Red State Rag

My state, Tennessee, has the fourth most regressive tax structure in America. That's the report of the 2009 edition of Who Pays, the annual analysis by the Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Ecomonic Policy of the distribution of state and local taxes across income groups in different states.

The poorest 20 percent of people in Tennessee, those families making less than $17,000 a year, paid 11.7 percent of their income to state and local taxes, compared to 3.1 percent of income paid by the richest 1 percent of families in the state—families making $414,000 or more a year. This means that the share paid by people making less than $17,000 was nearly four times greater that that paid by people making more than $414,000. In Tennessee the middle 60 percent of the population paid 7.6 percent of income in state and local taxes, more than twice the rate paid by the richest of the Tennessee rich.

As you may have guessed from these numbers, there is no income tax, progressive or otherwise, in Tennessee. Sales taxes make up most, about 70 percent, of total revenues. The state sales tax on food is 5.5 percent; obviously, such necessities are going to take a much bigger bite out of a $17,000 household budget than a $414,000 one.

Clearly this is obscene.

The fair thing to do would be to lower the sales tax, drop the tax on food, and add a progressive state income tax. During the 25 years I’ve lived here, there has been an almost continuous argument over doing just that. Generally the argument doesn’t get too far beyond the word TAX. At that point we are immediately get in tea party territory—we’re angry, we’re not going to take it anymore, don’t tread on me with your big government European socialism—and the discussion is over.

Of course, what this tea party amounts to is 80 percent of the population shoveling their early retirement and their kids’ college education and the vacation in Florida and their daily bread into the harbor, while a tiny group of people making more $414,000 stand on the dock and laugh at them.

If it were just the bottom 20 percent of the population getting screwed here, it would be easier to understand. As we’ve seen in the health care debate, compassion is not a significant political motivator. Nobody above the poverty level, middle class or rich, really cares about the people on the bottom who get shafted the most. We don’t care if they die with no health coverage, we don’t care if they pay taxes that could be going to food and rent. They are the unwashed “them” and they don’t vote and they don’t count.

More interesting is the 60 percent in the middle who are essentially shafting themselves. I live next door to people who get up every morning and start thinking of new ways to shoot themselves in the foot. More often than not these schemes involve shooting me in my feet as well. This is why I’m interested in how these people think.

But I would suggest that what goes on in these people’s brains should be just as important to those who don’t live next door to them. The past year has amply demonstrated that even when the red states lose an election, they can still call the tune for everybody in the country. The majority does not make policy; who makes policy is the guy who casts vote number 60 to cut off debate in the Senate. He can shoot you in the foot, whether you live in Knoxville or Boston or San Francisco.

So, yes, to protect yourself, you first build a majority on your side, and then you build a supermajority.

When was the last durable supermajority? Around 1936.

What do we do while we wait for 1936 to come around again? We make compromises. We sit down with our neighbors and try to talk them down from their ingrained hysteria. We listen to what they have to say. We make the best deal possible, we keep plugging, we do pretty much what Obama is doing right now.

Bob Dylan, Love, and Death in the Mountains

If you listen to your iPod on shuffle play, and you’re in the right meditative state, I swear it can speak to you like the voice of God. For one thing, these are your tunes. If they didn’t have something to say to you in the first place, you had no business putting them on your iPod.

OK, it’s a free country and you can do what you want. But I don’t put whole Beatles albums on my iPod, and there isn’t a Beatles album I don’t love. What I put on my iPod are just those tunes, by the Beatles or anyone else, that say something that matters so much to me that I don’t mind if I hear it over and over again.

The result is that I’ve got about 450 special tunes on my iPod, enough of them to give me the illusion in shuffle play of a random soundtrack, but each of them loaded with a personal message that—depending on what’s happening in my life on the particular day that the particular song jumps out at me from the mix—have the potential to crush me where I stand.

For example, when my friend David died of cancer I held my composure through the yearlong illness and final three months in the hospice and the entire memorial service. My breakdown moment didn’t come until I was sitting in the airport the day after the service waiting for the plane back home. I was listening to my iPod, and each time a song came on that I loved but had never talked to David about, I’d wonder if he had heard that one.

Talking with David’s family about him at dinner the night before, I realized that comparing notes on books, movies, and particularly music was what David and I did for a friendship. When Springsteen’s Born to Run album came out he sat me down, put it on the record player and made me listen. When I discovered he had not tuned into Little Steven’s Underground Garage radio show, I took him to the website and made him listen. Repeatedly, the music that mattered to him mattered to me, and vice versa.

So I’m running my iPod in the airport, counting the songs that I could have asked him if he’d heard had he been sitting beside me. As I listened I got up to walk down to the Starbucks for a snack and Dylan came out of the earbuds, singing an old song, one he didn’t write and David didn’t hear, an Appalachian murder song called Delia.

They knew something about grief management in the mountains back then, because there were plenty of sources of it, so many that sometimes you just let go and created your own. There was a whole class of songs—The Willow Garden, Knoxville Girl, Delia—about murder. First you’d kill your girlfriend; then you’d write a song about it.

In Delia, it’s not the singer who did the killing, it was some other rounder, and Delia took too many chances herself, for that matter. “Delia was a gambling girl,” the singer explains, “she gambled all around. Delia was a gambling girl, she laid her money down. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia’s dear mother took a trip out West. When she returned, little Delia had gone to rest. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia’s mother wept, Delia’s father mourned. Wouldn’t have been so bad if the poor girl died at home. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Cuddy’s looking high, Cuddy’s looking low. He shot poor Delia down with a cruel 44. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Man in Atlanta is trying to pass for white. Delia’s in the graveyard, boys, six feet out of sight. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Judge says to Cuddy, ‘What’s this noise about?’ ‘All about them rounders, Judge, try to cut me out.

“Cuddy said to the judge, ‘What might be my fine?’ Judge says, ‘Poor boy, you’ve got 99.’ All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You loved all them rounders, but you never did love me.

“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You wanted all them rounders, never had time for me.

“All the friends I ever had are gone.”

I didn’t make it to the Starbucks or even to the end of the song. I was sobbing after the second stanza.