How It Was

Well, that was interesting! A short vacation in Jerome— followed by blurred vision preparing for and recovering from cataract surgery— has kept me off the keyboard.

Jerome is a fascinating Arizona ghost town populated by about 400 living ghosts. Old hippies don’t die, or fade away, they move to Jerome and open gift shops and artists’ studios. Who’s to say they’re out of step with the rest of us? Certainly not I.

If you want spectral ghosts, you can find those there, too. The Jerome Grand Hotel, which is located in what was once the hospital, is supposed to be haunted; stayed there twice…never saw a ghost.

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We had breakfast at the Cup Cafe in the Hotel Congress the morning we left. That was the day the announcement of the funding for our streetcar line was announced  and street traffic was seriously disrupted.

I really wonder how Tucson’s drivers are going to take to the “nuisance” of sharing road space with the new streetcars.

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Jim Hopkins has relaunched his Gannett Blog, which he runs along with  blogs on the NY Times and News Corp. I’ve posted links in my blogroll. If you’re interested in the state of American journalism as commented on by (still) working journalists you might want to look at these. http://www.gannettblog.blogspot.com/

As always, read with a critical eye. Most commentators have a  dog in journalism’s current fight for survival. Still…good stuff.

The Data Port

Commentators, annoyed by previous Data Port posts about Arizona’s budget problems, have asked, “Okay, so what do you think ought to be done?” It’s a fair question, so here goes.

It’s taken a long time to dig ourselves into this hole. It’s going to take a long time to climb out. There are some short-term strategies and some longer-term solutions. Let’s begin with the short-term.

We should certainly vote, in May, for the increase in the state sales tax. It’s a regressive tax and tends to work a greater hardship on the poor, but it’s something that can be done immediately. Don’t count on it to go away.

We leak tax income through the current practice of forgiving taxes for donations to schools, whether private, parochial, or public. Remember that this is a straight write-off, not a deduction from income. Give 200 bucks, don’t pay 200 bucks in taxes.

This is radically unfair to the poor, who may have little or no disposable income to donate to their children’s schools. This loophole should be closed immediately so that there is more for the public school system.

Reduce the amount allowed as a tax deduction for gifts to charitable organizations. Let’s say reduce the amount to 70% of the gift.

For the next three years declare a moratorium on all new corporate tax breaks. Those now in place can stay in place, but say ‘no’ to any new reductions in corporate taxes. The same would be true for personal state income taxes which could bear a slight increase, but  certainly no cuts.

It has been a standard practice of the legislature to shift the cost of mandated programs to the counties. This in turn puts additional burden on local property taxes. (Currently the state is considering closing juvenile corrections facilities and returning the inmates to the counties. Can anyone count the cost of running 15 separate county juvenile jails?)

The long term solution is much more difficult, since it requires a change of attitude on the part of both legislative leaders and the rest of us. We’ve been slowly whittling away at tax revenues since about 1995, fueled by a political philosophy that says government is bad and taxation is theft (a view that is sometimes identified as ‘anarcho-capitalism,’ to differentiate it from its left-wing cousin, ‘anarcho-syndicalism. )

The predominant view in the Legislature, and amongst Republican theoreticians, is that the only way to support businesses already here, and to attract new businesses, is to extend tax benefits; that the best way to increase tax income is by reducing taxes.

It’s my judgement that this hasn’t worked. Why persist in following a failed strategy?

Remember Weiser Lock? They came, they ran out their tax benefits, and left. And how successful has the strategy been in attracting major corporate enterprise? Not very, in my judgment.

Getting back to square one is going to take us a while. The legislature should establish an order in which programs should be returned to their pre-recession level. In the end, the only way we’re going to improve corporate presence in Arizona is by making the state the sort of place where corporate leaders would want to relocate their own families.

Otherwise we will slip ever deeper into the status of a cheap labor state like, oh, maybe Haiti or Honduras.

Ooops

February has a lot to recommend it. It’s short, for one thing.

Once it’s over we can begin to pretend that Spring is just around the corner. In most parts of the country that pretense is perfectly delusional. What’s around the corner, and around the one after that, is melting slush and head colds.

February  harbors Presidents’ Day, but all it has to recommend it is a day off.

Valentine’s Day, on the other hand, is rich with the scents of chocolates and passion. Or it is if the chocolates work.

Married guys, except those in the clutches of some secret and unfulfilled sexual obsession, are seldom enthusiastic about the day. It means they will have to go shopping. Men don’t like to go shopping. In particular they don’t like to go shopping at the last moment, which they almost always do because they have forgotten what day it is.

They didn’t know what to buy for Christmas and here it is Valentine’s Day already! It makes them gloomy and dispirited. I met a friend  sitting slumped on a bench in the mall. He was staring dejectedly at a small gift-wrapped box.

“We’ve been married twenty-seven years,” he said. There was a long pause.  “They don’t give you that for murder.”

Of course some women don’t care for the day either. That is because their husbands believe that lingerie is the secret of a fulfilled sex life.

What these women have to look forward to on  Saint Valentine’s Day is a selection of improbable and uncomfortable undergarments that suggest bondage play rather than loving tenderness. They know with perfect certainty that as the highlight of  Valentine’s night they will have to strap, buckle and lace themselves into gear that is mostly straps, buckles, and laces, and parade around the house.

They will try to be understanding. But they will think, “We’ve been married twenty-seven years…they don’t give you that for murder.”

Valentine’s Day Cards are nice, though. My favorites are the ones children used to send to one another in school. Every child had to bring enough cards so that every other child would get one when deliveries were made from the big heart-decorated box on Miss Pringle’s desk. There were duckies and doggies and little plump boys and girls holding hands. They cost a penny.

Those penny Valentines had sincerity going for them. You could believe a duck. You could believe “Be Mine.” They didn’t promise much. Today’s gold-and-red-paper  extravaganzas,  lavish with  lace, and texts that cry out for deconstruction, have all the believable sincerity and depth of feeling of an old con’s petition to the board of pardons and paroles.

Clearly, we need to return to this holiday’s roots: The ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, which was held on February 15.

Well-found lads lightly costumed as goats ran through the streets whacking pedestrians with strips of goat skin. The Romans viewed the goat as the embodiment of sexuality, although I’ve never understood the attraction myself.

All this funny business was intended to insure fertility and to  fend off evil. It persisted well into the Christian era, after which it was all downhill…

Until the discovery of chocolate.