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With the Christmas season comes all the usual ornaments and traditions including, of course, the biggest tradition of all: spend money. We could consider renaming the holiday “spendmas,” especially when the news reminds us about how much we’re doling out for stuff in comparison to past years. Outlook: not so good. Says the Front Page’s favourite punching bag, the L.A. Times: “The International Council of Shopping Centers has estimated that in November and December, sales at stores open at least a year may decline as much as 1 percent. That would be the largest drop since at least 1969, when the New York trade group starting tracking data.” (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-webspend22-2008dec22,0,7287086.story)
The largest. Drop. Since. 1969. Cue expletive.
Some blame a shorter spending season – five fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas (http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2008/12/22/daily2.html?ana=from_rss). Others look at the big picture of rising unemployment, declining house values and general economic woes. And if that’s not enough, we get California’s budget, $41 billion deficit and all. But between the budget, the federal bailouts – Christmas seems all the more materialistic this year.
Can We Get Larry Flynt for Governor?
I can’t help but wonder what California’s budget would look like if we actually had a savvy businessman at the helm. Is it too late to get Larry Flynt into office? His proposal for expanded gambling – and thus tax revenue – struck me as a good idea. Call it the “taxing people’s vices instead of their virtues” approach. With incomes taxes and property taxes causing headaches, there’s something to be said about a tax scheme based, not on those things necessary to live, but on luxuries. Add in the principle that there is no crime where there is consent, we could really think outside of the box by decriminalizing drugs and prostitution. In the case of drugs, legalizing and taxing marijuana could bring in anywhere from $2.4 to $9.5 billion in revenues depending on whose estimates you accept. (http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/98317/) In the case of prostitution, we could save on law enforcement costs while having the added benefits of providing greater health protection for sex workers.
But even if these “sin taxes” don’t bring in as much as we’d like (and I realize that decriminalizing “vices” brings about costs as well), either because pot smokers grow their own, or gamblers suddenly discover the virtues of fiscal responsibility, decriminalizing victimless crimes would help drive down prison costs. The millions of dollars we could save by not imprisoning people whose actions don’t constitute a social threat is itself worth the effort.
Of course, any one of these ideas deserves more than just a few sentences – obviously, it’s complicated policy – but I’m convinced that unless we radically examine our basic assumptions about everything from crime to taxes, we’ll never really solve the budget problem. Of course, it would help if we didn’t have a dish towel governor caught between a rock (that would be Democrats) and a hard place (Republicans).
Back to Spendmas, er-r, I mean Christmas. We have all this depressing news, all this nonsense that amounts to a ship without any competent navigator at the helm, and we’re still missing the point. Christians didn’t invent it of course, but there’s something to be said about a time of year to remind people about fostering peace and goodwill – two resources in short supply. I am struck by the reaction to President-elect’s choice of Pastor Rick Warren, of the famous Saddleback Church, to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration; he’s seen as an insulting choice by many Democrats. “Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters — feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community — by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead,” writes Katha Politt for the L.A. Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/). To some extent, she has a point; Pastor Warren’s views on social issues, from abortion to gay rights, are odiously in line with other evangelical Christians like James Dobson. On the flip side, Obama makes a good point about using his administration to bring together a variety of viewpoints. What to make of it? I stand on the Obama side of things, and the reason has to do with the Front Page. What makes this scrappy little newspaper so exciting is the sheer diversity of voices within its pages. All kinds of perspectives are presented here, which makes for better reading and better thinking. It’s precisely the kind of model we want for bringing people together to at least talk, if nothing else. In this vein, I think Obama is right to mix it up with people whose views he doesn’t share. Because without talking, without listening, people become alienated from one another. And alienation inevitably leads to something worse. If Obama lives up to even a fraction of the promise that Bush, the self-declared “uniter,” didn’t even come close to fulfilling, 2009 might be a good year, indeed.
And in that lies the point of the season that we all seem to be losing, the need for us to renew a commitment to reaching out to our fellow human beings. In the end, whether dealing with the economy or struggling with potent political issues, we’re all the stronger for working together.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Yule and Winter Solstice – Happy Holidays!
Frédérik invites you to discuss this week's column and more at his blog (frederik-sisa.blogspot.com).
