Double Taxation and Buffett's Lamentation

UPDATE: Pure deliciousness. 

Why conservatives hate Warren Buffett

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: September 28

Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes.

You’ve got to love how he says that the wealthy should be “asked” to pay more in taxes. Much in the same way as the police “ask” you to put your hands behind your head when they arrest you for tax evasion.

You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.”

I can and I do. Buffett is obsessed with the idea of not being rich in spite of being fabulously wealthy. It’s why he lives in Omaha. It’s why he keeps a modest home in a modest neighborhood. It’s why he gives monumental sums to charities (usually run by fellow self-loather Bill Gates) instead of reinvesting it all in economically productive projects. That he’s embroiled national tax policy in his own self-loathing glorification of the everyman merely shows that class warfare canard of the nefarious rich has already worked on him, in spite of his many marketable talents.

That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up.

We despise him the same way we despise anyone trying to raise our taxes. Buffett’s personal guilt is not a valid impetus to impose a sacrifice on me--especially to fund a federal government rotting through to the core due to the bloat of incompetency, mismanagement, corruption, aimlessness and philosophical wrongheadedness.

Militant conservatives are effective because they are absolutely shameless.

What, exactly have conservatives to Warren Buffett that has been shameless? Ask him to back up his assertions with the physical evidence provided by his tax returns?

Many of the same people who think the rich should be free to spend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to disclose anything

Pay attention to the sentence structure here: “the people who think [ambiguous group] should be free to [do something]…[derisive dismissal].” It should be clear that the issue here isn’t campaign finance laws; it’s freedom. 

are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public.

And unlike “asking” the rich to pay more taxes, some conservatives are actually asking—in the sense that he actually has the option not to comply—Buffett to make his tax returns public as evidence to support his assertions.

I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lot of freedom of action.

This is America; everyone has a lot of freedom of action. Regardless, there is no contradiction. Buffett has provided factually dubious claims. Wealthy political donors do not make any factual assertion that needs substantiation. Treating them the same would be unreasonable and kind of silly.

Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary.

Assume Warren Buffett makes $650M this year in his equity position in Berkshire Hathaway from dividends (it keeps the math round). Corporations pay a top income tax rate of 35%. This means that to provide the $650M that Buffett received, Berkshire Hathaway would have had to produce $1,000M in EBT. Buffett then pays $97.5M  in taxes on the $650M of dividends. As a result, Buffett effectively pays $447.5 million in taxes on $1,000 million of income. That’s an effective tax rate of 44.75%--for federal taxes only. He’s still got to pay state income tax, state sales tax, school district taxes, gasoline taxes, payroll taxes, and ten thousand other things that the government has designed to piss us off. His secretary pays no more than 28%. QED, bitches.

He’s said this for years,

And has been wrong for years.

but he’s a target now because President Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes on millionaires.

Exactly. If he followed the laws, I wouldn’t care a lick if he did pay less than his secretary, or if he thought it was unfair. But Buffett wrote an Op-Ed, revised it, got input from an editor, and published it in one of the largest papers in the country. It's not like some intrepid reporter caught a few off-the-cuff remarks and injecting them into the national debate. What makes me care about Buffett's views on tax policy is that now he wants to leverage this colossally stupid and factually misguided nugget to make me pay more taxes than his secretary. More to the point, Obama is using Buffett’s sterling reputation to imply that this blatant stupidity somehow has the credibility of Buffett’s investment acumen. It doesn’t, and it's sad that Buffett is allowing a failing president to use him.

Thus did the Wall Street Journal editorial page call on Buffett to “let everyone else in on his secrets of tax avoidance by releasing his tax returns.”

I didn’t even read that editorial, and even I know that it’s a tongue-in-cheek way to imply that Buffett is lying about the facts of his tax return to make a case—which is provably false even if everything Buffett is saying is true.

Somehow, the Journal did not think to ask its friends who battle vigorously for low taxes on capital gains to release their tax returns, too.

Why would it?

But aren’t they just as engaged in this argument as Buffett?

Of course, but they aren’t using their personal narrative as a bludgeon in political theater. They’re using fact, data, and logic to win the narrative in the sphere of ideas.

Shouldn’t accountability go both ways?

This isn’t about accountability; these aren’t public fiduciaries. It’s about verifying factually dubious claims that have a material impact on public discourse. If not verified, jackasses like you, EJ Dionne, fill an entire column with wild non-sequiturs and factual errors that avoid entirely the reality we live in. If the Wall Street Journal wants to tell Buffett to disclose his tax records in an Opinion piece, why are they then also obligated to demand tax records from hundreds of other people?

Nor did the Journal suggest that the Koch brothers could serve the public interest by releasing a full accounting of all their political spending.

How many times is he going to keep going to that well before he realizes that it’s dry? 

Buffett’s sin is that he spoke a truth

If it’s truthful, what’s the harm in conservatives asking him to verify? 

that conservatives want to keep covered up:

If we wanted this argument covered up, we’d allow the narrative to wilt by ignoring it and rely on Boehner to kill Obama’s absurd policy. We would then collectively move on with our day and collectively have a ham sandwich. Instead, we have fixated on this because--in spite of our collective desire for ham--we believe that this is an argument that simply must be refuted because anything more than a cursory glance at Buffett’s claims show them to be downright laughable.

Taxing capital gains at 15 percent means that people who make their money from investments pay taxes at a much lower marginal rate than those who earn more than $34,500 a year from their labor.

Unless, of course, that money has already been taxed. Oh wait.

That’s when the income tax rate goes up to 25 percent. (For joint filers, the 25 percent rate kicks in at $69,000.) For singles, the 28 percent bracket starts at $83,600, the 33 percent bracket at $174,400.

Thanks for looking up the tax table for me. It’s very kind of you. Of course, it’s completely irrelevant to the argument, but very kind nevertheless.

So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money.

See above for more reasons to laugh at EJ Dionne. Also, he put $100M out there for no discernable reason since he didn’t actually do any math.

For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they’re paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn’t apply to capital gains or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than it does the wealthy.

Do we get to talk no about how the employing company pays payroll taxes as well, and that those payments are further deducted from the money available to pay capital gains? No? Shucks.

No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hate Warren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of the tax system against labor;

Refuted.

(2) the fact that, in comparison with middle- or upper-middle-class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes; and

Refuted.

(3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.

Payroll taxes are things like Social Security and unemployment insurance whose expenditures massively favor the poor. You want to know what insurance wealthy investors have against unemployment? Bankruptcy.

(Because this column appears in The Post, I should note that Buffett heads a company that owns a substantial minority share in The Washington Post Co. and for many years held a seat on the company’s board of directors.)

Warren, I don’t want to tell you your business, but it’s probably time to cut bait here.

It’s worth noticing that while conservatives who talk about religion get a lot of coverage

[FOOTAGE NOT FOUND]

— and I will always defend their freedom to speak of faith in the public square —

This is really taking a leap. Okay, I’ll stick with you, I guess.

what really get the juices flowing on the right these days are tax rates.

Considering that the Bush tax cuts are about to expire (again) and that the President has shown himself to be a flip-flopping lunatic on an issue that materially impacts economic prospects...yeah, it kind of makes us nervous.

I’m not sure that a politician who renounced the Almighty would get nearly the attention Buffett has received for his renunciation of low capital gains taxes.

He wouldn’t, because your assumption that faith is of primary concern to conservative voters simply isn’t a grounded assessment of the right. It’s a caricature from pretentious north-easterners who use their atheism as an excuse for moral laziness and inconsistent philosophical meanderings. (And I am an atheist.)

Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to “punish” the successful.

Taxation is synonymous with disincentivization, which is a fancy way of saying punishment. Unless you’re arguing that success and wealth are not congruent in this context—a nuanced point that is as irrelevant to the conversation as it is unlikely to be grasped by Dionne--you’re arguing against a definitional assertion.

Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at a recent town hall event in California to raise his taxes,

Subsequently, Doug Edwards got his first erection in twenty years seeing his own name in the paper.

are saying that none of us succeeds solely because of personal effort.

Horseshit.

We are all lucky to have been born in — or, for immigrants, admitted to — a country where the rule of law is strong, where property is safe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where government protects our liberties.

If I’m reading this argument correctly, the very existence of a prosperous and structurally stable country negates the ability for individual success? Obviously Dionne wants this to be true because it means that none of us fails solely because of personal incompetence.

Wealthy people, by definition, have done better within this system than other people have.

The reason that capitalism is the best system that the world has ever known is that it places every producer and every consumer on the level playing field of free commerce. It chooses winners and losers based exclusively on the merits of active competition. By dampening the rewards of success for the meritorious, you have fundamentally changed the risk/return equation that defines the system that you have claimed is responsible for the success in the first place.

They ought to be willing to join Buffett and Edwards in arguing that for this reason alone,

And yet, the system is not what defines who is successful; their inputs into the system do. This is why capitalism works with such ruthless efficiency.

it is common sense, not class jealousy, to ask the most fortunate to pay taxes at higher tax rates than other people do.

This is, of course, both inaccurate and wrong. It’s inaccurate because the argument is actually about whether the wealthy should pay more than others, or whether they should pay much, much more. It’s wrong because a flat tax or a consumption tax would be a simpler and more efficient means for raising the revenues the government needs to produce the healthy economic ecosystem Dionne so lazily describes.

It is for this heresy that Buffett is being harassed.

Buffett isn’t being harassed. He injected himself into the public discourse. When he was questioned, he continued to stay in the public discourse. He’s a big boy. He can handle himself. Crying harassment is like bemoaning an NHL hip-check as assault.

The scorn is not for his heresy. It is for the mendacity of his unfounded assertions. It is the arrogance that his petty and ill-defined notions of self-loathing should define my taxes. It is the indignity of being talked down to by a man clearly suffering from the Nobel Prize Complex. It is the aggravation of being expected to defer my judgment to the implicit authority of the Oracle of Omaha. 

Fuck off, Warren.

Sharing is Caring is Welfaring (Katrina vanden Heuvel)

Fighting for real ‘shared sacrifice’

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Published: September 20

At Hyde Park, N.Y., this past weekend, hundreds of young and old New Dealers

I could get more people to go to an Ace of Bass reunion concert on a Tuesday night in downtown Detroit. What’s that, Wikipedia? Ace of Bass is still together and touring in support of their September, 2010 album The Golden Ratio? Impossible!

gathered to mark the 70th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech.

Also, the Four Freedoms speech was inherently directed towards foreign policy, specifically a rebuke to isolationist tendencies. Even though I’m relatively certain Katrina’s going to parlay this (somehow) into a domestic policy piece, I’d still bet you $10 she’s going to promote isolationism at some point.

Delivered in January 1941, it laid out a bold commitment to freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Only three of those are actual freedoms. “Freedom from want” is a petty attempt to wish away scarcity, a universal condition that underpins the entirety of economics.

Roosevelt followed it three years later, amid World War II, with his remarkable elaboration of a basic “Economic Bill of Rights” for all Americans.

So, this whole thing has nothing to do with the Four Freedoms speech and the 70^th anniversary, and the gathering of hundreds in Hyde Park. The entirety of your little introduction is a structurally unsound bridge of free association and intellectually lazy meanderings to the “Economic Bill of Rights?” This is bullshit. I MADE AN ACE OF BASS REFERENCE FOR YOU!

This is still the message of tomorrow.

Democratic veneration for their heroes always makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Republicans don’t even get this weepy-eyed over Reagan, and he was a far, far better president. Hell, Nancy Reagan doesn’t even get this weepy-eyed over Reagan.

In so many ways, FDR’s leadership offers more than nostalgia. He demonstrated what we yearn for so clearly now: a moral voice, grounded in basic values; a clear stance on the side of working people; and a willingness to challenge the entrenched interests that stand in their way.

This is also the guy who tried to pack the courts, forced Congress and the States to ratify the 22^nd Amendment, and started Japanese internments. It is no surprise that the “moral voice” of today’s left built a policy platform entirely out of consolidating power in the Executive Branch punctuated by brief, but galling misappropriations of that power.

Over the past few weeks, President Obama has reached for that voice. He has now framed an argument that, given its scornful rejection by Republican leaders, will define the 2012 election debate.

The president favors higher taxes and the Republicans do not? I’ll take that argument ten times out of ten.

He would “jolt” the economy now to put people to work, by investing in teachers and infrastructure,

This is precisely why the first stimulus failed to jolt the economy. After all, why would it? Teachers and infrastructure projects don’t actually produce anything that leads to economic growth in the short-term. Indeed, it has precisely the opposite effect. Hiring more teachers out of the existing labor market reduces the size of the economically productive skilled workforce, plus it forces new training to accommodate career changes. Infrastructure construction, in the short term, slows travel times and increases transportation costs. Both of these adversely impact short-term economic growth and provide the precise opposite of a jolt.

cutting taxes on payrolls and small business,

Now that’s a staggeringly dishonest description of Obama’s plan, but I’ll take it. It is a deliberate and forceful acknowledgement that reducing taxes propels economic growth.

and extending help to the unemployed.

Also, someone please explain to me how paying someone to do nothing helps the economy. Anyone? Nancy Pelosi? Anyone? Anyone?

Republicans dismiss these common-sense and popular proposals, calling for more spending cuts and less regulation.

Considering that of the five job creating ideas above, three actively undermine economic growth in the short term and two are purely Republican ideas that aren’t really in Obama’s plan, this seems like an odd column to be writing.

To get our books in order, Obama would raise taxes on the rich

22 words ago, she argued that tax cuts propelled economic growth. I remember because it was only TWENTY TWO WORDS AGO! Yes, I counted. Now, either KVH has short-term memory loss on par with the guy in Memento, or she failes to understand that the inverse of a tax cut propelling economic growth is a tax hike impeding economic growth.

while gaining savings by ending the wars abroad

Of course, this was going to happen anyways, making these “savings” somewhat disingenuous.

and reducing Medicare and Medicaid’s unnecessarily high payments to drug companies.

In other words, not paying the drug companies market value for their products, thereby imposing a pseudo-tax on drug companies, further inhibiting growth and undermining their forward-looking research efforts.

Republicans rise in defense of tax cuts for the wealthy

We rise in defense of all tax cuts, which--if memory serves from a mere fifty four words ago--propel economic growth. The idea that we can tax the wealthy to cure our woes is not only economically backwards, it’s morally unjustifiable. Taxes on the wealthy are government-backed barriers to the fulfillment of our own American Dreams. They are impediments to class mobility that have been designed to hobble the notion of free enterprise and rebalance the calculus in the risk and reward equation. This is they tyranny of the majority at its worst. I refuse to validate the economic lynch-mob that has decided that the wealthy are to blame, and that some sort of self-gratifying lust for revenge will actually improve their own standing. It’s lazy and it’s self-serving. America is, and deserves, better than that.

and insist that deficit reduction come solely from cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other “entitlements.”

No air quotes. Social Security, Medicare and Medicate are, without qualification, entitlements. What’s more, each one of the holy trinity of liberal sacred cows is structurally unsound as American demography shifts to an older population.

The president stands for shared sacrifice; the Republicans for sheltering the privileged few.

One would figure that if Obama wants to tax only the rich, he doesn’t promote sharing the sacrifice at all. He favors concentrating it. Indeed, the sane would come to the conclusion that “shared sacrifice” is merely a bumper-sticker euphemism for a job-killing, American Dream-killing, class warfare.

Progressives will have no problem standing with the president in this fight.

We know. It’s the 80% of the country that isn’t batshit crazy that is at issue.

But with a head filled with the clarity of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, I can’t help challenging the definition of this debate. Shared sacrifice has become the establishment trope, and it is used by liberals in contrast with the Republican politics of privilege.

In other words, “shared sacrifice” is universally acknowledged as bumper-sticker euphemism for left-wing tripe. It’s fun to be right.

But shared sacrifice in the circumstances of this country, where the rewards of the economy are not shared, isn’t a moral posture. It is a moral outrage.

So once again, we see that Katrina vanden Heuvel is a flat-out communist. I know because she thinks the economy spits out “rewards” like fucking gold bars coated in shamrocks to the lucky rich. So that’s fun.

Look at the past thirty years. America has grown, but grown apart. The few have captured virtually all of the rewards of growth,

Every transaction in the modern economy is a transaction of choice, except those with the government. There is no force of compulsion in modern economics except taxation and fraud. No one became wealthy (legally) by exploitation. They produced something of value and sold it to another party who believed that they could derive more value from it. The wealthy are wealthy because you and I decided that they should be by the value of what they produced.

Deciding to re-allocate this wealth ad-hoc through the blunt instrument of government is foolish, inefficient, and a clear invitation for America to descend into the type of tyranny our founders feared. Instead of our allocation of wealth being decided by 300 million self-interested consumers, it would be decided by about 600 elected officials and their advisors. Who’s advocating the consolidation of power with the rich here? Me, who wants assets distributed via capitalistic commerce, or Katrina, who wants unlimited power to redistribute assets on a whim in federal hands.

Freedom is a scarce asset, and there is only a fixed amount to go around. Every bit of freedom we grant the government is a freedom we take from ourselves. I was raised to believe that freedom, no matter what anyone says, is my birthright.

while most families have struggled to stay afloat. The median wages of men age 25 to 64 declined by nearly 30 percent over the past 40 years.

That’s not even close to true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Income_men_women_1953_to_2005.png

A bipartisan conservative consensus, enforced by powerful corporate interests, defined our politics.

Uh…she’s serious, right?

Corporate trade policies purposefully exposed working people to global competition,

You can thank conservative free trade policies for the boom of new products now available at low prices, providing millions of jobs in different sectors of the economy.

Also, did I call that she’d go isolationist or what? You owe me $10.

while launching a war on unions.

We saw what unions did to Detroit. The rust belt is a carcass. Don’t tell me the unions were innocent bystanders.

CEO remuneration purposefully gave executives multimillion-dollar personal incentives to cook the books,

And yet, of the thousands of publically traded corporations, audited annually, only a handful have engaged in fraud over the last 20 years. This is because the Boards of Directors, the CEO’s bosses, have a vested interest in not permitting fraud. The idea that fraud is rampant in the business world is a silly conspiratorial fantasy.

or to merge and purge their companies.

First, there is nothing wrong with merging two companies, downsizing a company’s workforce, or shutting down operations all-together. However, it is another silly liberal conspiratorial fantasy that these actions often produce wealth. Wealth is created by growing a business, not by shutting it down. Also, mergers, by nature of the markets, virtually always favor the acquired firm over the acquiring firm.

Bankers freed themselves from adult supervision and opened the casino.

Far from being a sobering adult influence, the government is the most childish and irrational force in the market. What’s more, the stock market is not a casino.

The few benefited enormously, while most of us fell behind.

You who took no risks. You who produced, created, invented nothing. You who did not have marketable skills to meet the new economy. You who expected to be taken care of. You fell behind. Get rid of the income tax model and a boatload of regulations, and you could catch up. I’d love for you to be wealthy. I’d love to be wealthy. Take risks. Create something. Develop your unique skills.

This ended, of course, in a financial wilding — the housing bubble — with bankers peddling what they knew was junk.

And subsequently losing their asses.

They kept dancing, in the famous words of hapless Charles Prince, former president of Citibank, hoping to get out in time.

The problem wasn’t that the bankers bundled complicated new securities; it was that there were underlying assets--debt obligations--that could never be repaid.

But they danced with the confidence that if they blew themselves up, the government would put the pieces back together. And so it did.

Unless you’re Lehman Brothers. Or Bear Stears. Besides, conservatives were the ones calling for allowing the system to fail. We agree that moral hazard is bad for the efficiency of the markets. However, you think that moral hazard is the unavoidable result of having a market; I think it’s the unavoidable result of having a government involved in the market.

The resulting crash wiped out about $8 trillion in housing value

Actually, the intrinsic value never matched market prices. This is pretty much how you define a bubble. The value was never there. Only the price was.

and blew up the economy. Unemployment soared, as did federal deficits as tax revenue plummeted

Hey! Another cogent point! Tax revenues are far more contingent on the market cycle than they are on tax rates. This concerns me, because if liberals understand these basic points, as KVH appears to here, then their arguments should crumble under the weight of their own contradictory premises. Yet the liberal mind manages to forget basic ideas like this when they matter.

and payments for food stamps and other support for the jobless rose. From 2007 to 2010, the national debt increased as a percentage of GDP from 64.4 to 93.2.

Yeah. We know.

No one should forget. Wall Street and big corporations had the party.

What party? They went through the same downsizing as every other company in America.

They rigged the rules.

Rigging the rules and writing complex derivatives to be sold to sophisticated investors are two very different things.

They pocketed the rewards.

What rewards?

They created the mess.

People not being able to pay their mortgages created the mess. Government policies to encourage people getting mortgages that they couldn’t afford created the mess. Banks and derivative financing merely exacerbated a market inefficiency that they failed to adequately valuate.

They got taxpayers to save them.

Please. Government jumped to save them. It’s not like they had to beg.

The conservatives argue that the vulnerable should pick up the whole tab.

No, we argue that the banks should have been allowed to fail, enter bankruptcy, renegotiate their debt obligations and write off some assets, and emerge in a growing economy.

Now that it hasn’t happened, we argue that conflating errors of judgment from some banking analysts with the nefarious and ill-defined sins of all rich people is simply too stupid to actually be tax policy outside of Zimbabwe.

And even some liberals call for a “shared sacrifice” that would mean the most vulnerable in the society — the seniors, the poor, the disabled and the sick — should help to clean up the mess.

The structural instability of Medicare and Medicaid has absolutely nothing to do with the recession. Social Security is only proximally related, but the recession only sped up a process that was already destined to occur.

The fact is that most Americans have already sacrificed. They are the victims of bad policies skewed to benefit the privileged.

Really? Outside of the owners of Solyndra and LightSquared, which policies are those that benefit which of the privileged?

Real shared sacrifice would require that we send the bill to those who had the party and created the mess, and ask them to pay their fair share.

That’s not shared sacrifice at all. It’s basic free market pricing, which I find very heartening for KVH’s sake. Here’s the problem: the government created the mess. The government can’t collect from the government, and the only way for the people to collect from the government, hilariously, is to reduce tax rates—which is precisely the opposite of what KVH is proposing.

That’s where Roosevelt’s clarity is so important. It reminds us that we must ground our policies in moral vision

Again, Roosevelt was the least active champion for freedom in the 20^th Century. Internment camps. Packing the Supreme Court—or at least trying to.

— the freedoms that we would protect,

And those that KVH would jettison.

the economic justice that we would champion.

And the basic equality that KVH would ignore.

Let us build our policy out from there, not by positioning carefully to contrast with an extreme right.

The extreme right has the moral vision. The left only has warmed-over Marx.

Let our values — not our extremists — drive our policies.

I’ll agree to that. Conservatives believe in liberty, thus favor low taxes. Conservatives believe in equality, thus are opposed to taxes that target any specific demographic. Conservatives believe in justice, thus are opposed to imposing penalties on “the rich” in retribution for some imagined crime against the middle class. Conservatives believe in the power of the people, thus our rejection of cries for “power to the people.”

We know that this is where the erosion of our liberties always comes from: an intellectual lightweight with a shrill voice spouting off vaguely formulated articulations on fairness and sacrifice. This woman is a dangerous buffoon. She deserves nothing but lament, scorn, and ridicule.

Political Horror So Bad It's Good (Eugene Robinson)

Finally! Tax and budget policy! That’s my wheelhouse! Ring the bell; I’m all laced up and ready to go.

Obama’s tax plan is common sense, not class warfare

Doesn’t this kind of seem like giving up on a headline? You gave away the whole farm, Eugene. Also, you’re about to contradict yourself, but we’ll get to that.

By Eugene Robinson, Monday, September 19, 2:22 PM

“Class warfare!” scream the Republicans, in a voice usually reserved for phrases such as “Run for your lives!”

Maybe in a Giant Shark vs. Crocosaurus. (Seriously, check it out. ) That’s because the unintentional hilarity of the President’s proposal is that he’s successfully parodied himself into the caricature of the insatiable left-wing leviathan with a lumbering, incomprehensible narrative of logical contortions. It has the rest of us rolling on the floors. Sure the proposal is dangerous and foolish, but it’s never going to pass, and it’s important to keep a sense of humor--as any giant shark/crocosaurus type of scenario teaches us.

Why yes, it does feature Steve Urkel running down the beach
with an assault rifle. Why would it not?

Spare us the histrionics.

It must be exhausting castigating so many imaginary foes.

The GOP and its upper-crust patrons have been waging an undeclared but devastating war against middle-class, working-class and poor Americans for decades.

Except all of the super wealthy are liberal! Hollywood actors, professional athletes, people who read the New Yorker, and billionaires begging to pay more taxes just doesn’t jibe with the conservative ethos. But, again, as long as you find fulfillment from crusading against false premises, don’t let me get in the way.

Now they scream bloody murder at the notion that long-suffering victims might finally hit back.

So…liberal tax policy is class warfare? Please allow me to interject that this seems, on the surface, to undercut the title of this precious little temper tantrum, as well as the shoddy argument that President Obama has hastily constructed for himself.

President Obama’s proposal to boost taxes for the wealthy by $1.5 trillion

Rejoinder: everyone should already know, federal receipts are mean-regressive at 18.2% of GDP, and show absolutely no empirical correlation with tax rates, particularly top marginal tax rates. If you’ve sifted through the fancy financial jargon, congratulations! Here are some fun words as a reward: Jousting Proust. Everlasting gobstopper. Newfangled gizmo. Boobs.

over the next decade is a good first step toward reforming a system in which billionaire hedge-fund executives are taxed at a lower rate than their chauffeurs and private chefs.

Keep in mind, the $1.5T tax is supposed to be part of the effort to create jobs. Hilariously, this guy has multiple economic advisors, each paid handsomely to ignore the rudimentary principles of macroeconomics that they pawned off on their grad students to teach.

Republicans whine that since they oppose raising taxes on the rich —

Technically, they oppose all tax increases, but continue.

and control the House of Representatives,

Thanks to Obama doing things like this from 2009-2010.

which can block such legislation — Obama’s proposal should be seen as political, not substantive.

That’s pretty much a carbon copy of what Democrats said about Cut, Cap, and Balance. Also, about 5 other proposals Republicans had to raise the debt ceiling. The motto of that fight was that we needed serious attempts at legislation that can pass a divided legislature. Now, all of a sudden, bucking the Republicans’ sole immutable governing principle with proposed legislation deserves serious consideration? Please.

This is just a campaign initiative, they say, not a “serious” plan to address the nation’s financial and economic woes.

Well, considering that it’s a tax increase under the guise of a jobs plan, it’s unintentionally hilarious.

But that’s pure solipsism:

Or, precisely the opposite: practical.

Whatever does not fit the GOP’s worldview is, by definition, illegitimate.

The bill is illegitimate because it lies to itself about its own purpose. It’s political chicanery because it was never intended to pass. The two are separate issues.

By this standard, Obama could propose only measures that are in the Republican Party’s platform —

And this was the guy who didn’t really get why Republicans were so resistant to adopting a debt ceiling bill that was squarely in the Democratic Party’s platform. I get being a partisan. What I don’t get is the glaring hypocrisy.

which obviously would defeat the purpose of being elected president as a progressive Democrat in the first place.

Of course, Obama wasn’t elected as a progressive Democrat; he was elected as a centrist Democrat. People are starting to regard the latter as a political unicorn.

Outside of the Republican echo chamber, polls consistently show

Polls—that is the ballot boxes on election days—consistently show the country fleeing the Democratic Party in droves, so it takes some chutzpah (See that, NY-9 voters? That’s my olive branch to the newly conservative Jewish community. Welcome!) to frame the Democrats as populists.

the American people consider unemployment to be the nation’s most urgent problem, not deficits and debt.

And yet, there is no conceivable tie between raising taxes on the rich and creating jobs. The two are antithetical. Obama himself acknowledged as much less than a year ago after the November “shellacking.” Remember? When he extended the dreaded Bush tax cuts? Now you remember.

Obama was on target with the American Jobs Act he proposed this month, the only question being what took him so long.

Vacations, incompetence, tone-deafness, general arrogance, misguided priorities, and a general dearth of economic know-how.

Americans do have long-term concerns about debt, however, and by large margins see an obvious solution: a balanced combination of spending cuts and tax increases.

Which is kind of like asking a kid whether he likes Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or both. Both, bitches! Michaelangelo fighting Optimus Prime to the death! (I may have dated myself a little there.) The point is that when you ask a childish question, you get a childish response.

In other words, they want precisely the kind of approach that House Speaker John Boehner rejected during the debt-ceiling fight — and that he vows to reject again. Why did Republicans begin squawking about class warfare even before Obama had a chance to announce his proposals?

The class warfare card is kind of like the two of clubs in Obama’s game of hearts—it always gets played first. The race card is the queen of spades. If you don’t play hearts, these metaphors are kind of lost to you. Sorry.

Because by calling on the rich to pay “their fair share” of taxes,

Which is both vague and undefined.

the president has hit upon a clear and simple way to illustrate how unequal and unfair our society has become.

By refusing to speak in specifics and playing to the basest instincts of an increasingly sophisticated electorate?

Since the beginning of the Reagan years, the share of total income captured by the top 1 percent of earners has doubled while the share taken by the bottom 80 percent has fallen.

And yet, it was irrelevant when the pie was growing. The idea that the rich are taking from the poor is the type of redistributionist nonsense that has led Obama to believe that by reapportioning money through the vehicle of government, that he can create wealth. It can not; it can only destroy.

The rich are getting richer

And the poor are also getting richer! That’s how a growing economy works!

at the expense not only of the poor but of the middle class as well.

Sigh.

Studies demonstrating this trend tend to be dry and, let’s face it, sleep-inducing.

Eugene Robinson just called you dumb. Which, I suppose, is no worse than linking you to Giant Shark vs. Crocosaurus, (seriously, check it out)

But the perverse disparity in tax rates between the super-rich and the rest of us is enough to grab anyone’s attention.

Beautiful. Yes, the wealthy do pay more in income taxes.

The very wealthy earn much of their income through dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent.

So, already you’re talking about framing national economic policy based on a perceived slight by .0001% of the population. Brilliant.

This low rate would apply specifically to a wildly successful hedge-fund manager who made, say, $50 million last year. By contrast, an insurance company executive who made $500,000 — just 1 percent of what the hedge-fund manager took home — would pay a top marginal income tax rate of 35 percent. Even a teacher who made just $50,000 — 0.1 percent of the hedge-fund haul — would pay a top marginal rate of 25 percent.

Here’s the difference: the school teacher and the insurance company executive are both also saving, whether through a 401k, IRA, personal savings account, or pension program. When they pull that money out of the hedge fund, they are also taxed at 15%. The fact that this impacts their livelihood less is a testament to which industry they chose to work in, not a function of some unfair conspiracy. Plus, let’s also give a little love to the hedge fund managers: these guys are extremely good at what they do. Successfully managing a hedge fund is kind of like playing center field for the Yankees against 10,000 other Mickey Mantles. And still winning.

By increasing the capital gains tax rate, though, Obama is not only increasing the taxes on teachers and insurance executives alike, he is also putting a thumb on the scales of the capital budgeting equation. All companies have to make a decision how much of their operation to finance by debt and how much to finance through equity (and preferred stock, and other more complicated financing vehicles, but let’s keep this Robinson-accessible). By increasing the capital gains tax, the government has essentially disincentivized stockholders from putting their wealth in equity (or encouraged short-term stockholders that increase price volatility). This disincentivization sucks money out of the equity markets. The replacement funds must come from debt financing. And the primary lesson of the 2008 recession, if you recall, was that debt financing and overleveraging are dangerous tools. Yes, tinkering with this tax rate has the potential to cause economic ruination.

Either that or the entire financial industry will move to Switzerland, the Seychelles, or Malta.

Obama proposes tax legislation that would erase this disparity.

And create all sorts of exciting new ones, rife with government inefficiency and smothering bureaucracy!

He also vows that unless Congress enacts comprehensive — and fair — tax reform, he will allow the Bush tax cuts for households earning more than $250,000 a year to expire at the end of 2012.

That’s fine. He’ll be out by then. Also, how is this brinksmanship any less dastardly or nefarious than what the Republicans did with the debt ceiling debate? Oh right. The difference is that Eugene Robinson approves of this one.

The overall plan that Obama announced Monday would cut deficits by about $4 trillion over the next 10 years — without gutting programs that bolster the middle class and aid the poor.

Instead, he would simply gut the middle class. It’s much simpler that way. More direct.

New tax revenue and money saved from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan make up most of the total.

The end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be realized, but only because they’re actually spending cuts. Forgive, for a moment, that they were never supposed to be permanent budgetary additions, and appreciate the value of simply taking something off the books.

Obama’s proposed savings in Medicare and Medicaid are modest and tailored so that their impact is progressive.

The bone requisite has been thrown to the apoplectic left.

The president correctly decided that ensuring Social Security’s long-term solvency should proceed on a separate track.

In other words, he pussed out.

All this should be heartening to those who really want to preserve these vital programs.

Not I, but we’ll address that some other time.

The headline from Obama’s plan, though, is the call for wealthy Americans to pay taxes like everybody else.

Thereby upending the economic homeostasis with the delicacy and purposeful foresight of a 5-year-old shaking a snow globe.

If Republicans believe the current system is fine, Obama said, “they should be called out. They should have to defend that unfairness. . . . They ought to have to answer for it.”

We’ve already heard their answer.

And we’ve heard Obama’s retort: “This is not class warfare. It’s math.”

Except that Robinson explicitly acknowledged it was class war. Remember? It was the first thing he said after poorly imitating Republicans, (and giving me an opportunity to rattle off a Giant Shark vs. Crocosaurus reference for the first of three glorious times this article.) So, either Obama’s wrong and this actually is class warfare (true) or Eugene Robinson is a blithering idiot who can’t stay on topic for four sentences (also true.)

In the end, what does it matter? Eugene Robinson has screeched about hating the rich for a few paragraphs, so he’s probably all tuckered out by now. Obama has pulled off the last vestiges of the moderate’s façade, and I got an opportunity to talk about capital budgeting. Wins all around.

The Innate Contradiction of Progressive Constitutionalism (Ruth Marcus)

I’ll generously overlook the capitalization errors in the title and, unlike Ruth Marcus, get to substance: the Constitution.

Recovering the Constitution from conservatives

By Ruth Marcus, Published: September 15

Tea Party types and other conservatives talk about how they’d like their country back.

Don’t worry, Ruth. We’re taking care of it one district at a time 

I’d like my Constitution back.

Maybe when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

The rise of these self-proclaimed constitutional conservatives

Let the dripping disdain wash over you. Soak it in. It means we’re winning.

is an ominous development

Apparently, conservatives are never just wrong; we’re always dangerous.

that has received too little notice — and too little push-back. Until now.

That’s not a sentence, and you’re not leading a movement.

Under the banner of “Constitutional Progressives,”

Liberals have finally found the most concisely contradictory form of self-definition. Good for them.

a coalition of liberal groups has begun making an important, two-part argument: first, that a progressive government agenda is consistent with constitutional values;

That’s a tough slog. Notice also that she claims it is consistent with “constitutional values” and not “the Constitution.”

and second, that the constitutional conservative approach represents a dangerous retrenchment of the government’s role.

Take out the “dangerous” part, and that’s exactly the point. The government has used minor misinterpretations of the Constitution (particularly the commerce clause) on the part of the Supreme Court to justify unfathomable government bloat. The danger here is that we’re cutting our defense budget to pay for social programs and entitlements. Of course conservatives want to retrench.

This bid to “rebut the constitutional fairy tales being peddled by the Tea Party,” as Douglas Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center put it,

This would be a whole lot more impactful if you gave an example or two of conservative misinterpretations of the Constitution…or any Constitutional justification whatsoever for this mumbo jumbo.

could not be more timely, with the dizzying rise of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).

Who has his own problems with conservatives (as I so ably outlined here). The difference is that the governor of Texas is rarely constrained by the United States Constitution, as the United States Constitution is, as the name indicates, a document designed to guide and legally bind the federal government.

The constitutional conservative critique, as articulated by Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and others, goes far beyond the familiar laments about activist judges.

You missed the point, Ruth. The laments about activist judges are that they permit government to overstep its constitutionally permitted role.

It is, at bottom, an argument against the 20th century — specifically against the notion that the Constitution envisions and empowers a muscular federal government

It doesn’t.

able to ensure that its citizens have clean air, healthy food and safe workplaces.

Please find the justification for any of those three enumerated in Article I, Section 8. (Hint: you will not find them without some legal contortions.) For that matter, please explain why ay one of these necessitates federal legislation instead of state or local legislation.

To grasp the radical nature of the constitutional conservative approach, consider the record of every Republican president since the New Deal.

The best Constitutional argument Marcus has presented thus far: it is, therefore it must be permissible.

Richard Nixon ran on the pledge of appointing “strict constructionist” judges, but he created the Environmental Protection Agency, telling Congress that “our national government today is not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land that grows our food.” Nixon didn’t doubt — as do the modern constitutional conservatives — that environmental regulation was an appropriate and constitutional role for the federal government.

I think we all know that Nixon’s undoing was a failure to appreciate the limitations to his power. The EPA shares that trait.

Likewise, George W. Bush inveighed against judges “legislating from the bench.” Yet he presided over the largest expansion of Medicare — the addition of a prescription drug benefit — in the history of the program

Oddly, the actions of the legislative process do not in any way undercut Bush’s opposition to the imagination of new laws by the judiciary.

and oversaw a sweeping new role for the federal government in assuring quality education by local schools. Bush didn’t question — as do the constitutional conservatives — whether these were permissible activities for the federal government.

I think we all know that Bush’s undoing was that he never actually governed domestic affairs as a conservative.

Also, nothing to throw in Reagan’s face? I expected better research out of you, Ruth.

The constitutional conservative vision is dramatically different. It sees a hobbled federal government limited to a few basic activities, such as national defense and immigration.

Read: the items specifically enumerated in Article I, Section 8.

The 10th Amendment, reserving to states the powers not granted to the federal government, would be put on steroids.

How is it possible to put the 10^th Amendment on steroids? The interpretation of the 10^th Amendment is not particularly complicated, nor is the language obtuse or arcane: if there is a power or right not specifically mentioned within the Constitution, it does not belong to the federal government. The language is written to be absolute, so the interpretation should be absolute. That the Supreme Court has neglected and malnourished the 10^th Amendment is not evidence that it’s newfound prominence is unfounded or unjustified.

The commerce clause, giving the federal government the authority to regulate commerce among the states, would be drastically diminished.

New best Constitutional argument set forth by Marcus: “the framers didn’t really mean the ‘interstate’ part of the interstate commerce clause.”

Certainly, there’s a legitimate debate about the proper role of the federal government and the scope of federal vs. state power. But that is a different argument than the one long thought settled during the New Deal: that the Constitution grants the federal government power to regulate a broad array of activities in the national interest.

If we are not permitted to re-open issues thought to be settled, either by popular convention or by Supreme Court decision, then we would have a lot of disenfranchised blacks still drinking out of separate drinking fountains (foremost among a litany of terrible Supreme Court decisions).

The danger posed by the constitutional conservative approach is to attempt to lash together debates about what the federal government should do and what the Constitution allows it to do.

No, it’s an attempt to get government to stop doing things they’re not legally authorized to do. Like giving a half a billion dollars to a failing solar panel manufacturer and then subordinating the debt debenture to subsequent private investment. Or mandating that private citizens purchase health insurance. Or regulating the derivatives market. Or any one of ten thousand other things that the federal government does without a mention of the constitutionality of it.

A white paper by the liberal Center for American Progress spells out the potential consequences of the constitutional conservative vision.

Let me guess: Mel Gibson?

Programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would be deemed to exceed the federal government’s enumerated powers.

If they’re that invaluable to society, we can either amend the Constitution or shift the burden of these programs to the states.

The federal government would cease to have any role in education,

Great! Someone please explain to me how the presence of the federal government enriches any child’s education.

eliminating funding for public schools and college financial aid,

eliminating federal funding for public schools and college financial aid. There’s still state, local, and private funding available.

and in combating poverty, ending food stamps and unemployment insurance.

Again, these should be state programs anyways.

Laws on everything from child labor to food safety would be overturned.

And replaced by state laws. Stop me if this sounds redundant.

None of this is likely to happen, of course, for the simple reason that most Americans don’t want it to.

Please explain to me when exactly popular opinion made something constitutionally permissible.

When Perry was pushed during a debate about the implications of his views on the constitutionality of Social Security, for example, he waved off the question as an interesting intellectual exercise.

And yet, none of this addresses the question of whether Social Security actually is constitutionally permissible.

But the emergence of the constitutional conservative argument has real-world consequences — even without a constitutional conservative in the White House. It shifts the legal debate significantly rightward, energizing and empowering conservative judges and justices.

And Ruth Marcus wants those miserable bastards beaten down and dejected.

And it changes the nature of the political debate as well by narrowing the turf on which, at least in the view of some lawmakers, the federal government is deemed authorized to operate.

That’s a bad thing?

“This is a way to weaponize the Constitution to prevent a real debate about how the government can solve national problems,” Kendall told me.

In case Kendall wasn’t paying attention, that debate has been settled; the federal government can’t solve national problems.

Strong words,

Really?

but the constitutional conservative vision is too extreme to continue to ignore it in the hope that it will fade on its own.

So, having made it through this entire article, it appears that conservatives have laid out a well-articulated and comprehensive interpretation of the Constitution that envisions a limited federal government. We have cited the constitution, sought to understand the intention and mindset of the men who wrote it, and allowed that understanding to guide a reasoned interpretation of current events. By contrast, “Constitutional Progressives” have succinctly rebuffed: “Nuh-uh!”

There was not a single Constitution-based argument in this painfully elongated assertion. The closest Marcus got was a reference to the commerce clause that painfully omitted the phrase “and among the several States.”

This wasn’t a serious attempt to present a liberal or progressive interpretation of the Constitution. Instead, it was a political accusation that conservatives want to take away Social Security under the guise of Constitutionalism. There aren’t any court cases pending on the constitutionality of Social Security. Notice, however, that she didn’t once mention Obamacare, and how the conservative interpretation of the Constitution appears to be making serious headway in the courts.

This is just the next step in the progressive movement’s attempt to find an answer to the Tea Party. Remember the “Coffee Party?”

Opinion Nuggets: The Gray Lady's Bobblehead

Gail Collins is right. The Perry/Bachmann kerfuffle over mandatory HPV shots is a major score for Bachman politically and a serious liability for Perry. But, as per usual, Collins completely misses the point as to why.

About the vaccine. It’s been proved to be effective in reducing cervical cancer in sexually active women, and it apparently works best if you begin the shots around age 12. The intense opposition from the social right appears to be based on the idea that once the kids had the shots they’d be more likely to have sex. Or, in the convoluted and creepy words of Rick Santorum: “Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government.”

Let’s start with the obvious: “About the vaccine” is not a sentence. Collins undisciplined attempts at conversational writing simply give the appearance of amateurish writing. This is no less worthy of derision than the aimless ramblings that follow, as it reflects both on her professionalism and on the sagging reputation of the Times’ opinion page.

On substance, just about every sentence in this paragraph fails to make the grade (except those quoted from Rick Santorum). The first sentence isn’t actually a sentence. The second looks like it’s copied and pasted straight from Wikipedia and/or Merck’s website.

The wheels really fall off in the third sentence. It starts inauspiciously when Collins misunderstands which factions object to Perry’s vaccine policies. She dismissively and mistakenly tabs the “social right” as Perry’s antagonists—a particularly odd claim given Perry’s bulletproof standing with devout conservative voters. At the debate, these were the smattering of folks that cheered wildly when he said that he would always err on the side of life. They were grossly outnumbered by Perry’s detractors, yet Collins flips the roles. This is, of course, because Collins fundamentally misunderstands that all conservatives object to Perry’s policy because a) it is a gross misuse of executive authority at the expense of the legislative process and b) whether passed by executive fiat or by legislative deliberation, it uses the bludgeon of government to dictate healthcare decisions. Conservatives do not object to this vaccine or to vaccines in general; we object to overreaching mandates. A failure to grasp these basic concepts leads Collins down the primrose path to babbling idiocy.  

By this time, Collins accusing Santorum—who was speaking in on live television instead of writing with an editor to parse every word—of convoluted and creepy language doesn't even meet the bar of a pot/kettle situation. It’s a pot/anything-not-black situation. What’s more, she omits—either intentionally or though massive incompetence—Santorum’s preface that the basis for school vaccines and inoculations is to prevent the incidental spread of communicable diseases through interactions associated with being at school. In other words, a child shouldn’t get Pertussis or Diphtheria just because their schoolwork requires that they work in close proximity to each other. The full quote from Santorum is:

“I believe your policy is wrong.  Why — ladies and gentlemen, why do we inoculate people with vaccines in public schools?  Because we’re afraid of those diseases being communicable between people at school. And therefore, to protect the rest of the people at school, we have vaccinations to protect those children.

Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government.  This is big government run amok.  It is bad policy, and it should not have been done.”

FULL DEBATE TRANSCRIPT (See page 3 for above quote)

Santorum’s point was simply that no mandate may justifiably cover sexually transmitted disease because no class or school-related work may justifiably require sex. In fact, he put this difficult to articulate idea quite succinctly. Far from being creepy or convoluted, his point was on-topic and a necessary reminder of exactly why conservatives favor some school vaccines and precisely where we draw the line.

Gail Collins, for her part, is off somewhere reading Jennifer Rubin’s blog post today about Republicans assault on intellectualism and smugly nodding along like a bobblehead.

Opinion Nuggets: Doing the Time of their Life

"You just made a fool of yourself in front of T-Bone."

Neither is there time nor reason for a full write-up today; the idiocy of today’s New York Times editorial on criminal sentencing is at least concise enough for me not to belabor the point. The wizards at the Gray Lady posit that the sentence of life without parole is doled out too freely given the severity of the sentence. I do not concur.

The sentence [of life without parole] is no less severe when applied to adults. Yet life without parole, which exists in all states (Alaska’s version is a 99-year sentence), is routinely used, including in cases where the death penalty is not in play and where even an ordinary life sentence might be too harsh.

From 1992 to 2008, the number in prison for life without parole tripled from 12,453 to 41,095, even though violent crime declined sharply all over the country during that period. That increase is also much greater than the percentage rise in offenders serving life sentences.

The American Law Institute, a group composed of judges, lawyers and legal scholars, has wisely called for restricting the use of the penalty to cases “when this sanction is the sole alternative to a death sentence.”

First, to be clear: my scorn extends to prattling ninnies at the ALI with no less rancorous condemnation. Dumbasses.

More importantly, did these venerable scholars consider that the reason why “crime declined sharply all over the country” was because “the number in prison for life without parole tripled?” There is only one force that we know with absolute certainty that deters crime: an increase in the cost incurred by committing that crime. Sometimes that takes the form of harsh or uncompromising judges, hard-nosed cops, and relentless prosecutors. Other times, it takes the (admittedly more awesome) form of granny packing a sidearm. Liberals despise both.

There’s nothing valiant about condemning justice for its sometimes gritty byproducts. Issuing a blanket condemnation of a specific prison sentence is about as nonsensical as refusing to use the number two. By breaking the social contract, criminals forfeit their constitutionally protected rights. We’re not giving out life sentences without parole for parking tickets or smoking a dime bag. These are very bad people who have, with certainty beyond a reasonable doubt, done very bad things. I see not problem with sticking them in a very bad place. (Sadly, Canada is not a viable possibility—for now—so we’ll have to stick with prison.) 

The Paradox of the Conservative Voter (Original)

There are two dominant ideas at play in the political landscape of the right: that the country is naturally and overwhelmingly predisposed to conservatism, and that Republican political leaders are not true conservatives.

Get into it deep enough with any conservative worth his salt, and he’ll cite the 40/40/20 makeup of the American electorate (40% conservative, 40% independent/moderate, 20% liberal). This statistic, unchanged over decades, is rightly trumpeted as evidence of the profound sympathy the country has for conservative ideas and principles. Yet often it raises profound questions about where and how the generally accepted political center is formed.

Likewise, conservatives are far quicker than liberals to lament their elected leaders as inauthentic Johnny-come-latelies or nefarious liberal wolves in conservative sheep’s clothes. Look at the questions being asked of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or even Rick Perry by conservative figures, and you will search in vain for congruence from the left. Even as Obama’s support on the left wanes, the questions are about his political judgments and the tone of his speeches, not about whether or not he’s truly a liberal.

The problem is that these two narratives don’t jibe. You can’t argue that the country is predominantly conservative while the country’s intellectual leadership is predominantly liberal without inviting some skepticism. The left has used the natural assumption of competence that most Americans grant their elected officials (or at very least the natural deference they at feel to the institution which those elected officials serve) to spin the narrative to their liking. If the ruling class is intelligent and liberal, and the conservative majority is under-represented in the ruling class, it evinces a dearth of intelligence in the conservative majority. Hence, NASCAR, pickup trucks, flag-waving, and rural living have degenerated over decades of liberal assault into one amalgamated caricature of the toothless yokel. Add to this the massive leftward tilt of academia, and you have the undying refrain that liberals are simply more intelligent and refined than conservatives.

For their part, conservatives have come up with their own explanations for this phenomenon. Though most are plausible, they fail to dissuade the nagging dissonance that results from these simultaneous facts. The two most frequent arguments are that the liberal media dampens the conservative majority’s impact at the ballot box and that the liberal media pulls conservative elected officials to the left through classical Pavlovian conditioning. I happen to believe that both are true, but even with both factors at work, the cacophony of contradiction remains.

The conclusion that I draw from this is not complicated: Republican voters are simply more demanding than Democrat voters. Whereas Republicans need to see a candidate show an easy fluency with the core principles that comprise conservative thought, Democratic voters look only for assurances on their own individual issues: abortion, immigration, gay marriage, pro-union, anti-war, class warfare. No liberal president since Johnson has clearly articulated the progressive agenda, and Obama actively avoids speaking of it. I’ve written before that I did not vote for John McCain in 2008 despite greatly fearing the Obama presidency. I reasoned that McCain would act like a liberal under the banner of conservatism. Liberal policies in the guise of conservative thought are far more damaging than liberal policies openly acknowledged as liberal. That reasoning still appeals to me today. Yet that vote exacerbated a paradox that causes constant damage to the conservative cause.

This should be a lesson for Republican strategists (and Santorum backers). When conservatives get mired in the wedge issues, they lose. It’s not a matter of having the better argument; it’s a matter of the composition of the voting base of each party. Abortion should be the last thing a conservative talks about in a national election. Not only is it a losing issue for conservatives, it’s also completely irrelevant, seeing as it’s entirely a judicial matter. Similarly, conservatives should uniformly acknowledge gay marriage as a state issue in a half a sentence (or two words: “state issue”) before promptly changing the topic to more important issues—and no, gay marriage is not an important issue. The resolution of the paradox can come only if Republicans stop swinging at pitch-outs. The wheelhouse is the discussion about the size and scope of government. Republicans win that argument ten times out of ten. When Republicans get caught fighting elections around the periphery of core conservative thought, we all lose.