CDP
In all of the proposed solutions to all of our perceived problems it is difficult to find any suggestion that the size and scope of the government is in any way the problem, at least from the main two presidential candidates on offer. Most of the arguments revolve around percentages of how much larger we should make government programs, how funds should be allocated, or what programs should be abandoned in favor of programs that will surely, definitely work and will miraculously save the taxpayer money.
An unnerving lack of concern over government intrusion into the lives of the body politic has descended on the Republic. There are surely many reasons for this, but one may be that we, as a people, have become accustomed to the intrusions. The government has become such an omnipresent fact of life that we simply don’t notice it. We don’t recognize or think about just how many seemingly insignificant ways the government and its policies add up to a massive impact on our daily lives. So just how intrusive is the government on a daily basis in the life of an ordinary American? How much impact do government policies have on your average day? What follows is a list of some things a normal person deals with every day, and which government agencies or regulatory/legislative bodies are involved in some step of the process. The list will not be exhaustive. Feel free to add to the list in the comments. Just getting ready: water is regulated by the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the individual state’s Department of Health (or comparable agency), and a city/county water department. State and local authorities are required by Federal law to follow EPA standards for over 90 different contaminants. Your toothpaste and mouthwash contain fluoride? Requires FDA approval, plus must be properly labeled. Deodorant and other cosmetics don’t require approval unless they contain color additives, which do require it. However, if you use an antiperspirant or anti-dandruff shampoo or any moisturizer with SPF numbers, well that’s a drug. It requires approval. Your toilet cannot be over a maximum flush volume of 1.6 gallons, per the Energy Policy Act of 1994. The Department of Energy says your showerhead flow rate cannot exceed 2.5 gallons per minute at 80 psi. It is, in fact, a federal crime to even MANUFACTURE a showerhead in the U.S. with a higher flow rate. BREAKFAST: every single thing in your kitchen you didn’t grow yourself or buy from the old guy out of the back of his truck at the farmer’s market is regulated by the FDA and/or the USDA. Furthermore, the stuff that stuff is made from is affected by the Agriculture Act, aka the Farm Bill. Bacon? Regulated from the how the hog is raised and what it’s fed to how the bacon is cured, packed, dated, and labeled. Government regulations and subsidies affecting the price of corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar, salt, all have an impact on the cost of a pound of bacon. The hog itself, from hoof to table, is regulated by both the USDA and the FDA along with various offshoots under their aegis. That’s just your bacon. All of that applies to your milk, your eggs, all of it is regulated at every step. Oh, where you keep that bacon is also regulated. Refrigerator efficiency standards are regulated by the DOE. DRIVING: where to begin? Your vehicle is regulated by the EPA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and your state motor vehicle agency in the form of a license and some form of insurance to drive it (a couple of states will take a fee in lieu of insurance, but you’re still paying) plus vehicle registration. The roads are paid for and maintained through taxes, which you’re paying even if you don’t drive, with the state or local governments maintaining them. The fuel you use is regulated by the EPA, whether by forced additives or forced removal of pollutants to make it burn cleaner with fewer emissions. The local authorities can, of course, slap a fee on you for going three miles faster than some arbitrary speed they’ve decided you should be driving, and another for not wearing a seatbelt or talking on your phone or not using your blinker or having a tail light out. You’re only out of your driveway. We didn’t even cover if you turned on your television or computer (FCC) or perhaps own a pet (local licensing laws, breed specific bans). Every single item in your house is subject to government oversight on its manufacture (or at least importation) and sale. At every step there are OSHA regulations to be met, Federal and state and local taxes to be paid. And at all those steps the bulk of that cost is passed on to the consumer, with the people passing and enforcing the regulations paid by the taxpayer. Whatever you use to heat and cool your home is regulated and taxed at every step. The very air you breathe is effectively controlled from Washington. I know what you’re thinking. “How can you be against clean air and water and safe cars?” That isn’t the point. The point is the accumulation of all of these things leading to a citizenry that no longer even notices when the government decides to cede control of internet oversight to foreign powers, or whose reaction to ever larger scandals of the abuse of government power is a collective “meh.” We don’t realize that every one of those agencies employs thousands of people with a vested economic interest in the government never getting smaller. More laws in the name of safety lead to more regulations leading to more regulators. A thousand small cuts have bled us to the point that we haven’t the strength left to even be bothered to notice, until one day we do, but it’s too late.
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Donald Trump released his child care proposal yesterday, complete with an expansion of government mandate, convoluted tax rebates and fantastically magic funding sources. But he let Ivanka unveil it, so we all wanted to look anyway. Pure Trump.
Buried in the garbage, however, is one little tidbit that begins to scratch at a hugely important, potentially earth-shaking idea that could fundamentally remake the Republic in dramatic ways. Think I am exaggerating? Well, maybe I am…but read on anyway. What’s the big idea? I’ll let the Washington Post describe it: “The GOP contender, who announced his plan this week, wants to let parents deduct from their income taxes child-care expenses for up to four kids. The total deduction would be capped at the average cost of care in their state, which ranges from roughly $5,500 annually for infants in Alabama to nearly $22,000 in Washington, D.C. Parents who make more than $250,000 individually or $500,000 together would not be eligible for the break.” The big idea isn’t a tax deduction; the big idea is in tying the deductibility of child care costs to actual costs in the place you live. And the bigger idea, still, is normalizing the tax code to account for cost of living differences. And that, my friends, is a game changer. The tax code currently treats a dollar as equivalent regardless of where it is earned. Everyone in America, though, knows that such a thing is not true. This lovely three bedroom unit is within a stone’s throw of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock. It’s new, comes with a two car garage, roof deck and over 2,600 square feet of living space. It can be yours for about a quarter of a million dollars. This similar place, within spitting distance of the Massachusetts State Capitol in Boston, is a shade bigger at 2,800 square feet, and has a valet instead of just a garage, but you don’t get the roof deck and it will set you back at roughly $5.5 million. Is the cost of living in Boston a full twenty times higher in Boston than Little Rock? No, of course not, but it’s certainly an awful lot higher (about 50 percent higher, per the Economic Policy Institute). People who live in big, expensive, coastal cities – New York, San Francisco, Washington, Boston – pay more for everything they do than people in cities of all sizes in other parts of the country. The cost of living in Houston, for example, is barely half of the cost of living in Washington, DC. People in those cities tend to earn more, as well, although the real premium of earnings is much smaller than the nominal premium. But to the IRS, the family that earns $150,000 in Manhattan is just as rich as the family with the same earnings in Des Moines, despite the fact that the same income goes nearly twice as far in Iowa. Our income tax brackets, asset tests and income limits on all sorts of credits and deductions are uniform across the country, which benefits states with lower incomes and lower costs of living at the expense of the states with higher incomes and higher cost of living. What Trump has proposed begins to chip away at that, and that is a huge…nay, a YUGE…idea. It acknowledges that stuff costs less in Alabama than it does in Connecticut and the higher earnings of someone in Connecticut doesn’t actually mean that person has a higher standard of living, or more disposable income or whatever measure you choose to use to measure wealth. It lets a normal taxpayer in Connecticut with two kids claim a deduction of up to $40,000 of child care expenses while only allowing the Alabaman $11,000, which is magnified because the woman in Connecticut is already in a higher marginal bracket than her equivalent in Alabama because she earns more. Taken to its potential extreme, this fundamentally changes everything about the way we fund our government. Or, the portion we choose to fund instead of borrow, at least. If we started (and just to be clear – no one has proposed this) normalizing income tax brackets by state, or city or county or whatever, and readjusted the tax burden so that everyone paid a tax based on their cost-of-living-adjusted earnings and not their nominal earnings, the tax burden would shift in pretty remarkable fashion. A whole lot of people would have a whole lot more money, and a whole lot of other people would realize exactly how much they have been subsidized for 75 years. And it is not very hard to figure out what that shift would look like. Whose taxes go down? People in dense, wealthy coastal cities with high costs of living. Whose go up? People in lower-cost flyover country, especially the southern part of it. As a proud denizen of the state with the fourth highest cost of living in the lower 48, I am not really all that broken up about this. But I wonder how Trump’s staunch support in places like Mississippi, Tennessee, Idaho, Indiana or Oklahoma (the five cheapest) would react..?
CDP
Every episode of the A&E television show Intervention follows a predictable story arc: a first act introduction to the main character (the addict) with family and friends recalling childhood memories both good and bad (some presented as possibly causal), interspersed with scenes of the addict as they are today; a second act consisting of more current examples of the addict’s fall to (hopefully) rock bottom, with the family and friends planning, with the help of the interventionist, one final push to get the addict to save themselves; and a third and final act revolving around the actual intervention, with family and friends presenting the addict with the offered chance at treatment, but also making clear that whether they go or not, times they are a-changin’. Typically episodes end with the addict accepting the treatment, although usually after a short interlude of dramatically fighting it. If our electoral politics is an episode of Intervention, America is unfortunately still somewhere in the second act. That’s right, America: we’re an addict.
Our drug of choice is government, of course, and we’ve been junkies for a long time. Election 2016 is nothing if not proof positive that the majority of people in this country aren’t yet prepared to enter a treatment facility, and that the threats from friends and family that we aren’t going to “love you to death” by continued enabling and codependency still fall on deaf ears. Rock bottom still seems like a long, long way down. For an example of our addiction to government largesse as a nation one need look no further than the issue of maternity leave. Donald Trump, ostensibly the Republican candidate for president, recently announced a plan to extend Federal unemployment benefits to include coverage of 6 weeks of maternity leave for any person whose leave is not covered by an employer. The plan is estimated to cost $2.5 billion. Hillary Clinton’s plan is for 12 weeks paid leave, with a higher weekly pay rate, at around 10 times the cost of the Trump plan. One might well ask how the candidates propose to pay for these plans. The ideas on offer are the predictable from Mrs. Clinton (higher taxes on the “wealthy”) and the fanciful from Mr. Trump (eliminating waste and fraud in the unemployment insurance program). But addicts, even addicts facing $19T in debt, never particularly care where the money comes from as long as they get that fix. Addicts aren’t interested in hearing that either plan, if enacted, would undoubtedly skyrocket past budget projections the same way almost all such government plans do. Besides, as fixes go maternity leave is the good stuff: it panders to over half the voters and when it turns out to be budgetarily unworkable politicians can just blame businesses and insurance companies for not covering enough maternity leave. Some reading this might be wondering what sort of cold-hearted bastard has a problem with maternity leave. This is another sign of an addict: reflexive justification of their addiction by transference of blame onto someone or something else. Maternity leave is a good and necessary thing. In a perfect world all private companies, big and small, would offer whatever amount of paid leave the women in their employ felt they needed before returning to work. If Mr. Trump wishes to offer paid leave to his female employees, more power to him. If some enterprising insurance company wants to offer highly affordable short term disability insurance to small businesses to cover a set number of weeks specifically for maternity leave, that’s great (although they might want to call it something other than disability insurance). But private solutions are solutions our dealer isn’t particularly interested in making it easier to access. Dealers aren’t known for willingly helping paying customers kick the habit. Unfortunately, thirty or sixty days in rehab isn’t going to be enough to solve America’s addiction to government. We’ll need to kick the more benign stuff before we can even begin to be weaned slowly off the hard stuff (Social Security, Medicaid, farm bill subsidies, etc). The Republican nominee for president trotting out a plan offering essentially what Democrats have always wanted, even if a lighter version, shows just how addicted we have become to the relatively benign stuff. Nowhere on offer is there a real, actual plan to reduce citizen’s dependence on government programs, for the depressing reason that kicking the habit just isn’t very popular. The professionals on Intervention often say that addiction is a family disease. This is certainly true of America’s national addiction to government. The vast majority of us are enablers in one way or another. Once the horror of the current election ends those of us who recognize she has a problem will need to sit America down and explain to her that we are no longer going to love her to death, and that she needs to get some help. If she refuses, as addicts sometimes do, we may need to accept that she’s going to have to find her own rock bottom the hard way. But we’ll also have to accept that not every addict makes it back up from the bottom. |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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