taxes

Word Use Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

"Super Glue doll? "Mucilage buddy?" "Fly-paper friend"

Ah, politics! Words that are dishonest are winked at by the media without objection, and harmless terms generate apologies that support ignorance and vagueness.

I. Colorado Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn apologized yesterday for using the term “tar baby” during a Friday appearance on a Denver radio program.  Lamborn said this: “Even if some people say, ‘Well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that,’ they will hold the President responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get it, you’re stuck, and you’re a part of the problem now and you can’t get away. I don’t want that to happen to us, but if it does or not, he’ll still get, properly so, the blame because his policies for four years will have failed the American people.” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “New Jersey Lottery Ethics…”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Tom Fuller, who can be perceptive when he isn’t peppering us with the quotations of others (all right, even sometimes when he is) makes a useful distinction in the Comment of the Day, on today’s post about the New Jersey Lottery:

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of government-sponsored lotteries, and I share all of the concerns about them mentioned above. But a facile slogan like “lotteries are a tax on people who don’t understand math” is, like most facile slogans, too simplistic a way of making the arguments. There are plenty of psychological and economic reasons why even people who understand the math buy lottery tickets that are, quite literally, bad bets. There is lots of research on this; one of the better articles is now 21 years old, but is still cited as a good, brief, and comprehensible overview.”  [You can read it here.]

“Every gamble is a losing bet in the long run; otherwise it wouldn’t be a gamble. The trouble with state-run lotteries is not so much that they exploit those who “don’t get it”; they exploit anyone, even a mathematical genius, who is drawn towards what society generally regards as undesirable actities, thereby sending the same mixed messages as taxes on tobacco and alcohol.”

New Jersey Lottery Ethics…Well, Not Exactly

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

New Jersey has taken the live drawings for the state lottery off of television and placed it on the internet. Many regular lottery players are upset about this, it seems.

“I like to see them pull it so they don’t have the chance to switch it,” said one eighty-year-old player. “Older people don’t trust the system. We know what happens.” She doesn’t own a computer, nor do her friends, and they all say they won’t play the lottery again until they can watch the drawings on their televisions. Indeed, the New Jersey Lottery is getting many such complaints, and expected them.

Why?

Because the people most likely to play the lottery are poor, badly educated, ill-informed, dumb, or all of the above, that’s why. Continue reading →

Loop-Hole Ethics and The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The NYT’s website paywall plan floats in a sea of holes.

Ariel Kaminer, author of “The Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, made an interesting assertion in her answer to a reader who asked about whether he could exploit several loop-holes in the Times’ new paywall plan for its website.

Noting that he was a struggling freelance journalist who visits the Times website often, he asked if it was unethical for him to use his parents’ free access to the content, since they are subscribers.  Then he Mused about other scenarios. “If I buy online access, can I share the password with my live-in girlfriend, even if I move to New York for the summer? What about our other housemates?” Continue reading →

The Unethical Deficit Debate, a Cause for Despair

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Our future, thanks to Washington, D.C.

If the bi-partisan dishonesty and unethical conduct surrounding the budget showdown last week didn’t cause you to despair, then you weren’t paying attention:

  • At a time when the federal deficit threatens the long-term (and not all that long, either) solvency of the U.S., risking quality of life, world leadership and security while placing us under the thumb of China, a Machiavellian adversary, both parties—and the President— opted for ideological point-scoring and demagoguery rather than serious explication of the issues.  Irresponsible cowards.
  • The government was brought to the brink of a shutdown over a pathetic, meaningless, 39 billion dollars of cuts that Democrats called “draconian” and Republicans and Obama trumpeted as the “largest budget cuts in U.S. history”. They were draconian only if you think like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who argued that Republicans were heartless to put “cowboy poetry” on the cutting block, and if, as is increasingly looking to be the case,  the Democrats are willing to let the country stay on the road to bankruptcy as long as it also leads them to power. The cuts were the “largest” only in their inflated figures: the budget was cut close to 50% after World War II. Liars and frauds.
  • Even if it were truly”the largest,” the heralded 39 billion dollars cut represented an infinitesimal dent in the overall budget and will have no appreciable effect on the deficit at all. It took a near shutdown to accomplish that. Easy Quiz: what are the chances of our current leaders displaying the political courage to make the substantial, genuine, painful cuts that all serious analysts agree are imperative to stave off financial ruin? Liars and cowards.
  • After all of the drama, after all the condemnation and hype, after “draconian” and “largest ever,” and after the President joined the charade, the no-nonsense Congressional Budget Office announced that by its calculations, the so-called cut was mostly fiction. It boiled down to only $352 million, less than 1% of a 39 billion that was inadequate to begin with. Incompetents.
  • The Democrats chuckled into their sleeves; the Republicans cried that they had been deceived, as if legislators don’t have the resources to find out what the money in the budget they are charged with approving actually pays for. Liars, incompetents and fools.

For me, the low point was President Obama’s speech at George Washington University, announcing his engagement—finally!—in the deficit-cutting debate while resorting that old Democrat stand-by, class warfare; blaming the Bush tax cuts, irresponsible but only one of many contributors to the deficit crisis; and  pledging to cut expenses by ending waste, fraud and abuse while simultaneously stating that the deficit couldn’t be cut by addressing waste, fraud and abuse.  It wasn’t any of those cynical moments that caused me to lose hope, however. It was the President’s insistence that the deficit cutting measures must not interfere with his highest priorities…such as building “new roads.” Continue reading →

Are Citizens of Warring Nations “Innocent”?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

No.

“Innocent” and “civilians” apparently go together like a horse and carriage, if one is to believe the cliché used with increasing regularity by journalists, bloggers and even elected officials. The instance that finally provoked me to write about the irresponsible acceptance of this falsehood was the gratuitous appropriation of it by a sportswriter, who, if I understand him correctly, feels the United States has no standing to object to baseball star Barry Bonds’ lying and cheating because it dropped atom bombs on “innocent civilians” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (The sportswriter neglects to mention that these act occurred during wartime; perhaps he doesn’t know.) The exoneration of civilian citizens for the acts of their governments is a relatively new phenomenon, one happily endorsed by the habitually politically correct. It is untrue, and it is time to blow the whistle. Ethics foul. Continue reading →

Outrageous Corporate Conduct 2011: Transocean’s Unconscionable Bonuses

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

"Sure, but other than THAT: great night at the theater, right?"

I believe that much of the time the corporate sector is unfairly treated by the media, politicians, and the public. Part of this conviction arises from my experience working at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, directly under its current president when he was a rising young Turk. I dealt with corporate executives every day, and got to see the challenges of big business from their side. Most of the time, they struck me as genuinely concerned about workers, communities, fairness, while believing, of course, that an unfettered private sector was in the economic interest of everyone.

Increasingly, however, I see corporate behavior that is so arrogant, so transparently greedy, so contemptuous of the public’s intelligence, so blatantly, obnoxiously wrong that I wonder if it was all a dream. There was AIG, accepting billions from American taxpayers to save it from the consequences of its own fiduciary crimes, immediately spending some of it on lush retreats and parties for its executives. There were the leaders of Goldman Sachs, telling gape-jawed U.S. Senators that, no, they didn’t see anything unethical about selling their trusted clients investment products so awful that the company made money betting on their failure. There are the U.S. banks, hoarding their money and refusing to refinance mortgages that were unconscionable to begin with,  preferring to make the nation’s economic problems worse by foreclosing on families’ homes rather than making a good faith effort to undo a human and social catastrophe that was substantially of their own making.

Now comes the news that Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, has announced that it is giving millions of dollars in bonuses to its executives after “the best year in safety performance in our company’s history.”  Which seems perfectly reasonable, unless you want to make a big deal over that one little Gulf oil spill incident last April…you know, the one that began when a Transocean oil rig exploded, killing eleven people including nine Transocean employees. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NBC

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

An Ethics Dunce, in ten easy steps

  1. General Electric Co. earned $14.2 billion in worldwide profits last year, including $5.1 billion in the United States, and paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes.
  2. This especially interesting because Jeffrey Immelt, G.E’s CEO, is also the Obama’s administration’s link to corporate America.
  3. The story was widely reported by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and thousands of lesser media outlets.
  4. NBC is owned by General Electric.
  5. NBC could not find room in its news broadcasts for the tax story. Continue reading →

Wait…This Is MY Fault????

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

I have complained, more than once, about the naked greed and obvious incompetence displayed by the airlines charging $25 or more to passengers who check luggage. The results of this reverse incentive are that people carry on too many, and too large bags, boarding takes longer, and flights are delayed. Passengers talk about the idiocy of the policy all the time. So do the airline attendants. Anyone can see how dumb the policy is. The smart approach would be to charge for anything carried on other than a handbag or briefcase, and make checked luggage free. Boarding would be faster and there wouldn’t be passengers using the sneaky (but effective!) trick of carrying a piece of luggage through security only to check it at the gate at no charge when the airline personnel makes the routine plea for passengers to free up luggage bin space by doing so. Continue reading →

Ethics Heads-Up: When the President Talks About “Investment in Infrastructure,” Pay Attention

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Yesterday, a massive water main rupture shut down part of the Washington area Beltway, tying up traffic and swamping cars. From the Associated Press story:

“At one point, water from the broken main shot eight or nine feet in the air, said Lyn Riggins, a spokeswoman for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. There was significant damage to the office park, with chunks of asphalt strewn across the parking lot, building windows shattered and three cars filled with water.

“It looks like somewhere where you would go white water rafting,” Riggins said.”

Advance reports discussing President Obama’s State of the Union message tonight note that he will be talking about, among other things, investing the nation’s resources on infrastructure renewal: roads, sewers, bridges and more. Already, Republican budget hawks and the conservative talk shows are mocking this as simply a euphemism for more “out of control spending.”

Addressing this country’s dangerously decrepit infrastructure will be expensive all right, but it is definitely an investment, and not undertaking it immediately is irresponsible, short-sighted, dangerous and foolish. For a quick refresher on why the neglect of U.S. infrastructure has been a scandalous breach of duty  of duty by generations of U.S. leadership, read this.