72. From a Shanghai government official in 2006: "Outsiders think of everything about China multiplied by 1.3 billion...[but] We have to think of everything as divided by 1.3 billion." -- James Fallows, China Airborne (2012), pp. 10.
73. "In 1912, the government derived 45% of its revenue from duties imposed on imported goods, and another 42% from excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. There was no income tax. So tariffs and these two excise taxes accounted for 87% of government receipts. They were a kind of national sales tax, though no one called them that." -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 6.
"In the 1980s, the NBA and referees' union incorporated certain travel benefits into their contracts. Under the terms, the NBA paid its referees the cost of a first-class airline ticket for flights lasting longer than 2 hours and a full-fare coach ticket for travel under 2 hours. The referees, in turn, were permitted to exchange the tickets for cheaper seats and to keep the difference... The referees did not declare [the difference] as income... The practice was clearly improper." -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 180.
"But beginning in the 1960s, and then continuing through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a succession of Congresses and presidents slashed rates and amended and revised the tax code interminably, rendering it deformed and unintelligible, most noteworthy for its exceptions and exclusions. In other words, the real problem is not the tax code. It's Congress and the White House..." -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 233.
On lawyers and ethics: "When he [Webster Hubbell] was indicted on charges of income tax evasion growing out of the overbilling of clients in his Arkansas practice, Hubbell--a onetime chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court--claimed the real beneficiaries were his law partners... [His wife asked] 'You didn't actually do that, did you, mark up time for the client, did you?' [He replied] 'Yes, I did...So does every lawyer in the country.'" -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 219. 45.
74. “Our low effective corporate tax rates have led to calls...for corporations to pay higher taxes, but it is important to remember that companies are not real people. If they did pay higher taxes, it is hard to identify how that burden would be spread across employees (as lower wages), shareholders (as lower profits), or other capital owners (as lower rates of return)." -- White House Burning (2012), by S. Johnson & James Kwak, hardcover, pp. 121.
“Congress can dictate how much Medicare will pay doctors for a given Medicare procedure, but Congress cannot force doctors to accept Medicare patients; so for Medicare to be a viable health insurance plan, it must pay something reasonably close to the market price... In 1985 health care spending accounted for 1/10 of the national economy; in 2009, it was about 1/6; and by 2035, it is likely to be more than 1/4. That means Americans will have to devote a larger and larger share of their incomes to paying for health care.” -- White House Burning (2012), by S. Johnson & J. Kwak, hardcover, pp. 132.
"[M]ost government policies can be accomplished at least three different ways: spending, tax credits (provisions that let you reduce your taxes), and regulation. For example, let's say politicians...want to help poor people afford rental housing... they can build and manage public housing projects; they can give tax credits to developers who build affordable housing; or they can write a regulation saying that a certain percentage of all new housing units must be rented at affordable rates." -- White House Burning (2012), by S. Johnson & J. Kwak, hardcover, pp. 116. [The point is that some of these options are more palatable to voters than others. For example, the third option in the example above may seem more intrusive than the other two--one person called it "theft, pure and simple." In reality, however, all three methods accomplish the same goal, and all three methods expand government influence.]
"In 2010...Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt cost over $1.3 trillion, while tax revenues were less than $2.2 trillion [i.e., over half of federal taxes are automatically transferred to these programs, leaving other programs to battle for remaining revenue]. Balancing the budget at that level of taxes would have required cutting all other federal spending--national defense, immigration control, federal courts and the federal prison system, Medicaid, food stamps, student loans, everything--by over 60%." -- White House Burning (2012), by S. Johnson & J. Kwak, hardcover, pp. 113.
"A majority of Americans say Medicaid is important to their families, which may seem surprising for a program dedicated to the poor--until you realize that it served 68 million people in 2010. This is in part because Medicaid, unlike Medicare, pays for long-term care (although beneficiaries must first exhaust all of their assets)--relieving many middle-class, working-age people from having to pay for their parents' care." -- White House Burning (2012), by Simon Johnson & James Kwak, hardcover, pp. 108.
"In 1962, Kennedy began campaigning for a major, deficit-increasing tax cut as a way to increase demand and economic growth... For the first time in American history, a president was arguing that deficits could be a good thing, not an unfortunately necessary response to a military or economic emergency. Kennedy's VP and successor, Lyndon Johnson, also found that some things were more important than a balanced budget: faced with the choice between guns and butter, he chose both." -- White House Burning (2012), by Simon Johnson & James Kwak, hardcover, pp. 60.
75. On management styles: "[Gary] D'Addario was a rare breed of supervisor for a para-military organization. He had learned long ago to suppress the first impulse of command that calls for a supervisor to humiliate his men, charting their movement and riding them...that sort of behavior usually resulted from a new supervisor's primitive conclusion that the best way to avoid being perceived as weak was to behave as a petty tyrant... Supervisors like that either grew into their jobs or their best men ducked and covered long enough to transfer to another sector." -- David Simon, Homicide (1991, 2006), paperback, pp. 39-40.
"Typically, a detective will hold back [from the media] the caliber of the weapon used, or the exact location of the wounds, or the presence of an unusual object at the scene. If the murder occurred inside a house rather than on a street where a crowd can gather, the investigator might withhold a description of the clothes worn by the victim or the exact location of the victim's body in the house." -- David Simon, Homicide (1991, 2006), paperback, pp. 75.
The greatest challenge in gov hiring and promotion is to create objective AND useful tests: "Moreover, the test results--though they implied a quantitative approach--had always been subject to politics: an applicant's score on his oral exam was usually only as good as his departmental connections. Then, in the early 1980s, testing was discontinued and appointment to detective became purely political... In a decade of affirmative action, it helped to be black; it also helped to have a lieutenant colonel or deputy commissioner as a mentor." -- David Simon, Homicide (1991, 2006), pp. 97.
On police coverups and self-policing: "But it was [reformer Donald] Pomerleau himself who successfully fought a prolonged battle against the creation of a civilian review board, assuring that in cases of alleged [police] brutality the Baltimore department would continue to monitor itself. As a result, the [police]men on the street in the late 60s and early 70s understood that a bad shooting could be made to look good and a good shooting could be made to look better." -- David Simon, Homicide (2006), pp. 110.
"The question [when an officer mistakenly shoots an innocent civilian] was whether the department was going to sacrifice its own rather than confront one of the most unavoidable truths about police work: the institutionalized conceit that says in every given circumstance, a good cop will give you a good shooting." -- pp. 113.
"Among cops, some vague taint has always been attached to the title of lawyer, some grounded ethic that believes even the best and most devoted attorneys to be little more than well-paid monkeys wrenches hurled into the criminal justice machine. Despite his training, [Terrence] McLarney [with his J.D.] adhered to that ethic: He was a cop, not a lawyer." -- David Simon, Homicide (1991, 2006), pp. 144.
"The Baltimore unit has maintained its rate both through good, solid police work and through a gentle manipulation of the clearance rate itself. Whoever declared that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics could just as easily have granted law enforcement data a category unto itself. Anyone who ever spent more than a week in a police department's planning and research section can tell you that a burglary clearance doesn't mean that anyone was actually arrested, and that a posted increase in the crime rate can have less to do with criminal proclivity than with the department's desire for a budget increase." -- Id. at pp. 195.
During a police interrogation, those "few with heart enough to ask whether they are under arrest are often answered with a question: 'Why? Do you want to be?' 'No.' 'Then sit the f**k down." -- David Simon, Homicide (2006), pp. 210.
76. "Martin Buber once said, 'The lie is the spirit committing treason against itself.' Our acceptance of lies becomes a cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish. How much do we tolerate before we become sick and tired of being sick and tired?" -- Stephanie Ericsson, from "The Ways We Lie," a must-read essay.
77. "One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'" -- Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," applicable to the concept of jury nullification.
78. Change and tolerance come from getting used to each other, not logic nor arguments, according to Kwame Anthony Appiah: “I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement but because it will help us get used to one another--something we have a powerful need to do in this globalized era. If that is the aim, then the fact that we have all these opportunities for disagreement about values need not put us off. Understanding one another may be hard; it can certainly be interesting. But it doesn't require that we come to agreement.”
79. "My job is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed." -- Unknown, though it could be my life's unofficial guiding principle
80. It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world. -- George Dennison Prentice
81. Always hold your head up, but be careful to keep your nose at a friendly level. -- Max L. Forman
82. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmild teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. -- Ray Bradbury, "Coda"
I wasn't worried about freedom, I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV. See, we've never had censorship in this country, we've never burned books.... Fahrenheit's not about censorship, it's about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, and the proliferation of giant screens, and the bombardment of "factoids." -- Ray Bradbury
83. We must travel across lonely and rugged terrain, through isolation and silence, to reach the magic zone where we can dance an awkward dance and sing a melancholy song. -- Pablo Neruda
84. “A liberal plants feet firmly in the heavens and proselytizes nonbelievers by rejecting pessimism through calm discourse and common sense.” — A liberal recognizes bright stars in feeble bodies eager to shine." -- a very young and idealistic Matthew Rafat (See Justice John Paul Stevens quote below)
Justice John Paul Stevens: Ahrens v Clark, 335 US 188 (1948): "At stake is nothing less than the essence of a free society... Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber... For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny."
85. For W. E. B Dubois, the foundation of African-American culture is, in his famous formulation in The Souls of Black Folk, "double-consciousness," a conception strikingly parallel to the idea of the wavering hero--or, rather, a striking instantiation of it. For Dubois, "the American Negro... ever feels his twoness—an American, A Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
Furthermore, "the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife--this longing to attain a self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this he wishes neither of his older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the door of Opportunity closed roughly in his face." -- Playthell Benjamin and Stanley Crouch, Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk (2002), pp. 364-65