The holiday season is upon us; and with it, come the reindeer games.
That’s the only way to really describe the December 7th City Council meeting, as the Mayor and City Council butted heads and locked horns over one issue after another. Council members Marshall, Barton and Murphy trotted and strutted before the audience, still smug about their recent veto override victory and ready to dish out more punishment for the Mayor. Read the rest of this entry »
Apparently there are a group of people out there are tired of the liberals treating gospel like it’s, well, gospel.
The young white men neoconservatives at Conservapedia have determined that various translations of the Christian Bible have been progressively progressive, and have also made attempts to “dumb down” the text.
Oddly enough, at the same time, they complain that liberals are inherently “wordy,” and as such, have imbued the Bible with too many lengthy words. How they plan to address the “dumbing down” and “too many big words” issues simultaneously should prove to be a neat trick.
As President Obama settles into his third month in office, a long-raging debate continues over whether the best place to find the answer to our economic woes – government spending or tax cuts?
I’m going to go with spending.
The idea of lowering taxes to increase revenues has been given a fair try. Twice in our lifetime, and once before that. What it results in are massive deficits, unemployment, the evisceration of vital programs like education and health care, and increases in local regressive taxes, such as property and sales tax. Read the rest of this entry »
I just received a phone call from Mayor McShurley.
It was a “courtesy call” to tell me that my email addressed was being blocked, and that her entire staff was informed to no longer take my calls.
None of my calls or emails have been abusive, profane or harassing. I’ve been polite, friendly and helpful to everyone at City Hall, despite having being met with rudeness and contempt (such as that stunt she pulled during the last CC meeting).
I have offered suggestions and assistance, volunteered my time and expertise, and until recently, been supportive of the city administration (almost to a fault, according to some).
Admittedly, I did recently make a comment about “pissing contests” between the Mayor’s office and the City Clerk’s, in response to spending six months trying to get some documents emailed to me. I can’t believe that’s it, though. Saltier things have come out of her mouth, to be sure.
I guess that’s how she rolls. Funny, I thought she worked for me.
Has anyone else out there received a similar call, I wonder?
Jim Arnold writes:
I have been painfully pondering words with which to pontificate on the current legislative session that has failed to lock in property tax caps, failed to endorse the Kernan-Shepard recommendations and has proposed an unprecedented one-year budget that spends $800 million more than anticipated revenues.
Words that illustrate our legislators’ poor performance include appalling, atrocious, dismal, disgusting, dreadful, horrendous, pathetic, lackluster and lackadaisical.
Prose that paints an appropriate picture of the mood of taxpayers contains words like, angry, annoyed, perturbed, disturbed, enraged, irate, incensed, fuming and furious.
Jargon to describe taxpayers’ disposition include swindled, scammed, snookered, bamboozled, fleeced, flimflammed, hoodwinked, hornswoggled and hung out to dry.
Citizens reluctantly deferred protest when HB 1001 raised sales taxes by nearly 17 percent, as we were promised property-tax caps in the bargain. Many were skeptical when the sales-tax increase was immediate, whereas the corresponding tax caps were scheduled to be phased in over three years, but we held our tongues in the hopes that our legislators would honor the promise of HB 1001.
If any of the words listed above describe how you feel about the current legislative session and your middle name isn’t Apathy, please contact your legislators by phone, letter or e-mail and remind them that they work for us. Ask them to pass Senate Joint Resolution 1 to lock in the property tax caps, review the Kernan Shepard recommendations and pass a two-year balanced budget that demonstrates fiscal responsibility.
Or maybe they hear what you’re saying, but have determined that you are wrong.
Why does no one ever want to consider that possibility?
The job of legislators is not to do what the voters tell them to, for better or worse; but rather to study the issues and make the decision that he/she believes best represents his/her constituents’ interests. Read the rest of this entry »
Who are all of these people deciding not to work? For the past several days, I’ve read several letters to the editor claiming that the economic stimulus plan being put forth by the White House will result in people deciding they are better off not working.
I challenge the authors of such letters, and anyone else for that matter, to name for me three actual people that heard the news of these government bailouts and quit their job.
Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
In the meantime, maybe everyone else can give the “downfall of the nation” rhetoric a rest. You aren’t being penalized for success or rewarding laziness. Laissez-faire capitalism results in these increasing economic blow-ups every decade or so, and the longer the downside is ignored, the more destructive these explosions will get.
By moderating the downside, however, we create a level of economic security. By making sure that laid-off workers can keep their health care, draw unemployment and maintain some stability for their families during these transitional periods, we curtail much of the fear that drives many poor financial and economic decisions.
To do that, however, we also have to moderate the upside. The money for that security has to come from somewhere, while at the same time, the wealthiest of us have an obligation to invest back into the system that afforded them the opportunities they exploited in the first place.
Now conservatives will argue that doing that results in a lower GDP, and they’re correct. But most Americans, I believe, would be willing to sacrifice a little GDP in exchange for some economic security.
That’s not socialism, and anyone that tells you otherwise is relying on your ignorance of what socialism actually is in order to frighten you. It’s responsible management of capitalism.
This country was not founded on the auspices of “every man for himself,” but rather “we the people.” And as such, we all have a responsibility towards our our brethren. Those that try to justify their lack of compassion and unwillingness to contribute to our common cause by denigrating their brothers and sisters are, in my opinion, unpatriotic.
We may not be able to change such people’s perspectives, but the least we can do is not allow them to position themselves as the voice of America. They are just voices for themselves, and Americans must strive to be more than that.
I’m still waiting for those three names.
A few weeks ago I wrote a guest column in the paper, comparing Muncie to George Bailey, the larger point of which was to suggest that maybe the residents of Muncie should rally around the city that has been so good to them for so long.
Not surprisingly, most of the responses I received all focused on one little sentence in the thirteenth paragraph.
In trying to demonstrate that the economic problems we face are not as insurmountable as they have been characterized to be, I suggested that the difference between deficit and surplus could be bridged with a hundred dollar bill.
You’d have thought from some of the responses I received that it had suggested a doubling of property taxes. One comment really stood out for me, though. A reader wrote “I don’t have a problem with $100, it’s the $900 in property taxes that I have a problem with!!!”
Really?
John McCain talks about Washington like he hasn’t been there for nearly three decades. In the last debate, he said he knew how to solve all of these problems of economics and health care, win the wars and catch bin Laden – well, where has he been? Has he been holding back, saving all of his good ideas for his presidential campaign? Is that putting your country first?
I, and many others, would have a lot more respect for Senator McCain if he would just give us the straight talk. He supported deregulation, believing it was the best way to expand our economic markets, but didn’t account for – or simply underestimated – the opportunity for and impact of greed and corruption. Every economic policy is an experiment, and all we can do is learn from the results and keep trying to improve on the idea.
What’s wrong with that? It has the virtue of being thoughtful, honorable and true. Sure you may get called a “flip-flopper,” but to ignore new information that changes or contradicts your earlier notions is simply foolish. Could you imagine McCain standing in front of a crowd and telling them he’s not about to let fear of a fool calling him a name dissuade him doing what is the best thing for his country?
In 2000, you could.
Instead, now, we get all of this misrepresentation and false bravado. He distances himself from his family’s success to appear as something he isn’t.
We get comments taken out of context, like Michelle Obama’s $600 earrings, that purposely avoid the valid point that she was making: That the stimulus package was only an ultra-short-term approach that didn’t really have a significant impact on the challenges American families were facing.
Was she wrong? Did that check make everything all better for anyone? For us, it paid our rent for one month, and that was nice. But I’d be no better or worse off now without it.
Consider the cost of the rebate, plus the cost or processing and delivering it. Were those tax dollars well-spent?
But who cares, because Michelle Obama is an elitist, right?
We also get “who is Barack Obama really?” Really? The campaign has been going on for twenty months now. Barack Obama has to be the most completely vetted man in history, and you still don’t know who he is? Do you really believe he might be a terrorist?
If McCain and Palin really don’t know who Barack Obama is by now, they may be a little too slow on the uptake to really run this country. But we all know that isn’t true. They are simply trying to make Americans afraid of him, which speaks loudly to their character.
All of that being said, it’s difficult to believe Senator McCain when he says he knows what to do about the problems we face.
