James B. Stewart, a reporter and author wrote on Op-Ed piece in the Saturday, February 16, 2013, issue of The New York Times, entitled “The Myth of the Rich Who Flee From Taxes.”  His major argument is summarized in the following statement:

“At least three recent academic studies have demonstrated that the number of people who move for tax reasons is negligible, even among the wealthy.”

As a person who knows many wealthy people who have moved to states with no income or inheritance taxes, and many who have chosen not to do so, I am often asked by many people why we do not leave Connecticut and establish a primary residence in a state like Florida, where I could save millions of dollars in taxes over the rest of my life.  My view is that Stewart is only partially correct and partially wrong in his assertion that higher taxes do not drive people to change where they live.

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Many of my Republican friends (I am registered as an Independent) are bewildered that President Obama won. However, I believe in the voters’ collective wisdom, and would offer observations about some of the reasons Americans chose President Obama over Governor Romney.

The Republican Party platform and its U.S. Senatorial candidates frightened many people who would otherwise consider voting Republican because of harsh, insensitive positions on issues like immigration, abortion, and contraception.  Governor Romney’s path to winning the nomination forced him to support positions he probably would not have supported in a general election campaign.

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We think of extreme climatic events as happening only in this past few decades, but there were events that fundamentally altered our country’s demography in the 1920’s and 1930’s and 1950’s, and were more devastating than what we are now experiencing.

The Mississippi River flooded in 1927 and had short and long term impacts.  In those floods, 700,000 people lost their homes and Herbert Hoover became a hero for his leadership in flood relief efforts, which propelled him into the Presidency in 1928. The flooding disaster triggered acceleration in the migration by African Americans from the Southern delta farm areas to Northern cities, which was part of a major migration by African Americans from South to North between 1915 and 1970.  It also resulted in a significant increase in federal control of waterways and flood control systems across the country.

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Today, September 11, 2012, is the 11^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and like that tragic day, is a clear, cool Tuesday.  I remember that day well, as do all of us with some emotional connection to the day’s events.

I was in my sixth year as Pitney Bowes’ CEO.  I was at a breakfast meeting with representatives from our Main Plant.  It was a difficult conversation, because I was explaining why the Plant would eventually close (it closed in 2004).  The reason for its closure was not a cost-saving play, but the fact that postal regulations around the world were driving us away from printing fixed meter impressions on envelopes and toward variable digital printing.  Ink jet technology was the only viable alternative, and companies like Canon, Hewlett Packard, and Brother owned all of the critical patents on that technology.  Inevitably, they, rather than Pitney Bowes, would manufacture the low and mid-range products that had been produced in that factory for over 80 years.

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Vocational and Technical Education

As we just observed the Labor Day weekend, there is a tendency for the media and for elected officials to reinforce obsolete views of labor and of vocational and technical skills required to compete in the global economy. There is also a tendency to celebrate the wrong qualities of people they would generally characterize as being part of the “working class.” As a result many of us have image of “blue collar jobs,” the skills required to do them well, and vocational and technical education required to prepare people for them that is wildly out of date.

Why What We Celebrate is Obsolete

Blogger David Burr concisely described why the Labor Day holiday was created:

“The holiday originated in 1882 as a result of the labor movement and was intended to be a day of rest to recognize the efforts of the average working man.”

We need to reinvent what we honor for this holiday.  Labor Day was designed to recognize the value of the “average worker,” collective activity, labor union membership rights, and “hard work.”  The typical image of the “blue collar” worker is someone using muscular power to do a physically demanding, backbreaking task.  When I think of Labor Day as it has been celebrated historically, I am more likely to think of either the folklore of John Henry as a “steel driver” or the cleaning woman celebrated in Donna Summer’s great song “She Works Hard for the Money.”

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We are going through a very painful time in our country in terms of the changing nature of work, business, technology, healthcare, education, and the role of government.  Because of disruptive innovations in every sector of our society, the old rules about how people succeeded are gone, but it is unclear what will replace them.

The major changes that are horribly disruptive to people’s lives are these:

• Because every marketplace is changing more rapidly and radically than ever before, the value of decades of experience in a job, a company, or an industry is less than it has ever been.
• Because experience is less valuable, everyone is less secure in his or her current employment than ever before.
• When someone loses his or her job, the path to future employment requires more substantial adjustment than ever before.  Moving to the same job in a different company or industry is less and less likely.
• For many people, the right kind of paying employment may be in an independent contractor position, as opposed to a job with an employer.  In fact, many employers are going to sites like www.freelancer.com  to hire workers to perform tasks, without having to create a “job” without fixed responsibilities, pay levels, benefits, and taxes.  For someone to make a living, it is more important that he or she seek “paying work” than to seek a “job.”
• Adaptability and innovation are more important than conformity, a skill most people are not taught in the educational system, which rewards conformity to what the teacher believes is the “right answer.”
• Categories and definitions of what we think about the world are subject to challenge and are less permanent than they have ever been.  The ways we describe what is going on in the world are more likely to be challenged than ever before.  For example, when we use the analogy of a blueprint to describe our genetic code, a common metaphor for describing genetics, we are reflecting an obsolete understanding of genetics, since we now know that we are shaped by the way our genes are “expressed” or “switched on.”  Even something as seemingly fixed as our genetic make-up not only changes during our lifetime, but the altered genetic “expression” can also be passed on to our children.
• Education is increasingly about “learning,” from wherever source we can learn best, as opposed to “teaching.”  Teaching implies that there is a fixed body of knowledge that is imparted from teachers to students.  Learning changes that paradigm by inducing students to seek insight and knowledge from whatever sources they might be available, and to recognize that there are no fixed bodies of knowledge, but continually changing assumptions and paradigms within every body of knowledge.

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Why don’t more Americans go into public service?  This is a most important question, because the public sector is being crippled by mediocre, sometimes poor, and, infrequently, but too often, corrupt leadership.  When I was young, my parents strongly encouraged me to consider either a career in public service or taking on periodic assignments in public service. I do not want to romanticize government officials in the past, because many of the pathologies we see today have been around for centuries and even millennia.

Nevertheless, I grew up reading about historical figures like the Roman leader Cincinnatus who left his farm to serve in a leadership position, fulfilled his public responsibilities, and then returned as quickly as possible to his farm and his family.  George Washington was admired because he completed his two presidential terms, and then went back to his Virginia home.  Both of these leaders represented a set of values which placed public service above personal ambition.

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President Obama has proposed billions of dollars for rebuilding America’s transportation infrastructure.  Many others, including the America 2050 project, have very thoughtful plans for more intelligent transportation networks that will enable America to be globally competitive.  As a person who has been a strong advocate for transforming our transportation infrastructure, I could not agree more with the goals of better use of our transportation infrastructure and more public transportation in place of single-occupant vehicles.  The one place in which I might take a different view from those who advocate building new transportation systems is that I believe we need to repair, maintain and getter better yield from what we have.

However, I also believe that we could reduce the stress on our transportation systems with three non-transportation initiatives, all of which are far less expensive to implement than building a lot of new transportation infrastructure.

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Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote a column in the December 16, 2010, issue entitled “What are Taxes For?” This simple question triggered a thought in my mind about the broader purposes of government.

Most people would agree that government has certain roles as a provider of security, a deliverer of basic services, a regulator, an enforcer of societal norms through criminal and civil laws and the court systems that enforce them, and a provider or a creator of certain “safety net” services, such as unemployment compensation and welfare.

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I am going to make some end-of-the-year observations about the way I see the political system, the economy, and our society evolving.

Many elected officials do not have the political will to address fundamental structural economic and political issues.  We built an economy after World War II promising middle class wages for all Americans, but without the foundation of skills and educational capabilities to make such promises sustainable.  Public sector labor unions and unions in heavily politicized private sector industries like the automobile industry, successfully negotiated collective bargaining agreements allowing people with very low skills and educational attainment to secure middle class wages and benefits, and protections against downsizings, even as our economy has had to become more globally competitive.

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