Whitcomb: Healthcare Quandary; Tax ‘Em, Then Untax ‘Em; Anonymous Reports; Politics Is a Drag

Sunday, March 05, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

“The world works for us and we call it grace.

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It works against us and, if we are brave,

We call it nothing and we keep our faith,

And only to ourselves we call it fate.’’

-- Mark Jarman (born 1952), American poet

 

 

 

"No season ends overnight. Change comes slowly. Winter must be melted and blown and washed away, just as spring must be leafed and blossomed and gradually grown into summer. … Even the blustery winds of March tend to fall away at sunset. The winter night's dark fang is somewhat dulled.’’

-- Hal Borland (1900-1978), Connecticut-based author, best known for his nature writing

 

 

 

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PHOTO: file

It’s sad to see the gradual disappearance of small, family-owned New England ski areas as they are taken over by such national chains as Vail Resorts or simply closed down for being money losers because of high energy and insurance costs and the aging of the population.  The warmer winters don’t help either. I remember when it seemed that every member of an area’s owning family was working there – as ski instructors, lift operators, snack-bar officials and so on.

 

I have the fondest memories of March skiing, with the sun (relatively) warm and the corn snow easy to handle as you smelled the wood smoke from the base lodge wafting up the slopes in the moist air. And you could see spring in the bare earth around the base of trees by the slopes as they absorbed the sun’s rays.
 

 

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We set up three bird feeders a few weeks ago, and no birds appeared for two weeks. Then a mob of the avians appeared all at once. Insider trading?

 

Of course, the squirrels grow fat on bird food: They’re good Americans! But if your feeder is at the top of a pole, you can pour a little vegetable oil on it and watch these often obese and ingenious rodents struggle to climb up.

 

 

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Our day after day of gray, clammy English-style weather is a good argument for putting one of those anti-depression light boxes on your desk.

 

 

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We’ve been watching a couple of neighborhood kids whom we knew when they were tiny moving toward adolescence at a good clip. Indeed, they seem to be visibly growing up daily. But it probably doesn’t seem that way to them because time goes by so slowly for the young. They’re too young to appreciate how fleeting childhood is, and how soon they’ll be moving on.

 

 

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How much faster cars left in the sun warm up in the March sun compared to a month ago!

 

 

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Health Insurance PHOTO: file

Insurance, but Can’t Find a Doctor

Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Peter Neronha said some important things in an interview with ConvergenceRI’s Richard Asinof:

 

I especially liked this part:
 

“{W}e have a lot of people here {in Rhode Island}, most of our population, who are insured…. And that is a good thing, I suppose….

“{But}if there is an insufficient supply of primary care providers, doctors and others who provide primary care, what good is it to have insurance?... {And} if a hospital is financially unstable, again, what good is it to have insurance, if, in the long run, our hospitals are endangered.’’

 

Hit this link for the full interview:

 

 

There are at least two big reasons for the scarcity of primary-care physicians. One is that many young doctors want to get rich by going into very highly paid specialties, such as surgery. The drive to get rich is very powerful everywhere, but especially in America! Another factor is that many, perhaps most, young doctors come out of medical school with such huge debts that they feel compelled to enter the highest-paid specialties in order to pay them off as soon as they can. And the hours of specialists tend to be shorter than   primary-care docs’ (who are of course specialists themselves – specialists in being generalists).

 

But we need primary-care physicians the most.

 

 

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Manning Chapel, Brown University PHOTO: GoLocal

Orwellian Education

Please stop this!

 

Brown University, Bryant University, the University of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island School of Design are among the schools using a “student bias” reporting tool – Maxient software -- that lets students send anonymous reports on fellow students for allegedly showing signs of racial, sexual-identity or other bias. This is obviously a somewhat Orwellian threat to free speech on campus. And there’s no law against being biased, though there may be in acting on that bias.

 

Suppressing speech via such surveillance and intimidation is apt to make bias worse by raising paranoia and suspicion levels. And it sure won’t help the nurturing of friendships among students.

 

Looking at speech and related matters at colleges and universities convinces me that senior administrators, and not faculty or students, are the main forces inhibiting free speech there. The administrators, often with the best intentions – wanting everything to be lovey-dovey on campus even if it isn’t in “the real world’’ -- seek to block anything that might arouse charges of bigotry or indeed make anyone mad about anything. And of course they intensely fear anything that might hurt fundraising.

 

But rather than letting bias fester under suppression, it’s better to face it head-on in open debate. The disinfectant of sunlight.

 

 

 

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PHOTO: file

Tax the Rich, but Be Careful

How to get more money from affluent people to help pay for the public services and physical infrastructure that we all benefit from?

 

I’ve been intrigued by the $742 million tax-relief plan of Massachusetts’s new governor, Maura Healey, a Democrat. Much of this is meant to help poor working folks, families with children, renters, the elderly and other people with fewer-than-average resources. But no small part is devoted to encouraging the affluent to stay in the state.

 

Consider:

 

The plan would cut the state’s tax rate on short-term (held less than a year) capital gains to 5 percent from 12 percent; 5 percent is the flat rate on other personal income in the state. This measure overwhelmingly favors the affluent because, of course, they have far more investments. Many folks, of course, have virtually no investments.

 

The governor would also cut the state estate tax. That levy is currently on estates valued at over $1 million. Ms. Healey’s plan calls for effectively exempting all estates valued at less than $3 million from the levy. And yet the estate tax and user fees (such as tolls) would seem the fairest ways to get revenue.

 

Massachusetts’s current progressive estate tax rates go up to 16 percent.

 

The governor’s push for tax breaks for the affluent seems to be in response to the voters last fall narrowly supporting a 4 percent tax on annual income above $1 million – aka “the millionaires tax’’ -- on top of the state’s 5 percent flat income tax. The additional money is supposed to go to improving transportation and education. We’ll see!




The fear has been that this will scare away too many rich folks, especially those who may own, run or at least invest in job-producing businesses. Yep, a few have been scared away, but the state’s assets, including its best-in-the-nation public schools, its world-famous higher education, healthcare and cultural institutions, its related highly skilled workforce, and Greater Boston’s dense mass transit will keep most of them in the state, which remains among the country’s richest. Indeed, that Massachusetts has higher taxes than, say, Red States is a major reason why it’s richer: It’s willing to pay for services that, in turn, help create wealth.

 

 

Both Democratic and Republican politicians are leery of taxing the very affluent because they are campaign contributors and otherwise far more powerful than their numbers would suggest. And most Americans, despite the most extreme income inequality in the West, apparently accept –  fatalistically -- the status quo.  

 

Still,  Democrats remain more interested in helping the poor than Republicans. Many leaders of the latter, especially in solidly Red states, with regressive sales taxes the main levy, lure poorer people, especially whites, away from their economic self-interest. They do this with such culture-war issues as gun rights, abortion and pitches based on curious interpretations of the Bible (not the  endlessly contradictory book I read) even as they attend to the care and feeding of the privileged, at least more than the Dems do.

 

How will Rhode Island’s elected officials respond to its neighbor’s tax changes?

 

There’s some other stuff about the governor’s package in here:

 

 

 

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As Congress mulls cuts in Social Security, take a look at who benefits most from federal old-age benefits policies:

 

See HERE

 

 

 

Another Specialized Charter School

This is an interesting idea for a charter school, but is it too narrow? In Worcester, the Worcester Cultural Academy Charter Public School, serving students from kindergarten to fourth, and ultimately to eighth grade, will open in the fall. It will be run by the New England-history-focused Old Sturbridge Village museum, in nearby Sturbridge, in a partnership with a not-for-profit outfit called EL Education.

 

Hit this link:

 

 

Well, museums can be wonderful for kids; I fondly remember various field trips to them when I was in school. But are these increasingly specialized charter schools able to give the kids the basics in reading, writing,  math and other fundamental subjects? Too much entertainment, not enough learning?

 

 

The new institution will be modeled on the “experiential” approach of Old Sturbridge Academy Charter Public School in Sturbridge itself. Will this give ideas to, say, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Newport Art Museum?

 

 

 

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) PHOTO: Florida

Corporate Real Estate

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s running for president, has taken away the Walt Disney Co.’s self-governing power over a huge 43 square miles of central Florida. He’s doing this because, he says, he doesn’t like Disney’s “wokeness” on sexual-identity matters. He’s against Disney’s freedom of speech in such matters.

 

Whatever DeSantis’s obvious bid to appeal to the right wing of the Republican Party, which is pretty much all of the party these days, it always seemed to me that it was outrageous that a state would hand such power, granted Disney in the late ’60’s, to a company in the first place. Pretty anti-democratic! I toured the area back in 1971, to report on Walt Disney World, which would open soon, and was astonished that the state had made such a deal, after Disney had bought up vast amounts of land, much of it secretly.

 

 

What a Drag!

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, will sign a bill criminalizing “prurient” “adult cabaret’’ drag performances in public (including versions of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the revolting/funny films of John Waters?) or in front of children. Meanwhile, a photo of him in a 1977 high school yearbook shows the future statesman in a very short-skirted cheerleader’s uniform, a wig and a pearl necklace.

The setting for Mr. Lee’s drag photo seems to an annual event in which boys dress as girls and vice versa during  the football team’s homecoming week.

There’s a long tradition of men and boys in drag (see Shakespeare plays), often for humor and sometimes because, well, some folks feel really good in drag. We sometimes never quite know which factor most applies.

The “cabaret” part of the Tennessee law as it applies to shows viewed by adults may sound dubious from a First Amendment standpoint but will appeal to many in that deep Red state, maybe even a few people who like to secretly or semi-secretly dress in drag themselves.

The performers to be banned include “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest, or similar entertainers, regardless of whether or not performed for consideration.”

Gov. Lee likes to dress up, such as in the Confederate uniform he is shown wearing in the 1980 Auburn University yearbook.

I’m more comfortable with some Red states’ efforts to block or slow “gender-affirming” care for young people -- services that may include medical, surgical, mental health, and non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people. Can a young person really understand his or her sexual identity well enough to justify trying to change sex?

Hit this link:

 

 

 

What’s in it for Us?

This quote from an article in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols, an emeritus professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, is one of the best summations of why it’s in America’s interest to help Ukraine:

“Americans, for their part, need to think very hard about what happens if Russia wins—especially with an assist from the Chinese. They will be living in a North American redoubt, while more and more of the world around them will learn to accommodate new rules coming from Beijing and Moscow. The freedom of movement Americans take for granted—of goods, people, money, and even ideas—would shrink, limited by the growing power of the world’s two large dictatorial regimes and their minor satraps.’’

Hit this link to read the article:

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal,  and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.


 

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