Emptiness Part VII at New Ruskin College
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
06-02-05, 08-09-05,08-20-05
Emptiness Part VII
Why did Senator Boxer not support a reduction in benefits for the wealthy Social Security “beneficiaries”? Why should ordinary workers, half of whom earn less than $35,000 a year, pay the Social Security of the top 20% whose income is in excess of $75,000? I thought the Marin Senator was on the side of the people? Why not redirect these funds from the rich back to the poor, depositing it into the savings accounts of the poor?
Because she is from Marin. She represents Marin. The rich. This is the Democrat party of today.
Do you think the Marin Senator has carefully evaluated the $109k paid to BART train drivers and reduced the Federal subsidy to mass transit for such union excesses? Of course not the Democrats are the mouthpieces for the unions. We are all of us forced to pay but the funds are doled out my the Democrat machine to the Democrat machine. (And do you suppose that the Republicans stay up nights worrying about this looting? In a word no. They do not care. Indeed they compete to loot for their states an equal share which their party machines can dole out.)
For example, has the Marin Senator carefully examined how Federal highway funds are used by states to subsidize their exclusionary zoning laws? Advocated limits on Federal funds for those who exclude the poor and middle class? Has she blocked Federal funds for cities like San Francisco that have used their zoning powers to down zone their cities? No, no, no.
Does the Marin Senator care that 12% of the wages of people earning less than $35k, (half the people), are being redirected to the top 20% who control 50% of the national income and 60% of the financial wealth? Again, I say, No. (Note too that the top 20% were “paid” back all of their “contributions” in the first few years of their retirement. All the money they now collect is pure profit.)
The Marin Senator does not care about fairness. The Democrat party has formed an alliance with the state and municipal employees to loot the public treasury. In San Francisco, for example, Mayor Brown added 4,000 employees bringing the budget to $5.2 billion. (San Francisco) But this is minor compared to the looting across the nation where the Democrats have systematically plundered the public treasury for votes: “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, major public pension plans paid out $78.5 billion in the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2000. By the comparable period in 2004, that had grown to $117.8 billion, a 50% climb in five years.” (Business Week: Public Pension Sink Hole) Just as we have seen with the national debt, when the Republican stopped slaving to balance the budget the Democrat knew no limit and so thus, $8 trillion in debt, about which Mr. Bush said, it is just “numbers on paper.” (Peter Peterson, Running on Empty, Foreign Affairs)
And see how one lie leads to the next. For the Marin Senator will claim that we have “progressive taxation” which at least adds some fairness to the American system. But of course the dynamics of the market redistributes all costs, raw materials, energy, insurance, and taxes by the price mechanism. Taxation is a burden on the people it can not be made progressive. To the extent prices can be raised to offset the taxes they will be raised. And who then actually pays the tax? The people! (This is why taxes should be kept as low as possible.)
And see here a perfect kind of example of Emptiness. The Right regularly assails us with their triumphalist sneers that “they” pay most of the taxes. ‘See all the income tax “we” pay!’ they cry, failing to see that the taxes follow the distribution of income, let alone seeing that this income results from the ever constant price rises by which the tax is transferred to the people. Yet this myopia is matched by the jubilant cries of “tax the rich” from the Left, Post Liberal, whose smarmy manipulation of the people is matched by their smarmy contempt for the people, for they, of course, fail to point out that as long as “the rich” are free to set their own prices, the attempts to soak, or only tax, them will fail.
Thus both parties compete to mislead the people, and the Emptiness is found in not their dishonesty, but in the even more devastating thought that they are indeed sincere. They actually are as lost as they appear. And we are left to wander around the competing factions, in the dark, hopeless.
The so called “progressive tax” falls not on those who can “afford to pay” but on those who can not raise their prices, (for whatever reason). The classic example of a high earner who can not raise his prices is the “B” list movie star. He is still a movie star and has a high income but knows that the opportunity to raise his price is declining, even the opportunity to get another picture deal is falling. Yet the tax remains high.
And in Ronald Reagan’s time the income tax was real, rising to 91% during the height of “New Deal” “progressive” mania, but still at 72% prior to the Reagan Revolution. And see how this tax applied only to “ordinary” income. Wealth could be protected in tax shelters, in cattle ranch operations, oil and gas, in a hundred schemes created by War Time Washington. The War Raw Material Board, the War Energy Board, etc. created thousands of ways to administer the economy with preference to wealth, old money, not those with increasing incomes. (Kennedy tried to remove these regulations but it was not until Reagan swept through that these taxes and tax shelters were finally removed 35 years after the war’s end. (How much of the “stagflation” of the 1970s was a result of the effects of this massive redirection of the economy by these tax shelters and “redistribution” schemes? The government’s direction of the economy is always to stagnate and diminish opportunity, because of the fundamental dishonesty of the passion play which misdirects all efforts. This is the Emptiness.))
And today income is taxed but wealth is not. Capital gains are taxed, taxed even as ordinary income, but wealth, “patient capital”, is not. And even the “death tax” is now slated for elimination, the only way to tax wealth, unless the deceased had taken the precaution of tucking his capital away into another labyrinth of schemes to avoid taxes.
And note here the dishonesty of the Republicans who decry the “death tax” on the accumulated capital, even though this capital has often been accumulated “tax free” without even the payment of the 15% of the long term capital gains tax. But the American system as should be seen by now is not much concerned with fairness. Both sides contend to get what loot they can pull from the passion play, and fairness is of no concern. That ordinary workers pay taxes all their lives on their meager earnings while millionaires pay not even the 15% capital gains tax is not even on the agenda to be examined.
Yet what is fair about a tax system, for example, that levies the same tax on journeyman plumbers both earning the union rate, if one is 50 and the other is 25? Same income but the first already has bought his home, raised his children, funded his retirement, etc. while the younger one must try to start his family in a country where exclusionary zoning has pushed housing out of the reach of ordinary earners, where college tuition has pulled ahead of inflation, where the “debt bubble” has ruined the currency and the possibility to save, etc.
For practical reasons of administration, the wealth tax need not start until the accumulated wealth has reached the $10 million range, but this simple example has been used so that it can be seen that the fairness of the proposal is that those who have more, more savings not just more income, should pay more, since it can be seen to be fair even for low incomes.
The same market forces that redirect all taxes will also redirect capital or wealth taxes. As long as there is a free market without wage and price controls this is unavoidable. However the unfairness of loading the entire burden on income can be lessoned. For it is just those individuals who are creating wealth, and earning high incomes, but who have not yet accumulated great wealth who are now being heavily and unfairly taxed. These productive members of the economy are just the people we want to encourage. By taxing only income and not wealth we discourage innovation and reward the status quo. And the wealth tax would tend to encourage the productive deployment of capital as the tax will be due whether the capital has been invested or squandered on conspicuous consumption.
Note that the same process of market reallocation will take place with a capital tax just as it does with the current income tax. Capital will leave the country to avoid the tax. Interest rates will rise to attract capital back. The interest will thus be added to the cost of borrowing capital and passed on to you and me in higher prices.
And if you are saying, ‘well, what was the point if we are just going to pay it anyway,’ you still have not understood the first lesson of economics: it is a system of voluntary associations of mutual assent. You can not “take” other people’s capital in our system unless you first establish wage and price controls, i.e. government coercion. Again, the only way to make this proposal “progressive” is not in the tax, not in the “taking,” but as always in the expenditure. For example if the money thus raised were to be put in savings accounts for the poorest workers it would become “progressive.”
These workers would still pay the tax in the form of higher prices but they would uniquely benefit. Everyone would pay the higher interest but the poorest workers would receive the benefit of the individual savings accounts: therefore progressive.
(For example paying for half of the cost on installing photovoltaic solar panels on the mansions of the rich, as does California, is not “progressive”. But see how one lie leads to the next. The ‘Progressives’ will answer that this payment from California to the rich is funded by the rich? ‘Do not the rich pay most of the taxes?’ they will ask, ‘Are we not simply giving back some of what they have “put in”?’ (And this is how most people go through most of their lives, utterly lost.) So the myth of “progressive taxation” encourages and justifies the oligarchy and the misdirection of the economy. Emptiness.)
Note that from an national economic perspective it does not matter if the capital is in the accounts of the rich or in the accounts of workers for their retirement in 40 or 50 years. The capital tax simply transfers the money, at first from the accounts of the rich to these newly created accounts for the poor, and then as the rich demand higher interest for their capital we all end up paying higher prices for this interest.
The point was to spare those with increasing incomes, the most productive of us, from having to collect all the taxes themselves by sharing this onerous burden with those who are already rich. The rich only act as tax collectors for the state, passing the taxes on in their products or services. (The word ‘capitalist’ comes from the Latin for the one who bids for the right to collect the taxes from the provinces. The winner would pay the Senate in Rome and then to the province to collect back his bid, plus whatever profit he could collect for himself. Pilot was the CEO of a capitalist syndicate.)
In the above example, the two plumbers have the same income, and therefore the same income tax, but their wealth is not the same, and therefore their “ability to pay” is not the same. But do not look to the Marin Senators for answers to this unfairness. Nor any other. The Marin Senators stand for unfairness, for wealth and privilege, for the status quo, for Marin, in preference to the people.
But see how the Marin Senator Boxer and Al Franken can have it both ways: Ah politics!
They will cash in those bonds in the filing cabinet in West Virginia! Just as Randi Rhodes, (who Drudge rightly describes as little better than a trained seal with a ball on her nose), says that the tax payer will not have to pay for the pensions that have fallen into the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., because the “insurance” will pay. But who pays the insurance, Randi Rhodes? (http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/business/article/0,1299,DRMN_4_3430985,00.html)
(Drudge’s anger stemmed from Randi Rhodes’ advocacy of criminal trials for journalists who “lie.” (She describes her job, herself, as “filling dead air.”) Yet in the absence of any system of ethics or morality, any shared sense of right and wrong, what alternative is there to the courts and even criminal prosecution? Her logic is that without honor, honesty, all we have left is the courts. This is the logic of Emptiness.)
For example, the airline pilots, who complain that, before they drove their airline into bankruptcy, they had a $90k pension and now they will receive only $35k from their fellow taxpayers, do they have a reputation for concern about the welfare of their fellow workers? Citizens? I think not. I think airline pilots have a reputation for looking out for themselves. Egotistical pricks. And I think their fellows in the ----
Counselor: And you are not?
. . . And I think their fellows in the union ---
Counselor: Your Mr. Bush, The President, isn’t he a pilot?
. . . yes, . . .And I think their fellows in the union ----
Counselor: And your Mr. Rumsfeld? He too is a pilot?
. . . yes, . . . thank you Yvonne.
Counselor: You are welcome.
And I think their fellows in the union movement know this. I think the whole nation knows this. But see how not withstanding this fact, this ‘knowledge’, the pilots are still able to play the role of the righteous who are wronged by the powerful.
(Recall that it was the pilots association that blocked the attempt to strengthen the bulkhead and cockpit door to prevent would be terrorists and hijackers from gaining access to the cockpit and flying the airplane into an office block. The president of the pilots association shouted down the other speaker, shouting “our lives are on the line.” And what of the lives of the people of the World Trade Center, how did their lives figure into the president of the pilot’s association thinking? Their lives did not figure into his thinking. But do you not think this past president of the pilot’s union enjoys his retirement in Tucson? )
Yet in their selfishness and shortsightedness the Pilot’s Union is in no way exceptional. The American labor movement, unlike its European counterpart, was not concerned with “social justice” but with getting as much as possible for its union members, and therefore maximizing their union dues. They followed this “selfish” policy even to their own ruin.
For example German unions have ridden down declining industries by agreeing to work rules and givebacks to allow the firms to continue, prolonging their jobs and the usefulness of the sunken capital, where the American unions have simply driven their firms into bankruptcy. A large part of the union movement’s decline in America has been due to the closing of firms, whole industry groups, rather than allowing a compromise to extend the industry’s life.
Health care is an example of how American unions failed to use public policy and follow the example of the European unions. The American unions did obtain health care for “their” members and shortsightedly abandoned the rest of society. It does not follow that a ‘nationalized’ system need have been the only possibility, yet even so the French, Swedish, German health systems rival and surpass the American system in many respects. Nor is it clear that the American system, with its heavy government regulation and huge insurance bureaucracies even deserves to still be regarded as “private.”
Yet the American labor movement’s abandonment of the “uninsured” and now “underinsured” (with the advent of “limited” policies) has created a skewed payment structure where the cost of the policies rises due to the combination of shrinking consumer volume and the increase in moral hazard.
What if the American health system had been expansive, generous, instead of selfish? For example emergency trauma care is something everyone can agree on, yet the emergency rooms are often unpaid for the emergency care provided. Why? For though it would be a simple matter to divide up the cost of treating the injured by charging the causes of trauma care, e. g. cars, stairs, machinery, bathtubs, even this, something which is actuarially direct and simple to administer eludes us. Why? Because the contending parties refuse to work on their common interest, even as here, where all can agree any of us might be struck down. And one reason for this disunity is that the American labor movement asks, ‘what care we for those other fellows? They are not “members of our union,”’ each staying in his role in the passion play. See that the selfishness arises out of the Emptiness.
In a similar manner other groups of patients could be identified and a cost system developed. For example children do not represent a moral hazard. Underwriters cheer every time one of the little patients has to be dragged kicking and screaming into a doctor’s office. Those are the kind of “risks” underwriters want. And there can be no claim that the babe in swaddling clothes failed to “plan” or take “responsibility” or is trying to “live off of others.” Yet again, medical coverage for patient’s under 18 eludes the best thinkers of our day. Why? Selfishness.
Then too patient’s with congenital defects discovered in their youth can not be said to have shown a lack of prudence. Nor can patients whose policies have paid out their limits. In auto insurance the “uninsurable” can be placed or “assigned” with private insurance companies who provide the insurance coverage paid for under the assigned risk program sharing the costs, fairly. Fairly? If that is important to you. (Or do you prefer to stick these patients with some unsuspecting insurance company? Is that it? Still trying to ‘get over on the man?’ Still trying to soak the rich?) Similarly patients diagnosed with cancer in childhood might still be covered for unrelated medical claims with the “assigned risk” program paying for the detected cancer claim.
With the removal of each of these groups from “private insurance” the cost of the health premium goes down and the number of consumers who can afford the policy goes up, thus is the cost shared with a wider and wider pool of healthy individuals. Yet this happy situation has not developed in America, not because it is beyond our abilities, but because of shortsightedness, meanness, the selfishness of our leaders, in the union movement, in the insurance industry, and politics.
Yet see how the pilots, not withstanding this history of selfishness, ignoring the needs of their fellow citizens, having it both ways, playing their role in the passion play, they are all indignation and moral outrage that, after having driven their airline into bankruptcy, (United is employee owned the unions having forced an ownership position with their prior strikes), as have the steelworkers their steel plants, and as the autoworkers are doing to their auto plants, the tax payers will only pay 30% of their pension! Those selfish tax payers! The passion play’s audience’s appreciation of the pilot’s acting of their role of the ‘wronged’ is in no way diminished by the knowledge that the pilots are themselves the authors of their own misfortunes.
Have you not considered why the airline unions, (and GM’s unions, and Ford’s unions for that matter), did not secure their pensions and medical benefits? How secure? Well, . . . with money. Why not? Because there was no money left. The union movement now represents only 7% of the private workforce because they can only strike, hold for ransom, firms with large capital investments. (Ford has one metal stamping machine which cost $200 million.) Even if the airplanes sit on the ground the payments are still due. Leverage.
The only industries that can be struck are the ones with large capital investments. (Though interestingly silicon chip factories, Intel has plants that cost billions, have not been the targets of labor unions.) Thus held hostage the managements have agreed to terms that have mortgaged the future earnings as current accounts were all committed to wages and other costs. But in the passion play version of this industrial history it is the wicked corporations that have “cheated” the workers not the unions that have picked the pockets of these vulnerable highly capitalized firms and, of course, the public sector where the Democrat eagerly seeks to hand over the tax dollars, for the union’s support, a relationship reminiscent of certain kinds of bacteria floating in stagnant ponds, you know, scum.
Democrats, in good faith, see nothing wrong with this, having it both ways. They stand for every one in every thing never having to say no to anyone. Consider that it was only after the Republican gave up on balancing the budget, and (also having it both ways), started telling us the “deficits don’t matter,” under Reagan in the 1980s, that the debt bubble began to grow. Today we have two parties telling us that “deficits don’t matter.” Two parties having it both ways. (And I guess the national debt does not matter . . . if you die before it comes due. (Leave it for someone else. (The greater fool: your grand children. (Now who is the suicide?))))
Just as Franken can be for “progressive indexing” before he is against it, or for the war in Iraq before he turned against it, (after we were already there), and just as Kerry voted for the funding bill before he voted against it, American politics can be said to be the art of having it both ways. It is not really a discussion, it is a passion play.
For expressing such views I have been harassed and oppressed for these last fifteen years. In 1991 I thought that if only people could see the unfairness, if they could only attribute “bad faith” to my enemies, then justice might be done.
But now I see that it was hopeless from the beginning. There is no way, no religion, no philosophy, to move you. Some may attribute “bad faith,” yet even if they do it may have nothing to do with reason or justice. It would be mere chance or randomness.
Indeed my very act of writing the Last Letter in 1991 itself spurred on my enemies. I am left alone in a vast wilderness. Emptiness.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
06-02-05, 08-09-05,08-20-05
Emptiness Part VII
Why did Senator Boxer not support a reduction in benefits for the wealthy Social Security “beneficiaries”? Why should ordinary workers, half of whom earn less than $35,000 a year, pay the Social Security of the top 20% whose income is in excess of $75,000? I thought the Marin Senator was on the side of the people? Why not redirect these funds from the rich back to the poor, depositing it into the savings accounts of the poor?
Because she is from Marin. She represents Marin. The rich. This is the Democrat party of today.
Do you think the Marin Senator has carefully evaluated the $109k paid to BART train drivers and reduced the Federal subsidy to mass transit for such union excesses? Of course not the Democrats are the mouthpieces for the unions. We are all of us forced to pay but the funds are doled out my the Democrat machine to the Democrat machine. (And do you suppose that the Republicans stay up nights worrying about this looting? In a word no. They do not care. Indeed they compete to loot for their states an equal share which their party machines can dole out.)
For example, has the Marin Senator carefully examined how Federal highway funds are used by states to subsidize their exclusionary zoning laws? Advocated limits on Federal funds for those who exclude the poor and middle class? Has she blocked Federal funds for cities like San Francisco that have used their zoning powers to down zone their cities? No, no, no.
Does the Marin Senator care that 12% of the wages of people earning less than $35k, (half the people), are being redirected to the top 20% who control 50% of the national income and 60% of the financial wealth? Again, I say, No. (Note too that the top 20% were “paid” back all of their “contributions” in the first few years of their retirement. All the money they now collect is pure profit.)
The Marin Senator does not care about fairness. The Democrat party has formed an alliance with the state and municipal employees to loot the public treasury. In San Francisco, for example, Mayor Brown added 4,000 employees bringing the budget to $5.2 billion. (San Francisco) But this is minor compared to the looting across the nation where the Democrats have systematically plundered the public treasury for votes: “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, major public pension plans paid out $78.5 billion in the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2000. By the comparable period in 2004, that had grown to $117.8 billion, a 50% climb in five years.” (Business Week: Public Pension Sink Hole) Just as we have seen with the national debt, when the Republican stopped slaving to balance the budget the Democrat knew no limit and so thus, $8 trillion in debt, about which Mr. Bush said, it is just “numbers on paper.” (Peter Peterson, Running on Empty, Foreign Affairs)
And see how one lie leads to the next. For the Marin Senator will claim that we have “progressive taxation” which at least adds some fairness to the American system. But of course the dynamics of the market redistributes all costs, raw materials, energy, insurance, and taxes by the price mechanism. Taxation is a burden on the people it can not be made progressive. To the extent prices can be raised to offset the taxes they will be raised. And who then actually pays the tax? The people! (This is why taxes should be kept as low as possible.)
And see here a perfect kind of example of Emptiness. The Right regularly assails us with their triumphalist sneers that “they” pay most of the taxes. ‘See all the income tax “we” pay!’ they cry, failing to see that the taxes follow the distribution of income, let alone seeing that this income results from the ever constant price rises by which the tax is transferred to the people. Yet this myopia is matched by the jubilant cries of “tax the rich” from the Left, Post Liberal, whose smarmy manipulation of the people is matched by their smarmy contempt for the people, for they, of course, fail to point out that as long as “the rich” are free to set their own prices, the attempts to soak, or only tax, them will fail.
Thus both parties compete to mislead the people, and the Emptiness is found in not their dishonesty, but in the even more devastating thought that they are indeed sincere. They actually are as lost as they appear. And we are left to wander around the competing factions, in the dark, hopeless.
The so called “progressive tax” falls not on those who can “afford to pay” but on those who can not raise their prices, (for whatever reason). The classic example of a high earner who can not raise his prices is the “B” list movie star. He is still a movie star and has a high income but knows that the opportunity to raise his price is declining, even the opportunity to get another picture deal is falling. Yet the tax remains high.
And in Ronald Reagan’s time the income tax was real, rising to 91% during the height of “New Deal” “progressive” mania, but still at 72% prior to the Reagan Revolution. And see how this tax applied only to “ordinary” income. Wealth could be protected in tax shelters, in cattle ranch operations, oil and gas, in a hundred schemes created by War Time Washington. The War Raw Material Board, the War Energy Board, etc. created thousands of ways to administer the economy with preference to wealth, old money, not those with increasing incomes. (Kennedy tried to remove these regulations but it was not until Reagan swept through that these taxes and tax shelters were finally removed 35 years after the war’s end. (How much of the “stagflation” of the 1970s was a result of the effects of this massive redirection of the economy by these tax shelters and “redistribution” schemes? The government’s direction of the economy is always to stagnate and diminish opportunity, because of the fundamental dishonesty of the passion play which misdirects all efforts. This is the Emptiness.))
And today income is taxed but wealth is not. Capital gains are taxed, taxed even as ordinary income, but wealth, “patient capital”, is not. And even the “death tax” is now slated for elimination, the only way to tax wealth, unless the deceased had taken the precaution of tucking his capital away into another labyrinth of schemes to avoid taxes.
And note here the dishonesty of the Republicans who decry the “death tax” on the accumulated capital, even though this capital has often been accumulated “tax free” without even the payment of the 15% of the long term capital gains tax. But the American system as should be seen by now is not much concerned with fairness. Both sides contend to get what loot they can pull from the passion play, and fairness is of no concern. That ordinary workers pay taxes all their lives on their meager earnings while millionaires pay not even the 15% capital gains tax is not even on the agenda to be examined.
Yet what is fair about a tax system, for example, that levies the same tax on journeyman plumbers both earning the union rate, if one is 50 and the other is 25? Same income but the first already has bought his home, raised his children, funded his retirement, etc. while the younger one must try to start his family in a country where exclusionary zoning has pushed housing out of the reach of ordinary earners, where college tuition has pulled ahead of inflation, where the “debt bubble” has ruined the currency and the possibility to save, etc.
For practical reasons of administration, the wealth tax need not start until the accumulated wealth has reached the $10 million range, but this simple example has been used so that it can be seen that the fairness of the proposal is that those who have more, more savings not just more income, should pay more, since it can be seen to be fair even for low incomes.
The same market forces that redirect all taxes will also redirect capital or wealth taxes. As long as there is a free market without wage and price controls this is unavoidable. However the unfairness of loading the entire burden on income can be lessoned. For it is just those individuals who are creating wealth, and earning high incomes, but who have not yet accumulated great wealth who are now being heavily and unfairly taxed. These productive members of the economy are just the people we want to encourage. By taxing only income and not wealth we discourage innovation and reward the status quo. And the wealth tax would tend to encourage the productive deployment of capital as the tax will be due whether the capital has been invested or squandered on conspicuous consumption.
Note that the same process of market reallocation will take place with a capital tax just as it does with the current income tax. Capital will leave the country to avoid the tax. Interest rates will rise to attract capital back. The interest will thus be added to the cost of borrowing capital and passed on to you and me in higher prices.
And if you are saying, ‘well, what was the point if we are just going to pay it anyway,’ you still have not understood the first lesson of economics: it is a system of voluntary associations of mutual assent. You can not “take” other people’s capital in our system unless you first establish wage and price controls, i.e. government coercion. Again, the only way to make this proposal “progressive” is not in the tax, not in the “taking,” but as always in the expenditure. For example if the money thus raised were to be put in savings accounts for the poorest workers it would become “progressive.”
These workers would still pay the tax in the form of higher prices but they would uniquely benefit. Everyone would pay the higher interest but the poorest workers would receive the benefit of the individual savings accounts: therefore progressive.
(For example paying for half of the cost on installing photovoltaic solar panels on the mansions of the rich, as does California, is not “progressive”. But see how one lie leads to the next. The ‘Progressives’ will answer that this payment from California to the rich is funded by the rich? ‘Do not the rich pay most of the taxes?’ they will ask, ‘Are we not simply giving back some of what they have “put in”?’ (And this is how most people go through most of their lives, utterly lost.) So the myth of “progressive taxation” encourages and justifies the oligarchy and the misdirection of the economy. Emptiness.)
Note that from an national economic perspective it does not matter if the capital is in the accounts of the rich or in the accounts of workers for their retirement in 40 or 50 years. The capital tax simply transfers the money, at first from the accounts of the rich to these newly created accounts for the poor, and then as the rich demand higher interest for their capital we all end up paying higher prices for this interest.
The point was to spare those with increasing incomes, the most productive of us, from having to collect all the taxes themselves by sharing this onerous burden with those who are already rich. The rich only act as tax collectors for the state, passing the taxes on in their products or services. (The word ‘capitalist’ comes from the Latin for the one who bids for the right to collect the taxes from the provinces. The winner would pay the Senate in Rome and then to the province to collect back his bid, plus whatever profit he could collect for himself. Pilot was the CEO of a capitalist syndicate.)
In the above example, the two plumbers have the same income, and therefore the same income tax, but their wealth is not the same, and therefore their “ability to pay” is not the same. But do not look to the Marin Senators for answers to this unfairness. Nor any other. The Marin Senators stand for unfairness, for wealth and privilege, for the status quo, for Marin, in preference to the people.
But see how the Marin Senator Boxer and Al Franken can have it both ways: Ah politics!
They will cash in those bonds in the filing cabinet in West Virginia! Just as Randi Rhodes, (who Drudge rightly describes as little better than a trained seal with a ball on her nose), says that the tax payer will not have to pay for the pensions that have fallen into the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., because the “insurance” will pay. But who pays the insurance, Randi Rhodes? (http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/business/article/0,1299,DRMN_4_3430985,00.html)
(Drudge’s anger stemmed from Randi Rhodes’ advocacy of criminal trials for journalists who “lie.” (She describes her job, herself, as “filling dead air.”) Yet in the absence of any system of ethics or morality, any shared sense of right and wrong, what alternative is there to the courts and even criminal prosecution? Her logic is that without honor, honesty, all we have left is the courts. This is the logic of Emptiness.)
For example, the airline pilots, who complain that, before they drove their airline into bankruptcy, they had a $90k pension and now they will receive only $35k from their fellow taxpayers, do they have a reputation for concern about the welfare of their fellow workers? Citizens? I think not. I think airline pilots have a reputation for looking out for themselves. Egotistical pricks. And I think their fellows in the ----
Counselor: And you are not?
. . . And I think their fellows in the union ---
Counselor: Your Mr. Bush, The President, isn’t he a pilot?
. . . yes, . . .And I think their fellows in the union ----
Counselor: And your Mr. Rumsfeld? He too is a pilot?
. . . yes, . . . thank you Yvonne.
Counselor: You are welcome.
And I think their fellows in the union movement know this. I think the whole nation knows this. But see how not withstanding this fact, this ‘knowledge’, the pilots are still able to play the role of the righteous who are wronged by the powerful.
(Recall that it was the pilots association that blocked the attempt to strengthen the bulkhead and cockpit door to prevent would be terrorists and hijackers from gaining access to the cockpit and flying the airplane into an office block. The president of the pilots association shouted down the other speaker, shouting “our lives are on the line.” And what of the lives of the people of the World Trade Center, how did their lives figure into the president of the pilot’s association thinking? Their lives did not figure into his thinking. But do you not think this past president of the pilot’s union enjoys his retirement in Tucson? )
Yet in their selfishness and shortsightedness the Pilot’s Union is in no way exceptional. The American labor movement, unlike its European counterpart, was not concerned with “social justice” but with getting as much as possible for its union members, and therefore maximizing their union dues. They followed this “selfish” policy even to their own ruin.
For example German unions have ridden down declining industries by agreeing to work rules and givebacks to allow the firms to continue, prolonging their jobs and the usefulness of the sunken capital, where the American unions have simply driven their firms into bankruptcy. A large part of the union movement’s decline in America has been due to the closing of firms, whole industry groups, rather than allowing a compromise to extend the industry’s life.
Health care is an example of how American unions failed to use public policy and follow the example of the European unions. The American unions did obtain health care for “their” members and shortsightedly abandoned the rest of society. It does not follow that a ‘nationalized’ system need have been the only possibility, yet even so the French, Swedish, German health systems rival and surpass the American system in many respects. Nor is it clear that the American system, with its heavy government regulation and huge insurance bureaucracies even deserves to still be regarded as “private.”
Yet the American labor movement’s abandonment of the “uninsured” and now “underinsured” (with the advent of “limited” policies) has created a skewed payment structure where the cost of the policies rises due to the combination of shrinking consumer volume and the increase in moral hazard.
What if the American health system had been expansive, generous, instead of selfish? For example emergency trauma care is something everyone can agree on, yet the emergency rooms are often unpaid for the emergency care provided. Why? For though it would be a simple matter to divide up the cost of treating the injured by charging the causes of trauma care, e. g. cars, stairs, machinery, bathtubs, even this, something which is actuarially direct and simple to administer eludes us. Why? Because the contending parties refuse to work on their common interest, even as here, where all can agree any of us might be struck down. And one reason for this disunity is that the American labor movement asks, ‘what care we for those other fellows? They are not “members of our union,”’ each staying in his role in the passion play. See that the selfishness arises out of the Emptiness.
In a similar manner other groups of patients could be identified and a cost system developed. For example children do not represent a moral hazard. Underwriters cheer every time one of the little patients has to be dragged kicking and screaming into a doctor’s office. Those are the kind of “risks” underwriters want. And there can be no claim that the babe in swaddling clothes failed to “plan” or take “responsibility” or is trying to “live off of others.” Yet again, medical coverage for patient’s under 18 eludes the best thinkers of our day. Why? Selfishness.
Then too patient’s with congenital defects discovered in their youth can not be said to have shown a lack of prudence. Nor can patients whose policies have paid out their limits. In auto insurance the “uninsurable” can be placed or “assigned” with private insurance companies who provide the insurance coverage paid for under the assigned risk program sharing the costs, fairly. Fairly? If that is important to you. (Or do you prefer to stick these patients with some unsuspecting insurance company? Is that it? Still trying to ‘get over on the man?’ Still trying to soak the rich?) Similarly patients diagnosed with cancer in childhood might still be covered for unrelated medical claims with the “assigned risk” program paying for the detected cancer claim.
With the removal of each of these groups from “private insurance” the cost of the health premium goes down and the number of consumers who can afford the policy goes up, thus is the cost shared with a wider and wider pool of healthy individuals. Yet this happy situation has not developed in America, not because it is beyond our abilities, but because of shortsightedness, meanness, the selfishness of our leaders, in the union movement, in the insurance industry, and politics.
Yet see how the pilots, not withstanding this history of selfishness, ignoring the needs of their fellow citizens, having it both ways, playing their role in the passion play, they are all indignation and moral outrage that, after having driven their airline into bankruptcy, (United is employee owned the unions having forced an ownership position with their prior strikes), as have the steelworkers their steel plants, and as the autoworkers are doing to their auto plants, the tax payers will only pay 30% of their pension! Those selfish tax payers! The passion play’s audience’s appreciation of the pilot’s acting of their role of the ‘wronged’ is in no way diminished by the knowledge that the pilots are themselves the authors of their own misfortunes.
Have you not considered why the airline unions, (and GM’s unions, and Ford’s unions for that matter), did not secure their pensions and medical benefits? How secure? Well, . . . with money. Why not? Because there was no money left. The union movement now represents only 7% of the private workforce because they can only strike, hold for ransom, firms with large capital investments. (Ford has one metal stamping machine which cost $200 million.) Even if the airplanes sit on the ground the payments are still due. Leverage.
The only industries that can be struck are the ones with large capital investments. (Though interestingly silicon chip factories, Intel has plants that cost billions, have not been the targets of labor unions.) Thus held hostage the managements have agreed to terms that have mortgaged the future earnings as current accounts were all committed to wages and other costs. But in the passion play version of this industrial history it is the wicked corporations that have “cheated” the workers not the unions that have picked the pockets of these vulnerable highly capitalized firms and, of course, the public sector where the Democrat eagerly seeks to hand over the tax dollars, for the union’s support, a relationship reminiscent of certain kinds of bacteria floating in stagnant ponds, you know, scum.
Democrats, in good faith, see nothing wrong with this, having it both ways. They stand for every one in every thing never having to say no to anyone. Consider that it was only after the Republican gave up on balancing the budget, and (also having it both ways), started telling us the “deficits don’t matter,” under Reagan in the 1980s, that the debt bubble began to grow. Today we have two parties telling us that “deficits don’t matter.” Two parties having it both ways. (And I guess the national debt does not matter . . . if you die before it comes due. (Leave it for someone else. (The greater fool: your grand children. (Now who is the suicide?))))
Just as Franken can be for “progressive indexing” before he is against it, or for the war in Iraq before he turned against it, (after we were already there), and just as Kerry voted for the funding bill before he voted against it, American politics can be said to be the art of having it both ways. It is not really a discussion, it is a passion play.
For expressing such views I have been harassed and oppressed for these last fifteen years. In 1991 I thought that if only people could see the unfairness, if they could only attribute “bad faith” to my enemies, then justice might be done.
But now I see that it was hopeless from the beginning. There is no way, no religion, no philosophy, to move you. Some may attribute “bad faith,” yet even if they do it may have nothing to do with reason or justice. It would be mere chance or randomness.
Indeed my very act of writing the Last Letter in 1991 itself spurred on my enemies. I am left alone in a vast wilderness. Emptiness.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
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