On the Matter of Redefining Marriage

For several years, American society has been engaged in an intense political battle over the nature of marriage.  I haven't presented any thoughts here on this subject up until this point, and certainly not because I had no opinion.  

Today, a Facebook friend shared this comic:

It's not the first time that I've seen this sentiment, and it isn't even the best representation of it that I've seen.  For whatever reason, however, seeing this today convinced me that today was the day to share my thoughts on the issue of redefining marriage.  Here goes.

Terminology and History

To start, notice that I'm referring here to redefining marriage, not to "gay marriage" or to "marriage equality."  That's intentional.  The first term I loathe because of its distinction.

So-called "gay marriage" would be nothing distinct from what we now refer to as "civil unions," an alternate form of recognition.  No one wants to see "gay marriage;" some people want to see homosexual unions recognized on a civil level, while others want to see marriage redefined so that homosexuals may marry.

I don't remember who used the line so effectively, but it's stuck with me: "When I park my car, I just park it.  I don't gay-park it."

Then there's "marriage equality."  I hate this one too.  Marriage as it is defined in most societies today--in most of the United States and in much of the world--is a contractual arrangement between two people of opposite genders.  Most legal codes require mutual consent, but there is no requirement in the contract that the two people are in love, are attracted to one another, or intend to have any sort of sexual contact.  It's a contract.

Now, yes: marriage generally includes the assumption by the broader society of sexual intimacy.  But there's a singular reason for that, and it's the reason why marriage has traditionally existed: to assign property rights to heirs.  Whether property passed down maternally or paternally in a given society, there was always a need to decide how to deal with people's stuff when they died.

Perhaps it would have been easier if humans had enshrined collective confiscation of possessions upon death.  We did not.  Instead, our ancestors came up with a way of handing down on the basis of lineage, and because they couldn't tell who was actually fathered by whom, they left it to two things:

1. The children born to a man's wife or wives, who were unavoidably and necessarily legitimate (an arrangement that forms the basis of insistence upon female marital fidelity); and
2. The children born to other women whom a man might deign to recognize as being his own (at his discretion, hence the relative lack of concern for male marital fidelity).

Since any man who accumulated property wanted to have stuff to pass down, having heirs was valuable, so marrying was a worthwhile act.  Most of this approach remains in place today, with women continuing to be the obvious parents of any children they bear, while men are assumed to be fathers of only those children they recognize--adjusting, of course, for the ability we have now to conduct genetic tests.

The point is, marriage is not a couples' right but rather an individual right, and it has to do with property rather than cozy feelings.  In that regard, homosexuals have always had precisely the same legal rights as heterosexuals vis-a-vis marriage: they can choose to marry anyone of the opposite gender they wish, for reasons entirely their own.

The Modern Perspective

Over time, marriage has come to be used by legal systems as a convenient way of extending rights and benefits to people who form relationships--convenient because people in long-lasting relationships tended to get married.  That's one reason why we have discussions today about redefining marriage.

There are a great many things, including automatic passing of property and implicit power of attorney during incapacitation as well as custody of children and claims on pensions, that are by law given special treatment between legal spouses that do not get similar treatment for unmarried people, regardless of how long they may have lived together.  (Once upon a time, this was a non-issue by virtue of common-law marriage provisions; many states no longer recognize common-law marriage.)

At the same time, Americans in particular have bucked the trend of the developed world by doubling down on marriage as a desirable goal of personal life.  In Europe, marriage rates have declined in favor of civil filings that extend similar benefits.  Here in the U.S., people continue to see getting married as a superior and more legitimate form of announcing a public union.

For both reasons, and others of more personal natures, homosexual couples in committed relationships have sought to gain access to the specific legitimacy long afforded only to heterosexual couples.  The combination of non-legacy issues (e.g. things other than children) and the rising trend for couples to marry first and foremost out of love (enabled by a general increase in social prosperity and the independence of women as earners in a post-industrial workforce) makes this an understandable thing to want.

Practical Obstacles

Marriage has been around in its traditional form for a long time.  It was always a given that any attempt to redefine it would be challenged by those who liked it the way that it was.  Let's first consider the obstacles that fall into practical terms--that is, the ones whose objections are exactly what they seem to be.

#1: Pandora's Box: The Polygamy Argument.  Some have argued that by refining marriage to remove the requirement that it be between "one man and one woman" in favor of simply saying "two people," American society would be opening a line of thinking wherein the ability to restrict marriage at all would be in question.  The range of possibilities offered include everything from polygamy to people marrying their dogs.

Most such claims are silly.  Marrying an animal, an inanimate object, or a child would remain impossible because of the requirement for consent under U.S. marriage statutes; neither animals nor children are deemed by our laws to be competent to consent to such things, and clearly boxes and other inanimate objects are inherently unable to consent.

The polygamy claim is not silly.  It is unpopular with advocates for marriage redefinition to broach the subject, but if one can rationally argue that society has no valid right to restrict the recognition of a relationship between consenting adults on the basis of their genders, it follows quite easily that society would have similar difficulty explaining why precisely three or more people might not form a consensual relationship in the same manner. 

Abraham Lincoln famously called slavery and polygamy the twin evils of human society.  We retain that visceral objection to polygamy to this day.  But in Lincoln's day, American marriage was not between equals.  It's easy to see why a man taking multiple wives without their having much say in the matter would be an issue.  It's far harder to see how such a thing today, decided between men and women on terms of equality, would be any different than couples deciding to have open marriages or polyamorous relationships.  Why should secular society be concerned?

Indeed, the best response to the claim that redefining marriage might open the door to polygamy seems to be the same response given on the matter of homosexuality: "So what?"

#2: The Money Argument.  The only other practical argument against redefining marriage to allow for homosexual couples to marry is the dollars-and-cents cost of the matter.  I'm not talking about the time of judges to perform ceremonies or witness paperwork; that sort of thing gets covered by filing fees.  No, I mean the very real cost of extending spousal benefits to people who up until this point have been treated by the Federal government as single.

Don't shrug.  When one tallies the tax implications of deductions and credits that phase out at different levels for married couples and the gift exemptions afforded them, the numbers are big.  Toss in the value of spousal benefits for Social Security--not only one-half of the amount paid to the higher-earning spouse while he or she is alive but also the entire amount transferred to the survivor upon the higher-earner's death--and we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars. That's enough money for society to take notice and have a say. 

But what should that say be?  The only practical reason for society to reward marriage is and has always been its affect on children.  If we're concerned about how much marriage costs us as a nation, it's not much of a reason to avoid redefining marriage to take into account those committed same-sex couples raising children.  In that context, what we should be asking is why we offer benefits for marriage rather than parenting.

#3: People, not judges.  The third argument against redefining marriage deals with methods versus conclusions.  There are people in this country who are emphatically supportive of legislatures redefining marriage to include same-sex couples who are bothered by a State Supreme Court "finding" that the documents of government do not allow the people of the state to restrict marriage by gender.  I count myself among these people, and I don't think it's hard to see why.

The United States was founded by an act of rebellion.  Our Founders were aware of this and went to great lengths to establish means by which the people could weigh in on a given issue and change the rules from within the system; by doing so, the Founders removed the legitimacy of taking up arms in the way that they themselves had done.

We have courts in part to protect minority rights from majority whim, but we should not lose sight of the terrible cost associated with decisions made solely by the courts.  Desegregation was enabled by the judiciary in Brown v Board of Education but enshrined by the Civil Rights Act and is no longer widely questioned.  Abortion rights, in contrast, were established solely by Supreme Court decree and remain unsettled today. 

Taking into account that it is only the confidence of our ability to change things by working within the system that dissuades the most passionate from the legitimacy of an armed insurrection, we should be very careful in how we as a nation proceed regarding the use of courts to topple long-established precedents.  There are times when this makes sense and is necessary, but the court action should never be more than a vanguard for broader and more inclusive legislation that affirms a majority backing of what was done.  To do otherwise risks long-term divides that, lest we forget, might always be reversed by a new court as simply as they were made by an older one.  The definition of marriage deserves a better foundation than the whim of a judge.

Religious Obstacles

Having addressed the only three reasoned arguments that hold much weight with regards to redefining marriage, we now come to the one that matters: religious belief.

I wish that I could say that the wave of debate that has swept America these last few years channeled an invigorated rationalism in which millions of my fellow Americans gave careful thought to the merits of society, tax policy, and the proper role of the courts.  However, this is almost certainly not the case.

Because of America's particular divide between religious views and secular law, many of the most fervent religious opponents to redefining marriage cloak their arguments in secular-seeming morality.  "The sanctity of marriage" is a particularly favorite reference of religious activists, ascribing to marriage a positive vibe without having to say specifically that it is a blessing given by God Almighty and that His laws must trump our own.  (Some particularly fervent moralists, like Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, do take this position; notice Santorum's poll numbers.)

But make no mistake: marriage's so-called sanctity is only a cover for saying "God wants it to be this way and only this way," shallow camouflage for advocating an American theocracy.

That brings me back to the comic that I included at the beginning of this post.  Some people look at that comic and see a sort of hypocrisy.  There's no hypocrisy among the religious opponents to redefining marriage.  Given the power, they'd ban divorce.  They'd ban premarital and extramarital sex.  They'd ban not only pornography but also "suggestive themes," and they'd carry through with wiping out every last instance of immorality that they could find in consultation with their religious guidance on the subject.

Now, it is true that Christian activists in particular are regularly seen offering forgiveness to those who repent from their sins, and perhaps they do recognize the unlikelihood that those repenting are truly sorry.  But think about it from their perspective: God has mandated forgiveness for those who repent.  If they're lying, God will figure that out.  You'd be able to apply that same standard to people who had been in homosexual relationships and now repented.  You could not apply it to people who insisted that homosexuality was acceptable, just as you'd not condone people in ongoing open marriages.

Of course, there are Christians who take no issue with homosexuality and support redefining marriage.  But these fall into two categories:

1. People who chose their specific faith and place of worship because it fit with the beliefs that they already held, and would opt to keep their beliefs over their faith if the two conflicted; and
2. People who have studied their faiths and come to believe that the teachings and lessons say something other than what others believe.

To religiously motivated opponents of redefining marriage, the first group is obviously no role model.  But neither is the second: those who study the same words and come to different conclusions are heretics.  Unless and until they repent, they are as much the targets of enmity as are those they support.

Conclusions

From a 2012 vantage point, it appears to me that the United States is not far from removing the traditional restriction of marriage by gender.  Taking into account that the human interest in marriage is and has always been primarily for the good of children, and since so many families are now the products of adoption, in-vitro fertilization, and other means beyond traditional sexual couplings between spouses, I see little reason to take issue with such a change on a practical basis.

How we do it matters, and that's why I encourage supporters to build bridges based on respectful listening and tolerance.  Court decisions may be the first steps, but to retain equal status for all married couples, we need to go beyond the Supreme Courts and into people's own lives.  We need to win support that will translate in broad-based mandates.

We're almost certain to see the erosion of polygamy bans in the wake of such changes.  But let's be honest: people are going to do what they want to do anyway.  Recognizing these unions is as much about making it more annoying to end them as it is about giving positive benefits to the participants.  Serial monogamy might be religiously acceptable, but it's ruinous for children.  We want families to be happy and stable.

Supporters of redefining marriage need to talk to people.  Be respectful and thoughtful.  Make friends of those who disagree. You can't "win over" religious activists, and arguing reason or trying to tell them that they've misread holy teachings is more likely to get you kicked out than it is to turn on a light bulb over their heads, but focus on tolerance.  I've had friends who made terrible marriage choices.  That didn't keep me from liking them, or them me.

Remember, it's from those who oppose us that we stand to learn the most.  If we only respect those with whom we agree, our society isn't much worth saving anyway.

Fixing Our Primary Problem

As President Obama begins his re-election campaign, he's walking a line between exciting his base and keeping swing voters, while simultaneously wooing the business community whose big dollars underwrite modern campaigns.  I've read many comments on Facebook expressing shock or outrage at one thing or another that the President may be planning to do, and I find myself wondering: so what if he does?

It's not that I'm indifferent to policy decisions.  I'm just being realistic about the politics.  If you're a progressive or especially a liberal, you don't just want Barack Obama to be re-elected.  You actively fear what Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich would do in his place—especially Gingrich, because as I explained a few days ago, there's far more reason to think that he would follow through on his promises.

So if Barack Obama decides to break with your preferences and and go another way, what are you as someone on the left going to do?  Stay home?  Is it more important to you that you risk every major government social program being outright eliminated by a President Gingrich than that you help President Obama get re-elected?

Not likely.  Threatening to abstain out of indifference works well for people who are truly in the middle, because neither candidate usually appeals to them all that much.  The farther that one strays from the political center, though, the more that it's a matter of staving off defeat rather than claiming victory for one's own positions.  This is America's primary problem, where people who feel passionately are forced to accept candidates whom they realize don't represent their ideals but whom they are fairly sure are closer to them than the opposing candidates.

Restoring Choice

We could fix this by requiring all major parties—I'll say "all" on the off-chance that we were ever to get another, but I am at this point talking about Democrats and Republicans—to run primary challengers.  Democrats who think that Barack Obama has been insufficiently progressive should be able to make that known by backing someone with a stronger committment to progressive ideas.
 
Does that mean that a sitting president could be dropped by his or her own party?  Sure it does.  But that's happened before.  What I'm talking about is mandating that the party processes include a chance of it, rather than requiring a full-out revolt.  I'm saying that the party in power should be required to go through the same process that the party out of power does.

Restoring Balance

Just as important as who we get to vote for is how we decide who will be on the final ballot.  The current system that gives preference to a handful of always-the-same states known years in advance is silly and tends to deliver as finalists people who many Americans did not want, while eliminating some who were better choices.  We've seen it play out this time around for the Republicans as it always does:

1. The Christian conservative draws big in Iowa's caucuses before a pragmatist wins New Hampshire.
2. Negative ads come to bear and deliver South Carolina to the big money. 
3. In Florida, everyone scrambles to moderate his or her message, and whoever can do it the best walks away with the win.

We should scrap that whose process.  Instead, let's divide the country into three blocks. 

At the beginning (January 1) of an election calendar year, we draw the member states of each block using a lottery system.  February 1, the first block votes en masse.  March 1, the second follows.  April 1, the third wraps it up, and before May, we know who is running.  Better, since no one knew in advance which states would matter, any candidate seeking the nomination had the same amount of time to get his or her message out and convince people. 

Even if you're in Group Three, your state is likely to matter.

Conclusions

Some might think that "messing" with the parties' internal workings is somehow an infringement on their freedoms.  Others might think that for the Federal government to prescribe the primary order, whether by lottery or other means, is unfair.  I disagree. 

Certainly, these changes would require Constitutional amendments.  But why should that be such a high hurdle for such an important issue?

America has written in election laws in ways that overwhelmingly favor the two major parties.  We need to accept that they are de facto arbiters of our entire system of government.  In that context, the people of the United States have every right to insist that the parties offer them real choices.  A democracy based on a slate of pre-selected candidates is hardly free and open.  Without changes like these, we have little more than an Iranian-style Guardian Council, where only those deemed acceptable to the elite are permitted a chance at being heard.

Look at the partisan gridlock that what we do now has delivered.  Is this what you want?

Newt: The candidate America desperately needs

On the eve of the South Carolina primary--the kingmaker event that has for three decades successfully predicted the eventual Republican nominee for the Presidency of the United States--former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is riding high. 

Gingrich got a rare standing ovation earlier this week for his performance at a pre-primary debate; today, he got another.  Texas Governor and former rival Rick Perry dropped out of the race yesterday and gave him an endorsement.  On any topic where former Senator Rick Santorum sounds credible, Gingrich sounds more credible. 

And establishment frontrunner Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts who has spent more than more years analyzing polls to try and convince voters that he has heartfelt conservative convictions and many millions of dollars to try and convince them that he is a working man, has seen his lead erode to the point that he and Gingrich are all but even.

It might go either way.  It could even go neither way, with Santorum somehow taking the vote.  (It won't go to Ron Paul, the most solidly principled man in the race; the honesty of his positions and his unwavering willingness to say the only true answers to the questions he is asked wins him more detractors than supporters.)

But I hope, I really hope, that it goes to Gingrich.  We need him on the ticket in 2012.

A Brief History of the Gingrich Campaign

Those watching the Republican primary process as outsiders are surely as astonished as I am by the way in which former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's bid for the Presidency resembles bungee jumping. 

After presiding over the most successful period of conservative ascendancy in modern history (more on this later), Speaker Gingrich was driven from the House in shame by fellow Republicans who couldn't stand his leadership style or his revolving-door approach to marriage.  Banished, he rehabilitated himself by marrying the woman who had been the object of his latest affair and set out to work behind the scenes as the GOP's "idea man," a role to which he was well suited.  In that capacity, he consulted, spoke, and churned out an impressive array of books and papers addressing the various problems in America and the solutions he had devised to tackle them.

Newt--his campaign finds it fashionable to call him by his first name, so I'll embrace that approach here--passed on the 2008 campaign in which Barack Obama defeated John McCain, but in 2011, he decided to throw his hat into the ring as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.  He was well funded by his own Newt, Inc. enterprise and generated a lot of enthusiasm.  UP!

Having announced his candidacy, Newt then promptly went on vacation.  His staff fled.  His campaign imploded.  And everyone wrote him off as never having been serious (ironic given that his collapse paralleled the rise of pizza tycoon Herman Cain, whose style was undeniable but whose sincerity as a candidate approached that of Donald Trump).  DOWN.

Next, Iowa.  As the famed Caucuses whose bizarre rituals have somehow been granted a prominent role in our electoral process loomed on the horizon, Herman Cain dropped out amidst charges of affairs and sexual harrassment.  Gingrich poured money into substanative advertising and gave intelligible debate answers.  His popularity soared, and he confidently declared that he would win the Hawkeye State.  UP!

Then the so-called "super PACs," political action committees funded by unlimited contributions from industry and trade interests in the wake of the infamous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision two years ago, brought their guns to bear.  Romney's cronies crushed Gingrich under a wave of negative ads that the former Speaker was slow to match--despite having his own Super PAC, Gingrich had up to this point emphasized a positive campaign--and his numbers dropped like a stone.  DOWN.

Gingrich did not win Iowa.  He came in a disappointing fourth, ahead of floundering, clueless Rick Perry and voter-invisible Michele Bachmann but well below Romney, Paul, and Santorum.

Then came New Hampshire, where Paul chased Romney for the lead and third place went to now-eliminated Jon Huntsman (hands-down the best person being considered for the Presidency by either party, and thus dismissed as inadequate by hyper-partisan primary voters), with Gingrich nowhere to be found.  Definitely DOWN.

But not out.

The Gingrich Revival

Any way that one looks at it, it's impressive that Newt Gingrich has been able to emerge in the wake of New Hampshire with a campaign at all.  That he is a serious contender for the South Carolina primary is astonishing, and made all the more so by the recent revelation that missing votes would have made Santorum--not Romney, and certainly not Gingrich--the winner in Iowa.

Part of it is the Super PACs.  With unlimited money, they can afford to spend on a level that campaigns can't, because they can always raise more from the same donors (which the campaigns can't do because of campaign-finance restrictions).  Super-PAC contributions are not publically reported, so the super rich--polite society likes to call these folks "deep-pocketed donors," but let's be honest about it--can throw their cash into whichever coffers they like without the risk that they'll be given the cold shoulder should the other guy end up winning the nomination.

But there's more to it than that.

As I said earlier, Gingrich presided over the most successful period of conservative ascendancy in modern history.  His "Contract with America" captured the public imagination.  He grabbed onto the Reagan legacy and moved it down the field, and by engaging with Clinton's New Democrats in the forceful way that he did, he did far more than just advance a conservative agenda.  By the time that Gingrich left office--and many people then and now will concede that Clinton came out better for the exchange of blows--he had essentially restructured the entire political conversation.

Think about it.  Modern conservatism began as an intellectual rebuke to classical liberalism as it had been envisioned and advocated by John Meynard Keynes during the Great Depression.  Nixon threw the world into chaos when he embraced the floating-currency ideas of Milton Friedman and ended international convertability of dollars into gold.  Carter's attempts at stemming the mess did not work.  Reagan embraced the supply-side theories of people like Arthur Laffer and things turned around, but to Democrats, the value of government spending and deficits was accepted dogma--and they had been in majority control for decades.

Enter Gingrich and his Contract.  Republicans win control of the House.  A series of very tough battles with a strong President follow, including a bruising government shutdown.  There's Whitewater and the farce of the impeachment.  Gingrich resigned in 1998 under the dual pressures of poor election results and ethics allegations.  And then?

In 1999, Clinton signs the Financial Services Modernization Act, also known by the names of its sponsors as Gramm-Leach-Bliley.  That legislation, drafted by Republicans and signed by a Democrat, is what repealed the part of the Glass-Steagall Act that had for six decades separated commercial and investment banking.

And how about our trade deficit with China?  That comes from the October 10, 2000 signature by President Clinton of a bill that established Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China but pointedly did not include labor standards requirements that would have maintained an even playing field.

Newt, in other words, is not just a conservative.  He is the standard bearer of modern conservatism, all that it has done and all that it wants to do.  He is the one who successfully changed the entire Washington conversation from a debate between business and public interest to one that focused solely on how business interests should be given preference.

Democratic Dilemma

Republican policies of deregulation and tax reduction pursued at the same time that the United States waged two lengthy wars with expensive technology are responsible for both the massive U.S. national debt and the near-collapse of the global economy.  Unfortunately, because Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 (on account of broad disillusionment with those same Republican policies), Democrats were the ones who had to step in to bail out the economy when the crisis came in 2008.

Spending huge amounts of borrowed money to shore up industry and recapitalize banks is nothing new for traditional Keynesians, so this was not necessarily a role that Democrats disliked.  Republicans, however, were brilliant in their exploitation of American ignorance and short attention spans in spinning the bizarre and absurd notion that the economic collapse was primarily the fault of housing policies enacted in the Carter administration (1977-1981) and not the reckless, many-trillion-dollars casino bets of the deregulated financial institutions during the heydey of the Bush administration (2003-2008).

What's more is that Democrats, who by 2008 was entirely beholden to their Clinton-era recast narrative of business interests as supreme, failed to accompany their bailout with any of the sorts of restrictions that had defined similar actions in the Great Depression.  They spent more than a year wrangling over financial reform that ended up confusing, complicated, and expensive but did not reverse the disastrous mistake of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.  They created a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, not the Agency originally envisioned, and then failed to get a director appointed for more than two years.

Worst of all, they passed a stimulus package that at $770 billion was both eye-popping and too small to be truly effective, and shoveled the cash to private companies and tax cuts instead of the bold employment mechanisms and mortgage modifications that might have made real differences.

Democratic incompetence and cowardice, accompanied by three years of vacillation and pro-business meanderings by a President who has nonetheless been successfully branded as "the most anti-business President in U.S. history" by a Republican propaganda arm that by now is well aware that the American people have no sense whatsoever, has left us in a position where voters mistakenly think that these last three years have been textbook Keynesian actions and that it's now time to get "back" to deregulation and tax cuts as cure-alls for our ills.

Reckoning with the Right

For far too long now, conservatives have been able to pretend with straight faces that their peculiar mix of insistence on absolute freedom for businesses to abuse consumers and absolute government control over people's personal lives and relationships are the values on which America was founded, propsered, and continues to depend.

That their prescription for economic prosperity through exploitation and outsourcing was a lie should have been obvious in 2008, but it wasn't because there was no progressive choice.  There were only old-school liberals and pragmatic New Democrats in the Clintonian tradition, and the election of Barack Obama did nothing to change that: he left his signature healthcare law to be written by the liberals while staffing his cabinet with warmed-up Clinton leftovers.

Republicans, meanwhile, appear to be ascendant once more.  The Tea Party rose to prominence by demanding that in times of severe economic hardship, those who have should cling tightly while those who go without should be read carefully selected passages from the Bible and ridiculed for not working harder.  In recent months, we have even been slathered with blatantly absurd claims that anyone who is rich is a "job creator," as if one created jobs out of maganimity and the role of actual economic demand in supporting a created job were a minor point at best.

Ron Paul is not going to be the Republican nominee.  Loved by those who like him, he attracts no one who is not enthusaistically behind him, and his Constitutionalist view of military power doesn't play well with Cold-War conservatives who prefer selective readings of the Founding Fathers when it comes to standing armies.

Rick Santorum is definitely a conservative, but he's not a strong candidate outside of the far right.  His positions on social questions like homosexuality fire up his base and revile virtually everyone else.  Were he to get the nomination, he would lose out of hand.

And Mitt Romney?  Whatever his poll-based triangulation allows him to imply in the moment, he is not a conservative.  He may win, in which case he will pursue the agenda we'd all expect of an extension of Wall Street.  Or he might lose.  But either way, the disaster that follows will never belong to conservatives, because they will always be able to shrug and say that he was not one of them.  And the American people will by and large believe it.

And that is why this country truly, desperately needs Newt Gingrich as the Republican nominee in 2012.

A Strong Conservative Nominee

Newt Gingrich has flaws.  He can be condescending.  He has a lot of personal baggage in the form of three marriages, two of which began as affairs while he was still married to the preceding wife in the timeline.  Of his ideas, it has been frequently remarked by friends and detractors alike that there is a very large folder labeled "Newt's ideas" and a smaller one labeled "Newt's good ideas."

But Newt is also smart and articulate, with a strong debate style and a presence that fills a room.  There are few subjects about which he doesn't have at least something to say, and usually he knows more than the people he's addressing.

And about that baggage?  Well, when everyone already knows you've had affairs (including one while you were denegrating a sitting President of the United States for his lack of "family values"), asked your first wife for a divorce while she was being treated for cancer, and were under risk of removal from the House for ethics violations, it doesn't carry much weight against your popularity when your second wife (the one for whom you got that cancer-bed divorce before ditching her for the next one) accuses you of wanting an open marriage.

Presented with this sort of juicy gossip fluff, Newt can deny it, denounce her and the news media, and move on to substanative issues.  He can do it so well that he can force President Obama to do the same -- and he'll want to, because Newt is far more interested in besting Obama as a debater than he is in trying to sell voters on his family values.

All of this means one thing: a Presidential contest between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich will be a limited-distractions, deep-content contest between ideologies.  Gingrich is a true conservative intellectual and will not be easily dismissed as a lunatic.  Obama will be forced to articulate his own actual positions as a progressive and not hide behind the meaningless moderation that had defined his current presidency (and definitely not the New Democrat antics that prevailed until six months ago).

Whoever wins, we need a clear mandate.  This country needs to stop meandering and decide where it really stands.  Conservatives need pull the plug on Mitt Romney's scripted performance and rally around someone who will do what he's promising.  That's Newt Gingrich.

What's the Problem with Socialism?

In the United States today, there are many people who viscerally rail against socialism. There are many others who viscerally defend it. Many of the detractors offer soundbite notions of why it's bad, such as references to Stalinist gulags or mockery of European nations.

While the Soviet regime's actions speak for themselves, the idea that one can group the Stalinist Soviet era into the same category as modern France or Germany shows how little thought people have actually given the question. It's also worth noting that while France, Germany, and Britain are regularly mocked by American conservatives for their various socialist programs and policies, they are the also among the top-ten richest nations in the world. Given both their physical sizes and populations, that's saying something.

To dig into the problem with socialism, we can examine one of the longest-running historical examples of that philosophy in practice: the Western military tradition.

Rank and File
Western militaries for centuries have been organized according to a strict regimental model. These days, troops no longer fight in the fashion of close-order drill, but they still learn it, and it lies at the core of why the military is and has always been a bastion of socialism.

Warrior cultures are founded on bravery. Professional armies are not. Oh, troops may well be plenty brave; certainly, modern soldiers pretty much have to be in order to deal with the way that wars are now fought. But what makes someone a soldier is discipline, not courage or bravado. Ancient and more recent warrior cultures hinge on the idea of heroic death. Professional soldiers prefer to live but must be willing to die to hold the line, carry out the diversion, storm the beachhead -- not for their own sake, but for the sake of the collective.

To instill that socialist ideal, instructors have long drilled troops in a manner designed to erase their individual identities, ostracize them from their fellow citizens, and bind them together into cohesive units that work in sync. Troops learn to stand, pivot, and step at the same time; for many years, they learned to hold their fire except and until when everyone else fired. They also learned to do their drill so well that they could maintain that stoic discipline even as men to the left and right of them were struck or ripped apart in horrific fashion.

Don't be lured into the Hollywood notion of endless vulnerability to ambushes and so-called "Indian tactics." There were shortcomings to the disciplined model of warfare in heavy lines, but when the effective range of a weapon is a hundred feet with reload times of a minute or more and the troops number in the thousands, firing from treelines is only so useful when each shot sends up a huge plume of smoke and your enemies have bayonets. In those days, the ability to stand one's ground and continue on literally meant the difference between victory and defeat.

Strict adherence to lines eroded over time as weapons improved -- for instance, with the advent of smokeless gunpowder, and then again with the introduction of modern repeating arms. But even as late as the landing at Inchon, a forceful move en masse against enemy positions was how a nation won wars, while the ability to hold against such a move was how a nation wore down its opponents. In these strength-on-strength contests, the more disciplined side was likely to prevail.  Counter-insurgency operations work differently, but discipline still plays a role, and the combined-arms operations of yesterday are not so much obsolete as they are rare for the moment. 

Discipline is still the essence of the profession of arms.

Peacetime Socialism

Because discipline is so important, when not engaged in combat, soldiers historically nonetheless needed to maintain their unit cohesion. For that reason, they were quartered, fed, clothed, and provided for as units. In the mid-twentieth century, when the advent of nuclear weapons made major wars less likely but the need to deter aggression required large numbers of troops, countries like the United States began to offer longer-term arrangements for career soldiers and officers, things like on-base housing and family medical services.

Over time, the model of supply also changed, moving away from government appropriation in favor of a series of private nonprofit arrangements.

Today, U.S. military personnel draw either free base housing or a tax-free housing allowance. Meal cards have been largely eliminated in favor of subsistence allowances, also provided tax-free. Medical care is delivered through on-base, uniformed-staff hospitals where available, and when troops or their families must go to off-base providers, their expenses are covered under TRICARE Prime, an insurance program that works like an HMO with no out-of-pocket expense for military personnel or their families. Troops shop for groceries at stores operated by the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA), which sets prices at government cost plus a small surcharge, or buy other items at Exchanges whose net earnings are used to fund base activities; they pay no sales tax on these purchases.  Military families also often have access to subsidized daycare.

Civilians don't have equivalents to these benefits. While civilians very often make more money for certain jobs, they have to pay their rent, food, and clothing expenses out of their (taxable) paychecks, not out of allowances. They also pay sales tax on everything in most locales. And, of course, we all know that access to private health insurance comes with hefty premiums, even under the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (which pays about 78% of premium costs for Federal employees).

The point of this commentary is not to suggest that troops don't "deserve" the benefits that they get. It's to point out that these are benefits extended at the expense of taxpayers to all troops regardless of need. Some of those troops go to war, and others don't, but they all get the benefits.

That's socialism, and it works very well when it comes to delivering a minimum standard.

The Minimum Standard

The military excels at getting people to meet the minimum standard, to hold the line or pivot on cue or wait to fire. It's far worse at encouraging people to go above and beyond. Why?

It comes back to the drill. A soldier who doesn't keep up endangers the unit, but so does one who gets ahead. Everyone has to keep pace and think about the collective. There's some room for individual performance, but by and large, the military wants people to stay in step. Even promotions, ostensibly based on merit, fall into this pattern, with someone at a particular rank expected to receive a particular medal or award in order to be competitive for advancement to the next rank. No matter that one soldier may have gotten that medal for charging an enemy position and another got it for leading an inspection; it's a box that has to be checked.

Because of that model, the peacetime military in particular has a great deal of difficulty retaining people with specialized skills. It is no surprise that many of the technical positions in the U.S. military have been outsourced to contractors. The model of identical, standards-based performance works when going down the checklist for aircraft maintenance but doesn't work nearly as well when designing a strategy for computer network defense or engineering a missile guidance system.  Those tasks are best accomplished through individual incentive.  (Combat is distinct in that the incentive is survival, but most daily military duties are not conducted under live fire even for infantrymen.)

The military creates equality of outcome only by holding back those whose aptitude would otherwise allow them to do more than the minimum requires.  That's the problem with socialism. 

Social Capitalism
Imagine if instead of having stigmatized assistance for the poor, we agreed to just give everyone a basic allowance for housing and another for subsistence -- in essence, that everyone drew something like a housing voucher and food stamps.  The same thing goes for healthcare: we could all have access to minimum benefits with the option to buy something more expensive for an additional premium.

We all acknowledge that these ideas are good enough for the troops who we regularly venerate for their service to the country. What is "the country" except the ideals held by its citizens?
The benefits I'm talking about wouldn't be enough to live life to the fullest, but they'd be enough to live life at all, and anyone who wanted to could make do with the minimum and save the extra expense.  Whatever we want beyond the allowances, we could buy from money we earn, but we'd all have the ability to buy those basics, and all of the buying would be from free-market sources.

What a difference it would make!  Replacing the social safety net with a social foundation would restore the equality of opportunity that has slowly been squeezed out of our system.  These would not be second-rate, inferior goods.  No more "hand-outs!"  We'd have prepaid benefits to cover the minimum of things that we already buy anyway, things we need to stay afloat.  And by having that guarantee, we could afford to take the risks that drive a competitive meritocracy.  It's just a different sort of accounting.

Social capitalism.  What do you think?

What's wrong with the Post Office?

As I write this, more than 3600 post offices are on the list for possible closure, part of an effort to close a massive budget shortfall as people and businesses shift away from paper in favor of using electronic means for communications and bill payment.

Rural post offices are particularly at risk, ironic because these are almost always vital to the residents their host towns and villages while larger, more successful offices in major metropolitan areas could almost certainly be closed without more than slight inconvenience to residents. 

The Postal Regulatory Commission says that the methodology used to identify which offices should face closure is flawed.  Beyond simple revenue measurement, it wants the USPS to take into account factors such as the distance that residents would need to travel to reach the next-closest location for postal service.  That makes sense. 

But it won't change the fundamental problem: the U.S. Postal Service is built on a flawed business model.

Constitutional Authority

Postal service is one of the very few Federal powers explicitly delineated in the U.S. Constitution:

"The Congress shall have power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads" (Art. 1, Sec. 8, Cl. 7)

The Post Office Department was a cabinet-level agency under the Executive Branch from 1792 until 1970.  On August 12, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act, abolishing the Post Office Department and replacing it with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

The USPS Model

The Postal Reorganization Act established the USPS as an independent agency structured similarly to a commercial corporation.  There are five requirements to which it is subject:

1. The USPS is required to provide service to everyone.  To meet this requirement, the USPS (like the Post Office Department before it) employs hundreds of thousands of people across hundreds of processing and distribution centers and thousands of post offices.  It makes deliveries by automobile, on foot, and even by mule in remote locations.
2. The USPS is required to generate its own revenue to cover operating and capital expenses.  It is not funded out of tax revenues.
3. The USPS is required to get Congressional approval for its prices, to ensure that these will not negatively impact its requirement to provide service.
4. The USPS is required to pay the costs of its employee benefits, which encompass the standard Federal benefits package including the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) and the Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS).  No appropriated (taxpayer-funded) agency or department does so.
5. The USPS is not permitted to retain profits.  In any year when the USPS brings in more revenue than it spends, the excess revenue is delivered to the U.S. Treasury to supplement general taxation. 

So the Post Office is structured as if it were a private business, but it can neither set its own prices nor accumulate any reserves to cover future costs, requires Congressional approval to modify its service, and has no say in the benefits that it must provide to its employees even though it has to pay for those benefits.

Does that make sense?

The Private-Enterprise Illusion

Many Americans believe that taxpayers would benefit if we were to eliminate the USPS and hand over responsibility for mail service to private-delivery firms like United Parcel Service (UPS) and Federal Express (FedEx).  They are wrong, for two reasons.

The first is that, as was mentioned previously, the USPS generates its own revenue and (with very slight exceptions for things like overseas-ballot voting) is not funded through taxation.  In practical terms, the USPS has received loans from the U.S. government, but these are liabilities, not appropriations.  Eliminating USPS would not result in a lower tax burden unless the U.S. government explicitly guaranteed that it would never extend loans to whichever private carriers picked up the service -- in effect saying that it would allow mail service to collapse rather than make loans.  That's not likely.

But there is a much bigger, more important reason why private delivery can't replace the U.S. Postal Service: mail is not profitable.  UPS and FedEx do well precisely because they move rapid-speed packages and documents as well as very large packages, in all cases at premium prices based on destination.  The Post Office delivers letters anywhere in the United States for less than 50 cents.  There is nothing comparable.

Conclusion

We need to save the Post Office.  We should at least allow it to set its own prices without Congressional approval, and certainly it should retain any profits that it generates in one year to offset what may be declining revenues in future years (e.g. during an economic downturn). 

But we also should not shy away from extending explicit taxpayer support to the USPS, particularly with regards to employee benefits.  It is one thing to criticize an organization for embracing an expensive benefits package that it cannot afford, as was true for the old U.S. auto industry.  It is quite another to mandate pay and benefits by Congressional directive and then tell the USPS that it has to find the money to pay for things that its management (and even its employees) did not choose.

One thing is for certain: allowing the service to collapse or parceling it off to private enterprise would effectively deprive the tens of millions of Americans who can't afford to use UPS or FedEx from being able to send papers at all.  Yes, many of us now communicate electronically, but as surprising as it may be for the affluent, tens of millions of Americans are still without reliable computers or access to the Internet, especially in rural areas.  Postal service is a lifeline to these people, and to reiterate, it is a Constitutionally enumerated power of the Congress to provide it.

So, we must act.  We need to preserve an amazing public service that does what it does better than almost any other piece of the U.S. government (the only possible rival of similar stature is the Internal Revenue Service), and we need to accept that there are costs associated with doing so.

The Payroll Tax War

Democrats and Republicans are up in arms over the proposed extension and deepening of a cut to payroll taxes, the line item wage-earners see on their paychecks under the label FICA.

Let's look at what FICA is, why there's an argument, and what makes sense.

FICA 101

The Federal Insurance Contributions Act is the mechanism that collects money to fund Social Security and Medicare (though on some pay stubs, Medicare gets its own line item).  First established in 1939 after being moved from a 1935 provision co-enacted with the original Social Security Act, FICA has grown over the decades but retains two noteworthy traits:

1. It is levied on each employee (because employment is what qualifies someone for Social Security), with portions paid by both the employee and the employer; and
2. The Social Security portion (which from here on is what we'll call FICA, leaving out the 3.3% combined Medicare tax) is levied against earned income only up to a particular cap.

As of 2011, the "natural" FICA tax is 12.4%, with 6.2% paid by the employee and another 6.2% paid by the employer.  (The employee portion is what you see withheld.)

Is FICA regressive?

Because FICA starts at $0 and continues up to the cap, some people say that the tax is regressive -- that is, it affects people whose total earned incomes are equal to or below the cap more than it does those whose incomes are higher than the cap.  This argument would seem to be valid: the former pay FICA on all of their earnings while the latter see FICA withheld only until their gross pay for the year reaches the cap, after which FICA is no longer withheld from their paychecks. 

On the other hand, all of the money that someone pays into FICA is eventually returned (given sufficiently advanced age; it is impossible to outlive Social Security, which is itself old-age insurance and not a pension), and indeed those with the lowest incomes garner more from the program relative to their contributions than those with higher earnings.  For that reason, others -- including the Congressional Budget Office -- consider FICA to be a progressive tax, offering higher earners a less attractive deal.

People who make more than the cap therefore reach a point each year where their net pay goes up, and it stays up until year's end.  The 2011 contribution cap is $106,800, and it generally rises from year to year.

The 2010 Experiment

In 2010, Congress enacted legislation that cut the employee portion of the FICA tax from 6.2% to 4.2%.  Because everyone with earned income pays FICA, just about every American saw a net increase is his or her paychecks for 2010.  Anyone earning $20,000 per year took home an extra $15.38 per biweekly check. Those with incomes at or above the FICA cap of $106,800 saw an extra $85.13.

Like the $300 rebates sent out by the IRS in 2003 as part of the second round of Bush tax cuts, the FICA tax cut was meant to give us all an incentive to spend more.  Dollars spent = demand created, which in turn leads to more staff needed, and jobs are made; that's the thinking, anyway.

It's not clear whether it actually worked.  There are reports that the reduction in FICA may well have created or supported almost half a million jobs.  Others dispute that number, and when one looks at the dollar values, there's some reason to be skeptical.  An extra $30.76 among low-earners?  It's hardly a windfall, and with the job picture being what it is, it seems just as rational to dedicate that repeatable extra cash to debt reduction as to use it for splurges.

The Argument

Democrats want to extend the payroll tax cut.  Actually, they want to deepen the cut, reducing the employee rate to just 3.1% for 2012 -- half of what it would normally be.  And even that is a scaled-back version.  President Obama wanted to reduce the employer-side rate to the same 3.1%, arguing that it would make it easier for companies to create jobs.  (That idea has since been jettisoned.)

Democrats want to pay for the payroll tax cut with a surtax on high-earners.  Now that Congress has postured to the cameras that nothing is more important than deficit reduction, everything has to be paid for in some way.  Since FICA goes to pay for Social Security (and especially since its surplus goes to cover some of the deficit spending that we're already doing), cutting 3.1% off of the total 12.4% FICA tally is a big-bucks idea.  Democrats have proposed making up the revenue with a surtax imposed on people making more than $1 million per year.

Republicans denounce the surtax as a "job killer."  It would be significantly more believable if Republicans hadn't spent 2011 denouncing everything as a "job killer," but the argument is that many small businesses are subject to pass-through taxation, and that many of those supposed millionaires are in fact small businesses.  (A proposal by Senator Susan Collins, R-ME, would exempt anyone who met the threshold because of Schedule C small-business income.)

Republicans do not want to extend the payroll tax cut at all.  President Obama has spent considerable time and effort as of late pointing out that Republicans consider it a moral imperative to never raise taxes under any circumstances, yet have found cause to waver in that conviction the one time that the tax in question is of significance first and foremost to lower-income people.  Some of the strongest opponents agree: fervent supply-side advocates, these critics assert that the money handed to lower-income people does not have positive economic value.

Republicans are trying to make a deal.  Facing the expiration of these tax cuts next year, many of the same people who have said that the payroll tax cut is bad policy have indicated a willingness to extend it anyway if they get what they they want: the making permanent of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire next year.

Policy Implications

The effectiveness of the payroll tax cut is a matter of political debate, but there is little debate among economists: money handed to people who spend it does indeed have a stimulative effect.  How stimulative is not as easy to pin down -- did the cut create 400,000 jobs or just 180,000? -- but the effects are real.

Progressives should be concerned, however, to hear people like Nancy Pelosi touting the idea that cutting FICA leads to job growth in America, or hearing Barack Obama say that people have gotten used to the lower rates and will be outraged to see their taxes go up next year.

Remember, FICA is not just another tax.  It pays for Social Security. 

Now, it's true that year after year, the U.S. government has since the 1980s stolen... err, borrowed... all of the surplus revenues that were meant to be stockpiled in the Trust Fund, and spent these to cover just part of the budget deficit that has grown steadily for decades.  It's therefore true that Social Security does not actually have the money it needs to pay its bills, and that to provide it means redeeming the bonds in the Trust Fund out of current revenues.

But that is a matter of accounting.  The current revenues are indeed owed to the Trust Fund under the terms of its "investment," and if the spendthrift Congress is now scrambling to make good on those bonds, that doesn't change that the money was collected.  Social Security has until now paid its own way.

Cutting FICA changes that.  When we slice a fifth or a quarter of the income off of FICA, we're creating a literal shortfall -- not just an accounting matter caused by Congress, but a situation where less is coming in than is needed.  Social Security ceases to be self-funding and becomes parasitic.

Making the cut from 6.2% to 4.2% for 2011 was bad enough.  Making it deeper for 2012 will be far worse.  But the real problem is the language that the Democrats are using: if our economy needs a FICA cut in order to grow, if the American people are now "used to" the reduced rate and would be outraged to see an increase in 2012, then how will we ever get the rate back to what it is supposed to be?

Conclusion

President Obama seems to have found a winning issue hammering Republicans over their sudden willingness to stomach a tax increase under the sole instance where it would primarily affect low-earners.  He wants to keep hammering that point; fine.

Maddest of all would be for Democrats to make the deal that Republicans want, and trade a one-year payroll tax extension ($175 billion) for making permanent the Bush-era tax cuts ($1 trillion).  Those tax rates must be allowed to expire, no matter what, or our fiscal outlook is very bleak indeed.

As for FICA, to preserve Social Security, we should all hope that the payroll tax cut expires this year.  But if we do push through an extension, let's not repeat the Republican mistake of 2003.  Let's make sure that this time, a tax cut really is temporary, targeted stimulus, and that is goes on to die a natural death when the economy recovers.

Transcending Occupation

It has been two weeks since riot police cleared Occupy Wall Street protesters from their encampment in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, and similar actions removed Occupy protesters from encampments in Oakland, Portland, and Salt Lake City. 

Deadlines set by the mayors of Los Angeles and Philadelphia for the departure of their Occupy encampments expire today.  Neither has yet left or been evicted; time will tell.

In the national capital, the two established (and though affiliated, distinct) encampments at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza persist with periodic visits from the authorities -- in their case, the U.S. Parks Police, since both locations are Federal parkland and not under the control of the District of Columbia's municipal government.  In contrast to what has befallen their counterparts in other large cities, things have gone well for the D.C.-based Occupiers.  Last week, they celebrated the arrival of marchers dubbed "Occupy the Highway," who walked from New York to join them for protests against cuts of social spending envisioned by the so-called "supercommittee." 

These did not materialize, because the supercommittee failed, but the Occupiers went on to enjoy a Thanksgiving feast put on for them by the Occupy Faith D.C. coalition, a collection of local faith organizations whose affinity for the Occupy movement comes from its alignment with principles of social justice espoused by most global faith traditions.

Despite the evident support for the Occupiers themselves, however, I arrived at Thanksgiving Day wondering what comes next for this historic initiative.

Yes, with the help of the faith community and the many thousands of people who support the Occupy encampments with gifts of food, supplies, and other resources, the Occupiers might last the winter.  Depending on the response of the Parks Police, the D.C. encampments might both remain in place by the spring, and the notion of these camps still standing in April could bring new energy to the movement.

But what would that energy really mean?  Why does maintaining the encampments matter?

I'm a supporter of the Occupy movement.  I was one of the people who organized the Occupy Faith D.C. dinner for the folks here in the capital.  That hasn't kept me from having questions about the methods or intentions of those camping out.

Fortunately, my own holiday excursion took me away from this place, out to Reno, Nevada.  While there, I made a conscious effort to visit with the Occupy Reno group -- there's an Occupy group to be found anywhere at this point -- and I learned a lot.

It turns out that while everyone in the media and all of the political commentators are focused on Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and a handful of other big cities, the really exciting things are happening in smaller cities and even towns across the United States.  Isn't that typical?

Occupy Reno has an encampment, yes, but that's not its focus.  The people I met there, as usual, are a disparate group, but they have active purposes beyond mere existence.  They also have the backing of their city government, because while life in the big cities seems conspicuously normal, home foreclosures and economic upheavel are devastating places like Reno.

Here are some of the differences between Occupy Reno and its big-city brethren:

• Inclusion.  The Occupy movement captured the public's attention with its chant, "We are the 99%," but as time has passed, the inevitable separation between those in the encampments and those outside has led many (including supporters) to feel that the reference is only to the Occupiers themselves.  Occupy Reno's signs and messages are outward-facing, reminding passers by that "YOU are the 99%."
  
  
• Active focus.  Folks in D.C. often behave as if they are John Winthrop's City upon a Hill, whose mere existence is an example to others as to how they could live their lives.  What the Occupiers in D.C. and other cities have accomplished is impressive, but none outside of the encampments likely forget that these places are anything but self-sufficient.  The maintain themselves primarily through the generosity of those around them -- generosity that, with few exceptions, the Occupiers are at least unable and probably also unwilling to reciprocate.
  
  In contrast, Occupy Reno is not about simple existence.  The camp does get supplies donated from outside -- including from local businesses, and even members of the city council have pitched in -- but that just gives them a place to plan.
  
  
• Business connections.  While the cities attract the anti-capitalist crowd, many of whom know little about economics beyond certainty that "capitalism's bad (m'kay...)," Occupy Reno has focused its efforts on supporting local businesses to keep money in the community.  They regularly leave their encampment -- which they opted to put nowhere near much of anything -- to demonstrate outside of big-box retailers and national chains; nothing new there. 
  
  But instead of protesting materialism or profit, they advertise for local businesses that sell the same things.  Reno is a largely suburban city, and as with most such cities, the routing of interstate highways has long made it easier to get to mega-malls (built with tax subsidies back when governments imagined that luring national chains to their locales would bring boom times) than to find places owned by friends and neighbors.  Their message is about informed choice -- the bedrock of true capitalism.
  
  
• Tangible goals.  Changing the world is a fine goal for anyone to set out, but one need only do a quick tally of the world population (presently in excess of seven billion people) to appreciate the difficulties in brokering any sort of deal, particularly one based on a consensus model.  Most Occupy groups call for things like the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, but few know what it means.  (It separated the worlds of commercial and investment banking, preventing bankers from gambling with depositors' money, and was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, signed by President Clinton in 1999.)
  
  Occupy Reno agrees with the need to reestablish the Glass-Steagall model of bank separation, but it also wants more tangible things, particularly in the realm of housing.  As I mentioned, foreclosures in Reno are very high.  Occupy Reno places real mortgage relief as a key priority, and it works with homeowners to publicize both bank stall tactics and foreclosure filings (especially is affluent areas) so that the true scope of devastation and malfeasence on the part of misincentivized services can be brought to public scrutiny.  Given the extent to which foreclosures have been disregarded by Republican Presidential candidates in particular, this focus is important.

On November 1, I laid out three things missing from the Occupy movement: better coordination, business affiliation, and academic backing.  Since then, the encampments in the big cities have withstood assaults, welcomed marchers, eaten dinner, and had a few rallies.  In short, they have devoted the majority of their energies to mere existence, subsisting on the generosity of supporters while behaving as if reforming our political and financial systems could be done on the basis of a few pitched-battle actions pitting comparative handfuls of people against hardened lines designed to ignore them.

This approach will not work.  The powerful interests in America are powerful because they have concentrated wealth and influence from across the broad population.  We do need to look at what the government is doing, but we can deflate wealth and influence most effectively by changing individual behavior -- things like buying locally, knowing your neighbors (and helping them), and realizing the awesome human cost of faceless greed. 

We should preserve the social safety net that is the most enduring achievement of the progressive legacy, but keep these three things in mind:

1. Safety nets are effective only when the broader system doesn't require their constant use by large numbers of people.  Too many people relying on them for too long will always break them (and this applies to the support for the Occupy encampments as well).
   
   
2. Sustained, broad-based prosperity comes from how we relate to one another, not how the government relates to each of us, because we are the government, and if a majority of us refuse to treat one another well, it is foolish to think that our representatives will nonetheless force us to do so.
   
   
3. To the extent that we do need to change government, we will need to identify, vet, promote, elect, and support people who share our ideals of what government should be.  Refusing to have anything to do with politics while taking political positions is contradictory, confusing, and silly.

For too long now, American media, political commentary, and attention has been focused on the Occupy movement as it exists in the big cities.  These cities have not saved America from where it is today.  Indeed, the two cities most closely associated with the Occupy movement -- New York and Washington -- are most responsible for our being where we are today.

On a certain level, that makes them important battlegrounds, but keep in mind that any attempt to change minds in these cities that prosper even during a time of economic turmoil will be an uphill battle on difficult ground.  The real contest for the hearts and minds of the American people, the great debate of social justice(1), will and must be waged in the small cities like Reno, in ten thousand towns across the vast expanse that makes up our nation.

It is time that we transcended mere occupation and began a march towards returning progressive prosperity to the United States.

---

1 I'm referring to a contrast between social justice and market justice (i.e. pure market competition), the traditional line of contention between libertarians and progressives, but both sides of this line can find common cause in opposing the phony capitalism reflected by most American companies: a system where rewards flow primarily to managers rather than investors, where both parties use regulation to protect the entrenched interests of the powerful, and where any serious losses on the parts of those same plutocrats are covered by taxpayers.

Budget Realities

This morning, driving to work, I listened to someone from Americans for Prosperity arguing that instead of cutting funding to the Department of Defense (DoD), we should cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS).

I hear such claims far too often, and enough is enough.

Whether PBS deserves to be funded by taxpayers is a matter up for debate. Whether the funding that goes to PBS is in any way comparable to the funding that goes to the DoD, however, is not.  Take a moment to explore with me the realities of the Federal budget, including our deficit -- the amount that we spend each year beyond what we bring in.

For the sake of simplicity, we will work from the figures presented by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for Fiscal Year 2010.

Revenues

In FY 2010, the U.S. government brought in $2.16 trillion in total revenues, broken out as follows:

• $899 billion in personal income taxes
• $865 billion from payroll taxes
• $191 billion in corporate taxes
• $67 billion in excise taxes
• $140 billion in other revenues

Payroll taxes include those that pay for Social Security and Medicare (FICA).  Other revenues refers to rents, royalties, and recoupments that the Federal government receives for use of public lands and resources as well as other income.

Something interesting to note: FICA is tallied as 12.4% of income up to $106,800 per year plus a mere 3.3% additional tax on all income, yet it raises nearly as much reveue as the entire graduated income tax system with its top tax rate of 35%.  FICA is a flat tax with no deductions.

Spending

In FY 2010, the U.S. government had $3.45 trillion in total spending, broken out as follows:

• $793 billion for Medicare and Medicaid
• $701 billion for Social Security
• $689 billion for the Department of Defense
• $660 billion in other discretionary spending
• $416 billion in other mandatory spending
• $197 billion in interest on the National Debt

Mandatory spending gets its name from the way that it is funded: each year, unless Congress votes to restrict the money that goes to a mandatory program, it gets its previous year's allocation along with a formula-established increase. 

Among other allocations included under the umbrella of the $416 billion of other mandatory spending are:

• $83 billion for Federal civilian retirement
• $82 billion for the Internal Revenue Service (Treasury)
• $70 billion for the Interstate Highway System (Transportation)
• $70 billion for Veterans benefits (Veterans Affiars)
• $43 billion for Military retirement (Defense)

The $660 billion in non-defense discretionary spending, meanwhile, breaks down this way:

 



Deficit

Given $2.16 trillion in and $3.45 trillion out, the U.S. government had a deficit of $1.29 trillion in FY 2010.  Because total FICA receipts are tallied as revenue, this deficit is what we still had to borrow after allocating any money brought in by the Social Security tax beyond what we paid out.

The national debt of the United States stands at $15 trillion, the accumulated results of year after year spending more than we brought in.  Given our current deficit of $1.29 trillion per year, that puts us on track to reach $20 trillion within just a few years.

The Cut, Cap, and Balance Model

Now that we have the figures on the table, we are ready to discuss the Republicans' Cut, Cap, and Balance plan.  Under this model, we will:

1. Raise no new revenues; while we
2. Maintain the military budget at current levels (including Veterans benefits); and
3. Put the country on a track that will pay off the national debt.

As long as we bring in less than we spend, we cannot pay off the national debt.  Paying off a debt requires a sustained, year-after-year surplus in the same way that growing a debt requires a year-on-year deficit. 

Any sustained surplus will eventually pay off a debt -- smaller surpluses take longer, but they still make progress -- so for the sake of argument, let's say that we aim for a surplus of $1 billion.  That's a pretty low bar, and given the performance on Congress these last few years, there's no reason to make things harder than they need to be.  A total budget of $2161 billion and would make Cut, Cap, and Balance and success.

Now, keep in mind that we can't create a surplus by cutting Social Security benefits.  I don't mean this morally or ethically.  FICA is a dedicated tax that pays Social Security benefits.  To avoid raising taxes (which we have established we will not do), we can't cut benefits unless we offset these by cutting FICA. 

Within supply-side circles, there may be economic arguments to doing that (e.g. lower taxes create jobs, etc.), but in terms of balancing the budget, Social Security "is what it is."

We also have no choice but to continue paying the year-to-year interest on the debt, which is what prevents our debt from growing should be attain a balanced budget.

Since cutting Social Security has no effect and because we have exempted military spending, we have $1707 billion that is untouchable:

• $701 billion going to Social Security
• $696 billion going to the Pentagon
• $197 billion going to interest on the debt
• $70 billion going to Veterans benefits
• $43 billion going to military retirement

That means that, keeping current taxes as they are, the Cut, Cap, and Balance plans leaves us $454 billion to cover all expenses beyond Social Security and the military.

Reality Check: What can we afford?

Under Cut, Cap, and Balance, it is immediately apparent that the $454 billion pool of money left to allocate after we cover Social Security and the military is too small to cover the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which come to $793 billion.  Thinking that we could even devote what we have to those, though, misses a few important points.

What about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for instance?  Its operations are outside of the military, so it hasn't gotten anything in our budget yet.  DHS includes the Coast Guard, and surely under any model that enshrines military spending, we can agree that the Coast Guard is important too.  Let's assume that we will impose austerity and reduce the DHS budget for $43 billion to $30 billion.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) consumes another $28 billion, and that includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).  We need that, too.  Let's be tough with them too, and give DOJ only $24 billion.

We have $400 billion left to allocate.

Now, $82 billion goes to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and we are assuming no change in total tax revenues, or our entire exercise falls apart.  The only way to do that is to keep tax collections on track.  $82 billion approved for the IRS.

Forget about the Departments of Education, Energy and the Interior.  Those are Republican punching bags, as is the Environmental Protection Agency.  They're all gone.

Hmm.  Federal pensions.  That's $83 billion, and you know, most private-sector workers don't get pensions anymore.  There's enough in the fund to cover current workers, so let's end Federal pensions for new hires.  Zero.

But what about the Interstate Highway System?  Not only does the money the Department of Transportation (DOT) gives to the states provide for the upkeep of highways important to our businesses and industries, it also serves as one of very few levers available to the U.S. government to exert leverage over the states.  If we don't pay that, we'll lose the roads and the leverage.  We'll keep the $70 billion for Interstates, and we'll cut the DOT's operating budget in half.  $80 billion allocated.

We still have $238 billion left.

The State Department uses $28 billion right now.  Diplomacy is for wimps.  Let's cut that in half.  $14 billion for State, with zero for foreign aid.  We just can't afford it.

Beyond Veterans benefits, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a budget of $52 billion.  That includes the Veterans Health Service.  Hmm.  Socialized medicine; we don't need that.  Shut that down, and reduce the funding to $40 billion to obtain care from the private sector.

What about Labor and Commerce?  Those seem reasonably useful.  Each gets about $14 billion now.  Let's cut each one to an even $10 billion, for a total allocation of $20 billion.

We still have $164 billion!  How hard is this, really?

Oh... wait.  We never did anything with Medicare or Medicaid, did we?  Those programs cost $793 billion as they are, but we only have about a fifth of that available. 

We haven't even looked at NASA -- what about going to Mars?  And are we really going to eliminate the Department of Agriculture (USDA)?  Who will inspect the food? 

Okay, NASA gets $15 billion and USDA gets $20 billion.  They'll just have to make it work.

That leaves us $129 billion, and that just has to go to seniors.  Yes, we might like to offer benefits to the poor -- things like food stamps and healthcare -- but there are almost 40 million seniors, and they vote! 

So, let's see... $129 billion divided by 39.4 million seniors equals...

$3274.11 per senior to cover annual healthcare costs.  Let's send checks and tell them to buy their own coverage.  The private sector will find a way to make it work.

And we're done: $2161 billion.

What our budget would look like

Well, that was quite an exercise, wasn't it?  I'm sure we all learned something -- and I'll bet everyone now understands in stark terms that we had a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

Here's how our new budget breaks down:

But perhaps it is more illustrative to show it this way:

That's right: under cut, cap, and balance, you would pay the same amount in taxes that you pay today, but 42% of your tax dollars would be directed to military and security programs.

There would be no Federal money for education.

There would be no Federal stewartship of the environment.

There would be reduced oversight of food and drug safety.

And if you imagine for one moment that we could sustain -- indeed, that a democratic society would allow -- a situation in which just 7% of tax dollars would go to programs that benefitted children or working families, I'd suggest that you go back and give this some more thought.

But don't worry.  We'd only have to sustain this peculiarly balanced budget until our $1 billion surplus paid off the national debt in a mere 329 years.  And hey, if we're in a hurry, we could always make more cuts to that pesky 7% of taxes that actually goes to benefit taxpayers.

Bottom Line

Don't be played for a fool.  There is doubtless waste in the Federal budget, just as there is waste in every private-sector company.  (Every round of layoffs demonstrates how unnecessary all of those workers were.)

But whatever merit there is to cutting spending, we cannot balance the budget with spending cuts while maintaining our defense and security programs, much less pay down the national debt.  Anyone who tells you that we can is saying one of two things:

1. He or she secretly plans considerable cuts (50% or more) to defense spending; or
2. He or she has no intention of ever balancing the budget.

Be careful what you wish for.  You may find that you pay the same taxes only to get nothing at all.