Category Archives: campaigns

Do We Really Want To Be Like Tennessee?

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Advocated for Amendment 5, the income tax elimination, like to point to Tennessee as a state that flourishes without an income tax.

As usual, campaigns—whether personal or policy in nature—cherry-pick simple issues and dislike honest discussion of the complexity of our way of life.

The Pro-Five campaign has been long on deception.  Equaling Tennessee is not big deal. In most cases our lives will be no better if we decide to move from being 30-something in sales taxes to Tennessee’s 7th highest in the nation.

I don’t want to be like Tennessee. I want to be Missouri—the best Missouri

Let’s look below the deception and see if the things that really matter in how we live are worth voting for 5.

The newest ranking of states by U.S. News says it would not be much of an improvement.  Among the fifty states, Tennessee ranks 24th.  Missouri is 31st.

Ending the income tax might please Missouri’s rich folks but it will not appreciably benefit Missourians as a whole.  U.S. News ranked the states in eight categories and in 22 subcategories.  Here is how we match up with Tennessee, the sweetheart of the Pro-Five set: The numbers on the left are Missouri. Tennessee is on the right.,

44  Crime and Corrections 40

22  Economy  13

32  Education  31

17  Fiscal Stability 5

43 Healthcare  39

35  Infrastructure  39

17 Natural Resources 34

8  Opportunity  22

The survey breaks down the categories this way:

CRIME AND CORRECTIONS

35 Corrections Outcomes  8

40 Public Safety  46

ECONOMY

9 Business Environment 17

28 Employment 15

34 Growth 11

EDUCATION

30  Higher Education 37

27 Pre-K-12 20

FISCAL STABILITY

18 Long-term stability 1

18 Short-term stability 22

HEALTHCARE

40 Healthcare Access  37

39 Healthcare Quality 21

39 Public Health  48

INFRASTRUCTURE

22 Energy 31

33 Internet Access 13

36 Transportation 14

NATURAL RESOURCES

23 Air and Water Quality 16

20 Pollution  39

OPPORTUNITY

12 Affordability 17

34 Economic Opportunity 39

14 Equality 26

You can go to the U. S. News website to get some breakdowns of these categories.

Here is the main point:  Missouri’s goal is not to be as good as Tennessee but to be BETTER THAN TENNESSEE.  That is going to take some really deep and non-partisan (if there’s any chance of that) policy-making that sees our state holistically and encourages Missourians to see beyond themselves.

Abraham Lincoln told Congress in 1861 that circumstances had forced a break from the status quo: “As our case is new, we must think and act anew.”

We the people, and those we elect must not be afraid of thinking and acting anew if we want a better state.  A simplistic step being offered Tuesday that favors some and disadvantages many others is the wrong direction to go.

Notes From a Not-Quiet Hill

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I’m typing this between phone calls to check on my Medicare program, my burial plans, the unclaimed property that might be waiting for me, an accident claim with my name attached to it and who knows what else because I’m not answering and the people who are spending hours calling me aren’t leaving messages so I can call them back. How rude.

I am disappointed, however, that no candidates have called.  You’d think that with the emphasis President Trump placed on redrawing my Congressional District that he would be calling about his preference.  Maybe he’s saving his energy for the general election.

We could discuss whether he can take away my citizenship after about seven generations or so (I honestly do not know if my earliest ancestors were legal immigrants.  We are learning that it’s never too late for ICE to execute justice on those who think they are legal.

Back to the phone calls—

There are so many I can’t recall all of them.  Yesterday our phone started ringing with robo calls at 9:15.  Our last call came at about 6:15.  There were so many that our caller ID stopped at 14 and our landline stopped counting at 50 sometime yesterday afternoon.

If a candidate for Congress or for the U.S. Senate wants to curry my favor, hey will announce the introduction of legislation enacting penalties on companies that show up on my caller ID as someone, some place, or some thing that they are not.

I swear, the entire city of Mokane called but never left a message.  It WAS kind of entertaining for a while listening to the Lady of the Phone pronounce the names of the Missouri places calling us.

Political junk in the mailbox.  Insurance junk on the telephone.  Billboard junk on our highways (well, on I-70 anyway).  Talk junk in the White House.  If there was any more junk, I’d be living in a landfill.

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Speaking of I-70—I drove back Sunday night from the race in Indianapolis and rather quickly realized I had made a mistake of coming back on 70.  At night.  Especially at Kingdom City where I thank Heaven I was the only car on the road at the time as I sought the exit lane and then navigated the new traffic circle.  The entrance to the circle seems designed for truckers who sit up high and can see over the end of the bridge railing to see if there are vehicles coming around.  But my car is small and I had to pull into the circle to see peek around that end.

It probably will be very nice when it is finished.  But Sunday night I didn’t feel particularly safe getting into the circle. I am becoming more friendly with Highway 50.

Now, back to our main theme—

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One of our candidates is shown on the teevee carrying a rifle and telling us he’s going to stop the Chinese from buying our farmland. Pete Hegseth should be proud of this testosterone-loaded commercial.

I don’t vote for testosterone. And I’ve seen enough of people who pledge to “fight” for our rights by showing us a gun instead of an original idea. Eric Greitens wore that theme down to the nubbins. He was able to blow up some targets and he couldn’t blow things up when He became one.

What this present candidate hasn’t mentioned is what he’ll do to the Chinese who already own some of our farmland—-in this case, the properties that used to be Smithfield Foods, which sold its holdings in north Missouri to Chinese interests a few years ago. Will he go into the embassy in Washington, point his gun at the ambassador and demand the Smithfield land be given back?

Charleton Heston is dead.  He was not buried with a gun in his cold dead hands. It was impossible.  He was cremated.

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And please spare me all of cow cakes about ending waste, fraud, and abuse. Anybody who makes a big deal of that in a campaign is long on slogans and short on facets and is greatly unoriginal.  PLUS, they’re insulting the hundred or thousands of people who got into public office making the same promise by implying they were liars because it’s still going on. I have yet to hear from any of those candidates who promised to root out those terrible things, stretching back for several decades, who showed me at the next election time what they had accomplished anything. PLUS PLUS, I hope these candidates are not using the Trump playbook for eliminating WFA.

Wouldn’t it be nice to find a candidate that didn’t waste my time, use a fraudulent telephone number, and abuse my intelligence, or volunteer to shoot the bogey man of the day?

The problem with too many political campaigns is that they insult the voters by treating them as idiots.

Enough of this howling in the wind.  I need to grab my Red Ryder Daisy BB Gun and chase off a Chinese land-grabber somewhere.

And don’t try to take it away me. I’m going to consult with one of those callers who wants to talk about my final expenses and tell them I want to be buried with my BB gun in my cold dead hands so that I can the security force at St. Peter’s gate.  He must be getting some real doozies of  souls knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s Door.

Notes From a Quiet Hill (Worst Campaign Commercials, Best movie scenes, Cavernous Man-Made Potholes edition)

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We’re hoping to have enough time between automated Medicare phone calls to put these thoughts together. We did get a real person once a few days ago. He wound up apologizing.

Moving on to the pithy observations:

I can understand naturally-occurring potholes.  But I’m having trouble dealing with some man-made potholes in Jefferson City. A couple of years ago I had an expensive encounter with a pothole on I-70. We don’t have anything such as that in town but we do have some that give pretty big jolts.

The resurfacing of some of our streets has left some manhole covers below the street surface. Readers in Jefferson City might be intimately familiar with a real suspension banger for cars turning right from Jefferson Street onto East Capitol Avenue. For example.

It has taken me too long to decide on an alternate way to church.  That’s not the only man-made pothole in our street system but it’s the worst I’ve encountered so far.

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Nancy and I are college graduates.  I even went to graduate school until I discovered her, at which point I got a real job so we could get married (This is only partly true but I’m not sure which part).  We, as educated people, have trouble accepting how awful the commercials are for the income tax elimination proposal on the August ballot.  In the case I’m about to cite, they are so intellectually silly that the point they want to make is lost, assuming they make a point.

Here’s the script for one that is a total turn-off in our household;

Some uninvited guests have been eating at your table for years. Property taxes and income taxes, helping themselves to money that belongs to your family. Amendment 5 shows them the door: it cuts property taxes, phases out the income tax, and shifts the burden to the big corporations that have been getting a free meal. This is your table. It’s time you had room at it. Vote YES on Amendment 5. August 4.

The shifting of the tax burden to big corporations is exactly the opposite of what we have understood the proposal to be about and the ad’s targeting of them is pretty bewildering.  As we understand the rational explanations of Amendment 5, the shift of the tax burden would be from the wealthy and the big corporations to the little guy.

Further, aren’t “big corporations” supposed to flock to Missouri because we’re cutting the taxes?  Not according to this awful commercial that says we need to “show them the door,” presumably the door out, not in.

000

The famous archaeologist Dr. Alan Grant died a few days ago.  We will always remember him for one of the most magical sequences in movie history—the day Dr. Grant saw his first living dinosaur—and when we saw it with him—and then the first dinosaur herd.

We know Dr. Grant, of course, by his real name—Sam Neill

Remember, he and the rest of the cast were not seeing what we saw on the screen, which made the acting that carried the impact of the scene so extraordinary. We were as emotionally awed as Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) were.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=sam%20neill%20sees%20a%20dinosaur&view=detail&mid=883E4913FA95A4A0FD448

Everything about the Jurassic Park movie franchise seemed formulaic after this.  But these first few moments are pure magic—and we saw them with the eyes of Alan and Ellie.

Off the top of our head we can think of few other movie scenes with the visual scope and emotional impact of those few minutes.

Perhaps our first view of the slowly revolving space station in 2001 (with perfectly chosen music making it even better). Maybe the great pull-back scene in Gone With the Wind that showed all of the casualties of the Battle of Atlanta.  Maybe the intensity of Pickett’s Charge in Ted Turner’s “Gettysburg” series.

You might have comparable scenes in your memory. Share them, if you like, in the box below.

(picture credits: Instagram)

Heather

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It is not uncommon in our household for one of us (usually Nancy), to ask the other, “Have you read Heather’s column today?—Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston University history professor who gives us great understanding of the historical roots of contemporary events, calls her column, “Letters from an American.”  It’s one of the top columns on Substack.

Her column a day after President Trump’s fact-free speech Thursday night lifts the veil to expose his handlers (string-pullers?) and the frightening future they are planning for our country. It is a lesson we better learn from our past. As any good academic person would do, she footnotes her comments.

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Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.

As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Lisec explained to Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs that the reason they called the book “Unhumans” “is because it’s a verb, to unhuman someone…. To ‘unhuman’ someone means to deprive someone of their rights to life, liberty and property.” The authors insisted that “communists” were trying to “unhuman” those they consider good Americans, and that “we can’t tolerate an ideology like that” and so must do it to them first.

Ignoring the fascist revolutions that gave rise to World War II, the authors tie together left-wing revolutions from the late Roman Republic to the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to the present and claim that all political positions designed to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights reflect that same left-wing radicalism. In their telling, Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who said, “Wherever I am, there will be no communism,” is a hero.

Franco ordered illegal detentions, torture, and mass killings in the name of social cleansing. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times noted in 2024, the right wing has often championed Franco, but “it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.”

The embrace of authoritarianism in Unhumans reflects the modern version of an ideology shaped after World War II by those determined to get rid of the modern state. Although the great majority of both Republicans and Democrats embraced such a government, right-wing reactionaries insisted it was a slippery slope to socialism. Defending business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure investment, and civil rights cost tax dollars and so, they said, redistributed wealth.

Over the years, reactionaries insisted that Americans who believed in such a system were un-American takers sucking dry the country’s makers. Increasingly, they demonized Black Americans or people of color and women as lazy and looking for government handouts, breaking laws with impunity, corrupting the country with their godless ways, and winning elections only by cheating.

And yet voters continued to elect lawmakers who supported the modern government. This infuriated the far right, but even establishment Republicans recognized that voters liked Social Security and cancer research, clean air and reproductive rights. While they turned out voters by railing against the “Liberals” who supported regulations and the welfare state, they made sure not to cut into those programs deeply enough to cause a backlash.

Trump has unmasked that facade. He has put the far right in power, where they are destroying the modern American state. Right-wing officials have undermined the world trade system that underpins American prosperity, empowered economic monopolists by slashing regulations and public lands, decimated reproductive rights and healthcare, cut social safety programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, slashed medical and scientific research, and dismantled the post–World War II rules-based international order that has maintained global stability for seventy-five years.

But the right-wing push to get rid of the modern state is deeply unpopular. And so Trump and his loyalists are embracing the idea that his opponents are in league with a historic throughline of left-wing revolutionaries.

Trump’s speech last night began with a completely fantastical vision of current conditions in the U.S. that has been widely debunked, point by point, by fact-checkers. But his portrait of a nation “doing really well” was a setup for his warning that the prosperity and success he touts are under direct threat by “leftists” both abroad and at home.

Trump claimed to present evidence that beginning with the 2020 election cycle, China “carried out what was believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history.” He referred to “China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” and called this an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” In fact, as Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman of PolitiFact report, documents the White House itself posted show that such information is publicly available for purchase, and such purchases are common.

Trump also said documents showed that “members of the deep state” worked “to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.” But, in fact, the intelligence community told Trump about foreign interference in 2021, and Biden released its report when he took office. The report said China did not make an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Actually, one of the documents Trump released yesterday shows that Russia tried to influence the 2020 election to defeat Biden. Its operatives worked “with US officials and other prominent persons” to “spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 US elections.” Trump has denied Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Trump tied American journalists to this alleged plot, claiming the Chinese government was paying journalists to write negatively about him. He then attacked the media for being “part of a plot…to continue this [election] fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.” He called for the government to revoke their broadcast licenses.

“The findings are stunning,” Trump said, and indeed if they were true, we should expect dramatic diplomatic rifts and lawsuits. But does Trump actually believe any of this? The White House today said plans for a lavish state visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Washington, D.C., in two months have not changed.

Trump’s warning of a communist threat against U.S. elections was a setup for his insistence that future elections could be rigged and that the country must do as he says to stop that danger.

He said he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security “to notify every state about noncitizens on their rolls and direct them to be deemed ineligible.” And he demanded Congress pass the SAVE America voter suppression act, saying “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected in any other way.”

“These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I have mentioned,” he said, and he told Americans to call lawmakers to demand they pass the SAVE America act.

Today Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanded states run voter rolls through a federal digital tool designed to identify noncitizens who are ineligible for certain government programs. Federal judges have blocked federal demands for those rolls sixteen times and prohibited the use of the federal tool, noting it was not designed to scan citizens’ information and often flags recently naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Blocked by the courts, Mullin threatened state officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t comply with Trump’s demands.

Yesterday Secretary of State Rubio expounded on the administration’s opposition to “Radical Left terrorism.” A meeting at the State Department was billed as an examination of the “transnational” nature of far-left terrorism, but Shannon K. Kingston of ABC News noted that Rubio and other officials from the Trump administration spoke primarily about what they call “antifa” and conditions in the United States, including the assassination attempts against Trump.

Kingston noted that a 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed that left-wing political violence in the U.S. “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

Nonetheless, the White House said, “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

There is a point to all this. Bannon argued in Tuesday’s War Room podcast that the idea of “communists” threatening to take over the United States through corrupt elections is “a predicate for immediate action.” That immediate action, he said, would be for Trump to declare “a national security emergency executive order…that took all of SAVE America plus plus plus plus.” And then, we can be sure, the Republicans will win the 2026 elections and, as Trump keeps saying, all the elections for the next 100 years. They would do so by default as the administration purged so-called communists from public life.

The parallels between Unhumans and the administration’s current rhetoric showed yesterday in Miller’s speech at the State Department. Bannon’s introduction to Unhumans begins with an epigram that reads: “Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.”

Miller told the State Department attendees: “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person, not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that?… You look at two photographs, and you see, you know, a normal American street, you see an antifa protest. Why did the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

In response to Trump’s address last night, the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Cisco Aguilar of Nevada, released a statement saying: “That was some bullsh*t.”

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Notes:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-jack-posobiec-pizzagate-rape-melania-sign-twitter-conspiracy-theory-far-right-a8159661.html

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/trumpworlds-favorite-writer-says-the-right-must-emulate-dictators-in-battling-leftist-unhumans

https://www.thenerdreich.com/why-trump-keeps-talking-about-communism-the-unhumans-playbook/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/trump-administration-unleashes-global-campaign-to-crush-radical-left-terrorism/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/jd-vance-fascism-unhumans.html

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/17/politics/china-election-trump-xi-state-visit

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/homeland-security-secretary-markwayne-mullin-threatens-states-election-rcna588002

https://abcnews.com/Politics/rubio-urges-international-counterterrorism-crackdown-left/story?id=134820036

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-jack-posobiec_n_66a2755fe4b04c3a302465e7

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/steve-bannon-says-trumps-thursday-night-speech-must-be-predicate

usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-07-17/trump-says-these-documents-prove-his-false-claims-of-election-fraud-heres-what-they-really-say

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trumps-address-on-china-the-2020-election-and-what-documents-show

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/that-was-some-bull-state-election-chiefs-condemn-trumps-long-debunked-election-lies/

Facebook:

lasvegassun/posts/cisco-aguilar-who-also-chairs-the-democratic-association-of-secretaries-of-state/1471435425029177/

YouTube:

watch?v=NoyiHAMTk3g

X:

atrupar/status/2078136910694715775

i/status/2078225308503671116

rcohen/status/2077528414852984883

Bluesky:

mcopelov.bsky.social/post/3mquj46i4hk2r

muellershewrote.com/post/3mqspe3ohnk2r

marcelias.bsky.social/post/3mquxehtpf22t

Instagram:

p/C712zy5Nk-X/?hl=en

Amendment 1 

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(We intended to post this last Friday but it didn’t make it (we don’t think it did anyway)

Missouri is one of eight states without state park admission fees. Amendment 1 maintains that distinction.

We might think Amendment One would be a no-brainer.  It extends a popular, small, sales tax for ten more years.  But those disposed to vote “No” on everything next month might add a touch of uncertainty to this issue.

Voting “no” on everything is irresponsible.  So is voting “yes.”  Government, even something so small as one-tenth of a cent, requires responsible thought.

This one-tenth of a cent sales tax is earmarked for financing state parks and programs retarding soil erosion. When it was initially approved, Missourians weren’t so sure it was a good idea.  It was a 50.1-49.9 approval, about 1700 votes..  But it was renewed with a 69% favorable vote in 1988,  renewed again eight years later with two-thirds of the vote, with a 71% majority in 2006 and most recently almost 80% in 2016.  It has won with an average of about 71.5%.

Renewal should easy. But in 1984 it was on the ballot with  a Kansas City proposal to let the city issue bonds without voter approval if two-thirds of the property owners in a special benefit district wanted them. Fifty-nine percent of the voters said “no” on that one.

The third issue seemed benign—renaming the Department of Consumer Affairs, Regulation, and Licensing (CARL) the Department of Economic Development. It passed 61-39 percent, so we know voters were discriminating in casting their ballots.

DNR observes, “Since 1984, Missouri farmers have implemented more than 295,000 structural and management conservation practices on cropland, hayland, pastureland and woodlands. Through these conservation efforts, Missouri has stopped more than 194 million tons of soil from eroding, enough to fill the lanes of I-70 from St. Louis to Kansas City over 52 feet high. These practices were supported by over $975 million from the Parks, Soils and Water Sales Tax since 1984.

And what do our state parks get?  “Free admission to all state parks and historic sites,” and these other bullet points—

  • Enriches visitor experiences with improvements, such as the new Spirit Trail and playground at Knob Noster State Park, a new visitor center at Deutscheim State Historic Site and upgraded playgrounds at Bothwell Lodge, and Bennett Spring state parks.
  • Offers a variety of overnight accommodations from walk-in campsites to full service cabins and modern lodges.
  • Enhances campground amenities such as upgraded electric, showerhouses and restrooms.
  • Improves accessibility, including track chairs, 360-degree virtual tours and tram tours for senior citizens.
  • Provides ongoing maintenance and repair of more than 2,000 structures, 3,000 campsites and 1,000 miles of trail.

We are proud of our state parks.  We like not to see soil erosion providing a problem for our streams.  It’s only a tenth of one percent. We’ve gotten our money’s worth from this little tax and we should keep getting it.

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Amendment 1 

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Missouri is one of eight states without state park admission fees. Amendment 1 maintains that distinction.

We might think Amendment One would be a no-brainer.  It extends a popular, small, sales tax for ten more years.  But those disposed to vote “No” on everything in August might add a touch of uncertainty to this issue.

Voting “no” on everything is irresponsible.  So is voting “yes.”  Government, even something so small as one-tenth of a cent, requires responsible thought.

This one-tenth of a cent sales tax is earmarked for financing state parks and programs retarding soil erosion. When it was initially approved, Missourians weren’t so sure it was a good idea.  It was a 50.1-49.9 approval, about 1700 votes..  But it was renewed with a 69% favorable vote in 1988,  renewed again eight years later with two-thirds of the vote, with a 71% majority in 2006 and most recently almost 80% in 2016.  It has won with an average of about 71.5%.

Renewal should easy. But in 1984 it was on the ballot with  a Kansas City proposal to let the city issue bonds without voter approval if two-thirds of the property owners in a special benefit district wanted them. Fifty-nine percent of the voters said “no” on that one.

The third issue seemed benign—renaming the Department of Consumer Affairs, Regulation, and Licensing (CARL) the Department of Economic Development. It passed 61-39 percent, so we know voters were discriminating in casting their ballots.

DNR observes, “Since 1984, Missouri farmers have implemented more than 295,000 structural and management conservation practices on cropland, hayland, pastureland and woodlands. Through these conservation efforts, Missouri has stopped more than 194 million tons of soil from eroding, enough to fill the lanes of I-70 from St. Louis to Kansas City over 52 feet high. These practices were supported by over $975 million from the Parks, Soils and Water Sales Tax since 1984.

And what do our state parks get?  “Free admission to all state parks and historic sites,” and these other bullet points—

  • Enriches visitor experiences with improvements, such as the new Spirit Trail and playground at Knob Noster State Park, a new visitor center at Deutscheim State Historic Site and upgraded playgrounds at Bothwell Lodge, and Bennett Spring state parks.
  • Offers a variety of overnight accommodations from walk-in campsites to full service cabins and modern lodges.
  • Enhances campground amenities such as upgraded electric, showerhouses and restrooms.
  • Improves accessibility, including track chairs, 360-degree virtual tours and tram tours for senior citizens.
  • Provides ongoing maintenance and repair of more than 2,000 structures, 3,000 campsites and 1,000 miles of trail.

We are proud of our state parks.  We like not to see soil erosion providing a problem for our streams.  It’s only a tenth of one percent. We’ve gotten our money’s worth from this little tax and we should keep getting it.

Amendment 5

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We pay income taxes at our house because we know that we have to pay for the things we expect government to provide for us at various points in our lives. We’re both retired and we live on a flexible income rather than one popularly described as “fixed.”  But Amendment Five nonetheless is more ugly sister to us than it is Cinderella.

I don’t think I can count how many times our legislature has cut this or that tax with the promise that it will bring more businesses to our state, that it will create more jobs, or even that it will keep us from losing another congressman.

If all of those promises were true, our Center State would be bursting with national company headquarters and international trade offices and hundreds of new jobs. But since we aren’t, the solution to the problem might not lie in cutting taxes again.

Supporters of Amendment 5 repeat the same tired promises.  They’re bombarding us with manipulative advertising that never addresses the specifics of the proposal. We expect opponents to respond in similar fashion, reminding us again that political advertising and truth are, at best, cousins.

Governor Kehoe has trotted out the moth-eaten Republican statement that, “State government doesn’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem, and continuing to spend faster than we grow our economy is not a sustainable path forward.”

So the answer is to cut funding for services Missourians want our government to supply to them?  Or to shift the burden of taxation?

How long will we have to wait this time for the economic boom to arrive and everything comes up roses for me and for you, too?

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Max or Minnie

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His full name is Maximus Decimus Meridius McCatimus, General of the Felix the Cat Legions, loyal companion of the one who feeds him, brother to a curious sister, friend to the woman of the house.

We call him Max. He’s a 17-pound lovable lug.  He’s also a wimp.

Max’s favorite activity is sleeping on our bed.  Or the couch.  Or the chair next to me as I type.  Or in my recliner.   If he were an outdoor cat, he would starve.  But he and Minnie are indoor cats and Max takes the word “indoor” very seriously.

While Minne Mayhem, his sister who is into and on top of everything, does the ankle-rubbing from the first minute and wants to get up on the table when we have people over for a night of Rummikub and Five Crown and Swoop and rare times with dominoes (we lead such exciting lives), she is escorted into the laundry room for the night, we wont see Maximus.  She’s a take charge cat.

Max is a timid soul who finds something to get under or a dark shelf in the closet under which he can be concealed when we have visitors, even if they’ve been here a lot.   Eventually he will come out, carefully looking around corners to make sure it’s safe.

Minnie was lounging on our back porch the other day and I saw Max watching her.  He frequently sits in front of the door but when I open it for him to go outside, he hustles away.

I told him, “You can’t spend your life just looking out the window, Max.”

Whether it’s true for a cat or for a person, it’s true. Life isn’t to be viewed from inside. It has to be a participatory experience. Take a risk, even if it only stepping out onto a porch.

Be involved.  The only things resulting from looking at the world through a window is that those who are participating outside might create something you don’t like to see.

So do something. Don’t be afraid. Help change the view.

It is the DOING that makes life rewarding, that makes a difference. Nothing great ever happened because people just sat on a couch.

Today we have too many window people talking about how bad things are while the few—as usual just a few—who seize the opportunity and accomplish something. If it’s not good, it might be because we had too many watchers and not enough doers. Safety is not created by watchers. Danger, either.

We have elections coming up in a few weeks and various entities are spending millions of dollars to influence those on couches, those who are too timid to participate, those who look at the ballot issues for the first time when they go into their voting cubicle.

Our country won’t be better; our country can’t save itself; the human condition cannot be improved by the Maxes.

Go on.  Get out the door. Do something, don’t just watch others.

Be a Minnie, not a Max.

Take charge.  Get outside. Pay attention. Be involved.

It’s only your state and your country that we’re talking about.

Minnie wants YOU!

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The Income Tax Cut

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It’s going to take some pretty strong lobbying to convince me that the governor’s plan to eliminate the state income tax and make up for the lost state revenue by increasing the sales tax is a good idea.

We already have seen a major investment in promoting passage from an anonymous source—almost two million dollars so far.  Our campaign finance laws allow big money special interests or individuals to hide behind a legal campaign money laundering system that has been abused by both side of the aisle.

If I contribute $100 dollars to someone’s campaign (which never have been done or will be done), my name becomes a public record. If I were wealthy enough to buy part of the Missouri Constitution, I could hide my attempted purchase.

Getting back to the topic:

Here is an issue that could have a chilling effect on our public services and public protections that hasn’t been discussed as far as I have heard:

The local sales tax has been used throughout Missouri to improve local infrastructure—streets, sewer systems, parks, and improved public safety.

This last point has been highlighted in the last couple of weeks by requests from sheriffs in Boone and Cole County for temporary sales tax increases to fund jails and jail expansions.  The Boone County Commission is putting a 3/8 cent sales tax increase on the November ballot with proceeds building a new jail.

The Cole County sheriff has just asked his county commission for a temporary sales tax to improve and expand current jail—which was built with proceeds from a temporary sales tax increase.

Temporary local sales taxes need voter agreement.  It seems that if voters are given a specific amount to be raised and significant enough purpose for the increase, they are likely to support it as a matter of community self interest. We make this observation without having seen any professionally-done studies on the subject; it just seems to work this way. The system gives citizens an opportunity to evaluate the benefits they will receive versus the cost of obtaining them.

But if the income tax is cut and the state imposes new sales taxes on a myriad of products and services, the local voter has no say in how that money will benefit their communities. And the higher the state-imposed sales tax is (the legislature can determine what the rate will be), might it become harder for voters to approve temporary increases at the local level?

The income tax/sales tax proposal headed for the statewide ballot in August might be nice for those who have a lot of money and don’t want to share it but a lower income tax won’t much help our lower income residents—and a higher statewide sales tax not only will increase financial problems for the paycheck-to-paycheck families, it could weaken voter support for a temporary tool used by local governments  to increase public services and public safety.

I might find a temporary sales tax for a new jail or improvements to an existing one—or other public improvements and programs— more than my billfold can bear if the state taxes my purchases to make up for the loss of revenue that seems to benefit people higher up the fiscal food chain than I am.

Until we are better persuaded, the proposed income tax cut appears from our hilltop view to be a benefit I can’t afford and that my city and county can’t afford either.

I’m always open to efforts to make me think otherwise.  But for now, a billionaire’s money is unlikely to buy my vote.

Laws for the Presidency

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CNN polling discussed last weekend shows the overwhelming number of Americans are tired of President Trump lionizing himself, especially by sticking his name on  buildings while he remains in office. The data was called “clear as glass” by CNN’s Chief Data Analyst, Harry Enten.

The Survey found one in five Americans think it’s okay to name buildings after Trump—but only after has left office (and, we add, after time and more open evaluation of his behavior is possible).

Only NINE PERCENT say it’s okay for him to stick his name on government buildings while he’s still in office.

How strong is that feeling.  Enten looked at some other ridiculous ideas for comparison.  Nine percent is even lower than the 12 percent of Americans who think the moon landing was a fake.

It is even one point lower than the number of Americans who think the Earth if flat—ten percent.

Enten said, “On this issue, the rock core, that core Republican base that Trump has relied upon, that stick with him through thick and thin, even on this issue, though, just 17 percent, just 17 percent of Republicans say that, yes, it is. Three percent, not really so surprising, of Democrats say the same thing. So, you get rare bipartisan unity on this issue.

But is he fixated on himself, as if we need to ask? He plans to the celebration of our nation’s 250th birthday in Washington into a celebration of himself, which should remove any doubt, underlining the sentiment of only 29% of Americans in the CNN survey who think he is focused enough on issues that really matter.  More than two-thirds (68 percent) say he is not.

As we have noted in a previous blog, the polarization of America this man is causing is staggering in its scope.  In this issue—focus—only THREE PERCENT of respondents seemed to have no opinion.

Because our current occupant of the White House has so clearly violated or ignored all previous written and unwritten standards for the office, it is time for Congress put serious limits on the presidency, written standards with severe penalties for their violations. Some of these standards must be applied also to those who enact them.

These proposals are based on the proposition that the higher people rise in our political system, the more they must reveal of themselves as a matter public honesty with those who elevate them to those positions.

In short, the higher you rise, the less private your life becomes and the more you “belong” to the public because you are entrusted by that public with increasing levels of power that must be exercised with responsibility beyond personal interest.

To begin with the current example, these laws of the powerful should require:

—The name of no President shall be affixed to any government building, park, military equipment or other federal holding while in office. Such naming shall remain the province of the Congress and its usual process for such designations which shall not be made until the president has been out of office for one election cycle.

—No image, signature or other representation of a sitting or living former President shall appear on any United States currency or coinage used in general public circulation.

—Within two weeks of an individual achieving a nomination for President, or achieving the office through succession, the Internal Revenue Service shall make public the tax returns of the individual for the previous five years and shall release them for each year the individual is in office.

—The same standards shall apply to appointees to the United States Supreme Court, to cabinet positions, and to members of Congress upon their elections. .

—The President and incoming Vice-President, not later than two weeks  prior to inauguration, shall transfer all assets, including but not limited to personal financial holdings and property to an independent blind trust established by the Congress to manage those assets during the time they are in office. No transfer of assets within the families of the President and the Vice-President during the two years before the inauguration date shall be recognized as legal and such assets shall be seized and placed into the trust if so made.

—Failure to place assets into such a trust will delay the inauguration until such time as the obligation is met.  The sitting president shall serve as a President Pro Tempore until such requirements are met.  If the sitting president is incapable of serving under provisions of the 25th amendment or chooses not to continue service, the sitting president shall be replaced according to the line of succession established in the Constitution and that person will continue serving until all trust requirements are met. Impeachment shall be mandatory if it is determined later that these standards have not been met intentionally.

—Within two weeks of all annual physical examinations, the detailed results including (for lack of a better term) “beyond basic” tests of cognition, shall be released.

—No President shall order the unprovoked attack of or invasion of another independent nation without the approval of Congress.

—No President can claim, annex, or purchase any independent nation or territory of an independent nation without approval by Congress and a proven willingness by the inhabitants of such lands to become part of the United States..  “Proven willingness” shall mean a positive vote by the general population of the area proposed.

—No President unilaterally can withdraw this country from international bodies dedicated to the health, safety, welfare, financial stability, and peaceful coexistence with others without approval by Congress.

—No President may interfere with the orderly elections of the states nor with the standards of institutional of higher learning within those states.

—All revenue outside of campaign donations that would personally benefit a sitting President shall be applied against the national debt (ending the pay for play philosophy that seems so prominent in today’s presidential dealings).

—All campaign donations to presidential and congressional candidates shall be listed according to the name of the individuals making them.  Organizations aggregating campaign funds must identify the individuals contributing to such aggregated donations.

—No president shall establish independent political action committees to influence elections at the state level during the term of the presidency.

Nothing in these suggestions prohibits a president from making recommendations nor do any of them limit the president’s constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and expression nor his ability to associate with others who might advocate a cause on his behalf. But they will go far to prevent future presidents from taking the powers of the people from them.

Expecting Congress to enact any of these protections for the nation’s general welfare seems to be quite a reach. But we should know by now that failure to do so only invites something worse, if it is possible to envision something worse, than the inattentive but self-absorbed figure we have now.

Recall that on September 18, 1787, the last day of the Constitutional Convention. Elizabeth Willing Powell, a Philadelphia social leader we today would call “an influencer,” asked delegate Benjamin Franklin as he emerged from the final meeting, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  Franklin’s answer is well known: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

These recommendations are designed to keep our republic and have been created to respond to the excesses of the current holder of the presidency.  You might have modifications to these ideas or additional limits that Congress could and should impose.  Feel free to share them in the “comments’ section at the end of this posting. No snark please. This is too important for that.

In this campaign year, those seeking federal office should be asked by the media and the voters if they would support limits such as these on the most powerful single person in our government and for those seeking high federal positions. If yes, why?  If not, why not?

We citizens have obligations to ourselves and to our families as well as to our neighbors—known and unknown—to protect ourselves and to protect our nation.  Some might argue that the Constitution already protects us enough.  Your correspondent does not believe that it does, and we have seen demonstration after demonstration of that inadequacy, especially with President Trump.

These issues need to be part of the national dialogue in this election year. If you would like to begin this discussion with others by distributing these ideas, feel free to do so. If you have a chance to speak of these things with your congressional candidates, do not miss it.

A republic is a terrible thing to be wasted.

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