Author Archives: Larry Franz

The Background to What Romney Said

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Ezra Klein of the Washington Post responds to Romney’s remarks:

“83 percent of those not paying federal income taxes are either working and paying payroll taxes or they’re elderly and Romney is promising to protect their benefits. The remainder, by and large, aren’t paying federal income or payroll taxes because they’re unemployed.”

And why don’t many working people end up owing Federal income tax?

“Part of the reason so many Americans don’t pay federal income taxes is that Republicans have passed a series of very large tax cuts that wiped out the income-tax liability for many Americans. That’s why, when you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that.”

Klein points out that some of the tax cuts for lower income people were adopted to make tax cuts for higher income people more politically acceptable. Now, however, the Republicans are arguing that people who don’t owe federal income tax are parasites who don’t deserve government benefits:

“Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/17/romneys-theory-of-the-taker-class-and-why-it-matters/

What Romney Says When We’re Not Listening

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Somebody secretly filmed Romney talking behind closed doors at a fundraiser. He thinks that half of us are freeloaders:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax….My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

So being certain to vote for Obama is the same as not earning enough money to owe Federal income tax (while paying other taxes, like Social Security, Medicare and sales taxes), which is the same as not taking responsibility for your life. I wonder what the waitresses and bus boys were thinking while this guy was talking.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser

Stravinsky and Nijinsky

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Igor Stravinky’s ballet The Rite of Spring was first performed in Paris in 1913. It’s well-known that the performance was not a success. There was a tremendous uproar in the audience. Objects were thrown at the performers. Fights broke out. The house lights were eventually turned on to quiet the crowd. The performance continued, while some 40 members of the audience were ejected. 

I’ve always thought that it was Stravinsky’s violent modern music that was the source of the trouble. Apparently that isn’t true. From today’s New York Times:

“It was not Stravinsky’s music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky, the greatest dancer in the troupe but a novice choreographer, that offended the Paris public, for whom ballet was all about swans and tutus and elevation. Once the whistlers and hooters got going, nobody even heard the music. Most of the reviews paid no attention to Stravinsky beyond naming him as the composer before turning with gusto to the weird antics onstage and the weirder ones in the hall”.

The Rite of Spring was performed with less turmoil a few more times in Paris and then in London. But it wasn’t until the work was performed the following year in a concert hall in Russia, without the dancers, that it became a success.

Costumes worn by some of the dancers who raised a ruckus in Paris:

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/arts/music/rite-of-spring-cools-into-a-rite-of-passage.html?_r=1&ref=arts 

The Truth Shall Set You Free

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Albion’s Seed is a very long book by the historian David Hackett Fischer. It explains how four regional cultures from England were transferred to different parts of colonial America.

For example, the fact that English aristocrats controlled the settlement of Virginia but had little role in the settlement of Massachusetts explains important differences between the history of the South and New England, even up to the present day.

“As early as 1642, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required that all children should be trained to read by their parents or masters”. Partly out of fear that Satan (the Old Deluder) was always trying to cloud people’s minds, “the Old Deluder Law compelled every town of fifty families to hire a schoolmaster and every town of one hundred families to keep a grammar school which offered instruction in Latin and Greek”.

Contrast this attitude toward literacy and education with that expressed by Governor William Berkeley of Virginia in 1671: 

“I thank God there are no free schools nor printing (in Virginia), and I hope we shall not have these for one hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”

In fact, the aristocrats who ran Virginia believed in education for their offspring. It was the lower classes, including slaves, who were supposed to remain ignorant: “the penalty for a slave who tried to learn how to write was to have a finger amputated”. 

Crime in the Suburbs

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From the Police Blotter section of our local paper:

“On Sept. 3 at 11:11 pm, police received a report of a theft from a vehicle parked on Valmont Way. A pair of Dolce and Gabanna sunglasses valued at $500 was reported missing.”

Good.