We had a vey sad moment this week. Ella—The Malibu Times dog—died at the age of 18-and-a-half. She was a rescue from a Santa Monica shelter. For 18 years, she was my constant companion at home and work. She had a full and happy life. Though all of life ultimately has the same ending, death still leaves a big hole in your life when it happens. It took us forever to get used to each other’s idiosyncrasies. For me, it was learning to read all of Ella’s body language; for her, it was getting used to my occasional bouts of impatience. Ultimately, we learned and she was often far more forgiving than many humans I know. She will be sorely missed.
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The fires up north are still going on but the authorities are finally beginning to get a degree of control on the situation. We are clearly in some major climate cycles changes and with it longer and drier fire seasons, oceans rising and attacking shoreline properties, beaches washing out, greater periods of drought (and maybe greater periods of rain), tropical hurricanes sweeping through the south and east, major earthquakes in Mexico (and maybe here), major flooding in Texas and the Midwest, tornados, possible tsunamis, and dozens of other things that we haven’t seen yet. We will adapt and survive, provided we continue to believe that we are all one country; it’s in all of our interests to assist each other. That is the genius of our federal system. Still, it poses all sorts of future problems and many difficult-to-answer questions. To what extent should the country pour money into areas that are high hazard areas, subject to repeated storms and flooding, like parts of New Orleans, Houston, Miami and Puerto Rico? A lot of that depends on if these are 100-year storms or if this is the new normal. None of us know yet. It’s going to take a number of seasons and a number of cycles before we can clarify that picture. I suspect that lots of people are going to be moving. Puerto Rico, for example, has a population of over 3.5 million, who are all American citizens. If substantial numbers—say several hundred thousand people—head into Florida or Texas, the politics of those states could change radically. When people get off the plane and establish a new residence, all they have to do is register to vote. Florida has been critical in the last few presidential elections and that’s unlikely to change. So it’s not just the weather that’s changing—America is going to be changing, and relatively quickly if this weather continues.
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In my column last week, when I talked about Malibu and Ferguson, I wasn’t referring to racial or policing attitudes in communities, which are certainly not the same. What I meant (and probably didn’t state very clearly) is that many governments are relying on traffic and parking tickets as a source of revenue. In many places, that traffic ticket revenue actually goes to help pay for law enforcement. There was a time when if you felt like it was a bad ticket or there was an explanation, you could tell it to the judge.
If you get a parking ticket in Malibu, there is no judge to tell it to—it’s all been outsourced to a private company. Today, if you get a speeding ticket and the fine is say $150, they also add on something called a “penalty assessment.” When I started practicing law, the speeding ticket fine might have been $50 and the penalty assessment was $15. Today, the speeding ticket is $150 and the penalty assessment is an additional $350 or more. People don’t have the money, so they are afraid to show. Then there is a bench warrant and that speeding ticket is quickly up to $750-$1,000. The system punishes poverty more than speeding.
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On the brighter side of life, the Los Angeles Dodgers are hot. I was fortunate enough to see Justin Turner hit a three-run walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Chicago Cubs on TV. LA went wild. At a time when the world seems to be going to hell, it’s good to be distracted—if only for a short while. If the Dodgers go all the way, I’m hoping that Turner will take some of his World Series money and find a decent barber to trim his beard because he absolutely looks like a Barbary pirate. But ballplayers being a superstitious lot, I’m guessing he’s not going to touch that beard until it’s all over.
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Some ideas die hard. One of them is that, somehow, we can tax cut our way into more economic growth. It started with the very famous Laffer Curve, which predicted that, if we cut taxes, we would free capital for new investments. The economy would then grow and cover the lost money from the tax cuts. There is only one small problem: it simply doesn’t seem to work. They’ve tried it in a number of places. The last ones to give it a real shot was the state of Kansas and the very conservative Governor Sam Brownback, who, with a very supportive legislature, cut taxes and the totally predictable happened. The state deficit ballooned and they had to cut back on all sorts of things like schools. Brownback and his crowd wanted to wait for the promised economic growth to come but it just didn’t happen. In fact, Kansas trailed behind many other states. The voters in this very conservative state lost patience, kicked out many legislators, voted in a new crew and actually raised taxes back up.
The problem is we are about to do it again, and this time on a national level. Trump wants to cut corporate taxes and taxes on higher incomes; the supposed rationale is that this will give the economy a boost and increase growth to over 3 percent a year. I suspect that all that is going to happen is what happened in Kansas, that the economy is not going to be much affected (meaning no large jump in productivity) since we are already buzzing along with the economy hitting on all cylinders. All we will see is that the deficit is going to go up, unless they find some way to make the middle and lower portion of America pay for it, which they may very well do by cutting out certain deductions.