What’s inside this issue?

OK - Let’s Debate! Exchange on the topic from the article from previous Landsman’s Lagniappe Liberals imagine a better future – Conservatives imagine a better past

I’m not the only who thinks we give our children something far more important than money ... or “A Boy Named Sue,” Part Two. What more can anyone want from a father?

The Lincoln Box. When Harriet Beecher Stowe – author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – met Lincoln at the White House in the fall of 1862, did he say to her, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?”?

You won't have Ron Landsman to kick around this time. My associate, May-Lis Manley, will speak about elder law --estate planning, avoiding or using guardianship, and Medicaid-- continuing my tradition of profound insights, ineffable wisdom, and lame humor (but nothing on Lincoln, sorry).

Tuesday, November 15, 8:00 a.m., at Dutch’s Daughter Restaurant, 581 Himes Avenue, Frederick, Maryland.

For either, call or email Sanja Pirsl at 240-403-4300 ext. 106 or sp@ronmlandsman.com to make a reservation and, if your GPS is broken, get directions.

... not so much that I don’t do it, and besides, if I don’t, who will? So. Not only was I selected as a “Superlawyers” for 2012 in elder law in the Washington metropolitan area, but I am the “Elder Law Superlawyer of the Year.” I think that makes me a super-duper lawyer. It has a certain ring to it. The ring of a playground boast of a six-year-old, perhaps, so not quite in the “je ne sais quoi” category, but still, a ring is a ring ...

My essay in the last issue, Liberals imagine a better future – Conservatives imagine a better past, elicited a cancellation or two, one of them rather vituperative, and a somewhat more thoughtful commentary from Dennis Brandt, which merits a response. He is also a funny guy; his first email to me, in its entirety, read:

Rob Clofine is handling my father's estate. Along the way during our business, we have shared interesting asides and bit of back-and-forth ribbing over politics Since I have authored three books on the Civil War, Rob forwarded me the e-mail you sent him on Abraham Lincoln, which happens to be the topic of my last book. I gave him a free copy and only then discovered that the only thing he ever reads are briefs, presumably not those with "Fruit of the Loom" on the label. I thought I would be so bold as to give you the titles of that book and the first two I've written. Maybe you can help me spread the word.

The work that will remain in pristine condition on the Clofine bookshelf (assuming he provides any area for books) is Shattering the Truth: The Slandering of Abraham Lincoln (BookSurge). The first two (in chronological order) are From Home Guards to Heroes: The 87th Pennsylvania and its Civil War Community (University of Missouri) and Pathway to Hell: A Tragedy of the American Civil War (Lehigh University and about to be released in paperback by the University of Nebraska). All are available on Amazon.com.

I am always interested in feedback from my adoring fans - as soon, that is, as I discover the existence of one.

Your statement "If the GOP were to gets its way, Medicare and Social Security would be eviscerated and what little financial market regulation we have would be rendered toothless and we would have another Great Depression" is blatantly false fear-mongering. Except for Libertarians, who comprise precious little of the Republican Party and who generally condemn the party as a bunch of Neocons, the question is not now and never has been one of laissez faire vs. Socialism. This scare tactic is the invention of Democratic pundits to scare the hell out of voters, many of whom can't or won't stop to analyze the illogic of the message. The debate is, rather, a matter of degree.

Well, it may have been fear-mongering, but I don’t think it was false. Where shall I start? The GOP pushes amendments to Medicare that bring in expensive private corporate services – both Medicare Advantage (Part C) and the Part D drug bill – “Leave no drug company behind,” but when Democrats attempted to study – just study – cost savings in Medicare as part of the Affordable Care Act, GOP leaders cry “Death Panels!”

Financial market regulation? It was GOP senators who were brutal to Elizabeth Warren, who was guilty of setting up the consumer protection unit for the financial industry. Name one important Republican Senator who in the past twenty years has supported even one regulation of financial services industry. Okay, but try to name one not from Maine.

And speaking of socialism, who is calling who a socialist? That term is used to refer to much of what the current administration has tried to do – and it is exactly that extremism that makes reasonable debate so impossible.

At what spending point does ever expanding federal spending become economically destructive According to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the government should keep taking however much money it wants from whomever has it and spend it on programs so they can brag that they're offering "the people" something for nothing. According to common sense and the mathematical skill to count to 14 trillion and higher, we are on the brink of destruction right now.

Why is it that the Bush administration could take us from a positive cash flow and reduction in the national debt into two disastrous wars – under the mantra, “deficits don’t matter” – and now the GOP re-gets religion?

The important question now – in the worst slump in employment since that Great Depression – is what to spend money on. Paul Krugman noted the other day that those who oppose government spending on social welfare - - because we can’t afford it – are only too happy to promote a larger Defense Dept. budget on the grounds of job creation. “Weaponized Keynesian” is the term.

You are of course correct that Democrats are not great on putting limits on important social welfare programs, but what else can they do when Republicans play three-card monte – hiding their attacks on those programs and then mau-mauing Democrats when they move toward the reasonable - see the comment above about Medicare.

“Ever expanding federal spending”? I don’t think so. The debt is significant for reasons having to do with reduced revenue and emergency spending – oh, and those two trillion dollar wars that many Democrats opposed – those who were not cowed by the label of being insufficiently American.

The real debate now is between those who believe in the Confidence Fairy – that all we need is fiscal conservatism to restore the confidence of business so they will start spending – and those who recognize that the current slump reflects business’ absolutely correct awareness that there is insufficient demand. How do you create demand? By spending. Who can do that? The government. Can it afford it? Can it afford not to do it? That is the fastest way to revive the economy, which when growing again will shrink the deficit. That is what happened with government spending in the early 1940s and 1990s, as well as most of the time in between.

It isn't 1960 anymore, and Democrats long ago turned the moral high ground into a tool of obtaining unfettered political power. For example, their support of labor unions once had the whiff of caring, but blind support during the last half century, promulgated solely to maintaining a political base and a source of political revenue, has driven businesses out of the country, undermined the middle class by shoving millions out of work and onto food stamp rolls, and, ironically weakened private union membership.

The whiff of caring? You besmirch the memory of Frances Perkins and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and reveal your own rather cynical view. It’s nice when good policy is also good politics.

Driven business out of the country? You are right to some degree – unions bring higher wages and higher wages prompt some companies to go overseas – so to some extent I guess your syllogism is correct, although you manage to elide the operative mechanism and the policy implications. But isn’t it a tad more complicated than that, don’t you think?

Are you just anti-union? Much of the loss of manufacturing has happened in the last twenty years – when the union movement was already eviscerated and weak. That’s a lot of credit to give to a 97-pound weakling.

Then there is the constant Dem whine of the rich "paying their fair share" that ignores the 47% of American potential taxpayers who pay zero federal income tax and the small percentage that pays 70% of the income taxes.

Those 47% who pay zero income tax do pay taxes – or give up in pay through taxes their employers pay on wages paid – roughly 15% FICA (Social Security) tax on their very first dollar - no credits, no deductions – but, oh yes, there is a dollar limit so that those earning more than $110,100 (in 2012) pay no FICA tax on income above that amount.

And those poor put-upon souls who pay 70% of all income taxes – they also have most income of the income. The top 5% of wages earners paid 60.6% of taxes in 2007 – but they had 37.4% of wages – which does not include all of their other investment income, capital gains, and the like. This bears further discussion in a future number.

With all due respect, I distrust the selective use of numbers that suggest something horrible but which are on close inspection plainly incomplete.

Democrats use this canard to keep the largest possible percentage of the population dependent on the federal government for day-to-day survival so these newly minted slaves to federal largesse will fear voting their quasi-masters out of office.

"Will we have another Franklin Roosevelt," whose expensive spending programs failed to end (and may even have extended) the Great Depression,...

What the early New Deal programs did was ameliorate the effect of the Depression. The Depression deepened in 1937-1938 because FDR tried to mollify conservatives by cutting back on expenditures. What solved the Depression, once and for all, was that everyone was willing to have the government spend enough – on World War II. See the discussion of Weaponized Keynesians, above.

or another Ronald Reagan, this time with a congress dedicated to not spending every dime of new revenue plus an extra $.20 dolling out project crumbs to buy votes? With liberals in power, this country will become Greece except on a grander and uglier scale because our economic failure will take the rest of the world down with it. God, please grant us leaders who understand the question, "Can we afford it?" Sadly, too many Republicans haven't been able to answer that question, but liberals don't have a clue. Worse, they don't seem to give a damn.

I’m not the only who thinks we give our children something far more important than money ... or

Some of you may recall that I have written that my favorite estate planning song – you didn’t know there was one, did you? Sort of like The Ballad of the Audited CPA – was Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.” Recall, the father, knowing he would not be around, named his son Sue so that he (the son) would be forced to learn to take care of himself from the get go. It worked, unhappily, but after vowing revenge and coming across his father many years later – after a fight “in the mud and the blood and the beer” – the son is reconciled to his old man.

So here’s another one of that ilk, tho’more straightforward. British novelist-playwright Michael Frayn – he wrote the brilliantly witty play Noises Off – was raised by a father forced to start supporting his original family at age 14, later widowed with two children, who then spent his life as a traveling salesman of asbestos roofing. In his memoir of that childhood,

To me personally he left a fortune - an intangible and unrecorded legacy more precious than money or anything he might ever have written down. The humor he used to deal with his customers and circumvent his deafness, his indifference to all systems of belief, the smile on his face that I sometimes find so disconcertingly on mine. My very existence, in the first place, of course - and the beginnings of a life that turned out to be so much easier than his. I didn’t have to share two rooms with six other people or a kitchen and lavatory with four more. I didn’t have to leave school at fourteen, or go out and sell things, or support feckless parents and in-laws. He loved me, saw to it that I was fed and clothed and educated, and left me reasonably free to get on with things in my own way. What more can anyone want from a father?

As one denied the pleasure of a father by early death, I feel a vague envy, the vagueness arising from not really knowing what it is I never got, but suspecting it was a great loss because others seem to value it so.

The Lincoln Box

When Harriet Beecher Stowe – author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – met Lincoln at the White House in the fall of 1862, did he say to her, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?”?

I thought so. I read it in more than one of the many Lincoln biographies sitting around my house. But when I checked this morning – you’ll see why momentarily – I was surprised to see that most made no reference to the incident at all, and those that did discounted it. David Herbert Donald (Lincoln, p. 542) qualifies it as “according to a family story.” Neely (The Last Best Hope of Earth, paper, p. 147) refers to it as “the famous (thought questionable) anecdote.” And Oates (With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, paper, p. 389) introduced the quote by writing Lincoln “supposedly jested” with her, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” The Neely and Donald quotes are not quite identical, either.

A look at the sources reveals its unlikelihood. It was first recorded thirty-four years later in a magazine article by a Stowe biographer. It was not mentioned in the first two editions of a Stowe biography by one of her sons, Charles, despite his claiming to have been at the meeting; it was added (with the more elaborate version that Oates uses) in the third edition.

As Christopher Benfy writes in a review of a book about the book in the October 27 New York Review of Books, p. 67, it “has attached itself, barnacle-like, to the novel ... until it has become among the most familiar of all American literary anecdotes.”

More to the point, unlike many likely apocryphal Lincoln quotes – the one about providing Grant’s whiskey to all of his other generals is a good example – it does not for the most part ring true. As Benfy writes, Lincoln would not have ascribed the war to a book, especially one by a northerner, given his long and deep insistence that slavery and the determination of its protectors was the cause of the war. As he put it with his usual, seeming off-hand eloquence, in the great Second Inaugural, “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.” (When Lincoln uses the passive voice, he had a reason for it.) I would add that despite his well-earned reputation for rough jocularity, Lincoln would not likely use it about the war, especially in late 1862.

The one way in which it does ring true is in Lincoln’s casual pre-feminism reference to this “little woman.” Stowe was barely five feet tall.

For those of you really interested in the topic, Benfy cites “Daniel R. Vollaro’s excellent demolition of the encounter”: “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The Making and Breaking of a Great American Anecdote,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Winter 2009,” and he notes it is available on line at www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/30.1/vollaro.html . (Why is it that short magazine article have titles longer than two-volume biographies? Sort of the way kids books about science are “All About ...,” while dense freshman college texts are “An Introduction to ... .”)

Want to have breakfast with a real elder law lawyer, and get answers to all of your questions about Medicaid, Lincoln, special needs trusts, or...anything else I know about? It won’t be confidential because others might join us, and it is not the same as legal advice—see the disclaimer below—but you might find it interesting and worth the time.

You can join me for Breakfast with a Barrister on November 16, 2011, at 8:30 a.m. at La Madeleine Restaurant, 11858 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland 20850, Mid-Pike Plaza, Rockville Pike, between Old Georgetown Road and Montrose Avenue.

I'm just a small-time lawyer who pots around occasionally doing small estates and simple wills, so any chance I get to fill in the many gaps in my knowledge, I'll take. From what I've seen, Landsman's Lagniappe has got some very good stuff.

I also get a kick out of the political musings tidbits. By the way, I'm reading a biography of RFK and, in a few minutes, will be doing so by the side of a pool.

I wish that I was smart enough to market myself as well as Landsman is doing with his little informative newsletter.
OK, you regulars can stop here:

If you are an SNT trustee – or for that matter, a beneficiary or a relative or close friend of a trustee or a beneficiary – you might find Administering a Special Needs Trust – A Handbook for Trustees useful and/or troubling. It is published by the Special Needs Alliance, written by my esteemed and widely admired colleague, Robert Fleming (see www.elder-law.com), and provides an excellent brief review of the most important things the trustee of a special needs trust should know.

To get your FREE copy, contact the ever-reliable Sanja, by calling her at 240-403-4300 x 106 or e-mailing her at sp@ronmlandsman.com.

Ahora el siguiente guía “Administering a Special Needs Trust– A Handbook for Trustees”(Entendiendo la Administración de un Fideicomiso para Necesidades Especiales – Un Guía para Fideicomisarios) también esta disponible en español. Este guía puede que sea interesante o preocupante para aquellos que son fideicomisarios para Necesidades Especiales, beneficiarios, parientes, o amigos de un fideicomisario o beneficiario. Escrito por el reconocido y estimado colega Robert Fleming (visite www.elder-law.com) y publicado por el Special Needs Alliance (Alianza para Necesidades Especiales), el guía provee un excelente resumen de los datos mas importantes que todo fideicomisario de un Fideicomiso para Necesidades Especiales debe saber. Comuníquese hoy con Sanja llamando al 240-403-4300 x106 o por correo electrónico, sp@ronlandsman.com, para obtener su guía gratuita.

E lder and disability law firm – Ron M. Landsman, P.A., is an elder and disability law firm headed by Ron M. Landsman, who has worked in this area of the law since 1983. We represent older and disabled people, their families and advocates. The work we do includes estate, disability and retirement planning, probate, estate and trust administration, wills, trusts and powers of attorney, titling of assets and designation of beneficiaries, protective proceedings (guardianship and conservatorship), special needs trusts and public benefits – Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and SSI.

S pecial Needs Alliance – Ron M. Landsman is a Maryland-D.C. member of the Special Needs Alliance, Inc., a nationwide network of attorneys especially knowledgeable about coordinating public benefits and private resources through different kinds of special or supplemental needs trusts. We and our colleagues assist disabled people, their families, estate attorneys and personal injury attorneys in enhancing the resources of disabled individuals – savings and investments, inheritances, settlements or judgments – by coordinating them with public benefits like SSI and Medicaid. We also manage such trusts or advise family members or bank trustees who manage them. For more information on the Special Needs Alliance, visit its website at www.specialneedsalliance.com.

P lease share Landsman’s Lagniappe with anyone interested in the elderly and disabled and their advocates. (That’s the whole point, besides the fun I have avoiding work.) You may copy and use anything in this newsletter, but if you don’t credit us at the outset, no fair blaming us later. If you do use anything from the newsletter, please, please, please let me know.

If you would like to get Landsman’s Lagniappe or you would like to change the form in which you receive it or want to be removed from our mailing list, please send an email to newsletter@ronmlandsman.com, or call Sanja Pirsl at 240-403-4300, ext. 106, or fax her at 240-403-4301. No charge; still that same Mr. Big Spender.

I f you have trouble sleeping and are looking for something really soporific, I am available to talk on any number of topics, including some that I know about – Medicaid, Lincoln, planning for disability, Medicaid, planning for the disabled child, Medicaid, and that always lively topic, probate in Maryland and D.C., as well as Medicaid. If you are interested, call Sanja Pirsl at 240-403-4300, ext. 106.

W e hope you find this to be a good newsletter, but it is not the same as legal counsel. A free newsletter is ultimately worth what it costs you; you rely on it at your own risk. Good legal advice includes a review of all of the fact of your situation, including many that may at first blush seem to you not to matter. The plan it generates is sensitive to your goals and wishes while taking into account a whole panoply of laws, rules and practices, many not published and, often, will reflect years of experience and judgment about what works and how and why. Whether it’s worth the cost is for you to decide although, unfortunately, usually not ‘til after the fact. This is just a free e-newsletter; some may think an overpriced one at that.