Two, to start off the weekend...

Two quick snippets to help us all have a slightly more scary weekend.

First, it was reported today that Michael Mukasey, Attorney General of the United States, says he has two portraits hanging on his office wall.

One is of Robert Jackson, a former Supreme Court Justice and a prosecutor at Nuremberg.

The other is of Eric Arthur Blair, an author of some note, although not by that name. Blair wrote under a pen name. George Orwell.

Yes, according to our Attorney General, one of the two people he felt so connected to that he wanted their portraits up in his office is the author of 1984, with all of its revisionist history and "Big Brother" and double speak.

I can't decide if this is merely quaintly ironic or downright scary.

And if that doesn't just make your weekend, take a gander at this article from the UK's Guardian newspaper.

It reports that five former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands have written a "radical manifesto" for NATO, in which they insist that NATO must be prepared to use pre-emptive nuclear attacks to halt the imminent spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (quoted more or less directly from the article).

Now, read that again. It is not arguing that we need to keep the nuclear option open as retaliation for an extreme attack, nor even that it should be an option when such an attack is imminent. It suggests that we in "the west" should be willing to use nuclear weapons merely to stop other countries from getting nukes and other WMD.

But let's think about this for a bit. We've already seen the government of one country taken down largely over accusations of WMD that turned out not to exist. We've been told that another one is actively seeking a nuclear weapon and may have it any day now, when the experts report that they're likely 10 years away from having such a weapon, and that they don't seem to be trying particularly hard to get one.

So essentially these five geniuses have decided that we should use threat of (and possibly actual) nuclear terror on countries to stop them from doing something we've shown an incredibly poor record of accuracy in detecting.

Remember, we in the United States are the only country ever to drop nukes on anyone. We've lived in fear of nukes for years, with the Cuban Missile crisis and the cold war, and more recently the oft talked about "suitcase bomb" in the hands of a terrorist. But we're the only ones who have ever actually used one against a population.

How much of a bully on the playground do we really want to be, beating up the smaller kids not necessarily for actually doing anything we don't like, but because we've decided they're probably doing something we don't like, even if it's not true?

If this is made part of any country's official doctrine, then it's only a matter of time before some population gets nuked in retalliation for a sin not committed, and we'll become worse by far than the terrorists this action is supposed to combat, to say nothing of sparking the rise of a new generation of anti-American jihadists.

I wasn't alive for the only nuclear war ever to happen on this planet thus far, and I'd really hoped to get out of this life before the next one came along.

Liam.

My Thoughts on "Fair" Tax Plans

OK, as promised, here's some of why I don't like the "Fair/Flat" sales tax proposals that have been floated by various politicians in recent years. (If you haven't read my earlier post from today on the subject, please read that first, this sort of logically continues from that.)

First, it is much more heavily weighted towards the poor and middle classes than ever before. The poor spend a far greater percentage of their income than the rich do, so a much higher percentage of their money would be subject to the tax (obviously anything saved would not be taxed until it was later spent). Also, the rich are far more likely to be involved in international commerce, outside of the authority for the federal government to tax them. And if you tried to insist that foreign purchases be subject to the tax you'd have to have a much larger customs force, because every vehicle crossing the border would have to be searched. Each person leaving the country would have to have a detailed list of what they took out of the country, so that that list could be compared to what they brought back in, to allow the tax to be levied on all external purchases. If you didn't do that, you'd find anyone who lived within an hour's drive of the Canadian or Mexican border making regular trips across the border to buy items without paying the 30% premium. But regardless, much higher percentages of the income of poor people would be subject to taxation than that of rich people.

Say what you will, but I'm very fortunate to be where I am, and most people that I know of who are fiscally advantaged got there as much based on good fortune as on hard work. I guarantee I don't work harder than a lot of people earning much lower wages doing construction and other “blue collar” jobs. A small list of the things I have (through no credit to myself) that have helped me to get where I am:

• Fiscally responsible parents and grandparents who had the resources to send me to college and not leave me encumbered with lots of loans. They've also been a safety net, allowing me to over-extend myself financially, knowing they could give me a quick infusion of loaned cash if I needed it. To say nothing of the many gifts I've received. A car for college graduation from my grandparents, leaving me free from having to spend money early in my career on a car. Down payment money for my house, so I could get a better rate and not have to pay PMI. Various smallish loans which, when I went to repay them, were suddenly no longer due.
• A business savvy father, who gave me more than my share of good advice with regard to having a successful career.
• Above average intelligence (not meaning to brag, but it is an asset that I have that I can't really take any fair credit for).

I'm sure there are more. But the net result is that whenever I hear someone talk about how our present tax system “punishes” “hard work”, I have to look back and ask if it's humanly possible that the uber-rich CEO who makes 1000 times what his blue collar employees makes has worked 1000 times as hard. I don't like paying taxes any more than anyone else does, but I have no objection to paying a higher share of the burden than someone who is working a lot harder than I am for a lot less pay. (Sure, you can throw in welfare cheats as counter examples, but in my view welfare is a separate issue, needing reform but unrelated to the taxation issue).

Now, some proponents of this “fair tax” system say that some of the unfair influence on the poor would be offset by “prebates”, but in order to process the rebate system, you'd have to keep something like the IRS in place, and pretty soon you've not really simplified anything.

My second problem with the flat sales tax plan is how do you deal with middle-men? If you tax corporations on their spending then you raise the cost of their raw materials by at least 30%. Possibly more for corporations whose raw materials are parts processed by OTHER corporations from other raw materials, etc. One can quickly see prices of iPods spiraling out of control as follows:

1. The company that makes metal wire has to pay the mining company 30% in taxes on their purchase of raw ore and must raise their prices accordingly.
2. The electronic circuit manufacturer then has to pay 30% higher base prices and then the 30% tax for THEIR purchase, raising their prices accordingly.
3. Apple computer then buys the electronic components, which by this point have gone up 69% in cost, and pays the government their 30% sales tax, bringing their cost of materials up almost 120%.
4. Finally, you buy an iPod which today would cost $100 from Apple for $220 and pay your 30% sales tax, bringing your final cost on a $100 iPod to over $285. So much for a 30% tax! (And all of that is before your state and local sales tax, which of course would also be higher since it would be charged on $220 instead of $100)

The alternative to that, of course, is not to charge the tax to corporations, but then you need ever more taxes from individuals to make up for the tax corporations would no longer have to pay on their income. Plus, now you'd have to police the taxation process because the company that makes electronic circuit boards will have to charge the tax on circuits it sells to end-users at Radio Shack, but not to resellers who plan to put those circuits together into other purchasable goods.

My third problem with the flat sales tax plan is that it would very quickly make the current housing problems orders of magnitudes worse. According to the things I've read, in order for a 30% (or 23%, see my previous post on the subject) federal sales tax to bring in the same revenue as the current income tax, it would have to apply to things you might not expect, like houses and cars. Which means the cost of purchasing a house goes up by 30%, pricing large numbers of people out of the houses they'd currently qualify for. This would drop the demand for housing and thus drop the value of all of our houses until they reached a level where there was enough demand to buy them again. We'd lose significant core value in our houses and we'd lose any tax advantage to home ownership that we currently enjoy. It's already cost-prohibitive to move too often, because of the 6% (on average) real estate commission we have to pay when we sell a house. If that "lost money" on each transaction went up to 36% of the total paid, wouldn't most people do their level best to find ways to stay in the house they're in if at all possible?

Of course there are answers to all of these problems, but... each answer involves more regulation, more watchdogs to police the system, and more loopholes that those with connections and/or few scruples can slip through. Pretty soon, your tax is no more “fair” than today's system is and no easier to administer, just a whole lot of additional work to switch everyone over to the new system for little or no gain.

Something to think about.

Liam.

Fuzzy Math

Much has been made of the claim by Mike Huckabee that his “fair tax” sales tax rate is 23%, when it actually amounts to a 30% sales tax, and I want to crunch a few numbers, just to clarify for everyone.

Many people seem to have decided that Mr. Huckabee is being inherently dishonest, but for comparison purposes to our current income tax, his 23% number is actually clearer, if somewhat misleading when compared to current sales taxes.

Here's how the math works such that 23% and 30% can mean the same thing:

Suppose you buy something for $100. At a 30% tax rate, you would end up paying $130 ($100 for the item, $30 in taxes). However, if you consider the entire price as $130, then 23% of that ($30 out of $130) is taxes, 77% is core cost.

And this is the point that most people start yelling "But that's dishonest! It's a 30% tax if it raises the cost by 30%". But here's why I think the 23% number may be the more honest one when comparing this tax to the current income tax, which it is intended to replace:

Assume the same $100 item that you wish to buy. If you are in the 30% tax bracket, you have to earn nearly $143 in order to buy that $100 item. On the other hand, if you're in the 23% tax bracket, you have to earn $130 to net enough to cover $100. Therefore, when comparing taxes, if you have to earn $130 to buy a $100 item at a 23% income tax bracket, it's fair to refer to it as a 23% tax in the "fair tax" system as well, for clarity.

So while it is clearly confusing to refer to a 30% tax as a 23% tax, it is clearly more fair than those opponents of the tax who throw around the 30% number and compare it to the 15% tax rate of the poor. 23% vs 15% is already bad enough.

Now, I disagree with this plan for a number of reasons, which I will detail in a comment or a later post. But this particular bit of “he's being dishonest about his numbers (but please don't notice that I'm also being a bit dishonest myself” has been annoying me for a while now, so I thought it might be nice to write a bit.

Liam.

Disappointments Galore

This post is going to be more in line with the "online diary" aspect of blogging. There's no particular point to it, and not really any facts at all to back it up, only my feelings.

I'm feeling disappointed in former president Bill Clinton.

I have traditionally been in his camp. I think he's one of the best political speakers of my lifetime (all the more so in contrast to the somewhat underwhelming oratory skills of his successor in the position) and have generally felt that the country was generally in a very good place under his stewardship, with the Republicans controlling the Congress.

I have always been more willing than some to overlook his personal failings, because I know that I, too, have personal failings. I do not expect our leaders to be perfect, I simply expect them to do their best on behalf of my country and its citizens. I am far more inclined to fault a leader for failing in pursuit of their duties to their office than for failing in their private lives.

But in the last few weeks of the campaign between his wife and Senator Obama, I have begun to see a side of him that I find truly distasteful. For all of his words of strengthening his party and coming together for common good, he's been drawn down to a level of dirty fighting that I think retired Presidents should be above. It seems to me he's down in the trenches making technically true if highly misleading statements about Senator Obama and embodying some of the uglier side of dirty politics. At a time in his career when he should be playing the grand elder statesman, he's gone back into campaign mode, and it's ugly.

I don't know why I took the time to write this out. Why I should expect politicians not to be politicians I have no idea. Still, for the first time I think I'm seeing just a little bit of what the Republicans see in Governor Clinton(*), and it saddens me.

Liam.

(* Although no one does it, I threw this in because technically it is the correct way to refer to Mr. Clinton. When someone retires from a position held by more than one person at a time (such as Senator or Governor), they keep that title in retirement. But when someone holds a singular position (such as President, Vice President, Chief Justice, Speaker of the House or one of the cabinet), in retirement they are supposed to revert back to their highest previous non-singular position. Therefore, the correct title for Bill Clinton isn't "President Bill Clinton" or "Ex-President Bill Clinton", but "Governor Bill Clinton". Just a fun fact that isn't taught much in civics classes any more.)

Candidate Rehash

Hey, everyone in blog world.

I want to start out by apologizing to the two of you who asked when I was going to comment on the results of the primaries and caucuses so far, particularly ours up here in NH.

The truth is, I've been working long hours because of a couple of things at work that went blooey. To give you an idea, it's Tuesday night as I write this, and I've already completed over 30 hours at work for this week.

This has not left me with a lot of energy (or time) to blog.

Had I finally taken the time to sit down and write something yesterday, it would have been very different, the reasons for which will be obvious in a bit.

On the Democratic side I'm disappointed. Arguably my least favorite Democratic candidate (with the possible exception of Mike Gravel) is Hillary Clinton, and she's currently surging. Obama isn't far behind, he of the great rhetoric on what's wrong in this country and very few concrete plans to fix any of them (and the plans he does put out seem cribbed from the Edwards playbook).

John Edwards is still in the race, of course, but it seems a mere technicality. Of course, it's not impossible that he could have a strong showing in Nevada and be positioned well for Super Tuesday (or whatever the media are calling it this week). But he's certainly the outside candidate at this point.

Chris Dodd and Joe Biden have dropped out, each of whom I think would have been better than the two leading candidates right now. Dodd because I think he showed real leadership in leaving the campaign trail at a crucial time to go back to Washington in order to block a bill which was against the best interests of American citizens, and Biden because from what I've read, he may well have the most raw intelligence of any of the candidates. This is, of course, second hand, but still, he had a sense of humor about things and had a lot of good things to say.

And most recently, Bill Richardson has dropped out. I don't know what to say about him. He has a lot of good experience and seems to say the right things, but somehow he doesn't seem Presidential. He's a bit too much like the goofy fat guy we all knew in college. He seems to lack gravitas. And some voice in the back of my head says "Wait a second, if he was any good at any of the many jobs he's held, why didn't he keep them longer?" I can see why Secretary of Energy is generally a temporary position, but he's been a Governor, an Ambassador, he's run a business, and he doesn't seem that old. The phrase "jack of all trades, master of none" comes to mind.

Or maybe it's just that part of my brain that pipes up whenever I'm interviewing someone to come to work at the company I work for and they have too many short duration jobs on the resume. I always want to know two things: First, if you're any good, why didn't any of these places want to keep you longer? And second, why should I believe after we take the several months to get you trained you'll actually stay with US long enough to be a net gain to the company?

Still, my gut feeling is Richardson would also have been better than Clinton and Obama. But I guess we've got who we've got. I'll still keep praying for a miracle for Edwards, but start to resign myself to one of these two.

Which brings us to the Republicans, and why I consider even the least of the Democrats a better choice in this election. To answer the second part first, I am a strong believer that one of the things that helps keep this country on a fairly straight course is the pendulum of power swinging back and forth. So long as we're stuck with the two-party system, we have to keep jumping back and forth. Let one take power until they start to become corrupt, and then let the other, newly humbled, take it back. Then they start to become corrupt and the pendulum swings back again.

Or think of it like a ship. If you have the day captain and the night captain, and the day captain tends to like to steer the ship towards the right, it'd best if the night captain likes to steer it to the left so that the net result is progress in the forward direction.

Come to think of it, the last time we had anything like a balanced budget was under a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. So perhaps that's what we need again. Clearly the reverse is not working.

So, we come to the Republican candidates.

First, Ron Paul. I hate to tar a man with the nasty label of racism if there's any chance I'm wrong, and the fact is that there are lots of examples in the history of American politics of people being slimed with facts spun to seem more damaging than they actually are. And yet the evidence seems pretty damning. I don't want to support anyone who is actively racist.

Beyond that, he's a bit of a nutjob. There are aspects of his campaign which make a lot of sense, especially the parts about restoring the Constitutionally mandated balance of power between the States and the Federal government, and between the three branches of the Federal government. But then he goes off into nutjob land wanting to pull us out of the U.N. and NATO and most of our treaties and make us a completely isolationist nation. He wants to abolish the IRS without necessarily any plans to figure out how to make up the budgetary shortfall (although to his credit, he's also the most fiscally conservative candidate out there, and he may actually believe he can cut spending to the point that income taxes are no longer needed at the Federal level). But in the end, Paul is more Libertarian than Republican, and with that comes much too great a faith in the free market system, which works great with economics of simple goods and not at all well when it comes to something as complex as medications.

Then there's Giuliani. Every time I start to think that no, he can't really be as much of a Johnny one-note as the media portray him to be, he references 9/11 again on ever flimsier justifications. Asked if he was worried after the Iowa caucus results, he said "No. After 9/11, I worried. This isn't worry." Asked about the famous Hillary Clinton tearing-up moment, he said "I don't think crying is necessarily bad. I cried after 9/11." And the thing is, from talking to many of my friends who lived in or near NYC during the actual attacks on that day, it seems that far from the image he tries to paint, Giuliani's main contribution to that effort was to be on television. He certainly didn't fix any of the problems identified after the 1991 attempted bombing of the same buildings in the 10 years between, and only an idiot puts his main emergency response department's main command center in the single most recognizable (and previously targeted once) building in the city.

Giuliani is essentially trying to see if he can squeeze one more win out of the Republican fear-mongering tactic of the last six years or so. But we've grown, we've moved on. Most of us just aren't as tempted by the "Elect me because I'll be tough, and sure I may ride roughshod over some of your rights, but it's only because if I don't, the bogeyman is gonna getcha! Booga booga!" argument as we once may have been.

Mitt Romney... is artificial. That's about all I can say about him. He's willing to do or say whatever is necessary to get elected, and it shows. Did you see that he tried having his own tearing-up moment in MI after it was so successful for Hillary in NH? He's probably the most liberal (historically) of the Republican candidates and so he makes up for it by taking the most extreme right wing positions on everything, the end result being that no one believes him. Those of his party's base with whom his message might actually resonate see his record and any who are more moderate hear his message.

John McCain was my favorite... eight years ago. At that time I believed his maverick style and his straight talk express. But then he got trounced by lies and dirty politics, and he learned some tricks from them. Plus, he's too old, not physically but mentally. McCain is a true war hero, more so than just about anyone else running. But he has an old man's mind, sure he's right and not interested in hearing the other side of the argument. Having just gone through 7 years of an "I only want to hear from the people who agree with me" White House, that attitude scares me. But the most important is that McCain believes that traditional war tactics will work in our current struggles, even though our enemy this time is not another nation but a private group. Fighting against al Qaeda is a new kind of fight. Using the term "war" does a disservice to the battle, because it implies that any of our existing warfare tactics will work. The real reason we attacked Iraq originally was because the only tactics we had were for fighting nations. We hadn't the skills to fight this new kind of enemy, so we made ourselves a war in which traditional tactics would work... and thus we left al Qaeda to flourish and grow. And McCain seems to think more of the same is what we need. And old man's lack of flexibility.

McCain's time to be President was 8 years ago. He lost. It's too late. If he wins now, it'll be Bob Dole all over again, the old guy calling for his turn against the young idealist.

I'm not even going to say much about Fred Thompson. He doesn't seem to really want the job. He made the mistake of believing that the mystique of him as a candidate when he wasn't one would continue into support if he became one. It didn't, and now he's staying in mostly so as not to look like a goober for dropping out just after getting into it.

Which brings me to Mike Huckabee, and this is the part that would have been very different had I written this a day or two ago. Because I was starting to like Huckabee. Not for positions, he's almost diametrically opposed to my positions, being socially conservative and fiscally a little too liberal while I'm just the other way. But I liked him because he seemed to believe in his principles instead of believing in power. I liked him because he's a genuinely likable guy, as far as I can tell from hearing him speak. And I liked him because he shows the neoconservatives for who they really are: By embodying just about everything they've been telling us for years they want but being rejected by them for the primary sin of not being THEIR man, hopefully people will finally start to see that the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party is not the party of Christian values nor the party of social conservatism, they're the party of "Let's grab power by paying lip service to whoever's ideals we have to in order to get 50% plus one of the votes".

But then today Huckabee reminded me why he scares me more than any of the other candidates: If elected he would be to America what the Ayatollahs are to Iran, ruling this country from the Bible instead of from the Constitution. It's gotten a lot of bad-mouthing in conservative circles in recent years, but the fact is that the separation of church and state isn't about suppressing Christianity, it's about a country where everyone is free to worship his own way, his own religion of choice, or none at all if that's his wish. Freedom of religion is one of our most fundamental rights, and in order not to provide any hint of favoritism or government sanction for one religion over another we insist that our government remain theocratically neutral.

And then Huckabee says this. Don't just read the article, watch the video, so you can know that they are his words and not merely something someone made up.

He supports altering the Constitution to bring it in line with the Bible. He supports breaking arguably the most fundamental of our founding philosophies (fundamental in that many of the original people in this country came here to escape religious persecution). I'm free to be a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Muslim or a Jew or a Christian or an agnostic in this country, and so are you. We do not need a President who wants to make all but one of those a sub-optimal choice and those who make that choice second class citizens.

So in summary, the Republican field breaks down into three scary candidates, one who is too rigid and one who doesn't seem to want it. The Democrats have two solid candidates and a third who's probably the most qualified who have all dropped out of the race. Hanging on by a thread we have the guy I think is closest to what America needs right now. And at the top someone running on the experience of having been married to someone who actually has experience and someone running on a great ability to recognize and communicate problems without solutions.

I think I'm losing my will to live.

Liam.