A Free Man

“I said, ‘I like Fidel Castro,
I think you heard me right,’
And ducked as he swung
At me with all his might.”

Z, at just shy of a year old, got in his first fight at day care yesterday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t because he was espousing his Dad’s (and Bob Dylan’s) socialist  notions. Nor was it because he’s taken to wearing girls’ sunglasses (thanks Arizaphale). Nope, he tried to steal some kid’s dummy (pacifier) and the kid responded, impressively, by going for Z’s eyes with his/her claws. I haven’t seen the other kid, but based on the scratch marks, I’m guessing Z came out second best. I’ve got no idea what’s going on in that day care, seems to be filled with battling feral children.

——————-

Z’s birthday is in just over a week, and we’re planning the party. First birthday parties are, in my limited experience, only tangentially about the birthday boys or girls. For me, it’s a celebration of my success in avoiding major catastrophe whilst in charge of another human being for 365 days. That, my friends, is something to celebrate.

You’re all invited, by the way. Nichole looked online and found that she and the family could get down to Adelaide on short notice for $34,000 (U.S.). So, I’m looking forward to seeing her and Alex again. Don’t worry about a present, Nichole. Can’t think of a reason that the rest of you won’t be there as well.

Speaking of presents, Z’s gotten his first birthday gifts from his Grandparents in Florida and as with kids of his age, enjoyed the box as much or more than the contents. Among the contents, though was a great little piece of childhood memorabilia, a Tonka ambulance that has been playing the role of madeline for me since last night. It’s amazing how much you forget about childhood and how much can be brought back with a little bit of metal and plastic. You know what else is amazing - those old Tonka toys. Just indestructible, and Z’s giving it a good go.

—————

I took today off to spend with my son and I find that when I do that my brain goes a bit abstract and I start invoking Proust and shit. But among the partying that Z and I did today, we had to go and get another in the endless string of childhood vaccines. All the researching and posting and comment fielding that I’ve done about vaccinations and autism really got to me. Not because I had a slew of Luddites chiming nonsense and even some nut job compare me to Hitler. Nope, it was the thoughtful and valid points that people like April, NATUI and Joe and others made about the number of vaccines that kids are sometimes given at once. Since then, Dr. O’C and decided that Z would be fully vaccinated but that he would receive one jab at a time with a few weeks between jabs to let his immune system recover. Before you point it out, I recognize that we’ve made this decision in a very unscientific manner. But I’ve been parenting largely on instinct so far and, as I mentioned above, the boy’s still around. (One year, woo hoo!)

At any rate, the slightly thuggish nurse tasked with jabbing Boy Z tried to bully me into having the MMR and two other vax today as well. I told her no and explained my reasoning. I anticipated, and would have respected, an argument from Nurse Ratched based on the extra monetary burden on the health care system. One of the things about a socialized health care system is that you sometimes have to try to minimize costs and high maintenance parents demanding deviations from standard operating procedures cost money. That makes sense and if she had made this argument, I would have offered to pay the excess. But her case was that the kids get more upset with the more shots that they have to go through so its better to do them all at once. Bogus. Z barely whimpered with this one, which is about his 14th, and I doubt that he’ll be fazed by a few more. I’m always willing to stand on principle and Z will get his shots one at a time.

“As his fist hit the icebox,
He said he’s going to kill me
If I don’t get out the door
In two seconds flat,
You unpatriotic, rotten doctor commie rat…”

 

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There are still no sign of teeth, but just shy of a year old the boy’s taking to his feet. The days of lackadaisical parenting are near an end.

 

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Today, at long last, marks the beginning of the college football season in the U.S.* It also marks the day that this site makes the temporary transition from well reasoned and researched posts on parenting, music, politics and science to rabidly partisan support of the Number One college football team in the nation, the South’s Best University and my alma mater - the University of Georgia Bulldogs.

Georgia opens their season with the slightly less than whelming Georgia Southern Eagles. There’s not much analysis to be done for this game. The Eagles are a Div. I-AA team (or whatever that league is called now), have eight players suspended and are starting 37 or so freshman. It’s likely to be pretty much a cake walk for the Number 1 Georgia Bulldogs. Lest you think I’m being all cocky and jinx inducing - after all look what Appy State did to Michigan last year - Georgia Southern is no Appalachian State and Georgia is no Michigan. This one’s done. It will be a chance for Coach Mark Richt to see what he’s got and for the team to warm up for a championship run.

Kick off is 2 a.m. Sunday (Adelaide time), which means that I may sleep this one out and so, god willing, will Zach. Night games are going to work best for us this year, so let’s see what we can do about that, schedule folks.

But we’ll be with you in spirit. Go Dawgs!

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* Yes, I know that there were some games on Thursday, but those don’t count. Thursday night is for Junior High School football. Kind of like the Gamecocks.

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There is a gang of thugs that are wreaking havoc on the streets of my quiet South Australian suburb. For the third time this week, I’ve been accosted on my way to the bus stop by these hooligans for doing nothing more than walking down the sidewalk with a spring in my step. They’ve come charging across the street, hissing verbal threats, limbs raised aggressively with a glint of madness in their eyes. A couple of times I’ve had to sprint away lest I come to some physical harm by these ruffians.

Well, this morning was the last straw. Next time I’m going bring the boy’s baseball bat and batter those f*cking birds. We’ll have roast goose for dinner in the Free Man household.

—————

What? Sorry, did I not mention we were talking about geese? Geese can be very dangerous, you know. A goose can break a man’s arm with his beak. Or is that a swan?

The thing is, I’m a bird lover. Within the first month of living in Oz, before I even had a job, I bought a bird feeder to feed all the beautiful avian wildlife we’ve got around these parts. I love the bird songs in the morning, I even walk to the bus stop without my iPod plugged in to my ears so I can hear the birds. But these geese! It must look ridiculous to see a grown man running away from water chickens, but when they’re coming at you… You’d run too.   

The ironic thing is that these bastard geese were in the middle of the road a couple of weeks ago as I was driving home. I did the ‘humane’ thing and stopped and waited for the to waddle insolently across the street. They even stopped in front of the car and gave me a brazen look. I should have mowed the damn birds down.

———-

I read a blog post this week about researchers who had claimed that some birds can recognize human faces. I believe this to be true. I’ll go further and say that I believe birds can warn each other about the humans that they recognize. I believe that these avian thugs are retaliating for crimes visited on them by a member of my family - Timmins. The dog has kind of a history with local fauna, but he’s always left birds alone. This is primarily because they’re difficult to catch - the whole flying thing. However, in our temporary Happy Valley home, we have a back patio which is currently partially closed off for the winter with rolls of plastic sheeting. The dog spends more time outdoors in Oz because we finally have a yard that he can’t escape from and so his food and water bowls are kept outside. Birds are stupid, but not that stupid and have discovered that Timmins’ food bowl is a good source for a snack when the dog’s otherwise occupied. And even if the dog notices they can always fly away.

Except when they can’t. Except when they fail to notice the difference between transparent plastic and the lack therof and get stuck in what is essentially an elaborate, and unintended, bird trap. The carcasses are starting to add up, but to date have only been pigeons - the modern dodo. Don’t get me wrong, I do feel bad, but they are only pigeons.

Problem is, the birds don’t seem to see it this way and through the grapevine the word has spread about me and my homicidal dog. I’m pretty sure that the geese are the hit men of the bird world. And they recognize me. And they’re angry.

——————–

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Wow. I haven’t seen Obama deliver a full speech since the 2004 Convention and am glad that I took the time in the middle of the working day to watch MSNBC’s coverage of this one. How anyone could have watched this speech and not want this man to be our president is beyond me.

Here are some of my highlights:

“It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.”

“Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy. Michelle and I are only here tonight because we were given a chance at an education. And I will not settle for an America where some kids don’t have that chance.”

“Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility – that’s the essence of America’s promise.”

“We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans — Democrats and Republicans – have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.”

“But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s been about you.”

“That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours – a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.”

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Trying out some more Aussie slang today. Maybe one of my Antipodean readers can tell me if I’ve got it right.

I’ve always been a fairly cliched Gen X-er - sarcastic, cynical and suspicious of excessive earnestness. But nearly a year ago, with the arrival of Baby Z, the bulk of that sardonic skepticism got left on the delivery room floor. These days if you want to see me go all soft, see my eyes well up, see me get all gooey like baked brie, all you need to do is tell me a good evocative Dad story.

Like the one that I heard on a Radio 4 podcast this morning. A Ryanair flight (useless busses with wings) from Bristol to Barcelona lost cabin pressure at its cruising altitude. The oxygen masks deployed but did not dispense oxygen and neither the pilot nor crew made any announcement as to what was happening until they got down to a ’safe’ altitude of 8,000 feet. So the passengers on the plane were subjected to a few very frightening minutes during which they had no idea whether they were going to live or die.

One of the passengers was Pen Hadow - explorer, inspiration, environmental and motivational speaker and A Free Man’s new hero - was asked later by Radio 4 if he was frightened:

“Honestly, I don’t wish to sound sort of typically stiff upper lip about it, but for the first second or so I was sort of confused, it all happened so quickly. And then when I looked at my son’s face I knew what I had to do.”

———————–

This got to me as well, for the same softie Dad reason. If I was still uncertain about what to do on the upcoming election day, this might be enough to sway me.

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Well, I just got my e-mail from Barack*, we’re apparently on a first name basis, four hours after the story broke in the media. I’m thrilled to see Joe Biden join the ticket, absolutely thrilled. I know that he brings a bit of baggage with him and that, with 3o some odd years in the Senate, he dampens the Change® message. But Biden’s a terrier and right now Obama needs a terrier.

Because something is not going according to plan in the Obama campaign.  In the most recent generic polls, in which respondents are asked whether they would vote for a Republican or Democrat for President, the Democrat leads by 10. In the most recent daily tracking polls, Obama leads McCain by no more than three points. This is a discrepancy that’s been troubling me since Obama secured the nomination. The Democratic nominee has led McCain by as much as 7 points, but tends to hover around 45%. McCain is creeping up and in some recent daily tracking polls has surpassed Obama.

I know that polls in the summertime are about as reliable as British weather forecasting, but something doesn’t add up. Admittedly, up until the end of last week, McCain had been bashing Obama around quite a lot without much response. Obama spent a week on vacation, completely yielding the stage to McCain. Maybe that’s why McCain is catching up a bit, but what I find more disturbing is that if the election were held today, a generic Democrat wins by ten and the specific Democrat ties at best. I’m not the only one to wonder that, the pundits have been mashing numbers and waving hands and have come up with all sorts of ‘gaps’:

• The gender gap - stubborn Clintonistas that haven’t come into the party fold. In other words, they would vote for a generic Democrat if that Democrat was specifically Hillary Clinton.**
• The experience gap - McCain’s decades of public service, makes him stronger than the generic Republican. Similarly, Obama’s less than a decade in national office makes him weaker.
• The foreign policy gap - with uncertainty in the Caucuses and Middle East, voters are flocking to military man McCain. Because, you know, foreign policy equals war.
• The attack gap - McCain’s campaign is charging forward, arrows flying like a mob of Hun horsemen. They’ve tried every possible avenue of attack and have found a few that hurt.

All of these probably have something to do with the differences in these polls. But, increasingly, I’m beginning to fear that the real gap is a darker and unsurmountable one. I’m beginning to think that the gap that is hurting Obama is the skin color gap.  Consistently, in polls, a huge majority of Americans (76% in the most recent) say that the country is ready for a black president (or a woman for that matter). That’s both predictable and suspicious. For one thing, the phrasing of the question is tricky. Pollsters are not asking the respondents if they are ready for a black president. Only the most blatant of racists would admit, to a stranger, over the phone that they were unwilling to put a black man in the White House. But, occasionally in this election cycle, hard numbers have belied these whitewashed polls. The discrepancy between the polls in the New Hampshire primary and the results, for example, has been attributed to the so called “Bradley Effect” by a number of pundits. More disturbing and less contentious, however, are the results in West Virginia exit polls, in which 22% of respondents said race was important in their decision between Clinton and Obama. Of those 22%, 82% voted for Clinton. If 22% admitted to being driven by race, how many felt the same way but didn’t admit it?

And the answer to that question is what I’m worried about. Has Obama reached a glass ceiling of his own? When I first heard Obama, at the 2004 Democratic conveniention, I was blown away by his oratory. At that time, I thought that Obama was a rising star in the party but that his race, and more particularly, his name would keep him out of the oval office. I’ve been surprised and thrilled to see him get to the spot he is today - just days away from accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination. It’s been an amazing year in American politics and one that makes me proud of my country. But what if I was right in 2004, what if Obama can’t get past that 45% number. What if there is a enough of a minority of Americans to turn an election who are still so riddled with bigotry that they can’t fathom the idea of a black man in the White House.

I realize that there are scores of reasons that a person wouldn’t vote for Obama that have nothing to do with race. If you’re a Republican and have reasoned policy differences with the Illinois senator, then I have no problem with you. If Obama is a bit too conservative for your taste, I respect that and Nader is running again this year. If you really believe that Obama doesn’t have ample experience for the job, despite the fact that many that have come before him had even less, then fair enough.

If you’re not voting for Obama because his middle name is Hussein, or because he lived in Indonesia then I have a big problem with you. If you won’t vote for Obama because “you can’t relate with him culturally” or because of the church that he went to, then I have a big problem with you. When it becomes, at any level, about the color of Barack Obama’s skin, then you are not making an intelligent, well informed decision. You’re making a decision based on hatred. If you’re one of those 22% of West Virginians, you made a bigoted decision. More importantly, if you, even deep down, agree with them, you are a racist.

Similarly, I don’t think that voting for Obama solely because of his race is legitimate. Again the problem, the fear, the anxiety that is with me is the difference between the number of people who would like to see a Democrat in the White House and the number of people that would like to see this Democrat in the White House.

America is at such a thrilling place historically. We’re primed to finally resolve over two hundred years of slavery, segregation, lynchings, Jim Crow, and racial hatred. We’re at the doorstep of a colorblind society. And I hope that I’m wrong about this. I hope that the fickle summertime polls bear no relation to reality and that the number of people that refuse to vote for Obama because of his skin color are restricted to a few stubborn Klaverns and 22% of West Virginia. Because the election of Barack Obama could be a turning point in American history - like the rise of JFK in 1960 and the Reagan revolution in 1980, but moreso.

The last two presidential elections have not gone the way I had hoped. In 2000, I was confused after the presidential election results finally came in. In 2004 I was angry. 2008 can still go either way. If Obama becomes that generic Democrat, I’ll be able to walk around my adopted foreign home with pride in my country again - a pride that’s been hard to drum up in the last eight years. If Obama has indeed hit that glass ceiling, if he does come in around 45% and loses to McCain, I’ll just feel very, very sad and a little bit ashamed.

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*Started writing this on Sunday morning, but free time is at a premium these days. Daily tracking polls remain about the same as then.

** For those of you saying to yourself, “See, I told you Obama couldn’t get elected”, I firmly believe that Clinton would be having the same problem with a subset of voters that couldn’t handle a woman in the Oval Office.

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It was not my intent to open the Pandora’s box of punk rock for young Z over breakfast on Sunday morning. In the gamut of kid’s music, punk has some things going for it - loud, simple chord structure and often amusing, repetitive lyrics. It also has a number of fairly obvious negatives. But when my iPod randomly spun “Pretty Vacant” while Z was eating his yogurt, I got giggles galore by doing my best Johnny Rotten impression. So, I decided, damn the torpedoes, never mind the bollocks, let’s get hardcore, Baby Z. Oh, and his Mum was still in bed, so had little input in my parenting decisions.

——————

I’ve never really been much of a punk rocker. They heyday of punk was about a decade before my time, and by the time I got exposed to the genre it was hackneyed and kind of commercialised. For example, you could buy your own pre-safety-pinned leather jacket at the Oaks Mall in Gainesville. I came to age toward the end of earnest jangly rock and the beginning of grunge, so while I appreciated the paths laid by punk, it wasn’t really what got my musical groove going. I mean, I loved a bit of “Blitzkrieg Bop” but when someone turned on The Adverts, I rolled my eyes and wandered to more melodious pastures.

For a while, when I first moved back down to Georgia, I ran around with The Punks (TM). I can’t really remember why, but when I first moved to Athens, I was adopted into this group despite not really looking the part. I liked my jeans loose and boot cut rather than tight and peglegged, and my boots made by Tony Lama rather than Doc Marten. I had never sported a mohawk and my tattoos were a bit more reserved than most of the Athens punks. Nonetheless, they took me in and for a year or so were my best friends in town. They allowed me to be different, to stand out from the crowd and feel OK about it. By sticking with a group, I had both figurative and literal protection from the drunk frat boys that populate the streets of downtown Athens after closing time. (The irony here is that about five years earlier I was a drunk frat boy staggering the streets of a different Southern town). I could turn up any time of day at the local punk bar (Lunch Paper at the time, for my Athenian readers) and find a friendly face. Basically, I could be different in the cozy confines of a group of similarly different people.

Hanging with the punks didn’t make me a punk. I found the rules a bit stifling - which music you could and couldn’t listen to (Black Flag, yes; Nirvana, no), which beer you could drink (PBR, yes; Sam Adams, no) and so on. Thus, I was never a very good punk. But, in that year of cheap beer and additional tattoos, I learned to love punk rock. I had been exposed to the basics - The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The New York Dolls - but I never really got them until I started wandering the streets with my Georgian punk friends. I never really got the angst, the sense of persecution, the anger that these early punk rock bands shouted from the rooftops until that first year of dodging drunken alumni looking for someone to take their frustration out on after the Dawgs got smoked by Bama. I understood how three chords, strung together apparently at random, could provide succor when some bowhead from Macon made fun of your fashion decision. From the granddaddies, I branched out and learned to love artists like Patti Smith, The Buzzcocks, The Dead Kennedys and Pere Ubu. These were people who had changed rock music forever and from which sprung some of the “grunge” and “alternative” artists that I held up as heros.

I stopped hanging with the punks after a dark winter night following a particularly heavy session at the local. We headed to the Waffle House for some 2 a.m. sustenance. The details are hazy, as they would be after a night of PBR and Jim Beam, but something instigated a stand-off between my group of punks and a group of African-American guys across the restaurant. Starting off, as these things do, with a misinterpreted glance and escalating through strong words and big talk, it ended up in the parking lot with circling threats of violence. Fortunately it never got physical and everyone ultimately went their separate ways. For me, however, it was the beginning of the end of my running with these guys.

Something happened after that night, a veneer was stripped away. You see, in that Waffle House confrontation I saw my friends for what they were. Which, at the end of the day, was not much different from the drunk frat boys that they battled with. They hung together as a group, a group that relied on internal rules to dictate their behavior. The frat boys had their rules and uniforms, rules and uniforms that repulsed the punks. But as I stood back and watched that night, I saw my friends in their uniforms bridling against another group that they were different from and it got a little bit ugly. I saw the fear and insecurity that all that leather and all those piercings were failing to hide. And I saw a nastier, darker side that I didn’t know was there. It had never occured to me to discuss race with my friends, and it became clear to me from that night on that I had less in common with them than I had thought. From that night on, I decided that I needed to make my own way in the world, without a group, a herd, a tribe, to protect me.

I still like a good three-chord shoutfest now and again, though.

————–

And so, apparently, does Baby Z. He’s reached a stage of his development at which he approves quite strongly of disorder. It seems, in fact, that the idea of order offends him in some way. If you put his toys in the toybox, he rips them back out again. Given any kind of paper (news, toilet or other) he rips it to shreds and  scatters the remains to the four corners of the room. Given a container of any sort, Z will not rest until those contents are fully removed and preferrably destroyed. Maybe that’s why he appreciated The Sex Pistols so much.

“I am an anarchist
Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos i
I wanna be anarchy!”

My little anarchist grinned and giggled the whole way through “Never Mind the Bollocks”. I thought of pulling out The Ramones, but thought the boy might start pulling up the carpet or shaving a mohawk on the dog.

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The Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks” is available from .

 

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Sometimes I think I’m a masochist. As I mentioned in my last politically inclined post, I listen to a lot of podcasts from all over the political spectrums. One of these is Bill O’Reilly’s radio program (The Bill-O The Clown Show,  if you listen to Keith Olbermann). Now, I should point out that I generally listen to O’Reilly for the entertainment value - I like it when he yells at people and calls them pinheads. O’Reilly is long on vitriol and short on facts.

As long as you recognize this, you can enjoy O’Reilly’s show for the humor of it and it is an indication of what’s going on in the mind of the Far Right. The problem is that a lot of people don’t seem to reognize that O’Reilly is one of the great comics of his generation. They take him seriously. They go to him for news and analysis of the news. That’s some kind of scary. It’s not the narcissism, you get used to that, it’s the repetitiveness. O’Reilly seems to subscribe to that idea that the Right has taken on recently that if you repeat something often enough it becomes true. No spin indeed.

O’Reilly’s ranting this week has been based a lot on the current economic woes. He likes to repeat the same accusations against his bogeymen - “the liberal media”, the “Far Left loons” and “socialist Europe” who offer “cradle-to-grave entitlements, big federal apparatus, high taxation, all the things that the Democratic Party wants to introduce here in the United States”. One of his shows this week was about taxes. How the Dems want to raise everyones taxes to pay for their social entitlement programs - standard Right Wing chatter from the “independent” O’Reilly. He cites the crippling tax rates in Europe and other “socialist” countries with enititlements like single-payer health care that prevents their citizens from dying.

A lot of what O’Reilly had to say this week didn’t ring true. I’m now paying taxes in my third different country and I’ve never really felt that there was that much of a difference in the amount that I pay in taxes in any of the three. So, I decided to do a bit of research into tax rates in various countries. I used my income as a gauge and compared the individual income tax rates in a “low” tax country like the U.S. with a “socialist” country like France and a couple in between - Britain and Australia - where the tax rate is higher, but government services are more plentiful. Things like single payer health insurance, government subsidized maternity leave and generous unemployment benefits. I’m not going to tell you exactly what I make, but let’s just say it would put me solidly in the middle class. When did that happen? When did I become a member of the bourgeoisie?

• In the USA someone earning what I do would pay 28% of their salary as federal income tax. Depending on the state in which I lived, I may owe up to another 10% in state income tax. Again, depending on the state, I would pay between 0 - 10% on all goods as a sales tax. For example, if I lived in Utah (god forbid) I would pay about 33% of my income in taxes before sales tax. If I lived in California, that pre-sales tax rate would be 38%.
• In Britain, I would be paying a whopping 40% of my income in tax as well as 17.5% on top of goods that I purchase (except necessities like food).
• In that bogeyman of the right, France, I would also be paying 40% income tax rate and 19.6% of goods and services, so similar to the rate in Britain. But as in the UK, health care would cost me virtually nothing.
• In Australia, I’ll be paying 26% of my income back to the government and a surcharge of 10% on top of goods. At my income rate, I add another 1.5 % of my income that goes toward the national health service - so a grand total of 27.5% before sales tax.

So, Bill-O’s got it half right - people in “socialist” France or “capitalist” Britain do pay more to the government - but depending on what part of the U.S. you live in, not much more. And if you tack on the amount you pay for health insurance in the U.S., the amount of money you lose when you take time off for maternity leave or are unwillingly out of work and the like, I’d be willing to bet that you’re paying more.

That’s the thing, I really resented paying taxes in the U.S. because it wasn’t clear to me what they were paying for - sure, I want to support the NIH, NSF, NEA - but in 2007 nearly 20% of the federal budget went to pay for defense and an equal amount went to pay down the national debt. In the same year in Britain the top two budget items were health and education. This is why, even though my tax burden in Britain was higher, I didn’t mind paying it.

Australia was a surprise. Before you consider any government “entitlements”, I’m going to pay less in taxes in  Oz than I would be in the U.S. Now, the Australian health care system is not as good as Britain’s or France’s. We may in fact, once Dr. O’C starts working, be required to buy private health insurance or pay an additional 1% of my salary in taxes. A Free Man, who is a big advocate of nationalized health services, was not impressed by this. Nonethess, the biggest budget item in Australia is social welfare programs. Unfortunately, number two is “general government services”, in other words the massive Aussie bureaucracy. So, Down Under, I’m paying less but maybe getting less as well.

The take home message? “You get what you pay for?” “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes?” I guess so. More importantly, be careful about what you hear, especially in this election season.  The other day, Bill-O was shouting about buying land in Ireland if Obama raised his tax rate to 60%. Now, I know you’re probably calculating whether or not it would be worth it, but let’s take a look at reality.

I looked at Obama’s website for information about his tax plan. Unfortunately, it is notably lacking in specifics, facts or hard numbers. So, Bill-O could be right as far as I know. But, the highest tax rate in the world is in Denmark at 63% and even though the Danes are the happiest people in the world, I doubt that Obama will be looking to Copenhagen for his tax policy. For comparison, I looked at McCain’s website and the Republican nominee is more specific. He says that he will lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% and will “keep the [individual] tax rate low”. These were the only numbers on either candidate’s fiscal pages. Unfortunately, McCain fails to point out that only the largest corporations pay a 35% tax rate.

The fact of the matter is that no matter who gets elected, most people will pay about what they paid in taxes last year. This is about what people in most of the rest of the Western world pay - plus or minus a few percentage points. What may be worth looking at is just what you’re getting for your money.

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Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Greatest Hits” is available from .

 

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