Hope for Journalism

After a nauseating campaign season full of fawning adoration and “thrills up my leg” from almost every major news outlet except Fox (which is now killing the other news channels in the ratings), you would have ample reason to sigh, “That’s it.  Really this time.  Journalism is dead.”

That tough, junkyard dog, snarling up the tree at every corrupt politician or cheating company that the Founders envisaged as critical to the functioning of a democracy?  More like a lap dog, lately.  And one that yaps only at all the wrong things, at that.  Like all lap dogs, the complacent media can be somewhat entertaining, in a yappy, finger-nipping, ridiculous looking kind of way.  Not particularly helpful in actually informing the general population about any real dangers or concerns to the nation, however.

But wait!  Breaking news on that front!  (ok, not “breaking”, exactly; I’m behind, but bear with me)

First, we had Lila Rose, who posed as a minor teenager with an *ahem* older boyfriend looking for an abortion from Planned Parenthood but not wanting to tell her parents.  “Don’t worry, dear!  I didn’t hear you say he’s 35, and you don’t have to tell your parents, law or no law!”  Officials in the various states insisted that since Rose wasn’t actually pregnant or underage, no crime took place, in spite of PP staff’s intentional circumventing of parental consent and mandatory statutory rape reporting laws.

Then, there were the phone calls to various Planned Parenthood affiliates, offering a donation as long as it would be used to financially help someone abort a black baby.  “Because, you know, I have a son, he’s white, and with affirmative action and all that, I want to level the playing field for him by eliminating a black.”  The PP staffers tripped overthemselves in their excitement over the novelty of such a donation.  Or was it excitement in how the donation played into Margaret Sanger’s original vision in founding Planned Parenthood of eliminating the “undesirable” breeders?

The one that really hit the news big time, however, was the latest expose of ACORN.  Posing as a prostitute and her pimp/boyfriend, two people approached ACORN for help with securing a mortgage for a house to be used as a brothel.

The complications?  The 20-year-old “prostitute” told them she’d been “working” since she was 14, they had a “shipment” of El Salvadoran girls coming (illegally) to work as prostitutes, and, BTW, the girls were all 16 and under.  “No problem!” the ACORN staffers in city after city told them.  “Let’s see… we’ll just call you… an independent entertainer/dancer.  And you can claim a couple of those girls as dependents on your taxes, but not all twelve; that would look suspicious.”

The undercover videos show no attempts by the ACORN staffers to whisper or shut the door; apparently, they have no worries that anybody else in the office would really object.  Trafficking in persons, illegal immigrants, illegal prostitutes, underage prostitutes… no sweat, we’re here to help!  Oh, and since you’re a new business, we’ll give you a break on the tax advice fee, too!

 

Now, to be fair, the employees of Planned Parenthood and ACORN caught in the undercover tapings not only condoning but encouraging illegal activity were all fired.  Just a few more people thrown under the bus for the good of the continuation of the organization… but none of them acted like it was odd to hide the age of a minor seeking an abortion, or to sweep the statutory rape consideration under the rug, or to set up a brothel for fourteen-year-old illegal immigrants.

So what the heck else is going on that hasn’t been caught yet?  And why won’t most of the media cover any of this?  (I mean, besides the obvious answers that most of the media loves Planned Parenthood and ACORN.)

 

Until last year, when the initial voter fraud scandals started to surface, the US Council of Catholic Bishops funded ACORN for its community building and voter registration activities.

Until the latest set of videos broke, Congress funded ACORN, too.

Planned Parenthood is still widely funded by states for its “family planning” (i.e. condom distribution) and sex education services (probably already running in the public schools near you).

James O’Keefe (involved in all three undercover projects), Lila Rose, and Hannah Giles, you give us hope that journalism may yet re-learn its duties as the sharp-eyed, sharp-toothed watchdog of our nation.

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Not buying Obamacare

Ok, I said I was going to be gone, but the crisis is on hold, so I got to watch President Obama’s speech tonight.

Oh, joy.

Now, I’ll say this for him: President Obama is a great speaker, especially if you like traditional “black” pulpit-pounding preaching.  (I was a little disappointed at the lack of, “Can I get an ‘Amen’!?!”  Done right, I actually like that style once in a while.)  The problem is, I don’t believe a lot of what he says.

One of our strengths as a nation is a “healthy skepticism for big government…”  The man who presided over the $787 billion stimulus package (estimated by the CBO to have a true price tag of $3.27 billion in ten years)?  The president who took over car companies on the flimsy excuse they were “too big to fail”?  He’s skeptical of big government?  Maybe he thinks “skeptical of” is a synonym for “addicted to”.  (I did have an otherwise reasonable boss once who adamantly insisted that in lieu of meant because…)

“I won’t pass a bill that will add a dime to the deficit…”  Ok, this is technically true: if this passes, it will add millions and millions of dimes to the deficit.

“We’re going to pay for this out of savings from the inefficiencies in the system…” and I’ve got some lovely oceanfront property in Arizona to sell off to pay for my health care plan, too!

“… the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little…”  Actually, “too much government” got us the Revolutionary War.  Too little government gave us the Constitutional Convention.  I happen to be of the opinion that the Constitution is a whole lot better than a war, but that’s just me.

“There are still details to be worked out in this plan…” (loud guffaw from at least one Congressman)  Now that’s restraint; I would’ve considered booing.  Pelosi looked like she was going to jump out of her seat to strangle someone.

But that’s ok; President Obama insisted that he has an “open door” to discuss issues and suggestions with Republicans.  (General unhappy murmuring could be heard after this claim, too.)  Funny, but the Congressman who tried to take him up on going line-by-line through the bill doesn’t seem to have gotten an appointment yet.

Yes, the almost-nod to tort reform (although Obama carefully avoided that exact phrase) was good.  Frankly, if the bills were going to cover tort reform, legislate pre-existing conditions be covered, allow people and companies to band together to negotiate rates, allow everyone to buy insurance across state lines, and allow people to buy drugs from Canada… well, I’d be thrilled to see it passed fairly quickly (especially since DH’s company just passed on the news that the blasted health insurance company is cancelling our plan, forcing us into one with a higher deductible).

Of course, if all Congress was doing was removing restrictions, the bill would be ten pages or less and easy to read quickly.  Unlike the current bills.

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Happy 100th Birthday, Income Tax!

My local paper did me the favor of informing me this morning that this week is the 100th anniversary of the passage of the permanent income tax in the 16th Amendment by Congress.  (It would not be ratified and implemented until 1913.)  Gee, don’t you feel like celebrating?

But what would you do for a cake?  One with a chunk missing?  Or the top skimmed off?  Would you have to cut everyone’s piece, then take back a progressively bigger chunk off for the older people?

A state homeschooling e-newsletter I get had a cartoon once of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  One Founding Father was saying to another, “We have to do this now; if we don’t stand up to England, what’s next?  An income tax?”  (Actually, Great Britain levied its first income tax in 1789 to pay for the Napoleonic Wars.)

The first income tax in the U.S. was levied to pay for the Civil War.  Instituted in 1861, it was a 3% tax on incomes over $800 annually.  After the war, the income tax ended, but resurfaced in the 1890’s.  At least the first one had the advantages of being both temporary and flat.

Neither characteristic would last.

(May I point out here, that, although generosity is obviously encouraged, the Bible only demands 10%… from everyone.  Although the rich are slammed for being stingy at times (and even as a habit), tithing does not work on a mandatory progressive scale, where the rich would be expected to give 30% or more, while the poor were totally unobligated to contribute.)

In 1913, when the 16th Amendment went into effect, less than 1% of the U.S. population owed income taxes.  Apparently, it was considered something of a bragging right to be able to say you owed income taxes.

By 1919, the top tax bracket was 77%, allegedly to pay for U.S. involvement in WWI.  However, it remained primarily a tax on the upper classes.  Having discovered this lovely source of income, of course it was not going to remain a tax for only the rich for long.  Whenever a politician promises, “Oh, we’ll tax those nasty rich people, not you!” remember the history of the income tax.

Don’t get me wrong: I think there are benefits to a larger percentage of the population paying taxes. 

1. We have too many people who pay no taxes and expect handouts from the government, because they’ve been told the rich “deserve” to get stripped of their money.  We have degraded work by encouraging this attitude.
2. The Biblical tithe system expected everyone to contribute; even the poor can help someone worse off than themselves.  Some charities, like Heifer Project, incorporate a requirement to pass on the gift to another person (in their case, they give away pregnant animals and farming information, then the recipient has to give away at least some of the animals and pass on the information to help another family).  Contributing to your society is a dignifying thing.
3. Finally, we value things more that we pay for.  A friend of ours offered free trumpet lessons.  The kids hardly ever practiced, didn’t bother to show up on time, if at all, etc.  So, he started charging a measely $5 per week.  All of a sudden, parents were on their kids to practice, they were on time, they started caring.  Just because they’d paid something for it.

WWII made the income tax fun for everyone.  In 1944, the income tax started at 23% and topped out at 94%.  At least we still had patriotism to keep all those rich people from either quitting work or fleeing to an offshore tax haven.  And the instruction book was only two pages long for the 1040.

In 1986, the maximum income tax rate was set to 28%.  (And people wonder why conservatives love Reagan: we tend to think if you earned the money, then it’s yours, not the government’s.  We’re happy to share it with charities of our choice… but the government is not one of those.)

In 2009, the top bracket was 35%.  The booklet that tells you how to fill out the 1040 is considerably longer than two pages.  I wouldn’t know; we finally gave up and got the computer program to do it.  Apparently, even people *smart* enough to be appointed to the Presidential Cabinet can’t figure out the blasted tax code.  (Some wise guy commentator said we could fix our budget deficit by just appointing more people to the Cabinet, thus getting millions in back taxes finally settled.)

 

We still have four years until 2013, the 100th anniversary of the income tax’s actual implementation.

Can we dump the insanity and figure out something better by then?  Maybe something involving spending tax revenues as if they belonged to the people, not the government?

Two prominent suggestions include the Flat Tax and the Fair Tax, each coupled with the repeal of the 16th Amendment and the end of the income tax.  Either way, most of the $100 billion spent annually on tax preparation would be freed up to go to useful purposes instead of loophole nitpicking and taxcode deciphering.  Special interests and considerations would be excised from the discussion.  And there would be a lot fewer dead trees from printing gargantuan tax forms.

Glenn Beck keeps pointing out that our taxes aren’t just money, but our time.  The article in my paper this morning said that in 1989, the National Tax Foundation estimated that the average American worked 1 hour, 47 minutes each day to pay their taxes.  In 2009, they gave a Tax Freedom Day, but I calculated that would translate to 2 hours, 16 minutes each day to pay taxes (28.2% tax rate * 8 hours= 2.256 hours).

If we started thinking about it not just as money, but time, would it bother us more what Congress does with our tax dollars?

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