Four for Friday Edition No. 5

Q1 — Death and Taxes: When a suc­cess­ful busi­ness or cor­po­ra­tion shows an inter­est in relo­cat­ing to a new city, town or munic­i­pal­ity, if the busi­ness in ques­tion employs a fair amount of peo­ple or gen­er­ates a sig­nif­i­cant amount of busi­ness or pres­tige for the local area, city offi­cials will often woo or entice the com­pany by offer­ing sig­nif­i­cant tax breaks. Sim­i­larly, when a suc­cess­ful com­pany indi­cates that it may move its head­quar­ters or man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties to another locale, offi­cials offer the same–tax abate­ments (a reduc­tion of taxes or an exemp­tion from taxes granted by a local gov­ern­ment on a piece of real prop­erty for a spec­i­fied length of time). They say there are two things in life that are cer­tain: Death and Taxes. Do you think busi­nesses should be granted tax breaks by local gov­ern­ments or should they have to pay their prop­erty taxes just like every­one else?

A1 — In a per­fect world, such incen­tives would be unnec­es­sary. This is not, how­ever, a per­fect world and small towns that depend upon a par­tic­u­lar busi­ness to keep a large num­ber or, in some cases, even a major­ity of their cit­i­zens employed may find such mea­sures advis­able for the greater good of the com­mu­nity. It is nau­se­at­ing to hard-working tax­pay­ers who enjoy no such ben­e­fits, but the flip side of that argu­ment might be that hard-working tax­pay­ers would not have a job with which to pay taxes were it not for such a pro­gram. The other issue is the prece­dent set by such a pro­gram: Once a busi­ness enjoys such perks in one com­mu­nity, there becomes an expec­ta­tion that sim­i­lar incen­tives will be enjoyed in all com­mu­ni­ties and that fac­tor begins dri­ving busi­ness decisions.

Q2 — Pol­i­tics and Reli­gion: After speak­ing to an evan­gel­i­cal church last Sun­day in a tra­di­tion­ally con­ser­v­a­tive South Car­olina town, U.S. Sen­a­tor and Demo­c­ra­tic Pres­i­den­tial hope­ful Barack Obama said that Repub­li­cans no longer have a firm grip on reli­gion in polit­i­cal dis­course. “I think its impor­tant par­tic­u­larly for those of us in the Demo­c­ra­tic Party to not cede val­ues and faith to any one party,” Obama told reporters out­side the Redemp­tion World Out­reach Cen­ter where he attended church ser­vices. As every­one knows, sep­a­ra­tion of church and state is a polit­i­cal and legal doc­trine that basi­cally states that gov­ern­ment and reli­gious insti­tu­tions are to be kept sep­a­rate and inde­pen­dent of one another. Some would say that the two principles–secularity of gov­ern­ment and free­dom of reli­gious exercise–are what make the United States the great­est place to live on Earth, while oth­ers would argue that sec­u­lar­ity is our great­est down­fall. What do you think? Should reli­gion play a part in which can­di­date we elect as the next Pres­i­dent of the United States?

A2 — My belief is that the Found­ing Fathers designed our sys­tem of democ­racy so that reli­gion would not play a role in the Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, that sim­ply is not how it has worked out. Recall the hoopla sur­round­ing Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s Catholi­cism, for instance? Now we have the con­tro­versy that fol­lows Mitt Rom­ney. Even though I am a Chris­t­ian, I am dis­mayed when I hear polit­i­cal fig­ures talk­ing about their reli­gious beliefs, even though I know that it is impos­si­ble to com­pletely com­part­men­tal­ize your life. In other words, my spir­i­tu­al­ity informs every­thing I do to some extent, although I scrupu­lously strive to sep­a­rate my per­sonal beliefs from my pro­fes­sional pur­suits. I have writ­ten openly about the inter­sec­tion of my beliefs and busi­ness with respect to the biggest case I ever han­dled, but I did not do so openly until the final rul­ing was handed down, I knew there would be no fur­ther appeals, and the mat­ter was offi­cially ended, mak­ing me free to reveal some of the “behind the scenes” details, as long with my per­sonal expe­ri­ences and feel­ings. That was a highly unusual sit­u­a­tion, how­ever, that could never be duplicated.

Q3 — Home Own­er­ship: Fore­clo­sure fil­ings across the United States nearly dou­bled last month (com­pared with those from Sep­tem­ber of 2006), as finan­cially strapped home­own­ers already behind on mort­gage pay­ments defaulted on their loans or came closer to los­ing their homes to fore­clo­sure. With­out nam­ing names, do you know any­one impacted by or who is fac­ing foreclosure?

This time around I am not acquainted with any­one per­son­ally impacted by a fore­clo­sure, but know plenty of peo­ple who have tried, with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, to sell their homes. And I have a friend who lost her job with a major mort­gage lender a few months ago — she was part of a mas­sive lay-off.

By “this time around,” I refer to this lat­est hous­ing mar­ket down­turn. I knew folks who were hurt badly the last time California’s hous­ing mar­ket “adjusted,” but I think my removal from the sit­u­a­tion this time is due to the fact that I am older, i.e., not in the first-time buyer age range and, from what I’ve heard, that is the group hit the hardest.

Iron­i­cally, I live just a few miles away from Stock­ton, recently given the dubi­ous hon­or­ing of hav­ing the high­est fore­clo­sure rate in the nation.

Sadly, we all saw this “bust” com­ing … I have been hear­ing sto­ries about “cre­ative financ­ing” for sev­eral years that have left me scratch­ing my head, say­ing, “What are they think­ing?” (Recall that I hold a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence Degree in Account­ing!) Not to men­tion the prices being paid for homes in this part of the coun­try. We all knew it couldn’t last. I used to joke that if you owned a home in Cal­i­for­nia for more than five min­utes, you amassed equity and could sell for a profit! Devel­op­ers could keep up with post­ing ever-higher prices on their bill­boards. Now they are cov­ered with “price reduced” in ever-larger fonts.

I am for­tu­nate that I own my home, have no inten­tion of ever mov­ing or sell­ing, and don’t really care about the mar­ket value of my house. Since I’m here for the long-haul, I can ride out mar­ket fluc­tu­a­tions. My kids can worry about all of that when I’m dead. Peo­ple think I’m jok­ing when I tell them that I grew up in this house and plan to die in it, after which my kids can haul off my car­cass and decide what to do with it. But I’m really not jok­ing. That is my plan.

Q4 — X-Ray Vision: Ear­lier this week, at an air­port in Phoenix, Ari­zona, the Trans­porta­tion Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion (TSA) launched a pilot pro­gram to test a new air­line pas­sen­ger screen­ing sys­tem capa­ble of spot­ting threats hid­den under­neath cloth­ing. For now, pas­sen­gers selected for “sec­ondary screen­ing” can opt to forgo a typ­i­cal pat-down and instead walk through a device that allows secu­rity screen­ers to view the per­son with­out their cloth­ing get­ting in the way. (In other words, who­ever is watch­ing the secu­rity scan­ner gets to see you in the buff.) The TSA insists the machines can­not store images, but some pri­vacy watch­dogs are not buy­ing it. More­over, the TSA says that the peo­ple watch­ing the scan­ner sit in a remote loca­tion and are not able to tell the actual iden­ti­ties of the thou­sands of bod­ies they’ll be look­ing at all day. How do you feel about this? If this screen­ing process became a manda­tory con­di­tion of board­ing an air­plane or enter­ing a build­ing, would your protest the process by sim­ply refus­ing, or, is this just another rea­son­able mea­sure to pro­tect every­one from those who wish to cause us the great­est amount of harm?

I’ll take the pat-down, thanks. It will be con­ducted using basic law enforce­ment tech­niques right there in the secu­rity line with many other per­sons watch­ing. Under no cir­cum­stances would I sub­mit to that type of inva­sive x-ray pro­ce­dure. I don’t think they have any hope of get­ting that tech­nique uni­ver­sally imple­mented while there are still lawyers prac­tic­ing in this coun­try who under Con­sti­tu­tional principles.

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On the Same Topic:

• Four for Fri­day Edi­tion No. 6
• Four for Fri­day Edi­tion No. 6
• Four for Fri­day Edi­tion No. 4
• Four for Fri­day Edi­tion No. 3
• Four for Fri­day Edi­tion No. 2