Tag Archives: stagnation

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?

The Future of America is in its Past

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In case you haven’t noticed it lately, America has stagnated and isn’t really moving forward anymore. I know most people don’t want to face that possibility, and most people reading this (which means anyone aside from my stuffed animals and imaginary friends) will probably just ignore it and hope for the best. Unfortunately, we’re a bit beyond that option, and even though most people will attempt to embrace that plan, we’re kind of screwed if we do.

You see, according to Tyler Cowen’s thesis, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, we’ve pretty much exhausted all of our free ranges for expansion and exploration, leaving us with pretty much nothing but what we already have. And America was never designed around resting on its laurels; it was designed to expand and develop out, something it can’t do if there’s nowhere else left to go. Now that we’ve entered this inevitable recession, we’re hitting a point where we start to realize that there’s nowhere else for us to go, and that all of those jobs that we expect to come back might just not, and thus, we’re going to have to figure out how to make lemonaide out of already eaten apples. Yeah, I’ve run out of metaphors, similes and allusions. I’m a lot like my country.

Americans live in a system that promises that anyone can do wonders with little as long as that someone is willing to put forth a bit of elbow grease. Unfortunately, that’s kind of a lie, something we’ve been telling each other for generations, even though the lie relied on a lot of extra room to grow that we figured would always be there for expansion. Once that land started running out and the resources as well, we felt we could keep telling the stories long enough to pull a bait and switch, figuring no one would live long enough to really ask any important questions, at least not before we retired and/or died first. Well, we’ve reached the saturation point of that possibility, so now we’re kind of stuck in a future that relies on the lies of the past never being called, like markers in a poker game where we’ve been holding two aces, hoping its the best hand in the game, even though someone else may have had three twos showing all along. Yeah, more bad analogies, metaphors and similies. I’m just full of it today. Or them. Whatever.

Which leaves me with an observation that is probably important because we’re now hitting a point where we’ve already been called on our bluff. Everyone wants to see the hands of the cards we played, and all of the money is already on the table. Man, I’m just going to push this bad analogy all the way to the bank.

So what do we do? We’re in the middle of the unending recession, and we’ve been pushing forward with the belief that it had to end eventually because that’s what recessions tend to do. But if our economy doesn’t really have the power to pull us out of the doldrums, then where do we go from there? What if the recession we’re in happens to be the harbinger of doom that we should have been expecting from the beginning? What if all we have left is that Pandoran conclusion and hope just isn’t enough? Where does a rapidly expanding nation go if there’s no more room within which it can expand?

Part of the solution was the possibility of an untapped area of manifest destiny that offered a never-ending canvas for exploration. By that, I mean the Internet and the ever-expanding territory of a cyber universe. Unfortunately, even that has its limits, as we’ve realized that eventually everything explored in that world has to have some ties to the old world as well. While it might be fascinating to think one could live within a cyberworld, in reality, one still has to maintain a certain existence within normal society, even if to fulfill certain Maslowian needs. Forever expansion means little if someone still has to eat, drink and sleep in normal civilization. The days of Matrix-like exixtence are not yet achievable, so we’re still stuck with having to full basic, simple needs.

Which leaves us with having to find ourselves new frontiers in a walled garden of our own civilizations. The United States could offer endless expansion in the days of praries that went on forever, but once we hit the Pacific Ocean, we started to limit our ability to travel further. Now, everything has been spoken for, so any further expansion comes at a step backwards, a sort of inward despansion, for lack of better word. Much as cell growth is halted and the cells begin to collapse within themselves, feeding off one cell to sustain another, our future is now a tendency to cave in on our progress and trade resources amongst our already established infrastructure as we consolidate and seek to find new frontiers within those already explored. Our future expansion then becomes within, rather than out, mainly because we are without.

If we’re going to survive this change in perspective, we need to realize that we can no longer cannibalize upon outside resources to which we no longer have access. For territory, we must look at that which we already control. For fuel, we can no longer just take from nations that have weak military forces as the world is becoming savvy to that approach and compensating to it as well. We are going to have to consolidate amongst our own people to determine new ways to fuel our movement by either designing new technologies that allow us to use our own resources or to lessen our movement. The simple endothermic physics involved should go without saying, but we’re often not that intelligent when it comes to such matters.

If we’re ever going to figure out our future, we need to look to the rest of the world and see how it has compensated for our future situation already. When Europe ran out of space, it sent colonists to the new world to explore. We are a result of just that. However, when we rebelled and declared ourselves independent, we cut off an avenue of expansion for Europeans, and thus, forced them to realize that their expansion was forever finished, that they would have to learn to live with what they already had. We didn’t think about their reactions or thoughts because we were too busy thinking about how unique we were in comparison to the rest of the world. But in reality, all we were was lucky enough to still have room to grow. Now, we don’t.

So, our future should very much be the same future that was faced by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. When they ran out of space to explore, they consolidated. They began to move back over themselves and create from within. They didn’t just stagnate and disappear as we seem to think will happen to us if we stop expanding and growing. If we’re smart, and sometimes we can be, we would realize that we need to start looking to our future by examining what others like us did in the past. If not, we’re going to continue to try to expand as Germany tried to do in the 1930s, before the rest of the world rose up and stopped them. We might not see ourselves in this light, but if we believe that our expansion is never-ending, and we see ourselves as exceptional to other nations, it’s hard not to see us moving that way. That’s never a good thing.

Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will really listen, and we’ll go that direction regardless of any common sense or rational thinking. American exceptionalism relies on the very nature of believing in irrational outcomes to rational thinking. Think of it as a game theory where the result is an expectation of the highest payoff with the least possible chance of happening, but expecting it nonetheless. That’s kind of where we are today. I’d say more but American Idol is coming on soon, and we all know what’s more important.