Opinion-Columns.com

Another Opportunity Slipping

I know they’re distracted at the White House, what with Harriet Miers stepping down, the Special Prosecutor charging Scooter and a new nominee to find, but c’mon George, you could make some real strides right this moment in the Muslin world for almost no effort.

As the helicopter revved its engines for takeoff, a balding man with a beard leaned across the edge of the lowered cargo ramp and, smiling his gratitude, extended his hand toward Brandon Chasteen, a 21-year-old Army medic from Chattanooga, who gave it a hearty shake.

Remember Pakistan, the earthquake?  It was on your ‘to-do’ list last week.  Forget Karen Hughes (the quicker the better) and step into the vacuum created by a reliably helpless U.N.  There are two or three million people homeless and helpless in the mountains of Pakistan and Kashmir. Winter is tomorrow, George and winter in the Himalayas is as tough as it gets when you have no home, no heating materials, no time to prepare.  Add to that the loss of friends, family.  All the things that hold us together in society have been shattered for these millions.

Listen up, George, they are all Muslim.

"Obviously, this is the other side of the United States," said Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Shujabadi, a prominent religious scholar in the port city of Karachi. "For the first time in so many years I have seen the American planes dropping relief and not bombs on the Muslim population."

I know, we’ve had our helicopters in there, airlifting food and tents, pulling out the badly hurt on the return trips and the reaction has been amazing. Helicopter crews cheered, their hands shaken by grateful survivors.  Not a Kalashnikov in sight.  This is the stuff of providence, George, a possible turning-point in a very bad string of experiences you’ve had lately with Islam.

Don’t blow it. 

Don’t let Cheney or Rummy anywhere near it. Call in the top Democrat and Republican leadership and get it done, George. You’ll take some heat in New Orleans for another foreign disaster aid response after what you put together for the tsunami victims, but what-the-hell, go for it.

"It's a nice break," Lewis said. "It was strange for us to come over from Afghanistan because we had no idea how we'd be treated. But they came out, shook our hands. They're very nice people."

America is at its best when it shows its ability to help.  For three years we have fueled the passions of those who will remember our brutality in Iraq for generations.  Islam is pulled up at the pump, George, waiting to fill up.  The opportunity to pour in practical help as the rest of the world stands by will have passed as a week, then two go by and this part of the world becomes impassable.

Move, George.  Move now.
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More at my personal web site about what interests me in International Affairs.

If We’re Broke, Who Broke Us?

In the amazing statements department of my mind, there is a special place for Representative John Boehner of Ohio. He’s the chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee in that august body, the House of Representatives.

The name of the committee sounds like something we ought to be aware of, something to keep on the front-burner of political action as American jobs fly out the national window and re-education becomes a primary issue. Not on your life.  Particularly, not on John’s watch as chairman. 

He’s doing his part to deconstruct anything that might help the less-wealthy, so the most-wealthy can take a pass on present, future and forever-more tax obligations.  In his own small way, that means Boehner has come up with $18 billion over five years that can be slashed and burned in both pension protection and student loan programs.

“Listen, we’re broke. Let’s face it,” the defender of fiscal conservatism (after five years of uncontrolled deficit-spending) said yesterday. Over the past five years the guys who run the administration as well as both houses of the congress haven’t faced

• Funding an expensive war
• Stripping delivery costs of an out-of control Medicare and Medicaid
• Funding elemental corporate research and development
• Capping runaway costs of higher education
• The ludicrous and distasteful tax giveaways to the rich and super-rich
• Wasteful and ineffective boondoggling on supposed national security

What we do have to face, in Boehner’s strangely compartmentalized mind, is the fact that we are now broke . . . nationally in the poorhouse . . . and he and his buddies have broke us.

Bill Thomas, a California contribution to the House, is chairman of the Ways and Means committee and is trying his best to find ways to be mean in this race to gut what's left of programs for those who live on Wal-Mart wages.  He proposes to cut back payments to foster-care families and add policies that will cut child-support payments to single mothers who already struggle to provide for their kids.

Hey, it's a tough world out there and President Bush only noticed you poor people for a New York minute.  Time to move on.  This is a country that moves on.

The last administration, the one that began with a ‘C’ that no one dares mention anymore, left town with egg on its face over sexual impropriety, having narrowly escaped impeachment.  But they also left behind them

• Money in the bank
• The prioritized beginnings of long-term repayment of the national debt
• A sense of concern and help for those who were truly below poverty levels
• A balanced budget, with a surplus

No one in that faraway administration that began with a ‘C’ ever had to stand before the American people and admit that its political party had absolutely pissed-away the fortunes of the nation.  Down the tubes to the extent that we find ourselves broke, helpless and, for many people, hopeless. Out of control to the point where they're unwilling to stop runaway wars, runaway lies, runaway deficits, runaway civic failures and runaway ethical (non-sexual for the moment) lapses.

But they do stand in front of the American people, these neocons from California and Ohio, to say none of this is in any way the fault of the administration that begins with a ‘B.’  Oh, and by the way, these guys are going to ask for your vote next year.
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Enhancement Takes on a Whole New Meaning

Representative John Carter, a good-old-boy law-and-order Texas death penalty aficionado put a tag on the bill to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act.  An amendment I guess they call it.  Tag, amendment, it matters not. What offends me beyond nearly all words is the original title of his bill that became an amendment; the Terrorist Death Penalty Enhancement Act.

I am so amazed by the breathless fury and blood-lust of men like John Carter that I cracked my dictionary just to see that I had not misunderstood ‘enhancement.’ 

I had not.  Enhancement is defined as “to improve or add to the strength, worth, beauty, or other desirable quality of something.” John has, in his mind, added to the beauty and desirable quality of death. 

The Senate version contains no such language.  That’s what I love about the United States Senate, it’s unending willingness to deal with the psychopaths and small-time criminal element within the House of Representatives.  Mischief is hatched on a daily basis in the House and its idiocies scamper like cockroaches, scurrying over to the Senate where they are, for the most part, stepped on and squashed.

The USA Patriot Act is a small-minded document, reminiscent of some of our worst war-time legislation; things better off forgotten like the internment of Japanese during the Second World War.  But we do these things out of fear and anger.  We are not normally fearful and angry people, but we are helped along the way by men like John Carter.

The reauthorization triples the number of provisions under which the death penalty can be enhanced.
Which might be all right or at least arguable if the number were 2 and went to 6 but it is not.  The number is 20 and will increase to 61.  I never use numerals in my writing because I think it’s bad form and jars the fluidity of what I hope to be logical thought.  But I have used them here for just that purpose, to jar.  They are jarring numbers.

Among the acts for which one can be put to death, an individual could be sentenced to death for “providing financial support to an organization whose members caused the death of another, even if the individual in question did not know or in any way intend that the members engage in violence.” There's a bunch of innane stuff like that in his amendment. John Carter’s spokeswoman said that his enhancement was important because “the congressman believes capital punishment is a deterrent for all kinds of crimes, including terrorism.”

I don’t know how he matches his belief with the fact of suicide bombers. If you blow yourself up, we're going to execute you. Stranger than fiction, this Carter guy.

Over in the Senate, in a separate but equally preposterous move, Vice President Dick Cheney was enhancing as well.  In town from his undisclosed location, he has for the third time tried to persuade Senator McCain to exempt the CIA from the Senate proscription on torture of anyone, including prisoners of war.

Cheney, perhaps the most bloodthirsty and misguided Vice President in memory, had Porter Goss (Director of the CIA) in tow.  Both of them were worried that not being able to torture our prisoners held on foreign soil would irreparably damage our national defense.

McCain said no.  The Vice President and Director left in a huff, only one of them to a known location.
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There are lots more Things That Make Me Nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Freedom of Speech Manipulated

I believe in the freedom of speech and I’m sure you do as well.  If there is a foundation stone to the edifice that is America, I guess it is freedom of speech and of the press.

But I’m having problems. Problems of definition and wonder if we haven’t allowed freedom of speech to be hijacked by every special interest that comes down the pike.  We are a nation of lawyers and lawyers have done us well and done us not-so-well, construing and mis-construing, applying and mis-applying the avalanche of law that spills out of our state and national legislatures.

An example; is the freedom to spend money the same as free speech?  Political Action Committees (PACs) will tell you so and yet I’m damned if I believe in a freedom that takes away my other (and more precious) freedoms.

One definition of a political action committee is a ‘political group that is not formally related to a particular political party, but is associated with other groups.’ Fair enough.  But unfair enough, PACs are allowed to give money (or solicit money, if that is their aim) to candidates so that they can be elected.

Well, that’s way wrong.  Money is not speech.

If I have an interest in getting you elected, I ought to be able to speak on your behalf without anyone stopping me.  That’s an almost uniquely American privilege, but very different from my going out and buying you unlimited TV time so that either you or I can talk endlessly from the tube.  Somehow, our legislators (the same guys who get the free TV) wrote laws that allow me to do that and somehow the courts have decided that not allowing the purchase of that TV time would be an infringement on the right to free speech.

That’s not only nuts, it keeps us from getting good people in politics.  Therefore it limits choice.  It also keeps the guys who are in, in and the guys who are out, out.  What kind of free government is that?

This misinterpretation of free speech allows the NRA to keep our Congress awash in gun money, even though 70% of the public want  automatic weapons taken off the streets.  It keeps incumbent politicians in office, no matter how corrupt and incompetent they are, so long as they remain un-indicted.  It allows pharmaceutical companies to control the pricing and distribution of prescription drugs.  It facilitates almost any trampling of the public will by almost any company that can afford almost any price to be represented by almost any lobbyist.

And it’s bought us the worst representative government money can buy. 

The problem is that in the case of our Congress, the inmates are also the keepers of the keys.  Until that changes, or until a Jack Arbramoff blows the cover on some really big names in government, we’re going to have policy set by money alone. The sad fact is that honesty cannot survive in the mudslide of special interest money sloshing around the halls of Congress.

It makes me smile to hear top business executives shed crocodile tears that they have one hand tied behind them internationally by our federal law that no company can engage in foreign bribery.  The overpowering success of American business globally refutes that silly claim.  It merely proves that we need not engage in foreign bribery, when bribery at home has been so productive.

If it were only money, we could probably weather this cycle of government by corporation.  Many people claim that is only money and that the price we pay in terms of disillusionment means not a thing when we’re on a roll and they argue that we are on a roll.

Some roll!  I see it coming unhinged among those who were most strident in their argument;
conservatives at the throats of fellow-conservatives.  The churchgoers among us are appalled at the strident rhetoric that makes a mockery of representative government. 

The governing party that only recently strode across a world stage with such confidence is coming apart at the seams.  Every move now a disaster, every statement exposed as a lie, every hypothesis disproved, we have bribed and colluded ourselves into paralysis and claimed it to be the founding freedom of our heritage. 

The freedom to lie, the freedom to coerce, the freedom to corrupt . . . the freedom of speech.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

The Wet Spot in The Backyard

All right, so maybe it’s not in the backyard, but it’s a wet spot and in their mind it’s their wet spot, not the federal government’s.  The Supreme Court is set to shake all this out, in case you thought wet spots were trifling matters.

What we (and they) are talking about is the preservation of wetlands and who has or hasn’t the right to make them dry.  Most of us think that draining a swamp is a good idea, but the federal position is that wetlands are a part of the commonwealth ecosystem, something that belongs to us all and are protected by the Clean Water Act.

Which was probably a mistake and too broad an interpretation. 

What we needed and didn’t get was a wetlands protection statute.  But the Court often finds itself in this position, running up and down the sidelines, refereeing a mismatched game.  Wetlands and clean water are connected, but the structure the government has chosen to enforce its position relies on interstate commerce and waters that support recreation or shipping. 

To drain my swamp?  Are you kidding?  You gotta be kidding.

Once again the Feds are knocking on the court door to accomplish something worth while with laws that are not meant to do it.  Quite likely they will lose and the environmental people will scream and rage as environmental people are wont to do.  They should instead lobby the Congress for decent wetland legislation and stop misusing a minnow or frog to hold back the Darth Vaders of commerce. 

Saving old growth timber by enlisting the unwitting help of the Spotted Owl is wrong and, because it is wrong, people on both sides of a very worthwhile issue have come to blows.  The same kind of foolishness is shaping up with wetlands.  They need to be saved, but not by applying wrong law. Protecting a wetland threatened by a developer who wants to dry it up to build a supermarket is a good idea, but making the ludicrous claim that interstate commerce will be affected by his choice is just plain dumb.

Let’s face it, ownership of land is a problem.  On the one hand, our home is our castle and the sanctity of private property is basic to our freedoms.  But we’re such short-term owners, we're not indicidually very good stewards of long-term value to society.  We move on as quickly as profit or convenience allow.  Over a lifetime, I have owned some thirteen houses.  Owned them legally right down to the center of the earth and, within the limits of my mortgages, had the right to do pretty much as I wanted with them and the land upon which they stood. But a house is a house, it's not a wetland or an old-growth forest.

How did I come to own them? The obvious answer is I bought them, but the cosmic answer is pretty twisty.  Basically, American land was taken from those who had it before us, either by force or purchase.  It’s the ability of my government to hold off all comers that guarantees me title.  Title is a modern concept, a bargain, struck in an eyewink of human history.  It's an agreement, backed by the force of government. 

So private ownership and public good are in some ways, maybe many ways, at odds with each other.   

I can drain the swamp and move on, most likely at a profit, cut the timber and do the same.  Any fool with a chain saw can cut down a tree in ten minutes that took a hundred years to grow.  I have a short-term goal that may not (and usually does not) square with the long-term public good. 

But should I be stopped?

Yeah, I think so, but I also think we need to talk about that nationally and turn down the volume of the rhetoric a bit.  It is a certainty that cutting the last of our old-growth timber, paving over small-area wetlands, building on inhospitable barrier islands, pumping down the public water tables, diverting rivers to irrigation, allowing coal power generation and a host of other activities that are not friendly to our long-term health and happiness, all have various impacts on private rights.

The right to be left the hell alone  in comfort and health cannot help but infringe to some degree on the right to private profit. How we face that and what compromises are made in the process are really earth-shaking issues.  The Supreme Court will no doubt make various rulings on the constitutional issues raised.

That job is really a tough call for the Court and made a lot tougher when the law is bent to serve a worthwhile purpose in an underhanded way.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

The Next Sound You Hear

The next sound you hear out of Washington will be the quiet click of a door closing on New Orleans’ poor.  All of the Gulf Coast, actually.  New Orleans is the rallying name behind the rhetoric, but hundreds of miles of shoreline towns have virtually disappeared, left to wading birds and alligators.

The presidential sound-bite is over with, behind us.  George Bush no longer remembers speaking in somber tones from Andrew Jackson’s square.  The bean-counters are in charge, sitting deep in the Republican saddle in Washington.  Among other ‘fixes,’ they propose to cut $50 billion from next year’s budget in Medicare and Medicaid coverage for the poor.  The poor?  You mean the New Orleans poor? Those same folk the president so belatedly discovered on CNN?

Yep.

Seems George is the only leader to experience an awakening to the plight of the have-nots in America.  The fiscal conservative side of his supporters knew it all the time and it’s one of the things that made them furious---not the fact of the poor, but the programs for them. In their view, that’s what’s wrong with America and when they talk about smaller government, the same hatchet cuts the taxes for the rich as cuts the benefits for the poor.

These are equal-opportunity hatchet men.

Republicans don’t have to worry about coming up short at election time on George’s promise from Saint Louis Cathedral to root out the causes of poverty.  There will be someone new at the candidate’s podium next time around, someone to promise a kinder, gentler, more compassionate conservative presidency. 

Taking a leaf out of the religious book, neo conservatives promise the poor will find their reward in the next world.  Just a smidge more kindness, a sliver more gentleness or an ounce more compassion and the poor may find that being left on a blazing rooftop without food or water wasn’t really all that bad.

Anyway, food stamps and farm supports are on the block as well as health care, although you can bet corporate farms won’t be affected---moms and pops are what fiscal conservatives are after, they just don’t hold up their end of lobbying contributions.

All this from something called the RSC, the Republican Study Committee.  I’m unclear if these guys are studying to be Republicans, merely studying Republicans to see what makes them tick or have been sent home by Republicans to study more.  A sort of homework on the homeless.  But this group of young Turks jumped into the leadership void created by Tom DeLay’s unwillingness to believe he’d be indicted and have to leave someone in charge. 

A Newt Gingrich replay.

Representative Mike Pence, Republican from Indiana and Chairman of the Homework Committee is always good for a nifty quote and he claims not to want “an argument with friends,” but I guess in his world it’s better than a confrontation with the out-of-work, out-of-a-home and out-of-luck in the Gulf Coast.  Indiana is pretty far inland.

If you’re not out-of-work, out-of-a-home or out-of-luck, Washington is a very amusing place to watch right now.  Since Bush got caught with his hip-boots around his ankles, Congress just fell all over itself getting back to Washington to show their sympathy for Katrina victims.  In Washington, sympathy is offered  and authored by getting your name on a spending bill and they were flying; $10 billion in the first days and another $52 billion pending.  Pending?  Spending?  It’s only a letter apart and not even a vowel at that.

Mike Pence is riding the wave of talk-show, internet pundits and conservative columnists who are angry at just about everything their free-spending Republican brethren have done lately.  And when Republicans think their own party has been spending too lavishly, it’s time to get off the roof.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

The Second-Term Syndrome

I don’t know what it is about second terms.  Maybe George The First was lucky not to have had one.  They trip up every administration, from Nixon through Reagan, Clinton and now George The Second.  It’s possible I suppose that there’s a particular fear in attacking a first-term president, thoughts of retribution, a concern that it might all go wrong and come back to haunt at the polls. It's also possible that the losers are so stunned by their loss that they don't really get on track until a second term.

Because that’s what it’s all about, re-election.  Theirs versus ours, however they and us are defined.  Special prosecutors burst out of the underbrush like driven pheasants in second terms. 

And yet we are early into this president’s second term and, while the scandals revolve around who did or didn’t whisper in Robert Novak’s ear or Tom DeLay’s difficulties in Texas, the big one, the guy everyone edges away from as quietly as they can is Jack Abramoff. Jack is the big news.  File all others under ‘also of interest.’

Jack is almost entirely a construct of Tom DeLay, but man, did this loose horse ever get around.  If Tom was the engineer of the expressway between lobby money and lawmakers, Jack Abramoff was its general contractor, the guy who smoothed the concrete, painted on the striped lines and made sure traffic passed smoothly in both directions. And like all expressways, this one was connected to tributaries and feeder-streets, thoroughfares and secondary roads, one or another of which officed every single legislator that could be bought.

In this media-harried world we have created, the World Series and Jack Abramoff’s widening circle of the soon-to-be-indicted takes over our attention from Katrina, Pakistani earthquakes and the mudslides in Guatamala.  The difference between Jack and the Series is that seven games down the road we will have a World Champion and the rings will be distributed.  The Boys of Summer will take some time off until Spring Training.  Jack is destined to be background music to the balance of this administration, a three-year humming like summer cicadas and a distraction to everything and everyone it touches.   

Jack will prove to be the Boy of Endless Summer.

On the upside, Jack Abramoff’s endless summer promises great press; accusations, denials, shamefacedness, outrage, exposure, righteous indignation, quietly abandoned hopes, the reshuffling of priorities and the bringing down of the mighty.  Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Whether Washington will ever be the same depends upon if you are an optimist or pessimist. As they say, an optimist thinks everything is as good as it gets.  A pessimist is afraid he is right.

There is palpable fear in the corridors of power.  Everyone has a horse in this race and there will be no clear winners because the track is muddy enough to splash both right and left, Republican and Democrat.  You won’t see the usual C-Span pontification as the ruthless missionary-work done this past decade by Tom DeLay and his minions blossoms into a harvest no one wants to reap.  Well, that’s not entirely correct.  It is and has been a harvest no one wants to be seen reaping or down on paper as reaping or connected in any way to the e-mails of the weeping reaping.

Revealed corruption within our federal government will rival the most outrageous examples found in third-world nations.  I wish it were not so. It will be so and, like the worst congressional revelations of the past, it might bring in its wake a few much-needed and never-too-late restorations of conscience and law and ethical behavior.  It also might not.

It occurs to me that only one man stands to reap a benefit from this debacle and even John McCain will have to hope that his careful ride along the outside rail has kept him out of the mud.  But he’s been pointing fingers in the direction of lobbyist excesses for quite a while now and John has the one public perception that will matter in the coming months and years . . .  that of personal integrity, which promises to be in very short supply.  Which might get him elected.  And might bring some reforms as well. 

And then, of course, there will come his second term.
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More about politics in America at my opinion columns web site.

All In a Government Day’s Work

There’s a certain zeitgeist that conspires to land government embarrassments on the same day’s newspaper pages and yesterday was one of those.  We have a mostly well-intentioned government, but sometimes its pants are around its ankles when the lights go on.

First, our president was caught scripting another ‘spontaneous event,’ this one a tele-conference with troops on active duty in Iraq.  Makes me wonder who’s running the show in the White House and if there's a competition for dumb idea of the day.  You’d think that, after the umpteenth time caught at such shenanigans, it would be a no-no, but some lessons are learned harder than others.  This time it’s more an embarrassment than anything sinister, but there it is, our president supposedly having a spontaneous tele-chat with the troops in Iraq.  Rattling off one presidential euphemism after another, each is enthusiastically answered by a soldier.  Turns out each smiling respondent was picked for the duty and told how to reply. 

According to Jim VandeHei at the Washington Post, “before the president spoke via a video link, his event planners handpicked 10 soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry and one Iraqi soldier, told them what topics the president would ask about, and watched them briefly rehearse their presentations before going live.”

Pretty sad.

Elsewhere on the page, it seems our wounded troops are not only suffering the pain and difficulty of matching shattered bodies to shattered lives, they’re being dunned for it by the Pentagon.  Various stories have hit the media and certain powerful Senators are smokin’ about it, but the vast number of guys with garnisheed wages and credit-bureau blacklists are not getting any help from the military side.  How’s that for thanking our troops? You get wounded, dragged off the battlefield in pieces and the Army charges you for the ‘lost equipment’ left behind.  Never mind that you left an arm or a leg as well. 

Recovering in a hospital for months, these GIs get out to find chargebacks for any number of things from lost equipment to misapplied combat pay to the Army taking back their signing bonus money.  If you get shot-up and don't fulfill the term of enlistment, no bonus. Even more disgusting, the Pentagon enlists debt collectors to hound soldiers and their families, reporting them to various credit agencies. Try to get a Visa Card after that.

The Army blames an obsolete computer system they’ve been trying unsuccessfully for ten years to fix.  I don’t know about you, but it amazes me that American business keeps up-to-the-minute computer technology humming right along and American government at the Pentagon and FBI and CIA takes ten years to still get it wrong.

Completing the hat-trick of Washington-inspired embarrassment, a Brit Katrina hurricane donation of 400,000 packaged meals has been run down by our zealous USDA officials and impounded.  So much for our distribution capability, the impoundment costs you and me $16,000 a month while a total of six government agencies stumble over one another to try to figure out what to do and who should do it. 

The USDA prevents all imports of British meat because of a supposed risk of mad-cow disease, even though we specifically asked for this food donation.  A British version of military MREs, good enough and safe enough for Brit soldiers, they’re snagged in paperwork.  A USDA spokesman says "There is no question that different consideration would have been given to the situation if people were going hungry.” Excuse me?

All kinds of government agencies failed during Katrina.  Nothing seemed to work right and the stranded were out of food and water, tired and dying.  But our undaunted inspectors at the U.S. Department of Agriculture were up to the challenge.  Determining somehow that people were not hungry, they chased this rogue shipment and nailed it down at fourteen separate locations across Mississippi.  Neither rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers . . .

Take that, you thoughtless Brits.
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There are lots more Things That Make Me Nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Aspirin for a Broken Leg

While you and I go about our daily business, a Presidential Advisory Panel is at work. Actually, I doubt there’s been a time in recent memory when one wasn’t formed or meeting or in-the-process-of doing one presidential thing or another.  It’s classic politics when you haven’t a clue, to put together an advisory panel.  A blue-ribbon committee is another vehicle.  I’m not sure if a presidential advisory panel outranks a blue-ribbon committee or not. This one was called by President Bush 'to examine large-scale alternatives to the tax code.' Large-scale was not defined and perhaps should have been.

Expenses paid, nice hotels and damn fine restaurants, it's a pretty good gig. This is a bi-partisan
no-obligation advisory panel, whose advice the president is invited to accept or reject or simply sweep under the Oval Office rug.  Those are the best kind.  Presidents prefer them twenty to one over panels they have to do something about.

But this one suggests as a breakthrough ‘large-scale-alternative’ to take an aspirin and call them in the morning.  Pretty much the same advice doctors have been giving hypochondriacs for years.  Something, anything to send them home and get them out of the office.

The panel’s Bayer-advice is to ‘reduce the amount of mortgage debt for which interest is deductible’ and ‘cap the amount of health insurance premiums an employer can deduct at $11,000.’

Well, those are pretty amazing and astounding breakthroughs.  These recommendations surely comprise a couple of truly ‘large scale’ alternatives to the tax code.  I’m stunned by the reckless abandon with which these bipartisans ripped into the heart of the 55,000 page document. Rounding up the usual suspects, the members recommended additional tax breaks for charitable donations, removing the alternative minimum tax and on and on.  Fiddling. Rome isn't burning yet, but it's getting warmer and they're fiddling . . . fiddling.

Face it, bipartisanites, the income tax is a broken leg and the country has been hobbling around on it, hopping from one unfairness to another for ninety-two years, long enough.  Certainly too long to be given another aspirin or to be treated for hypochondria.  The sickness of off-shore wealth, millionaires paying no tax, billionaires paying damned little, homeowners pocketing a public contribution to their home ownership, as well as the widespread perception of unjust application is evidence of serious disease.

77% of the American public agrees that the Tax Code needs major reform or complete overhaul. 

And yet we are overwhelmingly supportive of taxes, as we should be.  But you and I and our neighbors didn’t expand and manipulate and mess with the 1913 law that took 1% of all net income above $3,000.  Lobbyists wrote those 55,000 pages.  Special interest groups sprung up over night like mushrooms on the forest floor, each with their own manipulation, until the code grew to the point that it is undecipherable. It contradicts itself unendingly.  It has become a tool so murky that government no longer has to prove you at fault, they merely declare it and you are required to prove your innocence.

The Internal Revenue Service needs to be abolished.  Dump it, burn it, blow it up. Get rid of personal and corporate income taxes, do away with payroll and self-employment taxes, scuttle the capital gains, gift and estate tax, shrug off the alternative minimum tax and earned income tax credit.

That low rumble you hear in the background is all the attorneys and tax-preparers and accountants beating their heads against their walls.  Many of them would have to find honest work, tilling the soil or flipping burgers.  This is one idea the acceptance of which could not be attributed to harming the economy.  The economy would positively take off, producing jobs and prosperity beyond the wildest of dreams and we have among us some pretty wild dreamers. 

Think about this: A very large proportion of personal income taxes are collected and paid through payroll deduction.  But corporations do not pay the income taxes of their employees, they collect them from consumers through prices.  Thus automobiles and refrigerators, books and bras and underwear manufacturers are all charging you and I the cost of employee deductions.  Not only that, they charge us the cost of charging us; it costs business over $500 billion yearly to collect taxes.  It costs small-business $724 to collect and send off $100 in taxes to Washington. How much sense does that make?

Immediately after the Second World War, corporations paid more than a third of all tax, now they pay less than 11% because they are voluntary taxpayers.  That's a tricky word. Voluntary doesn’t mean you can pay or not, it means you can take advantage of the law to not pay.  Guess how that happened?  Lobbyists for big business made it happen.  Unlike 1945, today’s business world is largely without borders and big companies, like wealthy individuals, are more and more ‘residents’ of off shore tax havens.  Oh sure, the have a Park Avenue duplex, but they actually live in a dusty back-alley in Grand Cayman. Yeah!  Getting rid of the income tax would bring $6 trillion back home.  Getting rid of the tax code would make us competitive again.

What to replace it with?  Tune in tomorrow.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Not Caring Much For Arrogance

I don’t know about you, but I don’t care much for arrogant people.  I’ll put up with nutcakes, nuisances and even the occasional incurable idiot, but arrogance is not something that goes down easily for me, even though I’ve caught myself at it from time to time. 

That’s one of the reasons I’ve so little empathy for George Steinbrenner as the Yankees fold yet again.  There’s a certain yeah! response from me.  When an incredibly rich guy buys himself a roster and then heaps blame on his players and coaches when the investment doesn’t guarantee to buy him a pennant and a series, I can’t help but feel a certain satisfaction that he got what he deserved.  Some people combine arrogance with temper tantrums and it makes them doubly nasty to be around.

George Bush seems to suffer from the arrogance backlash.  I think he’s probably a nice, clueless man, but he’s arrogant and those he’s surrounded himself with are arrogant as well.  That self-important condescension kept him from a stroll down his own driveway, that he could have turned into a Clinton-moment with just the flash of a smile, a hunkering down on his heels and nine dollars and ninety-eight cents worth of empathy.  He’s a charmer, I’m told.  But he just couldn’t do it, couldn’t bring himself to do in forced circumstances what he finds it natural and easy and second-nature to do in private.

The troubles Bush is in right now with the American people have more to do with arrogance than bad luck.  A man who agonized a little, as we all of us agonize over the terrible problems and choices we face, would bring the country along with him through these very tough times.  An old hound-man friend of mine told me a kennel story, saying that his sixty foxhounds were amenable enough in the kennel unless you had the misfortune to slip and fall.  Then they’d be on you in a pack, he said and they could kill you.  Instinct. Maybe George has slipped and we can only cross our fingers he doesn’t fall.

Trent Lott and Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter all fall into the unattractive category of terminally arrogant.  It makes them hard to be around, what with all that screaming and ill will.

Unsurprisingly, at least to me, the most loved and oft-quoted conservative of all was Ronald Reagan and he was the very model of down-home courtesy.  That characteristic, as much as any other, won him the absurd title of “greatest American” according to AOL’s Discovery Channel.  Absurd choice or not, the man accomplished a huge swing back toward the conservative right because he was a master of the aw-shucks grin and an intriguing storyteller.  We liked him.  Even if we didn't like his politics, we liked him. We gave Reagan extra leaway, separating him from those within his administration who drew a record number of indictments and prison terms, because we knew he was the best of what we were.  Bill Clinton was similarly down to earth and it likely saved his presidency.

I don’t know what has so deprived us of civility among the powerful these days, but it’s a cause for concern.  There are huge and fundamental differences between us that will not be settled by bad-tempered shouting-matches, but might well be alleviated by a stroll down our collective driveway.  Small-mindedness won’t serve any longer.  We badly need to hunker down on our heels, suck on a blade of grass, squint up into the sun that warms us rich and poor, powerful and helpless, those who have enjoyed the best of times and those who have endured the worst.

I can’t take too many more sore losers.  It’s not the way my old daddy raised me.  I want my country to come back and meet me half way, want the dialog to take place on the front porch instead of the Supreme Court, want to believe again in government of and by and for the people. 

It’s a lot to ask, I know, but this used to be a country that asked a lot.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.