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Sunday, February 20, 2011

GOP Tax Policy and Other Fairy Tales

OK so I know this is a little out of date now, but the point remains worth making.

Let’s talk about the Republican economic hypocrisy. This could be a long litany of the many examples of this (increasing the deficit during every administration since Eisenhower, and by exponentially more than the only 4 Dems to increase it at all since Wilson (in 1913) comes to mind), but no, I just want to mention the recent “taxes kill jobs” obsession that pervades despite all the evidence to the contrary. The tagline of the 2010 election was “jobs jobs jobs” and the causal “tax reduction” cry.  The story goes like this: business aren’t hiring because of “tax uncertainty” so the economy remains sluggish and all those multinational corporations are sitting on obscene piles of cash because they’re just terrified that they might have to face a tax increase – ANY tax increase.
            Let’s start with that statement just by itself and take a whiz-bang tour through federal taxation.[1]
1.      The “tax rate” is actually the marginal tax rate. It’s not the rate that a payor actually pays, it’s the rate applied only to the income in that bracket. So if your marginal tax rate is 20% (I’m making up numbers) because you made $100,001 last year and the 20% tax rate is for the “$100,000 - $150,000” bracket, then you pay 20% tax on that $1. Not on $100,001 -- on $1. Below that you pay exactly what everyone else does on that money. Thusly:
a.       $0 - $20k               5%
b.      $20,001 - $50k      10%
c.       $50,001 - $100k    15%
So if you made $100,001, your taxes will be:
      20,000*5%=1000
      30,000*10%=3000
      50,000*15%=7500
      1*20%=0.20
Total: $11,500.20  (or 11 ½% of your taxable income)
(This is the basic model of how income tax works. Corporate taxes are understandably much more complex, but let’s start there)

Which is the next point. This is NOT “I made $100,001 last year so I pay tax on that.” No you don’t. No one does, and they shouldn’t.  Because when you do your taxes, you take either a standard deduction or itemized deductions.  And the truth is that the higher your tax bracket, the greater percentage of your income is deductions, owing partly to the things that you may be doing with your money (charity, employees, health care, etc.) and partly to the fact that the wealthy generally have lawyers, accountants, and/or tax advisors who are skilled at shuffling income to reduce taxable income. So of that $100,001 you made last year, you may be reporting something like $75,000 in taxable income (again – making up numbers).  So not only are you NOT actually PAYING the 20% tax rate on your income, you’re not paying ANYTHING on a portion of that income to begin with. 
This is even more significant for corporations who, despite endless weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the high corporate tax rates, almost never pay those rates on anything, and often pay nothing at all due to the multitude of loopholes and deductions available.

            Which brings me back to my initial point.  The GOP spent vast sums of corporate money in 2010 to convince people that companies weren’t hiring because the Bush tax cut issue was unsettled. Let’s put aside the absurdity of that for a moment (companies hire who they need to do what they need when they need it based on demand and economic outlook, not based on a largely fictional tax rate) and look at the reality of the landscape.  Lo and behold, the GOP may actually be right about this one. But not for the reasons they’ve been peddling.  Companies may have actually been delaying hiring decisions (in small part) pending the tax package outcome, but consider this: nearly[2] all of the costs of having employees are deductible.  So, in fact, the tax rate has little or no effect on hiring at all, since almost nothing a company pays to an employee (or for them) is taxable. But also consider the impact of a REDUCED tax rate on that same dynamic. The deduction you get for payments to employees is reduced, so the benefit of hiring a tax deduction is diminished.  So what the GOP says is “if they have to pay more taxes, they won’t pay employees” but what businesses are looking at (whether they admit it or not) is “if the tax rate goes UP, the benefit of the deduction is more, but if the GOP cuts the tax rate DOWN, then I won’t get as much of a benefit.”
            Now, let’s get into a little more advanced stuff. The capital gains rate, which was slashed under Bush and is on the table for an increase now. Villainized, of course, as stifling investment. Capital gains tax is paid on investment income like interest or increased value of assets you sold (subject to lots more exclusions, but that’s the idea).  Put them together, and the picture becomes: increase the tax (and thus decrease the incentive to buy assets hoping they will generate income) and increase the tax on taxable income (thus incentivizing deductions) and you’ve got a double-edged sword creating double-edged incentives to hire employees rather than sending money off-shore to foreign banks and investments. 
            So where does that leave us? Besides, of course, with a GOP that has shown absolutely zero interest in doing anything related to jobs or the economy two months into their reign.  It leaves us with the Citizens United decision granting unfettered influence over elections to companies who want to hang onto their cash, send jobs overseas, cut benefits to workers (and hire illegal immigrants for less than that – Smithfield Pork, I’m looking at you), and tell you that it’s all the fault of the people trying to stop these very behaviors by using the tax system to motivate positive behaviors. 
Which is, after all, what tax deductions are all about in the first place. They’re a way to encourage socially beneficial behavior without requiring it. So higher tax rates on imports, on American companies’ overseas operations, and closing loopholes that allow companies to earn billions in profits by taking advantage of American society while paying a fraction of the cost of maintaining that society have always been relevant and proper uses of the tax code.  Unfortunately the GOP has been manufacturing the Kool-Aid that some Democrats seem to be drinking.  And certainly it’s been sold to the public so forcefully that a significant number of Americans seem to be believing this plot.  (Remember? The one that says a 3% increase in the income tax rate kills babies jobs?
            I am reminded of the first tenant of film and TV: suspension of disbelief.  Convince your audience that it’s more fun or beneficial to just lose themselves in the story, and they will follow along with you as you introduce implausible decision points and have bored housewives suddenly become super-spies. I see a similar dynamic here using the economic fear that pervades our country right now. People are looking for a handle on incredibly complex and dynamic situations, and the GOP is right there with a simple, bumper-sticker-worthy answer; it’s the taxes, stupid!  In the frightfully effective strategy of Glenn Beck, they’ve concocted an “C-B = A (and don’t look at anything else” formula that, in isolation, appears to at least make sense.  Even if it’s only a tiny portion of the story and told backwards.


{In the interests of full disclosure, I’m not fully convinced that the tax cuts affected hiring at all either way, but I write this to inject a framework into the conversation and at least introduce the idea.  So please, by all means, disagree. But don’t do it just because of the aforementioned weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, do it because you considered the actuality of the policy and business motivations and other factors. Thank you, and good night.}


[1] I wish to thank BoJack (if you need to know, you know) for teaching me everything I know about tax.  Which may amount to 1/10 of 1% of what there is to know, but considering I knew absolutely nothing before, I owe my knowledge to him.  However, he is not to blame for what I’ve done with that knowledge. All of the facts about operative tax policy are to his credit, but he is not to blame for my opinions about how to use that policy.  Kthxbai.
[2] I say “nearly” and “almost” just to hedge bets and allow a margin of error.  I think payroll taxes paid on employees are not deductible, but I’m not certain about that, and even so, they amount to something like 4% of a portion of salary and are not at issue in the Bush tax package. (BoJack: if you read this, could you clarify the deduction issue?)

Monday, February 7, 2011

Tea Party Feudalism (11/16/10)


            I think it needs to be said that the Tea Party is not only badly out of touch with the reality of America and its own preferred candidates, but they are also desperately deluded about the reality of their own positions.  If Tea partiers spent a fraction of the time considering the policies they advocate as they do on their costumes, some might see that they are not only supporting jaw-droppingly unqualified candidates, but also some very un-American policies.

            The Tea Party is not advocating a return to “traditional American values” in the Disney-fied sense of the oil paintings and great orations related to us in 6th grade history class (if, indeed, they still teach history). They are advocating a return to feudal England where the Haves have everything and the Have Nots die in the street crying “God Save the Queen.”  The real difference? Miniscule and diminishing.  American feudalism is rooted in an increasingly unbalanced “free market” where the brochure says anyone with gumption can succeed and hoard resources unto themselves and their heirs.  The English system, on the other hand, relied solely on family inheritance and ownership of money-making capacity. But the outcome is the same.
            The semi-secret catch in the free market myth is something felt more acutely by minorities, but increasingly by the middle class: generational wealth tips the scales.  Sure, there are the occasional fairy tales of The Guy Who Made It with little more than a dream and some ambition, but these are rare enough to be made into movies (The Pursuit of Happyness, for example). Outside these exceptions – which provide a pointing-place for the Haves as proof that the system works (and therefore that they are better than you) – most Americans are slipping further and further behind.  Meanwhile, the Haves continue to gain, hoarding power at levels that make it possible to build their own advantages into the systems that are then sold to us as a “free market,” disguising the fact that it is rigged to accelerate the funneling of resources right back to the people who made the rules because they had the money.  
            Meanwhile the rest of America is losing resources to those upper echelons, creating a situation where people in the middle class are losing their homes, losing their savings, and being forced to sell anything of value just to stay afloat. This leaves less (if anything) remaining for heirs to inherit, reducing their position and resource pool – and thus reducing the resource pool of their own heirs.  This increasing disparity in generational wealth has been studied as a factor in racial equalization, but it now affects Americans across the board in record numbers.  And there’s no end in sight, as Republicans continue to amplify the American myth and accelerate the redistribution of wealth upwards via protective policies. Not the Land of Opportunity we like to write songs about and give seminars about in other countries.

            Enter the Tea Party. Interestingly enough, made up almost exclusively of Have Nots who are convinced they have made it, and funded by Haves who feed off the ignorance of these self-satisfied minions and continue to tell them that they have made it! They’re American success stories! Why? Not really sure – most of them are unemployed or retired, so the measure of “making it” is a little fuzzy, but hey ... it sounds nice.
            Dressing up in costumes and crying for a return to the age of slavery, oppression of women, wanton pollution, industrialist robber barons, and 16 hour/52 week work lives, Tea Partiers merrily avoid any element of history they didn’t see in the theme park of Colonial Williamsburg, where the actors playing colonists are protected by labor laws, minimum wage, lead-free paint, and health insurance. Y’know, for a society that likes to say “those who don’t learn their history are bound to repeat it,” we’re sure doing a lot more repeating than learning.

            When it comes to the American Dream, we have flirted with it at times (maybe best during the post-war era), but we clearly haven’t gotten it right yet. It may turn out that “live and let live” is anathema to human nature if the let-ees are too different from the let-ors.  Democracy and the great Melting Pot may fade away into an interesting blip on the EKG of political history.  But I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. 

            We may be a young country, but we are a deliberate country.  We didn’t slip into ourselves over centuries of war and takeovers and turnovers and coups; we invaded, we settled, we rebelled, and we designed ourselves a government. Maybe not from whole cloth, but certainly from the better scraps.  Like children are shaped by their parents but destined to shuffle loose, America was informed by her mother (England – for those who slept through history) but set out to forge her own path and drive her own destiny, taking the best and rejecting what didn’t fit our burgeoning self-image. 
            This is why it pains me to hear so many refusing to respect those principles that we developed or imported.  Like hippies who grew up to be conservatives like their parents, leaving the rebellious, free loving, revolutionary spirit behind like faded tie-dyes, we seem to be facing a tide of fear-driven regression from those idealized goals of our collective national youth: liberty and justice for all.  Not for just the white, the male, the moneyed and landed, the Christian, or the heterosexual. ALL. Everyone. All of us. “One nation, indivisible.” 
            Too many voices on the extreme right (Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, Gingrich) are preaching open, and sometimes violent, divisiveness.  With patronizing flattery and manufactured fear, they urge their followers to listen instead of think.  To take up arms instead of joining hands. To point fingers instead of finding solutions. And affirming that whatever unfounded, ignorant, hateful, fear-based opinion you’ve half-formed is the OBVIOUSLY correct/ patriotic/ reasonable/ intelligent/ whatever viewpoint (so don’t bother listening to those Lefty NoGoodNiks who want you to consider consequences or facts).
            I wonder – what would America be like if the founding fathers had embraced this ugly side of human nature, rather than designing a temperate, cooperative system?  I know, I know, they weren’t saints, the system wasn’t perfect, and we’ve made some terrible missteps along the way (Jim Crow comes to mind) and occasionally had some terrible outcomes, but isn’t that what growth is about? It’s not about popping from the womb with a PhD and a perfect soufflĂ© in hand, it’s about falling down and getting back up. It’s about burning your hand on the stove and never touching it again.  It’s about learning from your mistakes and not repeating them.  Where did we lose sight of this? When did we, as a society, decide to throw history to the wind and head breakneck down the perilous and damaged road behind us instead of looking forward and thinking about what we could do better?
            So how about we try the real old-fashioned way of doing things. Let’s stop sniping and digging in our heels to get our way, and actually engage in the debate.  Bring the ideas, recognize that there will be intractable disagreements, and DO THE WORK! Wrestle with the conflict, discuss the differences, and take a legitimate vote. By all means – get worked up! Get mad, get irritated, but USE that to develop your views and ENGAGE in the process. Because that’s where we learn where the weaknesses and failings of our best-laid plans lie.  I will refer readers (reader?) back to my first post regarding social disconnectivity here. Since that’s really why I write these things; so I don’t have to repeat myself.
            Let’s consider what that flag that some people have gleefully wrapped themselves in really means. How this country actually came to be.  Et Mesdames et messieurs, it did not come on a silver platter of handholding and unicorns. It came in the sweltering humidity of a pre-air-conditioning Philadelphia summer. It came with hours and hours of arguing, debating, discussing, handwringing, and disappointment.  It came with a large dose of egos and apocalyptic predictions as well. And yet, the world did not end when someone’s idea got voted (or shouted) down. It has not ended in the 200 years since, despite innumerable other ideas being voted and shouted down.  And whoever you are, if your idea doesn’t make it, don’t be afraid – the world will not end then, either. Even though I admit, I see the harbingers of doom in the increasing valuation of thoughtlessness, selfishness, and intransigence.  And the disturbing number of candidates willing to run on “I’m not that smart and I have no experience, but I’m really, REALLY mad and really REALLY sure I’m right about everything!” platforms.  We used to respect educated, experienced professionals.  Now we call them “elitists” and “establishment” and villainize them for our own lack of understanding and unwillingness to learn.  I wouldn’t hire someone with no experience to build my house or run my business. Why would I hire them to steer my country?  I’m just sayin’.

The Illusion of "Privatized" Government (or - The Government is NOT a business!) (8/12/10)


The Government is NOT a Business!

            There seems to be an endless supply of simplistic complaints about government programs, spending, and accounting along the lines of “if I ran my business that way, I’d be out of business!”  Well, yes.  That’s the idea.  The government is not a business.  It is there to provide the services necessary to underpin society, not to provide profitable commodities.  It is not there to accumulate profits, it runs on tax revenues that fluctuate naturally and necessarily in response to the needs and the capacity of society.  The government “deficit” is an illusory and malleable number that essentially means very little in real terms. The deficit is an attempt to estimate a static number based on very dynamic factors – like a Farmer’s Almanac estimate of the temperature at 3 pm on August 23, 2014 based on this year’s record-high temperatures.  But somehow it’s become a Holy Grail to some parts of the wonkosphere.  Here’s the deal folks – when people aren’t working, they still need to eat and pay the bills.  Thus the need for government support goes up as tax revenue goes down. Voila! Deficit.  Then when those people get back to work, the reverse happens.  Voila! Surplus. 
            I’m not sure when the understanding of the mirror roles of government and private business diverged, but I suspect Sandra Day O’Connor is on to something.  Since retiring from the Supreme Court, she has taken up the cause of re-introducing civics education into the schools.  I truly hope she succeeds, because I hear a de-volution of understanding of how government works, what its goals are, and why the government and the free market occupy separate scales on the weigh-station of society. They (and we) HAVE to understand this, and have to let both operate in their own spheres – and nary the twain shall meet. 
            All unexpected changes in the innumerable economic influences will affect deficits and surpluses, and in both directions.  If the elderly suddenly stop seeking treatment for everything, then the demand on Medicare and Social Security will go down = less deficit.  If foreign nations embrace labor regulation and reduce global labor arbitrage so that manufacturing moves back to America = less deficit. War = more deficit. Drought = more deficit.  These are the natural fluctuations that are addressed by the tax system, not some newfangled boogeyman.  Taxes will go up, the deficit will come down, you put your left foot in and you shake it all about. 
            Our taxes right now are historically low, despite the apoplexy of the GOP and the Tea Partiers, which is contributing to the deficit.  As is the fact that our social need is nearly historically high.  So deficit numbers based on high need for services and low input of taxes are bound to be exaggerated.  Not untrue, just not quite the whole story.  Once our need drops or tax revenue rises, the deficit boogeyman will shrink.  Thus it is, thus it has always been, thus it shall always be.
            Also largely lost in this clamoring cacophony of complaint is the fact that the very “big government” the Tea Partiers claim to detest is up to 30% larger than they know about, largely because of something some call the “shadow government.”  This creepy-sounding phenomenon is a byproduct of elected officials caving to Tea Party-style paranoia and special interests in an unholy alliance of mutual misunderstanding that has given us the privatization of services that should never have even a scent of a profit motive.  The one that gets me is the prison industry.  States and the Feds have outsourced prisons to private companies, ostensibly to “smallen” government.  What has resulted is a profit-driven business that operates on the corporate profit model rather than on the government necessity model.  These companies literally hold people’s lives in their hands – their education, training, future, and present existence depends on being profitable. 
            And where does the constant flow of bodies come from that keeps this profit machine turning? Recidivism.  The “prison-industrial complex” thrives on turning people out with the assurance that they will come back.  And all evidence indicates that they are doing a bang-up job of it.  As for the cost savings, there are relatively few studies available, and the GAO has found the results largely inconclusive because of differences in evaluative factors and some studies using hypothetical public institutions.[1]  One in Colorado found the supposed equivalency of cost to be questionable because lower-level inmates were moved to high-security private facilities to increase the maintenance costs (and thus the profit to the company).[2] 
            In an excellent article for CNN Money, D.M. Levine highlights the minimal or negative savings in private-over-public prisons and many of the true costs of these savings. (http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/17/news/economy/private_prisons_economic_impact.fortune/index.htm).  Exempt from state oversight and largely free to shuffle prisoners to other states, private prisons are free to use low-paid and less-trained staff, cut corners wherever they can, and take their profit at the expense of those who desperately need the services that are most often cut.  They also operate with only the slightest flicker of transparency, whereas state agencies are bound to be transparent and accountable.
            And if the cost to the inmates doesn’t concern you, the cost to your neighborhood should.  When prisoners are returned to the streets without drug treatment, job training, or basic skills, what do you suppose happens? They re-offend, often simply because they lack the capacity to do anything else. Poof! Back to the slammer with you. What happens to the mentally ill? Returned to the street without care or diagnosis at even the abysmal level of state facilities because transfer to a hospital would cut out a bed-charge and good doctors are expensive.  All on the taxpayer’s dime, which finds its way directly into the pocket of the prison owner. Over and over again.
            Overall, the cost-savings seem largely illusory, the benefits questionable, and the profit motive disturbing.  But don’t talk to the Tea Party about that – they seem content with a “smaller government” at any cost, even though the government still has to pay for the private systems, and is often paying more.  Whatever, we like it! Why? We don’t really know – but we do, and we’re LOUD!
            Whatever the actual outcome of privatized services, the bottom line remains that some functions of society must be performed out of necessity, not out of profitability.  The truth is, where capitalism operates properly, the private sector performs its duties quite well.  But we cannot allow an overriding and unsophisticated “anti-government” furor to obscure the fact that a corporation is, by law, obligated to pursue the highest possible profits for shareholders. Other motives can and do subject corporate boards to lawsuits.  The government, on the other hand, operates with a social welfare goal, and properly so.  
            Somehow we decided that the government should be run like a corporation – dragging in profit at all costs and only providing services that can be paid for with retained earnings.  NO! Bad American! Don’t make me get the rolled-up newspaper. The government’s services are those that must be provided to members of a civilized society for the benefit of society.  Health care, prisons, trash removal, roads, postal services, and education may have a role for the private sector as an option, but absolutely can NOT be provided solely to those who can afford it.  We fought a whole war  (remember – the Revolutionary one?) to cast off a social structure that accumulated wealth and access to only those who could afford it, leaving the rest to sink deeper and deeper into poverty, dragging the entire Empire down with it (despite what the nobility thought). 
            So I beg you, whenever someone decries “big government” or “out of control spending” ask them – how much are you willing to pay out of pocket to a private company to remove your trash? To treat your drinking water? To inspect your food? To guide your airplane through the skies? Yes, there are private options (gated communities opt to stay off the grid and pay private companies for roads and trash, but they are certainly not the majority, and they act as a whole community – not as individuals) but consider the social fabric;  YOU may be willing to pay $1,000 per year for trash disposal, but what if your neighbors are not willing or able to do the same? Your block becomes clogged with trash, disease, and vermin.  Yay for you – the government went away. And back we go to Colonial times (you know – like the Tea Party costumes) when you had to buy memberships into fire and police guilds.  Anyone who didn’t buy in had to negotiate with the reps who stood outside and watched their houses burn.  Good idea? How about if your neighbor failed to buy in.  Ever seen a block of rowhomes go up in flames? All it takes is one person behind on his dues to bring an entire block of homes to ash. 
            What about police and 911 services? Should these be profit-driven? Do you want to be the person whose crime is too expensive to investigate? Where is the profit in solving murders? More importantly, where is the profit in solving them correctly. Is there a profit to ensuring your civil rights when you’re on trial? It’s far more expedient and far cheaper to simply dispense with some of the rituals designed to ensure the right person is convicted – is that what’s best for everyone? Sure it would reduce taxes, but do you want to be the one wrongly convicted because of a cost-cutting measure? You knew the victim, you have no alibi, you have no money for a defense lawyer, so away you go. Public defenders are so expensive, right? So you do it – go to court and stand in front of a judge, next to a prosecutor and detective who are instructed by the corporation to get this case closed and get you into a private-prison bed as soon as possible.  You can check out a book on local procedures at the library, I’m sure you’ll do fine.
            Ambulances? I envision a hierarchy of plans. You can buy in at the Gold rate down to the Wood rate.  Since vehicles are expensive and personnel more so, there are probably only 2  or 3 trucks in the company, right? So imagine a bad, bad night when 8 calls come in from private subscribers.  They have to allocate resources, right? Like any good corporation. So the Gold member in the gated community on the hill gets his truck, and the Silver member in the historic lakefront home gets her truck. Then the Bronze member who lives on the other side of town but is closer to the garage than you gets his truck, since gas is expensive and you’re also only a Bronze member. So your child who drank the stuff under the sink will just have to wait until a truck is available. Profit motive still looking good?
            There are also things the government needs to do a better job of – like inspecting the food supply and enforcing immigration laws. Why are they failing? LACK OF FUNDING!  Because we are so afraid of funding things that look like “big government” that we leave some of the most important functions anemic and hobbled.  What do we fund instead? Wars.  Endless, unplanned, unjustifiable wars against nations that (in recent memory) pose only the most tangential and theoretical threat to our own.  Despite the soaring rhetoric of terror, the nations of Iraq and Afghanistan posed no immediate or even conceivable threat to our security.  And yet we send trillions of tax dollars down the rabbit hole and complain about border security.  We spend trillions on arms accumulations and the largest standing army in the world, just in case we decide to pop in on another war at a moment’s notice.
            Here’s the facts kids: the government has multiple jobs to do for all of our benefit.  All of those jobs cost money.  We pay a relatively infinitesimal amount of tax compared to the value of the services we receive: police, fire departments, air traffic control, roads, water treatment and sewers, wildlife management, food and drug safety, the health care and retirement benefits that some people receive, food for the poor, housing safety for renters, labor protection for workers, harbor and shipping inspection, daily mail delivery, safe trucks on the highways with us on the morning commute, safe trains carrying millions of gallons of toxic chemicals and tons of cargo, and on and on and on.  Complain about taxes and government all you want, but the fact is that the benefits FAR outweigh the costs.  And while waste, ineffectiveness, and silliness certainly exist, and some functions absolutely need improvement,  the solution requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. That’s all I’m sayin’.


[1] http://www.gao.gov/archive/1996/gg96158.pdf
[2] http://www.afscme.org/docs/colorado.pdf

The Schizophrenic American Voter (8/13/10)


We cherish bi-partisanship among our elected officials.  When most of us decry the political machine, and “the Washington way” we mean partisan politics.  By which we usually mean voting along party lines regardless of whether it’s best for your constituents, the country, or your own conscience.  We want our officials to be adult, educated, able to lead

But we don’t want them too smart.  We say they should be real folks, not over-educated elitists, they should understand “the people.”  But these Real People have to be pristine and perfect, with nary a blemish in their entire lives.  No traffic tickets, no faux pas, no family skeletons.  No relations that might have them either.  An unbroken halo of a life unchallenged.  But still someone you want to have a beer with. Huh? The ideal person that the American voter wants (unmarked, unbesmirchable) is most definitely not someone I would want to have a beer with – they have no experiences to draw on. We learn by making mistakes, but we demand elected officials  who have never made them. But who understand that we make them. But who are just like us, only smarter. But not too smart. Hmmm.  Wait...

We develop and change as we grow (well, most of us), but we want our politicians to be static.  They can’t change their views, or alter their position based on altered facts or circumstances that warrant it without being accused of “flip-flopping.”  If you said something 15 years ago that your partly likes, you damn well better still be willing to say it.  Unless it’s something the party doesn’t like anymore – then you better repudiate (that’s “refudiate” to the Palinites) it post haste.

We don’t want growth experiences, evolving viewpoints, or connection to the complex dynamics of society to influence those Real People we elected – they have to maintain their perspectives from election to election in perpetuity so we “know who we’re voting for.”  But we don’t like the entrenched career politicians who do things the same old way.  We carry on about the Washington bubble where politicians go and lose touch with the real world. So you better be responsive to changing economies and changing social values. But don’t “flip-flop.”  As Sarah Palin put it – you better “dance with the one who brung you.” Meaning you follow the party line and you stick with whatever your opinion was 40 years ago when you got there. Even if people’s views change, you will be lambasted during the Silly Season for changing your position, often simply as a res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). Your change of position will be portrayed as an obvious sign of (insert bad thing here: weakness, influence of special interest groups, pandering, lying. etc.), even if what you’ve done is develop a more sophisticated understanding of the problem you’re trying to address. 

Which brings me to the new anti-government sentiment, which is all about getting the incumbents out.  But who are these incumbents? Guess what – they include all the freshman legislators you voted in just 2 short years ago to get the last incumbent out, who may well have been the new guy last time.  And now it’s about “we sent you there to clean up the joint and you didn’t.”  Well, the new kid on the block has a learning curve in Congress just like everywhere else – they can’t overhaul the entire political system in their first term. And for the most part, they shouldn’t.  New legislators - perhaps more than any other new kid on the block – are often in place based on populist slogans that aren’t forged in the fires of intellectual wrestling and deep research, but rather on things that average folks on the street think based on their emotional reactions to sound bites and 30 second news clips.  These are terrible foundations for legislation! But since we as a society have a sense that our government should do whatever we want rather than what’s best for the nation, we LOVE it when candidates tell us we’re right and smart and should be in control of everything.  So the new kid gets to Washington with little more than a fire in the belly and a few cue cards.  Then they start talking to the folks who’ve been there-done that and (hopefully) start to realize that they aren’t the saviors of mankind they thought they were – they’re more like teenagers stomping their feet and demanding to be in control of their own lives and not have to do dishes or take out trash. So anti-incumbent sentiment is not only inherently flawed as a platform (as soon as you elect a new savior, she becomes an ‘incumbent’ and is now the enemy), but also counterproductive - denying that legislators get better with experience just like anyone else.

We think we want the best and the brightest, but we demand unreasonable things from them, both in order to get elected and once they’re there. Is it any wonder that the best and brightest don’t want to run? Who wants that? Who wants their high school prom date in the tabloids discussing their juvenile pranks? Your vindictive ex on Fox News saying whatever horrible thing they want and getting the rapt attention of the non-fact-checking media? Or, heaven forbid, a college rally against a Wal*Mart showing up during a Republican campaign? Who wants to have their education used against them and face the demands of the screamingly uninformed that you kowtow to their every whim? And who are They anyway? One thing is for sure – if you’ve got 20 people in a room and one issue on the table, you’ll have 45 different opinions and probably another 32 issues being argued about.

Politics represents, in many ways, the deep divide in American thinking, and we continue to be shocked that “they” aren’t doing what “we” want when we don’t even really know what that is.  It’s a Madonna-whore complex of national significance.  And until Americans are better educated about the government and its processes and duties (i.e. NOT ‘do as I say, not as the other 60,000 people in this district say’) and more willing to recognize that every individual person can’t get their way all the time any more than one new representative can drive national policy, we will continue with this spiral of inferior candidates, inferior platforms, and inferior government processes.  And for heaven’s sake STOP denigrating education and STOP thinking that candidates should be just like you – they SHOULD be smarter than you! They should be smarter than me! They should actually be the best and the brightest, and if you want real people, you HAVE to accept that you can’t just checklist them off every time the opposition says “he made mistake X and changed his opinion about Y” – those aren’t bad things.  I guarantee you’ve done worse. So have I. Grow up America! Most people stop thinking in black and white at about second grade, but somehow our political thinking has regressed to toddlerhood where we think we know everything and we can do a better job and good candidates have to be perfect according to some standard that we don’t quite understand.

Join Sandra Day-O’Connor’s quest to re-introduce civics education into classrooms.  And coffee-shops and diners and anywhere else there are people.  http://www.icivics.org/.