A couple weeks past its shelf life, but still instructive:
Christian Schneider
Author, Columnist
Author: Christian (page 16 of 81)
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My column arguing for requiring government employees to kick in more for their retirement benefits appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel yesterday. It has undoubtedly riled state employees who have become accustomed to the generous retirement benefits offered by the taxpayers.
It seems, however, that state and local government employees should be willing to make a fairly small concession in exchange for saving their jobs. It seems that most on the left argue vehemently that fewer government employees makes for worse government. This issue exposes the schism between conscientious liberals who believe in effective government versus those who merely see taxpayers as a way to pad their own wallets.
In the article, I mention that the issue of requiring more employee retirement contributions is “an idea that nobody is talking about.” In fact, a requirement that new employees pay a portion of their pension was in the Assembly Republican budget that passed in 2007, and Representative Mark Gottlieb e-mailed me to point out that he introduced legislation on this in each of the last two sessions (2007 AB 449, and 2005 AB 267).
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau has an informative paper on the Wisconsin Retirement System which can be read here. The section on employee contributions begins on page 37.
I’ve posted about this before, but this most recent example just clarifies the blatant hypocrisy from both lawmakers and the teachers’ union.
Last week, Governor Doyle announced he would consider “cuts” to K-12 education as a way of making up the additional $1.6 billion deficit the state has recently identified. (A “cut” simply means “not giving teachers as much money as they want,” even though total spending will continue to increase.)
Of course, when the state aid increase to school districts is scaled back, districts will simply raise property taxes to make up the difference. Apparently, Democratic lawmakers are taking steps to cap these tax increases. From last week’s Wispolitics Report:
Without changes to the revenue limits, the cuts to state aid that Doyle and lawmakers are considering could be backfilled with property taxes to make up most of the difference.
But sources familiar with talks going on between the administration, legislators and school officials said revenue limits on school districts could be tightened to limit the impact on property taxpayers, or there could be a reduction in the per pupil adjustment.
Perhaps you remember such a scheme to hold down property taxes in the face of smaller increases in state aid. Legislative Republicans proposed similar plans for eight years running – with Governor Jim Doyle vetoing all of the property tax freeze proposals that got to his desk.
In fact, in 2003, WEAC reacted to a proposal similar to the one being proposed by Democrats now by saying it would “return Wisconsin to the Ice Age.” In the last budget, when Republicans proposed tightening revenue caps to allow an increase of $100 per pupil, Democratic Senator Bob Jauch said he had “a hard time understanding the Republican compulsion to take a meat axe to the children of this state.” Joint Finance Committee Co-Chair Russ Decker said the proposal was like “putting a gun to the head of public education and to students.”
It appears Doyle and legislative Democrats have been doing a little shopping at Menard’s, as they now appear willing to both wield a meat axe and aim a shotgun at our children. The budget Jauch and Decker will end up voting for might end up being bloodier than the entire “Friday the 13th” movie franchise.
Perhaps the most vocal critic of a plan to cap property taxes was Governor Jim Doyle, who in his 2003 budget veto message, said:
The Republicans in the Legislature had a different approach. Instead of focusing on the problems with the state government’s budget – problems they played a key role in creating over the last decade – they tore a page out of the discredited playbook of the last Governor and pointed their fingers at the leaders of our local communities and schools. They tried to distract attention from their unfair cuts and sham budgeting by resorting to political gimmicks and slogans.
The arguments against their levy limits are numerous, but at the heart is a very basic Wisconsin value: We in Wisconsin have believed for more than 150 years that local communities know best the needs of their citizens.
[…]
That value – trusting our communities to make wise decisions – has served us well in education. It has given us schools that are the envy of the nation. Our children consistently perform at the top of national tests. They are our future. In order for Wisconsin to prosper in an increasingly competitive global economy, our children must have the very best education available to them. Our teachers work very hard to deliver that education, often under extremely difficult circumstances. Making children and teachers the victims of the state’s fiscal mess is irresponsible and inconsistent with Wisconsin’s values.
Is Doyle going to issue a press release condemning his own plan making “children an teachers the victims of the state’s fiscal mess?” Or does he save that rhetoric for Republicans when they hold one or more of the houses of the Legislature? Amazing how things change when one party runs everything and you don’t have a reliable bogeyman on which to blame everything.
I can’t wait to hear all the outrage from the teachers’ union when this new plan goes into effect. More likely, we’ll hear praise heaped upon our lawmakers for “making the tough choices” and showing “fiscal discipline.”
Of course, these aid “cuts” wouldn’t be necessary if the state merely required government employees to kick in a little to their own retirement accounts.
From the WEAC website, a special message from teachers’ union president Mary Bell:
At the end, Bell suggests a new way of fixing the budget deficit, saying we should “revisit the thresholds for targeted tax increases.” I guess that’s one way of putting it. If WEAC spent half as much time trying to cut costs as they do coming up with innovative ways to say “tax increase,” we’d be out of this budget jam in a week.
I also enjoyed the stylistic flair of having two cameras filming Bell during her speech, then alternating camera angles. Here’s a cost-saving tip: sell one of the cameras, then give that money to a new teacher.
See? We’re already making progress.
Earlier this week, I linked to a column by Steve Malanga that detailed the history of the U.S. government’s attempts to expand homeownership to those who may not be ready to afford it.
Today, Malanga is back with an outstanding article in the Wall Street Journal that recaps the growth in union influence within government:
Call it a tale of two economies. Private-sector workers — unionized and nonunion alike — can largely see that without compromises they may be forced to join unemployment lines. Not so in the public sector.
Government unions used their influence this winter in Washington to ensure that a healthy chunk of the federal stimulus package was sent to states and cities to preserve public jobs. Now they are fighting tenacious and largely successful local battles to safeguard salaries and benefits. Their gains, of course, can only come at the expense of taxpayers, which is one reason why states and cities are approving tens of billions of dollars in tax increases.
[…]
The results of such efforts are evident in the rich rewards that public-sector employees now enjoy. A study in 2005 by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute estimated that the average public-sector worker earned 46% more in salary and benefits than comparable private-sector workers. The gap has only continued to grow. For example, state and local worker pay and benefits rose 3.1% in the last year, compared to 1.9% in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
But the real power of the public sector is showing through in this economic crisis. Some five million private-sector workers have lost their jobs in the last year alone, and their unemployment rate is above 9% according to the BLS. By contrast, public-sector employment has grown in virtually every month of the recession, and the jobless rate for government workers is a mere 2.8%. For anyone who thinks such low unemployment numbers are good news, remember that the bulging public sector must be paid for with revenues that most governments don’t currently have. This is one reason for a spate of state and local tax increases, such as $5 billion in tax increases New York state passed in April, and $12 billion in tax increases California’s legislature agreed to in February that will only become law if voters pass a series of ballot initiatives next week.
The whole article is certainly worth the read.
I was on Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes last week. Swine flu, taxpayer funded trains, and alarms on day care vans are on the docket.
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For as much time as I spend on the internet, you\’d think I would have seen most of this stuff before now – but some friends sent me a bunch of funny stuff today that I had missed, so here it is.
Check out actual resumes and cover letters at nothired.com.
I hadn\’t seen Eugene Mirman, but this stand-up special is pretty good:
Eugene Mirman Comedy Special Part 2
Some guy named Zach Galifianakis interviews Natalie Portman: (I know this is kind of the \”Chris Farley Show\” schtick from SNL, but it\’s still funny)
And an even funnier version, with \”Mad Men\’s\” Jon Hamm:
Ahhhh, yes. The Summer of 2008. I remember it so well. Michael Phelps was spending more time in the water than he was pouring bongwater. The Milwaukee Brewers were on their way to their first playoff appearance in 26 years. Brett Favre was in the midst of the second of what would become his six retirements from football. George W. Bush was still president, but Republican candidates at all levels were pretending that his name was as obscure as the leader of the German Bundestag.* (“George Bush? Never heard of him. Is this some kind of trick question?”)
You may also recall the one issue that had America in the grips of panic, as the economy chugged along at a weaker, but still resonable pace. Gas prices hovered at over $4.00 per gallon, causing riots in the streets. Elected officials broke into tears when telling the story of “price gouging” by big oil. Congress planned on rewriting the U.S. tax code to stick it to gas companies. Local television stations routinely broke into their prime time lineup to announce that an area gas station had lowered their cost of gas per gallon by a nickel. The public couldn’t believe that Big Oil would have the onions to charge them what they would gladly pay for a gallon of gas. America was in the grips of mass hysteria.
But a strange thing has happened since that national nightmare. Gas prices have been cut nearly in half. At one point, they were down to about $1.50 a gallon. And suddenly, nobody really cares about gas prices anymore. Nobody makes any effort at all to understand why the price of gas has dropped – we only care when the dog is barking, and gas prices are high. Clearly, Big Oil is only useful to our elected officials when they are there to be the subject of demagoguery.
Back in the Summer of 2008, we saw article upon article about why gas prices were up. Has anyone seen a single article trying to explain why prices are now down? Do we even care, as long as we’re paying less?
As I see it, oil companies did one of two things:
1. Dropped prices in response to global demand and world economic conditions, or;
2. They decided to stop being greedy d-bags.
Which is your guess?
So while we blame oil companies for gouging us when they increase gas prices, I would like to take a moment to thank Big Oil for keeping gas prices down. Here’s a big atta-boy. Your willingness to forgo record profits over the past nine months has kept money in the pockets of working class people, allowing them to buy more groceries and lottery tickets. Your perfectly reasonable and rational response to a bad economy (lowering prices) has saved regular folks the headache of learning how supply and demand works, and allowed them to store up their energy to start complaining again when the market forces prices back up.
Now we can all get back to watching American Idol.
*Answer: Dr. Norbert Lammert
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, relating to Governor Doyle’s announcement of state employee cuts and furloughs:
Risser said it’s unfair to require “dedicated and loyal” state workers to take unpaid furloughs.
He said he wants to consider other options, even tax increases, saying state workers aren’t responsible for the recession that caused tax collections to fall by 7.3% over the past 10 months. That drop meant state government collected about $790 million less in general-fund taxes over that period this year than in the previous year.
Translation: “Dedicated and loyal” state workers shouldn’t be punished for a recession for which they are not responsible, but everyone who pays taxes should be. (That would be you “undedicated and disloyal” private sector employees, 115,000 of whom lost their jobs in the last year – while government employees actually grew by 5,700.)
Does Senator Risser think taxpayers are responsible for the recession, since he wants to punish them for it?
Yesterday, the news we all expected finally came down: state tax receipts are expected to be $1.6 billion lower over the next two years, bringing the current budget deficit up to $6.6 billion.
Most of the coverage of this shortfall will be forward looking, and focus mainly on what steps legislators going to take to make up the shortfall. But it’s also instructive to look at how we got where we are.
Here’s a list of the percentage reduction in tax collections over the previous year for the three largest categories:
Income Tax: -8.3%
Sales Tax: -3.3%
Corporate Tax: -28.0%
The income tax reduction hurts the most, since the income tax is the largest single tax collected. The 8.3% one year reduction accounts for 86% of the $1.6 billion additional shortfall.
But I would call your attention specifically to the Corporate and Franchise Tax, which is down a whopping 28% from last year. This represents a $282 million reduction from previous estimates.
It’s not too difficult to figure out why business taxes are down. If you’ve picked up a newspaper in the last year, you know that business receipts are plummeting, leading to an unemployment rate of 9.4% in Wisconsin.
But secretly, liberal groups are cheering, as plummeting business tax receipts strengthens their most common – and also most inaccurate – talking point: that somehow businesses aren’t paying their “fair share” of the tax burden. Liberal groups like the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future advocate for higher business taxes on the premise that businesses are paying less in taxes and individual taxpayers are paying more, as a percentage of the total tax burden. With businesses taking on large losses, and therefore paying less in income tax, it skews the ratio even more in favor of these groups, who like to argue that businesses are “dodging” their tax burden.
This was an incredibly weak argument to begin with. The business/individual tax ratio could be skewed for any number of reasons. If the economy was doing well (as it did through the 1990s), individual income could grow at a more rapid rate than business receipts. As a result, it would appear that individuals were paying more as a percentage of taxes, even though it meant that incomes around the state were actually doing very well. Conversely, business taxes could drop, as they are now, if businesses leave the state or close down. This doesn’t mean businesses are paying less of their income in taxes, just that there are fewer of them and that they have diminished receipts on which to pay taxes.
Yet earlier this year, liberal groups had their way and sucessfully lobbied for a massive new tax (called combined reporting) on the same businesses that we now know are swimming in red ink. Shockingly, the $282 business tax shortfall expected by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau actually includes the combined reporting tax receipts. So even though they increased business taxes by $186 million, receipts are still $282 million short.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this punitive new business tax may have actually cost us as much revenue as it created. New business taxes force higher unemployment, which gives us fewer taxpayers. Higher business taxes also lead to more expensive goods, which could harm state sales tax receipts.
Furthermore, higher corporate and franchise taxes also force businesses to either move to another state (or country) or scale back their operations, thereby diminishing revenues on which they pay taxes. (The same phenomenon occurs when states drastically increase cigarette taxes – fewer people buy cigarettes – at least legally – and tax receipts actually drop.)
But this is a dream scenario for lefty groups, which sets a spiral of taxation into effect. They raise taxes on businesses, which causes business tax receipts to drop. Then, they argue that businesses aren’t paying their fair share, and lobby for even more business taxes. The circle is complete – and forces the remaining individual taxpayers in the state to pick up the tab when unemployment skyrockets and business tax receipts drop to virtually nothing.
Steven Malanga has written a must-read piece in this month’s City Journal Magazine that provides some historical background to the current housing crisis and how it has affected the American economy. Malanga goes back and demonstrates that each and every time the government has gotten involved in attempting to expand home ownership, the economy has suffered badly:
In December, the New York Times published a 5,100-word article charging that the Bush administration’s housing policies had “stoked” the foreclosure crisis-and thus the financial meltdown. By pushing for lax lending standards, encouraging government enterprises to make mortgages more available, and leaning on private lenders to come up with innovative ways to lend to ever more Americans-using “the mighty muscle of the federal government,” as the president himself put it-Bush had lured millions of people into bad mortgages that they ultimately couldn’t afford, the Times said.
Yet almost everything that the Times accused the Bush administration of doing has been pursued many times by earlier administrations, both Democratic and Republican-and often with calamitous results. The Times’s analysis exemplified our collective amnesia about Washington’s repeated attempts to expand homeownership and the disasters they’ve caused. The ideal of homeownership has become so sacrosanct, it seems, that we never learn from these disasters. Instead, we clean them up and then-as if under some strange compulsion-set in motion the mechanisms of the next housing catastrophe.
After detailing each housing collapse and how our lawmakers caused them, Malanga points out that we’re headed down the same road again:
Yet before we’ve even worked our way through this crisis, elected officials and policymakers are busy readying the next. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts congressman who serves as chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has balked at proposals to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which would eliminate their risk to taxpayers and their susceptibility to political machinations. Why? Simple: the government uses them to subsidize the affordable-housing programs that Frank supports. California congressman Joe Baca, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, also opposes reining in affordable housing lending. “We need to keep credit easily accessible to our minority communities,” he asserts. Republicans and Democrats, meanwhile, have scrambled to reignite the housing market through ill-conceived tax credits and renewed federal subsidies for mortgages, including the Obama administration’s mortgage bailout plan, which recalls the New Deal’s HOLC. As Harvard economist and City Journal contributing editor Edward Glaeser has observed, mortgage lenders have finally “recovered their sanity”-only to have government dangling subsidized low interest rates and tax credits in front of them and their potential customers all over again. Behind these efforts is a fundamental misconception among politicians that housing drives the American economy and therefore demands subsidy at virtually any cost.
Changing notions of fairness and equity also cloud policymakers’ minds. Our praiseworthy initial efforts-to eliminate housing discrimination and provide all Americans an equal opportunity to buy a home-were eventually turned on their heads by advocates and politicians, who instead tried to ensure equality of outcomes.
It’s a lengthy article, but well worth your time.
When revered members of the public pass away, some use the time to mourn. Some use the time to reflect on that individual’s good deeds. Liberal writer John Nichols, on the other hand, sees the death as a perfect time to take cheap shots at his political opponents.
In his column “Jack Kemp vs. the Party of No,” Nichols wastes no time cashing in on Kemp’s death:
Among the many tragedies of the contemporary Republican party is that the partisans who will honor the memory of former Congressman, cabinet member and 1996 vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp have refused so consistently and belligerantly [sic] to embrace the man’s wisest political insight.
“The only way to oppose a bad idea is to replace it with a good idea,” said Kemp, who worked harder than anyone else to make the GOP a positive force rather than the “party of no.”
Clearly, Nichols has been dutifully reading his Twitters (tweets?) from Harry Reid. I’ve been searching for the article where Nichols chastises Democrats for being the “party of no” when opposing Republican initiatives during the recent era of full GOP control. Surely, Nichols was bothered by the Democratic party being the “party of no” when opposing President Bush’s tax cuts or the War in Iraq. Someone let me know when they find that article – I’ll be here, holding my breath.
Nichols goes on to wax rhapsodic about what chums he and Kemp were, in order to convince us that this article isn’t just an opportunistic hit job. (Clearly, he fails in this endeavor.) He tells us that Kemp was an ideal Republican because he played with black players in the NFL and was opposed to apartheid. (Breaking dramatically from the strong pro-apartheid wing of today’s GOP, apparently.) Nichols makes sure that we know he once “traveled with Mandela,” and looks up some instances where Kemp spoke on behalf of racial equality. Wonderful.
I hereby challenge anyone to find anything positive about Jack Kemp uttered by John Nichols prior to his death. In fact, on economics, Kemp disagrees with everything Nichols stands for and attacks in the modern Republican party. Yet he would have us believe that his admiration for Kemp was so strong that he secretly pulled the voting lever for Dole/Kemp in 1996. In fact, a Lexis-Nexis search shows Nichols mentioned Kemp in 25 pieces he wrote for the Madison Capital Times in 1995 and 1996, and in not once instance did he reference him favorably. He once mockingly referred to Kemp as the “pied piper of supply-side economics.”
When Kemp was alive, Nichols didn’t have much use for him. But Kemp DEAD is a whole other story.
Of course, this is a common Nichols trick. He picks his GOP favorites only when it allows him to level a cheap shot against the powers that be. In 2002, he suddenly became a big fan of Republican Wisconsin State Senator Bob Welch when he found out Welch was thinking of challenging incumbent Scott McCallum in a primary. Naturally, Welch’s candidacy would have weakened McCallum significantly, which is all the Cap Times really cared about.
In 2006, Nichols bemoaned Republican Scott Walker’s exit from the GOP gubernatorial primary, praising his “moderation” on ethics issues, health care issues, and taxation. Naturally, this was merely an attempt to paint the remaining GOP candidate, Congressman Mark Green, as a bloodthirsty partisan. But just ONE YEAR earlier, Nichols shredded Walker in a column, calling him a “bigot” who wanted to make it harder for people to vote, and his candidacy for governor “very bad news for Wisconsin.” For the record, Walker never backed off his support of the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, his support of carrying concealed weapons, or the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR), for which Nichols rips him.
But since the left’s’ strategy became contrasting Walker with Green, suddenly Walker became an ACLU card carrying member, Grateful Dead fan progressive. When he was in the race, he was a “pretty typical Wisconsin Republican,” but the second he left the race, he became “palatable even to moderate voters.”
Fortunately, in this case, Nichols corrected this mistake. He decided to use a dead guy as a political prop, to be sure Kemp couldn’t speak for himself. Some day (and I hope it’s a long, long, time from now), the John Nichols obituaries will be written. Hopefully, at that point, someone will use his death as an example of how much more integrity liberal writers have than they did in 2009.
It was exactly at 1:11 PM on the afternoon of April 5, 2002 that State Senator Rod Moen wrote his own political obituary. On the floor of the Senate, Moen had offered an amendment to the 2002 budget adjustment bill that would have allowed a company in his district, Ashley Furniture, to fill in 13 acres of adjacent wetlands in order to expand their plant. Despite Moen’s own party controlling the Senate, his amendment failed, capping off what some considered a half-hearted effort on his part to keep jobs in his district. (A bill granting the wetlands exemption had passed the full Assembly nearly six months earlier, and Moen was never able to get it to the floor of the Senate.)
Fed up with state environmental regulation, Ashley announced on June 29th that it would be expanding in Ecru, Mississippi – costing Western Wisconsin 500 jobs. On July 3rd, the budget adjustment bill passed, with Moen’s provision included. But it was too little, too late. Moen’s provision was irrelevant, as the decision to move had already been made.
Behind the scenes, Republican staffers were joyous. This was, after all, a seat that was winnable for the GOP in November of 2002. Moen hadn’t had a serious challenge in a long time, and with the Ashley Furniture issue in their holster, Republicans dropped the issue on his head like a Steinway piano. Moen, a 20-year incumbent, lost the November election, helping Republicans gain control of the Wisconsin Senate.
Moen fouling up the Ashley furniture issue turned out to be gift for the GOP. But lost in the ebullience of the Republicans at the time was a sobering fact – 500 people had to lose their jobs for the GOP to pick up that seat. Basically, one party had to root for things to get really bad for Wisconsin in order to improve their chances of winning the next election. Such is the state of modern politics today.
***
It is now 2009, and Republicans have lost control of everything in state government, save for the Attorney General’s office. A recession is upon us, and Democratic Governor Jim Doyle has befouled the state’s fiscal standing. Doyle has done for the state’s finances what Vanilla Ice did for race relations in the United States.
Doyle’s Titanic-like captainship of the state budget, coupled with the current bad economy, has Republicans optimistic about winning the governorship in 2010. Unfortunately, for the GOP to have a good chance of winning, one thing has to happen.
Things have to stay bad. And if they get worse, even better.
Last week, I was talking to some Republican staffers about Governor Doyle’s proposed budget, which raises taxes by $3 billion, leaves enormous structural deficits, and is riddled with special interest giveaways. They all agreed they hoped it passed exactly as is – thinking there are enough politically damaging provisions with which to hang Democrats in the next election. Unable to actually change the budget in any meaningful way, the GOP political minds are actually rooting for liberals to overextend themselves. It’s like hoping your favorite football team loses the rest of its games so it gets a better draft pick.
Of course, this morose phenomenon isn’t exclusively a Republican one. It was in Democrats’ best interest for the War in Iraq to go as badly as possible (and it did, until it didn’t anymore.) The more the casualties piled up in 2006, the better chance Democrats had of taking over both houses of Congress – which they did.
In September of 2008, the John McCain presidential campaign was buoyed by a strong convention, briefly taking the lead in the polls over Barack Obama. Soon, however, the housing bubble burst, and McCain’s election chances went down the tubes along with the national economy. Claiming that the economy collapsing wasn’t politically advantageous for Democrats is like claiming horse tranquilizers aren’t advantageous to Paula Abdul.
As a result, the terrible economy that swept Democrats into power in 2006 and 2008 may also hinder their chances of keeping it in 2010. Basically, the GOP has to secretly root for unemployment to stay high for another year, in hopes of regaining control and making fundamental systematic changes that help unemployed workers in the long run. It appears that endless fruitless bailouts have fatigued voters, which may form a good platform on which the GOP to rebound.
The GOP is hoping short term pain brings long term gain. Let’s hope it doesn’t bloody Wisconsin’s nose irreprably in the next twelve months.
-May 4, 2009
After work on Wednesday, I headed down to Panera to grab dinner for the family. While standing in line waiting to order, I noticed a fairly attractive young woman standing about six feet behind me. When I turned around again, I saw she had edged a little closer and was looking right at me. Then, while still making eye contact, she took another step forward.
\”Uhhhh… hi,\” I said.
She smiled and said hi, and leaned forward a little. This seemed a little strange, as this is not the normal effect I have on women that have a full set of teeth. Generally, they manufacture some reason to pretend they didn\’t see me – like sawing off their foot.
Just then, the counter cleared, and I was ready to order. I ordered the food, then headed over to the other end of the restaurant to pick it up. I saw the girl order, then walk very slowly to a table, scoping out the restaurant. After a couple of minutes, a guy with brown hair walked over to her table. She got up, and they shook hands, as if they were just meeting. Then it hit me:
She thought I was her blind date.
Fortunately for her, I was not. I imagine she was relieved, as well. A small part of me wished that, had I known what was going on, I would have played along for a little bit. But after my ruse was exposed, I imagine it would have gotten uncomfortable.
I started to think about how different blind dating is these days, with the internet and all. I mean, does anyone go on a date anymore where they haven\’t at least seen a picture of the person first? It so happens that this guy looked a lot like me (or I, him), so I can see where she might have confused us. (Although on my blind dates, I always wore bright orange arm floaties and a Seattle Seahawks football helmet, to make sure the girl could spot me immediately. There generally weren\’t many second dates.)
But it seems that some of the best stories people carry throughout their lives are tales of blind dates gone horribly wrong. The ones where a friend of yours says she knows this really nice, funny girl that looks like Uma Thurman, and she actually looks more like Bob Uecker. (For some reason, at least in the mid \’90s, any time a girl wanted to set you up with a strange looking friend, they always said she looked like Uma Thurman, merely because she manages to be both hot and weird looking.)*
Now, with the internet, potential suitors can be fully vetted and examined prior to meeting in person – although, admittedly, any time someone posts a picture of themselves online, you should probably mentally slap on about 15 pounds to estimate what they really look like.
But sadly, the tales of crazy blind dates may be going the way of fondue and wife swapping. This is more disturbing than the disappearance of the newspaper industry. Everyone needs to experience a truly apocalyptic first date to tell all their friends about. Without these, people would be forced to sit around and tell stories about how they got their scars. (I have a theory that if more than 3 people are locked in a room for more than 2 hours, the conversation inevitably turns to drinking stories and scar stories – and sometimes, they\’re the same story. I have yet to be proven wrong.)
Oh, and since I know you\’ve been wondering: The sandwich was delicious.
*Side note – After college, I moved to Chicago and stayed with my friend The Gooch. We went to a bar one night, and I actually did meet a girl who looked like Uma Thurman – and in a good way. She was a law student at some school there. She called me a few days later, and asked me if I wanted to go have coffee. My answer? \”Well, I don\’t drink coffee.\”
Genius.