Tag Archives: ethics

Veteran’s Day

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I first posted this in 2011.  It bears repeating today.

Thank you for all who have, and are, serving.  And because I couldn’t have said it better, I’ll let Mike Royko, late of the Chicago Tribune, via BlackFive, say it from his 1993 column.

I just phoned six friends and asked them what they will be doing on Monday.

They all said the same thing: working.

Me, too.

There is something else we share. We are all military veterans.

And there is a third thing we have in common. We are not employees of the federal government, state government, county government, municipal government, the Postal Service, the courts, banks, or S & Ls, and we don’t teach school.

If we did, we would be among the many millions of people who will spend Monday goofing off.

Which is why it is about time Congress revised the ridiculous terms of Veterans Day as a national holiday.

The purpose of Veterans Day is to honor all veterans.

So how does this country honor them?…

…By letting the veterans, the majority of whom work in the private sector, spend the day at their jobs so they can pay taxes that permit millions of non-veterans to get paid for doing nothing.

As my friend Harry put it:

“First I went through basic training. Then infantry school. Then I got on a crowded, stinking troop ship that took 23 days to get from San Francisco to Japan. We went through a storm that had 90 percent of the guys on the ship throwing up for a week.

“Then I rode a beat-up transport plane from Japan to Korea, and it almost went down in the drink. I think the pilot was drunk.

“When I got to Korea, I was lucky. The war ended seven months after I got there, and I didn’t kill anybody and nobody killed me.

“But it was still a miserable experience. Then when my tour was over, I got on another troop ship and it took 21 stinking days to cross the Pacific.

“When I got home on leave, one of the older guys at the neighborhood bar — he was a World War II vet — told me I was a —-head because we didn’t win, we only got a tie.

“So now on Veterans Day I get up in the morning and go down to the office and work.

“You know what my nephew does? He sleeps in. That’s because he works for the state.

“And do you know what he did during the Vietnam War? He ducked the draft by getting a job teaching at an inner-city school.

“Now, is that a raw deal or what?”

Of course that’s a raw deal. So I propose that the members of Congress revise Veterans Day to provide the following:

– All veterans — and only veterans — should have the day off from work. It doesn’t matter if they were combat heroes or stateside clerk-typists.

Anybody who went through basic training and was awakened before dawn by a red-neck drill sergeant who bellowed: “Drop your whatsis and grab your socks and fall out on the road,” is entitled.

– Those veterans who wish to march in parades, make speeches or listen to speeches can do so. But for those who don’t, all local gambling laws should be suspended for the day to permit vets to gather in taverns, pull a couple of tables together and spend the day playing poker, blackjack, craps, drinking and telling lewd lies about lewd experiences with lewd women. All bar prices should be rolled back to enlisted men’s club prices, Officers can pay the going rate, the stiffs.

– All anti-smoking laws will be suspended for Veterans Day. The same hold for all misdemeanor laws pertaining to disorderly conduct, non-felonious brawling, leering, gawking and any other gross and disgusting public behavior that does not harm another individual.

– It will be a treasonable offense for any spouse or live-in girlfriend (or boyfriend, if it applies) to utter the dreaded words: “What time will you be home tonight?”

– Anyone caught posing as a veteran will be required to eat a triple portion of chipped beef on toast, with Spam on the side, and spend the day watching a chaplain present a color-slide presentation on the horrors of VD.

– Regardless of how high his office, no politician who had the opportunity to serve in the military, but didn’t, will be allowed to make a patriotic speech, appear on TV, or poke his nose out of his office for the entire day.

Any politician who defies this ban will be required to spend 12 hours wearing headphones and listening to tapes of President Clinton explaining his deferments.

Now, deal the cards and pass the tequila.

– Mike Royko

What’s Next?

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Yesterday I wrote about compromise.  Today, from Marc Thiessen at AEIDeas, here’s what we can expect given that compromise, over the next four years.  This comes against the backdrop of our—as usual—conflicted view of what we want (resolution of which puts a premium on two things: an honest press establishment and the conservatives among us doing a better job of getting our message out.  The lack of the former is no excuse for our not doing the latter, however).

Exit polls show that by a margin of 52-43, Americans want less government, not more.  By a margin of 63-33 they do not want to raise taxes to balance the budget.   And by a margin of 49-45, they want Obamacare either partially or entirely repealed.

With those clearly expressed requirements, which we’ve been expressing for the last two years, we re-elected President Obama and a Democrat-controlled Senate—while reelecting a Republican-controlled House.

Now those expectations:

  1. Obamacare will now become a permanent feature of the American political landscape.  It will never be repealed.
  2. The unprecedented levels of spending in Obama’s first four years will become the new floor, as America sets new records for fiscal profligacy and debt.
  3. Job creators will face massive tax increases, and more Americans will come off the tax rolls—resulting in fewer citizens with a stake in keeping taxes low and more with a stake in protecting benefits.
  4. Government dependency, already at record levels, will continue to grow.
  5. Four lost years in dealing with the entitlement crisis will become eight—digging us into a hole from which we may not be able to emerge.
  6. Obama, unworried about the impact of gas and electricity prices on his reelection, will finally wage the regulatory war on fossil fuels the Left demands.
  7. He will unleash the Environmental Protection Agency to impose crushing new burdens on US business.
  8. His administration’s assault on religious freedom will go on and expand to new areas.
  9. The Defense Department will be gutted, with cuts so deep that America will no longer be a superpower.
  10. Obama will almost certainly have the opportunity to appoint more liberal Supreme Court justices, possibly replacing conservatives on the high court—ending the Roberts court in all but name for a generation.

Compromise

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President Obama, in the aftermath of his reelection, says he wants bipartisanship and compromise in finding solutions to the nearby fiscal cliff and to the longer term problems of his deficits and his national debt.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) says the same.

But bipartisanship, the last several times around, has meant “be reasonable, do it our way.”

After all, it was Obama who said to the House (then-)Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R, VA), “Eric, I won” and to Senator John McCain (R, AZ), “John, the election’s over,” and generally, “Elections have consequences.”

It is Obama, too, who has announced that he’ll veto any cliff solution that doesn’t contain tax rate increases on that group of Americans whom he despises.

It was Reid who, last Congressional session (of which there remain a rump term lasting until the New Year), blocked nearly 40 jobs-related bills and two national budgets passed by the House and refused even to allow them to be debated, much less come to a vote in the Democrat-dominated Senate.

It was Reid, too, who said on the eve of the election that he’d never work with the Republicans if Romney won.

And it was Senator Patty Murray (D, WA), in a Fox News “Special Report with Bret Baier” interview Wednesday, who had this exchange with Baier:

Baier: So when you hear that [Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) saying that revenues could be increased through tax reform and closing loopholes], what do you hear?

Murray: First of all, I really appreciate the Speaker say that he understands that revenue needs to be on the table.

Baier: When you say “revenue,” you mean taxes, tax increases.

Murray: That’s correct.

She also said in that interview,

The President ran on making sure that the wealthiest Americans participate in solving this problem.  He won.  A number of our Senate candidates, in fact all of them, ran on the same thing; they won.  I think that puts us in a place where we can really move forward.

There’s that Democrat concept of “bipartisanship” and “compromise.”

On the other side, Majority Leader Cantor said in a letter to House Republicans on Wednesday (the letter can be found here)

This election was filled with good news, and bad news. The good news is that the American people responded to two years of House Republican leadership by sending us back with a strong majority. It is clear that our efforts to improve the economy and create the conditions for job growth were well-received….

Our task is to legislate based on our principles and forge the compromise that will be necessary to get our nation back on track.

This is entirely correct.  A man who would compromise his principles is a man who has no principles and so is a man who cannot be trusted.  While it’s true that a clash of principles can lead to an inability to compromise, at least one side of this debate is operating from principle.  For the other side, it’s only about power and ego, just as it has been these past four years.

A Modern Concept of “Morality”

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Leaving aside what led these folks to take on such debt in the first place, what a difference in the concepts of honor and morality is displayed below, both across generations and within the newer generation.  Think about what values were being taught….

On the one hand, we have these two examples [emphasis added].

Ms Cyndee Marcoux, a Massachusetts librarian, says she feels trapped.  She co-signed student loans for two of her three children—and both of them are struggling.  One, Jocelyn Marcoux, 30, says she has given up on paying back the loans that allowed her to graduate from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2005.  An import-export agent for a freight company, she says she struggled to pay for child care and medical expenses for an autoimmune disease she developed.  “If I had known the amount of money I would have to pay a month, I wouldn’t have gone,” she says.

…

The younger Ms Marcoux feels she is taking a calculated risk, because her husband owns their home and she has little savings. “If they sue us, they can’t get anything,” she says.  But her mother sees things differently; she even moved in with her 83-year-old mother to pare expenses and make payments on Jocelyn’s loans.  “I have to,” she says. “I co-signed them.“

So, the child quit and dumped the whole obligation onto her mother.  Having little of present value other than her income stream that can be taken by creditors, Marcoux the Younger feels no obligation to do the right thing, solely because it’s the right thing to do.  Yet her mother hasn’t quit, isn’t “taking a calculated risk,” and isn’t reneging on the joint obligation.  The mother understands the nature of commitment: “I have to.”  Even when there are no material consequences for not honoring it.

I also have to wonder two things: what was the mother teaching the daughter early on, and what prompted the daughter (and mother) to sign loans that they did not understand?

and

[G]randparents are getting pulled into the debt morass too; some of them co-signed when a student’s own parents didn’t qualify to help out.  Pam Gerke, a 49-year-old divorced fourth-grade teacher in Davison, MI, owes $98,000 on her own student loans—too much, she says, for her to co-sign her daughter’s loans for beauty school.  So Ms. Gerke’s mother, Darlene Kuhn, did so instead.

After the daughter dropped out and quit making the $200-a-month payments on her debt in 2010, the 72-year-old Ms. Kuhn took over. She says she fears her credit rating will fall, so she draws from the $1,400 a month she collects in Social Security—her only income since retiring.  “I tried to do a good deed,” she says.  Indeed, both Ms. Kuhn and Ms. Gerke say they are bitter about the whole experience. (The daughter declined to return phone messages.)  “My mother would rather not eat than not pay her bills,” Ms. Gerke says.  “I’m mortified as a mother and a daughter.”

Once again, the child feels no obligation to honor her commitments.  It’s too hard, apparently.  But morality and integrity aren’t too hard for her grandmother.

I have to wonder here, too, what values were being taught.  Also, how did the loan of the mother-between-the-grandmother-and-granddaughter get so large?

On the other hand, we have these [emphasis added].

Bob Stinson, 65, retired from his job as a FedEx Corp plane-maintenance scheduler in 2003.  Two years later, he co-signed for the first chunk of about $50,000 in student loans for his daughter Tiffany, a dental assistant with an associate degree.  Although Mr Stinson had stopped working due to degenerative arthritis, he and his wife were enjoying a comfortable retirement at their home outside Michigan City, MS, he says.

But after getting her bachelor’s degree, Tiffany Stinson had to sidetrack her plans to go to dental school to help her mom recover from serious surgery.  She says she stopped making her $1,200 monthly student loan payments when “I couldn’t pay for stuff right then.”  She has since resumed making partial payments….

A family emergency—not a personal convenience emergency—caused an interruption, but now the child, the primary borrower, is trying to catch up, instead of walking away and dumping it all on the co-signer.

And

[S]ome borrowers are simply working on paying off their debt faster—in part, to help get co-signers off the hook.  Valentina Fleer, a 29-year-old opera singer in New York, faithfully has made $864 monthly payments on about $90,000 in private student loans that helped her graduate from Barnard College and Manhattan School of Music in New York.  She says her father co-signed for some of the loans because “it was only way I could get the money.”

But her parents are Russian immigrants, and Ms Fleer says she didn’t feel that she or her parents fully understood their commitment when they applied for the loans.

“Today, she says, the debt “just hangs over me.  I make those payments because I don’t want any backlash hanging over them.“

As before, I have to wonder why they made the loan commitments if they didn’t understand what they were doing.  But, more importantly, Ms Fleer is honoring her commitment and actively declining to dump it onto her co-signer.