Most Came Home

 Veteran's Day 2021 Remembrance

(or, WHY I HAVE A SNOTTY BABY SISTER) 

 (Originally “Most Came Home” published in The Brazil Times November 11, 2009) 

  

Veteran’s Day is set aside to give due honor to those men and woman who faithfully served in the United States military, did their duty, and then came home. 

My father, Warrant Office Philip H Lewis, came home.  There was only one “i” in Philip, not two.  He was insistent on that after he came home. 

 

Philip H Lewis was not a warrior.  Although not belonging to any religions group which would have made him a legal pacifist, he did not want to go war because he did not want to kill.  Being a little older and having two children, he was not sent a draft notice until the third year of WWII.  He and my mother had something of a code worked out.  She called him at work one day and told him he had received a letter in the mail (she didn’t say what or from whom).  He went out and enlisted in the Merchant Marine.  Only many years after his death was the service of these in harms way sailors recognized. 

 

My mother told the family “war story” many times.   

 

Daddy was sent to Boston for training as a radio specialist (to his dying day he was a Morse code expert).  Orders came for him to go to San Francisco and report to a certain ship [that’s how the military works – if he’d been in Frisco they would have sent him to Boston]. 

 

In those days everyone went by train.  The hubs were Chicago and St. Louis; all passengers had to go though one or the other.  Philip Lewis had orders and tickets to transfer trains in Chicago.  We lived in St. Louis.  He got someone (maybe God knows who) to swap tickets with him so he could stop over in St. Louis. 

 

As mother told the story, because of that stop-over daddy was just a little late getting to California.  Wars and ships wait for no man, and another Radio Officer with almost exactly the same name took the ship my dad was scheduled to take. 

 

He came home and like most of “the greatest generation” went to work every day, did his best to love his family and rear we three children to honor God and country.  He did this through years of bearing with unbearable pain, suffering at the hands of many physicians, and dying young of heart problems easily detected and treated today. 

. 

In the process of coming home Philip H Lewis instilled whatever little good there is in me.  My father was the greatest single influence in my life.  Anything I may have actually done right in rearing our five children is due to my wanting to be like him.   

 

After the war somehow my parents learned the ship my father would have taken went down in the Pacific with loss of all hands.  In the goodness of divine Providence and military red tape I owe my being to a veteran whom I would never know.  Lewis H Phillip did not come home. 

Tax Triade

 

theDaddy’s Taxes Tirade!!!

CAVEAT: Much of the following tirade combines thoughts and writings previously expressed in one form or another. And, yes, I do have some new observations at the end. No, no one will be quoting anything I say 50 years hence. As with observations which preceded, no one will pay any attention whatsoever. Not worried, though. Being a mere man who writes to find out what I’m thinking, I am used to both being listened to when wrong and ignored when right.

WINE & ROSES

“A Billion here, a Billion there, after a while you’re talking about real money.”

The Good Life

Me and Kay have a fairly good life in a town with the unlikely name Brazil, in Clay County Indiana USA. There probably are those who appreciate living here as much as I. But, it is unlikely anyone appreciates it more. Maybe that’s because I spent so much of my life in an impersonal big city, while most folks here had the advantage of always calling this home and may be unaware of said advantage. Overall I kinda like the country (and the county) in which we live and think the price imposed by taxes seems something of a bargain. A bargain enhanced by monthly checks from Social Security and medical bills paid by Medicare, and by not making enough money to be taxed since retiring.

At No Cost To Us

Of course we’re not the only ones to live the good life courtesy the largesse of America. I mean, there seems to be no limit to how much our government spends on welfare of we the people.

In last year alone we’ve also benefited from:

• Every person breathing – and few who weren’t – got $2,000 to spend on anything their little black hearts desired.

• Over 250-million virus vaccinations were produced, distributed, administered, and paid for.

In the coming year our kids and grandkids can look forward to promised:

• Payment of childcare expenses so our woman folk can stop worrying about being mothers 24/7 and get back to bringing home some money.$300 per month free money just for having a kid. Money which can be spent at will on “cigarettes, whiskey, and wild wild women”. Wish we still had some kids at home so I could get me some….never mind.

All at no cost to us. Is America a great country, or what?

NOBLESSE OBLIGE?

“Taxes are the price you pay to live in a civilized society.”

Paying The Piper

Would you believe spending money leads to needing more money? Who knew? If you’re a government there are three tried-n-true need-money options: Stop spending so much money, raise income by raising taxes, or borrow some more money and let your grandkids worry about paying it back.

• Cutting expense has been advocated by every presidential candidate since Richard Nixon. None have cut federal expenditure. All left increased spending in their wake.

• The Republicans never want to raise taxes because rich folk are their main supporters. Democrats, on the other hand have no rich donors to placate, just don’t want their voters taxed. Neither Party, though, is anxious to be identified with this need-money solution.

• Borrowing is always easiest thing to do. It’s not really money [see previous tirade on Fairydust Funds]. And, it can be hidden until some future generation must cut their expense and/or raise their taxes!

Now or tomorrow or some distant moon, however, every government goes back to raising taxes. I like the idea of somehow taxing the grandkids – so I won’t have to listen to our kids gripe about paying taxes.

Have I Got This Right?

Let me see if I’ve got this modern taxation thing right. The government prints the money. They do this very well and frown on anyone else doing it. We have to use their currency which they issue to us, even though its value consists solely in how well we trust the issuer. Then, every time money passes from one hand to the next for “value received” the government wants back some of the money which they themselves printed. For example, if the kid who cuts your grass earns more than $400 in any calendar year, the government wants back part of the money it printed. If they don’t get it, the kid goes to fed’s Pen at Leavenworth Kansas. Have we got this correct so far?

Can’t Take It With You

In The Shawshank Redemption actor Morgan Freeman’s character says, “I don’t have to do anything but stay black and die.” He forgot to mention taxes. As Benjamin Franklin somewhat more succinctly put it, “… in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Of course while it is still appointed unto man once to die, you actually don’t have to pay taxes. They say Kansas is lovely in the spring when grass needs cutting, anyhow.

Whose Idea Was This?

As I understand history, taxes began as simply the stronger taking from the weaker. Thus a weaker merchant traveling across some stronger person’s territory would be subject to having all his goods taken. The problem which soon developed was that if you take all a person has with which to earn his living, that person will not return later due to having been put out of business. Once the goods of the merchant were consumed there would be nothing left to the stronger to live on, making him weaker. Thus began the system which we call “taxation.” The idea of taxes being to extort just enough to leave the poor saps an incentive to make more money and come back next year. From the earner’s perspective if it took less to pay the “toll” than move to another land, the merchant would simply pay the extortion and go about his business.

Enter The ‘Bean Counters’

Somewhere lost in history this extortion developed into government sanctioned taxation. Naturally, with government intervention came exact formulas for determining how much could be extorted to maintain the stronger while keeping the weaker coming back. However, this formula was deliberately kept decipherable only by the bureaucrat who had developed their own systems for taking from the weak. The merchant’s goal, of course, became to so deceive the tax collector as to pay the least possible tax. Soon enough it came to be the more one spent on tax experts (who learned how to hide beans) the less one actually paid in tax.

Gobbledygook

For practical purposes current tax laws all derive from the original provisions of Revenue Code of 1954 (as revised). In those days the country assumed as ‘given truth’ it was in nation’s best interest for a man and woman to marry and she quit working full-time in order to raise kids. This was rewarded in the Tax Code [and, as it turns out, punished the woman for working full-time]. If her husband died there was provision for widow to find a new man, she had two years. Also, we old folk were rewarded for getting old and voting Republican. Punished by the Code were those who remained single, or who tried to file without their ‘spouse’. Unfortunately, in making tax laws on those basic assumptions Congress failed to repeal the “Law of Unintended Consequences” and/or anticipate the vicissitudes of politics.

In America we perpetuate the ancient traditions of prestidigitation by electing representatives to travel to Washington. There they can go to great lengths to insure tax regulations are re-complicated on a regular basis. This guarantees none of the weaker (that is, poorer) among us will ever really understand why some specific amount is to be extorted (paid). The Republicans make changes which affect the rich, the Democrats those which may effect the poor. Henry Bloch, founder of H & R Block, once said something to the effect that H& R would be out of business in five years if Congress stopped changing the tax laws. Can’t wait to see what will happen next.

In case you don’t remember 1954 (I was 11), the world has changed while Congress was ‘busy doing other things’. Sticking to 1954 ‘givens’ as their base so many changes have been made it takes a super computer to track to how to pay taxes. And so, as the lady said, here we are.

In 10,000 years of human history nobody has come up with a better system. I for one am open to suggestions.

SWEEP BACK TIDE WITH BROOM!

“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible…"

According to 12^th century legend King Canute the Great proposed sweeping back the tide with a broom. One assumes his success would be the same if he attempted to sweep back the IRS. As promised, here are the inane ideas of one mere man as to what he’d do if there is ever an opening for a tax law sweeper-backer.

In interest of full disclosure, none of this has been researched, real life numbers have not been run, and I am totally unprepared and/or unwilling to defend anything herein:

Suggestion #1

No corporate tax. Rather, all corporations would be ‘pass through’ entries whose profits or loss would pass direct to shareholder. That is, if my one share of Bluwraps Unlimited earns $100 for year, I include $100 as income for year – whether I got the 100 bucks or not. There would be no ‘tax credits’ – ‘phantom deductions’ – or other loopholes.

Suggestion #2

A true “Flat Tax” on personal income: ‘Here’s what I got, here’s your tribute (I mean taxes)’. No deductions, no credits, no rebates. Hey, after all, it’s all just fairydust money the government printed.

Suggestion #3

This true “Flat Tax” would be the only tax. That is, eliminate sales tax, property tax, etc. and the bureaucracies needed to construct regulations for collecting them.

King Canute I’m Not

If you should quite naively think any of these suggestions might ever be considered by any politician with ability to do anything about it, see opening caveat.

Just a tirade for some future generation...

Most Dangerous Words

Are These the

Most Dangerous Words

Ever Spoken?

On April 2, 1919 then President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed America must enter World War I because, 

“The world must be made safe for democracy”.

Those words would change the world, because they changed America.

After 20-years of expenditure of men, materials, and very much money, President Joe Biden announced final withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. Thus ends one of a long line of American ‘interventions’. They say this ‘Afghan war’ thing began in 2001. It did not. It began in 1919.

One-hundred years and now seventeen Presidents later, Wilson’s mantra morphed into something like “Make every other country a democracy just like ours – whether they need it or not”. Not even God knows how many have died from wars entered in a quest to enforce this mantra on the world.

Whatever you or I may think of other forms of government around the world, is it really somehow our obligation to enforce ‘democracy’ on them because Wilson said it would make us “safe”? If it is our obligation, at what cost and enforced on whom?

In Afghanistan the British, then the Russians, then America tried to end the fighting and create ‘democracy’ in a Muslim land. Could democracy even be inflicted on a land where religion is everything, its priests supreme, with a 2,000 year history of killing each other? A lot of people tried, a lot of people died.

In this want-a-be historian’s observation, if the Army of the United States of America stood guard for another thousand years, when the last soldier left Afghanistan’s people would go back to killing each other for reasons long lost.

“The world must be made safe for democracy.” Are these the most dangerous words ever spoken? Is there one testimony of history showing more wars or deaths or money will solve anything?

Just asking for some future generation

Harry & Game of Life

HARRY and

the Game of Life

From 1945 to 1969 Harry Caray was play-by-play guy on KMOX Radio for the St Louis Cardinals baseball team. Those broadcasts reached millions who would never see major league baseball games in person. In 1953 ‘loser’ Browns left St Louis and the Cardinals took over as only home team. From then on, at least for we growing up in 1950’s learning baseball from him, Harry Caray was baseball.

Harry had two catch-phrases everyone waited for him to shout: “Holy Cow!” and “It might be, it could be, it is!” Mostly this meant something good was happening for the home team. But, Harry needed very thick glasses and in the days before he could watch play on TV monitors sometimes the ‘it might be’ was a fly-ball out to left-fielder.

Harry’s positive sound every Spring filled us with belief this would be The Year! He made us forget Cardinals were a fifth place team composed of Stan ‘the Man’ Musial and 23 other guys. Because we had Harry for our cheerleader we could ignore they’d lose as many as they’d win!

Met him once when driving cab in St Louis. If you had even once heard his voice you would have known who it was in the back seat without looking. I thanked him for all those springs when the sound of his voice gave us hope of a new season, of a new opportunity, of a new beginning.

His greatest contribution, though, may have gone unnoticed. Harry, Gabby Street before him, and Jack Buck who followed taught true team supporters how to appreciate and respond to the competition of sport and of life.

• You cheered for your guys, even when they failed seven times out of ten. You booed bad behavior by any man without regard to team loyalty, cheered valor found in any man on the field of play.

• Because it was a ‘family game’ true fans did not throw stuff, nor start fights, nor use language inappropriate for women and children (well, not often, anyhow).

• It was okay to ‘hate’ them; but the other team was the competition, not the enemy. You respected them as men just as you would your own team members. Sometimes they won because they just played the game better. Okay, yeah, some of them might have thrown an occasional spitball, so there’s that.

• When the umpire makes his final call, the last appeal adjudged, it is accepted. Arguing, denying, does not change the outcome. There would always be another competition, another chance to prove our team the better.

• The game wasn’t over until it was over; but, when it was over you accept the results. The final score was kept by ‘honest brokers’ who kept an honest count.

On January 20 2021 a new home team with its new man and new promises took over in the city of Washington. Promises, this time, of a pennant, of new dreams, of new wins with few if any losses. This time it would be spring again. This time it would be different. This time it would be better than before.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve grown old and too jaded by years of watching the home team have as many losses as wins; too wearied by too many lessons left unlearned, or ignored. Somehow it doesn't feel like the spring of my youth. Where’s Harry Caray when we need him?