Editorials and Opinions

Georgetowner • May 9, 2013

The times they are a changing, Bob Dylan used to sing. He didn’t know the half of it when it comes to Washington, D.C.

When was the last time you heard the word “global power”? Concerning the United States of America, for sure. But for the District of Columbia? Not so much.
But that’s one of the phrases that came up during the course of the Downtown Business Improvement District-sponsored State of Downtown Forum and Report, where listeners and participants, media and note-takers could look out a panoramic view of the city from the top of the Newseum that’s every bit as breath-taking as the one from offered by the top of the Pompidou Museum in Paris. We mention Paris because the French capital was one of the names mentioned by way of comparison, along with New York and London.

The forum panelists included Howard Riker, the managing director of Hines, the privately owned international real estate firm involved in many of the ongoing projects which are expected to make major impacts on the fast-changing downtown commercial, residential (as in condos) and cultural atmosphere ; Ginnie Cooper, chief librarian of the D.C. Public Library System, Gregory O’Dell, chief executive officer of Events, D.C., and Robert McCartney, the Washington Post columnist. Rich Bradley, president of the Downtown BID, moderated.

McCartney said that Washington was a world-class city, although not yet a “first-tier” city like Paris, London or New York. This could, of course, having something to do with size, even though the city is taking on new residents at an amazing rate, along with new developments, and projects, all changing the cityscape, especially downtown, which is practically unrecognizable from 20 years ago.

Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans, who is said to be contemplating a mayoral run, reminded the audience just how much downtown had changed and why — the why being mainly three then politically controversial projects which turned to be game changers. “The Verizon Center, the Washington Convention Center and the Washington Nationals baseball stadium all passed the city council by one vote,” said Evans, who reminded us that he was a key supporter of all three projects along with Mayor Anthony Williams and Linda Cropp.”

Now, It’s hard to imagine the city without those three elements.

(For more details on the State of Downtown report, visit www.DowntownDC.org.)

David Post •

What happened to “austerity”?

For the past few years, cutting spending was all the rage.

Now, except for the sequester, Congress shooting itself in the foot—which it didn’t expected to happen and is trying to dismantle—the notion of reduced federal spending has quieted to virtual silence.

The Republicans discovered a mistake in a spreadsheet that showed that its ideas of reduced spending–firing teachers and policemen and firemen–would somehow make the economy grow. Europe tried austerity. Some countries are entering their third recession in six years–only because unemployment dropping from 25 percent to 19 percent counted as a recovery–and are now in more trouble than before they tried budget cuts.

Here at home, we can’t cut. While the Defense Department tries reduce its budget, Congress passes legislation to manufacture weapons DOD doesn’t want. Congress doesn’t want to kill the jobs of defense contractors in their states and districts, even if DOD doesn’t need or want the weapons. Congress can’t even agree to stop giving away money to industries that no longer need it, such as farm subsidies, which cover very few people but a lot of geography and a lot of votes in the midsection of the nation.

Remember the complaint, “The Democratic Senate haven’t passed a budget in four years?” It finally did. Ho, hum.

The Congress Budget Act of 1974 passed during Watergate. Few paid attention to it. It required the President to present a budget in January and for the House and Senate to review it and pass a joint resolution by March directing the Appropriations Committees how to spend the nation’s money. That never happened.

Today, warring budgets stake out political positions and are bludgeons for attack the other party, and, of course, for getting votes. The budget itself has no teeth. It’s a road map, but like any road map, you don’t have to follow any particular route.

This year’s Republican House budget proposed the deficit to zero in ten years, mostly by shifting portions of health care costs to the states and by cutting almost $4 trillion from the safety net. Poor people don’t vote. One commentator questioned why all children should be entitled to a kindergarten. Kindergarteners don’t vote. The Republican budget didn’t touch Social Security or Medicare. Seniors vote.
The Democratic Senate budget didn’t touch Social Security or Medicare, cut defense (mostly by subtracting the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), raised taxes, and ended up with a deficit almost half what it is today.

President Obama’s budget actually cut Social Security and Medicare, cut defense, raised taxes. He’s no longer worried about getting votes.

Social Security and Medicare are the pins that are going to prick the budget balloon. With 75 million baby boomers knocking at their gates, they are the largest and fastest growing parts of the budget, and they are on auto-pilot. Even though Obama tossed out an idea–any idea–both the House and Senate rejected the president’s budget immediately.

For years, the country has operated on “continuing resolutions.” In other words, because they can’t compromise, Congress votes to “keep doing what we’re doing.”

Don’t hold your breath. Federal budgets are not spending tools. They are political weapons. Since Congress knows little is going to change, it found one solution: just stop talking about it.

Gary Tischler • April 25, 2013

“All in all, it’s been a tough week,” President Barack Obama said in the wake of the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which ended the week-long trial by terror of a proud, historic American city stunned into shock by the bombing attacks Monday at the finish line of its beloved annual Boston Marathon on Patriot Day. “But we’ve seen the character of America once more.”

Throughout the week, there was enough hard and difficult news to make many hearts buckle— flood waters in Mississippi, in the Midwest, in Missouri; the dramatic defeat of the background check amendment in the United States Senate, making the defeat of any sort of gun control legislation inevitable; poisoned letters sent to a U.S. Senator and the President by an Elvis impersonator; a huge fire and explosion that demolished the town of West, Texas and killed 19 people at last count, including firefighters.

In the end though, it was Boston where all attention flew, where our emotions were engaged most fully, where drama of the kind that had a 9/11 feeling to it unfolded for days from the moment of the seen-over-and-over-again explosion that knocked down a runner near the finishing line until the killing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the capture of his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar, two Chechen brothers and Boston residents who had perpetrated an act of terror by placing back- packs filled with deadly bombs in two different locations near the finish line of the marathon.

Three people were killed—an 8-year-old boy, a 23-year-old student from China and a 29-year- old restaurant manager. Their names were Martin Richard, Lu Lingzi and Krystle Campbell. Some 170 more were injured and hospitalized, some with injuries that required amputation.

The scenes at the scene—ambulances roaring in, people rushing to help, bodies flailing on the sidewalk, police with guns drawn, along with the accompanying sounds of sirens, screams, the yelling of officers, victims, bystanders, the energy that saw people running from and to the scene in confusion, seemed as familiar as any old dream of disaster, a particular disaster from a perfect fall morning nearly 12 years ago, when smoke, disaster and unimaginable horror and tragedy ruled New York.

Boston’s travail, the ruination of its proud day of celebration and of Patriot Day and all the frustration, confusion—one network anchor called it the fog of war—was in the end not 9/11 but 4/15 in the year 2013. It was something different, particular to the times, the place, and the people, including the perpetrators of the bombings, which hinted again at the unfamiliar culture of the others. Who and why could do such a thing, we all asked, and when we found out who, we still didn’t really know why, although it clearly carried a whiff of the cultural animus against America that permeated the horrors of 9/11.

It was not the same story—that needs to be clear. We caught the whiff of the terrorist bomb in the air, with random victims victimized again. But we live in age now that includes the wrath of Mother Nature and its Sandy, its earthquakes in Japan and Haiti, Katrina and New Orleans. We live now in the age of mass murderers and shooters, full of rage visited upon their own families, themselves, co-workers and bosses, but also most hurtfully to all, children and people in the wrong place at the wrong time. We live now in the age of terrorists, angry Jihadists, as well as homegrown killers.

The end result of such events is random death and destruction and loss, which can never be made up for with abstractions like blame, revenge, justice, rationale, ideology or psychosis. They are essentially senseless events which are utterly unfair in how and whom they victimize. The rest of us become spectators, left with a hunger to know what happened, to know and commemorate the lives of the victims, identify the causes and casuists, the time of day, the temperature of the air that hour, the life stories of both the perpetrators and their victims.

It is always different, with an overlay of the memories of previous tragedies. Boston was about innocent victims, about a historic city rocked to its knees, its people forced into a kind of lockdown in their homes while a huge law enforcement and military presence sought the two brothers. It was also about the city itself which other Americans hold dear for the origin history of our revolution which it contains on cobbled sidewalks, in stores and museums, for its Irish and ethnic overlays, its rough politics, its New England patina of intellectualism, poetry and education, its sports teams and rivalries.

It’s also about the media itself which went into its almost reflexive full court press, which is to rush to any and all bits of information and often report it unchecked, anchors, bloggers, freelancers, television and print reporters and gawkers mixing freely. In that sense, the usual happened—mistakes were made, the most egregious and unapologetic being that of the New York Post who ran a picture of a man on the front page of its tabloid, which suggested he was one of the men being sought. Hints of conspiracy flew through the air like bugs, including false reports of arrests.

When the bombers were finally identified— by way of an unprecedented appeal to digital and internet watchers to help find them in thousands of photos taken that day—it became a different story, a way of trying to figure out the torturous path that led these two brothers who had been in Boston since their early youth to the moment when they made these bombs and picked up and set down those backpacks. It was a complicated story, fueled by the anger of one of their uncles living in Maryland, who was furious at what he saws as a betrayal, by tentacles reaching to Russia and the Muslim republics, and the bloody battles of Chechnya. It ended with a cold-blooded killing of a Cambridge police officer, a running gun battle late Thursday night in which the older brother was killed and finally after a nerve-wracking day of lockdown and speculation, in the discovery of a bloody, wounded but still dangerous younger brother who had hidden for the better part of a day under the tarp of a boat in a yard in a house just outside of an established perimeter.

Politicians tried to butt in—it is in the nature of the beast—on what to do with the captured bomber and how to treat him. Questions remain, stories abounded. Boston—the citizens thereof— celebrated the end of their ordeal in ballparks and stadiums in the streets in cheers for police, fire- men and EMS personnel. They became “Boston Strong”, a slogan that was well on its way to copyright.
No one, of course, cheered in West, Texas, where firemen rushed bravely to their deaths, and not a single resident was left unaffected. But it was not Boston, no full court press here, perhaps understandably. Americans were left in grief, here, too, and reporters on television remembered to put the comma between West and Texas on the air, that pause, that identified the place. Soon, they too will be holding commemorations for those lost, and the unimaginable loss of life, and place.

West was not Boston and Boston, in the end was not 9/11 these years ago. It was the memory of 9/11 which touched Boston, if not West, a hint of smoke and fire and terror in the air. But it was April, a spring week, and the mornings came regularly after the Friday night.?

Georgetowner • April 11, 2013

It’s only two weeks until the special election on April 23, in which voters – lots of them, we hope – will elect an at-large District councilmember to fill the seat vacated when Phil Mendelson became Chairman of the District Council.

There have been a number of candidate forums all over the city—and there will be more including tomorrow’s TENAC forum—and it’s not yet clear whether a favorite has emerged.

Four candidates showed up for the recent forum sponsored by the Georgetown Business Association at Tony & Joe’s Seafood Place at Washington Harbour. Democrat Alicia Silverman, an economic analyst and former City Paper journalist, Anita Bond, a veteran government consul- tant and official did not appear. Again a Democrat, Michael Brown who had lost his bid for re-election to the at-large seat he had held in another recent (and low voter turnout) election, has dropped out.

The most familiar electoral face among the current crop of candidates is—in this most Democratic of cities—is Republican Patrick Mara, who serves on the State School Board, and previously ran twice for an at large seat, narrowly losing to Vincent Orange in his last bid. He is presenting himself as a can-do candidate, touted his ability to speak and connect with Republicans in Congress, including members of the House Committee that oversees the District, is a moderate on social issues, including gay marriage which he supports, and is keen to tackle ethical issues on the council. Mara has been endorsed by the Washington Post.

Two other candidates appear to be unabashedly liberal in their approach. Democrat attorney Paul Zukerberg supports marijuana decriminalization, saying that we “are put- ting more young people in prison than we are graduating from high school.” Perry Reed is the Green Party candidate and is a supporter of low-income and affordable housing.

Matthew Frumin is a community activist from Ward 3 has touted his leadership on education issues including the modernization of Wilson High School and on a variety of task forces and community organization.

The Georgetowner will issue an endorsement of one of these candidates in this special election next week.

David Post •

Where I’m from – Salisbury, Rowan County, North Carolina – is still a mystery location, but it is on a map.

Two weeks ago, a suit was filed against the county commissioners because they open every meeting with a prayer to Jesus. In response, Rowan County’s two state legislators proposed a “Defense of Religion Act.” A dozen legislators joined as co-sponsors.

Within minutes, we were national news. Huffington Post. NPR. Jon Stewart. The BBC. Stephen Colbert. The media said that North Carolina wanted to declare that Christianity was the state religion. One legislator remarked that he didn’t know that he’d be famous by the end of the day.

Our commissioners believe Jesus leads them to the right decisions, regardless of the Constitution. Their solution is to discard the Constitution.

Their resolution begins by suggesting that the First Amendment does not apply to states, municipalities or schools. Sweeping aside the Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868, our legislators said that the federal courts had [wrongly] required the states to follow the First Amendment. The resolution also proclaims that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to the states because the Tenth Amendment delegated power to the states.

The resolution flatly states that the Constitution does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what was constitutional or not even though that is exactly what Marbury v. Madison held in 1803 in surely the most famous and important Supreme Court case in history. It’s no secret. It’s in every U.S. history and civics book ever written. Marbury established the role of each of the three branches of government and how they serve as a system of checks and balances on each other.

Having tossed aside the First Amendment and the federal courts, the resolution concludes that government officials can do whatever they want with religion because they are also private citizens.

Hence, it asks the North Carolina General Assembly to assert that the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit the state from establishing a religion and that North Carolina is not subject to federal court rulings.

After a day of howling, the legislators withdrew their resolution as “poorly written . . . and ambiguous.” Meanwhile, gigantic billboards in yellow and red are sprouting up around my county shouting, “Keep Praying Commissioners . . . in Jesus’s Name, Amen.”

David Post • April 10, 2013

Happy Birthday, dear 16th Amendment.

You are now 100 years old. And, what a 100 years it’s been.
Before Roe v. Wade, you were aborted twice. During the Civil War, the country needed revenues, so Congress passed the first income tax. Today, war is no reason for a tax, but the Civil War tax expired after ten years, birthing the idea of temporary tax provisions.

During the 1800s, government raised revenues from excise taxes and tariffs. In 1894, thinking that those taxes caused inflation, Congress reduced tariffs by adding an income tax. The Supreme Court held that income from property such as rents and dividends could not be taxed while income from labor could be taxed. The entire law was tossed out.
Your birth was a long and difficult. In 1909, Republican President Taft proposed amending the constitution to allow an income tax. It took the states four years to ratify the 16th Amendment granting Congress the “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the . . . states.”

Once born, you grew quickly. That single sentence of the 16th Amendment has grown to a tax code of five or six million words, most dedicated to defining the word “income.” What counts? What doesn’t? What reduces it? And, at what rate? True to the Supreme Court 125 years ago, the tax code today taxes income from property at a lower rate than income from labor.

The tax code is flawed, for sure. It has become a hodgepodge of incentives that encourage certain economic behavior in exchange for lower taxes. The result is that many rich taxpayers pay lower rates than middle and lower class taxpayers. Similarly, many corporations – Exxon, Apple, and GE to name a few – report billions in profits and pay little or no tax in the US.

Over the past dozen years ago, Steve Forbes and Herman Cain have run for president proposing a flat tax, while Mitt Romney proposed lower rates. Their fundamental ideas were to eliminate incentives (loopholes) and reduce rates. The idea seems simple, but defining “income” remains exceedingly complex.

The best tax is one that neither alters taxpayer behavior nor allows taxpayers to manipulate the tax base. Taxpayers rarely make “what to do” decisions based on sales or consumption taxes or property tax. Sometimes, consumption taxes affect behavior if a lower cost option is easily available. For example, cigarette taxes of $4.25 per pack in New York encourage a black market in Virginia cigarettes with its $0.30 tax.

The proposed Fair Tax is a consumption tax-based system. “Fair” is a good marketing word, but it hits lower income taxpayers harder because they spend a higher percentage of their income on consumption – meaning they would pay more tax proportionally – than do higher income taxpayers. Instead of “income,” the code would have to define a “sale?” Would it include the sale of stocks or bonds? A house? Medical services or education? Soon, the Fair Tax would be a few million words long, and have a zillion lobbyists.

Taxes are complicated. My daughter is a CPA. She will never starve.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Income Tax. When you blow out the candles on your cake, here’s hoping you don’t get your wish.?

Gary Tischler • March 28, 2013

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s an election coming up. It’s yet another special election for the at-large seat vacated by D.C. City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson when he became […]

Georgetowner • March 26, 2013

Georgetowner •

In case you haven?t noticed, there?s an election coming up.

It?s yet another special election for the at-large seat vacated by D.C. City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson when he became chairman. The election is April 23, the field is large, the turnout is expected to be low, which it shouldn?t be, but probably will be, given the track records of past elections.

This particular election, though, has the potential to be a bellwether election for what is a city in a state of flux and change, and surprisingly?given the economies surrounding jurisdictions and across the country?with a robust economy and a substantial budget surplus. It occurs at a time when the major issue still seems to be ethics?past infringements by the likes of former Chairman Kwame Brown and Ward 5 Councilman Harry Thomas Jr., the latter languishing in prison, as well as the recent reprimand of Ward One Councilman Jim Graham, and the continued cloud of the District Attorney Office?s ongoing investigation of Mayor Vincent Gray?s 2010 mayoral campaign. Mayor Gray, with a rousing State of the District address, is sounding confident these days, while some challengers are lining up to shoot for his job, notably among them Ward 4 Councilwoman Muriel Bowser, who officially announced that she will run. Others?Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells and Ward 2 Council Jack Evans?are said to be exploring (Wells) or not saying no (Evans).

The race could be an indication how thing will go in the 2014 mayoral race, and may have a lot to say about where the power is in a shifting and changing city population on issues such as schools, the homeless, what to do with the surplus, statehood, relationships with congress, and affordable housing, as well as crime.

The race has attracted some predictable folks?Michael Brown, for instance, after being ousted from his at-large seat in the last special election in which he ran as an independent, is back again, this time as a Democrat, his true calling, we presume, since he started out that way. Anita Bonds, a familiar face and figure as a government official and adviser, for years, working with Mayors Barry and Williams, is holding down the seat as an interim council member and has drawn some advantage of name recognition for that. And back again is Patrick Mara, a Republican and a school board member who was narrowly defeated by Vincent Orange in a previous election.?

*The Georgetown Business Association will host an at-large candidates forum at Tony & Joe?s Restaurant, April 1, 6:30 p.m.*