Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

June 5, 2012

Voting in Wisconsin

I hope Governor Scott Walker is recalled today in Wisconsin. Whether you agree with him about this or that, other Republican governors are doing some of the same things he wanted to do, and they are not facing a recall. It is a very poor politician who bashes a hornet's nest with a big stick, and my home state deserves better than that. There are also a great many reasons to question Walker's integrity, including the fact that he evidently knocked up his girlfriend when he was in college and then tried to weasel out of it. That is not the way things were done in Wisconsin when I was growing up there. Read the story here.
      I'll be watching the results on TV later today, but I don't hold out much hope for sanity. Walker's election in 2010 was a fluke, but voters nowadays have short memories, and their knees are still jerking.

 

June 5, 2012

Those nontaxpayers again

Mary Meeker was quoted in the Wall Street Journal:

What gives me pause is that when we were born, 85% of households paid federal income taxes. Now only 49% do. 

This was in L. Gordon Crovitz's always interesting Information Age column yesterday, which was about politics in Silicon Valley. Meeker works for the Kleiner Perkins venture-capital company; that is Tom Perkins, who (he reported recently) can afford at age 80 to scuba-dive in Fiji every day, complaining about the cost of government, while taxes in his heyday, in other words while he was getting seriously rich, were higher than they are now. But I digress. 
      For years now I have been asking who are these people who do not pay any income taxes. I imagine Meeker was born about the time I was working in the world's biggest car factory, making good money and paying federal income taxes; that factory disappeared 25 years ago: are the people who are not paying taxes unemployed or underemployed, so that they have no income on which to pay taxes? Are they single mothers with several dependents working at WalMart, earning a hell of a lot less than I was earning 45 years ago? Could someone please tell me who they are? Anyone?
      It should be the middle class paying most of the taxes in the USA. The middle class has been shrinking for some years now as a percentage of the population, while the richest have been getting ever richer.