Sunday, November 1. 2009
When I left New York City in 1968, after graduating college, I like many of my fellow graduates from working and lower middle-class families sought our opportunities elsewhere, and most metropolitan elsewheres were better than NYC. The job market was still strong in NYC, but opportunities for advancement better elsewhere, the costs of living and taxes lower, the public services better, public safety higher.
Today, the New York City disease has spread more widely around the country. Most major metropolitan areas, the hub of most states, have seen their infrastructure serving the upward mobility and the financial and personal security of their upward-striving or holding-on working and middle class deteriorate over the past 40-years.
Still, there’s striking differences among the states, and the results show.
William Voegeli writes in today’s Los Angeles Times, "The Golden State isn't worth it." Voegli compares California to Texas, “Our high-benefit/high-tax model no longer works, especially compared with low-tax states like Texas.” Voegeli says, “These alternatives, of course, define the basic argument between liberals and conservatives over what it means to get the size and scope of government right….[T]he superior public goods that supposedly justify the high taxes just aren't being delivered.”
It’s not ideologues who are moving. For example, I recently ran into a couple I was friendly with in San Diego during the ‘90’s, he a French doctor-scientist and she a Dutch-Indonesian. They compared San Diego favorably in all respects (except cuisine) to living in Europe, and were happy to be here. Then they moved to a better job in Silicon Valley, where despite higher income they could afford a house half the size and they felt surrounded by selfishly aggressive strivers. Then they moved to Austin, Texas, where they could afford a much larger house for their family, in an excellent neighborhood with top schools, the cultural life is vibrant, and the daily courtesies among residents are welcoming and provide good role models for their children. These products of Europe are a reality test of America.
Voegeli continues: “Overall, the Census Bureau's latest data show that state and local government expenditures for all purposes in 2005-06 were 46.8% higher in California than in Texas: $10,070 per person compared with $6,858.” Between 2000 and 2007, “16 of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels had positive "net internal migration," in the Census Bureau's language, while 14 of the 17 states with the highest taxes had negative net internal migration.”
Why?
The high-benefit/high-tax model can work only if things are demonstrably not equal -- if the public goods purchased by the high taxes far surpass the quality, quantity and impact of those available to people who live in states with low taxes.
Today's public benefits fail that test, as urban scholar Joel Kotkin of NewGeography.com and Chapman University told the Los Angeles Times in March: "Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California. Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California's government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class.
How?
None of this happens by accident. California's interlocking directorate of government employee unions, issue activists, careerists and campaign contributors has become increasingly aggressive and adept at using rhetoric extolling public benefits for all to deliver targeted advantages to itself. As a result, the political reality of the high-benefit/high-tax model is that its public goods are, increasingly, neither public nor good. Instead, the beneficiaries are the providers of the public services, and certain favored or connected constituencies, rather than the general population.
What to expect?
The recession will eventually end, and California's finances will get better. Given its powerful systemic bias against efficient and effective public services, however, the question is whether the state will ever get well. California's public sector has pinned its hopes for avoiding fundamental reform on increased federal aid to replace dollars the state's fed-up taxpayers refuse to surrender. In other words, residents in the other 49 states -- the new 49ers? -- would enjoy the privilege of paying California's taxes. Their one consolation will be not having to endure its lousy public services.
If, on the other hand, America's taxpayers (and China's bond buyers) succumb to bailout fatigue, California may reach the point at which, after every alternative has been exhausted, it is forced to try governing itself competently.
It’s not just California, or New York City, but throughout much of America today that we’re seeing the hollowing out of the infrastructure and services and opportunities that built America’s uniqueness and success compared to the rest of the world. And, big-government advocates are clamoring for yet higher taxes. The New York Times reports today that “Faced with anxiety in financial markets about the huge federal deficit and the potential for it to become an electoral liability for Democrats” the White House and congressional Democrats are seeking some way to reduce the huge federal deficits they have created, and that more taxes are their prescription.
Government workers and their unions are prime beneficiaries of our heavy taxes. Most of even the made-up stats recently released about jobs saved or created by the federal appropriation of the near $1-trillion “stimulus” show relatively few and most of those among government workers. The $1-trillion, likely to be much more, cost of the wholesale upheaval of 1/6th of the US economy in health care – which really only serves about the 25% of those who truly need it who don’t have insurance at the expense of the 85% of Americans who do have coverage -- will fall heavily upon the working and middle class. The $trillions of indirect and direct taxes of the “cap-and-trade” illusory environmental bill will also add $thousands each year to each American's costs of living, to the economic benefit of profiteering fat cats and their politicos who garner contributions.
At root this may be an ideological battle, as Voegeli says. But, it is really a practical battle between those who aspire and work for a better life and those relatively few who would squander its underpinnings for their own greedy benefits. The real populist revolt is already shaking Washington and state capitals, and much more is to come.
Saturday, October 31. 2009
Amazing. Look and see: the curve ball is partially optical illusion. h/t, Dr. X.
Friday, October 30. 2009
That's how Vanderleun aptly titled this WSJ World Series photo:
Wednesday, October 28. 2009
The road out to our village in the Berkshires. It is indeed over the river and through the woods. Woods, fields, and swamps:
View from the upper barn. Trout stream down there in the valley. Those are our woods up on the hills too - insofar as anybody can "own" woods. The hawks, owls, deer and and bears own them, really. Well, God owns them, but I can harvest firewood there. You can see the White Pine infestation in the upper meadow. We have been at 'em, but it's a lot of work to cut them down. It's a shame that you cannot really burn White Pine in the fireplace. Too much resin, burns too hot.
Continue reading "Photos from the Farm"
 We owe it to King Camp Gillette for making it easy to be a well-groomed gentleman without cutting your head off, or having to visit the barber.
He was a clever tinkerer and, apparently, an equally good marketer of his "safety razor."
Since his invention, razors have seen many modifications to Gillette's basic idea - not to mention electric razors (do any guys use those anymore?).
When the Gillette products got too expensive for my taste, and I couldn't keep track of each new type of razor and the costly blades that went with them, I opted for buying cheap disposable razors in bulk. The one pictured is $10.49 for 100.
Depending on your testosterone level, one is good for a week - at least. Longer if you can put up with minor discomfort.
Added benefit: No problem if a daughter borrows your razor. Who cares?
Here's a good bio of Thurber from an opthalmologist who was interested in Thurber - and his vision problems. (Thurber's brother shot him in the eye with an arrow when they were playing William Tell games.)
Dorothy Parker or some equivalent wit commented that Thurber's drawings looked like unbaked cookie dough.
Hoping I can get some functional links to some more Thurber toons. Everybody's seen this one:
Tuesday, October 27. 2009
Here's one of my favorites:
I know that leaf photos are corny as heck. So what? My Red Japanese Maple is colorful. I would never have planted one of these flamboyant things, but somebody else planted it there about 30 years ago, and I am not going to cut it down.
Monday, October 26. 2009
 The other night I became distracted by reading the series on radio soap operas which James Thurber wrote for The New Yorker in 1948. "Soapland" is in Thurber's The Beast in Me and Other Animals.
I envy Thurber's clarity, simplicity, and directness of writing, whether he is doing humor or regular reporting. Liked him better than EB White, with whom Thurber collaborated in writing the spoof on self-help books, Is Sex Necessary?, in 1929.
If you have never read Thurber, you are missing a real delight. Start with The Thurber Carnival. I could not find any of his toons on line, but I didn't spend much time searching.
Here's a good summary of the history of the radio soaps. Thurber's piece on the topic is a masterpiece of straightforward New Yorker-style reportage; the kind that can make any random topic fascinating because it is so well-written.
Mistakes help us learn. Of course they do. Who ever doubted that?
Check out the stuff we posted over the weekend. Some fun stuff, I think.
Did a bit of driving around this weekend. Took some lousy photos. We did drive past a doctor's office in Norfolk, CT: Dr. Ralph Emerson. We all agreed we'd be glad to go to him. (In some areas the leaves were wonderful, and in some spots not so good, but we were not looking for leaves.) This is Canaan, CT:
The Housatonic Valley, Route 7 in Western MA:
More random road photos below the fold:
Continue reading "Driving around Southern New England"
Sunday, October 25. 2009
The pup who works in NYC is studying for her GMAT. It sounds like a rightly demanding and discriminating exam.
She says the grammar correction sections are extremely subtle aspects of complex sentences, and that the two-part interactive math problems only give you two minutes each if you want to finish them. If you get one right, the computer gives you a more challenging one. It ramps up fast, she says, to try to find your limits. That's a great idea, like an automated oral exam where they can push each line of questioning until you are totally stumped and crushed with humility. The two-part math questions involve something like Which of the following additional pieces of information do you need to solve this problem? A,B, Both, Neither.
Brain swirls. These sorts of logical challenges quickly separate the men from the boys.
There are two essays also. Sounds like good fun to me, but I like exams. No. I love exams, whether offered by schools, institutions or, most importantly, by real life every darn day.
The pup does too: she is busy re-memorizing her exponent and square root tables to save time on the exam. She has great fun doing it, and says "It will never hurt you in life to have 9 to the 5th on the tip of your tongue." She began with 1-12 to the third and is working her way up.
No calculators allowed for this exam. Good on them for that.
 I am in the middle of Conroy's new book, South of Broad, which is set in Charleston.
Being a Yankee, I had no idea what Benne Wafers were. Here's the recipe.
It's nice to know that there are still places in America where ladies routinely have teatime with homemade tea cookies. It is civilized and civilizing, like so many old Southern habits.
Regarding other low-country foods, She-Crab Soup is fine and dandy, but this summer I discovered how much I enjoy Shrimp 'n Grits (and I don't even love shrimp. I like it with the smaller shrimp).
This is a re-post of an NJ piece from a couple of years ago -
There are people living "deviant" lifestyles in the Northeast, and, sadly, they are frequently invisible and marginalized. After much searching to locate the most deviant family your reporter could find in western Massachusetts, we decided to interview Jim and Sarah D. We summarize our interview with this extremely deviant, euphemistically-termed "traditional family," here:
 Social deviant Jim D. 42, leads what we might best term a paleo life, largely out of touch with modern reality and seemingly oblivious to the exciting opportunities of modern lifestyle choices. Married for 21 years, with three kids, Jim drives 25 minutes to work each morning in his 8 year-old Subaru sedan. A college grad, Jim, on his fourth job, is CFO of a medium-sized manufacturing corporation based in Pittsfield, MA, making around $120,000 per year, not including generous benefits.
"I worked my way up the ladder to reach my level of incompetence," he laughs. "The job is a daily challenge, so I try to meet it each day determined to have some fun with it, and to rise to the challenges with a can-do spirit, corny as that sounds. I go to work every morning wondering what sort of pitch will be thrown to me, and hoping at least to hit a single. When I get stuck and confused, I call Sarah to talk it over." Really? "She's my partner, in every way. We joke that by combining the two of us, we add up to one barely competent human."
Jim claims his wife is "great to me and for me" and says "I love my kids to death." They go to their Presbyterian Church together every Sunday, and they tithe. "Budgeting our tithing is a blessing to us," says Sarah. Jim and Sarah have a date night every Thursday night, and family Sunday dinner with his in-laws.
They have lived modestly, and have accumulated over $500,000 in their 401-K savings. Jim says "Business hasn't been loyal to its employees for 20 years, so you have to take care of yourself. That's fine with me. My Dad did it by always living below his means, which were minimal for a long time, and I do the same. Unlike my Dad, though, I doubt anyone will let me continue working as long as I want to."
What did his Dad do? "He quit high school to join the Army. Hated school. They stuck him in the Corps of Engineers. Then worked up to a construction supervisor as a civilian, which he still does. He will never quit work, although he could retire now if he wanted to. He owns three houses; rents two and lives in one. The job gives him something to grouse about, and gets him out of the house and out into the world."
When asked what were the most important things in his life, Jim answers "Knowing God and being a responsible adult male. Working hard, paying my bills, being a good parent and husband, a good citizen and a good friend." For hobbies, Jim and Sarah enjoy gardening, jogging in the Berkshire Hills, and cooking together. When their first child was born, they gave their TV away and have been without one since. "Brain rot," says Sarah. "It interferes with family time, and we didn't want the kids to be passive zombies."
Sarah was a grammar school teacher until the kids came. "I would never have married a woman who wanted to work while we had young kids," Jim says. "That's an experiment with human nature I would not want to subject them to." As the kids enter high school, Sarah is planning to return to teaching high school English this time, having made herself "an amateur expert" in Medieval and Renaissance literature over the past 15 years. "I polished up my French, and learned Italian." What's her dream job? "Teaching Beowulf and Dante."
"Unlike Sarah, I was the first kid in my family to ever go to college," Jim says. "My first day at UMass, my Mom insisted I wear a jacket and tie. That is how traditional - or out to lunch - my parents were then. Mom baked a huge layer cake when I got my admission letter. They were both children of immigrants, my Dad's parents from Romania and my Mom's from Ireland." He says "UMass set me up for a fine career, but I had no big dreams. I just wanted to be able to support my family, and to find a way to have a fairly good time doing it. Math was easy for me, so I majored in it, but I made sure I got myself educated as widely as I had time for, while staying on the Rugby team and without too many drunken nights. I took some accounting classes to be practical about the future, but I met Sarah in a Chaucer class. She was cute as hell, and I said to her after class 'I don't think I belong in this class.' She said 'Let's discuss it.' The rest is history."
Politics? As Sarah says "We go to every Town Meeting, and we speak up when an issue is important to us. We don't obsess too much about national politics. We are local." When pressed on the issue, they confessed "Well, we do listen to Rush when we have the chance, but we are usually too busy."
Saturday, October 24. 2009
As a counterpoint to yesterday's Country-Pop You Belong With Me, here's Dylan's wonderful version of You Belong To Me, with some repetitive video of Bob with Sarah, his first wife, in what appears to be their bedroom in NYC - it doesn't look like their Woodstock, NY house.
Seeing all the Amish in Ohio last week got me to thinking about Rumspringa.
It seems to me that this is nothing unique about the Amish. A fair number of adolescent kids in any culture spend some time taking a vacation from their parents' values and way of life. Fortunately, most return to sanity sooner or later if they don't lose themselves or destroy themselves in the process.
Thursday, October 22. 2009
I like my kids to get out of the Northeast for at least some part of their education, and they all have done so. I am delighted to have a pup at Kenyon College. She loves it, and I am pleased and relieved about that because through secondary school she spent every free moment banging around NYC, going to theater, museums, concerts, street fairs, theater internships, pubs, etc. I had come to think of her as a city girl.
My overall impression of the Kenyon kids is clean-cut, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, cheerful, studious, not overly Maoist, and very engaged in all of the activities of the school. For one example, the pup tells me that she does not know one kid who is not involved in some musical activity, and that the intro Theater course is the most heavily subscribed, with four large sections.
Small liberal arts colleges in the countryside tend to feel like Prep Schools to me, and Kenyon does have that feeling. If a kid went to school in the relatively isolated countryside or to a place like Exeter, Andover, Hotchkiss, Choate or Deerfield, I don't think they would find Kenyon to be an exciting change of pace. (With around 1600 kids, Kenyon is half the size of the BD pup's high school.)
Kenyon was founded as an Episcopalian seminary and college by Dartmouth grad Philander Chase in 1824 when Ohio was pioneer country. It remains, technically anyway, an Episcopalian school.
Kenyon grad Paul Newman built them a wonderful new athletic center with pool, gyms and work-out rooms (which are shared with people in the town). He didn't need to build them a theater, because they already have three: a black box, a small theater, and a high tech large theater - plus a large music performance auditorium in Rosse Hall. That's enough for 1600 kids.
I took some snaps of the cozy campus, of course.
The pup's favorite classroom, in Ascension Hall:
Lots more snaps of the Kenyon campus below the fold -
Continue reading "Central Ohio #3: Kenyon College"
Tuesday, October 20. 2009
Plenty of Amish on the roads with their lively, quick-trotting rigs.
Lots more road snaps and scenic vistas below the fold, including cornfields by the mile (why no pheasants?) -
Continue reading "Ohio's Central Highlands #2: On the road"
Monday, October 19. 2009
I had never spend any time in Ohio, except passing through to other places like most people do, but I just spent a few days banging around Knox and Holmes counties, and found it to be like a larger-scale New England - but the New England of three generations ago. This area is thoroughly agricultural; most of the places are very well-maintained and the farms are well-manicured and appear prosperous; it's hillier than I expected; the autumn foliage matches that of Vermont and New Hampshire, and the towns resemble New England towns minus the old mills.
But that figures: most of the settlers of Ohio came from back east for better farming land - and found it.
It's the kind of place that feels like the real heartland of America. We were there for Parent's Weekend at Kenyon College (about which more, later) in Gambier, which is a few miles outside the fine town of Mount Vernon, Ohio and a little more than an hour or so from Columbus, if you drive 80 mph on 71 - which everybody does.
Yes, this area is Amish Country to a degree. Plenty of them moved to central Ohio and up in Holmes County they do a lot of funiture business and wood-working, along with horse-breeding, farming, and the making of jams, preserves, baskets, etc.
Most of America is appealing in its own way, but the feel of central Ohio is strong for me in the comfortable, undramatic hominess of the towns and landscapes.
I will post lots more snapshots over the next few days, as I find the time.
Sunday, October 18. 2009
From scholar Richard Rubenstein's The Religion of Sacrifice and Abraham, Isaac and Jesus:
Judaism never entirely rejected the idea that God demands the sacrifice of the first-born son. However we evaluate the existence of child sacrifice in ancient Judah, Israel, Canaan, and the colonies of Canaan-Phoenicia, it is evident that we are dealing with a God who demands the death of children. In reflecting on the issue of child sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, Levenson comments, “…the mythic-ritual complex that I have been calling ‘child sacrifice’ was never eradicated; it was only transformed."
A prime example of that transformation is the pidyon ha-ben ritual in fulfillment of the commandment already noted: “You shall redeem all the firstborn of your sons. None shall appear before Me empty-handed.” (Exodus 34:20) In this ceremony, the father presents his first-born son to a cohen or hereditary priest on the thirtieth day after his birth whereupon the priest asks the father, "Which do you prefer, your son or your money?" The father declares that he prefers his son and presents the cohen with five silver dollars, the symbolic equivalent of five biblical shekels, in order to "redeem" his son. The priest accepts the coins with the ritual formula, "This (the coins) in place of that (the child). This in exchange for that."
 Read the whole thing. We Christians often refer to Christ as "the lamb of God;" "Lamb" because a "spotless lamb" was one of the ritual Jewish sacrifices of the time, used as a symbolic substitute for human sacrifice like Abraham's ram in the thicket.
Christians view the sacrifice of Christ - God's "son" - as the final and essential sacrifice needed to redeem a fallen mankind. Thus the ancient themes of blood and human sacrifice endure and give deadly serious substance to our worship today.
My August photo of the stone urns in Carthage which contained the ashes of firstborns sacrificed to Baal:
Saturday, October 17. 2009
More fun ads from the wonderful but dangerous 1950's at Doug Ross.
Friday, October 16. 2009
 A friend asked me where the most beautiful women were on my summer trip.
I had to think hard about it. I'd say Lucca first, Mallorca second, and Barcelona third. Or maybe Barcelona second...or maybe Nice second...
It's a blessing and a curse for guys that this world is so full of charming, posed poised and graceful females. (I'll bet they wish we ordinary guys could make ourselves so appealing, but we can not and will not.)
Anyway, the Ukraine girls really knock me out.
Wednesday, October 14. 2009
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All artists steal and borrow. 