Mountain Views News          Saturday, April 2, 2011

11

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, April 2, 2011 


STUART Tolchin..........On LIFE

HAIL Hamilton My Turn

Mountain 
Views

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Dean Lee 

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Richard Garcia

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Lina Johnson

Chris Bertrand

Contributors

Teresa Baxter

Pat Birdsall

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Stuart Tolchin

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Hail Hamilton 

Rich Johnson

Chris Bertrand

Mary Carney

La Quetta Shamblee

Glenn Lambdin

Greg Wellborn

Ralph McKnight

Trish Collins

Pat Ostrye

Dorothy White

Webmaster

John Aveny 


HISTORY PAST AND PRESENT

SOMETHING TO THINK 
ABOUT WHEN YOU PAY 
YOUR TAXES

 Last night my wife, a 
neighbor, and I made 
our way to All Saints 
Church to hear a talk 
being given by James 
Carroll, a former 
Priest and a pretty 
brilliant guy who has a very unique 
perspective on the present state of 
the world. Earlier in the day I had 
heard Mr. Carroll being interviewed 
on NPR and the ability to hear him 
speak in person seemed like a great 
opportunity. Opportunity, for what 
I am not sure. I am now in a kind 
of forced semi-retirement as I am 
receiving Social Security Benefits 
and don’t have the financial need to 
earn as much money. Rather than 
discussing Mr. Carroll’s speech, 
which was highly interesting and 
provocative, I want to talk about this 
business of being unprepared for, or 
worse, completely unaware of the 
elements of the next stage of life. 

 Really, my getting older is no 
surprise. It happens to everyone 
else, so I must have known it was 
going to happen to me. I have always 
assumed I would continue working 
as long as my health permits, but 
I never considered what would 
happen to my attitude once I started 
getting money just for existing. Now 
that I am receiving this pension I 
just don’t scramble around the way 
I used to when my caseload would 
drop. I am realizing this right now 
as I work on this article in the middle 
of the day, instead of the middle of 
the night as is my usual practice. 
Why am I working on this now? 
Obviously, because I have the time. 
Fine - except for one thing - my self-
esteem is affected. I am not ready 
for all this leisure or maybe even 
freedom. I love sneaking in nine 
holes of golf when I have a bunch of 
other things that I should be doing. 
I have learned from the past that by 
playing golf I will be forced to end 
my procrastinating and do what I 
could and should have done earlier, 
except I couldn’t.

 In my head I can still hear my 
mother from fifty years ago and my 
wife from last week yelling, “Why 
do you always wait until the last 
minute?” All right, my wife doesn’t 
yell. She just glares at me as I plead 
with her to help my find some vital 
folder that I need right now because 
I have to file something in a few 
hours. “Why didn’t you look for it 
last week instead of playing golf?” 
Actually, I think I know the answer. 
I was afraid all along that I wouldn’t 
be able to find what I was looking for 
and I wanted to postpone the panic 
for as long as possible. Panic is no 
fun but it does enable one to act, and 
I know from my own history that 
once I get started I will get it done. I 
know this all sounds ridiculous but I 
don’t think that I’m the only person 
that works this way.

 Now let’s get back to my present 
dilemma. I’m not required to 
do as much work, so there’s less 
to procrastinate about and I feel 
strange. I just can’t go off and play 
golf in the middle of the day when I 
have nothing else to do. What am I; 
just an old man of leisure of no use to 
anybody? I need to be worthy of my 
own admiration. 

 Somehow all of this angst translated 
into my suggesting to my wife that 
we go to All Saints Church and hear 
Jim Carroll. She heartily approved 
of my idea and invited a neighbor 
and, suddenly, just before we left, 
I developed this terrible stomach 
ache. My wife said, “After all this 
you’re not going to go.” I said you’re 
right- we’re going! But we managed 
to be late and parked in a place 
where we got a ticket and because 
we were late we were ushered to sit 
up front facing the crowd just a few 
feet from the speaker. If I got sick or 
fell asleep it would be disaster. Now 
here’s the hard part to explain. All 
this added pressure and the lateness 
and the ticket somehow, for me at 
least, made the experience more 
significant. It’s the way I lead my 
life even though it gets on my wife’s 
nerves. I would like to eliminate this 
perhaps unnecessary anxiety and 
still do the kinds of things and live 
the kind of life that allows me to feel 
worthy of my own admiration. Does 
overcoming obstacles have to be a 
part of it? In a way that’s always been 
a part of my past - must it be a part 
of my present? Or perhaps for me, 
like for the rest of the world, today’s 
real-life obstacles are so ever-present 
that just struggling with them will be 
enough to keep me busy and quasi-
self-approving.

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is big 
enough to take everything you have.” Barry Goldwater

If you take home less than your gross pay, it is only because 
someone has siphoned money out of your paycheck. The 
federal government takes money from you under threat of 
imprisonment, including “contributions” to Social Security, 
which you will probably never see again, and Medicare taxes, 
which are not counted as income tax, and FICA, which is 
just another income tax. After your income is taxed, you 
still have to pay state and local sales taxes, gasoline tax, and 
numerous other taxes on everyday purchases. Federal and state gasoline taxes, on average, are 
43 cents per gallon. 

(California gas taxes include an 6% state sales tax and 1.25% local sales tax, plus a 1.2 cents per 
gallon Underground Storage 
Tank, UST, fee.)

In many cases, your money 
ends up in the hands of 
someone else who is either 
too rich or too poor to pay 
any taxes at all. Or it may 
end up in any of a myriad 
of hundreds of government 
agencies or programs that 
may or may not benefit you. 

According to the 
Congressional Budget Office 
In 2010 federal expenditures 
totaled a whopping $3.55 
trillion. Mandatory spending 
was $2.009 trillion, and 
discretionary was spending 
$1.368 trillion. Total tax 
receipts were $2.162 trillion. 
This left a deficit of $1.388 
trillion. This is how our tax 
dollars were spent. Fifty 
years ago, the Federal budget 
was less than $88 billion and 
half of that was military. A 
private soldier got about 
$32 a month, and lived in 
barracks. The money is worth 
less today, maybe a factor of 
10 at least. That would make 
the Federal Budget $880 
billion if it was still the same 
split. Back then half (1/2) the 
budget was military development, weapons, training and salaries.

Today the military get about 20% of the budget (about the same as Social Security) and salaries 
are a much bigger cost. No draft means they have to compete for manpower. Living quarters 
are updated, salaries are higher, the equipment is much more expensive. But modern war is 
now a lot cheaper (at least it’s supposed to be) because we do it faster. What has increased is 
not foreign aid, but welfare, tax cuts for the wealthy and money transfers (often to buy votes). 

There is the budget, the black budget, mandatory spending and discretionary spending. A lot of 
the money is off budget (like the $1.2 trillion spent so far on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) 
and not included in what the public sees. There are also the unfunded mandates paid for by 
the states. And when the government spends more money than it collects in taxes and fees and 
licenses, the country runs a deficit and that increases the National Debt. 

So in 2010 instead of $880 billion the government really spent $3.6 TRILLION! I suppose the 
good news is I’m old and won’t have to suffer much longer. However, The bad news is our kids 
and generations to come will suffer greatly because of the debt we have created--a debt in large 
part owned by foreigners. 

As of January 2011, foreigners owned $4.45 trillion of U.S. debt, or approximately 47% of 
the debt held by the public of $9.49 trillion and 32% of the total debt of $14.1 trillion. The 
largest holders were the central banks of China ($1.1 trillion), Japan ($885 billion), and the 
UK ($278.4 billion). This should be a wake up call for all of us when we pay our taxes this year.


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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN


HOWARD Hays

 As I See It

GREG Welborn

OBAMA DID THE 
RIGHT THING

 A prominent, and wealthy, 
German businessman was 
interviewed on Bloomberg 
Television, offering his views 
on the European economy. 
During the interview, he was 
reminded he pays a 60% tax 
on his income. He acknowledged it was true, 
then returned to the economy.

 The interviewer brought it up again, and again 
there wasn’t much of a reaction. Finally, for a 
third time, the interviewer brought up the 60% 
tax rate and asked if the guest wasn’t bothered by 
it. The businessman replied he didn’t want to be 
“a rich man in a poor country”.

 There are indeed rich men in poor countries. 
Number one on the Forbes list of billionaires 
is Carlos Slim Helu (net worth $53.5 billion), 
who made his fortune as Mexico privatized its 
national telephone company.

 After Bill Gates and Warren Buffett at two and 
three, numbers four and five hail from India; 
Mukesh Ambani ($29 billion, oil and gas) and 
Lakshmi Mittal ($28.7 billion, steel).

 In addition to being home to the world’s 
richest man, Mexico is also where (according 
to the CIA) one in five live in poverty. In India 
it’s one in four. United Arab Emirates is thought 
of as a land of wealth, but it has a poverty 
level similar to Mexico’s. Some of the poorest 
countries in Africa have rulers with some of the 
biggest (foreign) bank accounts.

 Recently in state capitals, we’ve seen policies 
leading to a few becoming very rich in an 
increasingly poor country.

 Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin 
began his term by pushing through $140 million 
in special interest tax cuts, and then came to his 
constituents with news of a budget shortfall - in 
the amount of $140 million. He’d take care of it 
by imposing wage cuts and other concessions on 
public employees, and taking away their rights 
to collective bargaining. 

 The employees agreed to the cuts and 
concessions, but Gov. Walker insisted they give 
up their collective bargaining rights as well. It 
had to be done, he explained, because it’s all 
about the budget.

 With Democrats preventing a vote, 
Republicans went ahead and took away public 
employees’ collective bargaining rights on their 
own. They could do so, they explained, because 
it had nothing to do with the budget.

 In the latest chapter, the Dane County 
District Attorney and others filed suit claiming 
the Republicans’ action violated open-meeting 
laws. A circuit judge agreed to hear arguments, 
and enjoined the Secretary of State from 
publishing the law, preventing it from taking 
effect. Republicans then sidestepped the 
Secretary of State and had it “published” (posted 
on a website) by another state agency - claiming 
the law thus was duly enacted.

 The judge reminded Republicans of her 
previous instructions, and noted, “Apparently 
that language was either misunderstood or 
ignored”. Republicans responded that because 
of “legislative immunity”, they weren’t bound to 
obey laws they wrote for themselves. Further, 
they claimed that having a judge opine on the 
legality of their actions somehow violated the 
concept of “separation of powers”. Their only 
accountability was to those who bought them 
their offices.

 In Michigan, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder 
pushed through $1.7 billion in corporate tax 
breaks as a first order of business, and then 
passed the expense to seniors in addition to 
public employees; adding tax liability to public 
and private pension income, eliminating the 
$2,300 senior tax exemption, reducing property 
tax credits for seniors, etc.

 To enable an expansion of the attack on 
organized labor from the state to the local level, 
Michigan Republicans enacted the “financial 
martial law” bill allowing appointees of the 
governor, individuals or corporations, to march 
into financially troubled school districts and 
municipalities, void labor contracts and fire any 
or all members of elected boards and councils. 
The legislature slashed billions in state aid to 
localities and schools in order to ensure a ready 
availability of financially troubled places to 
march into.

 Under Republican Governor John Kasich, 
Ohio has granted a $10 million tax break to oil 
companies, moved to eliminate the estate tax and 
grant tax cuts to the rich, while cutting support 
for schools by 25%, $12 million from children’s 
hospitals and a million from food banks. Gov. 
Kasich hopes to make up some of the revenue by 
allowing slot machines at race tracks.

 Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida 
proposed a corporate tax break of $1.5 billion 
over two years, along with $3 billion in cuts to 
Medicaid and $154 million from K-12 school 
funding.

 In New Jersey, Republican Governor Chris 
Christie has tied property tax rebates for seniors 
to public workers giving up health and pension 
benefits.

 Republicans in Georgia have pushed to 
increase teachers’ and other state workers’ health 
care costs by 20%, gut the HOPE scholarship 
program and take $75 million from state 
universities to cover a 33% cut in corporate tax 
rates.

 Republican Governor Sam Brownback of 
Kansas has proposed eliminating the corporate 
income tax altogether, while cuts to the Earned 
Income Tax Credit would push an estimated 
6,500 Kansas families into poverty.

 Tea Party Gov. Paul LePage of Maine froze 
health care funding for working parents and 
prescription drug assistance for seniors to save 
$30 million, while enacting tax breaks benefiting 
all of about 550 large estates - at a cost of $30 
million. (Gov. LePage is the one who removed 
paintings of laborers from the halls of the 
state’s Department of Labor, in response to an 
anonymous complaint that such depictions, 
which included Rosie the Riveter, are the kind 
used by North Korea to “brainwash the masses”.)

 There’s been a push for allowing corporate 
campaign contributions to be treated the same 
as an individual’s, because corporate bodies 
aren’t conflicted by human body emotions 
such as patriotism and sense of community, as 
evidenced by the German businessman who 
didn’t want to be a “rich man in a poor country”. 
Some policies might make a few very rich, but as 
a country leave us all the poorer. 


President Obama made a considerably 
strong case for the Libya intervention 
in his nationwide address Monday, and 
regardless of his hesitancy in coming to 
this conclusion, it is the right conclusion, 
and it should be acknowledged as such. 
There are many detailed questions which 
remain to be asked and answered, and I’ve 
not doubt that Republicans will pursue 
those lines of inquiry, as is their duty and 
role, but as a conservative I want to clearly 
and forcefully call Republicans to support 
Obama in the action that he has taken. He 
has done the right thing.

 The case for intervening in Libya has 
been building for awhile. We can go 
back months, years or even decades. This 
is, after all, the man who ordered and 
supported the bombing of Pan Am flight 
103 over Scotland. This is the man who 
has supported terrorist groups in the 
Middle East for decades. This is the man 
who inflicted terror and torture on his 
own citizens and promised to be even less 
merciful on those who were resisting him 
in Benghazi. We can have no doubt in our 
mind as to what he would have done to 
these people, and the most basic concepts 
of morality dictated that we stop that if we 
had the power to do so, which we did.

 On a more philosophical, but no less 
significant, basis, our intervention in Libya 
demonstrates once again that America is a 
friend to peace-loving Muslims the world 
over. We have nothing to be ashamed of. 
Over the last 20 years – from the first Iraq 
war liberating Kuwait, to saving Muslims in 
Bosnia, to freeing Iraqis from Saddam, to 
liberating millions from the barbaric rule 
of the Taliban – America has freed, saved 
and supported more Muslims than has 
ever been done before in history. America 
is a friend in deed.

 In the larger, practical context of the 
Middle East, this is also the right thing to 
do. Perhaps this is even the strongest reason 
to intervene. Muzzling, and hopefully 
eliminating Gadhafi, shows the Assads of 
Syria, the Ahmadinejads of Iran, and all 
other would-be tyrants that we are willing 
to move against those who slaughter their 
own people or support terrorism. This is 
of critical importance because bullies – 
whether they are 6 year old first graders or 
50 year old mad men – don’t stop until they 
are made to or convinced that it is in their 
best interest to stop. Nothing softens and 
ameliorates dictators quite as much as the 
prospect of losing power and facing justice 
at the hands of their former victims. 

 So, there are very good reasons to 
intervene, but there are also several 
lessons to be learned. We can hope that 
President Obama is growing in his job and 
is finally learning these lessons. This is 
where Republicans can help, remembering 
that Obama, as a candidate and as a new 
President, was very critical of American 
foreign involvements, the use of military 
force and on taking any action without 
overwhelming international public 
support. 

 The first lesson has to be that we cannot 
afford to allow Iran to obtain a nuclear 
bomb. Forget for a 
moment the possibility 
that Iran would export 
nuclear weaponry 
to terrorist groups 
for use on our own 
soil. Simply consider 
what our options 
would have been with 
Gadhafi if he had a 
nuclear weapon. Gadhafi only agreed to 
give up his nuclear weapons program in 
2004 when he feared that the U.S. would 
topple him from power just as we had done 
to Saddam Hussein. If Gadhafi possessed 
nuclear weapons today, we would not have 
been able to intervene. The stakes would 
have been too high, and by now the blood 
spilled in Benghazi obscene. The mad 
mullahs in Tehran must not be allowed to 
have that bargaining chip. 

 The second lesson has to be that 
consistency is important. Those who rise 
to the level of leadership on the world 
stage are practiced and skilled at sizing up 
everyone else who shares that stage. Those 
who lack a moral compass – and that sadly 
encompasses too many leaders in the 
Middle East – are motivated solely by their 
perceptions of strength and weakness. 
Nothing shows strength and resolve better 
than consistency of application. If we take 
on a tin-horn dictator like Gadhafi and 
yet let Bashar Assad of Syria ruthlessly 
put down the budding revolt in his own 
country, we will undermine the cause of 
freedom and peace in the Middle East. We 
don’t need to pick a fight with Syria, but we 
shouldn’t flinch at the opportunity. Syrians 
are resisting this tyrant, and we should 
support them in the hopes that there is a 
regime change here. 

 A third lesson to be drawn from all this 
is that the Bush doctrine of pre-emption 
is legitimate when used appropriately. 
When our own safety or the wholesale 
slaughter of innocents is threatened, we 
do not need to wait to be attacked or for 
a certain volume of blood to run in the 
streets of some foreign capital before we 
take action to protect ourselves or the lives 
and freedoms of others. We must of course 
use judgment and not be hotheaded, but 
we needn’t hesitate from fear. 

 Lastly, for all the reasons above, America 
must not be afraid to lead. The most 
legitimate criticism that conservatives have 
of Obama’s actions is his inference that the 
morality of an act is determined by the 
number of people who agree with you, or 
who are in coalition with you, rather than 
by the act itself. Whether or not the U.N., 
the Arab League, or France requested us to 
intervene, the Libyan intervention, like the 
Iraq and Afghanistan interventions, were 
monumentally and undeniably moral acts 
of a great and moral country. We shouldn’t 
be afraid to lead the world in this direction.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a 
freelance writer and has spoken to several civic 
and religious organizations on cultural and 
moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles area 
with his wife and 3 children and is active in the 
community. He can be reached at gregwelborn@
earthlink.net.

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