Two Guest commentary by Greg Lee and Douglas Burns
Middle class should not subsidize the wealthy
By Greg Lee
State Rep. Kraig Paulsen thinks Iowa state workers are overpaid, and as a solution to the budget deficit he suggests that their wages be cut. This is the sort of divisive leadership that didn’t work so well for the Republicans in past election. Rather than cutting anyone’s wages, shouldn’t the private sector be working toward providing comparable benefits for its own employees? Why shouldn’t everyone have health insurance, sick leave, vacation time or a pension earned after several years of service? These seemingly basic benefits are not provided by many private sector employers. Why shouldn’t all employees have the same benefits that are afforded to public employees?
Businessmen are often heard to say, while grumbling about government, that many politicians have never had to meet a payroll. Well, the businessmen always seem to pay themselves handsomely first before they get around to paying their employees. Rep. Paulsen used Principal Insurance Company as an example of what the private sector has done to cut costs, including slashing their employees’ wages. Benefits for state employees are by and large better than those provided by Principal Insurance to their employees. However, I am fairly confident in saying that the director of each department of state government is paid no more than twice the salary of his highest paid subordinate and probably no more than five times the average employee’s wages. Before Principal stock tanked to a third of its former value, its CEO’s compensation package amounted to more than $15,000,000 annually. That is something like 500 times the salary of the average Principal employee and 300 times the median family income nationwide. If some of that compensation had been more evenly distributed, maybe Principal could have provided better benefits to its employees. I suspect that many of them would have traded better health or sick leave benefits for the free admission tickets they were given for the Iowa State Fair.
What we need to look at are all the exemptions and tax breaks that are given largely to major corporations and wealthy taxpayers by the state government. Capital gains related to the sale of an Iowa business or farm are no longer subject to state income tax. That is a major tax break for the wealthy landowner or corporate farmer. Millions of dollars in tax revenue are lost from that source each year. Why should wages and salary be fully subject to income tax but a major source of income for the very wealthy be exempt from taxation?
Exemptions should be used sparingly. Small businesses should be helped through our tax policies, but major corporations shouldn’t be handed tax exemptions that they don’t need. If a business has the cash or credit to purchase several million dollars worth of computers or manufacturing equipment, then they should pay the sales tax due on the purchase price. The tax exemption should be provided only to those businesses that need help. It makes no sense to exempt income or purchases from tax if the person or corporation has the ability to pay the tax. The result is that the state has less revenue to pay for schools, roads and health care and for our public welfare.
The public school will lose more than $250 million that they expected from the state government. One way for the school districts to cover that loss is to increase everyone’s property taxes. In essence then, the richest among us and the major corporations have pushed taxes off themselves, which they were arguably the best equipped or able to pay. So the poor and middle class are effectively subsidizing the wealthy by taking on more taxes that the rich and wealth corporations could have paid. Conservatives don’t approve of the government providing assistance to the poor because they claim that it stifles their motivation to help themselves, but they are more than happy to provide welfare to corporations and the rich in the form of tax breaks, exemptions and credits. Can’t the free market system and Capitalism succeed without the intervention of the government? I guess my question was answered most clearly by the aftermath of the stock market debacle and the worst collapse of our economy since the Great Depression. Like the Great Depression, the government has had to step up to the plate and clean up the mess made by the greed, hubris and corruption of capitalists.
The United States Chamber of Commerce and the American Enterprise Institute continue to sell the public on the idea that the free market system is the best of all possible worlds. Maybe for businessmen and the rich, but not so much for the majority of the people who live from paycheck to paycheck. Their next great idea to promote the free market system will probably consist of having unemployed workers hand out flyers, at street corners, extolling the virtues of Capitalism to the next group of recently downsized, unemployed workers. CV
Greg Lee is a Des Moines resident and a state worker who is proud of his co-workers and the services they provide to the citizens of Iowa.
PoliticalMercury
By Douglas Burns
No longer a mystery
Christie Vilsack may not be running for a U.S. Senate Seat, but if there were an election for the classiest person in recent Iowa politics our former First Lady would surely be on the short list.
There is just something about a lady who can wear a hat — which Mrs. Vilsack was fond of doing during in the early days of her husband Tom’s gubernatorial efforts. Now those hats will have to wait for another campaign.
Pundits and party insiders were trial-ballooning Mrs. Vilsack as a potential candidate for the U.S. Senate, a challenger to the venerable Charles Grassley, at least up until Monday when she announced that she would not be running.
Iowa Democratic Party chairman Michael Kiernan said last month that his party would recruit a “mystery” candidate. Now, it seems, Christie Vilsack is no longer a mystery. And either is Des Moines attorney Roxanne Conlin, a one-time candidate for governor who will apparently pursue a Senate match-up with Grassley.
Since Tom Vilsack’s race for governor in 1998, I interviewed Mrs. Vilsack a number of times.
Whereas Gov. Vilsack projected all the charisma of a math test, Christie Vilsack, with a background in journalism, is a natural.
She worked rooms beautifully on campaigns and was always quite comfortable in interviews. She was exceptional at staying on message while campaigning for Hillary Clinton during the Iowa Caucuses.
Her roots run deep in this state and include a connection to the late Bob Beck, a one-time Republican candidate for governor. Beck was the owner of Centerville’s Daily Iowegian and a leading figure in journalism and Republican politics.
Christie Vilsack is fond of telling the story about returning home to Mount Pleasant from college in 1968 only to find that her dad, Tom Bell, had placed a “Beck for Governor” sign in their yard.
“When I asked my dad, an ardent Democrat, about the sign, he said, ‘There are some things more important than politics, and friendship is one of them,’” Mrs. Vilsack said.
Christie Vilsack has a basic sense of decency that is too easily dismissed in these times. Her campaign would have been a breath of fresh air.
A poll released recently by Research 2000 showed Christie Vilsack with respectable numbers in a hypothetical race with Grassley. Grassley’s at 51 percent to Vilsack’s 40 percent. Conlin pulls 39 percent to the GOP senator’s 51 percent in the same poll.
For his part, Grassley, 76, is an institution. He began his service in the Iowa Legislature when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president in 1959.
Because of this longevity and a throwback gentility, Grassley often has seemed above the fray, a simple-life sage, at times eccentric and occasionally country bumpkining, but as reliable as the setting sun.
But Grassley, usually cast in this role of elder statesman, the grandfather shaking his head at all the nonsense with his young colleagues in Washington, found himself in a 24/7 news cycle circus this summer involving former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s charge that President Obama and Democratic allies were seeking to create “death panels” to ration or withhold care from senior citizens.
No such provision exists in proposed legislation, but detractors seized on a plan inserted by a Georgia Republican to provide Medicare funding for voluntary end-of-life counseling for living wills. The government’s role would have been to reimburse doctors for taking the time to have the conversations.
Grassley, perhaps forgetting that he was Grassley and instead channeling AM radio banter, thrust himself into the center of the media firestorm surrounding the matter with that “pull the plug on grandma” business.
In a recent interview, Grassley told me he didn’t want a do-over on the remarks.
“I don’t wish I stayed away from it,” he said.
This is not Chuck Grassley at the top of his game. He looked positively ridiculous on some YouTube videos as he shelved his usual just-folks policy wonk approach in favor of this carnival barking.
And then there’s this: Chuck Grassley has been in politics for 50 years now.
He wants six more, and a state of 3 million people in a nation of 300 million should be reluctant to forfeit Grassley’s seniority. We have an outsized voice with Grassley and U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin representing us.
But there is an opening in 2010.
Christie Vilsack would have certainly found inspiration in the classy counsel of Mr. Beck, a man who put his city and state and friendships first.
Of course, Mr. Beck lost in the primary to Robert Ray. And Christie Vilsack is now out of the race. CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers political columns for Cityview.
