Whitcomb: Pawtucket Teardowns; Asphalt Angst; Tariff Trauma; Our Old Cottages
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Pawtucket Teardowns; Asphalt Angst; Tariff Trauma; Our Old Cottages
“Tax Day Tax, like fine wine, has a schedule, a time.
Deferring is good, tax-free is sublime!
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIncome or excise, gift or estate;
Pay not too soon, and pay not too late.
For if you are tardy, they slap on a fine;
And interest as well, come rain or come shine.
So on this Tax Day, sit back, take a breath;
It’s done ’til next year, or maybe ’til death!’’
-- From “Tax Day,’’ by San Francisco lawyer Robert W. Wood.
The whole poem and another by him can be found HERE.
“Don’t hit a man at all if you can avoid it, but if you have to hit him, knock him out.’’
-- Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), U.S. president 1901-1909, in 1916
“Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?’’
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), American novelist and short-story writer, in 1851
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Poor old Pawtucket. They’ve demolished McCoy Stadium. And the old Apex Department store, with its famous kitschy pyramid, is being destroyed too. We used to enjoy taking guests, especially from out of town and even from out of the country, to McCoy to see the Pawtucket Red Sox play. Friends from Taiwan, where baseball is very popular, and from France, where it is not, particularly enjoyed its intimacy and charm, and we enjoyed the cheapness of the tickets. As for Apex, another victim of the long physical store apocalypse, we ought to remember that all buildings are tentative amidst the economy’s “creative destruction”
Getting Around
There has been a proliferation of new “No Turn on Red’’ signs in Providence lately. That would be fine except too many of them are badly placed and too small. Many drivers don’t see them when, say, they’re on the other side of four lanes.
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An aesthetic and economic complaint: A lot of cement sidewalks are being repaired with ugly blotches of very black asphalt. While this stuff is cheaper than cement, it’s not as durable; it’s more prone to cracking and other wear. Cement is estimated to last twice as long as asphalt. So using asphalt is a long-term false economy.
This reminds me of traveling over Connecticut’s very sturdy highways in the ‘50s and 60s, when many of them were composed of cement blocks, creating gentle bumps as you drove on them. They were eventually replaced by asphalt to save money – short term but not long term. Those were the days of the Connecticut Turnpike (now we just call it Route 95), whose toll stops seemed to come at you every five minutes.
House Overboard!
Summer will soon be here, and affluent folks will be heading to pricey New England coastal towns, where some have beachfront summer houses that may look a bit more tenuous this year than last because of erosion from winter storms worsened by sea-level rise caused by our fossil-fuel burning. So alluring is seaside living that until the past year or two, prices for these properties have continued to rise. But now insurance woes and the fear of, and actual physical messiness of, storm damage are starting to reverse that in some places, leading waterfront property prices to plunge there.
Still, partially offsetting that is snob appeal. Many rich-rich folks (as opposed to mere garden variety millionaires) like to showcase their wealth by living next to other rich folks, who will always want waterfront properties even as the water rises. They can easily afford to rebuild.
Low sandy shorelines in places like the Cape, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Rhode Island’s South County are particularly vulnerable to damage.
As the Trump tariffs kick in, wholesalers and retailers would be wise to find ways to mark on their products’ containers that their prices have been raised to cover this massive Trump tax. It’s alarming that large numbers of Americans don’t seem to understand that tariffs are, in effect, taxes on them. Many enterprises must tack on the cost of the tariffs they must pay on imported goods in order to stay in business.
Economists quickly discovered that the tariff orgy was based on an absurdly and purposely misleading formula involving U.S. trade imbalances with other countries.
The broad effects of Trump’s disastrous trade war will likely include surging inflation; recession, though not necessarily immediately; worsening nontariff conflicts between nations; increased poverty in the Third World leading to social and political conflict within them; a sharp slowdown in American and global economic and technological progress because of the hit to the synergies and stimuli that flow from international trade, and a decline in U.S. competitiveness as our companies become much more insulated from having to innovate. Then there will be the permanent loss of millions of U.S. jobs as more and more companies use artificial intelligence in place of people to try to offset their higher costs from Trump’s trade war, as well as more corruption in Washington as powerful corporate lobbyists seek exemptions from some tariffs; some of Trump’s corporate pals will get them.
But then, what did you expect from a man most of whose fraud-infused business career, bankrolled by his very rich and ruthless Daddy, is a series of gigantic bankruptcies? Oh yes, note that these tariffs won’t apply to Russia….
Here’s a little history lesson:
Meanwhile, readers might remember that one of the aims of MAGA Master’s trade war is to use the revenue to cut income taxes, especially for the very rich – our leader’s most favored group, members of which comprise many senior positions in his regime; they want to be up close and personal when it comes to policies that affect them.
Yes, there are cases when tightly targeted tariffs are economically justified in order to help a nation’s new industrial sectors. Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, promoted tariffs to try to build up nascent manufacturing in an overwhelmingly agrarian America in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. But tariffs generally constrict or even reverse economic growth.
And as funding for federal programs is slashed or eliminated entirely in such areas as health care and environmental protection, leaders of many states will feel compelled to offset some of the cutbacks with state revenues. Given the power of wealthy campaign contributors, this would more often than not involve raising state sales taxes in place of income taxes. Sales taxes hit low-and-middle-income people much harder than the affluent.
In any case, the American income-tax “system’’ will remain the most complicated in the world because presidents and Congress have long used tax policies to manipulate social and economic conditions. Back in the ‘80s, when my wife and I lived and worked in Paris, our accountant used to joke that he should charge us by the pound so thick was our U.S. return; our French returns never exceeded four small pages. We had complicated U.S. taxes without the wealth. Our return is thicker now.
I’d like America to consider switching to some variant of a flat-tax system. Think of how much productive time could be freed up from not having to spend so much time swimming in our swampy system, with its assorted deductions, credits, special exemptions, and income classifications. And what we have now encourages congressional and presidential corruption because its complexity gives more power to lobbyists and political campaign donors. A strict flat tax in itself would favor the rich, but much higher standard deductions could offset that.
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New England tourism officials are urgently trying to deal with an expected big drop in foreign visitors this summer. They’re trying to distance the region from the accurate perception that America has become a much harsher and more corrupt place since Jan. 20. Of course, the fact that our new regime has started a nasty trade war with what had been our once very close ally Canada next door is notably problematic.
Many Canadians like vacationing in our region and we like them here. But many are now canceling, though they know that New England in many ways has more in common politically and culturally with our northern neighbor than with a United States dominated by the Red states of the South.
Presidents of the eight Ivy League universities need to get together, such as at joint press conferences, and fight back against Trump/MAGA attacks on free speech on campus and threats to yank congressionally appropriated federal research money, most notably in medical and other scientific areas. The regime has gone after the schools individually, and they’ve kowtowed in response.
As for the charge that they’re “antisemitic’’: All the Ivy League schools, in varying degrees, have long welcomed Jewish students, faculty and administrators; these institutions have long been vibrant homes of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Note that six of the current Ivy League presidents are Jewish!
The bogus assertion that these schools are antisemitic is just part of the right-wing culture wars drummed up by politicians, which include pumping up existing resentment of “the elites.
Where there’s smoke, there’s a smoke machine, in this case, meant to help undermine free speech at these universities by pro-Palestinian people and any others whom the Trump regime sees as threats to its hegemony.
But Bloat at Brown?
Most entertaining local story of the week: A gutsy Brown University sophomore, Alex Shieh, sent 3,805 administrators at super-expensive Brown University, which, like many elite schools, has an astonishingly large number of administrators, asking in a DOGEish way what exactly they do in their jobs. After he got 20 responses, the institution ordered administrators not to respond.
"I'm not exactly sure what that's about. I mean, somebody's job, their name, their title, this is all public information. Studies show that Ivy League schools are the best path to a good life. But, I also want to add that Brown receives a lot of federal funds from the taxpayer. So there certainly should be scrutiny from taxpayers, too. ‘’
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The right wing is stepping up its efforts in these first few MAGA-in-power months to push for taxpayer-paid vouchers to enable parents to send their kids to private K-12 schools. This takes money from public schools. It’s part of the atomization of America, in which institutions that tend to bring most Americans together in shared missions are broken up. You could say that the end of the military draft and the privatization of many federal functions over recent decades are part of this movement. Co-President/former illegal alien Elon Musk is a leader of this.
Some of these private schools are religio-political indoctrination establishments that eschew, for example, honestly teaching history, warts and all, promote the belief that the Bible (despite its manifold contradictions) is literally true – that, for example, the Earth was created 6,000 to 10,000 years ago – and revere Trump as sent by God.
Well, parents can send their kids to where they want, but must the taxpayers subsidize such stuff?
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If only Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would go back to simply being a rich, spoiled, volatile, sociopathic heroin addict rather than being able to eviscerate America’s health systems with his ignorance, lies, hatreds, and crank theories.
Local Architecture
Architectural historian and critic William Morgan’s book The Cape Cod Cottage tells the story of an architectural style that started in southeastern Massachusetts as 17th Century colonists’ adapted English houses to our hardy climate. The low-to-the-ground and one-to-one-and-a-half-story dwellings, with center fireplaces and steep roofs with gables, were modest buildings that evoked the practical and aesthetic attributes of the Puritans/Pilgrims.
Mr. Morgan’s history-rich essay and the terrific collection of photos, most by him, that follow make this little book a joy.
Sided with cedar shingles, which in the region’s damp, windy and salty wind turn gray, or with simple clapboard, Cape Cod Cottages from the start evoked a calm domesticity.
Many old Capes have been, to say the least, heavily modified since those early days, with, for example, porches, wings, and floors added on, not to mention garages with big ugly doors. Some new alleged “Capes” you might hardly recognize as in that style – too big and pretentious -- McMansions. But the simplicity of those that adhere to the original need or desire for simplicity and economy have continued to lure buyers. Note how many of the post-World War II housing developments, such as the Levittowns, featured small Capes and “modest Capes’’ are still being put up around the country, even in such places as deserts Out West.
I have generally happy memories of my Cape Cod relatives’ cedar-shingled Capes. The newer ones (built since the 19th Century) have two full second floors, but the basic house design was the same. If there was a water view available, lots of owners would stick a porch on that side, often glassing it in.
I well recall the oddly pleasant musty smell (maybe allergy-inciting for some people) of these cozy houses, up from the immediate shoreline in cedar and oak woods , and connect it with my laconic and ironic grandparents and other relatives down there, descendants of Puritans, Pilgrims and Quakers. They never seemed to swear and used phrases such as “don’t-cha-know?” (instead of “you know?’’) that I haven’t heard for a very long time.
(This book was originally published in 2006 by Princeton Architectural Press in paperback. It’s now being reissued in hardcover by Abbeville and with a new cover design.)