Vol. 5 No. 12
July 2007
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
http://www.commonwealinstitute
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we
are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not
only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American
public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But
it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him
than about any one else."
Theodore Roosevelt in the
_____
CONTENTS
Talking Points: In defense of taxation
Wit and Wisdom: Homer Simpson for President!
From the Blogs: "Messiah-Candidate
Thinking"
Quoted!: Mitt Romney on polygamy
Check It Out: The other global warming movie
Featured Article: "The New Atheists"
Happenings: Monthly round-up
Endorsements: Peter Coyote
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a
contributor
_____
In his novel Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov describes an imaginary country where,
under the guidance of a wise and benevolent king, "Taxation had become a
thing of beauty. The poor were getting a little richer,
and the rich a little poorer...."
Nabokov was
no socialist, yet the passage has a wistful idealism to it that must read like
pure fantasy to modern Americans. That sense of fantasy, it seems, reflects two
connected realities: first, the ongoing, and increasingly successful,
denigration of the political philosophy underlying progressive taxation, and
second, the recognition but unfortunately not always great regret - that
disparities in wealth are increasing. To describe the
As the
recently installed Congress seeks to address (or more likely to avoid) the
nation's persistent budgetary problems, with one eye on the question of whether
to make permanent the "Bush tax cuts" and the other on the 2008
elections, the political debate regarding taxes has gotten so lopsided and
regressive that one listens long and hard for voices of moderation,
enlightenment, and courage. No elected official, of course, calls for
"higher" taxes; they'd be voted out of office at the next opportunity
if not immediately hauled out into the street and shot like an animal. With
almost perfect unanimity, American politicians agree that taxes need to be
"lower," and the argument, thus framed, then moves on to the
magnitude and the variety of the contemplated tax cuts.
At first
glance, this situation would seem to reflect the famous antipathy of Americans
to central government, their rugged individualism, their fierce refusal to be
trod upon, and so forth. Such feelings, as Alexis de Tocqueville long ago
noted, naturally arose in a democratic country where resistance to tyranny
constituted the central creation myth and where all individuals were held, at
least in theory, to be equal. Yet de Tocqueville also recognized that in a
state of social equality, personal independence could also generate a sense of
individual powerlessness, and that this "debility" promoted a belief
in the importance of centralized power:
His [the American's] independence fills him with
self-reliance and pride among his equals; his debility makes him feel from time
to time the want of some outward assistance.... In this predicament he
naturally turns his eyes to that imposing power [the government] which alone
rises above the level of universal depression. Of that power his wants and
especially his desires continually remind him....
We do not have to agree fully with de Tocqueville's
rather stark portrayal of Americans in order to appreciate the wisdom of his
observation. At the very least, that wisdom advises us to resist the temptation
to ascribe American anti-tax sentiment to some deep and monolithic anti-governmentalism in the national character. There are causes
closer at hand.
More
immediately and directly, the modern anti-tax consensus reflects the success of
conservatives and the far Right in framing the debate, simplistically and
misleadingly, as a contest between "higher taxes" and "lower
taxes," and thus between "bigger government" and "smaller
government." This remains the case despite their electoral losses in
the 2006 election. Moderates and progressives, meanwhile, have been much
less successful at defining the issue as the kind of society we want to live
in, or as the ability of the government to help people, or as the importance of
pooling our resources in order to achieve shared goals. That's a shame, for in
the process, the Right has been allowed to co-opt the populist mantle in order
to enact policies that do not in fact benefit the majority of Americans.
Those
concerned about excessive tax cuts need to make two related arguments, and they
need to make them loud and clear. The first is that the Right's anti-government
campaign, packaged as "tax relief," is NOT just about reducing taxes
it is aimed at eliminating progressive taxation, and will actually increase
the tax burden on the non-wealthy. The second is that the underlying philosophy
of progressive taxation is populist by its very
nature. Let's take these one at a time.
What
middle-class and working-class Americans need to understand is that, under the
current administration's tax cuts, they are paying a higher proportion of the
total tax burden on the public. They may be paying less in absolute dollar
figures than they were in 2000, but the wealthiest Americans have been granted
an even larger tax reduction (the best word is probably
"bonanza"). So by definition, a greater proportion, a greater
slice, of the overall tax pie that the government collects is being paid by the
rest of us and it is the rest of us who most depend on the various government
programs and services that taxes pay for. To borrow a term from the 2000
election, that's the real "class warfare" taking place in the
But the whole idea
of a graduated tax policy is based not only on the idea of redistribution
(i.e., helping those in lower income brackets), but on the recognition that
those in the upper brackets will themselves benefit from a system in which a
larger number of people are able to participate fruitfully. How so? First, the
greater revenues generated by a graduated tax policy help the government avoid
excessive debt and deficit spending (emphasis on "excessive," because
some red ink may at times be good for the economy) and, as the 1990s
demonstrated, federal solvency encourages private and foreign investment in
both traditional and cutting-edge industries. Second, a graduated tax policy
gives the government the resources to provide services, such as education and
health care, to people who might not otherwise be able to afford them and the
education and health of these people are prerequisite to their productivity as
employees. Third, the government can more effectively build and maintain
smoothly functioning transportation, energy, public safety, law enforcement,
and information infrastructures, without which no business could hope to
achieve its full potential.
This side of the
debate, incidentally, is completely independent of two central arguments made against
taxation and government spending: first, that the government does not spend
money efficiently, and secondly, that much of the money goes toward funding
undesirable programs. Each of these arguments is itself vulnerable to
criticism, but that must wait till a later day, other than to point out that
surveys have consistently shown that, in general, the American public wants the
various programs from Head Start to the Peace Corps to NASA that tax
dollars make possible.
But beyond
discussing proportionality and surveys and infrastructures and so forth,
moderates and progressives need to make the case on a broader, and a deeper,
level.
The
political context in which we find ourselves involves the well-documented
effort by ultra-conservatives to starve the government of money and thereby
force cuts in the various entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, education) that have been put into place
beginning in the 1930s. (Such programs provide benefits to which all citizens
are entitled, at such time as they might meet the qualifying requirements, such
as age or income level.)
This
anti-entitlement strategy, and the anti-revenue tactics designed to ram it
through, reflect, on the part of some of the anti-tax conservatives, a
principled libertarian philosophy. For many more, however, the issue is not
"big government" per se, because they frequently support policies
that give the government more power over its citizens (such as the Patriot Act
or the anti-libertarian campaigns against flag-burning, medical marijuana,
same-sex marriage, and so forth). Instead, the primary motivation seems to
be to change the very nature of American governance, shifting it from a
nurturing and communal approach to human needs, to a more controlling,
moralistic response to human desire, difference, and fallibility. The
fundamental question is how one conceives of the proper function and scope of
government, and our society needs to tackle this question head-on.
All human
societies exist on a spectrum between totalitarianism and Darwinist anarchy. In
our view, enlightened government must have not only law-enforcement and
national security functions but also a balancing, redistributive function.
That is, it must arrange for an allocation of resources that is not wholly
dependent on private actors and the vicissitudes of fate, but rather one that
serves the needs of the greatest number of people (i.e., the commonweal). That
does involve taking money from some people and giving it to others, and to that
extent taxation is a violation of what might be called the "natural
liberty" of individuals to keep whatever they have. However, as argued
above, the well-to-do occupy the higher income brackets not simply because of
hard work and ingenuity (although those are obviously important), but by virtue
of the system which rewards their hard work and ingenuity, and which depends on
the fruitful participation of the less fortunate.
Another
important function of government is that it can help insure against some of the
accidents of life, such as being born to parents who cannot afford private
education, losing one's job in an economic downturn, or suffering illness.
Paying taxes for entitlement programs is like paying insurance premiums: One
pays for coverage so the resources will be there if and when one needs them.
At root,
however, we believe that government has a moral responsibility to help
people who are less able to help themselves. (Private charities are
wonderful things, and they do a lot of good, but they're not really up to the
task of meeting the needs of more than 300 million Americans.) We don't live in
a free-for-all jungle, and we shouldn't have to live there. The real conflict,
in these terms, is not between liberty and equality, or between liberty and
government, but between liberty and opportunity. If we don't think that
human society should simply let the weak or unfortunate suffer, perish, or fall
further behind, and if we agree that everybody deserves a fair chance
regardless of whatever family or circumstances they were born into, then it
seems a fair trade-off to restrict somewhat the liberty of the few in order to
serve the needs of the many.
People
concerned about what the current deep tax cuts mean for American society might
think about framing the question this way. It's less about making the federal
government bigger or smaller than it is about the character of our culture.
______
Top Ten Reasons Why I, Homer Simpson, Should Be the Next
President
10. I'm smarter than
the last guy
9. With an oval
office, I can't bump into anything
8. Fox News is already
on my side
7. I will take full
advantage of the free food that comes with the job
6. I have enormous
experience apologizing for failed decisions
5. I will appoint a
Secretary of Donuts
4. I will be the
Secretary of Donuts
3. My middle name
isn't Hussein....anymore
2. My vice president
will be Mayor McCheese
1. Kick-ass
inauguration party! Bring a six pack and you're in
______
I hear lots of people express the sentiment, "If only Gore would enter the race (or if only Obama took the lead, etc.), everything would be OK and progressives would win again."
This is what I call
"Messiah-Candidate Thinking." The example that got me thinking
about this was a DailyKos diary today:
Mr. Gore, you are the person best suited to rescue us from
the assaults on reason, our Constitution, our environment, our security, and
our domestic infrastructure perpetrated on us by the Busheviks
and their allies.
I am not faulting the sentiment here. I love Gore and he would be a great
President. I think most of the candidates would make great Presidents. But I
don't think that one person or one election is going to lead us out of the
wilderness. I think there is a lot of work required before progressives can win
again and turn
Dave Johnson,
CI Fellow
Read the rest of Dave Johnson's blog entry at
http://www.commonwealinstitute
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"I have a great-great grandfather. They were trying to build a generation out there in the desert and so he took additional wives as he was told to do. And I must admit, I can't image anything more awful than polygamy." Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on 60 Minutes
______
Call it
"the other global warming movie." Just over a year after An
Inconvenient Truth transformed the national discussion about climate
change, a new documentary titled Everything's Cool has come on the scene
as a vital complement.
Where An Inconvenient Truth focused on Al Gore giving
a PowerPoint presentation that carefully walked viewers through the science of
the global warming, Everything's Cool features a wider cast of
characters and focuses on how the public debate about global warming has been
shaped, distorted, stymied, and occasionally advanced over the last 20
years. Taking an often comic touch toward a tragic subject, the new
documentary explains how a "gap" developed between what scientists
knew about global warming and what the American public believed. Much of
the blame, of course, falls on the disinformation campaign waged by the
fossil-fuels industry and its well-funded network of pseudo-scholarly
"skeptics" at conservative think tanks, on the hostility of the Bush
administration to honest science, and on a media culture that prefers to offer
a specious form of "balance" rather than the hard objective
truth. That much is fairly well known by now, at least among politically
savvy progressives. But there are other stories and other actors that the
film pays attention to, from the Weather Channel's first climate-change
reporter, Heidi Cullen, to the environmental "prophets" Ross Gelbspan and Bill McKibben, to an
entrepreneur making biodiesel fuel in his own barn,
to a Inupiat village that votes to relocate to avoid the crumbling
sea-wall.
The filmmakers, Judith Helfand and
Dan Gold, say that their goal is to "to offer a fun, factually accurate,
passionate and more-than-timely film that will move our audiences from merely
embracing the origin and urgency of climate change, to marshalling the public
and political will necessary to create a new energy economy - and hopefully
some new clean energy into public office."
To reach that goal, Everything's Cool has to reach a
larger audience. So far, it has been shown mainly at local film
festivals, and while it has always made a splash, it has not yet cracked
through to wider public release. You can help, though, by visiting the
documentary's website, www.everythingscool.org,
and either buying the DVD, attending an upcoming screening, or informing others
about it.
If you think one documentary about global warming is not
enough, check this one out.
______
The following is an excerpt from Ronald Aronson's
"The New Atheists" which appears in the June 25 issue of The
Nation:
"Americans as a whole may not be getting too
much religion, but a significant constituency must be getting fed up with being
routinely marginalized, ignored and insulted. After all, unbelievers are
concentrated at the higher end of the educational scale--a recent Harris
American poll shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not
avow belief in God (compared with only 14 percent of those with a high school
education or less). The percentage rises among professors and then again among
professors at research universities, reaching 93 percent among members of the
National Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among
those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also
have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual
faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.
"But over the past generation they have come
to feel beleaguered and, except for rare individuals like comedian and
talk-show host Bill Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of
the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them. These
writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to
"breaking the spell" cast by the religious ascendancy, to overcoming
a situation in which every other area of life can be critically analyzed while
admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to American life but
exempted from serious discussion."
Read the whole article at http://www.thenation.com/doc
_______
New Senior Fellow Ian Frederick Finseth, who
has been the editor of the Commonweal Institute's newsletter, Uncommon
Denominator, for the past five years, has been appointed a Senior Fellow. Dr. Finseth is an Assistant Professor of English at the
Dr. Finseth's
professional background also includes experience as an editor and journalist.
He reported on political affairs and served as City Editor for the Daily
Californian; reported on police and community issues for the Riverside
Press-Enterprise; wrote a column about American political life for an online
magazine; and founded and edited an online journal devoted to the study of
American culture.
Dr. Finseth holds a B.A
in English from the
New Interns The first two
recipients of Leonard M. Salle Memorial Internships began work at the
Commonweal Institute this month. They are Sean Spielberg of
Sean Spielberg worked for four years as a summer
teaching assistant and curriculum materials designer at the Tulane Montessori
Children's House in
Jon Noronha worked in software design for Type-A
Software in
The Leonard M. Salle Memorial Internships were
established in memory of Leonard Salle, one of the co-founders of the
Commonweal Institute. Leonard was committed to educating younger
generations about progressive values and the political process. He
emphasized the importance of critical thinking skills as a foundation for
democracy and good governance. The internships which bear his name are
intended to provide young adults with an opportunity to build vital political,
organizational, and communication skills; make new contacts in the progressive
movement both locally and nationally; and help create the conditions for
achieving lasting social change in this country.
_______
"In my political life,
which bookends 51 years now, I cannot remember a darker time in public life
where clarity, wisdom, and compassion were ever more needed. The Commonweal
Institute is a public treasure, fostering dispassionate analysis, high
intellect, progressive ideals, and most importantly, compassionate
thinking." Peter Coyote, actor and author
_______
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