Tag Archives: Republicans

More Budget Baloney From a Leading Political Party

Posted on by

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, issued his proposed federal budget yesterday. The Republican majority on the Budget Committee is expected to approve it. Fortunately, even if the full House of Representatives approves it, the Senate won’t.

Nevertheless, Ryan’s budget is worth knowing about. It will influence the budget Congress eventually agrees on and it offers yet another clear statement of the Republican Party’s insane priorities. 

In brief, the Ryan budget calls for a big tax cut on high incomes, a lot more spending on the military, and a lot less spending on programs like Medicare and food stamps. In addition, Ryan would repeal the Affordable Care Act, even though there are now some 10 million people who have health insurance because of that law (via private insurance or Medicaid).

Ryan claims his budget will eliminate the federal deficit in ten years, despite the tax cuts and increased military spending, because he makes stuff up.

One part of the Republican budget document deals with Social Security. I plan to write more about that in a future post, but for now, consider this amazing sentence from page 66: 

Any value in the balances in the Social Security Trust Fund is derived from dubious government accounting. 

The Treasury Department says the government bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund were worth almost three trillion (not billion, but trillion) dollars at the end of December and were paying the Trust Fund an average interest rate of 3.6%. But, according to the authors of the Republican budget document, those bonds are basically worthless. They’re an accounting fiction. Such is the financial insight demonstrated by Congressman Ryan and his Republican colleagues as they go about planning our economic future. 

Republicans on Supreme Court Make Plutocracy Official

Posted on by

In their latest effort to make America’s status as an oligarchy (sub-class plutocracy) official, the five Republicans on the Supreme Court have now decided that wealthy people will be able to give as much money as they want to political parties and groups of candidates. According to the New York Times, the Republicans ruled that:

Overall limits of $48,600 by individuals every two years for contributions to all federal candidates violated the First Amendment, as did separate aggregate limits on contributions to political party committees, currently $74,600.

So, rich people will now be able to give millions of dollars every two years to the political party of their choice, without going to the trouble of setting up supposedly independent political action committees. In addition, rich people will now be able to give millions of dollars directly to candidates every two years, so long as they don’t give any candidate more than $2600 for a single election.

The $2600-per-election limit wasn’t killed off today, but it will be eliminated as soon as the Republican justices gets their chance. That’s because the Republicans on the Court claim, in the Chief Justice’s words, that “there is no right in our democracy more basic than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.” And by “participate”, of course, the Court means “use one’s financial resources to elect and influence as many politicians as possible”.

It’s now official, therefore, that the most basic right in our democracy is no longer the right to vote, a right that should belong to rich and poor alike. Now the most basic right is to “participate”. Anatole France once pointed out that “in its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” In the same way, the law in the United States now allows rich and poor alike to give millions of dollars to the candidates of their choice and buy as much political advertising as possible, all in the name of freedom of speech.

Treat money as speech, discourage low-income voters from voting (as Republican politicians are doing in every state they control), and do whatever possible to encourage financial inequality (let’s get rid of the death tax!). It’s an amazingly clear agenda. Replace government of the people with government of the few and make sure the few are the rich!

Us, Them and Incentives Again, But Briefly

Posted on by

Remember when Clinton was President and the federal government briefly ran a surplus? The Republican response was: “Cut taxes!” Their justification was: “It’s our money, not the government’s!”. Since then, the surplus having been eliminated, the Republican response has been: “Cut taxes! That will lead to growth and reduce the deficit!” Which isn’t completely relevant to “Us, Them and Incentives”, but I’m getting there. It’s another example of how adherence to a political ideology can lead to inconsistency, especially when you try to justify what you already want to do. 

In writing about the Republican approach to incentives this week (less income for the rich will make them less productive, but less income for the poor will make them more productive), I may have been unfair. Maybe the Republican position makes sense based on the relative economic success of the rich and the poor.

After all, rich people are doing well, you might say, so they must be doing things right. Therefore, let’s reward them. That way they won’t get discouraged and stop doing things right. Poor people, however, aren’t doing well, so they must be doing things wrong. Obviously, we shouldn’t reward them for doing things wrong. And, if we don’t reward them, maybe they’ll start doing things right. In a capitalist nutshell, economic incentives should be given to productive people, and economic disincentives should be given to unproductive people.

This approach sounds an awful lot like social engineering, which the Republicans are supposed to be against. Putting that aside, however, the question is whether it’s a good idea to make life harder for people who are struggling and make it easier for people who aren’t. If you view life as a total morality play, in which good people prosper and bad people don’t, maybe it does makes sense. That is, we all know, the reason for heaven and hell (which St. Thomas Aquinas understood so perfectly).

But people are doing well or badly these days, economically-speaking, for lots of different reasons: skills, health, age, location, connections, work ethic, luck, education, competition and so on. In fact, one major hindrance to doing well economically is being poor to begin with (when you’re poor, it’s harder to get around, harder to fit in, harder to stay healthy, and so on). Once we view our fellow Americans as individuals with actual, often difficult lives, not simply as Us and Them, the reasonable response is to help the ones who are struggling, not the ones who are already getting ahead.

(Coming soon, “A Guide to Reality, Part 11”, I hope.)

Us and Them Again

Posted on by

As noted in an update to the post below, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is having their annual convention, which means leading Republican politicians are getting the chance to express their deepest thoughts. So Senator Rubio of Florida got the opportunity to explain why Franklin Roosevelt had it all wrong — we should be very, very afraid.

Also today, Congressman Paul Ryan highlighted the difference between the right and the left by telling the story of a Wisconsin kid who’d prefer bringing his own lunch to school instead of mooching off the rest of us by getting a lunch at taxpayer expense.

Juliet Lapidos of the New York Times points out Congressman Ryan’s underlying, contradictory assumption:

[Ryan] argued that Americans want to work — every bit as much as the Republican Party wants them to work. “People don’t just want a life of comfort,” he said. “They want a life of dignity. They want a life of self-determination”….

In Mr. Ryan’s view, Americans would rather depend on themselves, or their families, than on the government. And yet, in Mr. Ryan’s view, if these same Americans gain access to government programs, they’ll jump at the chance to abandon their responsibilities, effectively exchanging a “life of dignity” for a “life of comfort.”

That doesn’t make sense. If all or most Americans, like the kid in Wisconsin, want their own lunch rather than a government lunch, then the prospect of a government lunch won’t change their behavior.

Ryan doesn’t notice the contradiction, since he thinks of his fellow citizens as Us and Them. On one hand, there are the honorable, hard-working Americans who hate the idea of getting help from the government (you know who they are). On the other hand, there are the dishonorable, lazy Americans who want nothing more than to live off government handouts (you know who they are too).

This is the same point I tried to make recently in a comment on another blog. There is a strange dichotomy between how Republicans expect poor people and rich people to respond to financial incentives:

— People who are struggling should receive as little financial assistance as possible, because helping them will only discourage them from becoming productive members of society. After all, they’re not really motivated to increase their incomes beyond the bare minimum. In their case, therefore, less income will translate into more work, and more income will translate into less work.

— People who aren’t struggling should receive as much financial assistance as possible, especially in the form of lower taxes, because helping them will encourage them to become even more productive members of society. In their case, more income will translate into more work, while less income will translate into less work!

It isn’t fun at all being poor or unemployed, but Republicans believe that making life as difficult as possible for the economy’s losers will convince them to do better. That’s because they’re not like us. They don’t care about improving their situations and they don’t respond to economic incentives the way normal people do.

Less money for the poor, so they will work harder; more money for the rich, so they will work harder. It makes perfect sense!

(Note: I’m going to try to lay off writing about right-wingers for a while. Maybe I’ll try fashion reporting. Or poetry! “There once was a girl from Nantucket, …”)

Republicans and Liberty, Part 4 (the End?)

Posted on by

When I think of what it means to be a Republican economic libertarian, I think of someone I know — call him “Bob”. He is a very affluent periodontist who lives in an enormous house in a beautiful suburb. Some years ago, Bob expressed his outrage over being forced to pay property taxes in support of the local public schools, since his own children were being educated privately. That’s an attitude that perfectly captures the essence of economic libertarianism:

What’s mine is mine and the rest of you, the damn government, shouldn’t take it away from me for something I don’t care about and isn’t doing me any good!

If Bob had read a certain book by another Bob (the late Robert Nozick), he might have expressed his outrage with a brief argument: 

1) It’s the most fundamental principle of morality that people should be treated as ends in themselves, not as means toward achieving someone else’s goals or for someone else’s benefit.
(2) Taking my property against my will in order to benefit other people is treating me as a means, not an end.
(3) When the local government forces me to pay property taxes to fund the local school district, the government is taking my property against my will.
(4) Therefore, the government should not force me to pay taxes to support public schools.

What’s wrong with this argument?

One serious problem is that it depends on a hidden assumption: namely, that the first sentence is not merely an important principle of morality, but the supreme principle that overrides all other moral principles. That’s a questionable assumption. Life, for both philosophers and normal people, is too rambunctious to fit under a single ethical umbrella. There are always exceptions and additional considerations.

When we were teenagers, for example, didn’t we all joke that the Golden Rule doesn’t apply to masochists (you know, do unto others…)? Similarly, imagine an isolated town in Alaska that’s been hit by a dangerous epidemic. The local pharmacist has a drug that will attack the disease but insists on full payment (or 75% of the price or whatever) before distributing his supply. He’s not a bad person — maybe he needs the money because he’s deeply in debt and on the verge of losing his store.

If the single overriding principle of morality is that we should always treat everyone else as an end, not a means, the town’s residents should accept the situation and either come up with the cash or do a lot of praying. Or are they justified in confiscating the drug, distributing it among themselves and watching the pharmacist go bankrupt? Can we apply principle (1) all by itself to solve this problem? I don’t think so. Principle (1), the philosophical basis for economic libertarianism, doesn’t say whose ends are more important when they conflict.

Fortunately, there are other ethical rules that come into play in situations like this (even though those rules aren’t foolproof or all-encompassing either). The British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, if he were available as an ethical consultant, would probably agree that treating everyone as a means, not an end, is a decent enough moral principle. But only because it tends to support a more important moral principle: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. In other words, we should always do what will ultimately result in the most happiness for the most people (including a town full of sick Alaskans and kids going to public school in New Jersey). 

Here’s another problem with this argument. It’s incredibly self-centered. If it’s valid, the principle that people should be treated as ends, not means, applies to those kids at the public school just as much as it applies to my acquaintance Bob. But how can Bob treat those children as ends? A really excellent way would be to pay the taxes that will help them get an education.

In fact, if Bob refuses to help those kids, he seems to be treating them as means, not ends. Some of them will grow up and take jobs in the community, working in stores, or maintaining roads, or performing heart surgery. Will Bob benefit from their labor? It’s true he might directly pay for their services one day, but he’ll also benefit from living in a community that’s safe and prosperous because of the work performed by people he’ll never bump into.

Consider what his life would be like if the few people selling groceries in his town were the only people selling groceries in the state of New Jersey. His town would still be a great place to live if he could find food on the shelves and didn’t mind checkout lines that were 20 miles long.

There’s also a problem with how this argument seems to identify me with my property. How do people acquire property anyway? The French anarchist Proudhon had an opinion: “Property is theft!” How was the first piece of property acquired? It was a long time ago, so we don’t know. But we do know that not one of us begins life as a clean slate and grows up in perfect isolation. The argument above suggests that taking any of my property against my will is a violation of my humanity regardless of where my property came from. That probably sounds plausible to whoever wrote the sentence I quoted in an earlier post, the one that referred to “the sanctity of private property”.

But are property rights sacred? Are they more sacred than anything else, like kindness or compassion? Are property rights so sacred that the tax collector who takes part of your paycheck against your will — for purposes other than the common defense and the maintenance of a free market — is committing a sin or a crime against humanity? Maybe if you think every penny you earn is solely the result of your God-given wonderfulness and had nothing to do with your genes or your upbringing. Or if you identify yourself with your property.

Like it or not, as everyone knows, we are social animals who grow up and survive in communities. Economic libertarianism, however, is a radically individualistic doctrine. It’s also simplistic and atomistic (in the social sense, not the physical sense). It reeks of adolescence.

A teenager, usually a boy for some reason, trying to figure out how to navigate the world, in the process of breaking away from his parents, looks for words that will explain other people and help him feel good about himself. Maybe he makes the mistake of reading Atlas Shrugged instead of The Lord of the Rings or The Brothers Karamazov: 

“Pleasure is all that really matters.”
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
“Poor people are stupid or lazy”.
“If God doesn’t exist, all is permitted.”
“Asking for help shows you’re a loser.”
“When I earn money, I should be able to keep it.”

Taken to its extreme, in fact, economic libertarianism reeks of infancy. We all have to share. That’s what we’re supposed to learn before we get to kindergarten.

Of course, there are probably few economic libertarians who hold the doctrine in its purest form. No doubt there are some who debate the finer points, however, like Russian intellectuals who debated the finer points of communism before the revolution. A wonderful person can have libertarian tendencies along with common sense. It’s all a matter of degree. Where on that chart above should people reside? Where does Senator RP reside? Where do you reside? 

I’m not sure, but I’m proud to say I’m not a Republican or an economic libertarian. I’m also not a “social liberal and fiscal conservative”. That’s too often code for comfortable people who enjoy their station in life while consistently supporting right-wing candidates and policies, the kind that “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted”, not the other way around.  

NOZICK 2

(Photo courtesy of Philosopher Shaming.)