Editorials and Opinions

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.*

Gary Tischler •

I came to live in Washington DC in 1975 after living and working on two different daily newspapers in Northern California for ten years. Looking back from the vantage point of the intervening years of four decades, it seems to me now that I had landed squarely in the middle of a railroad juncture one coming from the 1960s and the other chugging forward to what lay ahead.
It’s impossible not to think of two times and places—the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s coming America and the roiling, revolutionary 1960s of peace and love, war and anti-war, Washington, D.C., the political and policy capitol of the United States and the San Francisco Bay Area, the epicenter of what comes next, the caretaker of hip, cool, rock and roll and protest politics, where the Pacific Ocean made up one of the seas to shining sea—more different and more connected at the same time. Neither city was typical of the makeup in function and population of the great majority of this country. Being there, and then here, felt like an exercise, at least initially in straddling not only the center of the 1970s, but two contrarian attitudes of what was important.
By 1975, things had already happened here that we did not quite pay so much attention to out there. Californians—the explosively liberal North and the entrench conservatives of the South and mid-state—had always seen Washington as the city of government, monuments, not as a place where real people actually lived. Things had happened there—very big 1970s things like Watergate, which we saw, often as the fall of the despised Richard Nixon and his ilk. He was one of us, after all, and after an ill-fated gubernatorial run, had blasted the press and said “You know have Richard Nixon to kick around any more.” As far as we know, somebody else had kicked him around.

In Northern California, protests against the war, against the government, for women’s rights, seemed common place as if everything leftist and worthy was invented in Berkeley. Turns out they hadn’t.

In California in the early 1970s, you were inured to a lot of things—the presence of drugs (pot, cookies laced with acid and hashish) at certain parties, the decline of the hippie movement in the Haight, and the rise of the dominantly gay Castro district). We saw the end of the Vietnam up close and personal as transport planes full of children rescued in the last days of Saigon landed in Oakland. On that occasion, I interviewed a man over coffee as he talked about his son, who had been killed in the last month of the war.

Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States—now it was official, I had come full circle. I lived in the Bay Area during all eight years that Mr. Reagan was governor there. I had met him once, and he had remembered my name in five minutes, after answering a question of mine about Watergate by not answering it. He had followed to what was now:
Home.

The 1970s were over.