Post Script

Posting has been relatively steady for almost a decade at about thirty a year.

Right wing contempt for academia

A simple explanation for why the right hates academia is that it embraces inclusivity which the far right abhors; it prioritizes data and logic over emotion in argumentation; and it seen as out of touch and overly prescriptive, telling those outside the ivory tower how to think. But an element that may be missing from this list is a feeling of resentment that  academia is offering a solution to peoples' problems that is out of reach for many.

For decades academics (and politicians) have warned of the effects of globalization and the disappearance of manual jobs. Their solution was the "knowledge economy" where we would all become "knowledge workers"; and the passport to that nirvana was a college education. Unlike the lottery, or starting your own business, many were excluded from that opportunity early on in life with poor high school grades. You can still dream of becoming rich and famous in middle age; but getting a college degree is probably not on many people's radar; it may be too heavy a lift, intellectually and financially. And since that was the only solution the political establishment was offering, it led to disillusion with that institution as well. 

Globalization and the developed world's botched response over thirty years has created an ear of great tumult. How we choose extricate ourself from it will define our trajectory for at least a generation.    

Chance encounters

In "The Naked Sun" Isaac Asimov describes a world in which people never venture out and communicate electronically. While we are not there, you were are moving rapidly in that direction.

Asimov's fear was that people would never see the outside. What he didn't envision is that people would never have chance encounters with people they had not "friended".

Fifty years ago we might meet people on public transport on the way to work, or at theatres, movie and otherwise, and concerts, or in the shops. Today we telecommute, we get our entertainment streamed into our homes, and we shop online.  The opportunities to mix with people other than those we work with or have friended in social media are diminishing. That will likely make us more asocial if not anti-social.          

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

Democrats are celebrating the silver lining on the dark cloud of the GOP's unipartisan tax reform package; they are hoping that it is so unpopular, that along with Trump's low polling numbers, the GOP could lose the House as well as the Senate next November. Those chickens aren't ready to be counted just yet.

Astonishingly, the day of the bill's signing, a slew of large corporations has offered to pay their employees a $1,000 bonus this Christmas. What might be behind such unusual largess? AT&T and Comcast, two of those early adopters of these generous handouts are not known for their corporate social responsibility.  One explanation is that is this was a deal struck with the White House, possibly for "points" or to make corporate tax cuts permanent. While, we may never know what if anything was promised, in return the GOP gets re-election insurance.

Even if the individual tax cuts for the vast majority are piffling, these will be overshadowed for all those in the private sector whose employer's signed on the the bonus scheme, one that it's worth noting is a one time payment, and far better, from an employer's perspective, than raising wages which is would be recurring and permanent. That's a huge public relations coup for the GOP, allowing them to say in November that the new tax bill put real money in a lot of peoples' pockets.  The halo will have gone by 2020, but it shores up the mid-terms at a time when the GOP was looking potentially vulnerable.

Representative democracy

From time to time my House representative holds telephone town hall meetings. During his last one, about two weeks before the tax bill was passed, two callers in particular caught my attention.

The first was a pensioner who was worried that he and his wife's taxes would rise; it was not that simple a question, but my representative assured him that they would be fine.

A little later another caller noted that she would be losing a tax deduction for clearing beetle infested trees from her property. She had several hundred trees that needed to be felled and removed. My representative offered to set up an appointment with his office staff to help sort out her issue presumably by trying to get something that would solve the problem into the tax bill.

I could be wrong, but it seemed as though the constituent with enough property (presumably quite a large ranch) was more likely to be writing him a large check come the next election and therefore was afforded the red carpet treatment.

And that's how money translates into legislation.

Comment on Congressman Tom McClintock's Facebook timeline

I remain doubtful that the cut in corporate taxes will flow to investment, new job creation and higher wages; more likely it will be used to pay dividends and finance share buy-backs. This helps those with significant equity holdings or pension plans, but I imagine that is a relatively small proportion of your constituents.  The recent run-up in stock market is a pricing-in of the expected increase in corporate earnings. If the market expected that taxes would be used to pay higher wages, the impact on earnings would be a wash and share prices would not have moved. That they did suggests that the markets expect most if not all of the tax saving to be passed directly on to shareholders. 

Moreover, few if any economists expected the corporate tax cut to produce the administration's forecast 6% GDP growth, needed for the bill to be revenue neutral. The consensus is that the bill will add $1.5T to the national debt. The likelihood is that Speaker Ryan will now propose reducing the deficit by cutting social security. As long as this is done progressively, that may not be such a bad thing - but a simple across-the-board cut will fall disproportionately on your constituents. 

Lagged effects and pain concentration

The first trick to passing potentially unpopular legislation is to delay the pain until at least after the next electoral cycle, but still till after you are out of office and in that cushy lobbying job that "public service" was just a stepping stone for. So it is with the GOP tax bill. The tax cuts expire long after current administration has gone back to golfing on his own dime rather than the taxpayers'.

The second is to ensure that the pain is concentrated on a small segment that is too small or disenfranchised to matter: African Americans, the sick, poor families' kids. Then only the vicarious indignation of others will matter. Politicians bank on the fact that by distracting them with other shiny objects the mildly empathetic will forget about the disenfranchised.       

MAGA Hat

Today, my wife challenged me to walk onto our campus wearing a MAGA hat.

My immediate reaction was "No way. Do you want to get me lynched?" That was foolish; she immediately pounced on the fact that this was exactly what was wrong with universities; that they create an environment of such social pressure for conformity that no one with nonconformist (in this context right wing) views could express them publicly. She has a point. There is a degree of liberal values "one-upmanship", an "I'm holier than thou" scramble for the highest of moral high-grounds.

So I began to wonder what might happen were I to do as she dared me. How might such an episode unfold?  Here's how I imagined it.

I enter the room. There are shocked looks. No one says anything initially. After some polite conversation I may be asked "WTF?" but I demure and say simply that I'll have a few words to say later on.

Then, at an appropriate moment (not sure yet what that moment would be), I pick up a glass and tap it repeatedly with a knife until the room quietens down. Then I say this. 

"You may have noticed my hat this evening? I think many of you were a little shocked, perhaps by the crassness and vulgarity of wearing a hat indoors. 

But I suspect that you are more disturbed by what this hat represents. Since it was popularised by a lazy, misogynistic narcissist who ran for office only to massage his own ego and to enrich himself financially, a man who tacitly endorses white supremacists and explicitly endorses accused child sex offenders, this hat, then, comes with a considerable amount of baggage. 

But if we step back for a moment and think in the abstract about the words themselves, are they necessarily contentious? "Make America Great Again". 

Perhaps one's immediate reaction, and one not contradicted by the tweets, speeches and actions of, to use Rex Tillerson's pithy description, the "fucking moron" in the White House, is that he is hearkening back to a 'golden age', perhaps the 1950's, of "Mad Men", a growing middle class, rising economic prosperity for everyone, "what's good for General Motors is good for America", 2.2 kids and suburban tranquillity. But that was a fiction, for all but white Middle America. It wasn't the lived experience for minorities, for people of color, for non-heterosexuals, for Jews, for civil rights campaigners. It is an artificial image, a narrative written by the white men who held the reins of power; in government, in business, in society, at home.

So while a goal of "American Greatness", by the way, a construct open to a myriad of different and possibly contradictory interpretations, may seem only mildly controversial, perhaps it is the word "Again" that is problematic, implying that somehow America is no longer "great". 

And that opens up a more liberal, progressive interpretation of the slogan. If American greatness lies in its moral leadership, in tolerance for a multi-ethnic society, in social mobility, and a striving for social justice, there is, now, an urgent need to make America great again. For in less than two years, the orange buffoon has done more damage to that notion of greatness than anyone in their worst nightmares might have imagined. 

He has systematically undermined trust in the essential institutions of civil society. He has disparaged the serious press, the courts, experts and intellectuals, the civil service, and occasionally Congress, its members on both sides, and the military. He has stirred racial and religious hatred. He lies so frequently (and poorly) that the joke "How can you tell when he is lying?" "When his lips are moving" is no longer funny. With a few exceptions, he has surrounded himself with incompetent sycophants instead of well informed thoughtful advisers. He has, with bull-in-a-china-shop finesse, tried to disrupt a delicately balanced international order for no good reason, other than to differentiate himself from a predecessor he clearly hated, (probably just because he was black). He is a laughing stock in our corridors of power for his ignorance and his lack of judgement. He is considered a joke by foreign leaders; "stupefyingly ignorant" was Britain's Foreign Secretary's description. For many he is a poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Thanks to the electoral college, Russian meddling, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, Jim Comey's bizarre announcement about Hilary's emails just before the election, and some miss-steps by the Clinton campaign, there is quite suddenly a huge opportunity to make America, if not great, then not as reviled and ridiculed as it has become since June 16, 2015. 

So MAGA really means kicking Trump out of the White House (and his spineless enablers in the GOP--whose dogmatic lust for power has obliterated any semblance of morality, humanity and compassion--out of Congress to boot)".

Hypocracy it wasn't; but something worse

For the last few days, as the GOP has been ramming through its tax reform before anyone who might object could see what was in it, there was considerable discussion about the negative impact on the national debt which  was scored as being likely to add between 1 and 1.5 trillion dollars. That appeared hypocritical from a party that has been complaining vociferously about the national debt for almost the entire Obama administration.

Yet it turns out that they hadn't abandoned their hawkish stance after all. Now that they have given tax breaks to their donors with the limit on pass-through taxation for S-corporations, deductions for golf course owners (like Trump), private jet users (like Trump), not to mention the reduction in the corporate rate without closing loopholes to make up the difference, they are now turning to the question of how to cut costs to narrow the deficit.

Having reduced tax revenues, they "must" now cut costs or add to the debt; and since there isn't nearly enough room in the budget to close the gap by cutting discretionary spending, they have "no choice" but to cut entitlements, social security, Medicare and Medicaid.

You have to admit, while morally indefensible, it is tactically very astute. Kudos Paul Ryan!             

Reflection on reflection

In May last year I suggested that the election was at its heart a referendum on neoclassical economics and in particular the supply siders and free trade globalization enthusiasts of the Chicago school. Eighteen months on and it is clear while the supply siders and free trade globalization enthusiasts may have sown the seeds of the current disaffection with broken promises of greater wealth, they are not being blamed. Instead, anger has been redirected at immigrants and minorities. To make matters worse the GOP in its tax bill is sticking dogmatically to its trickle-down mantra, despite evidence that it doesn't work and the indications that corporations have little intention of diverting any of the money saved from lower taxes towards investment or salaries and wages. After all that's up to the market.

There is a lesson here. Politicians (and prognosticators) can promise all they want; except in highly unusual cases, they can claim that historic parallels are not appropriate and that circumstances changed in ways that could not have been foreseen. Ultimately,they will never be held to account.  

The Trump Doctrine

If Trump has a doctrine (other than narcissistic self-promotion and enrichment) perhaps it's best captured by these quotes.

"Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just...DO things."

"Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos".

"It's not about money... it’s about sending a message. Everything burns!"

("The Joker", from the "Dark Knight" 2008) 

Sauce for the gander

Mitch McConnell had no qualms dismissing the accusation that the tax bill was being rushed though with proper bipartisan consultation, despite the fact that amendments were hand written scrawls in a 500 page bill that almost no one voting on it had read in its entirety, and even those that had probably didn't understand much of it. His argument that "the rules were followed" is not an answer. Giving someone 5 minutes to read War and Peace may count as transparent consultation in the strictest sense but clearly fails the smell test.

It's worth noting in passing that McConnell was one of the loudest voices complaining about lack of adherence to process when Obamacare was passed even though as I recall far more more consultation took place for that piece of legislation. 

Two other noteworthy points; first what the GOP failed to do in their abortive "skinny repeal" they have managed to do in this tax bill, eliminating the individual mandate and effectively hobbling Obamacare. Whether this is the final straw remains to be seen but premiums will undoubtedly rise. For some this will effectively deny them health insurance; for others who qualify for the ACA's subsidies this will raise the federal deficit.  Second, while for obvious reasons, Trump has never released his tax returns, this bill will almost certainly benefit him personally and directly. That we have elected someone who stood for public office principally to line his own pockets and consistently lied about his motives is a terrible reflection on the motives and insight of the America electorate.

Tax reform

Republicans say that cutting corporation tax will boost growth sufficiently that the growth profits will generate a net increase in tax revenue. Non-partisan economic analysis says this is almost certainly not going to happen.

Republicans also claim that cutting corporation tax will lead to higher wages and more jobs. There is no historical evidence to support this; in the current climate, corporations are more likely to use the money pay higher dividends or buy back shares.

Unfortunately in our post-truth anti-intellectual anti-expert world, assertions made by people who have little or no expertise or training are treated as equally valid as predictions made by people who have ("fair and balanced", "on the one hand, on the other hand").

Experts don't always get it right; but on balance, they probably to a better job than the utterly clueless who rely on dogma and articles of faith. One commentator noted today that this isn't a tax bill but a political hit list.