall worked alongside John Madden, they grew into America’s most popular sports broadcast team. Their work for CBS at Super Bowl XVI, following the 1981 season, remains the highest-rated NFL game of all-time, with more than 49 percent of the nation tuned in.
“I was so lucky I got to work with Pat,” Madden said in an interview around the time of Summerall’s transplant. “He was so easy to work with. He knew how to use words. For a guy like myself who rambles on and on and doesn’t always make sense, he was sent from heaven.”
Summerall did either color or play-by-play on 16 Super Bowls, working first with Ray Scott …
… before becoming 0ne of TV sports’ first players-turned-play-by-play guys:
Summerall first worked with Ray Scott, the famed announcer of few words. And that’s certainly where Summerall became the announcer of few words himself, although he was certainly capable of understated humor:
As CBS’ and Fox’s number one NFL announcer, he got to do a few memorable Packer games:
Summerall did other sports, most famously golf, plus tennis. He even did the NBA, including a game famous to the (few remaining) fans of the Bucks:
The former basketball player also did NCAA basketball tournament games for CBS in 1985. He did sports for WCBS radio in New York (whose first all-news day started with its own news — a plane crash into its tower), and hosted NFL Films’ “This Week in Pro Football.”
Summerall had a great voice, and worked ideally with his more loquacious partners, particularly Madden. Remember Scott’s stereotypical call — “Starr … Dowler … touchdown”? For Summerall, it was “Staubach … Pearson … touchdown,” or “Montana … Rice … touchdown.”
Could Pat Summerall have been given the assignment to call 16 Super Bowls, all those Masters and U.S. Opens in tennis in today’s landscape?
It is an interesting question. The networks likely wouldn’t have been jumping all over each other to sign a former kicker who really didn’t say much on the telecasts. It’s more about color and flash, and unfortunately, sometimes screaming and yelling in today’s game. Summerall hardly was a flamboyant personality. …
Summerall did it because of two main assets: A wonderful deep voice that punctuated his wonderful sense of brevity. He didn’t overwhelm a telecast. Rather, he melted into it, providing the ideal sound track to accompany the hum of the venue and the pulse of the action taking place down below. …
He played the straight man, always bringing out the best in his partners.
What Summerall did really was an art. Would it work today with the volume turned up several levels in 2013? Who knows?
I still hear Pat Summerall saying something spare — “Third and ten . . .” — and I know the light has been fading outdoors. I know just as sure as any clockwork that Daylight Saving Time might be on its way, or that Daylight Saving Time has crashed in and blackened 5:30 already. I do not need to move from this seat. I do not need to look through a window. I know.
The deep, economized sound of the voice tells me the weather without telling me the weather. Of course it does. I know it’s quite probably crisp outside. I know the trees have taken on some mighty colors even if I’m not really looking at them during this game. I know there’s a plausible chance the sky has grayed, the birds mostly have left. I know that if I went outside and walked along the sidewalk to the driveway, the leaves might make that great sound when they crunch under my sneakers. I might look down the street to a distant front yard, see some kids playing, some hopeless bomb flying incomplete. …
In the den where the voice resonates, or in living rooms otherwise silent, or at the neighbors’ where you enter the house and can hear it from the other room, or in those houses where it maybe even comes from two places, the voice signals the momentous. It comes from on high in Irving, Texas, or from the Meadowlands of New Jersey, or from out by the bay in San Francisco, or Lambeau Field in later years, from the weighty games of the then-dominant NFC. It means the game matters, might sway the conference race, might determine home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.
For 28 seasons and 16 Super Bowls the voice implies gravitas, for a time alongside Tom Brookshier, then 22 seasons mingled with John Madden in the two-man NFL symphony, the voice giving way to the tick-tock of “60 Minutes,” or sounding kind of funny giving the Fox evening lineup.
I hear the voice, and I know the wall calendar has just about run out of pages. I can taste my mother’s Thanksgiving dressing, picture the grandparents driving in. The Christmas tree stands right over there; it seems so familiar with the voice. Friends will be over. May I get you a drink? Can’t wait for the playoffs. There goes Madden, explaining some contour of the game you did not know.
Now, here’s Summerall: “Third and 10 . . .”
The voice lets the game supply the drama, as all its admirers acknowledge and commend. It’s reliable, egoless and a bit clumsy on occasion. You might root for it through its unexpected pauses. There it goes all low and minimalist without a hint of a shout, as Adam Vinatieri’s field goal sails through to beat the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI: “And it’s right down the pipe.” Here it rises just a bit on the word “good” as Matt Bahr’s field goal at Candlestickstaves off the 49ers dynasty in the 1991 NFC Championship Game: “The kick . . . (pause) . . . is good . . . (pause) . . . There will be no three-peat.” Here it lets Marcus Allen’s amazing 74-yard run against Washington do the goose-bumping: “Here’s Marcus Allen . . . (pause) . . . cutting back up the field and Marcus Allen could be gone.”
Allen runs the last half of the field sans narration.
No matter the venue, the broadcast partner, or the sport, Summerall’s voice was always the same. Calm. Commanding. Reliable. That voice is one that will never be duplicated. When you heard Pat Summerall’s voice, you knew what you were watching mattered.
His understated delivery made sure the game was always at center stage where it belonged. He never talked more than his broadcast partners. John Madden would never have been John Madden without a partner like Pat Summerall. Perhaps that’s one of the greatest testaments to one of the greatest careers in not just sports broadcasting, but all of broadcasting.
Summerall’s legacy has been far underrated by the social media generation. To be fair, maybe we’ve lost our way a bit in what makes the best sports announcers. Pat Summerall was never someone who would compel fans to make Youtube tribute videos. I even tried to find a favorite Summerall call from Youtube to try to insert in this article, but perhaps it’s fitting there really isn’t one. Summerall didn’t need to jump out of his chair or come up with clever nicknames to do his job. In a sports world that lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps on viral videos, highlights, and catchphrases, Summerall was none of that flash. Only substance. Only the best.
In the ’70s and ’80s, when I hadn’t figured out that, yes, you can like more than one announcer, I preferred NBC’s Dick Enberg to Summerall. Today, ABC’s Al Michaels is the best football announcer. But Summerall taught a valuable lesson to someone who yearned to have his job. If you have a talkative partner, less can really be more.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 