Mark Gregory Turansky

Colorado Springs is dying.  Dramatic budget gaps and an electorate unwilling (and politicians unable) to consider tax increases force the city to cut crucial services across the board.  There are fewer cops, fewer firefighters, no recreation centers, all museums are closing, no public pools, no one to mow the lawns in the park, and no trash cans in the park at all because there will be no one to empty them.  Visitors are encouraged to take their trash with them.

Voters in Colorado Springs decried “big government spending” and emphatically voted against raising taxes to fill budget gaps.  Why?  Because voters did not “trust city government to wisely spend a general tax increase and don’t believe the current cuts are the only way to balance a budget.”

The result is a general deadening of the city.

The very citizens who voted against tax increases complained that “cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.”

Today, as always, we want all the services big government provides but we are unwilling to pay for any of it.

Ronald Reagan raised taxes.  His deficits were unsustainable.  The Tea Partiers will one day see the light.  Until then, we’ll get “small government” and complain about the death of public services.

The Economist has an interesting article talking about the true cost of goods and services we take for granted when the environmental impact is measured and accounted for.  This is also Lester Brown’s argument, which I wrote about recently.  Mr. Brown calls it a Global Ponzi scheme.

In The Economist’s article, the author writes about the destruction of mangrove swamps in Thailand to make shrimp farms.  Profits per hectare were nearly $10,000 and accounted for by the private sector, but the public cost of the farms include generous government subsidies, increased pollution, and the loss of the mangroves’ natural role in the ecosystem which includes protection against violent storms and a source of food and medicine for local people.  What looks good in an accounting ledger for the private sector masks the public cost spread over society as large that appears in no ledger at all.

My wife taught agroforestry in Cameroon for the Peace Corps.  Her job was to teach her village how forests protect their farms by preventing the wind from blowing away all their topsoil.  Preventing erosion is noted in The Economist article’s second sentence:

In 360BC Plato remarked on the helpful role that forests play in preserving fertile soil; in their absence, he noted, the land was turned into desert, like the bones of a wasted body.

Some things never change, though the lessons often need to be continually relearned.

South Carolina weather is good for an extended growing season. Here is my broccoli after Christmas.

Lester Brown has an interesting take on the unsustainable economy we live and work within.

http://www.grist.org/article/our-global-ponzi-economy/

He argues, for example, that “expensive” $3/gallon gas does not reflect the true cost of the fuel in our cars.  Mr. Brown believes the cost of gas isn’t just pumping, refining, and shipping gasoline.  It also includes the military cost of protecting oil in a politically unstable region, the costs incurred by climate change, subsidies to energy producers, and the health care costs of we the people breathing polluted air.

We’re overfishing our oceans, overgrazing our pastures, overpumping aquifers, and overpolluting the atmosphere to levels where the earth cannot regenerate.  We are borrowing from the future in ways that an unsustainable in the long term.

This is the very same point made by Thomas Friedman  in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.”   The planet is able to sustain a single American-sized consumption-based economy, which is profligate, wasteful, and dirty.  The problem is that India and China have each created 1 America-sized economy in terms of consumption and pollution and have several more incubating.  All our environment problems are going to get much worse.

A green revolution is just that:  a revolution.  It can’t happen piecemeal.  We need to shift from a consumption-based economy to one that develops sustainable trends.  This is the first time our industrial economy has faced this challenge and it flies in the face of 200 years of history.

If healthcare is hard to fix, I can’t wait to watch this fight develop in Congress and parliaments around the world.

“When I have a dollar to blow on a bottle of water, I buy Perrier!” quipped Robin Williams in his late ’70s stand-up days.

It killed. The audience howled at Williams’ derision of paying a lot of money for something we get nearly for free from the tap, especially when the EPA does a very good job enforcing water quality standards in the country.

Today, bottled water is a $50 billion business globally. We consume copious amounts of energy and fossil fuels to produce, fill, and ship plastic bottles of water while 1/6 of the world’s population (over a billion people) do not have access to reliable potable water.

The math from a recent Fast Company article is particularly illuminating:

If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

Enjoy: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has advocated painting roofs white as a cost saving measure that also reduces the impact of climate change.  The theory is that more heat would be reflected, thereby lowering a building’s cooling costs, which in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions because we’re using less power to cool the building.

An article (blog entry) on Time magazine’s website says studies have concluded that whitening a roof actually works and can make it 20% more cost effective to cool your house on hot days.  I’d love to see links to the studies, but the physics makes enough sense that I believe it.

You can read the article here:  http://cheapskate.blogs.time.com/2009/07/30/why-isnt-your-roof-white-already/

Here in sunny South Carolina, I spend more on air conditioning in summer than I do on heating in winter.  When my roof is due for an overhaul (and those shingles are getting pretty old), I will be looking into a light colored rooftop.

Finally, something that might — might — make me buy this game! It’s a true game changer…! Although, I still feel I should instead continue to learn to play Beatles songs on my real guitar.

$45 of every $100 dollars spent at local businesses stays in circulation in the local economy.  The money is spent on local salaries, payments to other merchants, and so on.  A big chain, on the other hand, only keeps $13 in local circulation.  This is the finding of an economic study done in Austin, TX.

Buying local is a nationwide trend.

For years, I’ve seen bumperstickers around Charleston, SC that read “Friends don’t let friends buy imported shrimp” or other slogans mean to encourage support for the local fishing industry.  Other communities have taken the Buy Local idea even further.

One community businessman in Brewton, AL handed out $2 bills to his employees with the rule that after a charitable gift the money must be spent locally.  The bills floated around town and eventually found their way back to his store, which dramatically drove home the point that money circulating in the local economy is its own form of stimulus.

Other communities have encouraged a “10% shift,” which encourages people to redirect 10% of their spending to local businesses or “$20 on the 20th” campaigns where you would spend $20 at a local business on the 20th day of the month.

Best selling author Barbara Kingsolver wrote “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” about her and her family’s quest to grow or buy only local food for one year. They intimately learned the value of their labor, the strength in their community, and the power of taking control of their health and environment.  They put the kitchen back in the center of their family and learned to work together toward a common goal.  Yes, they had to give up the instant gratification of being able to buy strawberries year-round, but they gained an intense appreciation for delectably fresh asparagus that you can only get by growing it yourself and you can only experience once a year in springtime.

Some may call buying local mini-protectionism, and in a sense it is, but it makes for a strong local community.  It’s kind of like saving your money during a recession.  It’s good for the individual who’s saving, but it’s bad for the overall economy because no one is buying.  But just as saving keeps more dollars here at home than abroad, so too does buying local keep our dollars in our own community.   There are intangible benefits, too, in that communities and families are strengthened as they come together not just for the greater good, but for their own.

I just read a Fortune magazine article about a farming youth movement and how young people are starting organic farms and businesses.   I find the article timely considering I just wrote an article of my own advocating backyard organic gardens.

You can read the Fortune article here:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0907/gallery.farmers_organic_local_young.fortune/

The Federal government is bleeding red ink, as are nearly all other states in the union.  Why?  Because Americans have lodged in their heads the idea that we are entitled to everything, which includes paying nothing.

We expect and demand safety and security from our police force and fire fighters.  We ask our real estate agents about neighborhoods with good schools and the best test scores.  We cry about the ever-increasing age at which we can retire and collect social security because we all want to retire early.

But we don’t want to pay for any of it.  We feel entitled to it all.

The Greatest Generation was raised in the depths of the Depression only to be called upon to fight World War II.  During the war, families grew Victory Gardens and accepted rationing to aid the war effort.  Buying Victory Bonds was patriotic.  Women entered the workforce, manned the factories, and worked hard to increase our industrial output that proved to be a decisive material contribution to the war.  This generation sacrificed, saved, worked hard, and built a nation.

After September 11, 2001, what did George Bush ask the nation to do?  What kind of sacrifice did he call us all to make?

None.  He told us to go shopping.

The real crack in the foundation wasn’t 9/11, though.  It was the tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.  Together, these cuts turned surpluses into massive deficits. After 9/11, the Bush administration engaged in two wars without asking the American people to sacrifice anything, even while our sons and daughters were sacrificing everything overseas.  Profligate spending accompanied by reckless tax cuts were a recipe for disaster.

Worse still, tax cuts at the Federal level forced all state and local government officials to cut taxes, too, lest they lose their jobs.  That was the political climate of the day.  Today, government at all levels — federal, state, and local — are in extreme financial straits.  All are hemorrhaging money and drowning in a sea of red ink.

Reaganonmics is dead.  Paul O’Neill was Treasury Secretary in 2002 when Cheney was discussing the tax cuts that passed into law in 2003.  O’Neill was concerned that the U.S. was “was careering toward a fiscal crisis” but was silenced by Cheney’s retort “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”  Paul O’Neill resigned later that year.

For the party that loves Reagan so much and hails his landmark tax cuts of 1981, Republicans seem to have forgotten that Reagan raised taxes!  In 1982, he signed two tax increases into law that raised 1% of GDP as tax revenue (~$40 billion, equivalent to $100+ billion today).  Other tax increases followed in 1983, 1984, and 1985.  George H. W. Bush raised taxes in 1990.

The Gipper raised taxes.  It was fiscally prudent to do so in order to reduce his growing deficits.

What should we do today?  Raise taxes!  We’ve got the money!  The average savings rate jumped to over 4%.

Thanks, Obama, for my $1,000 tax cut, but please, take it back.  In fact, raise taxes by 1% of GDP, just like Reagan did.  Restore my tax rate to what I was paying before Bush took office.  Cut spending wherever possible (like that F-22 you successfully fought against).  Restore fiscal sanity to the Federal balance sheet.  Return us to a surplus and start paying down the national debt.

I would much rather pay a few hundred extra bucks per month than be in the crisis we’re in today.  I would much rather be asked to sacrifice to continue the prosperity of our country than be able to buy more imported plastic pieces of crap I don’t need. I have children.  I am looking forward to bettering their future.

Mr. President, please, raise my taxes.