Across the Great Divide

My Columnist Went to Edinburgh, and All She Brought Me Was This Stupid Column.

It's shocking, I know. Katherine Kersten spent a week in a foreign country and came home from Scotland with a "fresh perspective" that nevertheless leaves all her beliefs intact:

• Unions, destructive
• Gas tax, horrific
• Welfare "spongers," bad
• Nanny state, to be resisted
• Government-run health care, oh, sure, people like it, but let me tell you about one case where...
• Personal responsibility, the source of all that's good and holy.

She neglected to get around to some of her other favorite themes, such as religion, sex and home schooling, but that's understandable, since having spent six weeks in Scotland myself on various occasions, I can't remember those topics coming up much.

Although 65% of Scots claim to be Christian, those Oliver Cromwell-burned cathedrals still standing work as a reminder to keep religion out of politics. Probably good for her to steer clear of sexual topics, too, since prostitution is legal there. But she missed the boat with home schooling. In the UK, parents have an obligation to educate their children, not to send them to school. Is Scotland a Nanny State or Heaven for Kerstenites?

She might've picked up a few other tidbits about her grand tour topics. Like why Scotland has longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates than the U.S., and why the people she talked to were satisfied with their care.

Kersten marvels at high European fuel prices like a farm kid rubber necking skyscrapers, pointing to the  approximately $10/gallon price and the fact that the North Sea is a oil producing region... as if Scotland and the rest of Europe were just as car dependent and their lifestyle as oil-sucking as in the U.S. (I recall asking in a Dornoch pub for an estimate of how long it would take to drive to the next town and no one in the place had a clue, since they hadn't been there.)

Kersten says more than two-thirds of the pump price is tax, but doesn't note the price includes a 17.5% value added tax which is tacked on to the product price plus the per-liter excise tax. With fuel prices only heading upward from now to infinity, that would be something for all flat taxers to keep in mind.

Traveling in other countries presents an opportunity to challenge your assumptions about the world, to learn from other ways of approaching life and to deepen appreciation for what you have at home.  Of course, it can also provide fresh fodder for a column flogging favorite themes and perpetual complaints.

Eye of Newt, Toe of Tim.

Chris Steller at Minnesota Monitor speculates that Gov. Tim Pawlenty's commentary on electronic medical records — written with Newt Gingrich and, let's be honest, some anonymous help — was timed to burnish Pawlenty's conservative sheen in advance of the McCain VP selection.

I see a few problems with this.

The uncontroversial electronic medical record (EMR) is strange pick for conservative credential burnishing, since it's one of the most bipartisan areas of agreement on the planet. Expanding its use has been part of candidate health care platforms from Brownback and Huckabee to Kucinich and Obama.

Is a co-byline  with Gingrich going to set conservative hearts racing? He's so rehabilitated that Hillary Clinton is even willing to say she's working with Newt on the EMR, despite his torpedoing the Clinton health plan as part of his strategy to gain Republican control of Congress in 1994.

And how does any commentary piece in Minnesota, where Pawlenty's image is pretty much set, shape his image nationally, where it needs the help? With Gingrich's national profile, he could certainly get his op/ed placed elsewhere. For example, in Baltimore, where he was addressing a national health care symposium at the same time the piece appeared in the Star Tribune. So far, the commentary hasn't been picked up by any other media nationally.

That symposium, by the way, was sponsored by Siemens, which is a major player in the EMR business and one of the funders of Gingrich's Center for Health Transformation.

I may have more to say about the content of the piece in a later post.

Do They Know Something We Don't?

Catholics Online has a summary of presidential candidates that outlines their positions on a variety of issues. It has left up all the declared candidates, stamping WITHDRAWN over the photos of those who've left the race.

I'm guessing Ron Paul isn't drawing much interest or support from mainstream Catholics. Or else they've got a source of intel not available to the rest of us.

Depressed, Soldier? Get on Down to the Pink House.

Penny Coleman,  the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after coming home, attended a Pentagon-sponsored conference on suicide prevention. She found that "nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — that's 300,000 men and women — have symptoms of post-traumatic stress or major depression."

At the end of 2007, the rate for completed suicides was 18.4 per 100,000, the highest since the Army started counting in 1980. The civilian suicide rate, which by the way does not reflect a population that is both young and screened for health, was 11 per 100,000, according to the latest figures from the CDC. And new Army figures show that 2,100 active-duty soldiers, Army alone, tried to commit suicide in 2007. That's about six a day. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day.

However, the military doesn't track — or at least doesn't reveal — how exposure to combat relates to suicide risk.  The VA's mental health director was found to be suppressing suicide statistics. And while a psychiatry policy analyst for the Air Force surgeon general talked about how the DoD lives and breathes suicide prevention, commanders in the field refer to the behavioral health unit as the "pink house."

They Teach History There, Don't They?

It was really a great speech on public life and public space, and hizzoner threw the note-laden pages into the air after he read each one, clearly in his element and relishing the moment. And he ended with a defense of planning, saying that people often asked him why he spent so much time thinking about little details like sidewalks and parks when there were so many larger, more pressing problems at hand ... things like the war in Iraq, climate change, or deepening economic inequalities. He said that he tells those people to "connect the dots", that we're fighting a war for oil for our cars, that climate change is going to demand walkable streets and less intensive lifestyles, and that economic growth starts with strong neighborhoods. You could tell he really meant it when he said, "together, we're going to rebuild the American city."

Last week, Bill Lindeke recapped Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak's speech to the American Institute of Architects  Reweaving the Urban Fabric: Minneapolis Great City Design Teams gala April 10th. And today he decodes the University of Minnesota's position on Central Corridor light rail.

The University argument against running the line down Washington Avenue seems to consist of "it will have serious adverse consequences," primarily by cutting down Washington Avenue's usefulness as a car-choked thoroughfare that divides the campus.

One particularly amusing rationale trotted out is how a light rail line and its overhead wires would destroy the integrity of the Northrop Mall Historic District, a culturally significant area "possessing integrity of location, design, setting, materials, spirit and association" that just happens to be passed by a concrete-wall-divided, four-lane,  bus- and car-filled trench.

The original design for the mall, part of a campus master plan that was never fully executed, was begun informally in 1907 by architect Cass Gilbert, commissioned a year later and built in a reduced form some 20 years after that.

In 1890, the Washington Avenue Bridge was reinforced to accommodate streetcars, and the Twin City Rapid Transit Company soon connected Minneapolis and St. Paul over the bridge with the area's first inter-urban line. The company issued a painting of the streetcar system in 1904 and updated it in 1916 [here in section] showing the Washington route through the campus connecting with University Avenue. The "historic" overhead-wire-free vista down the mall came only after 1954, when the streetcar line was dismantled.

Bad Ads Mocked: Romney the Gun Candidate.

Another in the series.

Romney the Gun Candidate

Tax and Spending Rankings: Who's Right?

Arguing over state rankings on taxes is a little like arguing over the order of professional draft picks — entertaining, but what really matters is results. Taxes, like college prospects, haven't accomplished anything until they are actually put in the game.

How much a state invests in itself and how that spending contributes to greater prosperity is the discussion we should be having, but instead, we're too often stuck on marginally meaningful distinctions about taxes.

Case in point from last week:

David Strom, President of the Minnesota Free Market Institute today lashed out at liberal think tank Minnesota 2020 and its President Matt Entenza for misleading Minnesotans on Minnesota taxes.

In Monday's (April 12) Star Tribune, Entenza claims that Minnesota's taxes are below the national average, placing Minnesotans' tax burden at the 32nd in the nation. That number is simply incorrect.

Well, if you ignore what Entenza actually said and trot out your own misleading number, it's simple to make it look incorrect.

Here's how Entenza's comment was reported in the Star Tribune story Strom cites:

But Matt Entenza, a former DFL legislator who now heads a think tank called Minnesota 2020, said the protesters had it wrong. For starters, he said, Minnesota is not one of the highest-taxed states in the nation if researchers consider all taxes, including fees, local property taxes and special assessments. Minnesota ranks number 32 in the nation when the broader taxes are included, he said.

Strom can't refute Minnesota's ranking on that basis, so he quotes a mixed bag of other numbers that support his claim that Minnesota's taxes are above average. But if you carefully read one of those reports, it actually supports Entenza's statement. It says:

For total state and local taxes, Minnesota ranked 20th for taxes as a percent of income. [One number Strom quotes to support his higher-than-average contention.] In comparison, Minnesota ranks 28th for state and local own-source revenue (taxes plus fees) and 33st [sic] for total general revenue (taxes, fees, intergovernmental revenue) as a percent of income.

Total general revenue reflects what Minnesota or other states actually have to spend on services. When you look at how Minnesota's state and local governments compare with other states on spending, we're above average only in public welfare and transportation. [See this report from the middle-of-the-road Minnesota Taxpayers Association Download pdf.]

Strom, the Minnesota Free Market Institute and the Taxpayers League of Minnesota may still insist on citing per-capita tax rates. MN2020, the Minnesota Budget Project and Growth & Justice will say percent of income is the best measure to use. Entenza's statement holds up, but there's no settling this argument.

But on the spending side, where it really matters, Minnesota is starting to look like a late-round pick.

New Package, Same Product.

Paul Krugman says John McCain's proposed tax policy — reinstating the "temporary" Bush tax cuts set to expire in 2010 — will reduce federal revenue by more than $5 trillion over 10 years. (And that doesn't include the trillions we'll still owe for the Iraq adventure in democracy.)

But here’s the thing: the reason the Bush tax cuts are set to expire is that the Bush administration engaged in a game of deception. It put an expiration date on the tax cuts, which it never intended to honor, as a way to hide those tax cuts’ true cost.

The McCain campaign wants us to accept the success of that deception as a fact of life. Mr. Holtz-Eakin is saying, in effect, “We’re not engaged in any new irresponsibility — we’re just perpetuating the Bush administration’s irresponsibility. That doesn’t count.”

Of course, Pres. Bush would never have to honor an expiration date of 2010 when his own remove-by date was January 2009. Maybe he was trying a Hail Mary pass, hoping things would turn out okay if his tax-cuts-grow-the-economy dogma somehow turned out to be true. Either way, it meant he wouldn't have to face the political consequences of finding the revenue or radically cutting government.

His successor will, and to get the job, now McCain is trying to get Americans to buy the Bush product all over again.

Of Fat Tires and Futility.

Yesterday we rode to Fruita for the Fat Tire Festival to watch the "Clunker Crit," a series of round-the-block races on aged and modified bicycles for all ages. Well, not races, exactly. More like self-propelled improvisational chaos on two or three wheels.

An uncharged battery — which I discovered only when trying to shoot the stars machined through the front sprocket of a Western Flyer — means no pics of the event, but photos wouldn't quite capture it anyway. The Crit takes the place of the parade that's part of any small town festival, except this parade changes direction at random intervals, participants may be required to exchange clothing, spectators may be spanked, and the races are handicapped on the fly so anyone trying too hard is guaranteed to lose.

In other words, the Fat Tire Festival is pretty much like any festival would be if it were run by stoners who love their community, drink copious amounts of beer and can ride trails that would cause arrhythmias in most Americans if they were walking.

When I grew up out here, Fruita was a tumbleweed farm and ranch town notable only for its wrestling team. It had so dominated the smaller high school class, it moved up to compete with the big boys, where it remained a force.

Today, the town is a work in progress, which is nevertheless a considerable advance over the old days. Suburban-style housing developments rise on alkali flats across from trailers and tin sheds. A new Walgreen's is going in downtown, but a refurbished brew pub shut down after a couple of tries. One storefront has been spruced up considerably from its days as an antique-cum-junk store, but the new occupant appears to be in the saving souls business, the second such establishment in that block.

Around the corner, the dry cleaners has closed for good, two outfits still bagged inside and all the fixtures left behind by a retiring owner who has no more illusions of a buyer coming along. The future for the sewing and alterations shop next door doesn't look much more hopeful; the proprietor was out having eye surgery.

Festival sponsor Over the Edge — about which I overheard one customer say, "This has got to be the coolest bike shop in the world" — is full of people today, but the cheapest bike with a price tag was on sale for $1899. Mountain biking has put Fruita on the map, but it is the map of Towns Where People Come to Look Without Spending Any Money.

Mingling in the friendly, tattooed and flat-bellied Fat Tire crowd, it was impossible not to harbor a little hope that we'll work our way out of this latest economic mess. How bad can it be if multi-generations can come together to eat ice cream, drink beer and watch renegade silliness on a Saturday afternoon? Perhaps the future does belong to smaller-scale life and counter-cultural, back-country boosterism.

But the ride back and the books awaiting reminded me of a larger landscape. It's the leading western edge of Obama's bitter midwest, a dry husk place where even the cheap suburban houses will never sprout, a place the kids with even half a mind will desert, not necessarily for anything better but for some place, any place, no so obviously on its last legs.

On the western slope, we're much better off than the High Plains towns on the other side of the state depicted in the recently published West of Last Chance, by Kent Haruf and Peter Brown. A week ago, the town of Ordway was nearly decimated by a wildfire that authorities said escalated because of high winds and dried-out farm fields fallowed because the owners could do better selling their water to flush city toilets than to irrigate their land.

Obama got in trouble for speaking a small truth about these places while trying to avoid the much larger one about the country. As Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, put it in a recent essay, "The Audacity of Depression":

And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course — that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

[...]

Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint, Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they write their campaign "plans for change." 

All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as modern civilization and mass society — halting, then reversing the momentum this monolith has achieved.

Okay, now I'm depressed. So today, it's read first, then bike.

 

Defining Franken: First His Jokes, Now His Business.

For months, Minnesota Democrats Exposed has dribbled out scores of out-of-context clips and quotes from a man whose business it was to say funny things. The humorless Michael Brodkorb labored mightily but unsuccessfully to define Senate candidate Al Franken as a mean man — never quite getting that many voters  understand the difference between cutting remarks about people and cutting programs that help people. 

So Brodkorb kept digging, and at last he got his mainstream media stories, if not his cherished attribution. While many people get the difference between a comedian and a bigot, fewer understand running a small but complex business. Thus, Franken's failures to make proper business filings in New York and California can more credibly be blown up into gargantuan character flaws and ethical lapses.

I'd wager at least half the U.S. Senate could not walk you through their tax returns, and if I found one senator's return without a signature from a professional tax preparer, I'd be shocked. On that basis alone, Franken would fit in. And when you add the fact that a senator's main job is to pontificate in committee and read speeches with conviction while staffers do the work, why, he's eminently qualified. Franken, at least, writes most of his own material.

Does bad paperwork disqualify him? As a former business owner who has not yet picked a candidate, I say no. But then, I have some empathy that has nothing to do with politics.

Most entrepreneurs, entertainers and other innovative types succeed by focusing intensely on creative output. Soon they are horrified to discover the are running a small business. This is the last thing they want to do. It is also the last thing most of them are cut out to do. While some will have succeeded by focusing on the details and others by focusing on the big picture, none get very far in business by focusing on the minutia.

Except for those stalwarts who do it for a living, filing tax forms and keeping up with regulations is minutia — especially in a business like Franken's that involved many different income streams from multiple states. Speaking fees, publishing and broadcast royalties, paychecks for TV appearances and associated expenses must only be part of his accounting. Then there's keeping up with tax and business law wherever he may land and pick up a payment.

Trust me, anyone in his situation will rely on others to stay on top of this stuff.

For example, I sold my company in 2005 but still own a very small stake in it. Among the 70 or so pages of tax forms I file each April, eight pages go the state of Georgia, where the company has an office. This year, I sent a check to Georgia for $6, the amount due on the taxable business income from Georgia attributed to me for 2007, which is still sitting on the company books, not in my pocket.

Meeting this obligation no doubt cost me more than I paid in tax. Was I aware I owed this tax? Only because my accountants told me so. Did I pay the correct amount? I have no idea and even less interest in reworking my accountant's computations, which were based on reports from my former company's accounting firm. If a problem turns up, I'll address it.

Franken's affairs were certainly much more complicated than mine, and his supposed transgressions may involve larger amounts, but I haven't seen any evidence he did anything to exploit the rules, intentionally evade his responsibilities or conceal his income. In my book, he's guilty of antipathy toward paperwork and a failure to hire the right people to watch over his areas of disinterest.

Minnesota had a U.S. Senator in the early '90s who also relied on the advice of lawyers and accountants for how he structured his speaking fees, publishing expenses and Minnesota condo ownership. By most accounts Dave Durenberger was once a pretty good senator and became an even better ex-senator. I had some empathy for him at the time, too, and was willing to accept that his conduct was in good faith. If you couldn't find a lawyer, accountant or investment advisor who'd tell you a shady deal was okay back then, it only meant you didn't have enough income to warrant sheltering it. But after reading this analysis and this retrospective from a former Republican staffer, I'm not so sure.

The difference between the two cases illuminates a couple relevant points, though. Franken's errors were passive, Durenberger's, active. Franken's failure to file may have temporarily put additional money in his pocket, but if you're a public figure and that's your goal, you structure a deal that looks legitimate, as Durenberger and his advisers did. Franken's business lapses occurred when he was flying around the country as an entertainer, not when he was a U.S. Senator collecting honoraria from groups that had legislation before his committees. Franken's oversight sullied only his future campaign; Durenberger's cast a shadow over all politicians and the institution he served.

Sure, I wish Franken had been given more attentive counsel, found the errors on his own and corrected them before the stink factory got a hold of them. I wish he had explained himself more completely and clearly. But does this say anything about his ability to carry out the work of the Senate?

I think the real lesson is about why more lawyers than business people run for public office.