Of wealth and want

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Joe Weber

Must our system be so skewed?

Life isn’t fair. We all know that. But does it have to be so unfair?

Recently, we watched a couple extraordinary spectacles on TV. One was a snowboard and ski competition in Alaska’s Chilkat Mountains that drew athletes from across the world to plunge down a breathtakingly steep pitch of impressive powder and occasional rocks.

The skill these folks demonstrated was extraordinary. Surely, the expense – since helicopters were involved, along with travel – was also exceptional.

The other event was simply bizarre. Called footgolf, it featured teams from around the world that kick a soccer ball around a golf course, aiming to pop it into oversized holes. More than 60 nations sent teams to Acapulco for this global competition.

Again, one must wonder how much all this extravagance must have cost.

Mind you, we watched all this after coming from a couple days in Snowmass and Aspen, Colorado. Two family members tested their mettle there against a half-marathon length mountain trail run that featured punishing slopes on a course where one could easily twist an ankle or worse.

Happily, both of our runners fared quite well and stayed healthy.

Later, as we enjoyed an Oktoberfest party near the Snowmass ski lifts, we eyed the extraordinary hillside and hilltop mansions that some of the 1 percenters own. Since places in that neighborhood sell for up to $49 million, “exclusive” is a word that does the area no justice.

It would be churlish to begrudge anyone of their athletic choices, no matter which venues they use.

And it’s true that those ski-area homes put a lot of people to work building them while keeping others employed maintaining them. For that matter, most sporting events spread cash around quite liberally. Just think about how many folks feed off the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, etc., as spectators pay extraordinary amounts to attend games.

Still, our society’s leisure is pricey and growing more so. It costs more than $1,650 nowadays to take a family of four to a Denver Broncos game, according to a recent survey. And in some stadiums where other teams play, the tab tops $2,000.

The problem is that with so much money sloshing around, it’s hard to reconcile such indulgences with scenes that we all occasionally see — even in relatively affluent Summit County, Colorado — of people begging on the street. Near us, for instance, a couple takes their three children along as they either plead for cash or sell flowers at intersections near a supermarket on many weekends.

They wave signs that implore drivers to help them support their little ones.

And, of course, as one drives around Denver or any other city, beggars have become commonplace, a sight as ordinary and often as ignored as a park bench. As we drive our grandkids to shops, playgrounds or kid sporting sites, some of us must steel ourselves for the moral quandary such trips can plunge us into – should we give these folks a few dollars? Or, by doing so, do we just help keep them on the streets by making begging financially rewarding for them? Do we perpetuate a cycle with our modest doles?

If their only alternatives were social service agencies and soup kitchens, would such folks just turn to them instead? Or do they need such things, and spare change as well, just to survive? And, for that matter, in these times when helping the poor seems politically toxic, do such people have enough agencies to turn to? If they are mentally ill or drug-addicted, can they get help?

Against this backdrop we have seen the inequality of wealth in the U.S. fly off the charts. “During three consecutive quarters in 2025, the share of total wealth held by the top 0.1 percent and the top 1 percent reached the highest levels on record since the Federal Reserve started tracking these data in 1989, with the latest data from 2026 showing it just below those peaks,” the Center for American Progress reports.

“Since the fourth quarter of 2024, the share of overall wealth held by the top 1 percent has grown from 31 percent to 31.6 percent, while the bottom half’s share has remained at a stagnant 2.5 percent,” CAP adds. “This gap has been driven wider by things such as soaring stock values and tax policy changes in the congressional Republican-passed Big Beautiful Bill that favor the wealthy, as well as persistently high debts for the middle and bottom of the wealth distribution.”

Now, it’s likely not the 1 percenters (or 0.1 percenters) who are jetting off to Alaska or Acapulco (or Snowmass) for unusual athletic challenges. The athletically minded may well predominantly hail from the middle or upper-middle classes, whose wealth levels have also risen in the last half-century (though not by anywhere near as much as those at the top). After all, it takes a certain level of financial comfort to afford such events and the leisure time to train for them.

But how is it that any of us – the megawealthy as well as those in the middle – can morally tolerate begging in our streets? Why do we not elect politicians who, instead of cutting taxes for billionaires, come up with solutions to help the desperate or the simply unlucky among us? When there is so much money in our system, why is it so unevenly distributed?

In a few weeks in Colorado we will vote on a proposition that would replace the state’s current 4.4 percent flat income tax with a graduated system ranging from 3.7 percent to 8.4 percent. Individuals and corporations earning above $500,000 would see their taxes rise.

If the measure passes, the state is expected to reap about $2 billion annually that advocates say would boost funding for K-12 schools, healthcare and early childhood programs. Perhaps some could help those on the streets, as well, if imaginative programs could be tapped to help them?

However, a competing proposal backed mostly by undisclosed donors – presumably including some of the state’s wealthiest folks — would keep the 4.4 percent rate, and its backers note that voters have twice lowered that rate from 4.63 percent in 2020.

To be sure, there are sound economic arguments against dumping that flat rate.

“Colorado’s relatively low 4.4 percent flat income tax has been a major draw for businesses and young professionals,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized in opposing the graduated tax. “It’s one reason the state’s population has surged over the last couple of decades. But now progressives want to make Colorado more like California and the high-tax states that many of its inhabitants left.”

The editorialists note that the change would disadvantage the state, compared with neighbors. “Colorado’s top rate would rank by far the highest in its neighborhood, which includes Wyoming (no income tax), Arizona (2.5 percent), Utah (4.45 percent), Oklahoma (4.5 percent), Nebraska (4.55 percent), Kansas (5.58 percent) and New Mexico (5.9 percent),” the Journal editorialist argues.

And it’s unlikely that most of the inhabitants of the sprawling ski-area homes actually pay income taxes in Colorado. Chances are good that they keep their main residences in low-tax states.

Still, does it not offend common decency that we live in a system where the biggest challenges for some people are putting soccer balls into oversize golf holes while others beg to feed their children? Is the split-screen universe we inhabit now all too reminiscent of the 16th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of a princess who, when told peasants had no bread to eat, said “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”? (loosely, “Let them eat cake.”)

Life will always be unfair, but maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so unfair. If we can scale mountains to ski and travel the globe to play odd games, can we not find a way to help the hungry to feed, clothe and house themselves?

Someone needs a timeout

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump’s terrible, horrible time is hurting others

Joseph Weber

Donnie Trump has been having a lot of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days lately, kids. It’s like he woke up every day for the last couple weeks with gum in his hair (and he likes his hair), missed out on a window seat in the car and got in trouble at school.

Only, it’s a lot bigger than all that – so much so that cranky Donnie has been stamping his feet, waving his little hands and banning newspeople from his house. Mind you, that’s The People’s House, even if Donnie thinks he can wreck it whenever he wants to, so his new bans on CNN, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) and Politico may just amount to an empty tantrum.

We’ll have to see what judges have to say about that – and a lot of judges haven’t been very nice to Donnie lately.

The problem for Donnie is that these newspeople have been telling everybody about a lot of no good, very bad things happening to him. He doesn’t like it when they do. He says they “constantly write or report FICTION and LIES” about him.

Some judges, for instance, have been spanking him and these people have told the country about that. One judge refused to let Donnie put his name back on the Kennedy Center after he and an appeals court had ordered Donnie’s name off it. This hurt Donnie’s feelings so much that he threatened to wreck the center just as he did the East Wing of the White House so he could build a big golden dance hall.

And a big group of judges in the Supreme Court stopped Donnie from using the U.S. Postal Service to stop some people from voting. Donnie yelled at the judges about that, calling three of his friends on the court “a shell of their original selves.” Donnie’s worried about voting coming up in November because a lot of his friends could lose unless he can scare a lot of voters away.

Donnie doesn’t like MS NOW, which used to be called MSNBC, because he says it mostly is kind to Democrats, people that Donnie calls “Dumocrats.” These are the people who might take a lot of jobs away from Donnie’s friends in just a few weeks.

But Donnie is also unhappy because of a lot of bad news in the economy. High gas prices have been making drivers very sad and they are mad at Donnie about that, giving him record low approval ratings. CNN, one of the places Donnie is most angry at, called this a “crude awakening.” And a friend of Donnie’s got him mad by raising interest rates, which will make everything more expensive for voters.

Some of the newspeople who Donnie doesn’t like have been saying he was fibbing when he said all kinds of things are getting less expensive lately. Most people know that’s not true, but it makes Donnie mad to be told that. He probably thought CNN was nasty when it said his “claim that ‘almost every item’ is getting cheaper comes up against a damning reality.”

Donnie’s fight with people in Iran is not going well, either, which also is making him sad. The Iranians are bombing ships again, so Donnie says he may “annihilate” them. Some newspeople have said Donnie has often said he won the war, but they keep telling people it’s still going on. Politico may have made Donnie especially mad because it has told people that at least one big member of Donnie’s party wants to fire the Secretary of Defense because of the fight with Iran.

But what may be bothering Donnie most about Politico is that it told people that a bad Russian man who is friends with the even badder man who runs Russia rented a private island and paid for fireworks at a party after the wedding of Donnie’s son. Donnie’s son’s wife said it was just a wedding gift, but some people who don’t like Donnie said it raised questions about “pay-to-play schemes and foreign intelligence infiltration” of Donnie’s family.

Donnie didn’t say what was bothering him most right now. Instead, he told people there were “cumulative stories over the last few years.” But he has been mad at newspeople for many years because many of them don’t like things he does, such as pushing brown and Black people out of the country even if that’s illegal and trying to build big monuments that a lot of people don’t want.

Donnie says that there may be other newspeople that he will ban from the White House and some people guess that this could include The New York Times and The Washington Post, which he says are “disgusting.” But the man who runs the Times, A.G. Sulzberger, wrote that lots of presidents have been mean to reporters.

“Presidents of both parties have done their best to pressure the press and discourage reporting they haven’t liked,” he wrote. “John F. Kennedy spied on one of our reporters. Richard Nixon tried to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both used the courts to try to force Times reporters to reveal confidential sources.”

But he said no president has been nastier than Donnie. “No president in modern history has been more hostile than Donald Trump to a press he’s dubbed ‘the enemy of the people,’” Sulzberger wrote. “He accuses reporters of treason, a crime punishable by death. He personally sues news organizations when their coverage displeases him. He directs his administration to use the levers of government power to investigate, subpoena and prosecute journalists for doing their jobs.”

And yet, when he is talking privately, Donnie has been nice. As Sulzberger put it, “… in a reminder of the press’s lasting importance, Mr. Trump, like his predecessors, still reads The Times. He still relies on us, still takes questions from us and still quotes us when convenient. Indeed, during a visit to The Times, he told my colleagues and me that he thinks of us as ‘a great, great American jewel, a world jewel.’”

Still, Donnie has not been a happy boy lately and he’s taking that out on other people, something that most children know is not a good thing. Do you think he should sit in the corner for a while? Might a timeout be a good idea for him? Maybe a really long one?

Do we want “watchful protectors?”

Posted on September 8, 2026 by Joe Weber

Flock cameras ignite a bipartisan backlash

Joseph Weber

A Flock camera opponent makes his view known, source: NPR

In late August, a 23-year-old driver weaving on a west Denver road late at night ticked off an 18-year-old and his passengers in another car. The younger man flashed his lights and his friends made obscene gestures, enraging the older fellow enough that he gave chase and repeatedly fired a gun, according to police.

He hit one of the passengers, who died four days later.

The shooter sped off with a Denver police car in hot pursuit. But, in the end, investigators used surveillance video, including from Denver’s Axon and Aurora’s Flock cameras, to track the car and capture the killer.

Score another win for the more than 100,000 such cameras that have popped up all across the U.S. The Denver case comes atop more than one million criminal investigations and incidents last year that were aided by Flock cameras, according to Flock Group Inc. The Atlanta-based company claims that its ubiquitous cameras were involved in one of every five resolved cases and that they helped authorities find more than 10,000 missing persons.

So, what’s not to love about the cameras, which don’t collect images of people but rather of vehicle information, principally car license plates? Well, according to a strange-bedfellows mix of right-wingers and lefties, there’s plenty to hate about the so-called ALPRs (automatic license plate readers) from Flock and its increasingly popular rival, Axon Enterprise Inc.

On the left, the “creepy cameras” drew the ire of the ACLU. “Just think about how much someone could learn about your life if cameras constantly tracked where you drove,” the group says. “They could find out which doctors you visit, what house of faith you worship at, who you visit or drive around with — even which political meetings and protests you attend.”

The ACLU points to repeated use of Flock by ICE and CBP to go after immigrants without warrants. “Kansas police used them to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while a Colorado police officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving her innocence,” the group adds. “A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen.”

Meanwhile, on the right, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, recently told police departments to stop spending state money on Flock Safety cameras. As The Texas Tribune reported, Abbott pointed to a Lufkin, Texas, police officer now facing 100 counts of misusing public information for allegedly using the area’s Flock cameras to surveil eleven people for more than a year. At least six police departments and sheriff’s offices across Texas in the past month have announced that officers were being placed on leave, investigated or criminally charged in misuse cases.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quickly followed Abbott’s move with orders to have the systems pulled off roads in his state. DeSantis, who also opposes using automated systems to clock speeders, describes the surveillance technology as “out of control.”

As Newsweek reported, more than 150 U.S. communities have now rejected, canceled or deactivated automated license plate reader systems, according to the anti-surveillance project DeFlock, marking a sharp increase in just a few weeks. They range from Lynchburg, Virginia, and Asheville, North Carolina, to Gloucester, Rhode Island.

Summit County in Colorado, where I live, suspended its deal with Flock for 30 days to seek public comment. At least nine of the 30 cameras in the county have been taken down or vandalized in recent weeks.

Across the country, the cameras have even become a midterm campaign issue. The Associated Press reported that candidates for governor in Wisconsin have sought limits, while others in Pennsylvania have supported a ban. A Michigan congressional candidate called the cameras “un-American,” and an enterprising Florida Senate candidate began offering campaign merchandise opposing them.

Donald J. Trump seems to be trying to suss out the politics involved, perhaps calculating how many votes his party could lose by taking a stance. “Well, it’s being studied right now,” Trump said, according to the Washington Examiner and PBS News. “You know, you have pros and cons, right? It’s being studied right now. We’ll have an answer soon, as to our views on it, in the coming weeks.”

For its part, Denver canceled its contract with Flock, but replaced it with cameras from Axon, known to police for its Tasers and body cameras. Denver halved the number of cameras to 50 under Axon, which backers say offers better privacy protections. Unlike Flock, which keeps its data in a national database accessible to law enforcers across the country, Scottsdale-based Axon limits its information to individual subscribing agencies. Denver, for instance, owns and controls its data. And that data disappears after 21 days.

Still, in the recent Denver murder, cameras from both companies played a role, it appears. Notwithstanding the abuses – which surely merit prosecution – there’s little question that the heightened surveillance with such cameras has been enormously helpful in nailing bad actors.

It all reminds me of a visit I made a while ago to Singapore, where cameras track not only vehicles, but people. On a bicycle tour of the city-state, our guide asked us why we had not seen any police officers or cars. His answer: there are few of them because everyone knows they are on camera in any public place. The result is an extraordinarily low crime rate, with just 341 physical crimes for every 100,000 residents reported last year.

Singapore “watchful protector,” source Singapore Police Force

Americans and Singaporeans, the guide noted, have different ideas about the tradeoff between safety and privacy. The “watchful protectors,” as Singapore police call them, don’t sit well with lots of Americans.

For me, the issue is something of a no-brainer, though, a case of flailing after a barn door when the thoroughbreds are miles down the road already.

As a matter of principle, I see little difference between my license plate being eyed by a roving police car or a cop on the corner and a fixed camera. Moreover, there are few public places anymore, it seems, where cameras don’t track our movements. Go to any shopping mall, walk into many shops, and trip down most city streets and it’s a good bet you are on candid camera.

Is this a good thing? Not sure about that. Is it creepy, as the ACLU says? No question. Still, that seems to be life in America and much of the rest of the world in 2026. Privacy seems to have become as quaint as the parchment the Bill of Rights was written on.

There’s no doubt for me, however, that abuses of the system by ICE or cops pursuing lovers who jilt them demand prosecution. Such things are far creepier than having my plate clocked while driving down Main Street in Frisco or anywhere else. Perhaps suitable regulation with good oversight would come in handy.

But depriving cops of a tool that can nab murderers or find missing folks? I suspect few of us would be down with that.

The Big Picture

Monthly Archives: September 2026