While riding from tee to tee in Vermont…

Golf is in the headlines and in the deep thoughts of one Vermont Tiger.

On what should have been a carefree charity golf tournament at the local country club one golf playing Vermont Tiger-blogger was suddenly seized by fear of a tax. It seems that “while riding from tee to tee,” he noticed that 16 of the 19 event sponsors were financial firms. Storm clouds of worry over burdensome regulations and related horrors rapidly formed.Troubling imaginary scenarios soon followed.

This begs the question: If these firms, and their owners, are the ones that continue to step forward to support their communities, even in a truly lousy economy, why would Vermont work so aggressively to penalize their success through onerous taxation, burdensome regulation, and constant muckraking?
More importantly, to what extent does every additional dollar of taxation, or page of regulation reduce their ability to make important community donations? How many actual cents of that taxation comes back directly to our communities after it has worked its way through the Vermont government bureaucracy?

Tournament of terrors! Poor man, a good ride from tee to tee spoiled. Can this type of whining perhaps reach a peak? Or maybe the thinning golf caddy is making some uneasy.

None other than Former Bush speechwriter David Frum went so far recently as to chide Wall Streeters whining and this week The Washington Post writes that mega level executive pay has reached unexpected places.
Frum said this:

By the numbers, you may wonder what the rich have to complain about. Corporate profits are up, and the S&P 500 has surpassed 2008 levels. President Obama has signed a renewal of the Bush tax cuts. …Millions of Americans have lost jobs, homes, and savings in a financial crisis and recession caused by the recklessness and incompetence of some of this country’s most eminent and best-compensated financiers.

Maybe awareness of the growing gap between the very wealthy and the unwealthy is at last drawing some needed attention. One indicator of economic inequality puts the US behind Cameroon and Ivory Coast and just ahead of Uganda and Jamaica. The Washington Post says that as the income gap widens it isn’t just executives in Wall Street firms that are getting rich but lesser ones from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.

Over the period from the ’70s until today, while pay for Dean Foods chief executives was rising 10 times over, wages for the unionized workers actually declined slightly. The hourly wage rate for the people who process, pasteurize and package the milk at the company’s dairies declined by 9 percent in real terms, according to union contract records.