Category Archives: economy

It takes a town to make a town

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(We want our city to be greater than it is, more than it has been to its own citizens and to those who visit or will visit it.  But the town has to WANT to be greater than it is and that means its citizens must want it to be more than it is, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of generations to come.  It’s not a job to be left to the city council or the chamber of commerce. This observation, written by Dr. Frank Crane shortly after the end of the First World War and published in The Delineator magazine, remains valid today as he suggests we put—)

YOUR HOMETOWN FIRST

Work for your own town.

Beautify it. Improve it. Make it attractive.

The World War and the Treaty of Peace and the Protective Tariff and all such things are important subjects but what’s the good of cleaning up the world unless you sweep your own doorstep?

The city whose main street is dirty, sordid-looking, cluttered, uninviting, suffers much. Such a city wants to be cleaned, recreated, made a thing of beauty so that people will come from miles to see it.

The best advertisement of your business if the town you live in.

Towns get reputations as well as men. Make your town talked of all through the state. It will thus draw people. And where the people come, there is prosperity. It does not take money. It takes cooperation.

Get together. Organize for civic improvement. Develop the civic nerve.

Rid your town of one eyesore after another. Clean up the vacant lots and plant them in gardens. Make a cluttered yard a disgrace. Make public opinion too hot for those who will help.

It pays.  It will promote law and order. It will help in the education of your children. It will draw factories and other business enterprises to your locality.

Shiftlessness, untidiness, dirt and selfishness as shown in your streets and buildings react upon your people.

Such things make your boys and girls grow up hating their home town.

Make your home town a children’s paradise, something their memory will lovingly turn back to.

Look after your amusements, your parks, your playgrounds, your theatres and all other forms of communal enjoyment.

Make your home town happy.

It pays.

Before there was Dave Ramsey—

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(There was Dr. Frank Crane who dispensed the same advice.  He did it with one column, not a series of lessons that detail how to accomplish the same goals Dr. Crane espoused.  The bottom line for both is—use common sense.  Dr. Crane wrote this in 1920.  See if it doesn’t sound like the kind of basic advice we see in Dave’s daily columns as he explores—-)

THRIFT

Thrift simply means the application of thought to money.

It doesn’t mean saving merely. It means to think every time you have to do with m

It means to make money with energy, to spend money wisely, and to save money systematically.

Some people have the idea that it denotes a superior person not to care about money. This idea is wrong. It indicates a lack of sense and a lack of morals.

Money carelessness means unhappiness by and by. It is one of the surest ways to slump into self-pity if not to crime.

The first thing needed in order to be thrifty is principle. You must make up  your mind and stick to it.

Principle number one is that a person can live on nine-tenths of what he does live on.  If you spend $1,000 a year you can get along on $900. Save the other $100.

To make $10 and spend nine means success.  To make $10 and spend $11 means ruin.  Which way are you headed?

Thrift is a general moral tonic. It develops character. It takes self-denial and hence creates self-mastery, which is the thing that every human being needs.

The Pandemic re-defines work

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Most of us probably have pondered what kind of permanent changes will remain in our society when the Coronavirus pandemic is finally considered vanquished.  With variants emerging and some of them appearing to be causing a bump up in our health statistics this month, we might not be learning the answer to that question for a while yet.

Clearly, the idea of “work” has been altered by this pandemic.  What will “work” look like when this finally blows over?   A few days ago, National Public Radio ran a story focusing on how the pandemic has changed, is changing, or will change the workplace.  Audie Cornish, the host on the afternoon news show, “All Things Considered,” interviewed three people, one in particular.  NPR was good enough to provide a transcript of that interview on its webpage. We thought the discussion worthy of passing it along to those who might have missed the broadcast or who don’t listen to National Public Radio.

CORNISH: Why and how to bring employees back into the office – those are the kinds of decisions company leaders are having to make. And they’re thinking about how to give employees flexibility, how the pandemic has impacted innovation and company culture. We spoke to a variety of CEOs – Christina Seelye, CEO and founder of video game publisher Maximum Games in California, was one of them.

CHRISTINA SEELYE: Innovation’s a big one. I think that innovation – I haven’t seen the technology yet that replicates what it’s like to be in a room with people and bounce off of each other.

CORNISH: And Dan Rootenberg, CEO of SPEAR Physical Therapy Company in New York.

DAN ROOTENBERG: I do believe that people learn from each other more. There’s more collaboration. There’s Zoom fatigue. I mean, I’m on so many Zoom meetings. It’s, you know, it’s really exhausting after a while. And so there’s a totally different feeling when you get together.

CORNISH: Those at the C-suite level, they turn to experts at places like McKinsey & Company.

SUSAN LUND: So we’re getting calls from executives and chief human resource officers to say, OK, we’ve now gotten used to everybody remote. But how do we bring people back? When do we bring them back? What protocols do we need?

CORNISH: I spoke with Susan Lund, a partner at McKinsey & Company and leader of the McKinsey Global Institute. They put out a report in 2020 that was updated this year looking at the lasting impact of the pandemic on the workforce.

LUND: If you had told any business leader a year and a half ago that we were going to send the whole workforce home – at least the ones who could work from home – home for more than a year, they would say this is going to be a disaster. And, in fact, it’s worked out quite well.

CORNISH: But brass tacks, were we all more or less productive when it comes to remote work? What did your research find?

LUND: So what we find is that in the short term, people are definitely as productive, that it looks like they’re spending more time at work, in part because they don’t have the commute. They don’t have to go out necessarily to get lunch. They don’t even have the office chit-chat. So on one level, it looks like the number of hours that people are working is actually up. But long term, there are questions about innovation and new products and new ideas are going to be as forthcoming because of the remote work setup.

CORNISH: I want to dig into this data more. But first, who do we mean when we say we? Who’s been able to work from home? What portion of the workforce are we talking about?

LUND: It’s really office-based workers who are able to work from home. Overall, we found that 60% of the U.S. workforce doesn’t have any opportunity to work from home because they’re either working with people directly, like doctors and nurses or hair cutters, or they’re working with specialized machinery in a factory or in a laboratory. So it is a minority of people who even have this option. But overall, so 40% of the U.S. workforce could, in theory, work from home one day a week or more. And about a quarter of people could spend the majority of their time – three to five days a week – working from home.

CORNISH: When we talk about that 40% of people who do computer or office-based work, now a large number of them have had the experience of remote work. With that experience in mind, what are people learning about what a post-pandemic scenario could be for them?

LUND: So when you look at employee surveys, you typically find that the majority of people say, going forward, when we’re vaccinated, when it’s safe to return to the office, they still would like the flexibility to work from home a few days a week. So that’s a hybrid model. But then you do have a segment of people, maybe a quarter, who say I want to be in the office full time. Now, maybe they don’t have a good home working setup. It’s often young people in their 20s who are starting out in their careers. They want the mentorship and the camaraderie. And then you have another small portion who say I would like to work remote 100% of the time and work from anywhere.

CORNISH: There have been CEOs out there quoted here and they’re saying things like, well, we’re going to know who’s really committed to the job.

LUND: Yeah. So there is a lot of issues. So for companies going down this hybrid approach, there are a lot of pitfalls to watch out for. And one is that you end up with a two-tier workforce, that the people – it’s always the same people in the room making the decisions and other people are on Zoom or video conference, and that those on video conference end up being passed over for promotion, not considered for different opportunities because they’re not there. So companies are being thoughtful. The ones who are pursuing some kind of hybrid approach are thinking through these issues. And how do we avoid that to keep a level playing field?

CORNISH: We’ve been talking about this idea of who comes back, whose decision it is, that sort of thing. Legally, what do we know? Can employers force employees to come back? Can employers gently encourage employees to be vaccinated? What have you learned so far?

LUND: Well, it’s a complicated question. So on vaccination, it looks like it’s a bit of a gray area, but it looks like under federal law, yes, companies can require employees to be vaccinated if it impacts the health and safety of their workforce. On coming back to the office, I think it’s a little bit more clear. Companies can require people to work on site – right? – as a part of the employment contract. But what they risk, especially for talented professionals, is that people will go to other companies that do allow more flexibility on some remote work or work from home.

CORNISH: When people look back at this time, will it be considered a reset in some ways when it comes to work, or are we going to be back to where we were in 2019?

LUND: Well, my crystal ball is broken, but I think it will be a reset. I don’t think that we will go back to the same pattern of working. I think that the forced pause for everyone to spend more time at home with family and friends has really caused many people to rethink. I think that this really has been a reset.

Incidentally, Audie admitted that she was conducting this interview from a temporary studio in the attic of her house.

If you’d like to listen to the entire piece, including comments from others, go to:

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004862350/-why-do-we-have-to-go-back-to-the-office-employees-are-divided-about-returning

 

An Untenable Position

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Missouri Gaming Commission Chairman Mike Leara was no doubt relieved by last week’s Missouri Senate defeat of an omnibus gambling expansion bill.

The bill would have saddled the cash-poor commission with even more things to regulate.

Senator Denny Hoskins’ bill would have allowed slot machines at truck stops and veterans and fraternal organizations (there is a big disagreement whether video lottery terminals are slot machines that we are not going to get into). It also would have legalized betting on sports in casinos.

The gaming commission is largely funded by admission fees paid by casinos.  One-half of the admission fees go to the commission and the other half stays with the thirteen host, or home-dock, cities. The bill did not address the problems caused by our long-outdated admission fee law.

The gaming commission had to cut more than two-dozen employees last year because the pandemic forced closure of our casinos for several weeks and admissions understandably lagged for the remaining months of the fiscal year.  The commission also reduced funding for the Access Missouri scholarship program administered by the commission by twenty percent.

The commission’s position has been further weakened by an almost decade-long thirty percent decline in   casino attendance, a drop from 54.3 million admissions in fiscal 2010-11 to 37.5-million in FY 2018-19, the last non-pandemic year. The pandemic year that ended last June 30 saw another drop of about ten million admissions, leading to the commission layoffs and reduction in the scholarship program. Admissions so far this year indicate another weak year for commission and home dock city income from casino patronage.

Pardon us while we get into some mathematics here:

The admission fee was set at two-dollars per person in 1993.

The commission, therefore, has been dealing for some time not only with declining income because of declining attendance but with declining value of the money it has collected in admission fees. Almost thirty years of inflation have reduced the purchasing power of fee income by about forty-five percent.

Those circumstances left the Missouri Gaming Commission with significantly reduced resources to regulate the casino industry, producing layoffs and taving Chairman Leara justifiably concerned about how well the commisison could regulate an entirely new form of gambling as well as regulate a large number of slot machines in veterans and fraternal organizations throughout the state.

The bill defeated by the Senate provided no protection against continued funding declines.

While the bill might have been seen by Leara as three lemons, it might be viewed somewhat differently by Missouri’s educators.

Other sports wagering bills in the last three years sought to tax sports wagering adjusted gross receipts at six to nine percent, far less than 21% rate on all other forms of gambling.  The effect of those proposals would have been to lower the state’s commitment of gambling funds to public education by tens of millions of dollars yearly. None of the amendments proposed during floor debate sought to change the Hoskins bill’s provision taxing sports wagering proceeds in the same way all other forms of gaming are taxed, a good first step in making sure next year’s sports wagering legislation protects other state interests as well rather than undermining them.

The Missouri Gaming Commission, faced with the likely return of this legislation in the next session in some form, would do well to evaluate its present financial situation that is significantly worsened by outdated gaming laws and suggest ways the legislature can protect the ability of the commission to do its job by bringing laws adopted in the last decade of the Twentieth Century into the third decade of the Twenty-first. Sports wagering legislation would be a solid vehicle to accomplish that.

A Trojan Horse and a Forked Tongue

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We have grown tired of the arguing, year after year, campaign after campaign, administration after administration about rebuilding or improving our infrastructure.

While all of this talking and proposing and blaming and balking has been going on, I have replaced the front struts on my car—not a cheap thing to do—perhaps because I hit a few too many serious potholes in the seven years I’ve owned the car (it’s a great car, so great that I see no reason to replace it—and I’ve driven its 2021 replacement).

They talk. I pay to replace my struts.

President Biden this week announced a $2.25 Trillion infrastructure plan.  He wants to offset its further expansion of the federal debt by increasing the tax on corporations and people who are a lot richer than almost everybody who reads these entries.

Immediate opposition has come from the usual sources—the people on the other side of the aisle.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has branded Biden’s plan a “Trojan Horse,” saying, “It’s called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan Horse is going to be more borrowed money and massive tax increases.”

By “massive tax increases” he appears to mean a rollback of part of the “massive tax cuts” the Republican Congress approved under the Trump administration in 2017, cuts that were supposed to help the simple folk who work for the people and companies that got the tax increases.  Many of the folks who find the tax increase odious are the same people who have complained about the increasing the national debt for infrastructure building/rebuilding.

From time to time we hear political leaders from both sides bemoaning, on one hand, the cynicism of the public toward the political process while on the other hand they take advantage of that cynicism by appealing to it to get votes and campaign money.

While they play their games, my car’s struts keep taking beatings.

The Biden plan spreads the fiscal pain through several years.  It has several elements, some of which are more urgent to address than others.  There’s plenty of room for compromise—we’ll pass this but you’ll have to ditch that for now—if anybody wants to compromise.  But why compromise when you can just fight?

We’re tired of hearing our politicians say they’ll “fight” for us.   To Hell with fighting.  DO something for us!

For starters, here is an alternative plan that Republicans might consider supporting because it comes from one of theirs:

This infrastructure plan would be smaller and narrower.  It would involve spending up to one-trillion dollars financed by government bonds that average citizens as well as big-money investors could buy.

It’s kind of like the War Bonds that were issued during WWII to finance the fight against the Axis. Yes, the national debt would be increased but the payout would be gradual and spread through a number of years and, as some politicians and economic theoreticians like to say from time to time, the economic benefits would produce the increased revenues to pay off the debt.

This idea was proposed in 2016 by candidate Donald J. Trump—and his party has demonstrated he could do no wrong. It never gained any traction during his administration, perhaps because he suggested it to counter a smaller proposal by opponent Hillary Clinton and then, once in office, abandoned it because it was no longer needed for political points when there were more self-beneficial things to talk about.

The Clinton campaign rejected the Trump proposal, by the way, saying “Donald Trump’s only actual infrastructure proposal is the build a giant wall on the Mexican border and have Mexico pay for it.”  In retrospect there seems to be an element of truth in that observation. We’re still waiting to hear the Treasury Department announce the arrival of the first payment from Mexico, by the way.

Conservative critics of the Trump plan might have used the word “Trojan Horse” to describe it because, as New York Times reporter Alan Rappaport related, they believed, it was similar to a stimulus plan set forth in 2009 by President Obama and would worsen the national debt.

Any plan put forth by Obama had to be blocked because it was from Obama.  Any plan from Trump had to be blocked because it came from Trump. Today, if it comes from Biden, it must be automatically opposed by those who offer nothing but attacks.

So while our politicians in Washington continue to speak with forked tongues, the potholes keep getting deeper, the bridges keep getting weaker, old lead sewer and water pipes become more dangerous, and a public that absorbs all of this (aided and abetted by powerful undermining  voices on the air and in print) continues to incrementally lose faith in the democratic form of government.

Those in public office who prefer to stoke the fires of public dissatisfaction with the processes of government are the ones who are building a Trojan Horse. We saw on January 6 what is inside it—anarchy and totalitarianism, which do not seek nor want what is best for the nation.

And in Washington, it appears, the only thing that matters is an argument not over how the gate can be made more secure, but over whose hand most weakly holds it closed.

 

 

Things seemed so normal then

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Remember how normal things seemed the last time we gathered on a chilly Monday on the south front of the Capitol lawn for the inauguration of a new governor?

Eric Greitens, a young Republican populist, riding the wave of the Donald Trump-led populist surge nationally, was sworn in as governor in what he referred to in his opening remarks as “our republic’s most revered ritual: the peaceful transfer of power.”

Greitens, who saw the governorship as one step in his eventual trip to the White House, promised to “be loyal to your needs and priorities—not to those who posture or pay for influence.”

Former sheriff and former senator Mike Parson, days removed from open-heart surgery, surprised some of us by being on the platform, taking the oath as Lieutenant Governor.

Jay Ashcroft, son of a former state auditor, attorney general, governor, and U. S. Senator John Ashcroft (only Mel Carnahan matched him by holding four statewide offices in his career), was sworn in as Secretary of State.

Former Senator Eric Schmitt became the new State Treasurer that day.

And University of Missouri law professor Josh Hawley took over as Attorney General after a campaign in which he vowed he would not use the office as a stepping stone to something higher.

Nobody wore masks that day, four years and two days ago.

Eleven days later, another inauguration saw Donald Trump rise to the Presidency, a surprise to many in the Republican establishment and a frightening possibility in the eyes of many who were not his deepest believers.

How normal things seemed even then—despite the uneasiness many felt about the tenor of the campaigns that put Greitens and Trump in office on those days.

A few months after that bright but chilly January day, Greitens was gone, resigning before he could be impeached after refusing to reveal records of his campaign and ongoing finances, and being dragged through the headlines generated by a sex scandal.

His resignation triggered unprecedented chair-swapping in state government.  Mike Parson moved up to governor and appointed term-limited Senate leader Mike Kehoe as the new Lieutenant Governor, an appointment later ruled legal by the Missouri Supreme Court.

Josh Hawley, forgetting his promise not to use his office as a stepping stone, rode the continuing Trump wave to victory over Claire McCaskill two years later, leading Governor Parson to appoint State Treasurer  Schmitt to replace Hawley in the Attorney General’s Office. The House budget chairman, Scott Fitzpatrick, was appointed to become the new Treasurer.

Only Jay Ashcroft remains where voters put him four years and two days ago.

Today is far different from that day four years ago.

Our capitol has emerged from months in a giant plastic cocoon in which workers cleaned and replaced stone put in place more than a century ago, ended serious water leakage problems, and even restored Ceres, the patron goddess of agriculture, to the top of the dome so she once again welcomes those attending today’s ceremonies.

Mike Parson is being sworn in for a term of his own as governor, bearing the scars of dealing with a pandemic, a state economic collapse it caused, and the pain of the budget cuts he had to make–all in an election year.

Eric Greitens’ wife left him; he reportedly is hoping he can rehabilitate himself to seek public office again, although his thoughts of a presidency might be much dimmer than they were when inauguration day was HIS day full of hope.

Josh Hawley, with his own dreams of White House glory, is under intense criticism from former supporters in the public and present colleagues in Washington for his attempt to capitalize on Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that have led to one of the most alarming political incidents in our lifetimes.

Donald Trump is isolated and increasingly alone, living the bitter final days in power he fears giving up, the idea of a peaceful transfer of power completely foreign to him.

And today we wear masks, our nation still under siege from a terrible virus that has forced us to withdraw from friends and family.

Oddly enough, a sentence from the inaugural address of Eric Greitens on January 9, 2017 comes to mind.

“This state in the heart of America has proven that the worst in our history can be overcome by the best in our people.”

Let us hope and fervently pray that on that, at least, he will be correct.

 

Us vs. It—part XII What’s next?

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It’s been a while (August) since we had a Us vs It entry but with vaccines starting to go into people’s arms, we have reached a new stage in this siege.

Even as we remain absorbed by the fight against the Coronavirus, we must start thinking of what comes after.

We will be different when we emerge from this plague. We will see in a glaring spotlight the shortcomings in our American system of doing things.  The list of issues, which must be addressed in ways that bridge a chasm of partisanship, will be long and should be inescapable.

Tough and thorough evaluations need to be made at the federal and state levels of the conditions of our readiness in the current situation and our preparations for readiness for the next wave. The evaluations are too important for Congress or for state legislatures. We need the brutal honesty of something like the Kerner Commission of the late 1960s.

Given social unrest that has flared during this time of the plague, it is good to recall the Kerner Commission not only to prove the point of this post but to highlight what it said more than fifty years ago that is tragically too close to life today.

Many, if not most, of those who read these entries might be too young to remember the commission appointed by President Johnson and headed by former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. It was formed after disastrous racial violence in 25 cities that far exceeded anything we saw in Ferguson a few years ago or that we have seen in some cities more recently.  The commission’s final report was brutal. It warned that this country was so divided that it was on the verge of becoming two “radically unequal societies—one black, one white.”

We won’t discuss here how accurate that forecast might still be—because we are talking about a different issue that deserves the same tough examination and, if necessary, the same brutal honesty in its assessment.  There are many who think the Kerner Commission’s report, and its severe final assessment, fell on deaf ears. The assessment of what our state and nation need to do in the face of massive threats to our health and to our economy deserves the same severe approach but certainly not the same outcome.

We might need new laws and new regulations to make us better prepared in the public and the private sector for the next pandemic.  It would be unwise to dismiss such things as once-in-a-century events.  Our world has changed and is changing and it’s clear that nothing seems to be constant anymore. And we do not know if our changing world produces a climate more susceptible to new and deadly viruses.

Even now, we recognize the failure to find ways to keep rural hospitals open and the inadequacy of internet communications in many areas (that provide telehealth services, in particular) can no longer be ignored and tolerated.  We are learning that science cannot be dismissed and that those whose roles involve anticipating the next sweeping illness or the next world outbreak must regain their numbers and their status.  We are learning that our healthcare system always must be prepared, staffed, and equipped for the worst—and must not be in a position of determining who lives or dies based on personal financial standing.

We need to be ready at the state level. But pandemics have a tendency to overcome even the best state preparations and financial capabilities. A national crisis requires national leadership, national empathy, and national cooperation with states. It is unfortunately true that states can’t print money but the federal government can and money is a gigantic factor in fighting pandemics all the way down to the smallest communities.

Our experiences might teach us new things about distance learning and suggest some significant changes in our country’s elementary and secondary (and collegiate) education systems.

The economic paralysis should teach us to look more closely at a trend in jobs that we have noticed but to which we haven’t given enough attention—-the growing tendency to use independent contractors instead of having fulltime employees.  The independent contractors often get no fringe benefits and that can have some long-term impacts on retirements but especially (as in times like this) on healthcare.  The number of people who live on commissions and tips who have neither opportunities to create retirement plans nor the money to buy health insurance will grow as our economy changes and their lives should not be imperiled when our country is next ravaged by a new pandemic.

Likewise, the pandemic-caused work-from-home operations will have taught us things about large offices and the need for them.  The entire business model of large buildings for a single business, or single floors in a large building for one company might change because of what we have learned about working away from a central headquarters. The sweatshop still exists in our country but it is rare because of labor laws, fire safety codes, unions, and minimum wage laws that have curtailed those conditions.  Will the Coronavirus doom cubicle farms tomorrow?  Will is lead to a rise in union activity?

What will all of this mean in terms of society—-social gatherings, organizational memberships, business-employee relationships, civic clubs, churches?

We will be remiss if we do not anticipate tomorrow’s society based on what we are learning from today’s pandemic.

Our world is changing in so many categories—climate, economics, education, health, communications—that we cannot continue to have society as usual.

If it takes new laws and new regulations to do something as simple as making sure our healthcare institutions and services maintain adequate supplies of protective apparel, equipment and facilities for treatment,  let’s have them.

To those who would say such positions represent government overreach, there is a basic response.  Government has a role when the private sector abuses its liberties or fails its responsibilities. There is no lack of discussion in these times that such things have happened.  There also is no lack of discussion about how government, itself, has failed to meet its responsibilities to the people who entrust it with their well-being.

All of these issues and more need to be addressed so we know what will come after the virus has gone away.  That’s why new Kerner-type Commissions are needed at the state and federal levels. We are at a point in our existence where the blunt findings are needed and cannot be put on a shelf.  And we, as people, cannot be afraid to address the issues that will be forcefully put in front of us.

Here is a key point:

These commissions should not include elected officials as members.  Partisan Foxes do not belong in Pandemic Assessment Hen Houses.

We appreciate the work our public officials are trying to do in difficult times. It is time to work on the instant issue without wasting time casting blame.  But it is time also to start thinking of what comes after, and what comes after must be an unblinking hard assessment of what is present and what is needed to deal with the next health or economic or health/economic crises that will visit us. We cannot be afraid to do what is needed.

It might make no difference to our generation if we fail to act.  But other generations will sicken and die if we don’t.

A Priddy Good Christmas Kiss

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A lot of people have visited towns bearing their names.  But your faithful correspondent’s name is not so common that it can be found in very many places.   There are two that I know of, one in the historic area of England, of Glastonbury and the territory of King Arthur, an area that legend records Jesus walked during the “lost years” not covered in the traditional Bible, taken there by his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant.  The area is known for its tin mines.  .

We shall not delve into a theological discussion today, however.  We shall instead tell you of a little Texas town and a seasonal crop that is a central part of the romance of the Christmas season and its seldom-discussed questionable reputation.

A few years ago, Nancy and I satisfied a long-held desire of mine to visit the other town named Priddy. It’s in Texas, south of Dallas and about 100 miles northwest of Austin, a community of 75-100 people with (it appeared to us) more cemeteries than churches, a one-bus school district (at least, we saw only one bus parked at the school), a former gas station that is now the town store, and some nice people.  Some might say it’s out in the middle of nowhere, of which Texas has plenty, but the people in the little town—as people in small towns throughout the nation—think it’s just fine, a good place to live, and to raise their children.  It’s the quality of the people, not their number, that makes any town a nice place to live.

Priddy, Texas is one of those towns that becomes important at certain times of the year.  And this is the time of year for Priddy because that area is prime growing area for one of the most important crops for Christmas.

Mistletoe.

The stuff mommy kissed Santa Claus under.

Scott W. Wright wrote for the Cox News Service thirty years ago, “This out-of-the-way little town is the place where the makings of romance are ripe for the picking. Where kisses are conceived.”

Mistletoe grows in a lot of places. It’s the state floral emblem of Oklahoma.

The Tiemann family has run a mistletoe business in Priddy for many years. Some years they don’t ship any because the stuff just didn’t grow in enough quantity to make processing and shipping worthwhile. Other times, there’s been a lot. Wright wrote about the company processing 2 ½ tons of it in one day.

Dozens of folks have gone out and harvested it in the good years and when they do, other plants are probably glad—as much as trees and bushes can show gratitude, because—and this was a surprise to us—mistletoe is a parasitic weed that attaches itself to trees and bushes.

Sort of takes the romance out of things, doesn’t it?

Kind of like some relationships, we suppose. Clinging vines.  Parasitic.

But it’s a symbol of how we can recycle something bad into something nice.

Kind of like relationships, too, we guess.

And who really cares, especially if two people can use it as an excuse for some public or private osculation?

Priddy, Texas never claimed to be a mistletoe capital of anything. It’s just been a big business in a little town on the vast central Texas plains.

We wonder if people who work on this weed all day find anything romantic about it.

And what do you suppose the school athletics teams call themselves in a town known for mistletoe?

The missiles?    Surely not to Toes.  The Parasites?   The Osculators?

Pirates, as the town sign says.  The Priddy Pirates.

As in people who steal kisses.

Under the mistletoe.

 

Us vs. It—Part XI, Reasons to Act

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I bought something from the internet the other day—a photograph from a company that sells archived news photos from decades ago.  No sales tax was charged by the company, which is in a nearby state.

The purchase is a reminder.

If the state needs money—and it surely does—

There is no better time to finally approve collecting a sales tax on purchases made through the internet.

The Missouri General Assembly has gone to great lengths to avoid enacting such a requirement for a decade or more. It has refused to create a collection policy of our own and it has rejected suggestions Missouri join a multi-state compact that collects sales taxes.

Past efforts have been attacked by those who use a faulty argument to avoid the responsibility needed to enact the bill.  “It’s a tax increase,” opponents claim.

Dishwater!

The state sales tax is not—let me emphasize that, NOT—being increased. If the law requiring the state sales tax be paid on purchases on the internet were to pass, the state tax you and I pay when we buy from an internet vendor would be the same as the tax charged when we buy from a hometown business. I should be able to duck a citizen responsibility to contribute to the well-being of others by buying something through the internet.

The argument in favor of an internet sales tax is even more compelling in today’s plague-mangled economy.  Hundreds of local businesses have closed because of stay-at-home orders. Many have not reopened and some never will reopen.  But one of our neighbors (yours and mine) who owns a brick-and-mortar business knows that customers who used to buy things at that store have been buying them on the internet while the store has been closed.

The problem of local folks visiting stores, checking the prices, and then buying the same thing from an internet vendor already was a problem before virus-caused closings forced consumers to increasingly rely in the internet.  Now the question becomes whether they will go back into the hometown stores when they open?

Passing a law requiring Missourians to pay the same sales tax on internet items that they have to pay for local in-store purchases is more symbolic than profitable for the merchant.  But at the same time, promoting the reopening of brick-and-mortar businesses without taking a step that offers a slight whiff of equality with internet vendors seems pretty inconsistent (although you might have a stronger word).

The need to do this has been increased by an executive order signed by our president that he says will resume the expired supplemental unemployment payments.  The executive order will pay $400 but the states will have to contribute $100.

The legality of the executive order aside, Missouri’s general revenue fund needs every penny it can generate whether for supplemental unemployment payments, virus-fighting efforts or maintaining services even at their reduced levels.

Our state leaders have insisted time after time that testing is the key to controlling the Coronavirus in Missouri.  At this point, it’s anyone’s guess whether Congress and our president can agree on a stimulus package that will include billions of dollars for state testing. Lacking that, it’s hard for someone well detached from the ins and outs of the statehouse these days to imagine where the state will find money for that testing without further wrecking the state budget, let alone where it will find money for its share of unemployment payments without the same result.

Where the state of Missouri would find $100 multiplied by several thousand each week is a troubling question.  The governor already has withheld or vetoed hundreds of MILLIONS dollars to balance the state budget.  Schools are opening and education at all levels has been badly bruised by the necessary budget actions. Inflicting deeper cuts to the biggest places to cut, education and social services, could be tragic at a time when schools, in addition their normal expenses, have to face the costs of keeping students, faculty, and staff safe from the virus.

By making Joe or Josephine Missouri pay the same sales tax on a coat from a Internet Inc., as Sarah and Samuel Showme have to pay for the same coat from a Main Street store, Inc., Missouri’s leaders and lawmakers can send a little positive message to the businesses they want to reopen despite health uncertainties at home by collecting needed funds from consumers who want to avoid a few pennies in sales tax by buying online.

The virus has produced all the justification needed to finally impose an internet sales tax. It won’t entirely solve the state’s financial problems. But it could at least partly equalize the competition for the local dollar, provide at least some of the funding for the state’s contribution to the supplemental jobless benefit, and/or ease the depth of any additional budget cuts or withholdings.

Unfortunately, this is a campaign year and candidates will stampede away from advocating anything that can be called, however erroneously, a tax increase no matter how desperate the virus causes the state to be for additional funds. Perhaps we’ll have to wait until January to see if those whose political futures have been determined by then will screw up the courage to take this step.

Crisis Buffet

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We are trying to think of a time when a Missouri governor has had as many major issues to deal with at one time as Governor Parson has on his plate now.

We can’t think of one.

In addition to the normal burden of duties governors have, there has been added to this one’s plate the state’s response to a worldwide pandemic, the related collapse of the state’s economy and its hundreds of large and small widespread ripples to which state government is either a party or to which it must respond, civil unrest that must be dealt with on a daily—or nightly—basis at a time when the responsibility of government to restore or maintain order is under intense scrutiny, and questions about the role of government in correcting the social and political ills that are behind the disorder. So far the governor has not had to deal with major natural disasters—a devastating tornado or a historic flood for examples.

Plus—it’s a campaign year. Additionally, the instability of national leadership, legislative action to overturn the will of the people on the so-called “Clean Missouri” initiate of 2016, and the August ballot issue to expand Medicaid and the state funding responsibilities that will go with it constitute a salad bar of issues to go with the buffet of crises facing a governor who has been given an average-sized plate.

Governor Henry Caulfield in late 1931 once ordered an immediate 26% cut in the state budget to deal with the depression’s major impact on state finances when retail sales were down by half and unemployment was rising toward a 1932 level of thirty-eight percent. His successor, Guy B. Park in 1933 faced a state treasury holding only $15,000 with a $300,000 payroll to meet. Central Missouri Trust Company loaned the state enough money to pay its bills and to match available federal funds for depression relief until a special legislative session could enact new revenue measures—a gross receipts tax that was later replaced with the state’s first sales tax.

A plethora of problems faced Republican Governor Forrest Donnell in 1941, the first being the refusal of the Democrat-dominated legislature to certify his election at the start of the year and, as the year wound down, putting Missouri on a war footing.

Governor Warren Hearnes faced civil unrest during the Civil Rights era and in the wake of the murder of Martin Luther King, calling out the National Guard at times to maintain order.

Other governors have dealt with killer heat waves or 500-year floods. But the Parson administration will be remembered for 2020, a year in which crisis after crisis came to Missouri.

We have watched his almost-daily briefings and have watched as he and administration members and private organizations have scrambled and worked to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and its myriad effects. The civil unrest in the streets will remain as extreme civil discomfort long after the streets are clear and a record is yet to be written on whether Missouri—and the nation—at last really will do something about that discomfort after decades of talk but insufficient progress being made to limit chances for the streets to blaze again.

The economy will come back although it might take years. Missouri and the country had finally put the 2008 recession far back in its rear view mirror when all of this hit but that experience should remind us that a quick fix to today’s economic ills can best be hoped for but not counted on.

A couple of times we have seen Governor Parson show some irritation with a reporter or a published story during his briefing, a circumstance that might best have been handled with a phone call rather than a public criticism. But we’re willing to cut him a little slack, given the pressures he feels, the burden he carries, and the daily stress of a job that has become far more than any governor we know about. The passage of time will evaluate whether his leadership in this unprecedented time is, or was, effective and long-lasting.

Missouri has seldom needed as steady a hand on the tiller as we need one now. Missourians viewing today’s challenges and responses through their personal partisan lenses might differ on how this governor is doing in the moment. But he is Theodore Roosevelt’s man in the arena.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Who among us would want to be carrying the burden of office that this governor is carrying? Who among us would want to be in the arena he is in?

Frankly, we think he is fighting the good fight. And we look forward to the day—as he undoubtedly does—when we can again live off a menu rather than deal with a crisis buffet.