James Gillen

Of course the main news event of the moment is that Saturday April 29 marks Donald Trump’s first hundred days as President, which is remarkable first because we’re all still alive.

But as historians know, the reason we use “the 100 days” as a benchmark is that during the first one hundred days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term as president, he addressed the 1933 bank crisis by establishing the first federal deposit insurance system, started the Tennessee Valley Authority and created an emergency relief system for the poor during the Depression (which eventually led to the Social Security Administration). Since then American media have used FDR’s example, where the start of his administration set the stage for modern government, to compare to every other president’s opening days, especially when a president like Trump comes in promising to shake things up.

As it turns out, Trump has stated (on Twitter, naturally) that the 100-day benchmark is a “ridiculous standard.” I would say that Trump has a point there, but it turns out this is yet another case where he directly contradicted something he said as part of his campaign statements.  In any case, he did indeed promise much. And while he has until either the end of his term or the end of his impeachment trial to make his final mark, the general consensus is that not only has he not accomplished much compared to other presidents at this point, he certainly has not accomplished much compared to his own boastful agenda leading up to inauguration.

As they did during the 2016 campaign, Democrats perhaps overstate the case for how uniquely awful Trump is compared to the rest of the Republican Party. Any other Republican would have presented a tax reform that favored rich individuals and corporations over the middle class and working poor. Any other Republican would have nominated a technically qualified but politically conservative judge like Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and the Democrats would have still acted like it was the end of the world.

(The fact is, even pragmatic conservatives have to skew to the extreme to get the kind of Justice they want. After all, everybody expected John Roberts to be a hardcore conservative, and he ended up saving Obamacare. Twice. )

But it was Trump who demanded an immediate plan for a border wall that nobody else wanted and nobody else wanted to pay for. Including Congress.  It was Trump who proactively decided to threaten North Korea with a carrier group that apparently wasn’t even near Korea.  And while all the Republicans in Congress yelled about doing “repeal and replace” on Obamacare, Trump attached himself to an immediate repeal effort before a replacement was finalized (or apparently even conceived) resulting in conflict within the Republican party over whether the new health plan should remove Obamacare restrictions (and thus cost more money) or be that much more restrictive and save money (and thus defeat the purpose of covering the previously uninsured). That in turn led to Trump setting up a threat to vote for a repeal or face reprisal in the midterms. The fact that Republicans were willing to let the bill die rather than vote for it indicates they were more afraid of reprisal from voters if they HAD approved it. Which ultimately demonstrated, on an issue of vital importance to both Trump and his party, that his power to negotiate a deal is practically nil.

This basically is of a piece with the mindset of a flim-flam man who promises the moon and doesn’t even have moon rocks. The real reason Trump is found wanting in the first hundred days is because his ambitions are far in excess of his capacity to achieve them, which has to do with the mindset he brings to the situation. As the milestone date came near, Trump did a much-quoted interview with Reuters and said  “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”

Now, nobody actually knows what it’s like to be President until they assume the office. But some presidents, like Reagan and George W. Bush, were former governors. Some, like Obama and LBJ, were former senators. So they had some idea of how this “government” thing works. But Trump not only didn’t have that experience, he didn’t seem to think it was necessary. It probably explains why he has such a rapport with his support base. “Hey, I have a bunch of belligerent opinions and I don’t know what I’m talking about either! This Trump guy, that’s ME!!!”

So again, there is one real and substantial achievement of the first hundred days, and that was Trump’s nomination of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, though as any liberal will tell you, that’s only because the Republican Senate left the seat open for him. And other than that nomination, it’s unclear whether Republicans regret their allegiance. As it stands, the best things about the start of the Trump Administration are entirely negative:

He hasn’t deprived the previously uninsurable of health coverage. Yet.

He hasn’t been able to fully deprive the rights of legal immigrants. Yet.

And he hasn’t started World War III because the dictator of North Korea hit his hands.

Yet.

It is often said that war is how Americans learn geography. But Syria has been a hot spot for several years now and most Americans don’t seem to know why. So in fairly brief terms:

Syria is an Arab country run by Bashar al-Assad, son and successor to the dictator Hafez al-Assad, who took over in 1970 as head of a Baath Party that was a contemporary of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. The elder Assad died in 2000. The country is technically a secular state, partly because Syria is majority Sunni Islam, and the Assad family belong to the Alawite sect which is a minority even within the Shia minority. As a result most Syrian Alawites are firmly behind the government because they know they would face reprisals if Bashar al-Assad lost power. This alignment has also led to the patronage of Shiite Iran and Iran’s ally Russia. However after the “Arab Spring” calls for democracy in the Middle East increased, and when Assad brutally suppressed such protests in Syria, it sparked armed opposition by 2011, escalating into the Syrian Civil War. The resistance started out as relatively liberal. However, in the last few years, evidence has surfaced that Assad has not only de-emphasized operations against fundamentalist groups like Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), he has allowed fighters from al-Qaeda in Iraq to flee to his country during the parallel conflict in Iraq, and actually ceded territory to ISIS in order to build them up as a domestic threat, while he- and his Russian patrons- focused on attacking the Free Syrian Army and local Kurdish groups who are at least partly supported by the United States.  The basic premise of Assad’s campaign to stay in power is to eliminate all alternatives to his rule except ISIS, so as to say, “you HAVE to keep this corrupt, one-party regime in control, or else you’ll be figuratively and literally raped by fundamentalist religious fanatics.”

In other words, the same sales pitch as the Democratic Party. Except Assad has done a lot more to destroy opposition than the Democratic National Committee did to destroy Bernie Sanders.

There is of course another wannabe strongman who got aid from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Trump Administration has come under increasing scrutiny- even from some Republicans- over what seemed to be suspicious contacts between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and people who were either connected to the Russian government or directly working for it.  By April 3, the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R.-California) was himself under suspicion for seeming to run interference on his committee’s own investigation. Then the next day, April 4, the Syrian town of Khan Shaykun, occupied by a fundamentalist militia, suffered a chemical attack with sarin gas, which depending on who you ask was either a Syrian airstrike or the accidental result of a Syrian conventional bombing that struck the militia’s chemical weapons stockpile. The result in any case killed at least 74 and injured hundreds more. This incidentally was not the first time the Syrian government had been credibly accused of gassing its own citizens.  But the Trump Administration reacted harshly.  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to a previous agreement Syria had made to disable chemical weapons stockpiles under Russian supervision, and accurately concluded, “either Russia has been complicit or Russia has been simply incompetent.” And even though on April 8, Tillerson said that “there is no change to our military posture” on April 7, Donald Trump ordered an airstrike of 59 cruise missiles on a Syrian airbase that was (allegedly) the base used for the Khan Shaykun bombing.

It came out, after the airstrike, that Trump’s decision was (allegedly) tipped by the influence of his daughter Ivanka. This was according to Ivanka’s brother Eric, who admitted in an interview that Donald Trump was very much against President Obama taking action in Syria two years ago.  Not to mention, up til April, Mr. Trump had expressed a pretty consistent record of defending Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian tendencies. For instance in a February interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News,  when O’Reilly said Putin was a killer, Trump said, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent?” Basically the Noam Chomsky for Dummies approach to history. But suddenly Trump is on TV talking about how “beautiful babies” were killed as though it were suddenly news to him that Putin does bad things and Assad is in his pocket.

If Trump really is that gullible, it only confirms my impression that Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump voter would be if he had money.

But one thing the airstrikes did do was shift the focus. During MSNBC live coverage of the airstrikes, Brian Williams actually invoked Leonard Cohen in quoting “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.”  Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-New York) said “Making sure Assad knows that when he commits such despicable atrocities he will pay a price is the right thing to do.” And polls showed that about 50 to 60 percent of the American public supported the strike, although there was still opposition to further involvement in Syria.

What is actually surprising is that much of the opposition to and suspicion of the attack came from Republican politicians, citing the Administration’s action as being taken without notice to Congress.  Not that it will ultimately amount to anything, because the defining characteristic of the modern Republican is not a defense of capitalism or traditional values, but the willingness to do any degraded and retarded thing that Donald Trump demands that you do. But it truly is remarkable that the Party of Trump is willing to raise as much objection as they have, especially given that it would seem to align them with the traditionally anti-war Left. Indeed, they’re not only displaying more regard for Congress’ warmaking power than the Democrats are now, they’re showing more skepticism than they did under Obama.

It could be that suspicion was sparked by details of the strike after the fact. Two days after the US strike, Syria launched air attacks from the same airbase, using conventional weapons against the same town of Khan Shaykun.  Satellite images reported from various sources indicated that the runways were not damaged. See, in order to minimize casualties – and thus the chance that military action would lead to an escalation with Russia – gave Russia advance notice of the strike to give them- and thus the Syrians- time to evacuate personnel and possibly stockpiles.  Now, the Syrian air force strikes that have occurred since did not use chemical weapons, and the conventional wisdom is that Syria and its patron were sent a message. But if the Russians and Syrians were capable of coordinating with America’s military strike well enough to minimize harm to both humans and the target, then it wasn’t the Russians or Syrians that needed to be sent a message, because clearly the government can communicate well with them. The message was for the various suckers in America, like Brian Williams and the Democratic leadership, who take this kayfabe seriously.

According to MarketWatch, each of the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles cost about a million dollars each and since Trump owns stock in the manufacturer,  that helped his portfolio, which is of course the main thing that matters to him. Again, according to Eric Trump, “if there was anything Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie.” But the lack of follow-through on the diplomatic front combined with the lack of further (publicized) military action in Syria means that the initial “shock and awe” of the airstrike gives everyone time to analyze how much or how little it accomplished, and in turn to question exactly how and why things went down the way they did. Not to mention why the Administration took a completely opposite policy from the one that they had held just a few days before in response to a Syrian regime whose use of chemical weapons was well-established. As with almost everything else, the more Trump tries to throw people off the Russia connection, the more obvious it becomes.

Which may be why there’s another war in the making even before whether we know that the first one is going to happen.

North Korea has been a dangerous state in Asia for some time, especially as it has developed nuclear weapons capability. As yet it does not have reliable missiles to strike the United States, though it has threatened to do so for years. There is also a tradition that on the anniversary of the first dictator’s birth, April 15, military parades, displays and tests are held to show the communist regime’s power. It was assumed by many foreign analysts that this year North Korea would engage in another nuclear test simultaneous with the test of an intercontinental missile. (As it turned out, yesterday’s missile test failed seconds after launch.)  But up to that point, the Trump Administration was ratcheting up tensions by sending a carrier force to the Korean Peninsula, with Trump saying “if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”

In defense of the current Administration, though, the Clinton Administration tried to negotiate with North Korea to stop it from getting nuclear weapons- and ended up giving it the civilian nuclear tech they needed to develop nuclear weapons.  Then both Bush and Obama, to varying degrees, kept the situation on the back burner just hoping it wouldn’t get any worse. But now it has, because this is what happens when you negotiate with a government willing to control its own people through starvation. You can’t negotiate with Kim Jong-un because he’s insane and unreasonable. What we need is a leader who is also insane and unreasonable.

No really. Up til now, no one has had the perspective to understand Kim. We need a negotiator who is also a pudgy, spoiled princeling to approach him on the same level. Donald Trump could bridge that gap. He’d be like Dennis Rodman, only with less natural coloration.

This might be possible because according to another much-quoted news story, Trump was willing to admit that the situation might not be cut and dried after getting a ten-minute “history” lesson from Chinese president Xi Jinping.  Who would have thought that resolving the Korea problem could be so complicated? But then, who thought that healthcare could be so complicated? For that matter, who would have thought that an Easter Egg Roll could be so complicated?

I’m beginning to sense a pattern here.

Some of the more paranoid (and perceptive) leftists have been warning for quite some time that at some point in the near future, especially as Trump’s continuing controversies become more of a liability for him and the Party of Trump, he will engineer some emergency to wrap himself in the flag and seize special powers, similar to what Hitler did after the Reichstag Fire. Now in the last few weeks, the schemes of Trump and the Legion of Doom that he calls a Cabinet have been partially blunted by the checks and balances of our republican democracy, and partly by their sheer incompetence. But if Trump is too incoherent and short-attention-span to be a true fascist, by the same token his willingness to switch tack on the shortest notice means there is no guarantee he won’t start a war with Russia over Syria or with China over Korea, just… because.

The danger is not that Trump will take over by means of a Reichstag Fire ploy. The danger is that he’s going to get us into a war because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

And on that note…

HAPPY EASTER!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnC4a7opeDI

 

“It’s NOT stealing! It’s just… using something without paying for it-  in what twisted universe is that ‘stealing’?”

-Willow Rosenberg, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This week on Facebook I’d posted an article from MSNBC about an asshole Congressman (guess which party) who had to deal with angry peasants taxpayers at a town hall, and objecting to the idea that they, the people, pay his salary, on the grounds that he pays his own salary through his taxes, presumably including the taxes he paid over a lifetime before becoming a federal employee who gets his income through taxes. The first comment on the post was a conservative friend who said (quoting indirectly) “Sounds like something I’d hear a Democrat say- followed by questioning patriotism for not wanting to pay taxes”. Which in itself is just knee-jerk conservative deflection. But the next response was a liberal friend who actually bought into the premise. Again, quoting without attribution to protect the guilty, that friend said “for information’s sake, not paying your taxes IS unpatriotic. By definition. Taxes are the price we pay for a working civilization. (Note that since the GOP decided to cut taxes on the mega-rich and corporations, society isn’t functioning very smoothly. Kind of like cutting off the oxygen supply to the brain). Paying your taxes is a part of your civic duty. So, how is refusing to pay your taxes NOT unpatriotic?”

I was mulling over exactly why that attitude rubs me the wrong way. And then it hit me to ask whether this person, or anyone else with that sentiment, is deliberately NOT taking the basic deductions and exemptions that they are eligible for. After all, if willingness to pay taxes is a measure of virtue, not taking those deductions is proof of patriotism. The fact that the dodges are largely built into the system is obvious proof that most people think they need their own money more than the government does, even if it goes to good purpose. And after this election, even liberals may be willing to admit that not all of what we give government money for goes to good purpose.

Given that what used to be “conservatism” now oscillates between being outright evil or merely reactionary, it might seem that my bleeding-heart libertarianism leans too much to the Left. But arguments like “paying taxes is patriotic” remind me why I can’t be in that camp.

Most people don’t consider this stuff, because they usually don’t pay taxes directly, and their income is at such a level that they may get a refund after April 15. That’s because most people have taxes taken straight out of their paycheck. That isn’t always the case, though. For instance, for a brief period of about six weeks, I worked with Uber. As you may know, Uber has a very creative sense of business accounting, such that employees are not employees, they’re “contractors.” But in practical terms, what this meant is that I had no withholding on that income. In the short term, that meant I made considerably more per hour than I did at my full-time job (and also considerably more than I did as an actual cab driver, but then the amount of gross taken by cab companies from the ‘book’ makes the average pimp look generous). In the long term that meant I ended up having to pay almost 280 dollars on a little under $1900 gross, whereas if my job with the W-2 was my only source of income for the year, I probably would have gotten a small refund. In itself, it’s not worth crying about: 300 over 1900 is slightly less than 15 percent, which is about what the withholding is on my standard paycheck. But it’s occurred to me, and a few of the people I’ve been talking with (not all of whom are right-wingers) that if you were going to pay X amount one way or another, you might as well keep your gross (minus FICA taxes and company deductions) and put the difference in the bank so that since you will be paying that money, you’ll be paying it after it’s earned interest. Otherwise, refund on withholding just means you gave government an interest-free loan and they’re paying the principal back. Some of it.

The Wikipedia entry on the subject quotes a Department of Treasury page (allegedly, since the archived source is no longer on the US Treasury site, with treasury.gov/education reading as ‘File Not Found’):

“Another important feature of the income tax that changed (with America’s entry into World War II) was the return to income tax withholding as had been done during the Civil War. This greatly eased the collection of the tax for both the taxpayer and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. However, it also greatly reduced the taxpayer’s awareness of the amount of tax being collected, i.e. it reduced the transparency of the tax, which made it easier to raise taxes in the future.”

I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

The pro-government/pro-tax apologia is countered by a meme much more common in social media, especially among libertarians: “Taxation is Theft.” Why, though? The answer is presumed to be obvious. But because society has not evolved to a point of pure voluntarism, some government is necessary, meaning that law enforcement is necessary to some extent, meaning that that includes the collection of revenue for government to run in the first place. So strictly speaking, I can’t agree that “taxation is theft.” I DO think that the assertion “taxation is theft” is closer to accuracy than the assertion “paying taxes is patriotic.” Because taxation is mandatory and patriotism is not. You can be a citizen and not be patriotic, but if you live in this country, you still have to pay taxes. If you are an American citizen and do NOT live in this country, you still have to pay US income tax (which is why a lot of expatriates would rather give up US citizenship than be ‘patriotic’.)  You can even be a resident alien, but if you live here, or you’re a foreign business with American holdings, you still pay American taxes. Love of America has nothing to do with it. That is a subjective internal judgment. Whereas if taxes are ultimately involuntary, the only thing that makes taxation NOT theft is that it’s the government forcing you.

And on that subject, PLEASE let us dispense with the legal fiction that paying taxes is voluntary. Reporting income is voluntary. Paying taxes on reported income is mandatory, and enforcing payment is one of the priorities that the US government actually takes seriously. As it should, frankly, or else it could not fulfill its functions, even the ones that most people like. So why bullshit us by telling us that there is, or even ought to be, a choice?

What’s irritating about that is that since your employer has to report payroll to the IRS for its own tax purposes, they already KNOW what your gross income ought to be for purposes of calculating percentage owed. Much of the complication of the tax code is precisely the fact that it is voluntary in the sense that tax liability is self-assessed, which creates gamesmanship – and a very big industry – out of tax preparation as people of various income levels try to justify various schemes to not pay government, even if it means paying hundreds of dollars to tax preparers.

Does that sound like a culture where the citizenry esteems paying taxes as a patriotic duty? More to the point, does it seem like government policy is encouraging or discouraging that sense of duty?

I do think there are several voluntary actions, which are not legal obligations, that are nevertheless non-negotiable in terms of being a good citizen. These include: voting, respecting the national anthem (whether kneeling or standing) and not endorsing a white supremacist movement that already rebelled against the country.  Stuff that would be easy for most people. But paying taxes is not a patriotic act. It is a responsibility, and liberals can make correct arguments for why it is a necessary responsibility, in principle. It’s when we have to determine how much is charged and for what purpose that we get into issues.

I agree that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. I just think we should get a money-back guarantee.

If liberals and other apologists for government were not so disingenuous about what paying taxes means for the average person, maybe the average person would be less inclined to resent that responsibility.

 

 

As of March 24, the Republicans cancelled their vote on the repeal of Obamacare, after almost cancelling the vote on the 23^rd, in a candy-assed attempt to avoid admitting defeat by having the bill fail passage on the floor. Allegedly the main reason the drama got prolonged another day was because Donald Trump insisted that a vote be held, because that was going to be the last time he would push for a healthcare bill. His idea of pushing apparently included reminding them that leaving Obamacare as-is would mean that Planned Parenthood would still be funded, and threatening Republican congressmen that he would campaign for their primary defeats if they voted against the bill. The fact that his bluff was called indicates he’s not so great at the Art of the Deal. It also indicates that Republican congressmen had more reason to worry about their seats if they DID vote for the bill.

The official name of the Obama Administration plan was the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. The new proposal was officially the American Healthcare Act. As in, “you thought you still had coverage? AHA!” Some wags have also referred to this as Trumpcare, deliberately reminding Republicans how they loved to brand the ACA as Obamacare. The difference being that Obama in the wisdom of time came to accept that label, whereas, Trump, who would put his name on 99-cent condoms if somebody paid him a lot of money for the privilege, refuses to have his name associated with the Republican plan. So in honor of House Speaker Paul Ryan, some critics were calling AHA “Ryan Care.” Or even blending Trump and Ryan to create “Tryan Care.” Pronounced, “try and care.”

There were many issues with the new plan, to the extent that it actually existed.  Not only did hardcore conservatives wish to destroy requirements for “essential” coverage for women’s healthcare (not just abortion), but the plan was touted as saving money by making subsidies dependent on age rather than income such that it would create an “age tax” on older working adults while younger taxpayers would be incentivized to get health insurance by greater subsidies.  This naturally caused a lot of liberal objections. But then it’s not like they weren’t going to object anyway. Complaining that the new bill shifted the benefits from older and poorer Americans (who create a loss to the system) to younger, well-off Americans (who are better able to pay for the insurance market) sort of assumes that that isn’t the point, or indeed that there isn’t a virtue to having a system that pays for itself better than the ACA does. The problem is that not covering those who can’t afford care defeats the purpose of “the Affordable Care Act.”

This ultimately reveals the whole problem with the use of the insurance industry as the paradigm for coverage. For one, there’s a difference between health insurance and insurance for other services. When you get an auto insurance policy, for instance, you aren’t expecting to get into a car accident that week. When you get a life insurance policy, you aren’t expecting to die next week. (And if you are, the company may be investigating your insurance risk.) Insurance is exactly that: coverage in a matter of last resort, not a basic support where you are expecting to collect on the policy immediately. Whereas for people with chronic conditions (like type II diabetes, for example), you get an insurance policy on the expectation of “collecting” on it immediately. And that’s because in this country, costs of medical care are such that for all practical purposes, health insurance is how you GET medical coverage.

But this still means that medical care is covered through the private insurance market. And insurance companies survive and profit through what’s called a “risk pool.” Basically a company selling life insurance, for instance, has a majority of its policyholders continuing to make payments for the duration of the time that they do not need to collect on their policies (in this case, until death). This works because the majority of people paying into the system do not die shortly after taking out the policy. The risk pool is big enough to cover the risks of collection. But if a majority of people with health insurance plans had to collect because of expensive and chronic conditions, the companies could not continue to profit and survive. So of course they were going to decide that “pre-existing conditions” were a barrier to getting coverage, and of course they were going to conjure rationales against anybody collecting on a policy once one actually needed to do so. So you had Obamacare. But in order for Obamacare/the ACA to cover everybody without the “pre-existing condition” barrier, you had to make the risk pool nationwide, which is why the hated individual mandate (forcing you to get coverage or face a tax penalty) is baked in. If the government forces insurance companies to take all patients and does not force those who do not currently need coverage to get it, no one would be covering the expenses of those at-risk people.

But all that just reveals the ultimate problems with the ACA. It does do one of the two things we needed a healthcare reform to do: It eliminated “pre-existing conditions.” But to do so it mandated coverage without sufficiently subsidizing the costs to the consumer, who was forced to take out a service with no regard for economic conditions, which defeated the other purpose of the Affordable Care Act- making healthcare affordable. But that was because the system is built around the private insurance industry, whose economic model is based on NOT providing a necessary service in order to profit.

The difference is that the ACA doesn’t cover people because it doesn’t render healthcare affordable, while AHA doesn’t cover people because it elides the difference between theoretical “access” to care and practical availability of care to the average income level. As one pundit put it, we all have access to Ferraris, but how many of us own them?

Even beyond that, if we had the dream of many liberals – single-payer, or Medicare for all- we would run into the limitations of the current system. The real reason healthcare is unaffordable, even with (or arguably because of) insurance, is because costs are out of control. Having government cover those costs would simply mean that they get transferred from the private sector to the government, and when government runs a deficit, that has effects on the private sector.

You have that situation because unlike most countries that have single-payer (the rest of the First World, really) we don’t put cost limits on what medical providers and drug companies can charge for covered services.

For instance, when Medicare was given a prescription drug benefit (Part D) via the Medicare Modernization Act in 2004, the Act specifically forbade Medicare from negotiating bulk prescription prices, as opposed to the Veterans’ Administration, which is able to do so, and whose patients pay far less for drugs. The MMA was largely written by Rep. Billy Tauzin (R.- Louisiana), who resigned from Congress on February 2004, the same month the legislation was passed. The year afterward, once he was legally able to do so, Tauzin became head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

So if you’re a senior citizen and you want to know why your drug coverage has a “donut hole”… that’s why.

In my Internet discussions, I eventually got converted into advocating for single-payer, and I did so on fiscal conservative grounds: It is illogical that the US, of all the developed nations, pays more for healthcare and gets worse results. But again, simply changing the system to a public one will not necessarily work if we do not correct the real problem with the system, which is that American medicine is predicated around a bureaucracy in which the government caters to industry interests more than the consumer.

It’s for these reasons that a lot of providers not only rejected Obamacare but the insurance system altogether. This is referred to as cash-only or direct primary care.  Another reason that some doctors took this path is that costs actually decrease due to the reduced overhead for not having to do billing and coding through insurance companies. This also means there is more price transparency, which makes it easier for consumers (patients) to determine costs. There is of course still going to be an out-of-pocket issue, which is part of why insurance companies cover health care in the first place. But as we have seen, the current system is often counterproductive for the purpose of getting medical care at affordable cost, and without transparency, there is not even as much concern for the Law of Supply and Demand as there would be normally in the medical system. Reform should thus focus on the “demand” (consumer) end instead of the provider, otherwise a public system would suffer the same long-term problem as the current public-private hodgepodge we have, where the costs are so high that neither government nor employers can sustain them without increasing liability.

If conservatives and libertarians had been bitching about Obamacare for more than six years, you would think that they would mull all this over and come up with some concrete proposals to transition away from Obamacare, as opposed to what we got, which was the Republican Party acting like the kid who partied until 3 am the night before a test and suddenly realized he had to do homework.

But that just leads to the political issue. For all the public attention paid to the dysfunction of Donald Trump, he is a reflection of the Republican Party that nominated and elected him. Their relationship is a quid pro quo: They let him get away with what he wants so that he could give them what they want- a signature on items like an Obamacare repeal that they say they’ve wanted since 2010, and had always been shot down before now by Obama’s veto. The problem was that Republicans were free to “repeal” Obamacare all they wanted with no consequences because they knew there would be that veto. But now that they allegedly have everything they want, the problem is that any bill they agree to would be passed by this president – and they would have to deal with the consequences of that.

It’s almost as if the Republican Party was simply a grievance industry that survives on stoking public hatred and resentment, and cannot even try to formulate constructive policy, let alone attempt to implement it, because if they did, they would lose their reason for existence.

And if Republican congressmen were willing to call Trump’s bluff on policy, is it possible that their voter base may call their bluff in turn?

 

 

I was thinking of doing a review of the Logan movie, but my friends didn’t want to see it on a crowded opening weekend, so for this week I’ll go back to political observations.

Of course if you have a full-time job and only so much free time for an unofficial blog, you can’t really keep up with the news when King Donnie, the First of His Name is steadily leaping to greater heights of fuckuppery every single day. Apparently on Saturday March 3, he had a panic attack after realizing that he wasn’t in the news for a few hours and excreted an epic Twitstorm  starting with the statement that he “just found out” that Obama was wiretapping Trump Tower just before the election. The problem was that people who actually know, like, government stuff started responding on social media, including Trump’s own feed.  And they pointed out, first and foremost, that the president can’t order a wiretap. In an official Twitter response, Senator Ben Sasse (R- Nebraska), a conservative AND Trump critic, said that “(wiretapping) was either with FISA Court authorization or without such authorization. If without, the President should explain what sort of wiretap it was and how he (Trump) knows this. It is possible he was illegally tapped. On the other hand, if it was with a legal FISA court order, then an application exists for surveillance that the court found credible. The President should ask that this full application regarding surveillance of foreign operatives or operations be made available, ideally to the full public, and at a bare minimum to the US Senate.” (i.e. Sasse)

In other words, if Trump deserved the benefit of the doubt (which he has completely pissed away by now) then an accusation that Obama was acting against him for partisan reasons is deeply serious and needs to be investigated. It’s also true that if there was cause to investigate, the government agents would not have been able to get to this point unless existing evidence had caused a judge to agree that a warrant should be issued. This is not the sort of thing you want to bring up if you’ve got something to hide. And it would have been hidden, except that it was also pointed out on Saturday that only the president would have the authority to reveal such an investigation, which, unofficially, he just did.

So Saturday March 4th was officially Trump’s STUPIDEST DAY EVER. And as you know, stupid by Trump standards is like “Communist by Stalin standards.”

This all gets to a point I made after the election. There is a second worst case scenario besides the one happening now, where Trump is re-enacting tragedy as farce. The other worst case scenario is that the Republicans really are going to turn America into a one-party state. That one party being the Democrats.

Because either Trump is going to succeed in his goal of turning America into his personal banana republic, or he will fail and fail spectacularly. Even if he succeeds, his regime will last only until he gets a piece of well-done steak lodged in his throat and he ends up choking to death because no one at the table will give him the Heimlich Maneuver. Either way, the Republicans’ experiment in getting everything they want is doomed to end, and depending on how badly it all blows up, being Republican will be associated in the public mind with treason and/or subnormal intelligence.

Or maybe not. Despite their increasing unpopularity, Republicans controlled the vast majority of state governments and used that position to reinforce their advantage by gerrymandering districts to increase the number of “safe” seats. Of course liberals who point this out to me are blanking out the point that Democrats needed to lose the seats they had for this to happen in the first place. If all the voters (many of them conservative) who came to yell at Republican congressmen at their recent townhall meetings actually went to vote against them in 2018, the Party of Trump would be in deep, deep shit. That is, IF Democrats present challengers who are not so boring or repellent that they make even the incumbents look good. Aye, there’s the rub…

But given that each party wants to cement its position as soon as it gains a majority, I would have to suspect that when, not if, Democrats regain control, they’re going to try to switch off the edge Republicans currently have. Franklin Roosevelt broke the previous unwritten tradition of only running for two terms as president, and when he died, Republicans in Congress passed the 22^nd Amendment forcing term limits on the office. And FDR was MUCH more competent, much more humane, and much better loved than Trump is. Once Trump/Pence is no longer in the picture, Democrats are going to look at some of the other unwritten traditions whose violation by Trump led us to this point, with an aim of banning them on the grounds that we can no longer give politicians benefit of the doubt.

For one thing, Trump’s expenses. During the campaign, it was pointed out in news articles that Trump used accounting maneuvers to make a profit for his businesses by having them cover things like campaign events and rent, using Trump campaign funds. It was pointed out at the time that if a campaign uses the services of a corporation, federal law requires that they be paid. “Federal election law, however, does not contemplate a mega-wealthy candidate like Trump.”

Since the election, Trump has gone on weekend getaway at least four times (January 20 was only five weekends ago). First Lady Melania Trump has decided, for some reason, not to live with Donald at the White House, so she and her son Barron are still at Trump Tower, requiring extra security from New York police (apparently $500,000 a DAY). Trump himself used private security in addition to Secret Service on the campaign trail. The Washington Post has assessed that Trump’s first three trips to Mar-a-Lago have cost the treasury about $10 million. If you take $500K for the New York expenses per day and multiply it by 365, it equals $182.5 million a year. If you take $10 million and multiply it by 12 months, you get 120 million dollars a year. Thus, over 300 million dollars to cover the Trump family over one year.  Whereas that liberal rag Breitbart says that the conservative group Judicial Watch estimated Barack Obama’s personal travel expenses at 96 million dollars. Over eight years.

If you are a Trump, you are at core a grifter. Your goal is to pass off all your liabilities onto someone else so you can do as you please. It is quite possible that the man’s primary reason to run for president was to have the American taxpayer cover the expenses of his lifestyle. (And then he got upset when he found out the role requires, y’know, work and stuff.)

So this is my idea.

It’s a maximum income rule. That is, in order to qualify for the protection of the Secret Service, Coast Guard, et al., the president cannot make more in a year than a certain amount (for the sake of the proposal, let’s cap the president’s income from assets, salary, et cetera, at 1 million dollars a year). If you make more than that maximum amount, you don’t get those services. This is on the logic that if you’re Donald Trump and you’re rich enough to hire your own private security in addition to the Secret Service, then you really don’t need the Secret Service.

But, if this limit is based on a known income, how do we determine whether a president exceeds the limit? That’s the other part of the proposal. I Am Not A Lawyer, and someone with qualifications is going to have to review this idea, but the other part of the legislation establishing the maximum income rule would be that the president is assumed to be in violation of the rule if he does not report his income, and this law would also apply to all presidential candidates before they are elected. In other words, for a candidate or president to apply for Secret Service protection or reimbursement of expenses, HE HAS TO RELEASE HIS TAX RETURNS SO WE KNOW WHAT HIS INCOME IS. So if you’re too rich to live on the public dime, then you pay for all that stuff yourself, as we know (or assume) that Donald Trump is able to do. If it turns out your income is less than (say) 1 million a year, you get the services. But covering all this stuff or paying back the government shouldn’t be a big deal if you’re an honest-to-goodness billionaire, right?

To me, this is an essentially libertarian principle. Government should not be in the business of punishing the rich, but neither should it go out of its way to give them more advantages than they naturally have. Nor should it be imposing undue burdens on the private citizen, but if you are to be a public servant, there should be less benefit of the doubt, not more, especially if the public is paying your tab.

Just an idea. I propose it to the Libertarian Party, and also to the Democrats, assuming they could seize a good idea if it smacked them in the face, which they haven’t so far.

Since Bill Maher’s controversial decision to have Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos appear on his HBO Real Time show, events sort of exploded on Milo like a bad money shot. The conservative (?) site Reagan Battalion reposted a video from last year in which Yiannopoulos endorsed pedophilia in terms of his own relationship with a Catholic priest when he was a teenager. The backlash from this required CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) to disinvite the alt-right darling from this month’s yearly convention, subsequent to which Milo resigned his position at Breitbart (apparently it was either that or get pushed). Maher, as is his wont, took credit for Milo’s downfall, on the grounds that exposing offensive individuals is proof that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

As it turns out, the reason the tape surfaced was because it was brought to light by a teenager in Canada who is described in Vox as right of center but disturbed by what was happening to the conservative movement. The girl seemed to recall an event where Yiannopoulos gave a Devil’s Advocate endorsement of pedophilia in the Church and by extension other man-boy relationships, in the same way that I researched an essay from the not too distant past where Milo said that social media trolling was hurtful and ought to be discouraged.

But when conservatives get embarrassed, rather than admit it or engage in self-reflection, they pull defensive schemes like the “they did it too” fallacy. Milo posted a video where Star Trek veteran and gay rights advocate George Takei talked about his formative experience with an adult when he was 14 years old. And Maher, an arch-liberal who nevertheless professes to loathe “political correctness” and has said very “incorrect” things about Islam, is a target of both the Left and the Right. So it’s no surprise that people went to the effort to dig up a tape of his old show where he defended the pedophile teacher Mary Kay Letourneau. But in response to attacks, this week on Real Time, Maher simply pointed out that if it was bad to give Milo an audience, “Donald Trump was the apotheosis of the alt-right, and the media gave him the biggest platform ever.”

Something I pointed out a while ago.

Still, the contrast makes it at least seem like there’s a double standard. Is it okay for Maher and Takei to endorse something that fellow travelers gutted Milo over?

No, but that’s dodging the point. For one thing, Maher was doing the same thing with Letourneau that he was doing with Milo: playing Devil’s Advocate himself. Even if one accepts that on a rhetorical level, it’s still wrong. Maher and Takei seem to avoid the point that even if a juvenile consents to sex with an adult, the law still considers it statutory rape. While one might posit that an individual might be in position to consent, there’s a reason that the legal concept of statutory rape exists, and there isn’t a serious legal or moral challenge to it.

In any case, I don’t think either Maher or Takei went so far as to “out” a trans woman at a university speech the way Milo did, nor did they, as Milo allegedly did, wish to use their speeches as an opportunity to expose illegal immigrants on campus.

So if you’re a “conservative” and you still think you can win this case of tu quoque… I have a wall on the border I’d like to sell you.
In fact, I would argue that the main double standard is one imposed by conservatives on themselves. It is possible for a conservative to be a hypocrite, but not a liberal. But that is because hypocrisy means disloyalty to what one actually believes, whereas liberals don’t really believe in anything except getting what they want. In politics, most Democrats don’t believe in “progressive” principles more than they believe in getting elected, and then getting re-elected, to which extent they will twist their prior positions around more than a pretzel. Similarly, with civilians like Takei and Maher, you can’t see them endorse a culture of libertinism and act too surprised. Tied into this is a general perception among mainstream liberals that “morality” on public matters should concern practical issues more than matters of conscience. For instance, most Catholic Democrats, like Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine, are considered to personally agree with the Church’s position against abortion, but are pro-choice insofar as they think the state should not be making that decision for others. Liberals (and some libertarians) do not consider that hypocrisy, but a proper regard for what decisions should be made on a public level.

But when conservatives are more and more convinced that personal morality is the same as political morality, when they publicly contradict said morality, that becomes an issue, both by their standards and the public-agenda standards of liberals. Milo is actually a case in point. However fabulously out he may have been, in his more serious moments he endorsed a fairly traditional defense of Catholicism and conservative morality. I refer here to an interesting piece on the Patheos site, which extensively quotes from video pieces where Yiannopoulos explains his defense of conservative Catholicism. The author tells the reader: “(Yiannopoulos’) goal is to reinforce Catholic guilt.” He later quotes Milo in regard to his fellow gays: “I don’t think gay people deserve any time to be bullies to settle into their position of authority and I think it does gay people a lot of damage to see these bitter, hysterical, nasty queens bullying and lecturing and hectoring ordinary people of faith. ”

For such rhetoric, a lot of Milo’s critics see where his gayness intersects with his conservatism. While he says, accurately, that people are complicated and that the Left often doesn’t acknowledge the “messy” contradictions within the individual, at the same time, these are contradictions, and not attempting to resolve them creates negative consequences whether or not you believe in sin. If a straight woman had a sex life like Milo, she would be in danger of venereal disease, and probably be subject to unwanted pregnancy. Unless of course she used either contraception or abortion, both of which conservative Catholics are against. Conservatives would generally prefer a pregnant woman keep her baby whether married or not, but this raises the prospect of an unprepared parent with no resources to take care of a family. And then such people go on about how children aren’t being raised right.

In fact one reason Milo’s critics on the Left despise him so much is that his flamboyance seems a calculated image that plays up a stereotype of gays that a lot of younger gays are less familiar with and do not embrace. In this respect he’s a sort of Stepin Fetchit who is loved by conservatives mainly because his negative and comedic traits justify a prejudice they already have.

Which is a practical reason why embracing hypocrisy is problematic. Just last week I said:  “Encouraging the fellow travellers of actual fascists like Richard Spencer is not only dangerous in terms of who you let into government, it is immediately dangerous on a street level. It is that much more dangerous when you’re a flamboyant Brit who repeatedly brags about getting fucked by big black cock. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the racist Right or the Stalinist Left. With collectivists, it is far more dangerous to be their friend than their enemy, because you would expect your enemy to stab you in the back.” You are dealing with authoritarian people who define themselves mainly in terms of who they hate. And when you go out of your way to dismiss your opponents and make them into outright enemies, you can’t expect a lot of help when your “friends” inevitably turn on you for the hypocrisy they tolerated only as long as you were an asset to them.

I have a few conclusions on all this.

First, this is yet another case of why conservatism and libertarianism are not the same thing, and why conflating them is actually dangerous. Conservatism is tolerant only to the extent that tolerance and individualism ARE part of the classical liberal philosophy at the foundation of this country. However most conservatives, in this country and elsewhere, really hearken back to an older tradition where church and state were either not neatly separated or they were actually united. Libertarianism may share conservatism’s disdain for the Left and its often illiberal agenda, but it is liberal in the sense that it endorses the freedom of the individual to find their own identity, including sexual identity.

Two, however much conservatives and others might think that hypocrisy serves to uphold morality, it often serves more to justify immorality. Rather than endorse a culture of guilt or shame that creates a vicious cycle of “sinning”, we should endeavor to create a culture of responsibility that encourages the individual to give up bad behavior after recognizing its consequences to oneself and others.

Third, it’s still the case that hypocrisy does reveal that “conservatives” still have some boundaries. The Party of Trump might have allowed or endorsed a spokesman for sexism and racism, yet even they will draw the line at pedophilia.

I wonder if any of them have heard of Jeffrey Epstein…

The National Review – standing athwart history, yelling, “Build that Wall!” – has posted a defense of Trump’s executive order on its website, titled “Trump’s Executive Order on Refugees – Separating Fact From Hysteria“.  Among other things, the article states: “the order imposes a temporary, 90-day ban on people entering the U.S. from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. These are countries either torn apart by jihadist violence or under the control of hostile, jihadist governments. The ban is in place while the Department of Homeland Security determines the “information needed from any country to adjudicate any visa, admission, or other benefit under the INA (adjudications) in order to determine that the individual seeking the benefit is who the individual claims to be and is not a security or public-safety threat.” It could, however, be extended or expanded depending on whether countries are capable of providing the requested information. The ban, however, contains an important exception: “Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.” In other words, the secretaries can make exceptions — a provision that would, one hopes, fully allow interpreters and other proven allies to enter the U.S. during the 90-day period. To the extent this ban applies to new immigrant and non-immigrant entry, this temporary halt (with exceptions) is wise. We know that terrorists are trying to infiltrate the ranks of refugees and other visitors. We know that immigrants from Somalia, for example, have launched jihadist attacks here at home and have sought to leave the U.S. to join ISIS.”

Except:

The rumors of Somali terrorists have not borne out. However, the terrorists who did attack us on 9-11 were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and these countries are conspicuously not on Trump’s executive order. Not coincidentally, these countries, along with Turkey, are among several countries where Trump has business dealings and are also not on Trump’s executive order.

The secretary of DHS has not issued any exceptions to the executive order.

The order affects legal residents with green cards– who presumably had thus been vetted.  It is literally as I write that it was announced that the policy does not apply to green card holders, even though a DHS spokesperson had said they would need additional vetting.

The order has been described as giving priority to Christians. Except that among those sent back were Syrian Christian refugees.

And Trump’s defenders, including the National Review, insist that the order is NOT a “Muslim ban.” How do we know this? Because when invited to Jeanne Pirro’s Fox News show, Rudolph Guiliani said  “OK. I’ll tell you the whole history of it. So when he first announced it he said “Muslim ban.” He called me up and said, “put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.” I put a commission together with Judge Mukasey, with Congressman McCaul, Pete King, a whole group of other very expert lawyers on this. And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger. The areas of the world that create danger for us. Which is a factual basis. Not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible, and that’s what the ban is based on. It’s not based on religion. It’s based on places where there are substantial evidence that people are sending terrorists into our country.  ”

See? Not the same.

As Vox reporter Dana Lind put it,  “The best argument the Trump administration has in response is that the executive order doesn’t do anything to single out Muslims — it bans people based on nationality, and the vast majority of Muslims don’t live in the seven countries singled out. (The administration has implied that it will exempt Christians from those countries, but that’s not happening in all cases.) It’s going to be much harder to make that argument when there’s a quote, in the public record, from someone claiming to have been involved in developing the policy, all but saying that the intention of it was to ban Muslims — but in a way they could sneak past a judge. In fairness, Giuliani does emphasize that the way to “legally” ban Muslims is to ignore religion and focus on “danger” instead. But in order for the government to argue in court that that’s what the executive order does, it’s essentially going to have to argue that even though the president wanted to violate the Constitution, he was successfully prevented from doing so. That’s a trickier argument than just saying he wasn’t trying to violate the Constitution at all. ”

Something else must also be brought up in all this. Some apologists have brought up the point that nowhere in Trump’s order does it specify countries except for Syria. The press had been reporting bans from seven specific countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. This was in accordance with existing Obama Administration protocol from 2015 and 2016.  (Of course most conservative critics who point this out are the same ones howling and screaming about the increased number of Syrians Obama let in before leaving office. But I digress.)

This Obama Administration action is quite real. And on this page, I have brought up  articles mentioning concerns from both libertarians and liberals about how it is a matter of concern that even a relatively progressive administration was willing to undertake actions that can undermine the rule of law, and are now a matter of concern when a non-liberal is in charge. The main reason legal opposition can be raised to Trump’s maneuver is because, according to Vox,  “Steve Bannon is the chief White House strategist and former Breitbart chief, while Stephen Miller is a former Jeff Sessions aide who now serves as the top policy aide in Trump’s White House. And according to this report it is the two of them — Trump’s “two Steves,” as he calls them — who are deciding how this executive order text should be interpreted, and holding the fates of hundreds of thousands of green card holders in their hands.  CNN also reports that the Homeland Security Secretary and his department’s leadership only “saw the final details shortly before the order was finalized.” The White House didn’t seek feedback from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — usually an ordinary part of the process — either.”

The reporter also implies that the Homeland Security Secretary was not asked for input. This is what happens when you only trust your legal decisions to people whose previous resume entries consisted of “Local Zoo, responsibilities: scratching balls and flinging feces.”

But it also means that such legal justification that does exist for the order was only possible because of previous officials who DID know how to do their jobs. All this is why libertarians (and others who are suspicious of government even when their ‘team’ is in charge) have been criticizing the real and disturbing power grabs by both parties, especially as the “War on Terror” becomes a permanent government posture. This case is a concrete example of that very point. As I said recently, “Donald Trump has neither the intellect nor the political grounding to formulate policy himself, and neither do most of his plutocratic supporters/Cabinet members. Apologists might argue that such unscrupulous people would seize power regardless, but Democrats, specifically Obama, made it that much easier for them by initiating expansions of the state – when they were not approving them under George W. Bush.”

The bad news is that it seems that after only nine days, Trump and his team really do want to create a fascist dictatorship. The good news is that so far Trump seems to be just as incompetent at that as he was at running Atlantic City casinos. The REAL bad news is that it may not matter, because there is now an institutional trend towards giving the executive power carte blanche, which Trump is counting on, and even if most of the country and its legal institutions are now on to him, it may not be enough.

The Trump Administration has already passed the point where supporting it amounts to active opposition to the principles of American government. And since the Administration IS the government, that means that those who want to support the government are going to have to make some hard choices.