I just read an insightful editorial about debt and class warfare by humorist Ben Stein that ran in the New York Times in 2006. It bears a second look today. Here it is:

In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning

NOT long ago, I had the pleasure of a lengthy meeting with one of the smartest men on the planet, Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, in his unpretentious offices in Omaha. We talked of many things that, I hope, will inspire me for years to come. But one of the main subjects was taxes. Mr. Buffett, who probably does not feel sick when he sees his MasterCard bill in his mailbox the way I do, is at least as exercised about the tax system as I am.

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

This conversation keeps coming back to mind because, in the last couple of weeks, I have been on one television panel after another, talking about how questionable it is that the country is enjoying what economists call full employment while we are still running a federal budget deficit of roughly $434 billion for fiscal 2006 (not counting off-budget items like Social Security) and economists forecast that it will grow to $567 billion in fiscal 2010.

When I mentioned on these panels that we should consider all options for closing this gap — including raising taxes, particularly for the wealthiest people — I was met with several arguments by people who call themselves conservatives and free marketers.

One argument was that the mere suggestion constituted class warfare. I think Mr. Buffett answered that one.

Another argument was that raising taxes actually lowers total revenue, and that only cutting taxes stimulates federal revenue. This is supposedly proved by the history of tax receipts since my friend George W. Bush became president.

In fact, the federal government collected roughly $1.004 trillion in income taxes from individuals in fiscal 2000, the last full year of President Bill Clinton’s merry rule. It fell to a low of $794 billion in 2003 after Mr. Bush’s tax cuts (but not, you understand, because of them, his supporters like to say). Only by the end of fiscal 2006 did income tax revenue surpass the $1 trillion level again.

By this time, we Republicans had added a mere $2.7 trillion to the national debt. So much for tax cuts adding to revenue. To be fair, corporate profits taxes have increased greatly, as corporate profits have increased stupendously. This may be because of the cut in corporate tax rates. Anything is possible.

The third argument that kind, well-meaning people made in response to the idea of rolling back the tax cuts was this: “Don’t raise taxes. Cut spending.”

The sad fact is that spending rises every year, no matter what people want or say they want. Every president and every member of Congress promises to cut “needless” spending. But spending has risen every year since 1940 except for a few years after World War II and a brief period after the Korean War.

The imperatives for spending are built into the system, and now, with entitlements expanding rapidly, increased spending is locked in. Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt — all are growing like mad, and how they will ever be stopped or slowed is beyond imagining. Gross interest on Treasury debt is approaching $350 billion a year. And none of this counts major deferred maintenance for the military.

The fourth argument in response to my suggestion was that “deficits don’t matter.”

There is something to this. One would think that big deficits would be highly inflationary, according to Keynesian economics. But we have modest inflation (except in New York City, where a martini at a good bar is now $22). On the other hand, we have all that interest to pay, soon roughly $7 billion a week, a lot of it to overseas owners of our debt. This, to me, seems to matter.

Besides, if it doesn’t matter, why bother to even discuss balancing the budget? Why have taxes at all? Why not just print money the way Weimar Germany did? Why not abolish taxes and add trillions to the deficit each year? Why don’t we all just drop acid, turn on, tune in and drop out of responsibility in the fiscal area? If deficits don’t matter, why not spend as much as we want, on anything we want?

The final argument is the one I really love. People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?

Oh, now, now, now I recall. It changed when we figured that we could cut taxes and generate so much revenue that we would balance the budget. But isn’t that what doctors call magical thinking? Haven’t the facts proved that this theory, though charming and beguiling, was wrong?

THIS brings me back to Mr. Buffett. If, in fact, it’s all just a giveaway to the rich masquerading as a new way of stimulating the economy and balancing the budget, please, Mr. Bush, let’s rethink it. I don’t like paying $7 billion a week in interest on the debt. I don’t like the idea that Mr. Buffett pays a lot less in tax as a percentage of his income than my housekeeper does or than I do.

Can we really say that we’re showing fiscal prudence? Are we doing our best? If not, why not? I don’t want class warfare from any direction, through the tax system or any other way.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist.

Author Ayn Rand saw the future in 1957 and wrote it thusly:

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a selfsacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

Despite the world's efforts to "X" out Christmas, this day truly is all about the miracle of the birth of Jesus, our Emmanuel--God with us.

"And the Word became flesh, and dwelt for a time among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."

I wish you all the blessings of this mystical season and a New Year filled with hope, love and much joy.

This will seem an odd posting to qualify as "The Christmas Blessing:" Indeed, it's all about burglary, deceipt and violation, not the usual fodder for stories of hope and good tidings to all men. But a blessing it was nonetheless. Let me tell you about it...

Last Monday I came home from work to find that my modest home had been burgled. Someone used a pry bar to force the lock on my back door and ransacked their way through the house in search of high-ticket, easily-pawned small items (little did my bumbling burglar realize that I am Queen of the Trash Pickin' Thrift Shop Set and I did not have any "high-ticket items" in attendance except those that I use to earn my livelihood).

Although every item that was stolen is merely a "material thing" and therefore replaceable in theory, there are still those things I rue that cannot be replaced, like my mother's sterling silver wedding band, my beautiful Canon XHA1 miniDV video camera bought to finish my Pennhurst Project documentary and that beloved Sony ECM 717 stereo lapel microphone received as a graduation present from my brilliant thesis advisor, Veronica. And, oh, how to replace the chunky silver Moravian star pendant made in my senior year in high school or the hammered wire ring wrought as a testament to my 1970s free spirit. Or how about the gold watch that my friend Yvie gave me, along with a luscious chocolate cake, to celebrate my forced early retirement from The Morning Call? How do you even think about replacing such memories? Trouble is, I can't. The memories, that is. To every material thing that we attach ourselves to, it's the memory surrounding the acquisition of the item that remains uncorrupted and incorrigible. It's the blessing of memory that can't be stolen or violated by thieves and pillagers.

I wondered at the time why the burglar took what he/she did but left other things behind. A tip from my sister reveals that I may have been the victim of one of the "backpack burglars" that are plaguing neighborhoods across the country. These misguided souls come to an area wearing a backpack and knock on doors to find out who is not home, then quickly break in and take only what will fit in their backpack. They are in and out in ten minutes and therefore not usually noticed by anyone in the neighborhood. A guy wearing a backpack walking down the street doesn't attract too much attention, or so they think.

And although my humble abode was violated, my first response is to pray for the thief's ultimate redemption. Call me sentimental but this is, after all, the season of miracles. I know that God has done far more with much less. Like George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," I was ready to throw my faith to the wind after yet another stroke of bad fortune. But then I remembered, like George, how blessed I truly am with a warm home and a new job and friends and family who truly care about me. The thief who invaded my home certainly can't have any of that, else why do what he did? So I will pray for him and the others like him who have no conscience. After all, if I don't, then who else will?  And I will continue to hold onto the hope that God will work His miracles in His own way and time.

As fellow blogger Ron Reed puts it:

     "[Christmas is a] time when refugees shelter in animal sheds to give birth, when politicos protect  their power with mass murder, when God sends messengers to keep saying over and over, "Fear not." A time when, against all odds and all fears, a baby is born, and lives long enough to make a difference.

     The deeper truth [in this film and in life] lies in sacrifice, community, leaving aside self-preoccupation to engage with other people's lives, to further other people's dreams. And that's where IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE shines. There's a maturity there - a Depression-raised, war-deepened realization that, in the final analysis, it's not all about me. "

"It's a Wonderful Life" 1946, Frank Capra

Thank God that I, like my old Building and Loan Pal George, still choose to believe. Yes, it truly is a wonderful life.

I wish you all a blessed and happy Christmas season.

The following letter was posted to the East Vincent - State of the Township blog. Please take a minute and read this insightful and well-written example of everything that is wrong with the Pennhurst Asylum haunted attraction. The letter is especially poignant coming a day after the incredibly banal and disrespectful sham of the "Ghost Hunters Live Halloween" show which aired last evening.  

The Final Indignity

The name Pennhurst is infamous in the disability rights movement – not once, but twice.

Pennhurst opened in 1908 as a school for people with physical and mental disabilities. By the time it closed in 1987, it had become an iconic symbol of segregation, overcrowding, abuse, and neglect. In a momentous victory, a Federal Court order mandated Pennhurst’s closure for violating the constitutional rights of the residents, who had done no harm to anyone. The people who left Pennhurst went to small family-like homes with 24-hour support and services, where their lives were enriched in practically every way we know how to measure. (See Temple University’s landmark Pennhurst Longitudinal Study, 1985.)

Emily Smith Beitiks, Ph.D Candidate, University of Minnesota

James W. Conroy, Ph.D, Center for Outcome Analysis, Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance

And so, we have lived through an earthquake (albeit a small one), a hurricane four days later and a five-day deluge from tropical storm Lee a week later. While at my brother's this afternoon, we stood by my car on the passenger side looking at some tools when we heard what sounded like a roar and the sky just opened up with rain drops the size of quarters. We actually heard it coming. He yelled, "Run!" and I ran to the driver's side to get in the car but in that short time I was soaked to the skin. We both said that it was the strangest rain we have ever experienced. The sky actually seemed to open up with a roar and curtains of water sliced across the driveway.

Strange, strange times we live in, Master Jack.

Well, here's one for the history books! I was busy on my new computer this afternoon when suddenly the whole desk started shaking. My first thought was that it was my fat cat, Boo Boo, rolling around under there but then the shaking got worse. It only lasted for about 20 seconds. I didn't think much about it until my brother Jim called me from Maryland and asked if I had felt the earthquake here. An earthquake! Get out!

I checked the news and sure enough, that's what it was. The earthquake, a 5.9 magnitude (which Californians would call a teeny-tiny quake), was centered in Virginia but was felt all along the east coast from the Carolinas to Massachusetts and some reports say to Toronto, Canada. Jim said it felt like his whole building was about to lift off the foundation and fall away. He has a garage apartment near Elkton and was much closer to the epicenter. I have never felt an earthquake before and while it was happening I didn't realize that's what it was. My first thought was that it might be another gas explosion but this wasn't a boom—it was serious shaking. The USGS says that the quake is the largest to originate in Virginia since May 31, 1897.

One person commented that most of the places where the quake could be felt are on the Marcellus Shale or the Devonian Black Shale. Now that's interesting. Wonder if fracking has anything to do with the quake as it did in Fort Worth, Texas?

Also interesting is the fact that there was another quake in Colorado last night at 11:46 p.m. that sources say was the strongest there in over a century. A series of aftershocks continued throughout this morning.

In fact, as the USGS map below shows, in the last seven days, quakes have occurred in Yellowstone and around the Salt Lake City area and in odd corners such as Oklahoma, eastern Tennessee and the Ohio/Penn border. Kinda makes you wonder.

I hope you all have a wonderful 4th of July celebration! Here are some outtakes from the fabulous Upper Macungie fireworks display last night at Earl Adams Memorial Park in Breinigsville, one of the best displays I've seen in recent years. See more photos on Patch.com.

The following is from the "Fit to Print" web site about a documentary by Adam Chadwick dealing with the demise of the daily newspaper industry. Looks like it will be an interesting take on another failing U.S. business. Be sure to check out the "Corporate Raiders" page featuring our own Sam Zell.

FIT TO PRINT

A DOCUMENTARY FILM ON THE U.S. NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY

“Fit to Print” is a documentary film that takes the viewer on a behind-the-scenes journey through the current upheaval in the U.S. newspaper industry. As subscriptions dwindle and ad revenues decline, newspapers are scrambling to establish their relevance.

The newspaper business lost $7.5 billion in ad revenues in 2008, and has reduced spending on journalism by $1.6 billion per year over the past several years. But what does this mean for the individuals whose lives have been turned upside down by the crisis? If the newspaper business is changing, what happend in the past half century to escalate this? How are legacy newspapers adapting? How are non-profit news outlets surviving? What is being lost as new media replaces old?

“Fit to Print” will ask these questions and showcase America’s newspaper story. It will detail how newspaper reporters have traditionally generated news which is presented on broadcast networks, including television and radio. Specific case-studies will be presented on what is being lost within investigative reporting as legacy newspapers reduce staff sizes and start-up news sites remain fragile. The film will also include interviews from reporters, staff members, and media experts within several major U.S. newspapers, including: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The Rocky Mountain News, The Seattle P.I., to name only a few. As well, we have secured interviews with founders of news sites such as Voice of San Diego, MinnPost and St. Louis Beacon.

A contemporary sixty year history of the decline in the newspaper industry will be examined. The internet and new media didn’t simply appear overnight. “Fit to Print” will detail how advertising, unions and major newspaper corporations shifted their priorities dramatically during a relatively short period of time dating back to the late 1950’s.

Anybody who cares about journalism has been exposed to a spate of stories and figures about the decline of the traditional newspaper business. This has spurred much debate about what comes next and how to adapt journalism to a world in which the digital word is quickly replacing the printed word.

But such stories are mostly abstractions. Newspapers are a business, they are crucial to the functioning of a democratic society, but they are often more than that. They are a way of life for those who are a part of them – ordinary individuals contending with turbulent times. “Fit to Print” will tell their story ….a story that is rarely seen in any broadcast news brief, podcast or web-link.

The numbers over the past year have been startling. Over 100 newspapers have been shuttered. Over 15,000 newspaper jobs have been lost. Print ad sales fell by nearly a third in the first quarter of 2009 alone. Of the top 25 newspapers, 23 reported circulation declines between 7% and 20%. “Fit to Print” will detail how the U.S. newspaper industry came to this breaking point.

FIT TO PRINT productions © 2010

Watch a trailer for the documentary here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyuG1xin5YY&feature=player_detailpage.

On a recent trip to Cedar Hollow, the town I grew up in, I happened upon some curious underground ruins of a structure that would have been right across the street from our old farmhouse. The house was demolished in the 60s by Warner Company, the limestone quarrying operation that owned the land, and there is now little trace that a house ever stood at that corner of St. Peters and Church roads. All that remains is the stone wall along Church Road where my father used to have his rock garden and a bit further up are the crumbling walls in front of the old bullpen.

The land is now a nature preserve owned, I believe, by East Whiteland Township, and the area where our house stood is a vast jungle of dense brush and monkey vines. Even so, I was amazed and pleased to find the forsythia bushes and daffodils, planted so long ago by my father, in full bloom along the road and under the old buttonball (sycamore) tree. Since I had my camera with me, I decided to hike up to the top of the hill on the other side of the road to see if the chimney of the old Boy Scout cabin was still standing.

While making my way through the downed trees to find the best path I happened to see a gaping hole between several rocks and stopped to peek inside. Thinking it was a cave of some sort and certainly worth further investigating, I stuck my camera in the hole with the flash on full power and started taking pictures. It took quite a while to get a rough focus because the hole was pitch black and I couldn't see anything at all inside. Perserverance pays off, though, and as you will see from these photos, the ruins appear to be an enclosed room with stone walls on four sides and two brick partition walls about three feet high in the middle. There are three metal pipes coming into the structure. 

We lived in that house in the 1950s and 60s and I don't remember any one of us ever coming across this place before. As kids, we played in those woods and probably knew every inch of ground around our house for a quarter mile in any direction so if this structure was there, it's pretty odd that we didn't know about it. It is absolutely invisible above ground; there are no foundation stones or markings or anything that would seem to indicate a house or a building once stood there. It's located about twenty feet from the rainwater culvert. This room doesn't appear to be the basement of a house—why would there be two brick partitions in the center?

I am hoping that someone out there might know what this structure once was. Maybe cousin Pearl can shed some light on this. She used to live up the hill near St. Peter's Church before my family moved down to the big house at the corner. One idea is that this was an ice house because of the partitions and the pipes but where is the foundation for the building? It would have had to have been built much earlier than when we moved in in the 50s to be completely undetectible by seven avid child explorers.

Here you can see the pipe coming into the room at the center of the far wall.

This is all that is visible from above ground, just a hole in the rocks.

These are the ruins of one of the three houses that once stood at the top of the hill on St. Peters Road (also owned by Warner Co. and also torn down in the 60s). The culvert is the same one that runs past the mysterious ruins at the bottom of this hill next to Church Road. My cousin Pearl Beckner would have lived in one of these houses.

This is a shot of the barn that once stood on our property. It was taken from an old 8mm movie that my father shot (thus the fuzzy reception).

Here you can see the chimney of the Boy Scout cabin. You can clearly see the foundation stones around the perimeter.

This structure is the old bullpen on Church Road which would have marked the northern edge of our property. That's a black walnut tree to the left. My younger brother and I used to sit on the roof of the bullpen and throw walnuts at passing cars (no, we never got caught!). The drivers probably thought it was just a nut falling from the tree.

I've been much too remiss in keeping up with this blog. As spring unfolds in the garden, I am again amazed at the color and variety of nature's beauty.

Of course, I'm also amazed at the destructive antics of the squirrels (tree rats). They came through the other day and bit the flower heads off nearly every tulip in the garden. I guess they thought it wasn't enough to dig up the bulbs through the winter; now they have to ruin the blooms of the ones that are fortunate enough to survive until spring. I would like to catch the person who is feeding these nasty little beasts peanuts and roast them over a very slow fire. Speaking of roasting over a slow fire, I remember my mother telling me stories of the Depression and how Grandpop Sheetz used to bring home whatever he could catch for the family to eat. She said squirrels were quite tasty, not unlike rabbit.

Hmmm... Now there's an idea I could live with.