President Obama has been in reelection mode for the past year, as have potential Republican challengers.  We would not expect the President to react to the Newsweek proclamation, but it does indeed appear that he is doubling down on his promises of more, bigger and stronger centralized government.  Surprisingly, though, the Republican primary candidates for President have said little about the country’s accelerating march toward European-style, big government liberalism.  Of course they have complained about Obama’s policies and the stretched-out recession; but none has presented much in the way of details on how to reverse course before the U.S. automatically qualifies for membership in the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) group.

President Obama has mentioned, in both of his memoirs, his attraction to Marxists.  He also told us that the Hawaii organizer for the Communist Party USA and another prominent Communist were frequent visitors to his grandfather’s home in Hawaii where Obama grew up.  The President’s 20-year membership in the Reverend Wright’s church, which emphasized Marxist “Black
Liberation Theology”, is another implication that Obama does not find Marxist government policies unusual, uncomfortable, or in any way out of the ordinary.

Obama Administration appointees, speaking on the various Democrat-friendly talk shows, have made remarks that indicate this administration believes 60% of the U.S. voters actually want more government assistance and support, foreshadowing another easy Obama election victory.

Karl Marx is frequently mentioned as “the father of Socialism and Communism”.  His actual contribution was an idea for systematizing the political exploitation of two common human weaknesses:  envy and indolence.  Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation¹ about the inherent weakness of a democracy might have been the catalyst for Marx’ thinking, but there is no evidence.  Marx detailed his brilliant idea in a short document published in 1848, “The Communist Manifesto”.  Later in life, Marx developed an interest in political economics, publishing in 1867, “Das Kapital” (and he revised it incessantly until his death in 1884).  Obviously, Marx did not live to see any of his intellectual efforts tried out in attempts to create and run an actual, real-life government.

An inadvertent co-conspirator with Marx in the attempts to turn wishful thinking into an operating government was John Maynard Keynes, a highly educated and respectable political economist.  Keynes’ ideas, like those of Marx, come in and out of favor across time; both have been criticized by a number of world-famous economists over the years.  For someone without much training in political or practical economics, a serious flaw that might be seen is that both Marx and Keynes seemed to believe wealth just existed—like matter (pre-Einstein), wealth cannot be created nor destroyed, just transformed (as in where and how used).  During Marx’ productive years no essential economic data were collected or available.  Keynes did not have that handicap; but he compensated by ignoring data that did not support his economic theories.

Today, neither Marx nor Keynes carries much weight—except with Socialist and Communist true believers and with clever, opportunistic politicians.  But, as we have seen time and again over the last 100 years or so in the United States, emotion frequently trumps logic and reason.  Therefore it is likely that the current owners of Newsweek magazine already have the cover designed for the 2013 issue that will appear after the presidential inauguration.  Utilizing the largest typeface that will fit, that cover will proclaim, “WE ARE ALL COMMUNISTS NOW“.  A good subtitle on that cover would be, “LEARNING TO LOVE BIG BROTHER AND COPE WITH THE POLITBURO”.

NOTE:

  ¹Alexis de Toqueville, a French scholar and philosopher, made an extensive visit and study of the United States in its early years and later observed, ”A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”  (In more recent history, a Margaret Thatcher quote would be an appropriate footnote to de Tocqueville’s quote, “The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”).

A reasonable definition of faith might be “a belief that does not rest upon logical proof” or “belief in something that cannot be seen or otherwise sensed”.  Religious faith means to most people a belief in a Supreme Being, a belief in God.  Past a basic belief in God, religious faith can take on many meanings, e.g., Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.

Perversely, though, strong as our beliefs may be, we humans have proven over the ages that we are capable of believing anything that we want to believe, whether that belief was arrived at via evidence and logic or is a matter of faith.  It’s fairly common to encounter, anywhere in the media, persons of religious faith,  agnostics, and atheists trying to convince each other of the “truth” of their respective beliefs.  “Proving” to anyone’s satisfaction that God does or does not exist is a most difficult chore; so those discussions and arguments will continue forever.

Belief in one form of government or another also seems to be spread across multiple groups, each with their favorites, and all opposed by anarchists (the “atheists” of government faith).  Many U. S. citizens appear to be governmental “agnostics”; they don’t seem to care much about what goes on in the federal government or in their state government.  But one thing is certain:  it is difficult to avoid those seemingly endless debates and arguments over politicians and governments that permeate the media—especially during our elongated election seasons.

We regularly see spokespersons within television broadcast and cable organizations who are unquestionably partisan true believers of their favorite form of government, exposing the depth of their faith on a regular basis.  Needless to say, those partisans exist throughout the political spectrum; on the Internet, free from FCC license concerns (at least at present), partisanship is more the rule than the exception.  In my opinion, even among professional reporters there are very few who stick to “who, what, where, when and how” facts, avoiding the temptation to editorialize.  The public usually would find it difficult to determine a really good reporter’s political preferences.

How do we arrive at our governmental faith (or lack of it) ?  Here, the parallels with religious faith seem to be most striking, as I noted in those previous blogs (above).  But the category which should yield the most information is the one with which I have the least personal experience:  people who have lived under governments quite different from that in the U.S.  One friend emigrated to Canada from The Netherlands, where the government was classic European Liberal-Socialist.  This friend developed one rule from that experience—don’t trust any emigrant’s outlook until he or she has emigrated twice!  All emigrants are looking for a better place, but they can’t truly judge which is better, their native country or their adopted country, until they have made the relocation twice.

Another friend emigrated from England, a place for which I have great respect, both from reading history and also from several visits which were longer than usual business trips or vacations.  What I learned from my English friend was that we can’t trust our judgement unless we have made that decision and have had the experience of permanently relocating.

A third friend was a fellow employee I met at my night janitor job during college.  He and his wife, both college professors, had escaped from Latvia at the time it was a slave state of the Soviet Union.  Because the Soviets wanted to make sure that any who escaped their clutches would have as difficult a time as possible reestablishing their lives in the west, my friend Petaris could not acquire the documents to prove his tenure at the University of Riga nor his doctoral achievement.  Of course, that meant that there were no college professor jobs for him (but the U. S. oil company that hired his wife, a PhD in geology, was not hung up on credentials and was happy to give her the opportunity to prove she could handle the job).  So Pete and I worked together each night with mops, buckets, scrubbers and polishers—giving me a rare job benefit of learning a little about classical philology (his doctoral specialty and teaching subject) and the country of Latvia.  But what I remember best of the things I learned from Pete is that freedom, personal and economic, is tenuous and can disappear in an unwary and unguarded moment; none of us can really appreciate the fragility of and the value of freedom until after it is gone.

These experiences of my three friends convinces me that most of us in the United States do not really understand the quotation of Thomas Jefferson’s that is engraved in large letters inside the Jefferson Memorial:  “Constant vigilance is the price of liberty”.  A seductive sales pitch for some other form of government, made by an appealing con man, may sound too good to be true; but we frequently let our guard down anyway, suffering the results.  Too bad more of us don’t remember that no Liberal / Socialist / Communist state has ever survived even a third as long as The United States.  But until we know more about how people acquire their views and preferences for some variety of government, we must resign ourselves to the simplistic rationale that it is an emotional decision, impervious to reason and logic.

Recently, a number of the EU member states have managed to get the International Monetary Fund and its chief contributor, the United States, to contribute (“loan”) more money to try to prop up Italy, along with whatever a few of the EU members can scrape up.  As big a deal as it is to U.S. taxpayers, it’s just another drop into the fire bucket to be poured onto the European Socialist conflagration.  That whole effort may really be just to shame Germany, France and the United Kingdom into deeper financial participation in this unprecedented firefighting exercise.

The root of the problem is, of course, half one of human nature and half one of the known vulnerability that all democracies share.  The human frailty, which we all recognize even if we believe it is impolite to mention it, is our desire to get something for nothing.  Of course, all politicians―even the most dense and inarticulate―know that votes are purchased with promise capital.  Moreover, even that stupidest politician knows that the very best lure is something for nothing and that an ongoing vote-buying program is best of all.  Politicians also well understand that feasibility or deliverability of the promise is immaterial; we want to believe that we will get something free, with no strings attached.

That other part of the cause is a characteristic of democratic governments.  Alexis de Toqueville, a French scholar and philosopher, made an extensive visit and study of the United States.  It was de Toqueville who observed, ”A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years”.  No one has yet discovered a procedural method of avoiding this pitfall; but the United States has managed so far to last only a tiny bit longer than 200 years.

Barack Obama began campaigning for the office of President of the United States around 2002, and in 2008 he succeeded in being elected.  In large part, Obama’s appeal was his promise to be “a President of all the people”.  His “hope and change” slogan resonated even with some number of reasonable, educated and knowledgeable voters.  Over the years since he was elected, however, that promise seems increasingly in doubt.

President Obama seems to be stuck in a rut, ever since his 2012 reelection campaign season began in 2010.  His repetitive speeches are more strident and angry; his nice guy attitude is nowhere to be seen.  The only vestige of the old Obama is his prowess in raising campaign contributions.  He has been delivering Marxist class-envy speeches, filled with trite cold-war-era Soviet phrases, at every fund-raising stop on his current campaign trail.  It seems that Obama would feel comfortable only in a European Socialist government setting.

Obama’s legislative accomplishments also appear to be copies of the European Socialist initiatives that have led those progressive governments into imminent financial peril.  The President has refused to consider any but the most trivial reductions in government spending, and he is obsessed with increasing income taxes.  Taken together, the President’s speeches and his legislative agenda indicate that Obama is more of a President of the PIIGS than he is a President of the United States.  Perhaps it would be best if he abandoned the 2012 U.S. election and instead looked into organizing the PIIGS into their own union, with Barack Obama as its head.  PIIGS voters would undoubtedly be receptive to promises of more and more government largesse.

One of the current reasons for our lack of vigilance is the success of those who have worked diligently to reinvent definitions of Pragmatism, Liberalism, Marxism, Socialism and Communism to make them more ambiguous and confusing.  I know a person who seems to actually understand the minute differences between those approaches to governing; once he volunteered that the label “Marxist” for a politician frequently should be, more accurately, “Marxist – Leninist”.  Although I respect those who have managed to learn these small details, I suspect that most of us don’t see two cents worth of difference across the whole lot.  Collectively, all of those labels refer to a form of government that is all about “coerce and control”, with abhorrence of even a small decision being made outside of the government.

Socialism, the blanket term, was an inadvertent side effect of the industrial revolution, the greatest improvement ever in the lives of ordinary people.  As the standard of living rapidly and dramatically improved in the industrializing western nations, people naturally looked back at the progress they had made from their feudal subsistence past.  As always, after things have gotten better, this retrospection generated anger at those undefinable forces or people considered responsible for that miserable past.  This angst was the catalyst for vast numbers of people to fall prey to Marxist propaganda, believing in its fairy-tale vision, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

At Thanksgiving time in the U.S. we should remember the earliest experience with failed Socialism in the new world.  The Plymouth Colony began with what we call Socialism today, only to watch it progressively fail to the point where the colony was in serious danger of starvation and extinction.  Governor Bradford, in a brave act of political leadership, mandated a return to the form of economic activity familiar to the colonists—what we call Capitalism now (and it worked so well that Bradford declared a holiday after a fall harvest “to give thanks…”).  The colonists literally learned, or relearned, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

But is the U. S. at present meekly acquiescing as a pack of Communists in Capitalist clothing pull our country down into the same black hole that Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain are currently spiraling into?  No Socialist government in history has ever survived even a third as long as that of the United States.  Are we going to cheer our entrance into Socialism and bankruptcy at the same time?  Will we continue to idolize and support the chief wolf in sheep’s clothing, gorged with his easy plunder already and still agitating the pack to binge on everything, down to the last remaining morsel of the flock that used to be the United States of America?

Will we wake up to the same unbelieving morning after the election as have Poland, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, and most of the struggling European Union member states?  Will we, too, have to learn the unacceptable cost of the free lunch?  Is the eventual victory of the President Of The Communists inevitable?  Do we have sufficient remaining optimism to believe in the possibility of electing a genuine President Of All The People?

We humans, like a lot of other animals, learn through experience.  As those experiences have been recorded for posterity, each new generation of researchers, as the saying goes, stands on the shoulders of those who came before.  In ancient times, long before the seeds of modern science were planted, alchemy was accepted as a legitimate scientific pursuit.  The best-known purpose of alchemy was its goal of converting base metals such as lead or tin into noble metals such as gold and silver.  That goal eluded its searchers for millennia, but it was thought to be possible, awaiting only a “right stuff” thinker who could accomplish what had proved impossible for so long.

Today the average person thinks of alchemy as a play toy of the incorrigible ignorant.  Although essentially true, that’s not a totally fair assessment, since alchemy was one of the seeds that lead toward modern science.  One alchemy-like problem we see today is the achievement of controlled nuclear fusion, like the controlled fission used in nuclear power plants.  But, unlike the efforts of those early alchemists, research that some day might lead to controlled fusion (the holy grail of energy sources) is being conducted by the world’s top scientists with supercolliders, supercomputers, and all of our modern research tools.

President Obama does not seem to understand that the alchemy of the middle ages cannot be made to work, in spite of his rhetoric and his desires.  It appears that his ingrained ideology and ignorance of (or contempt for) physics, mathematics and engineering makes him an easy target for confidence men.  It is painfully evident that our President believes that almost instantaneous elimination of fossil fuels is achievable via political fiat.  The President is not alone in his beliefs; many in his administration have the same fuzzy beliefs and the same contempt for those “little people” of science who can’t seem to understand what is wanted of them.

So we see billions and billions of our taxpayer dollars being donated for seed money in economically questionable renewable energy initiatives.  A recent winner in our energy folly lottery is the late lamented Solyndra company that filed for bankruptcy in early September.  At this point there is no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Solyndra, aside from poor management and possible lack of due diligence.

Poor decision-making and overconfidence are seen from time to time in totally private initiatives, those with no taxpayer money at risk and no political favor rewards (see Diogenes and Technology Breakthroughs).  Such examples just remind us that there is risk inherent in all business ventures.  Venture capitalists understand risk management very well, but still they continue to finance new startups regularly.  However, when the venture capital is taxpayer money (which belongs to no one) due diligence has, or should have, a completely different definition.

The use of tax monies to finance business startups is generally regarded as inappropriate, but there may be room for debate on that subject.  However, no debate should be required about risk management where public moneys are involved.  Most of us believe that investing taxpayers’ money in the finest, invisible, fabric from which to make the President’s new suit should be held up to considerably more scrutiny than its counterpart private investment.

But worse than questionable investments of our money is the President’s belief that if he can starve us of electricity from coal-fired plants, we will be forced to turn to wind or solar.  Unfortunately, our President doesn’t understand or believe that there is no replacement in sight for the electricity currently derived from coal.  Or perhaps he thinks we won’t mind the absence of power at night, when solar cells produce nothing and wind turbines produce little.

We voters are a little late in vetting our President’s technology awareness and competence (and also vetting his candidates for appointment to positions related to technology).  Our recourse at this point is to do our best to make sure that potential future Presidents do not have significant technology blind spots or contempt for technologists.  It would help if we could demand more technology familiarity from the media; technology-challenged reporters and anchors seem to be the norm.

My suggestion is to support candidates for President only if they are on a technology level of George Washington or better (or Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin, or…).

But what if Rick Perry had said instead, “Social Security works exactly like a Ponzi Scheme, such as that of Bernie Madoff”.  What would the leftist partisans and their fellow travelers say if the statement were phrased in that manner?  What reference could Rick Perry and others who agree with his view turn to for justification?  How about the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC.

On its web site the SEC provides this definition of a Ponzi Scheme:  “A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors“.  This is exactly how Social Security works.  There are no investments providing returns.  There is no actual “Social Security Trust Fund”; it is just an accounting collection of IOUs from all of the various government agencies that have spent almost every penny of Social Security payroll withholding not actually paid out to beneficiaries.

So Social Security is technically not a Ponzi Scheme, but only because what would otherwise be an investment fraud is allowed under U.S. law.  Those who blurt out emotional responses need to hold their indignity in check long enough to think about the real issue.  How can an unsustainable, Ponzi-like scheme be reformed into an enduring program to ensure an adequate retirement income for the largest number of workers?

The path toward a solution begins with a problem definition, which was skipped by the well-intentioned people who brought us the “temporary” Social Security program intended to assist workers who had been economically crippled by the Great Depression during their most productive years.  One critical part of a problem definition is articulating the desired goal that the solution is to create / enable.  The goal is simple:   enable every income earner to establish and make regular contributions to his or her personal retirement income plan that is actuarially adequate; provide strong incentives / disincentives to assure that the maximum number of earners faithfully follow through.

Realistically, that “maximum number of earners” who faithfully follow through will be significantly less than 100%; seventy to eighty percent will  be a more likely number.  Human frailties have no bounds, and there will be innumerable reasons why individuals reach retirement age with far less than enough income.  This remainder will fall into the welfare social safety net, and although there may be a little grumbling, we are not going to let those seniors starve in the dark.

What would make such an imperfect private retirement plan good for our country?  Today Social Security operates not just like a Ponzi Scheme but also operates like a welfare system:  a very large fraction of beneficiaries will take out much, much more than they ever paid in. Those retirement funds (withheld from our paychecks plus an equal amount paid by our employers) are not invested across our working lifetime and therefore grow not one penny larger; all the additional money that taxpayers must supply amounts to plain old welfare.  Reducing that welfare burden by even 50% would be a win for all Americans.

Would there be any losers?  Of course!  The progressive politicians who have been so successful in scaring the ignorant fraction of Social Security beneficiaries and the almost-senile fraction will be forced to come up with a believable rationale why nothing should be changed.  Those politicians will be quite unhappy when they have to earn the votes required for their reelection.

But recently my wife and I operated a small resale shop, along with our partners.  It was located on a minor but important state highway that traverses most of the width of our state.  Our experience in the resale / collectibles business in a low-population part of a low-population state have enabled a tiny view of this caste system at work in America.  It just took a while to see it.

The distribution of work in our partnership was simple; the women took care of merchandising, pricing, negotiating and handling sales while the men did the routine physical labor.  Upon opening the shop the women were busy opening blinds, turning on lights, moving mobile displays into their locations and all the other things necessary to actually sell merchandise.  Meanwhile the men were putting up the portable signs along our highway frontage, setting out eye-catching banners and flags, and similar deeply intellectual duties.

My last routine, daily-opening duty was to gather the day’s offerings of wind gifts and other homages that had been faithfully contributed by members of the lower castes.  This activity, which is not especially fulfilling nor completely unpleasant, stirs up mixed emotions.  These gifts and little rewards, that people of the lowest castes distribute to those they perceive as belonging to higher castes, are remarkably diverse.

Many of these honorariums must have involved a significant expenditure for those in the lower castes, even before the cost and/or effort of delivery is considered.  Others may have been free castoffs, stolen, or have cost very little money.  Every color in the visible spectrum is represented at one time or another.  They are made from an equally diverse range of materials; however, plastics, paper and glass are best represented.

The specific distribution techniques remain a bit cloudy.  This is mostly the result of the lower castes’ preference for anonymity.  Some are delivered in the daytime, most are delivered after dark, but the majority are delivered clandestinely.  It is as if the Untouchables and other low castes don’t even want to be seen by their presumed higher-caste recipients.  It is quite rare to actually see one of the timid low-caste donors in the act of delivering a gift, and he or she always disappears as quickly as possible.

It appears that differing distribution choices divide these honoraria into two general categories.  The preferred delivery technique, it appears, is a nonspecific-recipient technique that takes advantage of the wind (of which our state is blessed with plenty).  If a gift has a very low total weight, or has a rather large area-to-weight ratio, these low-caste donors have learned to toss them up-and-away into the wind.  Mother Nature’s delivery is efficient, although not particularly effective; only some fraction actually reach an upper-class beneficiary—many just rot away unseen in high grass, weeds, scrub timber and brush.

Our share of that fraction of wind gifts that actually reach a recipient still provide an abundant sample of materials, colors, textures and designs.  They are also sprinkled with well-known brand names, particularly McDonalds, Burger King, Frito-Lay and other food providers.  One category of wind gift producers is especially well represented—tobacco companies.  It seems that low-caste people don’t have the means or education to select innovative or unique gifts for those of us they consider upper-caste.  Therefore, colorful wrappers of all kinds of products predominate—candy bars, chewing gum, and so forth.  Each day reveals a never-ending variety of these simple, inexpensive offerings.

Those gifts which are too heavy for the wind are placed, or possibly tossed, onto the property of a selected recipient.  Those gifts made of glass are in this category; some fraction arrive intact, but the remainder are unfortunately broken in the delivery process.  The variety of colors and designs of the labels on these glass gifts is quite large, but the colors of the glass itself is essentially limited to three—primarily brown, with the remainder divided between green and clear.  Brand names, although well-known, are somewhat limited—Budweiser, Millers, Coors and a few others.

Aluminum cans used for beverages, both beer and soft drink, have the characteristics of both hand-delivered and wind-delivered gifts.  If a can is completely empty it can be wind-delivered; but if it has more than half a swallow of liquid, it must be placed or tossed.  Therefore it is difficult to tell if this type of gift was intended to be hand- or wind-delivered.  As I collected these pitiful little gifts, I always had a sense of guilt over the knowledge that the low-caste donors are unaware of the potential monetary value of aluminum cans.

But my greatest sense of guilt came about because of our limited means to properly display all the gifts.  Rather quickly I had to start storing them in a 55-gallon drum, and I feared that the donors might see me and think I didn’t appreciate their homages.  That 55-gallon drum could easily be mistaken for a rubbish container, and I certainly did not want to break the hearts of those poor little, miserable people.  It’s bad enough for the low castes to know that they are the bottom of the barrel, and the thought of them believing I would put their carefully delivered gifts in a trash barrel was heart-breaking for me.

It appears that many or most people develop their taxation theology in a manner consistent with the path they followed to arrive at their religious faith.  For many, family tradition sets people on their initial direction of development.  For others, group associations such as jobs, labor unions, schools, and churches are a major causative factor.  Curiously, political associations do not seem to be the causative factor in individuals’ taxation theology (although there is usually a strong correlation between politics and taxation faith; more about that later).  Age appears to have a minor influence; younger individuals (who have probably not paid any personal income taxes yet) tend to adopt a more liberal-left taxation theology and to be more indifferent about taxes in general.

Once an individual’s taxation theology is more or less set, that person rarely questions his or her deep-set opinion.  This seems to be true of most of us, irrespective of our tax denomination—flat tax, fair tax, progressive tax, confiscatory tax, etc.  However, it appears that changes in financial circumstances can trigger some introspection:  “I didn’t realize until lately that taxes consume more than half of my income!”, or “I have enough income and wealth now that taxes are no concern”.  Obviously there are more in the former category than the latter; but indifference to taxation by some wealthy people might have a negative effect on the rest of us.

One fact that is directly related to taxation theology is rarely mentioned:  fifty percent of us in the United States do not pay any income tax.  Does this tell us anything?  Because the House, Senate and President control how much income tax any of us and all of us pay, the answer is “not much”.  However it provides us with a context that may help us to understand how there can be so many opinions about income taxes.  Those of us who pay little or no income taxes might be expected to differ in our tax theology from those who pay anywhere from a fourth to more than a third of their incomes in federal income tax alone.

Some of the tax denominations have arrived at a point where they espouse a combination of class-envy and poison-the-well:  “If you have more than I do, give me the difference.   If you won’t give it to me, then throw it down the government well so no one can have it”.  Other denominations appear to be more egalitarian—a single flat tax for all, with no hidden add-on taxes / withholding (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, etc.).  There are also a few groups of heretics who believe that the government is obligated to prove that each and every expenditure of tax monies is prudent, necessary and useful (even taxation theology has its weirdos).

One example of the correlation between political persuasion and taxation theology is those people of the OPM persuasion, dominant among the most ardent denominations.  To the best of our knowledge, members of the OPM denomination are all associated with the left-liberal political spectrum.

OPM theologists frequently quote scripture in public, usually from the Book of Marx.  Their favorite verse seems to be “The top one percent of income producers don’t pay their fair share of taxes”.  This  scriptural passage actually has a slight correlation to current tax reality—the top one percent at present pay only slightly more than half of all personal income taxes.  But OPM believers are usually reluctant to engage in a debate on how much income tax is appropriate—sixty percent, eighty percent, ninety-five percent?   OPMers must not have heard that the United Kingdom at one point had a top tax rate of one hundred two percent, 102%; otherwise they might have an answer ready to use.

In spite of the range of taxation denominations, it is likely that the balance of power among taxation theology denominations will depend, surprisingly, upon where the taxation agnostics come down.  Tax agnostics generally show more resistance to politicians’ emotional appeals, but they do respond to calls for being “fair” in spreading the pain of taxes.  Perhaps they believe in the mathematics that prove the same tax rate yields a larger amount of taxes collected from upper income earners than from low income people.  They also generally believe that even the poorest of us should pay at least a few dollars per year.

It will be interesting in November 2012 to see which denominations are most heavily represented at the polls.  Will the current, irrational U.S. income tax law continue to be safe, for one more interval?

For those of us who are willing to admit that we are not politically omniscient, we are left with the meager visible facts.  One more time, my nascent opinion rests on a pitifully small number of facts.  The worry, which a number of sideline observers have voiced publicly, is whether the facts in that small quantity were salient and causative factors.

The way it looked to me:

1.  The debt limit “compromise” bill was passed by the House and the Senate and subsequently signed by the President into law.

2.  One of the credit / financial rating agencies rather quickly downgraded The United States from an AAA rating (its highest) to AA+ (one step lower), and added a financial Negative Outlook attribute for good measure.

3.  The amount of the increase in the debt ceiling is sufficient to allow the U.S. to keep borrowing until well after the next presidential election.

4.  Social Security checks went out on schedule, no military personnel missed a paycheck, medical providers received their Medicare / Medicaid payments, the millions of federal employees and contract personnel got paid, and Old Faithful had sufficient energy to keep erupting on schedule.

Now it’s down to somewhat lesser facts:

5.  The President publicly repeated over and over that failure to increase the Debt Ceiling would cause the U. S. to default on its bond holder interest payments.  At a later point he changed the wording to “default on its solemn obligations”.

6.  The President publicly stated a number of times that he “could not guarantee that Social Security checks would go out”  if the Debt Ceiling were not increased.  A few times he said the same for Medicare and Defense Department personnel payments.

7.  The Treasury Secretary also kept publicly iterating his stock disaster warnings, similar to the President’s.

8.  Some number of months before the Debt Ceiling deadline, the Treasury Secretary assured us in a televised interview that “there is no chance of a credit agency downgrade”.

At this point we segue to other minor facts, plus a few “what-if” speculations:

9.  Neither the President nor the Treasury Secretary ever publicly mentioned that the expected monthly income of the United States is sufficient to pay (a) bond holders, (b) Social Security recipients, (c) Medicare claims, and (d) Department of Defense payroll, with tens of billions of dollars left over.

10.  Neither the President nor the Treasure Secretary ever mentioned that there is no legal barrier to prioritizing federal government payments, allowing bond holders to be paid first (about $40 billion out of the expected $165 – $200 billion monthly income).

11.  Did the Treasury Secretary, or other Obama Administration official, ever privately tell the credit rating agencies that there was no danger whatsoever of default and that Administration rhetoric was just “political leveraging”?  It’s unlikely that we will find out.

12.  Did the President really take the Treasury Secretary’s “no downgrade” assertion at face value, without polling other knowledgeable people on his staff?  If so, perhaps he should turn to a better source (like the Tea Party?).

13.  There seems to be general agreement among media pundits that scaring “the old people on Social Security” continues to be an effective Democratic Party tactic.  Is the apparent diminished capacity epidemic among our senior citizens for real?

14.  Did the Republican leadership do a Charlie Brown, falling on its hind side when Lucy (AKA Democrats) yanked the football away from the tee at the last second—again?  Undoubtedly all those Lucys are still giggling.

15.  Did the Republicans learn any lessons from the attempts to scale the Everest mountain of U.S. debt?  It does appear that a sizable percentage have come to believe that it is not possible for our country to continue spending trillions more per year than the country’s income.

16.  Did the Democrats learn any lessons from the country’s unfettered credit-card spending?  The rhetoric of Democratic leaders indicates no!  But could it be that our President is smarter and more clever than most of us give him credit for?  Might he be just executing tactics from Alinsky and Marx, taking advantage of de Toqueville’s excellent hint about voting the treasury in a democracy, as keys to his Grand Strategy, whatever that might be?  If the debt escalation continues as at present, all of us will know for sure in five years or less.

One bit of government truth is possibly the best-known aphorism in the category, while being at the same time the least-heeded.  Thomas Jefferson observed, “That government which governs least governs best“.  However, a nineteenth century “philosopher / economist” later composed siren songs advocating governing most and governing everything; sadly, a large percentage of 20th  and 21st century politicians have fallen prey to those deadly tunes.

Another bit of Jeffersonian truth is prominently engraved in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty“.  It is clear that he meant vigilance of our own government and not of imminent invaders.

Alexis de Toqueville, a French scholar and philosopher, made an extensive visit and study of the United States and later observed, ”A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”   Alexis de Toqueville’s perceptive quote remains timely, especially during the last seventy years:  is the U.S. now running on borrowed time (as well as borrowed money)?