Whitcomb: To Control the Plaza Better; Irresponsible Tax Ideas; Pulling Back From Plastic

Whitcomb: To Control the Plaza Better; Irresponsible Tax Ideas; Pulling Back From Plastic

“The man who sold Manhattan for a halfway decent bangle,
He had talks with Adolf Hitler and could see it from his angle,
And he could have signed the Quarrymen but didn't think they'd make it
So he bought a cake on Pudding Lane and thought ‘Oh well I'll bake it.’’’

-- From “Deep Sorriness Atonement Song,’’ by Glyn Maxwell (born 1962), British poet and playwright

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Here’s the whole poem:

 

 

“Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.’’

-- Charles Kuralt (1934-1997), broadcast  journalist best known for his “On the Road” shows on CBS

 

 

“….I’m now at the end stages of full-time parenthood, when my teenagers have ‘other plans.’ A family trip no longer anchors summer’s end. I’m honestly uncertain how I’ll know that the season’s finally over and I’ve managed to escape.

“Is this just regret masquerading as smug superiority and earthy thrift? Perhaps. But I can focus on that in the fall, which is apparently next month, and it is past time to get ready. I’ve seen the Halloween candy on the shelves.’’

-- Pamela Paul, in The New York Times

Here’s the whole article:

 

 

Do a lot of readers feel sad that they’ve missed out on summer? And how many dislike summer and can’t wait for it to end?

 

 

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The immediate Kennedy Plaza area, in downtown Providence, is said to be the most violent acreage in the city. I suspect that the large number of mentally ill and/or homeless people around might have something to do with this. Understaffing, real and/or perceived, of police in the area allows too much crime to happen in the plaza because some bad actors, sane or not, housed or not, aren’t afraid to cause trouble there. This is not to say it’s terrifying; most people can calmly go about their business there as long as they keep their eyes and ears wide open. I’ve never been afraid there, though I have sometimes been irritated by some of its denizens.

 

Do we need social workers to be permanently installed at Kennedy Plaza?

 

There’s not enough tough prosecution of offenses there.

 

I wonder if stationing State Police officers and/or even National Guard soldiers in Kennedy Plaza for a few weeks – day and night -- might help break the cycle of disorder. It’s essential that such a central area and transportation hub – for the entire state -- be secured ASAP. Its problems darken the whole city.

 

And as with “broken windows’’ policing made famous in New York City in the ‘90’s, minor infractions of the law (e.g., public urination)  must be punished lest the visible failure to do so encourage more serious offenses.

 

 

Silly Season on Taxes

Election years bring out many bad ideas, however popular they might be with some constituencies. Consider Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s proposal to make tip money tax-free. This would deprive the federal government of many tens of billions of dollars that would otherwise go to finance essential federal programs and physical infrastructure.  The programs could include funding the major bipartisan bill in Congress this year aimed at sharply curtailing the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. Unfortunately the bill was killed, at least for this year, by Trump’s order to GOP members of Congress to quash it; he feared it would help Democrats in the November election.

 

The tips proposal would boost the national debt that much more while encouraging massive tax fraud as many people would claim all sorts of income as “tips’’ that really weren’t. Of course, some tip money -- which is taxable! -- isn’t reported now.

 

And Trump, knowing that the elderly vote more than other age groups, also says he wants to stop all taxation of Social Security benefits. Insane!

 

This move would increase federal deficits by $1.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion through 2035, the non-partisan public policy organization Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found in an analysis of Trump’s idea, and it would obviously drive both Social Security and Medicare (which is in the same funding system) into insolvency faster, eventually forcing sharply reduced benefits unless taxes were raised dramatically and rapidly.

 

Trump also wants to cut taxes some more for the very rich. Oh, well, who needs roads and the military!

 

Around 40 percent of Americans who receive Social Security benefits pay federal tax on those benefits, depending on their total income; several states also tax Social Security payments.

 

Techniques for extending the solvency of Social Security should include substantially raising the maximum amount of earnings on which you must pay Social Security tax via your income-tax form.  The cap on taxable earnings is now only $168,600. 

 

The IRS says: “You report the taxable portion of your Social Security benefits on line 6b of Form 1040 or Form 1040-SR. Your benefits may be taxable if the total of (1) one-half of your benefits, plus (2) all of your other income, including tax-exempt interest, is greater than the base amount for your filing status.’’ (There will be a short quiz next period.)

 

Paying off powerful groups with tax breaks is an old story. For example, taxing capital gains at a much lower rate than earned income is a long-entrenched goodie for Wall Street enterprises and the affluent individuals they serve. These folks give piles of money to candidates who promise to take good care of them.

 

The endless addition  of tax breaks and other complications to what is by far the world’s most complicated tax code helps keep accountants and tax lawyers in clover while making tax season a massive headache for many of the rest of us. The convolutions of  the tax code comprise a huge tax on our time.

 

Is it politically impossible to simplify this nightmarish “system.’’

 

 

Plastic Planet

Let’s hope that this goes somewhere.  In a major policy shift, the United States, one of the world's biggest plastic makers, will support a global treaty calling for reducing how much new plastic is produced each year, in a major policy shift. That is, it will unless Donald Trump becomes president again.

 

The amount of plastic pollution in the water and  on land is staggering. It poisons ecosystems around the world and of course is an aesthetic nightmare. (Look at our beaches.) Thinking that we can just leave it up individual  nations to cut back without an international treaty to enforce cutbacks is delusional. Cooperation from China?!

 

And remember the heavy greenhouse-gas emissions from making plastics.

 

But of course, we’ll be making plastics from petrochemicals for many years to come. But we can sharply reduce their production and improve recycling processes during that time.

Hit these links:

https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/nations-agree-end-plastic-pollution

 

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/shift-us-backs-global-target-reduce-plastic-production-source-says-2024-08-14/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20Aug%2014%20(Reuters),negotiators%20told%20Reuters%20on%20Wednesday.

 

 

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Major Strasser: “What is your nationality?’’
Rick Blaine: “I'm a drunkard.”
Captain Renault: “And that makes Rick a citizen of the world.’’

-- From the 1942 film Casablanca

 

 

From what he has sometimes implied, you might think that MAGA vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance grew up poor as a “hillbilly’ in southeastern Ohio. In fact, he was middle class, though he did have to deal with assorted common social pathologies.  Apparently, his biggest problem as a kid was his mother’s drug addiction – a big problem all over America.

 

But he used the poor hillbilly image to promote himself in his well-written memoir Hillbilly Elegy before going on to become a member of a far-right techie-venture-capital brotherhood and then get elected senator from his home state.

 

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

 

xxx

 

 

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was recently in hot water after it was reported that in 2018, when he was a congressman, he said while discussing what he saw as the need for serious civilian gun control, that he had carried “weapons of war that I carried in war”  in his 24 years in the National Guard. In fact, while there were U.S. wars during his time in the Guard, he never spent time in a combat zone. Did he consciously lie about his service,  or did he just “misspeak,’’ maybe because of fatigue and verbal sloppiness?

 

Walz served abroad in forward units, but he was not deployed to a combat zone. Vance, for his part, served in Iraq, a combat zone, as a Marine but not in a combat role.

 

Since Walz had long been a congressman when he made his remarks, you’d think he would have realized that they’d eventually get out.  Military service claims can lead to incendiary charges and countercharges.  What makes it worse is that unlike decades ago, when there were many Americans around who had served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, an ever smaller cohort of us have military experience and thus an understanding of  the armed forces’ practices and protocols.

 

 

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What would it take to bribe Venezuela’s vicious dictator, Nicolas Maduro, who just stole the election, to leave the country he has devastated? Set him up in another tyranny with enough money to live in a mansion with lots of bodyguards? In Russia? Cuba? Saudi Arabia? Belarus?

 

If Maduro, who is hated by most Venezuelans, stays in power, expect even bigger throngs of people fleeing Venezuela to neighboring countries and of course to the U.S. southern border – just in time for our elections. No wonder the Kremlin wants Maduro to stay in power.

 

 

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Will we be asked to get mpox (formerly known as monkey pox) vaccines in the next couple of years, if, as some experts fear, it spreads widely beyond Africa?

 

 

An Epochal Figure

Anyone who wants to get a fuller understanding of politics and economics since the ‘30’s would do well to read Jennifer Burns’s masterful biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

The fascinating Friedman (1912-2006)  revolutionalized economics with his work showing the centrality of government central bank money-supply policy, as opposed to federal fiscal policy, in business cycles. And his libertarianism and promotion of free markets, which he wanted as unfettered by regulation as possible, played a powerful role in pre-Trump Republican policies.

 

Some of this was very good in that it energized the economy for long stretches and forced the end of some outmoded laws and regulations. Some of it was not so good in that it tended to widen income inequality, it tolerated such social pathologies as racial segregation and other aspects of nasty political “populism,’’ and discouraged government efforts to protect consumers and others from rapacious business practices.

 

But I always liked his promotion of a minimum income for everyone (sometimes called a “negative income tax’’)  – a more efficient way to help the poor than many government social services.

 

In any event, Friedman changed world economic and political history and has claimed to be, along with John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the past hundred years.