The pain and gain of taxation

Between the news story from Cindy Barks, Tom Cantlon's column and the letter from Tom Britzman, local taxation is the theme of today's Courier.

The immediate issue is the City of Prescott raising our primary property tax coincident with a larger reduction in a secondary tax with the payoff of Willow and Watson lakes. I say "coincident" because the raise in the primary is not set out as a specific offset, rather it appears that Council sees a rare opportunity to bump up revenue in a way that won't likely attract a lot of opposition.

In his letter Britzman complains cynically that a tax, once instituted, never goes away, and overstates the situation — in fact, property taxes will go down, just not by as much as they would have without the primary hike — but he has a point in that Council is doing this hike opportunistically and without the public vote that many Arizonans have come to expect on new taxes.

In his column Tom points out some of the inconvenient complexities of taxation that prevent us from doing the sort of simple-minded "simplification" that many non-economists advocate. In going for the big picture, one complication he doesn't get to is why Prescott sees the need to boost property taxes: with the bursting construction bubble, we were badly burned by overreliance on sales taxes.

Social and economic scientists broadly agree that sales taxes more heavily burden low-income people, yes, but they also carry a land mine for governments that rely on them, in that when you need them most in an economic downturn, they disproportionately dry up.

At its core, the mission of government is to organize and deliver needed public services. Public reliance on those services increases in hard economic times, so depending on revenue streams that rise and fall with the economy exacerbates those problems.

The wise budgeter says, "So we should be saving up during good times so we have the funds available when things go sideways," and that makes all sorts of sense. Unfortunately the anti-tax powers-that-be in Arizona have amended our constitution to prevent that sort of forward planning.

Shifting from sales to property taxes will help make our public revenues more reliable over the long term. To do this most responsibly Council should be linking the property-tax hike with a reduction in the municipal sales-tax rate, which will be a marginal boost for both low-income residents and local retail businesses.

And since we're talking taxes, I have to add my usual rant that if we aspire to good and useful government, we have to change the conversation about taxes. It shouldn't be about how much money we pay individually, rather about how much value we receive for it. There is way too much focus on the dollar, and nothing like enough education about what it buys for us.

Voting Rights Act strikedown: Win or loss?

I expect most Arizonans don't know that our state is one of those selected for special scrutiny under Article 4 of the Voting Rights Act, struck down today by the Supreme Court. AZ won this honor with persistent,direct and official discrimination against minorities, particularly our native population.

An optimist who isn't paying much attention might think, terrific, we're finally past the era of racial discrimination, we can move on with an officially color-blind society. Sounds great.

Those paying closer attention will more likely raise an eyebrow. The continuing political fracas over "immigration issues," right-wing code for keeping the brown people in their place, and voter ID is prima facie evidence that the reflex to discriminate and segregate remains alive and well in our official apparatus. Does that warrant us having to run changes in our election laws and procedures through the Justice Department? Well, someone has to be the adult in the room, and as the majority of Arizona voters so far are clearly not up to the task, I think I'd prefer it.

Then there are those who are paying attention with different motives, and this ruling simply enables those who would continue to use and encourage racial fear to build their own power and wealth. They can say that the Supreme Court says there's no more discrimination, so we needn't worry about it anymore.

Without the federal backstop against voting discrimination, it falls to us as Arizona voters to take more responsibility to ensure that we not only don't backslide further, but make real progress on being an open and fair society for all our citizens.

Update, Thursday: Think Progress has the story on how seven of the nine preclearance states have already moved to restrict voting rights as a result of the Supreme Court decision. I'm guessing Arizona's reactionaries are only regretting that their legislative session didn't last long enough to get them in the game, too.

Editorial: Cheap is gooder

I've read today's editorial three times and I still can't say with much confidence that I understand what the unnamed editor is getting at. It verges on a drunken ramble, full of non-sequitur and tangential dead-ends and apparently unscathed by proofreading.

Peering through the murk, the best I can tell is that he's reacting to outlay for vital public services, using fire suppression as an ideal good (he could see the fire from his house), and comparing that skeptically to the removal of the widely hated traffic cams in PV in favor of live police officers, speculating that maintaining the level of traffic safety that the machines brought will cost more.

Let's posit for the sake of argument that PV officials never slanted their estimations of the effect of the cameras to justify their own decisions to apply them, and so the reductions in traffic injuries have been real and related to the cameras. Most people still hate them, and want live officers to handle traffic enforcement. Therefore the public sees higher value in getting rid of the cameras and, if necessary, paying more for that higher-value enforcement. That's just how our political system works, and understanding it requires a little better ken of economics than the Walmart model.

Of course, the exclusive "this thing or that thing" argument is far too simplistic to matter. If traffic safety is secured by reducing vehicle speed, then we could accomplish the goal more cheaply and effectively by, for example, removing paving or adding frequent speed bumps. The point here is that even if you believe that the cameras have been effective (and I think there's a persuasive argument against that), you have to admit that there are other ways to accomplish the goal that people will hate less.

Note: "Ravish" means "carry away for the purpose of rape," and is usually used archly today, though its application to a mountain remains outside even the boundaries of satire. (He meant to use "ravage," of course.)

Editorial: It must be Obama's fault

The unnamed editor suddenly discovers the growing shortage of physicians and somehow sees it as a problem stemming from the ACA. This has been a talking point on the right for years, and like so many of them, is completely spurious.

This sort of shortage is in large part a consequence of the baby-boom bubble. That large generation of doctors is retiring with their contemporaries, taking themselves off the market just as their generation begins to need the most medical attention.

The problem is also increasingly rooted in our high-cost, high-debt education system. Those medical students who aren't filtered out by the high up-front costs of the programs are forced into high-dollar specialties just to stay ahead of their debts, leaving an inevitable shortage of generalists. Add in our ridiculously obstructive state-by-state and skill-by-skill licensing regimes, and you really have to wonder why anyone would not expect a shortage in this area, and nothing to do with Obamacare, which of course is not yet implemented.

Sure, I've heard the stories of medicos so put off by the idea of "socialized medicine" (we're so far from that it's laughable) that they're getting out, just as they've been so unhappy with Medicare reimbursements that they won't take those patients. Frankly I'll lose no sleep over these guys, as they're most likely either incompetent (as shown in their inability to understand how the system is really designed to work) or just greedy.

The only failing specific to Obamacare that I can see as a real factor here is its neglect of coverage for integrative and complementary medicine in fulfilling its mandate to improve prevention and wellness care and reduce costs. Many forward-thinking health-care professionals are choosing these disciplines because they work better than the traditional allopathic industry, which has long been hijacked by Big Pharma, mechanistic thinking and profit motive. I'd like to hope that Congress will tweak the ACA to bring these smart, science-based professionals into the system sometime relatively soon. We'll see.

The truly ironic thing here is that had Obama not tried to start fixing our absurd health-care system, we'd still have these same problems, but the editor wouldn't be able to blame him for them.

Barnes on leadership

Welcome back, Ron.

Ron Barnes has been a leader on leadership for decades, and deserves great credit for positive effect on this community from his hard work to walk the talk. His book Lessons for Leaders is a good manual for those who aspire to do well in doing good. Obviously a single column can't cover the entire gamut, though, and while Ron's comments today are certainly valuable, I'd like to build on it and invert their focus. Yes, we need effective, service-oriented leaders, but I think we are far more gravely and generally in need of better followership skills.

The only power of leadership is in inspiring and motivating others. The best and most dedicated servant-leader can have little effect where few people are able to distinguish those leadership qualities, respect and embrace the value of those who have them, or understand the system principles necessary to effective collective action.

Where the culture is generally cynical about the motivations and competence of anyone who would take up the responsibilities of public service, why would anyone with any sense get involved? We tend to get the kind of leadership we deserve, sad to say.

But culture isn't about uniformity, it's about thresholds. If enough people hold a given value, it becomes a cultural norm, and the "enough" to trigger that shift need not be anything like a majority.

Promoting the PAL program is a good thing, but I think a followup on followership from Ron could spread more effective seeds.

And by the way, the Courier's headline for this column indicates just how far we have to go in teaching people to distinguish the qualities of servant-leadership. The editor saw "effective leader," passed it through the filter of his/her own ideas and reflexively applied the reactionary dog-whistle "moral compass," which you'll notice appears nowhere in the column. Note the commenters following the scent.

Oh, I am cut to the quick.

A reader alerts me that Courierwatch is no longer on dCourier's "Blogs" pulldown. This is the first I've heard about it, but since the editor didn't ask before putting me there, I don't suppose I would be in the loop when being removed, either. (Thanks, Tim, for letting me know you care.)

There was an interesting anomaly today in the 5pm hour, in which I got a huge burst of hits. Something getting around in a certain workplace, perhaps? No way to tell.

I've been holding back a little story that is likely related to this, and which holds something you need to know.

I mentioned at the end of my recent Muggs entry that I'd quit Pop Rocket. I thought that would be the end of the story, but I guess not. In any case the story begins a couple of weeks before that.

As is my occasional wont, I commented online on the paper's Memorial Day editorial. Late that evening while checking the new headlines, I looked back for new comments and found one directed at me by name. It was from the frequent anonymous commenter who styles hermself "The Rev," and it accused me of plagiarism.

That's not something a pro writer can take lightly.

I wrote Tim W directly and told him it was unacceptable, not only because the comment was slanderous, but as the Courier was complicit in the slander by publishing it. Tim wrote back, "Thank you for bringing this to my attention. We have edited the offending comment."

I replied that I expected a lot more action than a ellipsial fig leaf, in detail, including at least an apology. I've  yet to hear another word. I decided I can't work with people who won't take their own work seriously enough to follow their own policies or take responsibility for the harm they cause. After a week and a half of silence from Tim, I wrote that I was done with Pop Rocket.

What you need to know in all this is that the Courier's rules against personal attack and illegal use of the comments are at best poorly enforced, therefore the comments should not be considered safe against any kind of attack. By neglect or intention the editors are enabling the trolls. Sensible people should not participate.

SCOTUS caps Prop 200: Toldya

So in a 7-2 decision the US Supreme Court has ruled that the requirement to show documentation of citizenship to register to vote, installed here a few years ago with Prop 200, is an unconstitutional infringement on federal law and invalid. This is no surprise.

This is exactly what I and many other commentators predicted during the campaign and the period of widespread confusion and angst among voters in the ensuing years. It was as obviously illegal then as now.

Can we hope that the now so-fashionable spending hawks on the right will rise up in anger over the waste of literally millions of public dollars pushing the legislation through, retooling the elections bureaucracy to follow it, and defending it in court against obstructed and justifiably pissed-off voters?

Now that the law has been clarified by what everyone agrees is a conservative-leaning Court, can we hope that the armchair lawyers who proclaim themselves Constitutionalists will power up the criticism machine against the tenthers, birthers and haters of brown people who pushed through this predictably unworkable law?

Let's say I doubt it.

We knew it would be shot down in court, and we said so at the time. We knew it with Arpaio's immigrant sweeps, and with the show-me your-papers provisions of SB1070. We were right, though it takes years for the process to cancel what fear-driven voters did in hours. We knew that the volunteer border militias would wind up killing innocent people in spectacularly awful ways. Shawna Forde and JT Ready proved the point for us.

We knew that Al Gore won more votes in 2000. We knew that the neocons would leverage 9-11 in favor of the military-industrial complex. We knew Afghanistan would be a disaster. We knew Iraq was wrong from the beginning. We knew that the Patriot Act would wind up creating a surveillance/security state, and even its most ardent supporters would come to hate it. We knew the War on Terror would create more enemies than it would ever kill.

We were right, they were wrong. We know we'll never get any credit from the other side for this foresight, and why should we? Every one was as easy to predict as the sun coming up in the morning.

We know that single-payer, non-profit health care is the only sensible and sustainable system. We know that the genetic engineering of food is causing more suffering than it could ever relieve. We know that allowing 1% of the people to own 90% of the wealth is bad for us all. We know that allowing the germ of race distrust to bloom into hate hurts us all. We know that more guns create more violence. We know that human-caused climate change threatens our very existence as a species.

We're right, they're wrong. It's not ideological, it's not elitist, it's just a matter of correct or not correct.
Fact.

When can we get past the debate between the stupid idea and the not-stupid idea, and move on to debating whether doing the smart thing this way or that way is smarter? If the US were a person, we'd be stuck in the third grade, and our college exams are coming very soon.

You're surprised? Really?

Building on yesterday's release of the secret extension of authorization for the NSA to vacuum up metadata on Verizon calls, today the headlines are afire with indignation over further revelations of the NSA's Prism program (© 2007 GW Bush & Co.) and its years of doing the same with pretty much every email, phone call and online search in the country.

If I recall correctly, this is exactly what we on the loony left were jumping up and down about years ago when all the Very Sensible People were constructing logical card houses to explain why the draconian USA Patriot Act was necessary to national security. I dunno about you, but since that became what passes for "law" in this country, I've taken it for granted that privacy in electronic communication is a thing of the quaint and rapidly receding past. C'mon people, try to pay attention!

Update, Saturday: The unnamed editor concurs.

Muggs: Radical Bipartisans Stage a Coup

Pop Rocket, June 2013


We have a small group of subversives and traitors in the Arizona Senate working to undermine American values and turn this country into a socialist dependency state. At least that's what their most vocal opponents are saying about them. The funny thing is that the subversives and their opponents wear the same party lapel pins.
     I've written before about the conflict going on for years now within the Republican Party in this state. In May that conflict erupted into open war on the floor of the Senate as the body came to its vote on the (re-)expansion of our Medicaid system (AHCCCS) to include Arizonans making up to 133% of the income level the federal government defines as the poverty line. A very reluctant Governor Jan Brewer brought the measure to the Legislature not because she cares all that much about the thousands of working poor that would be able to access basic health care with state support, nor the many health-care workers who would be employed in that care, but rather because of the large pile of federal matching dollars that would come with it. For her the choice was stark: do the expansion and bring a couple of billion clams into the state, or don't, and spend half a billion out of the general fund. Every year. Not passing it would have been just stupid.
     If you've been paying any attention you likely know that the Senate passed an amended version of the governor's proposal as SB1492 on May 16, and as of this writing the bill is facing a gory flaying in the House. What you may not know is who made it happen and how, and why this vote was an important sign of positive change in our Legislature.
     To get this vitally important bill passed, five Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats: Bob Worsley, Michelle Reagan, Adam Driggs, John McComish and our own Steve Pierce. Driggs is the majority whip, McComish the majority leader, and Pierce the immediate past president, illustrating that the fracture in the majority cuts through to the very top.
     I trace the history of this vote back to the zenith of Tea-Party power and the brief tenure of Russell Pearce as Senate prez. The utter craziness of those sessions led to Pearce's recall and unprecedented defeat by his own voters in a special election, but while that occupied the headlines, influential non-crazy Republicans realized it was time to take their party back.
     They replaced Pearce as president with Prescott rancher/developer Steve Pierce, whom veteran legislator and political consultant Stan Barnes called "the adult in the room." With clear disdain for the over-the-top talk and pointless theatrics so beloved of the Tea Partiers, Pierce got the Senate back to work and kept it out of the headlines. The right wing knocked him to the back bench in the following session, replacing him with the reliably extreme Andy Biggs, but Pierce wasn't finished.
     As early as mid-March this year Pierce and his small group of like-minded senators began exercising muscle by siding with the united Democrats in the sort of bipartisan coalition voting that hasn't been seen in Phoenix in a very long time. Ahead of the Medicaid vote, just as a demonstration and warning, they even went so far as to defeat a perfectly good bill that everyone wanted passed, then they brought it back and passed it. At about that point Biggs' rhetoric clearly showed less confidence he could block the Medicaid expansion, even resignation to its passage. It was a classic palace coup, and while Biggs still occupies the chair, he no longer wields the power.
     Regular readers know that I don't share much with Senator Pierce in terms of policy positions, but over the years I've gained some confidence in his practicality and personal integrity. He doesn't say much, but he means what he says, and when he described his vote in an op-ed in The Arizona Republic as "not an act of courage, but simply what we were elected to do," I didn't read any false modesty.
     That's not to say that there won't be consequences. The battle is far from over, and we can be confident that the rightward forces will at least try to knock all five of the radical bipartisans out in the 2014 primaries. But it seems to me that the Tea Party star is fading and Republican voters are almost as sick of the crazies and the gridlock as the rest of us, preferring the party would focus on solving real problems over beating up on Republicans who won't walk the crazy talk.
     It's about time. For too many years sensible Republicans have been honoring Ronald Reagan's eleventh commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican") and watching their party slide into chaos and defeat as simpletons and hate-mongers have had their day. I've seen the wincing on their faces as they groped for excuses to explain the sorry behavior of their wayward brethren, even as the nutbars were throwing them under the Big Bus of Righteousness for their trouble. Former senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole recently said that the party should put up a "closed for repairs" sign for the coming year and try to figure out a positive agenda. I hope that those among our state Republicans still attached to reality will take that advice, find their spines and continue the work that Steve Pierce began here.

Update, June 6: In the past week Speaker Tobin has indicated that he does not have the votes to block the Medicaid expansion in the House. The House Appropriations Committee may still strip the Medicaid language from the budget bill, but if that happens supporters will very probably restore it through floor amendment and pass it anyway.

Note: This is my final column for Pop Rocket. I think that while the deep pockets of Western Newspapers will likely keep it afloat out of proportion to its real value, the paper's relentless mediocrity makes it an ultimately pointless waste of time and effort for me.

Political oppression or standard procedure?

Update, May 21: With a few more days' information, I find out that the whole story was hogwash from the start. Crooks and Liars has the whole thing laid out with citations, just go there. Bottom line: It was an attempt at triage in an overworked office, involving no unusual inquiries, and directed at groups of all political persuasions equally. The inquiries were not "extra thorough," rather the IRS followed procedure on these and allowed other organizations to sail through. Three organizations were denied status, all of them from the progressive end of the spectrum. It's a big fat pile of steaming BS. What's amazing is that almost all media are bought into the Republican narrative on this and are missing the bones of the story.

Original post: 
When the IRS "admitted" that it profiled Tea-Party groups for special scrutiny last year, it touched off a media brushfire and charges of politically motivated retribution. As always, there's more to the story than the headlines can provide.

For starters, let's say you're a tax inspector and you see, in an election year, a bumper crop of brand-new 501(c)4 organizations popping up with missions specifically related to tax resistance. Then you notice that many, perhaps nearly all, of them are raising and spending money to influence election results. The (c)4 code allows political activity, but it may not legally be the primary activity of the organization. Might you think that there could be widespread violation of the rules in the category?

When even a player as cagey as Karl Rove was unable to prevent conflict with the law in operating his (c)4, I'd expect that more than a few of these groups really didn't know what they were doing legally.

So now, Ms/Mr IRS Inspector, you have to decide whether your job is to enforce the law or to back away from a high potential for violations because enforcement might make things sticky for the administration, leaving an ugly precedent for the future. I'm pretty sure I know where I'd be on that question, regardless of the specific politics.

You may think that the Obama administration is as ethically challenged as Nixon's, but you don't need nefarious intent to see how this action could come about. Occam's Razor says keep it simple.

But there's more, and I haven't seen this noted anywhere in the press. My mom worked as an accountant for decades, and recalls that it was standard IRS practice as early as the '80s to select categories of businesses and organizations for special scrutiny in a given year. This makes sense from the standpoint of efficient management of limited resources. It doesn't mean audits for all, but it did look at common practices in an industry or category.

So for a very long time the IRS has used organizational profiling to look for common violations as standard practice. The Tea Partiers made a big, broad push in 2012 with new organizations, and so hit the IRS radar. Are you surprised?

The thing to look for is how many TP groups were actually audited. From that you can gauge whether there was any real pain involved. My bet is it'll be a very small number, if it comes out at all.

Update, Friday: Since I wrote this more details have come out about what the IRS was doing, particularly that it was being  "extra thorough" about applications for (c)3 and (c)4 status, auditing before the fact, as it were, and substantially delaying the applications with demands for information, a pretty classic bureaucratic tactic. The President has acted quickly to roll a head that appears to have been actually responsible from the outset. It's also come out that in the weeks before the suspect behavior began, the IRS was under extreme rhetorical attack from the newly minted Tea Party groups, including having one nutbar fly his plane into the Austin IRS building one week before.

Williams: How many fetuses can dance on the head of a pin?

The Courier's current bearer of the torch for reactionary anti-thought on the editorial page, retired cop Buz Williams, pulls another index card from his box of right-wing talking points and compares fetuses to slaves, building on this an argument that they deserve legal protection as full citizens.

The magical thinking begins in the first sentence, where Buz disregards the blood, sacrifice and hard work of our forebears to ascribe the rise of this nation to magical intervention, fairly warning that the column will not be about logical thought.

So why even read it, let alone respond? It's not as if the people like Buz, who've bought deeply into this circular mind-trap, will ever be convinced otherwise. But I have to believe that there are far more people who are not so committed and would like to see a path to resolving this persistent open wound in American political discourse.

After spending half the column on an embarrassing logical failure to equate the enslavement of black people with sensible family planning, he builds his argument on the idea that a fetus has human DNA, and so must be a citizen. Logical reduction leads to giving my fingernail parings the vote. But it's interesting that even in his bleary attempt to be expansive in his definition of what is legally human, he chooses an arbitrary, science-based limit, which is fertilization.

Digging a little further into this line of thought shows that any choice like this is equally arbitrary. In reality the reproductive process is a smooth continuum in which a woman and a child slowly diverge, starting while she is still a fetus and her eggs are developing with her. It's only our perceptual decisions that make a child separate at any point.

For the time being we are guided by millennia of tradition in recognizing the new human upon its successful birth, as seen in our Constitution, which assigns citizenship rights based on being "born." But we have to admit that this is as arbitrary as any other choice.

We are in a time of transition for women from essentially zero control over conception to, at some point in the relatively near future, complete control. Once a woman can and does consciously determine whether she will conceive, the barbarity of abortion will recede into history. But in the meantime we have to make a choice in law about how to deal with the conflict inherent in an unwanted or unhealthy pregnancy.

That choice is well established and I have little fear that the magical thinkers will do anything but harm their cause by insisting that fetal rights have priority over the mother's.

But I have a suggestion for the transition period. I would happily support a law reassigning the arbitrary choice of when a person begins to exist from the state to the mother. In other words, if you believe that your fetus should be recognized as a citizen, you can make that choice and accept the associated responsibilities and risks. Not fathers, because they risk much less, only mothers, and only their specific fetus, not someone else's. Birth becomes the outside limit at which the state takes over.

Accepting this compromise would give the religionists the beginning of the legal structure they want and show their commitment to a solution.

They won't, of course, because their objection to abortion and contraception has never been about the rights of the child. It has always been about paternalist control over the woman. It's not that they want  new rights for fetuses, rather they want fewer rights for women. As long as this is the basis for the conflict, it will not end, and sensible people will continue to resist it.

Comments in trouble again

I note that over the recent past something has changed in how the Courier editors are dealing with online comments.

Updates are infrequent, down to what appears to be about twice a day.  This substantially reduces the capacity for dialogue, and probably frustrates many commenters, seen in the higher frequency of repeat comments.

I can't know much about the sort of comment editing I note below, but it has been out of sight for a long time, and its return is worrying. Maybe it was one weekend substitute that really didn't know the drill. We'll see.

Editorial: Editor takes the bait

In today's column the unnamed Courier editor looks at the Legislature's latest attack on the Clean Elections system, and follows its seductive billboards into what amounts to a roadside clip joint.

Even after the editor acknowledges that the proposed initiative sets up a cynical and false conflict between funding for elections and funding for education, at the end of the piece he falls right in line with it. This is of course because the paper has never favored our system of public funding for election candidates anyway.

Along the way I find it telling that the editor believes our legislative representatives only work during "much of their winter and spring." This shows that he doesn't follow the real action any better than the public at large.

Legislative sniping and court reversals have already robbed the Clean Elections system of much of its power to assist regular, not-rich people in running for state offices. There may be better ways to accomplish this noble goal, but regardless of how you feel about the system, you have to be able to see that setting it up in a false priority comparison with school kids is unfair, particularly since the same people who are calling for diverting Clean Elections funds to the schools have been entirely responsible for defunding those schools over the past five years.

Make no mistake, this initiative will not be about improving the schools, rather it's about starving political competitors, exactly as the editor lays out.

The best way to fund the schools is to go ahead and fund the damn schools. Cynically using a self-inflicted crisis in education to kill off a program that well-heeled Republicans have always hated is despicable, and voters should reject it out of hand.

Muggs: Cracking Open the Door

Pop Rocket, May 2013


It's starting to look like Republicans, at least at the national level, are losing enthusiasm for their anti-immigrant strategy and cracking open the door to positive reform for our immigration system. This may be happening largely out of fresh respect for the expanding power of the nonwhite vote — there's nothing like an electoral spanking to get a pol's attention — but beyond the fairness issues, a host of factors make this kind of reform important to both our economy and each of us personally.
     Sure, it's all the rage to think that we already have too many foreigners knocking around for the number of jobs we have available. But big changes are near at hand that will dump that idea into the bin with economic isolationism and doubleknit bell-bottoms.
     Last year the Labor Department released a projection that labor-force growth will fall by 7% between 2010 and 2020 against the previous decade. Currently more than 200,000 baby-boomers are leaving the labor force every month, and that exodus will continue for a couple of decades. The Defense Department projects, "Over the next several years, the Federal Government will experience the largest unplanned exodus of middle and senior management talent in the history of our nation as significant numbers of older workers currently in federal service become retirement-eligible. … eventually the need to replace outgoing expertise, and to fill newly created jobs, will result in a significant demand for talent within the labor market."
     It may be difficult to imagine a surplus of jobs with unemployment nationwide still drifting down from eight percent, but the demographics are inevitable and this is just around the corner in economic terms.
     The aging-workforce problem is not new. Germany and Japan are already deep into it, and it's coming on for the rest of Europe and developed Asia just as it is here. It scares economists because when a population has too few workers, the tax base shrinks and capital, which can only do so much to increase productivity, has to seek resources elsewhere. This further hollows out the industrial base, potentially leading to a cascade effect that makes us all steadily poorer, making recovery that much harder.
     Things are looking up for educated and connected workers, who can look forward to a seller's market for skilled talent as the boomers hit their deck chairs. But younger Americans are generally neither aspiring to nor training for the manufacturing, service and craft jobs that other boomers are leaving as well. Beyond the obvious need for construction and agricultural workers, business will be looking to fill a lot of middle-class jobs over the first half of this century.
     Where business can't find talent and can't export the job, the invisible hand says it has to pay more for the work, certainly at least encouraging inflation. This may not be so bad for well-off retirees relying on asset values for income, but it's clear that will describe a minority of boomers. Only a productive, moderately expansive economy can keep the costs of maintaining a large elder population from impoverishing us all.
     As columnist Christopher Matthews wrote recently in Time Business, "Steady population growth is a good thing for the economy. New entrants to the workforce don't just supply labor, they also demand it," creating more vibrant economic activity. But higher rates of education and higher average incomes typically depress the birth rate, so where will we get those new entrants? From outside the country, that's where.
     The immigration bill currently under consideration in Congress is designed primarily to address the status of the roughly 11 million undocumented already living and working here. That's good as far as it goes, and it will help in terms of regularizing tax contributions, wage levels and legal compliance in all sorts of ways. But in looking at new visas, the bill only opens a few tens of thousand slots. This approach will be woefully inadequate to meeting demand for millions more skilled and assimilated workers between 2020 and 2050. Despite high-ish unemployment and underemployment right now, we're already falling behind for the future.     People cross our borders illegally to work because we've set arbitrary limits on legal immigration that do not meet the real demand for workers. It's only practical to look ahead at our needs, open the door a little wider, and make it easier for immigrants to live and work here legally, learn the ropes and build the experience and training necessary to work their way up.
     We have to get past the idea that "immigrant" necessarily means "wants to be a citizen." The "path-to-citizenship" centerpiece of the legislation is a comfort feature, implying that the foreign-born will become more like us, but for the foreign-born it's not a core interest. Speaking as a former illegal worker myself, what matters to them first is a prosperous life free of official harassment and employer exploitation, like everybody else.
     Meeting those needs isn't hard. We use the systems we already have in place, change the target numbers and give more immigrants legal working status. The result will be a richer, healthier economy for the long term.
     The baby-boom bubble is passing. It's time to look more closely at returning to our heritage as a nation of immigrants. We're gonna need them.

Education, and clipping the comments

I responded to today's editorial and its first comment, but an editor intervened. Here's the complete comment, emphasizing the section the editor found objectionable:

The well-off and anonymous private-school parent pays the additional costs of what seems a better education, thereby proving that more money can promote a better result, but would withhold that advantage from those who can't afford it. Not much of an argument for a PhD, and the basic spelling errors make that claim suspect as well.

Advocates of austerity argue against overfunding education despite having never seen an overfunded public education system. No one favors waste of public resources, but when placed in the real-world context, that argument boils down to "I got mine and to heck with the rest of you." The neglected piece is the broad benefit to all of better education, particularly for those less fortunate.

One can try to argue that profit or religion or antisocial fear produces smarter people, but I'm not buying it, that's ridiculous on its face. Better that we accept the premise that a public system offers the greatest potential for all and work together to identify and correct the problems that will inevitably dog any human system.

(Astute readers will have noticed that the editor used an unclosed ellipsis in place of the elision, a basic punctuation error.)

It's fascinating that whoever's fielding the comments this morning found the energy and motivation to screw around with this one, and all the more ironic that it happened in the context of a discussion of education.

I've sent in another comment to point readers here for the complete first comment. We'll see whether the anonymous editor will allow that.

Update, 11:30pm: And the answer is: no.

Looking behind the curtain

Feel like you're all recovered from the media firestorm last week? Good, you're sitting down, you're chill, time to read this brilliant piece. I'm sorry I missed it last week, but maybe it's easier to digest now, from Whowhatwhere.com April 19:

The Marathon Bombing: What The Media Didn’t Warn You About

Muggs: Post Office Needs New Routes

With the volume of snailmail plummeting against the expanding electronic choices for communication, sophisticates and boneheads alike are wondering what's the big deal if the US Postal Service eliminates Saturday deliveries. It's a question worth pondering in a little more depth than whether you'll get your next Netflix disc in time for your Saturday-night popcorn binge.
     When Congress and the Bush administration decided in '07 that the USPS would have to pre-fund its employee pensions for 75 years out, something that no other business or governmental authority has ever even thought might be useful or sensible, it put an impassable pinch in the postal balance sheet, turning modest profitability into billions in deficits. Faced with the stark choice of raising prices beyond the possibility of remaining competitive (which was the idea for the pols and their pals at UPS and Fedex) or cutting back payrolls and services, the USPS execs are doing what they can to remain afloat, making Saturday deliveries and the thousands of jobs behind them just the start of what will likely be a long spiral into oblivion in a few decades without major relief from a hypothetical smarter Congress in the near future.
     As you read this, maybe while sipping a latte at your favorite bistro, with your smartphone near at hand ready to alert you to your next vacuous update from Facebook and having just used it to deposit your paycheck and pay your electric bill, you may reasonably be thinking that you don't need the Postal Service anyway, so why not just let it go? It's so 19th-century, isn't it?
     In a lot of ways, you're quite right. The USPS has not kept up with changing technology or culture. Information has higher value when it moves faster, so moving it on trucks and planes is ultimately doomed. The USPS is locked into that 19th-century model, both by law and by habit. But it doesn't have to be, and I submit that with the application of some imagination and vision, it could again be one of the most important services in our society.
     Take a look at Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. (You've got a copy handy in your smartphone right?) It's there, right between coinage and patents, as one of the few services that the founders thought important enough to assign to Congress forever: "The Congress shall have Power ... To establish Post Offices and Post Roads."
     I'd like to parse this quaint image for what it meant in the 18th century. In the days when words on paper were the only way of communicating anything other than by direct word of mouth, the post offices were facilities for distributing communications to everyone, and the post roads were the designated routes for those communications. Under this mandate the federal government not only created the postal service, but the interstate highways as well to carry the mail. The reasoning underlying this was that efficient, low-cost communication was necessary to holding the nation together and informing the voters. Obviously It's no less necessary today, but now we seem to accept it can be better done by private enterprise.
     That's how it is, as far as it goes, because the USPS dropped the technological ball with the advent of telegraphy. Focused entirely on the movement of things, it failed to keep its eye on its mission of communication. It could have absorbed and owned the railroad-based telegraph services that became Western Union. Out of that, based on the same infrastructure, we could have had a national telephone service, as many nations do today. From that the service would have naturally flowed with new technology into telex, facsimile, email and Internet delivery of all sorts of communications. The offices and roads of the 18^th century are the servers, wires and airwaves of the 21^st.
     Just as the package-delivery services found a niche in competition with USPS for higher-end services, there would still have been plenty of space for electronic competitors. But the basic services would be secure, and that's the point.
     Today we hear the President talking about the need to extend broadband and high-speed services to rural and lower-income Americans, to provide them equal access and opportunity to prosper. Private enterprise is not getting the job done because it would have to accept low or negative margins in some markets, as the Postal Service must now with the mail. I don't hear him talking about having them pre-fund their pensions, of course.
     Public support for communication and access for everyone are principles clearly set out in the Constitution, and for good reason. The founders knew nothing about electricity, but they clearly understood that if we want a functioning democracy, we can't just leave some of the people out of the conversation because they can't produce enough profit.
     Making change on this scale at this late date would be very difficult, mostly in terms of untying a mountain of legal knots, but if given priority, it could happen. Sixty years ago, to address the breakdown of Japan's banking system with the end of the war, the postal system there began securing and transferring cash for its customers. Today it's one of the largest nonbank financial systems in the world, and its customers love it and use it as an adjunct to the regular banking system.
     I see us approaching a similar crisis moment in our domestic communications. We're already paying a lot more for much slower service than people are anywhere in the developed and much of the developing world, not just an annoyance for users, but a drag on commerce and competitiveness as well. For today's businesses and connected individuals, the wired and wireless communications infrastructure is as important as the rail and road networks, if not more so.
     Rather than let the USPS fade into history, I think it could be very smart and profitable for all of us to expand on its 18th-century mission and pull it into the 21st with a national broadband infrastructure based on the existing publicly owned backbone network to provide baseline access and services, as well as the necessary physical infrastructure appropriate to the local conditions and population, for everyone in this country.
     This goes far beyond your convenience in picking up personal email or streaming Stephen Colbert. Online business activity brings money into local communities, where it's more likely to stay and circulate. Giving middle-class entrepreneurs the realistic option of living and working in high life-quality areas like ours is a far surer bet for the future than trying to attract manufacturing businesses or tourists, with far lower impact. Connected schools better prepare young people for the careers of the future, and better access gives them better prospects for staying in the community.
    We used to be able to think big in this country. I have to think it still might be possible.

Guest spot: The Sacred Bond

The first political blog I read regularly was thismodernworld.com by Tom Tomorrow, starting because I love his cartoons, but continuing for his delicious sensitivity to political irony. This just came in on his weekly mailout to subscribers, and I think it really deserves a (slightly) wider audience. It references his cartoon coming out on Monday, but you don't need to see it to get the point.

by Dan Perkins (aka Tom Tomorrow), author of This Modern World

I grew up in the midwest and the south, and often traveled between those regions as we'd go to visit relatives here and there. I have a very clear memory of stopping at a gas station in rural Alabama, which had three restrooms: MEN, WOMEN and LADIES. I was maybe 11 or 12, and found this both indecipherable and hilarious: what was the difference between WOMEN and LADIES, I asked loudly. I remember my dad looking around uncomfortably, and only after we were back in the car explaining that the redundant restroom was a leftover from the days of segregation, at which point it would have been labeled COLOREDS.

When I lived in Iowa City, in the early 1980s, I had a friend who had to hide from his landlord the fact that he lived with his same-sex partner. They kept an extra bedroom made up to look as if someone were living in it, so they could maintain the pretense that they were just roommates. He had stories of narrow escapes on weekend mornings when the landlord would drop by unexpectedly, that sort of thing.

My friend's Potemkin spare bedroom seems like an artifact of a distant age now, as much as the extra restroom in that Alabama gas station. For several years now, when someone has asked me, more or less -- what's the point? what can we change? -- I've been using the turnaround on gay marriage as Example A for the argument that people's minds CAN be changed, and politicians can be pushed to do the right thing. It's also evidence that Obama, specifically, should not be given the blank check his more ardent supporters would prefer. He "evolved" on gay marriage because he was criticized and pushed and prodded. That's how change happens, not through blind faith that a politician will choose to do the right thing without external pressure.

When you boil it down, the main argument against gay marriage is essentially that "gays are icky," which is basically more about people's own discomfort with sex in general than anything else. The thing is, "gays are icky" just isn't a very compelling legal argument. And so gay marriage opponents have reverted to the fallback argument, that the purpose of marriage is for child-raising. This, however, puts them in the same bind that abortion opponents have with rape, i.e. that the exceptions undermine your entire argument. If you concede that abortion is necessary in the case of rape, then you have lost the moral high ground that all abortions are murder -- which is why there's this odd strain of thought on the anti-abortion extreme, that women who are raped don't get pregnant. It's the deus ex machina, the magic plot device that resolves your narrative dilemma.

Opponents of marriage equality have a similar problem: if straight marriage is superior due to the inherent possibility of procreation, what about the infertile? or the aged? or those who remain childless by choice? A Princeton professor named Robert George rides to the rescue with the theory of "dynamism toward reproduction" -- that penis-in-vagina sex is necessary to "real" marriage because at the very least it simulates the act which COULD result in pregnancy, even when it does not.

I am not making this up.

So, as Proposition 8 and DOMA wound their way through the courts, gay marriage opponents lit upon a more durable argument, seemingly grounded in science rather than animus or religion. Their case, presented most comprehensively by Princeton professor Robert P. George, is that only sex acts with a “dynamism toward reproduction”—that is, penile to vaginal intercourse—create true marriages and lead to legitimate child-rearing. Same-sex marriages, by this theory, are not “real” marriages, because they do not involve “organic bodily union.”

This argument puts gay marriage opponents in an awkward position. For years, they said gays were too libidinous and licentious to create stable marriages. Now, as proponents of gay marriage emphasize love, fidelity, and commitment, the right is fetishizing coitus.

The debate between marriage-as-love and marriage-as-coital-vehicle permeates the amici briefs that have flooded the court. George’s amicus — an abridged version of his book — pits the hallowed “conjugal” view of marriage against the destructive “revisionist” view. According to George, the revisionist view sees marriage as “essentially an emotional union, accompanied by consensual sexual activity.” The conjugal view, on the other hand, sees marriage as “begun by commitment and sealed by sexual intercourse" ....

Ostensibly, copulation is crucial because it leads to procreation. But that pretense collapses when George gets to the problem of straight couples who can’t procreate. He writes that “an infertile man and woman can together still form a true marriage” because “an act of sexual intercourse is organic bodily union whether or not it causes conception.” The couple’s “bodies are still united in coitus,” he reasons, and “the behavioral part” of their coupling “remains ordered to reproduction even when nonbehavioral factors ... prevent conception.” In other words, you should copulate with your opposite-sex spouse not to make a baby, but to behave in a way that would make a baby if you were fertile. Coitus is sacred not as a means, but as a performance.

As the article notes, the irony of it all is that the allegedly sex-obsessed gay community is now the standard-bearer of love and commitment, while traditionalists argue that marriage is primarily about the fucking.

Muggs: Tarbabies

Pop Rocket, March 2013


Benghazi. Illegal immigrants. Obama's birth certificate. Saddam Hussein. Sharia law. Gun confiscation. Agenda 21. Nullification. The New World Order. Blah, blah,blah.
     What these and so many others all have in common is that they are or were, in objective reality, non-issues, topics that look like important public problems but have no rational basis as such. People get hung up on them and can't let go. That's why I call them tarbabies.
     Tarbaby issues litter our history, and widespread online access has made them even stickier. It's a lot easier now to live inside an information bubble that reflects and reinforces a point of view, making it harder to let conflicting information in. People are easily fascinated, and once in that state are lulled into "knowing" comfort even as the assertions grow steadily more outrageous to counter impinging reality.
     In the version of the tarbaby story current in our culture, Br'er Fox used the tarbaby to trap Br'er Rabbit, a situation clearly evoking the life lessons of Aesop. Traditional cultures tell similar versions of this story worldwide. There's a lesson for us here, and it's about propaganda, a subject I know a little about, since I've been doing it as a living for decades. Goering called this tactic the Big Lie.
     We can build our own tarbabies, as any addict will testify, but the kind I'm thinking of are more often built as traps. When an unscrupulous operator wants to distract you from something, relieve you of your money or keep you from getting in his way, setting up a tarbaby is a standard ploy. And we fall for it in droves.
     Say you want to impede international cooperation on a social-justice issue, like land mines. Spreading shrill and unfounded rumors that the United Nations is out to take over your military is bound to peel off a large number people who might be otherwise inclined toward progress. Worried that your industry might have to change because it's killing the planet? Spend heavily to plant fake science stories that make it easier for people to ignore the huge, flashing warning signs and sink back into their Barcaloungers. Afraid that voters will do something sensible that will cost you money or power? Focus on governmental inefficiences or political venality (there are always a few), and tell people that the pols are all crooks and voting is for suckers. To some degree it always works.
     The bigger the lie, the more effective and long-lasting it can be. The idea that the founders of our nation designed the Second Amendment to support uprisings against the government -- otherwise known as treason -- a patently ridiculous concept, is left over from the secessionist rhetoric of the Civil War, and circulating more widely today than ever. The idea that contrails, the wispy clouds of condensation that high-flying planes stir up, are laden with mind-control chemicals, or that a secret government cabal conspired to blow up the World Trade Center, just will not die the ignominious death they deserve under the "um, that doesn't make sense" test. As a species we've proved endlessly that any investment in a tarbaby can pay off.
     Tobacco lobbyists and racists got together in the 1920s to create the "marihuana" tarbaby. Self-serving political sharps and oil interests used doctored "intelligence" to build the Saddam tarbaby. Flim-flam artists in the insurance industry counter sensible progress on national health care with the 'Socialism!' tarbaby. Get a mind stuck to one of these little beasties, and useful thinking processes cease, zip-zop.
     But you may notice that there's an easy defense against the tarbaby, one that works every time and takes practically no effort. Just don't touch it.
     Br'er Rabbit's mistake was that he got emotional, tearing into the tarbaby for a supposed slight before looking closely at what he faced. He managed to maneuver the fox into giving him the tools he needed to escape, but the people using this tactic now are a lot smarter than that. Better to simply take a good look before we invest anything in an idea, and keep looking as it evolves. The briar patch that will free you is more and better information.
     So when you hear over and over that "Social Security is insolvent" or "Obama wants to take your guns away" or "Donald Trump is a credible presidential contender," you have choices: you can take a little time to look, investigate and learn, or you can walk away. Just be warned that if you bite without thinking, you're likely to be hooked.
     Above all we must not let sticky tarbabies distract us from watching and working on the problems that really matter.

You heard it here first

Today we read that the City Council is calling single-stream recycling, including glass, a "no-brainer." Apparently this eureka moment comes at the urging of angry Prescottonians. Good going, we-the-people. Just let me remind you that this fruit has been hanging low the whole time, as I noted over two years ago:

Rethinking the Glass Problem
Pop Rocket, February 2011
An awful lot of Prescottonians, including yours truly, were dismayed when the City "suspended" its glass recycling program in September. Some were outraged. Of the myriad materials we send to the landfill, glass is arguably the most durable and among the simplest to recycle. It simply should not be in the waste stream.
     When The Daily Courier quoted City staff saying that there was "no market" for recycled glass and that "manufacturers found it cheaper to start from scratch to make new glass products," my internal BS alarm went off.
     Among the outraged is my partner Lesley, recently moved to Prescott from Sedona, a much smaller municipality that manages to maintain regular glass recycling through a private-sector arrangement. She dug into the issue and turned up some illuminating facts.
     It turns out that yes, prices for used glass are down, but it's not quite true that there is no market. A look at how the big kids do it shows that a lot depends on how you design your program.
     Prescott contracts with Norton Environmental in Flagstaff to pick up our recyclables at the Sundog transfer station, and we pay $10 per ton for the privilege, a savings compared to paying Waste Management to entomb the stuff out at the Grey Wolf landfill.
      But Norton has never been able to handle our glass. The City's glass effort has been a separate stream involving local crushing and direct marketing. In the mid-aughts, prices for glass fell below the costs (including transport, a big piece) of this relatively small operation, creating the sort of fluctuation squeeze any commodity manager can see coming when margins and efficiency are low. 
     Efficiency comes with scale. Phoenix, Mesa, Scottsdale, several smaller Valley cities and a bunch of large corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and the US Postal Service concentrate their recyclables on the huge Hudson Baylor facility in West Phoenix. This New York-based company does single-stream recycling, meaning all recyclables, including glass, go into the same bin and large machinery does most of the sorting. HB pays the cities for their materials, and it sells the sorted products to reprocessors. A YouTube search for "Hudson Baylor Avondale" will get you a look at how it works.
     Currently the most valuable materials in the recycle stream are aluminum and cardboard. (A large proportion of the cardboard winds up sold to Chinese concerns, an interesting foreign-trade angle. We may not be leading the world in manufacturing anymore, but our consumer culture does pump out a lot of salable waste.) With a diversified income stream, the more profitable materials compensate for lower-yielding materials, like glass is right now. The simplicity of single-streamingencourages people to recycle more, bringing in more profitable materials, and its processing efficiency reduces cost.
     Asked whether HB would be interested in taking on Prescott's recycle stream, Marketing Director Will Herzog is quite positive: "I would be more than happy to come up and meet with your City Council to discuss possible solutions." Herzog tells us that HB has never received an inquiry from Prescott. 
     So where's the catch? A couple of factors stand out.
     One is practical. Prescott would have to truck its recyclables to Phoenix, adding some cost. But rather than pay Norton $30,000 a year, HB would be paying us, and we'd be saving some tonnage cost on additional recyclables not sent to Grey Wolf. We'd have to work the numbers there, but the problem doesn't look insurmountable.
     The other catch is more about vision. We would have to think a little bigger to build an integrated system more in line with the economics of the industry. Recycling isn't just a feel-good perk, it is already a major money-saver for many cities and industries, growing more economically essential every day. It's unwise to hold off acting until the need becomes acute and obvious.
     A partnership with HB is a strong possibility, but clearly it will take a lot more research to determine what would be the best fit for Prescott or perhaps the region more generally. Many cities apply federal and state grants for this purpose, and the opportunities there require careful, expert scrutiny. Here I just hope to restart the conversation.
     The central question is not whether we can find a way to recycle our glass or anything else, it's clear that we can, but rather whether we care enough to deal responsibly and conservatively with our ever-growing piles of waste.