Prehistory of My Place - Part 2

Part 1 last week (scroll down below) dealt with the prehistory of Lovell, including the work of the late amateur archaeologist Helen Leadbeater of Fryeburg citing an article by William Rombola called, “The Ceramic Period in the Upper Saco River Drainage: An Analysis of the Helen Leadbetter Collection” in the Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin for Fall, 1998.Helen Leadbeater’s extensive collection also contained artifacts the age of which Rombola doesn’t guess at, including what he calls “groundstone” tools like “half-channeled gouges” he says “are thought to have been used for some specialized form of woodworking.” By groundstone, I assume he means polished. There have been several polished slate artifacts similar to what he describes found in Red Paint sites all over the northeast and as well as sites in northwestern Europe dating from the same periods. “One,” Rombola says, “was recovered from the north end of Kezar Lake in Lovell, Maine.”North end of Kezar Lake

In July of last summer, fellow teacher Terri McDermith and I arranged for several of our students to assist Maine’s senior archaeologist Dr. Arthur Spiess and his team as they excavated a portion of the area behind the Fryeburg Harbor Church. That’s just across the Old Course of the Saco River from the Kezar Lake outlet dam. Many other locals have extensive collections of artifacts gathered from there during the 20th century. With help from a local archaeologist, Lovell’s Jane Dineen, we found chips and scrapers of hornfels and Munsungan Chert as well as pottery sherds and fire pits surrounded by fire-cracked rock. Dr. Spiess said they all probably date from around 1200 AD. Time and funds ran out just as we were digging the most promising pits and Spiess said that almost always happens. If we can raise enough money - about $6000 for a week’s work - we can resume. That whole area would seem to have been used continually from about 4000 years ago until the Pequawkets (who were Abenaki) cleared out nearly three centuries ago.In the Fall, 1986 Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin, Dr. Spiess published a study titled: “The Kimball Collection From Bear Pond Inlet (Site 22.8).” Locals know that’s in nearby Waterford. The artifacts were gathered prior to World War II by Harold Kimball as he walked by the area where Mill Brook enters the pond on his way to and from work every day. Spiess said, “ . . . the collection . . . apparently includes Early Archaic material (circa 9000 B.P.). B.P. means “Before Present.” He goes on to state that “Abrasive stones are present in a variety of forms.” By “abrasive” I assume he means what Rombola referred to as “groundstone” and other archaeologists call polished slate. Most old stone wood-working tools are made of polished slate. The grainy images of them in the article look like the polished slate tools I’ve seen depicted in Red Paint sites in northeastern North America from Maine all the way to northern Labrador. Spiess states later that, “[this] heavy woodworking equipment, we suspect, belongs with the Early Archaic, Middle Archaic, and Laurentian Late Archaic.” That would mean they were between 3000 and 9000 years old.Also in the Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin for Fall, 1998 was an article by Craig Norman called, “Controlled Surface Collection And Artifact Analysis Of The Stevens Brook Site, Presumpscot Watershed.” Craig Norman, also, was alerted by reports of local amateurs collecting artifacts, this time on the shore of Long Lake where Stevens Brook enters and forms a sand bar. Here also, both stone and ceramics were recovered. The stone was made mostly from the same materials as those in the Leadbetter and Kimball collections. As with the Fryeburg Harbor site, there was much evidence in the form of what archaeologists call “lithic debitage” (lots of stone chips) that stone tools were created on the site over several millennia beginning during the Middle Archaic Period, 7200 years ago.Jane Dineen and Art Spiess

So it seems the earliest evidence of human activity within a 20 mile radius of Lovell is in the form of stone tools 9000 years old when the whole area would have been treeless tundra. They must have hunted animals, some of whom would now be extinct. The tools they made were of materials from as far away as Northern Labrador. Some sites were continually occupied, at least seasonally, for many millennia. We don’t know who the earliest people were, but the latest occupants before European settlement were Pequawkets - the local branch of Abenaki Indians. People around here used pottery for at least three millennia. They planted and harvested corn during the last millennium. The Pequawkets were aggressive, raiding English settlements in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.Terri McDermith and daughter Emily seated

There are many gaps to fill in my quest to understand everything that ever happened around here, and I’ve only got about 25 years left to do it. A few thousand dollars for more digging would help a lot, so if there are any pecunious readers out there who want to help, let me know. I promise to spend your money more wisely than government would, and I’ll also report back about how it was spent without your having to file Freedom of Information Act requests.

Prehistory of My Place - Part 1

I want to understand everything, but with a tight travel budget and less than a century of life-expectancy to study, I can only try to understand everything in the area where I live - within, say, a twenty-mile radius of Lovell. I want to know how the mountains formed, how old they are, what’s inside them, and what grows on them. I want to know why the rivers and streams flow as they do, how the lakes and ponds and swamps formed. I want to know what’s under the ground I walk on and how it got there. I want to know why it rains and snows and freezes and thaws as it does, and understand the glaciers that scraped it all. And, I want to know about the people who have lived here since the last time those glaciers melted.

The best guess is that the first people arrived when two-mile-thick glaciers last receded from here in southern Oxford County around 11,000 years ago. The earliest evidence of human activity found so far is in the form of stone tools from approximately 9000 years ago on the shores of Long Lake in Bridgton, as well as Bear Pond in Waterford, Kezar Pond and Lovewell Pond in Fryeburg and in other locations in the Fryeburg area. The earliest evidence of human activity so far discovered in Lovell proper is about 4000 years old along the shore of Kezar Lake.Old Course of Saco River Fryeburg Harbor

One of the most intriguing bits of evidence - though of unknown antiquity - was a skeleton uncovered in the year 2000 near Pleasant Point on Kezar Lake. Norris Bennett was digging a ditch with his backhoe to sink some water lines when he found a human skeleton. It’s rare for bones to survive long in Maine’s acidic soils. My daughter, Annie, was working there at the time and told me a forensic archaeologist guessed that, because of skull’s shape, the bones might be those of an adolescent Indian female. They went to the University of Maine Orono and I’ve heard little about them since.

Last summer I mentioned the skeleton to Dr. Arthur Spiess, Senior Archaeologist for the Maine Historic Preservation Commission. He’d never heard of it, though he’d been to Lovell on at least two other occasions in the performance of his work. That surprised me, but he indicated that when archaeologists uncover bones likely to be Native American, they usually avoid going any further. He didn’t say much more, but I got the impression that it was because of potential objections from modern Indian groups who would object to people digging up their ancestors.Test Pit in Fryeburg Harbor

It’s questionable whose ancestors they might belong to if the bones should date from 4000-9000 years ago. Little is known for sure about who those people would have been, and any claim they would be ancestors of today’s Abenaki is weak. Evidence that old of human activity in Ireland, for example, is probably not from my Celtic ancestors who seem to have arrived on the Emerald Isle only about 2500 years ago. We simply don’t know much about where those early Lovell residents (or visitors) came from or where they may have gone.

A lot of archaeological research in this area is confidential. I’ve had to promise to keep it that way in order to learn several things and that constrains what I can write here, so I’ll only refer to them obliquely. That goes against my nature, but a promise is a promise.

The Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin for Fall, 1998 contained an article by William F. Rombola entitled: “The Ceramic Period in the Upper Saco River Drainage: An Analysis of the Helen Leadbetter Collection.” Helen was the most knowledgeable of the many amateur archaeologists in our area and had the most extensive collection of artifacts found in Fryeburg, Lovell, Bridgton, Hiram, Conway and Ossipee. She was often accompanied by her friend, Eve Barbour, and both have since passed on. Though Rombola’s article focused mostly on Helen’s ceramic artifacts, he included some analysis of her lithic (stone) artifacts as well and those intrigue me most.

Rombola says the oldest artifacts in the Leadbetter collection date from the “Early Archaic Period” which would mean they are among the oldest artifacts found anywhere in Maine so far - 7000-9000 years old. Most are made of hornfels, which Rombola says “is prevalent in New Hampshire and southern Maine” and usually gray/black. Other artifacts are made of material from Mount Jasper in Berlin, NH, from the Moosehead Lake region, the Munsungan Lake region, the Champlain valley, from upstate New York, and several other sources. There was one piece made of the most intriguing material - found only in one location: Ramah Bay in northern Labrador. It’s a material favored by the “Maritime Archaic” or “Red Paint People” who lived in northeastern North America, including northern Labrador, more than 7000 years ago. Though I don’t know where Helen Leadbetter found her one piece, I was very lucky to find a small arrowhead made of Ramah chert last June near the Kezar Lake outlet dam in Fryeburg Harbor.My Ramah Chert Arrowhead

Part 2 next week.

Trouble In Utopia

“Americans work too hard,” said my son-in-law. “Over there, people sit around sipping good wine and relaxing. Maybe we should pack up and move to Europe.” He and my daughter had returned from cruising the Mediterranean on their honeymoon, stopping in Spain, Italy, and Greece. I had been reading things like America Alone by Mark Steyn about the looming debt crisis and low birth rates in those countries.

“I don’t think they’ll be relaxing like that for too much longer,” I said.

Last week, the end of the European vacation was coming into view. The almost-daily riots in Greece had escalated. Leftists threw Molotov cocktails at police. Huge banners hung from the Parthenon calling for revolution in Europe.Financial reality had intruded into socialist utopia and the left didn’t want to face it. Ironic that the birthplace of democracy and the birthplace of Achilles is also the place where democracy’s Achilles’ heel is being exposed. And what is that? Democracy works well until the majority realizes it can vote itself money out of the public treasury. The Greek majority has been doing that in the form of extended vacations, boundless entitlements, cushy jobs with short hours, and early retirement. Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and other European countries are right behind them - weakening democracies lined in a row and ready to tip over.

After World War II, average life expectancy rose in Europe as retirement ages declined. That meant Europeans would be sipping wine, relaxing at sidewalk cafes, and collecting fat pensions for many more years than the system could sustain. Taxes rose somewhat to help pay for it all, but not nearly enough. Added to this was an unwillingness to bear children. They weren’t having babies to grow up into workers paying those increased taxes.It takes money, effort, time, and self-sacrifice to raise children. That cuts into vacations and afternoon wine-sipping. It’s definitely more difficult to relax with little kids running around, teenagers challenging you, asking for money, borrowing your car, and questioning your values. It’s much easier to just go on living with your own parents until you’re forty-five. Mom can do laundry, cook, clean, and iron your clothes while government takes care of everything else. When your aging parents move on to assisted living or die, you can take over their house. Then retirement for you won’t be far away because you can stop working altogether at 53.

If anyone should suggest Europeans are too lazy and selfish even to reproduce, post-modern rationalizations abound. There’s: “Who would want to bring children into a world full of racism and imperialism?” Then there’s: Having children uses up scarce resources and increases our carbon footprint! Haven’t you heard about global warming?” And, of course, there’s: “Humans are overpopulating the earth and crowding out other species.”

While whales and polar bears are doing fine worldwide, human beings in Europe are declining rapidly and their economy is heading for a crash. Liberal/socialist politicians have been reelected again and again on promises of more and more unsustainable entitlements. When taxes were insufficient to pay for it, they borrowed. When it became obvious to lenders that Greece couldn’t pay it back, the money dried up. Liberal/socialist politicians couldn’t deliver on utopian promises and announced cutbacks. The left went ballistic. It was like parents with declining income cutting allowances to their children, who then threatened to burn down the house.Left wing demonstrators in Greece riot because they want government to do more for them. The conservative Tea Party in America demonstrates because they want government to get out of their way while they take care of themselves. Greek leftists leave behind destruction and dead bodies after their riots. Conservative Americans pick up after themselves, leave their demonstration sites spotless. Still, American media do their best to depict them as racist homophobes.

As Greece sank into anarchy, over here the Dow went into an afternoon free-fall brokers hadn’t seen before. Some analysts were blaming a computer glitch, but others knew what it was: the realization that the United States isn’t very far behind Greece. We’re on the same road they are and rapidly accelerating. We’re $14 trillion in debt and adding to it with trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits for the foreseeable future. Our demographics aren’t as dismal as Greece’s, but bad enough. Unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security exceed $100 trillion and that’s without considering the costs of the new health care “reform.” American investors looked at this and Greek riots - and they saw America’s future. That vision shook them deeply, as it should.

Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher saw it coming decades ago when she said: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Mayday-Mayday

Illegal aliens from Mexico are pouring into our country. It’s the federal government’s responsibility, but the feds don’t really want to stop the invasion. Washington feigns concern and wants to appear to be trying to prevent it - while avoiding measures that would actually stop it, like building a real fence. This has been true for both Democrats in the Obama Administration and Republicans in the Bush Administration, as well as congresses controlled by both parties for twenty-five years. Citizens, meanwhile, are getting angrier by the day. They resent pressing one for English in their own country.Somewhere between twelve and twenty million illegals are here already and tens of thousands sneak in every month, mostly into border states like Arizona. They go on welfare, work under the table, or with a stolen identity. They use hospital emergency rooms when sick or injured and don’t pay. They send children to public schools costing at least $10-15 thousand a year per child. They fill prisons at $45,000 a year per prisoner. Hospitals in border states are going bankrupt. School budgets are at the breaking point. According the Federation for Immigration Reform, California’s illegal aliens cost that state more than $10 billion in 2004. Today, California is nearly bankrupt.Illegal immigrant crime is exploding. A month ago, an Arizona rancher and his dog were shot and killed. The murder seems to have been the final straw leading to the passage of SB 1070, a law allowing making illegal immigration a state crime in Arizona. Demonized by leftists as Nazi-like, the law makes illegal immigration a major issue for the November elections. The left sponsored demonstrations in cities all over the country last Saturday, May 1st. I drove down to the one in Portland, Maine to watch.The Arizona law was definitely the aiming point for the few hundred in attendance. They came in from two directions on Congress Street singing a song in Spanish I couldn’t understand and chanting “Si se puede!” I looked that up and it means: “Yes we can!” or “It is possible!” Along with Hispanics and blacks carrying signs were white people with rainbow flags, SIEU and Obama T-shirts, Palestinian keffiyehs, and lots of tattoos. It was slickly organized by the Maine People’s Alliance, a left-wing group of “community organizers” with offices in Portland, Lewiston, and Bangor. The MPA pushes the usual panoply of government-expanding issues like socialized medicine, special rights for homosexuals, fluorescent light bulbs, amnesty for illegal aliens, and more taxes to pay for it all. It’s affiliated with national “progressive” groups like USAction and has an annual budget of over $800,000 with which it lobbies for the above issues.Portland, Maine demonstration

Mike Tipping, communications director for MPA, gave me a press kit which included endorsements by the Maine Civil Liberties Union. He told me his fiance would have had to wait ten years to get into the country if she were not engaged to him, implying that legal restrictions on immigration aren’t reasonable. “There aren’t enough busses to deport all the immigrants living here,” he said, and “families shouldn’t be broken up.”“Then let’s deport them intact,” I said.

He paused and he stared at me for a second. I had tipped my hand.

“But I don’t think that would be necessary,” I continued. “If we fined their employers and stopped giving them welfare, illegals would leave the same way they came.”

“Don’t you think it’s time for immigration reform?” he asked.

“You mean amnesty,” I said. “President Reagan did that twenty-five years ago, but 12-20 million more illegal aliens have sneaked in here since. No. I don’t think it’s time for amnesty. Arizona is doing what it has to do because the federal government isn’t doing its job.”

After the demonstrators gathered in Congress Square, various speakers railed against SB 1070 as “racial profiling.” However, the Arizona law only requires immigrants stopped for something else to show proof they’re in our country legally. Consider how many times we citizens must show our papers in the course of living our lives: at airports, banks, traffic stops, checkout counters, etc. It’s not racial profiling. Liberal Affirmative Action policies are racial profiling.MPA’s Tipping would seem to allow anyone from anywhere in whatever numbers to sneak the United States and stay - and anyone who objects is accused of racism. Hypocritical Mexican President Felipe Calderone called SB 1070 “racial discrimination,” although Mexico’s own laws against illegal immigrants coming into Mexico from poorer countries to his south are much tougher. US law requires resident aliens to carry registration papers on them at all times, yet President Obama says Arizona’s law would “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.” Presidential hypocrisy is rampant on both sides of the border.On May 1st four years ago, illegals carried Mexican flags and “Amnesty” signs in similar demonstrations. That indicated where their true loyalties lay but it backfired with Americans who watched it on television. Leftist organizers have since corrected that mistake. All I could see this year in Portland and elsewhere were American flags and “Immigration Reform” signs. Appearances have changed, but their motive hasn’t.

May 1st is Mayday, and Mayday is a warning. We’ll see how it plays out in November.

ADDENDUM:
For those who question immigrant welfare benefits, consider this from the Center For Immigration Studies:

More of Maine's Abandoned Neighborhoods

I. Saunders cellar hole

Soft, white-and-yellow flowers poked up through last fall’s leaves and contrasted with hard, gray granite. Whoever lived there had been very good with stone, and with flowers. The people who positioned each were long dead. Their house had fallen in and rotted away, but I knew I would have liked them if only for where and how they chose to live. The cellar hole still perched beside the steep dirt road. Holes don’t usually perch but this one did. Through deep woods, I pulled my ATV into what would have been their dooryard on the uphill side. From there, I could oversee what would have been the view from the house when it stood. Hardwoods across the road were bare of leaves and a mountainous horizon was visible to the west. The view would have been unobstructed when the farm operated back in the nineteenth century and sunsets must have been stunning. That was my second indication of how much intelligence and planning went into laying out that farmstead. Getting off my machine, I was careful not to step on more beds of flowers the like of which I’d never seen before. Next, I noticed a dug well covered with an old piece of galvanized steel roofing. Then I walked down to the cellar hole for a closer look. It was impressive. Massive chimney bases told me the house had probably been a cape with large fireplaces on the gable ends. From one uphill corner a galvanized, steel pipe stuck out - a gravity feed from the uphill well still trickled after all these years.

When I got home I pulled out my maps. One old Oxford County map told me that someone named “I. Saunders” lived there in 1858. Another showed him still there in 1880.

It was spring vacation and I’d finally found time to renew one of my favorite pastimes - exploring abandoned neighborhoods. I had focused on Albany Township, Maine. It’s not a municipality anymore, but it was once. Judging from the 1858 map, it had almost as many people as Lovell did, but seems to have lost many more in the post-Civil War outmigration to the west - so many that it ceased being a town and gave over control to the State of Maine. I’d looked it over from my pickup truck over the past ten years when I felt like driving around on Friday-night dates with my wife, and noticed some building going on. Some of the old neighborhoods are being repopulated. I saw homes going up next to or behind two-hundred-year-old cellar holes. People today obviously agree with 19th century pioneers about the best places to site a house.
1858 Map

Nobody built near the Saunders cellar hole though - too steep for them I’d guess. There are ledges on the hillside above and it looks like Mr. I. Saunders pulled some large flat stone down for his house foundation. He used two massive 5X5-foot slabs to form one corner and a few others to form parts of the cellar walls. Don’t know exactly how long they’ve been in place, but they haven’t moved after at least a century-and-a-half of freezing and thawing. As I said, he was good with stone. He might have been assisted by relatives as the 1858 map shows other Saunders farmsteads above and below his. Brothers perhaps? The Saunders farm above had disappeared on the 1880 map. Did that brother seek his fortune in America’s west as so many others from western Maine did?1880 Map

Looking at a 1915 USGS map to be found online on a University of New Hampshire web site, I could see there was still a house there where I. Saunders had built it and quite a few acres were still clear on both sides of the steep dirt road.1915 USGS map

On the 1943 map, some of the land was still clear but the house was gone. The 1963 map shows the forest having overtaken everything.1941 USGS map

As of last week, a few trees left from his apple orchard stood here and there between stone walls, and those delicate, white-and-yellow flowers were still blooming.

Obama's Nuclear Policy

“President Obama has announced a new policy on America’s use of nuclear weapons,” I told the class. “He won’t be the first to use them in a conflict with another nation, he said. And, he won’t retaliate with nuclear weapons if we’re attacked by a country which is using other WMD, or ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ such as chemical or biological weapons against us.”

I waited for that to sink in.

After a pause, a boy raised his hand and asked, “What would be the point of that?”

“Yeah,” said another boy. “Why have them if we’re not going to use them?”

“President Obama says America won’t retaliate with nuclear weapons against a country that has signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty - countries that have pledged not to make nuclear weapons. I think he’s trying to encourage more countries to sign it and that’s a big reason for his new policy,” I suggested.

“Who agrees with Obama’s new policy?” I asked.

A couple of girls didn’t stick their hands up, but turned their palms around to me while their elbows stayed on the desk. They smiled meekly.

“Who disagrees?”

Most of the students raised their hands. We had been studying WMD and the arms race following World War II. Students had seen “Hiroshima,” a made-for-TV docudrama focusing on President Truman’s decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s decision to surrender. They learned what a nuclear weapon can do - how it kills with a blast, with heat, and with radiation. They learned about kilotons and megatons. They learned what countries have nuclear weapons and when each obtained them between 1945 and today. They knew that North Korea has tested one and that Iran is trying to develop one. They knew that Iran is threatening to “wipe Israel off the map.”

A couple of days later I said to the class: “Sarah Palin criticized President Obama’s new nuclear policy saying, ‘It's kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, “Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me,”’”

“Good for her,” said a boy. “Is she going to run for president?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m sure she’s thinking about it. Who agrees with Sarah Palin on this?” I asked.

A scattering of hands.

“Who disagrees?”

Another scattering. Most did not to have an opinion one way or the other.

The next day, I told the class that President Obama responded to Sarah Palin’s criticism. “He said, ‘Last I checked, Sarah Palin's not much of an expert on nuclear issues.’” I paused and let them chew on that.

“And he is?” suggested a girl skeptically.

“Well, he does have experts advising him,” I said, “and he would have access to much more information than you or me or Sarah Palin would. He also said, ‘[I]f the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.’”

“But he hasn’t been president very long and he wasn’t an expert before that,” she said.

“Okay,” I answered.

The next day, I told them, “Sarah Palin has another response to President Obama. She mocked his criticism saying, ‘all the vast nuclear experience that he acquired as a community organizer . . .’ The president was a community organizer in Chicago for fifteen years or so before becoming a state senator and a US senator. Today, he’s in Prague, Czech Republic signing a treaty declaring that the United States would further reduce the number of nuclear weapons we have. He made a speech there last year saying he wants a world without nuclear weapons.”

“Can we do that?” asked a boy. “Can we get rid of our nuclear weapons? What would we do with them”

“We can disassemble them down to the enriched uranium or plutonium that is turned into energy according to the equation E=mc2, but we cannot unmake that material. We can only store it somewhere and guard it. Also, directions for constructing a nuclear weapon can be downloaded from the internet, so a world without nuclear weapons doesn’t seem like a real possibility.”

“How many weapons would it take to destroy the whole world?” asked another boy.

“Nobody knows for sure,” I said, “and I hope we never find out. Some speculate that it would be around 3000 or so.”

“And how many are we going to get down to?”

“Around 1600 in our arsenal, I think, assuming the Senate ratifies this treaty.”

“Hmm,” he said.

Taxing Situation

My wife is ticked off. She finished preparing her taxes and I haven’t. Our dining room table has been covered with my papers for weeks. The printing calculator sits in the midst of slips and invoices for deductible things I paid for in 2009 and I’ve been working on it all when I can find a few hours between jobs. I’ve always hated paperwork, but it’s particularly hard to motivate myself with government paperwork. She did all that for her private counseling practice weeks ago, but I’m still at it for my writing and property-management business and she can’t file until I’m ready.

“Make sure you tell the accountant it’s your fault and not mine,” she said. I filed for an extension and wrote checks for the amount we paid last year - about $11,000 for state and and federal taxes. That’s in addition to what is taken out of my teacher salary for which I claim zero deductions - and I have them take out an additional $150 per pay period. The tax code is much too complicated to figure out, so we pay $3-4 hundred each year to have a CPA do help us with it. Sometime over the next six months, we’ll sit down with her and hope she can show us ways to avoid paying so much.

Half of all Americans, however, do not go through this because they pay no federal income tax. And, according to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, because of college tuition credits, child credits, and something called the “Earned Income Tax Credit,” rather than write a check to the government, government writes them a check! These are not refunds I’m talking about here. They get more back from the government than was ever deducted from their paychecks - assuming they actually work. They don’t dread April 15th like I do. They look forward to it because it’s a payday. This time every year, money goes out of my account and into theirs.

During the first few years of my 35-year teaching career, government had me under the poverty line because I made less than $10,000 per year with a wife and four children. I cut firewood. We grew a garden, raised animals, drove clunkers, shopped at Goodwill, and ate a lot of soup. We got by and we even look back on those times as among our happiest. The kids are grown now and my wife works. I’m still a teacher but with a little business on the side, so now we’re “rich.” The left moans that “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Maybe it’s time to coin another phrase, such as “The ‘poor’ are getting richer while the ‘rich’ are getting poorer” because of the confiscatory power of government.
The Earned Income Tax Credit alone costs $50 billion a year. For months, I’ve been hearing radio ads in which a Spanish-accented woman tells us how fulfilling it is to work for the United Way telling more and more people about the EITC so they can get money from government too. In his latest column, Mark Steyn cited Congressman Paul Ryan’s claim that 20% of US households get about 75% or their income from the federal government. Another 20% get 40% of their income from federal programs. That’s four out of ten households. Throw in another 11% who are guilt-ridden, trust-funded, limousine liberals and you have a solid voting majority in any national election.

To keep this gravy train on the tracks, government goes further into debt by $1.5 trillion each year. We’re $12 trillion in the hole now, but with Obamacare, we’re frantically digging deeper. The McClatchey Newspapers write that since it passed, “Questions . . . have flooded insurance companies, doctors' offices, human resources departments and business groups. ‘They're saying, “Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?” ’ said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com.”

During the week before election day in 2008, a supporter at one of Obama’s rallies named Peggy Joseph said, “[When he’s elected] I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.”
The top 25% of earners pay 85% of federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% pay only 3% - and that’s after those tax cuts for the “rich” they whine about so much. No wonder they vote for Democrats.

Next on the Democrat agenda is amnesty for about 20 million illegal aliens. That will make voters who don’t pay income tax an even more solid majority. Mark Steyn asks: “If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go?”

Good question.

Government of Anointed Intellectuals

The more government tries to fix something, the worse it gets. New England yankees used to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Government, however, goes by the aphorism “If it ain’t broke, we’ll keep on fixing it ’til it is.”

In his most recent book Intellectuals and Society, economist Thomas Sowell dichotomizes Americans into those who view the world with a “tragic vision” and those who look at it with the “vision of the anointed.” The former believe the world will always be less than perfect, but people have the liberty to pursue happiness - and whether they succeed or fail is up to them. The “anointed,” though, believe they have superior wisdom, and with it, they can perfect the world if people will just do what they say. They would use government to impose their vision on everyone else, like it or not.Thomas Sowell

Those of us with a tragic vision see the Constitution as limiting government, which is a necessary evil. The anointed see the Constitution as something to get around so they can use government to “fix” everything. They see human nature as evolving and perfectible. They see no limit to what legislation can accomplish, and see nothing as immutable because they are anointed with superior wisdom. They believe, for example, that the law of supply and demand can be repealed if they will it. But the supply and demand dynamic isn’t the result of legislation; it just exists - always has and always will - independent of the anointed’s ability to discover it or define it. Government can outlaw drugs, prostitution or child pornography, but if there’s a demand, a supply will emerge. In spite of massive expenditures of money and manpower, the best government can do is reduce the supply somewhat and drive up prices. We learned that between the 18th and 21st Amendments to the Constitution, which were monuments to government overreach. The anointed thought they could ban alcohol and found out they couldn’t. Government could outlaw it, but if people wanted it, and they did, they’d find a way to get it. Smugglers got rich supplying it whether they were moonshiners or mafioso.

Maine’s government can increase taxes on cigarettes, but as local merchants try to tell them over and over, people will  continue to smoke and buy their cigarettes in New Hampshire or elsewhere. Government won’t get more revenue from the increased tax, but less. The same is true of income taxes and mandatory workmen’s compensation insurance. Make them too high and people will find a way to get around them. The underground economy will grow, not government coffers.

Our Founding Fathers rule of thumb was: “That government is best that governs least.” This kernel of wisdom is variously attributed to Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau and, until progressives started  using government to “fix” things in the 20th century, it was the American way. It’s the polar opposite of the anointed progressive mantra, which is: “That government is best that governs most.” In the early days of the century, anointed progressives at least had the decency to abide by the Constitution. To expand government power, they passed four amendments. Two were okay, including the 17th - allowing the direct election of US Senators, and the 19th - giving women the vote. The other two, however, were disastrous. The 16th created the income tax, and the 18th prohibited alcohol. Prohibition was repealed after sixteen years by the 21st Amendment and should have been a lesson on the limits of government for all time, but it wasn’t of course.

Progressives lost power in the 1920s. Then, when faced with economic slowdown, conseervative presidents Harding and Coolidge cut taxes and shrunk government. As a result, the economy thrived. Progressives regained control in the thirties however, and tried to “fix” another economic slowdown by creating a huge government bureaucracy. As a result, they prolonged it and turned it into The Great Depression. It might have gone on even longer if World War II hadn’t started. Nonetheless, progressives were able to give us our first major, unsustainable entitlement - social security - which is now bankrupt.

After an 8-year respite under Eisenhower, progressives came back with Johnson’s Great Society which gave us another major, unsustainable, bankrupt entitlement: Medicare. If conservatives hadn’t taken over Congress in 1994, progressives in the Clinton Administration would have given us still another major, unsustainable entitlement: socialized medicine for everyone. Now, in spite of a $12 trillion federal debt and a projected $100 trillion deficit in Social Security and Medicare entitlements, government is about to “fix” a medical system which is the envy of the world. How long will it take before it resembles the department of motor vehicles and the public schools?

Naturally, the president and the anointed progressives in Congress who imposed this upon the rest of us, have exempted themselves.