When federal-government employees make 40 percent more than private-sector ones, and when the top 1 percent pay 46 percent of all income taxes, something is out of whack.
The latest figures from Washington show that, for comparable work, the federal-government employee now makes 40 percent more in wage and benefits than the private-sector employee. I ask you, by what principle of democratic governance – by what notion? by what talking point? – can that disparity be justified?
• This is a big story and deserves its own column. You have my promissory note.
• Of all the Sixties rhetorical hits that Joe Biden replays endlessly, the one that bothers me the most, the one that really rattles my molars, is “the rich should pay their fair share.” Thanks to those feisty folks at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, we now know that the rich — the top 1 percent of income earners — now pay 46 percent of all income taxes. Hey, national press corps! Earn your constitutional keep! What, exactly, would be their fair share?
• When confronted with that 46 percent figure, a visitor from another planet, or at least from somewhere beyond the circulation area of the New York Times, might reasonably ask, “Wow! The Americans are soaking the rich at unprecedented levels. Won’t that inflict great damage on their dynamic economy?”
• If you’re in the conversation-bending business long enough, you will, now and again, get off a line that sticks. One day back in 1980, I was leaving Reagan-campaign headquarters when I ran into a friend, a well-known economist, who was on his way into a debate-prep session. I suggested that the candidate might want to ask voters, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” The candidate loved it. I know that because, in the years since, I have run into five guys who claim credit for the line. (The well-known economist, Alan Greenspan, was not one of them.)
• Then there was the time, a few years prior, when I was asked to ghostwrite a speech for Curtis LeMay, the former commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command. When I got to the core of the speech, I had the general propose how we should deal with the Communists in Vietnam: We should “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” That line stuck, too, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever claimed credit.
• Let’s break a taboo today, shall we? You probably follow, or are closely associated with somebody who follows, the winding path of competitive sports — you know, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Which means that you know, if only at the edge of your awareness, that the world of sports is abuzz with superstition. A baseball rookie, for example, who blurts out the fact that, by the middle of the fifth inning, his pitcher has not given up a base hit is likely to be muzzled roughly by veteran teammates. In competitive sports, the unhatched chicken is never, never to be counted.
• I am, as a general proposition, in favor of leaving taboos unbroken. (Close readers of this column may have sensed that my conservatism is of the unreconstructed sort.) But there’s another side to this jinx. If somebody doesn’t blurt out the news of a miracle in progress, said miracle may slide by unnoticed, and unsavored.
• As a public service, then, and in full knowledge of the awesome power of jinx, I alert you to what could be a miracle in the making. Call it Colorado Avalanche 2.0. Readers of this column may remember the story of the Denver Nuggets and how our ownership group built them from nowhere to somewhere. (You can find it here.) Here’s the rest of that story.
• If you own a pro basketball team, and you play in an old building in a midsized market, it is almost impossible to make any money. If you play 41 home games each year — assuming you don’t make the playoffs, which was a safe assumption in our early years with the Nuggets — you have 324 days where the bills for rent, heat, water, cleaning, insurance, taxes, and other costs beyond imagination pile up in your empty building. There are just so many nights you can fill a few seats with a tractor pull or a fly-casting contest or an Amway convention. Yes, Springsteen could give you a couple of nights every other year, and country singers abounded, but whoever is the Taylor Swift of the moment can’t find time in her schedule for Denver or Tampa or Portland. So what can you do?
• You can buy a hockey team, which also plays 41 home games each year.
• That was a magical year. In June of 1995, we bought a Canadian team. We renamed them (from the original French) in August. We had the new uniforms delivered in September. And in the following June, we skated the Stanley Cup as world champions. What a sweet, sweet ride.
• I reprise this piece of history to tell you that I’m getting that feeling again this year. The fingertip tingle. This Avalanche team is coming together with a rush. They have three established stars, all of them in their prime, all of them headed to the Hall of Fame. Remember the names. Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Mikko Rantanen — two Canadians, one from Halifax and the other from Calgary, and one Finn, one big, fast Finn. The Avalanche have a stingy defense and a gritty crew of third- and fourth-line forwards that will forecheck relentlessly. But will it be enough? Will the goalie, Alexandar Georgiev, a promising but untested Bulgarian, hold up? Can the new second-line center — the improbably named American, Casey Mittelstadt — provide good two-way play and prevent a sharp drop-off from MacKinnon’s top line? Can the somewhat-past-their-prime boys — Zach Parise (39), Andrew Cogliano (36), and Jack Johnson (37) — do it one more time? Can the team maintain poise and excellence over a grueling two-month tournament? Can the Avalanche get to the Finals and then win in June — when every member of the team will be hurting and more than a few of them will be headed to surgery over the summer?
• You may want to start watching the games. Many of them will be on the ABC, ESPN, or TNT networks. As we say in the hockey business, past results are no guarantee of future performance, but you could be in for a long, sweet ride. Go Avs!