For immediate release (622 words). Will we ever know the cost of “the Game” to the taxpaying citizens of Indianapolis? We ask the question because, even the day after, we are getting confusing reports in the media about the dollars involved. A couple of weeks ago we got a statement from the Capital Improvement Board (CIB), with some numbers at least estimated, that their part of the operation suffered a loss of something over $800,000.…

For immediate release (590 words). As a political strategists in battle-wearing Wisconsin watching union protesters threaten to block the Super Bowl spotlight in my homestate of Indiana, I could not help but think there had to have been a better way to make the Right-to-Work argument. A maxim of war is that you, not your opponent, defines the location of the battlefield, and the hype of a Super Bowl made a poor battlefield for the…

For immediate release (659 words). Mitt Romney pays lower tax rates than a teacher? Warren Buffett pays less than his secretary? Really? It’s not meant to happen that way. Our federal income-tax code is supposed to be “progressive”: those with higher incomes should pay higher rates. How does this work? First, exempted income — through exemptions and the standard deduction — causes average tax rates to rise with income. For example, if the first $20,000…

There was more, more, just inside the door In the store, in the store. There was more, much more, just inside the door In the corner grocery store. — Raffi, “The Corner Grocery Store Song” He was what we once called an ordinary American, a poor man’s capitalist growing up in an iconic corner grocery where his mother managed the cash register in front, his dad cut meat in back and he and his sister…

For release Feb. 1 and thereafter. (678 words) Merriam-Webster defines wishful thinking as “the attribution of reality to what one wishes to be true or the tenuous justification of what one wants to believe.” It’s an apt description for folks clamoring to spend hundreds of millions on a Central Indiana mass-transit plan. We can pump in more money, create faster bus routes, build a commuter rail system and construct a light rail line. But the…

Listening to our officeholders, insecure to the point of panic, make their recurrent promises to “fight” for us, I realize that my annual Veteran’s Day column is two months late. The date always slips by me, the holiday being understated to the point of ephemera in my politically correct corner of suburbia. That’s not entirely true. I always get a “Happy Veterans’ Day” from my wife and children, which brings a near tear and is…

Watching Gov. Mitch Daniels last night deliver his response to the State of the Union, the mind jumped ahead to Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012. The hunches of my wife and my optometrist have proved out. Barack Obama has won reelection. How, though, did it happen? In a column written after the South Carolina primary, Pat Buchanan had predicted a replay of 1964 and the San Francisco Cow Palace — a wonderful message but a horrible…

For immediate release (587 words) Here is an exercise in junior-high math. It takes 100 workers 100 days to make a locomotive. The workers are paid $100 per day. What are the labor costs of the locomotive? Answer:  $1 million. Here is a more advanced problem. Suppose another set of workers are paid $200 a day. Construct a story where it is actually cheaper to use the high-wage workers to make the locomotive. Easy. If…

For immediate release (678 words with optional cuts) “The truth? You can’t handle the truth.” — Jack Nicholson as Marine Col. Nathan Jessup on the witness stand in “A Few Good Men.” Perhaps politicians believe we can’t “handle the truth” about the costs of building and public works projects. They rarely put all the facts and figures on the table from the start. We are forced into the role of cynics, negativists and obstructionists, suspecting…

We have been looking for something on the front page of our morning newspaper. It is a headline, a story, that is journalism’s equivalent of the archaeology’s “Cambrian explosion” — a point of view that accounts for all points of view. We have dug deep but have come up empty even though our search has expanded to the newspaper’s web pages. It has become a game played with increasing seriousness over our morning cup of…