Fish for Friday

This column serves up fish caught by casting our hook into the waters of recent correspondence—fish that we think will be good for you, either for information or for provocation to think about something new, or about something old but from a different perspective.

If the Republicans get caught in the hurricane during their convention, it will be interesting to see how it affects the thoughts of Ryan and Romney on self-reliance versus well-funded emergency services.

My brother moved to St. Pete nearly 20 years ago. I have ridden out two hurricanes in Florida, one in a sailboat. If the Republicans get hit hard by a hurricane during the convention it will be a great test of faith not only in their plans to gut the budget for essential services but also in their god. For an American city, Tampa/St. Pete already has a Second World attitude about maintaining basic services on its good days, and it slides quickly toward Third World under challenging circumstances. [personal communication]

A man carries a handgun and is trained to use it. He practices shooting moving targets at a range once a week.

He drives home from work, gets out of his car, and walks toward his front door.

He hears a noise to his left and sees a man running at him with a knife. As he reaches for his gun his brain instinctively registers that the attacker is in full stride and only 20 feet away.

What should the man with the gun do? [riddle from a personal correspondent]

Thanks much for Wednesday’s link to Robert Reich’s piece on “The Ryan Choice.” I’d like to repay the favor.

I saw an insightful opinion piece in Wednesday’s Chapel Hill Herald—”We don’t cotton to tax cuts for the rich,” by North Carolina businessman Eric Henry; he’ s the president of TS Designs of Burlington, whose trade-marked motto is “printing t-shirts for good.”

Here’s how Mr. Henry’s piece begins:

If anyone tells you that ending the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2 percent would hurt job creation, tell them to talk with me. We founded our business, TS Designs, in 1977 as a small manual screen-printing company and grew to land contracts with some of clothing’s biggest brands. In the mid 1990s, we lost much of our business as a result of the supposedly job-creating NAFTA trade agreement as large brands sought out the cheapest labor costs they could in Mexico.

We decided to stick it out and keep good jobs in North Carolina. We invested in new technologies that reduced our energy and waste costs. We found new markets for our T-shirts. And we looked at our location as a virtue, not a problem. We decided to manufacture T-shirts from cotton grown, ginned, spun, knit, finished, cut, sewn, printed and dyed all within our state’s borders; or as we like to say, from dirt to shirt in North Carolina.

And here’s how it concludes:

The Senate recently passed a bill extending the Bush tax cuts on income below the $250,000 level for households. Almost everyone—98 percent of Americans including small business owners—have income below that. The richest 2 percent would keep their tax cuts on their income below $250,000 but not their extra tax cuts above that level.

On Aug.1, the House passed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts for 2.7 million high-income earners and pay for these tax breaks by raising taxes on Americans with less income—reducing the child tax credit, college tuition tax credit and earned income tax credit, which help 13 million working families, with 26 million children. North Carolina is home to more than half a million of these working families who would be hurt.

Taking money from the budgets of families struggling to make ends meet and giving it to the most prosperous families won’t help my business or our economy. Instead it will continue us down the path of subsidizing the already well-off instead of making the investments in our economy and our people that truly strengthen our nation and our homegrown jobs.

You can read the whole article at newsobserver.com. [personal communication]

Did you hear about the woman who flew from Pakistan to Paris, slept through the unloading of passengers and luggage, and woke up to realize she was on her way back to Pakistan? Seems no one noticed she was still on the plane....

Doesn’t that make you feel good about the hundreds of billions of dollars we have wasted on air travel security?

This is an almost perfect footnote to the jet skier who accidentally thwarted JFK airport security. His jet ski broke down in Jamaica Bay and as it got dark he swam toward the only lights he could see. They were the runway lights at JFK. He climbed a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, walked past several security cameras as he crossed two runways and entered the terminal—all while being soaking wet and wearing a bright yellow life jacket. He finally asked someone for help...and was arrested for security violations. [personal communication]