Nobody Knows Anything
I've wanted to write about politics since the ill-fated conquest of Iraq kicked off in March of 2003.
But beyond a couple dozen letters-to-the-editor of my local newspaper, I never really tried because I felt like I didn't know enough to get it right. I've always been long on opinions and short on facts, and I didn't want to look like a five-year-old trying to elbow his way up to the grown-up table. But recently, my wife put the matter into perspective by quoting the wisdom of the great postmodern philosopher Anthony John Soprano: "nobody knows anything."
The sprawling machinery of American politics has so many moving parts that nobody has all of the information. No one really knows exactly what game is being played, or by what rules, or by how many players, or where all of the pieces are on the board. And yet everyone else feels perfectly justified in pontificating their own personal best guesses as if they were the objective, unassailable truth.
I realized that I'm not really all that much less informed than anyone else. I am, in fact, more informed than many, and I have the threefold advantage of having a desire to be informed, a willingness to get informed, and the integrity to be honest about the information I find. I won't pretend that my opinions will always be objective, unassailable, or in some cases even true.
They are only my opinions, after all.
So I've been following the debt ceiling "discussions," such as they are, about as well as any other armchair politologist. And consequently, I've learned a couple of things in the last few weeks that have nothing to do with America's public debt.
First among these revelations is that I could never be President, and not just because I belong to the most unelectable minority in the United States (I couldn't even hold public office in Maryland, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, my own birthstate Pennsylvania, and my current state-of-residence North Carolina). What I discovered is that I couldn't hold the office of the presidency because there is a limit to my courtesy, and John Boehner has barrel-rolled across that line.
For instance: if I were the President, and I, in the interest of getting a debt deal done, had offered to make cuts to programs I had previously promised not to cut, and some tone-deaf mouthbreather like John Boehner had the gall to announce publicly that his congressional clique had no intention of considering tax increases as part of a bargain, my next presidential press conference would include a statement to this effect:
"Mr. Boehner may have been too busy pounding his chest to realize that he is going to consider tax increases. If he thinks that I'm going to authorize cuts to programs that don't even affect our deficit just for the fun of alienating the people who elected me, then he's either stoned or stupid. If he expects spending cuts, then he will reciprocate with tax increases on the richest 3% of Americans. If he really does want to shelter the most affluent citizens to the detriment of the other 97% of the country, then I'm not authorizing any cuts. His call."
So, yeah: I couldn't be President. Or maybe I could. Maybe that's what we need. How else do you deal with hardliners but with a hardline of your own? Because congressional Democrats aren't being unreasonable. When they talk about tax increases for the superrich, they're not even talking about
making them pay more than the rest of us. They're only talking about making them pay as much as the rest of us. These are people making billions of dollars in profits each year while the rest of the country circles the economic drain, and they are rewarded with loopholes that allow them to pay a fraction of the taxes on their income that the rest of us have to pay. Closing just one of these so-called "carried-interest" loopholes would bring in an additional $4-billion dollars per year from just 25 people.
Just by asking these multibillionaires to pay what the rest of us pay.
The argument runs that these men are the captains of industry. That requiring them to pay the same taxes as ordinary citizens are required to pay would stifle economic growth because these are the men that create jobs. Of course, that ridiculous concept only works in theory, and then only barely. If it worked in practice, the economy wouldn't have spiraled out of control during exactly the period that hedge-fund managers have been driving dump-trucks filled with cash through this particular loophole.
Part of the problem is the appalling Supreme Court ruling in CU v. FEC which, in short, gave corporations carte blanche to spend as much money as they wanted promoting their candidate of choice into office. Initially, I didn't have a problem with the ruling; I figured, rightly, that all the money in the world doesn't convince voters to vote for a candidate. But the ugly ramification of that decision is that once candidates do get elected, they wind up more beholden to the corporations that paid for their campaigns than to the voters that voted them into office, and they're more likely to go to the mattresses for those corporations to the detriment of their constituents.
I'm not going to pretend that I understand this country's byzantine taxation system. But I do understand people. And I understand that the type of person who wants billions of dollars, and is willing to do what it takes to get billions of dollars, doesn't give it up willingly. People don't become billionaires by giving away money. If those people aren't required to pay what the rest of us pay, they won't. They'll keep it, and they'll use their resources to find ways to shelter it so they have to pay even less in taxes.
They'll squirrel it away in off-shore and overseas accounts while men like John Boehner and Eric Cantor steer the American economy straight off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.
But beyond a couple dozen letters-to-the-editor of my local newspaper, I never really tried because I felt like I didn't know enough to get it right. I've always been long on opinions and short on facts, and I didn't want to look like a five-year-old trying to elbow his way up to the grown-up table. But recently, my wife put the matter into perspective by quoting the wisdom of the great postmodern philosopher Anthony John Soprano: "nobody knows anything."
The sprawling machinery of American politics has so many moving parts that nobody has all of the information. No one really knows exactly what game is being played, or by what rules, or by how many players, or where all of the pieces are on the board. And yet everyone else feels perfectly justified in pontificating their own personal best guesses as if they were the objective, unassailable truth.
I realized that I'm not really all that much less informed than anyone else. I am, in fact, more informed than many, and I have the threefold advantage of having a desire to be informed, a willingness to get informed, and the integrity to be honest about the information I find. I won't pretend that my opinions will always be objective, unassailable, or in some cases even true.
They are only my opinions, after all.
So I've been following the debt ceiling "discussions," such as they are, about as well as any other armchair politologist. And consequently, I've learned a couple of things in the last few weeks that have nothing to do with America's public debt.
First among these revelations is that I could never be President, and not just because I belong to the most unelectable minority in the United States (I couldn't even hold public office in Maryland, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, my own birthstate Pennsylvania, and my current state-of-residence North Carolina). What I discovered is that I couldn't hold the office of the presidency because there is a limit to my courtesy, and John Boehner has barrel-rolled across that line.
For instance: if I were the President, and I, in the interest of getting a debt deal done, had offered to make cuts to programs I had previously promised not to cut, and some tone-deaf mouthbreather like John Boehner had the gall to announce publicly that his congressional clique had no intention of considering tax increases as part of a bargain, my next presidential press conference would include a statement to this effect:
"Mr. Boehner may have been too busy pounding his chest to realize that he is going to consider tax increases. If he thinks that I'm going to authorize cuts to programs that don't even affect our deficit just for the fun of alienating the people who elected me, then he's either stoned or stupid. If he expects spending cuts, then he will reciprocate with tax increases on the richest 3% of Americans. If he really does want to shelter the most affluent citizens to the detriment of the other 97% of the country, then I'm not authorizing any cuts. His call."
So, yeah: I couldn't be President. Or maybe I could. Maybe that's what we need. How else do you deal with hardliners but with a hardline of your own? Because congressional Democrats aren't being unreasonable. When they talk about tax increases for the superrich, they're not even talking about
making them pay more than the rest of us. They're only talking about making them pay as much as the rest of us. These are people making billions of dollars in profits each year while the rest of the country circles the economic drain, and they are rewarded with loopholes that allow them to pay a fraction of the taxes on their income that the rest of us have to pay. Closing just one of these so-called "carried-interest" loopholes would bring in an additional $4-billion dollars per year from just 25 people.
Just by asking these multibillionaires to pay what the rest of us pay.
The argument runs that these men are the captains of industry. That requiring them to pay the same taxes as ordinary citizens are required to pay would stifle economic growth because these are the men that create jobs. Of course, that ridiculous concept only works in theory, and then only barely. If it worked in practice, the economy wouldn't have spiraled out of control during exactly the period that hedge-fund managers have been driving dump-trucks filled with cash through this particular loophole.
Part of the problem is the appalling Supreme Court ruling in CU v. FEC which, in short, gave corporations carte blanche to spend as much money as they wanted promoting their candidate of choice into office. Initially, I didn't have a problem with the ruling; I figured, rightly, that all the money in the world doesn't convince voters to vote for a candidate. But the ugly ramification of that decision is that once candidates do get elected, they wind up more beholden to the corporations that paid for their campaigns than to the voters that voted them into office, and they're more likely to go to the mattresses for those corporations to the detriment of their constituents.
I'm not going to pretend that I understand this country's byzantine taxation system. But I do understand people. And I understand that the type of person who wants billions of dollars, and is willing to do what it takes to get billions of dollars, doesn't give it up willingly. People don't become billionaires by giving away money. If those people aren't required to pay what the rest of us pay, they won't. They'll keep it, and they'll use their resources to find ways to shelter it so they have to pay even less in taxes.
They'll squirrel it away in off-shore and overseas accounts while men like John Boehner and Eric Cantor steer the American economy straight off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.