Tag Archives: political

Taxation Gurus Just Don’t Seem to Get It

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CNN Money ran an article today from Jeanne Sahadi advocating the need to raise taxes “because the looming debt problem is just too big”. Her argument goes on to say that Republicans are misthinking the whole issue because as long as the debt remains large, the country can never go forward.

Well, my response is twofold. First, we need to stop putting taxation into a partisan framework. That never solves anything but makes the issues so tied to other agendas that there’s no way to have a rational conversation about the issue in the first place. By making it partisan, any response of negativity to Sahadi immediately gets lumped into a “he’s a Republican, and therefore he is only limited to Republican talking points.” Whenever the conversation moves to the next level of analysis, the responder can immediately throw it, “oh yeah, but Republicans also believe (fill in the blank, and you realize why no rational debate is then possible).”

Second, and this is really my more important point, at what point did government become so important that it became the elephant we SEE in the room rather than the one hiding in the background? In other words, why is government always the most important factor for the debate? Why isn’t the individual considered more important?

Think about it this way. If we go back to the original foundation theories of government and agree that people came together in a Hobbesian fashion to escape from our evil surroundings, we understand that we then gave up a little bit of our freedom to achieve security. Now, no matter whether you buy Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau, at no point did we ever really give up the original reason for getting together, meaning that we got together because it was mutually beneficial to us, NOT because we were all desiring to create a government. At no point did the foundation of government ever supercede our reason for creating government. In other words, those who create a government are always more important than the government itself, not the other way around. Yet, in every one of these arguments, especially the one put forth by Sahadi, government is the reason we do the things we do, so that we are required to sacrifice at the altar of government, instead of the other way around.

I pay taxes. I’m not rich, but because I am low middle class, I pay money into taxes that really makes an impact on my daily life. The majority of people who pay taxes are like me, lower middle class people who don’t make a lot of money. Any increase in taxes to us hurts big time, yet we’re rarely ever represented in these conversations about taxation and government. Instead, the Republicans represent the interests of the very rich, and the Democrats represent government attempting to fund more money for governmental programs. In a fair world, we’d have another party that actually represented a social class of common people, but we don’t have that in this country. Oh, both sides claim to be that representative, but they never are. They represent their own interests and those interests are never ours.

What it comes down to for the majority of us is a question of how much we value government. I, personally, don’t value government all that much. I see it as a mechanism to keep gangs and drug dealers from killing me on a daily basis. And to be honest, government doesn’t even do that very well. Serious amounts of money are spent on a drug war that fuels this continuous battle between mean streets and the common person, and the common person is rarely seen as the one to which government answers. An example: A few years ago, I was beaten and robbed by gang members who targeted me because of my color. Instead of a serious response to the victim, which you would expect in a case like this, or at least might see on television played by actors who don’t represent real police officers, I ended up in a bizarre situation where two police agencies argued IN FRONT OF ME over which one was responsible for taking the report. Neither one of them wanted the responsibility. Of course, after all was said and done, the culprits were never caught, and I suspect they were never even pursued. Over the next few weeks, before I finally moved across the country to get away from the cesspool that is Hayward, California, I read the blotter reports in the newspapers about how the same individuals were continuing to target citizens in the EXACT SAME AREA EVERY DAY, and even escalating to public buses, convenient stores and train stations. In other words, government didn’t care one bit whatsoever.

Yet, when it comes to taxation, Sahadi believes that if government is starting to fail financially, it is within our requirements to respond immediately and fix it. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Right now, we spend so much money on things that have very little to do with the average American who does pay taxes. Let’s go over a bit of that list.

Wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq: Who benefits from this? Me? I don’t think so. Did I care about freedom in Iraq to begin with? No, not really. I’ve never had contact with anyone from Iraq before. Nor have I had contact with anyone from Afghanistan or Libya. Sure, I buy gas, and some of that comes from some of those places, but if we weren’t fighting a war in these places, we’d still be buying gas from these places regardless. I don’t even suspect it would cost that much more because prices are controlled by OPEC, not tin foil hat dictators.

That pretty much translates to our entire military budget. Yes, it is responsible for protecting America from foreign enemies, but honestly, we’re not actually doing that with our military. We are located in countries that are not ours, fighting for issues that have nothing to do with freedom in the United States. And in order to conduct these wars, we have had presidents (the last two specifically) advocating to suppress our freedoms, which means we’re fighting to lessen our freedoms, which is ironic in its own cynical way. If we were defending America specifically, I’d be happy, but we’re not. We’re pushing agendas of people who are not the lower middle class. And we’re backing up those issues by sending young lower middle class soldiers into wars to support people who rarely serve in the military themselves.

Most governmental agencies that the common person desires are usually handled by the states. My education is handled by the states. The federal government does nothing but institute standards that no one ever achieves. Our federal government has no idea how to educate the youth of America, yet they feel worthy of forcing their standards on the states regardless. I don’t see the value in this. Sure, I can see the value of making sure we don’t teach creationism in school, but nowadays, federal government isn’t even doing that; it’s doing the exact opposite and then fighting with itself over those specific, political standards. Not necessary and not helpful.

Heath care seems like it’s important, but when you threw it into politics, it starts to get useless. Tylor Cowen, in his excellent article, The Great Stagnation, points out that even though the United States spends more money than most countries on health care, we have some of the lowest levels of life-expectancy and our health success rates are dismal at best in comparison to nations that actually spend less of their GDP of health care. Like most governmental issues, we do horrible with our money because we keep believing in American exceptionalism, when we don’t realize that exceptionalism doesn’t always mean better. Part of our problem is that we have a lot of money already in the mix that should be spent better, not a need for more money to be spent on doing the wrong things more often. That last sentence is probably the most significant of this essay but will echo with no one.

In the end, it will come down to partisan drivel politics again where we have people who have a stake in winning an argument over issues that should never be decided by partisan politics. But we don’t seem to care because we’ve gone way beyond caring about what’s important and care more about winning arguments that don’t benefit us even when we do.

As a taxpayer who pays what he believes to be enough taxes, I don’t subscribe to the theory that more money is necessary to fix the problems of bad spending. Unfortunately, the people we have in government are not the best people when it comes to spending wisely; they never have been. Instead, we have the people who are best at convincing people to vote for them because they’re good at making people feel better about themselves, especially when we live in a country of people who should be a lot more critical of their own shortcomings. We’re educating ourselves horribly, we’re grossly overweight, and we let ourselves be ruled by foolish passions over issues that require serious contemplation. But this will fall on deaf ears because we’re a nation of people who likes to hear that we’re great, and when that person comes along who strokes our ego, we’ll vote for him, and we’ll wonder why no one ever does anything about fixing our country. We certainly won’t get the answers from anyone who is paid to tell us what we already keep hearing, but then we’d stop paying them if they didn’t. We’re pretty good at creating vicious circles in this country. Another thing we’re good at, eh?

Explaining the Libyan Conflict to College Students Who Don’t Care

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I’m a college professor who teaches political science to students who generally aren’t interested in the information. It’s a required course, which means you end up with a lot of students who are in the class mainly to fulfill a requirement and then get out. The information is irrelevant to them. It’s not important. It’s information best left to people who deal with that sort of information. Which kind of brings me to an aside. Years ago, I was a counterintelligence agent working in a foreign nation. I was working with some very dedicated people. I had an assistant who was sponging off me, trying to learn everything he could so that one day he could be an agent himself. I remember him asking me one day when we were involved in something that would take a novel to explain (and could have very well qualified for science fiction status) when my assistant turned to me and said: “Aren’t there people in our government who handle these sorts of things?” And my response was, which I’ve never forgotten: “We are those people.” His response was classic: “You really should be getting paid a lot more than you are.”

Which brings me back to teaching college. I was discussing current events of the day, and a student mentioned that we were now attacking Libya and then asked: “I don’t understand why we’re doing it? Why are we attacking?”

This was one of those questions that most people don’t have to deal with because either they’re hip on what’s going on in the world and are more a part of the argument than the reasoning, or they’re part of that group of people who are oblivious to what’s going on in the nation and the world around them, kind of like most college students tend to be. We like to think that college students are the smarter of the young people out there, but quite often they’re clueless, mainly because their interests are still high school interests that have yet to evolve into something more worldly.

So I stood in front of class and tried to bring it back home. We had been talking about the War Powers Act of 1973, that details when a president can and cannot commit troops to war, and as much as I tried to explain it, the questions kept coming up with how a war can actually take place when the resolution basically says that it really shouldn’t. I tried to explain that the War Powers Act was a response to the Vietnam War, where Congress no longer wanted a president to be able to commit the country to war without a resolution of war first, but then also explained that real events in real time were always a test of boundaries, and right now we were going through yet another test of the boundaries set forth by the Act itself. I went through and explained the ramifications of Bush II’s escalation of war from an angered country after 911, and how it had everything to do with the state of the Act today. Little by little, I was able to explain what was going on, but each time I peeled another layer of the political onion, I found yet another raw debate waiting to emerge.

In the end, I was left explaining that events are happening right now in which the future has everything to do with how things play out on a day to day basis, that quite often you couldn’t rely on a textbook or legal definition to reveal what was right and what was wrong. Often, more than sometimes, the events of tomorrow have no predictability because people today are rarely rational, even though political scientists tend to veer towards the rational actor theory (people do what is most natural and, for lack of better word, rational).

It was one student, sitting in the back of the room, texting her friends during the lecture, who offered probably the most poignant question of all. “What will this mean for us in the future?”

And she meant for young people like her, those going through college and trying to create a life for themselves. Realizing the nation was already at war in two other places, the revelation that we might be at war in a third caused a texting student to stop texting long enough to ask what this might mean for her future.

And I had to tell her that I didn’t know. Politics is all about how rational actors respond irrationally to events that often make little sense in a solitary context. It’s why political scientists should never predict, even though they keep trying to do so. All I could respond with was confusion and knowledge of the past, because I realize that nothing in our future is truly new, as we often fulfill the axiom of history repeating itself. What that axiom never points out is that most people don’t have a solid foundation of history to recognize it when it does. You see, most people are like my students in that class, oblivious to the world around them, and equally clueless to the past because they didn’t think it was important enough to study at the time.

My One Day as the Kingmaker of San Francisco

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Me on my usual throne before becoming a kingmaker

Some years ago, I had a pretty unimportant job as an investigator for a major hotel chain. I happened to be in San Francisco, working for one of the properties of that chain, when there was a major political event taking place in the city. The election for mayor was taking place, and this was the evening of the results. The man who was going to be the future Mayor of San Francisco was holding his election rally in the hotel where I was at, so the big convention was taking place in the Grand Ballroom of this hotel.

This meant that everyone that was involved in security needed to be part of the crowd control. As a security investigator, I sort of fell under that umbrella, and while I could have opted out, I figured I’d help out and stood at the top of the escalators where the mayor was holding the big get-together. Well, like most bad television sit-coms, this is where everything sort of fell into place.

It turned out that one of the main advisors to the future mayor was someone I knew. He and I had met at the college where I had gone back to school after getting out of the military. He just so happened to be my physics instructor at the time, and we had gotten along greatly, although that had been a few years ago. Well, he was walking up the escalator with the future mayor, saw me, and immediately steered that future mayor over to me and said: “I wanted you to meet one of the men instrumental in helping you get elected.” And I was then introduced to the future Mayor of San Francisco.

You see, this professor of mine mistook his recognizing of me as a recognition of someone who was actually involved in the campaign. He saw my recognition of him, and his eyes lit up, and he sort of filled in all sorts of false past events because he probably couldn’t remember why he recognized me. I was fine with it, and personally I thought it was kind of funny.

Things sort of escalated from there. The number one man in this mayor’s campaign heard the exchange and immediately looked at this guy in a suit and figured he was important enough to continue a conversation. He pulled me aside and asked me to walk with him into the ballroom, because he wanted to hear my ideas for when the mayor took over the city.

So, not believing this was really happening, I went with him and spent the next half hour outlining what I would do if I was to take over as mayor. The man hung on every singlel word I said.

Then he introduced me to the future mayor to have a small conversation with while we waited for the returns to come in. So I stood there, in front of a lot of very important people, and I outlined what I thought this mayor should do if he became the leader of the city. He listened to every word, asked me a bunch of poignant questions, and then listened to my responses to every one of these questions. I must have spent an hour talking to him before the returns came in, and this man was announced as the next Mayor of San Francisco.

He then turned to me, handed me his business card with his private phone number on it, and then told me to keep in touch, because he valued his friends well.

So, I shook his hand, took a business card from his campaign manager, and then went back to work, helping the security staff take their lunch breaks by filling in for them.

But for that one moment, I was listened to by some of the more important people in the city. They’d never listen to me again, but for a few hours, I was one of them and the one to whom they listened to every word spoken.

I can only hope that I made a difference to the city that one day.

(this is a reprint of one my old articles from last year)

The Dilemma of Action or Non-Action in Libya

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It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that we’re undergoing a fourth wave of democratiziation in the world right now, with the Middle East being the focus of the current spread. However, what’s not being made much of an issue is timing and how important it is to the success of this particular wave.

When Egypt went through the wave, it was already moved forward enough so that the results were conclusive before any real effort had to be applied. It may not have felt that way if you were living in Egypt, but when it comes to waves of analysis, it was a forward moving mechanism that never had much of a chance of a backlash. Some of the other areas of the Middle East have not been so lucky. Libya happens to be one of these more stubborn areas.

Right now, a skirmish is turning into a full blown civil war in Libya. But you wouldn’t know that if you were in any other place than Libya right now. Qaddafi is fighting for political and physical survival right now, and believe it or not, this is really his make or break time for his future as Libya’s leader.

Which brings me to the influence of outsiders, of which the United States is definitely in this category. Right now, Libya is fighting what could be the start of its civil war, but without assistance from outside, the rebel forces fighting right now might not last much longer. As with many independence movements in the past, western nations now have a chance to influence the future of a nation that is on its way to throwing off the chains of authoritarianism. The important question is: Should the west get involved at all?

Think about that question for a moment because the answer has a lot of huge implications that don’t often get brought up until it is too late. Right now, the United States, and other western governments, can probably make a significant difference by establishing a no-fly zone over Libya and then by escalating to providing assistance to rebel forces, either through supplies and/or through direct action.

But should we? If our sole purpose in life is to develop and establish democracy anywhere we can, then the answer would be pretty obvious. But is that our purpose? Or is our purpose to be completely self-serving, assisting only the interests that directly benefit our nation and its prosperity? Believe it or not, there are many arguments for both sides. In the end, whatever path we choose, it must benefit us in some way, or it’s not a logical path to choose in the first place.

There is a logical argument to not becoming involved at all, even if one is inclined to recognize potential benefits of democracies everywhere. And that’s the axiom that eventually all people are going to have to rise up themselves and throw off the chains of oppressors for themselves. It was the argument used against George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq, claiming a nation-changing strategy was in the best interests of the United States; his detractors claimed that if Iraqis really wanted freedom, it was something they were going to have to pursue themselves, not have handed to them on a silver platter.

The argument is simple. If a people are given a democracy and there is no historical framework for embracing democracy, chances are pretty good that in very little time they will throw it away in the name of security rather than freedom, kind of a reverse Benjamin Franklin-ish claim. However, if they are already embracing the foundations of what leads towards democracy, then the theory is that they don’t need us to push them in that direction because like entropy, they’re going to pursue it themselves as a natural process anyway. It just might take them a little longer than we would have wanted had we pursued the strategy ourselves.

So, using this theory, we would have to argue that the future for Libya could be democracy if its people are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring themselves to that situation. If Qaddafi succeeds in suppressing it, then they weren’t ready for it in the first place. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually pursue and receive it. They just weren’t ready at this time.

That’s all fine and dandy if you’re talking theoretics and don’t feel people deserve freedom because not enough of them are capable of achieving it yet. If the opposite approach is valid, meaning that people deserve freedom regardless of the forced servitude status they are currently in, then all means necessary should be used to pursue that state of democracy. This secondary argument points out that slavery is not a positive circumstance for any people just because the dominators have more guns and means to keep their slaves in check. I don’t think anyone would argue that forced slavery is a “good” that any wise people should be living within, and that any means necessary should be enforced to make sure that no one is ever forced into circumstances like that, especially if there is a larger, democratic power out there willing to enforce the idea that freedom is a right for all.

So, the question really narrows down to where we stand on this particular issue. Are we at a point in our own growth that we recognize the inalienable right of all people to live in a society where they are free to choose, or are we still of an older mentality, where we support only what benefits us personally and pretty much cast everyone else out to the idea of every man for himself, until that person can achieve his own better means through personal sacrifice?

I don’t really have the answer to that, but I can point out one thing that is most significant and crucial to the conversation. If we’re going to do something, we need to do it now, because if we wait any longer, the window of freedom will close, and then it all falls back to being talking points and theory.

But what do I know? Really.

The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Why It Should Matter

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Sometimes it takes a bit more than a flag

Years ago, political theorist Samuel Huntington postulated that the United States was the starting moment in popular freedom that he called the three waves of democratization. Essentially, his theory pointed out that governments moved from authoritative types to popular movements that eventually led to democratic institutions. The first wave was the initial American Revolution, which led to a number of others to follow, including the French Revolution. Then the second wave occurred shortly at the end of World War II, where all sorts of former colonies were given their freedom (or they just took it). Finally, the third wave was at the end of the communist period of expansion, culminating in the fall of the Berln Wall.

Huntington’s theory only predicted three waves, but it appears that we are finally hitting what could easily be considered the fourth wave of democratization, something that I’m sure Huntington would have concurred with, but had not predicted in his original supposition. With Yemen leading into Egypt, there stands to be a possibility that we’re about to see a resurgence of democracy efforts in the Middle East, something that, like most revolutionary movements, is rarely predicted correctly or even expected until it happens.

While it’s academic and fun to point these things out, there are some other lessons that follow from Huntington’s theory that we really should be focusing on because if we fail to recognize them, we run the risk of some pretty crappy circumstances happening, only because we failed to learn from history, a problem we’re quite capable of falling into on a regular basis.

First, it is important to recognize that with every wave comes a backlash, a resurgence in anti-democratization. This often happens because the “new” democracy realizes that not all is as green on the other side of the yard as one previously believed. In other words, just because you end up in a democracy doesn’t mean you end up with positive results in your economy and government. After the first wave, the French fell back into authoritarianism with Napoleon, and for many years, they fell back and forth between democracy and dictatorship. When the second wave occurred, there was a move from dictatorships to democracy and then a number of fights to keep governments from falling back into dictatorships and communism, such as with Greece and Italy. In the third wave, the back and forth happens on an almost daily basis, mainly because we’ve just recently left that time, and the events still sting upon us today.

This should be important to point out because if these new “democracies”, such as Egypt and Yemen (should they become democracies) have every strong possibility of falling into authoritian nightmares as well. People are fickle, and it doesn’t take much for them to decide they aren’t happy with the speed of their results.

So, what lessons should we take from this fact so that we understand the future? Well, first of all, we need to recognize that democracy is not always going to lead to wonderful circumstances. This means that if we embrace whatever countries emerge from the ashes, we need to be honest with them and let them know that things aren’t always so rosy in this atmosphere, and support them regardless of whatever means they decide are most important to them at that time.

Which brings us back to us. One of the biggest problems the United States has in the world is that we’re constantly struggling to support democracy and to support what’s best for the United States. For years, we supported dictators who fought against democracy mainly because those dictators were capable of providing economic and political benefits to the United States. We don’t have that luxury whenever we support the idea of democracy in the world. If we want to support emerging democracies, sometimes we have to understand that they’re not always going to be beneficial to the United States. While democracies don’t tend to go to war against each other, they also don’t have to emerge as the best of friends. We sometimes don’t understand that.

The very near future is going to be interesting because the United States has all sorts of different ways it can respond, and historically we’re not very good at responding in the best of ways. If we’re all for democracy for the world, we need to understand that some of those democracies might not be our friends. So we have to measure whether we our supporting the institution of democracy or our own best interests. Sometimes, the two are hand in hand; other times, they’re mutually exclusive.

Either way, there is a fourth wave that appears to be starting right now, and we have every opportunity to be a part of it or to stand on the side lines and watch it happen. But it’s going to happen regardless of whether or not we want it to happen. Standing in its way is like standing in front of a tank with a flower in your hand. It worked one time in China, but many times before it resulted in a dead villager and a smashed flower. What’s important is to know when to stand your ground and when to let the river flow down its natural channel.

Hopefully, we make the right choice this time around.