Politics – Page 24 – Auxiliary Memory

The Barbarians at the Liberal Gates

Republicans have dug in their heels and swear they’ll die before they allow any new taxes. What does this mean? I think they have two main motives: greed and the destruction of liberal ideals. This is no big news, but what does it mean really? Republicans have fixated on lowering taxes for decades and I think this is mainly due to ordinary old greed, but they have come up with so many justifications to achieve this goal, that they have developed an anti-liberal philosophy to promote tax cuts.

They think big government is taking their money, and so they’ve developed a philosophy against big government. But what does having a big government mean? Or more precisely, what does having a small government mean?

Civilization has always meant bigger and bigger government. All throughout history whenever a civilization would develop barbarians would come along and attack it because it was an easy source of booty. Protecting civilization began the ever spiraling costs to support big government and big military. There are two kinds of people in this world, those who want to build civilizations and those who want to tear it down. Civilizations take a lot of money to create and run, and history shows there are essentially two sources of wealth to run a civilization, taxes or conquering other civilizations, which is essentially a non-citizen tax if you will. Europe flowered during the Renaissance by taxing the natives of the Americas, Africa, Middle East and Asia, as well as the heavy burden of taxes they imposed on their own citizens.

Like it or not, great civilizations cost a lot of money. During the course of the last five hundred years we also saw the growth of liberal ideas. It’s no longer socially acceptable to attack a primitive society and steal their wealth to build your own society. Either through colonists, armies or corporations. And the history of corporations are really the history of private business plundering the resources of other nations through price speculation.

However, things have changed. The nations of the Earth are no longer in flux and national stabilization has set in, and corporations are no longer tied to specific countries, but work worldwide. This means vast booms of generating wealth through exploiting other people is tapering off. Nations are having to compete as equals, and the wealth of governments depend more and more on internal taxes based on economic productivity of their citizens.

In other words, if the United States wants to be the leading civilization of the world, the cost of that civilization is on the backs of its taxpayers. Our military might will wane as the world stabilizes. So will our influence. So what will make us the great nation we believe we are? As all nations become more capitalistic, we’ll no longer be the richest. For the longest time, we were great because we championed freedom and democracy, and liberal ideals – but they are spreading worldwide too.

So what kind of nation will we be if the Republicans get their way and cut social programs and other spending, and reduce the size of the federal government? I can’t help but believe we’ll be more like India or Egypt than Germany, Japan, England, South Korea or France. We’ll have a democracy with lots of poor people. We’ll have lots of beggars, criminals and lower class people, a small middle class, and a few very wealthy people that stand out in stark contrast.

We won’t have the arts, science, and infrastructure of a #1 nation, and instead start developing the look of a decaying empire.

The greed of the wealthy to avoid taxes will lead to a downward spiral of employed people, or people who look and act employed because of social programs. Social Security and Medicare allow millions of Americans to contribute to economic activity as if they were employed. We already have more young well trained people wanting work than we have jobs, so to throw millions of older, well experienced people to compete with them will ruin the job market and raise unemployment to new high levels. Employment levels have always been an illusion in our country. Unemployment is high now because we can’t maintain the fevered economic activity of unnatural economic booms.

We can only get to 5% unemployment when the economy is booming and support big social programs. If we cut out social programs and followed a balanced-budget economy we’d probably have 25% unemployed, if we were lucky. Some economists are saying we already have a real unemployment rate of 15% or higher now.

If we pursued a totally efficient economy we’d probably put half the workers out of work. Just think what a flat tax rate would do to bookkeepers, accounts, tax advisers, and other bean counters. Just imagine our society if no one used a credit card, or if everyone spent money like economic advisers advise. A large part of our economy is based on inefficiency, buying things we don’t need, social programs, crime, crazy unsafe business schemes and stupid unproductive speculation.

Liberal ideals have progressed until they believe that all people, regardless of gender, race, creed or sexual orientation deserve equality and a minimal standard of living and medical care. Pursuing those ideals has created an ever growing segment of our economic activity. Reversing those ideals will destroy our economy.

Just watch the news to see how all over the country governmental services are being cut back. This is the dismantlization of our civilization. The barbarians are at the gates looking to sack our civilization. And all of this just to save a few bucks on their taxes.

Barbarians have always wanted wealth for themselves. Civilized people have always wanted to share the wealth.

JWH – 7/9/11

Balancing The Budget–The Purpose of Governments

People hate taxes, but what really riles them is seeing their tax money wasted, misspent or used for purposes that are against their way of thinking. As our current civil war is heating up over the budget I think we need to draw a bigger picture of why we pay taxes. Understanding the purpose of governments should help. I think we can see governments going through four stages:

Civilization – creating Law and Order
Human Rights – creating freedom for individuals
Prosperity – creating sustainable wealth for all
Environmentalism – the stewardship of the Earth

If you look at the history of mankind, or just to places around the world where civilization is collapsing you’ll understand the value of a stable government. Generally civilization starts with the might of individuals, so often early governments are ruled by tyrants, kings, and men with guns. Sometimes the powerful are enlighten leaders, but often they are just men who want to amass wealth and women. We saw what happens to civilization when we take out the strong man as when the U.S. took over Iraq.

Most people have an innate desire for law and order and will submit to all kinds of governments, but sooner or later they want to be treated better. Sometimes this coincides with theocracy, other times it arises out of secular ideals, such as democracy. For most of history the right to rule was assumed as descending from God. It’s much easier to accept government from a leader if you assume his rulings are not personal whims but the fulfillment of a divine plan.

The Old Testament is really a history of building a nation. The spiritual leaders tried to convince the Israelites to create law and order based on God’s rules. The trouble is people have a hard time agreeing whether the rules are right or not. Often powerful leaders must pander to the whims of the people, so over the centuries the idea of rights for people evolved.

At first taxes were just to maintain the wealth and might of the leadership, but eventually the masses started expecting their leaders to give them something in return. Generally this was law and order and a semblance of justice.

By the time the United States was formed people wanted to rule themselves and create a just and ordered society. They created The Bill of Rights. Of course, at the time women, African Americans and Native Americans weren’t considered for these rights, but it’s a step in the evolution of Human Rights for all. Government became something run by the people for the people. Taxes were meant to maintain civilization and provide a fair treatment of all people, given them the opportunity to prosper and seek happiness. Taxes went to maintaining civilization and guaranteeing a legal system that protected human rights.

Population was sparse and people were expected to make their own way or die. There were few social support systems, mostly the charity of individuals and churches. Many conservatives want this kind of government, but there’s two major problems to this. First is the explosion of population. Second the explosion of wealth brought on by the industrial revolution. For many years governments tried not to interfere with human growth or the creation of wealth, but it’s now too late for that kind of thinking.

The third stage of government is the management of over population and the regulation of wealth. Government cannot ignore these problems without hurting human rights and even civilization. The mismanagement of wealth can lead to economic collapse and social disorder. Back in pioneering days wealth came from the land. If people failed they died or moved on. Now the population lives off the economy, which to most is an abstraction. That’s why it’s so hard to understand why the government needs so much tax money.

If the Republicans got their way and reduced the size of the government and drastically lowered taxes America would end up looking like India or Pakistan. Overpopulation would hinder the creation of wealth. Sure, some wealthy people would get much richer, but most of the population would get much poorer. The purpose of our taxes is to maximize the well being of the population to allow the maximum creation of wealth for all. In other words, a chicken in every pot. The trouble is some people don’t like paying for other people’s chickens.

This third stage of government is really about stimulating the economy. The first stage was about creating social stability, law and order. The second stage was about making everything fair for all. Now some people think the third stage is about providing handouts for the poor, but that’s not really true. What’s really happening is government is trying to create prosperity. Henry Ford paid his workers a decent wage because he wanted them to be well off enough to buy the cars he made. The modern role of government is to make sure the greatest percentage of its citizens contribute to the economic growth of the nation and all benefit fairly.

Now I didn’t say the role of the government is to get everyone a job. Our population has grown way to large for that to be possible. But if we ignored the people without jobs, the number of them would pull down the nation economically. Look back at the Great Depression. People on social security, welfare or unemployment still contribute to economic growth through the spending of government money.

Like it or not, the role of government has become the regulation of wealth and stimulus of economic growth. Now this might not be done fairly, efficiently or wisely, but it’s the job the government has to do. Reducing the government will only make our problems worse. The belief in pure capitalism is a fantasy.

There is emerging a fourth role for government, environmentalism. Our populations are now so large, and the creation of wealth so vast, that they are consuming the planet. If governments don’t become ecology cops we’re all going to die from self destruction.

Conservatives want to roll back governments to stage 1 and 2 functions. Actually them seem to want stage 1.5, law and order with some theocracy, something akin to Old Testament times. Even though most conservatives call themselves Christians they don’t seem to want to pursue Christ’s job of feeding and healing the poor. They seem to want law based on their religion, and to only pay taxes for things that benefit them directly, like roads and armies. That kind of government would probably work if the population density was like it was 2,000 years ago.

Like it or not, government has to be big. It has to be in the business of managing wealth and population dynamics. If we took away all those entitlement programs the country would go down the drain. Our economy is based on economic activity. Even if we had a smaller population that wouldn’t help the economy, look at Japan, with it’s declining population. And we also much face up to the problem that a heated economy is killing the planet.

If governments are going to succeed at stage three and four they will need to invent new ways to manage wealth and population, and reducing taxes or making the government smaller just isn’t a solution for solving those problems.

Also, notice the interactions between the stages. Without stage 1, stage 2 can’t exist. Without stage 2, stage 3 can’t exist. You’d think stage 4 would be above stage 1 because if the ecology collapses, so will civilization. But without civilization you can’t think of ecology. So it becomes a circular process.

JWH – 2/27/11

Balancing the Budget–Part 1

Everyone is talking about how to solve the federal budget crisis. Of course, people have been talking about this subject my whole life. It’s a heated topic with no easy answers. And it’s a more of a crisis in bad economic times than in boom times, so there is a certain amount of the sky is falling psychology behind the topic. However, the debt of the United States is growing so large that maybe the sky really is about to fall. Who really knows? It does seem prudent to slow the debt we’re incurring. It would be impossible to balance the budget in one year without massive spending cuts even if we set aside the current national debt as a separate issue. It could take a whole generation to really get close to balancing the budget.

There is an excellent graph at the New York Times showing Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal. It illustrates the sizes of the various expenditures in relationship to each other. However, you can read the details at the Office of Management and Budget. For the average citizen looking at the budget is just mind boggling, and for most people they just think, “Hell, let the experts worry about it.” The trouble is our government is in political gridlock with two opposing ideologies claiming they know what’s right. To solve the problem will require thinking and acting out of the box.

There are a number of think tanks that focus on the federal budget which have web sites you can study. I recommend studying these sites rather than listening to politicians or watching the news on television. They all have a political bias so I recommend reading more than one.

Personally, I have four recommendations that I think would help working on the problem.

First, don’t consider the budget as a whole, but break it down into parts and lets research and discuss the parts. Don’t think of it as one giant problem, but many smaller problems.
Remove Social Security from the annual Federal Budget. Consider it a separate insurance system paid for by FICA. Don’t allow the Federal budget to use FICA income and make it pay back what it’s borrowed. Consider Social Security a separate issue.
Let’s really examine the whole issue of defense spending. It’s been an untouchable sacred cow for too long. And it hasn’t been the defense budget since the cold war ended – it’s become a world police force and nation building organization. The whole system needs a rethink.
Let’s have a moratorium on tax cuts. Until the national debt gets under control lets work on spending cuts and don’t allow any more tax cuts until the budget is under control and we can afford them. If our country is about to go down the drain because of national debt then we really should be talking about tax hikes. It’s insane to talk about paying off debt and reducing income at the same time.

That still leaves a million issues to argue over, but I don’t want to write about them for now, that’s why I called this post part 1. My friend Bill in his blog “That’s interesting …” has been running a lot of posts about the battle of the budget. It’s such an emotional hot issue with way too many Chicken Littles running around. Are the press and politicians creating a panic that need not exist? Would a thriving economy just automatically solve these budget problems? Are politicians assuming it’s the end of the world as we know and have started a fight over a shrinking pie? I don’t know. Politics has become so contentious and ungentlemanly that I want to quit watching all news programs.

JWH – 2/19/11

Richocracy

Who rules America? We all like to think we do, since we believe we live in a democracy. But what if that’s not true? If you watch the new documentary film Inside Job by Charles H. Ferguson you might think the rich rule us, and they’re doing a bad good job because of the 2007-2010 financial crisis. Greed triumphs over wisdom. Richocracy is a form of oligarchy, where the extreme tiny minority of the very rich have the power of ruling. The insight of Inside Job is these people reign whether the Republicans or Democrats are in control.

We do not see the real ruling rich in Inside Job, but their representatives, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Alan Greenspan, the CEOs of the leading financial institutions, and their philosophical spin-doctors, the economists that teach in academia and consult in Washington. Many of these men stay in power regardless of which political party is in the Whitehouse or Congress. They rule by economic theory that justifies getting more wealth for the richocracy.

It’s all very obvious when you think about it. Money is power, the people with the most money have the most power. With very large amounts of money and power its possible to change both the laws of the land, and the rules of business. Furthermore the richocracy hire the top Ivy League economists to justify their wild money making schemes.

To me, the most damning evidence revealed in Inside Job is how the richocracy made the credit rating agencies a total sham. Wall Street created investment systems that insiders knew were worthless but got them rated AAA so gullible banks, investors, retirement systems, local, state and foreign governments, would buy. These investors of little people’s money used these corrupt credit ratings in their decision making, and thus trillions were stolen.

Would we have had this financial crisis if we had honest credit ratings? I don’t think so. Most people who invest money have very little knowledge of how their money is put to work. They have to trust the institutions that hold their savings. Those institutions use the credit rating systems like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s to understand risk. An AAA rating is suppose to be as secure as U.S. government bonds. How do you feel about your retirement money being invested in schemes rated AAA (prime) but should have been rated CCC (extremely speculative).

But that’s the point of this film, greed corrupts everything. People ignore risk when they think they can make a quick buck. The solution to that is regulation. Capitalism without rules is chaos. The richocracy fights all regulation with every fiber of their souls. That’s how they use the Republican party. Regulation slows down wild speculation, but it’s the bubbles of wild speculation that create wild piles of wealth. But in recent decades most new forms of speculation have been no more rational then Ponzi schemes. The richocracy love the Ponzi scheme because it’s a quick way to take away a lot of money from the suckers and give it to the very few, the richocracy.

As Inside Job points out, in the old days investment firms invested their own money and they were very careful how it was used. Over recent decades investment firms started investing ever larger growing pools of money that didn’t directly belong to the money managers, so it became ever more easy to bet on riskier schemes. Governmental financial regulations are designed to keep investing money within the bounds of reality. Which means no Ponzi schemes. And all systems for quick riches ultimately come down to a Ponzi game.

Now the real question to ask: What can us little people do about this? The people with all the money have all the power, but the legal system is suppose to be based on democracy. Democracy is corrupted by lobbying. The more money you have, the more lobbyists you can buy. For the little people to gain power they either have to find ways to get their own lobbyists, or force a political change to the lobbying system. But the inherent nature of the richocracy really precludes the second option from happening.

The ultra rich is often called the top 1% of America, but that would be over 3,107,044 people. My guess is the richocracy is actually much smaller than that, maybe only the top .1%, or a little over 300,000 people. Those other almost three million people are hardcore richocracy wannabes. So we can think of it as us (99%) versus them (1%). You’d think the little guys would have the power, but they don’t, because all the wealth is with the 1 per-centers.

But that’s an illusion too. Us little guys have a lot of wealth too, but we let the richocracy manage it for us. Of course, we’re just as greedy as they are. We want 10% returns on our retirement investments and take risky chances with our 401k money. It would be possible to lobby with our money but we don’t control how its invested.

We don’t make the laws of the land, the laws of business, nor the theories behind government and finance. We think we have power with our votes, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. As Inside Job shows, people voted for Obama because they wanted change in the financial systems but he failed to deliver. Obama hired the same richocracy representatives that were used by the Republicans, and regulation was once again avoided.

Essentially us little people have no power and all we can do is sit by and hope the richocracy doesn’t drive the country into absolute ruin. We can hope the richocracy can learn from their own madness but Inside Job also points out that all the people that caused the recent crisis walked away rich. The richocracy is evidently waiting for the economy to settle down so they can start up the next bubble. They know how to get fabulously wealthy from financial bubbles. The trouble is if you look back at the history of these bubbles, they are getting larger each time, and the country and us little people are suffering more with each new cycle. How many more can we survive?

JWH – 11/14/10

Waiting for “Superman” – The Indictment of the AFT and NEA

Waiting for “Superman” is an inspiring, if clunky, documentary about the problems of education in America. The director, Davis Guggenheim, made two other popular documentaries, An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud. I doubt Waiting for “Superman” will ignite the political firestorm that An Inconvenient Truth did, it doesn’t feature Al Gore, but it essentially convicts the AFT and NEA teacher unions for causing the failure of the American education system. To be perfectly fair, all viewers of this film should read the AFT and NEA responses to this documentary.

I called Waiting for “Superman” clunky because it starts off slow. My movie buddy left after five minutes to go find something else to watch at the theater, but I think she regrets it after I told her how much better the film got and the fact that she picked a dud of a Woody Allen film to sneak into. The show is also clunky with old clips from the 1950s Superman television show, amateur undercover video, dull press conferences and most unfortunately, uneven interviews with five students and their parents that was the core of the narrative. The featured real people were not always persuasive and some of the kids seemed bored by being subjects of a documentary.

To me, Waiting for “Superman” gets an A+ when it was presenting animated graphs. The actual facts and figures about the failure of American schools are the real stars of this show – but I don’t know if they are accurate. If you go see this documentary, don’t get sidetracked by the specific student stories Guggenheim tries to tell. The five students and their families did generate a certain level of emotion with me, but sadly, they didn’t seem like particularly good sample cases. Too much of the movie focuses on these kids trying to win school lotteries, time that could have been spent on sexier facts.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe everyone in America should see this film. I work at a College of Education, but not as an academic, so I’ve spent over twenty years hanging around with educational professionals and heard a lot. And the ones I’ve talked to consider Waiting for “Superman” misleading if not fraudulent. I’ve read many books, articles and seen quite a few other documentaries on the same topic. It’s a complex issue that no 102 minute documentary can cover fairly. The important thing is to get involved with the problem. Education in America is like Global Warming, a giant iceberg in our Titanic’s path – if we don’t change course we’re going to crash and sink. I’m sorry, that’s really a bad metaphor. In both cases we’ve already crashed into the iceberg, the real issue is how many people are going to make it to the lifeboats.

Hundreds of high schools in America have over fifty-percent failure rates, which Guggenheim and others call failure factories. This is the heart of the story, and Waiting for “Superman” does a B+ job of explaining. This topic deserves it’s own weekly PBS show, like NOVA. We spend so much of our TV time on partisan political histrionics while ignoring the real issues. The Democrats, Republicans and Tea Party candidates have zero content value when it comes to dealing with the real problems in America. Waiting for “Superman” at least focuses on something real and meaty. The subject deserves at least 52 hours – one hour a week of required watching for everyone in this country. We waste countless hours each week on political bickering that leads nowhere. Waiting for “Superman” gets an A+ for defining an important issue.

Not to spoil the movie, but Waiting for “Superman” makes the following hypothesis that needs to be tested: If we change the system it is possible to teach kids from the worse economic environments to beat the average test scores now from the best economic environments. This is the core of this film. It says America is cruelly and inhumanly condemning millions of its citizens to educational starvation and stunted intellectual growth. Waiting for “Superman” tries to express this graphically and emotional as a film, but I feel it only succeeds with a C- effort.

This is a heated subject, and Americans want to blame the students for not studying, the parents for not parenting, teachers for not teaching, and principals and superintendents for not leading. They feel that taxes are being wasted on education in America, and many want to even abolish the U. S. Department of Education. I give Waiting for “Superman” a B+ on explaining how such thinking is leading to national Hari-kari.

Waiting for “Superman” does have a prescription for educational success. It suggests by showing the strengths of experimental schools that a longer school day, including Saturday classes, with a full-time school year, combined with good school teachers that we could have dramatic change. To get good school teachers the film implies we need to do away with teacher tenure and allow school systems to fire poorly performing teachers. Thus the burden of changes comes from attacking the teacher unions, requiring them to give up job security and require working longer hours, and to work all year round. That’s a lot to ask.

The film left out asking students and parents to do more. I guess the filmmakers assume parents and students already want more for themselves and are willing to work harder, but I don’t think that’s true. That’s where Waiting for “Superman” gets a big fat F. It doesn’t show how kids and parents are failing the system. Sadly, too many Americans are just plain ignorant when it comes to understanding the value of an education. But we can only be a great nation if the average intelligence of our citizens is greater than the average intelligence of all the other national citizens we compete with on the world stage.

That’s why education is an issue that’s equal to global warming. We could survive the worst scenarios of each, but who really wants to live in a Mad Max future.

JWH – 10/24/10