Across the country Wednesday morning people woke up to face the unexpected. It’s fair to say that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters alike were dealing with shock.
It seems all along there was a “silent vote” for the former reality TV star that gave him the edge he needed to beat Clinton. Pollsters were not aware. Political pundits were not aware. The best research a campaign could buy could not identify the hidden resentment harbored by thousands who were not visible among the raucous Trump base.
So on the morning after the election as people turned on their radios and TVs and opened their newspapers, they were reminded that the United States is not the country they might have thought it was. For millions of Americans it was a terrifying wake up call.read more
While waiting for coffee recently, I became fixated on a mentally ill homeless man. He lay on his side in the shuttered entrance to what last was a Walgreens at East Avenue and the Esplanade. Every few seconds, the old, bearded, agitated man would flail his arms toward someone or something that was tormenting him but wasn’t really there. His situation – common across our country – struck me as just so sad and seemingly hopeless.
Yesterday, upon my return for coffee, I noticed that some sort of contraption covered by a blue tarp had taken the man’s place in the entrance. Attached to that tarp was a message, hand-lettered in pencil with more anger than planning: “Stay the Fuck out or else Little Bitches.”
When I look at that sign – and think about its message and its author – I see the face of an angry someone at a Trump rally.
But, really, the meanness of the message is not so different from that sent by the majority of the Chico City Council over the past couple of years: Roust the homeless out of sight; they’re bad for business.
Recently, a noted housing-first advocate from Utah spoke to a packed community meeting at Bidwell Presbyterian Church about solutions to the chronic problem of homelessness. The presentation was attended by council liberals Tami Ritter, Ann Schwab and Randall Stone — all of whom are seeking re-election today, as is conservative Vice Mayor Sean Morgan.
It was telling that none of the council’s four conservatives – Morgan, Mayor Mark Sorensen, Reanette Fillmer or Andrew Coolidge – cared enough to attend that homelessness meeting. Fillmer, who has publicly expressed insensitivity toward homeless in the past, later wrote a letter excusing herself for being MIA that the Chico Enterprise-Record dutifully published. The letter was nonsensical, just like everything else I’ve read written by Fillmer.
Today’s Election Day, and I just want to say that those we elect to our Chico City Council make a difference in how we as a community treat the least fortunate among us.
This commentary was penned by ChicoSol News Director Dave Waddell.
“Are you Hispanic?” isn’t supposed to be a tough question. Yet every time I meet it while completing a census form or medical history, my pencil hovers between “Yes” and “No” and my eyes search for the most accurate answer, which is never there: “Sort of.”
I’m one of the millions of Americans who occasionally change their ethnic designation. It’s complicated. My mother’s father emigrated with his family from Mazatlán, Mexico, when he was in his teens. He married my grandmother — not Hispanic — in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, and they had two daughters. My grandfather’s family was big, noisy, and still firmly tied to the Mexican state of Sinaloa. When my curly-haired Aunt Gloria was a little girl, the family took her there at festival time and dressed her as an adorable señorita. My mother and Gloria grew up in southern California in the 1940s and ’50s with a Spanish surname and were sometimes told, in those racist “good old days,” that they were “not like the other Mexican girls — you’re clean.” How could that history not be a part of our heritage?read more
Do tax cuts for the wealthy create new jobs? In fact, the exact opposite is true, and well illustrated in recent history.
Raising tax rates for the wealthy creates new jobs.
Why? When rates are raised, the value of a tax deduction is increased in real terms. Hiring a new employee or buying a new piece of equipment is a new business expense. At higher tax rates, the wealthy, and businesses small and large, look to offset taxable profits.
When rates are low, there may be little incentive to hire or replace older equipment because taxes are not perceived as a burden. When rates are high, those same increased expenditures provide a bigger economic benefit through tax savings, thereby creating an additional incentive to spend. High tax rates provide an incentive for expansion, in order to shelter profits from taxes. Higher rates provide an added benefit for risk-taking.
When I graduated high school in 1963, the individual tax rate on married couples was 75 percent on income over $100,000. It was 91 percent on income over $400,000. This was during the Kennedy/Johnson administration.
When I graduated college in 1969 the rates had declined only very modestly to 70 percent on joint incomes over $200,000. This was the beginning of the Nixon Administration. These rates remained relatively unchanged for the following 12 years, through 1981, including the Ford and Carter administrations. The Reagan years followed, lowering individual tax rates throughout his eight years in office.
Looking at the issue historically, how did the extremely high rates of the 1960s through 1981 affect job growth?
In the eight years of the Kennedy/Johnson era, job growth averaged 3.25 percent annually.
In the eight years of the Nixon/Ford era, job growth averaged 2 percent annually.
The four Carter years again provided 3.2 percent annual job growth.
Then came the reduced tax rates of the eight-year Reagan Administration term. Job growth averaged 2.1 percent.
Two Bush presidencies sandwiched the Clinton administration. The combined 12 years of the low tax rate of the Bush presidencies showed the lowest job growth in modern times. Annual rates of job creation averaged less than one-fourth of 1 percent, while the highest individual rates were dropped to 35 percent.
In between the two Bushes, the Clinton Administration raised tax rates on the wealthiest Americans.
The eight Clinton years showed average job growth rebounding to 2.5 percent, a dramatic difference from the lower tax rates of both Bush administrations.
How did the economy thrive during periods of seemingly confiscatory tax rates? It seems likely that the wealthy did not actually pay those rates. With rates that high, individuals and small businesses scrambled to avoid paying those rates by reducing income and profits. Increased tax deductions and business expenses were used to reduce taxable income. Hiring additional employees, buying new equipment — expanding — caused reduced tax liabilities.
When rates are low, the wealthy seek to maximize income. It is good tax planning to report (“bunch”) high income in low tax years. Expansion years are not normally high income years. It takes time for investment in plant, equipment, new employee hiring and training to pay off in higher earnings. Therefore, low tax rates invite complacent, non-risk taking behavior. Raising rates provides the incentive to take action to shield profits from these new higher rates.
The historical record clearly does not support the claim from The Right that, “lowering taxes on the wealthy, creates job growth.” But the truth of the matter is that the exact opposite is the case. It does make sense that The Right would not want to disclose this economic reality.
R. G. Rich is a retired IRS agent living in Tucson, Ariz. He can be contacted at richsqrd@gmail.com
Gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown
by Dave Waddell
Given the nauseating, demoralizing politics that overshadow the complex family issues of illegal immigration, I was heartened to read of the Obama administration’s intentionally laissez-faire treatment of students who were brought to the United States unlawfully as children.
To me, the best way to counter the demonization of all illegal immigrants, including these students, is to put a human face to their plight. So I’d like you to meet “Alicia,” my student.
I put quotation marks around the name because it is an alias. I would prefer to use her real name, but she fears being identified, despite the fact that students like her are increasingly stepping up and speaking out. Alicia was conditioned by her family to not “rock the boat.” That’s understandable when a wrong move could result in detention and deportation.
Alicia is a private person, so I’ve learned only in bits and pieces of her origins in Mexico. Alicia’s father died before she was even a year old, and her mother, who is also deceased, left Alicia in the care of her grandmother at an early age. Even though she lived in Tijuana, Alicia began attending California schools in kindergarten.
When the grandmother became too sickly to care for Alicia, she asked Alicia’s uncle, who is a U.S. citizen, and his wife, who is not a U.S. citizen, to raise her. They relocated Alicia to be with them in the San Diego area, which I assume was the best–if not only–option for the family.
After high school, Alicia went on to become an honor student at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, where she was editor of its nationally-acclaimed student newspaper, The Sun. I recruited Alicia to attend California State University, Chico, some 600 miles from her home. Today, she is one of the top students in our journalism program and an editor for The Orion student newspaper.
One sound bite that I’ve heard from those who would want to send Alicia south across the border goes like this: “What is it about the word illegal that you don’t understand?” In contrast to the Obama Administration, which has the basic common sense to differentiate between students and the criminal elements that it has, in fact, aggressively deported, this sort of rhetoric seeks to portray all undocumented residents as out of the same mold.
Well, they’re not. It was not Alicia’s idea to sneak into the country to take dirty, low-paying jobs away from Americans. She was only about 7 years old when family members brought her to this country to live. She had no choice in the matter.
The politicians who rail against illegal immigrants tend to be the same folks who promote their narrow type of “family values.” Is there a family value of more importance than the willingness of Alicia’s aunt and uncle to care for their orphaned niece, despite their own very modest circumstances? The reality is that Alicia has nothing and no one to go back to in Mexico.
While I tend to be cynical when it comes to politicians of all stripes, it does matter who we elect to high office to the Alicias of our nation—and there more than 700,000 undocumented students in the U.S., according to the New York Times. Would a McCain-Palin administration have decided against deporting undocumented students who arrived in the U.S. as children? I don’t know, but I’m fairly sure that any government initiative to deport them would tear this country apart.
It’s certainly not my purpose here to tout the California gubernatorial candidacy of Democrat Jerry Brown, who has been missing in action on the immigration issue and whose website is still spinelessly silent on the subject. However, this much I know: His mega-rich Republican opponent, Meg Whitman, would bar Alicia and every other undocumented student from admission to all public institutions of higher education in California, a position Brown has been quoted as calling “horrible.”
I know this is Whitman’s position because it’s on her campaign website, while she is simultaneously trying to cozy up to the Hispanic community whose votes she will most likely need to win election. It’s little wonder that I’m politically cynical and that Alicia does not want her real name printed here.
It’s worth noting that Alicia has been married to a U.S. citizen since 2006. In Chico, they live in an apartment they share with other college students. Money is tight because higher education is expensive, and Alicia receives no financial support from her family and is not eligible for student loans. Her husband, who has only a GED, works two part-time jobs to support them. He also has been taking community college classes with the hope of enlisting in the Navy after he’s accumulated a certain number of credits.
One might think that being married to a U.S. citizen who has served in the nation’s armed services would eventually bolster Alicia’s chances of gaining citizenship, but that is by no means a certainty, according to an immigration attorney that I have consulted. So her future is very much in the hands of the politicians that we elect.
As her teacher, I can see that Alicia has much to contribute to our society—yours, mine, and, yes, hers. But it will be impossible to be all she can be when she can’t even obtain a driver’s license or board an airplane. The thought of her having to spend the rest of her days unable to gain legal employment while cloistered in society’s shadows is a very disturbing one to me.
Yes, as a child, she was brought to this country illegally, but she has stayed out of trouble here and worked extremely hard to be an excellent student and to become a professional journalist. In this great nation of immigrants, providing Alicia and others like her with a path to citizenship seems like nothing more than the American way.
Dave Waddell teaches journalism and is faculty adviser to The Orion at California State University, Chico. Respond to this column by writing to chicosol@sbcglobal.net and let us know if we can publish your comments
Chico writer Alexa Valavanis wrote the following column in response to the Aug. 4, 2010 ruling by a federal judge overturning California’s gay-marriage ban.
by Alexa Valavanis
Judge Vaughn Walker doesn’t know my name. I’ve never written him a letter or rang his smart phone. We’re not colleagues or acquaintances or even Facebook “friends.” In fact, there’s a strong possibility the judge and I would defy the theory of “six degrees of separation.”
Which is a long way of saying the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in California, nominated by George H.W. Bush, doesn’t know anything about me. He doesn’t know I value my family and faith above all else. He doesn’t know how deeply I cherish being an American and the individual rights and freedoms both of my grandfathers fought for.
If Judge Vaughn Walker doesn’t know those things, he couldn’t possibly know I would be a loving wife and mother. The kind of wife who will listen and be patient. The kind of mom who will lift her children up to reach life’s joys or hold them close when life hurts. He couldn’t know I’ll teach my children to trust, to be generous and to see the good in things. Nor could he know I’ll do my best to love them unconditionally just as my mother and father have loved me. How could he know I’ll be the grandmother with warm cookies always waiting?
But Judge Walker doesn’t need to know about me. There is no reason for him to know my name. Nor do the thousands of people who have fought for marriage equality in the United States need to know it. They know something far more important — that the rights of American citizens are not determined by a majority vote. They know that under our state and federal constitutions citizens are equal regardless of our leaders, our majorities’ or our minorities’ preferences. Our internal and external differences do not dictate our civil rights in America, and they know that, too.
Today I want to make this pledge to Judge Walker and all those who have fought for marriage equality. I am not making it because they’ve asked or even want me to. It’s not because I think it is their business or anyone else’s business whom I love or create a family with. I make this pledge simply because it is the best way I can think of to say THANK YOU.
I pledge:
To be a loving and loyal wife.
To be a wonderful mother.
To be a kind grandmother.
To value above all else my faith and my family.
History has shown us that this battle for equal rights will be won. However painful, however long, there will be a time when being gay or straight no longer has a bearing on the state and federal rights bestowed on American citizens.
If I am here to see that day I will crawl back into my mind to these darker times and remember the thousands of gay and straight people, of every color and faith and political view, who fought to ensure that in our great nation, separate would never again be considered equal.
I will pull the hot chocolate-chip cookies out of the oven and share with my grandchildren a story about an America that didn’t always get it right at first, but did not stop until it was so.
Then, I will tell them Judge Vaughn Walker’s name and make them promise to remember.
Alexa Valavanis is CEO and President of North Valley Community Foundation and the author of the popular book Sipping Tea with Buddha and Christ. She is a mother and wife who lives on a small Northern California ranch with goats, chickens, a pair of cats and a dog.
