Earlier this week, the Salt Lake Tribune published a story featuring a memorandum that David Siegel sent to all his employees, including those in Utah.  In that letter/memorandum, Siegel declared that, if income taxes and corporate taxes were raised by those elected to the Presidency and the Congress in the forthcoming election, he would be laying off employees.  Siegel is the owner of a number of resort oriented businesses in Utah, as well as the founder and chief executive of Westgate Resorts, the largest privately owned time-share company in the world.  He and his wife are also building the largest home in the United States, a 90,000 square foot edifice called Versailles.

In follow-up interviews, Siegel declared that his letters were not a threat, but a fact based on the economics of business.  Of course, speaking as someone who’s had a little training and experience in economics, politics, and business, the economics of business aren’t exactly that clear-cut. Some business owners might consider other factors besides having enough profit to build and operate the largest private home in America.  Warren Buffet, for example, one of the wealthiest men in the world, still lives in a very modest two-story house.  Bill Gates’ generosity with stock and stock options for his employees made those who worked for him in the beginning very well off.  And there are many other founders of businesses who don’t glory in saying, “You’re fired!”

Obviously, any business that loses money over a period of time [unless it’s subsidized in some fashion, either in the way in which Amazon subsidized its predatory ebook pricing or some other fashion] will eventually have to close, but as any honest accountant can tell you, there are innumerable ways to make a profitable business look unprofitable, as those in the movie industry well know. It’s one thing to claim that increased taxes will have a harmful effect on very small businesses – those, for example, with ten or fewer employees. But in a business with thousands of employees and millions, if not more, in profits?

Like it or not, all too many businesses treat employees solely as a necessary cost, rather than as a source of revenue and more business.  The Darden restaurant group, for example, is “experimenting” with requiring more employees to be part-time so that it won’t have to provide health benefits.  If this “experiment” is successful, other restaurant chains will follow in order to keep their profit levels up, but no one seems to ask what the overall economic cost will be.  When people have to spend more money on health care out of pocket or get sick or have the government and hospitals pick up the tab through unpaid emergency room visits, all this does is shift costs from the restaurants to everyone else.  It may be good “business economics,” but it’s lousy societal and national economics.

What all these “sharp” business economists are talking about, whether it’s complaining about environmental regulations restricting their pollution, being required to provide healthcare insurance, or paying corporate taxes, is essentially an effort to shift costs from their operations to everyone else in order to increase their bottom line… and what bothers me is that so many Americans seem ready to buy it.

In the end, everything costs.  The only question is who pays and how.  In a “truly” fair system, everyone would pay their share.  The problem is that those who are poor often cannot, and that means that, if they are to eat and have health care, for example, someone else must help.  In addition, many lower-paid employees don’t make enough to afford health insurance if it’s not provided in some fashion through their employer.  How such burdens are distributed, assuming the poor are not to be left to suffer and die, requires government intervention, since human history clearly indicates that not enough individuals will do so, or can do so, on their own initiative.  I don’t have a problem with that, provided the distribution of that burden has some semblance of thought and fairness.  What I do have a problem with is businesses and corporations who have negative impacts — financially, environmentally, and in other ways – citing “economics” as a justification for not even carrying their own weight, especially in cases where it’s clear that their founders and CEOs are living the extraordinarily high life.  Like David Siegel.

The other day, I overheard a news story extolling the virtues of yoga in combating stress.  That was fine.  Yoga has proved to be of great value for people in high stress conditions. What absolutely floored me was the section on elementary and secondary schoolchildren.  This is far from the first time I’ve run across the issue of stress in schools.  In fact, most of the college students at my wife’s university complain about how stressed they are.  One of the most common phrases is:  “I’m so stressed out.”

What I want to know is why they think their lives are so stressful. Are their lives really filled with that much stress?  Have they created that stress themselves because they’ve filled so much of their lives with the time-consuming trivialities, such as texting, Facebook, and video games, that they’ve left no time for the necessary?  Or have they been so coddled that any pressure on them to perform and meet any type of reasonable standards creates stress?

I know I’ll sound like an old fogy, but… the generation represented by their great grandparents faced the worst economic conditions in more than a century and the largest world-wide conflict in human history. The generations before that faced the First World War and, before that, the Civil War, the bloodiest war in U.S. history. In all these cases, most young men faced the pressure of being drafted and dying in battle.  Their grandparents faced the Vietnam conflict, largely fought by conscripted forces, plus wide-spread civil unrest with bloody riots across the nation… and far wider racial and cultural discrimination, not to mention gender/sexual discrimination,  than any of today’s young people can possibly imagine. 

In the past, although the youngsters of today don’t believe it or understand it, academic standards were either far more rigorous… or the local schools were truly terrible.  Until the 1950s, polio was an ever-present threat, and I still recall contemporaries of mine in wheelchairs and braces. Academic curricula were rigid and unyielding, and woe betide the student who was different, or ADHD, or developmentally challenged.  First year students in college faced opening assemblies where they were told that a large percentage of entering students would fail academically within a year.

Today’s students are told how wonderful they are.  They have extraordinarily high grade point averages, and almost none of them are failed.  College students today spend less than half the time studying  as students of their parents’ generation did, but there are more scholarships and far more financial aid than was available a generation earlier. Even if they drop out of school, they don’t face being drafted into a war where tens of thousands of conscripts die.   And yet… huge numbers of them have little motivation and no goals.  

And  they’re stressed out.

 Stress is and has always been the human condition.  Welcome to the real world.

Perhaps because I was always the boy who had trouble convincing anyone of anything, even when facts and events proved I was right, I’ve always been skeptical of the glib, polished, and oh-so-convincing fast talkers who also seemed so earnest.  Then, it might be because I lost more than one girl-friend to the type… or because I saw so many of them in politics over the twenty years I spent in Washington.

I’d be among the first to admit that Mitt Romney was smooth, polished, carefully passionate, and superficially convincing… and he scared the hell out of me.  President Obama showed the not-quite-controlled frustration of a man who understands that absolutely nothing under discussion was as simple as Romney made it sound, a man who knows that trying to point out the details that would undermine Romney would merely make Obama himself seem like a quibbler, especially given the insatiable American appetite for the easy and simplistic.

The problem with really good politicians – and psychopaths – is that they have no problem shedding inconvenient facts or even saying that they didn’t say what they did, and doing it so convincingly that most people believe them.  This first Presidential debate showed that Romney is a master of this, and Obama is not.  Obama can shade the truth with the best of them, but it’s clear that he’s uneasy in totally denying it.  Romney shows no such hesitation.

Before this debate, I gave Mitt the benefit of the doubt.  I thought that, even if I didn’t agree with him, he honestly believed in what he was saying, but when a man who has spent months pushing a five trillion dollar tax cut and cutting tax rates for everyone blatantly denies having done so on national television, he certainly disabused me of the notion that he was a true believer in magic tax cuts.  Then, yesterday, he denied what he said about the 47% of Americans, which, while unpopular, actually had some truth in it… and people are buying everything he says now, because, all of a sudden, he “looks and sounds Presidential.”   All this tells me that Mitt’s just like all the smooth talkers I’ve encountered over the years, and it’s pretty clear that the only true belief he has is that he’s so fitted for the job of President that he’ll say anything that will convince anyone.

Is Obama any better?  All I can say is that he was trying harder to stick closer to the truth, and that’s also what all the political fact-checkers have been saying and writing.

As for me… I still have trouble with those oh-so-earnest types who are so convincing… and care so little for the facts… all the facts, and not just those that support their view of the world.

What is it with young American men… or maybe with young men across the world? Everywhere I look – from on the street, to some businesses, to glimpses of television shows and movies, since I’ve been traveling recently – I see young men with what amounts to a two-to-three-day scruffy shadow beard.  I don’t have anything against mustaches or beards, especially if they’re sported by men on whom they look good, but facial hair on men is like extraordinarily long hair on women, and neither looks good on most members of both genders. And I do know, because I once had a handlebar mustache that, in pictures and in retrospect, looked truly awful. Still,,, if that’s what people want, that’s their choice.  

 But the scruffy look… what’s the point?  It’s not a beard.  It’s not a mustache, and on 99% of all men it just looks dirty.  Is it to prove that you’re a he-man?  Or that you don’t have to conform to social norms, or that you’re following the trends?  Or is it because you have sensitive skin and are too cheap to buy sensitive skin aftershave balm?

 Or is it a subconscious desire to be sort-of Middle East macho, but clean-shaven enough to still be identified as western? Or are you too lazy to shave regularly, but not willing to go for a full beard?  Or could it be that a beard wouldn’t look good on you, but you want the world to know that you actually could grow one?

 Or maybe I’m all wet and just missing the fact that three-day beards are irresistible aphrodesiacs?

Several days ago, poor Mitt Romney committed the unforgivable. He said something so obvious, so accurate, and so to the point that people, especially Obama and the leftists, are jumping all over him.  Now… as must be clear to most of my readers, I’m generally appalled at the Republican positions on many issues, but what I find ironic is when someone whose positions I dislike says something that is absolutely obvious… and gets roundly criticized.  I fully admit that I supported Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter, but I applauded when Carter made the obvious statement that, “Life is not fair,” for which the media and everyone condemned him.

What was it that Mitt said?  In effect, he was saying that he was never going to reach 47% of the population because they were getting benefits from the government for which they weren’t paying.  And he’s absolutely right.  When only 53% of Americans pay federal income taxes, then the 47% who don’t are getting all the federal programs paid for by those taxes for nothing.  Should they get such benefits?  Of course, some certainly should – such as the truly deserving poor, hungry children, and others that have a true need.

Some of the liberals have made the point that many of the “47%” do pay taxes, such as Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes, and they’re right. Many do pay those taxes.  But what the left wing ignores is that those taxes do not fund most government programs, and for all the hullabaloo about deficits, Medicare and Social Security are not yet contributing to those deficits.  The deficits are caused by outlays in programs funded by federal income taxes.

But the larger questions raised by Mitt’s offhand, if honest, comment, go beyond that. As some courageous Republicans and many Democrats have noted, Americans now pay the lowest percentage of their income in federal taxes in more than 70 years… and yet the Republicans, the Tea Party, and the Libertarians are all demanding that taxes be lowered more.  Given the current deficit, this isn’t possible without literally eliminating not only a wide range of existing federal programs, but also ALL tax deductions, and that includes the cherished mortgage interest tax deduction, the earned income tax credit, credit for college and education expenses, and certainly various subsidies and business tax deductions.

All that isn’t going to happen, not in the current political climate of “I deserve it and someone else should pay for it.”  Why not?  Because it would destroy too many people.  For example, although “only” about a quarter of U.S. homeowner mortgages are technically underwater [owing more than the house is worth], close to 50% are realistically underwater and unsalable in the current market because of the other additional costs required in selling a house and moving.  If Congress were to remove the mortgage interest tax break, that would make the situation even worse, because the vast majority of homeowners would have even less income to make mortgage payments.  Similar problems would arise with the elimination of the earned income credit, and others… and what politician is really going to have the nerve to eliminate deductions that will make things worse for their constituents… and the immediate economy, regardless of the possible long-term impact?

How did it come to this? That’s a chicken and egg question, but one thing is very clear.  Americans, both rich and poor, have a lot more “things” than they did sixty years ago. The average new house being built is almost three times the size of those built in 1950, even while family size has declined since the 1960s.  In 1950, the average family had one car; by 1995, the average family had more than two cars… again with a smaller number of people in the family.  Almost every statistic – except for food consumed at home – dealing with personal consumption shows a significant real increase over the last 60 years – at all levels of income.  Likewise, government programs have grown enormously since 1950.  The one thing that hasn’t kept pace on a per capita or per family basis is the amount of federal tax revenue, and, as I’ve pointed out time and time again, while the taxes of the wealthiest individuals – and to a lesser degree those of the working poor – have decreased proportionately far more than those of other groups, even massive increases in taxes on the wealthy won’t close that revenue gap.  And, remember, that “wealth” isn’t the same as income, so that under our current income tax system, income taxes can’t reach the huge amount of assets already held by the extraordinarily wealthy.

In essence, Americans as a whole have come to expect a combination of personal and government benefits greater that we are willing to pay for, and many of those increased personal benefits have come through deficit spending at the cost of more money in our pockets and less going to government. Even though most people will protest violently that this isn’t so… it is, and simple arithmetic proves it time after time.

So… whether I like Mitt Romney and his proposed policies or not, he was right about who’s paying for what [even if I disagree, which I do, with how much who should pay]… and especially who’s not.

But then, regardless of political party, no one likes embarrassing accurate facts.