So Much Winning

Donald Trump’s campaign slogan was “Make America Great Again.” It’s proven to be popular among people who couldn’t tell you when America was great, or what happened to make it not great. His cultish supporters have followed him to Twitter, where they tweet out inanities with hash tags like #MAGA, and #winning. They boast of “owning the libs.” Everything is a game to be won. One might wonder, how is all that winning coming along? 

Congress passed the Trump Tax cut in December of 2017. Somehow the president managed to sell the concept that lowering corporate tax rates and taxes for the wealthy would benefit all of us. The Republican Party has been trying desperately to make trickle down economics work since the Reagan administration, even though it’s been a spectacular failure. The Trump Tax cut was trickle down on an enormous scale.

Trump told us that his economists estimated that the typical family would see an increase in income of $4000. We heard that statistic a lot. What typical family wouldn’t want to see a $4000 increase in annual income? Not only were workers going to get a break on their taxes, their incomes were going to increase, because their employers were going to get huge tax cuts, and would be passing on the largesse. 

How did it all pan out? The Bureau of Labor Statistics just issued a report on earnings through May 2018.  Real average hourly earnings decreased by 0.1 percent. In other words, workers who are not bosses are making less than they did last year. The hourly wages of mid-class employees (production and non- supervisory workers) is up 0.4 percent, or about a dime an hour. As Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, “At this rate, that tax-cut induced $4,000 in your paycheck will take 28 years.”

So much winning. 

Who could have imagined that corporate America, given a huge tax cut would choose to pocket their profits, and not trickle them down? Anyone who has been paying attention since the Reagan administration rebranded it as “supply side economics.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world, inflation is at a six year high, which means that extra dime you got isn’t going to go very far. That’s unfortunate, because nearly everything is going to cost more, thanks to the Trump tariffs. 

A recent piece in the Union Leader by Michael Cousineau took a walk through areas where NH is already being hurt by the tariffs. A Newington company that was shipping 50,000 pounds of lobster to China stopped getting orders after a 25% tariff was placed on US lobsters heading to China. Lumber and steel tariffs are making building materials more expensive, which means that housing costs are increasing, in a state that already has exorbitant property taxes and a lack of affordable housing. A company in Thornton that sells equipment for measuring wind and rain is abandoning their plan to expand. The tariffs may even have an impact on BAE systems, since US defense contractors are supposed to comply with federal regulations that specify requirements for materials. Our Trump supporting Governor, Chris Sununu, whose favorite slogan is “New Hampshire is open for business,” has been largely silent on this subject. 

So much winning.  

And speaking of winning, I would be remiss if I left out the Wayfair decision. Republicans schemed and manipulated to make sure they got the Supreme Court they wanted – and now Republicans living in sales tax free states are reaping their reward.  After decades of avoiding the collection and paying of  sales taxes to other states that they shipped products to, the Supreme Court addressed the issue of fairness, and found that remote sellers could avoid the regulatory burden of tax collecting and offer lower prices, thereby giving the non-sales tax states an unfair advantage. 

Naturally, the outcry was loud and instantaneous. It seems our NH Republicans thought that the Supreme Court they lied and cheated to get would mess up some other guy’s state – certainly not their own! The governor convened a special legislative session, and has pledged (what else?) to fight this decision. The draft legislation argues that it all comes down to fairness. Yes, they wrote that with a straight face, after decades of benefitting from an unfair advantage.

It’s safe to say that there will be at least one expensive lawsuit as a result of this. Our Republican legislatures historically prefer to pay for long, drawn out  taxpayer-funded lawsuits (can you say Claremont?) than attempt to govern effectively. 

On the national level, our leader is now attempting to take back remarks he made to Russian leader Vladimir Putin with all the skill of a third grader claiming the dog ate his homework. I hope we survive all this winning. 

Published as an op-ed in the July 20, 2018 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper. 

Learning from History

One of my friends wrote a book about town meeting a few years back. I contributed some stories and research. I spent a day at the Gorham Historical Society reading old town reports. The earliest town reports were mostly inventories of what the town owned. Shovels, snow rollers, rakes, and other tools. Those terse summaries show how the town began to grow and change.

The town reports also changed over time.  Early reports contained a narrative school report. The town meeting narratives came later. In 1891, advertising was introduced in the town report. In 1895, the town report contained a report from the Board of Health on the topic of sanitation. The school outhouses were decried as “unsightly and unclean.” Gorham’s status as a burgeoning summer resort was also a concern. The Alpine House hotel was lauded as “first class” for emptying their sewerage into the river.

In 1896, the town report included a list from the Library Trustees of the 476 books that were purchased for the new library. The list was updated for several years in subsequent town reports, along with a stern admonition each year that young readers needed to use more care when handling books. In the 1901 report, the library has 1700 books. In 1902 there were new volumes from Darwin, Kant, Hegel, and Adam Smith.

Then, as now, the town reports included births, marriages, and deaths. The causes of death were interesting. In 1897, there were deaths from “exema rubrance", spasms, a gunshot wound, and “general decline.” In 1899, two people were run over by cars. In 1901 a woman died of “natural decline” at age 91. In 1904 the tailor died of a bullet wound.

1903 was the first year there was an official notice of town meeting, and the first year the town report was indexed.

In 1904 the report contained 32 pages from the road agent that included every ditch dug, every man who plowed or shoveled snow, or fixed a bridge. Many more roads required many more man-hours. Twenty men were paid varying amounts for fighting forest fires.

1905 was the first year with a police report. Some 70 people were arrested for “drunk.” In 1908 there were 48 completed water closets in the town.

From counting shovels to water closets, the history of the town unfolds. I’m betting you cringed when you read about the hotel dumping sewage into the river. Polluted rivers were taken for granted when I was growing up. We moved to Groveland, MA when I was 10, and the nearby Merrimack River reeked in the summertime. The shoe factories along the river in Haverhill emptied their sewage right into the river. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1968. The environmental movement began. We stopped throwing trash out of our car windows. We stopped dumping stuff into rivers. We learned.

Human history is comprised of lessons learned, followed by vigilance, followed by the erosion of vigilance started by people who know we can do it better this time, followed by either the same problem or a variation of it. Rinse, lather, and repeat.

Reaganomics, supply side, trickle down, laissez faire – whatever we want to call the response to Keynesian economics has been a failure since it was imposed during the Reagan administration. We’re encouraged to believe that all of that wealth concentrating at the top will eventually trickle down to the peons at the bottom. This type of economic policy has been failing us for 30 years, with no end in sight. Meanwhile our infrastructure crumbles, and taxpayers pick up the tab for food stamps for the “job creators” at the top who refuse to pay their employees a living wage. This lesson remains unlearned.

THE PLEDGE seems to have begun on the fringes of NH politics in the 1950’s. In the seventies, under the stewardship of Governor Meldrim Thomson and Union Leader editor William Loeb, THE PLEDGE went mainstream. For over 40 years now, some of our elected officials pledge every two years that they promise that they will not support a state income tax or a sales tax. The Pledge is now seen as inevitable and necessary. It’s called The New Hampshire Advantage. As I’ve pointed out before, taking pledges is easier than thinking.

There’s a definite NH Advantage for the state’s 27,000 millionaires and the numerous military retirees who move to NH as a sort of tax shelter. For the rest of us, the advantage hasn’t been evident in some time. What the pledge really means, is that we will continue to raise insufficient revenue to fund our state at anything more than a bare minimum. Our infrastructure will continue to crumble, our state parks will continue to deteriorate, and we will continue to rank in last place in the nation when it comes to investing in our state university system. When this lesson is finally learned, it’s going to come at a very high price.

The lessons of the Gilded Age brought about the Progressive Era. We’re now watching the reforms of the Progressive Era erode. All of the positive gains through the 1970’s are disappearing faster than the polar ice cap.

Gorham learned that libraries are a great idea. They learned that dumping sewerage in the river was not such a great idea. In a 13-year period, Gorham went from applauding the dumping of sewage into the river to having 48 water closets. Progress through plumbing! It is possible for us to learn from our history and our mistakes, but we don’t seem to do it very often.

“I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

© 2014 sbruce

published as an op-ed in the Oct. 3, 2014 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.