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Georgia Tech and the SEC

TRUE STORY: Georgia Tech won the college football national championship in 1928, but in the following years the team struggled. Head coach William Alexander decided that he needed a new assistant to “shake things up”. In 1930, Alexander asked his line coach, Mac Tharpe, to drive to Knoxville to watch the game between Tennessee and Tech’s next opponent, North Carolina. Fate then intervened: Tharpe’s car broke down on the way to the game. It was an easy repair, and Tharpe was on the road again in a couple of hours. But by the time he got there the game was over, so there was nothing for him to see. Not wanting to return to Atlanta empty-handed, Tharpe sought out Tennessee coach Bob Neyland for his thoughts about the Tar Heels. Neyland suggested that Tharpe talk to one if his assistants, a guy named Bobby Dodd. Tharpe was so impressed with Dodd’s analysis that he raved about him to Alexander. Alexander had heard other good things about Dodd, and decided to hire him. And so Bobby Dodd became an official member of Tech’s staff on December 28, 1930.

Dodd would, of course, eventually become head coach, racking up a regular season record of 165–64–8 and a bowl record of 9-4, including three wins in the Sugar Bowl, two in the Orange Bowl and one in the Cotton Bowl. Under his leadership, Tech won a national championship and two SEC championships.

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Bobby Dodd in 1962

Which is interesting. Georgia Tech won five SEC football championships over the years, which is more than half the current SEC schools combined. Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas A&M and Vanderbilt have never won an SEC championship, while Mississippi State has won one and Kentucky has won two. Tech is only one SEC championship short of Ole Miss, who won their sixth (and, so far, last) SEC title in 1963.

But why did Tech leave the SEC anyway? Why did the school play as a football independent from 1964 to 1978, when it joined the ACC?

Part of it was a personal feud between Dodd and Alabama coach Bear Bryant. In 1961, Tech traveled to Legion Field in Birmingham to play the Crimson Tide. At one point in the game, Tech had to punt the ball to Alabama. After the Alabama receiver had signaled for a fair catch (but possibly before the referee blew his whistle), an Alabama player named Darwin Holt launched himself at Tech player Chick Graning, viciously hitting him underneath his face mask. Graning had five teeth knocked out, and suffered fractures of the alveolar process (facial bones),  the right zygomatic process (bone beneath the right eye), the right maxillary sinus, and had several other facial bones broken. He was knocked unconscious and suffered a serious cerebral concussion and (possibly) a fracture at the base of his skull. Graning was a very popular student at Tech, and Sports Illustrated said that he was “basically too gentle to be a truly great football player”. No need to worry: after Holt’s hit, Graning never played football again.

Dodd (and everyone else on the team, and all the Tech fans in the stadium, and faculty back in Atlanta, and alumni everywhere) thought Holt had committed a cheap shot that he should have, at the very least, been penalized for. After all, everyone involved – even Alabama’s players and local media – agreed that the hit had come after the fair catch had been called for, which effectively ended the play.

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Goodbye, Underbelly?

The sixth season of Underbelly, the Australian true-crime series that drew occasional comparisons to The Sopranos and The Wire, ended on Sunday. And it’s likely gone forever.

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The cast of Underbelly

Part of it is due to falling ratings. The first series – 2008’s Underbelly, about a gangland war in Melbourne from 1995–2004 – was intended as a one-off mini-series. But the series got massive ratings: each episode averaged 1.26 million viewers, which is especially impressive considering that the series was banned in Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state, because several of the real-life criminals featured in the series still had cases pending in the courts.

Underbelly was such a ratings blockbuster that the Nine Network commissioned Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities (about the start of the wholesale heroin trade from 1976-1987) in 2009. This time the whole of Australia got to watch, and the series averaged a staggering 2.159 million viewers per episode.

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Matthew Newton as Terry Clark in Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities

Ratings fell a bit for 2010’s Underbelly: The Golden Mile, about police corruption and organized crime in Sydney’s nightclub district. But viewership generally remained pretty solid at 1.712 million viewers per episode.

The series recovered somewhat with 2011’s Underbelly: Razor, which was set in the 1920s and featured two of Sydney’s most notorious gangsters… who just happened to be women. The premiere episode was the highest-rated drama in Australian history, with 2.79 million viewers (the population of Australia is around 22 million, so well over 10% of the entire country watched that episode). But ratings fell thereafter, averaging 1.546 million per episode. The series was the most critically-acclaimed of the show’s run, but seemed to divide among demographic lines: viewers under 25 really didn’t care for the “old-timey setting”, while older viewers loved it.

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The fierce bitches of Underbelly: Razor

The penultimate series, 2012’s Underbelly: Badness (about the 11 year quest to take down drug lord Anthony “Rooster” Perish), was fine in a technical sense, but felt somewhat stale and forced. It was the first Underbelly series to have only 8 episodes instead of 13, and on average only 1.05 million viewers tuned in.

Trying to capture some of Razor’s magic, producers went back to the 1920s for the (presumably final) series, Underbelly: Squizzy, about the life of Melbourne gangster Joseph “Squizzy” Taylor. While the premiere generated a healthy 1.68 million viewers, ratings for subsequent episodes were awful, averaging a mere 737,000 viewers per episode. And for good reason: as great as the first seasons of this series were, Squizzy really felt like it was scraping the bottom of the creative barrel. This season was a commercial and critical failure.

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The cast of the dreadful Underbelly: Squizzy

But it’s not just the falling ratings. It’s about taxes, too. Screen Australia, the Australian federal government’s funding body for TV and film, limits the number of episodes it will fund (and\or give tax breaks to) to 65 episodes. Their reasoning is that if a show is popular enough to air 65 episodes, it should be good enough to make money on its own without the help of the Australian taxpayer. Which makes sense. And the final episode of Squizzy put the total number of Underbelly episodes at 68, which is obviously over Screen Australia’s limit. With no more tax breaks, Underbelly – with its massive casts and sets and costumes – simply wasn’t profitable any more. This is also why Sea Patrol was canceled. A popular action show set in the Royal Australian Navy, Sea Patrol was simply too expensive to produce once the subsidies ended. Despite getting really good ratings, the show ended in 2011.

Now, none of this is “officially official” yet, but the ending of Squzzy made it pretty obvious that Underbelly is no more. Actress Caroline Craig, who played Senior Detective Jacqui James in the first Underbelly series and stuck around as the narrator for all subsequent series, appears as herself at the very end of Squizzy to give a few lines about Taylor’s legacy and his impact on Melbourne. That it was a bookend for the show was painfully clear.

But don’t fret: the creators of Underbelly are already at work on a new series: Fat Tony & Co. It’s based on the life of Tony Mokbel, an Australian of Lebanese descent who was featured in the original Underbelly as part of the Carlton Crew. Much of the series will be filmed on location in Greece, and the show will feature the return of many characters from Underbelly, including Gyton Grantley as Carl Williams and Vince Colosimo as Alphonse Gangitano. The series will air some time in 2014.

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SIMON’S PICKS – Week 1

SimonHey, y’all! Simon here! Can you believe it? It’s time for a new season of handsome, sweaty NFL mens and their skullcrackin’ thighs live on my TV set! PRAISE BE, GIRL! The Simon was 177-89 last year… let’s see if I can do EVER BETTER this year. You ready? Let’s go! 

 

 

Baltimore at Denver: With Ray Ray (and half the defense, and most of the receivers) gone, and Joe Flaccid’s unibrow under control, the Ratbirds just don’t seem to be the threat they were last year. That handsome Peyton Manning’s looking ageless as always. Simon says take the Broncos in this game!

New England at Buffalo: The best part of football coming back is having Tom Terrific on my TV set! He’s SO DREAMY! One wonders who Tom’s going to throw the ball to, however. Still, the Bills are awful as always, and Simon says the Patriots could sleepwalk through this game and win!

Cincinnati at Chicago: Which ugly Midwestern town will win this game? Who cares? Cincy has that weird cinnamon chili, while Chicago has those awful hot dogs! Blech! I’ll hold my nose and pick the Bears to win this one, but that doesn’t have to mean I like it!

Miami at Cleveland: My boys from South Beach are going to the Mistake by the Lake to take on the Brownies. Handsome former Steelers Mike Wallace should have a field day against the Browns who will, one again, suck (and not in the good way!) Put your money on the Dolphins and their hideous new logos!) on this one, girls!

Minnesota at Detroit: Those handsome Viking mens are going to take their rape and pillage show on the road against the puuuuufect Lions. And The Simon is pretty sure that the Lions will take this one!

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QUICK REVIEW: Campbell’s Slow Cooked Sauces

A few weeks ago, a friend posted a picture of some Korean-style barbeque she’d made. She’d made it with a new product called Campbell’s Slow Cooked Sauces. Oddly, Campbell’s doesn’t seem to mention them on any of their websites, so I had to get more info about them from Amazon. In doing so I found this:

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I’m a sucker for anything “Hawaiian” or “luau” related. I just had to track some of this stuff down and try it out. For some reason, though, I kept forgetting to look for them at the store. It took several trips for me to remember, but I finally found them last week at Walmart. Just so ya know, they come in several other flavors: my friend’s Sweet Korean BBQ (for beef), Moroccan Spice (for chicken), Tavern Style Pot Roast (for beef), Mexican Red Chile (for beef, for tacos) and Apple Bourbon BBQ (for pork).

I can’t speak for the other sauces, but preparing the Hawaiian Luau couldn’t be simpler: just put a pork roast in a slow cooker (pro tip: use liners to make clean-up easier), then pour the sauce over the meat, set your Crock Pot to 8 hours… and that’s just about it! The instructions tell you to shred the pork just before serving, which I was kind of nervous about: I didn’t want to pull the meat from the Crock Pot (and make a giant mess), but if I left the meat in the Pot I was afraid the forks would shred the liner and make a huge mess… which is why I used a liner in the first place… ya know? Thankfully, the meat was so tender that brute force wasn’t needed – the pork shredded very easily when it was done.

So… how is it? Pretty good! I liked the “Hawaiian” flavors of pineapple and mango. It was well balanced with the pork and was very… harmonious. One thing, though: either 8 hours was too long to cook the meat, or my Crock Pot runs hot… because some of the sauce burned. I don’t mind the taste (burnt ends are the best part of the brisket, in my opinion), but it you have any family members who are “sensitive” to burnt tastes, you might want to keep an eye on the Crock Pot and add some water or pineapple juice halfway through cooking to keep any burning to a minimum.

Other than that little quibble, I really liked the dish. What I didn’t like, however, was the price. The actual sauce mix is only $1.98 at my local Wally World, but it seems that most of the sauces are intended for 2-3 pounds of meat. I got a 3 pound pork roast from Walmart for around $9.77, making the total cost of the meal $12.24 (this includes 49¢ for the liner, but not sales tax or the electricity needed to power the Crock Pot for 8 hours, or the side of white rice I made to accompany the meal). $12.24 is a bit spendy for me, since I’m the only one in the house that’d eat it. Of course, for a family of four, it would be a much more reasonable $3.06 per person. And I did make two meals and a couple of snacks out it, so perhaps I should think of it as $3.06/meal, too. Still, as the only one in the house who eats meat, it seems expensive to throw down almost $15 for a meal. I wish they made the sauces in smaller portions, so you could cook, say, a pound of pork chops instead of a three pound roast. I’d be much more likely to buy them that way.

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MY $3 DINNER: Dim Sum

Back in July, I posted this piece about a ribeye “steak” for sale at my local Dollar Tree. A week later, my sister Facebooked a cell phone pic of a poster advertising the same “steaks” at her local Dollar Tree. I commented on her pic, and suggested that I review all the frozen food Dollar Tree sells. My sis thought it was funny… and so… here we are.

The missus and I go to Dollar Tree every few weeks to pick up various odds and ends, like shower curtain liners, tealight candles, C batteries, circus peanuts (don’t judge!) and Utz Crab Chips (every store in Charlotte sells Utz chips, but only Dollar Tree sells the Crab Chip flavor for some reason). Also, my local Dollar Tree recently installed a freezer, allowing this particular location to sell frozen food items for the first time. I almost always check out the frozen foods, and often pick up a few Golden Krust Jamaican beef patties, ‘cos they’re $2.58 for 2 at Walmart, but only $1 each at Dollar Tree.

On our most recent trip, the missus pointed out a bag of frozen pot stickers. I gave ’em a look, and was surprised that they were a 7 oz pack (compared to some of the other laughably small frozen items they sell). But then I spied another Chinese food item: cha siu bao, a bun stuffed with barbequed pork! Considering that this was a Dollar Tree in Belmont, North Carolina I was well and truly shocked! I know of only a couple of places to buy them in Charlotte, and those are restaurants. The notion of buying frozen ones – and for only a dollar no less! – was just… amazing!

I gleefully grabbed a pack of pot stickers (pork, naturally) and 2 bao. And last night was the night they became my $3 dinner:

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Although microwave instructions were provided for both items, I decided to go the traditional route and steam them. That meant getting out the double boiler and filling it halfway up with water. I then sprayed the top “rack” of the boiler with Pam, added the pot stickers and, when the water began to boil, put the rack on the boiler and covered. I let those cook for 9 minutes before adding the bao, as they (allegedly) only required 5 minutes of steaming. Come to find out, the bao were still slightly frozen inside after 6 minutes of steaming, so I plated the pot stickers and nuked the bao for a minute in the microwave. When the bao were done, it was time to eat:

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So… how were they?

Well, as soon as I opened the bag of pot stickers I noticed how pungent they were… and I mean that in a good way. They smelled almost exactly like the ones I get from my local Chinese restaurant. So that was a good sign. But it wasn’t until they’d steamed that I realized just how thin the wrappers are on these things. The wrappers my local Chinese place uses for pot stickers are thick, almost as thick as a Kraft cheese slice. These, on the other hand, were paper thin. I almost tore the first couple in half as I pulled them out of the steam basket. What’s more, these diminutive dumplings only had a teaspoon of filling each, compared to the tablespoon (and a half?) stuffed in the ones from my local Chinese place. Having said all that, all the right tastes were there. They might be small, but they sure tasted almost exactly like the ones from my favorite Chinese restaurant. And actually, when it comes to copying the taste of Chinese restaurant pot stickers, these actually put Trader Joe’s pot stickers to shame! If I had to choose between these and restaurant ones, I’d certainly choose the restaurant ones any day. But these are a perfectly serviceable substitute. I’d be happy to keep a couple packs in the freezer for football games and snacks. And they certainly have my local Chinese place beat on price: I could almost buy 5 bags of the things for what New China charges for a single order of pot stickers!

And then there were the bao. One thing I don’t like about bao generally is the inconsistent sweetness of the bun. At some places, the bun is nearly tasteless. At others there’s a faint sweet taste, as if they misted it with sugar water after steaming. But then some places seem to dunk the buns in high fructose corn syrup after steaming. Gross. So yeah – I’m not a fan of the sweeter buns, and thankfully these only had a slight sweetness to them.

I was also impressed by the ratio of filling to bun: many bao have a tiny amount of filling in a giant bun. If you’ve ever had chicken and dumplings with drop dumplings, imagine a baseball-sized dumpling with a tiny teaspoon of filling inside. These were perfectly balanced – not too much bun, not too much filling. And guess what? The filling had plenty of pork in it! If you’ve ever looked at the picture of a Hot Pocket on the front of the box – where they’re almost bursting with pepperoni or ham or whatever – then bit in to one to find mostly air… you have nothing to worry about here!

My only problem was that there was an odd sweetness to the barbeque pork that seemed to build as I ate the buns. Sugar (or corn syrup) is not listed as ingredient in the buns, but the oyster sauce and hoisin sauce both have sugar as a main ingredient. Still, it’s a minor quibble. These aren’t quite as good as the ones you’d get in a dim sum house… but they’re really, really good for a frozen product. Just steam them for at least 10 minutes, not the 5 listed on the instructions.

THE VERDICT: Two thumbs up – would eat both again!

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The “Battle” of the Sexes?

We’re around a month shy of the 40th anniversary of one of the most controversial tennis matches ever: the “Battle of the Sexes”, which took place between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King on September 20, 1973.

I was only two years old when the match happened, so I don’t remember it. But I certainly remember the era in which it took place. “Women’s Lib” was on the rise, and this tennis match, of all things, was very nearly a referendum on gender roles and equality. Millions of “male chauvinist pigs” were sure that no man could lose to a woman, and millions of women cheered for King, either vocally or silently.

Many people have forgotten that there was actually an earlier “Battle of the Sexes”. Riggs, who was 55 and retired, initially challenged King, then ranked #2 in the world, to a match. She refused, and so Australia’s Margaret Court, then 30 years old and the #1 female player in the world, agreed in her stead. On Mother’s Day 1973, Riggs and Court met in Ramona, California. Riggs easily won the match 6–2, 6–1, and got himself on the cover of Sports Illustrated and Time that week.

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All the media attention from the first match put enormous pressure on King to accept when Riggs approached her for “Battle of the Sexes II”. Riggs, who in truth was probably interested in money much more than gender issues, put together an effective PR campaign hyping the event. Indeed, it was likely Riggs’ people who really hyped the gender issues, stoking the fire of feminism in hopes of making more money from the event. Not that it was really needed: King was an outspoken feminist, and Riggs’ sexist taunts, freely given to any media outlet that would listen, begged King to reply. T-shirts and buttons were made up promoting the event, and millions of Americans chose sides. ABC, the network airing the event, ran breathless promos for the match around the clock, and Riggs went on 60 Minutes before the event just to make sure that every single American was aware of the match.

Tennis is normally a pretty sedate and well-mannered sport. But all the hype around the event gave it a pro wrestling feel. The 30,472 people who showed up at the Astrodome to watch the spectacle (the highest-ever attendance at a tennis match in the US, by the way) were treated to King being brought to the court in a chair “held by four bare-chested muscle men dressed in the style of ancient slaves”, while Riggs was brought in on a “rickshaw drawn by a bevy of scantily-clad models”. The two met at mid-court, where Riggs gave King a large lollipop, and King gave Riggs a live piglet named Larimore Hustle (“Larimore” being RIgg’s middle name, and “Hustle” coming from his reputation as a gambler). 90 million people around the world – a staggering 50 million in the United States, whose population was only 212 million at the time – were glued to their TVs as the match began.

And then, the damnedest thing happened: King won, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3.

Women across America cheered while men cried in their beers.

But let’s take a closer look at what actually happened, shall we?

Continue reading “The “Battle” of the Sexes?”

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Ask One Simple Question…

So I’ve been watching a lot of Australian crime dramas over the past couple of years, and one slang term always piqued my interest: “Jacks”, Aussie slang for police officers, as in “ever since the bank robbery, the Jacks have been watching me nonstop”. I wondered where it came from. Did early Australian police officers wear badges with prominent Union Jacks on them, maybe? Or did they represent British authority, as embodied by the Union Jack?

Nope – as always, the answer is far more complicated.

It all goes back to the Middle Ages, specifically France. Cavalrymen of noble birth were known as gens d’armes, which literally translates as “men at arms”. By the early 1700s, however, the gun had made heavily-armored cavalrymen nearly obsolete. So in 1720, the cavalry was placed under the authority of the French national police force – the Maréchaussée de France – and became known as the Gendarmerie de France. During the French Revolution, both the Maréchaussée and the Gendarmerie were abolished, only to be reincarnated as a military police force (still around today) called the Gendarmerie Nationale.

Contrary to popular belief, gendarme is not the generic French term for “police officer”.  The Gendarmerie Nationale has very specific tasks:

– to provide police services in areas outside the jurisdiction of the Police Nationale. This mostly includes rural areas, towns of less than 20,000 people and areas that cross multiple jurisdictions (like lakes and rivers). In this sense, they’re roughly analogous to county police in the United States that patrol areas outside city limits.

– Certain criminal investigations under judicial supervision.

– to provide all security at airports and military bases, and to conduct all investigations related to the military.

– to dress up in fancy costumes and participate in ceremonies involving foreign heads of state (much like the Coldstream Guards and their funny bear hats in the UK).

– to provide for crowd control.

– to provide all para-military (SWAT) services in France.

Sooooo… what does any of this have to do with Australian slang? Well, for a time in the late 1800s it was fashionable for seedy British types to call the police “John Darmes” in an obvious riff on gendarmes. Over time, “John Darme” became “John”, and then just “Jack” (that word being in use in English since the 1700s as British slang for a common man, as in “every man Jack needs a job”).

If it sounds weird… it’s possible that “John Darme” had a brief life in the United States, too. In the early 20th century, many Americans referred to the police as “John Law”. Whether this particular “John” comes from Britain and Australia’s “John Darme” or whether it’s a home-grown usage of John meaning “an everyman” (like “John Doe” or “John Q. Public”) is up for debate.

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Rugby Signage

I was flipping through the channels one rainy Sunday a while back and came across a rugby match from Australia. Since I hadn’t watched rugby in like… years (and since there wasn’t anything else on), I decided to watch for a bit.

I don’t remember much about the actual match, but I do remember being blown away by the ads on the field. It looked like they were made using the same technology TV networks use in American football broadcasts to “paint” the first-down line on the field… which is amazingly complex, by the way. Only this was some kind of super high-tech version, able to do all kinds of designs:

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Come to find out, it’s not high-tech at all. It’s just paint on a field, applied in such a manner so that from the camera’s point of view it looks like it’s “floating” on the grass. Here are a few pics from other angles so you can see how odd the graphics look away from the TV cameras:

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Apparently this type of “grass signage” is a big deal in Australia (see this company or this company). Although it’s not as high-tech as I’d thought, it’s still pretty clever.

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The (Bizarre) History of American Coinage

A while back I stumbled across this article at British newspaper The Guardian‘s website. It’s a filler piece written by a young man named Richard Morris. In it, he discusses the “five best” and “five worst” things about the year he spent studying at the University of West Georgia in the United States. One of Morris’ “worst things” was American coinage:

I’m not very good with numbers, so maybe this didn’t help me, but I still cannot understand American coins after living here for 10 months. One of the coins which is larger actually has a lower value than a coin which is smaller (and of the same colour), go figure. “Dimes” and “nickels,” still mean nothing to me.

Of course, to many of you the real mystery might be why anyone would travel 4,270 miles to go to West Georgia! SERIOUSLY: THOUSANDS OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE UNITED STATES, AND YOU CHOSE THAT ONE?? But that’s neither here nor there. And it is true that many foreign visitors have trouble with American coins. So let’s take a look at the history of American coinage and see if we can make sense of it all.

*     *     *

Modern American coins go back 221 years, to the Coinage Act of 1792. The act authorized the construction of the US Mint in Philadelphia, the very first building erected by the federal government under the new Constitution. The act also made the dollar the national currency of the United States, finally abolishing the hodgepodge of British and Spanish coins that had been used before. The act also defined several types of coin, which I’ll summarize below:

THE MILL

A mill is a thousandth of a dollar, or, to put it another way, a tenth of a cent. The name comes from the Latin millesimum, which means “thousandth part”. The funny thing is, even in 1792 mills were useless as a unit of currency. One couldn’t buy anything with a mill coin, so the Mint never bothered to make any. A few states made mill coins out of cheap materials like tin or paper for the purpose of paying taxes, but for the most part, mill coins have never existed.

But just because mills don’t exist as coins doesn’t mean they don’t exist as units of currency. In most American locales, property taxes are calculated using mills. Counties assess the value of each property in their jurisdiction and apply a millage rate to calculate the amount of tax a landowner owes. For example, a county might assess a piece of property as being worth $250,000. If the tax rate is 5 mills, then the homeowner owes $1,250 in taxes ($250,000 x .005 = $1,250). Mills are also used in a couple of industries: electric power is usually measured internally in mills, and stock brokers often charge their clients in mills rather than percentages.

But outside property taxes, the average American sees the mills most often with gasoline prices. In every US state, gas prices have nine mills tacked on the end, so that gas might cost $3.109 per US gallon. Why this is so is a mystery. Some say it came about thanks to a 1933 increase in the gas tax from 1¢ to 1.5¢ per gallon. Others say it’s just “charm pricing”, which is to offer an item for $1.99 instead of $2.00, because our brains process the former as being significantly cheaper than the latter. Still others believe a more likely story: that back when gasoline emerged as a consumer item in the early 1900s, it was sold in such small amounts and at such low prices that mills actually mattered.

But gas prices reveal something else about American culture: the universal dislike of mills. With the exception of property taxes, most every American will discuss such small units of currency as fractions of a cent instead of mills. No one ever thinks of a gallon of gas costing $3.10 and 9 mills… it’s $3.10 and 9/10 of a cent. And this might be because of trading stamps.

For almost a century, retailers across the United States offered trading stamps with every purchase. You’d save the stamps and redeem them for things like clocks, toasters and lamps. You may even remember the “54-40 and Fight” episode of The Brady Bunch, in which the kids agree to pool their saved trading stamp books, but chaos breaks out when the boys want to use the stamps to get a “boy’s item” (a row boat) while the girls want to use them for a “girl’s item” (a sewing machine).

Green Stamp

Of course, the stamps weren’t free. Companies like Sperry & Hutchinson charged retailers to join their programs, and charged for each roll of stamps the retailer ordered. And retailers, not surprisingly, passed these costs on to consumers as higher prices. In 1904, the state of New York passed a law requiring trading stamp companies to offer cash rebates in addition to housewares and sporting goods. Companies like S&H placed a value of one mill on each stamp, meaning that one could trade a book of 1,000 stamps for a dollar. But here’s the thing: almost no one took them up on the offer, because it was almost always a better deal to redeem stamps for goods instead of cash.

Continue reading “The (Bizarre) History of American Coinage”

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No Kidding?

So the other day I was reading this post at The Daily Caller. The gist of the story was that increasing tobacco taxes decreases revenue. This should seem obvious to anyone who took ECON 101 in college: the higher the price, the less demand there will be for the product. Because, ya know, that’s how supply and demand works.

Yet America’s politicians keep piling on the taxes and end up amazed when the higher tax generates less revenue than the lower tax did before. The linked article cites a study by the National Taxpayers Union, which found that (among other things) a 2006 cigarette tax increase in New Jersey actually produced $52 million less than the lower tax did the previous year. And broke-ass Illinois approved a $1/pack increase last June… which led to 39% less revenue compared to the lower tax the year before. Total shortfall: $130 million.

Of course, it helps that neighboring states might have lower taxes. Illinois has Missouri on one side (which has a 17¢/pack tax, the lowest in the country) and Indiana on the other side (which has half the excise tax of Illinois). And, for much of Massachusetts, dirt-cheap smokes and booze are only a 30-minute drive to New Hampshire.

Believe it or not, of all the issues we disagree on, THIS has always been my main beef with the Democratic Party. Not cigarette taxes specifically, but how Democrats want to have it both ways.

Back in 1990, Congress passed the infamous “luxury tax”, which added a 10% surcharge to jewelry and furs over $10,000, cars over $30,000, boats over $100,000 and private planes over $250,000. The theory, of course, was that wealthy Americans could easily afford such taxes, and would happily pay them. Or, to put it in more economic terms, TAXATION WOULD NOT AFFECT CONSUMPTION.

So… what happened? It was a disaster for American boat and airplane manufacturers. Before passage, Congressional policy wonks had estimated that the luxury tax would generate $9 billion in revenue over 5 years. But in 1991, the first full year of the tax, government revenues from the luxury tax were a mere $3 million. Demand for new boats plummeted by 70%, and at least 7,600 people in the boating industry lost their jobs (other estimates are much higher: one source says 13,000 workers in Florida alone lost their jobs, and as many as 30,000 people in related industries lost their jobs, too). It’s almost certain that the federal government paid out more in unemployment benefits than they gained from the tax. At the same time, the “boat tax” helped make a bunch of Bahamians and Panamanians rich. I don’t know if the tax did not apply to purchases made outside the US, or if the tax was simply easy to evade with overseas purchases, but suddenly overseas boat salesmen were swimming in money, thanks to Democrats in Congress. Odd how the world works sometimes..

The tax was such a disaster that Congress repealed it in 1993. And you know a tax is a mistake when the New York Times (a bastion of right-wing thought if ever there was one) says so. But yet, that very same year, First Lady Hillary Clinton advocated raising the tax on cigarettes by as much as $2/pack, with the publicly stated goal of “reducing teen smoking”. Thus, TAXATION DOES AFFECT CONSUMPTION.

So Democrats… which one is it? Does taxation affect consumption or not? You guys might be surprised to find that Chief Justice John Marshall figured it out all the way back in 1819 in McCulloch v. Maryland:

“the power to tax involves the power to destroy”

Use that power wisely, folks.