One week ago yesterday, I was exiting the parking ramp at 7th and Grand Ave. in Des Moines at 7 a.m. Having parked free all weekend, I wanted to get out before I raked up any parking fees. As I approached the exit, I noticed the gate down and the attendant booth empty.
As I pulled to a stop, I scanned the messages and buttons across the self-serve terminal. Nothing fit except the “Press for assistance” button. So I did.
I immediately heard a dial tone and dialing. Moments later, I was talking to a nameless voice in an office who knows where. I explained my situation and he replied, “OK, I’ll let you out.” After listening to keys punching, I saw the arm rise and exited. Last time I’d used this parking ramp, an attendant had been present to answer my questions and let me through the gate.
This incident brought to mind a response I received to my column about living wages for workers. The reader stated wages reflect the value of the work and claimed the minimum wage drove small businesses to close their doors. His example was the loss of full service gas stations.
I found it a strange coincidence that when I shared this reader’s views the next day with a friend from Clarinda, she retorted, “It wasn’t the minimum wage. It was Casey’s. People decided they wanted soda and cigarettes instead of service.”
She came to her conclusion via the experience of her father and grandfather who owned several service stations in southwest Iowa during the period we went from full to self service gas stations.
Which leads me to ask, who sets our priorities? Did we really decide we wanted to pump our own gas or did someone else decide there was more profit in selling soda and cigarettes? Did the parking company decide they could increase profits with fewer employees? Because I know from my days as a corporate manager and school board director, people (employees) are usually one of the biggest expenses.
But I think maybe we are hitting the law of diminishing returns. If we don’t employ people to work, people will not have money to purchase goods and services.
Unfortunately, Americans have come to see business as the economy, rather than as one sector. Healthy economies also have healthy government, military, non-profit and religious sectors. But we’ve been led to believe business drives everything.
Likewise, we’ve been taught to believe government has a spending problem; in fact, that government IS our problem. But as a recent Facebook infographic of the lastest collapsed bridge notes, “We DON’T have a spending problem. We DO have a priorities problem.”
So maybe we should ask who is setting those priorities. Are we citizens demanding fair wages and government policies to benefit people? Or are we allowing someone else to call the shots? Because as my husband once said to me, “Cherie, I can’t read your mind.”
What we do matters. We can choose to shop locally at stores that employ people to bag our groceries and at farmers markets with products from local growers. We can read news from many sources instead of listening to or watching only our favorite talking heads. We can vote. We can contact our government representatives – local, state and federal – about matters that concern us. If our church and other organizations are important to us, we can support them with our time and money. If we believe workers should be treated fairly, we can join a union.
Simply put, we can act. So, what are you doing to help set our priorities?
Friday, June 21, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
IRS: More than Boy Who Cried Wolf?
Amidst all the end-of-school and family activity we’ve had this past month, I’ve been following the IRS “scandal” with interest. I can’t help thinking Tea Party conservatives are a lot like the boy who cried wolf.
“Why?” you may ask if you’re outraged the Internal Revenue Service would investigate new conservative non-profit social welfare agencies.
Call me skeptical, but knowing how often groups and individuals massage their tax reporting to minimize payments, I suspect some of these groups have overstepped the boundaries.
Second, and more importantly, IRS staff was wrestling with new, unclear regulations for social welfare non-profits in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling without enough guidance. This ruling allowed corporations and organizations, including non-profits, to engage in electioneering communications. Unfortunately, cuts to the IRS, like other federal agencies, have made proper management and enforcement difficult. (This is part of our current “all cuts, no spending” Congress. I can only chuckle at the irony of our government officials cutting the one agency responsible for bringing revenue into the government. But I digress . . .)
Conservative groups brought the Citizens United lawsuit, so we shouldn’t be surprised that most of the groups under IRS scrutiny were conservative. Robert Maguire on OpenSecrets.org writes: “Of the 21 organizations that received rulings from the IRS after January 1, 2010, and filed FEC reports in 2010 or 2012, 13 were conservative. They outspent the liberal groups in that category by a factor of nearly 34-to-1, the Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows.” I think the media, as they often do, jumped the gun on this story and missed that fact.
So in an update to the story, the New York Times reported on May 26: “But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former I.R.S. officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.
“Money is not the only thing that matters,” said Donald B. Tobin, a former lawyer with the Justice Department’s tax division who is a law professor at Ohio State University. “While some of the I.R.S. questions may have been overbroad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked.”
And in another irony noted by Salon Magazine Editor at Large Joan Walsh, “We knew from the beginning of the IRS mess that the only group actually denied tax-exempt status was the Maine chapter of a Democratic women’s group, Emerge America.”
As Walsh concluded: “The IRS mess is coming to look more like the Benghazi ‘scandal’: a diversion from the genuine policy questions at issue, concocted to embarrass the president.”
I suspect if enough scrutiny is placed on the conservative groups crying wolf about IRS overreach, we may come to find out they are actually the ones breaking the law. And like the boy who cried wolf, they may have outsmarted themselves.
“Why?” you may ask if you’re outraged the Internal Revenue Service would investigate new conservative non-profit social welfare agencies.
Call me skeptical, but knowing how often groups and individuals massage their tax reporting to minimize payments, I suspect some of these groups have overstepped the boundaries.
Second, and more importantly, IRS staff was wrestling with new, unclear regulations for social welfare non-profits in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling without enough guidance. This ruling allowed corporations and organizations, including non-profits, to engage in electioneering communications. Unfortunately, cuts to the IRS, like other federal agencies, have made proper management and enforcement difficult. (This is part of our current “all cuts, no spending” Congress. I can only chuckle at the irony of our government officials cutting the one agency responsible for bringing revenue into the government. But I digress . . .)
Conservative groups brought the Citizens United lawsuit, so we shouldn’t be surprised that most of the groups under IRS scrutiny were conservative. Robert Maguire on OpenSecrets.org writes: “Of the 21 organizations that received rulings from the IRS after January 1, 2010, and filed FEC reports in 2010 or 2012, 13 were conservative. They outspent the liberal groups in that category by a factor of nearly 34-to-1, the Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows.” I think the media, as they often do, jumped the gun on this story and missed that fact.
So in an update to the story, the New York Times reported on May 26: “But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former I.R.S. officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.
“Money is not the only thing that matters,” said Donald B. Tobin, a former lawyer with the Justice Department’s tax division who is a law professor at Ohio State University. “While some of the I.R.S. questions may have been overbroad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked.”
And in another irony noted by Salon Magazine Editor at Large Joan Walsh, “We knew from the beginning of the IRS mess that the only group actually denied tax-exempt status was the Maine chapter of a Democratic women’s group, Emerge America.”
As Walsh concluded: “The IRS mess is coming to look more like the Benghazi ‘scandal’: a diversion from the genuine policy questions at issue, concocted to embarrass the president.”
I suspect if enough scrutiny is placed on the conservative groups crying wolf about IRS overreach, we may come to find out they are actually the ones breaking the law. And like the boy who cried wolf, they may have outsmarted themselves.
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