As IF Times

link  Supreme Court rules in favor of 6,000 black applicants for Chicago firefighter jobs – latimes.com.

This will be interesting.  If one reads the linked article closely, one won’t find anything about the firefighter’s exam that excluded race, at least not that I can see.  On a job competency test, the threshold needed to pass for consideration to be a firefighter was a score above 89, a threshold which was applied after receiving 26,000 applicants for only a few hundred jobs.  I’ll assume the test is more than asking candidates which is the working end of the hose.

Somehow, this has transmogrified into a racial issue with potential estimated damages of over $100 million payable to aggrieved candidates.  !!!  This will be interesting not because of the debate over the common sense of the issue, but because the dispute is centered in Chicago, home of the President AND hizzoner Mayor Richard Daley, who will each wind up on opposite sides of the battle.  If the city loses, they will have to pony up $100 real large, money which they don’t have.  If  the city wins, it will be seen as another blow to Obama’s allies.

But before we discuss this, there are some aspects to the statistics that were not revealed.  While the article states that 6000 blacks were excluded because of the “arbitrary” cutoff line of the test scores, how many whites were excluded as well?  How many Asians? How  many Hispanics?  Were there any blacks that tested over the threshold score? If so, does this not preclude a racial issue and instead create an issue of aptitude?   Apparently, experts insist that even with much lower scores than the threshold, people could become competent firefighters.  Perhaps.  But in the real world, people will choose the best available quality item that their purchasing power will allow.  If this is not evidently common sense, it’s because there are lawyers involved. 

For me, I cannot recall a time when shopping for food, that I didn’t try to select the best apples or bunch of bananas in the produce area.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never selected the off color product thinking, what the heck, it’s  all the same.   In the case of spending taxpayer dollars, why wouldn’t the city try to get the best candidates possible for the job as a matter of duty to the taxpayers?  Whether the civil servant is a firefighter, policeman or ambulance driver, the public should expect that the employees have gone through some kind of competency filter not a quota system.  When your house is aflame, you don’t want to be directing the fireman where to point the hose. The race of the guy holding the hose is irrelevant.   If a city cannot set some kind of standards for hires ( and remember we’re talking civil servants here), why have any at all? Just hire people on a  first come first served basis. 

In fact, think of how this policy would greatly expand the supply of doctors in the country.  Overnight, the applicants to medical school would skyrocket and the health care crisis is solved!  As we all know, they’ve essentially done this to driver’s tests, since competency is clearly not required, at least not  in our town. The only other area of work that has no test for competence is politics and look where that’s got us.

However, as said earlier, the interesting part of this story will be how the opposing factions resolve the issue.  There are some pretty powerful and vested interests here and the implications are far reaching.  Kind of like two mafia groups fighting for dominance over turf, except in this case, they’re all members of the same family.  This will be better than Godfather 2.

link Short-run tax hikes being used to fill gaps – USATODAY.com.

This is like short term herpes.  As if there’s a precedence in history for a short term tax.  As one of my friends said recently, as likely as a venus fly trap in a hospital.  Not many may know this, but the whole notion of income tax in the U.S. was first broached as a temporary measure in the early 1800’s.  According to the website About.com:

“…In the War of 1812, the U.S. first considered enacting an income tax, but the war ended before the tax was officially created. Yet, during the American Civil War, the first U.S. income tax was created, but this one was meant only as a temporary measure to help pay for the war. It was repealed in 1872.  By the 1890s, the U.S. government was hoping to find a way to more evenly distribute the federal tax burden and thus looked at creating a permanent income tax. However, until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified n 1913, the federal government was forced to collect taxes based on state population. Once the 16th Amendment was passed, the U.S. government passed its first, permanent income tax law in October 1913…”

And the rest is history as they say.  Speaking of history, this website also speaks of ancient tablets found from the ancient Egyptians where not only was there written evidence of taxes, there also were writings complaining of high taxation.  So, as we can see, nothing has changed throughout history.

If the naive folk in the places listed in the article think that temporary taxes will fix whatever shortfall they have to fix, then I’m going into the bridge selling business.  What has been true for eons is that people would rather not cut back but rather borrow into the future.  Instead of taking the correct measures by cutting spending on programs, on salaries or benefits, it is always easier to gouge the taxpayer.  Costs never go down and inflation expectations are permanently wired into the system.

Instead of many numerous corrections in spending like the regular tacking of a sailboat to keep it on a steady course, the imbalances in a government system build until one day they collapse of their own weight, as per the analogy of the boat crashing on shore because a sudden drastic action is needed.  We saw this happen with GM, essentially a government run entity where entitlements were not curbed even as income was collapsing.  In the case of GM, government bailed them out…sort of.  In the case of governments, they just keep gouging taxpayers, until that crash on shore happens.

California will be the state to watch in the next year or so.  Misguided wants by the residents are grossly mismatched by taxation revenue.  California is arguably the most important economy in the U.S., home to many of the nation’s vanguard industries.  When Arnold Schwarzenegger came to office, the budget deficit was over $16 billion dollars and now, almost 7 years after being given the mandate of trying to fix that gap, the deficit is an even larger portion of total state funds from 20% then, to 25% now.  Like adolescents, the citizens want their programs, the raises for civil servants, the entitlements, but would not allow tax increases to pay for them.  Looks like the idea of temporary tax is going to be introduced there.  It’s temporary, only in effect until you die.