Defunding Certain Police…

One inevitable result of November’s election will be the failure of any effort–at least in the short term– to make the rich pay their fair share of the national budget. Instead, we will see another gift to the super-wealthy, as the Trump administration rewards its billionaire donors with further tax cuts.

In all likelihood, that gift to the richest among us will be accompanied by cuts to the IRS budget. That budget was finally increased under Biden, in an effort to allow the agency to do its job. Ironically, it is the GOP that really wants to “defund the police”–in this case, the folks policing compliance with tax laws. Republicans have led the decades-long effort to defund the agency, ensuring that there will be fewer audits for the very rich. (Back in the 1990s, the IRS audited more than 20 percent of estate tax returns, but more recently it has been able to audit fewer than 4 percent.)

Congressional Republicans cut $20 billion for law enforcement at the I.R.S. in a recent spending bill. I guess GOP opposition to “defunding the police” depends upon which police you’re proposing to defund…

Policies that confer favorable tax rates (and ensure limited enforcement of those on the books) have a number of negative consequences. There is, of course, the matter of fundamental unfairness–I still remember when Warren Buffett pointed out that he paid taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. But there are notable, negative social consequences as well, as a site called “Fight Inequality” enumerates.

The most important rationale for a wealth tax is to reverse the age-old trend of rising inequality. Wealth taxes are meant to move society in the opposite direction, that of promoting equality. Economist Jomo Sundaram stresses the need to “get more revenue from those most able to pay while reducing the burden on the needy.”

Surprisingly, both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (WB-IMF) have come out in support of a wealth tax to counter rising global inequalities. This surfaced in a joint WB-IMF conference on Oct. 19, 2021, which noted “the persistence in income inequality” and concluded that a “progressive tax policy is one of the prime tools for addressing such inequality.”

The mere fact of inequality does not, in and of itself, justify imposing a greater tax burden on wealthy taxpayers. Rather, it’s the results that flow from that inequality. Social unrest is one: many uprisings seen around the globe over the past few years have been triggered by resentment of corporate greed, and the accompanying disproportionate exercise of economic and political power–the creation of plutocracies at odds with democratic principles.

Research tells us that systems of significant inequality are incompatible with social stability. 

The bias in our tax code and especially the fact of lax enforcement against wealthy tax evaders is a major assault against the rule of law, which rests on the premise that the rules apply equally to everyone. (That is particularly damaging at a time when Trump’s escapes from accountability have already undercut  that premise.)

The richest people are also notorious for rampant tax evasion.

The world’s top billionaires, particularly the owners of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix have avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes by transferring their wealth to tax havens outside the United States where they also set up shell companies.

Researches have revealed that tax rates by the top billionaires like Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Elon Musk range from 0.10% to 3.27% while corporate tax rates hover at 35%.

It isn’t just the U.S.

In the Philippines, the richest are not necessarily the top income taxpayers. The Department of Finance’s Tax Watch service showed that for 2012, “only 25 out of the 40 richest Filipinos (as reported by Forbes) are on the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s (BIR) list of top individual taxpayers.”.

Even when identified and charged accordingly, rich tax evaders are also able to escape prosecution or penalties. The BIR’s “Run After Tax Evaders” project has a pitiful accomplishment record. Out of 929 cases against tax evaders from 2005 to December 2018 with total tax collectibles of P148.35 billion, only 14 have been resolved, with only 10 convictions.

It’s difficult for most of us non-billionaires to understand the levels of greed involved, the apparent need for constant acquisition–the grasping for more, more, more. When I was growing up, my mother used to comment that, rich or poor, one could wear only one pair of pants at a time. Presumably, the rich can only sail on one yacht at a time…

There’s a lot wrong with our society today. Tax policy isn’t the reason for all of it, but it’s a big part of the problem. 

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America: The Tower Of Babel

An article I read recently in the Atlantic compared today’s United States to Babel. 

The Genesis story of the Tower of Babel is a tale about a mythical time when all people on Earth spoke the same language. They decided to build a great tower reaching up to the heavens. God, seeing their project as evidence of pride, confused their languages so they could no longer understand each other. That lack of ability to communicate caused them to abandon the unfinished tower and disperse across the Earth.

“Babel”  means “confusion” in Hebrew, and references to the “Tower of Babel” are often used as a shorthand for our very human miscommunications and misunderstandings.

Trump did not destroy the tower, but he exploited its fall.

He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

So much of our current dysfunction as a society is a result of the current, fragmented state of an information environment that encourages people to indulge confirmation bias and reject inconvenient realities–an environment in which propaganda and conspiracy theories thrive. (Not that what we call “legacy media” is exactly covering itself with glory…) The result is that people live in alternate realities and are increasingly unable to communicate.

That mutual incomprehension doesn’t just infect our political life.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people.

The article notes that initially–in the 1990s–the Internet, with its chat rooms, message boards, and then its first wave social-media platforms (launched in 2003) were hailed as boons to democracy.

Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?

What holds large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States together? Research has identified three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: “social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.”

Social media has weakened all three.

The article explains how social media has changed over time—and especially since 2009–with the introduction of algorithms that encourage dishonesty and what the author calls “mob dynamics.” The lengthy article is well worth reading in its entirety, but the following observation is at the crux of the (very persuasive) analysis:

The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

Thanks to social media–our very own “tower”–we’re in a fragmented world of hurt, and I don’t see us emerging any time soon.

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Actions We Must Take NOW

Thus far, there hasn’t been a single admirable or even minimally fit Trump Cabinet nominee –but even among the clowns, buffoons and conspiracy theorists who are likely to dominate the upcoming administration, four stand out: Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 

I’ve used the term “resistance” a lot since the election, without suggesting concrete steps to take. But Simon Rosenberg has outlined two in a recent Hopium newsletter, and I heartily endorse them.

  • Call your Senators and Representative to let them know your dissatisfaction with the rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy; and to inform them of your expectation that they will leave it all out there on the playing field to block these profoundly dangerous nominations whether they have a vote on them or not.

  • Contact the White House and ask President Biden to order the FBI to begin background checks into Trump’s nominees immediately and before Trump installs Patel to disable the process.

In case you are unfamiliar with these nominees, Robert Hubbell has offered a description of the terrifying Kash Patel, noting that Patel wants to destroy the FBI while converting it into a weapon of political vengeance.

Patel has promised to “shut down” the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. on his first day as director of the FBI and re-open the FBI Headquarters the next day as a “museum to the deep state.” He said,

“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.”

But he has also threatened to use the FBI to harass journalists and politicians who sought to hold Trump accountable for his crimes. Patel said,

“[W]e’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Patel’s nomination is also an assault on the US intelligence community; the FBI plays a critical role in counterterrorism and intelligence gathering. Hubbell links to a number of other resources for background on Patel.

Speaking of the intelligence community she would head, Tulsi Gabbard is widely considered to be a Russian asset. As the Independent has reported, 

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.

The media has been full of reports about Pete Hegseth–all negative. The New Yorker has issued an updated review of the behaviors that caused him to be forced out of prior positions. Those disclosures–unethical behaviors, sexual misconduct, egregious drunkenness–added to the already widely reported and salacious details of this nominee, who at this point, is not expected to be confirmed.

It is hardly necessary to update my prior comments about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His brain worm is insufficient to explain the conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine fixations he’s embraced. Even Trump’s former FDA commissioner has expressed significant concerns about naming him health secretary.

So here’s the assignment, as Rosenberg outlined it.

We need to inundate our Senators and Representatives with letters, emails, phone calls–any and all methods of communication decrying these nominees and demanding that they be properly vetted. Those of us fortunate enough to have Democratic Senators and/or Representatives can simply affirm our deep concerns and urge them to do whatever they can to derail what are actually attacks on the agencies involved.

Those of us unfortunate enough to be represented by Republicans have a trickier task. Here in Indiana, for example, we have two Republican Senators. Todd Young is relatively moderate (he’s a policy person and refused to endorse Trump)–letters to him should urge him to do what he probably knows is the right thing, and oppose these unfit nominees. Our other Senator (replacing Trump-complacent Braun) will be Jim Banks, who is certifiable. Banks is a lost cause; he will support anyone Donald Trump wants. Letters to him should set out the demonstrated flaws of these nominees and call on him to explain his support for any of them. Copy the news media with all of it.

Bury them with protests. I’m starting mine now.

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The Institutional Party

I often quote Talking Points Memo, which is one of the most reliable–and intelligent–sources of political reporting on the web. A few days back, the site’s Morning Memo had a very good essay on our era of distrust, which it preceded with what I think was an absolutely perfect characterization of the deluge of diagnosis and advice in the wake of the election as “variously half-baked, hyperbolic, histrionic or merely silly.”

I couldn’t agree more. We’ve been inundated with un-self-aware pontifications and nit-picking, which I’m sure soothed the angst of those issuing these pronouncements, but that generally were–as the essay accurately noted–half-baked, hyperbolic, histrionic and (usually) silly.

The essay then turned to a subject that didn’t fall into any of those categories–widespread public distrust. (A subject I addressed in my 2009 book, “Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence.”)

A key reason that many people are Democrats today is that they’re attached to a cluster of ideas like the rule of law, respect for and the employment of science and expertise, a free press and the protection of the range of institutions that guard civic life, quality of life and more. On the other side, say we have adherents of a revanchist, authoritarian politics which seeks break all those things and rule from the wreckage that destruction leaves in its path. So Democrats constantly find themselves defending institutions, or “the establishment,” or simply the status quo. Yet we live in an age of pervasive public distrust — distrust of institutions, leaders, expertise. And not all of this distrust is misplaced. Many institutions, professions, and power centers have failed to live up to their sides of the social contract.

In short, Democrats are by and large institutionalists in an age of mistrust. And that is challenging place to be.

It sure is. The essay pointed out that defending an institution shouldn’t include defending flawed examples of that institution. A free press, for example, is a vital institution in democratic systems. Democrats largely agree that it’s critical to support the press rather than tear it down. But that has often meant supporting and protecting flawed examples that routinely shortchange them on basic fairness. (The New York Times is a good example. Its coverage of Trump served to normalize a distinctly abnormal–and dangerous– candidate.)

When it comes to the establishment press, I think Democrats need to get used to running against the press. I don’t mean that simply because it’s good politics, though it probably is in many cases. I mean it because in many cases the way establishment press covers political news is very much part of the problem. You can criticize and yes even bash bad news coverage without in any way questioning the centrality of press freedom. A lot of people really seem to think they’re the same thing. They’re not. It’s stupid and wildly counterproductive to think otherwise.

But often it’s not as simple as that. The country needs an at least relatively disinterested Department of Justice. It needs scientists and clinicians studying and safeguarding public health. It needs a robust press and all the other infrastructure of civil society that together make up the soft tissue of civic freedom. If one side is saying “Burn it down!” and another is saying “We’re rootin’ tootin’ mad and we have many questions!” well then it’s definitely going to get burned to the ground because there’s no one taking up the defense. So often it’s not that simple.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that different institutions require different approaches. The essay references the people who lament every latest Supreme Court travesty because it reduces faith or trust in the Court. But–as most observers have come to recognize– the current Court is thoroughly corrupt. “Respect for the Court’s decisions and the Court itself is a problem to be solved, not a rampart or castle wall to be reinforced.”

Being the party of institutions in an age of distrust is an inherent challenge. It’s at the heart of why Democrats often think and talk in ways that don’t connect, break through to big chunks of the electorate. Democrats aren’t going to stop being the party of institutions because they want the rule of law; they want elections where votes are counted; they want real medicine over quacks. This is the foolery of those people whose response to the election is to fire Democrats’ voters. That’s not how anything works. But being a party of institutions and expertise in era of pervasive distrust is, again, an inherent challenge. You don’t surmount that challenge without giving the issue some real time and thought.

Yep.

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Getting Hortatory

My friend and occasional co-author Morton Marcus recently sent me the following:

Hortatory: Definition: giving exhortation or advice; encouraging someone to take a particular course of action
Origin: from the Latin word “hortatorius” meaning “encouraging”
Example: The coach gave a hortatory speech to the team, urging them to give their all in the upcoming game.

Giving exhortation or advice is at the core of what “hortatory” means. It involves motivating or inspiring someone to take action towards a certain goal or objective. This can be done through words of encouragement, counsel or advice. A hortatory speech can be given in different settings, such as in a business meeting, a classroom or a sports team huddle. It is a way to inspire people to aim higher and achieve their desired outcomes. Effective hortatory speeches are often filled with passion, conviction and sincerity, and can be a powerful tool for inspiring others to take positive action.

I’m not sure what this bit of wisdom was intended to convey–whether it was in response to a post, or someone’s comment– but it got me thinking about what I’ve been calling “the resistance.”

A number of people who’ve been advising/considering the options for those of us opposed to the coming full-scale assault on American governance have downplayed the effects of public demonstrations–protests, marches and the like. The central point is that these expressions of anger or disapproval don’t really accomplish anything–that We the People need to apply our energies to more substantive efforts. I don’t disagree with the observation that public dissent by itself is insufficient, but I think it is nevertheless important.

Look at that definition of “hortatory.” 

Widespread expressions of disapproval, whether delivered via letters to elected officials, mass demonstrations, letters to the editor, blog posts, op-eds or other means have important impacts we shouldn’t dismiss: they send a message, and not just to the MAGA folks and Trumpers, many of whom are unaware and dismissive of the extent of public disapproval. Examples of public exhortation help forge community among the people who are participating in other, more scattered acts of resistance. They reassure resistors that they are not alone, that many other people share their belief in American values–especially the rule of law and transparent, competent and ethical governance.

In 2022, the Brookings Institution considered the effects of mass protests. In a study titled “Protest Matters” the focus was on the effects of protests on economic redistribution. Researchers studied whether citizen-led protests were able to nudge governments to increase redistributive efforts of fiscal resources, using evidence from Nigeria. The results were mixed– but overall the results showed that protests did influence fiscal redistribution.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has also looked into the effects of demonstrations. Among other findings, that study found that such protests have been increasing globally.

Mass protests increased annually by an average of 11.5 percent from 2009 to 2019 across all regions of the world, with the largest concentration of activity in the Middle East and North Africa and the fastest rate of growth in sub-Saharan Africa.

Analysis of the underlying drivers of this growth suggests the trend will continue, meaning the number and intensity of global protests is likely to increase.

Protests have resulted in a broad range of outcomes, ranging from regime change and political accommodation to protracted political violence with many casualties.

The study also identified what it called “catalyzing factors” responsible for the trend: (1) the use of technology by protestors and governments alike, (2) the tension between shifting democratic and authoritarian government types, and (3) the need for improved understanding and responsiveness between governments and their citizens.

Some protests have greater impact than others–it turns out that the “how” of a protest is important. A study, titled “Protests: How Effective Are They?” found that three factors were most significant in predicting the success of such mass efforts: Nonviolent tactics, a favorable sociopolitical context, and a large number of participants. (A “favorable sociopolitical context” includes the existence of pre-existing, favorable public opinion, supportive elites, a favorable media environment– and luck.)

There’s a fairly robust academic literature considering the role of mass protests in promoting change, and while most studies don’t use the term “hortatory,” the hortatory element of successful protests was obvious. Those of us who are determined to resist the corruption, incompetence and sheer anti-Americanism of a Trump administration need to include public protest in our arsenal of weapons.

It’s not enough, but we shouldn’t dismiss it. It will be an important aspect of the resistance.

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