What is Right? (Tax Edition)

Sooner or later most of us encounter a financial adviser who tells us that the average household spends about 30% on housing and 20% on food, and, while our household may not be average, it's good to think in those terms occasionally as a yardstick.

So, what should we pay in taxes? In most of the world that looks like someplace we might want to be, people pay about 50% of their income in taxes, most of them without grumbling.

It's the price we pay for good government, and good government is the reason we're not still living in mud-daub huts. Good government is not something we can afford thanks to the productivity of modern trucks- modern trucks are something we can afford because we have good government.

There's all kinds of dimensions to this, but the bottom line is that if we wish to continue living as a first-world nation, we need to pay taxes at first-world rates. It's not a hard-and-fast figure, but a yardstick for use in understanding the general proportions of the problem, and of the solution.

Beware the Female of the Species

Hillary Clinton cites, as proof of terrorist conspiracies, the fact that “these drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency; all of a sudden, car bombs show up which weren’t there before.”

So, that would be totally different from that time in 1976 when the CIA helped a Chilean death squad to murder Orlando Letelier with a car bomb in Washington DC, right?

I'm pretty sure that there's a conspiracy to set off bombs and attack democratic government, and pretty sure Hillary is one of the ringleaders. All of a sudden, word bombs are being dropped by Hillary about more US war in Central and South America, word bombs that weren't there before.

Seattle- Not A Streetcar Suburb

It's fashionable now to describe Seattle as a city with 'streetcar suburbs', but maybe more interesting to see how this statement is wrong than how it is right. Seattle was suburban before the coming of the streetcars.

Seattle was first of all a city of ships and boats, spawning suburbanization around the shores of Puget Sound and the sloughs, rivers, and lakes. In this we find the explanation for many places that today are curiosities or question marks, reminders of the time when the Green River flowed backwards for half the year, and the produce of the Issaquah farms traveled down the Sammamish Slough, through Bothell, and to Seattle.

Then the cable cars virtually leveled the hills between Seattle and Lake Washington, making it a nickel ride to lake steamers at Leschi and Madison that spurred suburban development around the shores of the lake even before the streetcars had begun infilling the Central District or Queen Anne.

Then came the streetcars, and it will always be a matter of interest to me to grab an old streetcar map and drive the routes, to see how that infrastructure of buildings and development has survived, albeit often in fossil form. Along with the streetcars came the interurbans and linear development in the Rainier Valley and out north through Greenwood.

But the automobile was too perfectly suited to the topography for Seattle to resist it even for a moment, quite arguably virtually doubling the number of buildable sites in the city, a development still discernible on the north face of Queen Anne, a neighborhood close to the city core but denied by gradient to the streetcar.

It should not surprise us, then, if the next big change in transportation is discontinuous and creates development where none was expected. White Center or Burien- can't remember which- is now planning for 35-story skyscrapers, and it's hard not to hear this as a 'come hither' call to Sound Transit to build southwards. Extending light rail to Issaquah on the I-90 ROW would cost a fraction of what the Redmond route will cost and pass closer to Bellevue Community College. In the city, streetcars and light rail will not be built by real estate developers to serve single family dwellings, but by public agencies to serve many different needs.

It's ok to think out of the box now- you're in Seattle.

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9/11 and Pearl Harbor Iconography

Anyone watching world events in November of 1941 knew that an attack by Japan on the US was a matter of days or weeks, possibly a month at the most. Anyone familiar with the fleet exercises off Panama in the early 1930s and the British attack at Taranto could have predicted a spoiler attack by the Japanese at Pearl. None of this came as a big surprise to Roosevelt or our joint chiefs.

To the average American, the surprise was devastating. Japan, a land they knew as an exporter of tin toys and wooden dolls, and considered to be comically inferior to Americans, had not only attacked us, but won. Why, if the Japanese could attack us, why not the Cubans or Java Islanders? Suddenly, it appeared that any insignificant-appearing country could in actuality be a ravaging military dictatorship seeking to rule the world.

This fog of paranoia proved so useful to the military-industrial complex that billions have been spent in the years that followed to propagate the tale. Like a cargo cult waiting for the silver bird to return, America waited for the next Pearl Harbor- and it came!

Imagine the feelings of relief and joy at the sight of the two towers falling! For nearly a decade our feelings of fear had been eroded by the collapse of our only "real" enemy, but now we had new proof we should be afraid! America had once again been anointed in the blood of the innocent victim and marveled anew at how such events could so totally come out of nowhere. Now young people as well as old could tell their stories of where they were on that awful day when we were so viciously attacked.

Uh, well, maybe not to the point of raising taxes to pay for a war on our enemy. There are limits.

What's Wrong With Obama?

Bill McKibben reports that Obama has turned down an offer of a solar panel for the White House. This offer, of course, is symbolic, as is the actual solar panel, one of those Carter installed in the 70s.

Did you want to slap me in the face? Well, thank you very much, Mr. Corporate President, afraid that your billionaire buddies might not let you in the club if you hang around with environmentalists.

But maybe what Obama should learn from Carter is that life does not end when you leave the White House. Like Carter, Obama will probably have about 30 years in which to reconsider the wisdom of his acts. Judging from this performance, those will probably be painful years for him- and for us.

America and Pakistan

It's tempting to think that if the Pakistanis can't govern themselves, they are doomed to the evils of oligarchy and gangster rule. It's especially tempting because it lets us off the hook for our role in creating this disaster.

The Pakistanis might very well have that good government, if we hadn't stepped in along the way to support military dictatorships. The Pakistani-Indian rift might well be healed if we had not exploited those differences to challenge the Russians in the Indian Ocean.

It's not an accident that a large border area of Pakistan-Afghanistan serves as a terrorist base area- that was our plan. That was also "fighting the Russians".

And it's not an accident that timber cutting in Pakistan by timber poachers denuded hillsides and unleashed the floodwaters of a globally-superheated storm. Stealing the natural resources by dealing with local thieves is what "free trade" is all about.

Like the US-Mexico border, we've created a problem in Pakistan. Kinda makes you wonder- could there be even more of these problems coming in the years ahead?