An Immodest Proposal

(with apologies to Dean Swift.)

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The power to tax may well be the power to destroy, but the power to tax unfairly is the power to do worse--it's the power to enslave. With the increasing concentration of the majority of the country's wealth into fewer and fewer hands (2% of the population of this country now holds over 50% of its total wealth, and is moving to amass ever more), America is being turned into a fundamentally unfair economic oligarchy, not the government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" which the Founders envisioned.

Yet we seem paralyzed to do anything about it. Republicans want to keep cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, claiming that that's what will spur job creation and get the economy moving again, and that spending cuts will balance the budged. Democrats say that continuing to cut vital social programs will place the majority of the burden of government costs on the backs of those who can afford it the least, and that if we're going to cut spending, we must cut in areas like huge contracts to defense contractors, not areas like Head Start.

It is axiomatic that spending cuts alone will not balance the budget. The cuts the GOP wants merely nibble around the edges and are not big enough monetarily to dent the burgeoning interest obligations we have on the debt we've already incurred. Those cuts will, however, cause a great deal of misery for a great number of Americans, who are not looking for a handout, but for a hand, given that while income for the richest 2% of Americans has increased at least 20-fold in the past 15 years or so, income for the other 98% of us has remained stagnant (or even declined, in real terms, once inflation has been adjusted for) for the past 40 years.

Revenues must be considered. Revenues must be increased. But the current US tax code is a virtually impossible labyrinth of exemptions here and deductions there--in short, social engineering run amok. We seem to be at a stand-off. We've been at a stand-off for decades now, and positions are only hardening. People seem less and less willing to give a little to get a little. I include myself in that group, because, frankly, I do believe that "if you give a mouse a cookie, he'll want a glass of milk."

I honor the notion of compromise. I do believe it is the genius of our system and that it is what has made America work for as long as it has. But the problem with compromise is that everyone has to play with the same understanding. If you define "compromise" as "getting 100% of my own way," well, that's not compromise. And alas for us, President Obama has been "compromising" with a GOP which does define "compromise" as "my way or the highway." Yet even he has his limits, and he has shown rather more backbone of late. The GOP, of course, calls that partisanship. Face it: it is impossible to reason with anyone who thinks they should have things 100% of their own way and the rest of us can go hang.

Yet if we don't want the country to collapse into anarchy, we urgently need to move the discussion into productive channels instead of continuing to hash and rehash and re-rehash the same stale, non-productive rhetoric. Hence the following immodest proposal:

Median annual income in this country is now $35,000 per person. Under the new system I propose, that first $35,000 will be entirely exempt from taxes. Every penny above that will be subject to tax at the rate of 1% [or 1/2% even--whatever will increase net revenue without being so high as to be seen by any rational observer as objectionable. Look: we have to have some taxes, just as we have to have some government. Justice Holmes was right. Taxes ARE the price we pay for civilization--Ed.]. No exemptions. No deductions. No subsidies. No exceptions. Corporations would pay the same. They were so insistent on being treated as "people" for purposes of campaign financing, and a bare-bones majority of the US Supreme Court was so accommodating to them in its Citizens United decision, that they have no valid grounds on which to complain. Fifteen to 20 percent of all such revenues will be set aside to fund Social Security and Medicare and will be untouchable by anybody in government for any other reason.

The net result will ripple throughout the government. Without all the subsidy programs, the Dept. of Agriculture can shrink, thus greatly reducing its long-term operating costs. The Internal Revenue Service can shrink, too, as it will no longer need such an extensive enforcement arm as it now maintains. Even the Social Security Administration can reduce its size, as it will no longer need so many people to work in conjunction with the IRS to get and process its revenues in the first place. Individuals and corporations both would still have more than enough income to go about their daily "lives."

There is no downside to this proposal. The only reason for opposition would be greed, plain and simple. But it has the proverbial snowball's chance of getting enacted. For every exemption, deduction, subsidy, or perk in the present system [except for those few still remaining for real, individual people of modest means--Ed.], there's an army of lobbyists in Congress ready and rich enough to defend it to eternity. That's sad, and more than a bit frightening. Why are people so willing to be against their own government but totally pro-big corporate power? With government, at least in our system, you have recourse if you are done wrong. But with a corporation, if it does you wrong, you are essentially SOL . . . unless you have access to a governmental entity with enough teeth to protect you. I surmise that greed rules here, too. Everyone seems to think he's going to become the owner bee and not be a worker bee. Ain't gonna happen, folks. The 2% of the people in this country who hold more than 50% of the total wealth of this country will make sure of that--but they'll dangle the hope of its happening in front of you until you are mesmerized by it and stop paying attention to what they're really up to, which is amassing ever more money and power unto themselves and taking it all away from you.

I am inspired to this day by John F. Kennedy's call to "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." THAT is what America is, and should be, about. And by my "country," I mean my fellow citizens. And if that means "Social Security," great! I'm all for helping the vast majority of us, the 98% of us who wield increasing less power and influence as real money is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. I'm not alone, either. Tom Toles had an editorial cartoon in Friday's Washington Post wherein a 6-lane interstate, under a highway sign saying "what you can do for your country" was totally devoid of cars--while a two-lane exit ramp, labelled "ask not," was jammed to a standstill with cars overfilling both lanes. I'm not the only one who "gets it," as it were. But we seem to be in an infinitesimal minority. Nonetheless, we have to keep trying. For unless we can change the terms of the debate and start offering new solutions, workable solutions--unless everyone is willing, for the sake of the country, to give a little--we are too soon going to be pledging allegiance to the Corporate States of America. And that will mean the end of the American Dream.

Never Teach A Pig To Sing. It Wastes Your Time And Annoys The Pig.

-----Mark Twain

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I have been reminded repeatedly of Mr. Twain's great wisdom of late. I've been perusing the posts of a group of people who have banded together on Facebook, allegedly to study the Federalist Papers and other writings by the Founding Fathers. I say "allegedly" because after reading these posts for several months, I have no choice but to come to the conclusion that their real purpose is to cherry-pick quotes, take them out of context (or otherwise misinterpret them), and to bludgeon them into unrecognizable form so that they can justify their own prejudices instead of really learning anything about America's history.

Example the first. While I do not have the exact quote in front of me, one posting from Alexander Hamilton unequivocally stated that the system will work only when everyone realizes that if they are willing to give up a little in some areas, they can get a lot in others. In other words, that compromise is the heart and soul of the system. Yet people posting to this Facebook site deny that that's what Hamilton meant, because for them, "compromise" is a dirty word. This, even though they could not explain to me what Hamilton's words meant if they did not mean that the system was set up to function when everyone involved worked to compromise, or find solutions everyone could live with, even though those solutions may not give anyone 100% of what he wants. They insisted on their "interpretation" in utter contradiction to Hamilton's words, which were plain on their face. And then they denied that that's what they were doing. But they never could or did offer any explanations for their stand--and that's a textbook illustration of prejudice.

Example he second. While they claim that the Founders didn't believe in compromise, they have no explanation for the existence, let alone the significance, of things such as the 3/5ths Clause in the Constitution. That's the clause that agrees, for purposes of determining how many Representatives each state could send to Congress, to count each slave as 3/5 of a person--for purposes of representation only. Southern states wanted to count slaves as entire persons, again for purposes of representation only, which would give them disproportionate representation (and thus power) in Congress; non-slave-holding states didn't want slaves to be counted at all, for purposes of representation or otherwise. The 3/5ths Clause was [oh, horrors!--Ed.] A COMPROMISE. Since the document itself got adopted only after including compromises such as this, it is impossible for the Founders to have been against compromise per se. To claim anything else is to deny fact.

Example the third. The most frequent posters to this Facebook page are all quite fond of quoting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall's admonition that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." They tend to use it to justify not taxing them, at all, for anything. Ever. Marshall may have been correct, but taking that quote by itself is to take it out of context and also to refuse to recognize that while it may be true as a generality, it does not and cannot justify their unwillingness to pay any taxes. If the Founders did not want taxes at all, they'd not have given Congress the power to tax in the first place. Taxes are necessary. Indeed, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted about a hundred years after Marshall's dictum, "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

The people who ignore this are also fond of saying the federal government must be small, limited, and weak, and that that was the Founders' intent. They are forgetting or ignoring the Founders' collective experience under the Articles of Confederation, which was the Founders' first attempt at setting up America's national government. The Founders quickly realized that that government was too weak. It didn't succeed. Thus the impetus for creating the Constitution in the first place. Those same people also do not recognize that the same weaknesses, present in the Confederacy's Constitution, contributed mightily to the Confederacy's having lost the Civil War. Jefferson Davis's government could not compel the individual Confederate states to contribute specific funds to defray the costs of the war, to finance its own operations--in other words, to exist and to be able to defend its existence. Hence, Union victory; hence, "the Second American Revolution," designed to implement what the Founders wanted in the first place but which took a Civil War wherein over 600,000 Americans were killed, to realize.

Also note that the Founders stated the goal of creating a "more perfect Union," which phrase suggests two things: (1) perfection had not been obtained yet; (2) maybe 100% perfection would not be obtainable, but the point was, and is, to keep moving toward that "more perfect" Union. The operative idea being "movement." The Founders plainly did not want some static, stultified, one-size-fits-all-forever structure for the federal government. If they had, they'd never have said "more perfect." They'd have said "perfect." If they had, they'd never have created the process by which the Constitution can be amended. Yet the Constitution may be, and often has been, amended. The notion of "original intent" is important, but it does not slam the door against change, for the provisions for amendment, plus the compromises that were enshrined in the original document (such as the 3/5ths Clause), plus the Founders' behavior in tossing the Articles of Confederation once that document proved ineffectual, all add up to the total that life is what happens, that history changes things, and that the Founders were wise enough to build flexibility into the system so that we could cope several hundred years later.

Further, most of the people who claim they want to "restore" the federal government to what the Founders "intended" are not thinking through the consequences of doing that (allowing, hypothetically, that that presumption were correct, which we've already seen is not), which would be largely to destroy America's primacy and security in the world. It would turn the United States into the Balkans. Yet the people who insist that they want to "restore" America are always claiming America is the best, most powerful, most prosperous, most freedom-embracing place on Earth -- "rah-rah, we're Number One!" They always want America to be first in everything they think is good, but they won't recognize the fact that infant mortality rates in this nation are disgraceful, that high school graduation rates in this country are abysmal, that we are falling behind in the creation of new technology and in the education of our future generations . . . I could go on and on, but in short, that we are increasingly ill-prepared to meet the challenges of the future and thus are at grave risk of losing our presently privileged place on this planet. If they get their way, America will become the ultimate example of The Law of Unintended Consequences, because none of them seem to be able to see what the end result of what they say they want actually will be. [A perfect illustration of my contention that we have to stop trying to teach our children WHAT to think and that we must start teaching them HOW to think, but that topic deserves full exploration in its own post.--Ed.]

The saddest thing of all is that the people who advocate these positions do not seem to realize that if they get their way, they're still going to pay. It may be paying into a different pot, and it may even be more than they are paying now. But they'll be paying, because one way or another, the services their taxes now support will still be in demand, will still be needed for the country to function. Consider this: President Reagan's budget "cuts" were not so much cuts as they were redirecting whence the tax money would come. Infrastructure maintenance comes immediately to mind. The federal government used to provide assistance to the states to maintain our roads, bridges, and other transportation channels. Once Reagan's budget eliminated that assistance, the needs didn't magically go away. Their burden shifted to the states, which varied widely in their ability to take on that burden unassisted. The long-term result? Our bridges and roads are now falling apart, and we're going to have to pay far more to fix them than we would have had we just kept maintaining them with small but regular infusions of federal assistance in the first place. Yet instead of recognizing this and implementing a simple, straightforward plan to do that fixing, we're all pointing fingers and laying blame . . . and the repairs and upgrades we desperately need are not getting done. Maybe the Second Law of Thermodynamics really does apply to human behavior and governmental systems as much as it does to gaseous bodies [you may thank me for that straight line as soon as you use it to make some editorial comment about the Congress.--Ed.]

Unfortunately, recognizing all this does not solve the larger problem. If you consider what many Tea Partiers say about ending government hand-outs to Wall St. banks and protecting Medicare, you'd think those people would be making common cause with Democrats, not Republicans. But the GOP has managed to tie conservatism on social issues so tightly to its financial agenda that there's a knee-jerk reaction in the Tea Party: Democrats = liberalism, liberalism = bad. They are so locked into this way of thinking that they do not see the real facts, which contradict such presumptions. And as long as we're locked into that filtration of facts, we are living in a world much more like George Orwell's 1984 than in the America the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Say It Ain't So, Jo--er, Bob Costas!

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Bob Costas, whom I usually admire greatly and without reservation, is flat-out wrong in his stance on the issue of Barry Bonds going into baseball's Hall of Fame despite Bonds' being convicted earlier this week of obstruction of justice in connection with the Balco steroids scandal.

Costas says neither Bonds nor Roger Clemens will get his vote on the first ballot on which they appear, but they will on later ballots because both had established a body of work that is HOF-worthy before they clearly started "juicing" [as the somewhat unfortunate description goes--Ed.].

He then goes on to distinguish that status from players like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmiero, and others whose careers were not particularly distinguished until, as the dramatic improvement in their baseball performance suggests, they started using steroids. Costas has wrongly excluded McGwire from his own nuanced HOF criteria. Mark McGwire set the rookie record for home runs, 49, if memory serves, well before he ever began using androstenedione, and he never kept that use a secret, either. It wasn't illegal or against the rules at the time, and he said it helped him heal faster, not hit the ball farther.

Even if McGwire's defense is not 100% accurate [as Costas has also noted, healing faster means more time playing than otherwise, which is an indirect performance enhancement, at least in terms of career stats--Ed.], however, there is a valid point buried within it, to wit: steroids absolutely cannot make you hit a ball better than you could before. You still have to have the hand-eye coordination to make the fat part of the bat get enough of the ball at the proper angle to propel it on an upward (but not too far or even straight up) trajectory. Otherwise, no matter how strong you are, you're never going to hit the ball over the fences.

This is a bit tangential to my ultimate point, however. Costas is wrong about its being OK to vote Bonds and Clemens in on subsequent ballots because of their well-demonstrated actions. In the interview I saw on MLBTV, Costas pooh-poohed the "morality" aspect of the Hall of Fame, saying that was an indistinct and undefinable standard which can be ignored as easily as it can be enforced. So what? It exists. It's what has kept "Shoeless" Joe Jackson out of the HOF for more than half a century now, and what Jackson did--or didn't do--pales in comparison to the behavior of Bonds and Clemens both. All that Jackson did was keep his mouth shut about the impending Black Sox scandal, and he did that because it was the first time in all the years he'd played for the Sox that anyone else on the team had treated him as if he belonged. His stats from the 1919 World Series prove he didn't do anything to help throw it. Heck, if the White Sox had won, he might well have been the MVP if they'd had such a category then.

But Bonds has now been convicted of obstruction of justice. Even though that's a classic "white collar" crime, and first offenders normally get probation, it's still a criminal conviction. And it's not just a question of keeping one's mouth shut. Bonds has been convicted of actively impeding investigators and interfering with their ability to get to the truth of what they were investigating. This is not something to be taken lightly or to be pooh-poohed, even though it is not murder. It bespeaks of a fundamental lack of character on the order of Pete Rose's betting on baseball while he was a player and manager. It, too, brings disrepute to the game and sullies its unique standing as America's pastime. Hey--that isn't to be taken lightly--it's the legal justification for giving baseball an exemption from most anti-trust laws in this country.

Granted, Clemens hasn't been convicted of anything yet, but the corroborated descriptions of his adventures in moral turpitude are well-established. Not to mention his arrogance and his belligerent behavior when testifying before Congress in connection with this whole steroids mess. He will eventually be convicted of lying to Congress, once the charges are brought. There is not a shred of doubt that he did lie to the Congressional panel which called for his testimony. Joe Jackson's worst sins against baseball pale in comparison.

So, Mr. Costas, if you're going to vote to enshrine Bonds and Clemens in the Hall of Fame, do me one favor. Make sure Joe Jackson gets voted in first. Given that he has the third-highest all-time career batting average (.346, if memory serves), and given that his outfield play was described as so excellent that his glove was where triples went to die, he deserves to be in Cooperstown. [I will also concede that Mark McGwire was never so outstanding a defensive player, so if anything keeps him out of Cooperstown, it ought to be that lack of being the so-called "5-tool player," not his use of androstenedione--Ed.]

Do keep Pete Rose out, however. After he finally admitted the truth about his betting habits, after vociferously denying it for at least a decade, he simply doesn't deserve it, no matter how marvelously he played the game. Actually, since what Bonds and Clemens did also largely comes down to lying, too, maybe you should rethink your intention "someday, eventually" to vote them into the Hall of Fame.