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By Robert E. Wright for Augustana College’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, 28 March 2012. Strangely enough, I became an historian of the Early Republic in order to better understand current public policy debates. Politicians and pundits have long been pretty good at putting words into the mouth’s of the Founding Fathers. I don’t think that all our policy decisions need to be based on the thought of the Founders but when they are, they should be based on plausible historical interpretations. After having studied the thoughts and deeds of numerous Founders for almost two decades now, I’ve concluded that sometimes the words that policy wonks put into the Founders’ mouths ring true. But too often they are a load of specious bull puckey. One particularly laughable claim is that the Founders believed that roads should be forever free. Some Founders favored local government roads but realized that even those had to be paid for, with labor and materials if not cash. Other Founders -- including Ge...

In Philadelphia, Baltimore, and their respective suburbs, some homeowners still pay "ground rents." The term, which dates from the eighteenth century, is a misnomer as the payments represent interest on renewable 99-year or perpetual mortgages. Although the creation of new ground rents fell out of favor before World War II, ground rents and other types of long-term, interest-only mortgages have much to recommend them and are widely credited with making Philadelphia the "city of homes" and Baltimore the "city of home owners." In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lenders found in ground rents a secure, readily salable (liquid) long-term asset that generally yielded between five and six percent. Defaults were rare because loan to value ratios (LTV) were conservative, typically in the neighborhood of 50 percent, and the interest due any given quarter or year was negligible compared to the value of the real estate, providing borrowers with strong incenti...

I hate afternoon naps because each and every time I take one, I wake up feeling bad or nursing a headache. A lot of thoughts are running through my head but my emotions wouldn't connect, making them seem like a million miles away. But I don't want the day to end without me capturing some of those thoughts and getting in touch with my current feelings... some sort of breather, an outlet. Last Friday, our son's pediatrician finally (though awfully belatedly) confirmed that he has kawasaki disease. What's worse is that, his sickness is pass the so-called "golden period" of detection and medication of 10 days. The first questions to my and my husband's minds were: "what kind of pediatrician would fail to diagnose the disease even though the idea was already brought up by another doctor? and what kind of parents are we to 'allow' the doctor not to diagnose our son properly and not to have asked for more tests to be done, not to have been more obser...

Spring is here in two hours. Spring cleaning officially starts in two hours. Do you share a household with others? Do those of the household not share an equal level of desire to maintain an orderly and clean environment? Whether a husband and wife or roommates, sharing this responsibility can be a challenging task. How do you peaceful resolve the differences? One option: the envelope . How much would it cost to have a cleaning service come in weekly and keep the home in a 'guest-ready' state? Each of you contribute proportionally to the envelope. Each of you record your contribution to the clean environment for the past week. If the effort has been equally shared then divide the contents of envelope equally back to all of you. Somewhat lopsided? You get that percentage of the envelope that equates to your percentage of exerted work. No one worked at it - you have the budget collected to hire out. Either way, the "envelope" method helps for everyone to feel fa...

We filed our taxes this week. The picture on the wall of our tax preparer’s office included the quote: “When the first 1% income tax rate was being debated in 1913, a U.S. Senator opposed to it stated, "If they get away with 1% today, some day it may be raised to as high as 5%!" How lovely would it be today to be capped at 5%? We would even be excited to cap at a certain ex-governor’s 15% if fairly distributed to all tax payers, whether their earnings were by way of nursing a patient bedside or from long-term capital gains. We know that paying taxes is our legal obligation. And we believe it is a social responsibility to pay taxes to support the common good – our roads, street lights, schools, libraries, fire fighters, and so on. But it is a bit painful to see all in one lump sum the amount of our ‘giving’ to the government for the past year. In the words of Scottish whisky distiller Lord Thomas R. Dewar (1864–1930) “ The only thing that hurts more than paying an income ta...