NUMBER vs. VOLUME

I was reading the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin this morning and one of my MAJOR issues was there staring me in the face. Was it corruption in Pomona? No. Was it the dismantling of our history? No.

I was faced with this sentence in an article on page A3 by Canan Tasci on parking problems at Chaffey College: ". . . and that increases the amount of people trying to park on campus." Because the offending phrase was used in a direct quote I can't blame Canan Tasci, but it's usually OK for a reporter to clean up any obvious grammar problems. I'm sure that there was probably a "you know" or "like" in there that didn't make it into the quote (just speculation). The problem is that I've seen this type of thing in a LOT of stories in the newspaper (from some good writers) and heard in constantly in TV and radio news reporting. I guess copy editing is one of the victims of the changes in the news industry.

The grammar rule is that if you use a number word (few, fewer, more, less, number, amount, etc.) that a singular noun has to be an amount. You cannot have a number gasoline, but you can have an amount of gasoline so it would be "less gasoline," not fewer gasoline. When a noun is a plural, such a cows, you have a "number of cows," not an amount of cows. Amount refers to "volume" while number refers to (hold on) number. The same is true for less and fewer. Less refers to volume and is used on singular nouns (less gasoline, less cereal, less stress) and fewer refers to plural numbers (fewer cars on the road, fewer accidents on the highways, fewer pills I have to take for the stress).

One of the places where this first reared its ugly head was in grocery checkout lines. The sign above one or two of the lines began reading "10 items or less." The noun items is clearly plural, so it should have been "10 items or fewer" which just didn't sound right. Actually a better sign would have read "fewer than 11 items," but we don't want to go there. This has caused the whole, plural vs. singular noun numbers words thing completely out of whack. We now hear that there were "less people than last year," "less cars on freeway on Fridays," etc.

AT LEAST: Our own local Stater Brothers market does have a sign above the two registers at the south end of the store that state, "15 items or fewer."

This post is repeated on the M-M-M-My Pomona blog. I promise not to do that again.

Tax Thieves

So, am I the only one who is really upset over the television commercials with the happy couples touting how much they were able to settle their tax bills for. "I owned the government $4 million and only paid $1 million." While I understand that law firms are trying to entice business from people, is this the message that we as a society want to send? I can't wait for the "I murdered my wife and was able, through Bob the Lawfirm to get my sentence reduced from death to 6 months probation."

Don't we, as a society realize that it is our obligation to pay for the services we receive? If we all "settled for pennies on the dollar," how would we pay for our military, healthcare (I know), road systems, courts, police, fire, etc.?

When these smiling faces make their "happy" declarations of how much they were able to "save" all I can think of is that I pay my full taxes, so I'm not only paying my share (at the current TOP tax rate) but I'm helping to pay their share as well.

I'd be much happier to see those people who owned $4 million with their faces and voices distorted, showing shame at having gotten into a situation where they owed $4 million that they couldn't pay. At a 30% tax rate, they'd have had to have made about $13 million in taxable money (that's after all their deductions). Now if we assume that about half of the $4 million that they owed was in fines and interest, they still owned about 2 million on about $7.5 million. AND they got away with not paying for a significant amount of time. There was a time in this country when people who cheated others were shamed, but I guess that today they're heroes.

So, according to the commercials, we're supposed to be thrilled that these law-breaking, selfish (not paying their fair share) people, who probably also made some money on the money that they didn't pay in taxes, were able to cheat the rest of us and not pay their fair share.

So people who make a lot of money and scam the system out of their share of the tax burden are heroes, but illegal aliens are criminals. As Yakov Schmirnov used to say, "America, What a Country!"