My Thoughts Are a Gas
by Molly Ivors
Well, we're back on Lovely Liberal Mountain and ready to buckle down and finish our summer writing projects, as Thers noted. And yet I find myself reflecting on the same worries I had before my bemusing week in Louisville (note to self: if you ever think it's a good idea to read 1100 essays on the same topic again, please seek professional help. kthnxbai.): what will be the role of populism in the campaign, and how will that populism be defined?
We're all panicking about the economy these days: from gas prices to food prices (which stand, in the wake of the midwest flooding, to push even higher) to loss of equity in our homes to a fucking insane presidential candidate whose campaign slogan, as Thers has noted, is "Everybody Dies!" but also seems to have adopted a new mantra: "What Economic Problems?" Personally, I think we should all solve our economic problems by marrying pill-popping beer heiresses and calling them trollops and cunts in public: though I admit, the pool of people willing to share their bank accounts in exchange for such behavior may not be quite enough to bail out the whole country. Plus, some people are already married. But since we've essentially decriminalized polygamy, I don't think that will be much of a problem.
Anyway, back to the economy. In my College Writing class, I do a unit on the economy because I've found that the students I get--the traditional ones, anyway, who were generally born during Bush 1 at this point--have no tools whatsoever to dig apart the current economic ideology, even as they face it down and consider its effects in their own lives. I try to explain to them The Great Compression and what it meant in terms of the development of American civil society, and they're routinely blown away by the things their parents had which they never knew. (e.g. municipal garbage collection, which now seems weird and archaic, like one of those Little House stories about people making their own bullets). I'm no economist--just ask my credit union, who mourn my lack of numerical skills even as they rack up huge fees from my cluelessness--which is why I trust grownups like Krugman and Atrios to let me know how all this works. But I know what I see, and it's pretty grim.
And my students aren't stupid. They know what they see, too, but it has just never occurred to them to see it in any way other than a Norquistian Wet Dream. Taxes are bad, regulations are bad, globalization is good, corporate America has your best interests at heart. It's an essentially adolescent worldview, embraced by those who get to Ron Paul by way of Ayn Rand and haven't really figured out that they're supposed to outgrow that kind of selfishness at a certain point. (I'm totally rooting for a Ron Paul independent run, BTW. That would give Obama 49 states, rather than the 47 I've been confidently predicting. Go, Ron!) College students think they're Libertarians because they want to get high and make sure they have access to birth control. Oh, and they don't want to die in stupid wars. But they haven't thought much past that.
And so I try to reframe the economics debate via this concept I've been working on, and was delighted to see in the Washington Post this morning: taxes are the entrance fee into civil society. And you can't cut taxes too far without having that civil society break down.
Let's imagine an alternate universe. The U.S. government is running a large and growing deficit. Not far down the road it faces huge increases in Social Security and Medicare costs. Naturally, the candidates for president want to remedy this by raising revenue. They don't want us to bequeath bigger deficits to our children or stake our future on foreigners' willingness to keep lending us money.
But have you heard this speech? "My fellow Americans, I have a plan to raise taxes so that the budget will be closer to balance and future Americans won't have to worry about their retirement security." Neither have I.
Somebody, though, should be giving it.
It's Roger Lowenstein, the "Exuberance Is Rational!" guy, and I think that's pretty compelling evidence in itself that we are poised at the edge of a sea change in economic policy and indeed, in the basic sense of what it means to be American. Lowenstein offers five points of argument, as follows:
1. End preferential treatment for private equity fund managers. (They pay 15%? Jesus fuck!)
2. Raise the cap on the payroll tax.
3. Reinstate a meaningful inheritance tax.
4. End unfair deductions.
5. (Best for last): Repeal the Bush cuts in income and capital gains taxes.
Is this what the New Populism is going to look like? If so, I guess it's a start. The fact is, taxes pay for things we need, like, oh, I dunno, food inspections. Personally, I'm swearing off tomatoes until my own are ripe--and they're still just little guys.
It's a sane and comprehensible response to be skeptical of taxation when your government allows shit like this to slide. As in noted wanker P.J. O'Rourke's famous aphorism, "Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it." But Dems generally believe that government can do good, even though, in the same line, O'Rourke defines this as saying that "government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn." Well, I'm not aware of the party's position on lawncare, but progressive taxation and sane education policy would be objectively good for most people, in my opinion. And good childhood nutrition does tend to make people taller, so there's that. And that's worth some taxes, I think.
People are scared, and not without reason. But I think we can do something about it.
As it were.