The Point of View Waltz

Back in 1971, Harry Nilsson wrote the concept album called “The Point,” which was later made into an endearing animated special that I recall seeing in elementary school. While much of the material isn’t particularly relevant to business topics (the album and the film are about equality, tolerance, and finding value in people who are different from you – a very enlightened viewpoint by 1971 standards) – I will still pull out the occasional reference, since many of them are timeless. One of the songs on the album was called “The Point of View Waltz” (often shortened to the P.O.V. Waltz), and I always wind up thinking about it when something comes up in the news that depends entirely on how you look at it – as does the call made yesterday for a change in the depreciation rules for private and company jets…

Much like a business, our government has only two ways of improving cash flow: bring in more revenue or eliminate spending. In the case of a national government, revenue is mostly generated through taxes – it’s occasionally possible to raise some money by selling off assets, but unless you can somehow obtain new assets for less than your sale price, this will have limited possibilities. Reducing spending generally means that someone who has been getting government funding won’t be – and in a republic, that someone will most often be whoever has the weakest representation in Congress. Traditionally, Democrats have attempted to fix cash-flow problems by raising taxes (but only on people outside of their core power base) while Republicans have attempted to cut services provided by the government (again, focusing on those services that don’t go to their political base), but both parties have tried to avoid mentioning that they get most of their support from the wealthy and powerful…

In the current case, the President is suggesting that private jets be moved from the five-year depreciation to the 7-year depreciation category – effectively, that the people who own private jet aircraft should have to pay more taxes on them. Doing so would generate an additional $3 billion dollars over the next ten years – which sounds very impressive, especially considering that anyone rich enough to use a private jet in the first place can probably afford the increase in costs. However, when you consider that the President is trying to eliminate $4 trillion worth of Federal deficit, this comes to less than one-tenth of one percent of the total. It’s a good start – $3 billion is enough to do a lot of worth-while things, even in 2011 dollars – but for the Democrats to present this as a major step forward (or a major blow to the greedy rich) is just as disingenuous as the Republicans presenting this as a major hardship being visited upon people who already carry the bulk of the tax burden in this country…

The truth is that none of our national problems are going to be solved by political grandstanding, let alone with stupid accounting tricks, which is all this particular measure actually is. Even if you lined up a dozen more new taxes just as big as this one, you’d only cover about 1% of the deficit, and you’ve already got people from the private jet industry complaining about being “singled out” by the Federal government and how unfair this is. Meanwhile, our national debt is growing and our economy is tanking while our political leaders stand around and posture with tax raises and tax cuts that they know will serve no purpose beyond appealing to their own party’s power base. How you regard the situation, as with how you regard this particular tax initiative, depends mostly on your point of view – but from where I’m sitting, none of this is particularly reassuring…

Defending Your Right to Bigotry

One of the ongoing problems with life in these United States is that while our Constitution guarantees several of our most fundamental human rights – notably free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion – the right to be treated decently, the right to live your life as you see fit and not be constantly called unpleasant names by bigots, and the right to be left the heck alone by evangelicals who call themselves “Christians” are not guaranteed under the Constitution. As a result, an apparently increasing number of people who understand political power, financial power, religious conservatism and fundamental, and advertising – but apparently have no grasp whatsoever of the complex concept of tolerance – keep using their wealth, power, and First Amendment rights to free speech to spew hate about anyone of whom they don’t approve. I wrote about it last December , and I’ve also questioned whether religious speech that confers commercial advantages on the broadcaster should be considered protected on the Main blog , but there’s a situation going on in Florida these days that makes me question if our entire nation hasn’t started Racing to the Bottom…

I picked up the story off of the Wisconsin Gazette website, but you can find it in other places online, too. Basically, the idea is that every year LGBT community organizers pick a day in the spring to be “Gay Day” at Disney World in Orlando, and put out notice over various Internet channels. It’s part of the local Pride Week celebration, which draws an estimated 160,000 people to the Orlando area each year, and brings something on the order of $150 million to the local economy (not counting what the participants spend at Disney World). Unfortunately, this idea creates a full-blown panic in the local conservative “Christian” organizations, who appear to be convinced that seeing gay people and same-sex couples in public will turn children who witness the event gay, and similar brain-dead bigotry. Unfortunately, the event isn’t sponsored by (or even acknowledged by) Disney, which means there’s no one the “Christian” groups can lobby to prevent it. So instead, they’ve decided to hire airplanes to pull giant banners warning people in the area about the event…

Why, exactly, this is being tolerated in the first place is a bit unclear. Certainly, there is a right to free speech involved, but if anyone tried flying giant banners saying “There are Jews at Disney World Today!” or “Warning: Islamic Groups in the Area!” they’d be sued down to their underwear and shut down by the authorities before the first tow plane left the ground. Most of these groups defend behavior like this by claiming that homosexual behavior of any kind is against their religion, but the legal precedents on that are fairly clear: you have a right to practice whatever faith you like, but not to impose it on anyone else. And as I noted last year, if you actually do believe in Christian theology, spending this kind of money to attack people of whom you do not approve when there are millions of hungry people who need food, homeless people who need shelter, and sick people who need medical care – not even in the rest of the world, but just here in the U.S. – is about as anti-Christian as you can possibly get…

In the long run, I’m really not sure what is worse – if these so-called “Christians” believe the hate they are spewing, or if they’re just doing it for political, social or financial gain. The latter is despicable; a perversion not merely of the Christian faith they are aping for their own ends but of the social and religious freedoms of the only nation on Earth that would put up with this nonsense in the first place. But the former means that this is true hate speech – people who not only believe the most preposterous nonsense because of their own fear and hatred, but are willing to attack the rights (and presumably the lives) of innocent people because of that fear and hatred. Either way, it’s truly sad to see a religion dedicated to peace, love, and universal brotherhood becoming the Accelerator in our Race to the Bottom…