Category Archives: Government & Politics

Federal, State, and Local Government… Taxes, Social Programs, and International Affairs.

Welcome to the People’s Republic of Maryland…

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One of the last discussions about taxes I remember hearing in Tennessee was the need for an amendment to the state constitution that would permanently bar the government from levying a state income tax. Lord knows the state, county, and city still got their cut of your income through use fees, car registration fees, sales taxes, and property taxes so it wasn’t exactly like Tennessee was some kind of bizarre tax-free never-never land. Now that I’m back in my beloved Maryland and starting to pay attention to things again, I’ve seen a governor that has already increased tolls across the state and now wants to increase the state income tax and gas tax as well as increasing just about any fee he can think of.

Now I had my share of issues with Tennessee, but the tax thing is one that they were addressing pretty well. If I would have rented an apartment instead of becoming a property owner, by tax footprint there would have been almost negligible. Here in Maryland I’m already seeing a ridiculous percentage of my pay getting sucked up my direct taxes and by a laundry list of special fees and excise taxes… and that’s before I get around to buying a house and paying yet more taxes. Still, the governor says he needs more, but hey, he was able to slow the rate of spending growth to only 2% this year so we should all be congratulating him. That’s not a 2% decrease in spending, people… It’s “only” growing spending at 2%. If my income were growing at the same 2%, I’d be happy to kick in a little extra every month, but since it’s been frozen for two years it’s hard to be very sympathetic.

Maybe the General Assembly will stave off some of the more wild-eyed increases, but I suspect that most of the governor’s agenda will pass in some form or another. It may not be a mortal lock, but it’s a safe bet that come July 1st, we’re all going to have more bills to pay. Thank Governor O’Malley, kids.

State of the Union…

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In the strictest possible sense, the state of the Union, is peachy. It’s not like we have states threatening to join up with Canada or Mexico or anything. We’re in the middle of a presidential election cycle where if the incumbent is turned out of office we’ll most likely see yet another peaceful transition of executive authority. Considering world demographics, even the least among us is doing better than the large majority of everyone else on the planet. We survived our capital city being sacked. We survived a brutal civil war and then fought in the war to end all wars before getting pulled into the war after that. In between these wars, we survived finical panics and Great Depressions, pestilence, and famine. Despite it all, we’re still here and managed to cure contagious diseases, send a man to the moon, and connect the world with nothing more than electrons. Keep in mind, we did all those things in our free time when we weren’t occupied dealing with the big stuff. That’s my big picture thinking about the state of the Union, anyway.

If you distill the state of the Union down to the question of whether you’re better off now than you were four years ago, the response probably isn’t as positive. There are plenty of people who can’t find work, can’t buy or sell a house, and at best have spent the last four or five years treading water at best and being pulled under at worst. It’s not an easy time for America and it’s not an easy time to be American. It’s easy to be an optimist when Wall Street only goes higher and unemployment runs at 3%. It’s a hell of a lot harder to be an optimist when you can’t find a job or you’re going to bed hungry at night.

So, you ask, what’s really the state of the Union? Well, it’s probably somewhere between the two extremes. That’s where reality tends to live. It’s neither as strong nor as weak as the pundits and politicos make it out to be. The United States, warts and all, is still the shining example of how to be a republic. Local, State, and Federal governments fight one another. Political parties fight with everyone. Even the separate branches of the same government are locked in Byzantine conflict. Somehow we muddle through without veering too far left or too far right. Dysfunctional as it is, the process is still a wonder to behold. With financial crisis spreading through Europe, our lifeblood oil flowing from the Middle East, and the supply chain for our consumer goods that stretches all over Asia, we Americans are once again learning that we have to engage with the world – the whole world. The future, and a far stronger Union, lie in the direction of cooperation, consensus, and international competition. It’s a hard lesson, but one well worth learning.

Executive powers…

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Some sections of the Constitution are vaguely worded and difficult to understand. Others are written in pretty plain English and can be plainly understood even without a helpful ruling from the Supreme Court. Now bear in mind that I’m generally a proponent of broadly interpreted executive powers. I like my presidencies Imperial. But what we have here is just an example of an executive branch agency, namely the TSA, being stupid for no apparent reason.

As much as I think Senator Paul and his dad are a little and a lot on the kooky side, respectively, they’re still members of the United States Congress, which means that “in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace” they are “privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same,” at least according to Article 1, Section 6.

Whether TSA’s handling of this incident constitutes arrest, detainment, denial of service, or some other turn of phrase is certainly open for debate, but regardless of the phrase we decide to use, it ultimately means that the senator was, at least briefly, barred from returning to Washington. In doing this, I can have no opinion other than the TSA violated the intent, if not the letter, of the Constitution. Maybe it was an honest mistake and maybe it wasn’t, but there are broader issues that need to be addressed. The rights of a Member of Congress to free and unobstructed travel in the conduct of their duties as elected representatives of the people are specifically identified in our foundational document. If those rights can be so easily thwarted, what hope is there for the general public to be free from this kind of treatment?

Surely we can come up with a better method of maintaining public safety in the air than relying on federal employees touching our junk.

Blackout…

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As a general rule, I’m not a joiner. I don’t show up at protests and I don’t use my blog as a forum for anyone’s opinions other than mine. Today is an exception. S. 968 – The Protect IP Act is bad public policy and amounts to nothing short of censorship on a scale this country has never seen. Essentially, this Act would grant the government a nearly unfettered ability to order private companies and individuals to remove content, hide content from search engines, and generally make it impossible to continue using the internet as a means of freely exchanging ideas that it has been since its inception. The theft of intellectual property is absolutely wrong and should be prosecuted. Allowing blanket censorship of the internet, however, is like using a nuclear bomb to shoo a fly.

I urge everyone reading this to contact your Members of Congress and tell them that a free and open internent is in the national interest and that they should oppose efforts to censor what we can and cannot see online.

Go global…

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Say what you want about the evils of the global economy, but I’m an unabashed fan. Sure, it means we have to compete with countries that can manufacture just about everything cheaper than we can, but I think that misses the up side… Like being able to order something from Europe last night at 9:30 and having it sitting in Philadelphia 18 hours later waiting to clear Customs and get delivered to your door. I mean isn’t a little friendly competition a small price to pay for that kind of luxury and convenience?

I’ve traveled enough to know that the world’s too small a place to pretend that we can raise the drawbridge and keep everything out. By all means, we should regulate it, set the conditions under which it happens, and fight hard in those areas where we have a comparative advantage, but we can’t roll back the clock on international commerce any more than we can command the tides to go in or out. We need to encourage the kind of world where we can order anything, from anywhere and have it delivered in a day or two. It’s good for us as consumers, it’s good for them as merchants and manufacturers, and it forces us to take a realistic look at the kinds of things our own economy should be doing in the future. If going global isn’t a win-win scenario, I don’t know what is.

Against the Constitution…

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Three times today in three different contexts, I heard three different people say that something was “against the Constitution.” That’s all well and good of course, assuming that what you’re talking about has anything even remotely to do with the national user’s manual. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that nothing we were talking about today came anywhere close to that level importance. Look, “against the Constitution” is a fine figure of speech and I’m all for it, but these people were adamant that their particular issue was certain to be covered somewhere in an Article or in one of the Amendments at a minimum. I won’t cover the specifics other than to say simply that they were wrong. Not just wrong, but breathtakingly wrongheaded in fact.

It occurs to me that these are all educated people and then the real truth sinks in. Aside from knowing we have a Constitution and possible that there are amendments to it the average person knows alarmingly little about the Constitution and what it actually does. Now I’m not a fancy big city lawyer or even a passable excuse for a constitutional scholar, but I managed to follow the gist of it. I know more or less what the each Article covers and have a rough idea which amendments were added during which historical periods and the general topics they address. For those of you playing along at home, the first 12 were post revolutionary, 13-15 were a result of the Civil War, 16-21 were all about the Progressive movement, and 22-27 came along because the last half of the 20th century is when we started thinking that we needed an Amendment for things that would have been regular legislation in earlier eras.

I’ve long since given up on expecting people to know details about anything really, but if you’re going to try to buttress your argument by claiming constitutional blessing, it might help if you had at least some basic knowledge before opening your filthy pie hole. Otherwise you’re going to make me want to find a flag, wrap you in it, and then set you on fire. At least one of those two acts is constitutionally protected. Sadly, it’s not lighting dumbasses aflame.

Playing the numbers…

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With the collapse of deficit reduction “supercommittee”, once again the inestimable Congress of the United States has failed to do, well, anything at all. Since their collective approval rating hovers around 9%, you’d think that almost every member of the House and 1/3 of the members of the Senate would be looking for work after the next election. The fact is that over the last twenty years, House members seeking reelection are victorious well over 90% of the time. For their re-electable colleagues in the Senate, that number is closer to 80%. Still better odds than you’ll ever get in Vegas (unless you’re the house, of course). Using some roughly accurate statistics, that’s a long way of saying that unless something dramatic changes between now and the election, the Congress we have now is largely going to be the Congress we have after the election. If that doesn’t make you queasy, you’re probably not paying much attention.

Partisans on the left and the right will tell you that this is the perfect reason we need term limits imposed on elected officials. I submit that it’s not so much an issue of term limits being needed as it is a clear message about how engaged electorate is. Cycle after cycle, a small percentage of eligible voters go to the polls and select the guy whose name they’ve heard before, or the one who has the prettiest yard signs, or the one who had the nicest looking piece of direct mail. In doing that, the voters just don’t stop to ask if their particular senator or representative is part of the problem. If that person is currently serving, here’s a hint: He or she is the problem and needs to be replaced. Two years from now, if that new individual has become part of the problem, they need to be replaced. And again until voters stumble on someone responsive to the needs of the country and who’s putting national priorities above regional benefits or party politics.

Until that happens, we’re going to continue to get the kind of government we deserve. That is to say a government that is hopelessly dysfunctional. Elections are won based on who shows up. If all most people do is bitch and complain and let the same 20% who always show up to vote have their way, well, we’ll get the same level dysfunction we’ve all come to know and loathe. If you’re pissed off, if you want something different then it’s on you to get educated, make smart decisions, and actually go to your polling place. If you can’t be bothered to do even that much, then you’re a bigger part of the problem then the asshats we keep electing.

Election 2011…

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As you know from time to time I like to look at the searches and keywords that bring people to my humble home on the internet. OK, so technically I obsess over that kind of thing on a pretty much daily basis, but that’s beside the point. I was looking at my analytics this morning (yes, I check every morning before I go to work, now stop smirking). I think yesterday gave me my new all-time favorite search term: did jeffery tharp win the election-2011. For some reason, this blog returns to top two spots on Google for that group of words all crammed together in the search box. Other than that, there’s not much record of Jeffrey Tharp running for anything in 2011, except a dead link to a local news program in Indianapolis.

If I did run for election in 2011, there’s almost no chance that I would have won. Setting aside the whole telegenics issue for the moment, it’s way too likely that at some point during the campaign I would come unglued and tell some well-meaning, but stupid constituent that they were simply too dumb to vote. I’d have been overcome by compulsive honesty and told a group of concerned citizens that the worst possible thing the government could do for them was try to create jobs out of thin air and deficit spending. I wouldn’t have kissed babies or pandered to old people and I’d have walked off stage at the debate when someone tried to drag religion into the discussion, because believing in Jesus or Jehova or Vishnu or the Supreme Order of Jedi Knights makes you any better at administering the levers of government than the guy next to you who believes in something else.

I wouldn’t have made campaign promises I knew I couldn’t keep. Nope. I’m not going to lower your taxes. We have bills to pay. And no, I’m not going to increase your benefits, because guess what, we have bills to pay. We got twenty years of good times and now we’re getting the lean. That’s how the economy works, people. It’s a cycle. 10 years from now when we’re somewhere north of Dow 20,000 you’re going to forget all about The Great Recession. If four cable news networks weren’t cramming the economy down your throat and telling you how bad it is out there every night, would you know there was a problem? I sure wouldn’t judging only by the number of cars parked at the local shopping mall or the number of flat screen TVs rolling out the door at Best Buy.

That’s my long way of saying that I don’t think there’s much of a chance a guy named Jeffrey Tharp got elected in 2011… But if he did, I hope he’s got the guts to call it the way he sees it and not the way that’s going to make a great quote for the local newspaper.

Maybe Uncle Really is Broke…

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Nothing warms the heart of the guy who just snuck in the door before the hiring freeze snapped its icy jaws shut then sitting in a staff meeting talking about how his new agency will be offering early retirements and voluntary separation incentives between now and the end of the year. Those options are the last line of defense to head off a more general reduction in force if the total number of employees does not drop below the approved baseline. Fortunately, I’ve got enough years of service to not show up on the absolute bottom of list, but a far cry from enough to be anywhere in the top half or maybe even in the top two-thirds. Still, it looks like we could be in for a long winter game of I bump you, you bump me, and some old timer comes in and bumps both of us closer to the bottom of the list. That’s a great way to spend the long cold months of the year. Uncle usually offers pretty good work when you can get it, but it appears that we’re about to enter unusual times. So in the meantime, if anyone needs the services of a freelance blogger-logistician-analyst feel free to contact the business manager here at http://www.jeffreytharp.com.

Big Mac knew…

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This country use to know what to do with subversives, malcontents, and other undesirable elements who set up shop in our cities and made trouble for people just trying to do their jobs. One thing’s for sure, 80 years ago, we didn’t just turn off the electricity and hope they’d go away on their own.

On July 28th 1932, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by a column of Renault tanks commanded by Major George S. Patton, formed up on Pennsylvania Avenue. Thousands of people left work to line the street and watch. The protestors, who believed the troops were marching in support of their cause, cheered until Patton’s cavalry charged their position. After the cavalry charge, the infantry fixed bayonets and under cover of vomit-inducing gas, cleared the protestors from their makeshift camp on Anacostia Flats. Big Mac had plenty of faults, but he knew how to get a job done.

I’d give real money to see General Odierno and Colonel Allen go to work cleaning up the parks, town squares, and centers of commerce that have already been tied up for too long. If the Occupy Wall Street crowd that claims to be “peacefully” demonstrating continues breaking into public and private property, committing arson, vandalism, and violent acts, they need to be put down as the collection of common criminals that they seem bent on being. The 1st Amendment protection of free speech doesn’t mean we should allow a small subset of people to cause chaos on the streets of American cities.

We use to know the line between legitimate protest and creating a public nuisance. It’s a pity we’ve forgotten where that line is while we’ve been busy coddling everyone and telling them that they’re special and important.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, that’s what annoys Jeff this week.