Whitcomb: Intimations of an Ending; Always on Camera; Therapy for Tax Trauma?

Sunday, August 01, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

 

“The earth compels, upon it

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Sonnets and birds descend;

And soon, my friend,

We shall have no time for dances.’’

-- From “The Sunlight in the Garden,’’ by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), a poet from Northern Ireland who spent most of his life in England

 

 

 

-- “What happens is that every August photographers camp out in Hyannis Port. So anytime I go down to the beach, or go to the pier or whatever, there's no avoiding them.’’

-- John F. Kennedy Jr. (1960-1999), son of you know who;  journalist; publisher of George magazine, and lawyer. Spatially disoriented off Martha’s Vineyard, he crashed the small plane he was inexpertly piloting into the ocean, killing himself and his passengers -- his wife,  Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. Hyannis Port contains the summer compound of the Kennedy family, a much more famous place decades ago than now.

 

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Even with all the rain we’ve had, a few leaves on the plane trees are browning and falling off, and the weeds and ivy are growing a tad more slowly these days.  Seeds are gaining prominence over flowers. And yet the woods and suburban roadsides still resemble very green jungle so thick that it seems hard to believe that autumn freezes will wither it into a dead brown.

 

In the evening we’re hearing the first choruses of katydids, especially loud at the end of hot days, and there’s the slight dimming of the afternoon light compared to a week or two ago. Soon will come the back-to-school ads. And friends in Vermont have been touting the fall foliage in the Taconic Range.

 

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Brikcley's Ice Cream

Summer is the time of good goo: Ice-cream cones drip onto your chin; hot-dog mustard turns your face and hands an unsightly yellow; corn-on-the-cob butter slicks up the table; popsicles melt onto your sticky hands as you try to finish them before they turn completely into liquid.  And that fading favorite of kids at summer county fairs and amusement parks -- cotton candy, instant diabetes!

 

Messy but happy experiences.

 

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With smartphones as cameras; the spreading mandate that police wear body cams; surveillance cameras all around and in so many government buildings, businesses and residences, one wonders how much this is changing our brains. Is it intensifying our self-consciousness and, indeed, paranoia?  What would George Orwell have made of this?

 

This is a sibling to the general feeling that privacy is disappearing in the World Wide Web world. All one can hope to do is to keep piling on public stuff to bury the embarrassing stuff we’ve said and done before. Privacy through layering?

 

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I must occasionally give credit to the many municipal workers, in Providence and elsewhere, who deal so directly and kindly with the public on such a range of issues, from confusing property-tax bills, to crumbling streets, to law and order. In my experience of decades as a journalist or simply as a resident, I’ve found that most display patience and helpfulness, in the face of understaffing and outdated computer and other systems. They must often deal with impatient, confused and angry people.  They generally do it with courtesy and good will.

 

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Gondola in Providence PHOTO: file

Pray for September

We’re very sorry that the frequent weekend rains have cut into the revenues of New England summer resort areas this summer, especially after their huge hit by the pandemic last summer. And now, mostly thanks to the unvaccinated, COVID-19’s Delta variant threatens to sharply erode their revenues and our pleasure during the rest of this summer. But September probably has the nicest weather of the year in southern New England, apart from stray hurricanes. Maybe more should be put into marketing that month. And, for that matter, global warming is keeping things mild later in the fall.

 

Think of Columbus Day as the new Labor Day.

 

 

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Hurricane Carol, Downtown Providence PHOTO: Providence Public Library Collection

Speaking of hurricanes, the season has been sleepy for the last couple of weeks. But it’s expected to pick up soon. Hit this link for predictions:

 

 

 

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Masks and tests are obviously helpful in the COVID-19 mess. But what we need most is more mass vaccinations! Require people entering public places to show proof that they’ve had their shots. That’s the only approach that you can have really strong confidence in, though, as with earlier vaccination programs against other diseases, no vaccine is 100 percent effective, there can be (mostly mild) side-effects and policies must be modified as conditions change and new data come in. Viruses can rapidly mutate. That’s science.

 

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker have a very tough task in trying to adapt frequently changing federal COVID guidelines to local laws and regulations, including the political ones. Public health is mostly a state, not a federal responsibility.

 

Consider living in an America without the polio, measles and other vaccines that have saved so many people over the years!  That’s why so many schools have long mandated vaccinations.  Call it promoting relative freedom from getting sick. But there was more respect for science decades ago than in our current demagogic, Internet, cable-TV “news’’, big-lie-generating times.

 

And consider the range of now well-established public-health restrictions such as bans on smoking in public places, to reduce the damage done by second-hand smoke. Yes, it’s a violation of smokers’ “freedom’’ to hurt the health of others.

 

Meanwhile, we shouldn’t overly minimize the drawbacks of masks, especially in how they make it harder to hear in conversations and to gauge others’ emotions and understanding. Masks can especially make things tough for teachers. And yes, masks do make it marginally (for most people) harder to breathe.

 

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The ocean south of New England has gotten the lion’s share of attention to offshore wind-power projects, with New Bedford as the most important staging area for building these facilities. But developers are also eyeing the Gulf of Maine, with harbors as far south as Salem, Mass., seen as possible staging areas. Good. Turn offshore wind into a broad regional industry.

 

And for more than a century engineers have looked into harnessing the huge tides of the Gulf of Maine to generate clean and reliable power. Franklin Roosevelt was a big backer. Progress is being made in various places around the world in tidal power, perhaps most notably off Scotland. It seems time to give it a boost off Maine.

 

 

Strangled by Red Tape

As I have frequently written in this space,  many Americans are confused, frustrated, and angry about the endless red tape of our deeply bureaucratic society, drowning in lawyers and riven by often contradictory local, state and federal laws and private-sector requirements. Think of our incomprehensible tax codes, insurance forms and innumerable other documents that must be filled out to get private- and public-sector health coverage and such things as unemployment benefits.

 

This complexity nightmare hits the poor and middle class far more than the affluent. That’s partly because the wealthy can afford to hire people – lawyers, accountants,  consultants, etc. -- to help handle the forms. The affluent are also apt, of course, to be more literate and so better able to decipher – and game – laws and regulations. But it’s also because the forms that well-off people use to, say, invest (e.g., 401(k)s) are understandably much simpler than those used to determine eligibility for benefits.

 

All this is deeply regressive.

 

Further, most of our bureaucracies are grossly understaffed compared to other Western countries.  (Try calling the IRS.) There, bureaucrats do much of the sort of work that we must do ourselves here unless we’re quite affluent and can hire people to help. We increasingly have a do-it-yourself society that requires long hours to get the benefits we’re owed, if we can get them at all. Many people give up in frustration.

 

The Internet has played an increasing role in our being involuntarily forced into DIY. Remember when you didn’t have to print out your own forms or try to fill them out online and attempt to send them?

 

One of the best discussions of all this is Annie Lowrey’s piece in The Atlantic,  titled “The Time Tax: Why is so much American bureaucracy left to average citizens?’’

 

Please hit this link:

 

 

A Simple Tax Plan!

Michael Busler, an economist, and professor of finance at Stockton University, in New Jersey, has an interesting proposal that would greatly simplify the federal income-tax system – but be a disaster for the incomes of accountants and tax lawyers. It would, among other things, ensure that billionaires who have been paying no income tax under our unfair “system” fork over more money to help pay for the government services and physical infrastructure essential for their own investments’ success. Consider law enforcement, roads, education, much research and development, public health…..

 

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PHOTO: file

He suggests:

 

Enacting a 15 percent single-rate tax on all income above a livable minimum (say income beyond twice the federal poverty level) with no deductions for anything. All income would be treated the same, whether from wages, rent, interest, profits, dividends or capital gains. Corporate profits would also be taxed at 15 percent.   The current federal poverty level for an individual is income of $12,880 and $26,500 for a household of four people.

 

Think of how much productive time could be freed up by replacing the current income-tax-filing nightmare with a system as simple as this! And it’s hard to see how it would undermine the risk-taking and new capital formation that our economy needs to keep growing.

 

To read his discussion, please hit this link:

 

 

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This would be a powerful anti-poverty program: Encouraging people, through public policies, to get married before they have children. Revive the two-parent family! Look at how many of the poor families you see on the TV news have just the mothers. The sperm donors are nowhere in sight.

 

Seeking the Trans’ Vote

The Democrats must move away from racial/sexual/religious identity politics if they hope to be successful in the next few election cycles. These politics turn off most voters, the majority of whom are primarily interested in their economic security and in crime control, and not group affirmations and protests. And it must be said that few Americans feel guilty about how certain groups were brutally treated in the past; that was then.

 

As U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, of South Carolina, and some other pragmatic Black leaders have noted,  the ridiculous calls to “defund the police’’ in association with the Black Lives Matter movement lost the Democrats seats in last November’s election, leaving them with a painfully tiny majority. This is the sort of high-temperature identity politics that puts in, and keeps in, office those who oppose many of the policies meant to promote more equality of opportunity. A touch of the suicidal.

 

You can see how the identity obsessions can reach absurd levels. Consider, for example, the intense coverage of transexuals in The New York Times. You’d think that, say, 20 percent of the general population was trans, instead of an estimate of 0.6 percent!

 

The Democrats, to succeed, must focus on broad socio-economic policies that improve the condition of the poor and the middle class. These used to be called “lunch-pail politics’’. The increasingly corrupt and fascist national GOP will continue to try to take care of the Koch Brothers and some other megarich (often multigenerational) donors (many in the fossil-fuel and real-estate development sectors), more than a few of whom backed the sociopathic/kleptocratic/violence-inciting traitor Trump and his cultists.  Anyway, the Democrats, both because it’s the right thing to do and good politics, need to look after the nonrich regardless of race, gender, sexual identity, etc., etc.

 

Diaries of a Climber

A tome called Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries of 1918-38 contains the often outrageous observations and behavior of a man from a moderately rich Chicago family who maneuvered himself into the heights of British high society, married an English heiress and even became a member of the House of Commons. Channon (1897-1958) was one of the great social and political climbers of the 20th Century. Luckily he also wrote very well. Kings, prime ministers, Winston Churchill, Cole Porter, Vanderbilts, and Herman Goering are among the vast cast of characters in his diaries.

 

Channon, who was bisexual, handsome and very anti-American, seemed to know “everyone who was anyone’’ in that era and slept with more than a few of them. While in many ways he was a ghastly person (for example, for a long time he admired the Nazis, often wallowed in extreme materialism and drank far too much) his diaries also show him capable of honest, almost clinical analyses of the characters and motivations of both himself and others, some of whom are major historical figures. His descriptive powers are formidable. This is gossip at an industrial scale, and weirdly addictive.

 

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