Whitcomb: Taxing Questions; Opening up Primaries; College Controversies; Old Song in the Snow

Whitcomb: Taxing Questions; Opening up Primaries; College Controversies; Old Song in the Snow

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

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to be lost that their loss is no disaster.’’

-- From “One Art,’’ by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), American poet

 

 

“Everyone’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.’’

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), novelist and short-story writer

 

 

“February is for curmudgeons, whinge-bags, and misanthropes. You can’t begrudge us one month of the year or blame us for being even crabbier, it’s so short. There is nothing good about it, which is why it’s so great.” 

―  Lionel Shriver (born 1957), American writer who now lives in London

 

 

 

So Maybe Better Candidates

Kudos to Rhode Island state Rep. Arthur Corvese for sponsoring legislation that would open up primary elections in the state to all candidates and voters. The current system would be replaced by one in which all officially declared candidates (after meeting state filing requirements, including deadlines) would be replaced by a “general primary” in which all candidates would be listed. The two top vote-getters would then face off in the general election.

 

This would ensure that the final winner would get a majority of votes, making it easier for the winner to have the public support to strongly govern. It would also reduce the influence of party extremists in primary elections.

 

It should be emphasized that primary candidates would still be allowed to have their party affiliations, and endorsement by their party, listed on the ballots for both the primary and general elections. (My guess is that they’d often not want their party affiliations listed.)

 

This reform would be a major move to better government.

 

 

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I hope that Rhode Island policymakers are looking at whether the mix of taxes – especially broad-based levies (on income and sales) vs. local property taxes – should be revised to better encourage long-term economic growth. Maybe they could even look at such sacred cows as the homestead exemption.

 

How much does the current tax structure discourage business?

 

The Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council’s new report on this, “A System Out of Balance: Property Taxation Across Rhode Island,’’ is worth study. Hit this link to read it:

 

 

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Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is in the last year of his generally highly successful two-term reign. One thing he can be particularly proud of is pushing along the extension of MBTA train service between Boston, Fall River, New Bedford, and Taunton. This will be good for economic development in southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island; will help restrain traffic on area highways and, by providing wider access to more and cheaper housing, will tend to reduce Greater Boston’s “affordable housing” crisis. That cheaper housing will include the many old but still solid mills in the three cities that can be converted into rental or owner-occupied housing.

 

 

The Price of Admission

What will highly selective colleges, of which New England has many, do to try to maintain student populations at least vaguely representative of the country and world if, as seems likely, the U.S. Supreme Court bans affirmative for racial minorities in admissions?

 

Should the Feds ban the consideration of race and ethnicity as part of a holistic evaluation of a student’s application? I’d rather leave that to the colleges’ judgment.

 

 

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The decision of many colleges to no longer require that applicants for admission take the SATs probably makes sense because, in part, of the increasingly unfair advantage that kids from affluent families have because their parents can afford to send them to such expensive SAT-preparation services as the Princeton Review.

 

I suppose something like SAT-prep services existed back in the mid-’60s when I was taking such tests but I didn’t hear of any then. My high school’s college-admissions chief, the red-faced, chain-smoking and stout Mr. Sullivan, simply announced that the next SATs would be on such and such date – always a Saturday in two weeks. He said: “Bring two {or was it three?} No. 2 pencils and try to get plenty of sleep the night before’’ (ensuring that we wouldn’t sleep well).

 

And now the kids will take the tests on their own laptops and tablets. Hmm…will this favor more affluent students with more digital experience and could it make cheating easier? And what about kids who may not even own a laptop or tablet?

 

 

Those Noxious Nips

Rhode Island state legislators are considering banning those plastic nip liquor bottles of which you see all too many along roads, sidewalks, and on beaches.

 

Good idea. They’ve added to the plastic pollution you see everywhere and that’s bad for wildlife as well as aesthetics (and thus tourism). That’s in part because all too many of the people who buy them are slobs and/or drunk.

 

And the smallness of the nip bottles discourages reuse.

 

If only more people demanded glass containers, which can be used indefinitely. And even if slobs dropped them in the water or on, say, a beach, they gradually wear down from the abrasion from sand, etc. Anyone remember collecting “sea glass” as a kid?

 

Will someone someday finally invent a plastic that degrades rapidly with no harm to the environment?

 

 

The Appeasement Temptation

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”

 

– Winston Churchill in reference to the Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler in the Munich Pact, on Sept. 30, 1938, which allowed the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland – the high-water mark of appeasement of the insatiable Nazis and greatly strengthening Germany’s military position in Europe.

 

The betrayal of the Czechs by Britain and France was praised by then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as a way to ensure “peace for our time.” World War II started on Sept. 30, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland.

 

Something to think about when some of our Western allies go soft in responding to Russian aggression. Particularly problematical is (ironically?) Germany, which is anxious to maintain its dangerously close commercial relations with Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic police state.

 

Meanwhile, Putin’s constant saber-rattling is meant, among other things, to wear out and bankrupt the Ukrainians by forcing them to remain at high alert month after month.

 

And I wish people would stop saying that “Russia might invade Ukraine.’’ It has been invading since 2014, when it seized Crimea and part of eastern Ukraine, where its forces continue to attack Ukrainian defenders, with the loss so far of more than 14,000 lives.

 

 

Boris the Entertaining Liar

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has come under fire for parties he was associated with when Britain was in pandemic lockdown. But I think it’s not the parties and associated hypocrisy as much as fatigue with his constant lying – a pattern that’s long-established, going back decades to his making up stories out of whole cloth when he was a journalist for The Daily Telegraph. No one, including in his own Conservative Party, can trust him, though he still has avid fans of his show, especially those who continue to applaud that he led Britain out of the European Union, which has weakened the West.

 

 (According to a Statista poll this month, 49 percent of people in Britain now think that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 38 percent who thought that it was the right decision and the rest undecided.)

 

But he’s a far more entertaining – indeed charming -- liar than another pathological, nonstop liar—Donald Trump.  “Boris,’’ as he almost universally called, is very articulate and very funny (made funnier by his chaotic blond mop). And watching him and other MPs in the House of Commons in “Prime Minister’s Questions”  on C-Span is a hoot. “Resign, resign!” “Shame, shame!”

 

The knowledge-and-eloquence-based level of debate is vastly higher than what you hear from American legislators.

 

 

Old Song, Lost Climbers

I was wandering around in the Internet the other night and came across a 1941 movie called Sun Valley Serenade,  a musical film set in the Idaho ski resort of the same name. Seeing it took me back to February 1971, when I watched the film in a hotel room in Jackson, N.H. I was up there covering, (for The Boston Herald Traveler) the search for a couple of guys (said later to be stoned)  lost or dead just up the road, on Mt. Washington. The search was being run out of the  Appalachian Mountain Club’s Pinkham Notch facility.

For three days, about a dozen of us journalists (including from such national media such as Time magazine) hung around as rescuers from the National Forest Service looked for these guys. They eventually found them safe in a shelter somewhere near the tree line. But the authorities were very angry that such inexperienced climbers had jeopardized the rescuers on that infamously stormy mountain. (I’ve climbed it myself twice in the winter with an experienced team. It’s a beautiful spectacle.)

 

“Do those little bastards know how much this is costing?’’ griped one of rescuers.

 

Of course, we journos were bored much of the time, but some of us snuck away for cheery drinks and dinner in Jackson, hoping that nothing exciting would happen while we were enjoying ourselves.

 

But what I most remember from that trip, one of many crazy expeditions during my time at The Herald Traveler, was sitting in my hotel room as wet snow fell outside watching Sun Valley Serenade on the TV and, particularly, listening to the song “I Know Why’’ being sung while backed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. One of the lines is “Even though it’s snowing, violets are growing.’’

 

Corny but it brings a pang about the passage of time

 

I probably have yellowed clips of my stories of the lost climbers in the cellar, but I’d bring on an asthma attack looking for them. In those deep, dark, pre-Internet days you’d need clips to get your next newspaper job, if you were foolish enough to want one.

 

 

 

Industrial Cathedrals

The New York Times ran a story last Sunday about whether a huge structure housing long-abandoned grain elevators in Buffalo should be preserved as a reminder of that city’s storied past as a center for the shipping and storage of commodities from The Midwest – especially grain and iron ore. (My mother’s family was involved in both, especially iron ore.)

 

An architecture professor at the University of Buffalo called the Great Northern building a “cathedral of the modern age,’’ citing the “monumental” structure’s function and engineering technology.

 

Of course, there are many old factories in New England that have been converted for commercial and residential uses. But the Buffalo building may be too big and bizarre to save. I wonder if there’s anything this impressive in New England.

 

Hit this link for The Times’s piece: