Tax Cuts are Magic: Why We Need the Ryan Budget

        The Ryan budget is back, and just in time. It has been so long since we have had a major tax cut that it is a near-miracle that our entire economy has not imploded. President Obama, of course, has engaged in blatant class warfare by denouncing the plan as “Social Darwinism. ” But the Republicans are holding their ground, as well they should. The most fundamental assumption of the modern conservative ideology is at stake, as well as an incontrovertible truth of theology and metaphysics: that tax cuts are magic

        That’s right. Magic. Unlike the cold rationality of the “Obama Theory”—that generating more revenue will allow us to pay for more things, including paying down the debt—the Republican model harnesses the power of magic to make government revenue grow by making absolutely sure that there is less of it. And the Ryan plan is all about magic. By slashing Pell Grants, Medicare, Food Stamps, and nearly every other service for the poorest of the poor in America, he is able to give a vanishingly insignificant tax break to most Americans, a huge tax break to those earning more than $200,000 a year, and still balance the budget despite not producing anywhere near the revenue to do so. That is why magic is so cool.

          This may sound counterintuitive, but, of course, most magic does--that's why it's magic, after all. That tax cuts have never actually produced a balanced budget—and have, in fact, always exploded the deficit—is not due to their lack of magic powers; it is because those who have gone down this road—such as Ronald Reagan in 1981—lost faith in the magic. (Reagan, you will recall, raised taxes 11 times after his initial cut).

        How far have the original Reagan tax cutters fallen away? Well, consider this little bit of Benedict Arnoldism: Reagan’s own senior economic analyst—one of the architects of the tax cuts—now claims  that increasing revenues was never even part of Reagan’s plan. “No serious Republican economist ever said that a tax reduction would recoup more than about a third of the static revenue loss,” Writes Bruce Bartlett in his Fiscal Times column. And Reagan’s tax cuts, he points out resulted in revenues that, in constant dollars “were $66 billion lower in 1989 as a result of Reagan’s policies.”
        As we so clearly see, it is not just Democrats, but apostate Republicans who hate the magic. And make no mistake about it. Faith in the magic of tax cuts is every bit as important as faith in Jesus—because tax cuts make Jesus happy. This is stated very clearly in the Bible. In 1 Kings 12, what did God do when the evil king Rehoboam wanted to raise taxes after his father Solomon had almost bankrupted the country with his self-glorifying public works projects? He split Israel into two countries; that’s what he did. And he’ll do it again if we try to raise taxes the way that Rehoboam did.
        And this is why the tax cut issue is so important for the Republican party. It unites the faith of the two great halves of the conservative coalition: the business conservatives, who know that tax cuts are magic, and the Christian conservatives, who know that raising taxes will tick Jesus off. When Senator DeMint says that conceding anything to the democrats on taxes would destroy the GOP, he speaks with the authority of absolute truth. What could possibly be more destructive than getting on the wrong side of Magic and Jesus on the very same day.
        In a recent column on his “Capital Gains and Games” blog, Magic/Jesus hater Bruce Bartlett writes:

Distributionally, the Ryan plan is a monstrosity. The rich would receive huge tax cuts while the social safety net would be shredded to pay for them. Even as an opening bid to begin budget negotiations with the Democrats, the Ryan plan cannot be taken seriously. It is less of a wish list than a fairy tale utterly disconnected from the real world, backed up by make-believe numbers and unreasonable assumptions. Ryan’s plan isn’t even an act of courage; it’s just pandering to the Tea Party. A real act of courage would have been for him to admit, as all serious budget analysts know, that revenues will have to rise well above 19 percent of GDP to stabilize the debt. 

          Well Mr. Smarty-pants, RINO, traitor-to-the-Gipper guy, I’m here to tell you that you are WRONG. Its not about connecting your assumptions to some atheistic, Jesus-hating "real world" logic. Magic is not SUPPOSED to be logical. It’s about faith. It’s about religion. It’s about knowing something deep within your heart and making that special something the basis of your life. And that special something is simply this: that tax cuts are magic.

The Myth of the Mainstream Media

          I am old enough to remember when the term “mainstream media” actually had semantic value. When I was growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we had four TV stations (ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS) and three national news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report). Then we had the Tulsa World and the Tulsa Tribune. And that was about it unless you took the Wall Street Journal. If these news sources tilted to the left (and, to be fair, all but the Wall Street Journal did tilt to the left), one could probably make the argument that something like a “liberal media” was influencing the way that people saw the world.
          But that world is gone forever. By the early 1990—when Internet was still mainly computer geeks talking about Star Trek and trading dirty pictures—talk radio and cable news (both of which tilted, or more, to the right) already had as many viewers/listeners as the so-called major news sources. Even during the First Gulf War it was difficult to speak of any kind of monolithic “mainstream media.” Such a media existed back then, of course, but other news sources were plentiful and easy to find. But look at what has happened since then:

          Saying the news is controlled by a “liberal elite” in 2012 makes as much sense as saying that the world economy is controlled by a cabal of Jewish bankers.  The three formerly major networks account for a vanishingly small percentage of the news that people actually watch. The right-leaning Fox has twice as many viewers as CNN and MSNBC combined, and more people listen to Rush Limbaugh every day than watch any major news network at all. And in 2011, for the first time in history, more people got their news from the Internet than from printed news papers.
          What this produces is what journalists often call the “echo chamber effect.”  Americans now have access to so many TV channels, web pages, blogs, radio programs, and books publishers that we don’t have to spend any time at all listening to (or reading) opinions other than our own. When we all watched the same three news shows (well, four if you count The McNeill-Lehrer News Hour, but, really, who ever watched that), we all had different opinions, but we participated in more or less the same reality. That is no longer the case. Somebody who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck every day and watches nothing but Fox News does not participate in the same reality as someone who does nothing all day but read The Huffington Post and live-stream clips from The Daily Show.
          And the picture is becoming even more complicated with the rise of social media. Many people today (and I admit I am one) get most of their news from things that their friends link to on Facebook and Twitter. This has the potential to amplify the echo chamber, as most people have a self-selected group of friends who think the same way that they do. Regrettably, it is now possible to spend all of your waking hours reading about current events without ever being exposed to any views that you do not already hold. We need look no farther than this to understand the deep divisions that now paralyze our nation.
          Despite all of this, however, candidates still parade around the country inveighing against “the liberal elite” and “the mainstream media.” This is just a confirmation bias looking for a place to be confirmed. One will always be able to find thousands of examples of “liberal agendas” in the media. And conservative agendas, and moderate agendas, and, for that matter, Zoroastrian Elvis Fan agendas. But these examples do not go together to form a media conspiracy. Sure the New York Times still tilts a bit to the left. But who reads it? Rush Limbaugh has the highest radio program in the country, Fox News has the highest ratings on cable, and Mark Levin’s most recent book debuted at #1.What's a guy gotta do to be "mainstream" in this joint anyway? 

Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Florida

“If Trayvon was packing something heavier than skittles this world might be shorter one idiot rather  than shorter a young man with promise.”
 —Recent Facebook post discussing the murder of Trayvon Martin 

               For Thomas Hobbes, civil society was pretty much a no-brainer. However bad it might get (and Hobbes lived through some pretty bad times), it was better than the alternative, which was a worldwide and eternal version of The Hunger Games called "the state of nature." In this state, the only law that applies is brute force. Whoever can take stuff gets to keep it until someone else takes it. In the state of nature, Hobbes famously opined, the life of man (and woman) is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”         

          Fast forward from the English Revolution to February 2012, when Trayvon Martin, a young African-American man, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain with a long history of harassing people on the street. He (Zimmerman) was told by police operators not to pursue Martin, yet he did so anyway, leading to a confrontation during which Martin lost his life. Three weeks later, Zimmerman remains free, even though he admits to killing an unarmed seventeen-year-old boy, because, police say, they cannot dispute his narrative of self-defense.

          I will admit that my outrage at this event is coming late in the game. When I first heard of the incident, I was deeply saddened to hear of a young life cut short by a senseless, tragic act of violence. But I knew (or at least I thought I knew) that the man who did this would be punished. Just a few days ago, my wife and I were discussing the killing and I told her that we live in a civilized society governed by the rule of law, not in a failed state where people with guns can do whatever they want. Of course Zimmerman would be arrested and tried, I said. We haven’t gone so far down the path of gun-worship that we would stand by and allow a child to be gunned down in his own neighborhood without any consequences.

          Except that, apparently, we have. At least in Florida, and other states with “Stand-Your-Ground” legislation that makes it very difficult to prosecute anybody who claims to have been afraid. Up until now, the police have not even tried.

          Not getting arrested because of a “Stand-Your-Ground” law is a very different thing than claiming self-defense at a trial. Self-protection is a perfectly legitimate defense, and it can even be applied to mistaken situations in which somebody incorrectly believes that he or she is in danger. But it has always been an affirmative defense--one that comes with a burden of proof on the part of the one claiming it. What the Florida law appears to do (at least as it is being interpreted by the police in this case) is shift the burden of proof to the prosecution. If someone claims self-defense, then the state has to prove that the person was not acting out of a fear for his or her life. Such a shift is inconsistent with the rules of both law and logic, as it requires a dead person to prove a negative. 

         As the left becomes angrier and angrier about this miscarriage of justice, the right has become quieter and quieter, which actually surprises me quite a bit. This would be a perfect opportunity for Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin to demonstrate their commitment to law and order. This would also be a fine time for the NRA to focus on the responsibility of gun ownership—to hammer home the notion that the right to bear arms conveys responsibilities that, if ignored, have consequences. I can’t even see a down side to conservatives getting behind this issue and going on record opposing the  murder of unarmed boys.

          Though I have seen very few official statements from conservatives about the Trayvon Martin incident, I have run into a distressingly large number of informal comments on blogs and social networking sites like the one that I opened with. This incident proves (say the comments) that more people should have guns. If only Trayvon had been armed, he would have been able to stand up for himself. If only all decent, law-abiding citizens carried their own weapons, then things like this wouldn’t happen.

          This reasoning leads us directly back to the Hobbesian state of nature. If everybody has to walk around carrying their own weapon, and shooting before being shot, then there is no point in having a government, for we do not live under the rule of law. If Florida cannot find a way to at least bring Mr. Zimmerman to trial (where he would be free to offer his self-defense justification to the jury) then they do not deserve to be a state, having failed in the most fundamental responsibility of the social contract.


PS.

I have signed very few petitions in my life, but I signed this one. If you agree with anything I have said in this post, please sign it too:

http://signon.org/sign/attorney-general-holder-1.fb1?source=s.fb&r_by=3410758 

Liberals, What Liberals?

         Because I am writing a book on the Founding Fathers and the American right, I have had the opportunity over the past year or so to read the collected oeuvre of MM/Mme Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Anne Coulter, and dozens of other right-wing conservatives. In all of their works, I have encountered a political type called the “liberal”—a scary sort of fellow who supports trashing the Constitution for sport, turning America into a Communist State, and sending all children to Atheist Summer Camp on their seventh birthday.

         OK, the Atheist Summer Camp is an exaggeration. The others, not so much. Every one of these books is organized around opposing the massive threat from the left that is now (more than any other time in history in most cases) threatening to engulf our way of life. And I admit that they had me scared for a while. I don’t want our country run by these liberals any more than Glenn Beck does. They are scary.

         The problem is that they don’t exist. Not really. Oh, there are liberals here and there—mostly in English Departments (where I have spent most of my career) and in some of the social sciences. But there really is not—and has not been for some time—anything like a functioning left in this country. Think about it.

         When was the last time you heard seven politicians argue about who the “genuine liberal” was? Do you remember how, in 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton went into all of those debates to argue about who was the real successor to the McGovern legacy? Yea, me neither.

         What we have in America is a right and a center, with one party (the Democrats) positioned almost entirely in the center and another (the GOP) trying hard to stay somewhere near the center but not managing to do so with its own base constantly veering off to the hard right. Barack Obama, who is certainly the most liberal US president of my lifetime, barely qualifies as “slightly left of center” on any rational international or historical scale.

         This is a guy who spent most of his presidency fighting two wars, taking out bad guys, preserving tax increases, and cutting deals with people so far to the right that they could not would not have been elected by either party fifty years ago. Even his trademark bit of left-wing social engineering—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care—is basically just a sloppy wet kiss to the insurance industry masquerading as universal health care. No real socialist would even return the guys e-mail.

         But if you spend any time at all listening to right-wing radio or reading the ultraconservative press (trust me on this), you will be constantly bombarded by plaintive wails. Obama is a Socialist. The Democrats are trashing the Constitution. This is what liberals do. Etc. ad infinitum.

         What this has allowed the far-right to do is create one of the most skewed political landscapes that we have ever seen in this country—a world in which a traditional conservative (say, Mitt Romney) is classified as a moderate, a pragmatic centrist (Obama) is seen as a liberal, and blithering nincompoops like Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich are seen as acceptably conservative.

         Fortunately, the center is still where most of the people are and have always been. Just today, I came across this graphic in the Chronicle of Higher Education (bottom of page) describing the political views of college students from 1970 (back when most of them were supposedly hippies) to 2011. What the graphic shows is that, today, about 20% of students self-identified as conservative, a little over 25% identify as liberal, and over 50% identify as “middle of the road.” Back in 1970, on the other hand, about 20% of the students self-identified as conservative, a little over 25% identified as liberal, and a solid majority considered themselves “middle of the road.” And these results are pretty constant across different age demographics.            

        Most Americans are, and always have been, somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. These days, a significant minority consider themselves conservative to very conservative. Very few people consider themselves liberal, and even those won’t admit it. If Democrats can capture the center and hold it, they just might become the first party ever to be returned to power during a major recession.

          

            

      

          

Kosher Food, Health Care, and Why Conservatives Just Can't Win

“Holocaust survivors who for the first time were forced to eat non-kosher because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for your grandparents to eat kosher . . . . Where is Mitt Romney’s compassion for our seniors?”

—Newt Gingrich Robo-Call on the eve of the Florida Primary

         We learned several important things in Florida this week. First, we learned that Newt Gingrich, along with being a serial adulterer and a megalomaniac, is also a whiney-butt. Second, we learned that Mitt Romney is perfectly willing to pay people to be bastards while he stands on the sidelines smiling. But the most important thing we learned—at least I hope we learned it—is that extreme conservatism just doesn’t work (extreme liberalism doesn’t work either, but we already knew that).

         I refer, of course, to the bizarre robo-call that some Floridians received last night suggesting that Mitt Romney personally shoved pork chops and lobster down people’s throats at the Yad Vashem dinner in downtown Boston. It never happened. Romney took an item out of an appropriation bill that could have eliminated kosher food subsidies, but the legislature overrode his veto. But that’s not the point.

         Much more important to me is what this line of attack says about the extreme conservative position that Gingrich is trying to represent in this election cycle—you know who I mean, people who think that income tax is unconstitutional, that Social Security is a fraud, and that the universal health care bill proves that Obama was born in North Korea. This particular constituency doesn’t think that we should be providing insulin to seniors, much less kosher pastrami. This is exactly the sort of “do-it-for-yourself-but-don’t-expect-the-government-to-do-it-for-you” entitlement that both Gingrich and Romney are supposedly going to end when they get to Washington.

         Both Gingrich and Romney were unwilling to stand behind their own ideologies and say something reasonably consistent like: “This is what ‘tough choices’ are all about. If we are going to balance the budget, we can’t give everybody everything that they want. If we even want to make a dent in the national debt without raising taxes, we are going to have to cut entitlements. This means Social Security. This means the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And this means kosher food.”

         But it will never happen. As long as political power is awarded by popular vote, people are never going to get into power, or stay in power, unless they give people stuff. That’s how the whole voting thing works. People want stuff, and, as long as they hold the reigns of government in their hands, they are going to elect people who will give them stuff.

         This is why conservatives actually never win elections. Oh, people who claim to be conservatives win all the time, but by the time they win the election, they have ceased to be conservatives. And when they actually govern, they normally end up not being conservatives at all. No Republican President in my lifetime—Nixon, Reagan, Bush père, Bush fils—has ever actually taken away anybody’s stuff, nor have conservative presidents come any closer to balanced budgets than liberal ones. Giving people stuff is not about being liberal or conservative; it is about being president or not president.

         But here’s the rub: this might not actually be a bad thing. Maybe Jewish seniors should have kosher meals. Maybe everybody should have health care and security. Maybe, just maybe, these are the sorts of things that government is supposed to do—the reason that people (theoretical people at least) leave the state of nature and form civil societies is so that, through their governments, they can do things on a much grander scale than they could otherwise. Maybe one of the grand purposes of civil government is to give people a mechanism for taking care of the most vulnerable members of society: children, the elderly, the impoverished—the people that Jesus was always hanging around with and telling us to care for.

          And maybe all of this has something to do with what government “by the people, for the people, and of the people” actually means in a modern, post-industrial nation where nobody actually has to starve, to forego lifesaving care, or to eat milk with meat. 

"Class Warfare" is a Stupid Term; Let's Dump It

          It is officially time to retire the phrase “class warfare” from our political vocabulary. 

         Back when words actually meant things, “class warfare” was a pretty scary proposition. Not just anybody could do it; it took a lot of anger and a critical mass of people—always from the lower classes of society—who were willing to, well, have warfare. The French Jacobins certainly fit this description, along with L’ouverture's Haitian slaves and Lenin’s Russian revolutionaries. By the time a society got around to “class warfare,” it was pretty much going to change one way or another.

         Now, however, “class warfare” is the first thing out of a conservative’s mouth when anybody proposes a tax increase. It comes out especially quickly when somebody wants to raise the capital gains tax, or the maximum tax rate, or let the Bush Tax Cuts Expire. We don’t want to have “class warfare,” after all, or Mitt Romney might have to pay the same percentage of his income that I do, and then he will stop creating jobs.

         The tactic of labeling tax increases “class warfare” appears to have worked well in America, mainly because very few Americans perceive themselves as being in a lower class—we are a nation full of people who aren’t millionaires yet. And as long as this is the case, we certainly don’t want to go around doing class warfare things to the people who are millionaires, lest they hold a grudge when we move in next door.

         But it is time to abandon this ridiculous terminology. It was originally designed to convey contempt for the poor, which was bad enough. Now, however, it simply conveys contempt for reality.

Here is some reality to consider:

1.   As long as there is a United States government in any form, somebody is going to have to pay expenses. There will always, therefore, be taxes.


2.   There is no such thing as a tax plan that affects everybody equally. Whatever we do, whatever we tax, there will be winners and losers. In most cases, the winners and losers will each occupy different places on the economic spectrum. Some kinds of taxes are better for people with low incomes, and some kinds are better for people with high incomes. No system can be better for everybody.


3.   Questions about how to structure our tax system are legitimate items for public debate. Talking about who benefits and who does not benefit from a given structure is not “class warfare.” Pointing out that certain tax structures benefit the wealthy more than others is not a hostile act. It is not the same as storming the Bastille. It is, rather, an integral part of the democratic process.

         Criticizing politicians for encouraging rivalries between different social classes is not new in America, of course. It was one of the primary accusations that Hamiltonian Federalists routinely leveled against Jeffersonian Republicans. But Jefferson really deserved the criticism. In his immoderate support for the French Revolution, our third president really did advocate class warfare of the “kill-the-aristocrats-in-their-sleep” variety. And he had plenty of good things to say about early armed rebellions in America (Shea’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion) as well. Jefferson had very little use for the rich, and the rich felt exactly the same about Jefferson.

         But Jefferson was not actually a Jacobin—the writings of Alexander Hamilton notwithstanding. But he did stand firmly on the side of a government that did not transfer the burden of supporting government from the wealthy to the poor. How nice it would be if the self-proclaimed “Modern Jeffersonians”—the acolytes of small government and state sovereignty—would allow a national debate on the Jeffersonian ideals they reject without resorting to the kind of martial terminology that Jefferson himself despised.

Newtpolian of a Hundred Days

"The Democrats are spending millions of dollars running negative ads against Romney as they are hoping that Gingrich will be the nominee which could result in a landslide victory for Obama and a crushing defeat for Republicans from the courthouse to the White House.” –Bob Dole 1/26/12

"With Newt Gingrich, you throw out the baby and keep the bathwater.”—Ann Coulter, 1/23/12

         The Republican mainstream seems to be treating the Newt Gingrich surge the way that the crowned heads of Europe treated Napoleon’s escape from Elba. They thought they had gotten rid of him, they were finally starting to clean up the mess that he made, and they couldn’t believe that it was all about to happen again. Somebody send for that English fellow and let’s end this once and for all.

         Would-be Wellingtons include Bob Dole, who just got in the act today, along with Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Elliott Abrams—and these were the guys friends. The conservative media is not far behind, with Glenn Beck and  Ann Coulter taking turns trashing Gingrich and promoting his rival. And the story they all tell is the same: Gingrich can’t win a general election. If you vote for Gingrich, you will get Obama.
           That is a valid point, but I can’t help thinking that there is more going on—that they are really more afraid that he really could win and become both the President of the United States and the leader of the Republican Party. A large number of mainstream Republicans, I suspect, would rather muddle through four more years of Obama than place an unstable megalomaniac on the throne. Republican strategist David Frum said as much just this week. “Gingrich,” he confides, “has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power.”
         Which brings us back to Napoleon. Gingrich shares more with the Corsican general than just a bad haircut. Napoleon was one of the greatest minds of his age and one of the most ambitious men ever to walk the earth. He craved power and could never get enough to satisfy his need. He was willing to throw a half a million of his own soldiers away—as he did in Russia—for no reason beyond his own aggrandizement. And in the end, he was willing to destroy a continent rather than slip quietly away. If he had to go, he was going to take half the world with him.

         If I were a Republican right now, I would be as terrified as the Republicans seem to be that Gingrich would do something similar. I don’t think that he is going to win. The attacks by nearly every Republican that anybody has ever heard of are already driving Newt’s numbers down. But the Gingrich candidacy is exposing a fault line within the Conservative movement that Republicans would rather not expose during an election cycle. On one side of the line are the Tea Party activists; on the other is the Republican Party.

         Tea Party leaders have made it clear that they are only dating, not marrying, Republicans. Last summer, a Gallup Poll indicated that a majority of conservative voters would back a third party if they felt that the Republicans were abandoning conservative principles. With the forces of the right arrayed against him, Newt is now in the unsustainable position of being a former leader of the Republican Party running against the Republican Party for the Republican Party's nomination. And his anti-establishment rhetoric is wildly appealing to the 15-20% of Americans who associate themselves with the Tea Party--without whom the Republican Party would be consigned to perpetual second place in a winner-take-all world. There may be a better scenario for a third-party run, but I can't think of it.

         But, for Republicans, this could get much worse than a single-cycle third-party run. As a Democrat, albeit a moderate one, the idea of a permanent, electorally meaningful third party to the right of the GOP warms my heart cockles. It would virtually guarantee Democratic dominance in government for a generation. But I try not to get too giddy because I know that it would be virtually impossible for a third party to take root in the United States. Our entire political structure is oriented to a two-party system.

         For such a thing to happen, the stars would have to align with almost unreal precision. There would have to be a coherent group of voters that constituted something like (in Madisonian terms) a permanent faction. This group would have to be paired with a leader of rare intelligence and charisma who was also a rudderless megalomaniac. This leader would have to be willing to lead 15-20% of the electorate off of a political cliff with no motive beyond his own aggrandizement. He would have to be willing to turn his back on his own party and throw them out of power for sheer spite. And he would have to see himself as a world-historical figure on an epic scale—with an unshakable conviction that history and destiny were on his side. 

         And all that Democrats have to do is remember Napoleon’s greatest maxim: “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”