Osler's Razor

1) If you want to provide jobs for Americans, you can do that through targeted tax incentives to employers-- you don't have to chop taxes overall in a way that favors the very rich over time. In fact, the ability to set incentives is one of the beautiful things about tax policy. The fact that this is not what they are doing is telling. It's not about "jobs."

2) There is a very simple dynamic that is repeating itself-- one that is cynical and destructive. First, taxes are cut for the rich in a way that is guaranteed to exacerbate the deficit. Second, when the deficit predictably grows, the same people who called for the creation of that deficit will suddenly be shocked-- shocked!--that this happened and demand cuts in programs that benefit everyone except rich people and corporations.

Time will tell, of course.

Haiku excellence last week! This piece by Megan Willome told a little (Texas) story:

Iced tea at dinner,
then: "Do you have any wine?" 
Becker chardonnay

Thanksgiving is the biggest travel time of the year, as people shuttle back to the town they came from. When I was little, I remember someone trying to explain why Mary and Joseph were traveling to Bethlehem when Jesus was born. I guess this youth minister did not want to explain what a "census" was to a little kid, so he told me it was like Thanksgiving, when everyone travels to the place where their family comes from. It makes sense to me-- and somehow I still connect Thanksgiving to Mary and Joseph.

There is something deep and meaningful and sometimes scary about that journey. People have often left that place for a reason, good or bad, and traveling back  brings back a raft of feelings related to that move away. And the people, of course: family relationships are complicated. There are the inner-circle family members, and those further out, and sometimes they all bring their own complexities.

That journey is worthwhile for many of us (including me).

Is finding or re-finding faith like that journey?

Yesterday, I saw the movie "Lady Bird," and thought it was great. My only problem was the reference to Sacramento as being so boring that it is "the Midwest of California." Hey!!!

The Wes Goodman story, as told by The Independent:

On Sunday, the Waco Trib ran a piece I wrote about the Mueller investigation, which is fascinating to watch from outside. Here is part of what I said:

The Mueller team is like a clock: it offers simple information to the public, but a lot of whirring gears and intricate machinery is hidden from view. While we don’t know much about these inner workings, there is much to consider from what we can see on the outside.

Then my dad has this reflection for Thanksgiving. I hope that you will read that, too.

Some great haiku last week, guys!

This one from Jill Scoggins made me remember when we were both in Waco, and she was one of those new friends to me:

They are new-but-like-
old friends who have enveloped
me deep in their hearts.

But really, you should read them all...

My dad is going in for surgery this Wednesday. It's just a "routine" hip replacement, that would be a lot more routine if last time they did tried he hadn't pretty much died and had to be resuscitated. (He described that a little here on his blog:


Those of you who know me well know that I am not big on public prayer. I take Jesus at his word that maybe it is best done in a closet, to avoid the temptation of doing it for show. There is a good reason I don't get invited to a lot of prayer breakfasts.

There is a time to pray, though. And this is one of them.

What is the opposite of being jammed into a coach seat for a flight?

It's disappointing that the New Yorker piece is rooted in part in rumor. The story about child molestation is not rooted in rumor, though.

What does it take?

Look, I have known Christine a long time. A looooong time. Like, nearly half a century.  When we moved in down the street from her family, cars did not have seat belts. People on my street had party line phones (where you share a phone number with your neighbors). It was so long ago that color TV was still a big deal.

Anyways, her haiku last week has me stumped:

Played with Pammie J
In her backyard one summer
The London Game.

I know who Pammie J is. But I have no idea whatsoever what "The London Game" might be...

As I have mentioned here before, a lot of my time over the last year has been spent putting together a new casebook for first year criminal law students called "Contemporary Criminal Law." I sent it off to West Publishing yesterday-- all 1026 pages of it-- and there was real satisfaction in pushing that "send" button.

Last week, I wrote about how this project pushed me towards a spiritual state of aloneness that I really hadn't given much thought to before.  Today I want to talk about another aspect of the project that was a surprise, and a good one.

The trick to writing a good casebook, in part, is excerpting good opinions that illustrate the point you are trying to make. One thing I discovered as I read thousands of court opinions was an incredible range of writing ability on the federal bench. There are some terrible writers, and some fantastic ones. Of course, much of the writing is done by 20-something law clerks (I was one) whose previous experience was editing long turgid law review articles. The influence of bad academic writing on bad judicial writing became clear pretty quickly, as did the fact that some judges really transcend that challenge. I returned to the same judges multiple times, because their work was wonderful.

Once you have spotted a good opinion, though, the challenge turns to chopping it up. You rarely can afford the space to include an entire opinion. I found myself time and again spending hours on a single opinion, trying to reduce it to its essence and the facts that made it compelling.

When I did that well (and sometimes I was better than others) it was like chiseling a gem to a shape that seems to create light. After a while, it came to feel like an art. As I chipped away words to find the shape of a tragedy (and all of criminal law is tragedy), it reminded me of the way my dad seems to draw a person onto the canvas out of the ether.

Jesus did talk a lot more about what we need to give up than what we need to keep. I have often thought of that only in terms of sacrifice and humility-- cutting away wealth and pride-- but there is something more as well.

Sometimes we must carve away to reveal truth-- the noise, the distractions, the negativity. There is a spiritual value in that, of course, and the season for it begins in just a few weeks. I love Advent. It is coming at just the right time this year.

This week I was on a plane sitting next to a guy in a Liberty University sweatshirt. He was coming back from a hunting trip, and he was a talker.

I was reading the paper. He looked over my shoulder (at no story in particular) and said: "It's just terrible, all the crime. I can't believe how bad it's gotten."

Perhaps, I thought, he was referring to the horrible church shooting in Texas, but he assured me it wasn't that when I asked if that was what he was talking about. "I just mean the robberies and murders and rapes. It's out of control." (This is kind of a Fox News trope).

It was a pretty typical comment these days, but it is also completely wrong.  Even with a recent slight uptick in some areas, crime is much lower than it was ten and fifteen years ago. Here is a Gallup chart comparing the actual violent crime rate (bottom line) with what people think the crime rate is (upper line):

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Mostly, I love the idea behind it, and the fact that it is simply about a spiritual value, nothing more and nothing less. I love the time of year, too, that turn from fall to winter when the trees are bare and the ground shivers. The sky can be grey, but then the clouds break and there is no sun like November sun. In Minnesota, we get big fat snowflakes that drift this way and that, looking for exactly the right place to land on the bed of leaves. I refuse to race past all of this bounty to Christmas, because there is too much to enjoy about what there is right now. The next holiday can wait its turn, after Thanksgiving and Advent, thank you.

About now, I always begin thinking about what to be thankful for. It's easy to come up with that list, too-- I have an abundance, unearned.

As I get older, too, I realize how important this is. As I think about that, about gratitude, it turns me away from so much that is negative. You can't compile a gratitude list and not smile now and then. It makes me want to call people, to hold them close, to thank them (and sometimes I do, so don't be scared!).

It's a good thing that is coming, this holiday.

I'm talking, of course, about the Spanish Medievalist's excellent haiku:

Argh, I’m a pirate,
But wait! It is snowing tons,
Pirate with parka.

This year has included a lot of solitude. I am finishing up a first-year Crim Law casebook (Contemporary Criminal Law, West Publishing, 2018), and the thing is up around 1,000 pages and over 400,000 words.  It is due to the publisher this coming Friday, and it is going to be done on time (I'm just finishing up some fine-tuning at this point). That all is good-- and I really do think this is going to be a good and worthwhile book.

To get it done, I have had to spend a lot of alone in my office reading and writing. Some days, I didn't interact with anyone else during the work day. My office was a little monastery. At lunch I would walk alone, needing to keep the strand of thought in my head so I could go back in and continue a coherent line. It was like a bubble I could carry with me; I would see people but was invisible as I passed the other way. A city is a good place to be alone.

I don't know that I have had that kind of solitude before in my life. I'm an introvert anyways, but this was a new level of aloneness and focus.

Aloneness is something that Jesus sought sometimes. He retreated to the wilderness for 40 days (much more aloneness than I dealt with!) and was tempted during his solitude (I only had to resist the temptation of Facebook).  At other times, too, he withdrew. There was something important in that.

There is a sense in our society that if you are alone, there must be something wrong. I'm not sure that is healthy. Aloneness can be necessary, and a sense of comfort with aloneness can be a gift (and hard to obtain). Of course, sometimes there is something wrong when people withdraw, and we need to pay attention to that. But... aloneness is not necessarily a failing.

Do you ever have a song that just kind of haunts your brain, where you can remember snippets of it but never the whole thing? I've had that going on for about two years, and it was driving me nuts. I'd remember a little line from it, or the tune might run through my head, but I could never remember the  title or the group.

Then it popped back to me recently. Here is the song:



It's a good song, actually. The band, General Public, was a mash-up of people from other well-known bands. The two singers were from the English Beat, the guitarist was from The Clash, and the bass player came from Specials. The keyboard player and the drummer were previously in Dexy's Midnight Runners, who you might remember from this song:



Yeesh, those overalls... but it was the 80's. You should see the stuff I wore then!

Supposedly, the House Republican leadership will unveil their tax plan today. I won't express much of an opinion on it, since... you know, we don't know what is in it. But maybe by the time you read this we will, and I welcome your comments.

The versions that have been bandied around do raise two concerns for me. Maybe the final version will assuage these doubts, but I would be surprised:

1) I do worry about the deficit. I have for a long time. I have talked about that a lot here. Given President Trump's insistence on a cut in corporate taxation to a 20% rate (from 35%), none of the proposals up to this point have gotten around the fact that they will likely exacerbate the debt.

2) Income inequality was a huge issue for both Republicans and Democrats in the last election. It sure seems like the tax proposals under consideration would make that inequality worse.

What do you think?