Mean Mitt

How does that Monty Python thing go?  “Help, help!  I’m being repressed!” (when the peasant digging peat gets pounded by Arthur who can’t afford a horse) There’s a believer in democracy everywhere you go. 

Don’t tell me Obama isn’t shrewd politically.  He made an announcement about supporting gay marriage and it fell flat.  So immediately his crew sent out a half-bogus story about Mitt bullying a gay student in high school.  If your original strategy doesn’t work, change the subject. 

A few thoughts about picking on candidates for what they did as minors:  Women have ¼ the muscle mass of men and talk 4 times as many words per day.  Thus they usually flee violence since it ruins relationships and they would be on the losing end of a physical contest.  Teenage girls hurl insults right and left if they get in a fight, but usually don’t swing.  The same behavior can be observed in nature.  Females of a species often flee, then send out verbal warnings, and then when they do have to fight, fight with no-holds-barred, to-the-death to protect their young. 

Males on the other hand fight physically all the time.  Practically every high school guy picked on someone at some time and was picked on himself.  Fights erupted and somebody got beat up or at least slugged. It's kind of a sport, that guarantees to draw a crowd.  The constant fighting helps develop competitiveness and to understand their own power. Men are supposed to be dangerous but controlled.  But guys practice aggression under strict rules of engagement. It starts young with boys arguing about rules of wrestling or football that last longer than the actual fights last themselves.  Physical fighting teaches men something.  It teaches that there must be boundaries or there will be bad consequences.  But mostly it teaches you to resort to violence at last resort.  Else you might get beat up.  Thus it is that men ardently write the laws and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. 

And so most of us are a bit bemused at the allegation that mild-mannered Mitt was a toughie.  “If that’s true,” I can hear one of my friends who was a big tough guy in high school say, “then he sure has reformed.”  And that is said with admiration of character in mind.  Now realistically, it sounds like the story of Mitt as Aggressor has been embellished with politics in mind.  Likely he wasn’t so mean.  But whatever he did as a kid was likely a good lesson that changed his character.  The only guys we note for their meanness are the adults who never learned to be measured and stable.  Those are the guys with mug shots on the nightly news. That's Khruschev pounding the table with his shoe. 

So here’s my prediction.  When the story has played itself out, Mitt will gain support among men.  We understand what’s going on and who among us would like our own childhood dissected by the media.  Whether Mitt gains support among women depends on how he comes across, as a nerdy but lovable guy who can put us back on the right track or the evil demon the Dems make him out to be. 

Half breed

Two weeks ago B. Hussein Obama said that he was not going to question his opponent’s patriotism.  And then this week he did just that with his ad about how Romney wouldn’t have gone after Osama.  It surely reminded me of how he wasn’t going to make abortion or reproductive rights part of the campaign and then a couple days later he started the baiting of the Catholic church by making it plain to them that they would have to pay for birth control and abortafaciants, Fluke and all.  Does this not show what kind of a campaign this is going to be?  Making such ‘high road’ statements and then dropping a bomb doesn’t just show hypocrisy.  It shows a real eagerness for mudslinging.  Disclaimer: when I suggested that, due to his penchant for taking over the auto companies, and all my friends saying he was really a Muslim, that his nickname could be Carbama, I did not realize what a bomb-thrower he was going to be.  So I am not responsible.

Listening to Rush on Friday, I think he was getting pretty edgy with his fun again.  He was laughing about Elizabeth Warren’s gaffe about being Indian because she was 1/32 and using her minority status to get a dinner invite when she was at Haw-vud. He selected an old Cher favorite,Halfbreed, as a theme song.  I haven’t heard that song in about 40 years, remembered the words and began laughing not only at his skewering of Diversity, but laughing at myself for having liked that song.  The Indians said I was white by law.  The white men always called me, Indian Squaw.  I guess that song captured the angst and anger of youth which pre-emptively blames an adult world for failure on Unfairness and Racism. I suppose I was more liberal in those days. Half Breed! ‘She’s no good’ they warned. Too bad we still have one party that uses Unfairness and Racism and teenage thinking to get voters.  The songwriter eventually blames her love life and all else on being mixed race.  But you get older and realize things never were as you imagined.  America is a pretty mixed race place.  I read a series of papers that were meeting notes of the Nazis and Japanese at the beginning of WW II.  The thing both agreed upon was that if America entered the war, it was a nation of “mongrels and mixed races” that naturally fought with each other.  Thus USA would be easy to defeat.  Then came the windtalkers.  Then came the patrician general Patton who asked a bunch of Texas farmers to make suggestions about the Sherman tank.  They gave him a host of critiques about where grease zerks needed to be and certain parts needed to be redesigned “else you’d wait forever for parts’.  That done, the Sherman became a rapid-manufacture tank that “any farm kid could fix and any city kid could drive.”  The mongrels found no trouble allying with every nation against the Axis powers and Ike held them together like determined brothers.  Instead of a patsy, the Nazis found a juggernaut. 

We always moved around from town to town/ When you’re not wanted, you don’t hang around. Perhaps the Halfbreed songwriter really did experience such prejudice, but I doubt it was long-lasting or in Oklahoma.  I was doing research on Indian numbers for one of the elderhostel classes I taught for OU.  I came across evidence that totally destroys the racist narrative.  The US Army has kept very thorough notes on frontier incidents since colonial times.  The sum of all Native Americans killed in all skirmishes, ambushes, disagreements, and wars totals about 79,000.  But the census of 1900 for the first time asked about ethnic background and found 200,000 full bloods and over a million people were “partial Indian”.  Now if you are ‘partial’ that means you had a mixed marriage in your ancestry.  Thus there were at least 10 times as many romances going on as killings. (roughly 1/3 of Oklahomans are part native American.)  So I asked my blonde housekeeping assistant at the hotel (who was on the Ponca Tribal Council) if she knew anybody with a romance story about Cowboys and Indians.  She gave a grin as wide as the Salt Fork River and sat down to tell me the stories of her grandparents on both sides.  Gee, that didn’t take long!  Boy meets girl at trading post stuff. 

One story was humorous.  Some Indian fathers were eager to marry their daughters to settlers since the cowboys treated the girls well (that Western notion called “romance”) and the family got a heads-up on new ways of the white people with a son-in-law.  Ah, so Carolyn’s grandmother’s cowboy asked Papa for her hand and secured a dowry and the girl was so darned mad she wouldn’t talk to anyone.  This dismayed both her father and her fiancé.  Finally they figured it out.  A good woman was worth 3 horses in Ponca dowry, but the poor cowboy had only two.  Bride was insulted.  But the poor cowboy sat her down and told her he really loved her and was terribly disappointed because he wanted her to wear his sister’s wedding dress and get married in the Methodist church.  Suddenly she flew into his arms and all was forgiven.  Because Indian girls used to hide behind trees from a distance and envy the white girls getting married in the gown, and the cake, and the dance—well, you understand. Now in their 80’s, health of the old farm couple was getting bad and so Carolyn had come home to take care of them. 

The genius of America is that you can be what you want to be.  The genius of Oklahoma is that they poured a whole bunch of mixed people together and it still works, maybe works better.  So when this campaign gets nasty with the race allegations from the left, just roll your eyes and laugh.

Uncle Sucker

I guess the Obama campaign is promoting a video that shows a composite character “Julia” who starts getting government programs from age 3 to retirement.  It’s backfired.  It merely serves to remind most of us how crazy cradle-to-grave security is. 

Here’s to hoping that Julia is not like the woman that Obama put in his autobiography.   Now he says she wasn’t real, just a “composite girlfriend”.  Mom and I  looked at one another quizzically.  She finally responded, “What does that tell you about a guy who writes an autobiography and puts fabrications in it?” Well, I don’t know.  Maybe that is why the real girlfriend finally surfaced and said he was cold and aloof and guarded.  When she told him she loved him he said, “Thank you.” And then followed with something about how he could understand why she did.  That’s either cold as ice or dumb statement.  Dumb like when the weatherman Sunday night was following that tornado cell nearing Ponca City.  You know how they do it--showing radar maps, talking to some insane spotter trying to get closer to the twister, giving grave warnings about seeking shelter.  Then the tornado began to dissipate and he pronounced, “Now I wouldn’t get too relieved just yet since there is still persistent circulation.  Stay in your shelter for a while longer.”  I guess that statement was for the guy who really likes a comfortable tornado shelter complete with television service so he is watching the TV weatherman.  You know, big Lazy Boy, Slurpie in one hand and Big Mac in the other—so if you get blown away, they’ll say how you really enjoyed life.

Where was I?  Ah, Julia.  Julia gets all the state has to offer from little on.  It didn’t remind me of anything admirable.   It reminded me of the kids in our local group home and how growing up a system kid affected them.  Orphan kids had all they needed to eat and could constantly watch TV (the babysitter).  The state would take them on day trips to Frontier City and the Warren Center Ice rink.  They even had Slurpies and big Macs. 

They just didn’t have Mom and Dad.  And there was nothing on the face of this planet they wanted worse.  One kid grieved that he had blown a placement with a family that sounded downright like hillbillies.  Didn’t matter.  He wanted what the state didn’t have: Love, Encouragement, Someone to follow around, Somebody to eagerly get involved in his future. The absolute favorite TV channel at the group home was Disney.  17 year olds watched Disney.  Why?  It is the station that shows family life.  We took Amy as a foster kid.   I watched Amy spend her entire life savings of $42, earned at her job at Sonic, on Mothers Day.  It took me 3 hours following her around Walmart as she debated with herself over every gift. I remember Marcus, whose West African ancestry didn’t exactly match my German/Dutch. He latched onto us, calling us Mom and Dad while riding his bike down the hill every day he could. For what?  So he could run around with me fixing screen doors the renters had kicked out.  I remember cleaning a trashed-out house with Hayna.  He found a soiled magazine picture of a dog.  Stared at it a long time and asked if he could keep it.  Because it reminded him of a dog he had when he was 3, before his dad died and his mom got on drugs.  Warning: These are not composite characters!

The government cannot hold your hand when you walk down the aisle on wedding day.  The state won’t teach you how to measure up and be a man.  It’s not that the state is bad, they are just a safety net.  They are Uncle Sucker when they get suckered by welfare cheats and Uncle Sucker when they suck the taxes out of free people.  And they are Uncle Sucker when they encumber themselves with so many rules they don’t even know the rules themselves. 

If Julia was real, I’d ask her, “You want a real Mom and Dad?  Friends, Family and a Future?  Or do you  want Uncle Sucker?”  I know what Julia would say.

Zeros and Soakers

Steve gave me a copy of Laffer, Moore and Willliams book, Rich States, Poor States.  Bombshell conclusions!  Laffer is the economist who first studied Sweden and concluded that there was a relative maximum at which the state can tax.  Tax more than that and revenues actually fall because people are hiding their incomes and avoiding taxes.  He then applied this to USA and found that during the Eisenhower Administration, taxes reached this max and that by cutting taxes, Kennedy actually achieved higher revenues.  This Supply Side Theory then became the hallmark of Reagan’s revival of Carterville, Thatcher’s revival of the British Disease and the Pacific Tigers’ (Japan to Australia) fabulous success .  Steve Moore is the well-known guest on FOX business channel and senior economist for Wall Street Journal.  Jonathan Williams worked for the non-partisan Tax Foundation for years and is now director for Center for State Fiscal Reform.

These guys researched the matter of ‘what makes a state prosper’ and considered many things.  For example, they looked at right-to-work states.  Turns out that right-to-work states are slightly more prosperous than Union shop states but not significantly.  This either overturns older research in the 70’s or maybe it is simply because only about 10% of people are still unionized today, down from 42% in the fifties. State indebtedness also somewhat correlates, but not strongly.  They began looking at taxation because tax incentives matter to people.  People don’t just work for the purpose of giving it all to the government.  They found there was no clear link between sales tax rates and economic performance.  Similar results were found for property taxes. But when they studied personal income and corporate taxes, the explosions of correlation began. 

Now just because you have correlation between two things, doesn’t mean you have cause.  Just because you have poor students in school that are malnourished, doesn’t mean that food makes brainpower or that all the skinny girls are dumb.  It may mean that the true cause of poor school performance is uncaring parents sending kids to school without breakfast and not caring if the kid gets an education either.  So when you deal with economics, which can’t do double-blind testing, you rely on duration and broad scope for proof.  If it has been going on for a long time in a variety of circumstances, then correlation is likely causal proof.

So here’s what they found.  9 states with no personal income taxes were compared with the 9 states with highest income taxes and highest overall taxes.  In every category of growth, the 9 Zeros outperformed the 9 Soakers—Gross State Product growth, employment growth, population growth and tax revenue growth.  Moreover virtually ALL the Zeros did better than the Soakers.  Two stunning statistics:  In employment growth, all nine Zero Taxers outdid the 9 high tax states. (Performance of each Zero was better than best performance of ANY high tax state.) If this upcoming election is going to be about jobs, put that in your pipe and smoke it! Tax revenue growth to the state was better in 8 of 9 Zero taxers than in the average of high-tax states.  Think of that.  If you are a liberal, progressive, love-big-government leftist, why wouldn’t you go for revenue growth for your state that comes with zero personal income tax policy?  You would only oppose it if you are more concerned with government control over people’s lives via high tax rates, than with actual government largess. 

The zero taxers come from all around the country—Alaska, Texas, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Nevada, Tennesee—and so do the high taxers—California, Oregon, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Maryland.   The only regional skew is that high tax states do not have any representatives from the deep South.  Hence some liberals have cried foul saying that climate, not low taxes, is the reason for all the growth of the Zeros.  That’s amusing.  So people are fleeing the paradise states of California and Hawaii and moving to Texas, Florida, and Arizona which have a summer fit only for mad dogs and Englishmen?  Or Alaska? Give me a break! 

And this growth result has been going on since at least 1971.  Among the Zero states, personal incomes have grown about 45% per decade vs. 25% in Soaker States.  11 states have initiated an income tax since 1961.  ALL eleven have shrunk as a percentage of the US economy since.  ALL eleven have shrunk in population as a % of US.

The relationship between corporate taxation and economic growth behaves in much the same way though less pronounced.  The 8 lowest vs. 8 highest corporate tax states has 52% vs. 43% GSP
 growth.  (Pers. Inc. Tax comparison of 9 Zeros vs. Soakers is 59% vs. 42% for example.) And the authors run possible groups excluding heavy mineral-rich states like WY and AK through all these calculations to see if reliance on severance taxes makes an effect.  It is not much.

The upshot is that personal income taxes is the most likely target to reform.  This might surprise some pro-business Republicans who would prefer to lower corporate tax rates.  It might surprise some Democrats who would like nothing better than to tax the rich more.  And it probably surprises the conventional wisdom that since taxes are miserable, states should spread the misery around by taxing everything possible.  Texas and Florida really do know what they are doing.  California, Hawaii and New York are great states with many advantages but taxwise they are fools.  We will have to watch what happens to Wisconsin and New Jersey under new management.  But most of all it tells Kansas and Oklahoma  to press forward with Zero Tax reforms.  To create a corridor of states from South Dakota to Texas where taxes are low would not just transform these states individually.  It would make a free enterprise zone where incoming businesses could choose their state of preference based on other factors while staying in the tax-free zone.  That is, the “French Quarter Effect”—people go to the French Quarter of New Orleans to dine, not because of a single restaurant, but because there is an entire zone of fine dining.

So then, could our state use a better economy, more jobs and greater revenue?  

Guts

Now you tell me, what is so gutsy about Obama giving the okay to go after Osama?  If I walked down the block and asked the first 10 guys, "If  you had been in that position and the military came to you one day and said, 'We've located him; can we go after him?' would you have approved it?"  At least 9 would say, "Sure!"  In fact it would be hard to find someone who would say, "I dunno.  I'd really have a hard time giving any kind of approval.  I really don't like to make decisions.  Maybe we could just all sit down and talk instead."  Well, no wait, there are a few liberals who would say that. But most people would say Go For It. 

Nor, as Bill Clinton alleged in that ad, would anything have come of it if the mission had failed.  We would never have heard of it.  Nobody would have admitted a thing. ( Tell me, what happened last week in CIA news. )But even if somehow a story would have come out, most Americans would have said, "Darn.  Missed. Time to reload."  There was no danger of losing thousands of men.  This is not in the same league as Caesar building a bridge across the Rhine and marching his men and then burning the bridge. Or Crockett and his Tenneseeans staying at the Alamo.  Or to pick a modern example, Ike writing two letters before D-day, one to celebrate triumph and one to take all blame for the loss of thousands of lives and tender his resignation.  Then calling the orders.  That's guts.

The only way you say Obama had guts was if you would postulate him in the midst of a bunch of cowardly anti-war leftists who would want his resignation the way they wanted LBJ's if something went wrong.  Umm, well, maybe that is the answer.  

Ponca Wonka Politics

Ponca Politics was today.  Our city has a forum for questions from citizens for our state senator and representative.  I swear that the questions are all from cranky retired teachers.  Typically half the questions will have to do with education.  That's a good topic, but there are rarely any questions about energy or petoleum. Isn't that the main industry of our city?  Isn't that the largest refinery in the midcontinent, outside the window?  Isn't there a drilling boom sweeping across the northern OK area?  Nor are there questions about agriculture.  One of the hottest issues this year is about the Obama administration's war on family farms and the oil and gas guys.  EPA wants to crucify the oil industry and doesn't want to let the farmer's wife and kids help the family business.  These issues are so intense because they threaten the economies of Kay and Osage counties.  No questions at Ponca Politics, however.  There are rarely any questions about roads and bridges although this was a major emphasis in the state because two years ago, 1600 of 6800 bridges were condemned or judged insufficient and dangerous.  And interestingly, one of our major employers is the largest contractor on roads of the state.  No tourism questions, no law enforcement questions, no military questions, no wildlife questions, no small business questions.  Two lakes, 5 museums, cross border meth lab problems, and a secretive anti-terrorist sensory facility in the town.  The town has had good economic growth despite the doldrums around the country are found here. Weird,hunh?

Good thing I'm not a politician having to answer these questions.  The School Super stood up (the guy who makes $205,000 a year and has an underling who makes 185) and decried "the disastrous cuts" that came in 2011.  Wait.  I seem to remember our Governor limiting cuts to 3% in education before further cuts would be made in other state functions.  And he made a rambling rant that was really rather like a speech than a question.  Finally he asked something about threshold levels of cuts and how distasteful they were.  I would have shot off at the guy.  What, with 53% of state budget going to elementary and secondary education, and colleges and Human services taking up another 35%, is the rest of the state supposed to live on?  53% of budget goes to 4% of the state's workers.  And we possess #30 in ACT test scores, civics, economics and business is hardly taught, and why are you griping about 3% cuts when I used to often have 30% cuts in my former small business?  And still some classes don't have textbooks.  Where does the money go?

Some of the questions were unanswerable--asking the guys to predict natural gas prices, for example.  Another old guy who I know to be a retired teacher stood up and scolded Fields and Vaughan over constant cuts in budget and taunting them with "When is the benefit from tax cuts coming."  That finally drew a Chris Christie remark from Vaughan and plea from Fields that no one can predict the timing of the economy.  I would have held up three fingers at the guy.  3 years.  That's how much time it took for the state to swell sales tax revenues to exceed the cuts in income taxes they did in 2005.  Those cuts doubled the state's growth from the prior decade and have been much talked about.  Sorry if that runs counter to your mindset.

So I don't know what to make of this forum sometimes.  Maybe that is why it has only 30-50 people in attendance.

Crucify or tax

I'm holding my breath waiting to hear from my Italian friends.  The news is full of some EPA administrator urging his folks to do to the oil industry like the Romans, go into a Turkish village and crucify the first 5 guys you run into.  Of course the commentators are making hay about how lawless that is and not according to ethics of government regulators at all.  Fair enough.
     I'm choking on the history.  Rarely did Romans do such things.  They were famous for Roman Law, which is the basis for our own law down to the present day.  It was particularly well-defined, attempted to be fair and was considered a step up to what the Romans called 'civilization'--and conquered peoples often grudgingly admitted they at least loved Roman Law. 
     What the Romans did was tax.  They taxed the bejabbers out of their conquered territory--about 25%.  In the case of many lands, residents simply changed the names of their gods to some Roman diety with a wink and a nod, kept paying their 25% temple tax and made it a problem for the priests.  Life went on as before.  Universal Greek and official Latin replaced native tongues.  Everyone aspired to Roman citizenship.  Roman rule was fairly popular everywhere except for one place, Palestine.  Jews had a system of paying civil authorities and also paying three tithes to the priesthood.  Two were annual 10% tithes and one was triannual. So the religious tax was 23.3%.  Atop this came the Roman tax of 25%.  Living on a subsistence, the Jews couldn't pay and during the reign of Herod the Great, he took their lands in lieu of their tax payments.  By the time of his death, he owned half the land of Palestine and landless Jews such as Joseph, father of Jesus, had to abandon his family home at Bethlehem and work as a builder ('tekton', Greek) where he could find work.  The Jews couldn't take it and rebelled. And beginning in 66 AD the Romans had had enough and started a genocide campaign against the Jews that ended with the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.
     What Obama does is tax.  And Taxmaggedon is on the way January 2013 when he will have more "flexibility".  Tax is what will happen if we have a credit crisis.  Inflation is just another word for a hidden tax that robs people of the value of their life savings.  Tax is coming, unless we vote.  194 days.
    Oh, by the way, this EPA ding dong said the Romans went  into a Turkish village.  Turks were still in central Asia when Rome ruled.  Seljuk Turks didn't invade "Turkey" until 1000 years after Christ.  You think that EPA guy was educated in one of our government-run schools?