The Weakest Anti-Tax Argument

There are a lot of bad reasons for cutting taxes — and some good reasons for some tax cuts — but few of the anti-tax cut arguments made in Minnesota today are as weak as the tax flight argument.  Much has been written debunking the Tax Flight Myth, but it persists, perhaps because sound economic reasons don’t fit our current fiscal situation.

Leave the technical arguments to the experts which, of course, will mean nothing to the anti-tax folks anyway.  So I will focus on the absurdity of the Tax Flight argument and point out why it really isn’t a persuasive one in smart tax circles.

If the argument is going to be persuasive, there needs to be some sort of advantage or gain in the argument.  The Tax Flight people seem to think people will take their side of the argument because they don’t want them to leave.  I think that’s a weak argument.

People who support fair tax policy, community investment, and a smart government might hope this rhetoric isn’t a threat but rather a promise.  After all, if you want to fix government and resolve problematic funding issues do you want anti-tax takers getting in the way?  Probably not.  South Dakota is waiting and you’re free to leave.

But let’s hope they don’t leave too soon.  Watching the anti-tax crowd get all puffed up and threaten to leave is kind of fun in the way that listening to a petulant brat threatening to run away from home is fun.  It’s almost cute.

We could do what smug parents do and offer to pack the suit case, but I think a better approach — one that is both good for the state’s bottom line and like a good kick in the ass as they leave — would be a tax on interstate moving services. I don’t know…30% on interstate moving contracts seems like a good sting.

How about a tax on home sales not reinvested in the state?  Now there is a good idea!

Of course this isn’t a good idea and I am only being flippant, but it is a fun idea, at least when you think about sticking it to anti-tax hysteria.  It wouldn’t really wouldn’t do much anyway.  Even if you could tax people moving for tax purposes, it wouldn’t amount to much.  Tax flight isn’t a big deal.

People want to live in places with a high quality of living just as people choose to live in better neighborhoods.  Places with a high quality of living require support, including smart public investment.  It is one thing to say you don’t like taxes.  It is another to understand how your taxes are being invested.  In an era of reckless public disinvestment and chronic underfunding of government, it isn’t clear to me that many anti-taxers understand the benefits of fair tax policy and adequate public funding of state services in the first place.  And that is at the heart of the problem.

Taxes are not inherently bad, but how we raise taxes and how we manage revenues has become a mess.  It is a wicked brew of favors, incentives, and transfers increasingly skewing away from the common good and toward special interests.  A simple, progressive income tax — combined with business tax parity — can keep the state economically competitive and fund government services.  The system also needs property tax reform that finds a balance which will restores stronger state-funded local government aid.

Grown ups discuss things like this.  Children threaten to run away from home.

Monday in Linden Hills

I am on holiday and I am spending it close to home.   A good choice.  The afternoon weather has turned a bit overcast, but it doesn’t feel like heavy weather.  That’s almost a disappointment, actually.

I have the propensity to rally behind over-the-top weather.  If we’re experiencing a streak of snowy weather, I want more snow.   Heavy rain?  Why not some more?  Let’s go for a record.  Same for bitter cold, high winds, wild thunderstorms (a favorite), and dense fog.  Make it something to talk about.  That weather is best.

There’s something exciting about extremes.  In fact, other than stretches of heat, sunshine, and drought, I like extreme weather streaks.  And I only find heat and sunshine uninteresting because I lived in Tempe, Arizona, for ten years.  Droughts simply are not a good idea unless you live in a desert.

When I see the last bands of persistent heavy rain disappearing from a weather radar with only clear skies behind, I feel disappointed, almost a sense of loneliness.  So I hope for maybe just one more deluge before things calmer, more tepid days return.  Maybe some lightning and thunder, too.

Until then today has been nothing less than a decent one away from work.

Should I tell you about my walk in the woods?  Why not.

I notice from time to time deer tracks that appear to show a deer dragging a leg a little.  I have seen this before, not just recently, so I wonder if it is a way deer walk.  I doubt it.  More likely one of the deer is somewhat lame.  Although it is more common to see this dragging print in the snow.  Perhaps deer just get a little lazy and shuffle along like a bored kid impatiently trailing behind busy parents.

Not a warbler. It’s a cardinal.

The birds were out and so were the birders.  I chatted with two.  The first birder told me he was watching some sort of warbler.  I just nodded, pretending to know exactly what he was talking about.  He also corrected my owl identification.  I have been seeing — and hearing — barred owls, not great horned owls.  Although I do know for a fact that I have spotted great horned owls more than once in the woods and heard them in the back yard.

I took quite a few photos.  My camera works great!  But I need a tripod.  When on deep zoom, my ability to steady the camera doesn’t last long and with uncooperative birds that is proving to be a problem.  Still, I get a semi-decent picture from time to time.  As they say, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.

Going down the trail I noticed some bright white stuff on the ground beneath a tree.  I got excited.  It looked like egg shells.  Here was my chance, I thought, to find a hidden nest and earn some birder bragging rights.  Surely above these broken fragments of egg shell there was something special.  The pieces looked large, like potato chips. But no nest.  It made no sense until I got closer and saw that my discovery was a torn up styrofoam cup.

Barred Owl

Nonetheless, I think my instincts and logic deserve a compliment.  It could have been what I thought it was.

The second birder I encountered had a camera bigger than some beer coolers I own.  He had a tripod out of simple necessity.  (Have you ever tried to hold a beer cooler steady?  It isn’t easy.)  He told me he was photographing some bird nesting in a hollow tree.  Instinctively he seemed to know that the species would be irrelevant to me.

I did show him a couple of my pictures, however, and he seemed to be more than polite about them.  Feeling smug and chatty, in the whispering birder sort of way, I also commented on the “morning” warblers I learned about from the other birder.   When I came home and looked them up in my bird guide, I discovered they are mourning warblers.  I suspect the guy with the giant camera wouldn’t have noticed my mistake.

I do have a Sibley Guide to birds.  It is great, however I can’t really carry that in my back pocket.  I am thinking of getting a field guide, but I’m not sure if I really have the patience to stop and look up a bird.  And none of the serious birders seem to have a guide stuck in a back pocket.   I don’t want to look like a dork.

I wonder if I should get a photojournalist’s vest instead.

I’m not sure how I will finish my holiday.  Perhaps I will find time to embark on my Big Ambition.  I should probably check in at the bar, however, and make sure nothing has changed.  And I do have a couple clients I want to call.  Strangely, I tend to like making calls on my days off.  Those calls seem so unworklike.  I like that.

Whatever it is, I have to decide soon.  The afternoon is running fast and I have a very acute obsession with time, recently, especially the lack of it.  That Big Ambition can wait no longer.  To make something of a high art reference, these are indeed the days of our lives.

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Population and the Limits of Earth’s Biomass

Categorize this under things I thought about as a kid.

When I was a boy I thought I might be a scientist.  I probably imagined myself in all the cliché roles for boys.  (For the record, however, being a fireman never interested me, but being a railroad engineer did.)

Among the questions that got into my head at a young age and stuck with me for years was how overpopulation could work.  I reasoned that the planet could only support a certain level of biomass and that the natural order of things would maximize that biomass.  So I wondered…how can we ever overpopulate ourselves to death?

If you start to think about the question from this perspective, the importance of conservation makes a lot of sense.  So does the business of food production and politics of allocation.

I learned later that Thomas Malthus warned if population outgrew resources, disease, death, and disorder would plague the world.  But Malthus also thought there some inherent self-regulation existed in the system to control population.

For centuries disease and famine simply fulfilled a role in the natural order of things.

In 1970 Norman Borlaug – distinguished agronomist and University of Minnesota graduate — won the Noble Prize for his work in developing disease resistant wheat which was said to have helped save a quarter of the world’s population from starvation.  Growing up in the 1970s some people started talking less about the danger of overpopulation.  Science would save the day.

Norman Borlaug

Of course smarter people than a 10 year old kid thought about this, too, and still do, but maybe enough of us don’t think about this to make a difference.  Isn’t it the case that even with increased productivity there can only be so much living biomass on the planet at any given time on net?  If less wheat dies of disease and helps support more people, somewhere else something else has to lose, right?

And today we see it.  With more and more people on the planet, there is less of other things.  Think about it.  From the passenger pigeon to depleted oceans, on balance there is less of other living things as there becomes more of us.

So I read this past Sunday about a scientist who has bio-engineered artificial beef, one cell at a time, in a  lab.  He suggests that developing his process to be economically efficient on an industrial scale could satisfy the growing demand for meat as the world become more prosperous.  But can we really?  Where would this bio-material come from that creates the manufactured meat?

Maybe there is a limit to the number of people the planet can support, but it is less of a question about people outstripping the ability to produce the food to support a population than it is a matter of consuming too much of the overall biological resources that exist on the planet.

It seems to me that the “stuff” that can be living things on the planet must always have been allocated to its maximum potential.  We’re just reworking how it is allocated.  That might be where limits exist.  Looking at where we are today, for example, one might not conclude that there is an association between more wheat in the fields and fewer fish in the ocean, but maybe a relationship exists.

It is worth thinking about.

Related articles

• Meet Norman Borlaug, A Hero You’ve Never Heard Of (prosebeforehos.com)
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Reading Michael Sandel and Ready to Move On

My Couch.

For reasons and milestones I won’t reveal here — or dwell on any further — I’ve decided it is now or never.  Time to uncork the bottle, so to speak, and put a little panicked energy into things.

I have been engrossed with these thoughts for much of the day.  Obsessed to the point that I walked invisibly through a crowded neighborhood fair early and now almost day dreamed through a thunderstorm.  I even had trouble hitting a golf ball.

Clearly now is the time to act on decisions.   Now or never.

I titled this post with Michael Sandel and I cannot imagine why.  Perhaps he is in some way caught up in the malaise.  He strikes me as a rather dry, somber sort of guy.  Is he?  I don’t know.  I hear much about him and have read little things here and there.  I don’t know Michael Sandel.

For a little light reading, I am reading his recent book, What Money Can’t Buy, that’s all I know.  And so far I am only moderately impressed.  For something from a man of Sandel’s reputation, I find this book underwhelming so far.

I’m two-thirds through the book and it reads like a very basic essay on ethics with a dose of understated modal logic to brain it up a little.  And it feels presumptive, almost lazy.  Not deep and intense.

Among the things money can’t buy, for example, is a love of reading, Sandel argues…or seems to argue.  (That’s the nagging undertone of modality I sense.  His arguments come across a bit qualified, cautious, temporal.)

Sandel discusses programs that reward kids with money for finishing assignments, attending class, reading books and so and points out that this might teach responsibility to work (a job ethic, perhaps?) rather than a genuine love of learning.

But in the reading-for-money example, I think his criticism — if that’s what it is — were more focused on the benefits of learning to read for the sake of reading, his argument would be more persuasive and meaningful.

For example, isn’t it the case that someone who reads early and reads often evolves organically develops better reading and language skills generally?  The ability to interpret words and meaning skillfully is complex.  A mind trained to read for an external reward like money isn’t necessarily (that modal crap again) learning to read richly.  The creativity of reading and language matters beyond the written page, I think.  Where is a bright thinking like Michael J. Sandel on this line of thought and criticism?

Michael J. Sandel

It is a thought-provoking book and I think Sandel is right on the money — sorry — when he warns us that the tools of a market society have melded into a market society.  However, I hoped the book would dig deeper into the way society has changed, as he points out, from one that uses a market economy as a tool to one that lives as market society, where everything has a price and is assessed in commodity terms.

What does this change say about how our society functions politically today, for example?  That seems immensely prominent, but so far it isn’t discussed in any meaningful way in the book.  We’re given examples of the effects caused by market society, but no real discussion as to how it is changing us as a society and why it should matter.

Why, for example, are economic models for allocating human organs a bad thing?  How so in the way we organize ourselves as a society as a whole?  I wanted more discussion about this sort of thing…all the risks and benefits and why one choice should matter more than another.  Something with some meat.  Instead he argues points about fairness — as in paying to jump ahead in queues — and I think we can follow the argument of how this is unfair to those who cannot pay, but it doesn’t really get to how we got to this point as a society — where everything is for sale — and what the overall effect is of this market society behavior on our social structure as a whole.

But I’m not finished with the book.  I’ll probably end up writing a complete retraction.  But that’s ok.  I’m not finished with a few other things, too.  Time to get rocking.  The contemplative life is fantastic and not at all inconsistent with results in action.  Who’s got a bottle to uncork?  Come hither.  Help me write my strange little posts.  There’s a fresh storm brewing outside and I’m not missing this one.

Related articles

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Linden Hills Celebrity

Several days ago, I eavesdropped on a conversation at a local coffee shop between a realtor and an older couple.  She was trying to convince them to reconsider a house in my neighborhood.  The couple, however, was set on looking at other homes in an adjoining Edina neighborhood.

The realtor persisted, selling the neighborhood more than the house.  Obviously a couple that thought too highly of ever-striving Edina.

The realtor didn’t let up.  In a last ditch, allmost exasperated effort, she described Linden Hills as a highly educated, high-income celebrity neighborhood.  And that made a difference — to me, at least — it made me ask:  Why aren’t I a celebrity?

Quite a preoccupation, one burdened with deep responsibility.  But first, ff I am going to be a celebrity, I need to come up with something to do.  A guy definitely doesn’t want to become an accidental celebrity.  Even being Steve Harvey is better than being an accident.  No, you want to be in control of celebrity.  So I am seeking answers.

What shall I do?  I am open, however there are some restrictions.  First, I don’t want to be recognized as much as known.  I will only appear on The Charlie Rose Show.  And I will not be the Grand Marshall in any parade as a favor to an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend.  Other than that, what have you got?

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Maybe I Need a Project…

Writing slumps have become more frequent.  Like my pictures.  Look at the picture to the right.  What is wrong with it?  Aside from any technical or composition issues that might exist, it is just another picture of a tree-lined path.  I have taken thousands of pictures like this.  Usually of the same path, too!

Boring.

This reminds me of watching Kolchak:  The Night Stalker, a real weakness for me.  For no clear reason, I decide to watch an episode, then another, and then still one more.  Before long, I don’t stop Kolchak, Kolchak stops me.  I am numb and done.  No more Kolchak.  It fights me, wears me down, until I am an empty, drooling mess, dumber for the effort.

A Little Tour in Yellow feels that way right now.  I am an idea destroyer.  So it might be time to start a memoir or a play or a collection of racy short stories about coeds and their naughty mishaps at the olive oil factory.

Maybe political activism.  Investigative reporting.  Unicorn hunting.  (I only practice catch and release.)  Or how about a book-length study of Kolchak?

Until then, well, here is a picture of a railroad bridge crossing St. Anthony Parkway in northeast Minneapolis.  

And here is a picture of a train crossing St. Anthony Parkway on that bridge.  (You can’t hear it, but the engineer tooted the horn.)

Then here is a picture of a guy hitting golf balls into the Mississippi River.  I seemed to make this golfer uneasy, he wasn’t happy I had a camera.  I snapped this one in a hurry and scurried away with my prize.  That’s as good as it gets.

Feeling kind of Kolchakesque, isn’t it?

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Science Fiction is Made of This Stuff

In my experience, Republicans are not very smart or sophisticated, certainly not funny. It’s probably a fart joke.

Topsy-turvy world.  I wake up and my computer — the one that never holds a charge for more than 30 minutes —  is running, almost fully charged, and unplugged.  That is big news.  And very strange.  I expect a wife I don’t know to tell me breakfast is almost ready and see a bunch of cute, well-behaved kids quietly waiting for waffles in the dining room.

Alas, life is different, much less complicated, and feeling very much like it usually does this morning.  Certainly the computer working is strange, but I don’t ask metaphysical questions when things work in my favor.  Maybe the universe is paying me back for yesterday.  I was a good guy yesterday.

If generosity gives good karma, I have a little karma in the bank.  I am not sure what happened, but I felt giving yesterday.  I held open doors, gave up a cab, bought drinks, and handed out cash on whim.  I even thought about giving an old girlfriend or two a call.  I gave a pair of swindlers five bucks instead.

Later last night, I got one of my cab drivers to open up and start talking.  His wife is a nursing student at the University of Minnesota.  He and she work two jobs each.  (If you don’t live in a four-income family, that should make you think.)  He talked about was how exciting it is seeing her get a degree.  He said his wife feels so fortunate she cries and they laugh and they close their eyes and hope it will all really work out.   I felt alive simply listening to his happiness.  I gave him a tip on my fare plus $20.  It was worth many times that, but I am not a rich man.

When he thanked me he said most people are not friendly to him.  He said being an immigrant to the United States is very hard.  People are not nice.  He said it reassured him when he met a nice man.  Like me.  That made me feel really good.  Thank you.  Little gestures matter.  Remember that.

We’re all foreigners here, by the way.  Maybe being “a foreigner” is a hazing ritual.  Perhaps that’s it.  But bigotry and paranoia drive me nuts.

So then I ran into a couple ladies on the corner of Lake and Hennepin.  Somalis.  I gave them each five dollars.  And guess what.  They were offended!

Of course timing is everything.  I guess I understand why they were offended.  They probably thought I was a patronizing white guy shivering in the cold and had lost my mind, which is all true.  My gesture was out of context and probably inappropriate.  But I didn’t care then and just let it be.  I suppose I was set on making friends even if it meant offending people.  They bitterly took the gift and turned their backs to me.  It is part of the hazing ritual.  I’ll learn.

My twenty minutes is almost up.  Time to get on to other things.

I’m still waiting for the doting wife to tell me she and the kids are ready for breakfast.  If karma exists she’s wearing tight leopard-print capris and the kids are eager to go play in the yard.

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