Summer's over. Carry it in your heart from now on and forever. Or wasn't it one of those summers for you? Maybe Halloween will be kinder. Anyway, here's your top 20 Summer Song Jukebox Plays, Memorial Day to Labor Day, 2011. Ah, the memories....

That Rick Perry, he’s some slick politician. Even if Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll, she’d still have to split the headlines with the Texas Governor. And a lot of people think that’s the last time they’d ever be tied.

The honest-to-God truth? In terms of actually getting the nomination, Bachmann never really had a prayer. Maybe she’ll lose out to Perry along the way, but it’s more likely she’ll be seen as merely setting up the table for Mitt Romney. Sucking all the oxygen out of the room and suffocating the likes of Pawlenty, Huntsman, Paul, Cain and the rest who, let’s face it, were barely breathing anyway.

Perry probably wouldn’t be any more successful than Bachmann in overtaking Romney, but he’d have a better chance. That Newsweek cover photo wasn’t that far off the mark. Tina Brown and a broad swath of the electorate know in their hearts that Bachmann is what you’d call a religious fanatic. The fat cats in the Republican Party know it, too.

A long historical record demonstrates how poorly devout types ultimately fare in the political arena. Look at William Jennings Bryan. Look at Thomas Moore. Look at Joan of Arc. Look at Jesus Christ.

Does anyone really think Karl Rove was going to let Michele Bachmann run the Republican Party? Does anyone think David and Charles Koch were going to let Karl Rove let her run the Republican Party?

This is not to dismiss Bachmann out of hand. Doyle McManus pointed out in the LA Times, “She has managed to turn the primary campaign into a straightforward, head-to-head contest between two versions of modern Republicanism: her insurgent tea party conservatism and the more traditional, big-business conservatism of Romney.”

But that was always where it was going to end. In the Republican Party, the smart money will always bet on the smart money. Basically Bachmann cleared out the riffraff, better probably that Romney could have himself.

The path of the devout is arduous. Most of us are simply not ready to follow it. Once people get the full wonder of Bachmann’s brand of conservative reconstructionist Christianity digested, their collective reaction is likely to be that where she wants to take us is just not worth the journey. We're not worthy.

Too many rules. Too many demands, too many beliefs, many of them a little hard to swallow (especially if you happen to be not Christian in the first place or even just the wrong kind of Christian).

Bachmann is the product of a school of thought that sees the destiny of America as that of a definitively conservative Christian state, ruled by conservative Christians and for conservative Christians.

Her intellectual mentors at Oral Roberts Law School taught her that whenever American law came in conflict with their interpretation of biblical law, adherents should try unrelentingly, through legal and political means, to get the former to change. (Sounds a lot like Sharia Law, no?)

She wants a constitutional amendment banning abortion. She wants the same for gay marriage. She rejects evolution and wants it mandated that Intelligent Design be taught in public schools. These positions are ironic since they would likely create a bit more government than Republicans say they want. Many opposed to abortion and gay marriage and even biology might be uncomfortable with extending the government’s reach into what may be at some level private matters.

Many of Bachmann's views are guided by an almost mindless—certainly an unyielding—certitude, one seemingly impervious to mere facts. No matter how skilled a politician she becomes, and she’s getting better all the time, one suspects the closer the discussion gets to exposing her core beliefs, the more voters are going to fidget.

While we might not admit it in public, a lot of us get nervous around people who think they have an ongoing conversation going with God, one where he answers back and provides detailed directions. That creeped people out about George Bush, and everyone knew he didn’t even really mean it. Ever since the days of enlightened despotism, the march of democracy has kind of been away from that kind of thinking.

She may feel she’s all “Onward Christian Soldiers,” but for a lot of people it might feel more like Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paridise.”

What next for Bachmann? She should consider moving.

To Greenville, SC, where she’d find a lot of like-minded, kindred spirits. She should go down there with Sen. Jim DeMint. With his quest to “save souls” in Congress he’s not feeling very much love in Washington anyway, even from his fellow Republicans. He knows South Carolina, and could be very helpful with introductions.

A large contingent of folks in the region think just like Rick Perry talks: about seceding from the Union, creating their own idyllic Christian state and letting the rest of the world go by.

That ship sailed 150 years ago. But there’s nothing to stop them from creating their very own political party. To build one with the requisite scale to actually change the direction of the country would take a lot of money, of course, and it’s unlikely they could get that from the Republicans,

But if she made her goals clear and played her cards right, there’s money out there. There’s a good chance the DNC, for instance, might be willing to chip in and lend a hand. And they’ve got real money. Obama has fat cats, too, and once they fully grasped the idea, they’d probably be glad to help her out.

The way House Speaker John Boehner won the support of recalcitrant members for their own party’s debt ceiling bill was to propose a balanced budget amendment for the US Constitution. Basically the same proposal Republicans had earlier approved in their previous “Cut, Cap and Balance” legislation, which passed the House on a party-line vote before vanishing into the dustbin of the Senate’s history.

Basically, President Obama said we should “eat our peas,” so Speaker Boehner trumped him by proposing to add an “eat your peas” clause to the Supreme Law of the United States.

Republicans of late seem inclined toward constitutional amendments as the way to settle a variety of matters, frequently ones they’re in the minority on. It’s an idea that has come up with respect to gay marriage, abortion, and immigration(where they would actually be amending an amendment, one passed in 1865 that made the descendents of slaves, and anyone else born here, US citizens. That amendment was approved by their Republican ancestors, but now they don’t like the idea so much.

Historians would point out this is a different Republican party. The one in the 1860s was considered in many respects a party of progressives. Recall that at the time, many Conservatives, particularly of the southern persuasion, regarded Lincoln as a big-government tyrant hell-bent on leading the nation down the road to socialism (even though they didn’t really know what that was yet)..

Lately, you can’t show Republicans a constitutional amendment they’re not in favor of. The last one they were against was the Equal Rights amendment in the ‘70s (which passed Congress but which the states failed to ratify). This seems somewhat ironic. The current Republican-controlled House of Representatives convened with a reading of the complete US Constitution, (although they inadvertently skipped part of Article IV.).

The idea was to showcase that party’s Constitutional devotion and their commitment to passing only laws that conformed to its tenants (a requirement Congress is actually already burdened with). But given their regularly-invoked desire to alter its contents, one is inclined to wonder what it was they saw in the document that they liked so much in the first place.

Since its ratification in 1789, the US Constitution has been amended 27 times. Ten of those were done in a group at the Constitution’s inception and are referred to, as every school child knows, as the Bill of Rights.

There was a flurry of amendments around the end of the Civil War, of course. And then again around World War I concerning the right to vote (women) and the right to drink (everyone). That latter, well-intentioned amendment (passed while most of the drinkers were out of town) was, upon sober reflection, subsequently rescinded, by means of another amendment, which is the way the Constitution works.

There really haven’t been all that many amendments if you exclude the Bill of Rights, the temperance flip-flop and several unexceptional changes to the order of succession to the Presidency and mundane changes to terms of office for the President and Congress.

But such stability belies the inner unrest of this country’s political beast. Some 10,000 amendments have been proposed since 1789. In modern times, about 200 or 300 proposals surface every year. Most go nowhere, but clearly a lot of people are unhappy with the Constitution, lip service to the contrary. And the truth is, it was that way from the beginning.

The mechanism for changing the Constitution was built into the original document. It’s no simple matter, of course. The Framers didn’t want it to be too easy in order to discourage ill-conceived, half-cocked or hastily passed amendments.



To date all amendments, ratified or not, have been proposed by a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress. However, if two-thirds of the state legislatures demand one, Congress must call for a constitutional convention, which would have the power to propose amendments. After passing Congress, an amendment must also be ratified by three-fourths of the states (either by state legislatures or special state conventions.)

Actually, the Bill of Rights was a defining issue in the Constitutional debate that took place among the young nation’s 55 delegates in Philadelphia in the hot, hot summer of 1787. Lots of people felt no fashionable Constitution of the time could be complete without a specific delineation of individual rights. Federalists felt the rights were already delineated and one wasn’t necessary; anti-Federalists made their approval contingent on one’s creation.

You probably know this already, but the whole point of the Constitutional Convention was to create a more powerful federal government. Many influential founders, like George Washington, felt the country couldn’t get anything done under the Articles of Confederation. But even back then there were many who feared the encroaching power of big government.

So the Bill of Rights was a way to calm folks down while still making it possible to raise the money needed to pay an army and, important in a country that didn’t have many, particularly to the suburbs, build the roads that would support national expansion.

In short, the Bill of Rights was a compromise meant to mollify the feelings of delegates that the new Constitution was too much about how things worked and not enough about championing individual rights against the powers of government.

(Originally, the Bill of Rights included legal protection for white men only, excluding most Americans and all women. It was left to subsequent amendments, a civil war and any number of Supreme Court cases to extend the same rights to all U.S. citizens.)

It has become fashionable among some modern politicians and pundits to characterize our founding fathers somewhat sentimentally as a monolithic and single minded-corps. Actually they were a contentious and disagreeable bunch. That they got anything done at all was actually their single biggest accomplishment.

The US Constitution was borne of many compromises, as well as tacit agreements to ignore some matters deemed too sensitive to even compromise on. Most notably, the whole issue of slavery was passed over by the Framers and left to be settled a hundred years later with a war of secession that nearly succeeded in tearing the country in two.

Other major sticking points requiring negotiated compromises, or left wholly or partly unresolved, included large state versus small state representation, business versus agrarian interests, tariffs, executive elections, the extent of the federal government’s power, the exact role of the office of the President, and even the length of the terms of Senators.

In point of fact, the Bill of Rights amendments were ratified in 1791 three years after the Constitution, but in many states it was understood they were coming and voters based their ratification on that understanding.

Eventually all thirteen states ratified the Constitution. Some did so unanimously, but in others the votes were quite close: Massachusetts 187 – 168; New York, 30-27; and Rhode Island 34-32.

Rhode Island never did like the idea of the Constitutional Convention in the first place, and had refused to even send a delegation. Patrick Henry declined the opportunity to serve as a delegate himself but agreed to attend as an advisor to the Virginia delegation. He advised, vehemently, against.

Clearly, many delegates were less than pleased with the results of the effort, Bill of Rights or no. Thirteen Founding Fathers not only refused to sign the new Constitution, they left the convention before it ended and went home. Another three stayed on but still would not sign the final document.

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. But our elected officials in Washington are now demonstrating that it’s never too late to look good tackling an old problem. Namely, the deficit.

So it seems only fair that you, loyal visitors, also get a second shot at fixing the budget, only this time under new, more generous rules.

Washington's new goal is to cut $4 trillion in spending. How can they do that when spending only amounts to about $3 trillion annually? Well, what they’re talking is over a decade. Why do they do that? Most likely because it sounds more impressive than $400 billion, which is the annualized hit they’re really talking about.

Now that’s your new goal, too. Much more achievable, no? Give it a shot.

What’s the point if that’s only about a third of the deficit? Listen: These guys may be stupid, but they’re not as stupid as you think they are. How do you think they got you to vote for them in the first place?

First, $400 billion in annual cuts when combined with $400 billion in new revenues suddenly covers two-thirds of the deficit. Second, remember the recently popular Republican mantra about how we don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem? Well, as you probably figured out (because you’re not as stupid as they think you are either), we’ve had both ever since the recession came to live with us.

Each year, revenues now come in a bit short of where they used to. Guess by how much? $400 billion. Trifecta! If we could just get back to where they were in 2008—as Obama gets down on his knees every night and prays they will—voila: The deficit is gone. Think he doesn’t want a deal? With all his heart. That way, he can eat Romney’s heart in the next election. Right in front of him.

Imagine the Republicans dropping an opportunity like that in his lap. Also worth noting, Obama is apparently thinking more along the lines of $100 billion in new revenue. So even if he were to get the deal, it would still come up a little short.

But just in case, go to work. Do your part. And then don’t forget to pay your taxes. Both the new ones and the old ones. You don't hear much about it, but the biggest problem Greece has is they don't pay their taxes over there.

Since the Summer Song Jukebox first launched last August, here’s what you’ve been listening to. These are the top 20 Summer Songs as voted on by you, our esteemed site visitors, through your song selections. (Skelly votes didn’t count.) Thought you’d want to know.

Some observations:

How about those Beach Boys? Did they have a run in the early 60s or what? In addition to 2 of the top 5, they scored two more that just missed the Top 20: “Surfin’ USA” and “Surfer Girl.” And that’s without their seminal first big hit, which, technically speaking, does not mention the magic word, “summer.”


And then it came crashing down when the British invaded. B. Wilson and Dudes. continued to do some very good work, but until the mopheads it really looked like The Beach Boys were going to rule the school forever.

Even so, they didn’t score the top spot. That went to Mike Posner’s “Gone in September” just edging out “Warm California Sun” by The Rivieras. Which no doubt leaves some of our more wizened fans scratching their heads in wonder. Not how could that be so much as who is he?


To conflate a couple of clichés, it may be a mean old man’s world, but the future belongs to the young. And evidently I’m younger than I thought, and evidently so are some of you. Posner graduated from Duke in 2010 (with an overall GPA of 3.59.) But like another smart college kid named Kris Kristofferson, he’s evidently got music in his veins. His most recent charted opus: "Bow Chicka Wow Wow." But let’s see if he’s got a second summer song in him. But hey, timeless message if you're a guy, no?

Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” doesn’t crack the top 20? Unbelievable. And what, no “Under the Boardwalk”?

In the Hey, Really Old People! department: Top summer song from the 50s is Billy Grammer’s “Gotta Travel On”?

One thing, no doubt, that contributed to the popularity of “Girls on the Beach” was the full-breasted nudity on display in the video. Whoa, missed that, did you? Watch its ranking climb in the next couple of weeks. Just like with everything good in life, you have to pay attention.

Katie Perry and her vacuous chunk of “California Gurls” (the appearance of Snoop Dog notwithstanding) a no-show as well? Quelle surprise! Clearly this audience has a modicum of breeding and taste. I mean, she’s definitely hot and all, but that song was like nowhere, man. I don’t care how many people hit it up on YouTube. Probably her family mostly. It’s not even about summer.

Some songs may have suffered in the rankings because Youtube will drop a video from time to time over copyright infringements. When I find such, I look for a different release that’s dispute-free. But the code that calls the song has then changed, and the ranking drops because that song is then counted in the statistics under two different codes. (That may be what happened to Henley, and it happened to “Surfin’ USA” as well.) Such issues were left unresolved. I don’t have that much of a life to live down here, but it does preclude that degree of wonkish industry. The lawn needs cutting from time to time.

Other notable absences from the Top 20:
Dancing in the Street – Martha and the Vandellas
Summer in the City – Lovin’ Spoonful
Summer Song – Chad & Jeremy
Summer Wind – Ole Blue Eyes Night Moves – Bob Seger



And finally, most of you passed up two of the best of all. The diamond in the rough and crowning achievement in the brewmaker’s art: “Summertime” by Billy Stewart (1669) and “The Boys Are Back in Town” by Thin Lizzie (1976). What is wrong with you people? Have you no range? Well you’ve got all summer to make amends. It’s too hot to got outside anyway.

Happy 4th.

Go to the playlist now

Now that Michele (too few “l”s, too many “n”s) Bachmann has embarked on her fifteen minutes of fame, it seems likely that Sarah Palin, overshadowed, will officially drop out of the race she was never really part of. She’ll point out that she said all along she’d take the plunge if she felt the right candidates weren’t stepping up. She’ll allow as how she’s pretty comfortable with the field right now and there’s no reason for her to have to step in and save her party and her country in that order.

Her announcement will gratify some people and disappoint others. Most of the rest will have already moved on, the average American’s attention span being what it is. But one group will absolutely despair: the men and women who make their living reporting on politics for the nation’s newspapers, magazines, news services, radio, TV, and internet outlets. Sarah Palin makes good copy, and that talent will be sorely missed by her biggest fans: the lame-stream media.

Not since Jesus has a single person seen to the care and feeding of so many. And she does it effortlessly.

With a single off-the-cuff response to a reporter’s casual question about her day—fewer than one-hundred words long, reeled off in under 20 seconds in her trademark garbled and nearly grammar-free fashion—she unleashed a media frenzy that lasted two weeks.

With it, she re-opened all the familiar partisan wounds, rekindled all the unfair media claims, reminded us all of how annoyingly smug and closed minded she can be and what a beacon she is for all the true values that make America great and which we’ve somehow lost. Kind of like Ed Norton trying to explain to both Joyce Randolph and Jackie Gleason simultaneously how he really feels about Trixi’s mother.

It also calls to mind that classic ad spoof from Saturday Night Live in which Chevy Chase tells Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd: “Hey, hey, hey, calm down, you two. It's both a floor wax and a dessert topping!” Click to view.

Palin didn’t have every detail completely wrong. Someone had gone to some trouble to make sure she was armed with (probably too many) little-known details of that famous day and year. However, few of those details had much to do with the motive behind Paul Revere’s ride. Somebody may have rung some bells, and somebody else may have fired some shots, and Paul Revere may have indeed told a British Major after a patrol detained him outside of Concord (by which point his ride was over) that he’d alerted the countryside to the British march, (presumably to try to con them out of moving on Lexington too quickly). But clearly what Revere had been trying to do all along was just get to Lexington to alert Adams and Hancock they were in danger of arrest and to let the Minutemen groups along the way know that the British were on the move.



So why not just say what everyone else would have said: Paul Revere’s ride was to tell the people the British were coming? Because, clearly, she wanted to say something about the gun thing. She wanted to use the moment to stand up for one of the core verities of her ideology.

So she chose to make some kind of vague reference to an amendment to a constitution that wouldn’t be written for more than a decade for a country that few people in the Boston area, or anywhere else, were then even contemplating. Because that’s what Sarah Palin does. She likes to tell stories that make ideological points.



Pity there’s no one worse for the job. Most of the time, people can’t even figure out what she’s trying to say. She talks in pictures—little images—and when she tries to string too many together, people, sometimes herself included, get lost in the landscape on the periphery of her opus.

The Paul Revere story is just too big. Too many details to foul up or lose sight of amid the predictable carnage of fractured grammar, loosey-goosey syntax and a thought process that could be charitably described as elliptical. She’s okay for quick bursts and great with one-line zingers. But when Sarah goes out long she just can’t run the pattern.

After the Vice Presidential Debate, Kelly Nuxoll wrote on Huffington Post.com that Palin’s communications style leaves you with the impression that a) she doesn't know; b) she doesn't want to say; or c) she simply doesn't think in terms of cause and effect.

Nuxoll cites this comment to Joe Biden:

Nuxoll says, "I think we can intuit her meaning ... but the words are tossed and jumbled like a salad. It can't be because Sarah Palin is afraid to take a swing--it seems just to take her a long time to figure out who is actually responsible... A cause-and-effect thinker would likely put [the last word] first."

The simpler explanation could be that Palin—still—simply isn’t comfortable with the more formal extemporaneous exchanges politicians are expected to routinely engage in and handle well. And probably never will be. Many observers and reporters on the political scene use that ability as a metric for evaluating how clearly a political figure thinks. Which is probably wrong-headed and unfair. Somewhere in that practice and its attendant implications can probably be found the origins of the phrase, “You gotta be bullshittin’ me.”

Watching her struggle through the Revere diatribe, her discomfort is palpably clear, as is the moment when the rising inflection in her voice suggests a) she’s beginning to get lost in her words and b) has probably lost all interest anyway.

That doesn’t make her dumb or ignorant, nor does it disqualify her from running for President. George W. Bush was President for eight years, and he couldn’t talk either. (One thing about those Democrats, oh they’re glib, except for John Kerry, of course).

Anybody who can turn a profit like Sarah Palin has in the last two years, just by staying relevant, is no dumb bunny. Not to mention what she did in Alaska, which was more impressive than her critics like to admit. Compare her recent accomplishments to Obama’s. He may have steadied the U.S. economy, but she got filthy rich. By making you think she was running for President. Which she never was. If she had been, she would have been out of a job on Fox last spring, just like Gingrich and Santorum were.

Now the game is nearly up. We’re all going to miss you, Sarah. More than we know. Not as much as the press, of course. Two weeks of headlines from one innocent Paul Revere/cold, dead fingers rant? Damn. Michele Bachmann can’t do that. She doesn’t have the legs.

The Tea Party stormed Washington in the '10 election, with sturm und drang und the vaunted purpose of absolutely transforming the place. Or even tearing it down, depending on whom you listen to. Did they run into reality, or are they still a force majeur?

To some, they were always just a bunch of crazies. And a recent CNN poll just put the Tea Party’s favorability rating at an all-time low — 32%, with 47% of respondents viewing Tea Partiers negatively.

But "Slate," an online news magazine not widely renowned for its right-leaning views, says otherwise. David Weigel suggests the Tea Party is not merely still alive but kicking with good effect. Slate's continuing feature, the "Don't-Tread-on-Meter," credits the Republican House of Representatives, and the Republican conference in the Senate, with being "halfway there" in fulfilling the promises they made to Tea Party activists.

That may be a stretch or at the very least generous scoring. (The Tea Party folks weren't looking for just a good-faith effort that would wither on the vine.) Still, we'll keep an eye on this meter for a while. Why? Weigel puts it this way: "The Tea Party is still telling Washington what it's supposed to be working on every day."

Truth is, Tea Party enthusiasts were never alone in their alarm over federal deficits. It was a complaint critics of the Bush White House raised regularly even before the recession. The Obama administration, to its credit, was talking about deficits, and making promises, as far back as early '09, stimulus and TARP notwithstanding.

It's still a ways to 2013, but one could argue that's one promise Obama hasn't made much progress on (although federal spending did shrink, marginally, from '09 to '10, something you'd never hear any card-carrying Republican admit). But, for all the fevered concern, no one else has made much progress on the matter either. FY11 spending is expected to increase over the previous year by some $300 billion.

But, hey, there's still almost two years to go, for both sides, and everybody knows that nobody does anything in Washington anymore until the last minute. Will we live or die? Guess we'll all just have to wait and see. Whatever good happens, surely both sides will take credit. And if we die? Then each side, with its dying gasp, will surely blame the other. The real game in Washington doesn't change all that much no matter who's in there pitching.

It looks like those empty suits in our Nation's Capital really do not know how to wrangle the federal checkbook. It will never be fixed until someone who's actually balanced a budget somewhere along the line—which leaves out everyone in Washington—steps up and takes control. Someone’s got to do it, and it may just as well be you.

Remember the Little Red Hen? Here's your chance. There's really nothing to it. Just start cutting on the worksheet to your right, and keep cutting until you've zeroed out the deficit at the bottom. (Enter a % cut, click just about anywhere and it recalculates.)

This isn't some pie-in-the-sky projection with make-believe numbers. The left-hand column reflects actual FY'10 federal spending. Just fix it, one entry at a time to reflect the way you would have done it last year if you'd been in charge.

Once they see what's supposed to happen, Congress should be able to apply your received wisdom to their FY'12 efforts. And then we can stop all this fight and get down to the real business of the people.

A few precautions. You can't touch Social Security. Not because it's the third rail of American politics but because it is funded through its own payroll tax. You cut the benefit and you have to cut the tax, and that's what we call a zero-sum game. There may be very few people, as recent polls attest, who are happy with politicians messing with entitlements. But surely there's nobody who is going to continue to pay for a benefit they're no longer going to get. That would be a tax hike even to a Democrat. Just leave that one alone for now and we'll deal with it later. Just like President Obama and Congressman Ryan. Are you any smarter than they are? Come to think of it, maybe you are: you're about to balance the budget.

You can't mess with interest payments either. You certainly can't reduce them. And you're getting a break leaving them alone. You don't know anything about Undistributed Offsets, so leave that alone, too. And finally, leave Commerce and Housing Credit alone. It wasn't always, but the last couple of years it's been TARP, and you KNOW you've got no control over that. It's mostly over anyway. And besides, both those two are negative numbers and are helping your effort. They won't look like that next year, but we're going to fix last year first. Remember, this is an object lesson for your elected officials in Congress, who have lost their way.

If you feel you've done a particularly good job, email websitesammy a screen grab of your work, and copies will go to The White House, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But first we'll publish it here, and get the feedback and the approval of your fellow readers. See, unlike Congress, we know how to work together towards a common goal.

(Easiest way: position the worksheet on the screen so that all rows show. Don't worry about the headings. Don't copy. First open a new blank document in Microsoft Word (or your word processer of choice), then press the "Prt Scr" button, and then hit copy into the open Word Document. Save the document and attach it to your email to jskelly@websitesammy.com.)

So take your best shot. (Practice a little first.) You could get famous. Maybe even take a fling at running for public office. The race for Republican Presidential nominee is still wide open. And none of those guys seem to know how to balance a budget.

The point made serially in some (well-appointed) quarters of the kingdom, and with varying degrees of indignation (actually something more between heartache and angst), is that more than 75% of income taxes are paid by less than 25% of Americans. And as a factual matter the point is a valid one. Is it fair?

Are we becoming a bipartite society with a thin, diligent, hard-working slice of the populace called on to support the American way of life for a growing horde of indolent, unproductive, undeserving and ungrateful freeloaders?

Another way of asking that might be, does most of the money in this country go to a very small group of Americans? And that would be true, too. And it may be unfair, but that’s another subject. The subject here is just taxes, nothing having anything to do with fairness, as anyone who's ever been audited knows.

Catherine Rampell is a recent ex-Princetonian now writing a column on economics and finance matters (“Economix”) for The New York Times, and she’s worth a read. She makes me wish I were a) smarter, b) better educated and c) younger. No, I don’t want to be her; I just think that would improve my chances of getting a date with people of her ilk.

Recently she shed some light on the twin subjects of who pays the taxes in this country and, not a little correlatively, who makes the money. Basically she was pulling from a Congressional Budget Office report. Anybody could have done it. Only she did. I repaired to it forthwith. (You can too: Click here.) Some of the observations she reported included the following (with added graphs: thanks NYT), based on historical numbers.

“The overall effective federal tax rate (the ratio of federal taxes to household income) was 20.7 percent in 2006, with the highest quintile of American households paying 25.8 percent of their income in federal taxes.

“Because higher-income groups earn a disproportionate share of pretax income and because tax rates rise with income, higher-income groups pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes. In 2006, the top quintile of households earned 55.7 percent of pretax income and paid 69.3 percent of federal taxes, while the top 1 percent of households earned 18.8 percent of income and paid 28.3 percent.“

Economic disparity first surfaced as a social issue about five minutes after economics was invented, and folks have wrestled with it ever since, sometimes quite literally. People in some numbers have died over it, and still, after all these years, nobody’s come up with much of a satisfactory answer to the problem.

This country hasn’t done that bad a job, all things considered. No whole generation of nobles got itself trotted off to the executioner' axe after our revolution, and a lot of the wealthy down the ensuing centuries have done a good deal better than just hanging onto their heads.

The poor in this country have made notable strides along the way as well. We may no longer have the world’s highest standard of living, but it’s right up there. A big middle class, relatively speaking. And the opportunities for vertical advancement here remain unparalleled. Lots of people still yearn to come to America, and most Americans wouldn’t trade places with anyone on earth.



It seems like it's always a good time to be anybody in America and now is an especially good time to be rich. One suspects, as do they, that the tax burden is not going to do them in, not now and not any time in the foreseeable future. In fact, their actual tax burden is lower than it has been in a generation.

There is the troublesome fact of a widening split between haves and have-nots, but it augurs ill not so much for the rich as for the not-so-rich. Over the past 15 years even the middle class has taken quite a hit. The recent financial stampede may have started in the executive suites on Wall Street, but its occupants were not the ones who got trampled nearly to death.

Still, a certain amount of unfairness is an integral part of life on earth. Religion and philosophy are there to help us deal with that unfortunate reality. The meek get to inherit the earth some day, and in the meantime, it’s the rich that pay the taxes. As annoying as the well-heeled may find that division of labor, the opposite makes no sense at all. Who should pay the lion’s share of taxes? The poor? They don’t have any money. That’s how they got poor in the first place.

In a scene from the movie League of their Own, after the women’s baseball league has finally taken off, team owner and candy bar magnate Walter Harvey (Gary Marshall) is sitting in the packed stands talking with league commissioner Ira Lowenstein (David Strathairn) about how pleased he is, even though with the war ending he won’t need the girls’ league much longer. The boys will soon be coming back to play baseball.

Ira reacts a little bitterly. “This is what it's going to be like in the factories, too, I suppose, isn't it? ‘The men are back, Rosie, turn in your rivets.’ We told them it was their patriotic duty to get out of the kitchen and go to work; and now, when the men come back, we'll send them back to the kitchen.“

At which point an aggravated Harvey asks him, in the Bronx accent he has never lost, “What should we do—send the boys returning from WOAH back to the kitchen?

Not totally analogous, but a similar enough case study in simple common sense. And a good story and a great scene. If Gary Marshall hadn’t been a great producer and a more than adequate actor, surely he could have made an excellent candy bar magnate.

As the CBO report said, the well-off pay the overwhelming bulk of the taxes because they earn the overwhelming bulk of the money. That’s why it’s called a progressive tax system.

The question should be, is the burden the well-off are being asked to shoulder too large under this progressive system? This is not something measured by the percentage of overall taxes they pay. One would need to look elsewhere for the answer, maybe at what’s left in their pockets after the IRS “dry cleans” them, as it were. A fair amount, as it turns out.

Fitzgerald: “The very rich are different from you and me.”
Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”

The average American in the top quintile of income earners had about $67,000 of the year's earnings left in his or her family (or unit) coffers at year-end 2009 (according to the CBO) after paying for not just all taxes but all ordinary annual living expenses as well. How’d you do last year? About like that? Better? Worse? And you’re not even poor. Yet.

A reflective rich woman once famously said, “If the poor found out how the rich live, they’d rise up and kill us.” But the truth is, not too many of us have anything against the rich. Most of us would dearly love to get rich ourselves. It’s a really nice way to live. You can buy just about anything you want, even after you’ve paid all your taxes.

On ABC’s Sunday morning talk show, This Week, Christiane Amanpour, an import, was bemoaning the state of US manufacturing and what to do about it.

Memo to Christiane: The world leader in manufac-turing in 2010, meeting an astounding 20% of all global manufacturing demand, was—drum roll, please—the United States. That’s right. Not China, not Japan, not Germany, not Korea, but the good old USA.

The leader in producing manufacturing jobs? Not so much.

In 1950, nearly 31% of nonfarm workers in the US were engaged in manufacturing. Since then, the share has dropped steadily. Overall manufacturing employment has actually stayed fairly stable. The U.S employed about as many workers in manufacturing in 2006 as in 1950: just over 14 million.

The economy has mushroomed since the ‘50s. Back then, manufacturing represented 30% of GDP; today it’s about 12%. Employment in other areas of the economy has grown at an average pace of 1.9% per year (at least until recently). The role of manufacturing as an employer, like farming before it, was bound to shrink as the economy evolved.

Plus, US manufacturing output in 2007 was over 600% higher than it was in 1950. So forget what you’ve heard. Manufacturing is alive and well and prospering in America. The thing is, they just figured out how to do it without people.

In the more lunatic (or just talking-point driven) quarters of the body politic, this state of affairs is loudly lamented as a bad thing, but that’s merely one more urban myth. Just like all new jobs are created by small businesses, or the deficit is the result of an executive spending binge, or Obama is really a citizen of Mars. People who dwell in the more mundane business sectors of life more properly refer to this situation as “increases in productivity.”

The US has been the world leader in manufacturing since World War II; its output has more than doubled just since 1975, according to Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Mark J. Perry. professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus, reported in an online blog in February 2010 that the productivity of America's factory workers has doubled in less than two decades.

Employment in the manufacturing sector has declined by just about any metric you choose. That, of course, is a trend evident elsewhere in US business. Everyone is doing more with fewer people.

They have to. The US labor force is one of the most expensive on earth.

Companies don’t want you as an employee anymore; they want you as a customer. There’s an inherent contradiction in that line of thinking, but that discussion can be left for another time. Especially since there is no good solution readily at hand just at this moment.

How long can the US hold on to its manufacturing lead? Most likely not much longer. China’s is a huge economic engine just waking up. With a billion people and abundant resources and the money to buy what it lacks. Its potential for growth far outstrips that of the more mature US economy or that of anyone else for that matter. China is still an emerging economy. When the UN tracks industrialized nations, it doesn’t even include China in the pack yet.

But important to note is that China’s growing manufacturing might has not exactly come at the expense of America's, whose manufacturing sector has also been growing, as noted, over the last 20 years at a most impressive rate. China’s just happens to be growing faster.

And even that’s not all bad for this country. We may buy a lot of stuff from China, but they are now in a better position to buy stuff from us than ever before. China has risen from 18th among US export markets in 1990 to 3rd in 2010 according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s right, their growth builds our export markets.

And it’s not likely they’re going to knock the US out of any of the manufacturing markets where this country is preeminent. They can’t get the paint right on children’s toys. They’re not taking over top market share in fields like ventricular fibrillation or robotic micro-surgery systems anytime soon. Or even, it appears, high-quality steel production.

The fact is, this is probably as good a time as any in history to own a factory in America. It’s just not a very good time to be trying to find a job in one.

The state with the highest tax collections per capita is Alaska. That's just the sort of factoid that's calculated to drive Sarah Palin, Alaska's erstwhile governor and current guardian angel now that Ted Stevens has been recalled, into full tweet mode.

It's a true statement, as far as it goes, but it ignores the fact that most of Alaska's tax revenue comes from corporate contributors, specifically oil and gas. The tax bite on the average citizen is the lowest in the nation. That's the trouble with facts. They can get in the way of the truth. There's a lot of that with taxes.

A certain noisy faction of the US populace has been vociferously complaining about being taxed to death, but at 15% of GDP, federal tax collections in 2009 were at their lowest level of the past 50 years. So why the long face?

Well, for one thing they're not exactly wrong. We get taxed a lot in this country and in a lot of different ways. The much-excoriated federal personal income tax accounted for only 43% of the $2.1 trillion Uncle Sam took out of our pockets in 2009. Social security and Medicare accounted for another 42% and corporate taxes another 7%. Then there's excise taxes, estate taxes, gift taxes, unemployment taxes, transfer taxes and God knows what else.

There's also state and local taxes. No matter what you do in life somebody in the public sector thinks you should be paying them for the privilege.

Federal taxes actually stay pretty steady over time. (Revenues have averaged approximately 18.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) over the past 40 years, plus or minus 2%.) On average, we pay about 20% of our income in federal taxes.

In 2008 state and local taxing authorities loaded an additional 9.7% onto the average American's tax burden. But the bite is uneven. If you're in Alaska, you're feeling pretty good about state and local taxes. In New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Ohio, not so much. And if you live in New Jersey and work in New York, you're pretty fed up with the growing tendency states have of building up their coffers by taxing out of state residents.

The good news is, only 10 states have increased their aggregate tax levies over the last 20 years, and those that did raised them just 1.7% (Ohio) or less. The bad news is, states may not be able to sustain such restraint much longer. On Jan. 13 Illinois raised its personal income tax rate by 66% for the next four years. In case it's escaped your notice, your state is probably broke, too.

The very first victim of recession, whether at the federal, state or local level, is tax revenues. Adjusted for inflation, state tax collections are running 12% per year below pre-recession levels, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Shortfalls are expected to persist in each of the next few years.

States do not possess the financial flexibility of a federal government. They can't manipulate interest rates or the money supply, they can't borrow too heavily, and they generally can't engage in deficit spending.

It is probably worth pointing out that states already possess a combined debt load in the $3 trillion range. That could be another fact getting in the way of the truth. On a per-state basis, with some troubling outliers, state debt averages only about 7.5% of Gross State Product (the state equivalent of GDP or economic output), which isn't much higher than it was in 1992.

Many financial experts will tell you that's well within their comfort zone. Of course, these are the same experts who were comfortable with savings and loan lending, dot.com valuations, real estate prices in the '90s and derivatives trading. Moreover, the debt levels of municipal, county and other local entities routinely double the total indebtedness figure of most states.

Possibly more troubling is the growing pile of unfunded liabilities, in pension, health and other retirement obligations, which many states have been steadily amassing. Robert Rubin was concerned about this at The Economist's" recent Buttonwood Conference in New York. And it's enough of a concern to rating agencies that Moody's has announced it will start factoring unfunded liabilities into its state ratings in the near future.

Forbes magazine speculated in January 2010 that states' total unfunded liabilities could range somewhere between $2 and $3 trillion. Illinois and Kansas currently have reserves set aside to cover less than 40% of their total projected liabilities. You think you had a few bad years in the market?

That money will have to come from somewhere, but we don't have to worry about it right now. That can be the subject of some future websitesammy posting somewhere down the road.

Most states are required to balance their budget each year, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Their only real options in dealing with their financial plights are to scale back services, which irritates die-hard Democrats, or collect more taxes, which irritates die-hard Republicans. Normal people are generally irritated by both.

Discerning eyes will observe, in viewing the state-by-state figures in the box above, that spending and revenue numbers are a bit out of whack. So how are states balancing their budgets? Well, with federal money mostly.

Remember the stimulus package, so broadly castigated as a waste? Funds from that plus interest-free loans from the federal government (unemployment, health care) have pretty much been a lifeline to the states over the last three years. Now the well is about to run dry. The prognosis? As much as $140 billion more in red ink for 2012 that states will have to mop up, this time without federal help.

Conventional wisdom says it takes state governments longer to recover from recessions than the federal government or big business. And even longer this time because it was such a bad recession.

There are some encouraging signs, like the stock market, gdp, consumer spending and even employment. Positive performances in these areas could portend an uptick in state tax revenues sooner rather than later. But the smart money is betting it will take most states as long as five years before revenues return to pre-recession levels.

Maybe your state could do better than that. Or maybe not. If you read The Wall Street Journal, you already know that some thoughtful types are thinking the stock market is way oversold and could be due for a pull back. And that the surge in corporate earnings could run out of steam. And that the glimmer of hope in the employment numbers could do a disappearing act. And, of course, residential real estate has no plans to recover any time soon.

North Dakota is the one state that had no budget shortfall in 2009, 2010 or 2011. The only drawback with that state is, it's in North Dakota. Or maybe you live in a state like Alaska, New Mexico or Montana. States with a little nest egg buried in the ground in the form of oil, gas or mineral deposits, on which they collect extraction fees. Alaska collects so much (severance taxes) that it was able to set up a trust fund and actually sends a check to citizens each year rather than taxing them. So they should be fine, at least until the oil runs out.

But if you're anywhere else, keep in mind what Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is often misquoted as saying in All About Eve: Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.