Monthly Archives: August 2007

Last month I was a guest at the Colonial Area Republican Men’s Association (CARMA) lunch in Williamsburg. A fellow handed out a table of Virginia State-Local Tax Burden Compared to the U.S. Average (1970-2007) – from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce. I don’t recall if he made a pitch that the numbers were good or bad.

I glanced at the numbers again today and they tell the same story that Harvard’s long-term study reported in the Jan 06 alumni magazine.

• Harvard said the average American’s total tax burden went from 24% to 30% since the mid 70s.
• This table shows the average Virginian’s total tax burden went from 29.2% to 32.9% – before the Republican-controlled General Assembly raised taxes in 04 and 07.

If you take the average (median) income of Virginian families (Fairfax Govt web site) across the Commonwealth ($51,689) and in Fairfax ($88,123), it tells quite a tale. The firefighter married to a school teacher making $51k in RoVa and $88k in NoVa had their total tax burden increased 3% over 35 years (not including the latest hikes).

The tax-and-spend Republicans and Democrats will say, “Virginia is a low tax state.” The increases are small. Look, only 3%.

If greedy legislators at the local, Commonwealth and national governments hadn’t raised taxes, here is what it would mean to that family of four parented by a firefighter married to a school teacher.

• RoVa family would have $159.37 more EVERY month.
• NoVa family would have $270.08 more EVERY month.

Go ask the firefighter married to the school teacher what that money would mean to them every month – starting right now.

This is why ‘little’ tax increases are just a lie. That money means a lot to the average family. Even more to the working poor.

How did government services improve, or what essential new ones were provided, since the early 70s to justify taking this money from the families of Virginia?

Don’t say the 3% increase in taxes paid the salaries of the firefighter and the teacher. Their inflation adjusted wages didn’t profit from higher taxes.

Understanding what a couple of hundred bucks means to working families is the genius of Gov. Jim Gilmore’s ‘No Car Tax’. The concept is lost on the Republican leadership in the General Assembly. Witness today’s back pedal on the super max traffic fines from HB 3202 – the ’07 Transportation Tax Panic – they aren’t offering to repeal the whole abortion of Republican principles, just stick the ‘fees’ to out of state drivers too.

Ask your friends, family and neighbors what an extra couple of hundred dollars a month would mean to them. Maybe they should demand that government give the extra money they’ve taken since the 70s back.

From bands to bombs, let us change the focus again.

One of my favorite parts of BRIDGES will be Chapter 14, “What Did I Tell You? Anatomy of Opportunities Lost.”

The chapter will include reference to many opportunities taken such as preserving the future of the Adirondacks but will focus on opportunities lost. It will contain links to old favorites such as “DOWN MEMORY LANE WITH KATRINA” and others. By the way there will be a new trip on memory lane with Katrina to mark the second anniversary of “rebuilding” the Gulf Coast out soon.

This new “What Did I Tell You?” caught us by surprise.

Some of you will recall that in the early days of Bacon’s Rebellion Blog, Jim opened the scope of subjects beyond the Commonwealth to explore thoughts on occasion of the US of A’s invasion of Iraq.

Our 9th column for Bacon’s Rebellion was titled “Three Questions.” Under the second question (“Why is the United States repeating in Iraq, the same mistake made in Afghanistan?”) we outlined an alternative strategy for both pseudo-nation-states.

Now WaPo, in a 17 August 2007 story by Robin Wright titled “Nonpartisan Group Calls for Three-State Split in Iraq” summarizes a report by the Fund for Peace.

On 22 August CNN carried a story “U.S. Officials rethink hope for Iraq Democracy” quoting generals and intelligence sources.

Read “Three Questions” at https://www.baconsrebellion.com/ and then these two stories at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ and http://www.cnn.com/ and see why it will be in “What Did I Tell You?”

EMR

Thad Williamson and I tackle the thorny issue of what to do about Richmond’s public schools in our latest “Agree to Disagree” columns.

Now for something a little lighter… Scott Miller and the Commonwealth is one of the greatest rock and roll bands ever to emerge from Virginia. It’s a darn shame that Miller, the talented composer, lead vocalist and lead guitar, ever moved to Tennessee.

The Old Dominion would be justified to claim Miller just for his music, which ranges from hard-driving rock to soft, Civil War-style ballads. But his lyrics are deeply rooted in Virginia, West Virginia and the South. They celebrate a sense of time, place and values that Virginians will find familiar. In the YouTube video clip above, he performs “The Amtrak Crescent,” describing a railroad ride from New Orleans to Washington, D.C.

Listen to the words. Miller has is sensitive to dysfunctional human settlement patterns! Watch out, Joni Mitchell (“Pave Paradise”).

You know, it used to be pretty on the Eastern Shore.
Now it’s more New York down to Baltimore.
It takes so much effort just to move one train.
Why does everything around me have to look the same?

Virginia has many great bands and performers. The Dave Matthews Band is the best known, followed perhaps by Bruce Hornsby. Carbon Leaf, Susan Greenbaum and Robin Thompson — to name some Richmond-area musicians — are enormously talented as well. But Scott Miller beats them all. I don’t know why he hasn’t made it into the big time. Judging by the tenor of his lyrics, I’m guessing, he’s the kind of guy who sings about whatever the hell he wants to sing about, and if the big record labels don’t like it, that’s their problem, not his.

I would link to other YouTube videos, but the fan-made recordings are such poor quality that they don’t convey Miller’s talents very well. If you want to hear clips of his music, including a studio recording of Amtrak Crescent, visit the Scott Miller website. Then send him an e-mail and beg him to move back to Virginia where he belongs. Or, at the very least, urge him to swing through the Old Dominion on his next tour.

Michael Barone offers a somewhat different take on Michael Vick, dogfighting and Virginia history:

It’s astonishing and saddening that a man would risk his $130 million football contract to engage in such behavior, which seems barbaric to almost all of us. Where did he even get the idea of doing this?

I got an answer, or rather clues to an answer, while rereading David Hackett Fischer’s superb Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. In his chapter on how the original settlers of Virginia brought with them folkways from their home territory in Wessex (southwestern England), Fischer notes another striking characteristic of Virginians—their obsession with gambling. Virginians were observed to be constantly making wagers with one another on almost any imaginable outcome. The more uncertain the result, the more likely they were to gamble. They made bets not only on horses, cards, cockfighting, and backgammon but also on crops, prices, women, and the weather. “They are all professional gamesters,” a French traveler observed of Virginia’s gentry.”… Colonel Byrd is never happy but when he has the box and dice in his hand.”

The rest of the entry is worth reading, if only to get a sense of our blood-soaked past…which, like so many things in this Commonwealth, seems like only yesterday.

In the Bacon’s Rebellion Blog post “Here, Take My Lint” of 10 August, Jim Bacon profiles the current debate on the role of the Hampton Roads Transportation Authority (HRTA) in achieving Mobility and Access in the Hampton roads New Urban Region.

In Peter Galuszka’s Bacon’s Rebellion News Service story “Fizzled Launch” and in Jim Bacon’s 14 August Blog post “A Stumbling Start” further details of the status of HRTA emerge.

In a 15 August Blog post Jim Bacon examines “The Conservative Backlash Grows” over the legislation that established HRTA and gave a similar Agency, similar powers in the northern part of Virginia. Jim provides links to six news stories on the topic. Something must be important here to spend all this ink. Or it there?

The issue being discussed is how to raise money for transportation facilities. The debate rages in spite of the fact that more money, no matter how much is raised or from what source it comes, if spent for more of the things Agencies have spent money for in the past – primarily roadways for Large Private vehicles – such new facilities will only make the Mobility and Access Crisis worse in both the Hampton Roads New Urban Region and the Virginia portion of the National Capital Subregion.

As large an issue as this is, there is a bigger one.

As reported in Jim Bacon’s “Here, Take My Lint” story, George Donley, an “ordinary citizen,” told a 9 August public hearing by HRTA that he had only “lint” left to contribute to the functions of government. Donley’s plea made for a good quote for the public hearing story in MainStream Media and it caught Jim Bacon’s eye.

A citizen who has the wherewith all to get to a hearing and the ability to make a public statement saying he has only lint and that this foolishness would be newsworthy is a tragedy of epic proportions.

Citizens may not, for good reason, approve of what government Agencies are doing with the money they are now getting or where these Agencies plan to get more money in the future. However, the reality is that it is “the public,” “the Commons” that is running on empty. Those in the top one half of the economic food chain are spending their children’s and grandchildren’s future.

It will take vastly more taxes, vastly higher fees and vastly greater amounts of volunteer and sweat equity devoted to public, common efforts (rather than private, self-serving efforts) to create safe and secure Households, Dooryards, Clusters, Neighborhoods, Villages, Communities and New Urban Regions much less safe and secure nation-states.

Contemporary Civilization is running on fumes. There is a Mobility and Access Crisis, an Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis and a Helter Skelter Crisis directly related to dysfunctional human settlement patterns.

The well respected commentator “Anon 12:18” states the issue well (although that may not have been his intent) in a comment under “The Conservative Backlash Grows”:

“The problem is that no taxes, no new spending is not a principle. It’s a slogan. … A promise to never ever raise taxes, to hold spending to an artificial goal, simply sets up an impossible goal.”

Bridges are falling down. Lenders are packaging debt and selling it as a speculative investment / asset. Nation-states are tearing down forests to grow sugar to burn in Large, Private Vehicles. The temperature is rising faster than anyone expected a few years ago and the US of A is leading the world in the production of Greenhouse gas and buying everything China and India can produce regardless of health, safety or economic concerns.

There is staggering private debt, mortgages are being forclosed, credit is shrinking. There is a huge balance of payments deficit, two wars and a federal government that took a 50.1% vote as a mandate and has demonstrated more incompetence and corruption than the U. S. Grant’s administration – the cannot even rebuild after a hurricane. There is a widening Wealth Gap that threatens free markets and democracy…

In the face of this fat, self-serving citizens get press quotes for saying they have noting to give but lint?

Humans has built a technology based civilization that is hugely expensive yet well fed citizens who enjoy – for now – unprecedented freedom and luxury and champion ever more private rights are not willing to accept public responsibilities.

Governance practitioners, in fear of losing their jobs, scramble to see who they need to appease and subsidize – cotton farmers, oil refiners, autonomobile makers — to keep the ship up for a few more years…

Those who only have lint to give better save in for their life jackets.

EMR

If Jim Bowden pens political potboilers reflecting the perspective of the evangelical wing of the conservative movement (See “At Last, a Political-Thriller that Cultural Conservatives Can Love”), Matt Carson reflects the libertarian wing. In his slender, self-published novel, “On a Hill They Call Capital,” Carson places a gang of wise-cracking, tobacco-chewing good ol’ boys from Rappahannock County at the center of a plot to spark a second American revolution.

In the world of Matt Carson, president of a Warrenton web development firm, government has become the leviathan state. The governing class, in the words of Ronald Reagan, has taken on the attitude, “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” In a post 9/11 twist, government doesn’t threaten only economic liberties, it undermines their civil liberties. To Carson, the Patriot Act aims a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun at the Bill of Rights.

In this fast-paced novel, Cat, a bubba philosopher king, organizes his beer-drinking buddies into a conspiratorial brotherhood they name the Grandsons of Liberty. Launching a night-time raid into Washington, D.C., reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party, they hurl PCs out of the windows of the Internal Revenue Service headquarters building. As a follow-up, they roam the East Coast abducting Congressmen, whom they bring back to their compound in the Virginia hills and hold in a redneck re-education camp. Unlike real bad guys, though, the Grandsons of Liberty wouldn’t hurt a flea.

“On a Hill They Call Capital” has a breezy, humorous style full of allusions to popular culture, but it mines a deep vein of disenchantment with the political system. As Carson writes:

“We wanted to do something to make a real and lasting difference. Cat was right, enough bitching, we didn’t want to live the rest of our lives in fear of the tyrants in DC. We’d voted, some of us had written letters, we’d talked to our friends and families – Spanky even called in to John Stewart. Ultimately, we had tried the routes available to us and no inkling of change was in sight – so now were going to hold them accountable.”

In the fictional world of the novelist, the grand-standing stunts of Cat and his red-clay compadres succeed in igniting the popular imagination. If only… In the real world, the media would portray Carson’s rollicking revolutionaries as deluded and dangerous fanatics, and the authorities would hunt them down like terrorists. In the real world, the majority of the population would be too stupefied by government-engineered wealth transfers or too consumed by mortgages, car payments and other obligations to ever heed the call. In the real world, the American population is too beset by historical amnesia for the name “Grandsons of Liberty” to resonate with them in any way. Americans are incapable of launching the kind up uprising that Carson imagines. But, hey, it’s fun to fantasize that a few daring men might try.

To read more about the book, visit the website at http://www.grandsonsofliberty.us/.

Not long ago I watched a piece of forgettable piece of Hollywood drivel in which the bad guys, a bunch of corporate tycoons and rogue CIA goons, were undermining democracy and killing people with impunity. Sigh. Five years after 9/11, the lefties in La La Land have yet to produce a thriller in which the villains are Islamic terrorists. The United States may be engaged in a war with people who behead their captives on videotape and kill indiscriminately with truck bombs but in the mindset of tinsel town, the biggest threat to the world isn’t al Qaeda or nuclear-armed mullahs, it’s environment-raping businessmen, murderous members of the military and power-hungry Southern Senators reading from the Jerry Falwell playbook.

If you’re tired of the predictable Hollywood formula, then here’s a fresh one for you: Drug Lords and Islamists have united to attack the United States. Narco-terrorists are besieging the country. A government run by namby-pamby liberals is powerless to halt the slide into anarchy. Only a handful of good guys – a group of patriotic officers and computer programmers within the intelligence community – can save the country.

That summarizes the plot of Rosetta 6.2, a self-published novel by James Atticus Bowden, a military futurist and frequent contributor to the Bacon’s Rebellion blog and e-zine. Bowden is a gifted writer. Although the book could have benefited from the advice of a professional book editor – pick up the pacing over here, flesh out the plot over there – Rosetta 6.2 is a compelling read. I found myself reaching eagerly for the paperback volume on my bedside table every evening until I finished it.

Early in Rosetta 6.2, Bowden pulls in the reader with “the mystery of the rose cinquefoil” – an inscrutable insignia that pops up on the Internet. As the novel moves along, it sucks in the reader with the thrust and counter-thrust between the good guys, who are on the run, and the cyber-savvy narco-terrorists determined to destroy them. Bowden does a creditable job with character development, peopling his book with distinct and memorable individuals, many of them Evangelical Christians like himself, and builds an effective sub-plot around Jack, an agnostic NASA computer programmer, and his growing respect for his God-fearing companions.

The plot culminates with the execution of a hair-raising plan to destroy the Narco-terrorists. Bowden creates a fascinating scenario, but I’m not sure that it has the impact on the reader that he intends. Indeed, even as one who not infrequently finds himself on the same side of the political divide as Bowden, I found his solution to the Narco-terrorist threat to be scary – the very kind of potentially totalitarian, civil rights-trampling scheme executed by rogue militarists and fanatical Christians that jangle the nerves of paranoid Hollywood liberals. I wouldn’t be surprised if some lefty script writer one day purloins the Rosetta 6.2 plot and flips it to re-fashion Bowden’s heroes from good guys into deluded and dangerous fanatics!

Bowden has assumed a high profile in the Republican Party politics of Hampton Roads in recent years. Admire him or loathe him, you’ll gain insight into his worldview – and that of his conservative, Evangelical confreres – by reading Rosetta 6.2. You can order the book either through Amazon.com or by visiting his website, http://www.americancivilization.net/.

Dear Groveton:

Unlike Jim B, I do not have a way to contact you other than via BRB.

I am with you 100% on the new “Party” and the guidelines make good sense on first reading.

In our household, my wife and partner manages the funds so I cannot commit a dollar amount at this time. Perhaps 50% of our annual book royalites?

On a second topic: Thank you for test driving some of the terms in GLOSSARY. You are getting a good grasp of what Funcamental Change will mean.

Do not be dissuaded by sillyness like 2% shared-vehicle system potential. In a Balanced Community with Villages served by a high capacity system it would be closer to 90%. Even in a lower intensity Balanced Community the number would exceed 50%.

There are two things driving down the conventional wisdom perception.

One a shared vehicle system served Village the intensity made possible by the system converts many vehicle trips to pedestrian trips. We have pointed this out in most of our long columns on shared vehicle systems.

Second the whole conception of what a household is and how it obtains Mobility and Access has not been updated in traffic generation models.

I will be posting one more note on the density string when we have time but wanted to get a word to you before heading for the Farmers Market and then the Core for a chained trip with 9 stops. One way we cut VMT.

Keep up the good work…

EMR

So long, folks, it’s off to Ocracoke for the Bacon family. If there’s wireless Internet access, I’ll have a few things to post. If not, you won’t hear from me for 10 days. Enjoy sweltering in the 100-degree heat. I’ll be thinkin’ of ya as I’m sitting in the shade and sipping Margaritas.

German physicists say they have broken the speed of light.