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A very good analysis of J-Street and it's desired role in the American Jewish community and the Pro-Israel/Pro-Peace movement.Delahunt’s journey to Mideast upended - The Boston Globe
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Sunday, February 28, 2010
Delahunt’s journey to Mideast upended - The Boston Globe
Delahunt’s journey to Mideast upended - The Boston Globe
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The Goldstone Illusion | The New Republic
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An excellent and fairly balanced analysis of the Goldstone report and the unfortunate bias that is simply a reality at the U.N. and in reports like this. This article be Moshe Halertal by no means gives blanket support for the war. The alternatives are clearly pointed out. But in a manner that is clearer than most who have attempted it, the difference between traditional war and war with a terrorist entity is extremely well done. And again, the question is raised whether any war against such an entity embedded in a civilian population should be carried out at all, given the necessary moral compromises one is forced to make. And that is a valid point. Halbertal artfully allows the reader to entertain this possibility while at the same time asking the reader to put themselves in the shoes of those who do choose the option of war and do try to balance some kind of morality along the way.The Goldstone Illusion The New Republic
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Monday, February 22, 2010
Political Cartoons - On Target with Stimulus, Health Care and Republican Obstruction
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Here are some of my favorite political cartoons from the past few weeks.
This first one is my favorite. Its PERFECT and completely challenges any argument against spending in the current economic climate.
Rising deficits make a convenient political hammer for the Republicans these days, because they do indeed threaten the nation’s long-term financial stability. But the need for new jobs is urgent, and any proposal to stimulate employment in the short term is vital - and yes - will cost money now.
Even though feeding the corporate beast was tough for me to swallow, I don't think people really understand what would have happened had the many banks and companies that benefited from stimulus funds failed. The human toll on families - for generations - is already steep as a result of this crisis. Those additional failures would have had an almost unimaginable human toll. Why are more people not condemning conservatives for wanting to leave those people hanging in the wind? Does the "Tea Party" argument of "let them fail" really wash when it would have been many of those same people out of work?
In a similar way, have people forgotten that one of the main reasons behind health care reform AND a public option is because as things stand, tax payers ARE ALREADY paying for the health care of the under and uninsured? Wouldn't it have been better to create a more efficient system (not program!!) where-by they could have gotten comprhensive health care at a lesser expense to us?These last two are classic. Of course I realize that it is customary for the party not in power in congress to try to win it back. But it has also been customary for SOME bi-partisanship to emerge during a crisis. Enjoy these two Olympics inspired cartoons on Republican obstructionism.
Here are links to each political cartoon (this first link - gocomics.com - is a great site to just explore):
Stimulus vs Deficit:
http://www.gocomics.com/mattdavies/2010/02/08/
Health Insurance:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/cartoons/20100215_ink_tank?pg=6
Skating to Recovery or November:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/cartoons/20100215_ink_tank?pg=3
GOP Against Anything Obama is For ..
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/cartoons/20100215_ink_tank?pg=18
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GPS with Fareed Zakaria - A Must Watch Show!
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If I've said it once, I'll say it a thousand times - GPS with Fareed Zakaria is a MUST WATCH show for anyone interested in a balanced and refreshingly global take on current events. It is also an excellent source for reading material, first hand international reporting, and excellent interviews - all accessible on-line (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.zakaria.gps/)
His most recent shows have been focusing on both the current paralysis in the US government and the Iran dilemma.
Regarding the state of affairs at home, he has a particularly on-target assessment of the public's role in producing the government paralysis at hand - and at the same time railing against it for abstract reasons. Echoing many posts on The Cohen Side, Zakaria also is exasperated over the desire of so many to have government DO and SPEND less, yet without the accompanying specifics and without the will to sacrifice the government benefit that is their own "sacred cow." He is also perplexed and amazed at the way this has somehow re-positioned the Republicans as "champions" of certain government programs - like Medicaid - that for years has been on the chopping block for them, like so many other human service related entitlements.
And regarding Iran, Zakaria has always had a more reasoned approach than many in government. When most simply portray Iran as being ruled by a set of demonic clerics and an insane President, he explains the very real goals an aspirations of Iran - based on years of mistrust of the West, a desire to have a hegemony over their sphere of influence in the region, and a defiance of the double standards of the United States that make complete sense. (Why can't we have Nukes if Israel and Pakistan can?) What he explains is that we need to embrace those realities and understand them - as we make the case for containing Iran - with REASONED ARGUMENTS - like telling them they maybe could have nukes if they didn't do things like threaten the destruction of Israel, or destabilize the globe by selling arms to Hezbulah and Hamas - which Israel and Pakistan really don't do.
To be critical for one moment, he had a fascinating interview with James Baker this past weekend, but I wish he had hit him harder. Baker was on as the senior statesman criticizing Washington paralysis - yet made two glaringly partisan digs that I wish had been followed up on. When Zakaria was trying to get Baker to criticize the approaches of both parties, all he did was follow the Republican party line about how bad spending was. When asked to also comment on the inadvisability of Tax Cuts - at this time, all he was willing to say was "Well you will get the deficits down more quickly." Its like when conservatives agree that cutting green house gasses will certainly help the environment - yet don't really support them in political practice. And to follow that one, when asked about how obstructionist the Republicans have been about health care, he joked about not knowing much about it but not liking it because he "heard" that it meant granny and grandpa would have the plug pulled on them. Huh? The eminent statesmen doesn't know any details about the most contentious debate in years and then drops a Palin- esque "death panel" bomb like that - in a joke? It was all calculated and well executed. Get on the show by appearing to criticize everyone - and then once you're on - only REALLY criticize the policies of the left. Nicely done James.
I will expand more with these lines of thought in subsequent posts. But please, if you haven't already, give this show a try. (DVR 10am Sundays on CNN)
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Tuesday, February 9, 2010
A Better Approach to Student Evaluation
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Here is the full text of the letter I sent in to the globe. Their edited version is in the post below and can be found here.The letter is responding in part to a Globe editorial from last week "Obama's Education Plan Errs in Abandoning Proficiency Goal", which praises standardized testing and criticizes a new Obama initiative that is seeking to modify the emphasis on high stakes testing with a more holistic approach to education. The letter is also a response to a series of editorials which routinely demonizes unions and pins all the eductional ills in this country on teachers. Enjoy!
In your February 3rd editorial, “Obama’s Education Plan …”, you compel me to ask – What bad experience did the editors of the globe have with teachers when they were younger?
What else could explain the way you so demonize teachers, unions, and praise the standardized testing that most progressives disagree with? In this editorial, you explain that “teachers work harder” knowing what is at stake for the students. As a former classroom teacher who has seen both the good and the bad in schools, it is remarkable how little you understand about schools and teachers. Teachers do not need high stakes testing to know what is of vital importance to their students.
In many schools, what happens within the walls of the classroom between the teacher and his or her students is the best part of our educational system. A lack of quality school-wide and system wide leadership, poor prioritization of resources, and societal forces always seem to be ignored by your commentary. Obama’s plan would move us away from the high stakes testing “gotcha” game and toward a more holistic approach to assessment. This approach is not quite as easy to understand as looking at a test score, but it is exactly what progressive educators and honest politicians have been seeking for years.
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Sunday, February 7, 2010
A User's Guide for Responding to Anti-Tax, Faux Populists
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"What Do We Mean When We Say We Hate Taxes" is an excellent piece on our irrational attitude toward taxes - and our vulnerability to manipulation by some well meaning, and some not so well meaning folks on the right.One of the best aspects of the article is they way in which it provides almost a blueprint of what to emphasize around our dinner tables, with our friends, and among our colleagues - in short that "this is a .... country that expects to be left alone while at the same time expecting a certain level of services."
It is during hard times like these that most people forget about those services - both on a personal and an abstract level. Much like the gentleman who absurdly stated that he wanted the government's hands of his medicare, it always amazes me how many people who are DIRECTLY benefited by services, never reflect on that hypocrisy.
As Pierce writes, "Quite simply, if you love [or need] a particular government service - that your bridges are repaired, for example, or you emergency calls answered - you ought to love [or at least appreciate] the taxes that pay for it. Yet, that is rarely the case."
When there was a fledgling movement in Massachusetts to eliminate the income tax, it was defeated largely because most people understood this - on a private, practical level. Yet, when it comes to electing or supporting people who would move us in that same direction (some programs cut, just not all) we jump at the chance to voice our anger. Yet, philosophically, the votes would seem incongruous. As Stephen Crawford goes on to explain in the article about defeating the above mentioned initiative, "What I found surprising ... was the other side's refusal to identify a single thing they would cut. One person's cut is another person's benefit."
Pierce also includes comments from Barney Frank who also puts the situation in excellent perspective. “Taxes” are viewed by many as “my money going to things or people of which I disapprove,” which makes any political appeal in favor of raising them, even for the purpose of funding people and things of which you might approve, a dodgy matter at best. Navigating that predicament is so tricky that, over the past 30 years or so, many politicians -- most notably conservative ones in Washington -- have simply declined to do so at all, relying on former vice president Dick Cheney’s now-famous dictum that Ronald Reagan “proved deficits don’t matter." Frank expresses correctly that "The problem is that government got so unpopular in the last few years that the anti-tax side has an easy out, they don’t have to argue that we have to cut services anymore.”
In my own debates with people on the "cut" side of the argument, I have also found this to be true. They don't ever have to give any detail about cuts. The routine responses are all straw men: "Come on, can you honestly say you don't think government is too bloated." or "You don't think they can't find areas to cut that are clearly wasteful?" They all think there is this imaginary pie of "wasteful" spending that would be the only thing effected. And you know what ... people are buying it hook line and sinker.
A similar problem exists when people think they know how much things are "suppose" to cost. Schools are a perfect example. Using percentages and big numbers, the assumption has already been sold that too much money is spent on education or schools and that they are failing despite the money spent. For the most part, outside of struggling inner city or rural schools, most schools do an excellent job with the situation they are placed in. No one wants to talk about how schools are doing more in 2010 than anyone ever envisioned under the current funding structure or that more money is spent on special "services" for students than on the average student who simply comes to school, goes to class, plays a sport and does their homework. Ahh - but there is that magic word again. Schools provide incredible "services" that no one would want cut for "their" child but that in the abstract - everyone IS ACTUALLY ASKING FOR IT TO BE CUT when they vote down prop 2 1/2 overrides.
Schools should be cathedrals. They should be the thing we spend the most on and be proud of it. I think Newton should spend an exorbitant amount on a school and set a standard that all schools in Massachusetts want to emulate. How about that thought - a race to build the best schools - and with it - a "profit sharing" arrangement like they have in major league baseball so the poorer "markets" can be supported in some way by the more affluent who have more money than they seem to know what to do with. (how socialist of baseball - oh my)
But the culture of indignance to taxes and indifference to what that really means is with us and goes over the top in tough economic times. The faux populists find more receptive audiences for their messages these days, but that is not new. But what would be new is if knowledgeable, influential people actually used articles like this to turn the tide.
Even just using this section on the "Death Tax" would be a great first step to bring up at the water cooler or at the coffee shop ...
"Calling it the “death tax” gave its opponents a huge advantage in perception. Through this, and through taking advantage of the revamped terrain on which any discussion of taxes now must take place, the people seeking the elimination of the estate tax -- and, one can fairly conclude, the concept of progressive taxation generally -- have managed to make allies out of people whose estates never had a chance of being taxed at all.
In Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth, their 2005 book about the political battle over the estate tax, Michael Graetz, a Yale professor who worked for the Treasury Department in the first administration of George W. Bush, and Ian Shapiro, also a Yale professor, tell the story of Chester Thigpen, an elderly Mississippi tree farmer who testified before Congress in favor of repealing the tax despite the fact that his estate was too small to be taxed.
“My father recently died,” recalls Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor and the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which bailed out banks at the expense of (yes) the taxpayer. “He worked all of his life, and at the end of the day he had a modest home that was paid off, Social Security, and a few bucks in the bank, and he was worried about paying ‘death taxes.’ That man would have had to make 100 times more than he’d made, he was so far away from ever paying a dollar of the so-called ‘death tax.’
There was something heartbreaking about it. Where should his interests have aligned? Toward a much more populist notion of a progressive tax structure. He saw his interests in avoiding ‘death taxes.’ It broke my heart.”The battle over the estate tax -- which is ongoing in Washington -- is a nearly perfect prism through which to look at the consistently problematic view Americans have of the concept of taxes.
Ultimately, no matter which side of the political aisle you find yourself on, taxes are a public demonstration of the kind of political commonwealth we desire for ourselves. And there is a terrible price to be paid for believing that we can get something for nothing. The way we look at taxes is the way we look at ourselves, even if we choose to look away."
Full article and link below...
Our Love-Hate Relationship With Taxes
The fight over taxes -- in Massachusetts and across the country -- is as furious as ever. But what is the battle really about?
Charles Pierce - Boston Globe Magazine - February 7, 2010
It’s hard not to wonder about them, as they drive north to New Hampshire, blinded by plasma screens and home furnishings. As we are all painfully aware, Massachusetts -- “Taxachusetts” to political consultants and other public people on the dodge -- raised its sales tax to 6.25 percent back in May. This sent folks scattering northward, at $2.75 a gallon or more, mind you. People even told reporters that they were going to New Hampshire to shop for groceries, which are not taxed at all in Massachusetts, and apparel, which is not taxed here either until the purchase goes above $175. Nevertheless, they heard all the radio commercials asking them to come shop in “tax-free” New Hampshire, and they were on the road before they knew it. They were running away from ghosts.
Put simply, this state is fairly average when it comes to taxing its citizens. According to data from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group in Washington, D.C., the state and local tax burden in Massachusetts is 9.5 percent, 0.2 points below the national average, placing Massachusetts 23d among the 50 states. The personal income tax system is the 29th highest. On the other hand, the data show that the state’s corporate tax structure ranks it fourth among those states that have corporate income taxes, and property taxes here are the eighth highest in the country. In short, by any empirical measure, calling this state “Taxachusetts” in 2010 is no more accurate than calling it “Massachusetts Bay.”
“That’s been the case since 1991,” says one veteran analyst who declined to be identified and who worked on the state’s tax structure under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “There’ve been about 50 tax reductions enacted by governors and the Legislature since then.”
Nevertheless, the cars still drive north, and the arguments continue, exacerbated over the past year by the national economic downturn and the angry, inchoate populist politics that resulted from both the downturn itself and the occasionally erratic attempts to solve it. The arguments were most clearly evident in the upset victory of Republican and former state senator Scott Brown in the race to replace the late US senator Ted Kennedy. Brown ran on the vague, but eminently salable, notion that he would lower our taxes, even though, as the member of a legislative minority with the least seniority, what he could actually do about them remained unclear. Indeed, some interviews with voters prior to the election led one to believe that people voted for Brown because he would somehow reduce all their taxes, state and federal.
However, we can be ambivalent about taxes. In Dedham last month, voters passed property tax hikes totaling more than $15 million and earmarked for a new elementary school and improvements to another school. At the same time, the town gave 55 percent of its vote to tax-cutting Brown. If nothing else, the results prove that, on a local level, if a proposal to raise taxes is tightly drawn as to the purpose of the increase, it has a better chance of succeeding, even amidst a seismic event elsewhere on the ballot.
More clearly than ever, the issue of taxes must be seen as something far beyond pure economics, and well beyond simple dollars and sense. Taxes have become the way we define ourselves as a political commonwealth, or a way of determining whether we still see ourselves as such at all. There’s a strong -- and occasionally successful -- school of political thought that sees very little in government or in society that belongs to us all. “Right now,” says Robert Borosage, the president of the Institute for America’s Future, a nonpartisan research and education center in Washington, D.C., “when you say ‘taxes,’ it’s a substitute for government, and in some contexts that means Big Government, which is oppressive, and taxes represent the intrusion of Big Government into our lives.”
Of course, as with so many things in our politics, in the discussion of what taxes represent, inexactitude is everybody’s friend. Last summer, when the Tea Party movement hit high tide, there was some very loose and unformed talk about keeping the hands of “government” off people’s Medicare. This is a state -- and beyond it, a country -- that expects to be left alone while simultaneously expecting a certain level of service from its government. One that expects, in the words of its founding document, to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare, but to do it, at best, on the cheap. Quite simply, if you love a particular government service -- that your bridges are repaired, for example, or your emergency calls answered -- you ought to love the taxes that pay for it. That, however, is rarely the case.
“What I found surprising during our debate,” explains Stephen Crawford, the Arlington-based public relations executive hired as the spokesman for the successful opposition in 2008 to a ballot question that would have eliminated the state income tax, “was the other side’s refusal to identify a single thing they would cut. One person’s cut is another person’s benefit. That’s why we were successful.”
The drive to repeal the income tax was led by perennial libertarian candidate for everything Carla Howell of Wayland. Her next project takes aim at the state sales tax: This November, Massachusetts voters will likely see a proposal on the ballot that would slash it to 3 percent.
“Taxes” are viewed by many as “my money going to things or people of which I disapprove,” which makes any political appeal in favor of raising them, even for the purpose of funding people and things of which you might approve, a dodgy matter at best. Navigating that predicament is so tricky that, over the past 30 years or so, many politicians -- most notably conservative ones in Washington -- have simply declined to do so at all, relying on former vice president Dick Cheney’s now-famous dictum that Ronald Reagan “proved deficits don’t matter.”
“The problem is that government got so unpopular in the last few years that the anti-tax side has an easy out,” says US Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. “They don’t have to argue that we have to cut services anymore.”
Part of that is the thrall that the theories of supply-side economics have held over Republican leaders through the years of conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Reagan in 1980. Much of supply-side theory holds that lower taxes eventually translate to higher government revenues. Over the years, this morphed into a kind of reflexive and general anti-tax fervor so pronounced that Jonathan Chait, a reliably centrist senior editor at The New Republic, wrote a book in which he called supply-siders, among other things, “sheer loons.” Even so, they succeeded so well politically that the entire national debate on taxes changed and, with it, the way we looked at ourselves as a self-governing people with certain institutions and values that we hold in common. Right about the time Reagan brought the theory into the federal government a similar thing was happening in Massachusetts, and, unlike in Washington, it was happening from the ground up.
Thirty years ago, she was a noisy voice from the sidelines, a bleacher-creature heckler in Massachusetts politics. She was loud and raucous and far too easily dismissed by people in the state’s political establishment who should have felt the ground shifting beneath their feet, but who had been standing in the same place so long that their legs had gone numb. She was pounding away on the subject of taxes -- not merely on how much they cost, but on what they had come to represent -- in the same relentless catechism with which William Lloyd Garrison once blessed himself here: She was in earnest; she would not equivocate; she would not excuse; she would not retreat a single inch. And, Lord knows, she would be heard. In this, Barbara Anderson probably has affected Massachusetts politics more than anyone ever has who’s never been elected to anything.
“To me,” she says, “taxes have never been about the money. It’s been about power and who’s in charge and who’s in control.” A native of western Pennsylvania, where her parents ran a hardware store, the former Barbara Hervatin enrolled in the DuBois campus of Penn State, where friends introduced her to the work of Ayn Rand. By 1980 and two husbands later, she found herself here, working as the executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation. CLT was six years old then, a creature of the state’s lively, if powerless, conservative libertarian political subculture. (At the time, the national headquarters of the John Birch Society was tucked into the leafy streets of Belmont, across from the public library.) By the time Anderson took over from Greg Hyatt -- who, in 1986, would become briefly notorious for abandoning his gubernatorial campaign when he was said to have been spotted naked in his office -- CLT was struggling and nearly broke. But it had been paying attention to what had been going on in California, where in 1978 a tax revolt led by a man named Howard Jarvis had resulted in an amendment to the state constitution severely limiting property taxes. In 1979, CLT launched an initiative petition in Massachusetts called Proposition 2½ that would limit a municipality’s total annual property tax revenues to 2½ percent of the assessed value of all the municipality’s property and would cap a municipality’s ability to raise its property taxes at that same 2½ percent. It also would reduce the excise tax on automobiles.
At the same time, a court decision in Massachusetts had stopped the practice of taxing businesses more and more and had forced a shift in the property tax from industrial property to residential property. “Prop. 2½ really was a money problem back then,” Anderson recalls. “People were generally angry about the concept that we had gotten sales taxes, income taxes, and the Lottery on promises to lower the property taxes, and it didn’t happen. People saw that they had to do it themselves.”
The campaign for Proposition 2½ wasn’t entirely a people’s crusade. The Massachusetts High-Tech Council, furious at the state Legislature for ignoring a milder tax-limitation amendment in July 1980, threw itself and its money behind the CLT’s ballot question. Anderson, however, was the public face of the campaign. She was uncompromising. Once, when countering an argument that passing the measure would cause the closures of public libraries all over the state -- which it did -- she responded with a discussion of how cheaply people could buy paperback books. Nonetheless, the message got through, and an unlikely coalition of technology millionaires, small-business owners, and put-upon homeowners gave the ballot question a whopping 59 percent of the vote that November.
Making the new law work, then, became the problem. The Legislature’s taxation committee took up the job. The underlying question remained what the passage of Proposition 2½ meant beyond simple budgetary mathematics. Did it represent anything more than abandoned wrath? Was it a plea purely for lower taxes and the devil take the hindmost, or was it really a kind of angry call for better and more responsive government? And if it was all of those, then its implementation was a very complicated thing.
“The bill, as it was drafted, was really Draconian,” recalls US Representative Michael Capuano, who at the time was chief counsel to that committee. “Even its proponents knew that. We asked them, ‘Is this really what you want?’ Barbara and I worked together. The answer was that we agree that, in general, we want significant tax cuts. If we implemented the whole thing right away, one community could have had 50 percent tax cuts that year. The state couldn’t command that. The internal argument was, even if you do this, you’re not living up to the spirit of what you said you wanted -- which was thoughtful tax policies.”
One thing the Legislature declined to do was to substitute its judgment for that of the voters, which was in its power to do. (Proposition 13 in California was different. It was a constitutional amendment and not simply a new law, the way Prop. 2½ was here.) “Right after it passed,” Anderson says, “there were a stack of bills to amend or repeal 2½. The Legislature, to its credit, decided that somebody had to do something about property taxes and we’re never going to do it. There were some people you could trust up there then.”
Proposition 2½ is now an established part of how the state governs itself. (There have been sporadic attempts to repeal it, which rarely got beyond the talking stages.) Other tax rollback attempts have not fared so well. In 2000, voters overwhelmingly passed another Anderson-led petition, this time to rescind state income tax increases that had been passed in 1989 and 1990 that would have brought the tax rate back to 5 percent, but the Legislature froze the rollback at 5.3 percent. The howls that greeted that action had little to do with money. “That was the whole motivation of the campaign in 2000, when we didn’t even talk about how they spend most of the money,” explains Anderson. “It was, ‘Aren’t you sick of politicians who lie to you and then break their word?’ People in this state have long memories about ‘temporary’ taxes.”
Within the context of Prop. 2½, the fight over what taxes really mean has moved to Massachusetts’s cities and towns. Whenever a municipality wants to override the provisions of the law, it must do so at the ballot box. This can range from the $6.2 million override for the town library that passed by eight votes last June in Walpole, to the crowded ballot in Winthrop last May, when the town passed eight of 10 overrides. (Up with the library and trash collection, down with the town planning and grants office.) Between 1990 and 2005, 224 communities passed a Proposition 2½ override. The more affluent the community, the more often an override seems to pass. Cape Cod seems to have been one of the more enthusiastic spots; in that same 15-year period, Chatham passed a whopping 55 overrides and West Tisbury passed 46, while Eastham, Tisbury, and Truro passed 34, 32, and 30, respectively.
“Government has gotten so big that it’s hard to track where the money goes,” says Capuano. “When people know where the money’s going, they like it better. At least you know with the gas tax that the money is going to roads and bridges. They’re more accepting of that than they are of general taxation.” At the very least, Proposition 2½ forces municipalities wishing to override it to say precisely why they are doing so.
“Nobody likes paying taxes,” Crawford says, “but nobody likes potholes in their roads or myriad other impacts that we’re just starting to see in this state. The other change in our culture here has been a deep commitment to provide local aid that was not there before Proposition 2½. [Prop.] 2½ is there, but it also required the state to provide state aid not provided at that level before.” On the 2008 income tax ballot question, Crawford’s interpretation prevailed, but it is significant that the campaign was fought on the terrain that Barbara Anderson had helped define 30 years ago.
Long ago, in the days before supply-side economics and Propositions 13 and 2½ and the supremacy of what taxes have come to mean over what they actually are, it was a Republican named Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who, when asked by a young secretary whether he hated paying taxes, replied, “No, young fellow. I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.” And it was another Republican named Theodore Roosevelt, arguing for the implementation of what we now call the estate tax -- and what conservative politicians frame as the “death tax” -- who argued: “The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”
According to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan institute in Washington, D.C., eliminating the estate tax would blow a $1.3 trillion hole in the federal budget over 10 years. Meanwhile, the tax itself in 2009 only applied to an estimated 0.24 percent of all the people who died that year. And according to another study, this one by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, more than 99.7 percent of estates owe no estate tax at all. The estate tax revenues in the United States as a share of our gross domestic product are below the international average for such taxes. In a country that believed in progressive taxation, the issue likely would not even arise. But the brawl over the estate tax is not strictly a matter of money and percentages. It is also deeply, profoundly political. Opponents of the estate tax have argued against it on an issue of “fairness.” They contend that the estate tax penalizes people by “making them pay taxes twice.” As journalist Peter Beinart pointed out in The New Republic four years ago, they have managed to cast the estate tax as a millstone tied to the American dream. “Ultimately,” Beinart wrote, “the argument against the estate tax . . . is moral. It is about right and wrong.”
Calling it the “death tax” gave its opponents a huge advantage in perception. Through this, and through taking advantage of the revamped terrain on which any discussion of taxes now must take place, the people seeking the elimination of the estate tax -- and, one can fairly conclude, the concept of progressive taxation generally -- have managed to make allies out of people whose estates never had a chance of being taxed at all. In Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth, their 2005 book about the political battle over the estate tax, Michael Graetz, a Yale professor who worked for the Treasury Department in the first administration of George W. Bush, and Ian Shapiro, also a Yale professor, tell the story of Chester Thigpen, an elderly Mississippi tree farmer who testified before Congress in favor of repealing the tax despite the fact that his estate was too small to be taxed.
“My father recently died,” recalls Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor and the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which bailed out banks at the expense of (yes) the taxpayer. “He worked all of his life, and at the end of the day he had a modest home that was paid off, Social Security, and a few bucks in the bank, and he was worried about paying ‘death taxes.’ That man would have had to make 100 times more than he’d made, he was so far away from ever paying a dollar of the so-called ‘death tax.’ There was something heartbreaking about it. Where should his interests have aligned? Toward a much more populist notion of a progressive tax structure. He saw his interests in avoiding ‘death taxes.’ It broke my heart.”
The battle over the estate tax -- which is ongoing in Washington -- is a nearly perfect prism through which to look at the consistently problematic view Americans have of the concept of taxes. Ultimately, no matter which side of the political aisle you find yourself on, taxes are a public demonstration of the kind of political commonwealth we desire for ourselves. Even the most radical anti-taxers -- and they have moved far away from anything like what Barbara Anderson was pushing in 1980 -- believe that. (Remember, the fundamental principal behind supply-side economics was that cutting taxes would increase government revenue.) At the same time, anyone on the other side who believes in progressive taxation has a deep and abiding responsibility to make sure the money is neither wasted nor grafted away. “Taxes have become a litmus test,” says Capuano. “Maybe they always were, I don’t know. But my argument is that what you can’t do on the local level we can do on the national level. You can cut taxes and then just increase the debt ceiling. Borrow and spend is just as bad [as], if not worse than, tax and spend. You can have anything you want and you don’t have to pay for it.”
Like them or don’t like them, taxes are the statement of what we freely choose to be, and not what we wish we were. “We have a badly structured society, a decrepit infrastructure, and we’re now seeing the collapse of the university system that was our pride and joy because tuition costs are rising so much faster than the cost of living,” says Borosage, referring to the whole nation. “There is a terrible price to be paid for believing that we can get something for nothing.” The way we look at taxes is the way we look at ourselves, even if we choose to look away.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
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The Faux Populism of Palin ... by Jonathan Alter
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An excellent take on the false populism of the Conservative Right & Tea Party Patriots. This is not a new phenomenon at all. See the works by Historian Eric Foner to see how this faux populism keeps rearing its ugly head - with the clear purpose of duping the middle and under class. Please - don't believe the hype! The direct link to the article is below.Enter the Foxulists: The Faux Populism of Palin, Dobbs, and Beck
Jonathan Alter - Tuesday 01 December 2009 - NEWSWEEK
With unemployment surging and the public mood souring, populism is in the air.Sarah Palin, flattered in recent days by a comparison to William Jennings Bryan, is a plausible presidential candidate, according to George W. Bush's pollster. Lou Dobbs, the modern incarnation of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, is dropping hints about running for the White House in 2012, presumably without the benefit of the Hispanic vote. And Glenn Beck is planning a huge rally next summer in Washington dedicated to "Re-founding America." If Beck pulls a big crowd and wins some credit for decimating Democrats in the midterms, it's not hard to guess what he might try next.
We haven't elected a populist president since Andrew Jackson 180 years ago. But we haven't had a black guy with no experience and a Muslim name as president either. Our omnipresent mediacracy makes a lot of unthinkable things thinkable. Barack Obama's use of social networking and YouTube in 2008 just scratched the surface of what's possible when anyone can have access to any idea or image at any time. That's the science-fiction society we live in now.
The resulting Tower of Babel has good news and bad news for would-be populists. The good news for them is that the dissemination of outlandish ideas is easier than ever. Where cranks were once limited to red-ribbon typewriter rants or maybe a radio show, they now have unlimited potential to get their message out. The bad news for them is that they have nothing to say. They say nothing loudly, colorfully, and sometimes even charmingly, but it still doesn't amount to a new vision for the country. If their means of communicating are dramatically enhanced, their ends are hopelessly conventional.
Populism has been expanded to include anyone on the side of the people against the elites. But the word once had a more particular meaning. The anger had content. Populists of the past like Bryan in the 1890s, Huey Long and Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and even Pat Buchanan in the 1990s were angry about East Coast capitalists who were hurting the little guy in the heartland. They were anti-Wall Street, strongly protectionist, and committed to economic justice, even when some of them descended into racism and anti-Semitism.
Today's faux populists also feast on emotions -- anxiety, anger, resentment -- that intensify in hard times. But they are more accurately described as plain old reactionaries, a wonderfully precise word that has gone out of common usage. They're reacting against the pace of change and feeding right-wing nostalgia for a bygone era when a liberal black man wouldn't dare run for president. Palin might try to echo Bryan, but she would consider Bryan's Populist Party platform of 1896 communistic were she to add it to her famous reading list. Dobbs, once corporate America's biggest apologist, still has no use for labor unions, which might make it tough to forge a connection with working people. Beck said recently that his reading of history suggested it was in the progressive era that the United States first started going to hell. He wants to make the country safe for the 1880s.
And that's what will likely save us. That instead of wanting to be president, Palin just wants her own talk show, Dobbs (whose ratings were in steep decline before he left CNN) merely hopes to boost his speaking fees, and Beck aspires to nothing more than dethroning Rush Limbaugh. The Foxulists all know that actually running for office is a lot harder than signing books and mouthing off about Obama.
That still leaves room for a more serious reactionary populist -- perhaps Mike Huckabee -- to push Obama on deficit reduction, as Ross Perot pushed Bill Clinton. Perot, a billionaire, bought TV time to show his charts of scary numbers (all of which were proven wrong within a few years). Today you don't need money for TV, just a message that's catchy enough for a few million hits on YouTube.But even the most artful use of new technology won't likely make a populist president. That's because the country is conservative in a deeper sense. Populism -- reactionary or progressive -- is disruptive of the social order at a time when most people crave some sense of control over fast-moving events. Sure we want someone to give voice to our frustrations. But from the heart and head, not the spleen.
(c) 2009, Newsweek Inc. All rights reserved.
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