Hillary Clinton has given up on “change.” Her new TV ad features the angelic faces of various children sleeping in their homes while the White House phone rings with some pending emergency. Here’s the voiceover:
Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. It’s three A.M. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?
So much for “if you’re ready to make a change, I’m ready to lead,” and “I embody change.” And so much for the youth vote. This one’s strictly for the parents and grandparents. As Obama has cut deep into the ranks of Hillary’s “pantsuit army,” her touting of establishment credentials is probably a smart move. She never had a shot of her beating Obama as an outsider candidate. And just as he’s embraced the charge of being fresh and substance-free, she should own her Beltway status and advertise her A-list rolodex. (That the names in the rolodex haven’t done her much good lately and that her connections are more cocktail-party than war-room is a different story.)
However, there has not been a single Hillary campaign gambit that doesn’t fall cleanly into one of two categories: the low-blow boomerang or the too-little-too-late. This image shift is decidedly of the latter variety. If she had only picked up all the emergency calls that came in over the past few months, she’d be in far better shape.
There was something about GWB that made you want to hit the remote regardless of the subject. The Gettysburg Proclamation n his hands would have sounded like something from a cereal box. If the medium is the message, the one George conveyed was second rate is plenty good enough if we’re all pals. “Doin’ a heckuva job, Brownie.” “Why shore, Harriet, I bet you’d make a dang good Supreme Court justice.” The Festus act wore thin. Obama might be unspooling cotton candy every time he speaks, but it always sounds important. If GWB’s speaking skills were primary level, McCain’s were only middle school. Like it or not, rhetorical and performance skills are as important today as they were in the days of the great Greek and Roman orators.
The underlying idea that government should be asking for sacrifice from the people is specious. Those who join the military and their families are prepared to make the “ultimate” sacrifice, but other than that voluntary form of sacrifice there is no other that the government should ask for or expect from the people it represents. If people wish to give more time or money to charity, that is their business, and they can pat each other on the back or honour themselves with rubber-chicken dinners. There is something nauseating about a citizen asking how he can sacrifice for the nation. I recall during the campaign a woman asked McCain how we could sacrifice. I do not recall the answer. My answer would have been: no government should ask sacrifice of its citizens beyond minimal taxes to keep the nation secure. Only ideological totalitarians – whether religious or secular – demand “sacrifice” of its citizens. We know what that looks like.
Banjo is exactly right–Bush’s Achilles Heel was his complete inability to communicate effectively with the American people.
I’m with C.Gee–government is to secure the people’s rights. It’s “for the people,” not vice versa.
If communication is everything, it seems GWB out-communicated Al Gore and John Kerry. As bad as things seem now, it’s a good thing we didn’t elect either of those mealy-mouths.
I have no problem with leaders asking citizens to volunteer their time and money. But I mean “asking” in the true sense of exhortation, not in the political sense of confiscating, which is how liberals always use the term. Thus, every tax increase on high earners is called “‘asking’ the ‘wealthiest among us’ to do their fair share,” as if a polite “no, thank you” were an option.
Broder appears to be misusing the word as the liberal he is. He isn’t really complaining that the President didn’t ask for sacrifice. As Mr. Wehner points out, the President clearly did ASK for sacrifice (whether with enough commitment being a separate question). What the President did not do, and what Broder really wanted him to do, is to TAKE from everyone. A case can be made for such shared sacrifice, too – I’m all for a military draft – but it needs to be called by its rightful name lest commentators like Mr. Wehner get the idea that a real ask – like the Freedom Corps – refutes a charge that no euphemistic “ask” – like a tax increase – has been made.
The annoying use of “ask” to mean “take” has given “asking” a bad name. But volunteering some of one’s time and resources is good for the giver and for the given, and that fact should not be lost in partisan semantics. So a call to service seems to me an entirely proper thing for the guy on the bully pulpit to do.
As for taxes, I think it would have been a good idea to raise taxes when it became apparent how much the Iraq war was going to cost. The economy collapsed from exogenous events that would have happened at any tax rate. Would higher tax rates have stopped banks and Freddie and Fannie from obeying the CRA? How can we blame the liberals for demanding that bad loans be made, or, on the other side, blame the ratings agencies for prostituting their ratings or the SEC for sleeping at the switch, or Congress for defanging the CFTC, and then say that tax policy would really have mattered to the current situation. Yes, if rates had been raised, they would now need to be lowered on account of the recession, but that’s not the same thing as saying that they should not have been raised as a way of sharing the cost of our wars.
I get disgusted anytime I hear politicians speak of “sacrifice”. As they continue and try reaching their hands deeper into my wallet and yours, the last thing I want to hear from their mouths is how I need to sacrifice. How about government sacrifice? There’s a novel idea! How about government agencies lay off a few people, take true budget cuts (as opposed to a cut in the increase) and generally downsize in keeping with the economy. Congress should “sacrifice” by having their pay cut 10%, having their medical premiums increased, and their staff budget cut. But no, instead you and I have to sacrifice for the sake of government. We must do without so government can do with more. I’m confident this is not what the founders of this great nation envisioned in the late 1700′s.
#1 Loose Strings: So why isn’t the Hillary-pawing cotton-candy-spinning Favreau president? Or, for that matter, The One’s Very Own Svengali, D. Shrum Axlerot?
David Broder thinks that, because he has been hooting from the same perch for a quarter of a century, he is a wise old owl.
Mr. Broder: Do we need MORE taxes?
We already have a few taxes imposed upon us …. are politicians going to impose MORE taxes?
Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL License Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Luxury Tax
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Service charge Taxes
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax (Truckers)
Sales Taxes
Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surecharge Tax
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Tax
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax
(And don’t forget to include inflation: the “hidden tax”.)
(And don’t forget to include the thousands of different types of local, state, and federal “fees”.)
(And don’t forget to include the thousands of different types of local, state, and federal “licenses”.)
DOES ANY POLITICIAN THINK THIS IS FUNNY?
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago … and our nation was the most prosperous in the world.
We had absolutely no national debt…
We had the largest middle class in the world…
and Mom (if she wished) stayed home to raise the kids.
What happened?
Can you spell ‘P-O-L-I-T-I-C-I-A-N-S’ ?
And we still have to press ’1′ for English.
What the heck happened?????
Answer: Coercion.
Why?
Answer: “Supply & Demand”
The ideological DEMAND for security was met with a political SUPPLY of coercion.
And if one examines every major civilization in history, one concludes that all such civilizations ultimately collapsed for the same reason:
The ideological DEMAND for security was met with a political SUPPLY of tyranny.
Broder reverts to tax policy in this reflexive way because he is an old-style (mid-century era) economic interventionist: one who thinks the only problem for “moderate,” European-style government “management” of the economy (and its interrelationship with social patterns) has been all those over-politicized critics objecting to it.
“Tax policy” has become so embedded in our economic life that it is virtually impossible to separate it from the ideologies of social and political morality. A key enabler of this phenomenon is the fundamental basis we use for taxation: the percentage of income, capital gains, or property value.
We have taxed percentages of income for so long that people today can’t even imagine another basis. And I don’t mean a sales tax here: I mean the concept of taxing the people to pay for current government expenditures, based not on what the people produce and earn, but on what the expenditures amount to.
This is a useful thought exercise, because it highlights the artificiality of taxing percentages of income. It also throws into relief the unexamined assumptions that inevitably go with this taxation practice:
(1) That our government has a prior claim on a portion of our incomes, independent of what it plans to spend;
(2) That the percentage of tax paid by individuals is a matter of moral “fairness” or “justice,” to be addressed as an invidious political issue;
And (3) that taxing a percentage of the people’s production away from them is a macroeconomic management tool in the government’s economic toolbox, AND a tool for government to intervene in social and demographic patterns, rather simply than a means of paying for what government spends.
Once you accept premise 1, premises 2 and 3 follow as night the day. One of the biggest reasons we don’t revisit these premises today — although they were much discussed, and with great passion, a century ago — is our practice of payroll withholding. For most Americans, their personal, conscious interaction with the tax code involves filing a 1040 once a year and getting a refund. They rarely think about the amount that never enters their bank accounts because it is removed from their pay before they even see it. They have a general awareness that this is going on, but the terms in which they apprehend its reality are premises 1-3 above.
Americans have been persuaded to think about income taxes in this abstract way largely because we don’t have to consciously make regular payments based on what the government is spending. We do have to do that with our utility bills and credit cards, and we treat them very differently (yes, even the credit cards. None of us has the government’s option of suffering no meaningful consequences from abusing credit).
It is easily possible to agree with the assertion that we should pay for our wars as we fight them. That is fiscal responsibility in a nutshell. But we are not taxed to pay for our wars. We are taxed because we accept government’s prior, generic claim on our productivity. The amounts by which we are taxed are selected not to pay government’s bills, but to satisfy emotional ideas about “fairness,” and to experiment with theories about economic and social intervention. This latter complex of premises — and not simple fiscal responsibility — is what David Broder works off of.
“Mr. Broder is one of those people who views higher taxes as a sign of moral rectitude.”
Quite so… such a view is one of the most reliable tell-tale signs of a liberal.
I’m tired of the word “liberal.” It’s not accurate or descriptive. There is nothing liberal about David Broder or his ilk. He doesn’t respect the individual and he doesn’t respect freedom.
Can somebody please coin a new term to describe these people?
CFB, well “statist” comes to mind. As J.E.Dyer points out, this is a worldview in which the state “deserves” a certain proportion of everyone’s incomes and uses the funds to set up incentives to engineer social change agents of the state deem desirable.
The enterprises on which the state embarks are no longer exclusively those to defend the citizens or to provide infrastructure that expedites the citizens’ own projects; instead most of the government’s enterprises have to do with shaping and making over the citizens’ motivations and choices in certain ways.
A side enterprise is keeping as many government employees as possible in their current elective and appointive offices by feeding rewards to groups of citizens who can help these employees in elections, legislation, and executive appointment.
Wehner was on Bush’s staff so presumably he feels some inner need to defend what happened on a watch that he was a small cog in even when the criticism is fairly mild and tangential as is Broder’s. Conservatives would be wise to drop this entire subject. Bush is leaving office in disgrace. It really is that simple when you have approval ratings in the low twenties. To give you a benchmark his father left with approvals in the mid fifties, and Clinton and Reagan were in the high sixties. When you’ve sold someone a lemon, a house or a car say, and the engine has dropped out or the roof fallen in, coming back to try and convince the buyer that the car was fast or the decoration in the dining room nice, is not going to win make him like you. In fact it’s likely to make him mad. This is marketing 101 so why is the Republican party persisting in it. All we are doing is tying a reputation for unreality at best or plain lying at worst around the neck of our party. It’s been a total disaster guys. Bush has run the country and his party onto the rocks and there is no mileage in trying to pretend otherwise.
They’re not liberals in the classic sense, nor are they progressives, since their advocated policies don’t lead to progress as an ordinary person would understand the word. I’ll continue to call them utopians.
I know Jonah Goldberg likes the term “statist.” I don’t know. I don’t think it has much of a ring to it, though it is accurate. The problem with “utopians” is it sounds positive, to the ignorant. At this point in our history, people are so unschooled they don’t know why utopianism is evil.
As for John, go ahead and judge President Bush by his approval ratings if you will. Truman is remembered as a good president who made the hard decisions, and so will Bush. You can impute all the self-serving evil motives to Peter Wehner that you will, but facts are facts. Bush kept us safe for seven years. He left a terrorist surveillance policy that his successor voted for, an Iraq policy that his successor will follow, a Middle East policy that his successor has announced his intention to follow, a stem cell policy that his successor apparently intends to follow, a “global warming” policy that he will apparently follow. I guess the “same failed policies of George Bush” weren’t such failures after all.
It is not Peter Wehner that is deluding himself.
Ouch.
17
CFB Says:
January 18th, 2009 at 8:20 PM
As for John, go ahead and judge President Bush by his approval ratings if you will. Truman is remembered as a good president
The irony of this is rich. Truman was absolutely excoriated by Republicans who demanded that MacArthur when he was fired mount a military coup to replace Truman, I’m not kidding, accused Truman of losing China, claimed that General George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson were communist fellow travellers, yes that’s right the great General George C. Marshall, said Truman was damaging race relations when he de-segregated the military, and claimed the Berlin airlift was a failure. I’ve said it here a few times but the our besetting sin over the past five years has been denying reality. The notion that Obama’s approach to foreign policy is going to bear the slightest similarity to Bush’s which CFB seems to believe will be the case is a classic demonstration of the desire for self delusion. Bush is leaving office with lower approval ratings than Nixon and if that’s not disgrace I don’t know what is. At some point we have to grow up an recognize it and respond accordingly. If we don’t it will be a long time before we see the inside of the White House again.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Richard Perle’s account of Bush’s problems with his own people:http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=20486
Lincoln was loathed by millions. That is what happens when a leader makes the difficult decisions that his predecessors avoid. Clinton was popular when he left office, but Bush got 9/11 eight months after being elected President partly because Clinton refused to sacrifice his popularity to eliminate the growing threat of Islamic terror.
There are worse things than being unpopular. Being dead is one of them. As a live American who thanks Bush for helping keep me that way, I refuse to join in the know-nothing piling on being conducted by people who don’t know anything about either history or leadership.
Unpopularity does not equal disgrace. If it did, cheerleaders and jocks would have a monopoly on moral rectitude while nerds would all commit suicide rather than face the social opprobrium of their judgmental peers. Now we have a popular President. May events conspire to keep him as lucky as he has been to date.
I’ve always wondered why those who want to pay more in taxes won’t voluntarily do it themselves. After all, the government will accept additional tax payments throughout the year and gifts can be made to the Treasury. Yet, when the IRS runs it annual figures, fewer than 1% of the nation actually pays more in taxes voluntarily. No, I think people like David Broder lives by the creed of Karl Marx: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
On his rip on Bush, how surprising historians in the future will be when they realize that many of the things Obama says and do will be the exact same things that Bush had been doing for the eight years he was in office.
Chris Bolt Sr.
Assuming you really have always wondered why “those who want to pay more in taxes won’t voluntarily do it themselves,” let me offer an answer.
Lots of behaviors only make sense if everyone does them. I want people not to stop at red lights. But fi I were the only one who stopped at them, I’d likely get rear-ended, and drivers crossing my path would only be confused. I don’t “want” to stop at red lights; but I think it would be a good idea if everybody did, and I would if everyone else would.
The Articles of Confederation, we are taught (and I have no reason to disbelieve), failed in part because states were asked but not required to contribute funding to the central government. If one state had “wanted” to contribute, and had contributed, the money would have been wasted. No one wants to waste money.
And no one “wants” to pay more taxes. But many of us believe that there is an optimal tax level for any time and place, and that if taxes are less than that level, they should be raised. On everyone, because that’s what taxes are.
As for the Marxian reference, although I don’t consider myself a “people like David Broder,” I do believe that our current system operates on the principle “from each according to his ability to pay [Marxism demands more than money, so the whole comparison fails, by the way], to each according to the amount he has to lose.” If I make or have more money than a cop or a soldier, why shouldn’t I pay more than the cop or the soldier to protect our respective incomes and fortunes? I don’t get what’s wrong with that result.
I understand that the power to tax must be limited because we have a government of humans, but I don’t understand why anyone believes that coordinating the prisoners’ dilemma game of government funding (don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fella behind the tree) is a bad thing.
* to stop a red lights, not “not to stop” Damn, why can’t we get a preview button!
If I just read the quoted parts of this article, without the knowledge of where, or when, or by whom, or how or why it was delivered, I would say that this was boiler-plate Barack-speak.
Now I know it was President Bush at his brilliant best!
If Obama´s inaugural speech has half as many such high thoughts he´ll have made a solid beginning!
No fireworks, no high-falutin words, no well-modulated baritone, no sugarcoat! Just a man speaking from his heart to salve the wounds of a hurt nation!
And yet the BDS sufferers say that the message was unbearable because the messenger was anathema!
Yes, Moses stammered and spoke to G-d; Aaron the orator merely spoke to Pharoah!
Comparing traffic control with taxes is a real stretch. There really isn’t any comparison. Traffic control is all about safety, taxes are all about other things. And the Articles of Confederation don’t have much to do with it either. There’s no requirement that we use a national individual income tax even now, there are alternatives. For instance, under our present federal system the states could be responsible for providing the funds to finance the national government based on their population, land area, business activity, etc. How they obtained the money would be up to them. This would probably be more consistent with the ideas of founding fathers and would make the construction of the federal budget a much more conservative process.
Chuck Martel:
If the red light example is a stretch, then try stretching. The problem with the self-styled conservatives on this blog is that they are intellectually lazy. Taxes, in the abstract, pose a prisoners dilemma: the best strategy for each of us is to avoid them; the best strategy for all of us is to pay them. Ditto obeying traffic laws. Now, how hard was that?
I’m relieved to know that the Articles of Confederation are irrelevant to the discussion of whether taxes should be mandatory. I thought they were, but you’ve cleared that up for us. (Why do people think that saying a thing proves it’s so?)
Meanwhile, nothing in my defense of mandatory taxes against Mr. Bolt’s suggestion that people who “want” to pay taxes just pony up has anything to do with the method used to apportion them. I did not defend the income tax per se; I defended taxes, per se, including, implicitly, your state-based alternative. Incidentally, would your state thing be mandatory, or would the states merely be exhorted to do the right thing? I would suggest considering the example of the Articles of Confederation on that score, but I just learned that they are irrelevant, so we’ll need some other basis for deciding what to do.
Lawrence Kramer — where intellectual sloppiness is, there is little basis for accusing others of intellectual laziness. It’s one thing to examine things in light of the artificial constructs of game theory. It’s quite another to call other people intellectually lazy for not doing so, when there was no prior accord on that matter.
In this case, I suggest that your analogy is faulty not because taxpaying can’t be analogized to driving at all, but because neither activity is one in which the human actor, on average and in reality, sees it as maximizing his own good to literally avoid conformity to the rules.
I’m keeping in mind here the original proposition that the driving activity to be analogized is not stopping at a stop light. You say: “Taxes, in the abstract, pose a prisoners dilemma: the best strategy for each of us is to avoid them; the best strategy for all of us is to pay them. Ditto obeying traffic laws.”
By what measure is it the “best” strategy for each of us to avoid either taxes or traffic laws? What is the premise here? Few people over the age of 17 would agree that this formulation describes a realistic principle.
Humans do not, on average or over time, prize mainly the maximization of superficial or transient benefits to the self; e.g., getting past the next intersection without having to stop. In actuality, human patterns are of balancing priorities and considering impacts on others, as well as considering how corporate activities and purposes will affect us individually.
We can assume this reality away by using the artificially constricting terms of game theory. But we had better be explicit when we do that, because most people are not thinking in game theory-type terms, most of the time.
You will not get a lot of natural agreement on the proposition that “the best strategy for each of us is to avoid taxes.” A lot of people would dismiss this formulation for a different one, along the lines of “the best strategy for taxes is to minimize them for everyone while covering public expenses.” Other people may see the optimum tax policy differently, but only in the artificial terms of game theory and abstract philosophical argument will you see a defense of the wholly self-oriented proposition — “the best strategy for each of us is to avoid taxes” — as describing anything realistic enough to bother talking about.
(Another reading, of course, is that one who thinks it the best strategy for himself to avoid taxes, in a manner analogous to not stopping at a stop light, is simply expressing the priority of the criminal. In other words, there are some people who do think that way, perhaps like Tim Geithner, but we do not, on average, agree with what they judge to be “best,” or with their criteria for determining it.)
I am well aware that there are assumptions behind what I say here. But those assumptions, if we were to parse them one by one, would be found to be realistic. Meanwhile, reducing arguments to artificial analogies, and simplistic premises that don’t prevail in the real world, has no inherent superiority for intellectual inquiry. Indeed, I would say in this case that it has the severe drawback of representing reality so poorly that it could lead us to unsound analysis.