Arizona’s Race To The Bottom. Our co-hosts welcome Karen McClelland and AZ State Representative Mitzi Epstein to the show to discuss the state budget recently passed by a slim Republican majority. Epstein is a Democratic member of the House of Representatives who has served since 2017.
“This in a word, is a rotten budget,” says Epstein. “A huge tax cut for the very, very wealthy.” She explains that the new budget not only cut taxes for the wealthy. It changed the entire tax structure. “Start with the flat income tax,” she says. “You want income taxes to be progressive, because everything else is regressive. [But] thanks to the Trust Fund tax loophole, if you are extremely wealthy, you can avoid paying taxes altogether.”
One casualty of the budget is funding for public education. According to Epstein and McClelland, the legislature cut education funding by $300 million in defiance of a recently passed voter initiative intended to increase education funding. As a result, Arizona’s teacher salaries will remain the lowest in the nation and its per pupil spending will remain among the nation’s lowest.
The changes are part of the Republican-controlled state government’s desire to be a low tax state. But as Epstein notes, “Arizona is a low tax state only for the wealthiest.”
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Cole Interview – Podcast May 17, 2021
Advice From The Distant Past. Democratic Perspective welcomes Juan Cole back to the show to discuss his new book The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam – A New Translation from the Persian. Cole is a professor at the University of Michigan and commentator on the modern Middle East and South Asia through his website Informed Comment.
Cole’s research suggests Khayyam is what is often called a frame author. He says the poems were likely written by various people over centuries. But they were all attributed to Khayyam. Centuries later, the poems were discovered by Edward Fitzgerald who translated about 50 of them. They became beloved in Victorian England and the US during the Gilded Age. According to Cole, “By 1900 you had a new edition of the poetry coming out every day…it was tremendously influential. T.S. Elliot started writing poetry under its influence that was well thought of by all the modernists. And Robert Frost’s Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Night is actually an homage to this poetry.”
A careful reading of these 800-year-old poems shows another side of the Middle East and may dispel common stereotypes. They also have much to say about how to best live our lives. For example, by dismissing the “fear of hellfire and the hope of paradise,” Cole says the poetry seems to tell us not to worry about death and our own non-existence. “I think what Khayyam was saying is don’t spend a lot of time worrying about that. It’s that time you take away from living in the moment.”
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