Government is not a Financial Blackhole

 Government is not a Financial Blackhole

Contrary to the economic right’s dogma, government expenditures and public investment are no less valid than private ones. It is incredible to hear the tax cuts cure-all crowd argue that government expenditures don’t create “permanent jobs”! Where…what is a permanent job in our culture? Which job is more permanent and which, particularly of late, the more productive, a school teacher or a mortgage banker?

Elon Musk - The Role of Government

Elon Musk - The Role of Government

Elon Musk has become a public figure, and his latest source of attention is his bold claim that he can shrink the government. This is interesting, given how much he depends on it and how little he doubtless pays in taxes for all he has made, largely with government support.

According to Wikipedia, Elon comes from a wealthy South African Family. After college, he became involved in several online business projects, one of which became PayPal, where he made his initial fortune. Looking for a way to build on his fortune, Musk started SpaceX in 2002. By 2006, SpaceX had spent nearly $100 million developing the Falcon 1 Rocket, which had yet to fly when the company landed a $396 million contract with NASA. That same year, Musk became the majority investor in Tesla Motors, taking control from the original creators in 2007.

SpaceX won another government contract from the Dept. of Defense for launch services using its Falcone 1 rocket, but all three initial launch attempts between 2006 and 2008 were failures, and Tesla, with $187 million dollars invested, had only delivered 147 cars by the end of 2008. Both companies were on the verge of bankruptcy when SpaceX won a $1.6 billion NASA contract, and in June 2009, Tesla obtained a government loan for $465 million. With no working rocket and having only made a token number of two-seat roadsters, Musk’s companies were into the Federal Government by something more than two trillion dollars.

The above only includes the direct investments made by the government in Musk’s enterprises up to 2009. There has been much more since. But how about the indirect investments? We all forget the actual role of government in forming our civilization and making wealth possible. Set aside the obvious and essential functions of defense, police, and fire protection and consider the other ways the government has subsidized Musk’s empire for a moment.

Let’s start with the very existence of the concept of a corporation, which is a government invention that makes it possible to build the fictional legal entities necessary to amass large financial resources to do what Musk has done. How corporations are formed, governed, and operated, and how they raise money and otherwise do business, are all defined by laws created by government. Patents, copywrites, and trademarks that allow the creation of wealth from creativity and invention are made by the government. The money and banking system that all this relies on, and that his original investment was a novel part of, is also designed, regulated, and maintained by the government. In fact, his initial online banking concept arose from the Internet, invented by the government. All the billions of contractual agreements that have occurred in his businesses are made meaningful by commercial laws established by government and made enforceable in government courts. The weights and measures that define the designs and facilitate the construction of everything his businesses make are defined by and regulated by government. The time of day to a billionth of a second is determined by government and used by the GPS system that his cars and rockets navigate with. When a decision is being made about whether to launch one of his rockets, the weather data comes from the government, using a forecast model developed by government, run on a digital computer, a concept paid for by government.

The employees his companies depend on are, by and large, either educated at public subsidy or immigrants who work for reduced wages under a government visa program. When he started SpaceX, just about everything the engineers he hired knew about how to build a rocket had been paid for by government. In fact, the government has pioneered the whole space industry, and the communication satellites he has been putting up run on a communication frequency system defined by government. The cars he sells, the trucks that ship them, and the materials they and his rockets are made of, and his employees who report to work use the public ground transportation system owned, designed, and maintained by government. Similarly, packages and people moved by air in relation to his businesses do so on a system owned, designed, and maintained by government, and when one of his rockets is recovered by barge at sea, it navigates over the inland, coastal, and intercoastal waterway system designed, owned, and maintained by the government. All this is almost entirely free.

Civilization is a creature of government; it cannot exist without it, and fortunes are impossible without both. People who tell you that government is in the way, or the problem, or a burden on the economy are either ignorant or lying. Some people and most corporations will do anything for an extra dollar of profit if they can get away with it. The government stands between greed and the worker, the consumer, and the environment and is, therefore, inherently in the way of heedless greed when serving the common interests.

The difference between a first-world economy and a third-world one is a quality functioning government that is built on and enforces the rule of law. Musk did what he did here, not somewhere else, precisely because we have the greatest government in the world. Let’s hope he does not screw it up with his arrogant ignorance.

Ideas for a Twenty-first Century Constitutional Tune-up.

Ideas for a Twenty-first Century Constitutional Tune-up.

The creation of the U.S. Constitution was the collective work of brilliant minds living in an age when political science was the pinnacle of intellectual disciplines and the practice of the political arts among the most honorable of endeavors; it was the moonshot of its day.

But the Constitution was not, and is not, perfect.  While it justly deserves to be admired, it would be a mistake to think of it as holy scripture. Indeed, the original document has been amended twenty-seven times. Some, like the Bill of Rights, addressed flaws perceived during the ratification process, while others have come in response to experience, changing conditions, or values.  As change in every respect only accelerates, it should be no surprise that further amendments are in order.

The focus here is on concepts that would help restore function to our failing democracy.  The need for political reform is one area where consensus exists across the political spectrum. The problem will be getting the political establishment, in our current hyper-partisan, money-dominated political environment, to turn the necessary gears.  If the Republicans are sent into the political wilderness in 2020 to contemplate the disaster that has befallen their once-venerable party and the nation, the moment could be ripe for the changes proposed here.  (Note: 12/30/2020, this, unfortunately, did not come to pass.)

Citizens United - Only money disagrees that we must reduce the role of money in politics.  Money is the principal toxin in our political body.  We must undo Citizens United and make way for publicly financed federal elections.

Electoral College - We must remove this inflamed vestigial organ from the Constitution.  The Presidency is too important to be decided by less than a majority vote, and the justification for the concept has passed while the filter of independent electors, which might give it some meaning, has been removed.  

Attorney General Reform - The Attorney General, as the nation's chief law enforcement officer, must be an independent agent whose overriding loyalty is to the nation and the law.  It is unreasonable to expect the AG, appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the President, to provide objective legal oversight of the government. The independent counsel process has repeatedly proven unsatisfactory.  The very existence of the concept underlines the flaw in the current structure.

Most states, recognizing the need for independence in the AG, elect the position.  But at the national level, this would make the position more, not less, political in nature, creating the risk of unhelpful competition and conflict between the AG and the administration with which the Justice Department should generally work cooperatively.

The answer is to depoliticize the position by having the Supreme Court nominate the AG for confirmation by a two-thirds vote of the Senate.  Who better to select the head of the nation's justice department?  Requiring such consensus between and within the judicial and political branches would ensure the office is filled, as well as one might ever hope to be, with a highly competent, apolitical professional, placing law enforcement as firmly outside the political sphere of government as possible without creating a competing political agency.

Judicial Confirmation Reform - We need to depoliticize Judicial appointments to the extent possible.  There once was, actually still is, a consensus that a two-thirds vote in the Senate should be required to confirm judicial appointments to assure moderate consensus appointments to the bench.  The concept has succumbed to the general deterioration of the political ethic.  We should restore it in the Constitution, along with a 60-day deadline to vote on a judicial or justice department appointment, which, barring bipartisan consent to delay a vote for cause, failure to comply results in automatic confirmation.  Finally, a nomination should not die at the end of a session of Congress or an administration.  Once made, a nomination must be taken up unless withdrawn.

Legislative Process Reform - Leaders in both houses of Congress have adopted practices that place partisan interests above doing the nation's business, often by refusing to take up bills that expose the majority party's members to risky and difficult votes.  The constitution should mandate that any bill passed in one house be considered in regular order in the other.  

Removing the Debt Ceiling Charade: The nation's debt level is a product of previously passed budgets; voting on a debt ceiling is superfluous, misleading to the public, and contrary to the existing constitutional requirement that the nation honor its debts.  The practice has become a disruptive and damaging lever for political blackmail and brinksmanship.  Accordingly, the Constitution should expressly provide that Congress has no authority to limit the nation's debt other than through the budgetary process.

Electoral Reform - The currently dominant election process, in which parties nominate candidates to compete in a general election, is polarizing.  In too many places, one party is so dominant that the general election is rendered meaningless if there is a contested election at all.  The result is that offices are often not filled by a majority of those represented but by a majority of the majority party.  Those whose views align with the minority party effectively have no meaningful vote or voice in who represents them. The result is to send extremists to Congress and facilitate the threat of being "primaried," which undermines compromise and accentuates the power of money in our politics.  The Constitution should mandate some form of Rank Choice voting for congressional and presidential elections.  Doing so would force candidates to appeal to the majority of all voters rather than just to the majority of the dominant party in their district or state.  In addition, it would tear down the current practical barrier to having more than two parties. 

Voting Rights - The Supreme Court has been sidestepping obvious manipulations of the electoral process, such as gerrymandering, which undermine the fidelity of our elections. We need to expressly provide a constitutional mandate that every citizen has the right to equal access and voice at the polls.

There it is, a list of items to tune up our democracy for the twenty-first century, restore compromise and civility to the political process, and drive consensus-building rather than division and polarization.

There is one more amendment called for by changing circumstances that I can't help but mention.  I bring it up here as an aside because it does not fit in the political reform portfolio.  But, not having heard of it elsewhere, I can't walk past a postscript mention.  We need to add the environment to the Bill of Rights. In this case, a right that belongs to future generations as well as the current ones.  The constitution should provide that the government has a duty to protect and preserve the nation's natural heritage resources and ensure a healthy and stable environment for future generations.  This idea is necessary as humanity is no longer limited to adapting to the environment.  We have the power to adapt it to us and must do so with due regard for those yet to come.

Global Warming and the Drake Equation

Global Warming and the Drake Equation

One day, Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with colleagues Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York, all eminent physicists working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.  A recent spate of UFO sightings had entered the discussions on the walk over to the Fuller Lodge for lunch. Although the conversation had moved on, as the group sat down to eat, Teller recalled that Fermi quite unexpectedly blurted out, "Where is everybody?" According to Teller, the result was general laughter because, despite Fermi's question coming out of the clear blue, everybody around the table immediately understood that he was talking about extraterrestrial aliens. 

Fermi had simply considered that the galaxy is billions of years old, there are a billion-billion stars in it, and we are here. What are the odds of being the first and only intelligent life on the scene? Where is everybody, indeed?

Twenty-three years later, Frank Drake, a notable radio astronomer following up on Fermi's logic, was interested in exploring the rationality of searching for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations by monitoring for artificial radio transmissions. So, he devised a rather straightforward equation to evaluate the probabilities of there being other technologically advanced civilizations in our galaxy with which we might hope to communicate. His now-famous formula laid the foundation for the SETI projects ongoing today.  

Starting with the rate of star formation, Drake's equation proceeded through a set of six modifying factors: what percentage of stars likely had planets, what percentage of those were habitable, what percentage of those would evolve life, etc. The final variable, labeled the "L" factor, was the length of time the average civilization, capable of interstellar radio communication, could be expected to last. This was important because the issue was not how many advanced civilizations have been or would there ever be, but how many are here now.

Drake and the other scientists who gathered to explore the issue plugged in an admittedly speculative range of assumptions for each factor. They knew they did not know enough to get an accurate answer; the goal was only to define a reasonable range within which the answer might lie. When done, the formula suggested that there should be between 20 and 50,000 communicable civilizations currently scattered throughout our galaxy. The factor that most dominated this large range was the longevity factor "L". Probably among the most speculative of the factors, they had ventured a range of 1,000 to 100,000 years.  

At this point, humanity has had radio technology for just about 100 years and does not yet have the ability to meaningfully transmit across interstellar distances. So, we have a long way to go to log the minimum assumed longevity, perhaps even start the clock on Drake's L factor.  

At the time of his conference, Drake had already begun searching. SETI programs, as they are now known, have since grown in capacity and sophistication. Today, we know much more about many of the factors in Drake's equation.  We know, for example, that planets are ubiquitous, with close to 100% of sun-like stars probably having them.  Yet, after sixty years of earnest listening, nothing has been heard, not a peep. Were the assumptions so flawed, or is there something portentous in this silence?

For billions of years, the only route to biological success on Earth has been adaptation to the environment, whether by physical form or, in the case of higher organisms, intellectual response. But humans have recently broken that paradigm. We have been adapting the environment to suit us at an ever-increasing rate since the advent of agriculture.  

For the first ten thousand years, it seemed all good to our ancestors, even to very recent generations. In modern times, we have identified isolated demographic collapses in the past, at least contributed to by unsustainable human manipulation of the environment, and, in the case of Easter Island, wholly caused by it. But, for the most part, the changes humans have wrought were so localized and slow in implementation that it all seemed natural; whatever we might do, Mother Earth could absorb and adapt to it.  

But with the formalization of the scientific method and the subsequent industrial revolution, our manipulations, we now know, have become global in their impact. No species has attempted to manage an ecosystem and planetary climate before, other than perhaps the twenty- to fifty-thousand advanced civilizations that Dark's equation says should be out there that we can't find. 

Our first real hint that there were serious risks in manipulating an entire global ecosystem came when we discovered that the ozone layer was disappearing. Fortunately, a fairly painless fix was available. But now we realize we are presiding over an ongoing and accelerating mass extinction and general decline in biomass, meaning the amount of life on the planet is falling. The ocean food chain is at risk due to warming and acidification, consequences of the altered composition of the planet's atmosphere.  The frank reality is that we have unwittingly taken Earth off its climatic autopilot and will never be able to hand it back.

True, other natural variables also impact the climate, but that only complicates the situation, as it muddies the waters about what is due to us and what is not, and about the combined consequences of any particular action taken or not taken.  

How we conduct ourselves, as relates to the climate, is now a permanent item on our collective global policy agenda, impacting different places on the planet in varying ways and degrees, with differing consequences. It is like driving a car with an oiled, smeared windshield on a winding road, with controls attached to the critical components with rubber bands.

The tragedy of an overburdened planet.  More to come.

At the same time, a great deal of humanity still lives in subsistence poverty. Climate impacts, combined with overpopulation, are forcing mass migrations, stressing economies, undermining civil order, and stirring nationalist impulses in many places around the world.  The resulting mass migrations, in turn, are causing serious political divisions in the most advanced nations on the planet. Our military considers all these dislocations an existential threat to national security.    

It seems obvious now, in retrospect, that we are and have been for some time wading into a critical and inherently dangerous transition in status - from occupant to manager of our planet's environment.  By tapping what seemed to be a huge buried treasure of stored energy that we assumed we could pull from the ground without consequence, we walked into a dead-end alley.  We have built a world and a population that we can't sustain without that energy, and yet we now realize we can't keep using it.  We are, in short, out on an environmental and economic limb. 

The connection with the Drake equation is the realization that this transition, which we can now see is inherently fraught with danger, may be a rite of passage that every civilization must navigate successfully to advance to the state of development contemplated in the Drake Equation.  Having progressed to the point of learning how to read nature's laws, every civilization risks overplaying newfound powers before discovering consequences they had not dreamed of.  Perhaps Drake was one factor short in his equation: the T factor represents the percent of advanced scientific civilizations that would successfully navigate this critical threshold challenge and advance to the stage assumed by L, which we have yet to achieve.  

So, how serious is our situation? As a result of a combination of ignorance, scientific conservatism, and political and public relations expediency, I think the problem is being understated. Humanity is about to go through the most profound change since the advent of agriculture. What people aspire to, how we measure personal worth and success, how we define freedom, economic structure and theory, our political values, and how we govern will all change profoundly in response to this existential challenge. The question is how traumatic the passage to the other side will be, whether it will be utopian or dystopian in direction, and what will be left of the natural biological diversity we inherited on the other side. 

But all that is for another post.  

This issue is not a recent one for me.  Here is an earlier, less formal take on climate change and our collective approach to it.  

SO YOU ARE PUT OFF BY HILLARY'S EMAIL...

SO YOU ARE PUT OFF BY HILLARY'S EMAIL...

So you say you are put off by the fact that Hillary used a private email server.  So much so you can't imagine voting for her even in the face of the alternative.

In Defense of Liberalism

(Originally published in Talk Business Quarterly)

Liberal is derived from the Latin word “liberalis,” meaning freedom, as in not to be owned by another. Conservative is derived from “conservare,” meaning to conserve the existing order. The terms define a long-standing political conflict, which emerged from the Enlightenment.

A Tax is not and Economic Black Hole

Contrary to the economic right’s dogma, government expenditures and public investment are not less valid than private ones. It is incredible to hear the tax cuts cure-all crowd argue that government expenditures don’t create “permanent jobs”! Where…what is a permanent job in our culture? Which job is more permanent and which, particularly of late, the more productive, a school teacher or a mortgage banker?

The Three Monkeys

Three Monkey Adventure 

This is a story about three monkeys, one of reason and two of faith. With his native curiosity, Reasoning Monkey had figured out how to escape the zoo and open the zoo keeper's car door. The two monkeys of faith, Religious Monkey and Invisible Hand Monkey followed him. Reasoning Monkey figured out how to get the car out of the park, and as the car began to roll, all the monkeys cheered their newfound mobility with excited voices, somersaulting and jumping before the changing scenes; it was great fun!

But as the velocity grew, Reasoning Monkey became concerned and suggested that perhaps they needed to learn how to control the car—maybe even slow it down. But the monkeys of faith were not at all concerned.

You see, one believed that the world and everything that happened in it was under the direction of an omnipotent Sky Monkey. Accordingly, either no disaster would befall them, or if it did, it was preordained, and all the monkeys of faith, like himself, would ascend to where Sky Monkey lived. Either way, there was no responsibility and no point in being concerned.

The Invisible Hand Monkey had a different faith. He believed that as long as every monkey looked after his own immediate interests, the "invisible hand" of the marketplace would automatically look after the collective interests.

Besides, the sanguine monkeys of faith reasoned that nothing untoward had happened yet in their joint ventures. Well, of course, it had many times in other contexts, but they clung to their beliefs anyway, as faith necessarily blinds reason.

So confirmed in his faith was Invisible Hand Monkey that as the pace of the vehicle continued to quicken, he convinced Religious Monkey that they should work together to prevent Reasoning Monkey from trying to alter the course of the vehicle or even to look outside. After all, it would interfere with the invisible hand for Reasoning Monkey to try to slow or steer the car.  Furthermore, Invisible Hand Monkey noted in ominous air addressed to Religious Monkey, "We mustn't monkey with Sky Monkey's plans, now should we?!"

Reasoning Monkey, with increasing alarm, did his best to convince the other two that it was necessary to think about the future; that having used reason to change their condition, they must also use it to address the consequences of that change. But the monkeys of faith covered their eyes and ears to not see what was coming or hear what Reasoning Monkey had to say. Instead, they ran their mouths, incessantly issuing the professions of their respective faiths to drown out Reasoning Monkey's arguments and protect their comfortable faith-based views of reality.

So down the hill, they rolled, faster and faster, yelling and arguing, two believing instead of thinking. It's not a pretty thought, but it could be worse. Instead of three monkeys in a car, it could be eight billion people on a planet.

The Mad Tea Party; A Looking Glass View of Economic Reality.

Looking Glass View of Economic Reality

Have I passed through a looking-glass mirror into a world of inverse economic reality?  Many are upset about bailouts, economic malaise, and mounting public deficits.  There is nothing strange about expressing such at the polls unless it means voting back into power the mindset that brought us the mess in the first place!  As a frightened squirrel about to make it safely across the road suddenly cuts back to disaster, the self-styled Tea Partiers seem intent on taking us all on another pass under the wheels of conservative economic dogma. 

The Tea Party madness has been stoked by the Madhaters of monied interest news (FOX—as in the hen house). It is simple, really. Conservative media tells their audience what they want to hear in consideration of their well-cultivated prejudices and preconceptions. From their point of view, it is good business and good politics. Focused on the painful nature of the economic cure, the audience readily forgets the disease, especially as most of them voted for the cause in the first place.  

In the Tea Party's mind, this is all about runaway socialism, not about recovering from the brink of economic collapse.  To anyone who has not fallen down the Mad Haters’ rabbit hole of propaganda, it is plain how close cowboy laissez-faire economics brought us to utter calamity.  It is a miracle that we are in a recovery at all.      

Mired in economic malaise and national decline, our political process is not working.  The Republican party has long since ceased to offer an intellectually defensible counterpoise to the Democratic party.  While any political party is hostage to its native constituencies to some extent, the Republican party has become a wholly owned engine of manipulation.  Run by and for various forms of concentrated wealth, it depends upon emotional manipulation to achieve an election majority.  Fusing the politics of greed with the politics of ignorance, the party taps and cultivates xenophobia, homophobia, gunomitophobia, huntomitophobia, and raceophobia, along with various economic, religious, and political dogmas, playing on emotions not to reason in pursuit of its owners’ special interest agenda.  

For a generation, the Democratic party has failed to project a reality-based vision to counter the Republican party’s fear and faith illusions. Lacking faith that the American electorate is capable of responding to intellectual arguments, the Democratic party has condemned itself to a fruitless search for its own emotional levers.  

Economics provides an example.  The central Republican economic dogma is that only the private sector delivers prosperity; the public sector can only be in the way, and jobs and prosperity depend upon low tax rates for the wealthy; it is the American way.  These twin messages are delivered in surround sound with the regularity of a prayer wheel.  Both of these ideological concepts are, at best, gross exaggerations and do not reflect America’s pragmatic economic tradition.  Yet they are firmly entrenched in the popular mind, and the Democratic party is not willing to directly dispute them even though they have brought two near economic collapses in a generation and underpin the Tea Party’s efforts to turn us all back for another pass at economic disaster.  

Last month, over a hundred and fifty thousand state and local public sector workers were laid off.  Nearly fifty thousand of these jobs were teaching positions.  However, it was not uncommon to read or hear that this was not such bad news because there were sixty-four thousand private sector jobs created in the same period (mostly low-paying food and retail service jobs).  Implicitly, the ninety-five thousand net loss could be discounted because they were public sector jobs!  

Let's examine this concept.  Both kinds of jobs make a living, and both kinds pay mortgages and taxes.  So what is the difference?  To most Americans who have heard the mantra for so long, the answer is self-evident.  The private sector jobs produce something of value, while the public sector jobs are just “in the way”.  Sure, you knew that!  

Plainly, the porn star is an eye-opening private sector asset, but a public school teacher that opens eyes to knowledge is a leach.  The marketing vice president, whose job is to sell your children carbonated sugar water at outrageous profit margins, most to be spent on marketing to sell them more, and the physician who treats the resulting diabetes is the economic foundation of domestic prosperity.  But, the public sector physician who works to prevent disease is a hole in our economic boat.  The Wall Street investment banker who securitizes dubious mortgages and sells them to your pension plan as “AAA” rated securities is worth tens of millions of dollars of private sector productivity a year, while the bank examiner who is working to assure the integrity of the financial system is a 100k drag on the economy.  The reckless cost-cutting BP drilling manager is doing the Lord's work, but it does not matter if the energy department employees who are supposed to regulate that activity are competent; they are only there to humor those who think government is important. 

With this distorted view, one can transform a public sector drag into a private sector asset by simply contracting it out, be it a school, a prison, military security, or garbage collection.  The metamorphose in value is readily apparent as a professional public service manager making a professional wage will be replaced with an entrepreneurial CEO making much more and paid largely with stock options taxed at a reduced capital gains rate.  New Management will fire most of the high-level personnel, replace them with minimum wage functionaries, join the country club and the Chamber of Commerce, and tithe to the Republican party.  Oh, and hire a lobbyist to keep the money coming and avoid any scrutiny of the quality of the job being done.  Thus, obviously, the Halliburton world is a more prosperous place.  Surely, you are starting to get the picture.  

It is past time for a little economic truth of the forgoing kind but we aren’t getting it from the Democratic party. How about another sample.  Human initiative and greed are universal.  It follows that the disparity in economic success between nations is not genetic, despite what our politicians tell us (“most productive workers in the world”).  Rather, hold on to your tea cup now, prosperity is the result of a properly conceived and managed public sector. Yes, believe it or not, a responsible public sector literally makes it possible to turn paper into gold.  

Our government was constituted “to promote the general welfare” and empowered to “regulate commerce”.  Government, the law that define and regulates private contractual relationships, creates and regulates a monetary and financial system, weights and measures, public infrastructure for transportation and communication, a public education system, these are the foundational prerequisites of a modern economy.  They are not by-products of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.  They have to be paid for with taxes and have to be voted into existence.  Nations with effective public sectors that educate their people and regulate commerce to ensure private activity is productive, not destructive, and invest in public infrastructure are wealthy.  Those that lack these public sector assets aren’t.  

If a people insists on electing people to public office who don’t believe in government they should not be surprised when they don’t get government.  Without government, you should not be surprised if bridges collapse, damns break, children are not educated, oil ends up on beaches, drinking water is polluted, the economy is undermined with fraud and abuse, and your retirement is stolen.  It is that simple.  Hay, but your taxes may be lower.

How about another surprise.  Public sector deficit spending is not an inherent evil and our current deficit is not a bad thing given the economic situation, in fact (hold on to your cup and saucer) in the short run it should certainly be higher!  In times of economic chaos, the government becomes the investor of last resort, stabilizing the economy and restoring confidence.  It is widely accepted that the depression was prolonged by a Tea Party-style impulse that prematurely trimmed the seemingly burgeoning deficits (two-thirds of the federal budget was being borrowed at one point), leaving it to the even larger deficits brought by the war effort to finally turn the inertia of economic contraction.  

After the war the Nation’s debt dwarfed anything that the depression era tea party mentality could have conceived  but the technological and industrial benefits of the war effort were such that the deficit essentially melted away in the resulting post war economic boom.  Just as an individual or business can profit by borrowing for an education or other investment, so can a nation.

So how about those laid off public workers and especially the teachers?  But for the Tea Party mentality, a relatively modest additional borrowing by the federal government could have kept those people in their jobs.  The news would have been that jobs grew by sixty-four thousand last month rather than shrank by ninety-five thousand, and there would be a hundred and fifty-nine thousand more people paying taxes and producing something of value instead of drawing unemployment.  There would be fewer mortgages going delinquent and that many more confident consumers. It is entirely conceivable that the net result of having borrowed a little more money to pay these people to work rather than a little less money to pay them not to work would be less public debt, not more, within a short time.  

But we should not ignore the lost value of what they are not now doing.  Lets assume that on average each of those forty eight thousand teachers would have inspired one student this year to a new ambition or seen one through an educational rough spot, maximizing their personal potential, what is the economic cost of that?  We wisely borrowed to save thousands of autoworkers' jobs and the industrial base that would have been lost with those jobs as part of a plainly successful strategy to interrupt an ongoing economic free fall, but fail now to carry through the logic to borrow a bit more to preserve necessary public service jobs, including nearly fifty thousand teaching positions?   

It makes no sense for the government to follow the private sector into contraction, perpetuating the downward economic spiral.  The latter course only makes sense to those who have an irrational fear of public expenditure derived from the view that it will mean higher taxes for them or competition for consumer dollars from the public sector.  These are the true self-interest motivations for depreciating the value of public sector services, not economic reality.  This brings us to the other foundational economic falsehood of the greedy right.

At the end of the First World War, the marginal federal income tax rate was 77%!  This began a period of sustained economic growth, so much so that taxes were cut five times before the party ended in the depression.  Taxes were cut because of growth, not the other way around.  At the end of the Second World War, the top marginal rate was 95% and remained north of 90% for nearly twenty years until 1964, when it was reduced to 77%!  Again, an unprecedented period of prosperity.  

After the false period of borrowed prosperity under Reagan and Bush I, Clinton raised taxes retroactively. Contrary to the dire predictions of the renowned economist Dr. Rush Limbaugh of Talk Radio University, the country entered another period of exceptional growth, with shrinking deficits and a rising dollar.  

There is no evidence that marginal tax rates on truly wealthy incomes have any demonstrable impact on job creation or economic activity.  The responsible government does, as unfortunately does irresponsible government, as we all should now well know.  

But economics is only one issue. The country cannot have a rational debate about any topic because the Republican party will engage its propaganda machine to distract the voters from the facts and the issues with emotionally charged falsehoods.  Health care reform, education, competitiveness, and even war.  You name it, reason is not going to get a hearing. Legitimate differences in philosophical views will not be addressed.  

To anyone with any sense of history, which, unfortunately, many of our children and young, even not-so-young adults, now lack, it is apparent that the human race is on a grand and limitless adventure of discovery.  In her time America has played a leading role in that adventure - until recently.  Post Vietnam, it is now plain, America lost its way and, with it, any unitary sense of purpose or even of its identity.  We have become in our own eyes and that of others a hedonistic society, defined entirely by what we consume not what we produce or contribute.  It is this and what it means for our children’s future that is truly bothering the American people.  The Tea Partiers may be deluded, but they are patriots; it is this sentiment by which they are being manipulated.  

The economic right tells us that our national well-being depends upon private consumption.  Low taxes and small government mean more dollars for Walmart, in the short run at least.  However, our nation has not historically been defined by what we consume individually but by what we have built and done together.   When we explore civilizations past, we may dig in refuge for insight, but it is their public works and their collective contribution to human knowledge and culture that we judge them by.  

This country last knew itself, had a sense of purpose and direction, when it was going to the moon, when it was committed to the public education of its children and their physical health, was at war with true totalitarianism, when marginal tax rates on the income of the well to do were north of 90% and the President could stir the public with, “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.  

We will not recover what has been lost in mindless personal consumption by filling landfills, attics, and storage buildings with Chinese-made products, nor in building empty condominiums and grotesque homes by the thousands.  Prosperity will not be found in the flat earth economics of the Tea Party, nor will the purpose be found in the racist, xenophobic politics of the modern Republican party, nor, unfortunately, in the cowardly no-vision of today’s Democratic Party.  America as it was and should be cannot be based on an education system that only teaches the three “Rs” (code for a bare-bones occupationally functional education that the Chamber of Commerce will endorse).

The path back to the future for America is not really all that obscure, though to ears unaccustomed to hearing reality it may well sound radical.  It will not be found as long as one political party remains a shameless, dissembling special interest propaganda machine and the other lacks the confidence to directly challenge that dissembling with the truth about where we are, where we have been, and what a path forward must look like.

The Right's Wrong Faith Based Economic Dogma

A modern financial system is necessarily a symbiotic construct, partly public and partly private; one defining, the other expressing the definition intended. It is absurd to view government as an obstacle to economic activity when the truth is a modern economic system is only possible through government action. To speak of deregulating the modern marketplace, in the sense the economic right implies – to "get government out of the way,” is to advocate economic and financial chaos, which not coincidentally is what we have been having.

Redneckus Giganticus Americanus

There has always been a significant ignorance demographic in this country, particularly focused in certain areas.  However, it seems to have grown in relative numbers and willingness to vocalize - to the point that it feels as if the country is inhabited by two subspecies of Humans: Homo Sapien Sapien and Homo Sapien Redneckus Giganticus Americanus.

How Thinking Almost Ruined My Life

(Author unknown, if you do know share it with me.)

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then, just to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's. I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka.

I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it, exactly,we are doing here?" One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey, I confessed, I've been thinking." "I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!" "But Honey, surely it's not that serious." "It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep onthinking, we won't have any money!" "That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot, with NPR blaring on the radio, and ran up to the big glass doors...They didn't open. The library was closed. To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was lookingout for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra a Poster caught my eye,"Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.  You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous poster.  Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.

I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.  I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed...easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today I made the final step: I registered to vote as a Republican.

Same Sex Marriage, Law vs. Religion

Some have argued that in addressing the issue of same-sex marriage, the state cannot escape dealing with marriage in religious terms and hence the definition should remain that of religious tradition, i.e. no same-sex marriage.  However, the assumption that marriage is a theological or religious invention is fundamentally invalid, as is what may be seen as a corollary proposition that morality itself is sourced in religion. 

ITS A SUNNY DAY

The other night all the kids were over. When it came time for the Phillip unit to go home, Lizy asked James if he would like to stay with us overnight, to which he promptly said yes - a departure from recent trends. Shortly after that, the question arose as to where he would like to sleep; with Becky in her bed, in Sid's bed, or Becky suggested, with granddaddy Bruce in Becky's bed. To my surprise, he immediately responded affirmatively to the last suggestion.

While we have kisses and hugs and such, granddaddy has not been the warmest spot in the room over time. Granddaddy dishes out more discipline than Ice cream and Grandmother is just hard to beat for tolerance and attention.

Anyway, he was obviously fading fast, so we promptly went upstairs and hopped in bed. I put a hand on him, just so he would know I was there, he reached back and gave me a few pats and was gone to the world.

Next morning when I awoke, I rolled over to check on my charge. There he was wide awake, completely still and staring at me. Before I could say anything, he announced in a very flat monotone manner, "It's a sunny day," which indeed it was.

I just wanted to let those of you who may have felt a bit burdened of late by my emotional neediness, that you now have some relief. I think I have a new friend.

PS I have another location for things like this.  Not sure why really, but I have chosen not to make access public, but willing to provide to just about anyone who asks.  Just leave a request here and I will provide you with an invitation.  Thanks.