Pledge Politics

Jackie Cilley, who says The Pledge is a pledge to raise property taxes

Grover Norquist Who Wants to Drown Your Government In His Bathtub

When you think about it...But who ever really thinks about anything in governance now?
But if you do think about it, every Republican and every Democrat who has taken this asinine pledge to NEVER PERMIT AN INCOME TAX in the state of New Hampshire, has actually taken a pledge to raise property taxes.

Jackie Cilley did think about it and she said, "No."

Only two things are certain: Death and Taxes. 

If we are going to have a government, we will have taxes of some sort.

Unless, of course, you agree with Grover Norquist that the government we ought to have should be small enough so Grover can drown it in his bathtub, but even then, you need taxes.

And if we have taxes, then if you make one tax smaller, or eliminate one tax, then all the other taxes have to, do what?  That's right, Einstein, the others must GET BIGGER!

So if we say no sales tax, no income tax, no this tax, no that tax, what has been left to taxpayers in New Hampshire is the property tax. 
 As taxes go, the property tax may seem like a "progressive" tax, that is, it falls more heavily on those with more valuable property.  Problem with this simplistic thinking is, it really does not fall most heavily on those with the most disposable income, those whose bank accounts get bigger every year. It falls most on those people who have owned property, their homes, for the longest and they have seen the value attributed to their homes and land rise. Of course, this is imaginary value. Your home and land is worth nothing until you sell it, but you pay rising  taxes on that imaginary value every year you do not sell it. So if you are retired, living on your Social Security and your 401 K, you watch your "rent" you pay the state of New Hampshire on your paid off home rise, while your income does not rise.

When I ran a small business I paid: Federal income tax, income tax to the State of Maryland, self employment tax, Alternative Minimum Tax, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, Maryland and county property tax, state personal property tax, Auto Registration tax.  And those are just the taxes I can remember. I had an accountant who kept track of all the taxes I had to pay. 

Of all these, I hated the income tax most because it required me to keep all sorts of records and receipts, which even after 30 years of collecting and filing these things, I never felt I got right. And it made me play games with what was a reasonable deduction:  I could deduct the miles I put on my car driving to certain locations but not to others, if I kept a log of where I drove. Driving to my office parking lot was not deductible. Driving to a hospital parking lot was deductible. It was intrusive, frustrating and I knew others were gaming the system where I was not.  People like Mitt Romney didn't have "ordinary income," so they paid only 1/3 of what I was paying.  Friends bought Expeditions and Excalibers, very large SUV's because they could deduct most of the cost of these behemoths, while I drove my economy car. Friends put their malpractice insurance on credit cards, because they could deduct payments made by credit cards and that paid air fare for London vacations. People gamed the federal income tax and I resented the whole game.

So I hate income taxes.

But the state income tax was a straight fraction of whatever you paid the feds. It was less obnoxious.

I wouldn't want a state income tax, but I might prefer it to higher property taxes or to a tax on my car or on my parking at work. 

But what I really find obnoxious is a pledge some sleazeball like Grover Norquist popularizes telling me what a third rail, an electric fence in the state of New Hampshire ought to be.

American Taliban: The Republican Party

Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy in The Newsroom

             

The Newsroom has been savaged by some reviewers, both from the political right, which is predictable, and from the left, for the usual reasons of stupidity posing as intellect, but I wound up watching all ten episodes, and was not at all put off by the preachiness. In fact, its writer, Mr. Sorkin, does pretty much what George Bernard Shaw did in the early 20th century--he writes plays of ideas, in which speeches are made and ideas vigorously presented. For doing this, Sorkin is criticized for not writing what the critics expect from TV. He is criticized for being preachy, which is apparently not allowed in television drama. It violates somebody's rule.

Apart from its place in literature, the show is useful as a platform for ideas. It summarizes with great clarity the great issues of the day, and its last episode lists the 12 characteristics of today's Republican/Tea party, after a nifty observation about what the Republican Party is now all about, summarized in a quotation from a Republican office holder explaining why he did not support any of the government's social programs, like Medicaid, Social Security or Medicare:

"My mother told me not to feed stray animals. Because, you know why? They breed."

This of, of course, is what I've been describing as the Republican view of the poor and disadvantaged as "the undeserving poor."  If you are not rich, it's because you have not worked hard enough or you are too stupid.

So here is the profile of the dirty dozen characteristics. You'll have to watch the show for examples of each, but I'm sure you can supply your own. I've supplied a few:

1. Ideological purity (Mitch McConnell saying his only job in the Senate, and the only job of Republicans is not to govern but to deny President Obama a second term.)

2. Belief that compromise is weakness (Paul Ryan stomping out of Budget negotiations with President Obama.)

3. Fundamental belief in scriptural literalism. (Teach creationism not evolution.)

4. Denying science (Vaccination causes mental retardation. Abortion causes breast cancer. Birth Control pills cause prostate cancer. Deny global warming. Rejection of evolution.)

5. Unmoved by facts (President Obama is responsible for the downgrading of the US credit rating--when Standard & Poor's, who did the rating specifically said it was the Republican "political brinkmanship" that moved them to downgrade. Ryan calling Obamacare "government controlled health care," when in fact it is a private insurance company boon and the government option was thwarted. Ryan saying President Obama hurt Medicare by funneling $716 billion away from it--when in fact that very number was in Mr. Ryan's own plan.  This list goes on--see the NY Times 8/31/12 for a list under "Facts Took a Beating in Ryan's speech.")

6. Undeterred by new information (Always)

7. Hostile fear and demonization of education: (See anything by Michele Bachmann, or see the testimony of the New Hampshire Tea Partyers who call it "government education, indoctrination and socialization.")

8. Need to control women's bodies.  (Do we really need to elaborate here?)

9. Febrile xenophobia (Ditto)

10. Intolerance of dissent.

11. Pathological hatred of the United States government.

12. Tribal mentality.

There is Jon Stewart and there is Stephen Colbert. There is Paul Krugman and there is Gail Collins. And now there is Alan Sorkin. 

And then there are the women I work with every day, who do not know any of these people and have never watched The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, or The Newsroom. They do not read newspapers. They do not listen to TV news. 
And, they vote.

But their husbands do listen to Rush Limbaugh.

The question for us, between now and November is: How do we change this?

Paul Ryan and Medicare: Hiring the Fox to Guard the Hen House

YOUR HENS ARE IN GREAT DANGER! YOU NEED SOMEONE YOU CAN TRUST TO GUARD THESE PRECIOUS INVESTMENTS.


Since each of these programs was hatched, the Republican Party has been trying to steal into the hen house and snatch them away.

Now, Paul Ryan says, "Trust me. I can save these imperiled birds."

How smart do you have to be, Farmer Brown?

Live Free or Die. 

Paul Ryan Saves The Drowning Dolphin!

                                   WE HAVE TO SAVE FLIPPER!  HE'S DROWNING!


Paul Ryan and the Republicons are not the first to invent a crisis which requires dire action to remedy.
In the 20th Century there was a little band of merry men who burnt the Reichstag and used that smoking parliament building to win an election and seize power.
So now it's the sky is falling, the dolphins are drowning and we have to save Medicare and Social Security.
Of course, neither is in any real danger from within. 
Both programs are healthy and likely to remain so. 
Social Security has been so healthy the government has been borrowing from it's coffers for years.
But if you hold Flipper's head below the water, you can drown the poor mammal. He's got to come up to air to breathe.
Good going, Paul. You're right there to lend a helping hand.

Republicons vs A Republican

George Bernard Shaw observed, "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."

Today I heard Mitt Romney say he is convinced of American exceptionalism--that we are different and better than all other countries on earth.

Abraham Lincoln called America the last best hope of mankind, but when he said that he was speaking of a country which was the only true democracy on the planet. England was evolving into a constitutional monarchy, but, for the most part, the American experiment was the first real, large scale effort to forge a republic, "If you can keep it," as Benjamin Franklin said.

Lincoln called himself a Republican.  He would be appalled to see the Republicans of today--John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney. These are men who would say the slaves would free themselves if only government regulations did not constrain them.

But, to go back to GB Shaw, "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

And we have been discovering just how little we deserve a good government lately.

What I cannot understand is why we are so undeserving, what makes us so stupid that Rush Limbaugh is a man who commands the attention and adulation of 15 million listeners daily. 

During the Civil War, soldiers who were educated, if at all, in one room school houses looked at their choices, looked back over three years of dreadful carnage and did not choose to vote for the glamorous George McClellan, but they voted for Lincoln. They chose well, but why? How did they reason and reach the decision that saved the Republic?  Could our soldiers, will our citizens be able to see through the wall of lies to the truth?

I am not sanguine.

Part of the argument this time is not about union or slavery or even rape or contraception and abortion. It's about the economy. The Republicans persist in selling the idea that all we need to do is to reduce taxes and, like pixie dust, everything after that will miraculously turn happy.

They will trot out economists to say it's all true.

But, as GBS remarked:  "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."  

Bad Leaders Matter

Top:  General Ambrose Burnside; Bottom:  General Benjamin Butler

During the Civil War, the Southern insurgents who began with war with not a single cannon factory, with a huge disadvantage in terms of population, economy and political organization (no central government) managed to fight the North to near defeat because they had one form of central government which mattered, an army, and they had excellent generals.

The North had some pretty terrible generals.  Some, like Ben Butler were well connected politically, and really incompetent and some, like Ambrose Burnside, were simply incompetent.  But they did things like sending their troops across a long field in long lines of marching bodies only to have them mowed down because the enemy now had rifles instead of muskets.  In the days of muskets, long lines of infantry marching upright worked pretty well because you could not shoot accurately from half a mile away and you could not reload many times. Rifled barrels changed all that, but the generals either did not realize this or they realized this but were not flexible enough to change tactics. Something similar occurred in trench warfare in World War I, when lines of troops were sent running across fields raked by a new weapon, the machine gun.

In hospitals, the generals, i.e. the chiefs of service, kept on call schedules for interns at the thirty six hours on call rather than instituting a night coverage system whereby interns handed off the baton at night and went home and got some sleep. The chiefs argued this was good for the interns, because they could see a patient from his admission, through his "crisis" and could appreciate the full course of an acute illness.  This may have been true when the chiefs were training, because there was relatively little for interns to do during lose long nights on call.  But by the time the chiefs had become chiefs, the patients were sicker and there was more to do at night.

When the chiefs were interns and a patient went into cardiac arrest, they sent that patient to the morgue and the interns could go back to bed. When electrical defibrillators and a new generation of medications arrived, patients going into cardiac arrest became a new demand for interns' time and energy.  Ditto for patients who went into gram negative sepsis. 

Charles Christian, who was chief of medicine at Cornell once stunned a group of medical residents by saying it was much easier to be on call in the "days of the giants"  when interns were on call every other night, because they slept through the nights most nights and there was so much less the interns could actually do for patients. His generation of doctors had always bludgeoned the current generation who complained about the sleep deprivation and the difficulty of surviving the on call schedule with comments like, "You guys have it easy, every third night on call. We were on every other night."  So don't be so faint hearted, you wimps. This was a revelation. 

Eventually, the system changed and interns were sent home to get some sleep and the number of hours they worked consecutively were limited. And guess what? The interns still got trained as doctors.

So now, we are faced with choosing leaders again. And there are men and women who want to be leaders who do not understand the nitty gritty of what the troops on the front lines have to do and the difficulties they face. These leaders say we can do health care with coupons, and they say we can provide for retirement with the stock market and they say we do not need taxes--all we need is tax cuts. They say government is bad and what we need is less government and more private enterprise to solve the problem of a stalled economy, of business men who destroy banks and business. They say government regulation is the problem, not the solution. 

If we make these people our leaders, our troops will suffer, and the people they serve will suffer. And by our troops, I mean everyone who works in the trenches, providing medical care, putting out fires, policing our towns, building bridges, paving roads. 

In Hampton, the Smutty Nose brewery almost did not get built because there was no sewer hook up. All those jobs would have been lost, all the commerce down the drain because leaders were short sighted, not wanting to spend money to provide infrastructure to bring business to town.

Penny wise, pound foolish. That's the Republican-con.  Bad leadership. 

Zombie Tax Deniers: New Hampshire and Reason to Believe

It was hot today in Hampton.  The Hampton Democrats put up a tent in a Mill Road backyard and heard from three candidates for governor and one for US House of Representatives.

The crowd, as usual was compromised mostly of sixty to seventy somethings, but there were younger people as well, and spirits were high, despite the heavy weight of the heat.

The governor of Connecticut showed up, with his security people with the ear pieces and the vigilant looks and the governor gave a stirring speech about how the Republicans are intent on destroying government and all the good things it does in the name of some cockamamie idea of "freedom." 

I met a man running for sheriff, who was a Republican last election but could not abide the government haters, and so he switched parties.

Maggie Hassan gave one of those polished, focus group tested speeches with which I could agree, but somehow I could not see her persuading anyone with that who was not already a solid Democrat.  A man named Kennedy got up and introduced himself as a candidate for governor and said he favored an income tax and legalization of marijuana. You might say he dug in on the left flank. He sort of lost me when he said, "I often shoot from the hip, but always from the heart."  

Then Jackie Cilley got up and really started shooting, not from the hip, but raising that gun to the chin and letting loose with both barrels.  This is the Jackie Cilley who will bar the door against the zombies who keep trying to rise up from the dead and break the house down with their efforts to destroy the tax base of New Hampshire. 

Cilley has refused to take the pledge to never impose an income tax because she thinks it's a cowardly, destructive and ultimately immoral thing to do. What you are doing, essentially, when you grandstand and promise never to approve an income tax is to say, "Okay, I've got this gun, but it's not loaded. So now drop yours."

She identified about a dozen ways other than income taxes you could raise enough revenue to run the state government, but none of these proposals will even get a hearing if you don't have the threat of an income tax to hold against the temples of 425 legislators in Concord.

"We've got t consider what will happen when we actually do win this election," Cilley said. "Then we have to govern."

The Republicons are, of course, only concerned with winning. They have no interest in actually governing. They promise no taxes and then they cannot govern. They replace big government with really bad government.

I spoke with Chris Muns, who is running from Hampton for a seat in the House at  Concord. He'd seen the disaster of the 2010 election, when Democrats were swept from Concord and replaced with people who believe birth control pills cause prostate cancer and vaccines cause mental retardation.

I asked him why he had not given up trying to save this state, which persists in trying to walk back through some time warp, to get back to the 19th century.  He shrugged and said we'd never move forward if we give up.

Carol Shea Porter drifted by and she did not say, "I told you so," when I mentioned Frank Guinta, who beat her for the US House seat last time, has said he wants to destroy Social Security so thoroughly his own children will never learn that it ever existed.  He wants "private enterprise to lead the way," whatever that means. Ms. Shea Porter just smiled and said, "Vote."

So, there are people out there who continue to fight. 
It has been comforting to read A Stillness At Appomattox  which depicts the voting in the Union Army during 1864, when the army had been beaten repeatedly, when the government of the people, by the people, for the people seemed to be to be a ship going down in stormy waters. But the Army, which had loved its little dandy of a general, George McClellan, who was running against Lincoln, lined up and voted overwhelmingly against their darling and for Lincoln.  They sensed, or reasoned, some how concluded, the work they had done together over the three prior years of immense tumult and sacrifice and loss had to be continued.  They were staggering, but they had not given up on the idea of Union, on the possibilities of government and they voted to continue the fight.

And so it was a Southern Cause, the cause of aristocracy, slaves, fairy tales of chivalry which masked the bullwhips cracking and the iron shackles and chains and the fact that less than 20% of the population even owned slaves, that pixie dust monster was finally brought down and a stake driven through its heart.

So, in the end, because it has happened before, maybe there is a reason to believe, it can happen again: Maybe this great experiment of a government of the people, by the people, for the people may not perish from the earth.  

PS: Here's the link to the zombie ad. It's fun.
http://youtu.be/kTZMTTcvTm8