Dear Yuk
You know your Runyard Kipling’s poem a has some good advice. (Dismiss the gender limiting last line — Kipling was not the last of the white male imperialists.)
IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!
Keep the common touch here, and keep a laser like focus on promoting postive policy change for your constituency, including possibly earmarking casino proceeds to your programs.
The casino debate will be sucking the air out of the State House, but maybe it will also serve to illustrate and illuminate the need for a broader publc debate about all of the revenue streams that fund the governments public programs and infrastructures — from income taxes to fishing fees to gambling. Been a lot of tax cuts in Massachusetts over the last 15 years or so. And a lot of programs have been slashed because of a shrinking reveues.
Is it time to look at the big picture?
That is an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote – no liberal, but a man who went to war and came home determined to have a society ruled by law.
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Casinos are not a panacea, and no replacement for using taxation for income shifting, and to ensure a sound infrastructure.
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I hear houses that sell for more than a million dollars are still selling briskly – that is because it is the millionaires who actually benefit from tax cuts.
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It is not the millionaires who will throw their millions into the Money Pits a/k/a casinos.
Former State Rep Frank Jakubowitz has an interesting observation in a letter to the Globe
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The elephant that’s not in the room: taxes
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September 20, 2007
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THE FEAR of raising taxes to adequately fund necessary government services is the reason that American politicians like Governor Deval Patrick succumb to the temptation of legalized gambling as a revenue source.
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The public, according to the earliest recorded historical text, had come to detest taxes and tax collectors because of the greed of the rulers and collectors. This hatred is even reflected in the Bible. Over the years, it took a lot of time, effort, and persuasion by political leaders to get the public to tolerate taxes as the main means of continuing to provide adequate revenue to fund the public services people demand in return. But conservative Republicans in the 1980s began to play on the historical hatred of taxes with their mantra of “tax and spend” Democrats, and the public lost its tolerance of increased taxes to meet increased costs.
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If people demand a continuation of the services they are accustomed to, then they should tolerate their government paying for such services the old-fashioned way, by imposing adequate taxes, rather than through other sources of revenue such as gambling.
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FRANK JAKUBOWICZ
Pittsfield
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The writer is a former state representative.
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Now. Let us discuss if people do INDEED demand a continuation of these services which a benevolant Legislature has wished upon us during the course of time.
My 25 years of lobbying experience taught me that while most elected and appointed public officials, including legislators enter public office with their own action agenda, they very quickly find themselves spending most of their time responding to demands to change a public policy from others -the administration, their constitutents, organized special interest groups with paid or volunteer lobbyists, their political supporters, their familiy members and heaven forbid, their mother. No public official can wish anything on us ……….somebody has to have organized and mobilized a smart savyy lobbying campaign.
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That’s what civic engagement is all about………