The number one British album today in 1972 was a Tyrannosaurus Rex double album, the complete title of which is “My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair … But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows”/”Prophets, Seers & Sages: The Angels of the Ages.” Really.
The number one single today in 1956 was this artist’s first, but certainly not last:
The number one single today in 1962:
I’m unaware of whether the soundtrack of “West Side Story” got any radio airplay, but since I played it in both the La Follette and UW marching bands, I note that today in 1962 the soundtrack hit number one and stayed there for 54 weeks:
Today in 1957, Alan Freed hosted the first prime-time rock and roll TV show — called, in a blast of original inspiration, “Rock ‘n Roll Show”:
The number one single today in 1961:
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1970, Ohio National Guard soldiers shot and killed four Kent State University students, prompting this song:
I have written a lot in this space about the Corvette. (And by the way, my birthday is one month from today.)
The Corvette is a car that by conventional business standards probably should have been discontinued after its third year, when just 700 of them were sold. But 1955 was the year the Corvette got an actual engine, Chevy’s first V-8, after it got an engineer who actually cared about the car, Zora Arkus-Duntov.
The rest, as they say, is history. Except that GM’s other divisions wanted Corvettes too, or at least cars like Corvettes — two-seat sports, or sporty, cars. (Well, except GMC, although one could easily put together a two-seat pickup truck with a big V-8 and manual transmission. Styling might leave something to be desired, though, but imagine the cargo space.)
Every other GM division apparently got the two-seat bug in 1954. The list begins with the Pontiac Bonneville Special …
… powered by a bored-out Pontiac straight-eight.
One of the remaining Specials sold for $2.8 million. That is not a misprint.
That same year, Oldsmobile trotted out its own two-seat concept, the F-88.
The F-88 was designed the same time as the initial Corvette, but was powered by an Olds V-8 of 250 horsepower, 100 more than the initial Corvette six. After it appeared in GM’s Motorama, it became the personal transportation of the legendary Harley Earl, GM’s chief designer of the time. One of its duties was to represent GM at the grand opening of Road America in Elkhart Lake in 1955.
The lone surviving F-88, by the way, sold at an auction for $3.24 million. That is not a misprint.
Buick’s contribution was the Wildcat II, slightly smaller than the Corvette, and again with a stronger motor, a Buick 322 V-8.
Cadillac had multiple efforts at its own two-seater. In 1954 Cadillac unveiled the El Camino coupe …
… and La Espada convertible …
… both powered by Caddy V-8s. Each was 200 inches long, or a full two feet longer than the same year Corvette, so they weren’t intended as Corvette competitors, but they weren’t designed for production either.
One year later Cadillac created two LaSalle II concepts — the pictured roadster and a four-door with suicide doors, a few inches longer than the ’55 Vette. The engine was an experimental aluminum V-6. The first GM V-6 was in a Buick nearly a decade later, and by the time Cadillac got a V-6, well, recall the difference between wanting something and finally getting it.
None of these cars reached production; none was ever intended to reach production. The Bonneville became the top-of-the-line Pontiac (my mother-in-law owns the last Bonneville); the Wildcat became a sporty full-size Buick; the El Camino became, of course, a Chevy cartruck, or “coupe utility”; and despite numerous proposals, Cadillac never used the name “LaSalle” for one of its models.
That more or less ended Olds’ and Buick’s attempts at Corvette-style cars. A decade later, however, Pontiac put together a car smaller than the Corvette, powered by Pontiac’s overhead-cam six, the Banshee. Motor Trend Classic sets the scene:
Imagine yourself as the general manager of Chevrolet in 1966. You’re at the wheel of the largest division of General Motors, with total passenger car production in excess of 2 million units under your watch. Things are good, right? Not so fast. In 1966, Chevrolet was taking a beating on several fronts, and there was a sense that the competition was beginning to eat USA-1’s lunch. The greatest hit came from Ford’s Mustang. Without any direct competing model to consider (the Camaro was still a year away), a million Mustang buyers skipped past Chevy showrooms, where boxy Chevy II Novas and reputation-tarnished Corvairs were the only lines of defense.
In this context of mounting hostility from Ford and the rest of Detroit, the last thing Chevy wanted was more competition from within General Motors. And that seems to be where the story of the Pontiac XP-833 begins — and ends.
The sleek silver two-seat Banshee sports car on display was poised to enter production in 1966, but obviously never reached that goal. Some say its demise was a direct result of complaints from Chevrolet that it would bite deeply into Corvette sales. That assumption makes sense in light of the fact the XP-833 was a fiberglass-bodied two-seater, just like the Corvette. And with annual Corvette sales in the low 20,000-unit range, there wasn’t much room for competition.
This car was at an Iola Old Car Show during a tribute to Pontiac (R.I.P.). It is smaller than any Corvette, and powered by a six, not a V-8. John DeLorean (yes, that John DeLorean) headed Pontiac at the time.
Should the Corvette team have been frightened by Pontiac’s proposed lower-cost sports car? The likely answer is yes. While it would have snared a good number of potential Mustang buyers, its similar theme would have also been attractive to the lower end of the Corvette buyer demographic. Adding the XP-833 to Pontiac showrooms nationwide, especially at the height of GTO mania, would have resulted in excitement you could have seen from outer space. And with the possibility of options like disc brakes, performance-suspension goodies, and that big 421 riding the XP-833’s miniscule 91-inch wheelbase, maybe the 427 Corvette (half a foot longer) wouldn’t have seemed so hot after all.And so it was when DeLorean, [Pontiac engineer Bill] Collins, and the rest of the team unveiled the XP-833 to top GM executives in mid-1965. Permission and funding for further development were denied; the XP-833 program was over. …
The Banshee offers a rare glimpse of what might have been. And if any comparison to the nearly 66,000 Solstices sold between 2006 and 2009 can be made, perhaps Pontiac’s concept of an affordable two-seat sports car wasn’t off base after all.
The Solstice, and the companion Saturn Sky, were smaller-than-Corvette two-seaters. There was, however, a Cadillac “Corvette,” the XLR, built on the Corvette platform, but with the 32-valve Northstar V-8 (and, disgracefully, an automatic) instead of the Corvette small-block. Where the Corvette has sold in the tens of thousands every year, the XLR sold in the thousands.
Before that was the Cadillac Allanté, another two-seater that was more like a Mercedes–Benz SL than a sports car.
So why did the Corvette avoid inside-GM competition, let alone GM’s usual badge engineering? Part of it was perhaps corporate politics. Corvette has always had high-level backers within GM’s Byzantine management structure. Part of it also was perhaps GM’s realization of how much money the Corvette, even with five-figure yearly production levels, made for GM, and GM was therefore reluctant to create an in-house competitor that wouldn’t have necessarily made more money for GM.
Chevrolet (which was purchased by GM 95 years ago yesterday) has always been the most-things-to-most-buyers division of GM. The 6,000 or so Chevy dealers in the late 1970s sold everything from the minicompact Chevette to the land yacht Caprice, plus trucks and SUVs. The Corvette by rights should have been built by Pontiac, the “excitement division” (though it wasn’t when the Corvette was built), or even Cadillac for exclusivity. It’s been suggested more than once that Corvette should be split off into its own division. (Only about one-third of Chevy dealers are reportedly getting the new Corvette.)
The other reason is that, for all the occasional criticism of way-out-there styling (the C3), the Vette’s being more expensive than other Chevys, and Chevy’s refusal to green-light a mid-engine Corvette, Chevy actually got the Corvette right as an affordable (by the standards of the genre) supercar. Consider this from Corvette Online:
Some interesting facts:
- Most expensive Corvette in constant dollars? The 1989 C4, at $59,216
- Least expensive? $24,004 for the 1954 Corvette
- Over its lengthy run, the MSRP of the C3 nearly quadrupled, and even adjusted for inflation, it still rose more than $10,000
- The switch between C3 and C4 saw the biggest run up in real cost, jumping 15.5% from 1982 to 1984
- On average, the adjusted cost of buying a Corvette has gone down since the dawn of the C4 era, from the mid-$56,000 range to $51k for the C6
If not for Zora Arkus-Duntov, who turned the Corvette into an actual sports car, and Bill Mitchell, who designed the most recognizable Corvettes, perhaps the Corvette would have died after a few years. Or perhaps the Corvette would have died after faring badly against inside-GM competition. Instead, the Corvette remains America’s sports car.
One of the most salutary developments in American business is the growth of the microbrewery.
Tom Acitelli explains how the growth of microbrewing proves the converse of the phrase “if you want less something of it, tax it”:
Today there are more than 2,300 breweries in the United States—where beer production is second only to China’s—but it wasn’t long ago that American beer was an international punch line. Embodied by yellowy lagers in aluminum cans, nearly all domestic beer was made by a handful of breweries like Miller and Anheuser-Busch. As recently as 35 years ago, there were fewer than 50 breweries in the whole country, and the fastest-growing type of American beer was light, which Miller introduced in 1975.
The story of the U.S. ascent to the top tier of world beer began in the late 1970s, when brewing was liberated from government taxation and regulation that had held it back since Prohibition.
In 1976, Henry King, a gregarious World War II hero whose favorite drink was a whiskey-based Rob Roy, trained the attention of his U.S. Brewers Association, the industry’s biggest trade group, on Congress. The brewing industry had been trying unsuccessfully for years to get Washington to lower excise taxes on beer produced by smaller brewers.
King was determined to change things. In an impressive feat of bridge-building, he lined up support from the industry’s labor unions as well as its owners. Steelworker and glassworker unions called in favors; the big brewery owners wrote personal checks. These owners, whose excise taxes would remain the same, figured that by helping their smaller brethren, they would ultimately help themselves by inspiring more beer consumption in an American alcohol market suddenly awash with California wines.
Brewer Peter Stroh—whose family name was a mainstay of Midwestern beer—lobbied a fellow Michigander, President Gerald Ford, to sign the bill that King’s efforts finally steered through Congress. H.R. 3605 cut the federal excise tax on beer to $7 from $9 per barrel on the first 60,000 barrels produced, so long as a brewery produced no more than two million barrels annually. (There were few breweries that did, which was another reason King’s association went to bat for the tax cut.)
The tax cut unleashed a revolution in American brewing. Hundreds of smaller breweries began to open across the country selling what came to be called craft beer. But as significant as the numbers was the rise of American brewers and consumers as the industry’s tastemakers. …
Some of the stars of American craft beer, such as Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada and Sam Calagione at Dogfish Head, got their start with home brewing—an activity that until the late 1970s was illegal in the U.S.
The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 legalized home winemaking, but, because of an oversight, did not legalize home-brewing of beer. Stores that sold supplies for winemaking also sold supplies for making beer at home, and the government did little to enforce the anti-home-brewing law. …
Gradually, though, the secretive home brewers grew bolder. In the 1970s—about when Henry King was lobbying Congress to cut the beer tax—home-brewing clubs in California, where America’s craft-beer revolution began, joined with trade groups representing the winemaking shops that sold home-brewing supplies. They lobbied California Sen. Alan Cranston to introduce legislation legalizing home-brewing at the federal level.
Cranston introduced legislation that was reconciled with a House bill in August 1978. President Carter signed the law that October, and it took effect the following February. Home-brewing of up to 200 gallons a year per household was suddenly permitted.
Following the federal example, state legislatures also began rewriting their bans on home-brewing, and it is legal now in every state except Alabama. The result: Home-brewing took off, helping to spur the movement toward craft beer that had been touched off by the beer tax reduction.
Keep all this in mind the next time you read about a state legislator wanting to increase alcohol taxes. Keep this in mind as well when you read calls for higher taxes, as Acitelli concludes:
The rise of American beer wasn’t an accident. It was spurred by efforts to cut taxes and regulation that unleashed entrepreneurship. Too bad Washington doesn’t raise a toast to that idea more often.
Or Madison.
Hot Air passes on a Huffington Post (or is it Puffington Host, Mr. Taranto?) report that half of the staff of the Los Angeles Times has threatened to quit if the Koch brothers — who by the way employ more than 2,000 Wisconsinites, most at Georgia–Pacific — purchase the Times.
At a Los Angeles Times in-house awards ceremony a week ago, columnist Steve Lopez addressed the elephant in the room.
Speaking to the entire staff, he said, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Austin Beutner’s group.” No one raised their hands.
“Raise you hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Rupert Murdoch.” A few people raised their hands.
Facing the elephant trunk-on, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by the Koch brothers.” About half the staff raised their hands. …
As Tribune Co. emerges from a four-year bankruptcy, the predominantly Democratic city is quivering at the rumor that libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch may be interested in buying the LA Times. The brothers are believed to be the only group prepared to buy all eight Tribune papers, including the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant, as a package — how Tribune would like to sell them.
The ownership that most Angelenos seem to favor is a coalition of LA billionaires who have expressed interest, led by former Democratic mayoral candidate Austin Beutner and including prominent Democratic donor Eli Broad.
Many say local ownership is preferable because there’s more accountability and involvement. Local owners know and care about the city. Because they live here, they’re concerned and accessible. They won’t tarnish the paper, because they have local reputations to uphold. It would restore the family feel that the paper had for more than 60 years under the founding leadership of the Chandler family.
However, local ownership can have a dark side. Until the 1960s, the Chandlers used the Times to promote real estate development and Republican ideals. Similarly, when local real estate investor Doug Manchester bought the San Diego Union Tribune in 2011, he turned it into a platform for local business interests. To the dread of most Angelenos, Manchester has expressed interest in buying the LA Times, though he’s not considered a frontrunner.
The rest of the Puffington Host piece is a slurry tank full of speculation about how the Kochs might turn the Times into their own libertarian mouthpiece, vs. how other potential owners might turn the Times into their own fill-in-your-favorite-pejorative mouthpiece. (Including support of, horror of horrors, business and development. The irony of “a coalition of LA billionaires” being considered more acceptable is lost on the Puffington Host.)
Big Journalism asks a self-explanatory question:
Brent Bozell, president of Media Research Center, appeared on The Kudlow Report, Wednesday on CNBC to point out the double standard in the media when outrage is expressed over the politically conservative duo owning the newspaper.
“If you’re going to say that a known conservative entity like the Koch brothers should not be getting into the business of dictating what a news operation should do, what does that tell you about Warren Buffett?” alluding to the multi-millionaire, Democratic Party supporter and activist who owns many newspaper companies.
The useful part of the Puffington Host piece is the history of the Times as what was considered a conservative newspaper under the Chandlers. (The Los Angeles PBS station did an excellent documentary on the Chandler family.) The Times helped launch the political careers of, among others, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The Times was not taken seriously nationally, however, until, under publisher Otis Chandler, the Times stopped letting ideology determine its news coverage. (The same applies to the Tribune when its publisher was the isolationist Robert McCormick.)
I can’t comment on the other potential owners save one, but it’s pretty obvious that the Kochs didn’t amass their wealth by letting their personal views get in the way of making the right business decisions. (Ditto another potential owner, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.) The opinion page (and the Times’ is about as liberal as it gets) is one or two pages out of a daily newspaper. (And the Southland already has a pretty conservative/libertarian opinion page at the Orange County Register.) A newspaper gets a reputation for good or ill based on how it covers the news of the area it serves, not for the ideology of its owners, or what’s said on its opinion page.
Here’s an Economics 101 lesson for liberals and the media: A business product or service is purchased when the buyer and seller agree on price for what the buyer gets. If the buyer doesn’t want it for the seller’s price, the seller doesn’t sell. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are successful because readers and advertisers like what they’re buying. The Kochs are successful because their companies’ customers like their companies’ products and services. (Particularly in the case of Fox News, which is getting higher ratings than the better-established CNN or MSNBC.)
What about the Times staffers? (None of whom are entitled to their jobs, because no one is entitled to their preferred job, or in fact any job.) Hot Air answers:
Call their bluff. Wherever you stand politically, we can all agree on that, right? If you’re a liberal, you want to see the fair, balanced, impartial LA Times newsroom rise as one and walk out in protest of having to work for libertarian oligarKKKs. If you’re a conservative, you want them gone for different reasons, partly as a smoking gun of bias and partly because it’ll clear the decks to hire more neutral reporters. And if they don’t walk out, that’s okay — their cheap bravado will have been exposed in all its cheapness.
Here’s another econ lesson: The value of an employee is how much it costs (financially and otherwise) to replace that employee. If the Puffington Host’s prediction is correct that half of the Times newsroom would depart, here’s one possible (though hysterically argued) result:
Perhaps one brave Times reporter would go public with a story killed by the new owners. She would lose her job, and it would be written about in The New York Times. And, it would pressure the LA Times owners to be more objective. But many of the people working at the Times support a family or are still developing their careers and can’t afford to lose their jobs — especially in a town with few job opportunities for newspaper journalists.
If half the staff quit under Koch ownership, that would leave half as many people likely to stand up to the owners — probably the half that would be more likely to do so. Not to mention, it would be a tremendous loss of talented journalists who have built a wealth of LA knowledge and relationships over years of experience.
Care to guess how long it would take the Times to replace half their staffers? Given that journalism schools keep pumping out more graduates than journalism has jobs, not very long at all. (I might even take a job offer were it not for the fact that anymore California ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.)
There are people who work for much smaller publications than the Times who do work that as good, if not better. The Times also is likely to have more newsroom staffers than it actually needs, particularly given that it is a — surprise! — union newsroom. Losing institutional memory of Los Angeles would not be a good thing, but to claim that half of the newsroom’s choosing to leave would be “a tremendous loss of talented journalists” is an assertion without evidence.
The other obvious point is belief without evidence that the Kochs would automatically be bad newspaper owners is based on their politics. That is, as usual, a way to dismiss any viewpoint left of the Puffington Host’s as illegitimate. That opinion ignores the fact that there are millions of Californians whose political views are closer to the Kochs’ views than the views expressed on the Times editorial page.
Perhaps the Kochs should purchase the Times and watch some number of its staffers leave. (Or if the Times purchase doesn’t work out, perhaps the Kochs can look at two other media companies not doing very well these days: Journal Communications, my former employer — a place that was better to work at under employee ownership than as a publicly traded company — and the publisher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, or Lee Newspapers, publishers of the (formerly conservative) Wisconsin State Journal, La Crosse Tribune and Kenosha News.) When I was in UW journalism school, “journalist” was defined as “an out-of-work reporter.”
Today is the 53rd anniversary of what I used to consider the greatest radio station on the planet in its best format:
How did Wisconsin get to ranking in the top five in state and local taxes in the nation, while the state’s per capita income ranks around 25th?
Disrespect from the political class for the taxpayer, as demonstrated by Media Trackers:
On a per capita basis, Wisconsin taxpayers are paying more in property taxes now than they did just over 20 years ago. Numbers from the state Department of Revenue, and first touted by the office of state Rep. Michael Schraa (R), show that per capita property taxes were higher in 2010 than they were in 1990, even when adjusted for inflation. Property taxes as measured by revenues and tax bills had trended upwards under previous governors before a property tax freeze was implemented in Governor Walker’s first budget.
Walker has insisted that his second biannual budget, which is being debated by the legislature, must include an extension of the property tax freeze. Because the measure also ties in with Walker’s move to control overall public school spending, some lawmakers, particularly in the Senate, have expressed concern over plans to potentially reduce the percentage – and possibly amount – of revenue coming into local government through property taxes.
Republican Senator Luther Olsen has indicated that believes schools should get more money because many of them are strapped for cash. Asked by Gannett Wisconsin Media about what he plans to do about school funding, Olsen promised to “die trying” to secure more money for schools through changes in the state budget.
“If you look at the governor’s budget, the money he does give to schools is property tax relief,” Olsen complained. Schools just “can’t handle that,” the 62 year-old concluded in his Gannett interview.
So is property tax relief an unnecessary endeavor because the state is not generating enough revenue from property taxes?
Some of the more accessible property tax data is available in 5-year increments, making a study of property tax trends between 1990 and 2010 a reasonable way to study overall property tax revenues.
In 1990, the total value of the Wisconsin property tax base was $141.4 billion, and property taxpayers paid $4.07 billion in property taxes for that tax year. In 2010, the value of the property tax base had grown to $495.9 billion and taxpayers paid $9.34 billion in taxes.
Wisconsin’s population saw a significant increase over that same time period. It is possible to look at the per capita rate of property taxation and index it for inflation to see how the per capita property tax burden has fared in that two decade span. Not everyone in Wisconsin pays property taxes, but property taxes impact living costs and indirectly or directly affect every resident in the state.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Wisconsin’s population in 1990 was 4,891,769. In 2010, Wisconsin’s population was 5,686,986. That means that in 1990 the per capita property tax paid was $831.73. By 2010, the per capita property tax paid had risen to $1,642.83. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the 1990 per capita tax would have been $1,387.63 in 2010 when adjusted for inflation.
The difference in inflation-adjusted 1990 per capita property tax payments and per capita property taxes in 2010 is $255.20, or a total of $1.45 billion when multiplied out across the state’s 2010 population.
Except for those living in facilities exempt from property taxes — prisoners, residents of mental institutions and college residential students come to mind — everyone pays property taxes, either directly in the case of homeowners, or indirectly in the case of renters. When adjusted for inflation, your property taxes, whether you pay directly or indirectly, increased by 18 percent from 1990 to 2010. Have the quality of state and local governmental services improved by 18 percent in the past two decades? (A suggestion that government services have deteriorated by at least that much is more likely to be accurate.) Other than gasoline (whose price has nearly tripled since 1990), has the price of anything you buy increased by nearly one-fifth without any improvement in features or quality at all in the past two decades? This comes in a state near the bottom in personal income growth over those two decades (and longer).
(Note: The numbers in the above paragraph were corrected by an alert reader. Remember, journalism is the opposite of math.)
Media Trackers goes on to say that “A variety of factors contribute to rising property values and changes in local property tax rates.” One of them is the lack of state and local spending and tax controls in the state Constitution. Unlike in most states, the only thing that restricts spending or taxes is the whim of the Legislature and local politicians. Gov. Tommy Thompson enacted the Qualified Economic Offer law to restrict teacher salary increases. Gov. James Doyle got rid of it. Thompson also enacted the school district revenue caps, but the Legislature can change that.
Some Republican legislators are proposing taking technical colleges off property taxes and increasing the state sales tax from 5 percent to 6 percent to fund technical colleges. This has been proposed before, and this is not necessarily a bad idea. (Though it really needs to be discussed separately from the state budget process.) Given the fact, however, that every single initiative to reduce property taxes — in rough chronological order, instituting the income tax, instituting a 3-percent sales tax, increasing the sales tax to 4 percent, increasing the sales tax to 5 percent, and allowing counties to institute a 0.5-percent sales tax — has failed to reduce property taxes, you can guess how likely this proposal is to reduce property taxes.
Media Trackers adds:
When President Barack Obama declared, “We don’t have a spending problem,” earlier this year, conservatives mocked him. “The United States has a revenue problem. Taxes at all levels of government are too low,” wrote two far-left progressive policy analysts in The American Prospect in 2012. Conservatives insist that the proper way to view the problem is as a spending problem because government expenditures are creating a perceived need for more revenue when in fact, tax collections are up.
Freezing property taxes slows the rise in per capita property tax revenues. Because property values can and are rising coming out of the housing slump, as the MacIver Institute has pointed out, property tax revenues will not stay stagnant. But under Walker’s plan, neither will they rapidly outpace inflation with property owners seen as a sort of magical ATM machine for local governments looking for more revenue. …
The problem is that if property taxpayers are protected only by Walker’s freeze, what happens when Walker is no longer governor? The 1990–2010 period had, remember, Republican Thompson and Democrat Doyle, along with Republican, Democratic and split control of the Legislature. Little happened to protect property taxpayers in the former governor’s term, and nothing happened to protect taxpayers, period, in the latter governor’s term.
If Republicans were serious about tax relief, they would introduce a Taxpayer Bill of Rights mechanism — in the state Constitution, not merely in state law that can be overturned by less taxpayer-friendly politicians — that (1) strictly limited growth in spending to some combination of inflation and population growth, and (2) required voter approval for tax increases. I notice no such proposal in this Legislature or from this governor.
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the first of its 13-show U.S. tour at the Milwaukee Auditorium:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 