Author Archives: jparquette

About jparquette

Fortunate and blessed in companionship with my wife of fifty seven years, in health and in modest, but more than adequate circumstances. Life is good.

December 23, 2012 · 10:14 am

Bittersweet

St. Patrick’s Christmas

Friday night, we brought our granddaughter, Gianna (pronounced “Jahna”) to the St. Patrick’s Parish Nativity play. Gianna remained rapt for the entire performance, needing an occasional gentle restraint from wandering too far up the aisle. A teen choir accompanied the players; there were twirling, dancing, singing angels, a trek around the church with a donkey for Mary and Joseph only to be turned away at several inns, sheep singing with shepherds, a tall, lanky, twelve year old yellow star leading three Magi to the cradle and the tiny Holy Family in the stable. All of the players were ardently earnest; everyone sang. We stood to cheer for them at the end. Gianna didn’t want to leave.

“Are we like sheep?”

St. Patrick is a small, inner city bilingual parish. The parishioners span a wide cross section of Providence life from all ages, colors and abilities, almost none of them affluent. Prison tattoos can be seen on some of the men, who are attending with their families. These men hug their wives and kids frequently; some have packs of cigarettes in their shirt pockets. St. Pat’s has a soup kitchen and help for the homeless at a food pantry called Mary House; there is a small Eucharistic adoration chapel in a converted office trailer with a year round 24/7 vigil. Pretensions are rare. There is no cry room; children make children noises: beautiful sounds. We are reminded of our first parish as adults in Maine, St. Joseph’s, because of the community life, joyful music, love and peacefulness of the assembly. We have come home again.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.. W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Jesse Lewis

Grace Audrey McDonnell

Daniel Barden

Charlotte Bacon

Ana Marquez-Greene

The Children of Newtown

I have been to Newtown many times. My old company had a lumberyard there about three miles from the Sandy Hook School. Much has been written about the perfect New England village with the friendly coffee shops and picturesque woods, fields and upscale homes of NYC professionals. All of this is true, yet it is a town like any other. Like yours and mine with the imperfections, well hidden family troubles, anxieties and small betrayals, as well as love, joyful sounds, Christmas lights and festivities. And schools.

Evil visited Newtown a week ago. Books will be written about the deterioration and lack of funding for mental health facilities and support; about semi automatic weapons such as the AR-15 with hundred shot clips (for which I can see no earthly rationale for circulation in the general population, just to be clear – they have only one function); about bullying and Asperger Syndrome and autism spectrum disorders; about the sad necessity for fortress schools; about the crushing of some children who never recover from their parent’s divorce and withdraw into a killing isolation; about the failure to identify evil before it pounces full throated on the innocent; about a fascination with violence within our entertainment, within ourselves. It seems to me a confluence of these things created Adam Lanza, a weak, cowardly and wounded boy/man; they afforded him the facilities to make a decision for evil. All of these aspects merit full analysis to uncover a passageway to enable us to perform our most basic human function – to protect our young.

I think also, we need to be thinking about Pope John Paul’s Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life), a 1995 encyclical in which he decried a “culture of death” which has inculcated itself into our attitudes and practices, almost without notice anymore. This dark culture misconstrues freedom as license, leading to “this eclipse of the sense of God”, and devolving ever more into narcissism, materialism, hedonism and utilitarianism. Adam Lanza was the product of his personal and familial pathology, but he also was the effluence of the milieu in which he swam. A “culture of death” according to John Paul most specifically reveals its morbidity as a war of the strong against the weak, be they handicapped, old or unborn. “The first to be harmed are women, children, the sick or suffering and the elderly.” Adam Lanza was harmed. From that he made increasingly easy decisions to inflict his rage and pain on others more vulnerable: one evil act cascading into the unspeakable – a definition of evil.

Perhaps Eugene Kennedy, cited in Peggy Noonan’s column, put best what should be our response to all of this (in addition to seeking preventative solutions). What good can we take from this senseless act? Newtown reminds us of “the mystery of being alone in the world as it is and as we are… with cracks running through it… from small disappointments to blows of the heart.” But it “revealed the goodness of normal people, which is seldom celebrated” when the teachers sacrificed their lives trying to shield the children. Ms. Noonan says that we will attempt to respond politically to “take actions that will make our world safer, and this is understandable. But there is no security from existence itself.” As Professor Kennedy put it, the answer is to “plunge into life … we have to engage in life and take it on with all the risks it entails or we won’t be alive at all.” “It is better to suffer pain than to live in a world in which you don’t allow yourself to be close enough to anybody to have the experience that’s bound to give us suffering. Love guarantees suffering.”

Kennedy concludes, ”we’re all on a hero’s journey… the hero faces challenges along the way… entering the forest each day without a cut path, and finding our way through is what we are called to do.” Here, says, Ms. Noonan, Mr. Kennedy suggests that faith offers not an explanation of tragedy, but the only reliable guide. “Jesus said, ‘I am the Way.’ That is not a metaphor.”

“Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” Isaiah 49:15

The response at St. Patrick’s Church was not to be embittered or paralyzed with sadness over inexplicable tragedy, but to embrace the life given to us. At the conclusion of the pageant, Rita asked our four year old Gianna if she wanted to be in the nativity play next year when she turned five. I suggested that she could practice really hard and be the donkey. Never lacking ambition, Gianna told us she wanted to be Mary. Mary, the Christ bearer, who within her carried Love, is the call to all of us at this time of the year. To hold within us Love, and to do what that Love calls us to. For when it comes down to it, that is all we have.

NYC Nativity, Mary waits and welcomes

6 Comments

Filed under Culture views

December 9, 2012 · 2:31 pm

The Taxman Cometh

Great Horned Owl taken 12-8 on Angela’s garage
The calm of a waiting predator, watching.

I am like a desert owl, like an owl among the ruins.

I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof.

Psalm 102: 6,7

“When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before.” Eugene O’Neill

Still in our early twenties, we withheld some of our Federal income taxes for 1969, the year we lived in Boulder, to express our displeasure at the conduct of the war in Vietnam. Woefully naïve on several counts, I wrote a note with our tax return clearing up in excruciating detail why we were doing so. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were dead, and the world seemed bleak. Returning to Massachusetts with our infant daughter, we were living temporarily with my parents waiting for a cheap winter rental to open up on Mashnee Island off Cape Cod.

How they found us remains a mystery, but as I was coming home from work one evening driving my hand painted 1956, flathead six Chevy pickup truck, two tired looking gray men in rumpled suits pulled into my father’s driveway driving a dirty gray Ford Crown Vic. Apparently, they had been waiting for me. The younger of the two had a black band fedora; the older one had a close cropped fringe of salt and pepper hair with nothing on top. I had a lot of hair and jeans stained from climbing trees.

The older one in charge, whose name has long receded, gave me his card and explained that they had no issue with our political views, which were our prerogative to hold, nor did they care to debate – very clear there would be no debate. However, they had come to collect the taxes due plus penalties and interest. It wasn’t a lot of money, but taxes were taxes after all and not an option. He rattled off his bullet points unapologetically by rote without a smile or a threat or an alternative. First they would attach and drain, if necessary, our checking and savings accounts. If we had no such accounts, they would garnish my wages. If I lacked a job, they would lien our house. If we had no house, they would take our truck. He looked over at the Chevy pointedly. Which would I prefer?

And so it goes.

Raushenberg’s “Canyon”

A story in this week’s WSJ reminded me of this incident for some reason. Lifelong art dealer, Ileana Sonnabend, died in 2007 leaving her considerable collection to her heirs, Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem. The heirs were forced to sell about $600 million dollars worth of their heritage to pay the $471 million in death taxes due on them. ($600 million was more than was due, but of course, taxes were owed on the proceeds from selling them – capital gains taxes on the death taxes.) Of course, there was a catch with one of the pieces: Robert Rauschenberg’s “Canyon”, created in 1959 and appraised at $15 million by the IRS.

The collage legally couldn’t be sold because it contained a stuffed bald eagle; selling it would violate the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty. That Rauschenberg before his death filed a notarized letter in 1988, stating that the eagle had been killed and stuffed by one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders long before the 1940 law was in effect, made no difference. The art work could not be sold; the auction house said it was worth nothing as a sale item. The family filed an affidavit claiming that due to the inability to sell it, there was no value, and therefore no taxes were due on the inheritance for it. Aha, responded the IRS, since there was a “gross understatement” of its value by the owners, the IRS value had now been upped to $65 million, so the tax bill was $29.2 million plus $11.7 million in penalties for understating its value. Plus interest.

After five years of expensive legal wrangling, the painting, which had been on permanent loan for display by the owner at the Metropolitan Museum, was donated to the Museum of Modern Art, also in New York. The painting had been exempt from Wildlife Service penalties as long as it was on loan to the museum, so now it passed with the same waiver to the MOMA.

And so it goes.

The hang up on avoiding the fiscal cliff is the tax rate on the top 3% of earners, not the tax dollars paid, but the tax rate. While President Obama has proven to be a poor to middling CEO in his role at governance, he is a near genius at politicking, perhaps learned through political infighting during his bureaucratic years as a community organizer. The tax rate increase he has drawn as a line in the sand has little to do with revenue – the dollars that would be collected are a little spot of yellow in a great snow drift. The tax rate increase has everything to do with driving a wedge and causing as much consternation as possible amongst his political enemies.

Bear with just a few numbers. In 1958, the top 3% of earners paid marginal rates as high as 91%, a progressive erotic dream, but almost no one paid those rates because of the pages of loopholes and deductions available. The total income of the top earners was 14.7% of all income earned, and they paid 29.2% of all federal income taxes. Many of the loopholes have been closed or capped already, and in 2010 the elite 3% earned 27.2% of all income; their percent of all taxes paid rose to 51%. Middle and lower income earners (the bottom two thirds) earned 41.3% of all income and paid 29% of all taxes in 1958. In 2010, their share of earned income had fallen to 22.5%, but their share of taxes paid plummeted to 6.7% of all taxes.

So, indeed, the rich have gotten richer, and their relative tax burden reflects that proportionately, but almost 50% of the rest of us pay no federal income taxes whatsoever. The compulsion of the progressive liberal is not about “fairness”, it is about redistribution, punitive measures against the successful and ideology. But even more so, it is about casting chaos into the opposition and twisting the knife.

And so it goes.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly

“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.

“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.

“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”

“And what difference does that make?”

“That’s some catch, that catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

Catch 22, Joseph Heller

5 Comments

Filed under Politics and government

December 2, 2012 · 9:37 pm

Sing, But Keep Going

A story is told about Winston Churchill that may or may not be apocryphal, however the significance for us is timeless. After the war was over and Sir Winston unceremoniously voted out when his indomitable gift of leadership and candor became politically inconvenient, he was invited to speak at a gathering at Cambridge University. He sat through the formal dinner with his bulldog visage unreadable, silently contemplating the tribute that dominated one wall, memorializing the long list of Cambridge alumni and students who laid down their lives to protect their country from being brutally incorporated into the Third Reich. The dean finally concluded his endless extravagant introduction lauding Churchill, and how his soaring rhetoric saved the British Isles. An expectant hush settled on the listeners, awaiting inspirational brilliance. Sir Winston stood wearily and looked out over hundreds of fresh young faces, survivors whose brethren would never return. Glancing once again over to the wall, he spoke, “Never give up, never give up, never give up.” Churchill settled back into his chair.

The usually laconic, if not truly morose, Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, burst out laughing when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner proffered the Obama administration’s “compromise” solution to avoid jumping over the “fiscal cliff” on January first. Without a scrap of compromise or one inkling to slow down spending, its raison d’etre was taxes, taxes and then, again, more taxes, and even those barely cover a couple of weeks of Federal expenditure. Not a serious proposal, only more political posturing and dialectic of class struggle. To add to the comic relief, the proposal suggested that Congress should abdicate its responsibility to approve debt ceiling increases. “Leave it to us and avoid the unseemly bickering,” suggested the Executive Branch. Perhaps that is the rub that incited McConnell’s rarely seen mirth.

The administration kicked off the reign of the 44^th president with an unprecedented level of unstimulating stimulus spending at the staggering level of $800 billion larded on in 2009. The unprecedented soon became business as usual with spending levels sticking at the newly established benchmark, resulting in undreamed of deficits, over $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) a year. This deficit and the negotiations to raise the debt ceiling resulted in the beggar’s choice deal that dug the chasm looming ahead and deemed by a gleeful media as a “fiscal cliff”. $16 trillion in debt (and counting), and the compromise solution only addressed asking more from the taxpayers with the rhetoric about fairness and redistribution. Not a syllable about specific proposals to curtail diarrhea profligacy.

One provision, raising the estate taxes on the “wealthy” from 35% to 55%, would result in the breakup of long held family ranches and farms. Ranches and farms are by definition illiquid, with their “wealth” consisting of hundreds or even thousands of acres of agricultural land – land owned for generations. Every nickel of the income derived from these businesses and the income of their owners has already been taxed, every acre taxed each year with property taxes. Yet when the principle owner lacks the good sense to stay alive, the heirs are subject to the “death tax”. Their only option is either taking on insupportable debt or selling off some land to pay the taxman. Estate taxes are deeply rooted in progressive egalitarianism and antipathy to any attempt to pass along the hard earned net worth of the successful to their heirs. Not just the oft cited Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian excesses, but privately held farms, ranches and businesses are to be crushed with burdensome taxes at the passing of the owner.

Perhaps the least understood and therefore mostly avoided debt discussion is not the fiscal deficit that shows on the Federal balance sheet. The debt that is held “off the books” is far worse. Like Enron, which sealed its own ruin by concocting sophisticated accounting to hide liabilities, the Federal debt that isn’t declared on the balance sheet is shocking to comprehend. Think icebergs.

The promises made to those who have paid into the system their whole working lives are not stipulated in Federal deficit reports. The mostly unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare and federal employees’ future retirement benefits already are over $86.8 trillion, 550% of Gross DP. Much has been made of our stated deficit of $16 trillion crossing the line of 100% of GDP. Quick addition of both the stated and unstated deficits is $102 trillion or about $310,000 for every man, woman, child and transgendered person in the country. You only thought you had worked all your life to pay off your mortgage and credit cards. Think again.

Secretary Geithner stated unequivocally that Social Security is not on the table in any debt discussion under any circumstances. Why? My cousin, David, is an unrepentant Connecticut/Manhattan progressive, yet somehow remains very intelligent and a good guy. I have full confidence that he and I could sit down with a halfway competent accountant and come to an agreement to fix Social Security funding for the foreseeable future over a couple of beers. Eliminate the cap (satisfies taxing the rich), stop the ridiculous pandering of cutting the Social Security contributions of all of us employees, gradually continue to raise the retirement age to reflect the increased longevity of our citizens, and we’re just about done. How about another beer? Why can’t our elected officials do the same?

Nearly 49% of the voting population chose Door “B” to common sense and responsibility. We lost, but cannot surrender. Never give up, never give up, and never give up. For the sustainability of this noble Great Experiment of ours. To remain true to our ideals and consciences. For our children and grandchildren. Sing, but keep going.

“Let us sing alleluia here on earth, while we still live in anxiety….So, then, brothers (and sisters), let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labors. You should sing as wayfarers do – sing but continue your journey… Sing, but keep going.” St. Augustine

Irish Cuisine

“I’m Irish, so I’m used to odd stews. I can take it. Just throw a lot of carrots and onions in there and I’ll call it dinner.” Liam Neeson

Many would say the topic is oxymoronic, but the roots of all things Irish are hardscrabble. My father was half Irish, and never knowing his father, who died when he was an infant; he was raised by his Ma, Margaret Veronica Lannon, a former vaudeville singer who married her stage manager, John Parquette, and helped by her Irish sisters Stacia and Essy — immigrants all in a three decker full of family in Lynn, Massachusetts. My mother was the youngest of six to Irish parents, her mother, Molly Manley, was full time at home, and her father, Jim Laracy, was a tin knocker. She was born in the apartment over D.A. Baker’s sheet metal shop where my grandfather lived (and worked) before they bought the house on Maple Street in Walpole.

Our family of six children in Walpole, of which I was the oldest, was deeply imbued with an Irish culture, albeit with a French name. My mother, Betty (or Girly to her sisters), going strong at 91, still possesses her characteristic sense of humor and intelligence. The main danger she presents currently is to gondola displays at the local Target when someone foolishly allows her to drive a battery powered ‘accessible’ sit down shopping cart. All her kids grew up straight and true. Somehow. All of us are blessed with the strong work ethic of both our parents. Ma has long claimed that her six children would never go hungry as long as she had a good can opener. She was pretty good at potatoes, though, and beef stew, even if Dinty Moore canned stew was not foreign to us in a pinch.

“I have always found the Irish to be a bit odd. They refuse to be English.” Winston Churchill

My wife, love of my life and frequent muse, Rita, suggested this blog topic, so I’ll begin with a story that includes her. When we were newlyweds, we didn’t have a lot of money. Rita was a registered nurse working full time, while I finished out my last three semesters of college. We lived in a third story walk up ‘shotgun’ apartment on a tight budget, painfully young and rhapsodically happy. Rita, of Italian and Portuguese descent, is a creative cook acquainted with all manner of spices alien to me at the time. Salt and pepper were the only spices I knew from my mother’s table, and pepper was suspect.

I tried to inflict my childhood Saturday night tradition of hot dogs and beans on Rita, which held for awhile. A month or two into our marriage, we sat down on Saturday night – canned Boston baked beans and hot dogs grilled in the frying pan – two each. Halfway into this ambrosia, Rita, who is genetically incapable of telling a lie or a joke with a straight face, started snickering. When I asked her what was funny, my question stimulated full blown laughter.

It seems, since our food budget allowed nothing for waste, that when she was gathering the goods for supper, there was a new package of hot dogs and two left over hot dogs that were a bit, shall we say, sticky, but not yet quite green. My young beloved artfully and meticulously kept the old segregated from the new in the frying pan throughout the cooking. I, of course, was given the old ones. But she couldn’t hold the deception together and giggled her way to full disclosure. Her justification for this crushing of young love was that I, being Irish, couldn’t tell the difference, and she being of more refined culinary sensibilities, could.

“It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s rather they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.” Brendan Behan

Our friend and former coworker with Rita at Rhode Island Right to Life, Peg Lavallee, told Rita this recent story of her brother, Charlie Galligan, a retired cop (what else?). The Lavallees and the Galligans were going to a fund raising event for an Irish cause at McBride’s Pub on Wayland Street in Providence. McBride’s features normal pub fare along with Galway Shepherd’s Pie, Fish and Chips, Bangers and Mashed, an occasional boiled dinner and “Famine Stew” along with the “Perfect Pint” of Guinness. The pub is located in the old carriage house of the Monahan Funeral Home and part of the Monahan complex, a century old site of Irish wakes in the city, which is still open for business across the shared parking lot. It is convenient to go to a wake, tell a few maudlin jokes and hoist a few to honor the recently deceased at the pub. Every night at ten the bartender calls for a pause as a “Last Call” where all raise their glass in memory of someone who has “gone to the Promised Land.”

As Peg and her husband, Arty, were coming from their cars with Charlie and his wife, a van pulled up with a long wooden box which carried a replica of a full size statue of a small family, part of the Irish Famine Memorial in downtown Providence. It was to be displayed in the restaurant. Two older gentlemen in their late sixties were unloading the crate. Charlie offered them a hand, but his help was politely declined.

As the determined Irishmen slid the box out of the back of the van, disaster struck, the statue smashed through the front of the crate and flew out to a loud thud on the parking lot. Charlie in typical Irish wry humor, without missing a beat, said to them, “Hope you guys aren’t the undertakers.” Then he started back towards the parking lot pretending to look around, and asked them, “Do you need this head?”

“I’m Irish. I think about death all the time.” Jack Nicholson

A grandchild story will round out the topic for this week. Gianna is my daughter Angela’s four year old. Her dad is Polish and Irish, and Gia has dragged a few of the dry Irish wit genes through. She does, however, manage to maintain more sophisticated taste buds. Recently I was bringing her to Walpole one Saturday to treat my mother to lunch. On the way, we discussed the menu. I asked her what she would like for lunch, and she said tostados. I told her it was unlikely Nana could be talked into a Mexican restaurant (IHOP as it turned out was the selection). Since squirrels and a large oak tree in my backyard are a frequent topic of conversation, I suggested she might enjoy an acorn sandwich. She remained somewhat skeptical.

I assured her that with strawberry jam and ketchup, acorn sandwiches were tasty, and that if people were really hungry, they could eat acorns just like squirrels. She assured me that she wasn’t that hungry. We changed subjects.

Later we discussed her uncertainty that we might not find Nana’s house given the limited access highway (Route 95) we were on. I explained the concept of exits and not to be concerned as I knew which one to take. After we mulled that around for a few more miles, she spotted a sign coming up and proclaimed it said, “EXIT”, which it did. She asked if that was where we were going, and I told her there was another one farther ahead.

Being a grandfather, I then told her she was the smartest four year old girl in the world. Gianna graced me with her half smile and replied without a pause, “Smart enough not to eat acorns, Papa.”

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” William Butler Yeats

3 Comments

Filed under Personal and family life

November 14, 2012 · 10:17 pm

Stalemate

A chess match ends as a win, a loss or a draw. A draw can be agreed to by the persons playing the white and black pieces. Certain situations are deemed a stalemate, which is a draw by definition. No one wins. The rules defining a stalemate have application to real life. If one player on either side is not in checkmate, but has no legal moves, the game is a stalemate and drawn. If both players have moved fifty times without a pawn moving or a capture being made, that’s a stalemate. If a position has been repeated three times with every piece on the exact same square for both sides, that’s a stalemate and drawn. It matters not if the positions are repeated sequentially, so long as they are reproduced exactly. Only the side in the weaker position poised for a loss would declare the repeated position and draw.

“If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing your grandmother with her teeth out.” George Brett

At the end of drawn out, bitterly contested campaigns, we find ourselves shell-shocked weary with virtually no change in the balance of power in Washington. Hundreds of thousands of words have been and will be written about changing demographics, debate performances, issues false and true, ground games and early media blitz bets placed in swing states. The essential question, however, is where do we go from here? Can the Republicans tweak their base and make inroads into the new demographic coalitions of Latinos, single women, citizens of Asian origin and other minorities? Have we reached a “tipping point” such that those relying on government and “in the wagon” outnumber those contributing to tax revenues and “pulling the wagon”?

“When the people find they can vote themselves money–that will herald the end of the republic.” Ben Franklin

Can we avoid repeating our exact position or making fifty moves with no progress to break the potential of stalemate? Will common sense prevail over ideology and a compromise be crafted to avoid the “fiscal cliff” of large across the board tax increases and devastating cuts to our defense that the Congressional Budget Office tells us will script us directly into over 9% unemployment and a new recession? Other than a textbook definition, did we ever truly climb out of the last one with the prolonged anemic “recovery”? Will the now assured full implementation of Obamacare with its assured tax increases and enormous expenditures make cutting our deficit structurally impossible over the next decade and trip us into a recession anyway? What the hell was David Petraeus thinking? So many questions to answer, we can be easily overwhelmed.

“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Attributed, but not fully documented, to the late former minority leader, Senator Everett Dirksen

There is some certainty in the real numbers, however, and they are worth understanding as we discuss everything else. Let them speak for themselves. The deficit that deeply troubles so many of us and will beggar the future of our children can be grasped quite easily with a minimum of sophisticated fiscal knowledge by using this table from a Wall Street Journal article:

U.S. Deficit Growth (from US Treasury Dept and CBO records)

Total federal revenue, outlays and deficits,

fiscal years 2007-2012, in billions of dollars.

Year           2007        2008        2009        2010        2011        2012

Revenue $        2,568 $    2,524 $    2,105 $    2,163 $    2,302 $    2,449

Spending $        2,729 $    2,983 $    3,518 $    3,456 $    3,599 $    3,538

Deficit          ($161)       ($459)    ($1,413) ($1,293)    ($1,297)    ($1,089)

% of GDP           -1.2%        -3.2%      -10.1%      -9.0%       -8.7%       -7.0%

Let these numbers roll around the back of your head for just a little while. As revenues dropped (and are now just starting to recover), spending exploded and set a new benchmark frozen at an unprecedented level. No serious attempt has been made to curtail the profligacy of Washington as they buy our votes and the campaign contributions of special interests. Our deficit in the Obama years as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (the sum of our total economic activity as a nation) has never been less than double the worst year of the Bush administration, which was fighting the same two wars. And the actual dollars of deficit have never been less than double the worst of the Bush years.

The Republican caucus insists on paring back the out of control spending; President Obama’s supporters such as those in the public unions and MoveOn.org insist on reducing the deficit by raising taxes. His proposal in last year’s debt ceiling negotiations was to raise them by about $82 billion a year, which is still only 7% of last year’s deficit. This week he has upped the ante to double that with no mention of trying to reduce spending. Stalemate. Many believe he would be content to let the economy go over the fiscal cliff and blame the Republicans for the new recession while satisfying his left base which demands higher tax rates and very few cuts. Next year he could negotiate from the now higher rates. Stalemate, and playing political brinksmanship with our fragile economy.

Unsustainable is a clichéd buzz word, but sometimes clichés are the best we can do.

2 Comments

Filed under Politics and government

October 28, 2012 · 8:18 pm

Simplicity

Last weekend on Saturday we attended the wedding of Allison and Henry; we’ve known Allison since she became our youngest daughter Meg’s friend in the second grade. Twenty odd years later, both Meg and Allison are professionals with letters after their names and married. Both have now been in each other’s wedding parties; Allie was a bridesmaid in Meg’s wedding in August. Allie’s wedding was in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul near downtown Providence, the main building completed in 1889 on the site of a former, smaller church, built on “Christian Hill” in 1832. The structure is magnificent and is a sign of the majesty of God, constructed by the faith of its builders and thousands of worshippers who have assembled there for over a century.

For Allie and Henry’s wedding, the ceiling height pipe organ filled the space with classic music, including Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D as the beautiful bride processed into the church and later Shubert’s Ave Maria. During the wedding Mass, the priest told a story of the late actress Helen Hayes, a lifelong Catholic and one of only eleven people to ever win an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony and a Grammy. She was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, by President Reagan. Her first stage role was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when she was five, and her last was as Agatha Christie’s character Miss Marple when she was eighty five.

When Helen was first married to her husband, playwright Charles MacArthur, they had little money. On their first anniversary he gave her a paper bag full of peanuts and told her he wished it could be a velvet bag full of emeralds. After nearly thirty years in a loving marriage, Charles was diagnosed with terminal cancer; Helen was fifty six. On their final anniversary together, he gave her a velvet bag full of emeralds. Her response was to tell him she wished it was a bag of peanuts, and they could do it all over again. As he finished the story, Rita and I reached over to grasp hands as both of us were filled with gratitude for our forty five years together.

After the homily, the priest joined the young couple before the altar and guided them through the marriage vows. He left the microphone off, and in such a large church, only those witnesses right near the bride and groom could hear them. It wasn’t necessary to hear. As they exchanged rings, everyone present could see and knew their love and sincere intent to “have and to hold” for the rest of their lives. To me, it was entirely appropriate that their vows and love were for them alone – simple, in complete focus one to one, heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul.

“The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.” George Santayana

Last Sunday, in lieu of our regular parish, we went to Mass at St. Patrick’s on Smith Hill in Providence, an inner city, poor, bilingual church – poor in money and accoutrement, rich in Spirit and Love. The church building had long ago been declared structurally unsound and demolished, but the parishioners converted their school auditorium into a church and persisted with both school and church. St. Pats hosts a soup kitchen on Mondays and has for over thirty years. The school evolved three years ago into St. Patrick’s Academy, a small high school staffed by both professionals and dedicated volunteer mentors. Next year will see its first graduating seniors. The contrast to the soaring cathedral could not have been more striking. The music was guitars and a piano, not a large pipe organ; the pews were filled with all manner of folk, color and age – teenagers, children, the elderly, families, the halt and the lame. The sound of children, silent or rare in many churches, was beautiful.

We were a bit disappointed that her pastor, Father James, wasn’t presiding over the Mass, and an older priest was there in his stead. Father James’ homilies are always to the heart, his humility genuine and immediately apparent to all who are fortunate enough to pass his way. Since he is fluent in Spanish, he must have been the celebrant last weekend at the Masses in that tongue. He has done such things as live anonymously on the street as a homeless person to more fully understand the poorest of the poor in our city. Father James is a gifted listener and counselor.

“I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions, and when the answer is simple then God is answering.” Albert Einstein

Our disappointment was short lived as we heard the lovely Irish lilt, saw the impish warm smile, intelligence and wisdom of this priest we had never met. Reminiscent of the many Irish priests of my youth, he was simultaneously loving, witty and direct. His homily about the gospel reading reminded us that complaining about “not getting anything out of Mass attendance” quite misses the point. “Since when did we become the center of the universe?” he asked. Worship is not another entertainment we think should have to compete in a world of feel-good distractions, to be judged and participated in based on the liveliness or ‘relevance’ of the music or the emotions and passion of the preaching. We come for the Eucharist and the Word, to give thanks, to gather together as Christians have gathered for two millennia. Being a “good person doing our best with good works” is an inadequate response in and of itself to the transcendent Gift which bridged the gap between the eternal and the ephemeral, the mortal and that which never dies – the soul and the Creator.

The music was occasionally ragged, the voices in harmony, but untrained, some of them in their teen years, some of them in their sixties. Nothing was diminished by the imperfections; the spirit was authentic. Everyone sang.

“Being with someone, listening without a clock and without anticipation of results, teaches us about love. The success of love is in the loving — it is not in the result of loving. ”
A Simple Path – Mother Teresa

3 Comments

Filed under Personal and family life

October 14, 2012 · 3:56 pm

Friends with Benefits

Heather was a nineteen year old freshman at Columbia University, one of the world’s most prestigious centers of learning. Her frequent mood swings of deep depression and unpredictable crying led her to visit a psychiatrist at the school’s clinic, Dr. Miriam Grossman. Dr. Grossman drew out Heather’s personal situation. Her new boyfriend was delighting in the female gift of her young body, but was balking at going out to eat or to a movie because that might lead to a “relationship”, and he didn’t want a relationship: he just wanted to be friends…..with benefits. Heather was wondering why she was depressed because “friends with benefits” was a common arrangement after all, and she had not considered it as a possible source of her unhappiness. From Dr. Grossmans’ book “Unprotected”: “Heather thinks women are like men, so she’s puzzled when her “friend with benefits” – a man with whom she has a physical relationship, no strings attached – is content, while she hates herself. Is Zoloft the answer?”

In “Unprotected” she writes of other client-students she counseled: Stacey, who was cutting herself with scissors, had an HPV infection that would be with her the rest of her life; condoms are ineffective with HPV and 25% of teenage and above women are infected. Some strains of HPV can cause cervical cancer. The medical community’s and big Pharm’s solution de jour is inoculating all young girls with “Gardasil”, which a study now shows can trigger the premature death of ovaries and eggs causing permanent infertility. Stacey had three “relationships” in the last year and was unaware whether her partners may have had previous relationships, creating multiples of exposure; her odds of HPV infection went up 300%.

Then there was Olivia, who was bulimic, vomiting frequently and depressed, the first big love of her young life having dumped her. She told Dr. Grossman, “When it ended, it hurt so much,” she said, weeping. “I think about him all the time and I haven’t been going to one of my classes, because he’ll be there, and I can’t handle seeing him. I was unprepared for this. Why, doctor,” she asked, “why do they tell you how to protect your body – from herpes and pregnancy – but they don’t tell you what it does to your heart?”

Dr. Grossman eventually left Columbia when she became terminally discouraged with both the medical community’s acquiescence in a political and social agenda and Columbia’s advice to its students on the “Go Ask Alice” web site for students. “Go Ask Alice” suggests experimentation to help students “find their sexual identity” tacitly encouraging multiple “friends”, ménage à trois trysts and homosexual hook ups. Sadly, Columbia is far from unique.

Dr. Grossman started her (wholly secular) crusade. Here is a direct quote from her website mission statement:

I am here to tell you that radical politics pervades healthcare, and common sense has vanished. Who’s paying the highest price? Girls and women.

Not long ago, we physicians could call casual sexual activity “mindless” and “empty”. Before political correctness muzzled us in the 90’s, a therapist might advise her client that it is love and life-long fidelity that bring liberated sensuality and provide the best insurance against infectious diseases. An unwanted pregnancy, an abortion – these were weighty issues.

We understood that men and women are profoundly different and weren’t afraid to say so….Self restraint built character, and character was something to strive for…

Things have changed. Teens are encouraged to explore and experiment with their sexuality. Self-discipline has been replaced with latex and Plan B. There is tacit approval of promiscuity, and an STI is a rite of passage. Abortion? It’s likened to a tonsillectomy.

The health care system has declared war on tobacco and alcohol, tanning salons and transfats, but is silent about the hazards of our hook-up culture….Devoted professionals, motivated by altruism are foisting these agendas on young people. I witness the ramifications daily.

The agenda is sunk deeply into the soil of some misguided feminism that confuses equal treatment and opportunities for women with men and women being the same in every aspect of their personalities. Even well-meaning parents are not immune. Many “put” their teenage daughters on birth control pills, some below the age of legal consent, falling into the trap that all of them will be sexually active anyway, and there is nothing to be done about it, so we may as well protect them as best we can. Their girls remain unprotected, however, against emotional havoc and over 50 sexually transmitted diseases. The implicit communication is that character development in all things sexual and self-control are not possible — and the girl is informed subtly that she is ready and available.

“Which of you fathers, if your (daughter) asks for a fish will give (her) a serpent instead? Or if (she) asks for an egg, will give (her) a scorpion?” Luke 11: 11-12 with apologies to St. Luke for paraphrasing for a female child.

Further ripping away the mantle of protection are the possible side effects of the pill itself: increased risk of depression, mood swings, weight gain, suicide, breast cancer, infertility, stroke, blood clots, cervical cancer and, most ironically, loss of libido. The World Health Organization lists the birth control pill as a Group 1 Carcinogen along with tobacco, asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde, plutonium and others. In NYC schools, a pilot program with the catchy acronym CATCH (Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Healthcare) provides birth control pills, Plan B abortion pills, Depo-Provera long-lasting contraceptive shots as well as condoms to 22,000 students as young as 14 in 14 city high schools without parental consent or notification. They can’t get an aspirin from the school nurse without parental consent. Political correctness run amok.

When the Catholic Church objects to Obamacare mandating inclusion of contraception and abortifacient drugs in their health care plans, the Health and Human Services department of the Obama administration refuses to allow an exemption (with the very narrow exception of churches themselves). Catholic hospitals, schools, charitable organizations and universities are put in the impossible dilemma of providing what is morally repugnant to them or not providing a health plan at all to their employees. Over 40 lawsuits are pending. Political correctness runs rough shod over religious freedom, freedom of conscience and common sense.

“Unprotected”, indeed: it seems we have lost our way.

While it is true, of course, that (technological progress) ha(s) given us tremendous power, it is absurd to suggest that we must use this power to destroy our most precious inheritance: liberty. The Road to Serfdom – F. A. Hayek

4 Comments

Filed under Culture views

October 7, 2012 · 7:23 pm

Acrophobia – Tale of Two Bobs

Any phobia is irrational. There is a fear of heights that is rational, however, and any tree climber will tell you that to fail to respect gravity adequately is to learn it is not to be mocked without consequence. Only a fool is careless after leaving the ground. To paraphrase the old adage about pilots: there are bold tree climbers, and there are old tree climbers, but there are no old, bold climbers. Both the Bobs of this tale have courage and common sense. They survived the recklessness of youth while tested in widely diverse challenges and gained wisdom and prudence. While very different, neither was atypical of the collection of educated iconoclasts that populated the ranks of tree guys in the late sixties.

Like many good men, they varied greatly in personality. I met Bob Brown when we both worked summers for a branch of an old Yankee tree company, Frost and Higgins, in Northampton Massachusetts. I was a brand new climber; Brownie was more experienced and highly skilled. When it wasn’t summer, we both were students at the University of Mass in Amherst, although he was almost ten years older than I, married with a child and on the GI Bill. He was a veteran of the Army Special Forces with two deployments to Vietnam and one running night dog patrols on the DMZ in Korea. Even among the tough guys on the crew including another lead climber who was a veteran of the 101^st Airborne, Brownie enjoyed special status.

While he never told us combat stories, at lunch one day he told us of needing to create a lot of noise and chaos to intimidate like a much larger force on night raids into Viet Cong enclaves. He said he carried an automatic weapon and a short barreled 12 gauge semi automatic shotgun – one in each hand. A couple of hunters on the crew doubted his accuracy one handed with a 12 gauge held along even his thick forearm. He didn’t suffer the kidding well. Before the days of the chipper, the potential firewood would be yarded for splitting, but the brush would be hauled to its own section of the town landfill. At the dump the next afternoon, he pulled his barely legal shotgun from behind the truck seat. Things were a bit more casual about guns forty years ago. We laughed when he badly missed the first can from the dump we threw in the air. His pale blue eyes flashed dangerously cold; then he hit the next five. We stopped laughing.

He could be a tad scary. I saw him throw a recalcitrant very old chainsaw fifty feet out of a tree to the sidewalk cursing quietly and intensely through clenched teeth. The tired Homelite C9 probably should have been long since retired, and after a frustrating too many minutes of trying to get it to run while precariously balanced to make a tough cut, Brownie retired it and calmly ordered another one tied on his line. Another time, his 3” tree gaff kicked out of a hard wooded locust tree and buried itself in his other calf. He burned his rope coming out of tree, asked the homeowner if she had any rubbing alcohol, poured the alcohol into the cut and went back up to finish the tree. After work, he got a tetanus booster.

His wife, Jane, who had been a Navy nurse, met Bob when he was wounded. She told of his seething anger when he first got out of the service. A Navy officer on leave was drunk in a bar and pushed Brownie too hard, finally taking a swing at him. Brownie broke both his collarbones. She married him anyway because she saw the good man underneath with a wicked and clever sense of humor, quick intelligence and deep, compassionate loyalty towards friends and family. He had your back.

Bob Brown was of average height and cut from granite; Bob Cormack was a classic Western “tall drink of water” in Colorado working with me at EZ Tree Service. By now, I was the experienced climber, and Cormack was the prodigy. I never saw anyone with more easy facility at heights. He had a degree in Physics and Math from the University of Colorado, was 6’1” or so, about 180 pounds without an ounce of body fat. One Friday night, Rita joined me and some of the guys and their dates for an all-you-can-eat fish fry at a local watering hole in Boulder. The cook filled your plate on the first round, and then much smaller servings followed until the eater gave up. Except Cormack didn’t. The restaurant broke its advertising promise and shut him off after twenty deep fried fillets.

We became friends in the ephemeral, quickly close way of the sixties. He gave me my first lessons on a five string banjo. As unlikely as it seems with a math major, I taught him to play chess. He schooled me on new subtleties of rope work, and I initiated him in some of the vagaries and eccentricities of different tree species, especially when it came to the fine points of pruning. He needed virtually no training in balance and climbing skills.

Bobby was a member of the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group. When some hapless or injured climber was stranded on some inaccessible, impossible precipice, Cormack was one of the lunatics who went to get them safely back on the ground. He told me once he was traversing a ridge with steep embankments on both sides when a sudden storm came up. Suddenly, his hair stood on edge and his ice axe started spitting sparks. He knew that a lightening discharge builds up on both the ground and in the air; he had a second or two before he became a lightening rod. He dove off over the embankment getting very bruised up, but with no broken bones and alive.

He was once suspended for a semester, even though his GPA was north of 3.9. An area dorm director caught him outside his then girlfriend’s window on the 15^th floor without a rope, back and legs up a masonry inset in the wall. As I said, climbers learn eventually of their mortality, but at 19, there is a learning curve. His dream, as with all serious mountaineers, was to summit the great peaks.

Six years after I knew him, I read about Bob Cormack in the Maine newspapers, then the National Geographic. On October 26, 1976, on a Bicentennial climb, Bob and his friend Chris Chandler were the sixth and seventh Americans to ever summit Everest. Two hundred and twenty five climbers have died attempting to climb Everest. Bobby wasn’t one of them.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong. Winston Churchill

4 Comments

Filed under Tree Stories

September 30, 2012 · 4:23 pm

The Nature of a Beech Tree

Beech trees are comfortable. Smooth gray bark with sweeping sloped crotches, beech gifts the climber with branches near enough for easy assent and spaced far enough to allow access to all areas of the tree without too much rope tangling. The canopy is graceful, spreading as much as fifty feet. Taxonomically related to oaks, the wood is strong and reliable with plenty of convenient nooks for a contented coffee break. I love beech trees.

In the eighties Jimmy and I formed a symbiotic partnership that lasted almost a decade. We were the proverbial weekend two guys in a pickup truck (actually two pickup trucks). He was a high school biology teacher who saved his money, bought a small clapped out, now thriving, nursery and landscaping operation and today owns a successful business, even hosting for years his own landscaping advice Saturday radio show that is widely respected in Boston. Both of us were trying to support our dreams (and in my case parochial school tuitions). I was the tree climber; he ran the ropes and chainsaw on the ground. Both of us cleaned up the mess. Occasionally, we would take on projects far beyond the scope for which we were equipped. Jimmy and I were nothing if not confident in our ability to overcome.

One such job was taking down an old, weakened and dangerous beech tree on the estate Jimmy lived on as part time groundskeeper. Forty five or more inches diameter at the ground, it extended upwards at least eighty feet. We had room to drop it, but to control the fall I climbed it to put in a pull line at sixty feet or so. About twenty feet up, the trunk branched into two main leaders. As I climbed past that divergence, I heard a low familiar hum and looked down into a mass of honey bees nestled in the crotch. The bees and I attentively ignored one another.

When I descended after setting the pull line, we huddled and came up with a contingency plan. Clearly, when the tree hit the ground, a nest of undetermined size would be broken open and discharge an army of protective, seriously overwrought, stinging insects. We warned off weekend picnickers and Frisbee throwers; the estate was open to the townspeople and lovely. Jimmy hooked up the pull line to the pickup truck, putting tension on it well clear of the fall zone, and I began to cut the notch about two feet off the ground. The cutting stopped abruptly when sparks erupted and we discovered the center of the tree had been filled with cement many years earlier to try and treat a cavity. The hits just kept on coming. We regrouped at Jimmy’s tool box and pulled out a three pound hammer and cold chisel.

Making the cut took well over an hour, normally a ten minute job. A little careful chain sawing, resharpen the teeth, some hammer and chisel work – eventually the tree was sufficiently notched to start the back cut, which involved the same arrangement of chain saw, chisel and chain file. As the tree started its rapidly accelerating fall, I ran like my life depended on it to the truck and jumped in the cab. The beech hit the ground with a crash, splitting open longitudinally and tearing apart an awe inspiring bee’s nest over fifteen feet long. Almost immediately the windshield and side windows of the truck were covered in bees so thick we couldn’t see out. We waited, tethered to the top of the tree with no place to go and told stories. Eventually, we had to kill the bees that night when they settled down, after we consulted with a local bee keeper, who assured us we would never be able to find the queen and relocate the nest. We didn’t want to spoil all that honey with pesticide, but the exposed nest could not be left with all the children who played in the fields nearby. We cut the tree into firewood by our headlights late into the night and hauled the brush to the estate’s mulch pile.

Current arboricultural practice avoids the cement filled cavity because it seals in the rot and creates a fulcrum further weakening the tree against future storms. Other common practices of my youth are no longer espoused by those who understand the nature of trees. At one time, we carried screw top paint pots, ruining our clothes as we painted all cuts over three inches to protect the tree. What the paint really did was kill back the cambium, that single layer of growth cells that produce bark on the outside and vessels to transport nutrients on the inside. Cambium is how the tree grows in girth and how it heals from injury. The paint slowed healing, and the protection it afforded against rotting fungus spores broke down long before the wound healed over.

A third abandoned common wisdom relates to how young trees were planted. Routinely we would stake them with wire and hose to keep them from blowing over and fill the hole in which we planted them with rich nutrients and peat moss. Stakes are now left in place only a very short period, if at all, and the heavy nutrients are now generally left out. As knowledge of tree development and physiology has evolved, we’ve learned staking prevents much of the normal swaying in the wind that stimulates long term root growth, which more permanently anchors the tree against uprooting in a storm. Over fertilizing saplings promotes excessive root development circumscribed primarily within the original planting pit and depresses root growth out into the indigenous soil that is necessary to nurture the tree for decades.

There is an analog, I believe, with people. Over protection and excessive coddling inhibits the testing and development necessary for healthy, long term growth. As our child centered culture awards trophies for participation and social promotion for substandard academic performance, we wrongly cultivate “self esteem” at the expense of self reliance and real confidence fired in the kilns of overcoming difficult circumstances. The truth is rooted in the difficult reality that we are not all equally talented, bright or capable in every aspect of life, but we all have a niche wherein we can contribute and flourish.

Culturally, the progressive holds out for equal outcome, not opportunity, to the detriment of long term societal health. Robust individualism slowly putrefies in a culture steeped in collectivism and entitlement, ultimately weakening the whole organism of this great blue ball we inhabit. Individualism is decried as selfish and egocentric, while, I believe it to be our only true course to growth and healing.

“The individualism of which we speak (is) in contrast to socialism and all other forms of collectivism… The essential features of that individualism which, from elements provided by Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity, was first fully developed during the Renaissance and has since grown and spread into what we know as Western civilization—are the respect for the individual man qua man, that is the recognition of his own views and tastes as supreme in his own sphere…and the belief that it is desirable that men should develop their own individual gifts and bents.” The Road To Serfdom, F. A Hayek

2 Comments

Filed under Culture views, Tree Stories

September 23, 2012 · 3:48 pm

The Scribes and The Pharisees

Just behind sex, food, shelter and clothing in the hierarchy of human drives is the pharisaical impulse – that most ardent desire to write down and impose the minutiae of stultifying rules and regulations upon the spirits of our fellows. Jesus put it this way: “They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” (Matt 23:4) John the Baptist was more succinct: “You brood of vipers!” (Luke 3:7)

We have advanced exponentially in the technological competence to distribute and enforce these regulations, but not a whit, it seems, in controlling the inclination. In the twentieth and twenty first centuries, the prime movers of regulation are the progressives or liberal political parties (or tyrannies), most especially exemplified currently in the United States by the Obama administration.

Just a couple of examples from the most prolific regulations generators in American history:

In 2010, the administration headed the charge to fulfill Rahm Emanuel’s admonition (former White House chief of staff, now Mayor of Chicago) to never let a serious crisis go to waste by signing into law the Dodd Frank financial reform bill. When any bill is passed, it then falls to the bureaucrats to promulgate the regulations defining how it will be enforced. And propagate the new bureaucrats necessary to enforce it. Propagating bureaucrats is something at which progressive government is particularly talented. Consisting of 2,319 pages, Dodd Frank has generated over 8,000 pages of new Federal Register regulations. And counting.
The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was worse yet, imposing over twenty new taxes, over 2,700 pages in length, it has generated to date almost 12,000 pages of new regulations. Eighteen pages of these went just to define the term, “full time employee”. No kidding. Any reasonable person could have defined the term in a well constructed sentence. 11, 327 pages in July so far. And counting.

The far from conservative and long esteemed magazine, “The Economist” wrote this about Dodd Frank: “(the bill) will smother financial institutions in so much red tape that innovation is stifled and America’s economy suffers.” Given the tepid recovery, barely above horizontal since the recession ended in early 2009 – the slowest post war recession recovery –and the record breaking low velocity of money turn over, “The Economist” was prescient, albeit with an obvious prediction. Banks are sitting on enormous reserves of cash that are not being put to use.

Financial institutions are struggling to understand and implement the 8,000 pages of Dodd Frank, and are increasingly timid to put their cash back into growing the economy. Businesses, also concerned with compliance and future tax implications, are reluctant to borrow the money necessary to grow and hire new employees. Fear and the fearful levels of work necessary to comply are two sea anchors that an economy just beginning to see the wind pick up from the doldrums doesn’t need. Experts approximate that the 8,000 pages so far are about 30% of what will ultimately be imposed. The House Committee on Financial Services calculates that the law will take private companies 24 million labor hours a year and require that businesses hire 26,477 employees to comply. In that sense, it is, I suppose, a jobs bill. Of course, not one of those 26,477 expensive employees will contribute an iota to growing the business or the profits necessary to hire more people. Au contraire.

What does this new bureaucracy look like, and how much does it cost the already overburdened taxpayer? One section (there’s a lot of sections in 2,300 pages) of Dodd Frank was the original brainchild of Elizabeth Warren (Harvard professor and Senate candidate running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts). Dodd Frank established a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (bureau being first two syllables of ‘bureaucrat’). Sounds lofty and helpful, doesn’t it? The CFPB has a budget of over $447 million for fiscal year 2013, ladles on 958 new federal employees, 60 % of whom make over $100,000 in salary, and has authority to draw up to $550 million directly from the Federal Reserve with no Congressional oversight and just a one page letter to the Fed describing why it needs the money. Five percent of the employees make over $200,000, which is more than a sitting cabinet member. The “administrative assistant” (secretary) of the director, Richard Corday, makes $165,139. They spent $40 million (40% of it borrowed in the deficit) on office renovations.

In contrast to those exalted salaries, the median American taxpayer makes $50,054, an amount that has decreased against inflation every year of the Obama administration, including 4% last year. So far, we have seen the CFPB produce such gems as Consumer Alerts (such as the mandatory small print in things like credit card terms and conditions) published in 187 languages at taxpayer expense, including Somali and Tamil – spoken predominantly in northeast Sri Lanka. How many of us have read the terms and conditions in the existing credit card statements? The Tower of Babel had nothing on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Labour Party government in post WWII Great Britain left in place many of the wartime restrictions and regulations; this is typical of the progressive Pharisee: once in place, regulations tend to grow brothers and not ride off into the sunset. A report was commissioned in the fifties to investigate the benefits of closely managing the youth. Here are some excerpts: Special agencies, called Citizen’s Advice Bureaus, are set up to steer the bewildered through the forest of rules, and to indicate to the persistent the rare clearings where a private person may still make a choice…(the ordinary citizen) spends great stretches of his waking hours going through motions that have been predetermined for him by directives in whose framing he has had no part, whose precise intention he seldom understands, and of whose appropriateness he cannot judge. (They are) so acclimatized to that state that they seldom plan and carry out under their own steam any new….enterprise. He thus looks forward to no future period at which a sinewy faculty of responsibility is likely to be of service to himself or others.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to work for a micromanager experienced the slow sapping of creativity, energy, commitment and joy that results.

At his inauguration, President Obama promised “hope and change” and to “fundamentally change” America. Many did not understand the degree to which he wanted to change us, nor exactly how he would go about it. This time during the election process, we do.

(Powerful central government) covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided… Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd. “Democracy in America” Alexis de Tocqueville.

1 Comment

Filed under Politics and government

Author Archives: jparquette

About jparquette

Bittersweet

The Taxman Cometh

Sing, But Keep Going

Irish Cuisine

Stalemate

Simplicity

Friends with Benefits

Acrophobia – Tale of Two Bobs

The Nature of a Beech Tree

The Scribes and The Pharisees

Post Categories

Most Recent