{"id":564,"date":"2010-04-30T09:40:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-30T14:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auchtoon.2gtech.com\/blog\/?p=564"},"modified":"2010-04-30T09:40:50","modified_gmt":"2010-04-30T14:40:50","slug":"budgets-and-tax-structures-and-punching-dachshunds-in-the-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/?p=564","title":{"rendered":"Budgets and Tax Structures and Punching Dachshunds in the Face…"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press<\/em>, April 24, 2010<\/p>\n

I typically don\u2019t go for the \u201clabeling\u201d approach of editorial cartooning. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it wasn\u2019t uncommon for a newspaper editorial cartoon to have 20 or more callouts with arrows and signs and whatnot. And this worked because readers generally spent some time going over the cartoon and cartoonists didn\u2019t necessarily expect everybody to get each jab and joke, so they tended to include something for everybody. Over the past 100 years cartoons have trended toward simpler, single-idea pieces and labeling has become kind of pass\u00e9.<\/p>\n

But I had this wonderful vision of a wiener dog chasing its own tail. And because it\u2019s a wiener dog, the chase is an exercise in futility — it is physically impossible to catch its tail. It seemed the perfect allegory for Michigan\u2019s chasing a sustainable budget with a revenue structure created back in our manufacturing economy era. It\u2019s not going to happen, so it\u2019s time to make some decisions. It will be difficult — some people will have to pay higher taxes!!!!!!!!!!!! — but it\u2019s the sensible thing to do.<\/p>\n

This allegory actually carries further with my life. When I was two or three, my uncle gave our family a dog: Charlie Brown. And (Mom and Dad, correct me if I\u2019m wrong) if he wasn\u2019t exactly a dachshund he was dachshund-ish. Charlie Brown loved my Mom. I loved my Mom. Charlie Brown did not love me. I did not love Charlie Brown. Fighting ensued. I can remember Charlie Brown latching onto my arm and the feeling of me punching Charlie Brown in the face. Clearly things were not working, nor were they going to get better. So my parents had to make a difficult decision. Understand that my Mom — aka, St. Francis — did not want to get rid of Charlie Brown. It might have been timely successes with potty training that tipped the scales to my favor, and I got to stay. (I have no doubt that Mom and Dad had their second thoughts when several years later the bills for my orthodonture work started rolling in.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, April 24, 2010 I typically don\u2019t go for the \u201clabeling\u201d approach of editorial cartooning. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it wasn\u2019t uncommon for a newspaper editorial cartoon to have 20 or more callouts with arrows and signs and whatnot. And this worked because readers generally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grand-rapids-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}