As 2012 draws its last breath, my thoughts have been on
death and taxes. Those anticipating the world’s end based on misinterpreting
the Mayan calendar have gone back into their holes. I’m sure they are busily
inventing some other catastrophe to cheer for.
The rest of us watch the slow moving catastrophe we call the
United States Congress as it deals, or does not deal, with death and taxes.
Death
With the passing of Daniel Inouye, Congress lost one of its
true heroes. If you aren’t familiar with his story, this Wikipedia link can give
you the basics. While he certainly looked after Hawaii’s interests and could at
times be partisan, he usually had America’s best interests at heart. He worked
to get things done. He did not think compromise a dirty word and showed the
continued courage to find middle ground. He had friends on both sides of the
political aisle—all attributes that these days seems more and more rare.
The latest mass killings, this time of twenty children and
six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, is unlikely to make much of a change in our
attitude toward guns in this country. Those afraid they will no longer have the
opportunity to purchase weapons and ammunition clips, whose sole justification
is that they can fire massive numbers of rounds in a very short period of time,
will make more purchases now. The false statisticians (those who claim to prove
causality by use of statistics) will be talking heads on a fawning media for a
few weeks, neither side providing much value to resolving the real issue.
The second amendment of the US constitution is short, and
reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
At the time the constitution was drawn, most of the army was
composed of militias paid by the various states. Part of the grand bargain that
got us “These United States” rather than “these collective states” was the
Federal government accepting responsibility for the individual state’s debts
from the Revolutionary War. Having seen England try to impose its will by eliminating
the right of citizens to bear arms (and therefore protect themselves against
the state) our founders wanted to make sure to inhibit the national government
they were forming from taking a similar tack.
The NRA claims this sentence means each of us has a right to
carry whatever weapons we choose wherever and whenever we want. I suppose
that’s a bit too strong. They would probably agree that tactical nuclear
weapons should be limited to our national armed forces. They might agree that
those with certain criminal records should not have the right to weapons. But
they can’t actually say those things directly, because once they concede that
not all arms should be available to all individuals, they have agreed that the
discussion is not one of absolute, but of where we draw the line.
And they do not want the public to understand the real issue
is where to draw the line. To again distract the public and lawmakers from this
real question they presented a straw man: suggesting that by making schools no
gun zones it puts a target on our kids’ backs because gunman will be drawn to
schools where there is no one to shoot back. Their solution is to make schools armed
compounds in order to protect our children.
Many of our schools already have armed guards—not primarily to
protect children from outside gunmen, but to protect children and teachers from
other students who would carry concealed weapons. This, the NRA conveniently
forgets. They also neglect to mention that if schools did become armed
compounds, those bent on a mass killing of our children would turn their
attention elsewhere—say to ambushing a school bus. There the kids are already
confined to an aluminum can with limited exits, a place where a semi-automatic military-style
weapon could quickly riddle the entire bus, changing clips before the children
(or an armed guard on the bus, since that would be the NRA’s next logical step)
could react.
These latest deaths won’t change anything, because they are
a blip in the total. Every year we lose about 11,000 Americans to bullets. If
there were no guns, there would be no deaths by guns. However, as with
automobiles (we lose 36,000 Americans a year to vehicle accidents), guns are a
part of American society. We are inured to all these deaths because our
individual risk of such a death is low.
To minimize the risk of automobile deaths, we require people
to use seatbelts; we require cars to have certain safety mechanism. We test
drivers (at least once) to make sure they can drive safely. We should apply all
these same considerations to people who own guns.
I am not against guns. I have lots of friends who hunt; I
even let them hunt on my property. When hunting, they fire their shotguns and
rifles one shot at a time, and that is where we should start. Every rifle and
shotgun should be single shot, not even three-round bursts should be allowed.
Multiple shot bursts and semi-automatic fire are designed to kill people, not
deer.
We already ban certain types of bullets because their only
purpose is to kill people. Why shouldn’t we ban magazines designed to kill
people? Hunters do not need ten or twenty or larger magazines to hunt. A
half-dozen shells before the weapon needs to be reloaded provides more
firepower than most hunters need in a whole day of hunting. Larger magazines
are designed for killing people, not deer.
Revolvers (a dying breed) are single shot and usually carry
between four and ten rounds. We could limit them to six in the future. Pistol
clips can similarly be limited to a small number of rounds. Revolvers and
pistols are not nearly as accurate as rifles, and as distance increases they
become increasingly less accurate.
As with automobiles, all firearms should be registered,
their serial numbers recorded and the owner required to acknowledge that they
will be charged with a criminal act if they do not safeguard their guns. We
require individuals to have licenses and carry insurance to drive a car. We should
require all gun owners to pass a safety course in order to be licensed to carry
a gun. (The NRA has safety courses, and my recollection is that they are very
good. I passed one in junior high school before I was allowed to target shoot
at my grandparents’ farm.)
All gun transactions should be conditional on the buyer
passing a background check, which also requires them to be licensed. Private
transactions must not be exempted. It matters not whether the seller is a
licensed gun dealer, a trade show operator or me selling a gun to Josephine
Blow. In all cases Josephine must pass the same background check and wait the
required number of days before taking possession. The costs for maintaining the
database of guns and background checks should be paid by the gun purchaser. If,
as the NRA claims, the process is inefficient, charge more to pay for an
efficient system. Those who want to own cars and be licensed to drive them pay
the costs of the system; so should gun owners.
Obviously these policies cannot be implemented without a
transition period; however, a transition period should not be an impediment to
implementing strict gun ownership requirements. Nor, turning my attention from
death to taxes, should a transition period be an impediment to fixing our
budget crisis.
Taxes
I admit that until I wrote this piece, I had not read the
Grover Norquist “Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” It reads:
I, _____, pledge to the taxpayers
of the (____ district of the) state of ______ and to the American people that I
will: ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rate
for individuals and business; and TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination
of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing
tax rates.
In the 2011-2012 Congress, 236 Representatives (all but six
Republican House members, and including only two Democratic House members) and
forty-one Senators (one Democrat and forty Republicans) signed this atrocity.
Since a majority of the House is 218, this means (unless people break their
pledge) no bill can pass to raise income taxes (expect perhaps through subterfuge).
Further, since it takes sixty votes in the Senate to vote cloture and break a
filibuster (at least in theory; these days it seems any one Senator can put a
permanent hold on any nomination without the necessity of formally going
through a filibuster, but that’s a different illness of the Senate),
Republicans could prevent any increase in taxes in that body as well.
The deficit for FYE 2012 is about $1.1 trillion. Expenses
were something on the order of $3.6 trillion. To balance the budget without
increasing revenues would require across-the-board cuts of over 30%. Take your
own situation and envision cutting 30% from your housing expense, from your
food expense, from your clothing expense, from transportation, from
entertainment, from supporting your children or parents, from absolutely
everything. That’s how far off we as a nation are from a balanced budget.
If you were faced with this scenario, you would probably
borrow your credit cards to the hilt rather than cut all the way back on
spending. That’s what Congress has done. We took on two wars, Afghanistan and
Iraq and charged it all. Republicans wouldn’t raise taxes because of their
pledge and for the first two years of Obama’s presidency when Democrats controlled
the House, Senate and White House, the country was in a severe financial
recession and raising taxes made little sense.
As someone who thinks the Keynesian idea that when we have a
struggling economy we should run some deficits and when we have a robust
economy we should run surpluses, I’d suggest that we should currently be
running something of a deficit because we have additional expenses caused by
the past recession (extra unemployment benefits, food stamps, training costs,
etc.) However, those extra costs caused by a lousy economy add up to a few
hundred billion at most; nothing close to $1.1 trillion. The difference is our structural
budget problem and will not be solved by a robust economy.
Every individual prefers to pay less for government. That is
not the same thing as preferring less government. The Republicans (with the
complicity of Democrats) have focused their tax efforts for the last two
decades on pandering to our preference to pay less for government. The Bush tax
cuts decreased annual Federal Government Revenues around $350-400 billion. Had
we not enacted them we would have about $4 trillion less in accumulated
deficits than we do. Had Bush and the Republicans raised taxes temporarily to
pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we could lop off another trillion or
two.
This disparity is not about the rich versus the middle
class. Almost all of us need to pay higher taxes to afford the government we
want. Most of us also need to collect less from the government than we desire.
On the spending side, we have long-term structural problems with Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Defense Department. Republicans are
correct that we must look at these areas (well, actually they only want to look
at the first three; I added the Defense Department because it is equally
broken.)
President Obama is correct that either marginal tax rates
must rise or net deductions decrease. He is myopic considering the problem is
addressed by focusing on those earning $250,000 or more (or his latest weasel
to only increase taxes for those earning $400,000 or more). However, I suppose
we have to start somewhere and that’s with the wealthy. Either Republicans must
renounce their puerile Norquist pledge or be responsible for a failed
government. The president must not give in on this because once there is
agreement that changes can be made we can start to have real conversation about
the right level of government and how to structure taxation to support it.
That’s when middle American has to suck it up and pay more taxes or suck it up
and stop asking the Federal government to solve every problem that
inconveniences them.
So there we have it. I have run out of patience with
Republicans, Democrats, the President, the House, the Senate and the American
people when it comes to taxes and spending. With only a few notable individual
exceptions not one of them is actually facing reality.
Every empire I am aware of failed in part because they
debased their currency attempting to protect their empire while bribing the masses
with public goods. I hope we can learn this lesson from history, rather than
following those earlier empires’ paths. Nothing this past month has given me a
glimmer of hope.
It’s the time of year we celebrate miracles and the
beginning of more light in our twenty-four hour days. So despite my best
rational judgment, I’ll keep hoping for heroic leaders who will lead us to a
better, sustaining future.
~ Jim
