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Thursday, September 13, 2007
MARTA’s GM; Mexico trucks; the Clintons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• A cop who arrests a McDonald’s clerk for delivering a too-salty burger, as one did in Union City, is in the wrong line of work. And employees who deliver a burger accidently over-salted because the business has been wasting too much meat needs a manager.
• MARTA hires a new general manager. A year to learn and schmooze, followed by a year to “shake things up” and then one to find another job before the realization sets in that the broken pieces don’t fit back together. Steps one and two may be reversed. In year four, the board finds a marvelous new prospect employed somewhere else. The cycle begins anew. Ho hum.
• Any old person who attends a sponsored “free lunch” thinking it’s free probably should have a conservator managing their money. The feds are cracking down on investment firms for luring well-to-do old folks to “free lunch” educational seminars where they’re pushed to open new accounts or make investments. The old people who need protecting are those victimized by con artists such as the one who bilked an 83-year-old north Fulton woman out of $97,000 for a driveway paving. He’d been arrested 40 times in the past 17 years for similar crimes. Lock ‘em up, toss the key in an asphalt truck.
• The young people who need protecting are those being victimized by shooters and drug-dealers, not those tempted to buy a knock-off pair of Nikes on the street corner.
• The problem with all stories about foreclosures is that it’s impossible to know, from the information given, who’s at fault: borrower, broker, lender or somebody else. All appear to have grown equally careless. But carelessness on a grand enough scale invites politicians to “do-something.” In Georgia, income rose 60 percent between 1990 and 2006. But housing values rose 122 percent. Lenders and borrowers were taking greater and greater risk.
• Redeveloping Fort McPherson is a boon, a winner every which way. But wait. The good news is bad. Taking the neighborhood upscale could mean that some renters might choose to relocate to places with cheaper rents. This is bad. But on the bright side, it’s another chance for a government remedy. How about a rent freeze?
• Too bad our children aren’t pandas. We could rent them out (the Atlanta Zoo pays China $1.1 million per year for Lun Lun and Yang Yang) to a family that supports them in country-club lifestyle. All they’d have to do is sit and look cute.
• White House aid Frances Fragos Townsend talking about Osama bin Laden sounds like Steve Spurrier critiquing the performance of my beloved Georgia Bulldogs: “This is about the best he can do,” said Townsend after viewing the Osama tape. “This is a man on a run, from a cave, who’s virtually impotent other than on these tapes.”
• Moveon.org’s full-page ad in The New York Times headlined “General Petraeus Or General Betray Us?” subtitled “Cooking the Books for the White House” demonstrates yet again an eternal truth about America’s loony Left: Unassisted, it will always marginalize itself.
• Resistance to allowing Mexican trucks to deliver throughout the United States is driven by pure protectionism, not safety concerns. The administration opts to allow a one-year test. Congress, pushed by the Teamsters and the Sierra Club, balks. Mexico is opening its doors to U.S. truckers.
• The length or time of “commutes” within metro Atlanta, an obsession in these parts, is as irrelevant as the number of blondes driving Chevrolets. The commutes start here and end there — with neither here nor there being anyplace in particular. Hard to draw conclusions from that, except the one offered by Alan Pisarski, author of “Commuting in America” — metro Atlanta continues to grow.
• Just days after the release of Bill Clinton’s book, “Giving,” wife Hillary lives the sequel, “Giving Back,” returning $850,000 raised by Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu. He’s under federal investigation for allegedly paying straw donors to contribute to Hillary and other candidates. When it serves their interests, the Clintons — and especially Hillary — seem to find the company of shady players.
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Should Georgia end property tax?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Republicans, I’ve long argued, don’t handle the media very well — in large part because they assume a liberal bias. Believing their message will be distorted or misunderstood, they choose to try to work around it. That’s not particularly smart, but most get by with it until they come up with a really novel idea that requires a great deal of explanation and selling.
A good example is House Speaker Glenn Richardson’s proposal to eliminate property taxes while expanding the sales tax to services such as haircuts and laundry. The property tax is the most hated government levy and everybody would be glad to be rid of it. The question is how to make up the lost revenues. That’s where the sales job comes in. In addition to the tax on services, which will be a hard sell, the other problem for Richardson to deal with is that the state would collect all taxes and remit local governments’ shares back to them. The exception would be a local option sales tax, collected and kept locally.
It’s a big idea with some merit. Richardson argues that capping state collections, as has been proposed, is pointless if locals are able to raise taxes. That would invite tax-shifting rather than spending discipline, he said. Locals hate the idea and are quietly but aggressively working the state to get Richardson’s proposal killed.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, one of those Republicans who has a more formal relationship with the media, warmed up Wednesday, inviting a number of State Capitol reporters to breakfast at a midtown diner, to talk about issues of the day and about the upcoming session.
He’s cool — as in not particularly receptive — to Richardson’s proposal. He thinks it would encroach on local authority, as it would. That’s intentional. “The first thing you’ve got to keep in mind when you want to do good is not to do harm,” said the governor.
This tax shift, if it happens at all, is a long time off. It won’t happen in the coming session. People don’t understand it well enough. Details are still in flux. And it requires a lot more communication — and selling — than one state official can do alone or with a few allies addressing civic clubs.
The question here, though, is whether people do hate the property tax enough to consider a shift and, if so, how? A higher sales tax? A lower, but expanded, sales tax that would include services? A higher state income tax? The maximum rate now is 6 percent. Or leave the system untouched?
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