I've really enjoyed listening to streaming audio from "internet radio stations"; you can find programming from many countries and in many languages - a great way to tune your ear and refresh a language you may have forgotten.
For day-to-day listening, one of the best 'stations' I've found, with quite a variety, is Radio Paradise, at http://www.radioparadise.com/. It's modern, so don't expect soft rock or classical music, though the mix does span a huge range.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
Book Recommendation: The Nuclear Express
I just finished "The Nuclear Express", subtitled "A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation", by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman. I'd ordered it a while back, then forgot about it - when it came my interest was a bit reduced. I picked it up, and after not that many pages I couldn't put it down.In one way it one of the best kinds of history: it is written by knowledgeable people who use specifics of persons, time, and place to illustrate the points they are making. There is little fluff here - even personal opinion is labeled as such. It is fact after fact after fact, not in an unordered recitation but rather laid out to underpin the historical themes within the book.
By the end I felt somewhat fearful about the future. During the Cold War people worried about nuclear war, but I think the danger of the use of nuclear weapons is much greater now (though not, at least initially, in the context of an all-out war). I hope those responsible for relevant policy decisions read this book, including the new President.
On Accidental Reincarnation
"And now for something completely different."
This may seem a bit mystical, and I'm not - so it isn't, really.
On a recent birthday I recalled a thought I'd had when much younger, when I wondered if I would be much different as a person if I'd been born another day. The main difference might be one that perhaps provides a shadow of a rationale for the personality predictions of astrology: I'd have spent my first months of life in a different season, and one might imagine that this could color one's view of the world. My first six months or so were spent during the cold and dreary months of the year - perhaps I'd be slightly different if it were Spring and Summer instead.
That isn't really what I was after, though; I thought it might be an interesting exercise in imagination to toss away personal details, and see how much of "me" was left as I went along. Would I be the same person if I'd been given a different name? I think so, without a lot of doubt, though having a "B" at the beginning of my last name got me through lots of institutional processes faster than I would have been had my last name been "Zuppa" or "Zabaglione". So there might have been some small difference, but I don't think it'd have been significant.
It's an interesting exercise to try - what if you'd been born in a different country? What if you'd been born in a different century? How much of your personality, your "soul" if you wish to consider it in those terms, would be the same, and how much would be different?
My view is that I'd be the same person, though my different experiences might have led to different choices in life. I can't get away from the sense of having a central identity that wouldn't be subject to the vicissitudes of time and place.
A recent TED talk (Technology, Entertainment, Design; www.ted.com) by Steven Pinker, "Chalking it up to the blank slate" (just under 23 minutes long; well worth the time) addresses this from a neuroscience point of view. The evidence he cites for surprisingly similar behavior from identical twins, even raised in different environments, he uses to point to the importance of underlying brain structure as a determiner for human nature. Even twins aren't *exactly* the same - and if one of us were born in another place and time, physically identical to who we were at birth, we'd be even more similar to our current selves than twins are, despite environmental differences..
Then I began to wonder: who in the past might have shared some or all of the elements that make up that identity? It really doesn't matter if you get to be the way you are via nature or nurture - what you are in terms of outlook, personality, affinities, and so forth may have existed before, and may exist again at some time in the future, in whole or in part. I don't know quite what to call this: perhaps 'accidental reincarnation". It doesn't require any mysticism to consider it a possibility.
Perhaps this has happened to you: you'll be reading some bit of history, before you turn the page you think that if you were there/then, you'd say something specific, or react in some way - and you turn the page, and find that the person said or did just that. Now in the obvious cases this isn't so striking - if nearly anyone would have said or done it. But what about when almost no one would have? It can be a very eerie experience, the sense that some part of your mental life existed before you were born.
A few years after this idea had occurred to me (this was in the 1970's), I stumbled on a poem of Jorge Luis Borges. It's not his best, but the fact that it touches on the same point was a bit of a surprise:
Perhaps my surprise when reading this was that it almost proves the point: while wondering if there were others in the past who'd thought similar thoughts to my own, I'd found someone else thinking the same thing!
The "(and are)" part in the last line hadn't occurred to me (and I must admit this whole topic was something of a passing thought). It's not just that there may have been people in the past (and may be in the future) who to a lesser or greater extent were "me", but that this may be true of others alive now. And of course it's not that they're identically me; they may just have some overlap in attitude, imagination, instinct, emotional response, world view, sense of humor, or any of the other aspects that make up the mental life of an individual.
Maybe we do intuitively understand these kinds of mental life overlaps; when reading history, or even watching a movie, we identify with some characters, and can at least appreciate the actions of others, even if we wouldn't act like they did. If we couldn't do this, there'd be little value in history or literature. To the extent that I understand Christian thinking about the brotherhood of man, I make sense of it this way: we each share a little bit of each other.
One can take this further - Terence (Publius Terentius Afer, 185 BC - 159 BC) said "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto " (I am a man: nothing human is alien to me). When I first read this I thought it to be quite powerful, but over time I've come to doubt it: when I read of certain types of crimes, too bizarre or disgusting to mention here, I feel I'm touching something alien. On the other hand, these human actions may just reflect mental illness. Or perhaps we define something as mental illness precisely when we can't empathize with it at all.
The type of overlap of mental outlook I'm speaking of might even cross species boundaries, though probably with some inherent limits. Anyone who has spent time around dogs knows they have distinct individual personalities, and, even ignoring the anthropomorphism we sometimes bring to such observations, one may find traits that humans share. I wonder how far one might take this - say, if the mind of a dinosaur that walked her 70 million years ago, perceiving similar landscapes, may have had some overlap with how I see the world. It may be that such similarities are an inevitable hallmark of consciousness.
I found another poem recently, unpublished for some time, this one by Cavafy. He's perhaps most famous for Waiting for the Barbarians, but others of my favorites are Ithaca and Thermopylae (if you've never read them they are worth the web detour). While this may have more to do with the specifics of Cavafy's life, it still touches on the same theme:
This may seem a bit mystical, and I'm not - so it isn't, really.
On a recent birthday I recalled a thought I'd had when much younger, when I wondered if I would be much different as a person if I'd been born another day. The main difference might be one that perhaps provides a shadow of a rationale for the personality predictions of astrology: I'd have spent my first months of life in a different season, and one might imagine that this could color one's view of the world. My first six months or so were spent during the cold and dreary months of the year - perhaps I'd be slightly different if it were Spring and Summer instead.
That isn't really what I was after, though; I thought it might be an interesting exercise in imagination to toss away personal details, and see how much of "me" was left as I went along. Would I be the same person if I'd been given a different name? I think so, without a lot of doubt, though having a "B" at the beginning of my last name got me through lots of institutional processes faster than I would have been had my last name been "Zuppa" or "Zabaglione". So there might have been some small difference, but I don't think it'd have been significant.
It's an interesting exercise to try - what if you'd been born in a different country? What if you'd been born in a different century? How much of your personality, your "soul" if you wish to consider it in those terms, would be the same, and how much would be different?
My view is that I'd be the same person, though my different experiences might have led to different choices in life. I can't get away from the sense of having a central identity that wouldn't be subject to the vicissitudes of time and place.
A recent TED talk (Technology, Entertainment, Design; www.ted.com) by Steven Pinker, "Chalking it up to the blank slate" (just under 23 minutes long; well worth the time) addresses this from a neuroscience point of view. The evidence he cites for surprisingly similar behavior from identical twins, even raised in different environments, he uses to point to the importance of underlying brain structure as a determiner for human nature. Even twins aren't *exactly* the same - and if one of us were born in another place and time, physically identical to who we were at birth, we'd be even more similar to our current selves than twins are, despite environmental differences..
Then I began to wonder: who in the past might have shared some or all of the elements that make up that identity? It really doesn't matter if you get to be the way you are via nature or nurture - what you are in terms of outlook, personality, affinities, and so forth may have existed before, and may exist again at some time in the future, in whole or in part. I don't know quite what to call this: perhaps 'accidental reincarnation". It doesn't require any mysticism to consider it a possibility.
Perhaps this has happened to you: you'll be reading some bit of history, before you turn the page you think that if you were there/then, you'd say something specific, or react in some way - and you turn the page, and find that the person said or did just that. Now in the obvious cases this isn't so striking - if nearly anyone would have said or done it. But what about when almost no one would have? It can be a very eerie experience, the sense that some part of your mental life existed before you were born.
A few years after this idea had occurred to me (this was in the 1970's), I stumbled on a poem of Jorge Luis Borges. It's not his best, but the fact that it touches on the same point was a bit of a surprise:
Inscription On Any Tomb
Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,
in many worlds recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men do not.
The essentials of the dead man's life -
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight -
will abide forever.
Blindly the willful soul asks for length of days
when its survival is assured by the lives of others,
when you yourself are the embodied continuance
of those who did not live into your time
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.
Perhaps my surprise when reading this was that it almost proves the point: while wondering if there were others in the past who'd thought similar thoughts to my own, I'd found someone else thinking the same thing!
The "(and are)" part in the last line hadn't occurred to me (and I must admit this whole topic was something of a passing thought). It's not just that there may have been people in the past (and may be in the future) who to a lesser or greater extent were "me", but that this may be true of others alive now. And of course it's not that they're identically me; they may just have some overlap in attitude, imagination, instinct, emotional response, world view, sense of humor, or any of the other aspects that make up the mental life of an individual.
Maybe we do intuitively understand these kinds of mental life overlaps; when reading history, or even watching a movie, we identify with some characters, and can at least appreciate the actions of others, even if we wouldn't act like they did. If we couldn't do this, there'd be little value in history or literature. To the extent that I understand Christian thinking about the brotherhood of man, I make sense of it this way: we each share a little bit of each other.
One can take this further - Terence (Publius Terentius Afer, 185 BC - 159 BC) said "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto " (I am a man: nothing human is alien to me). When I first read this I thought it to be quite powerful, but over time I've come to doubt it: when I read of certain types of crimes, too bizarre or disgusting to mention here, I feel I'm touching something alien. On the other hand, these human actions may just reflect mental illness. Or perhaps we define something as mental illness precisely when we can't empathize with it at all.
The type of overlap of mental outlook I'm speaking of might even cross species boundaries, though probably with some inherent limits. Anyone who has spent time around dogs knows they have distinct individual personalities, and, even ignoring the anthropomorphism we sometimes bring to such observations, one may find traits that humans share. I wonder how far one might take this - say, if the mind of a dinosaur that walked her 70 million years ago, perceiving similar landscapes, may have had some overlap with how I see the world. It may be that such similarities are an inevitable hallmark of consciousness.
I found another poem recently, unpublished for some time, this one by Cavafy. He's perhaps most famous for Waiting for the Barbarians, but others of my favorites are Ithaca and Thermopylae (if you've never read them they are worth the web detour). While this may have more to do with the specifics of Cavafy's life, it still touches on the same theme:
HiddenSo I'll die, my specific memories vanish, but some day, maybe many days, a new person will be born who will more or less, in many combinations, be me.
From all I've done and all I've said
let them not seek to find who I've been.
An obstacle stood and transformed
my acts and way of my life.
An obstacle stood and stopped me
many a time as I was going to speak.
My most unobserved acts,
and my writings the most covered -
thence only they will feel me.
But mayhaps it is not worth to spend
this much care and this much effort to know me.
For - in the more perfect society -
someone else like me created
will certainly appear and freely act.
Book Recommendation: Conquistador
I'd like to recommend the book "Conquistador", by Buddy Levy (Bantam, 2008). It is very readable history, and covers an epoch I'm sure we've probably all studied in school - but I had no idea how fascinating the people era, and events were.
In places it reads like the script of a fictional adventure movie, but it is a true story. When I was about halfway through I thought "What more can there be?", and it just got better and better. If you like to escape into fiction from time to time, give this a shot - while it also is a completely different world you'll enter, it has the virtue of actually having existed.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
I see two emerging trends that may threaten the core of our nation. One is an erosion of respect for our Constitution, the other what might be a disease of democracy, a tendency for one part of the population to vote itself benefits at the expense of another.
Constitutional Belief
What makes our country's Constitution work is, ultimately, that people believe and expect that it should. Other countries in the world have constitutions, often ones that promise rights such as freedom of the press, but these guarantees are routinely ignored. Why is that? Why did the Soviet Union not respect its constitution's guarantee of the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to relivious belief? Mainly because the citizenry understood that "that's just not the way it's done", that is the common citizen's expectations were quite different from what the document stated.
One striking example of an American symptom of this occurred when I was working in the campaign office of (U.S. Congressman) Rob Simmons: a man came in and asked loudly where in the Constitution the federal government was granted the authority to establish Social Security. This seemed somewhat jarring to me (and often does to others), as Social Security seems such a established program that one thinks that such questions must have already been fully resolved; it seemed a laughable question.
Yet if you look at the Constitution, we have a federal government that is only supposed to have the specific powers enumerated there, with all others residing with the states and the people. And there is no enumerated power giving the federal government the authority to establish Social Security. The Constitionality of Social Security was decided in May of 1937 by the Supreme Court, but (according to the Social Security Administration's own web site on its history, http://www.ssa.gov/history/court.html) only after Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the court with extra judges to get his way.
These days (I'm writing this in 2008) some are saying that President George Bush has been "shredding the Constitution" through the Patriot Act, the Guantanamo jail, and telecomm surveillance of terrorists - yet none of this required threatening the integrity of the Supreme Court, and none is geared towards changing the electoral dynamics within the country.
And today, how many people have even thought of the constitutionality of the $850 billion "bail out" bill, or that of the new proposals for the federal government to buy ownership of selected banks? Have we lost any real feel for what our country's founding document really means? If so, we're headed towards a mindset shared by much of the rest of the world, in which a constitution is a nice collection of noble thoughts, but doesn't reflect "the way things really work".
Raiding the Public Purse
This brings me to the second trend, in which it seems increasingly common for Congress to vote benefits to powerful constituencies. This too goes back to FDR, as illuminated by his aide Harry Hopkins commenting on Democratic Party strategy 1933: "Tax, tax, tax; spend, spend, spend; elect, elect, elect." In other words, use the government's taxing ability to collect vast funds, and then use those funds to establish programs that benefit important blocks of voters - once hooked, they'll never vote to remove the largesse they're receiving.
The Fabian Society in Britain supported a move towards socialism through such gradual steps, counting on the populace to never desire to give up such benefits once it had acquired them. The 'political pendulum' might swing back and forth between left and right, but if incremental gains were made and preserved after every leftward swing, eventually a socialist society would result. They took their name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus ("the Delayer"), who used a similar incremental approach to beat Hannibal in the Punic Wars.
The premise of our Constitution was that it provided a structure which would be adequate to perform the essential services of government, within fairly strict and specified limits. In a full democracy without such limits, the people would be able to vote in any arbitrary measure: to expel all left-handed people, or confiscate the property of any unpopular minority group. Clearly this is not what the founders intended - the idea of freedom requires that many areas of human activity remain beyond government's reach, and they wrote those boundaries into the Constitution. Now we've reached a point where those barriers are being knocked down, not because of some overarching social need or imperative, but as a means to political power. And, like the Soviet citizenry mentioned above, we just accept this as "the way things are", regardless of what our Constitution says. The idea of Social Security being challenged on such fundamental grounds seems laughable only because we no longer seem to care very much about that issue.
I will acknowledge that the motivation behind many of the vast social initiatives of the last 50 years or so may have been partly, or even largely, idealistic. Certainly it seems that the Great Depression may have warranted extraordinary action, though now it's becoming clearer that FDR's steps may well have lengthened and deepened it (see for instance this book; the comments on the Amazon page are worth a quick glance as well). And I'm not sure even that event justified the permanent damage to the Constitution that we've sustained by removing any real barriers to federal involvment in just about any area.
Even if the constitutionally problematic elements of the New Deal were a good idea at the time, to adopt them required an "The ends justify the means" attitude that is unhealthy at best and disastrous at worst. History has shown that freedom is fragile, and at any given moment there may be numerous good and powerful reasons to curtail it or give it up, often sounding quite compelling: social unrest, global warming, religious or philosophical compulsions. Against these there is only one reason to keep it, though it trumps all the others: it is essential to the life of a fully-functional human. It is the only state which allows us the full range of moral action, to live the life that a human ought to live.
It is the confluence of these two trends that is dangerous: our citizenry is slowly but clearly losing its expectation that government officials and institutions closely adhere to the Constitution, and simultaneously is rewarding politicians who bestow gifts from the vast federal budget. The quote below (variously attributed to de Toqueville, Disraeli, and others, though apparently from the Scottish judge Alexander Tyler):
(This data is from the Tax Foundation, "Distribution of the Federal Income Tax", Special Report No. 101, November 2000.)
Two things to note here: first, most any sort of tax cut will of course leave more money in the hands of "the rich", because they're paying most of the taxes (the top 10% pay 65% of the total tax bill) - anything but a tax cut very much skewed against the rich will have this effect. It has long been a goal of those pushing 'progressive' taxation that the rich pay more; now they do, and consequently any tax cut will as a consequence leave them with more of their money. The people who have advocated this shouldn't now complain that tax cuts benefit the rich: that was implicit in their plan.
The second thing to note is that a tax cut that didn't "benefit the rich" would move more of the burden of taxpaying onto them - if one cut the percentages paid by lower-income segments, "the rich" are the only ones left to foot the bill. The logical conclusion of this process is one in which many, many Americans will pay very little in taxes, while "the rich" will pay most of it (indeed we're pretty much there already). Now, what incentive will the average American have to not vote for expensive programs? He or she won't personally have to pay much if anything - something for nothing! Voters may then make all sorts of choices without any significant personal accountability, which will inevitably be a disaster.
I've put "the rich" in quotes because that's the current term in political circulation, but it isn't quite right. What it should be is "people with high income", which is emphatically not the same thing. Many people who are indeed rich have tax-exempt income, or may just spend saved dollars; income tax won't touch them very much at all. On the other hand, someone who struggles through medical school, practices for a number of years, and finally has a hefty income will be hit very hard as one of "the rich", even if he or she carries substantial educational debt and might well need to make up for a number of low-income years.
I believe there are steps we might take to get out of this bind, before we're in even deeper. They will require a greater respect for the Constitution, and a more ingrained cultural scepticism about candidates promising various sorts of goodies. One glimmer of a solution, which I'll address in a separate post, is to separate the coercive power of the state from the more charitable functions of society, so that any of the various forms of "bribing the voters" become much more transparent and more difficult.
Constitutional Belief
What makes our country's Constitution work is, ultimately, that people believe and expect that it should. Other countries in the world have constitutions, often ones that promise rights such as freedom of the press, but these guarantees are routinely ignored. Why is that? Why did the Soviet Union not respect its constitution's guarantee of the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to relivious belief? Mainly because the citizenry understood that "that's just not the way it's done", that is the common citizen's expectations were quite different from what the document stated.
One striking example of an American symptom of this occurred when I was working in the campaign office of (U.S. Congressman) Rob Simmons: a man came in and asked loudly where in the Constitution the federal government was granted the authority to establish Social Security. This seemed somewhat jarring to me (and often does to others), as Social Security seems such a established program that one thinks that such questions must have already been fully resolved; it seemed a laughable question.
Yet if you look at the Constitution, we have a federal government that is only supposed to have the specific powers enumerated there, with all others residing with the states and the people. And there is no enumerated power giving the federal government the authority to establish Social Security. The Constitionality of Social Security was decided in May of 1937 by the Supreme Court, but (according to the Social Security Administration's own web site on its history, http://www.ssa.gov/history/court.html) only after Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the court with extra judges to get his way.
These days (I'm writing this in 2008) some are saying that President George Bush has been "shredding the Constitution" through the Patriot Act, the Guantanamo jail, and telecomm surveillance of terrorists - yet none of this required threatening the integrity of the Supreme Court, and none is geared towards changing the electoral dynamics within the country.
And today, how many people have even thought of the constitutionality of the $850 billion "bail out" bill, or that of the new proposals for the federal government to buy ownership of selected banks? Have we lost any real feel for what our country's founding document really means? If so, we're headed towards a mindset shared by much of the rest of the world, in which a constitution is a nice collection of noble thoughts, but doesn't reflect "the way things really work".
Raiding the Public Purse
This brings me to the second trend, in which it seems increasingly common for Congress to vote benefits to powerful constituencies. This too goes back to FDR, as illuminated by his aide Harry Hopkins commenting on Democratic Party strategy 1933: "Tax, tax, tax; spend, spend, spend; elect, elect, elect." In other words, use the government's taxing ability to collect vast funds, and then use those funds to establish programs that benefit important blocks of voters - once hooked, they'll never vote to remove the largesse they're receiving.
The Fabian Society in Britain supported a move towards socialism through such gradual steps, counting on the populace to never desire to give up such benefits once it had acquired them. The 'political pendulum' might swing back and forth between left and right, but if incremental gains were made and preserved after every leftward swing, eventually a socialist society would result. They took their name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus ("the Delayer"), who used a similar incremental approach to beat Hannibal in the Punic Wars.
The premise of our Constitution was that it provided a structure which would be adequate to perform the essential services of government, within fairly strict and specified limits. In a full democracy without such limits, the people would be able to vote in any arbitrary measure: to expel all left-handed people, or confiscate the property of any unpopular minority group. Clearly this is not what the founders intended - the idea of freedom requires that many areas of human activity remain beyond government's reach, and they wrote those boundaries into the Constitution. Now we've reached a point where those barriers are being knocked down, not because of some overarching social need or imperative, but as a means to political power. And, like the Soviet citizenry mentioned above, we just accept this as "the way things are", regardless of what our Constitution says. The idea of Social Security being challenged on such fundamental grounds seems laughable only because we no longer seem to care very much about that issue.
I will acknowledge that the motivation behind many of the vast social initiatives of the last 50 years or so may have been partly, or even largely, idealistic. Certainly it seems that the Great Depression may have warranted extraordinary action, though now it's becoming clearer that FDR's steps may well have lengthened and deepened it (see for instance this book; the comments on the Amazon page are worth a quick glance as well). And I'm not sure even that event justified the permanent damage to the Constitution that we've sustained by removing any real barriers to federal involvment in just about any area.
Even if the constitutionally problematic elements of the New Deal were a good idea at the time, to adopt them required an "The ends justify the means" attitude that is unhealthy at best and disastrous at worst. History has shown that freedom is fragile, and at any given moment there may be numerous good and powerful reasons to curtail it or give it up, often sounding quite compelling: social unrest, global warming, religious or philosophical compulsions. Against these there is only one reason to keep it, though it trumps all the others: it is essential to the life of a fully-functional human. It is the only state which allows us the full range of moral action, to live the life that a human ought to live.
It is the confluence of these two trends that is dangerous: our citizenry is slowly but clearly losing its expectation that government officials and institutions closely adhere to the Constitution, and simultaneously is rewarding politicians who bestow gifts from the vast federal budget. The quote below (variously attributed to de Toqueville, Disraeli, and others, though apparently from the Scottish judge Alexander Tyler):
Democracy in America is doomed when the people learn to vote themselves money from the public trough. A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.Lest you think I'm going too far, consider this recent campaign ad by Hillary Clinton, in which she sits under a Christmas tree and presents new programs as 'gifts' to voters:
(This may also be found on YouTube here, should the above format not be congenial.) This ad so directly illustrates the problem that it hardly seems that more is necessary.
A more subtle use of the same "you'll get something for nothing if you vote for me" approach is the campaign argument brought forth first by John Kerry, and now echoed by Barack Obama: that various proposed tax cuts are "tax cuts for the rich", and are therefore unfair. What they know but don't tell you is this: the rich pay the vast majority of taxes. (scroll down if this blog presentation inserts too much white space above the table.)
| Taxpayers by Income Level | Percent of Tax Burden Paid |
| Top 1% | 34.8% |
| Top 90% to 99% | 30.2% |
| Top 75% to 90% | 17.6% |
| Top 50% to 75% | 13.1% |
| Everybody else | 4.3% |
(This data is from the Tax Foundation, "Distribution of the Federal Income Tax", Special Report No. 101, November 2000.)
Two things to note here: first, most any sort of tax cut will of course leave more money in the hands of "the rich", because they're paying most of the taxes (the top 10% pay 65% of the total tax bill) - anything but a tax cut very much skewed against the rich will have this effect. It has long been a goal of those pushing 'progressive' taxation that the rich pay more; now they do, and consequently any tax cut will as a consequence leave them with more of their money. The people who have advocated this shouldn't now complain that tax cuts benefit the rich: that was implicit in their plan.
The second thing to note is that a tax cut that didn't "benefit the rich" would move more of the burden of taxpaying onto them - if one cut the percentages paid by lower-income segments, "the rich" are the only ones left to foot the bill. The logical conclusion of this process is one in which many, many Americans will pay very little in taxes, while "the rich" will pay most of it (indeed we're pretty much there already). Now, what incentive will the average American have to not vote for expensive programs? He or she won't personally have to pay much if anything - something for nothing! Voters may then make all sorts of choices without any significant personal accountability, which will inevitably be a disaster.
I've put "the rich" in quotes because that's the current term in political circulation, but it isn't quite right. What it should be is "people with high income", which is emphatically not the same thing. Many people who are indeed rich have tax-exempt income, or may just spend saved dollars; income tax won't touch them very much at all. On the other hand, someone who struggles through medical school, practices for a number of years, and finally has a hefty income will be hit very hard as one of "the rich", even if he or she carries substantial educational debt and might well need to make up for a number of low-income years.
I believe there are steps we might take to get out of this bind, before we're in even deeper. They will require a greater respect for the Constitution, and a more ingrained cultural scepticism about candidates promising various sorts of goodies. One glimmer of a solution, which I'll address in a separate post, is to separate the coercive power of the state from the more charitable functions of society, so that any of the various forms of "bribing the voters" become much more transparent and more difficult.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Beginnings
I have a number of topics to address, and I've finally decided to get to them. What I write might not be the most polished, but I intend for each post to convey at least one point worthy of consideration.
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