The above question comes to light in the form of two articles:
“Six Californias? Residents poised to vote on splitting up state”, CBS News, 7/15/2014, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/six-californias-residents-poised-to-vote-on-splitting-up-state/
“New California declares ‘independence’ from rest of state”, CBS News, 1/16/2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-california-declares-independence-from-rest-of-state/
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Fleeing the coop isn’t the only option for those disgruntled with the lefty coastal dominion over the whole of California.
First it was the north of the state petrified of the south stealing their water and turning them into another Owens Valley. Ex-state senator from Redding, Stan Statham (R), in the 70s and 80s, would introduce a bill at the start of each legislative session to split the state north from south. It’d go nowhere, of course.
Stan Statham from 1993 describing his plan to divide the state into three.
More recently, in light of the lefty state government’s delinquency on real infrastructure and the wild pursuit of the greenie utopia, the ol’ State of Jefferson was resurrected, a union of the northern counties of California with the southern counties of Oregon.
Earlier, in 2014, entrepreneur Tom Draper floated an initiative to break up the state six ways. See the above article.
And, again, more recently, is a proposal to amputate the lefty coast from the rest. “New California” would be free of the diseased part. See the above article.
Sure, the ideas will end up in the circular file. Nonetheless, they are a sign of desperation for people still anchored to the state but flabbergasted at the iron grip of the looney left on the state.
Maybe the best option – for the country but nor for the masses beyond the Coast Range – is the looney left’s drive for secession. I hope they succeed so the rest of us can receive the refugees and say goodbye to the experiment to make the world’s largest hippie commune.
The following is a reply to a report in the Washington Examiner for 1/17/2018, “Jeff Flake: Congress needs to denounce Trump’s lies or we will walk ‘a very dangerous path'”, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jeff-flake-congress-needs-to-denounce-trumps-lies-or-we-will-walk-a-very-dangerous-path/article/2646169
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Senator Jeff Flake (r, Ariz.) in the well of the Senate.
Clearly Jeff Flake (R, Ariz.) has animus for Trump and Trump has animus for anyone who crosses swords with him. In that sense, they’re two peas in a pod. But the promiscuous use of the word “lie” is devaluing the term and causing endless and needless hyperventilation. Jeff isn’t clarifying anything, nor is he on the side of the angels. He has joined the alt-right, the Resistance, Trump, much of the professoriate, the college snow flakes, the Dem’s base/leadership, and almost anyone with access to the internet and facility for explosive hyperbole. Please, everyone, including Mr. Flake, take a breath.
First, let’s clear up this willful misuse of the word “lie” by accessing the dictionary. Here’s a classical definition for Mr. Flake and his comrades-in-arms: “an intentionally false statement”. Can a person be simply mistaken without the guilt of “lying”? Can a person be blinded by their own favoritism to believe an untruth to be a truth? Can a person just jump to a false conclusion without lying? Yes, of course. It happens all the time, particularly in Mr. Flake’s chosen profession, politician.
Anyway, an abundant power to divine the mind of a person is required to fulfill the “intentional” part of the definition. Ancient Greeks would read a flock of birds to access the will of the gods.
Etruscan wall painting from Tomba degli Auguri (c. 530 BC) showing two augurs practicing ornithomancy – divination through an examination of the actions of birds.
What do today’s politicians and activists use to see the unseen? I have no answer other than their own unchecked mendacity for their real or imagined opponents. Thus, any weakness of the mind can be contorted into the worst possible violations of the moral code.
Has Mr. Flake joined the ranks of the cranks and crazies? You know, the people occupying the Area 51 zone of the political space. If so, he’ll get more than he bargained for. He’ll get no restrained judges or a government with limits. He’ll end up like the czarist critic of 1917 finding himself in the company of the Bolshevik goons.
Bolshevik goons on patrol in Leningrad looking for policemen to brutalize, October 1917.Protestors run through the street before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States Friday — capping his improbable journey to the White House and beginning a four-year term that promises to shake up Washington and the world. / AFP / ZACH GIBSON (Photo credit should read ZACH GIBSON/AFP/Getty Images)
The following is my posted response to Kevin D. Williamson’s column in National Review Online, “From Sea to Shining Sea”, 1/7/2018, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455208/conservatives-have-abandoned-coasts-cities-bad-move.
KDW,
Okay, let’s make a play for New York and California, and the rest of the blue dots on the election map. Yes, Republicans and conservatives seem to have abandoned them. But the interrogatives pinch me awake, especially how, who, what, when. The land of B1 Bob Dornan (ex-R, Santa Ana/Anaheim) is as firmly Demland as almost any of the precincts around Harvard. “Anacrime” and “Stabba Ana” are more than putdowns. They’re signs of the state-of-play in formerly conservative strongholds in a state that is more reflective of Nancy Pelosi than Ronald Reagan.
Nancy Pelosi, D, CaliforniaA Santa Ana Crime Scene Investigator takes photographs after a male was shot while riding a bicycle in the 3900 block of West 5th Street around 11:40 p.m. Tuesday night in Santa Ana. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: KEVIN WARN, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER – 05/19/15 – A man riding a bicycle was shot to death in Santa Ana, police said today around 11:40 p.m.. The unidentified victim was riding in the 3900 block of West 5th Street when police received reports of shots fired and a victim down, Santa Ana police Sgt. Matt Hermans said. The victim was pronounced dead at a hospital, Hermans said.Homeless encampment near freeway in Anaheim, Ca.
Napoleon was allegedly famous for having said, “When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.” He could afford to say that. At that point in his career, he was unrivaled on the battlefield. What advantages do Republicans possess in areas currently on the verge of secession after the near-nullification of federal immigration law? Certainly, Rudy Guiliani won a couple of terms as NYC mayor, but it was after the city had cemented a reputation as an open sewer and murder capital of the world. The lesson: Take Vienna after the plague has set in.
1970s NYC street scene.1970s NYC sqeegee boys. A form of aggressive pandhanding accosting motorists.Undercover cop arrests a mugger on a NYC subway. The city’s subway system averaged 250 felonies a week during the early 80s. By 1990, annual homicides in New York peaked at 2,245.Pictured, a woman exits the subway station at Grand Central among a score of sleeping homeless individuals sometime in the 1980s.The urban decay led to the mayoral victory of Rudy Giuliani (r) over David Dinkins (l) in 1993.
The rot will have to ravage a lot more before Republicans have a real shot on the lefty coasts. Heck, the Republicans couldn’t field a candidate in California’s last Senate race. It was a brawl between two Dems: Loretta Sanchez – the big cheese of B1 Bob’s old district – and the lefty attorney general, Kemala Harris, the eventual winner … and scourge.
Poison is popular in California, as it is in the rest of blue-world. Scan the list of the recent popular initiatives. It’s become the land of the perpetual high, tax rape, greenie everything, transgender everything, and a plethora of petty annoyances like expensive eggs, pricey gas, skirting the Heller decision with clamps on ammunition, empty plastic bag carousels at the grocery store, etc., etc.
The state legislature could be confused with the staff of the Resistance, Black Lives Matter, and the LGBTQ… lobby. The governor travels around as the independent potentate of his own personal satrap. It’s not much of an exaggeration to ask if they’re channeling Nicolas Maduro and his consiglieres.
It must be said, though, that the bi-coastal insanities mirror the national map. These states are really blue along the coast and a scattering of blue dots elsewhere. But the red areas are shrinking as the sober flee the asylums. Andrew Breitbart was famous for exclaiming, “Politics is downstream from culture”. A cliché to be true, but still accurate. The culture is frightening for a church-going anyone with a spouse and a couple of kids.
County-by-county breakdown for Prop. 67, the ban on free plastic shopping bags.
So, how do we [conservatives] make a play? Take resources from Erie County where we have a shot and give them to lonely opponents of the lefty kleptocracy in California? If you’re talking about seed money to keep the movement alive, then I’m with you, KDW. If you’re talking about an abrasion-free message, call me comrade. After that, the zero-sum game presents too big of a toll.
Pray for rot. To borrow from addiction therapy, hitting bottom may work wonders.
“If a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into our frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it – or attack it if it’s threatening. ” — George Lakoff, cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, as quoted in National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue. (1)
One of my main reasons for maintaining a National Geographic Magazine subscription is to keep tabs on the animating infatuations in that part of America politically colored “blue”. The magazine seldom fails to disappoint, perhaps unwittingly and unknowingly. The infatuations are a product of a favoritism, encoded into blue-America’s urban and academic “betters”, arising from a pervasive mix of social tastes and a grand ideo-philosophy. It operates as a kind of mental impairment for its devotees.
Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Magazine.
The above quote from page p. 50 of the magazine was meant to describe others not so enlightened according to the author of the piece from which it was taken. It could just as easily apply to the author, editors, and staff of the magazine in their Washington, D.C., bubble.
“The pot calling the kettle black”: A phrase from at least the 1600s meant to convey hypocrisy. It would be better understood if we experienced life in a medieval kitchen.
On the “affective filter”
Are the publication’s content producers immune to the presence of half-baked assumptions and prejudices that they assign to others? I think not. The affective filter concept of learning theory comes to mind. The filter functions as an emotional Polaroid lens as we consciously try to attain new knowledge. Our emotions, the theory asserts, are said to make learning difficult, and, by implication, operates to facilitate passage of those stimuli and facts that comport with our previously entrenched hunches about how the world works. If true, it is universally operable beyond the “bitter clingers” of Pres. Obama’s famous characterization.
The affective filter theory was devised to explain student second language acquisition.
The magazine’s staff could benefit from a mirror.
There is a strong emotional attachment to our deep, unquestioned, and strongly held beliefs. While we may convince ourselves that we are paragons of scientific inquiry, the reality may be quite different.
On materialism
So, what are the basal beliefs pervading the upper reaches of the status hierarchy in our urban and academic clusters? One attachment is a broad conviction for the philosophy of materialism. No, I’m not referring to materialism as a synonym for greed. Alternatively, materialism as accepted wisdom attempts to explain everything as a product of matter and material forces. Modern practitioners of science could be weaned into this line of thought by the very nature of their preoccupation. Science is focused on the physical world. The temptation is to reduce wisdom to an understanding of matter, its forces and processes.
The stage is set for a full-throated assault on anything seemingly not in tune with the current state of scientific understanding as presumed by some practitioners momentarily at the top of the science popularity pyramid.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a popular pied-piper of science-as-wisdom.
A death sentence for tradition and rise of subjectivism
To no great surprise, nearly anything old – morals, traditions, institutions, established religion – will sooner or later fall under the crosshairs. If its antique, it can be explained away as something not worthy of our “enlightened” age. For these acolytes, it’s become like a reflex, as in the blinking of the eyes.
The old sexual morality is a victim of this popular turn of mind, a bent very popular in metropolitan and academic surroundings, and anywhere else under their sway – which means almost everywhere. Cohabitation is up; virginity is down; chaos in the home is up; and genital compatibility (heterosexuality) no longer necessary.
In fact, genital diversity (again, heterosexuality) is made irrelevant. Since an orgasm is the penultimate in this brave new world, sodomy is to be sanctified alongside the Church’s preferred option. Anything is okay if the desired end is achieved. Such is the logic of the mind unmoored from anything higher.
In these stunted minds, a belief in something higher is as expendable as a zipper that won’t zip. God? What god? Morality? Whose morality? These questions are regurgitated as readily as terns vomiting for their young.
“Nothing is written in stone.” — the quintessence of moral relativism when taken to an extreme.
The result, though, is a confusion of knowledge with wisdom. While we have the knowledge to expeditiously abort a late-term fetus, “ought” we? Even though we have the ability to euthanize the momentarily depressed, “ought” we? While we can treat people as livestock for their stem cells, “ought” we? Should we use our knowledge of genetics to manufacture custom-made human beings? Many of the most profound questions in life cannot be answered by a sole reliance on the knowledge of synapses and molecules. The reference point for such decisions must lie in something other than ourselves. Some would call it “wisdom”. A scientist may have the knowledge but be completely lacking in the wisdom.
The absence of anything higher, something outside of us, elevates each person into the the role of Creator of our own personal standards. The subjective, and relative, reigns supreme. The love of an unbounded individualism – the uninhibited self – lies here. The combination of science, materialism, and now subjectivism pushes the mind toward unlimited possibilities, a benign concept if kept abstract; a pernicious one if allowed to undermine limits.
On transgenderism, the gay agenda, and the uninhibited self
Seemingly, now even the physical limits of chromosomes can be discarded. We are in the age of transgenderism and 40 or so genders. We have come full circle when the individual as emperor of reality is liberated from science, chromosomes and all. Have we entered an epochal phase when subjectivism has put a gun to the head of science? If an idea or feeling gets locked into our head, even our physical bodies must be made to give way.
This heap of notions is so taken for granted in the confines of academia and among our self-styled cultural elites that counter-ideas are hubristically dismissed as ignorance. The 3,000 years of Judeo-Christianity and Greek philosophy must bend a knee to a new god and faith: the uninhibited self and its modern priesthood of shortsighted PhD’s and media mandarins.
The ladies of the View, 2017.
Their arrogance is astounding. They claim a monopoly ownership of science, while unintentionally dismantling it. In fact, it’s a semi-science that functions as a cover for their biases … or, more accurately, prejudices. For instance, National Geographic Magazine devoted its January 2017 issue to the “Gender Revolution” (as was covered in a previous blog post).
While reading the article, I was struck, when you cut through the excess verbiage, by the gullibility of a cluster of academics to accept a person’s claims in interviews as proof of the existence of a condition (gender dysphoria) on a par with schizophrenia and diabetes. When it involves children, the psuedo-diagnosis is very disturbing. Common adolescent confusion now can lead to permanent genital and bodily disfigurement. Efforts to less drastically treat the internal turmoil through therapy are made criminal acts in some jurisdictions.
In the same issue was a piece about female genital mutilation (FGM). The practice is resurrected in the West under the guise of “gender reassignment surgery”. Board certification and a scalpel doesn’t make the practice any less horrifying.
Is this the new wisdom?
Using their position at the commanding heights of contemporary culture, the socio-political nomenklatura seek to rub out opposing views on other subjects as well. A defense of traditional marriage – a viewpoint not very well articulated as of late – is pounded into submission by an alliance of our cultural aristocracy and the fashionable victims’ group du jour: the L-G-B-T-Q …. movement (The presence of 40 or so genders makes an acronym difficult).
One of their signature issues is gay marriage. Yet, we can only get to the idea of same-sex matrimonials if we skip over some obvious questions. Like, what is marriage? Is it simply a union of adults? Gayness, by its very nature, makes their unions only about the adults. It can be about nothing else. Last time I checked, sodomy can’t produce offspring. So, childbearing is out of the question. Yes, yes, gays can adopt, but the simple existence of those children is ipso facto proof of a heterosexual coupling. If marriage exists for the purpose of family formation, it’s incoherent to sanction as “marriage” a genus of union that can never do it (produce children).
What of the heterosexual unions who either can’t, or won’t, produce children? Are they marriages? Most emphatically … Yes! Heterosexuality is the essential condition, not the decision to have children. As for infertile couples, medical interventions are a tacit recognition of the absolute necessity of the very essence of heterosexuality: sperm meeting egg, in one way or another. Being childless doesn’t repeal the legitimacy of a marriage; and holding a ceremony and exchanging rings, by itself, can’t make one. Heterosexuality is written all over the institution.
Marriage as a mixing of the only 2 genders having any basis in chromosomes – leaving aside the unusual, but not unexpected, chromosomal abnormality – was remarkably obvious to our ancestors who lived at a time when they couldn’t be afflicted, as we are, with the hectoring of our cultural “betters”. The idea of marital bliss applying to 2 men was so outside the pale that it never came to mind to anyone coming before Justice Kennedy’s term on the Supreme Court. Marriage of the 2 genders is all that we find mentioned in the historical record. While scanning historical documents, I ran into this juicy bit from Emperor Justinian’s reforms of Roman law, Institutes, Title II, “Of The Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law”:
“The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea. Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished.” (Emphasis added) (8)
Gay marriage is an inanity to logic and to our predecessors.
On Hegel, “progress”, and historicism
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), rector and holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.
The growing acceptance of same-sex unions is a testament to the wrongheadedness of Hegel’s 19th century view of history as the unfolding of increasing rationality – i.e., “progress” (sometimes referred as “historicism”). We aren’t getting smarter, or more rational, or more contented. Instead, we’re proving that history has no arc. It’s filled with unexpected zigzags and stumbles, and chic journeys into nonsense.
In castigating historicism and any other form of determinism in the manipulation of history, the philosopher Karl Popper had it right when he said that there are no “inexorable laws of historical destiny”. (6,7) Marx/Engels (meaning the present converts of the pair), Obama, Hillary, Thomas Piketty, Robert Reich, and all self-styled Progressives please take note.
“Trend is not destiny”, Karl Popper. The old saying, “crap happens”, is the roadblock to any universal trend in history. It’s something Obama should keep in mind before he lectures us about being on the “right side of history”.
On “climate change”
For our brethren at the top of our urban and academic status pyramid, maybe the thought that they could be wrong never occurred to them. Maybe they’re blinded by their own arrogance. Well, sadly for us, their arrogance isn’t limited to the LGBTQ … wishlist. A favorite in their panoply of causes, when they aren’t yammering against homophobia, is “climate change”.
If left alone as a two-word phrase and without any of the ideological baggage that so often attends it, it’s rather innocuous and acceptable to most people. Though, our haughty “betters” couldn’t leave it alone. It’s freighted with “apocalyptic”, “catastrophic”, “solely anthropogenic”, and with sub-agenda terms like “green”, “sustainable”, etc., etc.
Al Gore as the climate change Jeremiah.
With their ever-present faith in “progress”, they’re fully on-board with upending the settled arrangements of a free people. Their confidence in politicized “experts” knows no bounds. Indubitably, government – with themselves at the helm, of course – is expected to have free reign to bring about the “green” world. The crusade has breathed new life into the disaster that is socialism. It also bequeathed to us the juiced-up social engineer.
The social engineer of the progressives’ imagination, appropriately papered with degrees and certificates, will be ensconced in administrative bureaus with sweeping and unconstitutional powers to legislate, execute, and adjudicate. It’s government by papal bull and czarist ukase. What would James Madison think?
If Madison was reanimated into today’s world, he might be struck by more than a sovereign people’s willingness to surrender their sovereignty over to Harvard’s graduating class. He’d be smacked with the glaring hypocrisy of the situation’s cheerleaders.
My blue-America barometer – National Geographic Magazine – unconsciously revels in the duplicity. Going back to the “Why We Lie” cover story (June 2017 issue), I found this gem:
“Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accept lies that affirm our worldview. Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change … and spread other ‘alternative facts’, as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability.”
“Deny climate change” as a lie? Is it a lie or simply a disagreement? “Lie” is used to cover a difference of opinion with our cultural suzerains. Grand prognostications in science, if its real science, should be met with a “Yes, but ….” or a “No, but ….”. Qualifiers abound in a field for which there is much unknown, and definitely so regarding those grand prognostications.
The resort to cocksure “lie” labeling is heartily exhibited by those with the least expertise in science. Al Gore is no scientist; he’s a politician/lawyer. Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor. The author of the NGM piece, Yudhijhit Bhattacharjee, is a “writer” according to the bio on his website. And since scientists, like everyone else, aren’t resistant to the surrounding cultural zeitgeist, and since politicized government largesse is widely available, today’s science can be easily hijacked by its celebrity and political non-practitioners possessing huge megaphones.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Democratic Party booster, from the 2004 campaign.
Here’s the hypocrisy: opposition to the crusade is fitted with the “liar” label while a concerted campaign in 2009 of lying was uncovered in spirited emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Houston Control for the “climate change” enterprise. Maybe intimidation to suppress is more accurate. Still, the episode exposed the effort to misrepresent the truth. Do we dare call it “lying”? (9)
The scandal involved partisan scientists bound-and-determined to shoehorn data into a prefab outcome: climate change is apocalyptic . It included efforts at hiding data and methods from scrutiny outside a narrow, mutually reinforcing group. Further, the emails bring to light the attempts at manipulation of their models to produce their preferred results, and the frustration when they don’t. In addition to hiding and statistical messaging, intimidation and excommunication of critics from the field is plotted among the climate change clerisy’s brethren.
Putting the best face on the scandal would be to recognize the emails were taken out of context and only blunt expressions among close-knit colleagues. However, the exculpation is only limited. At a minimum, it illustrates the behavior of a highly partisan claque of scientists. It’s an example of what happens when science becomes a partisan movement and then a political industry.
Is any of this to be seriously considered – even if made aware – among the lords in their Hollywood/west Los Angeles/Manhattan/campus castles? I think that we now know the answer to that question.
Why even have a magazine issue devoted to “Why We Lie”? Why now? Why did the topic come up and demand so much of the magazine’s resources and time? I suspect a political motive. The subject of “lying” is a particular obsession in the hot nodes of lefty political activism. Blue-America’s most prominent inhabitants are busy trying to delegitimize the shocking result of the 2016 election.
I’m reminded of one of the historian Henry Adams’s witticisms from his book, The Education of Henry Adams.
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
The organization of hatred can occur with or without a patina of science. Susan Goldberg, chief editor of National Geographic Magazine, please take note.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Why We Lie”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017, pp. 30-51.
“Fox Says It Won’t Interfere With National Geographic’s Editorial Content”, Andrew Beaujon, Washingtonian, 9/9/2015, https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/09/09/fox-wont-interfere-with-national-geographic-editorial-content/
“The End of Identity Liberalism”, Mark Lilla, New York Times: Sunday Review, 11/18/2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html
“Input hypothesis”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis. The affective filter concept arose from Stephen Krashen’s research into second language acquisition and is part of his broader “input hypothesis”, first published in 1977.
“Gender Revolution”, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue.
A brief summary of Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel’s “historicism” can be found in wikipedia under the article “Historicism”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
A fuller description of Popper’s critique of historicism can be found here : “The Central Mistake of Historicism: Karl Popper on Why Trend is Not Destiny”, Farnam Street, https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/03/karl-popper-mistake-of-historicism/
As a pdf file: “Justinian, Institutes“, http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/digital/CJCiv/JInst.pdf
An interesting op-ed about the U. of East Anglia email scandal can be found here: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph, 11/28/2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 1, Henry Brooks Adams, 1907.
Special counsel Robert Mueller on Capitol Hill in June of 2017.
The following is response to an article, “Who Watches the Watchmen?”, by Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, 11/29/2017, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454133/russia-investigation-robert-mueller-special-counsel-needs-oversight-prevent-abuse?fb_comment_id=1688957164469800_1689590284406488&comment_id=1689590284406488#f1fadcf5c799748
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VDH, you raise an important point. Who polices the police? In this case, who polices Robert Mueller? I would like to add one more question: Why have we become so enamored of unaccountable government agents? From Congress delegating its legislative authority to the EPA, FCC, CFPB, to “special counsels”, we have witnessed a profound erosion of popular sovereignty. We don’t control our own government.
And once unleashed, these suzerains scurry about looking into every knook and cranny for human flaws. Some might even prove to be illegal. We’ve got so many laws and regulations that its hard not to break a couple of dozen as we make our way to the morning shower.
Welcome to the reign of “experts”, progessivism’s promise. I call it a low grade nightmare.
First Lady Melania Trump, China’s President Xi Jinping, and US President Donald Trump attend a state dinner at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, 11/9/2017.
The following is a comment to an American Enterprise Institute report, “America’s inconvenient trillions”, by Derek Scissors, November 27, 2017, http://www.aei.org/publication/americas-inconvenient-trillions/.
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We’ve become so self-critical that we flagellate ourselves over the slightest thing. It doesn’t take much. Crude numbers often send us into a tizzy. There’s few things more crude than “GDP” and the “Trade Deficit”. The “Trade Deficit” has little to do with accurately measuring what we contribute to the international economy. It’s essentially meaningless. But in the mouths of our demagogues, it’s gold for their personal political fortunes.
As for “GDP”, it excludes and ham-handedly misstates much. Plus, the thing is at the mercy of a country’s politics. In communist/totalitarian countries, all numbers are creations of the state. Those states have as their prime existential motive a secular evangelism for a socialist utopia. Everything is warped, including numbers, in service to that ultimate end. So, comparing numbers between a closed and open society is lunacy.
Honest evaluations of national wealth are more helpful. Read the article, take some time to digest it, and see if you don’t agree.
The world may not be as our visible, popular, semi-literate elites – right, center, and left – would have us believe.
An intriguing match-up is in the offing for Friday, Dec. 1, the PAC-12 championship game. It’s a rematch of Sept. 9’s face-off.
Prior scores make betting odds superfluous. Check out these scores:
Sept. 9 had USC outplay Stanford 42-24. It was an early season contest before any team had time to gel. And it happened before Darnold lost his confidence, USC’s shallow bench proved troubling, and Darnold’s quick short-circuit to his athleticism has shown itself to be a weakness. Conversely, Stanford may have found a quarterback in Costello.
On Oct. 21, USC embarrassed itself before Notre Dame, 49-14. Injuries proved to be a problem due to a shallow bench, and Darnold’s high school approach to the game were key determinants of the outcome. Plus, ND is no pushover this year.
Sam Darnold, USC quarterback, fumbles versus Colorado.
Nov. 25 had Stanford convincingly beat Notre Dame, 38-20. It was 21-8 at halftime in a game that was supposed to be a nail-biter. Costello’s play was fantastic, and Stanford exhibited that hard-nosed style for which they have become famous since the glory days of Harbaugh.
Stanford TD catch versus Notre Dame.
If these scores are any indication, USC fans (of which I am one) shouldn’t be comforted by the LA media or Las Vegas bookies. Either USC’s mid-to-late-season lackluster performances were due to a lack of focus and therefore subject to change, or Stanford’s late season surge indicates the rise of a powerhouse.
I don’t know. The game has to be played. My money is on Stanford; my heart is with USC.
Recently, I had an exchange with Sen. Jon Tester’s office over the Republican tax reform effort. I’ll try to be fair to Sen. Tester in summarizing his position. What follows is my response. You might find it interesting.
Sen. Tester:
* Tax cuts must be done “in a fiscally responsible way and not increase our deficit or add to the debt”.
* Republican tax cut proposals would “add trillions to the national debt, saddling our children and grandchildren with heavy financial burdens”.
The issue of the national debt hangs heavy in his response.
My resonse:
Sen. Tester,
Thanks for the timely reply. I appreciate your willingness to communicate with your constituents.
But I’m taken aback by the use of partisan rhetoric such as “everyone pays their fair share”, “saddling our children and grandchildren with heavy financial burdens”, “tax breaks for the extremely wealthy and big corporations”, and the frequent use of the term “irresponsible”. I understand the need to be concise by using generalities, but the inclusion of the rhetoric complicates attempts at a thoughtful discussion of the issues.
First, the class warfare charge (“tax breaks for the extremely wealthy”) obfuscates the reality. No one, for all practical purposes, gets a job from a poor person. Sorry, you need rich people. Targeting rich people is self-defeating. So, now the question turns on the quest to get upper middle income and rich people to increase their business activities and create jobs. Punishing them with high tax rates and transferring wealth to DC won’t do the trick. If it did, then a robbers’ economy would be a fountain of prosperity. I refer you to Henry Hazlitt’s classic, “Economics in One Lesson”.
Next, the worry over adding to the deficit rings hollow coming from people who approach spending cuts with all the enthusiasm of nurses entering an ebola ward. The deficit is an indication of a spending problem, not a product of people refusing to be fleeced any further. The tax haul is already huge, particularly among the people who you’ll expect to produce the jobs. I’m reminded of a slave economy. For that hideous society, it is believed that increased whipping will make the people more productive. What? How does that work? The same is true with tax-the-rich schemes.
Thirdly, it’s strange to apply “cost” to a lowering of the tax burden. Our economy, and the people shouldering the burden of creating the jobs, is already excessively labored by a plethora of noncompetitive taxes. A tax cut is relief. Deficits are, ipso facto, creatures of spending excesses.
Anyway, projections of the “costs” and “benefits” are like many of the projections regarding environmental impacts, WAGS or SWAGS: “wild a** guesses” (WAG) and, adding a gloss of math, “scientific wild a** guesses” (SWAG). The federal number-crunchers can’t even get their spending WAGS correct. Look at the ’65 projections on the outyear costs of Medicare and Medicaid. What makes you think they’re any good at measuring the outyear ramifications of new tax rates?
Fourthly, if worry over adding to our children’s burdens was legit, we’d be taking a serious look at spending, especially entitlements. They are spending on cruise control. There’s no amount of “revenue raisers” that can keep up without biting into our children’s future prospects. The extractions to DC means less available for a growing the economy. An anemic economy is one that won’t make room for them.
So, get on board with the tax reform bill. I’ve already cited ways to improve it. These suggestions aren’t about the fool’s errand of Keynesian stimulus. Such foolishness is an acting out of a robbers’ economy, as mentioned earlier. “Bottom up” economics – or demand-side economics, or a “robber’s economy” – is one of the most anti-young economic approaches on the political shelf. If you’re serious about a prosperous future for the young, it won’t come out of maintaining, or increasing, the dollar flow to DC.
I think that a reconfiguration of the practical meaning of ‘irresponsible’ is in order.
Salt as sodium chloride is a necessity. SALT as the State and Local Tax deduction is a luxury, and an irritating one at that — like pouring salt into open wounds if you live anywhere that didn’t give Hillary 60% of the vote.
One need not stroll into the culture war to be smacked with evidence of our great political and social divide. The tax code is a lively arena for conflict. It is a monstrous affair, littered with baubles and beads, overlapping into almost all human activity, and encrusted with boundless perks for politically privileged courtesans. Not all tax code gimmes, though, are equal. One – the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) – has evolved into an icon of worship in blue state jurisdictions with a penchant for taxing and spending their way to heaven. Take it away and they behave like alcoholics being forced into cold turkey treatment.
For low-tax locales, they receive little or no benefit for their reluctance to turn their state tax offices into Soviet Lubyankas. Their sole compensation is the exasperation of knowing that their self-restraint makes the subsidy more “affordable” to the public servants in hyper-taxed, Democrat-friendly environs. People outside and between the urban and bi-coastal romper rooms know it. It’s galling for them to know that the federal tax code incentivizes tax promiscuity.
SALT was born of the Civil War’s 1862 Revenue Act and the 19th century’s infatuation with sticking it to the super rich. (4) Common terms for the fat-cats that stretches across the last couple of centuries are “buccaneer capitalists” or “robber barons”. It’s easy to find antique characterizations that align with the modern left’s preconceptions.
Cyrus Field, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Russell Sage on bags of millions, “Puck” magazine, 1883.John D. Rockefeller as “king”, 1901.
The excitement led to the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which legalized the fed’s tax on income. The federal tax on income was reified into the Revenue Act of 1913, and the state and local tax deduction (SALT) tagged along.
The archaic justification for SALT was the fear of the federal government swallowing up all tax revenue, leaving little for streets and public safety. SALT was thought to preserve a slice of the cash cow for city hall. How quaint.
A more modern pretext is the avoidance of double taxation. You know, the same dollar of income being slammed by the locals and then hit by the feds. But what isn’t subjected to double/triple/quadruple taxation in our own tax Leviathan according to this logic? Think about it. For today, the excuse becomes less than a pointless gesture.
Look below at the growth of our federal tax monster by page volume. (5)
Does anyone claim that multiple taxation isn’t at work here? There are so many ways to tax income, and, when you’re done, tax the things that were purchased with that taxed dollar. We don’t even need the income to be from human beings. We extract the pound of flesh from ghosts in the form of businesses. The requirement of breathing isn’t necessary.
Let me count the ways beyond the tax on personal income.
Estate taxes, assessments on your assets after you’ve left the land of the living. Please remember, that stuff was most likely purchased with already taxed dollars.
Corporate income taxes, the tax on a business as if it were real human being. These taxes are layered on top of all the income taxes generated by all of the buying and selling involved in doing business.
Tariffs and duties, the products being taxed at point of entry. After facing this hit, these products will generate income to be taxed once again as estate, corporate, and income taxes.
Sales and excise taxes. These extractions are mostly generated from spending originating in previously taxed income.
Ditto for property taxes.
Our whole tax system is a series of overlays of double/triple/quadruple taxation. What’s the relevance of attempting to excuse state and local taxes from something that is so generic to our, or any, tax code?
If you believe the existence of “double taxation” is hyped – which some people do – the case for SALT teeters further. A good portion of tax dollars to different levels of government goes to pay for different services. Tax dollars to the feds for national defense aren’t the same dollars as those going to the state to fulfill a state’s policy of equalizing budgets among a state’s school districts. It’s only when services overlap between layers of government do we run the risk of a taxed dollar being hit again. The deduction purports to dodge something that doesn’t really happen in the first place.
Even more convoluted contentions have been summoned to keep SALT. One mind-boggling claim is the belief, absent the deduction, state and local spending would be “sub-optimal”. Wrap your head around that one. Here’s the concoction: stir into the witch’s cauldron tax incentives to pay for more or less public services and add someone’s ideological preferences, and out comes the right amount of local spending. Allegedly, SALT is the ingredient to go “optimal”.
Is it making any sense? Only if you believe in magic. The thing rides on the mystical power to glean SALT’s ability to encourage the funding of more local government services, services that might increasingly benefit non-residents. Is that “optimal”? I don’t know, though it smells fishy. Strip away “optimal” and, in reality, you are left with a simple local decision to fund a service. Nothing more. Whether it aligns with a pundit’s conception of “optimal” is meaningless. In reality, SALT is the noise in the calculation to finance a park.
If the mystical sound of “optimal” doesn’t sound convincing, a second line of trenches in defense of SALT is thrown up by blue-state advocates when they contend that they get fleeced more by the federal government and, therefore, are more deserving of a bigger break. They trot out such crude numbers as the return on federal taxes paid – i.e., residents’ taxes paid out and federal spending coming in, as in this chart appearing in a 2015 issue of The Atlantic (7):
Deep blue, Hillary/Bernie-loving sanctuaries as New York and California reside at the bottom of the chart. They get less than a $1.00 for every one sent to the feds. In contrast, redder-than-red South Carolina gets a whopping $7.87 back. (7) Are some states riding on the federal teat as they keep their tax burdens low? Are red states hypocrites? Are blue state victims and therefore deserving of SALT?
The numbers in the “return on federal investment” chart are too raw to be of much value. Local circumstances muddy the picture. Number one on the list of federal contributors is military installations. Northeast states aren’t likely to be the source of cheap real estate for sprawling tank exercises and bombing runs. A state like California ironically is (Does the Mojave Desert remind you of anything?), and so are states populated by now-posthumous “yellow dog Democrats”and represented by long since gone-to-room-temperature congressional mandarins: South/North Carolina, Texas, etc.
Marine armored vehicles at Twentynine Palms, Ca.
The presence of federal defense spending in a state has much to do with historical inertia. Those states long in the game have the advantage. It’s a mixture of red and blue states. Of the top ten receiving the lion’s share of the defense pie, 4 are solid blue states (California, Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts); 2 are purple (Virginia and Pennsylvania); 4 are red (Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama). (9) Nothing remarkable here since the federal pipeline was long established before the current progressive/left mania came to make blue states “blue”. (10)
Hampton Roads with Newport News, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. It’s the location for major military installations as the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.USS John Kennedy at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, 1983.
Looking at it from the perspective of the importance of the federal defense spending on a state’s economy (GDP), 4 of the top jurisdictions are solidly blue (Hawaii, DC, Maryland, and Maine) and the rest are purple or red (Va., Alabama, Alaska, Miss., Kentucky, Arizona). (9) Once again, a blend. Regardless of a state’s political hue, Pentagon dollars mostly go to facilities that predate ’41 Pearl Harbor. (10)
So, what do we have? We have some blue states with a large infusion of federal defense money, coexisting with a tax-spend-regulation frenzy, all the while screeching about the loss of SALT. Suddenly, the picture ain’t so clear.
Anyway, the scramble by localities for bases resembles the hustle for the next Google server farm, and should be viewed in that light – not as a “federal handout”. Defense is an industry, and like any industry, it brings paychecks to be spent in the state. It works the same as an Amazon distribution center. If it adds to the state’s coffers in the same way as a Google or Amazon facility, so what. A state can’t present itself as a victim of the federal tax monster as it shuns, or is incapable of attracting, industry – federal or private.
A growing state economy from expanding industries means a growing state tax base and a decreasing bite for each taxpaying resident … under normal mathematical rules. Hence, low tax states. High tax states punish economic activity, restrict the role of business/industry taxes to the state’s balance sheet, and create a greater reliance on personal tax extractions. Up goes their state-driven personal tax load, up goes the desire to hide the gouging through SALT, and down goes the federal dollar influx. The result is the funky calculation called the “return on taxpayer investment”.
And what about a state’s inflationary character that drives incomes and tax receipts? That’s the other side of the “return on taxpayer investment” equation: the money that flows out of the state. Yes, there is such a thing as a cost-of-living and income feedback loop. As a state’s cost of living rises, so does the income to keep up; and as incomes rise, so does the cost of living. Are state policies compelling an increase in the cost of living, and necessitating a higher income to maintain residence?
To no surprise, according to one measure, mega-blue and high tax states like California and New York nowhere appear on the list of the cheapest states to live. Pride of place goes to 9 red states (Texas, et al) and 1 purple (Michigan). (11)
On the flip side, blue states occupy near the top in the necessity for its people to shell out lots of cash to continue to live there. (13) Two of the big stimulants are housing and energy costs. Both are highly sensitive to a state’s public policies. Environmental, land use, and growth control measures wreak havoc on the cost of living. Add “prevailing wage” inflators to the mix and you have a recipe for escalating wage demands. Plug those inflated income numbers into a progressive tax code and a river of money flows to the state capital and DC.
Californios, take a look at your electricity bill for a familiar inflator. All that “green” energy is expensive, and it shows. See below. (12)
Utility rates are one of the favorite social engineering tools of the green lobby. In many blue states, the presence of an all-powerful green lobby defines what it means to be blue. Living in a 3 bedroom/2 bath house in the Central Valley of California means a $400/mo. electricity tab, unless you knuckle under to the state’s commissars and load your roof with solar panels.
The price of everything inexorably climbs. An inflated utility bill component is factored into everything you buy. No wonder a comfortable existence in these locales requires more green of the kind with presidents on them.
Democrat bastions don’t seem to be aware of the trap that they created. It begins with an infatuation for progressive tax codes. Then, greenie fascinations raise the price of existence. Lump onto the process the attempt to raise wages by ukase (minimum and prevailing wage law), add a plethora of regulations to assuage any chic cause that comes down the pike, and the pitchfork-wielding peasants end up demanding more in their paychecks. As they do so, they’ll be trapped into higher tax rates to artificially inflate the flow of cash to the feds. At this juncture, there will be no shortage of number-crunchers to produce a kind of mathematical demagoguery to justify a special perk for the victims.
What started out as an honest gesture in the dawn of income taxation is a higher mountain of contradictions today. The old pretext, along with these more modern ones, is baloney. CPA status isn’t required to figure it out. The real reason is something more simple. After 104 years, people have grown attached to SALT, whether it makes sense or not. In this sense, SALT is like today’s opioid epidemic. An addict begins with raiding the medicine cabinet, a dependency develops and grows, and the person ends up as a client of the drug cartels. Like an addiction, entire financial lives become wrapped around ages-old tax provisions. Threats to take it away lead to the political equivalent of withdrawals.
Heebie-jeebies can erupt at any time from a blue-state anybody. D’s we expect to be afflicted, but R’s aren’t immune from the spasms brought on by the threat to take away the perk. It’s simply a blue or purple state thing – aka tax-happy jurisdictions – no matter the partisan color of their advocates.
Rep.’s Peter King (R-NY) and Tom MacArthur (R-NJ) threaten opposition to tax reform that includes the elimination of SALT.
Yesterday’s absurdity has morphed into today’s “necessity”. As such, the inmates of tax-happy jurisdictions haven’t limited their defense to now-discredited claims. They’ve invented additional arguments based on prudence. Come to think of it, really, it’s the prudence of the addict.
The abolition of SALT, it is asserted, would wreak havoc on a state’s bond rating. In essence, blue-state defenders are admitting that without the sweetener of SALT their residents would seek to be residents elsewhere. Probably true. Without SALT, residents would be exposed to the full effect of their blue-state’s tax mania. The logic: out flows an alarming amount of the tax base, down goes the ability to make good on their bonds. Elementary, my dear Watson.
Understandable, probably true, but as a defense, it’s bunkum. The blue-state perk shields a state’s residents from the full effect of sky-high taxation while simultaneously making it easier for the state’s tax collectors to have a crowd to fleece. The image recurs of a vampire with a herd of human livestock to feed upon. Drugging the victims with SALT to make the experience more tolerable isn’t a valid justification for bleeding them white. If they were sober, they’d flee like hell. The argument for medicating the victims is an argument for exsanguination (sever loss of blood), without the slightest recognition about whether they should have their hemoglobin stolen in the first place.
Instead, sticking with the metaphor, wouldn’t it be wiser to start a campaign to eradicate vampires by recruiting an army of priests armed with wooden stakes? In our case, cloning an army of Arthur Laffers would do the trick. The effort would be expedited by a clear-headed confrontation with the horror among the patsies. Eliminating SALT might produce outcomes such as an exodus (and a run on U-Haul rentals), mob exterminations of blue-state Republicans, and/or the patrons of Starbucks turning into icon-smashing peasants as they march to the homes and offices of the state’s revenuers and their abettors. Maybe all three.
Number 2 on the probabilities list is a very real possibility: the extermination of blue-state Republicans. Blue-state Republicans are already an endangered species. SALT might make them go the way of Martha, the last known passenger pigeon who died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
The fate awaiting blue-state Republicans if SALT is repealed?
Or so it is argued. That might be the short term effect. Beyond one election cycle, after the hypothetical wipeout, the residents would be accosted with more tax-crazed “public servants”, further intensifying the state’s slide. Don’t forget, your most likely choice on the ballot is between a tax lunatic (a “D”) or a now dispirited R. After multiple waves of tax bingeing, an alcoholic’s bottom would be reached. Then there’d be sobriety and a cleaning up – i.e., a return to tax sanity. A short term loss might be acceptable if it results in a long term fiscal clean-and-sober.
But try selling the logic to a soon-to-be-unemployed Republican legislator in a hostile state. Yet, is the preservation of his job a sufficient justification for keeping an iniquitous tax perk? The rationale worked to keep the antebellum South married to slavery. The South’s entire way of life , they cried, couldn’t survive the loss of their human property. The argument was as dubious then as it is today in its latest incarnation for SALT. The only difference in the 2 scenarios is the object of veneration and preservation.
While the tax perk may preserve a few “R” politicos, it continues to do violence to equity among the our sovereign states. States that prudently restrain their state Leviathans also have modest tax regimes. They receive little, if any, benefit from the perk. There’s just too little to deduct to reduce a taxpayer’s overall burden.
The calculus is reversed in most blue states. Nanny states are expensive, and so is their tax bite. The deduction is a salve to a gaping wound. Not surprisingly, it is coveted by tax hells and viewed contemptuously by places not located anywhere along Dante’s descent through tax “Inferno”.
There you have it: love of SALT is synonymous with jurisdictions defined by words such as spendthrift, irresponsible, gouging, and excessive. For those locales not so enamored by SALT, words like prudence, modest, and limited apply. Put the two sentences together. SALT enables all that should be avoided in a universe with a reasonable relationship to reality.
It is, literally and figuratively, pouring salt into the open wound between the states. It has no rationale other than to make the consequences of irresponsibility less felt. But that isn’t reasonable, is it?
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Congress might eliminate California state and local tax deductions. Here’s a look at the numbers”, Kurt Snibbe, Orange County Register, 10/27/2017, http://www.ocregister.com/2017/10/27/congress-might-eliminate-california-state-and-local-tax-deductions-heres-a-look-at-the-numbers/
“Which Places Benefit Most From State and Local Tax Deductions?”, Alan Coe, Tax Foundation, 4/27/2017, https://taxfoundation.org/map-state-and-local-deductions/
“The State and Local Tax Deduction: A Primer”, Jared Walczak, Tax Foundation, 3/15/2017, https://taxfoundation.org/state-and-local-tax-deduction-primer/
For a modern leftist rendition of the demographic, see: “Michael Novak’s Ethics of Buccaneer Capitalism”, Frank Cocozelli, 10/1/2007, Daily Kos, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2007/10/1/392711/-
“Look at how many pages are in the federal tax code”, Jason Russell, Washington Examiner, 4/15/2016, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/look-at-how-many-pages-are-in-the-federal-tax-code/article/2563032
“Which States Rely the Most on Federal Aid?”, Morgan Scarboro, Tax Foundation, 1/11/17, https://taxfoundation.org/states-rely-most-federal-aid/
“Which States Are Givers and Which Are Takers?”, John Tierney, 5/5/2014, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/
This article was cited in the above piece: “2017’s Most & Least Federally Dependent States”, John S Kiernan, Senior Writer & Editor, 4/21/2017, WalletHub, https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/ .
“MILITARY’S IMPACT ON STATE ECONOMIES”, National Conference of State Legislatures, 2/21/2017, http://www.ncsl.org/research/military-and-veterans-affairs/military-s-impact-on-state-economies.aspx
Virginia’s Hampton Roads has 20 military facilities, many date back to the Civil War and before. For one compilation refer to wikipedia, “Hampton Roads”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads#U.S._military
“Top 10 States With the Lowest Cost of Living”, Rick LeBlanc, The Balance, 5/16/2017, https://www.thebalance.com/states-with-lowest-cost-of-living-4137935
“Electricity Prices Rise for 30 States, But Some State Leaders Want Them Even Higher”, Heath Knakmuhs, Senior Director, Policy for the Global Energy Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 4/8/2016, https://www.uschamber.com/above-the-fold/electricity-prices-rise-30-states-some-state-leaders-want-them-even-higher
“See how your state scores for living costs”, Natasha Sporn, MSN: Money, 12/22/2016, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/see-how-your-state-scores-for-living-costs/ss-AAlEaoG#image=31
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